According to Politico, there is a continuing debate on how much thrust to push the Europeans toward a security architecture more to Trump’s image. Parts of this plan was published in February 2023 by the Center for Renewing America.
Central to the development of Trump’s National Defense Strategy is Elbridge Colby -(whose father was the former CIA head overseeing that infamous Phoenix Program in Vietnam (Chiến dịch Phụng Hoàng) - who for years, has had held that China is the principal threat abroad, and that the United States should focus on Asia to the near-exclusion of everywhere else, "Defense Strategy and a Strategy of Denial?". Institute for National Strategic Studies, March 2022; see also Wang Honggang (王鸿刚) US strategy towards China - the new two prongs approach.
Colby's Strategy of Denial - whence the monopoly capitalist ruling class is conditioning the people of the United States - by magnifying threats and increasing fears in order to build support among publics and the US war machines - for the catastrophic world war not in Europe but in Asia. The focused objective is to execute a pre-emptive strike on China’s coastal infrastructure assets (military and public) regarding the Taiwan issue; see Jin Canrong’s (金灿荣) predictions (in Chinese) that China will soon move towards armed cross-Strait (re)unification (in Guancha.cn on 22 June 2024).
Colby sees continued U.S. imperialist hegemony in Asia as central to U.S. financial capitalism free wheeling-dealings and its ruling class prosperity through capital accumulated.
Former Trump's security advisor John Bolton has indeed indicated that Trump’s goal “is not to strengthen NATO; it’s to lay the groundwork to get out” - and to face the Asia-Pacific basin challenge where the people of Asia and nations specifically ASEAN have fundamentally different visions on neutrality and peaceful coexistence for the region.
In the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2019 Indo-Pacific Strategy, pp15-16, it is stated that the primary strategic goal is to maintain the United States as the “preeminent military power,” both in the Indo-Pacific and globally. This is translated inadvertently into U.S. efforts to slow and inhibit China’s advancement while limiting its projection of power worldwide. Most U.S. strategies for winning the New Cold War directed at China are aimed at a strategic-geopolitical defeat of the latter country that would envisage bringing down President Xi Jinping and eliminate the Communist Party of China, ensuing a regime change from within and the subordination of China to the U.S. imperium from without; see Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition with China Must Be Won, Not Managed, Foreign Affairs, (May–June 2024); David Geaney, What Would Victory Against China Look Like?, Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, September 21, 2023; John B. Foster, The New Cold War on China and in the monthlyreview July 2024, Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific — An Introduction.
This specific shift in Washington’s relations with Beijing, which began in 2010, was partly a reactive posture to the success of the Chinese economy and the relative decline of the United States’ state of a nation, (fire2storm, Aug 2023).
Even Yi Wen, economist and vice president of the Federal Reserve Board of St. Louis has pointed out in a research paper that between 1978 and the early 2000s, “China compressed the roughly 150 to 200 (or more) years of revolutionary economic changes experienced by England in 1700–1900 and the United States in 1760–1920 and Japan in 1850–1960 into one single generation.”
In 1978, China’s per capita income was only one-third that of sub-Saharan Africa, with 800 million of the Chinese population in 1981 living on less than US$1.25 a day. By 2018, China’s per capita income had ascended to the world’s median income level, and the country has eliminated absolute poverty country-wide, Yi Wen, 2016; see World Bank, 2022, whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach as to why Socialism with Chinese characteristics is so vibrantly successful; read also John Ross, China’s socialist economy efficiency, and The Chinese path to modernisation.
Whereas in 1953, China accounted for 2.3 percent of world industrial production potential, but, by 2020, its share of world manufacturing had risen to around 35 percent. Presently, China is the world’s leading exporter, with its share of world trade at approximately 15 percent in 2020, compared to around 8 percent for the United States, UNCTAD, April 2021, China: Rise of a Trade Titan; and America capital imperfection and China’s Socialism efficiency.
The wholesome containment policy in the encirclement of China, (Amanda Yee, Liberation 2023; firesstorms 2023, military bases and empire building; morningstar, Asia's NATO) is unleashed since Clinton’s Indo-Pacific grand strategy, followed by Obama’s Pivot to Asia in 2010–2011, and the recent Biden-Blinken's blinkered Asia-Pacific outreach as America responsed to this epochal global economy shift.
Today, the world progressive movement is anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, antiwar, ecologically enabling. The struggle towards equality with common wealth-sharing for equity humanity destiny is on a victory path.
Postings published during the week:
1] Syed Husin Ali - remembering in remembrance, csloh.substack
2] India-China Relationship, Manoj Kewalramani
3] The French elections - the reactionary forces, Progressive International
4] Modi's foreign policy - as viewed from China, Hu Shisheng (胡仕胜)
5] MOMENTUM and FRIDAY FILES.
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