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Vol. 80/No. 36 September 26, 2016
(front page)
US imperialist power declines across Asia as Beijing expands
BY MARK THOMPSON
President Barack Obama’s last official visit to Asia in early September
highlighted the continuing challenge to Washington’s domination of the
Pacific by China’s growing economic and military capacity. This is
despite Obama’s “pivot” to Asia to counter Beijing’s influence that has
been a central foreign policy initiative of his administration.
Obama visited Hangzhou, China, Sept. 4-5 for the G-20 summit, a meeting
of heads of state of the world’s larger industrialized countries. He was
in Vientiane, Laos, Sept. 6-8 for a meeting of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations.
Media reports of Obama’s tour focused on diplomatic rebuffs, including a
clash between security officials over Obama’s arrival in Hangzhou and a
canceled meeting with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte.
Obama pushed unsuccessfully at the ASEAN meeting for a sharp declaration
opposing Beijing’s expanding claims to islands in the South China Sea.
In a visit to Asia in 2009 Obama called himself “America’s first Pacific
president.” He has made 11 trips to Asia during his two terms. “This is
where the action’s going to be when it comes to commerce and trade,” he
told reporters at the ASEAN meeting.
The administration’s “Asia pivot,” announced in 2011, assumed the
winding down of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. But
conflicts and instability in the Mideast have escalated.
While Washington continues to seek Beijing’s collaboration, along with
Moscow’s, to help stabilize the world, the pivot was intended to
strengthen military and trade alliances with other Asian nations to
counter Beijing’s more assertive role in the region.
Washington “assumed that a merely symbolic reassertion of U.S. power and
resolve would be enough to make China back off,” noted Hugh White, an
Australian journalist and former government defense adviser, the
Financial Times reported Sept. 5. But “China’s assertive posture in the
East and South China Sea today is strong evidence that they were wrong.”
China’s economic weight
While in Laos, Obama announced a $90 million contribution to help clear
U.S. bombs there — acknowledging but not apologizing for this
“unintended” cost of Washington’s brutal war in Vietnam. From 1964 to
1973 U.S. warplanes dropped 2 million tons of bombs over Laos in 580,000
missions. Eighty million cluster bombs remained undetonated. These have
killed some 20,000 people since the war’s end.
At the same time, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced investments in
Laos worth billions, including a hydro-power project, a rail line to
China, and a $1.6 billion special economic zone.
Beijing has opened a new rail line to Afghanistan, opening an
alternative trade route for that land-locked country, where it is
already the leading foreign investor. In 2011, then Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton announced that Washington would sponsor the construction
of new transport links to Afghanistan, but nothing happened.
A centerpiece of Washington’s Asia pivot was the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, a trade pact intended as a counter to China, signed in
February with 11 other Pacific nations. It covers 40 percent of the
world’s gross domestic product. But Obama still hasn’t presented the
pact to Congress for ratification, and the two leading presidential
candidates have criticized it.
Relative decline in U.S. power
The U.S. imperialist rulers came out of World War II as the victor. This
included naval supremacy in the Pacific and South China Sea. It was
China, above all, whose land, resources and cheap labor the U.S. rulers
lusted for.
But the war had opened a new upsurge of struggle across Asia, Africa and
Latin America against colonial rule and imperialist domination. A
revolution by the workers and peasants ended foreign domination of China
and made it clear that any intervention by Washington would be fiercely
resisted. Washington’s plans to intervene were further thwarted by mass
protests by U.S. troops across Asia demanding to go home.
For three decades until 1979, Washington refused to recognize the
government of China, instead backing the Republic of China government on
Taiwan with massive military and economic aid.
With the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe from 1989-91, Washington and its closest imperialist
allies believed, mistakenly, that they had won the Cold War and would
reap new markets for investment and trade. They anticipated similar
openings in China.
At the same time, they acted as if they now had free rein to impose
their will politically. At the ASEAN conference in Hanoi, Vietnam, in
2010, Hillary Clinton lectured Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi that
Washington had a “national interest” in the South China Sea and told
Beijing to stay out. Yang warned his Southeast Asian hosts in response,
“China is a big country. And you are all small countries.”
Since then, Beijing has accelerated work to build artificial island
military bases in the South China Sea. Russian President Vladimir Putin
backed Beijing’s stance when he attended the G-20 summit. The Russian
and Chinese navies began eight days of drills in the South China Sea
Sept. 12, their largest ever joint operations.
The Chinese government is also building its first overseas naval base in
Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, and in August pledged increased military
aid to the Syrian government.
The massive growth of capitalist industry and trade in China over the
past 30 years has meant increasing competition for U.S. imperialism.
This drives the Chinese rulers to seek a political and military role in
the Pacific commensurate with their economic strength. They continue to
make headway at Washington’s expense.
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