By Pepe Escobar, Tom Dispatch
Goldman Sachs -- via economist
Jim O’Neill -- invented the concept of a rising new bloc on the planet: BRICS (Brazil, Russia,
India, China, South Africa). Some cynics couldn’t
help calling it the “Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept.” Not really. Goldman
now expects the BRICS countries to account for almost
40% of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and to include four of the
world’s top five economies.
Soon, in fact, that acronym may
have to expand to include Turkey,
Indonesia, South Korea and, yes, nuclear Iran:
BRIIICTSS? Despite its well-known problems as a nation under economic siege, Iran is also
motoring along as part of the N-11, yet another distilled concept. (It
stands for the next 11 emerging economies.) The multitrillion-dollar global
question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered
a new multipolar world?
Yale’s canny historian Paul Kennedy (of “imperial overstretch” fame) is convinced that we either are about to cross or have
already crossed a “historical watershed” taking us far beyond the post-Cold War
unipolar world of “the sole superpower.” There are, argues Kennedy, four main
reasons for that: the slow erosion of the US dollar (formerly 85% of global
reserves, now less than 60%), the “paralysis of the European project,” Asia rising (the end of 500 years of Western hegemony),
and the decrepitude of the United Nations.
The Group of Eight
(G-8) is already increasingly irrelevant. The G-20, which includes the BRICS,
might, however, prove to be the real thing. But there’s much to be done to
cross that watershed rather than simply be swept over it willy-nilly: the reform
of the UN Security Council, and above all, the reform of the Bretton Woods
system, especially those two crucial institutions, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
On the other hand, willy-nilly
may prove the way of the world. After all, as emerging superstars, the BRICS
have a ton of problems. True, in only the last seven years Brazil has added 40 million people as middle-class
consumers; by 2016, it will have invested another $900 billion -- more than a
third of its GDP -- in energy and infrastructure; and it’s not as exposed as
some BRICS members to the imponderables of world trade, since its exports are
only 11% of GDP, even less than the US.
Still, the key problem remains
the same: lack of good management, not to mention a swamp of corruption. Brazil’s brazen
new monied class is turning out to be no less corrupt than the old, arrogant,
comprador elites that used to run the country. In India, the choice seems to be
between manageable and unmanageable chaos. The corruption of the country’s
political elite would make Shiva proud. Abuse of state power, nepotistic
control of contracts related to infrastructure, the looting of mineral
resources, real estate property scandals -- they’ve got it all, even if India is not a
Hindu Pakistan. Not yet anyway.
Since 1991, “reform” in India has meant
only one thing: unbridled commerce and getting the state out of the economy.
Not surprisingly then, nothing is being done to reform public institutions,
which are a scandal in themselves. Efficient public administration? Don’t even
think about it. In a nutshell, India
is a chaotic economic dynamo and yet, in some sense, not even an emerging power,
not to speak of a superpower.
Russia, too, is still trying to
find the magic mix, including a competent state policy to exploit the country’s
bounteous natural resources, extraordinary space, and impressive social talent.
It must modernize fast as, apart from Moscow and
St. Petersburg,
relative social backwardness prevails. Its leaders remain uneasy about
neighboring China (aware
that any Sino-Russian alliance would leave Russia as a distinctly junior
partner). They are distrustful of Washington,
anxious over the depopulation of their eastern territories, and worried about
the cultural and religious alienation of their Muslim population.
Then again the Putinator is back as president with his magic formula for
modernization: a strategic German-Russian partnership that will benefit the
power elite/business oligarchy, but not necessarily the majority of Russians.
Dead in the Woods
The post-World War II Bretton
Woods system is now officially dead, totally illegitimate, but what are the
BRICS planning to do about it? At their summit in New Delhi in late March, they pushed for the
creation of a BRICS
development bank that could invest in infrastructure and provide
them with back-up credit for whatever financial crises lie down the road. The
BRICS know perfectly well that Washington and the European Union (EU) will
never relinquish control of the IMF and the World Bank. Nonetheless, trade
among these countries will reach an impressive $500 billion by 2015, mostly in
their own currencies.
However, BRICS cohesion, to the
extent it exists, centers mostly around shared frustration with the Masters of
the Universe-style financial speculation that nearly sent the global economy
off a cliff in 2008. True, the BRICS crew also has a notable convergence of
policy and opinion when it comes to embattled Iran,
an Arab Sprung Middle East, and Northern Africa.
Still, for the moment the key problem they face is this: they don't have an
ideological or institutional alternative to neo-liberalism and the lordship of
global finance.
As Vijay Prashad has noted, the
Global North has done everything to prevent
any serious discussion of how to reform the global financial casino. No wonder
the head of the G-77 group of developing nations (now G-132, in fact), Thai
ambassador Pisnau Chanvitan, has warned
of “behavior that seems to indicate a desire for the dawn of a new
neocolonialism.”
Meanwhile, things happen anyway,
helter-skelter. China,
for instance, continues to informally advance the yuan as a globalizing, if not
global, currency. It’s already trading in yuan with Russia
and Australia, not to
mention across Latin America and in the Middle East.
Increasingly, the BRICS are betting on the yuan as their monetary alternative
to a devalued US dollar.
Japan is using both yen and yuan in
its bilateral trade with its huge Asian neighbor. The fact is that there’s
already an unacknowledged Asian free-trade zone in the making, with China, Japan,
and South Korea
on board.
What’s ahead, even if it includes
a BRICS-bright future, will undoubtedly be very
messy. Just about anything is
possible (verging on likely), from another Great Recession in the US to
European stagnation or even the collapse of the eurozone, to a BRICS-wide
slowdown, a tempest in the currency markets, the collapse of financial
institutions, and a global crash.
And talk about messy, who could
forget what Dick Cheney said, while still Halliburton’s CEO, at the Institute of Petroleum
in London in 1999: “The Middle
East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is
still where the prize ultimately lies.” No wonder when, as vice president, he
came to power in 2001, his first order of business was to “liberate” Iraq’s oil. Of
course, who doesn’t remember how that ended?
Now (different administration but
same line of work), it’s an oil-embargo-cum-economic-war on Iran. The
leadership in Beijing sees Washington’s
whole Iran
psychodrama as a regime-change plot pure and simple, having nothing to do with
nuclear weapons. Then again, the winner so far in the Iran imbroglio is China. With Iran’s banking system in crisis, and the US embargo playing havoc with that country’s
economy, Beijing
can essentially dictate its terms for buying Iranian oil.
The Chinese are expanding Iran’s fleet of oil tankers, a deal worth more
than $1 billion, and that other BRICS giant, India,
is now purchasing even more Iranian oil than China. Yet Washington
won’t apply its sanctions to BRICS members because these days, economically
speaking, the US needs them
more than they need the US.
The World through Chinese
Eyes
Which brings us to the dragon in
the room: China.
What’s the ultimate Chinese obsession? Stability, stability, stability.
The usual self-description of the system there as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”
is, of course, as mythical as a gorgon. In reality, think hardcore
neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics led by men who have every intention
of saving global capitalism.
At the moment, China is smack
in the middle of a tectonic, structural shift from an export / investment model
to a services/consumer-led model. In terms of its explosive economic growth,
the last decades have been almost unimaginable to most Chinese (and the rest of
the world), but according to the Financial Times, they have also left
the country’s richest 1% controlling 40%-60% of total household wealth. How to
find a way to overcome such staggering collateral damage? How to make a system
with tremendous inbuilt problems function for 1.3 billion people?
Enter “stability-mania.” Back in
2007, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was warning that the Chinese economy could
become “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” These were the
famous “Four
Uns.”
Today, the collective leadership, including the next Prime
Minister, Li Leqiang, has gone a nervous step further, purging “unstable” from
the Party’s lexicon. For all practical purposes, the next phase in the
country’s development is already upon us.
It will be quite something to
watch in the years to come.
How will the nominally
“communist” princelings -- the sons and daughters of top revolutionary Party
leaders, all immensely wealthy, thanks, in part, to their cozy arrangements
with Western corporations, plus the bribes, the alliances with gangsters, all
those “concessions” to the highest bidder, and the whole Western-linked
crony-capitalist oligarchy -- lead China beyond the
“Four Modernizations”? Especially
with all that fabulous wealth to loot.
The Obama administration,
expressing its own anxiety, has responded to the clear emergence of China as a power to be reckoned with via a “strategic pivot” --
from its disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East to Asia.
The Pentagon likes to call this “rebalancing” (though things are anything but
rebalanced or over for the US
in the Middle East).
Before 9/11, the Bush
administration had been focused on China as its future global enemy
number one. Then 9/11 redirected it to what the Pentagon called “the arc of
instability,” the oil heartlands of the planet extending from the Middle East
through Central Asia. Given Washington’s
distraction, Beijing
calculated that it might enjoy a window of roughly two decades in which the
pressure would be largely off. In those years, it could focus on a breakneck
version of internal development, while the US was squandering mountains of
money on its nonsensical “Global War on Terror.”
Twelve years later, that window
is being slammed shut as from India, Australia, and the Philippines to South
Korea and Japan, the US declares itself back in the hegemony business in Asia.
Doubts that this was the new American path were dispelled by Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton’s November 2011 manifesto in Foreign Policy magazine,
none too subtly labeled “America’s Pacific Century.”
(And she was talking about this century, not the last one!)
The American mantra is always the
same: “American security,” whose definition is: whatever happens on the planet.
Whether in the oil-rich Persian Gulf where Washington
“helps” allies Israel and Saudi Arabia because they feel threatened by Iran, or Asia where similar help is offered to a
growing corps of countries that are said to feel threatened by China, it’s
always in the name of US security. In either case, in just about any case,
that’s what trumps all else.
As a result, if there is a
33-year Wall of Mistrust between the US
and Iran, there is a new,
growing Great Wall of Mistrust between the US
and China.
Recently, Wang Jisi, Dean of the School
of International Studies at Peking University
and a top Chinese strategic analyst, offered the Beijing leadership’s perspective on that
“Pacific Century” in an influential paper he coauthored.
China, he and his coauthor write,
now expects to be treated as a first-class power. After all, it “successfully
weathered... the 1997-98 global financial crisis,” caused, in Beijing’s
eyes, by “deep deficiencies in the US economy and politics. China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest
economy and seems to be the number two in world politics, as well... Chinese
leaders do not credit these successes to the United States or to the US-led
world order.”
The US,
Wang adds, “is seen in China
generally as a declining power over the long run… It is now a question of how
many years, rather than how many decades, before China
replaces the United States
as the largest economy in the world… part of an emerging new structure.”
(Think: BRICS.)
In sum, as Wang and his coauthor
portray it, influential Chinese see their country’s development model providing
“an alternative to Western democracy and experiences for other developing
countries to learn from, while many developing countries that have introduced
Western values and political systems are experiencing disorder and chaos.”
Put it all in a nutshell and you
have a Chinese vision of the world in which a fading US still yearns for global
hegemony and remains powerful enough to block emerging powers -- China and the
other BRICS -- from their twenty-first century destiny.
Dr. Zbig’s Eurasian Wet
Dream
Now, how does the US political
elite see that same world? Virtually no one is better qualified to handle that
subject than former national security adviser, BTC pipeline facilitator, and briefly Obama ghost
adviser, Dr. Zbigniew (“Zbig”) Brzezinski. And he doesn’t hesitate to do so in
his latest book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.
If the Chinese have their
strategic eyes on those other BRICS nations, Dr. Zbig remains stuck on the Old World, newly configured. He is now arguing that, for
the US
to maintain some form of global hegemony, it must bet on an “expanded West.”
That would mean strengthening the Europeans (especially in energy terms), while
embracing Turkey, which he
imagines as a template for new Arab democracies, and engaging Russia,
politically and economically, in a “strategically sober and prudent fashion.”
Turkey, by the way, is no such
template because, despite the Arab Spring, for the foreseeable future there are
no new Arab democracies. Still, Zbig believes that Turkey can help Europe, and
so the US, in far more practical ways to solve certain global energy problems
by facilitating its “unimpeded access across the Caspian Sea to Central Asia’s
oil and gas.”
Under the present circumstances,
however, this, too, remains something of a fantasy. After all, Turkey can only
become a key transit country in the great energy game on the Eurasian
chessboard I’ve long labeled Pipelineistan if the Europeans get their act
together. They would have to convince the energy-rich, autocratic “republic” of
Turkmenistan to ignore its powerful Russian neighbor
and sell them all the natural gas they need. And then there’s that other energy
matter that looks unlikely at the moment: Washington
and Brussels would have to ditch
counterproductive sanctions and embargos
against Iran (and the war games that go with them) and start doing
serious business with that country.
Dr. Zbig nonetheless proposes the
notion of a two-speed Europe as the key to
future American power on the planet. Think of it as an upbeat version of a
scenario in which the present Eurozone semi-collapses. He would maintain the
leading role of the inept bureaucratic fat cats in Brussels
now running the EU, and support another “Europe”
(mostly the southern “Club Med” countries) outside the euro, with nominally
free movement of people and goods between the two. His bet -- and in this he
reflects a key strand of Washington thinking -- is that a two-speed Europe, a
Eurasian Big Mac, still joined at the hip to America, could be a globally
critical player for the rest of the twenty-first century.
And then, of course, Dr. Zbig
displays all his Cold Warrior colors, extolling an American future “stability
in the Far East” inspired by “the role Britain
played in the nineteenth century as a stabilizer and balancer of Europe.” We’re talking, in other words, about this
century’s number one gunboat diplomat. He graciously concedes that a
“comprehensive American-Chinese global partnership” would still be possible,
but only if Washington retains a significant
geopolitical presence in what he still calls the “Far East” -- “whether China approves
or not.”
The answer will be “not.”
In a way, all of this is familiar
stuff, as is much of actual Washington
policy today. In his case, it’s really a remix of his 1997 magnum opus The
Grand Chessboard in which, he once again certifies that “the huge
Trans-Eurasian continent is the central arena of world affairs.” Only now
reality has taught him that Eurasia can’t be conquered and America’s best shot is to try to bring Turkey and Russia into the fold.
Robocop Rules
Yet Brzezinski looks positively
benign when you compare his ideas to Hillary Clinton’s recent pronouncements,
including her address
to the tongue-twistingly named World Affairs Council 2012 NATO Conference.
There, as the Obama administration regularly does, she highlighted “NATO’s
enduring relationship with Afghanistan”
and praised negotiations between the US
and Kabul over
“a long-term strategic partnership between our two nations.”
Translation; despite being
outmaneuvered by a minority Pashtun insurgency for years, neither the Pentagon
nor NATO have any intention of rebalancing out of their holdings in the Greater
Middle East. Already negotiating with President Hamid Karzai’s government
in Kabul for staying rights through 2024, the US has every intention of holding
onto three major strategic Afghan bases: Bagram,
Shindand (near the Iranian border), and Kandahar (near the Pakistani border).
Only the terminally naïve would believe the Pentagon capable of voluntarily
abandoning such sterling outposts for the monitoring of Central Asia and
strategic competitors Russia
and China.
NATO, Clinton
added ominously, will “expand its defense capabilities for the twenty-first
century,” including the missile defense system the alliance approved at its
last meeting in Lisbon
in 2010.
It will be fascinating to see
what the possible election of socialist François Hollande as French president
might mean. Interested in a deeper strategic partnership with the BRICS, he is
committed to the end of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The
question is: Would his victory throw a monkey wrench into NATO’s works, after
these years under the Great Liberator of Libya, that neo-Napoleonic image-maker
Nicolas Sarkozy (for whom France
was just mustard in Washington’s
steak tartar).
No matter what either Dr. Zbig or
Hillary might think, most European countries, fed up with their black-hole
adventures in Afghanistan and Libya, and with the way NATO now serves US global
interests, support Hollande on this. But it will still be an uphill battle. The
destruction and overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime was the highpoint
of the recent NATO agenda of regime change in MENA (the Middle East-Northern
Africa). And NATO remains Washington’s
plan B for the future, if the usual network of think tanks, endowments, funds,
foundations, NGOs, and even the UN fail to provoke what could be described as
YouTube regime change.
In a nutshell: after going to war
on three continents (in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya), turning the
Mediterranean into a virtual NATO lake, and patrolling the Arabian Sea non-stop,
NATO will be, according to Hillary, riding on “a bet on America’s leadership
and strength, just as we did in the twentieth century, for this century and
beyond.” So 21 years after the end of the Soviet Union
-- NATO’s original raison d’etre -- this could be the way the world ends; not
with a bang, but with NATO, in whimpering mode, still fulfilling the role of
perpetual global Robocop.
We’re back once again with Dr.
Zbig and the idea of America as the “promoter and guarantor of unity” in the
West, and as “balance and conciliator” in the East (for which it needs bases
from the Persian Gulf to Japan, including
those Afghan ones). And
don’t forget that the Pentagon has never given up the idea of attaining Full
Spectrum Dominance.
For all that military strength,
however, it’s worth keeping in mind that this is distinctly a New World (and
not in North America either). Against the guns
and the gunboats, the missiles and the drones, there is economic power.
Currency wars are now raging. BRICS members China
and Russia
have cordilleras of cash. South America is
uniting fast. The Putinator has offered South Korea an oil pipeline. Iran is
planning to sell all its oil and gas in a basket of currencies, none dollars. China is paying
to expand its blue-water Navy and its anti-ship missile
weaponry. One day, Tokyo
may finally realize that, as long as it is occupied by Wall Street and the
Pentagon, it will live in eternal recession. Even Australia
may eventually refuse to be forced into a counterproductive trade war with China.
So this twenty-first century
world of ours is shaping up right now largely as a confrontation between the
US/NATO and the BRICS, warts and all on every side. The danger: that somewhere
down the line it turns into a Full Spectrum Confrontation. Because make no
mistake, unlike Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, the BRICS will actually be
able to shoot back.
Pepe Escobar is the roving
correspondent for Asia Times, a TomDispatch
regular, and a
political analyst for al-Jazeera and RT. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
Courtesy: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175534
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