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The Americans carried out three very different policies on the People’s Republic: from total denial (and Mao-time’s guarantees of mutual annihilation), to Nixon’s sudden cohabitation. Finally, a Copernican turn: The United States detected no real ideological differences between them and post-Deng China. This signaled a “new opening”: the West imagined China’s coastal areas as its own industrial suburbs. Soon after, both countries easily agreed on interdependence (in this marriage of convenience): Americans indulged their corporate sector (machine and technology) and released their greed, while the Chinese in return offered cheap labor, with no environmental considerations. and submission in imitation.
However, for both countries this was much more than an economy, it was a policy: Washington read it as interdependence for transformative contention and Beijing seeded it as interdependence for (global) penetration. Meanwhile, the Chinese acquired more sophisticated technology, and great American technology became sophisticated in digital authoritarianism: “technological monoculture” met politics.
But now with a Covid-19 tidal wave, the honeymoon is over.
(These days, many argue that our C-19 response is a planetary fiasco, the size of which has yet to appear with its disproportionate and long-lasting side effects. All this illustrates, according to the argument, nothing more than the concentration of non-transparent power and our general democratic recession; long-lasting consequences of cutbacks, environmental holocaust, privatization of key national intergovernmental and vital institutions, unfortunate globalization of healthcare (focused on allopaths) and the fate of public data commons.
There is also increasing speculation if the blockade is invasion or protection, if the objective is the collective immunity of herd loyalty; if there is any way out of the crisis to normality or if this disaster “turned into planetary terror, through the global coup d’état” it will be exploited to promote something already designed (with fear, not as a side effect, but rather as a tool made to gain control). E.g. Le Monde Diplomatique – examining the possible merger between the technological oligopoly and the political monopoly – he states: “Political decisions have been central to the formation of this tragedy, from the destruction of animal habitats, to the asymmetric financing of medical research, even crisis management itself. They will also determine the world we emerge into after the worst is over. ” The first line of the 21st century is the right to health and work, privacy and human rights. (LMD, IV20))
Even to be precise, the so-called virus pandemic brought nothing really new to already overheated Sino-American relations: it only amplified and accelerated what was present for quite some time: a gap between alienated power centers, each on their side of the Pacific, and the rest. Is this the time to return to a nation-state, a great time for all dictators waiting to finally build a cult of personality? So, will our democracy be electromagnetized and vaccinated for a greater good (or a more greedy “god”)?
This text examines a prehistory of that crack; and suggests possible outcomes beyond the current crisis.
Does our story just seem overheated, while essentially quietly predetermined? Is it directional or conceivable, dialectical and eclectic, or cyclical and therefore cynical? Surely, our history warns (it doesn’t matter if the past is seen as a destination or resource). Does it also provide hope? So what is before us: destiny or future?
Theory loves to teach us that the lengthy debates over what kind of economic system is most conducive to human well-being is what consumed most of our vertical civilization. However, our history has a different opinion: it seems that the manipulation of the global political economy, much more than the introduction of ideologies, is the dominant and possibly more lasting form that human elites generally conspired to build or destroy civilizations, like projects planned. . At some point in the process, he tricked us, becoming self-entrapment. How?
One of the biggest (almost schizophrenic) dilemmas of liberalism, since David Hume and Adam Smith, was an idea of reality: if the world is essentially Hobbesian or Kantian. As postulated, the main task of any liberal state is to enable and maintain the wealth of its nation, which of course rests on wealthy individuals who inhabit that particular state. That imperative caused another dilemma: if you are a wealthy individual, the state rob you, but in the absence of it, the masses poorly pound you.
the invisible hand of Smith’s followers have found the satisfactory answer: sovereign debt. That “invention” meant: a relatively strong central state government. Instead of popular control through the democratic mechanism of control and balance, such a state should be quite indebted. Debt, primarily for local merchants, rather than foreigners, is a much more powerful deterrent, as it resides outside the popular checking domain.
With such mixed blessing, no empire can easily demonetize its legitimacy and abandon its hierarchical but invisible and unconstitutional controls. Thus a debtor empire was born. A totalitarian blessing or curse? Let us briefly examine it.
The Soviet Union, like China (pre-Deng), was much more of a classic continental military empire (openly brutal; rigid, authoritarian, anti-individual, apparent, secret), while the United States was more of an empire financial trade (covertly coercive; hierarchical, but asocial, exploitative, dominant, polarizing). On opposite sides of the globe and cognition, each other remained enigmatic, mysterious, and incalculable: Bear of permafrost vs. Fish of the warm seas. Sparta against Athens. Rome vs. Phoenician … However, common to both (as much as to China today) was a super appetite for omnipresence. Along with the price to pay for it.
Consequently, the Soviets filed for bankruptcy in the mid-1980s: they cracked under their own weight, imperially stretched. The Americans did the same: the “white man’s burden” had already fractured them by the Vietnam War, with the Nixon Shock just making it official. However, the empire of the United States managed to survive and outlive the Soviets. How?
The United States, with its financial capital (or a dazzling illusion of it), became a debtor empire through Wall Street guarantees. Made of titanium Sputnik vs. Gold mine of printed paper … Nothing sums it up better than the words of the head of the US Federal Reserve. USA, Alan Greenspan, who most famously quoted JB Connally to the then French President Jacques Chirac: “True, the dollar is our currency, but your problem.” Hegemony against hegemoney.
House of cards
Conventional economic theory teaches us that money is a universal equivalent to all goods. Historically, coins were related to space and time, to say that they depended on the locality. However, as never before, the United States dollar became, beyond World War II, the universal equivalent to all other money in the world. According to the history of coins, the main component of non-precious metal money is a so-called promissory note, an intangible belief that, at any given time in the future, a particular shiny paper (self-styled as money) will be fluid exchanged for real goods. .
Therefore, in general terms, money is nothing more than a civilizing construction on the imagined / projected tomorrow: that the next day (which no one has seen in the history of humanity, but with which everyone operates) definitely comes ( i), and that tomorrow will undoubtedly be a better day than yesterday or even today (ii).
This and other types of collective constructions (horizontal and vertical) on our social contracts keep society together as much as its economy keeps it alive and evolving. Therefore, it is money that drives the economy, but our blind faith in the built (imagined) tomorrow and its supposed certainty is what empowers money.
Clearly, the universal equivalent of all equivalents, the US dollar, follows the same pattern: a bold and widely accepted promise. For the United States, it almost instantly corroborates the extraterritorial economic projection: Americans can print (any sum of money) without fear of inflation. (Quantitative easing is always exported, the value is kept at home).
But what does the US dollar promise when there is no gold cover attached since the time of the Nixon shock in 1971?
The Pentagon promises that ocean shipping lanes will remain open (read: Controlled by the US Navy), Unobstructed Roads, and that the world’s most marketed product – oil – will be delivered. So it is not a crude oil or its delivery that is a hedge for the US dollar: it is a promise that oil of tomorrow will be deliverable. That is a true power of the US dollar, which in return finances the massive expenses of the Pentagon and assumes its supremacy.
Admired and feared, the Pentagon further fuels our planetary belief in tomorrow’s ability to deliver, if we just keep our faith in the dollar (and the hydrocarbon-fueled economy), and so on in a perpetual circle of mutual reinforcements.
(Complementing the Monroe Doctrine, President Howard Taft introduced so-called “dollar diplomacy” in the early 1900s, which “substitutes bullets for dollars.” This is one of the first official recognitions of the symbiotic link of the Wall Street Pentagon. .)
These two pillars of the EE. USA They could come from the east coast (the US Treasury / Wall Street and the Pentagon) along with the two pillars of the west coast, both financed and amplified by the US dollar, and extended through open sea routes. (Silicone Valley and Hollywood), are an essence of the American position.
This very nature of power explains why Americans have failed to take humanity in another direction; towards non-confrontational, decarbonized, de-monetized / under-financed and psychologized, self-realized and green humanity. In short, turning the story into a moral success story. They had such an opportunity when, beyond Gorbachev’s unconditional surrender of the Soviet bloc, and the change of Copernicus from Deng to China, the United States, without restrictions as a lone superpower – terms of reference dictated only; our common destiny and direction / s towards our future / s.
The winner rarely changes the game
Unfortunately, that was not the first missed opportunity for the United States to smooth out and delay its impending multidimensional imperial withdrawal. The epilogue of World War II meant a guarantee of total security for the USA. USA: Geoeconomically: 54% of everything manufactured in the world carried the Made in the USA etiquette, and geostrategically: the United States had enjoyed nearly a decade of “nuclear monopoly” without interruption. Until today, EE. USA It obtains the largest number of N tests conducted, the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and represents the only power that has deployed this ‘ultimate weapon’ in another nation. To complete the irony, Americans enjoy a geographical advantage like no other empire before. Hail to the USA In the USA, as Ikenberry points out: “… all the great powers of the world live in a crowded geopolitical neighborhood where changes in power usually cause a counterbalance.” Look at the map, in Russia or China and its surroundings. The United States has been blessed with its insular position by neighboring oceans. Everything that should have tranquility, peace and prosperity, foresight.
Why the lonely power, a empire by invitation did not evolve to relaxation empire, a harmony generator? Why are you holding (extrajudicially) more political prisoners on Cuban soil than the grumpy Cuban regime? Why are you still obsessed with weapons at home and abroad? Why the existential anxieties for the home and the security challenges for the foreigner? E.g. 78% of all weapons available at the largest MENA theater are manufactured in the USA. While the Americans in the country, for their civilian purpose only, have 1.2 pieces of small arms per capita.)
Why the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago ushered in decades of stagnant or bankrupt income in the United States (and in other parts of the OECD world), coupled with alarming inequalities. What are we talking about here; the inadequate intensity of our tireless confrontational drive or about false course of our civilizational leadership?
In fact, no successful and enduring empire is only based on coercion, whether abroad or at home. The grand design of every empire in the past was based on a skillful calibration between obedience and initiative, at home, and between group work and commitment, abroad. In the 21st century, one wins when one convinces, not when one coerces. So if you can’t escape your inner logic and deep-seated appeal of nostalgia for confrontationThe prevailing archrival is just a winner, rarely a game changer.
One country or one cause, both or neither?
To sum up; After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans accelerated expansion while waiting for adversaries (real or imagined) to continue to decline, “liberalize” and jump on the bandwagon behind the United States. One of the instruments was to aggressively promote greater economic integration between regional and distant states, which, as we see now, passed the euphoria of the “end of history” of the 1990s, caused a socio-political (irreversible) disintegration within each of these states
Expansion is the path to security. the opinion, from the post-Cold War socio-political and economic mantra, only exacerbated the problems affecting Pax Americana. This is how the ability of the United States to maintain its order began to erode faster than the ability of its opponents to challenge it. A classic imperial self-entrapment!
The repeated failure to notice and recalibrate his imperial withdrawal brought painful hangovers to Washington, the most notable, in the last presidential election. The inability to manage the rising costs of maintaining imperial order only increased internal popular revolt and political pressure to completely abandon its “mission.” Perfectly hitting the target to lose everything else …
Therefore, Americans are no longer fixing the world. They are just managing their decline. Look at your footprint in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Georgia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine or Yemen, to name just a few.
When the Soviets lost their own indigenous ideological matrix and their nonconformist confrontational position, and when the United States dominated the West they failed to succeed even though they won the Cold War, how can we expect the impersonator to win lasting or even temporary economic victory?
I don’t like the relationship with the Soviet Union, which was clear confrontational acceptance From start to finish, Americans carried out three very different policies on the People’s Republic: from total denial (and guarantees of mutual annihilation in Mao’s time) to Nixon’s sudden coexistence. Finally, a Copernican turn: The United States detected no real ideological differences between them and post-Deng China. This marked a “new opening”: China’s coastal areas will become the industrial suburbs of the West. Soon after, the two countries easily agreed on interdependence: the Americans indulged their corporate sector (machine and technology) and unlocked their greed, while the Chinese in return offered cheap labor, without environmental considerations and submission in imitation. However, for both it was much more than an economy, it was a policy: Washington read it as interdependence for transformative contention and Beijing seeded it as interdependence for (global) penetration. Meanwhile, the Chinese acquired more sophisticated technology, and great American technology became sophisticated in digital authoritarianism.
But, the honeymoon seems to be over now.
The enduring collision course already leads to subsequent calls for a collapse of the world’s two largest economies. In addition to marking the end of global capitalism that has exploded since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this may finally trigger a global realignment. The rest of the world would end up, voluntarily or not, in rival (commercial) blocks. It would not be a return to the 1950s and 1960s, but to the pre-World War I constellations. Epilog is in sight: no more confrontation and more carbons or more arms trade and exchanged weapons will save our day. It failed in our past, it will fail again on any given day.
Imitation entrapment
Curiously, China opposed the First World, left the Second in disagreement, and since Bandung in 1955 it did not win or (truly) join the Third Way. Today, many see him as a main contestant. But where is a lasting success?
There is a close consensus among economists that China owes its economic success to three fundamental factors. Firstly, it is that the People’s Republic adopted an imitative economic policy (just as Japan, Singapore, Taiwan or the Republic of Korea did before) through the opening proclaimed by Deng. The second goes to modest household consumption, and large German-like home savings. Finally, as the third factor that economists attribute to the Chinese miracle, it is the low production costs of the nation, but mainly in the expenses of its aging demography and in the expenses of its own workforce and the country’s environment. None of this has international appeal, nor does it promise an achievable future. Therefore, it is not surprising that the imitating power fights, at home and abroad, a defensive ideological battle. Such a reactive status quo has no intellectual appeal to attract and inspire beyond its borders.
So, if China was a “century of humiliation” for the XIX, XX a “century of emancipation”, should it be that the XXI is labeled a “century of imitation”?
(The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is most widely attributed as an instrument of China’s planetary stance. Chinese leaders promised massive infrastructure projects around them burning trillions of dollars. Still, the numbers are more subdued. . The II BRI Summit Until now, Chinese companies have invested $ 90 billion worldwide. It seems that neither the People’s Republic is as rich as many (wish) to think nor will it be able to finance its promised projects without seeking global private capital. Such capital, if ever, will not flow without conditionalities. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS or “New Development” – Bank have about $ 150 billion on hand, and the Silk Road Infrastructure Fund (SRIF) has up to $ 40 billion . According to OECD estimates, Chinese state and semi-private companies can access another $ 600 billion (many of them adjusted) from the state-controlled internal financial sector. That means China is missing BRI deliveries worldwide. Ergo, whether it’s bad news for the world (BRI) or China’s conditionalities.
How to behave in the world where the economy is destined for trade in services (as defined by the Sino-American high priests of globalization), while trade constitutes an important part of the great power’s national security strategy? And how to define (and measure) the existential threat: by inferiority of the ideological narrative, as during the Cold War; or by a size of a lag behind in total manufacturing output, as in the aftermath of the Cold War. Or something third? Perhaps a return to inclusive growth.
Of course, there is no intellectual appeal in growth without well-being, an education that does not translate into fair opportunities, lives without dignity, liberalization without personal freedom. Greening international relations together with a greening of social fabric and its economy: geopolitical and environmental understanding, deacidification and relaxation is the third way to go for tomorrow.
This requires both at the same time: less confrontation for cutting-edge technology and its de-monopolized redistribution, as well as the determined work on Tesla’s so-called holistic implosion / fusion systems. That would include free-transfer non-hertzian energy technologies (capable of detoxifying our troposphere of dangerous fields, waves, and frequency frequencies, bringing it closer to the Schumann resonance); coal sequestration; anti-gravity and auto-navigation solutions; bioinformatics and nanorobotics.
In short, more initiative than obedience (including more public control over data hoarding). More effort for excellence (creation) than a fight for preeminence (partition).
“Doing like your neighbor” is an economic prophecy that sounds biblical and that circles close to the IMF love to repeat tirelessly. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine formidable national economic prosperity if good neighborhood relations are not built and maintained. Clearly, no global leader has ever emerged in the history of an unstable and distrustful neighborhood, or offering a little more of the same in lieu of innovative technological advancement.
(For example, many see Chinese 5G, in addition to the dangerous IoT electrosmog that this technology emits in Earth’s biota, as an illiberal innovation, which can end up serving authoritarianism, anywhere. And, in fact, learning In-depth AI inspired by biological neurons (neural science) including its three methods: supervised, unsupervised and reinforced learning may end up being used for the dissemination of digital authoritarianism, predictive surveillance and fabricated social governance based on social credits of behavior of bonus-malus).
Ergo, everything starts from the inside, from home; socio-economically and environmentally. Without the support of a local base (including Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet), there is no game changer. China’s home is Asia. Its size and centrality, along with its impressive production, limit it enough.
In conclusion, it is not just a new, non-imitative, socio-economic and technological shift that is needed. Without sincerely and sincerely embracing mechanisms such as the NaM, ASEAN and SAARC (eventually even the OSCE) and the main proponents of multilateralism in Asia, first of all India, Indonesia and Japan, China has no future than expected on the planet: Third Force, a game changer, enduring visionary and trusted world leader.
Prof. Anis H. BajrektareviC,
Vienna, MAR 31st 2020
Post Scriptum:
To varying degrees, but throughout premodern and modern history, almost all of the world’s leading creators of foreign policy depended (and still depend) on what is going on in Russia and in Russia. Therefore, neither a structure, nor the content or the general direction of world affairs for the past 300 years has been done without Russia. It is not just a size, but also a centrality of Russia that matters. That is important as much (if not more) as it is an omnipresence of the USA. USA Or a hyperproduction of the Chinese RP. Ergo, which is an uninterrupted flow of manufactured products for everyone, is a balance between oversized and downtown, and is the ability to controllably corrode the path and insert itself into the peripheral. The oscillatory interaction of these three is what characterizes our days.
Therefore, reducing world affairs to the constellation of just two super players, China and the United States is inappropriate, to say the least. It is usually done while superficially measuring Russia’s overall situation simply by checking its current GDP, and comparing its volume and PPP, and finding that p. equal to one from Italy. Through that “quick fix,” Russia automatically lowers itself to a second-tier state of power. This practice is as dangerous as it is highly misleading. Still, that ill-conceived argument is one of the most favored narratives that authors in the West are tirelessly selling. What many analysts do not understand is, in fact, easy to see; throughout the history of Russia: for such a large country, the only way to survive, regardless of its relative weaknesses due to many “economic” parameters, is to always go the extra mile and remain a great power.
To this end, let us quickly compare the above narrative with some key facts: Russia occupies key positions in the UN and its agencies as one of its founding members (including the Security Council’s veto power as one of the P5s); it has a highly qualified and mobilized population; their society has a deep-seated sense of a special historical mission (that notion has existed for centuries, among its enhanced intellectuals and elites, probably long before the United States had emerged as a political entity in the first place). In addition and revealingly, Moscow has the largest gold reserves in the world (on the surface and underground; in mines and its treasury bars); For decades, it has mastered its own GPS system and the most credible outer space delivery systems (including the only remaining working connection to the ISS), and it also has an elaborate, ready-to-go alternative internet.
Finally, as Thomas Graham of the Council on Foreign Relations of the United States admits: “With the exception of China, no country affects more matters of strategic and economic importance to the United States than Russia. And it must be said that no other country is capable of destroying the United States in 30 minutes. “(FAM, 98-6-19, p. 134)
The author is President and Professor of International Law and Global Political Studies, Vienna, Austria. He is the author of six books (for American and European publishers) and numerous articles on mainly geopolitics, energy, and technology.
The professor is editor of the New York-based GHIR (Geopolitics, History and International Relations) magazine,
and member of the editorial board of several similar specialized magazines on three continents.
Your 7th book, ‘From World War I to www. – Europe and the world 1918-2018 ’took place last winter.
