Geoeconomics in Geopolitics #21
Encircling China; Lula in China; EU and China; Africa's Socialism; The Global South debts crisis and Global South international order
“USS Canberra“ - arrives at the Royal Australian Navy’s Fleet Base East, in Sydney, Tuesday, July 18, 2023 - the Star-spangled kangaroo arming to protect itself from the United States! where Australia is inseparably intertwined with the U.S. military and is in practice nothing other than a U.S. military and intelligence asset in every meaningful way, (Caitlin Johnstone).
Commentaries on situational events and emerging geoeconomic issues with reference to my articles as posted in the week that was:
1] CONTAINMENT AND ENCIRCLEMENT OF CHINA
The encirclement of China not only has the formation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (The QUAD), but enhanced by the trilateral security partnership known as AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom and the United States) that is no more but an effort of the US to build a new alliance containing, if not, militarily against China, The Rand Report: 1996–2017. That act would support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines and enabling patrol of nuclear-powered submarines in the Indo-Pacific region which, unfortunately, shall bring ‘nuclear- feverish anxiety’ in southeast Asia, and across the world.
Australia’s defence co-operation with the US is “unprecedented in scale, scope and significance. Australia will continue to work with our partners, including the United States, to build a region that is peaceful, stable and prosperous, including through the longstanding US Force Posture Initiatives in Australia”.
A number of these Force Posture Initiatives involving US bombers and submarines [but US is stalling her submarines deliverance] are widely seen as essentially relevant only to a future US war with China (csloh.substack, China-Taiwan War 2025).
These armed festivities come after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese delivered his first major foreign policy speech of the year, seeking to lower the regional temperature as tensions simmer between Washington and Beijing. He rejects assumptions about the inevitability of conflict, calls for the implementation of guardrails and highlights the agency of smaller nations, (eastasia forum 11/03/23); read too the UTS wrap-up.
However, it is of interest to note that The U.S. Defense Department publicly states it needs at least 66 attack submarines to meet its operational requirements as the Virginia-class submarines are being retired. Further, the U.S. Navy’s SSN fleet is well below that requirement and expected to dip to 50 submarines by 2026. The declining size of America’s attack submarine fleet is particularly problematic given that the People’s Liberation Army Navy fields more than 60 attack submarines with at least seven SSNs and is working hard to increase both quality and quantity. To make matters worse, the United States must deploy its SSNs around the world, whereas Beijing focuses almost all of its attack submarine deployments in the Indo-Pacific. That provides Beijing a numeric advantage in attack submarines in locations where U.S.-China conflict is most likely to occur.
Hence, it comes to past that a more belligerent NATO makes the world more dangerous, especially on encouraging scaling the Australians, New Zealanders and other Asian leaders into the NATO summits. On one prime contagious area, the warmongering of NATO in the Asia-Pacific Basin will submerge, and drown national independence integrity, of all southeast Asian countries just because the Americans wants to maintain its hegemony in the face of what is China’s essentially peaceful rise to a modern civilisation state; view Vijay Prashad's take on China’s progressive rise +6-minute; unless a thaw is forthcoming, (Laurenceson).
It can to be said that from the perspective of the European Union’s characterisation of China as a partner, competitor and rival, this could be interpreted as ‘neither friends nor foes’ and ‘both enemies and friends’ [似乎是非敌非友、又敌又友].
On another angle, this type of positioning - especially within the foundation of international relations - is often regarded as being unstable and of a transitional nature.
Ultimately, which direction this will take will depend on which of the three dimensions in this trichotomy will end up predominating [占了上风]. This will be determined by a combination of both internal dynamics within the EU [欧盟内部博弈] and international factors – in particular, the influence of the United States, according to Yuan Hang (原航) – Associate Professor at the School of International Relations and Deputy Director of the Centre for Polish and Central and Eastern European Studies, Sichuan University.
The difference that China and the EU present their policies towards one another – with the EU emphasising differences and conflicts, and China emphasising similarities and cooperation – reflects diametrically opposed ways of thinking about their bilateral relations: China hopes to reduce the risk of conflict [冲突] by looking for space for cooperation through a search for common ground while retaining differences [求同存异]; while the European side hopes that by facing problems squarely, it will find opportunities for their resolution, which will then lay the groundwork for potential cooperation.
Under such circumstances, confronted by this difference, both sides may need to take a step back from their respective approaches and find a real common denominator so as to stabilise and continue to promote the development of China-EU relations. In other words, at the same time as it underlines its differences with China, the EU may have to endeavour to attach a greater importance to an unifying and harmonious space for cooperation between both sides.
As for China, it could respond appropriately to the EU's emphasis on differences, particularly in view of the fact that the international landscape is now undergoing major changes.
[A Note here: By ‘changes’ Jian might be referring to US-China rivalry and tensions as well as the general instability of the world that his country is now facing].
Therefore, on adapting to these dramatic changes, we could adjust the wording of our policies towards the EU in an appropriate manner and [find a] suitable way to look [more] squarely at the differences and contradictions between both sides.”
Jian Junbo (简军波) – Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Centre for China-Europe Relations, Fudan University is of the opinion that the EU's gradual emphasis in recent years on the geopolitical dimension [of international relations] is related to the ‘geopolitical commission’ that [European] Commission President von der Leyen underlined after she came to power. In other words, [the aim was for] the EU to become a stronger geopolitical actor. This technocratic body that is the Commission has been increasingly emphasising its political standpoints and seems to be pushing EU institutions away from their original balanced stance on China towards a more politicised one. In its triadic characterisation [of the PRC], the competitor and systemic rival aspects are set to be even more emphasised.
READ the Article.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's visit to China in April 2023 to his counterpart Xi Jinping was more than just another step in this integration process. In addition to signing important trade and financing agreements, they announced that the dollar would no longer be used as the currency of exchange and that trade would be conducted in national currencies (Chinese ¥uan and Brazilian rèal), constituting a great leap towards the de-dollarisation process.
That Brazil is a regional and world economic power with specific global weight, generates strong repercussions when people like this come to power. On the other hand, it has to be seen in terms of the geopolitical struggle between the US and China. Brazil seeks its own space in the framework of this dispute on the basis of its interests, which tend to be, in many sectors, convergent with China, but divergent with the United States.
Thirdly, Lula's visit to China, because of what motivates it and the world scenario that frames it, is part of the process of transition towards multipolarity that is already taking place in the world.
In 2022, Brazil's exports to China exceeded its imports by roughly 22 billion U.S. dollars. In that year, the value of products exported from Brazil to the Asian country reached nearly 90 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of about two billion U.S. dollars in comparison to the previous year, (oec world, June 2023).
As Paul Baran noted, the paradox was that prior to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Western Europe had been poorer in natural resources and less developed economically than either China or India.
A bit of history to relate, and to reconfirm, African states surge to adopt socialism.
The 16th. to the 19th centuries, nearly 13 million Africans were brutally snatched from their homelands, enslaved, and forced to toil for the greater good of European and Euro-American powers, London not least. Roughly two to five million Native Americans also were enslaved and traded by European settlers in the Americas, English and Scots not least. This form of slavery coexisted roughly with enslavement of Africans, leading to a catastrophic decline in the population of indigenes.
There can be no question that the genocidal wars waged by white colonizers and settlers were tied to conceptions of the Indigenous “Other” as alien, subhuman, and exploitable capital. It was the pillaging of foreign lands for resources, the enslavement of the non-Western world, and the rape of its women that allowed for the development of mass production, industrialization, and the global capitalist economy, (Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992).
The establishment of colonial rule over the African interior (c. 1880-1900) reinforced Africa’s commodity export growth to serve the Global North. With Colonial control, facilitated by the construction of railways, further induced colonial penetration, and forced profound changes in the operation of labour and land markets. That is, colonial regimes might have abolished slavery, but they replaced it with other colonial forced labour schemes. The scramble pushed African exports to new expropriation heights.
The European powers partitioning of Africa led not only to a massive extension of colonialism and the plundering of the continent, they introduced diseases as well. As the British colonized Uganda, an epidemic of sleeping sickness broke out, killing a third of the population in just a few years. Trypanosoma epidemics also broke out in the French Congo, Belgian Congo, and the colonies of Germany and Portugal.
The increased European encroachment ultimately led to the colonisation and occupation of South Africa by the Dutch. The Cape Colony remained under Dutch rule until 1795 before it fell to the British Crown, before reverting back to Dutch Rule in 1803 and again to British occupation in 1806.
Even after 30 years of German settler colonialism in South West Africa (1884–1914) the legacy continues with white minority rule under South African control. As summarised among others by Werner (1993), Melber (2000), and Wallacell and Kinahan (2011: chapters 5–7), German colonialism created an apartheid society, in which the forced removal of the colonised people from their land in substantial parts of the country and its subsequent occupation by white settlers became an enduring and essential component of a past that remains alive in the present. The primary resistance against the foreign invasion triggered the first genocide of the twentieth century among the Ovaherero, Nama, and other groups as the main occupants of the eastern, central, and southern regions of the country, where they were forced from their land into so-called native reserves.
Related, under colonialism rules, the British Empire empire killed 165 million Indians in 40 years, (geopoliticaleconomy, 12/12/2022); the Bloody French decolonisation, (Al Jazeera, 2020).
5] NEW DEBT CRISIS THREATENING GLOBAL SOUTH
As a preamble to the article by Martin Guzman, Argentina’s former Minister of Economy, some thoughts on the role of the IMF; and why the Global South needs to demand political negotiation of debts that are hurting emerging and low-income economies immensely.
The IMF 2023 Report in its latest World Economic Outlook indicated that though inflation was sliding downward, but the balance of risks facing the global economy remained rather tilted to the downside, and financial credit being tight, the Institute projects global real GDP growth of 3.0% in 2023, and its outlook for 2024 remains unchanged, also at 3.0%, (theedgemalaysia, 25/7/23).
This comes on the heels where in the emerging market economies, a 10 percent US dollar appreciation, linked to global financial market forces, decreases economic output by 1.9 percent after one year, and this drag lingers for two and a half years. In contrast, the negative effects in advanced economies are considerably smaller in size, peaking at 0.6 percent after one quarter and are largely gone in a year, (IMF, 19 July 2023).
Remembering that it was at a time when major economists have put forward theories predicting a falling tendency of the rate of profit under capitalism. There is no reason at all why the rate of profit in the economy should fall because of accumulation of capital, (Prabhat Patnaik, 23/07/2023).
Indeed, a paper in the New Political Economy published online in 30 Mar 2021 by Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala have contended that wealth drain from the Global South remains a significant feature of the world economy in the post-colonial era; rich countries continue to rely on imperial forms of appropriation to sustain their high levels of income and consumption.
The researcher-authors further identified that the Global North appropriated from the Global South their commodities at least worth US$2.2 trillion in Northern prices that were enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over. Over the 1960–2018 period studied, the value drain from the Global South totalled USD$62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), or USD$152 trillion when accounting for the Global South countries’ lost growth alone, (see STORM 2021, Unequal exchange under neo-imperialism.
Factually, the United States exercises de facto dictatorial power over what the IMF may or may not decide, reflecting the international correlation of forces existing in the aftermath of World War II, (resumen: latinoamericano and the third world, July 2023).
READ Guzman's paper HERE.
6] THE GLOBAL SOUTH AND THE INTERNATIONALORDER
Therefore, is it any doubt that the Global South has to exert itself because as the world’s majority, the voice of the vulnerable, and the keeper of the global consensus, our position is for peace, sovereignty, and principled non-alignment has to be adopted and accepted.
The voice in the Third World, Samir Amin, with theoretical interventions, analyses political conjunctures, and narration of personal experiences, combining with various cultures, political leaders, and militant intellectuals around the world to inform us the global convergence of such grassroots social movements:
Samir Amin: Negating Eurocentrism, Creating Universal Culture
Read “For a Truly Universal Culture,” chapter VI of Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism, here.
Vijay Prashad: Developing countries are not easily bullied anymore, 2023, view +30-minute.
Content-links covering events in and around the Indo-Pacific Basin, and global geopolitical situations with geostrategic dimensions:
7] MOMENTUM #157
FRIDAY FILES 28/07/2023