By Sachithanandam Sathananthan –

US Absolutism

The US administration sought an exemption for its armed forces personnel engaged in foreign military operations and compelled the UN Security Council to grant “immunity from prosecution by the ICC (International Criminal Court) to United Nations peacekeeping personnel from countries that were not party to the ICC”, through the June 2002 UNSC Resolution 1422, valid for 12 months. “The resolution was passed at the insistence of the United States, which threatened to veto the renewal of all United Nations peacekeeping missions…unless its citizens were shielded from prosecution by the ICC.” The UNSC extended it for one year in 2003 but refused a further extension in 2004 citing abuse of inmates in the Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq); the US dropped its demand.

Readers may recollect Washington flouted the 1986 ICJ (International Court of Justice) Ruling, that the US exercised “unlawful use of force” in its naval blockade of Nicaragua and support for Contras, alleging the ICJ had no jurisdiction though the “Court concluded that the United States, despite its objections, was subject to the Court’s jurisdiction”. Washington refused to participate in the proceedings and moved its Veto in the UNSC to block Nicaragua enforcing the Ruling. In the following year the US withdrew its consent to ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction and also escalated the aggression. It’s well known the US administration violates almost every canon of international law in the Guantanamo Bay and by the so-called Extraordinary Rendition (kidnap and torture) in similar black sites in allied countries. This illegality and more was justified by the so-called “War on Terror”, undeclared against an amorphous enemy the US intelligence agencies had nurtured in Afghanistan between the 1970s and 1990s.

The Congress, ever faithful to its hallowed principle of “what’s wrong + what’s legal = what’s right”, routinely passed the 2002 American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), which President Bush Jnr. signed into law. Human Rights Watch noted the ASPA’s major anti-ICC provisions:

• “a prohibition on U.S. cooperation with the ICC;
• an ‘invasion of the Hague’ provision: authorizing the President to ‘use all means necessary and appropriate’ to free U.S. personnel (and certain allied personnel) detained or imprisoned by the ICC;
• punishment for States that join the ICC treaty: refusing military aid to States’ Parties to the treaty (except major U.S. allies).”

The US administration enticed numerous sovereign governments to approve bilateral “immunity agreements” that dictate US nationals shall not be handed over to the ICC. The result, noted HRW (Human Rights Watch), is “a two-tiered rule of law for the most serious international crimes: one that applies to U.S. nationals; another that applies to the rest of the world’s citizens” and it urged governments not to sign the “impunity agreements”.

Attempts have been made to extract a similar legal immunity from Sri Lanka Government under the 2019 SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement), under which “the US armed forces and its civilian components, while in Sri Lanka, will not be subject to Sri Lankan criminal or civil laws.” Public outcry compelled President Maithripala Sirisena to suspend the proposed agreement; its current status seems murky.

The US is manoeuvring to codify the peace-meal immunity agreements and extend them on a global scale under its version of a RBIO (Rules-Based International Order) in which, the Neoconservatives-controlled Washington apparently believes, the Congress and/or Executive would draft laws for NATO to impose across the world. The existing UN-centred International Law Regime is a clear obstacle to establishing this near US Absolutism. The eastward expansion of NATO towards the Russian border, co-called “colour revolutions” in several former Soviet republics, the 2014 regime change and on-going proxy war in Ukraine and many other egregious violations of International Law in the post-Soviet space have the potential to render the existing International Laws largely irrelevant. Washington is perhaps gambling most nations, compelled to desperately seek remedy under any legal regime, would not resist the US’ version of a RBIO.

The unprovoked aggression against China is a further nail, so the US-led NATO seems to believe, in the UN International Law Regime’s coffin. Time will tell.

Containing China

The British Royal Navy eliminated alleged “pirates” – who for the most part were competing Chinese maritime traders – in China’s Gulf of Leotung in 1855 to open the seas to “free passage“ and “lawful trade” for, yes, the English and later British East India Company. Quite accidentally, of course, the Britain’s navy found itself dominating the maritime trade routes and again accidentally ended up occupying littoral territories – Gibraltar, Cairo, Eden, Ceylon, Madras, Singapore, Malacca, etc. – a British “String of Pearls” that led many, as during the recent Falklands War, to condemn the British Navy as the most ruthless among pirates!

During his October 2019 address to the Heritage Foundation (his speech on the State Department website has since been taken down), then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo evidently took a leaf out of British Imperialism: he peremptorily issued an ultimatum to Beijing. The “security talks” between US, India, Australia and Japan within the East Asian Quad (EAQ), he reportedly explained, “will prove very important in…ensuring that China retains only its proper place in the world” – a “proper place” to be determined of course by Washington and its key NATO allies.

President Vladimir Putin deplored precisely “this insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility and all permissiveness” among US officials in his February 2022 address to the Russian Federation, in, on the eve of launching Special Military Operations in Ukraine. He continued: “we saw a state of euphoria created by the feeling of absolute superiority, a kind of modern absolutism, coupled with the low cultural standards and arrogance” that peddled an “empire of lies” – that, we may add, includes the Domino Theory, Clash of Civilisations, Thucydides “Trap” and the End of Peace Narratives.

Pompeo’s October Ultimatum cut through the academic waffle to state US’s realpolitik steeped in dangerous undertones of Thucydides’ primitive hubris: “…right, as the world goes,” Thucydides had cautioned Sparta more than two millennia ago, “is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Today’s International Law Regime has been crafted precisely to prevent such arbitrary and destabilising exercise of State power and the US administration seeks to undermine it for that very reason.

Regional alliances against China

Washington swiftly escalated the EAQ, in the newly minted Indo-Pacific Region, from a “Security Dialogue” to a security doctrine – the “Asian NATO” – to “contain” rising China. The US minted the “Indo-Pacific Region” as the EAQ’s theatre of operations, instead of the traditional Asia-Pacific, in order to isolate China. New Delhi acquiesced in return for Washington’s backing in the confrontation with Beijing on its northern border in the Himalayan region.

The Quad faltered, rather inauspiciously, when it began in 2007 and was re-booted in 2017. It is buttressed by the trilateral military alliance, AUKUS, cobbled together in 2021 to counter China and, again, steered by the US with UK and Australia in tow.

Both alliances supplement the third, earlier one: The Five Eyes (FVEY), which was put together at the height of WW2 in 1941 and consolidated during the US-USSR Cold War. FVEY is the combined espionage network of UK and its Anglo-Saxon settler-colonies US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The FVEY extracted intelligence to prosecute wars (Vietnam, Falklands, Gulf), overthrow governments (Mosaddegh’s in Iran, Allende’s in Chile), assassinate nationalist foreign leaders (Patrice Lumumba, Muammar al-Qaddafi) and more. Washington and London are swinging FVEY around to confront China.

New Zealand is the sole dissident within FVEY, less due to moral niceties and more because the country earns about 30% of its export revenue from trade with China. When the Foreign Minister “felt uncomfortable” and demurred, the CIA-front Voice of America stridently bullied Wellington for “selling out to Beijing”.

The Australian strategic planners are similarly walking a political tight rope between the US and China, as their Prime Minister awkwardly put it: “[w]e are a staunch and active ally of the United States…We share a comprehensive strategic partnership and free trade agreement with the People’s Republic of China”. Clearly Morrison, like Philippines President Duterte, worried about the economic fallout since China is an important trading partner.

The national character of Britain’s white rulers and of white-settlers who control the State in the other four FVEY member-countries has been forged in the crucible of colonial exploitation through slavery, land grab, resource theft and genocide of original peoples, whose remnants are now patronisingly labelled “First Nations”, etc. The resulting amoral ideology of Herbert Spencer‘s “Social Darwinism”, refined by Francis Galton into Eugenics, were invented in Britain to explain and justify why its white elite topped the Empire’s food chain and why it ought remain there. Social Darwinism found a much larger and an enthusiastically receptive audience in the US and its influence underpins US’ proxy war in Ukraine against “inferior” Russia’s Slavs and extends to Asiatics/Mongoloids in China in the confrontation in the South China Sea.

In contrast, China and India, despite their admitted shortcomings, have developed and emerged as major powers on their own steam, without looting the labour, land and resources of other nations. The FVEY member-States fear the more replicable development models of China and India may be attractive not only to neo-colonial client States but, more dangerously, entice their own peoples. They are further reasons for the relentless drumbeat about the negatives of Chinese and Indian experiences and for lunging to crush China’s economy and, inevitably, India’s too.

Apparently the three regional groupings above are insufficient to contain China; so two other Quads are on the anvil. In 2021 the US drew Afghanistan (before completing the US/NATO retreat), Pakistan and Uzbekistan into the Central Asian Quad (CAQ). The Biden administration claimed the CAQ, “[r]ecognizing the historic opportunity to open flourishing interregional trade routes, intend to cooperate to expand trade, build transit links, and strengthen business-to-business ties.”

In the same year, India joined the US-inspired embryonic “IndiaArMid Quad” (IAMQ) that includes the United Arab Emirates and Israel. It is expected to be an India-West Asia-Europe trade route “to drive China’s BRI [Belt and Road Initiative] into the ground”.

Given the context of the US military build up in the South China Sea, it’s evident the CAQ and IAMQ aim to keep Afghanistan (and some Central Asian countries) out of China’s sphere of influence by blocking the extension of its BRI into West Asia. The publicly stated rationales are the supposed “enhancing regional connectivity” and promoting “peace” in Afghanistan .

The CAQ surfaced, significantly, in July 2021 barely a month before the US completed the retreat of US/NATO forces from Afghanistan. In Washington’s calculus, the war-shattered and dirt-poor country would desperately need money to rebuild social infrastructure and construct particularly its flagship project, the TAPI (Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline. If the Afghans cannot be decimated by the Gun, they can surely be defeated by the Dollar.

Immediately after the Taliban took power in August the US administration sequestered Afghan Central Bank reserves, between $ 7 billion to $ 10 billion, held in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. Perhaps Washington expected the cash-starved Afghans could be brought to their knees. Within 10 days of Taliban leaders occupying the Presidential Palace, CIA Director Williams Burns visited Kabul on the 25^th of August to “consult” with Taliban’s leader Abdul Ghani Baradar.

However, the regional power balance had shifted while the US intelligence agencies were engrossed over the two-decade long Afghan invasion and its debacle. On the heels of US’ retreat, on 22 September Chinese and Russian diplomats re-established relations with Taliban leaders and agreed “to maintain constructive contacts in the interests of Afghanistan’s peace and prosperity, and regional stability and development” and, perhaps, fund the TAPI pipeline.

Brzezinski’s nightmare

Washington made apparently little progress on the CAQ and IAMQ, probably due to its involvement in the Ukraine proxy war. The US-led NATO has armed and trained Ukraine’s army after the 2014 right-wing coup in Kiev and US personnel largely orchestrate the army’s ground operations against Russian forces. The palpable strategy is to emasculate the militarily powerful Russia, consolidate US control over that country and then tackle the economically more challenging competitor, China.

President Trump’s Secretary of Defence General Jim Mattis in his 2018 National Defence Strategy, cautioned “the present time [is] one of global disorder” and repeated the Neoconservative rhetoric of “the decline of the rules-based international order established at the end of the World War II.” Gen. Mattis’ contribution to “global disorder” is not insignificant. During his stint in the US-led NATO’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marine Forces General’s own troops nicknamed him Gen. Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis.

He carefully distanced himself from the UN’s International Law Regime and pushed the alternative “rules-based” US-led Imperial Order in which Washington writes the rules, enforced by NATO. Observing the US hitherto fought regional wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., Gen. Mattis converged to Brzezinski’s Neoconservative Project: Mattis insisted on readying the US to fight Big Power wars, if necessary simultaneously, against Russia and China – the two Eurasian Big Powers Brzezinski had stressed must be subdued – to shore up US-centred unipolarity.

The rhetoric of Big Power war implied the US-led NATO forces are ready to take on Russia and China, if necessary simultaneously. The reality so far, however, is that Washington did not confront Moscow head on. Instead the US has used Ukrainians as cannon fodder, hoping to weaken the Russian military. Does NATO intend to then put boots on the ground to mop up the remnants? Or has the Vietnam Syndrome entrenched itself more deeply in the US psyche after Iraq and Afghan debacles and foreclosed anther foreign ground war? Or is Washington aiming to launch an air war to crush Russia, in which case what purpose does the proxy war serve?

The absurd assertion that China is a military threat to the US has hardly any merit. However ratcheting up war fever serves the political function of justifying military spending to pull the US and western industrial economies out of the Monopoly Capital-induced Stagflation, which registers in the neo-classical economists’ mind as its empirical symptom of unemployment and inflation rising in tandem. So, the financial outlays for the M-I Complex are well underway. The Quad, AUKUS and FVEY alliances are aggressively postured against the PRC. While Beijing so far has only one foreign military base in Djibouti far from the US border, China is ringed, reported John Pilger, by approximately 400 (four hundred) US and allied military bases in countries Noam Chomsky characterised as “sentinel States”.

Would the people in the Quad countries, like the Ukrainians, become cannon fodder in the US’ pursuit of its strategic interests in the near future?

China-Russia Pact

Unsurprisingly hostility from the US-led NATO has pushed Beijing and Moscow closer, a nightmarish situation (for Washington) that worried Brzezinski in his 1997 Chessboard: “the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances…China would likely be the leader…Averting this contingency…will require a display of U.S. geostrategic skill on the western, eastern, and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously” (p.44), in order no doubt to extend the North American Manifest Destiny of US’ White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) over Eurasia.

Clearly that “skill” is in woeful short supply. The proxy war in Ukraine, cornering China using a surfeit of Quads and Washington transferring to AUKUS partner Canberra US technology to build, for the first time, nuclear-powered submarines – in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – are two US administration’s manoeuvres that, rather than deflate, has in fact strengthened the China-Russia partnership.

The US Hawks’ fears have come to pass in the wide-ranging February 2022 bilateral Pact between China and Russia. It dealt with numerous issues; among them are:

On World Order

* protecting the UN-driven “world order based on international law, including the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations”, and “advance multipolarity” and pursue “true multilateralism”,

* seeking “genuine multipolarity” with UN/ UNSC playing a central role,

* to “resist attempts to substitute universally recognized formats and mechanisms that are consistent with international law for rules elaborated in private by certain nations or blocs of nations” [RBIO],

* democracy is “a universal human value”, that “there is no one-size-fits-all template” and the importance of opposing “[c]ertain States’ attempts to impose their own ‘democratic standards’ on other countries [and] monopolize the right to assess…compliance”,

* the “full and effective implementation of the Paris Agreement” on Climate Change.

On security

* collective security within the UN framework: “[n]o State can or should ensure its own security separately from the security of the rest of the world and at the expense of the security of other States.”

* oppose further “enlargement of NATO” and “its ideologized cold war approaches”,

* the threat to peace and stability of the US’ “Indo-Pacific strategy” and “U.S. withdrawal from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles”,

* the peaceful uses of outer space” under the “central role of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space”, and prevent “the weaponization of space”,

* prohibit “the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons”,

* the US is “the sole State Party to the Convention that has not yet completed the process of eliminating chemical weapons”,

* the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)” to further shape “a polycentric world order” based on “the universally recognized principles of international law”, and

* to “develop cooperation within the ”Russia-India-China“ format”.

To achieve the above and more goals in the Pact, “[f]riendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation”. Most western media outlets have quoted this last sentence out of context and in isolation to insinuate the China-Russia Pact is an anti-West conspiracy.

Both Beijing and Moscow are of course pursuing their own geo-strategic interests; it would be ludicrous to assert otherwise. However, whilst Washington wishes to entrench unipolarity both Eurasian powers are at this writing struggling against the US-led NATO to defend the fledgling multipolarity that is conducive to their ambitions and advantageous for most UN member-countries. The rejection of US sanctions against Russia by the majority of nations, among them key ones – India, China, Brazil, South Africa – in the Global South underlines this perception.

Though cooperation with the stronger Russia may be a shot in the arm for China, China in fact expects to take about 25 (twenty five) years from now, up to 2049, to reach military parity with the US. Till then the balance of armed power is overwhelmingly advantageous to the US. Anglo-American military planners, consequently, are asserting a “limited war” could be fought in, and contained largely to, the Chinese mainland. The objectives are to assuage the US and West European publics that hostilities will not spill over to their home territories and to inveigle the US middle and working classes to condone Biden’s whopping $813 billion arms budget to pay for weapons and military contractors, envisaged by Mattis’ 2018 National Defence Strategy. To make the unprecedented allocation to the M-I Complex palatable, the arms expenditures are sugar-coated with proposals inter alia for a minimum income tax on the super rich and an increase in corporate tax; how the tax collection would play out in practice remains to be seen.

Peoples’ Forums in the US have firmly questioned the so-called “defence spending”. For instance, President of the US advocacy group Public Citizen Robert Weissman reasoned it “is ill-advised and enormously wasteful. The greatest threats to Americans in the 21st century are not external adversaries, but rather skyrocketing wealth inequality, impending climate chaos, public health crises, and corporate greed;” he emphasised, “that sky-high Pentagon spending will somehow keep Americans safe [instead] works to prop up the military-industrial complex while siphoning resources away from real solutions to these problems and true, urgent human needs”; and he appealed: “Congress must resist the growing pressures to increase militarized spending at all costs, and instead put that funding to work for everyday people.”

President Biden has requested Congress to approve an additional $ 33 billion, supposedly $ 20 billion of which is to finance the proxy war in Ukraine.

Whether or not war preparations against China could be reined in depends on the well-known commitment to peace by the vast majority of the common people in the US and EU, on their political capacity to rein in Military-Industrial Complexes and, hopefully, to bring the Permanent War Economy to a close.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng cautioned the US political class citing the Chinese proverb: “One who tries to blow out other’s oil lamp will get his beard on fire.”

Previous posts

War on China? – I

War on China? – II

War on China? – III

War on China? – IV

(Next: Akhand Bharat)

*Dr Sachithanandam Sathananthan is an independent researcher who received his Ph.D degree from the University of Cambridge. He was Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies and taught World History at Karachi University’s Institute of Business Administration. He is an award-winning filmmaker and may be reached at: commentaries.ss@gmail.com