Tag: trump

The US presidential elections and the prospects for peace

This article originally appeared in the Morning Star, and has since been translated into Dutch on ChinaSquare.

The most significant foreign policy component of Donald Trump’s four years in the White House has been the US’s increasingly hostile stance in relation to China.

While Trump has led a dangerous escalation, the general direction of travel is not significantly different from that of the Obama administration, which pointedly kicked off the reorientation of US global strategy from Middle to Far East with its ‘Pivot to Asia’.

This shift in US-China relations from cooperation through containment to confrontation is most likely a long-term fixture, driven as it is by historic changes in the global economy. To the extent that China’s extraordinary growth in the earlier part of the Reform and Opening Up period was driven by low-cost, low-margin, low-tech, large-scale manufacturing within Western-led supply chains, the US felt that its interests were sufficiently well served that it could accept China’s emergence as a middle-income country. Indeed, the abundant supply of cheap, competent, diligent and well-educated Chinese labour has made a lot of Americans very rich.

But China’s strategy was not aimed at permanently playing a subservient role in a globalised economy dominated by the US and its allies. As Yang Weimin, a senior economist in the Chinese government, said in 2018 in reference to the nascent trade war: “You can’t let China only make t-shirts while the US does high-tech. That is unreasonable.”

China is gradually shifting towards a leadership position in the global economy. Furthermore it is – horror of horrors – a non-white, non-capitalist country that aspires to build socialism. As such it is considered a serious threat to contemporary US-led capitalism. This is the principal trigger for the New Cold War; it is the reason the US has started to prioritise China containment over all other foreign policy concerns.

Escalation under Trump

The Obama administration adopted a relatively sophisticated, multifaceted and multilateral approach, designing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, installing a US marine base in Australia, strengthening the US’s relationship with its
traditional European allies, and quietly encouraging Japanese re-armament. Obama was explicit that the purpose of his ‘pivot’ was to preserve US hegemony: “We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy. And we should do it today, while our economy is in the position of global strength. Because if we don’t write the rules for trade around the world – guess what – China will.”

Nevertheless, the overall anti-China strategy was accompanied by some level of sensible cooperation with Beijing, particularly around environmental issues; the Paris Climate Agreement came about in no small part due to the coordination between Obama and Xi Jinping.

The Trump administration has continued along the same overall path of hostility and containment, but without the sophistication and multilateralism. Its approach has instead been characterised by overt threats, bluster, blackmail, demagoguery and racism.

Anti-China rhetoric was a key plank of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump told his interviewers and his rally attendees: “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country and that’s what they’re doing.” He repeatedly described China’s trade imbalance with the US as “the greatest theft ever perpetrated by anyone or any country in the history of the world”. The decline of US manufacturing was blamed on Chinese currency undervaluation – and of course weak presidents like Bill Clinton that had allowed the Chinese to get away with murder.

Needless to say, Trump’s line of argument is ludicrous and unsubstantiated. The US has benefitted enormously from China’s rise, and its failure to strategically re-invest and upgrade its own economy is the fault of its own myopic ruling class. Singaporean academic and former diplomat Kishore Mahbubani puts it succinctly: “The American people would be far better off if America stopped fighting unnecessary foreign wars and used its resources to improve the well-being of its people.”

Furthermore, as Martin Jacques points out, China’s accumulation of US treasury bonds has “allowed Americans to continue with their spending spree, and then partially helped to cushion the impact of the credit crunch.”

Nonetheless, Trump’s demagoguery has performed its intended role. Significant sections of the US population have been persuaded to direct their anger towards China rather than towards the ruthlessness and decrepitude of neoliberal capitalism.

Trump and his top China hawks – Robert Lighthizer, Peter Navarro, John Bolton and Steve Bannon – thought they would be able to apply ‘the art of the deal’ in order to win unfair concessions from China. Essentially they wanted China to agree to buy hundreds of billions’ worth of US produce that it didn’t need; end state subsidies to key industries; allow US companies unrestricted access to Chinese markets while accepting tariffs on Chinese exports; and stop negotiating technology transfer deals with US companies.

In summary, the US negotiators wanted China to sign up to permanent subservience. Unsurprisingly, the talks collapsed, and the US launched a trade war in January 2018, introducing tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese exports. In 2019, the US government imposed a ban on Huawei, and pressured its ‘Five Eye’ and European allies to do the same. In 2020, it has sought to ban the popular Chinese-made apps TikTok and WeChat.

Meanwhile Trump has led US politicians and media in blaming the coronavirus pandemic on China, insistently referring to it as the “China virus”. Alongside the president’s racist rants, the media propaganda around Hong Kong and Xinjiang has reached hysteria levels. Parallel to the economic and propaganda attacks, there’s been a military escalation that includes ever more frequent US naval operations in the South China Sea and an enormous new weapons deal with Taiwan. The US administration has relaunched the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a strategic cooperation network between the US, Japan, Australia and
India, obviously meant to be an instrument of China containment.

Better with Biden?

There’s a significant chance Donald Trump will no longer be resident in the White House as of January 2021. This would be a very good thing since, in spite of Joe Biden’s proven and outspoken commitment to the neoliberal imperialist status quo, Trump represents the most reactionary and dangerous section of the US ruling class; given his climate denialism, Trump’s presidency is quite literally a danger to the planet.

The question is: would a Democratic victory in November open the door for improved relations between the US and China? Might the US ruling class be willing to step back from a potentially calamitous New Cold War?

It is rather unlikely that there’ll be any meaningful change in the US’s overall strategic position vis-a-vis China. This has become an invariant of a declining US capitalism that’s determined to hold on to global hegemony via whatever means it can muster. China is rising, and along with it a multipolar world order is coming into being, in which no single country will be able to act as ‘global policeman’, imposing its will and reaping the rewards.

A particularly acute problem for the capitalist class in the US is that China is set to surpass the US in the realm of digital technology; it is already leading the field in artificial intelligence and network infrastructure. US companies have been pre-eminent in the digital world for several decades, and this has been the key engine of growth for US capitalism. The household names of the digital era – Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon – are based in the US, and their enormous profits flow primarily into American banks. This is the context for the attacks on Chinese tech companies such as Huawei, ByteDance, Tencent and ZTE. The desire to preserve US digital dominance will not go away with a change of president.

Similarly, the policy of military encirclement will remain in place, as will the propaganda war and blame game. As US capitalism continues its inexorable decline, both Republicans and Democrats can be expected to try and build cross-class solidarity against the big external ‘enemy’ of the era: the People’s Republic of China.

A Biden victory may allow the US to extricate itself from a trade war that has damaged the US economy significantly more than it has the Chinese. This would certainly be a welcome development. Meanwhile, Biden can be expected to return to Obama’s multilateralism, and this is positive; even though the US concept of multilateralism is centred on building a broad alliance against China, it necessarily involves re-engaging with the UN and with international law. Indeed, Biden has said that his administration would return the US to the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organisation and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran nuclear deal).

On balance, then, the interests of peace would probably be better served by a Biden presidency. The most reactionary elements of the ruling class throughout the world are certainly hoping for a Trump triumph, and aggressive China containment is a large part of the reason. As Nigel Farage recently commented: “In terms of stopping China effectively taking over the world, the reelection of Trump is actually central to it.”

This issue was be one of the key themes discussed at the recent No Cold War-organised dialogue between the US economist Jeffrey Sachs and Chinese international relations expert Zhang Weiwei. The dialogue can be viewed on YouTube.

Trolled by a Trump

This article was written for the Chinese website Guancha, and was published on 23 July 2020. The original English text appears below.

The extreme sensitivity of the US to any reporting of the real situation of China-US relations was revealed by the following event. On Tuesday 14 July, I tweeted the following:

China will soon be the world’s largest economy. It’ll be the first nation to reach that status whose rise isn’t built on colonialism, slavery & genocide, but rather on hard work, good economics & effective governance. This should earn China love, but it earns it hate in the West.

This statement was almost immediately met with a fierce attack on Twitter by the son of the US president, Donald Trump Jr!

Why this extreme sensitivity from a Trump family member about a statement of obvious truth? Of course, there’s only so much you can say in Twitter’s 280 characters, but I wanted to have some input into the discussion in the West about the so-called ‘China threat’. Although there has been increasing hostility to China’s rise over the course of the past decade – starting with the launch of the ‘Pivot to Asia’ by the Obama administration in 2011 – anti-China rhetoric in the West has reached new levels of hysteria this year.

Western government and media are both constantly attacking China on the following false lines:

  1. The National Security Law is an attack on the freedoms of the people of Hong Kong and violates China’s legal obligations under the Sino-British joint declaration of 1984.
  2. The Uyghur people are being subjected to torture, mass incarceration and forced sterilisation.
  3. China caused the Covid-19 pandemic and didn’t do enough to stop it spreading.
  4. Chinese technology companies are working to provide their government with sensitive data about other countries.
  5. China uses “predatory economic practices” (in the words of Mike Pompeo) to give its companies an unfair advantage in global competition.

Since March this year, when the pandemic struck New York, this propaganda has become so loud as to be deafening, as the US administration desperately tries to find a way to deflect US attention away from its terrible failure to contain the virus. The US propaganda echoes across the Atlantic, as the British government – committed to a ‘Hard Brexit’ in which it withdraws from the EU Single Market and Customs Union – follows instructions from the US in the hope that this will lead to a good US-UK trade deal.

Because people in Britain, where I live, are exposed to anti-China propaganda on a daily basis, myself and others try to put forward another, more accurate, side to the story: to show people that China’s rise doesn’t need to be considered as a threat; that China deserves credit for its achievements in overcoming the Century of Humiliation, joining the ranks of the technologically-advanced countries, and lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. We hope to promote the idea that friendly win-win cooperation between the world’s great countries is both possible and desirable.

So that’s the context for sending the tweet mentioned above. This tweet quickly became popular, with several thousand ‘likes’. Somehow, after a few hours, it reached the feed of a certain Donald Trump Jr, son of the sitting US president. Trump Jr reposted the tweet, along with the comment:

Who’s gonna tell him? This is literally the most laughable thing on twitter today. The communists spreading their propaganda hard today.

For the next 48 hours, my Twitter notifications became completely unusable, as I was receiving many hundreds of messages an hour from Trump supporters in the US telling me I was an idiot, that China is a colonial power, that China has only become successful by copying American technology, and so on.

Somewhat ironically, a large number of these Trump supporters criticised me for not caring about the human rights of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, claiming they were being denied freedom of worship. Given that Trump introduced a Muslim travel ban in 2017; given that Mike Pompeo is well known for his horrible anti-Muslim rhetoric; and given the US record in bombing Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, it may seem surprising that American right-wingers are so concerned about the Uyghur people. The reality is of course that they’re not concerned about the Uyghur people at all – they’re simply looking for any opportunity to criticise and slander the People’s Republic of China.

Thankfully some prominent and intelligent people, not only in the West but in China, for example Zhao Lijian and Wang Wen, supported my message, and this online Twitter battle wasn’t too one-sided.

This social media fight between myself and Donald Trump Jr has a much broader significance, and is in fact a reflection of the key global political struggle of this era: between the forces of peaceful multipolarity and ‘win-win’ development on the one hand, and the forces of aggressive hegemonism on the other.

The reason that China’s rise, when translated into the language of US policymakers, is a ‘China threat’ is that China’s emergence as a major economic power means that the era of US unipolar dominance is coming to an end. It is simply not realistic to expect that the global economy and the framework of international relations will continue to operate primarily in the interests of the US (or more specifically, the US ruling class).

Working through the UN, the G20, the WTO, along with regional organisations such as the SCO, and developing the broadest possible economic cooperation via the Belt and Road initiative, China is helping to construct a more democratic, multipolar system of international relations. This is a “rising tide that lifts all boats” – a world in which multiple centres of power, in both competition and cooperation, create an equilibrium that promotes long-term peace and rising prosperity.

Unfortunately, elements of the US ruling class are struggling to adapt to this new reality, hoping instead that they can create a ‘New American Century’. In terms of global politics, this is the real meaning of ‘Make America Great Again’: Make America Hegemonic Again. Many of these forces have oriented to Donald Trump, because his idea of ‘greatness’ is the easy road, denying the need for any major strategic shift, denying the inevitable nature of a new global reality. Indeed as Kishore Mahbubani has written, Trump “has divided America on all his policies, except one: his trade and technological war against China.”

A clash of civilisations is neither necessary nor inevitable. If the fundamental national interest of both the US and China is to improve the wellbeing of their populations, it’s obvious that the two countries should cooperate towards that end and avoid major conflict. Humanity faces several very serious problems – climate change, war, hunger and pandemics among them – and they require global cooperation to solve.

The key political task for progressive and pro-peace forces worldwide is to unite to oppose a New Cold War. As Samir Amin put it, “the creation of a front against hegemonism is the number one priority today, as the creation of an anti-Nazi alliance was the number one priority yesterday”.

Towards this end, some activists have set up an international initiative called No to the New Cold War, which will have its first public meeting on Saturday 25 July (9pm CST). Speakers at this meeting include Wang Wen, Yang Hanyi, Martin Jacques, John Ross, US peace activist Medea Benjamin, Venezuelan minister Carlos Ron, and the Chinese-American group Qiao Collective.

More information can be found at www.nocoldwar.org

What’s driving the peace process in Korea?

This article first appeared on Telesur English on 15 June 2018.

This week witnessed a historic step towards lasting peace in Korea. For the first time in history, the heads of state of the US and North Korea met face to face. The meeting appears to have laid the ground for ongoing top-level talks, and US president Donald Trump has announced that the joint war games conducted by the US and South Korea are on hold.

Given that just a few months ago, Trump was threatening nuclear war against the DPRK and referring to its leader Kim Jong-un as “rocket man”, these developments are breathtaking and extremely welcome.

But what changed? Has the Trump administration decided to abandon US imperialism and engage usefully with an increasingly multipolar world? Have some of the most sinister and vicious ‘hawks’ in Washington, like John Bolton (National Security Advisor) and Mike Pompeo (Secretary of State), unexpectedly led a volte-face in foreign policy?

Needless to say, nothing could be further from the truth. In every corner of the earth, the Trump administration has been making it all too clear that ‘Make America Great Again’ is, at its heart, an arch-neocon project. In April, the US carried out missile strikes against the Syrian state for the first time. In May, Trump announced that the US would exit the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and reintroduce sanctions against Iran. Sanctions against Venezuela have been ramped up, and its recent presidential election declared ‘illegitimate’. The steps towards bilateral normalisation between the US and Cuba are being reversed. In an outrageous attack on the national rights of the Palestinians, the US has moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Trump has fired the opening salvoes in a trade war with China. The US has bolstered its support for the breakaway Chinese province of Taiwan, and for the brutal and reactionary Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The globally hegemonic leopard has not changed its spots. To locate the key variables driving change, we must shift our gaze eastward.

One very important change is the stance of the South Korean (ROK) government. President Moon Jae-in came to power last year on the basis of a campaign promising, among other things, a serious bid to improve relations with the DPRK. Moon, a former student activist and human rights lawyer, represents the most progressive wing of mainstream South Korean politics (admittedly this is not saying much) and was mentored by Kim Dae-jung, author of the ‘Sunshine Policy’, which aimed to build understanding and de-escalate tensions with the DPRK.

While essentially pro-US, Moon is on record as saying that “South Korea should adopt diplomacy in which it can discuss a US request and say no to the Americans”. This is consistent with the wishes of the vast majority of the South Korean population, for whom the country’s status as a semi-colony of the US is a source of profound shame – Camp Humphreys, just 40 miles south of Seoul, is “the largest power projection platform in the Pacific”, and is the largest US overseas base; meanwhile the US maintains wartime operational control of the South Korean armed forces. Incidentally, another important Moon policy is to take back wartime operational control.

Moon also opposed the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and is in favour of improving relations with China. The China issue is critical. Throughout its history, the ROK has been heavily reliant on the US, both militarily and economically. South Korea was given preferential treatment in terms of technology transfer and foreign investment specifically so that its population wouldn’t be too attracted by socialism (most people are unaware that the DPRK was economically more advanced than the ROK until the early 1980s, and that the ROK only really started on the path of economic growth on the back of massive aid and preferential market access due to its military role supporting US genocide in Vietnam).

These days, however, the regional economic landscape has changed beyond recognition. China is now South Korea’s number one trade partner by a long way – ROK-China trade is double that between the ROK and the US, for both imports and exports – and it doesn’t take a genius to predict that this trend will deepen as China continues to grow. This economic shift lays the foundations for a political shift, as the South Korean ruling class’s dependence on the US starts to wane. It also gives China a certain amount of leverage. China is a longstanding ally of the DPRK; it wants to see denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula; it wants and needs a peaceful regional environment; it wants to limit the US military threat against it (and hence it is resolutely opposed to THAAD and would very much like to see the removal of 30,000 US troops from Korea); it also wants to ensure that Japan doesn’t develop a nuclear arsenal. All of this means that China is pushing hard for an improvement in relations between the DPRK and ROK, and between the DRPK and the US.

Meanwhile, the North Korean leadership has in recent months outwitted the US in the diplomatic realm, showing itself to be serious in its pursuit of peace. US vice president Mike Pence went to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang (ROK) with the specific intent of impeding any North Korean charm offensive, but he was uniquely unsuccessful: North Korean politicians, athletes and even cheerleaders acquitted themselves brilliantly and won widespread respect. This was soon followed up by two face-to-face meetings between Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, as well as two meetings between Kim Jong-un and Chinese president Xi Jinping. Thus a path to progress has been opened up over the last few months by the leaderships in North Korea, South Korea and China, specifically excluding the US until the East Asian neighbours could present a united front.

The ground has now been laid for a historic advance, although it will no doubt be a rocky and winding road.

Jimmy Carter wrote last year that the North Koreans have been very consistent in their requests of the US: ”What the officials have always demanded is direct talks with the United States, leading to a permanent peace treaty to replace the still-prevailing 1953 cease-fire that has failed to end the Korean conflict. They want an end to sanctions, a guarantee that there will be no military attack on a peaceful North Korea, and eventual normal relations between their country and the international community.”

The people of the world – and especially the US – should add their voices to these entirely reasonable demands. The Korean people on both sides of the 38th parallel desire and deserve peace, stability and reunification.

Can a new Korean War be averted?

This is a slightly edited version of an article that appeared on RT Op-Edge on 23 April 2017.

In recent days, the US administration has been recklessly issuing threats against North Korea, escalating tensions and creating a potentially catastrophic situation in East Asia.

Ridiculously, many people in the west are worried about the situation not because of Trump’s insane militarism but that of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Such thinking is irrational and ahistorical, and is rooted largely in mass media deception and good old-fashioned yellow-peril racism. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has invaded and bombed not a single country. The United States of America on the other hand has invaded and bombed dozens of countries – including Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Grenada, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and, yes, Korea.

The war waged by the US and its allies against North Korea from 1950-53 was nothing short of genocidal. All major cities were destroyed. At least 20% of the population was killed. Only through extraordinary heroism and creative genius – along with the selfless support of China and the USSR – did the country survive. Since then, the North Korean people have lived every single day under the threat of nuclear annihilation. As Bruce Cumings, the leading western academic expert on the DPRK, puts it:

North Korea is the only country in the world to have been systematically blackmailed by US nuclear weapons going back to the 1950s, when hundreds of nukes were installed in South Korea… Why on earth would Pyongyang not seek a nuclear deterrent? But this crucial background doesn’t enter mainstream American discourse. History doesn’t matter, until it does – when it rears up and smacks you in the face.

The DPRK’s leadership never tires of pointing out that it doesn’t actually want to be a nuclear state; its demand is for denuclearisation of the whole Korean peninsula. However, given the nuclear threat that it lives with, it is by no means unreasonable for it to develop a deterrent.

What about talks? The DPRK has consistently said it is willing to engage in negotiations, as long as these don’t take place in a context of bullying and threats. China has worked hard over the years to facilitate such talks. It is precisely the US that has made bilateral or multilateral talks impossible, by including an unreasonable and hypocritical precondition that the DPRK abandon its weapons programme.

Any reasonable person wants to see a nuclear-free Korean peninsula and to avoid a nuclear war. The key first step towards this is for the US to drop its preconditions to negotiations, and to lessen its aggressive stance – at least by reciprocating the North Korean assurance of nuclear no first use. Negotiations will need to cover a number of tough issues, including the removal of US troops from South Korea, removing the nuclear threat against North Korea, steps towards national reunification. Resolution on these issues feels out of reach after so many decades of mistrust, but as Selig Harrison writes in his authoritative book Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement, “if the United States agrees to play the role of an honest broker and to remove what North Korea regards as threatening aspects of its conventional force presence, in return for missile limitations, Pyongyang would be more likely than it is at present to give up its nuclear weapons option and to permit a meaningful inspection regime.”

Under international law, countries have the right to independence and sovereignty; to choose their own path, even if that path doesn’t correspond with the needs of US economic, political, cultural and ideological domination. Do you want the DPRK to be less of a siege state; to devote more resources to social welfare and less to military development? Fine. The key to that is taking away the constant threat of war, nuclear annihilation and regime change.

North Korea is full of normal human beings who want to enjoy their lives, live in peace, raise their children, learn, love, socialise, dance, sing, and so on. They don’t have the same ideology as modern westerners, but frankly that’s not an entirely bad thing. And in many respects the DPRK is surprisingly successful. Bruce Cumings writes in his book North Korea: Another Country:

An internal CIA study almost grudgingly acknowledged various achievements of this regime: compassionate care for children in general and war orphans in particular; “radical change” in the position of women; genuinely free housing, free health care, and preventive medicine; and infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the most advanced countries.

Life expectancy at birth is 70.4 years. Hospital bed density (number of hospital beds per 1,000 of the population) is 13.2 – quadruple that of the United Kingdom. The entire population has access to improved drinking water. The literacy rate is 100%. Think these statistics come from the DPRK’s ministry of propaganda? They’re from the CIA World Factbook. Most developing countries would be very happy to achieve such figures.

Bombing the Korean people would be reckless and unjustifiable; all sides must work to avoid war. The international community has almost unanimously condemned the DPRK’s nuclear missile tests as an unacceptable provocation. However, there should also be recognition of the US’ double standards. As General Charles Horner, former commander of the US Space Command says: “It’s kind of hard for us to say to North Korea, ‘You are terrible people, you are developing a nuclear weapon,’ when the United States has thousands of them.” (cited in Harrison, op cit)

It’s time to stop the escalation of tensions and for all sides to sit down at the negotiating table.