[Peace-discuss] China and the Grand Area
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Thu Sep 2 13:43:51 CDT 2010
China and the New World Order
By NOAM CHOMSKY
Amid all the alleged threats to the world’s reigning superpower, one rival is
quietly, forcefully emerging: China. And the U.S. is closely scrutinizing
China’s intentions.
On August 13, a Pentagon study expressed concern that China is expanding its
military forces in ways that “could deny the ability of American warships to
operate in international waters off the coast,” Thom Shanker reports in The New
York Times.
Washington is alarmed that “China’s lack of openness about the growth,
capabilities and intentions of its military injects instability to a vital
region of the globe.”
The U.S., on the other hand, is quite open about its intention to operate freely
throughout the “vital region of the globe” surrounding China (as elsewhere).
The U.S. advertises its vast capacity to do so: with a growing military budget
that roughly matches the rest of the world combined, hundreds of military bases
across the globe, and a huge lead in the technology of destruction and domination.
China’s lack of understanding of the rules of international civility was
illustrated by its objections to the plan for the advanced nuclear-powered
aircraft carrier USS George Washington to take part in the U.S.-South Korea
military exercises near China’s coast in July, with the alleged capacity to
strike Beijing.
By contrast, the West understands that such U.S. operations are all undertaken
to defend stability and its own security.
The term “stability” has a technical meaning in discourse on international
affairs: domination by the U.S. Thus no eyebrows are raised when James Chace,
former editor of Foreign Affairs, explains that in order to achieve “stability”
in Chile in 1973, it was necessary to “destabilize” the country—by overthrowing
the elected government of President Salvador Allende and installing the
dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which proceeded to slaughter and torture
with abandon and to set up a terror network that helped install similar regimes
elsewhere, with U.S. backing, in the interest of stability and security.
It is routine to recognize that U.S. security requires absolute control. The
premise was given a scholarly imprimatur by historian John Lewis Gaddis of Yale
University in “Surprise, Security, and the American Experience,” in which he
investigates the roots of President George W. Bush’s preventive war doctrine.
The operative principle is that expansion is “the path to security,” a doctrine
that Gaddis admiringly traces back almost two centuries—to President John Quincy
Adams, the intellectual author of Manifest Destiny.
When Bush warned “that Americans must `be ready for pre-emptive action when
necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives,”’ Gaddis observes, “he
was echoing an old tradition rather than establishing a new one,” reiterating
principles that presidents from Adams to Woodrow Wilson “would all have
understood … very well.”
Likewise Wilson’s successors, to the present. President Bill Clinton’s doctrine
was that the U.S. is entitled to use military force to ensure “uninhibited
access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources,” with no need
even to concoct pretexts of the Bush II variety.
According to Clinton’s defense secretary, William Cohen, the U.S. therefore must
keep huge military forces “forward deployed” in Europe and Asia “in order to
shape people’s opinions about us” and “to shape events that will affect our
livelihood and our security.” This prescription for permanent war is a new
strategic doctrine, military historian Andrew Bacevich observes, later amplified
by Bush II and President Barack Obama.
As every Mafia don knows, even the slightest loss of control might lead to
unraveling of the system of domination as others are encouraged to follow a
similar path.
This central principle of power is formulated as the “domino theory,” in the
language of policy-makers, which translates in practice to the recognition that
the “virus” of successful independent development might “spread contagion”
elsewhere, and therefore must be destroyed while potential plague victims are
inoculated, usually by brutal dictatorships.
According to the Pentagon study, China’s military budget expanded to an
estimated $150 billion in 2009, approaching “one-fifth of what the Pentagon
spent to operate and carry out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” in that year,
which is only a fraction of the total U.S. military budget, of course.
The United States’ concerns are understandable, if one takes into account the
virtually unchallenged assumption that the U.S. must maintain “unquestioned
power” over much of the world, with “military and economic supremacy,” while
ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might
interfere with its global designs.
These were the principles established by high-level planners and foreign policy
experts during World War II, as they developed the framework for the post-war
world, which was largely implemented.
The U.S. was to maintain this dominance in a “Grand Area,” which was to include
at a minimum the Western hemisphere, the Far East and the former British empire,
including the crucial energy resources of the Middle East.
As Russia began to grind down Nazi armies after Stalingrad, Grand Area goals
extended to as much of Eurasia as possible. It was always understood that Europe
might choose to follow an independent course—perhaps the Gaullist vision of a
Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization
was partially intended to counter this threat, and the issue remains very much
alive today as NATO is expanded to a U.S.-run intervention force responsible for
controlling the “crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system on which
the West relies.
Since becoming the world-dominant power during World War II, the U.S. has sought
to maintain a system of global control. But that project is not easy to sustain.
The system is visibly eroding, with significant implications for the future.
China is an increasingly influential player—and challenger.
This is the first of two columns by Noam Chomsky about China. The second will
appear at InTheseTimes.com on Tuesday, Oct. 5.
© The New York Times/i> Syndicate
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S.
foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News
Service/Syndicate.
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