China, The West, and the Rest - On the Competition to Forge and Implement a Global Strategy

China has a global strategy and they are implementing it – control as many natural resources as possible and the transportation links between them and China. I do not think the Chinese envision a global, green, collaborative future for Humankind. For them the future is one of winner and loser nations. See Africa and China. China is planning and acting to win.

The U.S. and other Western nations still see themselves as continuing to retain their privileged position by cajoling or coercing the rest of the world to line up behind them. How? Through ‘international development’ or by force, if necessary.

The U.S. and rest of the West have no unified, strategic plan compared to the Chinese. That is, more precisely, they have no nation-based, international political, economic, ecological consensus on anything closely resembling a global plan. They only have alliances and facts; and those in power, particularly in the U.S., politically manipulate (propagandize) those facts, domestically and internationally.

When resources (metals and other minerals, water, food commodities) become scarce or less accessible compared to the present, which they must, push will come to shove. China is preparing and bolstering its readiness for when this happens and is anticipating and awaiting the Western response. They know Western history well.

The U.S. in particular makes no secret of its de facto foreign policy through its actions. This is what I call the Four Bs of U.S. Foreign Policy, an escalating scale of measures to have its way among the rest of the world’s nations: Bullshit, Bride, Bully, Bomb. To begin with, if obfuscation and lies fail, the U.S. then ratchets its efforts up to each more potent means as needed until opposition to its will is eliminated.

Chinese preparations for the coming conflict with the U.S. and the West include its many grants and loans to resource-rich yet politically and economically weak countries through its Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese readiness includes a large highly disciplined and motivated military. Behind all this is a deeply entrenched autocratic government that is in near total control of the Chinese private sector.

The Chinese Communist Party and its governance apparatus firmly command its military and the rest of society. It does so through highly-palatable-to-the-masses myths of a Chinese ethno-patriotic return-to-world-prominence; and by delivering on tantalizing prospects of ever-greater individual material abundance, and ever-increasing financial wealth for the political and economic elite. Domestic dissent and accountability from outside the CCP is rare, weak, and/or crushed early by the state.

Chinese preparations also include external propaganda. (The U.S. describes its own similar efforts as “soft or public diplomacy.”) Wikipedia describes Chinese efforts in this area as follows:

The Chinese state refers to all media work abroad as wai xuan, or "external propaganda." Through its external propaganda operations, frequently directed by the United Front Work Department, China seeks to shape international perception of the Chinese government and its policies to "allay concerns about China's economic rise, military build-up and increasing political and diplomatic influence." Specifically by:

Reducing fears that China is a threat to neighboring countries. China seeks to change its image within the region from that of a growing threat and aggressor to that of a benefactor and potential partner. Beijing is working to "diminish fears of China's future military power, or concerns that China's massive economic growth would divert trade and foreign investment from other nations."

Securing access to resources and energy. As China's economy continues to grow at a rapid pace, the need for resources and energy has become more pressing. To protect its access to these resources, China is working to gain the trust of foreign states that possess oil, gas, and other materials.

Building alliances and weaken Taiwan's relationship with the international community. In 1994, China announced that it would "use all economic and diplomatic resources to reward countries that are willing to isolate Taiwan." Through propaganda as well as economic incentives, China seeks to convince any nation that still recognizes Taiwan to switch their loyalty to Beijing and formally declare that Taiwan is part of China.

Promoting a multipolar world and constrain U.S. global power. China seeks to slowly diminish the United States' influence in Asia, and create its own sphere of influence in Southeast Asia.

In a 2008 report, the U.S. State Department's International Security Advisory Board declared that China was in the midst of a "comprehensive strategic deception campaign," which was said to include "Psychological Warfare (propaganda, deception, and coercion), Media Warfare (manipulation of public opinion domestically and internationally), and Legal Warfare (use of ‘legal regimes' to handicap the opponent in fields favorable to him)." On its official Chinese Web site, CCTV describes itself as "the mouthpiece of the Party and the government," and lists its main operations under the heading "propaganda situation," referring to new foreign-language channels as "reaching a new stage in external propaganda."

The U.S.-led Western response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been to keep at the strings-attached ‘international development’ strategy it initiated after World War II. What will the West’s ultimate response be when their aid-money-heavy international development efforts fail to compete with China’s more infrastructural, multiplex approach? (There are significant indications that this Western failure to compete is already well underway.) The U.S. will initiate conventional warfare conflicts disguised as righteous, moral responses to made-up or real Chinese provocations, and try and drag the rest of the West and other nations into another bloody and expensive quagmire.

Which nation, one might ask, would win a conventional war between the U.S. and China, either through a direct bilateral conventional war or warfare via proxy combatant nations? It will likely not be the U.S., a nation heavily laden with a moralizing, hectoring, cat-herding, crony-capitalist democracy, and an all-volunteer military.

The United Nations is the only possible option to protect and conserve world natural resources, mediate international competition for and arbitrate conflict over them, and implement and enforce sustainable globally sustainable climate change amelioration measures. However, as reasonable as this may seem, the UN will not be empowered voluntarily by its member nations to do so. Neither the world’s hegemonic autocracies nor its equally hegemonic democracies will cede a significant amount of their respective power to a governing collective of all the nations. Control of national futures is too valuable to the respective nations’ wealthy and powerful to delegate control of global law and its enforcement to the needs and desires of what they perceive as a mob of the envious, lower-minded poor in the world. They will never agree to the UN holding ultimate global executive power and the enforcement means that it requires.

Nevertheless, Humankind has no choice but to take immediate action on one global threatening matter, climate change. As one freethinker here south of Atlanta told our local group: “We must first take action individually, then collectively and simultaneously at the local, national, regional, and global levels.” I agree. But this problem is also tied to larger economic, political, and religious problems such as inequality, ideology, and human exceptionalism. What to do?

In the U.S., Democrat Party members want to take power from Trump and the Republicans and resurrect the U.S. and global Enlightenment Project of maximal liberté, egalité, fraternité, and at the same time rescue Humankind from imminent political, economic, and ecological collapse. The problem is they want to do so by returning to the Western myth of progress through reason, science and technology; yet disabuse Humankind regarding its delusion of exceptionalism and privilege over all other life forms. The problem? This popular approach has been supported for a long time by an Abrahamic religious and social-Darwinian myth of exceptionalism. This is a view most Democrat elites have abandoned in favor of pluralism and cosmopolitanism, yet it remains the divine and racist guiding worldview still vigorously held by a critical mass of people in the U.S. These are the voters the Democrats are trying to woo away from the Republicans.

And how well are the Democrats doing with that? Paul Krugman voiced an opinion on this in an October 14, 2019 essay in the New York Times. Much of what Krugman had to say was on point but he omitted a sizable portion of the U.S. population.

The problem Krugman points out is about more than U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s religious zealotry and the unclean evil horde of nonbelievers he and others claim are howling and plotting in the wild areas of the Land of Milk and Honey, and lurking in the back offices of ‘deep state’ Washington. That’s bad enough. This is also about another equally sizable portion of our fellow Americans.

Krugman left out a sizable number of folks in his reckoning of Trump supporters. Trump’s base also has many ‘educated to semi-educated’ upper middle class members from all ethnic/racial demographics. This includes many Whites and African, Asia, and Hispanic Americans who have bought the Republican myth of enormous wealth achievement through savage unbridled crony capitalism. A myth of prosperity for all served up with stories of a faux all-glorious past, individual freedom, heart-thumping patriotism, and a steaming supersize side dish of affordable consumer goods available on easy credit.

The most wealthy and powerful people in the U.S., particularly the wealthy and powerful on the Right, have the motive, will, and means to effectively impose themselves on everyone in the country.

Their motive is the protection of their wealth and power in the name of individual freedom and patriotism. Their will is a commitment and lack of hesitancy to act in almost any way necessary to further their motive, including immoral, quasi-legal government manipulation, dog-whistle hate speech, and other white supremacist actions. And their means is the manipulation and control of governance and its institutions at all levels of government, local to national. They are very good at what they do.

Countering these people by taking the Democrat high road of reason and facts to the polling stations is unlikely to succeed. The Right's low road is wide, smooth, and does not require a demonstration of reasoning or evidence at its toll booth. All you need to enter is a declared (regardless of however twisted) faith in a certain God; and a pledged allegiance until death to the GOP, and to the national flag and the NRA.

This road appeals to a significantly critical number of the white tribal lower class, and many financially aspiring members of the middle class of various identities. All in this critical mass of voters believe the Republicans are sincere in their well-packaged and consumer goods-laden promise to help all those below them move to higher levels of wealth and power.

The Right in the U.S. has, as the Garth Brooks song calls them, ‘friends in low places,’ enough it seems to do their bidding and keep them in power for a long time.

In keeping this self-righteous, exclusionist lot who are currently in power in the U.S. in mind, let’s return to a global consideration of the predicament of modernity and consider how the U.S. Right fits into it all.

Try and imagine a kind, caring, eco-stewarding, regulated capitalism managed by democratic socialism. A globalistic, pluralistic world where there is sustainable tolerance between competing nations, religions, political ideologies, and economic methods, all of which mediated by the United Nations.

Does this sound too good to be a possible future for Humankind, a dream? It probably is. But, you say, surely we can get there through reason, education, science and technology, engaging the opposition, compromise, democracy? Haven’t we tried that already and found that it got us into the very mess we are currently in?

I think what seems to be ever-increasingly inevitable conflict and collapse (economic and ecological) will force a dreamer’s world or something like it upon us.

If such a new world reset comes into being, it will likely be preceded by the multiple and horrific bangs and whimpers of catastrophe. None of which is the West, especially the U.S., seriously preparing for or trying seriously to avoid or ameliorate.

The Chinese see economic and ecological collapse and conflict coming, and are preparing and positioning themselves to have their nation survive and thrive, regardless if its a green future or not. The U.S. is ignoring collapse while escalating toward conflict with China.

The Vietnam War was a proxy conventional war in Asia pitting the U.S. against the Chinese and more remotely the Russians. The U.S. lost that time. Next time in Asia will the U.S. opt for the "overwhelming strike capabilities" of the Powell or Weinberger Doctrines, to include the use nuclear weapons when conventional weapons fail?

We can only hope, support activism, and vote that U.S. leadership does not choose that option.

Become an activist. Vote. Cue the band, all you dreamers: “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky

Imagine all the people
Living for today (ah ah ah)

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one