Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Maintaining American Supremacy in the Twenty-First
Century
By Alfred McCoy
Posted on September 15, 2015, Printed on September 15, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176044/
It could be a joke of the a penguin, a rabbi, and a priest walked into a
bar variety, but this one would start, five Chinese naval vessels
operating in the Bering Sea sailed into U.S. territorial waters, coming
within 12 miles of the U.S. coast... And the punch line would be yours to
come up with. Certainly, that event, which did indeed occur recently
(without notification to U.S. authorities), caused a small news flap here,
in part because President Obama was then visiting Alaska. Not since German
U-boats prowled off the East Coast of the U.S. during World War II had such
a thing happened and though American officials reported that the Chinese had
done nothing illegal or that failed to comply with international law, it
still had a certain shock effect in a country thats used to its own navy
traveling the worlds waters at will.
No one would think to report similarly on U.S. ships transiting global
waters of every sort (often with the urge to impress or issue a warning).
Its the norm of our world that the U.S. can travel the waters of its
choice, including Chinese territorial ones, without comment or prior
notification to anybody, and that it can build strings of bases and
garrisons to contain China, and determine which waters off Chinas coasts
are Chinese and which are, in effect, American. This is commonplace and
so hardly news here.
Any Chinese attempt to challenge this, however symbolically -- and those
five ships were clearly meant to tweak the maritime nose of the globes
sole superpower" -- is news indeed. That includes, of course, the giant,
grim, militaristic parade the Chinese leadership recently organized in the
streets of Beijing, which U.S. news reports left you feeling had taken
place, like the brief voyage of those five ships, somewhere in close
proximity to U.S. territory. There's no question that, despite recent
economic setbacks, the Chinese still consider themselves the rising power on
planet Earth, and are increasingly eager to draw some aggressive boundaries
in the Pacific, while challenging a country that is pivoting directly into
its neighborhood in a very public way. Get used to all this. Its the
beginning of what could prove to be a decades-long militarized contest
between two bulked-up powers, each eager enough to be off the coast of the
other one (though the only coast China is likely to be off in a serious way
for a long time to come is the cyber-coast of America).
Fortunately, TomDispatch has Alfred McCoy, a veteran empire watcher, keeping
an eye on all of this. Recently, he wrote a much-noted piece, The
Geopolitics of American Global Decline, on Chinese attempts to reorganize
the world island of Eurasia and break the encircling bounds of American
power. Today, in what is in essence part two, he turns to the other side of
the equation, American power (never to be underestimated), and suggests
that, in the imperial sweepstakes that have been the essence of global
politics since at least the sixteenth century, the most underestimated
figure of our moment may be President Barack Obama. The question McCoy
raises: Might Obamas global policies, much derided here, actually extend
the American century deep into the twenty-first? Tom
Grandmaster of the Great Game
Obamas Geopolitical Strategy for Containing China
By Alfred W. McCoy
In ways that have eluded Washington pundits and policymakers, President
Barack Obama is deploying a subtle geopolitical strategy that, if
successful, might give Washington a fighting chance to extend its global
hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. After six years of silent,
sometimes secret preparations, the Obama White House has recently unveiled
some bold diplomatic initiatives whose sum is nothing less than a
tri-continental strategy to check Beijings rise. As these moves unfold,
Obama is revealing himself as one of those rare grandmasters who appear
every generation or two with an ability to go beyond mere foreign policy and
play that ruthless global game called geopolitics.
Since he took office in 2009, Obama has faced an unremitting chorus of
criticism, left and right, domestic and foreign, dismissing him as hapless,
even hopeless. He's a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to
understand reality," said Venezuelas leftist president Hugo Chavez, just
months after Obamas inauguration. I think he has projected a position of
weakness and... a lack of leadership, claimed Republican Senator John
McCain in 2012. After six years, opined a commentator from the
conservative Heritage Foundation last April, he still displays a troubling
misunderstanding of power and the leadership role the United States plays in
the international system. Even former Democratic President Jimmy Carter
recently dismissed Obamas foreign policy achievements as minimal.
Voicing the views of many Americans, Donald Trump derided his global vision
this way: We have a president who doesnt have a clue.
But let's give credit where it's due. Without proclaiming a presumptuously
labeled policy such as triangulation, the Nixon Doctrine, or even a
freedom agenda, Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused
by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then
maneuvered deftly to rebuild Americas fading global influence.
Viewed historically, Obama has set out to correct past foreign policy
excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that can
be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of
unilateral power. Within the spectrum of American state power, he has slowly
shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of
unilateral military action toward the more cooperative realm of trade,
diplomacy, and mutual security -- all in search of a new version of American
supremacy.
Obama first had to deal with the disasters of the post-9/11 years. Looking
through historys rearview mirror, Bush-Cheney Republicans imagined the
Middle East was the on-ramp to greater world power and burned up at least
two trillion dollars and much of U.S. prestige in a misbegotten attempt to
make that illusion a reality. Since the first day of his presidency, Obama
has been trying to pull back from or ameliorate the resulting Bush-made
miasmas in Afghanistan and Iraq (though with only modest success), while
resisting constant Republican pressures to reengage fully in the permanent,
pointless Middle Eastern war that they consider their own. Instead of Bush's
endless occupations with 170,000 troops in Iraq and 101,000 in Afghanistan,
Obama's military has adopted a more mobile Middle Eastern footprint of
advisers, air strikes, drones, and special operations squads. On other
matters, however, Obama has acted far more boldly.
Covert Cold War Disasters
Obamas diplomats have, for instance, pursued reconciliation with three
rogue states -- Burma, Iran, and Cuba -- whose seemingly implacable
opposition to the U.S. sprang from some of the most disastrous CIA covert
interventions of the Cold War.
In 1951, as that war gripped the globe, Democratic President Harry Truman
ordered the CIA to arm some 12,000 Nationalist Chinese soldiers who had been
driven out of their country by communist forces and had taken refuge in
northern Burma. The result: three disastrous attempts to invade their
former homeland. After being slapped back across the border by mere
provincial militia, the Nationalist troops, again with covert CIA support,
occupied Burmas northeast, prompting Rangoon to lodge a formal complaint at
the U.N. and the U.S. ambassador to Burma to resign in protest.
Not only was this operation one of the great disasters in a tangled history
of such CIA interventions, forcing a major shake-up inside the Agency, but
it also produced a lasting breach in bilateral relations with Burma,
contributing to that countrys sense of isolation from the international
community. Even at the Cold Wars close 40 years later, Burmas military
junta persisted in its international isolation while retaining a close
dependency relationship with China, thereby giving Beijing a special claim
to its rich resources and strategic access to the Indian Ocean.
During his initial term in office, Obama made a concerted effort to heal
this strategic breach in Washingtons encirclement of the Eurasian land
mass. He sent Hillary Clinton on the first formal mission to Burma by a
secretary of state in more than 50 years; appointed the first ambassador in
22 years; and, in November 2012, became the first president to visit the
country that, in an address to students at Rangoon University, he called the
crossroads of East and South Asia that borders on the most populated
nations on the planet.
Washingtons Cold War blunders were genuinely bipartisan. Following Truman
and drawing on his own experience as Allied commander for Europe during
World War II, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower proceeded to wage the
Cold War from the White House with the National Security Council as his
staff and the CIA as his secret army. Among the 170 CIA covert operations in
48 countries that Eisenhower authorized, two must rank as major debacles,
inflicting especially lasting damage on Americas global standing.
In 1953, after Irans populist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq challenged
Britains imperial monopoly over his countrys oil industry, Eisenhower
authorized a covert regime change operation to be engineered by the CIA and
British intelligence. Though the Agency came perilously close to failure, it
did finally succeed in installing the young, untested Shah in power and then
helped him consolidate his autocratic rule by training a secret police, the
notorious Savak, in torture and surveillance. While Washingtonians toasted
the delicious brilliance of this secret-agent-style derring-do, Iranians
seethed until 1979 when demonstrators ousted the Shah and students stormed
the U.S. embassy, producing a 35-year breach in relations that weakened
Washingtons position in the Middle East.
In September 2013, spurning neoconservative calls for a military solution to
the Iranian problem, Obama dramatically announced the first direct contact
with that countrys leader since 1979. In this way, he launched two years of
sustained diplomacy that culminated in an historic agreement halting Irans
nuclear program. From a geopolitical perspective, this prospective entente,
or at least truce, avoided the sort of military action yearned for by
Republicans that would have mired Washington in yet another Middle Eastern
war. It would also have voided any chance for what, in 2011, Secretary of
State Clinton first termed a pivot to new global realities. She spoke as
well of our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific, a policy which, in a 2014
Beijing press conference, Obama would tout as our pivot to Asia.
During his last months in office in 1960, President Eisenhower also
infamously authorized a CIA invasion of Cuba, confident that 1,000 ragtag
Cuban exiles backed by U.S. airpower could somehow overthrow Fidel Castros
entrenched revolutionary regime. Inheriting this operation and sensing
disaster, President John F. Kennedy forced the CIA to scale back its plans
without stopping the Agency from proceeding. So it dumped those exiles on a
remote beach 50 impassable miles of trackless, tangled swamp from their
planned mountain refuge and sat back as Castros air force bombed them into
surrender.
For the next 40 years, the resulting rupture in diplomatic relations and the
U.S. embargo of Cuba weakened Washingtons position in the Cold War, the
Caribbean, and even southern Africa. After decades of diplomatic isolation
and economic embargo failed to change the communist regime, President Obama
initiated a thaw in relations, culminating in the July 2015 reopening of the
U.S. embassy in Havana, closed for nearly 55 years.
Obamas Dollar Diplomacy
Moving from repair to revival, from past to future, President Obama has been
using Americas status as the planets number one consumer nation to create
a new version of dollar diplomacy. His strategy is aimed at drawing Chinas
Eurasian trading partners back into Washingtons orbit. While Beijing has
been moving to bring parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe into a unified world
island with China at its epicenter, Obama has countered with a bold
geopolitics that would trisect that vast land mass by redirecting its trade
towards the United States.
During the post-9/11 decade when Washington was spilling its blood and
treasure onto desert sands, Beijing was investing its trillions of dollars
of surplus from trade with the U.S. in plans for the economic integration of
the vast Eurasian land mass. In the process, it has already built or is
building an elaborate infrastructure of high-speed, high-volume railroads
and oil and natural gas pipelines across the vast breadth of what Sir
Halford Mackinder once dubbed the world island. Speaking of pivots to Asia
and elsewhere, in a 1904 scholarly essay titled The Geographical Pivot of
History, this renowned British geographer, who started the study of
geopolitics, redrew the world map, reconceptualizing Africa, Asia, and
Europe not as three separate continents, but as a vast single land mass
whose sheer size could, if somehow integrated, make it the epicenter of
global power.
In a bid to realize Mackinders vision a century later, China has set out to
unify Eurasia economically through massive construction financed by loans,
foreign aid, and a new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that has already
attracted 57 members, including some of Washingtons staunchest allies. With
$4 trillion in hard-currency reserves, China has invested $630 billion of it
overseas in the last decade, mostly within this tri-continental world
island.
As an index of influence, China now accounts for 79% of all foreign
investment in Afghanistan, 70% in Sierra Leone, and 83% in Zimbabwe. With a
massive infusion of investment that will reach a trillion dollars by 2025,
China has managed to double its annual trade with Africa over the past four
years to $222 billion, three times Americas $73 billion. Beijing is also
mobilizing military forces potentially capable of surgically slicing through
the arc of bases, naval armadas, and military alliances with which
Washington has ringed the world island from England to Japan since 1945.
In recent months, however, Obama has unleashed a countervailing strategy,
seeking to split the world island economically along its continental divide
at the Ural Mountains through two trade agreements that aim to capture
nothing less than the central global pole position for almost two-thirds
of world GDP [gross domestic product] and nearly three-quarters of world
trade. With the impending approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP),
Washington hopes to redirect much of the vast trade in the Asian half of
Eurasia toward North America.
Should another set of parallel negotiations prove successful by their target
date of 2016, Washington will reorient the European Unions portion of
Eurasia, which still has the worlds largest single economy and another 16%
of world trade, toward the U.S. through the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Finally, in a stroke of personal diplomacy that much of the U.S. media
misconstrued as a sentimental journey, Obama has been courting African
nations aggressively, convening a White House summit for more than 50 of
that continents leaders in 2014 and making a state visit to East Africa in
July 2015. With its usual barbed insight, Beijings Global Times has quite
accurately identified the real aim of Obamas Africa diplomacy as
off-setting Chinas growing influence and recovering past U.S. leverage.
Trade Treaties
When grandmasters play the great game of geopolitics, there is, almost
axiomatically, a certain sangfroid to their moves, an indifference to any
resulting collateral damage at home or abroad. These two treaties, so
central to Obamas geopolitical strategy, will bring in their wake both
diplomatic gains and high social costs. Think of it in blunt terms as the
choice between maintaining the empire abroad and sustaining democracy at
home.
In his six years in office, Obama has invested diplomatic and political
capital in advancing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a prospective treaty
that carefully excludes China from membership in an apparent bid to split
its would-be world island right down its Pacific littoral. Surpassing any
other economic alliance except the European Union, this treaty will bind the
U.S. and 11 nations around the Pacific basin, including Australia, Canada,
Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, and Vietnam, that represent $28 trillion in
combined GDP or 40% of gross world product and a third of all global trade.
By sweeping up areas like agriculture, data flows, and service industries,
this treaty aspires to a Pacific economic integration unparalleled in any
existing trade pact. In the process, it would draw these highly productive
nations away from China and into Americas orbit.
Not surprisingly, Obama has faced ferocious opposition within his own party
from Senator Elizabeth Warren and others who are sharply critical of the
highly secretive nature of the negotiations for the pact and the way it is
likely to degrade labor and environmental laws in the U.S. So scathing was
this critique that, in June 2015, he needed Republican votes to win Senate
approval for fast track authority to complete the final round of
negotiations in coming months.
To pull at the western axis of Chinas would-be world island, Obama is also
aggressively pursuing negotiations for the TTIP with the European Union and
its $18 trillion economy. The treaty seeks fuller economic integration
between Europe and America by meshing government regulations on matters such
as auto safety in ways that might add some $270 billion to their annual
trade.
By transferring control over consumer safety, the environment, and labor
from democratic states to closed, pro-business arbitration tribunals, argues
a coalition of 170 European civil society groups, the TTIP, like its Pacific
counterpart, will exact a high social cost from participating countries.
While the European Unions labyrinthine layers of bureaucracy and the
complexity of relations among its sovereign states make completion of
negotiations within the year unlikely, the TTIP treaty, propelled by Obamas
singular determination, is moving at light speed compared to the laggard
Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations, now in year 12 of
inconclusive talks with no end in sight.
Grandmasters of Geopolitics
In his determined pursuit of this grand strategy, Obama has revealed himself
as one of the few U.S. leaders since Americas rise to world power in 1898
who can play this particular great game of imperial domination with the
requisite balance of vision and ruthlessness. Forget everyones nominee for
master diplomat, Henry Kissinger, who was as inept as he was ruthless,
extending the Vietnam War by seven bloody years to mask his diplomatic
failure, turning East Timor over to Indonesia for decades of slaughter until
its inevitable independence, cratering U.S. credibility in Latin America by
installing a murderous military dictatorship in Chile, and mismanaging
Moscow in ways that extended the Cold War by another 15 years. Kissingers
career, as international law specialist Richard Falk wrote recently, has
been marked by his extraordinary capacity to be repeatedly wrong about
almost every major foreign policy decision made by the U.S. government over
the course of the last half-century.
Once we subject other American leaders to a similar calculus of costs and
benefits, we are, surprisingly enough, left with just three grandmasters of
geopolitics: Elihu Root, the original architect of Americas rise to global
power; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter,
who shattered the Soviet Empire, making the U.S. the worlds sole
superpower; and Barack Obama, who is defending that status and offering a
striking imperial blueprint for how to check Chinas rise. In each case,
their maneuvers have been supple and subtle enough that they have eluded
both contemporary observers and later historians.
Many American presidents -- think Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton -- have been capable diplomats, skilled
at negotiating treaties or persuading allies to do their bidding. But
surprisingly few world leaders, American or otherwise, have a capacity for
mastering both the temporal and spatial dimensions of global power -- that
is, the connections between present actions and often distant results as
well as an intuitive ability to grasp the cultural, economic, and military
forces whose sum is geopolitics. Mastering both of these skills involves
seeing beneath the confusion of current events and understanding the deeper
currents of historical change. Root and Brzezinski both had an ability to
manipulate the present moment to advance long-term American interests while
altering, often fundamentally, the future balance of global power. Though
little noticed in the avalanche of criticism that has all but buried his
accomplishments in the Oval Office, Obama seems to be following in their
footsteps.
Elihu Root, Architect of American Power
All but forgotten today, Elihu Root was the true architect of Americas
transformation from an insular continental nation into a major player on the
world stage. About the time Sir Halford Mackinder was imagining his new
model for studying global power, Root was building an institutional
infrastructure at home and abroad for the actual exercise of that power.
After a successful 30-year career as a corporate lawyer representing the
richest of robber barons, the most venal of trusts, and even New York's
outrageously corrupt William "Boss" Tweed, Root devoted the rest of his long
life to modernizing the American state as secretary of war, secretary of
state, a senator, and finally a plenipotentiary extraordinaire. Not only did
he shape the conduct of U.S. foreign policy for the century to come, but he
also played an outsized role, particularly for a cabinet secretary of a
then-peripheral power, in influencing the character of an emerging
international community.
As a prominent attorney, Root understood that the Constitutions protection
of individual liberties and states rights had created an inherently weak
federal bureaucracy, ill suited for the concerted projection of American
imperial power beyond its borders. To transform this patchwork state and
its divided society -- still traumatized by the Civil War -- into a world
power, Root spent a quarter-century in the determined pursuit of three
intertwined objectives: fashioning the fragmentary federal government into a
potent apparatus for overseas expansion, building a consensus among the
countrys elites for such an activist foreign policy, and creating new forms
of global governance open to Washingtons influence.
As secretary of war (1899-1904), Root reformed the Armys antiquated
structure, creating a centralized general staff, establishing a modern war
college, and expanding professional training for officers. Through this
transformation, the military moved far beyond its traditional mission of
coastal defense and became an increasingly agile force for overseas
expansion -- in China, the Philippines, the Caribbean, Latin America, and,
ultimately, Europe itself. With his eye firmly fixed on Americas ascent,
Root also covered up atrocities that accompanied the armys extraordinarily
brutal pacification of the Philippines.
As secretary of state (1907-1909), senator (1909-1915), and special envoy to
Russia (1917), Root then led a sustained diplomatic effort to make the
country, for the first time, a real presence in the community of nations. To
insert Washington -- until then at the periphery of a world politics still
centered on Europe -- in the game of global power projection, Secretary of
State Root launched an unprecedented tour of Latin America in 1906, winning
the continents support.
With the backing of 17 Latin republics among the 44 nations present,
Washington gained sufficient geopolitical clout at the Second Hague Peace
Conference in 1907 to conclude the first broad international legal agreement
on the laws of war. To house the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the worlds
first ongoing institution for global governance, which emerged from the
Hague peace conferences, Roots friend Andrew Carnegie spent $1.5 million, a
vast sum at the time, to build the lavish Peace Palace at The Hague in 1913.
A year later, as chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(1910-1925), Root helped establish The Hague Academy of International Law
housed within that Peace Palace.
Simultaneously, he cemented a close alliance with Britain by promoting
treaties to resolve territorial disputes that had roiled relations with the
worlds preeminent power for the better part of a century. That effort won
him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. Even in retirement at age 75, Root served
on a League of Nations committee that established the Permanent Court of
International Justice, realizing his long-held vision of the international
community as an assembly of sovereign states governed by the rule of law.
Throughout these decades, Root was careful to cultivate support for an
assertive foreign policy among the countrys ruling East Coast elites. As
the culmination of this effort, in 1918 he led a group of financiers,
industrialists, and corporate lawyers in establishing the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York, which soon became the countrys most influential
forum for shaping public consensus for an expansive foreign policy. He also
cultivated academic specialists at leading universities nationwide, using
their expertise to shape and support his foreign policy ideas. In sum, Root
recast American society to forge a nexus of money, influence, and intellect
that would sustain U.S. foreign policy for the next century.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Destroyer of Empires
After a long period of indifferent international leadership, during Jimmy
Carters presidency foreign policy came under the charge of ¬an
underestimated figure, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Émigré
Polish aristocrat, professor of international relations, and an autodidact
when it came to geopolitics, he was above all an intellectual acolyte of Sir
Halford Mackinder. Through both action and analysis, Brzezinski made
Mackinders concept of Eurasia as the world island and its vast interior
heartland as the pivot of global power his own. He would prove
particularly adept at applying Sir Halfords famous dictum: Who rules East
Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the
World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the world.
Wielding a $100 million CIA covert operation like a sharpened wedge,
Brzezinski drove radical Islam from Afghanistan into the heartland of
Soviet Central Asia, drawing Moscow into a debilitating decade-long Afghan
war that weakened Russia sufficiently for Eastern Europe to finally break
free from the Soviet empire. With a calculus that couldnt have been more
coldblooded, he understood and rationalized the untold misery and
unimaginable human suffering his strategy inflicted through ravaged
landscapes, the millions his policy uprooted from ancestral villages and
turned into refugees, and the countless Afghan dead and wounded. Dismissing
the long-term damage as "some stirred-up Moslems," as he saw it, none of it
added up to a hill of beans compared to the importance of striking directly
into the Eurasian heartland to free Eastern Europe, half a continent away,
and shatter the Soviet empire. And these results did indeed mark Brzezinski
as a grandmaster of geopolitics in all its ruthless realpolitik. (Mind you,
the future suffering from those "stirred-up Moslems" now includes the rise
of al-Qaeda, 9/11, and Americas second Afghan War, as well as the
unsettling of the Greater Middle East thanks to the growth of the Islamic
extremism he first nurtured.)
In 1998, in retirement, Brzezinski again applied Sir Halfords theory, this
time in a book titled The Grand Chessboard, a geopolitical treatise on
Americas capacity for extending its global hegemony. Although Washington
was still basking in the pre-9/11 glow of its newly won grandeur as the
worlds sole superpower, he could already imagine the geopolitical
constraints that might come into play and undermine that status. If the U.S.
then seemed a colossus standing astride the world, Eurasia still remained
the globes most important playing field... with preponderance over the
entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy.
That Eurasian megacontinent, Brzezinski observed, is just too large, too
populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically
ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the
most economically successful and politically preeminent global power.
Washington, he predicted, could continue its half-century dominion over the
oddly shaped Eurasian chessboard -- extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok
only as long as it could preserve its unchallenged perch on the Western
periphery, while the vast middle space does not become an assertive
single entity," and the Eastern end of the world continent did not unify
itself in a way that might lead to the expulsion of America from its
offshore bases. Should any of these critical conditions change, Brzezinski
warned prophetically, a potential rival to America might at some point
arise.
Barack Obama, Defender of U.S. Global Hegemony
Less than a decade later, China emerged to challenge Americas control of
Eurasia and so threaten Washingtons standing as the globes great hegemon.
While the U.S. military was mired in the Middle East, Beijing quietly began
working to unify that vast middle space of Eurasia, while preparing to
neutralize Americas offshore bases.
By the time Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009, there were already
the first signs of a serious geopolitical challenge that only the president
and his closest advisers seemed to recognize. In a speech to the Australian
parliament in November 2011, Obama said: Let there be no doubt: in the
Asia-Pacific in the twenty-first century, the United States of America is
all in. After two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost us dearly,
in blood and treasure, he explained, the United States is turning our
attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region, which is the
worlds fastest-growing region -- and home to more than half the global
economy. His initial deployment of just 2,500 U.S. troops to Australia
seemed a slender down payment on his deliberate and strategic decision to
become Americas first Pacific president, producing a great deal of
premature criticism and derision.
Four years later, one CNN commentator would still be calling this Obamas
pivot to nowhere. Even seasoned foreign policy commentator Fareed Zakaria
would ask, in early 2015, Whatever happened to the pivot to Asia?
Answering his own question, Zakaria argued that the president was still
mired in the Middle East and the centerpiece of that pivot, the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, seemed to be facing certain defeat in Congress.
To the consternation of his critics, in the waning months of his presidency,
from Iran to Cuba, from Burma to the Pacific Ocean, Obama has revealed
himself as an American strategist potentially capable of laying the
groundwork for the continued planetary dominion of the United States deep
into the twenty-first century. In the last 16 months of his presidency, with
a bit of grit and luck and a final diplomatic surge -- concluding the
nuclear treaty with Iran to prevent another debilitating Middle Eastern
conflict, winning congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
and completing negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership -- Obama just might secure the U.S. a significant extension of
its waning global hegemony.
Specifics aside, the worlds two most powerful nations, China and the United
States, seem to have developed conflicting geopolitical strategies to guide
their struggle for global power. Whether Beijing will succeed in moving ever
further toward unifying Asia, Africa, and Europe into that world island or
Washington will persist with Obamas strategy of splitting that land mass
along its axial divisions via trans-oceanic trade wont become clear for
another decade or two.
We still cannot say whether the outcome of this great game will be decided
through an almost invisible commercial competition or a more violent drama
akin to historys last comparable imperial transition, the protracted
rivalry between Napoleons continental system and Britains maritime
strategy at the start of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, we are
starting to see the broad parameters of an epochal geopolitical contest
likely to shape the worlds destiny in the coming decades of this still
young twenty-first century.
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington Professor of
History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author, most recently, of
Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, and
co-editor of Endless Empire: Europes Eclipse, Spains Retreat, Americas
Decline.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Alfred W. McCoy
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176044
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Maintaining American Supremacy in the Twenty-First
Century
By Alfred McCoy
Posted on September 15, 2015, Printed on September 15, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176044/
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for the details. Tom]
It could be a joke of the a penguin, a rabbi, and a priest walked into a
bar variety, but this one would start, five Chinese naval vessels
operating in the Bering Sea sailed into U.S. territorial waters, coming
within 12 miles of the U.S. coast... And the punch line would be yours to
come up with. Certainly, that event, which did indeed occur recently
(without notification to U.S. authorities), caused a small news flap here,
in part because President Obama was then visiting Alaska. Not since German
U-boats prowled off the East Coast of the U.S. during World War II had such
a thing happened and though American officials reported that the Chinese had
done nothing illegal or that failed to comply with international law, it
still had a certain shock effect in a country thats used to its own navy
traveling the worlds waters at will.
No one would think to report similarly on U.S. ships transiting global
waters of every sort (often with the urge to impress or issue a warning).
Its the norm of our world that the U.S. can travel the waters of its
choice, including Chinese territorial ones, without comment or prior
notification to anybody, and that it can build strings of bases and
garrisons to contain China, and determine which waters off Chinas coasts
are Chinese and which are, in effect, American. This is commonplace and so
hardly news here.
Any Chinese attempt to challenge this, however symbolically -- and those
five ships were clearly meant to tweak the maritime nose of the globes
sole superpower" -- is news indeed. That includes, of course, the giant,
grim, militaristic parade the Chinese leadership recently organized in the
streets of Beijing, which U.S. news reports left you feeling had taken
place, like the brief voyage of those five ships, somewhere in close
proximity to U.S. territory. There's no question that, despite recent
economic setbacks, the Chinese still consider themselves the rising power on
planet Earth, and are increasingly eager to draw some aggressive boundaries
in the Pacific, while challenging a country that is pivoting directly into
its neighborhood in a very public way. Get used to all this. Its the
beginning of what could prove to be a decades-long militarized contest
between two bulked-up powers, each eager enough to be off the coast of the
other one (though the only coast China is likely to be off in a serious way
for a long time to come is the cyber-coast of America).
Fortunately, TomDispatch has Alfred McCoy, a veteran empire watcher, keeping
an eye on all of this. Recently, he wrote a much-noted piece, The
Geopolitics of American Global Decline, on Chinese attempts to reorganize
the world island of Eurasia and break the encircling bounds of American
power. Today, in what is in essence part two, he turns to the other side of
the equation, American power (never to be underestimated), and suggests
that, in the imperial sweepstakes that have been the essence of global
politics since at least the sixteenth century, the most underestimated
figure of our moment may be President Barack Obama. The question McCoy
raises: Might Obamas global policies, much derided here, actually extend
the American century deep into the twenty-first? Tom
Grandmaster of the Great Game
Obamas Geopolitical Strategy for Containing China
By Alfred W. McCoy
In ways that have eluded Washington pundits and policymakers, President
Barack Obama is deploying a subtle geopolitical strategy that, if
successful, might give Washington a fighting chance to extend its global
hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. After six years of silent,
sometimes secret preparations, the Obama White House has recently unveiled
some bold diplomatic initiatives whose sum is nothing less than a
tri-continental strategy to check Beijings rise. As these moves unfold,
Obama is revealing himself as one of those rare grandmasters who appear
every generation or two with an ability to go beyond mere foreign policy and
play that ruthless global game called geopolitics.
Since he took office in 2009, Obama has faced an unremitting chorus of
criticism, left and right, domestic and foreign, dismissing him as hapless,
even hopeless. He's a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to
understand reality," said Venezuelas leftist president Hugo Chavez, just
months after Obamas inauguration. I think he has projected a position of
weakness and... a lack of leadership, claimed Republican Senator John
McCain in 2012. After six years, opined a commentator from the
conservative Heritage Foundation last April, he still displays a troubling
misunderstanding of power and the leadership role the United States plays in
the international system. Even former Democratic President Jimmy Carter
recently dismissed Obamas foreign policy achievements as minimal. Voicing
the views of many Americans, Donald Trump derided his global vision this
way: We have a president who doesnt have a clue.
But let's give credit where it's due. Without proclaiming a presumptuously
labeled policy such as triangulation, the Nixon Doctrine, or even a
freedom agenda, Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused
by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then
maneuvered deftly to rebuild Americas fading global influence.
Viewed historically, Obama has set out to correct past foreign policy
excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that can
be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of
unilateral power. Within the spectrum of American state power, he has slowly
shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of
unilateral military action toward the more cooperative realm of trade,
diplomacy, and mutual security -- all in search of a new version of American
supremacy.
Obama first had to deal with the disasters of the post-9/11 years. Looking
through historys rearview mirror, Bush-Cheney Republicans imagined the
Middle East was the on-ramp to greater world power and burned up at least
two trillion dollars and much of U.S. prestige in a misbegotten attempt to
make that illusion a reality. Since the first day of his presidency, Obama
has been trying to pull back from or ameliorate the resulting Bush-made
miasmas in Afghanistan and Iraq (though with only modest success), while
resisting constant Republican pressures to reengage fully in the permanent,
pointless Middle Eastern war that they consider their own. Instead of Bush's
endless occupations with 170,000 troops in Iraq and 101,000 in Afghanistan,
Obama's military has adopted a more mobile Middle Eastern footprint of
advisers, air strikes, drones, and special operations squads. On other
matters, however, Obama has acted far more boldly.
Covert Cold War Disasters
Obamas diplomats have, for instance, pursued reconciliation with three
rogue states -- Burma, Iran, and Cuba -- whose seemingly implacable
opposition to the U.S. sprang from some of the most disastrous CIA covert
interventions of the Cold War.
In 1951, as that war gripped the globe, Democratic President Harry Truman
ordered the CIA to arm some 12,000 Nationalist Chinese soldiers who had been
driven out of their country by communist forces and had taken refuge in
northern Burma. The result: three disastrous attempts to invade their former
homeland. After being slapped back across the border by mere provincial
militia, the Nationalist troops, again with covert CIA support, occupied
Burmas northeast, prompting Rangoon to lodge a formal complaint at the U.N.
and the U.S. ambassador to Burma to resign in protest.
Not only was this operation one of the great disasters in a tangled history
of such CIA interventions, forcing a major shake-up inside the Agency, but
it also produced a lasting breach in bilateral relations with Burma,
contributing to that countrys sense of isolation from the international
community. Even at the Cold Wars close 40 years later, Burmas military
junta persisted in its international isolation while retaining a close
dependency relationship with China, thereby giving Beijing a special claim
to its rich resources and strategic access to the Indian Ocean.
During his initial term in office, Obama made a concerted effort to heal
this strategic breach in Washingtons encirclement of the Eurasian land
mass. He sent Hillary Clinton on the first formal mission to Burma by a
secretary of state in more than 50 years; appointed the first ambassador in
22 years; and, in November 2012, became the first president to visit the
country that, in an address to students at Rangoon University, he called the
crossroads of East and South Asia that borders on the most populated
nations on the planet.
Washingtons Cold War blunders were genuinely bipartisan. Following Truman
and drawing on his own experience as Allied commander for Europe during
World War II, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower proceeded to wage the
Cold War from the White House with the National Security Council as his
staff and the CIA as his secret army. Among the 170 CIA covert operations in
48 countries that Eisenhower authorized, two must rank as major debacles,
inflicting especially lasting damage on Americas global standing.
In 1953, after Irans populist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq challenged
Britains imperial monopoly over his countrys oil industry, Eisenhower
authorized a covert regime change operation to be engineered by the CIA and
British intelligence. Though the Agency came perilously close to failure, it
did finally succeed in installing the young, untested Shah in power and then
helped him consolidate his autocratic rule by training a secret police, the
notorious Savak, in torture and surveillance. While Washingtonians toasted
the delicious brilliance of this secret-agent-style derring-do, Iranians
seethed until 1979 when demonstrators ousted the Shah and students stormed
the U.S. embassy, producing a 35-year breach in relations that weakened
Washingtons position in the Middle East.
In September 2013, spurning neoconservative calls for a military solution to
the Iranian problem, Obama dramatically announced the first direct contact
with that countrys leader since 1979. In this way, he launched two years of
sustained diplomacy that culminated in an historic agreement halting Irans
nuclear program. From a geopolitical perspective, this prospective entente,
or at least truce, avoided the sort of military action yearned for by
Republicans that would have mired Washington in yet another Middle Eastern
war. It would also have voided any chance for what, in 2011, Secretary of
State Clinton first termed a pivot to new global realities. She spoke as
well of our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific, a policy which, in a 2014
Beijing press conference, Obama would tout as our pivot to Asia.
During his last months in office in 1960, President Eisenhower also
infamously authorized a CIA invasion of Cuba, confident that 1,000 ragtag
Cuban exiles backed by U.S. airpower could somehow overthrow Fidel Castros
entrenched revolutionary regime. Inheriting this operation and sensing
disaster, President John F. Kennedy forced the CIA to scale back its plans
without stopping the Agency from proceeding. So it dumped those exiles on a
remote beach 50 impassable miles of trackless, tangled swamp from their
planned mountain refuge and sat back as Castros air force bombed them into
surrender.
For the next 40 years, the resulting rupture in diplomatic relations and the
U.S. embargo of Cuba weakened Washingtons position in the Cold War, the
Caribbean, and even southern Africa. After decades of diplomatic isolation
and economic embargo failed to change the communist regime, President Obama
initiated a thaw in relations, culminating in the July 2015 reopening of the
U.S. embassy in Havana, closed for nearly 55 years.
Obamas Dollar Diplomacy
Moving from repair to revival, from past to future, President Obama has been
using Americas status as the planets number one consumer nation to create
a new version of dollar diplomacy. His strategy is aimed at drawing Chinas
Eurasian trading partners back into Washingtons orbit. While Beijing has
been moving to bring parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe into a unified world
island with China at its epicenter, Obama has countered with a bold
geopolitics that would trisect that vast land mass by redirecting its trade
towards the United States.
During the post-9/11 decade when Washington was spilling its blood and
treasure onto desert sands, Beijing was investing its trillions of dollars
of surplus from trade with the U.S. in plans for the economic integration of
the vast Eurasian land mass. In the process, it has already built or is
building an elaborate infrastructure of high-speed, high-volume railroads
and oil and natural gas pipelines across the vast breadth of what Sir
Halford Mackinder once dubbed the world island. Speaking of pivots to Asia
and elsewhere, in a 1904 scholarly essay titled The Geographical Pivot of
History, this renowned British geographer, who started the study of
geopolitics, redrew the world map, reconceptualizing Africa, Asia, and
Europe not as three separate continents, but as a vast single land mass
whose sheer size could, if somehow integrated, make it the epicenter of
global power.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20In a bid to
realize Mackinders vision a century later, China has set out to unify
Eurasia economically through massive construction financed by loans, foreign
aid, and a new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that has already
attracted 57 members, including some of Washingtons staunchest allies. With
$4 trillion in hard-currency reserves, China has invested $630 billion of it
overseas in the last decade, mostly within this tri-continental world
island.
As an index of influence, China now accounts for 79% of all foreign
investment in Afghanistan, 70% in Sierra Leone, and 83% in Zimbabwe. With a
massive infusion of investment that will reach a trillion dollars by 2025,
China has managed to double its annual trade with Africa over the past four
years to $222 billion, three times Americas $73 billion. Beijing is also
mobilizing military forces potentially capable of surgically slicing through
the arc of bases, naval armadas, and military alliances with which
Washington has ringed the world island from England to Japan since 1945.
In recent months, however, Obama has unleashed a countervailing strategy,
seeking to split the world island economically along its continental divide
at the Ural Mountains through two trade agreements that aim to capture
nothing less than the central global pole position for almost two-thirds
of world GDP [gross domestic product] and nearly three-quarters of world
trade. With the impending approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP),
Washington hopes to redirect much of the vast trade in the Asian half of
Eurasia toward North America.
Should another set of parallel negotiations prove successful by their target
date of 2016, Washington will reorient the European Unions portion of
Eurasia, which still has the worlds largest single economy and another 16%
of world trade, toward the U.S. through the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Finally, in a stroke of personal diplomacy that much of the U.S. media
misconstrued as a sentimental journey, Obama has been courting African
nations aggressively, convening a White House summit for more than 50 of
that continents leaders in 2014 and making a state visit to East Africa in
July 2015. With its usual barbed insight, Beijings Global Times has quite
accurately identified the real aim of Obamas Africa diplomacy as
off-setting Chinas growing influence and recovering past U.S. leverage.
Trade Treaties
When grandmasters play the great game of geopolitics, there is, almost
axiomatically, a certain sangfroid to their moves, an indifference to any
resulting collateral damage at home or abroad. These two treaties, so
central to Obamas geopolitical strategy, will bring in their wake both
diplomatic gains and high social costs. Think of it in blunt terms as the
choice between maintaining the empire abroad and sustaining democracy at
home.
In his six years in office, Obama has invested diplomatic and political
capital in advancing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a prospective treaty
that carefully excludes China from membership in an apparent bid to split
its would-be world island right down its Pacific littoral. Surpassing any
other economic alliance except the European Union, this treaty will bind the
U.S. and 11 nations around the Pacific basin, including Australia, Canada,
Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, and Vietnam, that represent $28 trillion in
combined GDP or 40% of gross world product and a third of all global trade.
By sweeping up areas like agriculture, data flows, and service industries,
this treaty aspires to a Pacific economic integration unparalleled in any
existing trade pact. In the process, it would draw these highly productive
nations away from China and into Americas orbit.
Not surprisingly, Obama has faced ferocious opposition within his own party
from Senator Elizabeth Warren and others who are sharply critical of the
highly secretive nature of the negotiations for the pact and the way it is
likely to degrade labor and environmental laws in the U.S. So scathing was
this critique that, in June 2015, he needed Republican votes to win Senate
approval for fast track authority to complete the final round of
negotiations in coming months.
To pull at the western axis of Chinas would-be world island, Obama is also
aggressively pursuing negotiations for the TTIP with the European Union and
its $18 trillion economy. The treaty seeks fuller economic integration
between Europe and America by meshing government regulations on matters such
as auto safety in ways that might add some $270 billion to their annual
trade.
By transferring control over consumer safety, the environment, and labor
from democratic states to closed, pro-business arbitration tribunals, argues
a coalition of 170 European civil society groups, the TTIP, like its Pacific
counterpart, will exact a high social cost from participating countries.
While the European Unions labyrinthine layers of bureaucracy and the
complexity of relations among its sovereign states make completion of
negotiations within the year unlikely, the TTIP treaty, propelled by Obamas
singular determination, is moving at light speed compared to the laggard
Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations, now in year 12 of
inconclusive talks with no end in sight.
Grandmasters of Geopolitics
In his determined pursuit of this grand strategy, Obama has revealed himself
as one of the few U.S. leaders since Americas rise to world power in 1898
who can play this particular great game of imperial domination with the
requisite balance of vision and ruthlessness. Forget everyones nominee for
master diplomat, Henry Kissinger, who was as inept as he was ruthless,
extending the Vietnam War by seven bloody years to mask his diplomatic
failure, turning East Timor over to Indonesia for decades of slaughter until
its inevitable independence, cratering U.S. credibility in Latin America by
installing a murderous military dictatorship in Chile, and mismanaging
Moscow in ways that extended the Cold War by another 15 years. Kissingers
career, as international law specialist Richard Falk wrote recently, has
been marked by his extraordinary capacity to be repeatedly wrong about
almost every major foreign policy decision made by the U.S. government over
the course of the last half-century.
Once we subject other American leaders to a similar calculus of costs and
benefits, we are, surprisingly enough, left with just three grandmasters of
geopolitics: Elihu Root, the original architect of Americas rise to global
power; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter,
who shattered the Soviet Empire, making the U.S. the worlds sole
superpower; and Barack Obama, who is defending that status and offering a
striking imperial blueprint for how to check Chinas rise. In each case,
their maneuvers have been supple and subtle enough that they have eluded
both contemporary observers and later historians.
Many American presidents -- think Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton -- have been capable diplomats, skilled
at negotiating treaties or persuading allies to do their bidding. But
surprisingly few world leaders, American or otherwise, have a capacity for
mastering both the temporal and spatial dimensions of global power -- that
is, the connections between present actions and often distant results as
well as an intuitive ability to grasp the cultural, economic, and military
forces whose sum is geopolitics. Mastering both of these skills involves
seeing beneath the confusion of current events and understanding the deeper
currents of historical change. Root and Brzezinski both had an ability to
manipulate the present moment to advance long-term American interests while
altering, often fundamentally, the future balance of global power. Though
little noticed in the avalanche of criticism that has all but buried his
accomplishments in the Oval Office, Obama seems to be following in their
footsteps.
Elihu Root, Architect of American Power
All but forgotten today, Elihu Root was the true architect of Americas
transformation from an insular continental nation into a major player on the
world stage. About the time Sir Halford Mackinder was imagining his new
model for studying global power, Root was building an institutional
infrastructure at home and abroad for the actual exercise of that power.
After a successful 30-year career as a corporate lawyer representing the
richest of robber barons, the most venal of trusts, and even New York's
outrageously corrupt William "Boss" Tweed, Root devoted the rest of his long
life to modernizing the American state as secretary of war, secretary of
state, a senator, and finally a plenipotentiary extraordinaire. Not only did
he shape the conduct of U.S. foreign policy for the century to come, but he
also played an outsized role, particularly for a cabinet secretary of a
then-peripheral power, in influencing the character of an emerging
international community.
As a prominent attorney, Root understood that the Constitutions protection
of individual liberties and states rights had created an inherently weak
federal bureaucracy, ill suited for the concerted projection of American
imperial power beyond its borders. To transform this patchwork state and
its divided society -- still traumatized by the Civil War -- into a world
power, Root spent a quarter-century in the determined pursuit of three
intertwined objectives: fashioning the fragmentary federal government into a
potent apparatus for overseas expansion, building a consensus among the
countrys elites for such an activist foreign policy, and creating new forms
of global governance open to Washingtons influence.
As secretary of war (1899-1904), Root reformed the Armys antiquated
structure, creating a centralized general staff, establishing a modern war
college, and expanding professional training for officers. Through this
transformation, the military moved far beyond its traditional mission of
coastal defense and became an increasingly agile force for overseas
expansion -- in China, the Philippines, the Caribbean, Latin America, and,
ultimately, Europe itself. With his eye firmly fixed on Americas ascent,
Root also covered up atrocities that accompanied the armys extraordinarily
brutal pacification of the Philippines.
As secretary of state (1907-1909), senator (1909-1915), and special envoy to
Russia (1917), Root then led a sustained diplomatic effort to make the
country, for the first time, a real presence in the community of nations. To
insert Washington -- until then at the periphery of a world politics still
centered on Europe -- in the game of global power projection, Secretary of
State Root launched an unprecedented tour of Latin America in 1906, winning
the continents support.
With the backing of 17 Latin republics among the 44 nations present,
Washington gained sufficient geopolitical clout at the Second Hague Peace
Conference in 1907 to conclude the first broad international legal agreement
on the laws of war. To house the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the worlds
first ongoing institution for global governance, which emerged from the
Hague peace conferences, Roots friend Andrew Carnegie spent $1.5 million, a
vast sum at the time, to build the lavish Peace Palace at The Hague in 1913.
A year later, as chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(1910-1925), Root helped establish The Hague Academy of International Law
housed within that Peace Palace.
Simultaneously, he cemented a close alliance with Britain by promoting
treaties to resolve territorial disputes that had roiled relations with the
worlds preeminent power for the better part of a century. That effort won
him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. Even in retirement at age 75, Root served
on a League of Nations committee that established the Permanent Court of
International Justice, realizing his long-held vision of the international
community as an assembly of sovereign states governed by the rule of law.
Throughout these decades, Root was careful to cultivate support for an
assertive foreign policy among the countrys ruling East Coast elites. As
the culmination of this effort, in 1918 he led a group of financiers,
industrialists, and corporate lawyers in establishing the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York, which soon became the countrys most influential
forum for shaping public consensus for an expansive foreign policy. He also
cultivated academic specialists at leading universities nationwide, using
their expertise to shape and support his foreign policy ideas. In sum, Root
recast American society to forge a nexus of money, influence, and intellect
that would sustain U.S. foreign policy for the next century.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Destroyer of Empires
After a long period of indifferent international leadership, during Jimmy
Carters presidency foreign policy came under the charge of an
underestimated figure, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Émigré
Polish aristocrat, professor of international relations, and an autodidact
when it came to geopolitics, he was above all an intellectual acolyte of Sir
Halford Mackinder. Through both action and analysis, Brzezinski made
Mackinders concept of Eurasia as the world island and its vast interior
heartland as the pivot of global power his own. He would prove
particularly adept at applying Sir Halfords famous dictum: Who rules East
Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the
World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the world.
Wielding a $100 million CIA covert operation like a sharpened wedge,
Brzezinski drove radical Islam from Afghanistan into the heartland of
Soviet Central Asia, drawing Moscow into a debilitating decade-long Afghan
war that weakened Russia sufficiently for Eastern Europe to finally break
free from the Soviet empire. With a calculus that couldnt have been more
coldblooded, he understood and rationalized the untold misery and
unimaginable human suffering his strategy inflicted through ravaged
landscapes, the millions his policy uprooted from ancestral villages and
turned into refugees, and the countless Afghan dead and wounded. Dismissing
the long-term damage as "some stirred-up Moslems," as he saw it, none of it
added up to a hill of beans compared to the importance of striking directly
into the Eurasian heartland to free Eastern Europe, half a continent away,
and shatter the Soviet empire. And these results did indeed mark Brzezinski
as a grandmaster of geopolitics in all its ruthless realpolitik. (Mind you,
the future suffering from those "stirred-up Moslems" now includes the rise
of al-Qaeda, 9/11, and Americas second Afghan War, as well as the
unsettling of the Greater Middle East thanks to the growth of the Islamic
extremism he first nurtured.)
In 1998, in retirement, Brzezinski again applied Sir Halfords theory, this
time in a book titled The Grand Chessboard, a geopolitical treatise on
Americas capacity for extending its global hegemony. Although Washington
was still basking in the pre-9/11 glow of its newly won grandeur as the
worlds sole superpower, he could already imagine the geopolitical
constraints that might come into play and undermine that status. If the U.S.
then seemed a colossus standing astride the world, Eurasia still remained
the globes most important playing field... with preponderance over the
entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy.
That Eurasian megacontinent, Brzezinski observed, is just too large, too
populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically
ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the
most economically successful and politically preeminent global power.
Washington, he predicted, could continue its half-century dominion over the
oddly shaped Eurasian chessboard -- extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok
only as long as it could preserve its unchallenged perch on the Western
periphery, while the vast middle space does not become an assertive
single entity," and the Eastern end of the world continent did not unify
itself in a way that might lead to the expulsion of America from its
offshore bases. Should any of these critical conditions change, Brzezinski
warned prophetically, a potential rival to America might at some point
arise.
Barack Obama, Defender of U.S. Global Hegemony
Less than a decade later, China emerged to challenge Americas control of
Eurasia and so threaten Washingtons standing as the globes great hegemon.
While the U.S. military was mired in the Middle East, Beijing quietly began
working to unify that vast middle space of Eurasia, while preparing to
neutralize Americas offshore bases.
By the time Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009, there were already
the first signs of a serious geopolitical challenge that only the president
and his closest advisers seemed to recognize. In a speech to the Australian
parliament in November 2011, Obama said: Let there be no doubt: in the
Asia-Pacific in the twenty-first century, the United States of America is
all in. After two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost us dearly,
in blood and treasure, he explained, the United States is turning our
attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region, which is the
worlds fastest-growing region -- and home to more than half the global
economy. His initial deployment of just 2,500 U.S. troops to Australia
seemed a slender down payment on his deliberate and strategic decision to
become Americas first Pacific president, producing a great deal of
premature criticism and derision.
Four years later, one CNN commentator would still be calling this Obamas
pivot to nowhere. Even seasoned foreign policy commentator Fareed Zakaria
would ask, in early 2015, Whatever happened to the pivot to Asia?
Answering his own question, Zakaria argued that the president was still
mired in the Middle East and the centerpiece of that pivot, the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, seemed to be facing certain defeat in Congress.
To the consternation of his critics, in the waning months of his presidency,
from Iran to Cuba, from Burma to the Pacific Ocean, Obama has revealed
himself as an American strategist potentially capable of laying the
groundwork for the continued planetary dominion of the United States deep
into the twenty-first century. In the last 16 months of his presidency, with
a bit of grit and luck and a final diplomatic surge -- concluding the
nuclear treaty with Iran to prevent another debilitating Middle Eastern
conflict, winning congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
and completing negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership -- Obama just might secure the U.S. a significant extension of
its waning global hegemony.
Specifics aside, the worlds two most powerful nations, China and the United
States, seem to have developed conflicting geopolitical strategies to guide
their struggle for global power. Whether Beijing will succeed in moving ever
further toward unifying Asia, Africa, and Europe into that world island or
Washington will persist with Obamas strategy of splitting that land mass
along its axial divisions via trans-oceanic trade wont become clear for
another decade or two.
We still cannot say whether the outcome of this great game will be decided
through an almost invisible commercial competition or a more violent drama
akin to historys last comparable imperial transition, the protracted
rivalry between Napoleons continental system and Britains maritime
strategy at the start of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, we are
starting to see the broad parameters of an epochal geopolitical contest
likely to shape the worlds destiny in the coming decades of this still
young twenty-first century.
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington Professor of
History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author, most recently, of
Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, and
co-editor of Endless Empire: Europes Eclipse, Spains Retreat, Americas
Decline.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Alfred W. McCoy
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176044
