1. “Who lost China?” For years this accusation formulated as a question fomented the American public debate after Mao Zedong’s triumphal entrance into Beijing in March 1949 riding in a jeep made in the USA, taken from pro-American Nationalists in retreat . President Harry Truman, accused of giving in to a “global communist conspiracy,” ended up being attacked by the far right. The theoreticians of the Red Scare, the apocalyptic censurers of the red plot infiltrating national institutions, sparked a hunt for Moscow’s alleged spies infiltrated in the State Department and allegedly caused Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat and reduced China to being Stalin’s maidservant. The leader of this crusade, Senator Joseph McCarthy, even accused the distinguished Sinologist Owen Lattimore of being a Soviet mole who supposedly induced American decision-makers to leave the field clear for Mao’s communists.
“After China, are we now losing Eurasia?” This far more realistic alarm is circulating in whispers in the geopolitical workshops of the American establishment. This is an existential question, since, as Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in his The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, published in 1998, during the highpoint of America’s triumph as the only world power, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.” According to the inventor of the Afghan trap, in which the roots of Soviet power would forever be dissolved, “America's global primacy is directly dependent on (…) its preponderance on the Eurasian continent.”
Today the United States is experiencing the rapid erosion of that primacy, already undermined by the catastrophic “war on terrorism” and the economic crisis that overturned the Washington consensus, until recently – in Eurasia more than anywhere else – a synonym for American “globalization.” Of course America remains prima inter pares. However, on the basis of Brzezinski’s analysis, its grip on Eurasia continues to weaken, and the last residue of its hegemony is supposedly in danger. History’s irony is that responsibility for this crisis lies not with an existential enemy – none of America’s competitors claims to be such. It is America itself that is responsible, and not because of the plots of some Chinese cabal infiltrated in the Obama administration, but because of his choices. Or rather lack thereof. And if there is an observatory from which the gauche self-destructive manoeuvres of the former “single superpower” are being anxiously followed, it is in Beijing rather than in the often irresponsible “allied” capitals.
2. The Eurasian land mass is shaken at its extremities by parallel and converging geopolitical macro-dynamics questioning American hegemony there. On the Atlantic shores, the decomposition of a once western Europe, now expanded to the point that it appears amorphous, is transforming the former bridgehead of America’s transoceanic projection into a quarrelsome no man’s land. Unless of course it should end up ruled by Germany, which has rediscovered its anti-American streak in the tragicomedy of spies. On the Asian-Pacific front, disputes between re-emerging Chinese and Japanese nationalisms – not to speak of the Indian, Vietnamese or Korean ones – elude the United States’ manipulation attempts. If anything they use them to their own advantage. America’s pretension to qualify itself as a resident Asian power, and the arbitrator of regional conflicts, seems an illusion. All this while the trajectory of a once again flourishing China, which Obama would like to contain, seems projected towards the most ambitious of objectives; that of overtaking the United States.
Compressed between geopolitical turmoil to the east and to the west, in the heart of Eurasia, rejected by America and its European neighbours which challenged it over “its” Ukraine, Russia has once again lit up the oriental eagle in its coat-of-arms in order to set up a marriage of convenience with China, toasted with Siberian gas. This in the hope of regaining importance and credit in Europe, thanks to historic links with Berlin (a Gerussia familiar to Limes’ readers).
It is from the combination arising from these three trends that a downgrading of American influence in Eurasia, and hence in the world, threatens to emerge. Seen from Washington, the worst possible scenario is a Beijing-Moscow-Berlin alignment, implicit at least from a geo-economic perspective in the context of “new silk roads” proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping. This is the economistic version of the “Chinese dream” and “new kinds of relationship between great powers”, two of the lyrical headlines with which the Mandarin leadership, the first born under the regime of the People’s Republic, outlines its return to global primacy, to be completed within two centuries of the humiliation suffered in the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60. The energy, rail and road infrastructures of the modern silk roads are the yellow thread that will sew together the Chinese-Russian-German trio led by Beijing, destined to redesign the economic and geopolitical storyline of the Eurasian fabric. The enthusiasts of transport geo-strategy will discover a fascinating analogy between Xi Jinping’s railroad projects and those of Kaiser William II. Two ways of stating power in Eurasia: with China on the east-west axis and the Second Reich on the north-south one. The first involves the Trans-Eurasia Express network, of which the high-speed train link between Chongqing (China) and Duisburg (Germany) is a symbol and a warning. This to consolidate a Chinese-German infrastructural hub – with Russia reduced to a change-over station – equipped with sufficient magnetism to attract and organise around itself the most important Eurasian players. The second envisaged a Berlin-Baghdad railroad, which going all the way to Basra, would have allowed the Germanic empire to overlook the Persian Gulf and marked its aspirations for global influence.
It is perfectly possible that the marriage of convenience between China, Russia and Germany will not result in a new Eurasian order. Forces unleashed by the current quakes between the Greater Middle East and the Far East could turn out not to be coercible within any parallelogram. The result would be chaos. An ungoverned and ungovernable Eurasia. Compared to Chinese hegemony in a scalene triangle with Moscow and Berlin, to which Tōkyō, Seoul, Delhi and Tehran would be drawn, chaos may seem an enviable objective by some American strategists. In their opinion, by staying out of Eurasian scuffles and instead encouraging them, the United States would soon be called upon by the parties in conflict to arbitrate a compromise. At its own conditions. America is playing with fire in a continent home to eight of the world’s nine atomic powers.
Are there better alternatives for the Americans and the rest of humankind? Are they realistic? Can they mature over a sufficiently short period of time? Yes, yes, and yes. In order to outline these alternatives, we must illustrate the causes of the current great Eurasian crisis, starting with the main one; Washington’s reluctance to come to terms with the end of the “unipolar moment”. And thus also with the need to share its declining but currently still significant power with Beijing and other emerging players. The sooner it does so, the more relevant its position in the world will remain. Should America delay excessively, any eventual compromise would occur at less than equal conditions and all to the advantage of the challengers, and not just the Chinese. And this would not necessarily take place following peaceful competition. Time is running out. Before the end of this decade, America’s decline and China’s ascent may cross paths. The future of Eurasia and the world will depend on how Washington and Beijing reach that crossroads.
Inertia does not favour America. As far as economic matters are concerned, China continues to have a growth rate triple that of the United States, also in terms of soft power, since America’s persisting technological advantage does not result in greater geopolitical attractiveness, when not turned against its own custodians (from Assange to Snowden the catalogue of pointless crises caused also with “friendly and allied” countries is shocking). The USA’s military super-power does not produce the effect it is meant to, seeing that the country’s last victory in a real war dates back to 1945. Finally, from a geopolitical perspective, there have been two ruinous presidencies, from Bush Junior to Obama (unless there is an improbable last-ditch change of heart from the current leadership, which the unkind compare to the Carter presidency), which will soon amount to sixteen years of decline on the international stage.
It would be unfair to blame this extended crisis only on Washington’s political class, and in particular on presidents, of whom the global media reflect a deformed image as if they were absolute monarchs, thereby projecting a hyper-simplified and misguided image of the American decision-making network. America must reckon with the multidimensional playing field of formal and informal powers, which in many ways changes regardless of the influence it tries to project. The fact remains that, never before has America’s approach to the world been so inconsistent, due above all to the effect of rivalries between state agencies and the competing interests of groups or private individuals, the power and the limitation of one of the most open societies there is. And added to the now chronic inefficiency and weakness of the political leadership, the result is an attitude without precedents in American geopolitics. Let us call this offensive isolationism.
3. The golden rule of geopolitics states that the world leader should entertain better relations with his main challengers, than they entertain with one another. The objective is to prevent a coalition of revisionist powers opposing hegemony. The United States respected this principle in the second twenty years of the Cold War, when bipolarism was undermined by the emergence of rivalry between the USSR and China, the updated version of a “clash of civilisations” between Tsarism and the Middle Kingdom. It was Richard Nixon who changed the paradigm, first in 1969, threatening with reprisals the Soviets, who were about to spark a nuclear holocaust against the Chinese, revealing the prevalence in Moscow (and in Beijing) of a geopolitical calculation based on ideological dogmas; national interests and imperial syntax first, Marxist-Leninist grammar far less. And again in 1972, by going to visit the leader of Communist China in his own country to seal a de facto alliance between the American democracy and Mao’s regime. Pincers to push the Soviets into a corner. An informal pact that, with its many downs and a few ups, was to resist until the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, without ever becoming a formal alliance. Ideology took its revenge on geopolitics.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Washington established that it no longer needed Beijing, until, at the turn of 21st century, the United States did not wish to see the People’s Republic as the only centre of power capable of subverting America’s leadership for a second century in a row. America sees China as a new USSR, less armed but more dangerous due to the volume and global ramifications of its economy, symbiotically binding it to America. Hence two alternatives; embrace China in order to co-pilot its economic and geopolitical development, asserting one’s own superiority – and China’s inferiority complex regarding America, or demolish China, creating an anti-Chinese alliance with the main Eurasian powers, from Germany to Russia and Japan, differently but clearly inferior to the leader and the challenger.
Two decades later Washington has yet to choose. The American charger stops at the jump, tries to go around it, backs off and sets off again at a gallop, but the obstacle remains, neither knocked down nor jumped moving towards the leader’s increasingly improbable embrace of the brilliant second, well-on the way to overtaking America. Obama assumed an intermediate position with a hint of containment, modestly called ‘pivot to Asia’. Words or little more. A handful of marines deployed to Australia; ambiguous support for claims made by Japan’s and for all China’s neighbours bordering on the East and South China Seas; the creation of a transpacific free trade area without Beijing (one already on the verge of sinking, just like the parallel transatlantic agreement, due to Congress’ objections and to not very convinced partners).
The two conflicting geopolitical elements of the Obama presidency, offensive and isolationist, one eliminating the other, are reflected in the rhetorical mirror in which hawks at the Pentagon want to see the prologue of an air and sea war against “Red China.”
As far as going on the offensive is concerned, the superpower’s withdrawal was to a certain extent inevitable following over-exposure resulting from the “war on terror”, the adventure with which George W. Bush accelerated the decline of the United States while intending to revolutionise the Middle East to reaffirm its planetary hegemony. Hence the withdrawal from Iraq, the almost completed retreat from Afghanistan and disengagement from the Greater Middle East – the south-western front of an extended Eurasia – alongside disinterest for regional crises, unless dragged into them by supposed friends or riding them without a clear strategic outcome as in the case of Ukraine. In this context, the pivot to Asia turned out to be a pivot to America. This means tidying up matters at home, re-launching the economy, and lighting up the beacon of freedom created by the Founding Fathers.
The second element consists of refusing to consider any other nation as being equipped with equal dignity. America remains superordinate to the rest of the planet. Not only is it the most powerful state, it stands alone. It is unique. Consequently it cannot form alliances, only associations with those ready to accept its leadership, venerate its teachings, follow in its path. The best definition of this self-portrayal, a brand name inscribed in the American genetic code, remains the motto used by Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence for the “war on terror”, who believes it is not coalitions that determine the mission, but the opposite. Missionaries by self-definition, the United States decides who to use on a case by case basis. Such absolutism presupposes full spectrum dominance; military, economic, geopolitical and cultural. Assuming for the sake of argument that this has ever happened in the history of humankind, it certainly does not apply to today’s America. And yet, no American leader seems capable of renouncing this ideological premise. During crisis periods, the hiatus between self-belief and real power relations is amplified to the point of backfiring. And it undermines credibility.
Nothing doing. History punishes those who wish to appear more than they are. By continuing to present itself as the “one indispensable nation... for the century past and… for centuries to come,” and as the “hub of alliances unrivalled in the history of nations” (as Obama told West Point cadets on May 28th) , America exposes its flank to the most devastating of enemies, ridicule. After the humiliations experienced in the Arab uprisings and the war in Syria, and the repercussions of spying scandals that have re-awakened latent anti-Americanism even within NATO, authoritative leaders of “allied” nations have dared make remarks unthinkable until recently. These range from the vulgar private considerations of Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski on the pointlessness of giving Americans “a blow job” since “the Polish-American alliance is worth nothing”, to the unease expressed by Germany’s austere Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who believes that using CIA agents to infiltrate government agencies in Berlin and intercept the Chancellor’s cell phone was “an idiocy, and such a degree of idiocy simply makes one want to cry.” It appears that the smart power with which Obama likes to mask his own strategic indecision it not fully understood by his dear European partners.
In an analysis by Dimitri Simes, formerly Nixon’s favourite Kremlinologist, these dissonances are also explained by the president’s inclination to consider international affairs an “unwelcome distraction” from his domestic agenda (which one?) and reveal he is thus “disengaged and uninterested in understanding the other side.” Add the foreign policy team’s low profile, defence cuts and a reluctance to use force (drones excluded) and one obtains a “pushy but casual and weak moralism.” The result is that “rivals like Russia and China are more offended than deterred,” while “allies and friends question Obama’s resolve.”
4. One overall look at Eurasia is sufficient to understand that Obama’s non-strategy is resulting in an overturning of the golden rule. Between Middle Eastern amnesties and mentions of Asian containment, intelligence’s not very intelligent intrusions into the homes of any partner/competitor not pertinent to the Anglosphere – definitely the most robust European “ally” – and the transformation of the Baltic-Polish offensive against Kiev with an existential challenge to Russia precisely where Moscow venerates the baptismal font of its empire, the United States has contributed to a de facto alignment between China and Russia, as well as strengthening relations between both countries and Germany. We shall soon see how deep or weak the bonds established between the three powers ranked behind the United States in the global hierarchy are. It is certainly not a coalition of America’s enemies. It is far worse; it is the unexpected result of Obama’s vacillations and the mistakes made by Bush Jr. The Beijing-Moscow-Berlin triangle is ‘Made in the USA’, just like Mao’s jeep (table).
Xi Jinping, following the example set by his predecessors (including Mao), wants a global understanding with America in order to rewrite together the guidelines of the geopolitical and economic rules, which can no longer be those established in the era of western triumph and China’s eclipse. Just like nearly all the Chinese, he disdains the Russians and this sentiment is cordially reciprocated, with the extra dose of hatred that in Moscow clouds the reflexes of one once under the illusion of being a master, who now perceives himself as a servant.
Putin made his debut at the Kremlin exploring America’s readiness to admit Russia to NATO, only to be rejected as the minor heir of the power defeated in the Cold War. He was therefore obliged to restrict his range of western cooperation to Germany and to individual European partners, among them Italy. Losing Kiev, for which he risks going down in history, induced Putin to suffocate the already lifeless Russian political debate within a media-propaganda bubble worthy of a “Great Patriotic War.” The mission to Beijing, with which Putin on May 21st under western pressure in Ukraine, decided to turn to his cumbersome Asian neighbour to launch, together with Xi Jinping, the unexpected gas agreement (signed at conditions not entirely favourable to Russia), placed under the spotlight for those who preferred not to see them, the importance of Russian-Chinese energy, military and technological links, unthinkable without America’s double “no” to both.
Merkel has no intention whatsoever of breaking off relations with the United States. And yet she leads a state that opposed a not-forgotten (especially in Washington) “nein” to America’s invasion of Iraq. Germany has, for almost have a century, establish strategic dialogues, industrial cooperation and energy interdependency with Russia and intends to continue to develop them even after the Ukrainian crisis. It distanced itself from French-British intervention protected by the American umbrella in Libya and has earned a reputation for being the “sixth BRICS” due to its habit of voting (see: abstaining) often with the other five - Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa – at the United Nations and other international institutions. Above all, the German chancellery does not remotely share the idea of placing a geopolitical-economic chastity belt around China. Finally, personal relations with Obama, never warm, are at an all-time low. Were it her choice alone, after discovering the network of American spies in Berlin, in addition to expelling the CIA’s station chief, Merkel would have recalled her ambassador in Washington “for consultations.” Supplications from her more cautious advisors, worried about American reprisals, finally persuaded her to desist.
In this web of attacks and counterattacks, feints and counter-feints, the leading players often show their hands. In the Beijing-Moscow-Berlin triangle, strategic projects, protected by a smokescreen of propaganda and diplomatic jargon, outline the following plot.
A) China uses Russia to seek America. But, faced with the sphinx Obama, it is starting to become impatient. Pressed by the United States and by Japan on the maritime front, China reacts by organising its continental penetration and to do so, in addition to central Asian and Siberian raw materials, relies on a convergence with Germany that is not only economic.
B) Russia, beaten but not broken in Ukraine, uses China to seek Germany and western Europe, thereby preparing for a debate/clash with America and its former satellite countries in central-eastern Europe along the Baltic-Black Sea line, where a new Iron Curtain is being consolidated. The U.S. Congress’ vote, offering Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova the status of non-NATO allies, confirms this. Unlike the two other angles of the triangle, Moscow is involved in a survival battle and is thus more ready to embark upon expensive tactical compromises, but also unpredictable moves.
C) Germany needs Russia and China to support its feeble growth and to self-proclaim itself a world power and not only (or no longer?) a European one. Hence Germany indulges in a more ecumenical vision than the Russian and Chinese, since it also does not have their military power, nor is it accustomed to geostrategic reasoning following the detoxifying treatment imposed by the winners of World War II. Germany, however, cannot stand America’s habit of treating it like the satellite country it was during the Cold War.
In all three cases, the geopolitical spark linking China, Russia and Germany is provided by the United States. Their closeness is the result of distance imposed on them by Washington. If not interrupted or redirected, the current situation will result in the United States’ progressive alienation from Eurasia. Or World War III. Of course Obama did not want these consequences of his (in)action. He was probably too distracted to envisage them. He will now have to deal with them, and we with him.
5. China is the prism through which it is best to observe current Eurasian dynamics. This continent-civilisation is changing its coat. It has not yet established a geopolitical course, but its “low profile” times are over. The process of being a cooperative or assertive leading player has begun. For the moment there is no codified mapping of strategic objectives and means for approaching China, although if one wades through the jungle of official and semi-official ideograms more than a trace emerges. In the Chinese Communist Party there is currently a bitter and at times dramatic debate, between very different orientations and interests, reunited by the leadership at the cost of a degree of ambiguity regarding the strategic objectives of a colossus now capable of orienting the future of the entire planet. All world players, starting with powers involved in the Eurasian match, are aware that if by chance the People’s Republic – one fifth of humankind and one third of global growth – were to fall into a black hole, the effect would be comparable to the impact of a gigantic meteorite on earth.
This is not an educated guess. Domestic stability is the premise on which its leadership acts in outlining geopolitical priorities. Primum vivere. The territorial, social and cultural dynamics unsettling a colossus with unstable and contested peripheries (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang) surround by other not exactly pro-China state-civilisations (Russia, Japan, India), with the worst possible regional “allies” (North Korea and Pakistan) and constantly under America’s non-benevolent eye, oblige the red mandarins to always sleep with one eye open.
Xi Jinping intends to turn these risks into opportunities. In less than two years he has reoriented the approach to internal security and to the rest of the world, on the basis of active and not only defensive lines. As soon as he was elected, he addressed the nation on subjects and in optimistic tones projected to the future. He quoted Mao, but also the famous poet from the golden era, Li Bai: “I will ride a great wind one day and break heavy waves,” his rhetoric about the “Chinese dream” (Zhōngguó mèng), so out of tune to ears educated to the American dream, indicating the “path of rebirth” (fùxing zhī lù), hence a return to the rank of a great power, “of a new kind” of course (xīnxíng ).
On the Eurasian front, the “path of rebirth” is a synonym for “new silk roads.” Xi intends to reconnect China to Europe and the Mediterranean through two integrated infrastructural networks (railroads, roads, ports and inter-ports, energy pipelines etc). The first goes over land from Xi’an to Venice, and from there to central-western Europe, reminding one of the ancient routes that linked the Han Empire to the Roman world. The second also converges on Venice, but via the Indian Ocean-Suez and the Mediterranean, thereby underlining the Chinese leaders’ peculiar attraction to Italy, regularly put down by our leaders. All this to form an “economic belt of silk roads” , with still vague but certainly tri-continental borders. Xi has personally identified the five most important nations/macro-regions. Russia, to whom in this context Chinese leadership assigns the role of an infrastructural connector between Asia and Europe, while also acknowledging that the Eurasian Union dreamt of by Putin and seriously damaged by the Ukrainian crisis, is no alternative to the Chinese “belt”; post-Soviet central Asia (Kirghizstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan); western Asia (Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey); the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia); and western Europe (Ukraine, Byelorussia, Moldova). While important ramifications are envisaged involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, among them links with the Pakistani (Chinese) port of Gwadar – but on a bilateral basis.
How should one interpret this grand plan? First of all this is not only an economic matter, but also a geopolitical one. The basic reason remains security and therefore national sovereignty. In the already advanced plans and in the first implementations of the “belt” one can identify the Xinjiang and specifically its capital Ürümqi as centres for this system. Since 1992 central Asia’s largest trade fair, renamed the China Eurasia Fair in 2011, is held every year in Ürümqi. Transforming the country’s most unstable suburb, the epicentre of Uyghur “terrorism” – the expression of the autochthon Muslim and Turkic ethnic group’s opposition to Han colonisation – into the hub of the new silk roads indicates a domestic objective, thus accelerating development in the north-west and thereby reducing the gap separating it from the wealthy south-east, soothing the most inviting fault line for those wishing to divide China.
And there is more. Turning to deep Asia, Beijing intends to assert itself as a continental power, denying the Western vision that would like China anchored to the Far East and its oceanic border. This is an internal rebalancing, after European colonial powers based their penetration of Chinese markets on the development of ports and their immediate hinterland, thereby accentuating the fracture that Xi is now trying to correct.
The external reflexes of internal rebalancing are at least three:
A) Wrong footing the United States, which believes that China is its greatest rival in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as a continental and therefore global power. This results in the particularly absurd idea of containing China by locking it in by sea from the south, raising the spectre of the Middle Kingdom’s oceanic expansion, almost without historical precedents, while NATO applies pressure on Russia from eastern Europe. All this as if the Chinese-Russia border, over four thousand kilometres long, did not provide Beijing with an alternative, not to mention the border with land satraps with no access to oceans and not very relevant to Washington, such as Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Tajikistan, as well as Afghanistan from which Obama has almost completed America’s withdrawal. Furthermore, this sweeps away the mirage of a “silk road” made in the USA, so dear to Hillary Clinton, centred on Afghanistan as its geographical fulcrum and on Turkmen gas as its main resource, and to be run between the Middle East and central-southern Asia – regions in which Obama’s withdrawal is moreover perceived as a retreat. The more pro-American elements among Beijing’s strategists, believe that new Chinese Eurasian policy should result in Washington understanding that cooperation with China would be much easier and fruitful on the continent, instead of in the Asian-Pacific where the network of U.S. alliances centred on Japan could cause an involuntary conflict between the world leader and its most important competitor.
B) Emphasising the convergence of geopolitical and energy interests with Russia, favoured by America’s dual containment of Moscow and Beijing, whose recent agreement on Siberian gas (38 billion cubic metres a year, from 2018 to 2048), unblocked never-ending, negotiations, is only the most visible element. Putin turned up in Shanghai, hat in hand and with his back to the wall. Negotiations on the officially secret price for supplying China with Siberian gas were a nauseating experience for the Russian delegation. There were some in the Chinese leadership pressing to impose an even lower price than the one finally agreed on (about $350 per thousand cubic metres), also to prove to the Americans that this gas deal of convenience was not directed at them. And perhaps they thought of belated revenge, remembering the humiliation suffered by Mao in December 1949 in Moscow, when Stalin dictated the clauses of a sensationally unfair agreement. In the end moderation prevailed. At the moment, the priority is to organise the pact with Russia, inevitable for the development of the silk road “belt” and guarantee clean energy to the thirsty red dragon.
C) Signalling to Germany, and other Europeans of goodwill, that the main end market for Chinese and Asian goods transported using the new Eurasian infrastructures, will be theirs. It is also a warning not to support “coloured revolutions” inspired by Baltic and Atlantic Europeans under Washington’s umbrella, which from Ukraine are aimed at Russia and central Asia all the way to China’s north-western borders. “You would be lost if you did that. If together with us you shape the silk roads, it will only be to your advantage”, is the not very cryptic message that Chinese diplomacy sends to all Europeans.
The most uninhibited theoretician of the “march to the west”, as he likes to describe the new silk roads, is the dean of Beijing University’s School of International Studies, Wang Jisi. In October 2012, Wang published an ambitious essay in English with a title that says it all, “’Marching Westwards’: The Rebalancing of China’s Geostrategy”. This is a singularly explicit text, which, within the internal debate, some experts consider provocative, because it supposedly envisages a plan of China’s conquest of central Asia . But Wang Jisi agrees with those who long for a Chinese-American G2 and considers the peaceful and cooperative integration of a Eurasia “led by Beijing” a necessary premise, since it would sanction equal status between China and the United States. This is why the People’s Republic must stop its exercise in modesty, often mistaken for dissimulation, and assume responsibilities linked to its global status. This is the idea of “creative cooperation” dear to another influential academic citizen of Beijing, Wang Yizhou. It is a risky enterprise, one that exposes China to the backfiring of the crisis in the Greater Middle East, from Iran to AfPak, as well as repercussions arising from the NATO-Russia clash in Ukraine. It is however an unavoidable enterprise if the “path of rebirth” is to be taken seriously.
6. Competition between the greater powers is approaching the crossroads between compromise and clash. They are all oriented towards the first option, also because the price to be paid for the second would be enormous, perhaps the ultimate one, but each with its own often diverging conditions. It is perhaps best to therefore concentrate on the most threatening fault lines and downgrade them before it is too late. These fault lines are situated at the opposite ends of Eurasia; at the extreme east and at the disputed Euro-Russian border. The first crisis epicentre involves the China seas, which other regional powers, more or less supported by the United States, would like to at least see partly less influenced by China. The second one runs along the Baltic Sea-Black Sea vertical – the Intermarium drawn during the Twenties by the Polish leader Józef Piłsudski to block Russian expansionism – where the Russian and Euro-Western tectonic plates collide with their epicentre in Ukraine, now a war theatre.
In the Asian-Pacific scenario the risk lies not so much in an improbable American attack on China or vice versa, but rather in local nationalisms opposing Beijing’s hegemony. There is a large choice, ranging from Japan to the Koreas to Vietnam. Each is mistrustful of the other at least as much as they dislike the Chinese. To prevent an incident sparking a regional conflict, cooperation between Washington and Beijing is inevitable, and also possibly in their reciprocal interest. This in order for the United States to assert itself as the internal co-balancing element in the Far East, with and not against China, and for the People’s Republic to reveal itself as a reliable power in the area that countermines its more developed provinces, to seal, at a regional level, its bonds to other emerging economies, with and not against America. Otherwise the maritime routes of silk will remain a map-writing exercise.
The European crisis is far more serious. Since the so-called end of the Cold War, Russia has seen its western borders draw closer and closer to Moscow (or allowed this). In the bi-polar word the united West successfully practised containment of the Soviet Union. In the current chaos, a number of stars in the Atlantic firmament believe that the time has come for a roll-back against the Russian Federation, in the original sense of saying, “roll back” the carpet – meaning Moscow’s empire.
The objective is to deny Putin a sphere of influence in his nearby abroad, even that sort of domestic abroad that Kiev is considered by most Russians. Even at the risk of war, one already sparked in the eastern regions of Ukraine where Russian separatists supplied, but not controlled, by Moscow, refuse to enslave themselves to the change of oligarchs sparked by the Majdan uprising, which led to a coup d’état that has brought to the presidency the currently pro-west king of chocolate, Petro Porošenko. The clash, not even all that indirect, is between the United States and Russia, with the Europeans as always disseminated or dissimulated along the orderly lines traced by Washington and Moscow. The anti-Russian formation is led by the United Kingdom, Sweden, Poland and Romania, with support from the former Soviet Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). Italy has joined the pro-Russian formation, or at least the formation not taking part in the roll-back, not only for energy reasons, but because aware that those who will have to pick up the pieces of a Russian-American match will be above all the Europeans.
Washington’s second target is Berlin. Or rather its excessively intrinsic relations with Moscow and Beijing. The shooting down of the Malaysian Airways flight at the Ukrainian-Russian border – for which Obama immediately attributed indirect responsibility to Russia, guilty of having supplied medium-range surface-to-air missiles to its anti-Kiev hit men – has extended and exacerbated the clash. Germany must choose, insist White House envoys in Berlin. It is time to stop these balancing acts and adapt to the offensive launched by the Baltic-Oriental partners neighbouring with the Russian Federation. So far Merkel has assumed an intermediate position, not holding back as far as verbal condemnations of Russia are concerned, adhering to the first round of sanctions but restraining some of the NATO hawks’ more adventurous ideas in the wilder moments following the downing of the Malaysian plane. The chancellery does not intend to destabilise the cooperation created in over forty years of Ostpolitik.
Obama is also aiming at the other side of the triangle, the German-Chinese one, referred to in Berlin’s chancellery as a “special relationship”, wording intentionally evocative of the British-American axis. Were the Russian-European border perpendicular, separating two incompatible blocks, China’s “march westwards” would be unthinkable. An overheated Intermarium, if not one in flames, would burn the silk roads.
The Ukrainian crisis has escaped the control of its creators. In Obama’s intentions, the objective in changing the guard in Kiev was “to keep Putin honest”. He wanted to remind Russia’s leader of his place following too many crises – Egypt, Syria, Snowden – in which he had taken excessive liberties. Taken by surprise when Janukovič fled, the Kremlin’s leader first tried to limit defeat by retaking Crimea, sparking the hyper-patriotic paroxysm that always animates Russians when they feel attacked, and fuelling separatist guerrillas in Eastern Ukraine in order to reach an acceptable compromise with Porošenko. Both Obama and Putin have lost control over their respective agents in Ukraine, attentive to their own interests before those of their supposed puppet masters. Washington and Moscow now risk a head-on clash.
To avoid this a compromise is needed; one that becomes increasingly necessary and more difficult each day. The basic terms are clear; neutralisation of Ukraine guaranteed by all powers and broad regional autonomies so as to placate a multi-ethnic area, with elements of reciprocal racism between Russians and Ukrainians and therefore not suited to becoming a national state. If everything should end in the least worst possible way, the ceasefire we will call peace will be agreed on between Obama and Putin. Repercussions will, however, inevitably involve the entire Eurasian area, Berlin and Beijing included. And hence the rest of the world.
There is finally a third level of competition on which the choice between compromise and conflict will be played out by the great powers. Perhaps it is the most important since the leading players keep it mostly under wraps and it involves rewriting the rules of world trade. It is there that the fate of the dollar, Washington’s real strategic weapon, will be determined. The economic crisis appears to have shattered the prospects of global free trade to which the ruinous negotiation rounds of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) were aimed. The United States has promoted two parallel initiatives – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – destined to reaffirm its geo-economic hegemony on the planet. The objective is to codify the terms for exchanging goods, capital and people at a global level, before the BRICS and other non-western “emerging” countries do so.
Unable and unwilling to enter a global agreement, Obama has opted for two economic areas (far more than just free trade) centred on America: one in the Asian-Pacific, which excludes China, and a Euro-Atlantic one without Russia. Both these operations are geopolitical albeit in a trade version. The TPP intends to pressure China in the context of containment strategies, while the TTIP wants to re-launch the transatlantic link, no longer implementable just through NATO. The tendency is leaning towards regional protectionism and bilateral agreements, emphasising the rift between established and aspiring economic powers. At this rate the gap between the West and the BRICS will assume the characteristics of a monetary war, not just a trade war.
In this match we Europeans have a special responsibility. The European Union is a trade block of a size comparable to the United States and to China. Trade negotiations are the only issue on which the EU presents a united front, or tries to. Getting caught up in a game involving selective protectionisms and bi- or tri-lateral agreements would be punitive for us. Co-participation, albeit indirect – in the disintegration of Russia and/or the containment of China, would be absurd. Breaking with the United States would be fatal. Cutting the fragile western bond would sanction our regression to warlike xenophobic instincts, exhibited without shame along the Intermarium fault line – and beyond. The only positive result of this crisis is the birth of a sovereign European subject, bound to the United States with equal status, the western avant-garde of Euro-Asian development. This is possible only following inclusive agendas, open to all available partners, starting with Russia and China. The “silk roads” are useful to anyone wanting or capable of using them.
What is certain is that we Europeans cannot make do with an inertia that invites a permanent conflict between the major powers. Nor can we delegate our interests to Germany, which is not willing to integrate them in its global projections. The Asian-Pacific is too far away to listen to voices from the Old Continent. On Ukraine and the TTIP, however, we have the duty and the right to express our opinions, but only after reorganising the scattered Euro-Atlantic tribe around a reasonable policy. Otherwise, it would be best to admit that Europe is naked and establish that no one has the right to use it as a fig leaf for their own particular objectives. Each will assume their own responsibilities. Should Italy not do so, it will no longer have the right to consider itself an active player on the international stage, hence to exist.
“After China, are we now losing Eurasia?” This far more realistic alarm is circulating in whispers in the geopolitical workshops of the American establishment. This is an existential question, since, as Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in his The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, published in 1998, during the highpoint of America’s triumph as the only world power, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.” According to the inventor of the Afghan trap, in which the roots of Soviet power would forever be dissolved, “America's global primacy is directly dependent on (…) its preponderance on the Eurasian continent.”
Today the United States is experiencing the rapid erosion of that primacy, already undermined by the catastrophic “war on terrorism” and the economic crisis that overturned the Washington consensus, until recently – in Eurasia more than anywhere else – a synonym for American “globalization.” Of course America remains prima inter pares. However, on the basis of Brzezinski’s analysis, its grip on Eurasia continues to weaken, and the last residue of its hegemony is supposedly in danger. History’s irony is that responsibility for this crisis lies not with an existential enemy – none of America’s competitors claims to be such. It is America itself that is responsible, and not because of the plots of some Chinese cabal infiltrated in the Obama administration, but because of his choices. Or rather lack thereof. And if there is an observatory from which the gauche self-destructive manoeuvres of the former “single superpower” are being anxiously followed, it is in Beijing rather than in the often irresponsible “allied” capitals.
2. The Eurasian land mass is shaken at its extremities by parallel and converging geopolitical macro-dynamics questioning American hegemony there. On the Atlantic shores, the decomposition of a once western Europe, now expanded to the point that it appears amorphous, is transforming the former bridgehead of America’s transoceanic projection into a quarrelsome no man’s land. Unless of course it should end up ruled by Germany, which has rediscovered its anti-American streak in the tragicomedy of spies. On the Asian-Pacific front, disputes between re-emerging Chinese and Japanese nationalisms – not to speak of the Indian, Vietnamese or Korean ones – elude the United States’ manipulation attempts. If anything they use them to their own advantage. America’s pretension to qualify itself as a resident Asian power, and the arbitrator of regional conflicts, seems an illusion. All this while the trajectory of a once again flourishing China, which Obama would like to contain, seems projected towards the most ambitious of objectives; that of overtaking the United States.
Compressed between geopolitical turmoil to the east and to the west, in the heart of Eurasia, rejected by America and its European neighbours which challenged it over “its” Ukraine, Russia has once again lit up the oriental eagle in its coat-of-arms in order to set up a marriage of convenience with China, toasted with Siberian gas. This in the hope of regaining importance and credit in Europe, thanks to historic links with Berlin (a Gerussia familiar to Limes’ readers).
It is from the combination arising from these three trends that a downgrading of American influence in Eurasia, and hence in the world, threatens to emerge. Seen from Washington, the worst possible scenario is a Beijing-Moscow-Berlin alignment, implicit at least from a geo-economic perspective in the context of “new silk roads” proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping. This is the economistic version of the “Chinese dream” and “new kinds of relationship between great powers”, two of the lyrical headlines with which the Mandarin leadership, the first born under the regime of the People’s Republic, outlines its return to global primacy, to be completed within two centuries of the humiliation suffered in the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60. The energy, rail and road infrastructures of the modern silk roads are the yellow thread that will sew together the Chinese-Russian-German trio led by Beijing, destined to redesign the economic and geopolitical storyline of the Eurasian fabric. The enthusiasts of transport geo-strategy will discover a fascinating analogy between Xi Jinping’s railroad projects and those of Kaiser William II. Two ways of stating power in Eurasia: with China on the east-west axis and the Second Reich on the north-south one. The first involves the Trans-Eurasia Express network, of which the high-speed train link between Chongqing (China) and Duisburg (Germany) is a symbol and a warning. This to consolidate a Chinese-German infrastructural hub – with Russia reduced to a change-over station – equipped with sufficient magnetism to attract and organise around itself the most important Eurasian players. The second envisaged a Berlin-Baghdad railroad, which going all the way to Basra, would have allowed the Germanic empire to overlook the Persian Gulf and marked its aspirations for global influence.
It is perfectly possible that the marriage of convenience between China, Russia and Germany will not result in a new Eurasian order. Forces unleashed by the current quakes between the Greater Middle East and the Far East could turn out not to be coercible within any parallelogram. The result would be chaos. An ungoverned and ungovernable Eurasia. Compared to Chinese hegemony in a scalene triangle with Moscow and Berlin, to which Tōkyō, Seoul, Delhi and Tehran would be drawn, chaos may seem an enviable objective by some American strategists. In their opinion, by staying out of Eurasian scuffles and instead encouraging them, the United States would soon be called upon by the parties in conflict to arbitrate a compromise. At its own conditions. America is playing with fire in a continent home to eight of the world’s nine atomic powers.
Are there better alternatives for the Americans and the rest of humankind? Are they realistic? Can they mature over a sufficiently short period of time? Yes, yes, and yes. In order to outline these alternatives, we must illustrate the causes of the current great Eurasian crisis, starting with the main one; Washington’s reluctance to come to terms with the end of the “unipolar moment”. And thus also with the need to share its declining but currently still significant power with Beijing and other emerging players. The sooner it does so, the more relevant its position in the world will remain. Should America delay excessively, any eventual compromise would occur at less than equal conditions and all to the advantage of the challengers, and not just the Chinese. And this would not necessarily take place following peaceful competition. Time is running out. Before the end of this decade, America’s decline and China’s ascent may cross paths. The future of Eurasia and the world will depend on how Washington and Beijing reach that crossroads.
Inertia does not favour America. As far as economic matters are concerned, China continues to have a growth rate triple that of the United States, also in terms of soft power, since America’s persisting technological advantage does not result in greater geopolitical attractiveness, when not turned against its own custodians (from Assange to Snowden the catalogue of pointless crises caused also with “friendly and allied” countries is shocking). The USA’s military super-power does not produce the effect it is meant to, seeing that the country’s last victory in a real war dates back to 1945. Finally, from a geopolitical perspective, there have been two ruinous presidencies, from Bush Junior to Obama (unless there is an improbable last-ditch change of heart from the current leadership, which the unkind compare to the Carter presidency), which will soon amount to sixteen years of decline on the international stage.
It would be unfair to blame this extended crisis only on Washington’s political class, and in particular on presidents, of whom the global media reflect a deformed image as if they were absolute monarchs, thereby projecting a hyper-simplified and misguided image of the American decision-making network. America must reckon with the multidimensional playing field of formal and informal powers, which in many ways changes regardless of the influence it tries to project. The fact remains that, never before has America’s approach to the world been so inconsistent, due above all to the effect of rivalries between state agencies and the competing interests of groups or private individuals, the power and the limitation of one of the most open societies there is. And added to the now chronic inefficiency and weakness of the political leadership, the result is an attitude without precedents in American geopolitics. Let us call this offensive isolationism.
3. The golden rule of geopolitics states that the world leader should entertain better relations with his main challengers, than they entertain with one another. The objective is to prevent a coalition of revisionist powers opposing hegemony. The United States respected this principle in the second twenty years of the Cold War, when bipolarism was undermined by the emergence of rivalry between the USSR and China, the updated version of a “clash of civilisations” between Tsarism and the Middle Kingdom. It was Richard Nixon who changed the paradigm, first in 1969, threatening with reprisals the Soviets, who were about to spark a nuclear holocaust against the Chinese, revealing the prevalence in Moscow (and in Beijing) of a geopolitical calculation based on ideological dogmas; national interests and imperial syntax first, Marxist-Leninist grammar far less. And again in 1972, by going to visit the leader of Communist China in his own country to seal a de facto alliance between the American democracy and Mao’s regime. Pincers to push the Soviets into a corner. An informal pact that, with its many downs and a few ups, was to resist until the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, without ever becoming a formal alliance. Ideology took its revenge on geopolitics.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Washington established that it no longer needed Beijing, until, at the turn of 21st century, the United States did not wish to see the People’s Republic as the only centre of power capable of subverting America’s leadership for a second century in a row. America sees China as a new USSR, less armed but more dangerous due to the volume and global ramifications of its economy, symbiotically binding it to America. Hence two alternatives; embrace China in order to co-pilot its economic and geopolitical development, asserting one’s own superiority – and China’s inferiority complex regarding America, or demolish China, creating an anti-Chinese alliance with the main Eurasian powers, from Germany to Russia and Japan, differently but clearly inferior to the leader and the challenger.
Two decades later Washington has yet to choose. The American charger stops at the jump, tries to go around it, backs off and sets off again at a gallop, but the obstacle remains, neither knocked down nor jumped moving towards the leader’s increasingly improbable embrace of the brilliant second, well-on the way to overtaking America. Obama assumed an intermediate position with a hint of containment, modestly called ‘pivot to Asia’. Words or little more. A handful of marines deployed to Australia; ambiguous support for claims made by Japan’s and for all China’s neighbours bordering on the East and South China Seas; the creation of a transpacific free trade area without Beijing (one already on the verge of sinking, just like the parallel transatlantic agreement, due to Congress’ objections and to not very convinced partners).
The two conflicting geopolitical elements of the Obama presidency, offensive and isolationist, one eliminating the other, are reflected in the rhetorical mirror in which hawks at the Pentagon want to see the prologue of an air and sea war against “Red China.”
As far as going on the offensive is concerned, the superpower’s withdrawal was to a certain extent inevitable following over-exposure resulting from the “war on terror”, the adventure with which George W. Bush accelerated the decline of the United States while intending to revolutionise the Middle East to reaffirm its planetary hegemony. Hence the withdrawal from Iraq, the almost completed retreat from Afghanistan and disengagement from the Greater Middle East – the south-western front of an extended Eurasia – alongside disinterest for regional crises, unless dragged into them by supposed friends or riding them without a clear strategic outcome as in the case of Ukraine. In this context, the pivot to Asia turned out to be a pivot to America. This means tidying up matters at home, re-launching the economy, and lighting up the beacon of freedom created by the Founding Fathers.
The second element consists of refusing to consider any other nation as being equipped with equal dignity. America remains superordinate to the rest of the planet. Not only is it the most powerful state, it stands alone. It is unique. Consequently it cannot form alliances, only associations with those ready to accept its leadership, venerate its teachings, follow in its path. The best definition of this self-portrayal, a brand name inscribed in the American genetic code, remains the motto used by Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence for the “war on terror”, who believes it is not coalitions that determine the mission, but the opposite. Missionaries by self-definition, the United States decides who to use on a case by case basis. Such absolutism presupposes full spectrum dominance; military, economic, geopolitical and cultural. Assuming for the sake of argument that this has ever happened in the history of humankind, it certainly does not apply to today’s America. And yet, no American leader seems capable of renouncing this ideological premise. During crisis periods, the hiatus between self-belief and real power relations is amplified to the point of backfiring. And it undermines credibility.
Nothing doing. History punishes those who wish to appear more than they are. By continuing to present itself as the “one indispensable nation... for the century past and… for centuries to come,” and as the “hub of alliances unrivalled in the history of nations” (as Obama told West Point cadets on May 28th) , America exposes its flank to the most devastating of enemies, ridicule. After the humiliations experienced in the Arab uprisings and the war in Syria, and the repercussions of spying scandals that have re-awakened latent anti-Americanism even within NATO, authoritative leaders of “allied” nations have dared make remarks unthinkable until recently. These range from the vulgar private considerations of Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski on the pointlessness of giving Americans “a blow job” since “the Polish-American alliance is worth nothing”, to the unease expressed by Germany’s austere Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who believes that using CIA agents to infiltrate government agencies in Berlin and intercept the Chancellor’s cell phone was “an idiocy, and such a degree of idiocy simply makes one want to cry.” It appears that the smart power with which Obama likes to mask his own strategic indecision it not fully understood by his dear European partners.
In an analysis by Dimitri Simes, formerly Nixon’s favourite Kremlinologist, these dissonances are also explained by the president’s inclination to consider international affairs an “unwelcome distraction” from his domestic agenda (which one?) and reveal he is thus “disengaged and uninterested in understanding the other side.” Add the foreign policy team’s low profile, defence cuts and a reluctance to use force (drones excluded) and one obtains a “pushy but casual and weak moralism.” The result is that “rivals like Russia and China are more offended than deterred,” while “allies and friends question Obama’s resolve.”
4. One overall look at Eurasia is sufficient to understand that Obama’s non-strategy is resulting in an overturning of the golden rule. Between Middle Eastern amnesties and mentions of Asian containment, intelligence’s not very intelligent intrusions into the homes of any partner/competitor not pertinent to the Anglosphere – definitely the most robust European “ally” – and the transformation of the Baltic-Polish offensive against Kiev with an existential challenge to Russia precisely where Moscow venerates the baptismal font of its empire, the United States has contributed to a de facto alignment between China and Russia, as well as strengthening relations between both countries and Germany. We shall soon see how deep or weak the bonds established between the three powers ranked behind the United States in the global hierarchy are. It is certainly not a coalition of America’s enemies. It is far worse; it is the unexpected result of Obama’s vacillations and the mistakes made by Bush Jr. The Beijing-Moscow-Berlin triangle is ‘Made in the USA’, just like Mao’s jeep (table).
Xi Jinping, following the example set by his predecessors (including Mao), wants a global understanding with America in order to rewrite together the guidelines of the geopolitical and economic rules, which can no longer be those established in the era of western triumph and China’s eclipse. Just like nearly all the Chinese, he disdains the Russians and this sentiment is cordially reciprocated, with the extra dose of hatred that in Moscow clouds the reflexes of one once under the illusion of being a master, who now perceives himself as a servant.
Putin made his debut at the Kremlin exploring America’s readiness to admit Russia to NATO, only to be rejected as the minor heir of the power defeated in the Cold War. He was therefore obliged to restrict his range of western cooperation to Germany and to individual European partners, among them Italy. Losing Kiev, for which he risks going down in history, induced Putin to suffocate the already lifeless Russian political debate within a media-propaganda bubble worthy of a “Great Patriotic War.” The mission to Beijing, with which Putin on May 21st under western pressure in Ukraine, decided to turn to his cumbersome Asian neighbour to launch, together with Xi Jinping, the unexpected gas agreement (signed at conditions not entirely favourable to Russia), placed under the spotlight for those who preferred not to see them, the importance of Russian-Chinese energy, military and technological links, unthinkable without America’s double “no” to both.
Merkel has no intention whatsoever of breaking off relations with the United States. And yet she leads a state that opposed a not-forgotten (especially in Washington) “nein” to America’s invasion of Iraq. Germany has, for almost have a century, establish strategic dialogues, industrial cooperation and energy interdependency with Russia and intends to continue to develop them even after the Ukrainian crisis. It distanced itself from French-British intervention protected by the American umbrella in Libya and has earned a reputation for being the “sixth BRICS” due to its habit of voting (see: abstaining) often with the other five - Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa – at the United Nations and other international institutions. Above all, the German chancellery does not remotely share the idea of placing a geopolitical-economic chastity belt around China. Finally, personal relations with Obama, never warm, are at an all-time low. Were it her choice alone, after discovering the network of American spies in Berlin, in addition to expelling the CIA’s station chief, Merkel would have recalled her ambassador in Washington “for consultations.” Supplications from her more cautious advisors, worried about American reprisals, finally persuaded her to desist.
In this web of attacks and counterattacks, feints and counter-feints, the leading players often show their hands. In the Beijing-Moscow-Berlin triangle, strategic projects, protected by a smokescreen of propaganda and diplomatic jargon, outline the following plot.
A) China uses Russia to seek America. But, faced with the sphinx Obama, it is starting to become impatient. Pressed by the United States and by Japan on the maritime front, China reacts by organising its continental penetration and to do so, in addition to central Asian and Siberian raw materials, relies on a convergence with Germany that is not only economic.
B) Russia, beaten but not broken in Ukraine, uses China to seek Germany and western Europe, thereby preparing for a debate/clash with America and its former satellite countries in central-eastern Europe along the Baltic-Black Sea line, where a new Iron Curtain is being consolidated. The U.S. Congress’ vote, offering Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova the status of non-NATO allies, confirms this. Unlike the two other angles of the triangle, Moscow is involved in a survival battle and is thus more ready to embark upon expensive tactical compromises, but also unpredictable moves.
C) Germany needs Russia and China to support its feeble growth and to self-proclaim itself a world power and not only (or no longer?) a European one. Hence Germany indulges in a more ecumenical vision than the Russian and Chinese, since it also does not have their military power, nor is it accustomed to geostrategic reasoning following the detoxifying treatment imposed by the winners of World War II. Germany, however, cannot stand America’s habit of treating it like the satellite country it was during the Cold War.
In all three cases, the geopolitical spark linking China, Russia and Germany is provided by the United States. Their closeness is the result of distance imposed on them by Washington. If not interrupted or redirected, the current situation will result in the United States’ progressive alienation from Eurasia. Or World War III. Of course Obama did not want these consequences of his (in)action. He was probably too distracted to envisage them. He will now have to deal with them, and we with him.
5. China is the prism through which it is best to observe current Eurasian dynamics. This continent-civilisation is changing its coat. It has not yet established a geopolitical course, but its “low profile” times are over. The process of being a cooperative or assertive leading player has begun. For the moment there is no codified mapping of strategic objectives and means for approaching China, although if one wades through the jungle of official and semi-official ideograms more than a trace emerges. In the Chinese Communist Party there is currently a bitter and at times dramatic debate, between very different orientations and interests, reunited by the leadership at the cost of a degree of ambiguity regarding the strategic objectives of a colossus now capable of orienting the future of the entire planet. All world players, starting with powers involved in the Eurasian match, are aware that if by chance the People’s Republic – one fifth of humankind and one third of global growth – were to fall into a black hole, the effect would be comparable to the impact of a gigantic meteorite on earth.
This is not an educated guess. Domestic stability is the premise on which its leadership acts in outlining geopolitical priorities. Primum vivere. The territorial, social and cultural dynamics unsettling a colossus with unstable and contested peripheries (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang) surround by other not exactly pro-China state-civilisations (Russia, Japan, India), with the worst possible regional “allies” (North Korea and Pakistan) and constantly under America’s non-benevolent eye, oblige the red mandarins to always sleep with one eye open.
Xi Jinping intends to turn these risks into opportunities. In less than two years he has reoriented the approach to internal security and to the rest of the world, on the basis of active and not only defensive lines. As soon as he was elected, he addressed the nation on subjects and in optimistic tones projected to the future. He quoted Mao, but also the famous poet from the golden era, Li Bai: “I will ride a great wind one day and break heavy waves,” his rhetoric about the “Chinese dream” (Zhōngguó mèng), so out of tune to ears educated to the American dream, indicating the “path of rebirth” (fùxing zhī lù), hence a return to the rank of a great power, “of a new kind” of course (xīnxíng ).
On the Eurasian front, the “path of rebirth” is a synonym for “new silk roads.” Xi intends to reconnect China to Europe and the Mediterranean through two integrated infrastructural networks (railroads, roads, ports and inter-ports, energy pipelines etc). The first goes over land from Xi’an to Venice, and from there to central-western Europe, reminding one of the ancient routes that linked the Han Empire to the Roman world. The second also converges on Venice, but via the Indian Ocean-Suez and the Mediterranean, thereby underlining the Chinese leaders’ peculiar attraction to Italy, regularly put down by our leaders. All this to form an “economic belt of silk roads” , with still vague but certainly tri-continental borders. Xi has personally identified the five most important nations/macro-regions. Russia, to whom in this context Chinese leadership assigns the role of an infrastructural connector between Asia and Europe, while also acknowledging that the Eurasian Union dreamt of by Putin and seriously damaged by the Ukrainian crisis, is no alternative to the Chinese “belt”; post-Soviet central Asia (Kirghizstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan); western Asia (Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey); the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia); and western Europe (Ukraine, Byelorussia, Moldova). While important ramifications are envisaged involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, among them links with the Pakistani (Chinese) port of Gwadar – but on a bilateral basis.
How should one interpret this grand plan? First of all this is not only an economic matter, but also a geopolitical one. The basic reason remains security and therefore national sovereignty. In the already advanced plans and in the first implementations of the “belt” one can identify the Xinjiang and specifically its capital Ürümqi as centres for this system. Since 1992 central Asia’s largest trade fair, renamed the China Eurasia Fair in 2011, is held every year in Ürümqi. Transforming the country’s most unstable suburb, the epicentre of Uyghur “terrorism” – the expression of the autochthon Muslim and Turkic ethnic group’s opposition to Han colonisation – into the hub of the new silk roads indicates a domestic objective, thus accelerating development in the north-west and thereby reducing the gap separating it from the wealthy south-east, soothing the most inviting fault line for those wishing to divide China.
And there is more. Turning to deep Asia, Beijing intends to assert itself as a continental power, denying the Western vision that would like China anchored to the Far East and its oceanic border. This is an internal rebalancing, after European colonial powers based their penetration of Chinese markets on the development of ports and their immediate hinterland, thereby accentuating the fracture that Xi is now trying to correct.
The external reflexes of internal rebalancing are at least three:
A) Wrong footing the United States, which believes that China is its greatest rival in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as a continental and therefore global power. This results in the particularly absurd idea of containing China by locking it in by sea from the south, raising the spectre of the Middle Kingdom’s oceanic expansion, almost without historical precedents, while NATO applies pressure on Russia from eastern Europe. All this as if the Chinese-Russia border, over four thousand kilometres long, did not provide Beijing with an alternative, not to mention the border with land satraps with no access to oceans and not very relevant to Washington, such as Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Tajikistan, as well as Afghanistan from which Obama has almost completed America’s withdrawal. Furthermore, this sweeps away the mirage of a “silk road” made in the USA, so dear to Hillary Clinton, centred on Afghanistan as its geographical fulcrum and on Turkmen gas as its main resource, and to be run between the Middle East and central-southern Asia – regions in which Obama’s withdrawal is moreover perceived as a retreat. The more pro-American elements among Beijing’s strategists, believe that new Chinese Eurasian policy should result in Washington understanding that cooperation with China would be much easier and fruitful on the continent, instead of in the Asian-Pacific where the network of U.S. alliances centred on Japan could cause an involuntary conflict between the world leader and its most important competitor.
B) Emphasising the convergence of geopolitical and energy interests with Russia, favoured by America’s dual containment of Moscow and Beijing, whose recent agreement on Siberian gas (38 billion cubic metres a year, from 2018 to 2048), unblocked never-ending, negotiations, is only the most visible element. Putin turned up in Shanghai, hat in hand and with his back to the wall. Negotiations on the officially secret price for supplying China with Siberian gas were a nauseating experience for the Russian delegation. There were some in the Chinese leadership pressing to impose an even lower price than the one finally agreed on (about $350 per thousand cubic metres), also to prove to the Americans that this gas deal of convenience was not directed at them. And perhaps they thought of belated revenge, remembering the humiliation suffered by Mao in December 1949 in Moscow, when Stalin dictated the clauses of a sensationally unfair agreement. In the end moderation prevailed. At the moment, the priority is to organise the pact with Russia, inevitable for the development of the silk road “belt” and guarantee clean energy to the thirsty red dragon.
C) Signalling to Germany, and other Europeans of goodwill, that the main end market for Chinese and Asian goods transported using the new Eurasian infrastructures, will be theirs. It is also a warning not to support “coloured revolutions” inspired by Baltic and Atlantic Europeans under Washington’s umbrella, which from Ukraine are aimed at Russia and central Asia all the way to China’s north-western borders. “You would be lost if you did that. If together with us you shape the silk roads, it will only be to your advantage”, is the not very cryptic message that Chinese diplomacy sends to all Europeans.
The most uninhibited theoretician of the “march to the west”, as he likes to describe the new silk roads, is the dean of Beijing University’s School of International Studies, Wang Jisi. In October 2012, Wang published an ambitious essay in English with a title that says it all, “’Marching Westwards’: The Rebalancing of China’s Geostrategy”. This is a singularly explicit text, which, within the internal debate, some experts consider provocative, because it supposedly envisages a plan of China’s conquest of central Asia . But Wang Jisi agrees with those who long for a Chinese-American G2 and considers the peaceful and cooperative integration of a Eurasia “led by Beijing” a necessary premise, since it would sanction equal status between China and the United States. This is why the People’s Republic must stop its exercise in modesty, often mistaken for dissimulation, and assume responsibilities linked to its global status. This is the idea of “creative cooperation” dear to another influential academic citizen of Beijing, Wang Yizhou. It is a risky enterprise, one that exposes China to the backfiring of the crisis in the Greater Middle East, from Iran to AfPak, as well as repercussions arising from the NATO-Russia clash in Ukraine. It is however an unavoidable enterprise if the “path of rebirth” is to be taken seriously.
6. Competition between the greater powers is approaching the crossroads between compromise and clash. They are all oriented towards the first option, also because the price to be paid for the second would be enormous, perhaps the ultimate one, but each with its own often diverging conditions. It is perhaps best to therefore concentrate on the most threatening fault lines and downgrade them before it is too late. These fault lines are situated at the opposite ends of Eurasia; at the extreme east and at the disputed Euro-Russian border. The first crisis epicentre involves the China seas, which other regional powers, more or less supported by the United States, would like to at least see partly less influenced by China. The second one runs along the Baltic Sea-Black Sea vertical – the Intermarium drawn during the Twenties by the Polish leader Józef Piłsudski to block Russian expansionism – where the Russian and Euro-Western tectonic plates collide with their epicentre in Ukraine, now a war theatre.
In the Asian-Pacific scenario the risk lies not so much in an improbable American attack on China or vice versa, but rather in local nationalisms opposing Beijing’s hegemony. There is a large choice, ranging from Japan to the Koreas to Vietnam. Each is mistrustful of the other at least as much as they dislike the Chinese. To prevent an incident sparking a regional conflict, cooperation between Washington and Beijing is inevitable, and also possibly in their reciprocal interest. This in order for the United States to assert itself as the internal co-balancing element in the Far East, with and not against China, and for the People’s Republic to reveal itself as a reliable power in the area that countermines its more developed provinces, to seal, at a regional level, its bonds to other emerging economies, with and not against America. Otherwise the maritime routes of silk will remain a map-writing exercise.
The European crisis is far more serious. Since the so-called end of the Cold War, Russia has seen its western borders draw closer and closer to Moscow (or allowed this). In the bi-polar word the united West successfully practised containment of the Soviet Union. In the current chaos, a number of stars in the Atlantic firmament believe that the time has come for a roll-back against the Russian Federation, in the original sense of saying, “roll back” the carpet – meaning Moscow’s empire.
The objective is to deny Putin a sphere of influence in his nearby abroad, even that sort of domestic abroad that Kiev is considered by most Russians. Even at the risk of war, one already sparked in the eastern regions of Ukraine where Russian separatists supplied, but not controlled, by Moscow, refuse to enslave themselves to the change of oligarchs sparked by the Majdan uprising, which led to a coup d’état that has brought to the presidency the currently pro-west king of chocolate, Petro Porošenko. The clash, not even all that indirect, is between the United States and Russia, with the Europeans as always disseminated or dissimulated along the orderly lines traced by Washington and Moscow. The anti-Russian formation is led by the United Kingdom, Sweden, Poland and Romania, with support from the former Soviet Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). Italy has joined the pro-Russian formation, or at least the formation not taking part in the roll-back, not only for energy reasons, but because aware that those who will have to pick up the pieces of a Russian-American match will be above all the Europeans.
Washington’s second target is Berlin. Or rather its excessively intrinsic relations with Moscow and Beijing. The shooting down of the Malaysian Airways flight at the Ukrainian-Russian border – for which Obama immediately attributed indirect responsibility to Russia, guilty of having supplied medium-range surface-to-air missiles to its anti-Kiev hit men – has extended and exacerbated the clash. Germany must choose, insist White House envoys in Berlin. It is time to stop these balancing acts and adapt to the offensive launched by the Baltic-Oriental partners neighbouring with the Russian Federation. So far Merkel has assumed an intermediate position, not holding back as far as verbal condemnations of Russia are concerned, adhering to the first round of sanctions but restraining some of the NATO hawks’ more adventurous ideas in the wilder moments following the downing of the Malaysian plane. The chancellery does not intend to destabilise the cooperation created in over forty years of Ostpolitik.
Obama is also aiming at the other side of the triangle, the German-Chinese one, referred to in Berlin’s chancellery as a “special relationship”, wording intentionally evocative of the British-American axis. Were the Russian-European border perpendicular, separating two incompatible blocks, China’s “march westwards” would be unthinkable. An overheated Intermarium, if not one in flames, would burn the silk roads.
The Ukrainian crisis has escaped the control of its creators. In Obama’s intentions, the objective in changing the guard in Kiev was “to keep Putin honest”. He wanted to remind Russia’s leader of his place following too many crises – Egypt, Syria, Snowden – in which he had taken excessive liberties. Taken by surprise when Janukovič fled, the Kremlin’s leader first tried to limit defeat by retaking Crimea, sparking the hyper-patriotic paroxysm that always animates Russians when they feel attacked, and fuelling separatist guerrillas in Eastern Ukraine in order to reach an acceptable compromise with Porošenko. Both Obama and Putin have lost control over their respective agents in Ukraine, attentive to their own interests before those of their supposed puppet masters. Washington and Moscow now risk a head-on clash.
To avoid this a compromise is needed; one that becomes increasingly necessary and more difficult each day. The basic terms are clear; neutralisation of Ukraine guaranteed by all powers and broad regional autonomies so as to placate a multi-ethnic area, with elements of reciprocal racism between Russians and Ukrainians and therefore not suited to becoming a national state. If everything should end in the least worst possible way, the ceasefire we will call peace will be agreed on between Obama and Putin. Repercussions will, however, inevitably involve the entire Eurasian area, Berlin and Beijing included. And hence the rest of the world.
There is finally a third level of competition on which the choice between compromise and conflict will be played out by the great powers. Perhaps it is the most important since the leading players keep it mostly under wraps and it involves rewriting the rules of world trade. It is there that the fate of the dollar, Washington’s real strategic weapon, will be determined. The economic crisis appears to have shattered the prospects of global free trade to which the ruinous negotiation rounds of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) were aimed. The United States has promoted two parallel initiatives – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – destined to reaffirm its geo-economic hegemony on the planet. The objective is to codify the terms for exchanging goods, capital and people at a global level, before the BRICS and other non-western “emerging” countries do so.
Unable and unwilling to enter a global agreement, Obama has opted for two economic areas (far more than just free trade) centred on America: one in the Asian-Pacific, which excludes China, and a Euro-Atlantic one without Russia. Both these operations are geopolitical albeit in a trade version. The TPP intends to pressure China in the context of containment strategies, while the TTIP wants to re-launch the transatlantic link, no longer implementable just through NATO. The tendency is leaning towards regional protectionism and bilateral agreements, emphasising the rift between established and aspiring economic powers. At this rate the gap between the West and the BRICS will assume the characteristics of a monetary war, not just a trade war.
In this match we Europeans have a special responsibility. The European Union is a trade block of a size comparable to the United States and to China. Trade negotiations are the only issue on which the EU presents a united front, or tries to. Getting caught up in a game involving selective protectionisms and bi- or tri-lateral agreements would be punitive for us. Co-participation, albeit indirect – in the disintegration of Russia and/or the containment of China, would be absurd. Breaking with the United States would be fatal. Cutting the fragile western bond would sanction our regression to warlike xenophobic instincts, exhibited without shame along the Intermarium fault line – and beyond. The only positive result of this crisis is the birth of a sovereign European subject, bound to the United States with equal status, the western avant-garde of Euro-Asian development. This is possible only following inclusive agendas, open to all available partners, starting with Russia and China. The “silk roads” are useful to anyone wanting or capable of using them.
What is certain is that we Europeans cannot make do with an inertia that invites a permanent conflict between the major powers. Nor can we delegate our interests to Germany, which is not willing to integrate them in its global projections. The Asian-Pacific is too far away to listen to voices from the Old Continent. On Ukraine and the TTIP, however, we have the duty and the right to express our opinions, but only after reorganising the scattered Euro-Atlantic tribe around a reasonable policy. Otherwise, it would be best to admit that Europe is naked and establish that no one has the right to use it as a fig leaf for their own particular objectives. Each will assume their own responsibilities. Should Italy not do so, it will no longer have the right to consider itself an active player on the international stage, hence to exist.
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου