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belt and road initiative
The Second Cold War Is More Dangerous Than the First
Americans have to ask themselves: Is it worth risking nuclear war—and an apocalyptic nuclear winter—for no loftier purpose than to maintain their country’s violently enforced grasp of overwhelming global power?
Apr 02, 2023
Twenty years ago, Noam Chomsky published a bestselling book called Hegemony or Survival. Since then, the stark choice he posed has only become more urgent. Depending on how humanity responds to the challenges of ecological destruction and imperialistic war, in the coming decade that terrifying question “Hegemony or survival?” may well be answered.
Modern history shows that the most dangerous periods are when two or more great powers are struggling for hegemony. The eighteenth century in Europe was a time of “multipolarity,” as Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia were almost continually at war, competing for geopolitical advantage and to divide up the continent between them. The conflicts escalated in the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, as a mighty France, bursting with revolutionary energy, strove for absolute dominance against, in the end, Britain and Russia.
The 1815 Congress of Vienna led to a century-long relative balance of power presided over by an industrializing Britain, which soon became the supreme world power. Once industrialization swept the rest of Europe, however, particularly Germany, Britain’s hegemony began to be challenged, not only in the Scramble for Africa but even in Europe itself. German elites wanted their country to be the next Britain, and to a great extent it was their desire for hegemony that caused World War I. As well as World War II, of course.
Since 1945, the United States has been the global hegemon, or something close to a hegemon. As John Ross notes in the recently published Washington’s New Cold War, even at the height of its relative economic achievement in the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union’s GDP was only 44 percent of the U.S.’s. The Soviets had vast power in their limited sphere encompassing Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but they were not a capitalistically expansive, dynamically growing imperial power in the mode of the United States—or, more recently, of a resurgent China. China’s GDP is 74 percent of the U.S.’s, and its growth rate is higher (it has grown seven times faster than the American economy since 2007). Measured by purchasing power parities, the U.S. accounts for only 16 percent of the world economy, and China’s economy is 18 percent larger. In short, for the first time since World War II, we are entering an era of real competition between two mammoth economies, a declining hegemon and an aspiring hegemon.
When people talk about “the China threat,” this is all they mean. In the long run, China poses a greater threat to U.S. power than the Soviet Union ever did. Mainstream commentators and politicians will prate about China’s threat to democratic values and human rights—there always has to be an ideological rationalization for geopolitical strategy—but U.S. foreign and domestic policy since the Second World War tells us how much its elites care about democracy and human rights. From the Vietnam War to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, and from U.S. support for thugs like Batista, Diem, Iran’s Shah, Suharto, Duvalier, Trujillo, Somoza, Pinochet, Marcos, Rios Montt, Mobutu, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak, Sisi, Modi, Mohammed bin Salman, and Netanyahu to CIA coups and attempted coups against countless governments, it is self-evident that policymakers couldn’t care less about the moral values they pretend to espouse.
Americans have to ask themselves: Is it worth risking nuclear war—and an apocalyptic nuclear winter—for no loftier purpose than to maintain their country’s violently enforced grasp of overwhelming global power?
Threats to U.S. Power
The current flashpoint, of course, is the war in Ukraine, which is helping to midwife a “partnership” between China and Russia, both of which are also deepening their ties with Iran.
Decades ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that “a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.” He would presumably not be very happy with U.S. policies that are bringing about exactly this coalition. At the same time, U.S. missteps in the Middle East and its relative disengagement from the region since the Obama presidency are allowing China to improve its position there, as illustrated by the deal it recently brokered between Iran and Saudi Arabia to normalize relations. China’s burgeoning economic interests not only in the Middle East but across most of the world, a function of its colossal, globe-spanning Belt and Road Initiative, necessitate that the country play an ever-greater diplomatic role in fraught regions. Saudi Arabia, for its part, has shown it is happy to defy Washington, even joining much of the world in disregarding Western sanctions on Russia.
While Washington’s failure to convince most countries to economically and diplomatically isolate Russia highlights the U.S.’s declining “hegemony,” the real threats to American power run deeper than diplomatic embarrassments. In the coming years, the very status of the dollar as the world’s dominant currency may be threatened. A kind of “de-dollarization” has been happening for some time now, as, for example, the share of dollar reserves held by central banks declined from 71 percent in 1999 to 59 percent in 2021. But in the last few years, and especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing effort by many countries to undermine the dollar’s dominance of the global financial system has intensified.
In part, this is because of the U.S.’s “weaponization” of the dollar: in the recent past, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Afghanistan, and Russia have all suffered from financial and trade sanctions that have included even freezing overseas assets and removal from the SWIFT messaging system that underpins the world’s financial infrastructure. Other countries, understandably worried about suffering the same fate, share Russia’s interest in developing new financial institutions and networks outside of the U.S.-led system. Apart from this motivation, they simply want to reduce their exposure to the effects of U.S. economic and monetary policy, which can devastate economies. And as China rises, it makes sense for it to promote use of the renminbi, or at least non-dollar currencies.
To that end, the BRICS countries, for instance, have been establishing new institutions and market mechanisms to bypass the dollar, and are even exploring the possibility of creating a new reserve currency based on the BRICS basket of currencies. Institutions like the New Development Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, new payment infrastructures that are alternatives to SWIFT, central bank digital currencies, bilateral trade conducted in currencies other than the dollar, and a renminbi oil futures market to partially de-dollarize the global oil trade all point toward a future currency regime that is at least multilateral, if not bilateral. The famous economist Nouriel Roubini argues that, “in a world that will be increasingly divided into two geopolitical spheres of influence,” a bilateral currency regime is likely to emerge, perhaps in the next decade.
Given that “the dollar’s dominant position in the global financial system [is] the very foundation of [the U.S.’s] global leadership,” as two experts note, Washington can hardly be viewing all these developments with equanimity. Loss of the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency would have severe consequences for the American economy. But this outcome is exactly the end goal of Washington’s bellicose policies toward its perceived rivals! Through economic sanctions and aggressive military actions—expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and encircling China with U.S. bases, military forces, and militarized partner states like Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and even Taiwan—the United States is driving into existence a hostile bloc of great powers and medium-sized powers that are necessarily committed to its defeat. Their policies, then, will become increasingly belligerent, which will serve to justify even more belligerent U.S. policies, in a vicious circle that amounts to an extraordinarily dangerous “hybrid war” and arms race.
History shows that imperial hubris goes before a fall. In this case, though, it won’t be only the empire that falls; it will, in all likelihood, be civilization itself.
Addicted to War
The Pentagon has made a record budget request this year of $842 billion, which it says is necessary to counter China. This claim should inspire skepticism, given that the U.S. has around 750 overseas military bases and China has about eight—one in Djibouti and a few on man-made islands in the South China Sea. China’s military budget, which has been increasing since America’s “Pacific Pivot,” is $225 billion, not a small sum but still a fraction of the Pentagon’s.
It is an interesting thought experiment, incidentally, to imagine how Washington would react if China had scores of military bases off the U.S. coast and had deputized countries in the Americas to act as its armed sentinel states. Most probably, we wouldn’t be around to talk about it, because a world war would already have wiped us out.
In fact, contemporary China is probably the most pacific great power in world history, as Craig Murray observes. As the U.S. has rampaged all over the Middle East and expanded its direct or indirect military presence to virtually every region of the globe, what wars has China started?
What territories has it annexed? What countries has it invaded? The usual response is that sometime in the future it might invade Taiwan—but given the harm such an invasion would likely inflict on the Chinese economy (because of Taiwan’s cutting-edge semiconductor industry, whose physical facilities could well be damaged or destroyed in an invasion), we should be skeptical of this claim too. Even hawkish Chinese generals seem to think war with Taiwan would be “too costly.” In any event, are annual military budgets of almost a trillion dollars necessary to defend Taiwan?
The conclusion is inescapable that the U.S. is simply trying to intimidate an economic rival, a country that, like Putin’s Russia (only more so), challenges its unfettered dominance of the entire world economy. The record of Washington’s foreign policy since 1945 is to seek and enforce compliance in any way it can, whether through carrots or sticks—blandishments and economic or military aid in some cases, coups, invasions, sanctions, paramilitary operations, and militaristic bullying in others. Defiant regimes cannot be tolerated. Accordingly, policymakers want a compliant (or weakened) Russia and a compliant or weakened China. The calculus is evidently that military buildup, whatever crises it leads to and however unpredictable its long-term effects, is the surest means of achieving these ends. It also has the virtue of projecting overwhelming power, which is something powerful states value for its own sake.
Even if the United States doesn’t succeed in provoking military conflicts with China (as it did with Russia), the new Cold War of which Washington is the primary instigator is profoundly damaging to the interests of humanity. As the Washington Postreports, this new Cold War “may see the world divided into opposing camps for decades, stymieing cooperation on climate change, choking global action on human rights abuses, paralyzing international institutions and increasing tensions in contested regions.” If only for the sake of cooperating to tackle global warming, nothing is more imperative than for great powers, first among them the U.S., to adopt conciliatory policies.
But that means Americans have to pressure their government to this end. And that, in turn, means building an anti-imperialist left. From Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (not to mention right-wing legislators), there isn’t a single principled anti-imperialist in Congress. In a time of staggering dangers from war and ecological destruction, this is an astonishing and shameful fact.
For now, it seems that humanity is choosing the path of battling for hegemony rather than surviving.
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Ukraine and The Tunnel at the End of the Light
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more.
Feb 26, 2023
“Light at the end of the tunnel” was an iconic phrase used by the warmongers who kept the U.S. in Vietnam long after the War had been lost. The implication was that insiders could see through the fog of war and know that things were getting better. It was a lie.
In January 1966, long before the military height of the War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson that the U.S. had a one-out-of-three chance of winning on the battlefield. But Johnson, like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, and Nixon after him, didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. So, he ginned up a simplistic lie and “soldiered on.”
The lie was blown by the Tet Offensive in January 1968. More than 100 U.S. military installations were attacked in a simultaneous nationwide assault that stunned the U.S. The broadcaster, Walter Cronkite, then “the most trusted man in America,” bellowed on national television, “I thought we were supposed to be winning this damned thing.” It was the beginning of the end of the U.S.’ murderous and failed occupation.
We’re now facing another light-and-tunnel event, this time in Ukraine. Only now, it’s not the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the tunnel at the end of the light. What do we mean by that?
Until now, it’s been all light. Remember when the scrappy Ukrainian forces were kicking the barbarian Russian hordes’ asses? When every development betrayed the Russians’ clod-footed strategy, its soldiers’ bad morale, its army’s poor provisioning and worse leadership, and the perilous political situation for Putin back home? The testosterone was flowing. The bravado was intoxicating. The exceptionalism was sublimely seductive. It was only a matter of time and pluck and determination before Ukraine would bloody the bully’s nose and show it what the West was made of.
Remember?
No more.
You can prosecute a war for only so long on the strength of smoke and mirrors, delusions and illusions, lies and press releases. Eventually, however, reality catches up with you. The thuggishly propagandized American citizenry couldn’t know it, but that catching up began in the first weeks of the War and has only accelerated since.
Within the first week of the War, Russia had destroyed Ukraine’s air force and air defenses. By the second week, it had taken out most of Ukraine’s armories and weapons depots. Over following weeks and months, it systematically demolished artillery shipped in from former Warsaw Pact, now NATO, countries in Eastern Europe. It dismantled the country’s transportation and fuel supply systems. It has recently taken out most of the country’s electrical infrastructure.
The Ukrainian army has lost an estimated 150,000 troops, a pace more than 140 times the rate of U.S. losses in Vietnam. This, at a time when 10 million of its formerly 36 million people have fled the country. The military is down to dragooning 16-year-old boys and 60-year-old men to man the barricades. It cannot get replacement ammunition. Russia has knocked out some 90% of Ukraine’s drones, leaving it largely sightless. Delivery times for the tanks that are the hoped-for “game changer” are running into months and years. Not that that will matter.
Remember all the other failed “game changers”? The M777 howitzers and the Stryker armored fighting vehicles? The HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and the PATRIOT air defense systems? All were going to turn the tide at one time. All have proven impotent to stop Russia from seizing 20% of Ukraine’s territory and annexing it and its people to Russia.
The U.S. lost the economic war, as well. Remember Joe Biden’s delusional prediction that the U.S. would see that “the ruble will be reduced to rubble”? And that “the most stringent sanctions regime in history” was going to “weaken” Russia, perhaps even leading to Putin’s overthrow? Most of it backfired, badly. Last year, the ruble reached its highest exchange rate in history. Russia’s 2022 trade surplus of $227 billion was up 86% from 2021. The U.S.’ trade deficit over the same period rose 12.2%, and is approaching $1 trillion.
As a result of all of the above and more, the tide of insider opinion has turned against the War. Senior officials in Europe are talking openly about how the losses are unsustainable and they need to get back to security architectures that prevailed before the poisoned CIA-supported coup in Maidan in 2014. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently let slip that “It will be very, very difficult to eject the Russians from all of occupied Ukraine in the next year. The Washington Post warned recently that Ukraine faced a “critical moment” in the war, belaboring the fact that U.S. support was not limitless and would soon be reached. Hint. Hint.
The Rand Corporation, one of the U.S.’ best-connected strategic whisperers, just published a report stating that “The consequences of a long war far outweigh the benefits.” It explicitly states that the U.S. needs to husband its resources for its more important upcoming conflict with China. Newsweek headlined that “Joe Biden Offered Vladimir Putin 20 Percent of Ukraine to End War.” It also revealed that “Nearly 90 percent of the world isn’t following us on Ukraine.” Vast swaths of Latin American, Africa, and Asia refuse to support the U.S. in its demand for sanctions against Russia.
These are not “Light at the end of the tunnel” divinations. Quite the contrary. If there’s a common thread running through it all it is the sickening recognition that the war is lost, militarily, economically, and diplomatically, that there is no plausible scenario in which those losses will be turned around by soldiering on, and that what is needed now is a hide-the-loss, get-out-any-way-you-can, face-saving exit strategy.
That will not be available, either. That’s where the tunnel at the end of the light comes into play.
Even before the U.S. and its NATO puppets undertook the War, the rest of the world—and that means most of the world—was congealing itself into an anti-Western economic and security bloc. Led by China and its strategic ally, Russia, that bloc includes more than a dozen trade and security organizations. Those include the BRICS confederation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, working explicitly to devise multi-polar institutions to stand up to the U.S.’ unipolar hegemonic model.
It includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security compact made up of leading nations from east, central, and south Asia, including China, Russia, India, and soon, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. It is explicitly working to devise measures to prevent the kind of predatory military assaults the U.S. carried out against Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
The organizing economic engine behind these efforts it is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. BRI is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines, to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more. It is critical to understand why BRI poses such daunting challenges to U.S. supremacy in the world.
Infrastructure is so powerful because it spins off a vast, unimaginable array of secondary, and tertiary economic benefits. It was the railroads in the nineteenth century that bound the U.S. together as the world’s first continental-scale market. Manufacturers could produce for a larger market, and, therefore, at larger scale, and, therefore, at lower cost, than could producers anywhere else on earth.
The railroads made the U.S. the largest market in the world for iron, steel, machine tools, grading equipment, farm equipment, and scores of other commercial and industrial products essential to a modern industrial economy. The U.S. began the 1800s with 1.5% of the world’s GDP. It ended the century with 19% of a four-times larger number, making it the largest economy in the world.
Similarly, automobiles. People think it was Henry Ford and mass production that made the Twentieth Century “The American Century.” In fact, it was the build-out of millions of miles of roads and, later, interstates, without which automobiles would have remained expensive playthings of the wealthy. Those roads stitched the country together into an asphalt network that allowed individual mobility, by virtually anybody, anywhere, down to every street address in the country. The world had never seen anything like it.
The secondary and tertiary economic effects were astounding, everything from the world’s largest markets for steel, glass, plastics, and rubber, to gasoline, diesel, highway construction on a continental scale, repair shops and drive-ins, to the entire panoply of culture we know of as suburbia. The Twentieth Century was the Century of the Automobile. The infrastructure the U.S. built to make it possible was the major reason—at least economically—that the U.S. led the world for most of that century.
China is now proposing to do the same for Asia in the Twenty-First Century, but on a much larger scale. It is leading an infrastructure build-out that will dwarf Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system. It will serve most of the five billion people in Eurasia, thirty TIMES more than the 150 million people Eisenhower’s project helped.
Wisely, China has ensured that all of the 100+ nations joining BRI are enriched by their participation, whether building themselves up domestically, or extending their reach internationally. It is the largest, most compelling, geographically extensive, nationally inclusive, mutually enriching economic enterprise in the history of the world. The U.S. is not part of it.
Finally, there is the matter of the dollar. Since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, the global economy has used the dollar as the primary currency of international trade. This has given the U.S. an “exorbitant privilege” in that it can essentially write an unlimited stream of hot checks to the world, because countries need dollars to be able to conduct international commerce. The U.S. “sells” them dollars by issuing Treasury debt, which is a universally fungible international medium of exchange.
One of the consequences of this arrangement is that it has allowed the U.S. to spend far beyond its means, running up $32 trillion of debt since 1980, when its national debt stood at a mere $1 trillion. The U.S. uses this debt to, among other things, fund its gargantuan military with its 800 military bases around the world, which it uses to do things like destroy Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and a host of lesser predations on other countries. All the world sees this and is repulsed by it.
The world sees how dollar hegemony underwrites the U.S.’ ability to carry out or attempt coups in Honduras, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Belarus, Egypt, Syria, and, of course, Ukraine, among others. And these are just those in the past two decades.
The same dollar hegemony underwrote U.S. predations in the latter part of the Twentieth Century against Iran, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries. Again, the rest of the world sees this. U.S. citizens, rapturously oblivious in their hermetically sealed media bubble, do not.
The world saw how the U.S. stole $300 billion of Russian funds that were held in Western banks, part of its sanctions regime against Russia for its role in the Ukraine war. They’ve seen how the U.S. has carried out similar thefts against dollar-denominated funds of Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Iran. It sees how the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates to take care of U.S. needs makes capital flow out of other countries, and how it makes their currencies fall, forcing inflation on them. Not a single country in the world is left untouched.
The cumulative impact of these facts is that many countries would rather not be held hostage to the implicit and explicit negative consequences of dollar hegemony. They also want to remove the “exorbitant privilege” that they believe the U.S. has abused to their individual and collective detriment.
They have begun—again, led by Russia and China—to build an international finance and trading system that doesn’t rely on dollars, that uses countries’ local currencies, gold, oil, or other assets to trade. This received special impetus last year when Saudi Arabia announced it would begin accepting Chinese yuan in exchange for its oil. Oil is the world’s most valued internationally-traded commodity, so the perception is that a dam is beginning to break.
It will take years before an equally functional substitute for the dollar is devised but what began a few years ago as a trickle has gained momentum and urgency as a consequence of U.S. actions in Ukraine. When the dollar is no longer the world’s international reserve currency and nations don’t need dollars to trade with each other, the U.S. will no longer be able to fund its massive budget and trade deficits by writing hot checks. The withdrawal will be agonizing and will greatly circumscribe the U.S.’ role as global hegemon.
U.S. actions in Ukraine have driven together its two greatest adversaries, Russia and China. They, joined by India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and dozens of other countries, are carrying out a Mackinder-feared Eurasian integration that will leave the U.S. outside of the world’s largest and most dynamic trading bloc.
The U.S.’ military failure has advertised, once again (after Iraq and Afghanistan), the relative impotence of U.S. military solutions. Yes, it can still destroy small, defenseless countries like Serbia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But against a peer competitor that has chosen to stand up to it, the U.S. has, frankly, been handed its ass. All the world can see it.
Events have shown the hollowness of U.S.-led economic and financial systems, as well, especially compared to China. China’s economic performance has far surpassed that of the U.S. It has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than any country in the history of the world. Its growth has made it the largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. While average inflation-adjusted incomes in the U.S. are little higher than they were 50 years ago, incomes in China are up more than 10 TIMES over the same period. And it has done this without brutalizing and pillaging other nations that refuse to bend to its hegemonic will.
And, the War has betrayed, as nothing else possibly could, the diplomatic isolation of the U.S., with the vast majority of the world’s people refusing to implement U.S.-demanded sanctions against Russia. Its destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline is recognized as the greatest act of state-sponsored terrorism in history, easily surpassing 911 in terms of the hundreds of millions of people it will hurt. And this, to one of its putative allies, Europe. Imagine what happens to its enemies.
This is the tunnel at the end of the light, a multi-polar as opposed to a unipolar world. It means increasing isolation of the U.S. from the rest of the world, the closing in of options, the narrowing of opportunities, the loss of strategic primacy that once graced the greatest power in the history of the world. It will mean dramatically reduced power and influence vis-à-vis the U.S.’ strategic adversaries, and markedly constrained ability to operate militarily, economically and financially in the world, what with the hot checkbook soon to be taken away.
In twenty or thirty years, the U.S. will still be a substantial regional power, perhaps like Brazil in South America, Iran in West Asia, or Nigeria in Africa. But it will not be the global hegemon it once was, able to project and inflict power in the world as it has done for the last century. The U.S. abused its providential anointment as the exceptional nation. That abuse has been recognized, called out, and is now being acted against by most of the other nations of the world. The future will be very different for the U.S. than it has been for the past 80 years, since the end of World War II when it towered over the rest of the world like a giant among pygmies. Ukraine will prove to have been the turning point in this transformation, the tunnel at the end of the light.
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China’s Highly Effective Global Dominance Is Intensifying the Death Economy
Jan 15, 2023
After publishing the first two editions of the Confessions of an Economic Hit Man trilogy, I was invited to speak at global summits. I met with heads of state and their top advisors from many countries. Two particularly significant venues were conferences in the summer of 2017 in Russia and Kazakhstan, where I joined an array of speakers that included major corporate CEOs, government and NGO heads such as UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and (before he invaded Ukraine) Russian President Vladimir Putin. I was asked to speak on the need to end an unsustainable economic system that’s consuming and polluting itself into extinction — a Death Economy — and replace it with a regenerative one that was beginning to evolve — a Life Economy.
When I left for that trip, I felt encouraged. But something else happened.
In talking with leaders who had been involved in the development of China’s New Silk Road (officially, the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI), I learned that an innovative, potent, and dangerous strategy was being implemented by China’s economic hit men (EHMs). It began to seem impossible to stop a country that in a few decades had pulled itself from the ashes of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to become a dominant world power and a major contributor to the Death Economy.
During my time as an economic hit man in the 1970s, I learned that two of the most important tools of the US EHM strategy are:
- Divide and conquer, and
- Neoliberal economics.
US EHMs maintain that the world is divided into the good guys (America and its allies) and the bad guys (the Soviet Union/Russia, China, and other Communist nations), and we try to convince people around the world that if they don’t accept neoliberal economics they’ll be doomed to remain “undeveloped” and impoverished forever.
Neoliberal policies include austerity programs that cut taxes for the rich and wages and social services for everyone else, reduce government regulations, and privatize public-sector businesses and sell them to foreign (US) investors — all of which support “free” markets that favor transnational corporations. Neoliberal advocates promote the perception that money will “trickle down” from the corporations and elites to the rest of the population. However, in truth, these policies almost always cause greater inequality.
Although the US EHM strategy has been successful in the short term at helping corporations control resources and markets in many countries, its failures have become increasingly obvious. America’s wars in the Middle East (while neglecting much of the rest of the world), the tendency of one Washington administration to break agreements made by previous ones, the inability of Republicans and Democrats to compromise, the wanton destruction of environments, and the exploitation of resources create doubts and often cause resentment.
China has been quick to take advantage.
Xi Jinping became president of China in 2013 and immediately began campaigning in Africa and Latin America. He and his EHMs emphasized that by rejecting neoliberalism and developing its own model, China had accomplished the seemingly impossible. It had experienced an average annual economic growth rate of nearly 10 percent for three decades and elevated more than 700 million people out of extreme poverty. No other country had ever done anything even remotely approaching this. China presented itself as a model for rapid economic success at home and it made major modifications to the EHM strategy abroad.
In addition to rejecting neoliberalism, China promoted the perception that it was ending the divide-and-conquer tactic. The New Silk Road was cast as a vehicle for uniting the world in a trading network that, it claimed, would end global poverty. Latin American and African countries were told that, through Chinese-built ports, highways, and railroads, they would be connected to countries on every continent. This was a significant departure from the bilateralism of colonial powers and the US EHM strategy.
Whatever one thinks of China, whatever its real intent, and despite recent setbacks, it’s impossible not to recognize that China’s domestic successes and its modifications to the EHM strategy impress much of the world.
However, there’s a downside. The New Silk Road may be uniting countries that were once divided, but it’s doing so under China’s autocratic government — one that suppresses self-evaluation and criticism. Recent events have reminded the world about the dangers of such a government.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers an example of how a tyrannical administration can suddenly alter the course of history.
It’s important to keep in mind that rhetoric around China’s modifications to the EHM strategy disguises the fact that China is using the same basic tactics as those employed by the US. Regardless of who implements this strategy, it’s exploiting resources, expanding inequality, burying countries in debt, harming all but a few elites, causing climate change, and worsening other crises that threaten our planet. In other words, it’s promoting a Death Economy that’s killing us.
The EHM strategy, whether implemented by the US or China, must end. It’s time to replace the Death Economy based on short-term profits for the few with a Life Economy that’s based on long-term benefits for all people and nature.
Taking action to usher in a Life Economy requires:
- Promoting economic activities that pay people to clean up pollution, regenerate destroyed environments, recycle, and develop technologies that do not ravage the planet;
- Supporting businesses that do the above. As consumers, workers, owners and/or managers, each of us can promote the Life Economy;
- Recognizing that all people have the same needs of clean air and water, productive soils, good nutrition, adequate housing, community, and love. Despite the efforts of governments to convince us otherwise, there’s no “them” and “us;” we’re all in this together;
- Ignoring and, when appropriate, denouncing propaganda and conspiracy theories aimed at dividing us from other countries, races, and cultures; and
- Realizing that the enemy is not another country, but rather the perceptions, actions, and institutions that support an EHM strategy and a Death Economy.
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