One of the
major pillars of U.S. hegemony is its monopoly control over the world financial
system. This control is so total that the U.S. can threaten and seize the
financial assets of people around the world almost at will. It also maintains a
system of total surveillance over all the world’s financial transactions. It
controls the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two malign
institutions of money power that have caused untold hardship to literally
billions of people over the years.
So it was
potentially a major blow to U.S. power when China in 2013 announced the formation
of a rival financial institution, the so-called Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) based in Beijing. (It could have just as
well been called the Anti-IMF, or AIMF.) The U.S. has worked assiduously
to try and make the Chinese initiative a flop by ordering its client states
around the world (and “allies,” that is, subalterns to U.S. imperialism like Japan,
Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to stay out of the Chinese bank.
But
now, some ducks that since 1945 have always lined up dutifully behind their
U.S. master, have announced they’ll join China’s new Fund. First, Britain-
Britain! the Loyalest Lapdog!- announced it would sign on with China. That gave
Germany, Italy, and France the nerve to follow suit. (There’s Safety In
Numbers, I guess they figured.) The U.S. had a snit, just as it upbraided China when China originally
announced plans to form the new Bank. (Maybe if the U.S. didn’t treat its “allies”
like adversaries and secretly surveil all their communications, especially
those of its rulers, they would continue to stick by it. It probably also doesn’t
help that Europe, and not the U.S., is
paying the economic price of the U.S. economic warfare against Russia being
waged over the Ukraine “crisis” that the U.S. caused by its subversion and
destabilization actions there. But as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria
Nuland said in a memorable phone call- intercepted and posted to youtube for
all the world to hear- to the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine who was managing the
subversion, “Fuck the EU.”) [1] To make matters worse, now Australia
and South Korea are reconsidering their earlier decisions to decline China’s
invitation to join. Control is rapidly slipping out of the U.S.’ fingers when even
satrapies like those two are jumping ship.
The top
Chinese propaganda organ, Xinhua, did
a little victory dance in the end zone after this touchdown. (Apologies to my
foreign readers for the American football analogy.) [2]
China
has already been making economic inroads in the U.S.’ self-proclaimed “backyard,”
Latin America, with development projects, among other things. Meanwhile the
U.S. continues to destroy the nations in the region it declared as its property
way back in 1823. (This act of arrogance is grandly named the “Monroe Doctrine,”
after president James Monroe, only the fifth U.S. president, and is celebrated
to this day. The U.S. from the beginning didn’t waste any time pursuing its
imperialist ambitions. It invaded present-day Canada in 1812 in an attempt to
steal territory.)
The
U.S. continually wreaks havoc and social and economic destruction in “its”
hemisphere. It did that with the Honduran coup of a few years back, that turned
that country into a chaotic charnal house. It long ago wrecked Guatemala and El
Salvador. (I knew, before it was reported, that the wave of “Central American”
refugees fleeing into the U.S. last year came from those three countries, and
not Nicaragua. And I was right.) Now the U.S. is trying to overthrow the
Venezuelan government. Still it persists in its criminal ways, which it thinks
have no consequences as long as it continues to paper them over with
transparent lies and cynical rhetoric about “American values” and its alleged
love of freedom and democracy and human rights (all things which it has in fact
been one of the major destroyers and enemy of). Is it a mystery that eventually
others would turn against it?
As
far as strategy goes, the U.S. doesn’t do strategy these days. It does tactics.
It thinks clever, devious tactics constitute strategy.
They don’t. Despite knowing better- remember the “pivot to Asia” announced by
Obama-Clinton a few years ago, since forgotten?- the U.S. ignored the big
picture, the geostrategic one, preferring
to pick unnecessary fights. Like ripping
Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit. Ukraine is a vital strategic area for Russia, on
its border, with military equipment industries it relies on and the absolutely
critical Black Sea Fleet naval base in Crimea. U.S. interest in Ukraine is
actually zero- aside from the irresistible compulsion to try and control the
whole world. (The whole world except Israel, that is. The U.S. has a weird
submission thing going with Israel, with Israel as its Dominatrix. The U.S.
surrenders complete control to Israel. Maybe someone will invent the field of political psychiatry to figure this one
out.)
The
imperialist elite in the empire’s capital of Washington, D.C., was definitely
miffed at its lackeys for joining the new Chinese financial club. Some poohbah
at the Brookings Institute, a D.C. “idea” factory for grinding out ruling class
ideology and “position papers” (advice to government officials), groused that Britain
needed to be punished. “Britain should not be let off the hook,” growled nomenklatura member Thomas Wright
ominously from his perch at Brookings. And Obama regime officials have been
open about expressing their, shall we say, displeasure.
[3]
This from a
country that almost sided with the fascist military regime of Argentina in the
Falklands War! It was only thanks to then-War Secretary Caspar Weinberger that
the Thatcher regime wasn’t betrayed by the U.S. Alexander Haig and Jeane
Kirkpatrick were steering the fascist president Reagan into siding with
Argentina until Weinberger spoiled their plans.
With the
U.S., loyalty is a one-way street.
A U.S. establishment
apparatchik in Beijing moaned “We’re going to come out looking insecure and weak.”
(Fear of “weakness” is a chronic neurosis among U.S. elites. It is a paranoia
that the establishment media and Republican politicians infect reactionary
nationalists among the U.S. populace with also.) [4]
Funny thing
is, the U.S. could have avoided all this if it had merely given China greater
voting rights in the two big global financial institutions it controls, the IMF
and World Bank. But it refused to make even modest changes. That’s what happens
when you get greedy and want it all. (A cautionary note to the world’s
billionaires too, by the way.) Just as the U.S. would have been better off not
trying to gobble up Ukraine. (Not to mention all the suffering and dead
Ukrainians who would have been better off.)
If in the
future the imperialist baton is snatched from the U.S.’ fingers by China,
doubtless nations will come to chafe under Chinese domination. The more
fundamental question is, after several millennia of various empires, will
imperialism, which is anti-human
because it oppresses and denies autonomy to people, and economically exploits
them, ever be consigned to the dustbin of history? Probably not until a
majority of homo sapiens evolves into
conscious
human beings, at which point they will no longer tolerate imperialist
systems of power.
For now,
resistance to the so-called “international system,” the rule of venal
nation-state elites, is limited to ineffectual protests, spasms of anarchist
vandalism, and nihilistic psychopaths of the ISIS variety (the latter having no
interest in human rights and liberation from oppressive power but to the contrary
aspiring, with maniacal zeal, only to supplant the existing dominators with
their own even viler forms of oppression). Those in power have many
tried-and-true methods for suppressing movements for change. Only fanatics willing
to sacrifice themselves are left to oppose them meaningfully.
1] See
, “U.S. Enlisted UN Stooges in Ukraine Subversion,” April 5, 2014.
2] See
, “Commentary:Washington, what are you waiting for?”
Xinhua, March 18, 2015.
3] See
“China gloats as Europeans rush to join Asian bank,” Washington
Post, March 18, 2015. Even the Post, the elite newspaper of the empire’s
capital, had to admit that U.S. refusal to reform the IMF helped drive other
nations into China’s open arms.
4] “Insecure and weak;” thus fretted Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center in Beijing, ibid.
Posts
