By Alfred McCoy
February 05, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "RT"
--Throughout
2021, Americans were absorbed in arguments over mask
mandates, school closings and the meaning of the
Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Meanwhile,
geopolitical hot spots were erupting across Eurasia,
forming a veritable ring of fire around that vast
land mass.
Let’s
circle that continent to visit just a few of those
flashpoints, each one suffused with significance for
the future of U.S. global power.
On the
border with Ukraine, 100,000 Russian troops were massing with
tanks and rocket launchers, ready for a possible
invasion. Meanwhile, Beijing
signed a
$400 billion agreement with Tehran to swap
infrastructure-building for Iranian oil. Such an
exchange might help make that country the future rail
hub of
Central Asia, while projecting China’s
military power into the Persian Gulf. Just across
the Iranian border in Afghanistan, Taliban
guerrillas swept into Kabul ending a 20-year
American occupation in a frantic flurry of shuttle
flights for
more than 100,000 defeated Afghan allies.
Farther east, high in the Himalayas, Indian Army engineers
were digging tunnels
and positioning artillery to fend off future clashes
with China. In the Bay of Bengal, a dozen ships from
Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, led
by the supercarrier USS Carl Vinson, were
conducting live
gunnery drills,
practice for a possible future war with China.
Meanwhile, a succession of American naval vessels continually passed
through the South China Sea, skirting Chinese island
bases there and announcing that
no protests from Beijing “will deter us.” Just to
the north, U.S. destroyers, denounced by China,
regularly sailed through the Strait of Taiwan; while
some 80 Chinese jet fighters swarmed into
that disputed island’s air security zone, a
development Washington condemned as “provocative
military activity.”
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Around
the coast of Japan, a flotilla of 10 Chinese and
Russian warships steamed
aggressively across waters once virtually owned by
the U.S. Seventh Fleet. And in frigid Arctic oceans
way to the north, thanks to the radical warming of
the planet and receding sea ice, an expanding fleet
of Chinese icebreakers maneuvered
with their Russian counterparts to open a “polar
silk road,” thereby possibly taking possession of
the roof of the world.
While
you could have read about almost all of this in the
American media, sometimes in great detail, nobody in
the U.S. has tried to connect such transcontinental
dots to uncover their deeper significance. U.S.
leaders have visibly not done much better and
there’s a reason for this. As I explain in my recent
book, To
Govern the Globe,
both liberal and conservative political elites in
the New York–Washington corridor of power have been
on top of the world for so long that they can’t
remember how they got there.
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During
the late 1940s, following a catastrophic world war
that left some 70 million dead, Washington built a
potent apparatus for global power, thanks
significantly to its encirclement of Eurasia via
both military bases and global trade. The U.S. also
formed a new system of global governance,
exemplified by the United Nations, that would not
only assure its hegemony but also — or so the hope
was then — foster an unprecedented era of peace and
prosperity.
Three
generations later, however, as populism, nationalism
and anti-globalism roiled public discourse,
surprisingly few in Washington bothered to defend
their world order in a meaningful way. And fewer of
them still had any real grasp of the geopolitics —
that slippery mix of armaments, occupied lands,
subordinated rulers, and logistics — that has been
every imperial leader’s essential toolkit for the
effective exercise of global power.
So,
let’s do what our country’s foreign policy experts,
in and out of government, haven’t and examine the
latest developments in Eurasia through the prism of
geopolitics and history. Do that and you’ll grasp
just how they, and the deeper forces they represent,
are harbingers of an epochal decline in American
global power.
Eurasia as the Epicenter of Power on Planet
Earth
In the
500 years since European exploration first brought
the continents into continuous contact, the rise of
every global hegemon has required one thing above
all: dominance over Eurasia. Similarly, their
decline has invariably been accompanied by a loss of
control over that vast landmass. During the16th
century, the Iberian powers, Portugal and Spain,
waged a joint struggle to control Eurasia’s maritime
commerce by battling the powerful Ottoman empire,
whose leader was then the caliph of Islam. In 1509,
off the coast of northeast India, skilled Portuguese
gunners destroyed a Muslim fleet with lethal
broadsides, establishing that country’s century-long
dominance over the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the
Spanish used the silver they had extracted from
their new colonies in the Americas for a costly
campaign to check Muslim expansion in the
Mediterranean Sea. Its culmination: the destruction
in 1571 of an Ottoman fleet of 278 ships at the epic
Battle of Lepanto.
Next
in line, Great Britain’s dominion over the oceans
began with an historic naval triumph over a combined
French-Spanish fleet off Spain’s Cape Trafalgar in
1805 and only ended when, in 1942, a British
garrison of 80,000 men surrendered their seemingly
impregnable naval bastion at Singapore to the
Japanese — a defeat Winston Churchill called “the
worst disaster and largest capitulation in British
history.”
Like
all past imperial hegemons, U.S. global power has
similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over
Eurasia, now home to 70 percent of the world’s
population and productivity. After the Axis alliance
of Germany, Italy and Japan failed to conquer that
vast land mass, the Allied victory in World War II
allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put
it,
to build its “colossal imperium… on an unprecedented
scale,” becoming the first power in history to
control the strategic axial points “at both ends of
Eurasia.”
In the
early 1950s, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong forged a
Sino-Soviet alliance that threatened to dominate the
continent. Washington, however, countered with a
deft geopolitical gambit that, for the next 40
years, succeeded in “containing” those two powers
behind an “Iron Curtain” stretching 5,000 miles
across the vast Eurasian land mass.
As a
critical first step, the U.S. formed the NATO
alliance in 1949, establishing major military
installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to
ensure control of the western side of Eurasia. After
its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the
world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington
dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts
in the region with Japan, South Korea, the
Philippines, and Australia and so acquired a vast
range of military bases along the Pacific littoral
that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia. To tie
the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a
strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the
continent’s southern rim with successive chains
of steel,
including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat
aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone
bases stretching
from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam.
With
the communist bloc bottled up behind the Iron
Curtain, Washington then sat back and waited for its
Cold War enemies to self-destruct — which they did.
First, the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s shattered
their hold on the Eurasian heartland. Then, the
disastrous Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the
1980s ravaged the Red Army and precipitated the
break-up of the Soviet Union.
After
those oh-so-strategic initial steps to capture the
axial ends of Eurasia, however, Washington itself
essentially stumbled through much of the rest of the
Cold War with blunders like the Bay of Pigs
catastrophe in Cuba and the disastrous Vietnam War
in Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, by the Cold War’s
end in 1991, the U.S. military had become a global behemoth with
800 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet
fighters, more than a thousand ballistic missiles,
and a navy of nearly 600 ships, including 15 nuclear
carrier battle groups — all linked by the world’s
only global system of communications satellites. For
the next 20 years, Washington would enjoy what
Trump-era Defense Secretary James Mattis called “uncontested
or dominant superiority in every operating domain.
We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted,
assemble them where we wanted, operate how we
wanted.”
The Three Pillars of US Global Power
In the
late 1990s, at the absolute apex of U.S. global
hegemony, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, far more astute as an
armchair analyst than an actual practitioner of
geopolitics, issued a stern
warning
about the three pillars of power necessary to
preserve Washington’s global control. First, the
U.S. must avoid the loss of its strategic European
“perch on the Western periphery” of Eurasia. Next,
it must block the rise of “an assertive single
entity” across the continent’s massive “middle
space” of Central Asia. And finally, it must prevent
“the expulsion of America from its offshore bases”
along the Pacific littoral.
Drunk
on the heady elixir of limitless global power
following the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991,
Washington’s foreign-policy elites made increasingly
dubious decisions that led to a rapid decline in
their country’s dominance. In an act of supreme
imperial hubris, born of the belief that
they were triumphantly at the all-American “end of
history,” Republican neoconservatives in President
George W. Bush’s administration invaded and occupied
first Afghanistan and then Iraq, convinced that they
could remake the entire Greater Middle East, the
cradle of Islamic civilization, in America’s
secular, free-market image (with oil as their
repayment).
After
an expenditure of nearly $2
trillion on
operations in Iraq alone and nearly 4,598 American military
deaths,
all Washington left behind was the rubble of ruined
cities, more than 200,000
Iraqi dead,
and a government in Baghdad beholden to Iran. The
official U.S. Army history of that war concluded that
“an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be
the only victor.”
Meanwhile, China spent those same decades building
industries that would make it the workshop of the
world. In a major strategic miscalculation,
Washington admitted Beijing to the World Trade
Organization (WTO) in 2001, bizarrely confident that
a compliant China, home to nearly 20 percent of
humanity and historically the world’s most powerful
nation, would somehow join the global economy
without changing the balance of power. “Across the
ideological spectrum,” as two former Obama
administration officials later
wrote,
“we in the U.S. foreign policy community shared the
underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could
readily mold China to the United States’ liking.” A
bit more bluntly, former national security adviser
H.R. McMaster concluded that
Washington had empowered “a nation whose leaders
were determined not only to displace the United
States in Asia, but also to promote a rival economic
and governance model globally.”
During
the 15 years after it joined the WTO, Beijing’s
exports to the U.S. grew nearly fivefold to $462
billion while, by 2014, its foreign currency
reserves surged from just $200 billion to an
unprecedented $4
trillion,
a vast treasure it used to launch its
trillion-dollar “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI),
aimed at uniting Eurasia economically through newly
built infrastructure. In the process, Beijing began
a systematic demolition of Brzezinski’s three
pillars of U.S. geopolitical power.
The First Pillar — Europe
Beijing has scored its most surprising success so
far in Europe, long a key bastion of American global
power. As part of a chain of 40 commercial ports
it’s been building or rebuilding around Eurasia and
Africa, Beijing has purchased major
port facilities in Europe, including outright
ownership of the Greek port of Piraeus and
significant shares in those of Zeebrugge in Belgium,
Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Hamburg, Germany.
After
a state
visit from
Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2019, Italy became
the first G-7 member to officially join the
BRI agreement, subsequently signing
over a
portion of its ports at Genoa and Trieste. Despite
Washington’s strenuous objections, in 2020, the
European Union and China also concluded a
draft financial services agreement that, when
finalized in 2023, will more fully integrate their
banking systems.
While
China is building ports, rails, roads, and
powerplants across the continent, its Russian ally
continues to dominate Europe’s energy market and is
now just months away from opening its
controversial Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline
beneath the Baltic Sea, guaranteed to increase
Moscow’s economic influence. As the massive pipeline
project moved to completion last December, Russian
President Putin intensified pressures on NATO with a
roster of “extravagant”
demands, including a formal guarantee that
Ukraine not be admitted to the alliance, removal of
all the military infrastructure installed in Eastern
Europe since 1997, and a prohibition against future
military activity in Central Asia.
In a
power play not seen since Stalin and Mao joined
forces in the 1950s, the alliance between Putin’s
raw military force and Xi’s relentless economic
pressure may indeed slowly be pulling Europe away
from America. Complicating the U.S. position,
Britain’s exit from the European Union cost
Washington its most forceful advocate inside
Brussels’ labyrinthine corridors of power.
And as
Brussels and Washington grow apart, Beijing and
Moscow only come closer. Through joint energy
ventures, military maneuvers, and periodic summits,
Putin and Xi are reprising the Stalin-Mao alliance,
a strategic partnership at the heart of Eurasia that
could, in the end, break Washington’s steel chains
that have long stretched from Eastern Europe to the
Pacific.
The Second Pillar — Central Asia
Under
its bold BRI scheme to fuse Europe and Asia into a
unitary Eurasian economic bloc, Beijing has
crisscrossed Central Asia with a steel-ribbed cat’s
cradle of railroads and oil pipelines, effectively
toppling Brzezinski’s second pillar of geopolitical
power — that the U.S. must block the rise of “an
assertive single entity” in the continent’s vast
“middle space.” When President Xi first announced the
Belt and Road Initiative at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev
University in September 2013, he spoke expansively
about “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea,”
while building “the biggest market in the world with
unparalleled potential.”
In the
decade since, Beijing has put in place a bold design
for transcending the vast distances that
historically separated Asia and Europe. Starting in
2008, the China National Petroleum Corporation collaborated with
Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to launch a
Central Asia-China gas pipeline that will
eventually extend
more than 4,000 miles. By 2025, in fact, there
should be an integrated inland energy network,
including Russia’s extensive grid of gas pipelines,
reaching 6,000 miles from the Baltic to the Pacific.
The
only real barrier to China’s bid to capture
Eurasia’s vast “middle space” was the now-ended U.S.
occupation of Afghanistan. To join Central Asia’s
gas fields to the energy-hungry markets of South
Asia, the TAPI
(Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline
was announced in
2018, but progress though the critical Afghan sector
was slowed by
the war there. In the months before it captured
Kabul, however, Taliban diplomats turned up in
Turkmenistan and China to offer assurances
about the project’s future. Since then, the scheme
has been revived,
opening the way for Chinese investment that
could complete its capture of Central Asia.
The Third Pillar — the Pacific Littoral
The
most volatile flashpoint In Beijing’s grand strategy
for breaking Washington’s geopolitical grip over
Eurasia lies in the contested waters between China’s
coast and the Pacific littoral, which the Chinese
call “the first island chain.” By building a
half-dozen island bases of its own in the South
China Sea since 2014, swarming Taiwan and the East
China Sea with repeated fighter plane forays, and
staging joint maneuvers with Russia’s navy, Beijing
has been conducting a relentless campaign to begin
what Brzezinski called “the expulsion of America
from its offshore bases” along that Pacific
littoral.
As
China’s economy grows larger and its naval forces
do, too, the end of Washington’s decades-long
dominion over that vast ocean expanse may be just
over the horizon. For one thing, China may at some
point achieve supremacy in certain critical military
technologies, including super-secure “quantum
entanglement” satellite
communications and hypersonic missiles. Last
October, the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs, General
Mark Milley, called China’s
recent launch of a hypersonic missile “very close”
to “a Sputnik moment.” While U.S. tests of such
weapons, which can fly faster than 4,000 m.p.h.,
have repeatedly failed,
China successfully orbited a prototype whose speed
and stealth trajectory suddenly
make U.S. aircraft carriers significantly more
difficult to defend.
But
China’s clear advantage in any struggle over that
first Pacific island chain is simply distance. A
battle fleet of two U.S. supercarriers operating
5,000 miles from Pearl Harbor could deploy, at best,
150 jet fighters. In any conflict within 200 miles
of China’s coast, Beijing could use up to 2,200 combat
aircraft as
well as DF-21D “carrier-killer” missiles whose
900-mile range makes them, according to U.S. Navy sources,
“a severe threat to the operations of U.S. and
allied navies in the western Pacific.”
The
tyranny of distance, in other words, means that the
U.S. loss of that first island chain, along with its
axial anchor on Eurasia’s Pacific littoral, should
only be a matter of time.
In the
years to come, as more such incidents erupt around
Eurasia’s ring of fire, readers can insert them into
their own geopolitical model — a useful, even
essential, means for understanding a fast-changing
world. And as you do that, just remember that
history has never ended, while the U.S. position in
it is being remade before our eyes.
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular,
is the Harrington professor of history at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author
most recently of In
the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and
Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch
Books). His latest book (to be published in October
by Dispatch Books) is To
Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic
Change.
This article is from
TomDispatch.com.
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