Tag: Movements and Resistance

When President Obama announced his strategic ‘pivot’ to the Asia Pacific region, most understood that it was primarily aimed at bolstering the U.S. economy and containing China. However, in Playing with Fire: Obama’s Risky Oil Threat to China, Michael Klare provides crucial analysis of the shifting “energy equation” for China and the U.S. It explains much about the political, economic and military calculus behind this move.   He writes:

The U.S. military buildup and the potential for a powerful Chinese counter-thrust have already been the subject of discussion in the American and Asian press.  But one crucial dimension of this incipient struggle has received no attention at all: the degree to which Washington’s sudden moves have been dictated by a fresh analysis of the global energy equation, revealing (as the Obama administration sees it) increased vulnerabilities for the Chinese side and new advantages for Washington.

The New Energy Equation

For decades, the United States has been heavily dependent on imported oil, much of it obtained from the Middle East and Africa, while China was largely self-sufficient in oil output.  In 2001, the United States consumed 19.6 million barrels of oil per day, while producing only nine million barrels itself.  The dependency on foreign suppliers for that 10.6 million-barrel shortfall proved a source of enormous concern for Washington policymakers.  They responded by forging ever closer, more militarized ties with Middle Eastern oil producers and going to war on occasion to ensure the safety of U.S. supply lines.

In 2001, China, on the other hand, consumed only five million barrels per day and so, with a domestic output of 3.3 million barrels, needed to import only 1.7 million barrels.  Those cold, hard numbers made its leadership far less concerned about the reliability of the country’s major overseas providers — and so it did not need to duplicate the same sort of foreign policy entanglements that Washington had long been involved in.

Now, so the Obama administration has concluded, the tables are beginning to turn.  As a result of China’s booming economy and the emergence of a sizeable and growing middle class (many of whom have already bought their first cars), the country’s oil consumption is exploding.  Running at about 7.8 million barrels per day in 2008, it will, according to recent projections by the U.S. Department of Energy, reach 13.6 million barrels in 2020, and 16.9 million in 2035.  Domestic oil production, on the other hand, is expected to grow from 4.0 million barrels per day in 2008 to 5.3 million in 2035.  Not surprisingly, then, Chinese imports are expected to skyrocket from 3.8 million barrels per day in 2008 to a projected 11.6 million in 2035 — at which time they will exceed those of the United States.

The U.S., meanwhile, can look forward to an improved energy situation.  Thanks to increased production in “tough oil” areas of the United States, including the Arctic seas off Alaska, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and shale formations in Montana, North Dakota, and Texas, future imports are expected to decline, even as energy consumption rises.  In addition, more oil is likely to be available from the Western Hemisphere rather than the Middle East or Africa.  Again, this will be thanks to the exploitation of yet more “tough oil” areas, including the Athabasca tar sands of Canada, Brazilian oil fields in the deep Atlantic, and increasingly pacified energy-rich regions of previously war-torn Colombia.  According to the Department of Energy, combined production in the United States, Canada, and Brazil is expected to climb by 10.6 million barrels per day between 2009 and 2035 — an enormous jump, considering that most areas of the world are expecting declining output.

What does this all mean?

All of this ensures that, environmentally, militarily, and economically, we will find ourselves in a more, not less, perilous world.  The desire to turn away from disastrous land wars in the Greater Middle East to deal with key issues now simmering in Asia is understandable, but choosing a strategy that puts such an emphasis on military dominance and provocation is bound to provoke a response in kind.  It is hardly a prudent path to head down, nor will it, in the long run, advance America’s interests at a time when global economic cooperation is crucial.  Sacrificing the environment to achieve greater energy independence makes no more sense.

A new Cold War in Asia and a hemispheric energy policy that could endanger the planet: it’s a fatal brew that should be reconsidered before the slide toward confrontation and environmental disaster becomes irreversible.  You don’t have to be a seer to know that this is not the definition of good statesmanship, but of the march of folly.

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Stars and Stripes reports:

South Korea plans to build accommodations for U.S. servicemembers on one of the Yellow Sea islands near the disputed maritime border it shares with North Korea, but officials from both countries insist there are no plans to permanently station Americans there.

“The Republic of Korea is building a transient barracks for the (South Korean) Marine Corps on (Baengnyeong) Island for use during training or in a crisis,” U.S. Forces Korea spokesman Jason Chudy said Monday. “It could also be used as temporary billeting for any U.S. forces training with our (South Korean) counterparts on the island, which increases our readiness and strengthens our alliance.

“There is no plan for the permanent stationing of U.S. forces on the Northwest Islands,” he said.

Baengnyeong Island is west of Yeonpyeong Island, which almost a year ago was shelled by North Korea. That attack left four South Koreans dead – including two civilians — and prompted a series of changes aimed at making sure the South is better prepared to respond to any future provocations from the North.

North Korea will surely see this move as a provocation by South Korea and the United States.  It will increase the danger of war in this volatile and disputed region:

A variety of experts on the two Koreas have suggested in recent months that the Northwest Islands are a likely location of future military conflict between the North and South given their location and history.

The North has long disputed where the maritime border between the two countries was drawn in the wake of the Korean War, suggesting it should be farther to the south. In addition, the five westernmost islands are actually closer to the North Korean mainland than the South’s.

Adding to the potential for armed conflict is the new shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach being taken by the South Korean military on and around the islands.

That more-aggressive approach was on display June 17 when two South Korean marines mistakenly fired 99 rounds from a Byondong Island guard post at an Asiana Airlines plane enroute to landing at the South’s Incheon International Airport.

No one was injured in the incident, and the marines were not reprimanded for their actions because officials said they had followed the new rules of engagement.

In a Truthout interview Arundhati Roy: “The People Who Created the Crisis Will Not Be the Ones That Come Up With a Solution”, the acclaimed author and social visionary interprets and analyzes the significance of the Occupy Movement:

AR: I don’t think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don’t think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the movement will, or at least should, become a protean movement of ideas, as well as action, where the element of surprise remains with the protesters. We need to preserve the element of an intellectual ambush and a physical manifestation that takes the government and the police by surprise. It has to keep re-imagining itself, because holding territory may not be something the movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.

AG: At the same, occupying public spaces did capture the public imagination. Why do you think that is?

AR: I think you had a whole subcutaneous discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomise. The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it – and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.

“Subcutaneous discontent”!  At the same time she challenges the Occupy Movement:

I hope that that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East. Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. So, whether this movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, or whether it is a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale, remains to be seen.

She had a comment on the language of the movement:

As a writer, I’ve often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom. So I think that turning the word “occupation” on its head would be a good thing, though I would say that it needs a little more work. We ought to say, “Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine.” The two need to be put together.

Referring to the struggles of traditional peoples in India resisting neoliberal economic policies as an example, she beautifully frames what our common struggle for peace and justice is about:

Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfilment. And this battle demands that the world see that, at some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

President Obama used the backdrop of the November 2011 APEC summit in Honolulu to unveil his foreign policy ‘pivot’ to the Asia-Pacific region, then traveled to Australia where he announced the expansion of U.S. military exercises and bases there.  Recently, Secretary of State Clinton wrote an article in Foreign Policy entitled “America’s Pacific Century”, where she articulated the same policy.

At the Moana Nui peoples’ conference in Honolulu and at the Japan Peace Conference in Okinawa, many speakers discussed the U.S. pivot as a policy of simultaneously containing and engaging China. It is a tango of ‘competitive interdependence’.

Dr Jian Junbo, an assistant professor of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and an academic visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom, echoed this theme in an op ed in the Asia Times “Rivals Under the Same Heaven”.   However, Professor Jian sees recent U.S. moves as a shift towards a more aggressive containment of China, which could have dire consequences for peace and prosperity:

US policy toward China in past three decades could be summarized as seeking a balance between containment and engagement.

The diplomatic offensives launched by the administration of US President Barack Obama in past weeks are evidence that Washington is quickly tipping the balance in favor of containing China, frustrated by its failure to engage that country into US-led international order.

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Hawaii in mid-November, Obama demanded that China play by international rules, and be more responsible in the international community, since it had grown up. He said China should continue to revalue its currency against the US dollar, narrow the Sino-US trade deficit and better protect intellectual-property rights. Even more aggressively, Obama has kicked off negotiations on forming a Trans-Pacific Partnership, a US-led free-trade zone in the Asia-Pacific area that would exclude China – the second-largest economy in the world.

Right after the APEC Summit, Obama visited Australia, a political and military ally of the US, where he declared that 2,500 American troops would be stationed in Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. This is widely viewed as a new deterrence to China’s navy.

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Taking into consideration all of this and other actions by the US administration in East Asia in recent years after Obama proclaimed the ”return to Asia” strategic shift, it’s easy to see that a new containment policy toward China is in formation, although Obama and his top officials have publicly denied it.

And U.S. bases play a key role in this strategy now that America’s ‘tender trap’ failed to capture China in a U.S. dominated world system:

All this is not to mention that the US has many military bases in countries and regions neighboring China – South Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan – and it has military cooperation with Mongolia, Indonesia, Malaysia and others.

All in all, it seems Washington is now seeking comprehensively to contain China with both hard and soft approaches after its adoption of the ”return to Asia” strategy and its failure to frame China in the US-led international system despite the efforts of each US administration in the past three decades. When Obama visited China in 2009, he tried to sell the new idea of a Group of Two – a US-China convergence in geopolitical interests – but Premier Wen Jiabao straightforwardly told Obama that Beijing didn’t like such an idea.

Originally, Obama hoped in this way to ”tame” China – not by containment or engagement alone but with what some called a ”tender trap”. But he failed. After that, we can see Washington has been readjusting its policy toward China, and the readjustment should not be considered only as temporary ”election rhetoric” by Obama to please the Republicans and common voters. Rather, this is a systemic and strategic readjustment of China policy, in coordination with Washington’s ”return to Asia” strategic shift.

China’s response has been subdued. This has puzzled some Asia watchers including Richard Halloran, a contributor to the Civil Beat and former columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser, who writes:

Surprisingly, China’s response to President Obama’s plan to “pivot” American attention and military power from the Middle East, Iraq, and Afghanistan to East Asia has been remarkably mild.

Dr. Jian attributes China’s restraint to “domestic affairs”, such as preparations for the 18th National Congress next year to reshuffle the Chinese Communist Party’s top leadership, as well as China’s culture and history and its national strategy of “peaceful rise”.   Unfortunately, the U.S. continues to follow the script of western imperialism, as expressed by Joseph Nye, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.   He asserts that the two world wars were the result of the failure by the dominant powers to integrate a rising power into the existing order.   Therefore, he counsels applying greater pressure on China to conform to and integrate into the U.S. dominated order:

The Pentagon’s East Asia Strategy Review that has guided our policy since 1995 offered China integration into the international system through trade and exchanges, but we hedged our bet by simultaneously strengthening our alliance with Japan. Our military forces did not aspire to “contain” China in a cold war fashion, but they helped to shape the environment in which China makes its choices.

So it is a policy of containment, not ‘Containment’.  However, Jian advises:

It is important that the US should not treat China like those rising powers in history, and Beijing should seek more flexible and functional ways to deal with Washington’s challenges.

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Containment is the worst and stupidest way to deal with or manage China’s rise.