(This is the second part of my Globalization and Isolation series, which began with an overview of some of Nigeria's demographics, environmental, social and diplomatic challenges.)
What with the little Washington D.C. trial-bloodletting, and the not so surprising fact that combat vets have, and possibly always will be treated like shit in pretty much any society, who has time for you know, the global arms race? Let's tune into Wolf Blitzer for 15 minutes of mindless hyperbole about some bearded Arab and then watch a commercial for hair loss treatment while the whole chain of consequences surrounding the U.S.'s eternal fight against Osaddamakhosseini (dirka dirka, we were always at war with Oceania) is crashing the party.
China is becoming a superpower. Though the U.S.A. is still globally supreme. neither will the PRC take two centuries to get there.
BEIJING - China will boost military spending by 17.8 percent this year, a spokesman for the national legislature said Sunday, continuing more than a decade of double-digit annual increases that have raised concerns among the United States and China's neighbors... (Yahoo)
That tireless humanitarian and peace activist John Negroponte goes on to say he's concerned about China's openness about their military buildup, how sweet of him blah blah. Then some about China and Taiwan, not really a changed situation as of late, so on...
"However, Jiang said the $44.94 billion military budget would mainly be spent on boosting wages and living allowances for members of the armed forces and on upgrading armaments "to enhance the military's ability to conduct defensive operations."
"China is committed to taking the path of peaceful development and it pursues a defensive military posture," Jiang said. "China has neither the wherewithal or the intention to enter into an arms race with any country and China does not and will not pose a threat to any country."
The 2007 budget marks an increase of $6.84 billion over last year. With its economy booming, China has announced double-digit annual increases in military spending every year since the early 1990s.
Always ready to keep the projection rolling, the Pentagon lays this one on:
China's 2.3 million-strong military is the world's largest. The Pentagon believes China's total military spending may be much greater since the announced budget does not include weapons purchases and other key items.
Could it be they're subconsciously recalling how their own projected military budgets do not honestly cover expenditure and lack any sort of international or civilian oversight?
Jiang defended spending as "quite modest" compared to what is spent by Britain, France, Japan, and the United States, where President Bush signed a bill authorizing $532.8 billion in military spending for the 2007 fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
"This increase is compensatory in nature in order to make up for the weak national defense foundation of our country," Jiang said.
In the past, Beijing has spent heavily on adding submarines, jet fighters and other high-tech weapons to its arsenal, which despite its size, lags well behind those of other major nations"
What with the little Washington D.C. trial sideshow, and the not so surprising fact that combat vets have, and possibly always will be treated like shit in pretty much any society, who has time for other stories?
While it would be obvious to point out that ultraconservatives are caught up in the jingoism and racism of their narratives, Manifest Destiny, the City on the Hill, so on, they are easily dealt with, as per this little grain of reality passing through their ideological filter:
Earth is full of dead cities. Civilizations, like individuals, are born, flourish and die. Except ours. Ours, we believe, is different, the beneficiary of all the rest. The sunny afternoon in which we thrive will stretch ahead forever. In this belief, we carry on our lives against the evidence of time (European Tribune)
The Divine Right of Kings carries on in this regard, but still to no more effect then the nations and empires that believed it before, and declined. No, the racism I refer to in my title is something that a student of the old jingoists: the Know-Nothing Party, the isolationists after World War I, would recognize. You see this most often today in old libertarian, hardcore rightwingers and some of the old Liberal guard.
Ah, China has control of our market!!!
While I've never stifled criticism of neoliberal pyramid schemes before, these protests all too often have a racist and alarmist tone, and you'll notice they are then trumpeted by The Minutemen™, Pat Buchanan, et cetera, who dislike NAFTA and the slaughter of the manufacturing class, et al., as much as pinkos and progressives. In the 80s the dangerous asian card got played against the Japanese, who have pretty much gotten the economic shaft for decades despite being the number two national economy by several standards. The Japanese had the audacity to buy Yankee real estate and assets through multinational holding companies on the very institutional system imparted to them under threat by the Commodore 150 years ago. You also hear it now under the "taking the jobs Americans won't do" meme, also fundamentally racist if you follow it to its logical conclusion, and the "India/Outsourcing is stealing our jobs" meme.
As someone who admires badass pinkos, real libertarians and anyone who can read through the 24/7 bullshit, I'm not a neoliberal. I definately oppose NAFTA and the plutocracy which is engulfing the planet's dwindling resources. However there are not two sides to this global situation. America's jingoists always seem to resurge right when the system is on the verge of social, political or economic collapse: the 1850s, the 1920s, and now, as capitalism has been so gutted to the bone and so folded up like a pretzel by political-servant boys. These people are right in some of their criticisms but wrong in their moral and empirical lens. It is not China's fault we are fucked up. It is not possible for the U.S. to always remain supreme. Like any human being's death, the U.S. has a choice in its lifespan, will it demise in the most ugly, brutal, warmongering way possible, or will it hold on to power through cooperation, openness and positive globalization?
After World War I, many anti-war cynics sided with the Republican Party after watching Wilson threaten the republic with a police state domestically and internationally. Those cynics did so under the false banner of the isolationists, a proud, neurotic bunch of money-worshippers, bigots and snobs. The immigrant past that Americans recall nostaglically (what was Morgan Freeman's line in Million Dollar Baby about everyone wanting to be Irish?) is simultaneously denied as a present reality. The Irish, the Italians, East European Jews, Poles, Ukranians, so on, were all shut out when the more subtle isolationists (who looked like William F. Buckley compared to Michael Savage in light of the insurgent Ku Klux Klan) lowered the immigration quotas to protect American culture, American language, American jobs. Or so they said.
Pat Buchanan and his contemporaries have, as a whole, made some good points here and there, but always remember that these old guys aren't so far removed from this. Buchanan may be Catholic but the legacy he inherits is pure WASP classism, elitism, racism, however you need it to be worded.
The United States has bullied not only the Middle East, but the broader world. Global surveys found many people believe the U.S. is a threat to peace, the most dangerous nation, and dangerous to them, from fjords on the North Sea to the Straits of Malacca. You cannot totally seperate this bullying from Putin or some Russian body killing off its critics, a Moscow journalist, a London defector, a Washington analyst, so on, and China becoming a military power, and Russia joining with it in reverse detente.
Oh, and what's this story? India set to open base in Tajikistan.
Yet the American people seem to have no clue that we are going back to a balance of powers world, where at the least Russia, China and India are going to be de facto leaders because of their economies--resources in the first, raw demographics in the latter, if not the E.U., Brasil, and interestingly enough, Chavez's new axis of anti-neoliberalism, as a couterweight to the Davos/Friedman view of things.
There's nothing pretty about any of this, but it's not the fucking end of the world, at least not yet if people can stop House of Bush and the other political whackjobs around the globe. Not a single one of these nations is seen as trustworthy enough to handle the planet, even the E.U. has critics. Nor should the U.S. resign itself to letting China and India usurp the world's resources and power through trade and consumption. China and India have shoddy environmental, human rights and diplomatic records (Taiwan, Pakistan) and neither can be trusted with nuclear weapons or large militaries in light of their recent history:
NEW DELHI: In its eagerness to arm its favourite ally in on war on terror, the US is well on its way to triggering an arms race in South Asia.
As American military assistance turns into a deluge, Pakistan is more than making up for the years of nuclear sanction that had stemmed its armoury. There is concern, not just in Delhi but elsewhere too, that Pakistan's new-generation weaponry could fuel a fierce arms race in the subcontinent (Times of India)
While we do not want Asian powers taking over the fights and failed economic conditions plaguing our country, there enters a question of inevitability. Either we can adapt or drown, and that adapting does not call for a MacArthurian round of bombing all global competitors or other neoconservative masturbation. We may have to deal with not being a superpower in 20, 50, 100, 200 years. However it works we cannot micromanage in the hope of staying allpowerful, but we can shape things in a way that maximizes order, (or change) enriches the lives of all people and protects resources, including things that don't have a price tag like mental health, stable oceans, and better forms of energy.
I suggest the U.S. can redeploy itself globally, not just in Iraq. Whatever ideological model is used, a hegemonist, imperialist, social democrat, internationalist, isolationist, so on, some severe change is going to happen in the coming decades. Those who think otherwise forget they themselves march for capitalism, perhaps the most consistently radical social model, and that the world of today does not resemble their childhoods, except in the illusions they've constructed for themselves.
The U.S. has the choice of getting its ass handed back on a plate through this kind of military hubris that declares its own invincibility, (except when the critics supposedly "stab it in the back" a la spitting hippies or whatever nonsense) or of not making major changes and slowly but quietly dwindling into impotence and irrelevence, or changing strategy. There will be major forces in Washington and abroad working for radical change, some with be Republicans and Democrats, some will be foreigners, but this is not two sided. How this change should occur differs in every person's mind.
The problem here is not Chinese stockholders, outsourcing to India, rich people or the Bush Administration. Involving all of these things, it is a much wider picture, one not told the ever dumbed down army of economic footmen and women in the empire. This crisis didn't appear at some linear moment in the GWOT or the war against Iraq, but predates. The most linear aspect of our current crossroads is that every minute, we make decisions that further peace, or prosperity, or entrench classism, including the usuprtion of power and wealth by the United States. In a day a person could make hundreds of decisions that further these contradictory courses. But the moral arc's direction is clear: if we do not want to stare down the barrel of demise and misery, we must not retreat into the anti-China or anti-globalization camp and avoid the world's problems, or become fascists to dominate them.
There is no apocalypse. Every day people in Baghdad, Houston, NYC, Pago Pago and Havana suffer for the decisions we make, and many of us do suffer, but can know far greater pain tomorrow. An attack on Iran, for instance, would not only devastate the peoples of Persia, who've been riding the storm of the conqueror for thousands of years, but would shatter any hope of the U.S. having a positive, meaningful and successfully self-interested global part. The long cycle has much left for reaping.