Pivoting Great Powers

 In geopolitics, pivoting is not something only pivot-states do.

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The current debate concerning the management of international relations centres around two key concepts: multipolarity and unipolarity. The opposition of the two concepts is creating a lot of tensions and global security headaches at present, as the Ukraine war illustrates. Consequently, it is worth recalling the origins of multipolarity and of its counterpart, unipolarity.

Multipolarity has a proven historical track record of keeping the peace between great powers, through its balance of power mechanism. It originated in Europe and flourished after the fall of Napoleon, when it included 5 great powers: Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia. Through regular meetings between them, the five powers succeeded in keeping relative peace in Europe for a hundred years, until 1914.

Unipolarity was born out of the ashes of the bi-polar world around the year 2000, being the brainchild of American neoconservatives, with no precedent in modern history. In assuming the role of the only hegemonic power, the US has engaged in almost continuous warfare in the Middle East, Asia and now in Europe, violating - in the process - the UN charter and provoking the devastation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine. 

In the first decade of the 21st century, a number of former and current military powers from Asia and Europe, such as China, France, Russia or Germany, have started to push for the demise of unipolarity and for the transition to a European-style multipolar world order, dominated initially by 4 great powers: the US, the EU (the Franco-German alliance), Russia and China. ( A 5th member, India, would join this exclusive great power club in the next few years). By the end of the current decade, this multipolar system will very likely replace the broken unipolar system put in place by the US two decades ago.

One other issue that is connected with the advent of multipolarity is that of pivot states, which I have already discussed elsewhere. There is, however, one essential aspect I have omitted to mention. That is, whilst no great power can be considered a pivot state, some of them are themselves pivoting quite significantly.

The first to do so was the United States. We all remember the Obama administration's "pivot to Asia". Disappointed by Western Europe's "ungratefulness" for the role the US played in the prosperity achieved by the continent after the devastation of WWII, the Obama administration decided to turn its back on Europe and pivot towards the Pacific region and China instead.

The second superpower pivoting was the EU, under the leadership of France and Germany. After refusing to endorse the US' invasion of Iraq, the two leading European countries started lobbying for "strategic autonomy" from both the US and NATO and pivoted economically towards Russia and especially China.

The latest great power to pivot was Russia, following the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev. Disillusioned with repeated Western invasions of its homeland and the presence of NATO at its borders, Russia itself pivoted east towards China. By 2023, the two countries concluded a comprehensive alliance, directed against what they regard as NATO's expansionist drive in Europe and Asia and against the regime-change crusade promoted by Washington recently.

The only great power that does not need to pivot and keeps to its millenary Middle Kingdom tradition is China. For a few decades now, China's huge market has become a magnet for all the other great powers, which covet Chinese low labour costs and access to the pockets of its large and growing middle class. 

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that China has emerged as the only great power interested in maintaining global peace and stability, as its contributions to the peace efforts between Iran and Saudi Arabia have recently proved.

Accordingly, US policymakers would be well-advised to abandon their mindless quest to keep unipolarity going, and to take their rightful place among the other great powers. Such a course of action could only pay dividends for global peace and prosperity.

How Pivot States Can Affect Global Peace and Security

 The transition from American unipolarity to a multipolar world order is well and truly underway and cannot be reversed. When dealing with threats to international security, Western policymakers should contemplate action starting from this new reality. 

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On the 1st of January 2014, four researchers from The Hague and London published a ground-breaking research report on pivot states and their role in regional and global security. The 57-page report identified 22 pivot states from Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America and listed 4 great powers currently in existence : the US, the EU, Russia and China. On its way to achieving the status of a great power, India is currently the only major regional country that still clings to its famed neutrality.

The basis of the report is - clearly - multipolarity, while the notion of spheres of interest and its importance in international relations is fully recognised as such. For the authors, the definition of pivot countries is as follows:

"Pivot states are states that possess military, economic or ideational strategic assets that are coveted by great powers. Pivot states are caught in the middle of overlapping spheres of influence of multiple great powers, as measured by associations that consist of ties that bind (military and economic agreements and cultural affinities) or relationships that flow (arms and commodities trade and discourse).

A change in a pivot state's association has important repercussions for regional and global security. States that find themselves in overlapping spheres of interest are focal points of where great power interests can collide and also clash. States located at the seams of the international system have at various moments in history been crucial to the security and stability of the international system.

Intra-state cleavages often divide pivot states. Such cleavages can be religious, ethnic, linguistic or cultural in nature, and more often than not they are a combination of all of the above. And it is precisely when these pivot states are caught in the middle, when opposing great powers push and pull in opposite directions, that they are torn apart. Hitherto weak centrifugal forces might suddenly become unleashed. Ukraine is currently succumbing to divisive forces, and Iraq is at real risk of falling apart.

In some cases there is an increased likelihood of great power conflict when pivot states fall victim to great powers encroaching on each other's spheres of influence. Great powers competing over respective spheres of influence (think here the US vs Russia) employ what is commonly called brinksmanship, either to change or, alternatively, to uphold the status quo. But brinksmanship can be exercised by pivot states too. These pivot states can be moral hazards or "rogue pivots" if they behave recklessly while betting on the opposing great power to come to their rescue. Georgia in the run-up to the 2008 war with Russia is a case in point. Georgia had been keen on bolstering ties with the West and was betting on Western assistance in its conflict with Russia, while the latter did not materialise in the end. Brinksmanship of pivot states also introduces a real risk of direct or indirect confrontation between great powers. The solution seems simple: do not let a rogue pivot state pull you into a great conflict."

The report provides a useful guide to understanding the current war in Ukraine, as well as the political instability in Georgia and elsewhere. It should be a must-read for policymakers and diplomats alike. 

By clinging to unipolarity, the US foreign policy establishment is actually depriving international relations of the needed shock absorbers and it could, unfortunately, lead the world to nuclear catastrophe.

Can the US Reinvent Itself ?

 Engaging the US in permanent military conflicts abroad is not the way to solve the serious problems at home, but a way to court disaster. America can and should reinvent itself, not as an "indispensable nation", but as a normal country.

The gaping ruins in Ukrainian cities, the thousands of deaths and millions of refugees now pouring into the West are spelling the end of the US's unipolarity in international affairs. The same conflict, however, is important for a vastly different reason: that of bringing into sharper focus the West's internal strife and the accelerating decay of its political systems and societies. 

Through the extrapolation of observable tendencies, one can safely assume that unless the US and the countries making up the Western alliance reinvent themselves and adapt to the world as it is, their very survival could be at stake. For this to happen, there are some major issues the Western alliance countries must urgently attend to. These encompass the military, diplomatic, economic and social fields. 

From a military point of view, the US's first priority is the long-overdue dismantling of Nato. As matters now stand, Nato is held responsible for a mindless expansion to the East which has led to the war in Ukraine. Undaunted, the foreign ministers of Nato countries and some from the Indo-Pacific have recently reunited in Brussels and have decided to change the organisation's European focus into a global one. This can only mean that Nato members could be involved in far-away military conflicts in the South China Sea in the future. Such an outcome was predictable ever since the US decided to use Nato in its quest for maintaining its global hegemon status. 

The war happening now in Ukraine, however, has proved beyond a doubt that the Russian army is much less powerful than the Red Army during the Cold War era and cannot conceivably represent a credible conventional military threat for Europe. It follows, therefore, that enrolling new Nato members has been done through deception, with the hidden agenda of expanding the US military-industrial complex's customer base.

The preference for unipolarity springs from the fact that American military and political elites consistently draw the wrong conclusions from their study of history. To give but one example, soon after the US became a nation-state, its elites emulated not the philosophers of the Enlightenment, but those of Ancient Greece. As a result, those elites decided that their democratic system of government was fully compatible with the institution of slavery. Consequently, they kept slavery going for more than 50 years after all other European nations outlawed it, one after the other. The result of such a skewed reading of History was the American Civil War of the 1860's, which made tens of thousands of victims and almost jeopardised the unity of the country. (It was rather fortunate for the US that Abraham Lincoln did not attend an Ivy League university or have a classical education)

Closer to our own times, American pundits became infatuated with the study of the Roman Empire, identifying with Rome as the foremost military power in ancient times. These type of studies increased in intensity after the fall of communism and were used to provide the historical arguments in order to maintain America's unipolarity well past its due date, like in the case of the 19th century slavery issue. We are all familiar with the results of this flawed reading of Roman history, and so are the Serbs, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Syrians and now the Ukrainians.

The US is also fully engaged in preventing China from replacing it as world hegemon, an effort that could result in war in the Indo-Pacific. The lens through which American policymakers interpret China's rise is that of the "Thucydides Trap", which also forms the basis of US foreign policy. Again, the study of Ancient Greek historical thought has led some otherwise highly educated Harvard historians to import ideas from the infancy of humanity into a mature and highly complex society which the United States is today. Considered one of history's deadliest patterns, it almost mandates that countries involved in such a "Trap" must go to war with each other. Sadly, it has not occurred to American historians and pundits that the two rather small city-states of Ancient Greece - Athens and Sparta - can by no means be a model for the enmity that exists between the US on one side and China on the other, today.

For its part, China has time and again assured the US that while it disagrees with American unipolarity, it does not intend to substitute itself in its stead. Rather, the Chinese preference is for a 19th century European type of multipolarity, revamped to suit the management of global affairs in the 21st century. To be more precise, China seems to be in favour of an institution like an enlarged G7 - which is to include both established and emerging economic and military powers - that would take over the management of global affairs from the United States. Unfortunately, the ancient model of Thucydides Trap still exercises a strong fascination over the minds of American policymakers, a fact that could have catastrophic practical consequences. 

For the United States, another emergency is an overhaul of its diplomatic service, which has to include the sacking of all neoconservatives who are lurking in the hierarchy of the State Department. The neoconservatives are the foremost supporters and enablers of American unipolarity, which saw the US dragged into needless wars and nation-building fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and now in Ukraine, all with disastrous consequences. Given their propensity to push for the wrong foreign policy measures and initiatives, such people should not be allowed nowhere near the State Department or its embassies abroad. Instead, the US should start a major education program for top State Department bureaucrats and diplomats, aimed at making them understand the finer points of multipolarity and how it is to be implemented and operated in practice.

One of the biggest headaches in the Western world during modern times has also been the presence of Catholics in positions of leadership in major European countries or in the US. Indeed, practically all modern times' crusades were led by Catholic leaders, from Napoleon and Hitler to Tony Blair, or Boris Johnson and Joe Biden today. There is currently an unholy alliance between neoconservative bureaucrats in the State and Defence Departments and Catholic political leaders like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Boris Johnson, who have joined forces to unleash the latest crusade on Russia via Ukraine. The US cannot reinvent itself with Catholic leaders in control of its foreign policy and neoconservatives in charge of its diplomatic service.

There is a great need also of an overhaul of the American military-industrial complex, and of limiting its access to federal legislators and administration officials alike. During the Obama administration, some initial efforts were made to trim the US defence budget by some 10 percent. The defence budget is the lifeline of this complex, which unfortunately has been amply funded by both the Trump and Biden administrations. Consequently, its representatives have a vested interest in expanding the US military, in the expansion of Nato and what is commonly called the "forever wars", which have become a fixture of US involvement abroad.

Being a highly secure country positioned between two oceans, the US should have reduced the size of its military significantly after the fall of communism. Again, only the Obama administration started a process of downsizing the American military, a commendable effort that wasn't followed through by the next two presidents. Unfortunately, having an oversized military and a huge defence budget is bound to ignite ever larger conflicts abroad to justify the expense. This is in part what we are witnessing in Ukraine, and an explanation for the push to paint China as a US strategic competitor, to prepare for war with it.

Finally, there are other urgent measures that have to be taken in order to make the American economy more performant and less dependent on global supply chains, as well as make American society fairer and more egalitarian. However, not being a specialist in these fields, I would not attempt to recommend solutions, but just to highlight the need to fix these problems. Like the military and diplomatic fields, the West has to find the appropriate remedies to its ills and reinvent itself if it is to survive and thrive in the future. As Americans are bound to find out, there is life after unipolarity after all.

The US is about to Cancel Itself

 After initiating bombing campaigns over the last 23 years in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, and fomenting "color revolutions" in Eastern Europe, American politicians have lost the moral authority necessary to lecture the Kremlin about its military actions in Ukraine.

The average European or American TV viewer can naturally be excused for believing that Russia, and especially its president Vladimir Putin, bears the blame for what is happening in Ukraine. After all, citizens of Western countries are being bombarded on a daily basis with sickening images of buildings in ruins, crying women with babies, with the occasional cat or dog being thrown into the mix for good measure. To top it all off, Putin's latest actions in Ukraine are being presented as the acts of a madman, a bloodthirsty dictator, whose expected downfall justifies the adoption by Western countries of the harshest possible sanctions ever devised. The objective is clear: Russian people have to suffer for supporting their president, until they take to the streets to bring down those responsible.

The sorry spectacle of Russian bombs falling over Ukrainian cities and of millions of refugees heading towards the borders cannot obscure the fact that the heaviest responsibility for these horrors belongs to the neoconservative-dominated US foreign policy establishment. As known, they are now the main backers of the Zelensky regime, the ones writing his speeches and the ones opening doors for him in the West.

The harshness of the sanctions against Russia is the result of applying woke ideology to the field of international relations. Indeed, these sanctions are not meant to lead the Ukrainian conflict to a resolution, or the Russians to the negotiating table, far from it. The true goal of American neoconservatives is, astoundingly enough, to "cancel" Russia both as a country and as a menace to America's status as sole hegemon left after the demise of the bipolar world.

Taken together, the US' actions directed over the past few years against Russia and especially against China can only be explained by the desire of American foreign policy circles to keep America on top, at the expense of all other military and economic powers, established or emerging ones. To this end, crippling entire economies and vast geographical areas of the world and reigniting the spectre of war in Europe seem a small price to pay for the initiators of American unipolarity in world affairs.

There is currently talk in Washington about hegemonic transition and the Thucydides trap which, if not carefully managed, could finally erupt into an all-out war between the US with its NATO allies, on the one hand, and Russia & China on the other. This time around, however, the leadership of the would-be hegemon supposed to replace the US, namely China, is a hell of a lot smarter than American policymakers ever were. To be sure, China deserves a much more important role in world affairs than is currently the case. To their credit, however, the Chinese do not want to replace the US as the world's sole hegemon, but instead prefer to see the world run in multipolar fashion, by a kind of revamped G7 in which nobody is at the head of the table, but where all major participants share into decisionmaking concerning global affairs. 

In the first decade of this century, the US hoped that they could enlist Russia to organise a Washington-operated balance of power aimed at containing China's rise. American policymakers sensed, rather correctly, that no policy of containment towards China can be successful without having Russia on board. This was the main reason why , between 2009 and 2012, the Obama administration tried to mend fences with Moscow during the so-called reset. Fortunately, the Russians felt the danger of being used for the wrong ends and refused the US's overtures, siding over the last decade with China instead. As Russia refused to come on board, America's architects of unilateralism in international affairs, the neocons, have supported the 2014 upheavals in Ukraine and practically took over the political management of that country in order to turn it against Russia. What we are now witnessing is Russia's military reaction to the threat on its western borders. Regardless of how strident the Biden administration is now in framing the resulting competition as a fight between democracies and autocracies, from an IR point of view the strategy is shallow and is backfiring.

Coming back to the sanctions regime and NATO's posturing in the media, these have only proved to the Western public and to the new allies in Eastern Europe how ineffective the US has become in managing global affairs, especially in Europe. As much as American neocons would like to treat Putin like Saddam and Russia like Iraq and sanction them out of existence, the truth of the matter is that the use of the financial A-bomb (cutting out Russia from SWIFT) and of the financial H-bomb (freezing its central bank reserves in Western banks) is hugely counterproductive and can be fully met by the Russians -if pushed too far- with real atomic and hydrogen bombs. 

Now everyone would agree that this is not the type of global leadership with which the world could put up for long. America's extreme tactics call into question the current arrangements in global affairs: the fact that most commercial transactions are conducted in US dollars, and that all countries have to obey US diktats or else. In fact, all the US has succeeded in doing by interfering in Ukrainian internal affairs since 2014, and by supporting the war against Russia, has been to speed up its own demise as the sole world hegemon. By "cancelling" Russia, the US has initiated the process of cancelling itself. 

All Hegemons Have an Expiry Date

 A day after Jake Sullivan's 7-hour meeting with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi, questions remain about the true objectives of the American "negotiators".

I, for one, am inclined to believe that Sullivan was instructed to use a carrot-and-stick approach with China. Over the past few years, China-bashing by various White House administrations has not yielded any practical results, so the overused threat of sanctions if China does not align itself with the US against Russia would not have worked by itself. 

It is entirely conceivable, therefore, that during the 7 hours of talks Sullivan might have alluded to "giving" China chunks of Russian territory in case wider conflict erupted and the Chinese came on board. Similar techniques were used by Henry Kissinger in the 70s to divide the former communist bloc and they worked. 

This time, however, China is a much more prosperous country and, as such, cannot embark on an anti-Russian course without risking serious consequences, nor does it want to. The United States cannot conceivably hope to stop China helping Russia, if needed, as both countries share the same continent and the same strategic interests, while being the targets of various sanctions and hostile propaganda from Washington.

The role of "masters of the universe" played by the United States over the last 20 years is fast becoming untenable , as the demise of the US as the sole hegemon is approaching. Sadly, instead of opting for a more rational organisation of decisionmaking in world affairs, officials of the current American administration prefer to evade reality and cling to the forlorn hope of keeping the world still, with them on top.

Now more than ever, the American foreign policy establishment needs to display clear thinking and set for the United States achievable objectives instead of ideological ones. This means that its top diplomats should stop pushing liberal democracy worldwide, as this lacks exportable qualities and is intensely disliked by at least two thirds of the world, from Russia and Asian countries, to the Islamic world and Africa. By the same token, the Americans should stop lecturing and moralising foreign leaders and countries and instead sit down with them at the negotiating table, fully taking into consideration their grievances and security concerns. 

Unfortunately, by walking the current path, the White House team - from the President down to Victoria Nuland at the State Department, who were the original architects of the events in Ukraine's Maidan - run the huge risk of getting their country into nuclear conflict with Russia.

The US are Acting on the Wrong Philosophical Assumptions about History

 When foreigners or Americans themselves are complaining about the US, they usually take aim at its political and economic elite, institutions, its foreign policy, the military or America's cultural or global ambitions.

Few, however, are aware of the fact that powerful nations are run according to an agenda that incorporates a specific interpretation of history:  a historical algorithm, so to speak. By and large, this philosophical interpretation of world history goes a long way towards explaining why nations like the United States behave the way they do.

From the Age of Enlightenment we have inherited a conception about the historical evolution of humanity which in most cases is depicted as both irreversible and unidirectional, or as some specialists call it, linear. In the 19th century Hegel, a German philosopher of history, refined this approach by adding a final destination to this linear historical evolution, which he called "the end of history" (in his view, German history ended with the formation of the Prussian state). Karl Marx was one of his students and he devised his own end-of-history , which was supposed to happen when the proletariat would get on top of the capitalist class for good. The type of society he imagined was called communism, in which exploitation of any kind would completely disappear and  perfect equality would reign among all members of society.

One of the legacies that Marxist philosophy of history left behind was a partition of history according to different types of societies, defined by their specific modes of production. Thus, humanity advanced from prehistorical hunter/gatherers to the classical, slave-owning ancient societies, on to feudal societies, which gave birth to what Marx called capitalist societies, in their turn the harbinger of future communist societies. And herein lies one of his biggest errors. According to a number of social scientists like Eugene Buret, or renowned economists such as J.A. Schumpeter,  capitalist society is not a new and entirely different type of society if compared to the feudal one, but just the decaying phase of medieval Western society. 

In other words, what we were conditioned by Marx to believe about the existence of capitalist and communist societies is basically wrong. If, on the other hand, we look at capitalism (in the west) and communism (in the east) as simply the decomposing phases of feudal societies, many aspects about the organisation and functioning of capitalist or communist societies become more comprehensible from a sociological point of view. What is important to note at this point is that whereas decaying medieval Western societies turned capitalist, decaying feudal Eurasian or Asian societies turned communist. 

It is useful to remember that both capitalism and communism have facilitated the transition of entire nations from agricultural countries to industrialised and urbanised ones in a relatively short period of time, albeit using vastly different methods in achieving these goals. Both types of transition, however, have been marred by extremely painful dislocation, misery and in some cases millions of casualties.

The most problematic part of the historical algorithm used to elaborate political, geostrategic and military agendas is that which refers to the evolution of humanity as a whole. Thus, if Hegel and Marx were right, then under certain conditions historical evolution will stop after reaching a peak, after which the history pages in the book of life will remain blank. A version of this misguided interpretation of historical evolution was given to the American public by Francis Fukuyama, who in 1992 published his essay "The End of History and the Last Man".

Like Hegel before him, Fukuyama believed that after the 1991 implosion of the USSR the end of history was in sight. In his view this consists of the universal adoption of market economics principles and of liberal democracy as a political system. His interpretation of world history and especially his end-of-history thesis has informed  the political action of the US and that of American neoconservatives since 2000. To this day, neocons wrongly believe that because the US is the only superpower left, it should retain the status of world hegemon for at least another century.

What actually happened after the implosion of the bipolar world was - after a brief unipolar moment - the advent of the multipolar world, which the US alone adamantly opposes.

In fact, a much more fruitful approach to understanding the historical evolution of humanity could be found in the writings of Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico. In his "Scienza Nuova", he postulated that human societies have a cyclical - instead of linear - evolution. Vico's definition of progress differs from that of Kant or Hegel, for example, who were firm believers in the infallibility of human reason. For Vico too, reason was the catalyst for human progress. However, Vico believed in the possible collapse of reason at some point, which in turn could cause civilisational collapse. In other words, he was convinced that a breakdown in reason can cause man to revert to an earlier, barbarous state.( His approach could for example better explain how the excesses of nazism and even communism were ever possible.)

In this cyclical paradigm of evolution, a fallen empire like Rome, for example, partially re-emerged in a different form in 800 under the name of The Holy Roman Empire (considered by Popes as the secular arm of the Church), and it was arguably the most powerful European feudal state during the Middle Ages. The Holy Roman Empire lasted for a thousand years until 1806, when it was replaced by the Confederation of the Rhine by Francis II, the Austrian emperor. After the reunification of German states around Prussia in the 19th century, the rise and the fall of the German empire in the 20th century, the partition of Germany after 1945 and its reunification in 1991, the German federal state is still the most powerful country in the EU.

Yet another example is the recent re-emergence of China as an economic powerhouse, after what the Chinese call "the century of humiliation", with the Chinese share of global GDP  approaching again 25 percent, as it did around the year 1800. 

Russia, too, has put the trials and tribulations of empire collapse and 70 years of communism behind her and is fast re-emerging as the leading Eurasian military power, a status that it used to hold undisputed from the middle of the 18th century. 

Such examples conclusively prove that today's American policymakers would be well-advised to discard theories of history, like Fukuyama's, that can only lead to huge errors, especially in foreign policy. Adopting a cyclical approach to assessing historical developments could indeed yield much more positive outcomes for American experts and politicians alike.

Accordingly, German reunification and de facto leadership of the EU, the re-emergence of Russia as a major military power in Eurasia, or China's rise as a global economic actor should be considered normal historical developments . Moreover, even these countries' quest to have their spheres of influence recognised has deep historical roots and should be considered by Washington as legitimate, instead of being treated as offensive, as it is now the case.

TIME TO GET OUT OF HISTORY

Once economic modernization is completed, all communist regimes have to face up to their lack of legitimacy. The Chinese communist regime is no exception. Taking into account the recent history of communist regimes worldwide, China's current leadership will soon have to make a choice between 2 options. The first is the one Gorbachev chose in 1991. The second is the one that Ceausescu opted for in December 1989. Unfortunately, there is no third option available.

One of Lucian Blaga's brilliant remarks - which referred to the period in which there is an absence of data on the Romanian people in medieval European historiography - is that Romanians "went out of history to remain in history."

Nowadays, I would apply Blagian thinking to the impossible situation currently facing the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. For several years now, the latter have been making furious plans aimed at perpetuating the unbroken political monopoly they have held  since 1949.

Like the USSR communists in the interwar period, the Chinese Communists succeeded in the economic modernisation of China, which in a few decades was transformed from a poor agrarian nation into a strong and prosperous industrial nation.

However, Chinese leaders - like Ceausescu before them - believe that they can stay in power forever with the help of electronic means of mass surveillance or by putting tanks in the streets. They do not seem to understand that the only way to secure a prestigious role in Chinese history is to voluntarily relinquish power - yes, as Gorbachev did - and to allow other political forces to take over and continue China's institutional and political modernization. In other words, to go out of history in order to remain in history.

Any communist society, no matter how economically  or militarily advanced, suffers from a major flaw in the logic of its governing program. When communist governing programs reach this point - like China today or  the USSR in the 1980's - the system goes haywire. The solution chosen by the Chinese leaders - that of strengthening political repression and mass surveillance of the population - only aggravates the situation.

Of course, China's problem is  not the system's lack of economic performance, as in the case of the USSR. However, China urgently needs the demonopolization of its political system, even a controlled one,  as well as numerous institutional and legal reforms that would guarantee, not violate, the fundamental rights of Chinese citizens in their relations with the state.

In conclusion, a minimum of political intelligence should prompt the current Chinese leaders to leave power now, while they are still on top. The growing complexity of the problems facing the Chinese society today imposes this. The intensification of the Marxist education of the population and of the repression and surveillance of citizens are only pseudo-solutions, totally inadequate for this moment in history.

Unfortunately,  the Chinese communist leaders do not seem to be able to understand a simple fact, namely  that their historical role has ended and that  time has come to "get out of history in order to remain in history", since their governing program no longer meets  the needs of Chinese society and has even become toxic.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

 Last December, Germany finalised a Comprehensive  Agreement on investment  with China on behalf of the EU, angering many EU members in the process. While somewhat understandable from a German point of view, the speed with which the agreement was concluded and the opportunity to do so in the current context leave much to be desired.

Before signing it, officials should have taken clues from last year's attack by the Chinese government on Australian exports. As dependent as Germany is on the Chinese market for a significant share of its exports, Australia has seen its barley, beef, wine, lobster, timber and even coal exports brutally affected by an official ban. China has revived its old imperial kow-tow policy, according to which countries around it could see their access to its market denied if the political leadership in Beijing feels slighted by them in any way.

Australia has displeased Beijing last year when it called for an international inquiry on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The call was seconded at the time by the EU and is fully justified in scientific terms, even if the Chinese leadership preferred to give it a political spin. Soon thereafter the Chinese government started targeting Australian exports one after another on an almost monthly basis, trying to make an example of Australia should any other country try to follow in its footsteps. Problem is, Australia had signed a bilateral free trade agreement with China back in 2015, which should theoretically have protected the two countries' companies from such unwarranted political disputes. It follows that concluding treaties with China is not worth the paper treaties are written on and will clearly not protect anyone .

The EU-China investment protection treaty ( CAI) should not be ratified until the Chinese government abandons such harmful commercial tactics with Western countries like Australia, with which they have a free trade agreement in force. In this case, Australia is no more and no less than the canary in the coalmine for the EU, blinded - as it were -  by the false hope of enjoying normal economic relations with China.

Once it concludes major trade agreements, China succeeds in modernising and in boosting its own economy's growth. However, it does so at the expense of its trading partners, as its record attests when examining its economic relations with first the USSR and then the US.

This is why Australia's recent commercial predicament should be taken seriously in Brussels and should act as a powerful brake against the type of wishful thinking that disregards Chinese polity's true nature and its hidden geopolitical agenda.

From Tiananmen to Hong Kong via Timisoara

 

July 10, 2020

First, as a responsible major country, China stands upright with honour. We never strong-arm others, never seek supremacy, never withdraw from commitments, never bully others, and never complain. The word ‘coercion’ has nothing to do with China.
— Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, October 2019

If anyone cares to listen to the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s vehement reaction against any country objecting to what is currently happening in Hong Kong, they will notice that Chinese authorities are basing their rebuttals on the principle of non interference in China’s internal affairs.

For seven decades, the affirmation of non interference in a country’s internal affairs has been one of the pillars of China’s foreign policy. Look closer, however, and the much-trumpeted principle means that other nations are forbidden to comment on Chinese internal policies, but Chinese officials on the other hand feel free to intervene in other countries’ internal affairs, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Starting with 1964, Zhou Enlai prodded socialist leaders from the Soviet bloc to rise in revolt against Moscow’s territorial grab after World War II. Ceausescu fell for it and started claiming back Bessarabia, which Romania had lost in 1940 before the communists came to power.

Also during the sixties, the CCP tried to force Albania to enter into an anti-Soviet, pro-Chinese alliance together with Yugoslavia and Romania, according to the memoirs of the late Enver Hoxha, Albania’s former Stalinist leader.

In 1971, taking advantage of the uncalled for visit to Beijing of Australia’s Labor leader of the opposition, the same Zhou Enlai swiftly used the unhoped-for opportunity in order to attack Australia’s alliance with the United States, which he compared to China’s alliance with the USSR. The ANZUS Treaty has been under attack by the Chinese ever since.

As we all know , communism was foreign to the political traditions of Central and Eastern European countries. After WWII the communist regimes came to power there under the occupation of Red Army troops. In 1989 Mikhail Gorbatchev was intelligent enough to recognise that such a political arrangement was no longer desirable or sustainable. Accordingly, after he ordered the Red Army troops to withdraw, the communist dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe were toppled one after another by pro-democracy movements.

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe emboldened pro-democracy forces in China to occupy Tiananmen Square and ask, in their turn, for the democratization of political life. After a few weeks of indecision, the Chinese communist leadership asked the PLA to crush the demonstrators, killing hundreds in the process.

Thus from June to December 1989, China was the only communist state that dared to use the army against its own people. To be sure, this was a very unenviable position to be in. This is the reason why the Chinese leadership decided to grossly interfere in Romanian internal affairs, attempting to prop up the Ceausescu regime. At the end of November 1989, a Chinese Politburo member touched down in Bucharest, offering support and military aid to the Romanian dictator.Consequently the Romanian revolution was the only one in Europe where the army was used against the demonstrators, Tiananmen-style. The bloody events led to the execution of the presidential couple. (At the time, the couple’s execution in Romania was extremely well received by Chinese protesters and students )

In truth, no amount of police repression, book burnings or imprisonment of pro-democracy dissidents can make democratic aspirations go away. Such aspirations are, indeed, truly universal and no nation who refuses to democratize could be considered civilized, regardless of its economic status or number of boots on the ground. By resisting democratic reforms, the Chinese leadership is in fact keeping their country outside the ranks of civilized nations, and in a league with other dictatorships from Africa or Asia. This is the reason why the only respectable people in China these days are the pro-democracy dissidents and militants.

It would be wrong to assume, however, that Chinese authorities’ meddling in other countries’ internal affairs has diminished in intensity. To give but one example, since 2012 they have created a 16+1 group from ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe plus a few from the Western Balkans. (This is the political component of the Belt and Road infrastructure project.) Eleven countries from the group are full EU members and China’s diplomatic initiative is a grave interference in the Union’s internal affairs. As the 1989 Timisoara repression proves, we can safely assume that Beijing is prone to extend its support to radical nationalistic and anti-democratic political parties within this group of countries.

This is one of the many reasons why EU officialdom is more than entitled to act in support of Hong Kong dissidents and the Uighur minority, in accordance with the fundamental values the European Union was built upon. In future, they should make it clear to China’s henchmen that they are fully expected to respect the democratic aspirations of the Chinese people, for the benefit of China and the international community as a whole. Any lesser reaction to the current events in Hong Kong can be construed as kowtowing to China in exchange for elusive economic gains.

Why the EU is Wrong about US Criticism of the W.H.O.

 May 20, 2020

This week’s World Health Assembly videoconference did nothing but provide an opportunity for China to take center stage in the debate about the handling of the coronavirus pandemic and for the United States to be paraded as the villain of the piece. As matters now stand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the proposed “review” shifting the responsibility for the spread of the virus from the country that should have contained it in the first place, namely China, to the many nations who were caught by surprise and seriously destabilised by it.

I understand EU diplomats’ commitment to multilateralism. But this time they went too far in giving a platform to a communist regime and a Marxist WHO boss to attack the US, which until now have contributed 75 percent of the organisation’s budget and had created practically all multilateral institutions, including the United Nations after WWII.

Now more than ever, there is a great need for Western solidarity in dealing with the issue of WHO reform if further pandemics are to be avoided. Siding with China and the WHO against US criticism is therefore a losing approach to actually solving matters. No Western diplomat should endorse WHO attacks against the US Administration, since the agency’s largest financial contributor is entitled to freely criticise it when it performs poorly.

This is not to say that the US tendency of withdrawing de facto from most UN key positions in recent years is a good strategy. The latter has created an opportunity for China and its supporters in developing countries to grab the key posts at the FAO, the WHO and other UN agencies, thus rendering these otherwise important UN bodies ineffective (the WHO management of alerts during the current pandemic is a case in point). These days it seems that to get a top job at any UN agency, it is more important how well-connected the candidate is in Beijing than how competent the person really is.

Whilst I agree that the WHO needs to rapidly get rid of Tedros and his team before any meaningful review can take place, permanently cutting the organisation’s funding and abandoning it altogether would be highly counterproductive for the US and for the world as a whole.

Instead, the US can make its crucial financial contribution to the WHO conditional upon approving who gets to be its next directors, as long as the selection is made from trustworthy countries such as Australia, South Korea or Greece, since they have proven their credentials in managing the response to the current pandemic.

EU Diplomacy's Munich 2.0 Moment

 

May 9, 2020

European diplomatic traditions, which are some of the most illustrious in the world, have not prevented the External Action Service from writing one of the most inept letters I have ever read. After months of China’s diplomatic bullying, aimed at changing the pandemic narrative in its favour, is this ill-conceived message addressed to the Chinese leadership all that the best diplomatic experts within the EU have been able to come up with ? To add insult to injury, the EU officials have even accepted the letter to be censored by Beijing before its publication, deleting any reference to the fact that the pandemic started in China.

Diplomatic intimidation was not invented by the Chinese. The Nazis used it before them. Just before the start of the second world war, this type of bullying made Neville Chamberlain bow to Hitler’s demands in order to achieve – in his view – “peace with honour”.

Pushing back against Chinese bullying, however, is the only reasonable course of action of any country and self-respecting diplomatic establishment. From my personal experience working for Chinese bosses, I also happen to know that taking a firm stand against their bullying is the only way to deal with the representatives of a nation that has recently achieved economic success, but is still haunted by a huge inferiority complex. Trying to appease Chinese bullying or to ignore it will not make it go away, but will only lead to more serious bullying in the future.

To give but one example, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called for an international inquiry into the origins and handling of the coronavirus pandemic. His initiative has prompted a furious attack by the Chinese ambassador to Canberra, who by now is used to treating Australia like a de-facto Chinese colony. He used the media to threaten that Chinese consumers could stop importing Australian beef and wine. This type of threat echoes the Davos speech of a Chinese official this year, who claimed that the United States will not do anything to counter China’s recent belligerence because his country is the biggest market for American hamburgers outside the USA.

“If you give China an inch, they will take a mile. And if you succumb to bullying and intimidation, you can expect only one more thing: more bullying and intimidation. It’s going to be a question not simply of what is Australia saying about what’s happening in China: it’s about China trying to dictate what’s happening in Australia.” (Dr Samantha Power, former US Ambassador to the UN Security Council, in Financial Review, November 2019)

The Chinese amhassador’s assertion that his country’s consumers might decide not to buy Australian beef in the future is also directed against the Chinese middle class. These are the biggest consumers of beef in the country, and if the communist party decides for some reason to stop importing it, they will have to revert to a more traditional, pork-based diet. In other words, the communist party seems as displeased with Australia as they are with the restless Chinese middle class, who have nevertheless made the fatal error of putting their future prosperity into the hands of the communist officials.

The EU , on the other hand, is China’s biggest export market and this fact alone gives it a lot of clout, a temporary disruption in supply chains notwithstanding.

This is why appeasing China’s offensive diplomatic behaviour makes so little sense.

Instead, EU diplomats should intensify calls for an independent inquiry into the handling of the pandemic and declare at least a few Chinese diplomats in Europe persona non grata after their unwarranted offensive behaviour in Paris or Stockholm. Anything else will be construed by the communst regime in Beijing as proof of Western democracies’ inherent weakness. Indeed, like the Nazis before them, their entire propaganda machinery rests on proving to the population how strong China’s communist government is and how weak Western democratic governments are by comparison.

Naturally, no European country wishes to confront China, which is fair enough. However, by appeasing its diplomats’ bullying and ignoring its shameless propaganda, the EU is making a huge error, one which is already being put to good use by the continent’s “ideological competitor”.

Chinese Diplomacy and the Wuhan Virus

 March 31, 2020

“The geography of infectious disease is important because, as living organisms, pathogens—that is, the bacteria, viruses, and other microparasitic entities that cause disease—all have histories linked to time and place. Every widely distributed disease originated as a local outbreak.” (Monica H. Green, “Climate and Diseases in Medieval Eurasia”, 2018)
 

 

One of the most sickening aspects of the current pandemic is the way Chinese diplomats are trying to bully everyone into not calling the Covid-19 the “Wuhan virus”. From a scientific point of view, asigning to Covid-19 a geographical location for its place of origin makes a lot of sense. The Ebola virus, for instance, was thus named from the river in Congo where the epidemic started. For scientists and for the public, knowing where a viral outbreak or pandemic originated is essential for identifying and combating its root causes. This is the reason why I side on this issue with Mike Pompeo and not with the die-hard Marxists in China or in the West.

My professional intuition also leads me to suspect that the few weeks’ delay in anouncing the new epidemic and in taking adequate measures to contain it did not occur as a result of incompetence on the part of Chinese communist authorities, as initially believed. After all, if they had really wanted to nip the outbreak in the bud, they would have immediately followed international protocol and called the WHO or the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. The latter was instrumental in insulating the world against the most recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa a few years ago (2014) and in containing it within the first week when it was spreading to Nigeria. But at that time, the Nigerians called the CDC within the crucial first days of their Ebola outbreak.

In hindsight, it looks to me as if high-ranking communist party officials saw in this outbreak the perfect opportunity to spread it around the globe via the Chinese tourists travelling abroad in their millions in early January. For a Stalinist like President Xi, the possibility of provoking the general crisis of capitalism – a veritable obssession for devout Marxists – was probably too hard to resist. He and others in his party also knew perfectly well that the West would be caught quite unprepared for a pandemic, as most of its medical supplies are still manufactured in China.

Unfortunately for the Chinese communist leadership, the resolve of mainly conservative Western governments to spend big money in order to help their people and businesses survive the pandemic was something it did not count on. The Great Depression from the inter-war period had been made worse by Western nations’ unwillingness to pump money into their broken economies. That error gave Stalin an enormous propaganda advantage, and Marxists in the West opportunities to massively infiltrate governments and media organizations.

This time around, despite their recently acquired economic clout, the Chinese communists blew it miserably. Instead of falsely blaming the Americans for the outbreak, they should admit that their population’s diet has something in common with that of the Congolese. Indeed, the Ebola and the Covid-19 zoonotic viruses are a direct result of their people’s fondness for eating roasted monkeys, fried bats, pangolin meat and the like.

The EU is today the most heavily-affected continent outside China, with Italy and Spain registering an unbelievably high 10 percent mortality rate. Chinese tourists’ fascination with Spain and Italy prompted many of them to visit in their thousands, spreading the virus as they did so. As the EU had never been dependent for its prosperity on Chinese tourists, however, this pandemic will make European officials think twice about granting visas to such potential disease-carrying guests in future.

The way the outbreak was handled in the first instance by the Chinese communist authorities has all but ruined China’s standing and international reputation. As neither Italian, Spanish or British families can bring the victims back to life, there is nothing Chinese diplomats can do to ever make the world trust them again.

The EU and China: Geo-economic Agendas Compared

 November 22, 2015

The wave of blowback terrorism currently sweeping Western European capitals is likely to obscure a major event due to take place on November 24th and 25th in China: I am referring to the annual meeting of the leaders of 16 Central and Eastern European countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia) with the Chinese leadership in Suzhou. Following immediately after this weekend’s ASEAN summit in Malaysia, the meeting provides an extremely useful glimpse of China’s geo-economic agenda from the Balkans to Poland and Hungary.

An even more useful exercise, however, would be to compare the EU’s geo-economic agenda, with that of China and Russia in our parts of Europe.

The leading exponent of the West’s geo-economic agenda has to be considered Pascal Lorot, the founder of geo-economics. In the 1990s he published a booklet, suggestively titled “La conquête de l’Est”. The book contains the main tenets of the West’s economic expansion in the ex-Soviet bloc states from Central and Eastern Europe. Although NATO expansion has preceded that of the European Union, the main actors of the West’s geo-economic agenda in the region are the global corporations headquartered in France, the US or other participating Western countries.

While financial transfers from the EU to new member states from Central and Eastern Europe have diminished significantly over the years, having contributed only marginally to upgrading their infrastructure to EU standards, Western global corporations have taken over even the water supply or gas distribution in countries like Romania.

The results of the economic penetration in the area are, in some cases, nothing short of disastrous. Thus, companies like Vivendi or Gaz de France have succeeded in imposing to consumers at least ten tariff increases for water and gas in the last four years alone, contributing heavily to further impoverishing Romania’s population whose income levels, however, were already well below the EU average. To top it all off, Brussels is about to stunt Romania’s economic growth by imposing an EC-backed premier, unelected and undesired by the locals.

Moreover, throughout the region, Western global corporations have systematically deprived all the governments of much needed taxation income via transfer pricing and other accounting gimmicks.

Sure enough, there are a few success stories of Western economic expansion in the region, like that of German, American and French auto-makers in countries like Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania, but these are the exception rather than the rule.

At the time of their EU accession in 2007, citizens of predominantly Orthodox countries like Romania and Bulgaria were hoping that this would put an end to their countries’ economic plight. The ensuing cultural shock suffered during the latest drive of Western expansionism has instead reopened old wounds. The 1204 ransacking of Constantinople by the crusaders is still alive in the collective memory of the Balkans. On that occasion, Western military “assistance” morphed into full-blown pillage and plunder, followed by the occupation of the Byzantine capital.

By contrast, since 2012 when the first China-CEE meeting took place in Warsaw, China has proven more willing than the EU to invest heavily in these countries’ infrastructure and manufacturing sector. In 2013, the first direct rail link between southwest China and the Polish city of Lodz was inaugurated, greatly facilitating two-way trade between the two countries. Nowadays, it takes only 15 days by rail for Chinese goods to reach Poland, or for Polish agricultural products to reach China. The upgrade of Baltic countries’ ports with Chinese investment is also underway, not to mention the upgrade of the port facilities in Piraeus, Greece by Cosco.

To date, the most ambitious Chinese infrastructure project in the region is the building of a very fast rail link between Piraeus and Hungary, connecting Athens and Skopje with Budapest via Belgrade. Not very far behind are the Russians, who are planning to build a gas pipeline from the Balkans to Central Europe along the same route. The Russians have also agreed to finance, to the tune of a few billion euros, the upgrade and construction of nuclear reactors in Hungary in spite of vehement EU protests.

The leaders of Central and Eastern European countries are now in a position to choose from the two geo-economic agendas the one that best suits the needs of their economies. As matters now stand, it seems that the West has largely exhausted its economic growth potential and is instead trying to exploit – colonial-style – the resources or populations of the new member states accepted after 2004. With its large cash reserves and “win-win” economic philosophy, China looks set to capitalize on local disenchantment with the EU by expanding steadily into this region.

The SCO's Landmark Ufa Summit

 July 11, 2015

On the 9th and 10th of July 2015, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has held a landmark summit in Ufa (Russia), its 15th to date. Ufa has simultaneously hosted the BRICS summit, which was meant to further strengthen economic ties between its five emerging economic powers.

Founded in 2001 by Russia, China and four Central Asian republics, the SCO had until recently as its main objective fighting “the three evils: separatism, extremism and terrorism”. At Ufa, the six founding members have for the first time agreed to allow for the expansion of the organization by offering full membership to both India and Pakistan. Thus the US geopolitical push to see India included into a balance-of-power mechanism in Asia aimed at containing China has been thwarted. Accordingly, the United States will remain with a handful of allies in Asia, from the Philippines and possibly Vietnam to its old-time ally Japan.

The expanded SCO covers a huge geographical area which includes Eurasia, China and the entire Indian subcontinent, with a combined population in excess of 3 billion. Four of its members (Russia, China, India and Pakistan) are nuclear powers and have large, well-equipped military forces. During the summit the leaders of member-countries, new and old, have expressed their willingness to also enhance economic cooperation in strategically important sectors such as transport and energy production/distribution.

The State Department officials have reacted to the new developments in Asia by declaring that the United States do not consider Russia or China as “existential threats” to the Americans.

 

The SCO Expands

 August 15, 2014

The EU’s expansion into Ukraine obeys the law of unintended consequences. Alliances that were probably decades into the making are starting to take shape in months, if not weeks.

Thus, after ten years of protracted negotiation, Russia agreed to sign the huge gas-supply contract with China last June. The two countries have reinforced their diplomatic and military cooperation within the SCO and are now poised to enlarge this organization to ten members.

Russia and China have recently announced that India, Iran, Pakistan and Mongolia will be accepted as new members at the forthcoming SCO summit in Dushanbe to be held on the 11th-12th September 2014. This is how the enlargement process is perceived in New Delhi:

“With Beijing having had a profound rethink on India’s admission as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the tectonic plates of the geopolitics of a massive swathe of the planet stretching from the Asia-Pacific to West Asia are dramatically shifting. That grating noise in the Central Asian steppes will be heard far and wide — as far as North America, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.”

In a not-too-distant future we could expect Turkey to respond positively to President Nazarbayev’s invitation to join the Eurasian Union. There is also a very strong possibility that Turkey’s observer status within the SCO will morph into full membership of the organization.

In hindsight, the EU’s and NATO’s ill-inspired eastward drive and subsequent sanctions against Russia have greatly accelerated the latent integration plans in Asia and have increased the bonds of solidarity and economic cooperation within the BRICS group of countries.

 

Is the EU Ready for a G3 World ?

 April 10, 2012

One of the key issues in IR & geopolitics is that of hegemonic transition. In the space of only thirty years, the world as we knew it has gone from bi-polar (international affairs dominated by the USA and the USSR) to unipolar (with the US as the only superpower left), to what is now a disorganised and anarchic state of affairs most commonly known under the label of G-zero.

As much as we would like to see a multi-polar world order emerging, the most touted options in IR to date are that of a G-2 order (“Chimerica”), or a G-3 world with the USA, China and the European Union in charge of global governance.

The G-2 formula was first advanced in US academic circles in 2006 by Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In his view – and that of many IR specialists or diplomats like Henry Kissinger – the US and China should cooperate in order to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation and to address together global problems such as trade surpluses, world hunger or climate change. The idea of a G-2 world order, however, has left both Washington and Beijing unimpressed. Its echoes were found only within some EU policy-making circles.

Thus in 2009, during a Sino-EU summit in Prague, the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has stated that

“it is totally ungrounded and wrong to talk about the dominance of two countries in international affairs”. Indeed, as professor Jian Junbo from Shanghai comments in an article on this issue, “the responsibility of a G-2 member to jointly shape the world’s economy and international affairs is too far beyond China’s ability and ambitions”.

As he rightly points out, China is still a developing country with huge under-development problems, low per capita income and inferior military strength if compared to that of the United States.

China’s refusal to endorse a G-2 formula does not mean, according to ECFR specialists, that it would be adverse to the emergence of a G-3 order which would include the EU as well. As Mark Leonard and Parag Khanna argue in an article originally published in the New York Times, we are already living in a G-3 world,

“one that combines US military power and consumption, Chinese capital and labour and European rules and technology. The United States, the European Union and China are the three largest actors in the world, together representing approximately 60 percent of the world economy – with the EU being the largest of the three”.

Unfortunately, the EU’s strengths – the largest trade bloc, foreign investor and aid donor in the world – are constantly being undermined by an irresolute common foreign policy, or as former UK foreign secretary David Miliband put it, “confused messages, patchy coordination and relationships with global powers that lacked clarity, strategy or purpose”. (sources: Asia Times, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, NYT)

Military Spending: Less Boots on the Ground for the EU

March 20, 2012

International military analysts have recently pointed out that military spending in Asia has increased to 262 billion euros in 2012. The amount could overtake the EU’s own military spending in the near future, possibly as early as next year. Smaller military budgets, however, are consistent with the EU’s new focus on soft power and diplomacy, as opposed to investment in new weapons systems and more ‘boots on the ground’. Moreover, European countries have had an insignificant military presence in the Middle East or Asia, its former role being filled over the past sixty years by the United States. Naturally, the financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures are also considered responsible for the anaemic military spending by EU members.

In 2012 the US will spend an estimated 739 billion dollars, which, combined with the EU’s own 270 billion euros in military spending, will secure NATO’s position as the world’s most powerful military alliance. The refocusing of the US’ military strategy on Asia, which includes a new base in Australia and more American warships in Singapore, has been recently decried by Middle Eastern kingdoms feeling somewhat abandoned to their fate. Accordingly, they have increased their own military purchases and are intensifying diplomatic pressure on the US to remain engaged in their region. For Arab leaders, these lobbying efforts could not have been undertaken at a worst time, as the Obama administration plans to further reduce military spending to an estimated 500 billion USD per year.

Russia has recently announced that it would spend 775 billion dollars until 2022 for a much-needed refurbishment of its armed forces’ equipment, and for making its troops more professional.

China’s military will receive an estimated 89 billion dollars in 2012. In recent times, the Chinese military expenditure has shown a tendency to double every five years or so. Worries about Chinese hegemony in Asia have prompted other Asian nations, including India, to increase their military spending this year, which is good news for European weapons manufacturers. Fortunately – according to most analysts – the danger of a confrontation between major powers is rather remote at this point in time, as the Chinese military’s might will match America’s only in 15 or 20 years from now. (sources: www.sipri.org, Le Monde, International Institute for Security Studies, Reuters)

The US' Strategic Defence Review Assessed

 January 28, 2012

The Defense Strategic Review (DSR) released by the Pentagon on the 5th of January 2012 summarises the Obama Administration’s geopolitical agenda and strategic priorities. From it, experts can discern which country is considered the new enemy of the USA, although President Obama’s speech on the occasion does not mention China by name.

In France, the refocusing of the US strategy on the Asia-Pacific region is viewed by Professor Jean-Jacques Roche from ISAD as a positive development. Whilst he observes that some of the new EU members (countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and even Romania) might express their misgivings about the planned US troops withdrawal , Western suppliers of military hardware should supposedly rejoice. Professor Roche believes that the Pentagon’s DSR could kick-start the accelerated development of the European Defence Agency (EDA) and increase the mutualisation of the defence capabilities of the EU’s member countries.

The two reasons given by the US for the elaboration of the new military doctrine are the changed geopolitical environment and the radically different fiscal circumstances. In other words, the adoption of the new strategy is supposed to save the US some $450 billion over ten years, fiscal consolidation being nowadays regarded by Washington as a national security imperative…

We can also gauge from the document who the US’ current friends and enemies are. Unfortunately, China is identified as a potential foe, in the same paragraph with Iran. In the Middle East, America’s friends and allies are the Gulf countries and Israel. In Asia, India, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are the allies supposed to offer the US the means of putting in place – if needed – a balance of power mechanism against China. This time around, the US needs Russia on its side, especially in the wake of the upheavals in the Middle East – hence the reset.

Interestingly enough, the Indians are advised by their own experts to refuse bandwagoning on the issue. Thus R.S. Kalha, an ex-Secretary of the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, notes that in the past the US had forced India to settle on Kashmir. He rightly observes that South-East Asian nations are loath to become close allies of either China or the United States, for such an option could prove disastrous for them. R.S. Kalha believes that the Indian leadership should be prudent on the matter, as a clear-cut alliance with the US might prove detrimental to Indian interests. He knows that the nature of the US – China relationship is very complex and that a military conflict between the two giants seems highly unlikely, as long as China needs the American export markets and the US needs China to continue to buy its T-bills. To be sure, the relationship between the two powers is deeper and more complex than the one established by Washington with its Soviet counterpart during the Cold War.

The reception of the Pentagon’s DSR by the Chinese government was a rather cool one. The Chinese leadership seems unwilling to intensify confrontation and to become a new cold war target for Washington. The People’s Daily has insisted that China should continue with its economic development and avoid being dragged into a military competition with the US, as the Russians had. Still, the Chinese intend to continue to take care of what they call their ‘peripheral security interests’, in spite of the new assertiveness of the new US defence policy in Asia. For all other issues, the Chinese apparently intend to cooperate with the US in solving potential tensions via dialogue. (sources: Le Monde, Pentagon Paper, People’s Daily, IDSA India)