From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Mon Sep 08 2008 - 19:38:40 EDT
Toward a New American Isolationism
Walden Bello | September 5, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Despite the glitter that surrounded both the Olympics in Beijing and the
Democratic National Convention in Denver, the messages coming to Asia from
the two events were very different.
>From Beijing the message was, to put it in the words of one pundit, China
has had a few bad centuries but is back on its feet. From Denver, the word
was that the United States has been on a desperate decade-long downspin
that can only get worse if the Republicans keep the White House.
For people in this part of the world, the weakening of U.S. power is most
evident elsewhere: in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, where Washington
is bogged down in unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; in Latin America,
where the rebellion against neoliberalism and U.S. meddling is in full
swing; and, most recently, in Central Asia, where Washington and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been taught a painful lesson in
overextension in Georgia.
The erosion of Washington's position is less obvious in Asia. After all,
the United States continues to maintain more than 300 military bases and
facilities in the Western Pacific. Over the last decade, it has established
a permanent troop presence in the Southern Philippines to make up for its
giving up its two big military bases on Luzon Island in 1992. And in
Indonesia, the Pentagon has reestablished its close ties with the
Indonesian military after several years of uncertainty, using the
opportunity provided by relief operations during the tsunami of 2004.
Erosion of U.S. Power in East Asia
Nevertheless, the region – and Southeast Asia in particular – is
probably more independent of the United States today than at any other time
in the last 60 years. Economics is the reason. Over the last two decades,
several developments have eroded the U.S. position.
First of all, its drive to create the trans-Pacific free-trade area known
as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) failed. APEC was meant to
be a westward extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
and both were intended to serve as a geo-economic counterweight to the
European Union. Japan, China, and the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN), fearing U.S. economic domination in the name of free
trade, scuttled President Bill Clinton's trans-Pacific dream at the APEC
Summit in Osaka in 1995. APEC summits continue to be held, but these are
remembered more as times when heads of state don the host country's
national costume than as occasions for serious economic decision-making.
Second, U.S. efforts to impose capital account and financial liberalization
on the Asia Pacific economies as a key element of more thoroughgoing
structural transformation backfired. Capital account liberalization led to
the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Instead of helping to shore up
economies in crisis, Washington took advantage of the crisis to try to
comprehensively transform the region's economies along neoliberal lines. As
one of Clinton's economic lieutenants saw it, "Most of these countries are
going through a dark and deep tunnel…But on the other end there is going
to be a significantly different Asia in which American firms have achieved
a much deeper market penetration, much greater access."
The outcome proved to be different. Malaysia imposed capital controls. The
International Monetary Fund (IMF) was discredited, with the Thai government
declaring its intention never to go back to the agency after paying off its
loans in 2003 and the Indonesian government resolving to do the same thing
in 2008. While Washington and the IMF were able to kill Japan's proposal
for an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) at the height of the crisis, the East
Asian governments formed the "ASEAN Plus Three" financial mechanism that
excludes the United States and is likely to be the precursor of a
full-blown regional financial agency. Neoliberal transformation has stalled
in Japan and most Southeast Asian countries, with possibly only South Korea
continuing to travel along the free-market path desired by the United
States.
Moreover, the Asian governments have built up massive foreign exchange
reserves to protect themselves against future speculative crises provoked
by the movements of global finance capital led by U.S. funds. And the
United States has become dependent on these Asian reserves for funds to
prop up its massive military expenditures and the middle-class spending
that for a long time served as an artificial barrier against recession.
With the unraveling of American financial institutions, the onset of
recession, and the depreciation of the dollar, the U.S. economy has become
hostage to these countries' decisions to continue to lend to Washington and
Wall Street.
In a third development not positive for the United States, the region has
become increasingly dependent on the red-hot Chinese economic locomotive.
According to a United Nations report, China has been a "major engine of
growth for most of the economies in the region. The country's imports
accelerated even more than its exports, with a large proportion coming from
the rest of Asia." In fact, this Chinese demand pulled the Asia Pacific
economies from the recession caused by the Asian financial crisis. China
has not only surpassed the United States to become Japan's main trading
partner but Chinese demand has helped keep the world's second-largest
economy from falling back into recession.
Conscious of its economic clout, China has moved to consolidate its
position as East Asia's new economic center via smart economic diplomacy.
In 2002, it convinced the ASEAN governments to create the ASEAN-China Free
Trade Area that is scheduled to come into effect in 2010. Japan has tried
to catch up by offering ASEAN countries "economic partnership agreements."
Meanwhile, talks on a U.S.-Thailand free trade area have been frozen by
popular opposition to Washington's strident championing of the so-called
intellectual property rights of its corporations. All in all, the biggest
beneficiary of the Bush administration's imperial and corporate
misadventures over the last decade has been China, which has kept itself
from military entanglements and devoted itself single-mindedly to economic
development.
Challenges Posed by China's Ascent
The rise of China poses a number of fundamental challenges to different key
actors in East Asia.
For Japan, the key challenge is to move from being the springboard for U.S.
power projection in the region to a mature relationship with China. A
definitive acceptance of responsibility on the part of the Japanese people
and their leaders for the atrocities committed by Japanese troops during
World War II, including the infamous Nanjing Massacre, is an indispensable
step in this move toward a mature relationship between Asia's leading
economic powers.
For Southeast Asia, the challenge is how to avoid becoming an appendage of
the Chinese economy. Chinese demand was, as mentioned earlier, an immense
force lifting Southeast Asia's economies from the depths of the Asian
financial crisis. However, China's developing trade and investment
relations with ASEAN also include some unpleasant aspects, for instance the
experience of Thai vegetable and fruit producers under an "early harvest"
free trade arrangement with China earlier this decade. Under the agreement,
Thailand expected to export tropical fruits to China while eliminating
tariffs on imports of winter fruits from China. The expectations of mutual
benefit evaporated after a few months, however, as massive imports from
China wiped out Thai producers of many fruits and vegetables such as garlic
and red onions.
But the fears of many in Southeast Asia go beyond lopsided trade agreements
with China. With land and energy relatively scarce in China, Beijing has
encouraged Chinese enterprises to seek deals to mine minerals and grow
crops in Southeast Asian countries for exclusive export to the China
market. For example, in a deal with the Philippines, the Chinese Fuhua
Group plans to invest $3.83 billion over five to seven years to develop 1
million hectares of land to grow high-yielding strains of corn, rice, and
sorghum. The Philippine government is currently identifying "idle lands"
that can be incorporated into these Chinese plantations. This in a country
where seven out of 10 farmers are landless.
Some have been quick to call China's international economic policies
"imperialistic." However, exploitative relations between China and other
developing countries have not acquired an imperial structure and lack the
element of force and coercion that accompanied the imposition of European
and American economic power on weaker societies.
Nevertheless, Southeast Asian governments need to balance their spontaneous
feelings of South-South solidarity with cool-headed realism. Countries like
China, Brazil, and India are led by developmentalist elites that are
seeking to find their place in a new global capitalist order marked by the
loosening of the economic hegemony of the old capitalist centers, that is,
Japan, the United States, and the European Union. The pursuit of national
economic interest, not regional cooperation for development, is the central
concern of these elites. The intention of China, India, and Brazil in
promoting trade and investment agreements with smaller countries or
courting them to join regional economic formations is to advance their own
regional and global aims.
However, this does not mean that a trade agreement and regional economic
formation linking China and ASEAN should be avoided at all costs. Rather,
ASEAN governments must enter talks with China with eyes wide open and
negotiate collectively, not as 10 separate governments. They must make it
clear to China that they don't desire a trade agreement based on free
trade–such as the arrangements that the U.S., EU, and Japan are pushing
on them – but one in which the net benefits of the arrangement accrue to
them, not China. Although China's relationship with Southeast Asia is not
exploitative, the negotiation of economic relationships between Beijing and
its neighbors could replicate the old structural patterns marking the
relations between Southeast Asia and Europe, the United States, and Japan
– unless considerations of equity are front and center.
The U.S.-China Relationship
The most critical regional relationship, however, is between the United
States and China since the United States is the most powerful power in East
Asia and China the next most powerful.
In his stimulating book Adam Smith in Beijing, the eminent political
economist Giovanni Arrighi of Johns Hopkins University writes that there
are three alternative policies that the United States can adopt toward an
ascendant China.
The first is an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment. In
this strategy, China is seen as a strategic threat or, as the Bush
administration puts it euphemistically, a "strategic competitor." The U.S.
response would be to "dissuade China" from its military ambitions by
boosting the massive American military presence in the Western Pacific,
strengthening the bilateral agreements with U.S. allies that sustain this
trans-Pacific garrison state, and building up defense cooperation with
India, Asia's other big power. This response misconstrues the nature of the
Chinese challenge, which is an economic rather than a strategic one, and
would be disastrous for the whole world.
According to the second strategy, the United States chooses not to confront
China directly as it confronted the old Soviet Union but to put into motion
balance of power politics to weaken China indirectly. Arrighi quotes James
Pinkerton, a protagonist of this approach: Instead of confronting directly
the rising Asian powers, the United States should play them off each other.
As the Latin expression tertium gaudens – the happy third – reminds us,
rather than getting in the middle of every fight, sometimes it is better
"to hold the coats of those who do." For the U.S. national interest, "a
better Asia would be one in which China, India, Japan, and possibly another
'tiger' or two contend with each other for power while we enjoy the happy
luxury of third party by-standing." This strategy, too, would also have
terrible consequences for the region.
A third strategy, which Arrighi identifies with former national security
advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, views China not as a
revisionist power but as one that wants to join the global status quo. The
appropriate response for Washington is to accept China as part of the elite
of the global state system and work with it in pursuit of international
stability, in the same way that Britain, the hegemon of the 19th century,
cooperated and made way for the United States, the hegemon of the 20th
century.
Arrighi prefers this third strategy. And I do, too, though not
enthusiastically since it still is in essence conservative, preserving the
global status quo. This strategy is, however, the least likely of the three
to be adopted. Imperial America is not like imperial Britain. The United
States is ideologically an expansionist missionary democracy that will find
it difficult to accept No. 2 status without provoking a reactionary
populist reaction among key segments of its population. Aside from powerful
corporate and strategic interests – which desire an accommodation with
China – U.S. leaders have a messianic drive to remake the world along the
lines of a liberal or neoliberal Lockean democracy.
Civil Society, China, and America
This conundrum inevitably leads to a discussion of how civil society, both
in Asia and globally, ought to respond to the erosion of U.S. hegemony and
the ascent of China. In the best of all possible worlds, the United States
and China could be supporters of the drive to create a new world order
built on peace, justice, and popular sovereignty. Unfortunately, we live in
a less-than-ideal world.
The task of civil society is to pressure China, as it intensifies its
engagement with the world, to resist the temptation of following the
destructive imperial path blazed by Europe and the United States. Social
movements must also push China away from the fossil-fuel intensive,
consumption-oriented path of development pioneered by the West and toward
one that is more ecologically sustainable and sensitive to equity issues.
This won't be easy. Nevertheless, there are signs of hope. For instance,
Chinese leaders are currently rethinking the direction of the country's
development. Notes Arrighi:
If the reorientation succeeds in reviving and consolidating China's
traditions of self-centered market-based development, accumulation without
dispossession, mobilization of human rather than non-human resources, and
government through mass participation in shaping policies, then the chances
are that China will be in a position to contribute decisively to the
emergence of a commonwealth of civilizations truly respectful of
differences. But, if the reorientation fails, China may well turn into a
new epicenter of social and political chaos that will facilitate Northern
attempts to reestablish a crumbling global dominance.
Given the Chinese leadership's concern for legitimacy both internally and
internationally, the failure of the proponents of reorientation is not a
foregone conclusion. This is why pressure from international civil society
for a change in economic strategy, for pro-environment policies, for the
expansion of democratic rights, and for equitable relations with the
developing countries must be kept up.
Toward a New American Isolationism
Blunting Washington's innately hegemonic thrust will be much more difficult
– but not impossible.
Perhaps the best strategy for civil society at this point is not so much to
rely on appeals to American ideals but to continually point to the very
high costs of intervention, in terms of soldiers killed, money spent,
domestic strife, and credibility lost. Part of this strategy must be
pressure for the removal of the U.S. military bases from Asia and the
Pacific and the neutralizing of the bilateral treaties between the United
States and a number of Asian countries. Aside from being the pillars of
Washington's containment of China, these institutions are the main factors
that prevent China and other East Asian countries from evolving a more
mature relationship.
More broadly, the aim of civil society mobilization both in Asia and
globally should be to encourage a new American isolationism. Barack Obama
is definitely preferable to John McCain, but the world doesn't need a new
American internationalism of the liberal and soft-power variety. We
shouldn't tolerate a policy of withdrawing troops from Iraq only to send
them to Afghanistan in the name of defending human rights. We don't want in
place of military confrontation, an aggressive diplomatic isolation of Iran
led by a Democratic elite that is uncritical, as Obama is, of Israel. We
don't want an obsession with the Middle East to be replaced with an
obsession with destabilizing Hugo Chavez and restoring U.S. influence in
Latin America. And we should worry when Bill Clinton says, as he did during
the Democratic Party convention, that one of Obama's objectives will be to
"restore American leadership in the world." Asia doesn't need or want
American leadership.
What Asia, like the rest of the world, needs is a vacation from a messianic
United States. A few decades of a withdrawn, self-absorbed, isolationist
America, paying attention to its domestic troubles and deterred by the high
costs of the continued pursuit of hegemony globally, would be good for the
region and good for everybody.
Walden Bello, a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, is professor of
sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the
Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He
is the author of, among other books, Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking
of the American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----