US v China: zero sum or we win/you win?

When we pay attention to what John Mearsheimer says in that stellar debate with Jeffrey Sachs, featured in yesterday’s post, two things are clear. One is his insistence that the US-led proxy war – fighting Russia down to the last Ukrainian – was a huge and foolish provocation on the part of the West, Europe especially. ¹

For a fuller list of reasons for saying Russia was provoked, see The Guardian Media Group warmongers

Since the 2004 expansion which brought former Soviet Republics and yet more former Warsaw Pact states into NATO (and saw the first attempted US coup in Kiev) Professor Mearsheimer has been one of the most prominent mainstream voices to warn that Ukraine in NATO would cross the reddest of red lines for the Kremlin. ²

The second thing John insisted on, in his debate with Professor Sachs, is that war with China is nigh on inevitable for America.

This may surprise those of us who, in opposing “our” poking the bear in Ukraine and  baiting of Beijing in the China Seas, see their driver as one and the same: a dying empire wedded to a zero sum – I win, you lose – view of international relations reflected in the terrifying grandiosity of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), in claims of “indispensable nation” status, and in a concomitant demand for a full spectrum dominance which brooks no other nation or bloc – “allies” like Europe absolutely included – attaining peer or near peer status. ³

But John’s seeming in-and-out running on these two spheres of conflict is the logical product of his “Realism”. A liberal at heart – albeit without the blindness to material drivers and realpolitik afflicting so many of today’s liberals, and without the insistence on exporting ‘liberal values’ at gun point, pace  Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton ⁴ – his opposition to war with Russia on the one hand, enthusiasm for “containing” China on the other, are both premised on perceived interests: viz, that Russia is no threat to US interests but China is. Further, that Washington obsession with “containing” Russia has driven Moscow into the arms of Beijing. ⁵

Two things about this amoral  assessment. ⁶ One, it chimes with the immoral  view held by that Beltway faction at odds with a Russophobic Neocon wing exemplified by Victoria Nuland, wife of PNAC founder Robert Kagan and author of the 2014 coup which ousted Viktor Yanukovych to plunge Ukraine into a war now in its eleventh year. Unlike Nuland and the Neocons, this  wing of the US oligarchy, with loose cannon Donald Trump its flaky fixer, opposed the weaponising of Ukraine precisely because, while fully prepared to risk WW3 over China, it sees the Ukraine project as a senseless squandering of energy and resources.

Two, in the debate featured in yesterday’s post, Jeffrey Sachs does an effective job of showing Offensive Realism – be it moral, amoral or immoral – as impractical. As I said in that post:

[Jeffrey] cogently shows that, in our thermonuclear age, the zero sum philosophy of Washington – even if mirrored in Beijing (and I’m with Jeffrey on there being scant evidence of that) – makes John’s Realism deeply unrealistic.

Talk of a zero sum philosophy segues neatly into one of several elephants in the room of polite Western discourse. It’s an elephant our media – ‘quality’ no less than tabloid; financial no less than generalist – do sterling service to ruling elites in steering us away from.

What does China think?

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1. As Conor Gallagher, cited three posts ago in The Super Mario Plan for Europe, put it:

   The EU goal was clearly to cause a collapse of the Putin government, install a puppet friendly to the West, and exploit Russia. It failed.

   The context being that, while on the debit side Washington has had its proxy ass kicked in Ukraine, and seen its capacity to contain China diluted, on the credit side of its leger a major trade rival, Europe, has not only been weakened but downgraded from the status of junior political ally to that of semi-colony.

2. It’s true that the 2004 expansions, bringing in the Baltic States, placed NATO on Russia’s border. But those states are tiny, albeit with leaders – like Estonia’s recent prime minister and would-be NATO Secretary General, Kaja Kallas – shrill in their Russophobia. Ukraine by contrast is vast. Given Bush’s 2001 abrogation of the ABM Treaty, a Ukraine (and for that matter a Georgia) in NATO would allow the latter to place nuclear warheads within a few seconds’ strike time of Moscow.
3. That Russia has, on a fraction of US arms-spend, surpassed it in hypersonic missiles and ordnance output reflects more than full spectrum dominance as a self-defeating chimera (since no rising power could submit to it). It reflects too the superiority of a state-directed defence sector over one whose overriding priority is to maximise profit.
4. It’s a moot point whether and to what extent the West’s oligarchs conflate “our values” and “our interests” through confusion rather than cynicism – but for this discussion the distinction need not be made. Those who are  interested in making it might read Glenn Diesen’s masterly work, published this year, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order.
5. On this point John Mearsheimer fleetingly finds common cause with Michael Hudson – see US diplomacy as Greek Tragedy – who likens US efforts to prevent a Sino-Russian partnership to those of Sophocles’ eponymous hero, Oedipus, which in seeking to thwart Fate serve only to advance her designs.
6. John is cheerfully amoral. Defending US efforts to prevent China’s emergence as regional hegemon in the South Pacific, the way the US is regional hegemon in the West, he argues that having no rival in the global north frees up America to encircle the global south with military bases. This is true. The cheerful amorality part kicks in when, absent a shred of evidence that China seeks regional hegemon status (far less the global supremacy which Washington insists on as of right) John counters that, if he were advising Xi Jinping, he’d advocate precisely that. Which, once we unravel the sophist circularity, boils down to this: “Of course China seeks dominance. How do we know? Because we would in her shoes!”  A healthy grasp of realpolitik is one thing. It makes John a far more insightful guide than liberal pundits like the pugnaciously shallow Simon Tisdall. But it’s another thing entirely to project our basest instincts onto nations we, or those who rule from the shadows, see as a threat. However compelling the case for such an approach in the Great Power stand-offs of the 19th century – and to give those their due, they looked to Westphalia balance of power, not one nation’s destabilising addiction to unipolarity – in ours it’s an avenue to Armageddon.

   (Worth noting in such projections is the old saw: “when one finger points accusingly, all the others point back at the accuser”. We see this in charges, roundly debunked here by US academics using empirical data, of China’s Belt and Road as a trojan horse for debt traps of the kind to which a neoliberal IMF and World Bank have long condemned the global south.)