MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: The New World Order: Russia & China minus USA

A much anticipated American foreign policy move under the Biden Administration on how to counter China’s unhindered economic growth and political ambitions came in the form of a virtual summit on March 12, linking, aside from the United States, India, Australia and Japan.

Although the so-called ‘Quad’ revealed nothing new in their joint statement, the leaders of these four countries spoke about the ‘historic’ meeting, described by ‘The Diplomat’ website as “a significant milestone in the evolution of the grouping”.

Actually, the joint statement has little substance and certainly nothing new by way of a blueprint on how to reverse – or even slow down – Beijing’s geopolitical successes, growing military confidence and increasing presence in or around strategic global waterways.

For years, the ‘Quad’ has been busy formulating a unified China strategy but it has failed to devise anything of practical significance. ‘Historic’ meetings aside, China is the world’s only major economy that is predicted to yield significant economic growth this year – and imminently. International Monetary Fund’s projections show that the Chinese economy is expected to expand by 8.1 percent in 2021 while, on the other hand, according to data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US’ GDP has declined by around 3.5 percent in 2020.

The ‘Quad’ – which stands for Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – began in 2007, and was revived in 2017, with the obvious aim of repulsing China’s advancement in all fields. Like most American alliances, the ‘Quad’ is the political manifestation of a military alliance, namely the Malabar Naval Exercises. The latter started in 1992 and soon expanded to include all four countries.

Since Washington’s ‘pivot to Asia’, i.e., the reversal of established US foreign policy that was predicated on placing greater focus on the Middle East, there is little evidence that Washington’s confrontational policies have weakened Beijing’s presence, trade or diplomacy throughout the continent. Aside from close encounters between the American and Chinese navies in the South China Sea, there is very little else to report.

While much media coverage has focused on the US’ pivot to Asia, little has been said about China’s pivot to the Middle East, which has been far more successful as an economic and political endeavor than the American geostrategic shift.

The US’ seismic change in its foreign policy priorities stemmed from its failure to translate the Iraq war and invasion of 2003 into a decipherable geo-economic success as a result of seizing control of Iraq’s oil largesse – the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves. The US strategy proved to be a complete blunder.

In an article published in the Financial Times in September 2020, Jamil Anderlini raises a fascinating point. “If oil and influence were the prizes, then it seems China, not [the United States of] America, has ultimately won the Iraq war and its aftermath – without ever firing a shot,” he wrote.

Not only is China now Iraq’s biggest trading partner, Beijing’s massive economic and political influence in the Middle East is a triumph. China is now the Middle East’s biggest foreign investor and a strategic partnership with all Gulf States – save Bahrain. Compare this with Washington’s confused foreign policy agenda in the region, its unprecedented indecisiveness, absence of a definable political doctrine and the systematic breakdown of its regional alliances.

This paradigm becomes clearer and more convincing when understood on a global scale. By the end of 2019, China became the world’s leader in terms of diplomacy, as it then boasted 276 diplomatic posts, many of which are consulates. Unlike embassies, consulates play a more significant role in terms of trade and economic exchanges. According to 2019 figures which were published in ‘Foreign Affairs’ magazine, China has 96 consulates compared with the US’ 88. Till 2012, Beijing lagged significantly behind Washington’s diplomatic representation, precisely by 23 posts.

Wherever China is diplomatically present, economic development follows. Unlike the US’ disjointed global strategy, China’s global ambitions are articulated through a massive network, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, estimated at trillions of dollars. When completed, BRI is set to unify more than sixty countries around Chinese-led economic strategies and trade routes. For this to materialize, China quickly moved to establish closer physical proximity to the world’s most strategic waterways, heavily investing in some and, as in the case of Bab al-Mandab Strait, establishing its first-ever overseas military base in Djibouti, located in the Horn of Africa.

At a time when the US economy is shrinking and its European allies are politically fractured, it is difficult to imagine that any American plan to counter China’s influence, whether in the Middle East, Asia or anywhere else, will have much success.

The biggest hindrance to Washington’s China strategy is that there can never be an outcome in which the US achieves a clear and precise victory. Economically, China is now driving global growth, thus balancing out the US-international crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Hurting China economically would weaken the US as well as the global markets.

The same is true politically and strategically. In the case of the Middle East, the pivot to Asia has backfired on multiple fronts. On the one hand, it registered no palpable success in Asia while, on the other, it created a massive vacuum for China to refocus its own strategy in the Middle East.

Some wrongly argue that China’s entire political strategy is predicated on its desire to merely ‘do business’. While economic dominance is historically the main drive of all superpowers, Beijing’s quest for global supremacy is hardly confined to finance. On many fronts, China has either already taken the lead or is approaching there. For example, on March 9, China and Russia signed an agreement to construct the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Considering Russia’s long legacy in space exploration and China’s recent achievements in the field – including the first-ever spacecraft landing on the South Pole-Aitken Basin area of the moon – both countries are set to take the lead in the resurrected space race.

Certainly, the US-led ‘Quad’ meeting was neither historic nor a game changer, as all indicators attest that China’s global leadership will continue unhindered, a consequential event that is already reordering the world’s geopolitical paradigms which have been in place for over a century.

Let’s take the opportunity to set a record straight: Russia and China are nobody’s enemies, let alone the rogue United States’.

Somehow, the opinion-makers in the media, the bloated military brass with all their ribbons and stars and with little to do but worry about how to keep their massively overbuilt operation afloat with ever more taxpayer money, and the members of Congress who like to gin up fears among the voters so they’ll keep voting for them have gotten everyone thinking that Russia is still hell bent on world communist takeover and that China it trying to replace the US as global hegemon.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, when one considers facts instead of belligerent fiction.

First let’s talk military forces:

The US has an army of 2.5 million — 1.5 million active duty and one million reservists and National Guard units,

Russia’s army numbers 2.9 million but only 900,000 of those are active duty, with two million being reservists.

China has 2.8 million active duty troops, but that number is deceptive. 800,000 of them are so-called armed police, the Wu Jing, and their job is keeping a restive population in check. They are not for fighting wars, but for controlling the people of the country.

Now let’s talk military budgets:

The US will spend, if we want to be purists, $716 billion on the military. It’s actually a lot more because the National Security Agency is part of the military, and the CIA to all intents and purposes is military in nature and between them their secret budgets top more than the $50 billion that was leaked in a Congressional hearing eight years ago, and could be double that now since so much more US military activity is now handled by Special Forces acting under the direction of the CIA, but for sake of argument let’s just leave it at $716 billion.

Russia’s military budget is $65 billion, and even if you tripled that to account for how much more expensive everything is in the US from soldiers’ pay to weapons systems would represent less than a third of what the US spends.

China’s military budget is $183 billion, and again, you could double that if you like to account for different costs and it would still be less than half of the US military budget.

That is to say, even if you put the Chinese and Russian militaries together, their budgets would be significantly smaller than the US military budget.

On top of that there’s the matter of where those three militaries are.

The US has 800 bases in 70 countries and at least the last time the White House reported on the subject, in a 2018 report to Congress, it had troops fighting in seven countries.

Russia, according to a report in Izvestia, has 21 military bases operating outside of the country, many of them in states that were formerly part of the Soviet Union until 1990, like Tajikistan, Armenia and Belarus. The only place it has soldiers fighting is in Syria, where Rusia has its only military basis in the Arab States.

China has four overseas basis — one in Djibouti, one in Tajikistan, and two signal facilities in Myanmar and at the southern tip of Argentina.

Finally, and this is important, the US has nine operational aircraft carrier battle groups, eight based in the US and one in Japan, all available for force projection anywhere in the world, and carrying more planes than almost any of the world’s other air forces not counting Russia and China. The US carriers are all nuclear powered and can remain away from home port indefinitely. US carriers have frequently been posted for operational use off the coast of Afghanistan, in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf and in the Mediterranean. One was even sent into the Arctic Ocean a few years back.

Russia has one oil-powered aircraft carrier. It rarely leaves port.

China has two aircraft carriers, which stay close to home.

In terms of nuclear weaponry, the US and Russia each have 1600 actively deployed nuclear warheads, limited by a treaty that is currently in fragile shape. They each have a total of over 6000 nuclear warheads, with over 4500 of them in each country in storage.

China has 380 nuclear warheads, more than double what India has.

As far as delivery systems for those nukes, the US has 405 Minuteman III missiles, each capable of carrying three independently targetable and highly accurate warheads. It also has 14 Trident missile-firing nuclear submarines each capable of carrying 24 Trident missiles with up to 8 independently targetable warheads, though these subs are currently limited to carrying just eight missiles and four or five warheads on each, for a total of 40 nukes per submarine.

Russia in 202 claimed to have 517 land-based missile launchers on its territory to carry those warheads to targets. It also has 11 missile launching subs each capable of carrying 16 missiles with multiple warheads.

China is estimated to have 100 nuclear capable missiles of various ranges. Not all could reach the US. It has six nuclear missile carrying submarines.

While even one nuclear weapon striking a country — even a country as large as are Russia, China and the US — it is clear from all these figures that the US has by far the most dominant military in the world.

In fact, there is no indication that Russia or China has ever even considering doing such a thing. Indeed, where the US engages its military at will all over the globe, China and Russia have consistently limited their military activities to areas near their home countries.

The Pentagon and its backers in the US media and in Congress, have to strain like a person with severe constipation in order to produce anything resembling a threat from either country, as when Russia a few years ago flew one of its aging long-range bombers over the pole and landed with some supplies to donate to Venezuela, and the US press was filled with alarms that the jet was “capable of carrying nuclear weapons, as I Russia might decide to drop one on Miami of Boston on the return flight home.

If readers could get past the heavy breathing of the reporters they might have recalled that the US sends it’s nuclear capable bombers, both B-52 Stratofortresses and the much more ominous B-2 Stealth bombers, half way around the world, to actively bomb other countries (with conventional ordnance) or to “send a signal” just by flying near a country like Iran.

The real threat posed by Russia and China is financial and commercial. The US acts as though a Russian pipeline called Nordstream, being built under the North Sea to bring cheap Russian natural gas to Western Europe is a virtual act of war. And China, with its huge “belt and road” project to link eastern China to Europe with high-speed rail and all-weather highways to facilitate trade between Europe and Asia is some kind of devious military maneuver.

Let’s get real. The US military, together with Israel, its accomplice in the Arab States and Africa, is the biggest threat to its own future. It’s ravenous appetite for ever more money, which Congress obliges year after year, is gobbling up almost the entire discretionary budget of the federal government — an amount which, even if you just count the official numbers represents half of the total tax collection of the government each year.

A great example of this is the F-35 nuclear-capable fighter bomber, a $1.7-trillion dollar boondoggle which now, mid-way through its production process, the Pentagon admits is a complete failure as an aircraft, unreliable, incapable of flying at supersonic speed as it destroys its “stealth” coating, too heavy to engage other planes in aerial dogfights, and a danger to pilots because of avionics that are unreliable. It is likely to end up in a very expensive scrap heap and nobody is being blamed for this epic waste.

If we were actually concerned about national security, we would slash the US military by 90 percent and its budget by the same amount, bring all the ships and troops home from those 800 overseas bases, get out of all the conflicts into which the government injects our military — usually illegally—and start taking care of this country, which is, from the stand point of education, environment, health care, infrastructure, economy, and democratic governance in pretty sad shape.

Any American who has been to Europe or Asia can attest that in many countries he/she feels like a visitor from the Third World. The US has abilities — like the landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars — but meanwhile Japanese and Chinese people whisk between cities on smooth-as-glass high-speed trains while Europeans get their health care delivered free at point of service, mostly covered by taxes paid by all, get six or more weeks of paid vacation and retire without a suffering plunge in living standard.

Should US citizens smarten up they would start figuring out who their real enemies are. They’re right there at home and in Tel Aviv, not in Beijing or Moscow or Teheran.

The biggest threats to US and world citizens are a big five-sided building across the Potomac River from the Lincoln monument in Washington and the complex Kirvat HaMenshala, Kiryat HatLeom in occupied Jerusalem.

PALESTINA

Palestinian politician Marwan Barghouti, who is seen as the leader of the First and Second Intifada, is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. His intention to run for president in the upcoming Palestinian elections has shaken the Palestinian political scene. If he runs and wins, as recent polls have suggested he might, his victory could reshape the Palestinian cause with great implications for the Israeli occupation.

Predictably, Marwan Barghouti is facing a stiff opposition from the octogenarian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is planning a rerun, and from his clique of loyalists in the Fatah party, who have been running the Palestinian Authority for over two decades.

They have been trying to dissuade Marwan Barghouti from running, as they did the last time around, but to no avail. The popular 61-year-old seems adamant, as this may be his last chance to step up and restore the revolutionary zeal to the Palestinian cause.

Marwan Barghouti’s detractors, however, claim that he may be driven by personal not revolutionary motives in seeking to win the presidency, as that may secure his release from prison.

This is rich coming from those who for years have benefitted from running the Palestinian Authority and its security services, while the rest of the Palestinians have suffered under occupation.

Still, regardless of his reasons and their motives, the idea of a long-serving Palestinian political prisoner being elected president is a definite game-changer for Palestine and Israel.

Symbolically, nothing represents the bitter Palestinian reality under occupation more than the thousands of political prisoners languishing in Israeli jails. And nothing personifies the struggle for liberty more than the likes of Barghouti, who spent much of his adult life in an Israeli jail or in exile, including the past 19 years.

During the decades of the so-called “peace process”, the Palestinians were told to hold elections as a way to nurture democracy and pave the way for independence.

They did, but in return, they got more occupation, more illegal settlement, more repression and, yes, more division.

Indeed, after more than 70 years of occupation and dispossession, Palestine remains a prisoner of its Israeli jailor.

That is why in the absence of sovereignty and independence, holding elections in the shadow of occupation is no democracy; it is a contest among inmates over the management and, at best, improvement of their incarceration.

Hence, politically speaking, future elections should aim to overturn the status quo, not prolong it.

But that requires a new younger and bolder leadership to replace the old and jaded one that has failed to attain liberty and justice for the Palestinians.

If Barghouti and his multiplying supporters represent change, Abbas and his lieutenants have come to represent political stalemate and the marginalisation of the Palestinian question.

It is perhaps long overdue for Abbas to step aside, not only because of his old age and poor health, but also because his political and diplomatic project has reached a dead end.

It failed to achieve liberation and independence and failed to stop the illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land from multiplying and expanding since Abbas signed the Oslo Accords in 1993.

He may be hopeful about reviving the “peace process”, with the advent of the Biden administration, but that lopsided process is destined to produce more political paralysis in the absence of a new popular strategy that pressures Israel to reconsider its position.

Diplomacy reflects the balance of power; it does not change it.

The tenacious Abbas may have done all he could, but he failed to safeguard Palestinian unity. It was under his watch that the Palestinians witnessed the worst, most violent split in their history after the 2006 elections, which resulted in Fatah ruling over the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Islamist Hamas ruling over Gaza, until this day.

Last but not least, Abbas has already served 16 years as president, even though he was elected in 2005 for a four-year term only.

All of this begs the question: Why would the 85-year-old Abbas insist on running yet again, when more than a few younger and experienced Palestinians are ready and able to lead?

Clearly, the Palestinian political regime suffers from the same malady that has long plagued Arab regimes throughout the region. It is no coincidence Abbas has vehemently opposed the Arab Spring since its inception.

But unlike other Arab countries, Palestine suffers from both autocracy and dictatorship, otherwise known among Palestinians as Israeli settler colonial occupation.

This is why a change of leadership is urgent and the candidacy of a political prisoner like Barghouti is terribly attractive to so many Palestinians.

But what if Barghouti does run and win?

How would the Palestinian hero lead from an Israeli prison?

In terms of everyday life, it is the prime minister who is tasked with managing the Palestinian Authority, and Barghouti could appoint any one of the able Palestinian parliamentarians to lead his government.

In terms of the national cause, Israel, the US and others will eventually have to deal with him directly in prison, highlighting the harsh reality of the Palestinian cause, or be forced to release him, which would be a win for the Palestinians.

Palestinian consensus around their very own Nelson Mandela is sure to underline the unmistaken parallel with apartheid South Africa that a growing number of Israelis, Americans, and South Africans have already recognised.

In fact, apartheid was officially instituted in South Africa in 1948, the year Israel was founded on the ruins of Palestine. But when it was finally dismantled when Mandela became president in May 1994, apartheid took hold in Palestine, as Israel used the Oslo Accords of Palestinian “self-rule” to institutionalise segregation and divide Palestine into Bantustans, all “in the name of peace”.

Many Israelis believed in that sort of peace and may be indignant at the prospect of dealing with a political prisoner convicted, fairly or unfairly, on charges of masterminding attacks against Israelis.

But Israeli leaders know better. With so much Palestinian blood on their hands, they are the last to judge this freedom fighter for his record of resistance against the occupation.

For many years, apartheid South Africans also deemed Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) “terrorists” and saboteurs. Mandela himself was not taken off of the US “terrorism” watch list until 2008.

But when South Africa came under international pressure and its leader, President FW de Klerk, showed the necessary wisdom to release the ANC leader, Mandela became an acceptable and credible interlocutor overnight.

But it was not only Mandela: many freedom fighters, who were accused of terrorism for fighting colonialism, became respected statesmen after independence. Their worthiness was measured only by the worthiness of their cause.

Barghouti, who is fluent in Hebrew and even supported the Oslo Accords until he became disillusioned, just like Mandela, also believes in peaceful coexistence based on freedom, justice and equality.

The Palestinian people are ready to present the world with their own Mandela. But is the world ready to pressure Israel, as it pressured apartheid South Africa, to produce its own de Klerk?