East Asia – Informed Comment https://www.juancole.com Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion Mon, 22 Jan 2024 03:54:37 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.11 Iranian Economy Buoyed By ‘Dark Fleet’ Oil Shipments To China https://www.juancole.com/2024/01/iranian-economy-shipments.html Mon, 22 Jan 2024 05:06:09 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=216706 By Michael Scollon | –

( RFE/RL ) – More than 6,000 kilometers from Tehran, in treacherous waters off the shores of Singapore, a “dark fleet” of oil tankers waits to offload the precious cargo that helps keep Iran’s economy afloat — a dependency that could also sink it.

The fleet has grown steadily over the past five years, delivering Iranian crude to China as the countries work in concert to circumvent international sanctions that target Tehran’s lucrative oil exports. But while the clandestine trade has buoyed Iran’s budget, it also comes at tremendous cost and risk to Tehran.

Iran gives China a hefty discount to take its banned oil, taking 12 to 15 percent off the price of each barrel to make it worthwhile for Beijing to take on the liability of skirting sanctions, according to research by the data analysis unit of RFE/RL’s Radio Farda.

Additional costs add up as well: ship-to-ship operations to offload the oil, middlemen, hidden-money transfers, and rebranding the oil to mask its Iranian origin and make it appear to come from a third country, said Dalga Khatinoglu, an expert on Iranian energy issues.

Altogether, said Khatinoglu, who contributes to Radio Farda’s data analysis unit, Iran’s budget figures and official statements indicate that 30 percent of the country’s potential oil revenue was wasted last year.

And with the draft budget for the next fiscal year currently being debated by the Iranian parliament, there are no guarantees that Tehran’s bet on quenching China’s thirst for oil will continue to be a panacea.

With Iran almost entirely dependent on Beijing to take its oil and on other entities to facilitate the trade, Tehran has managed to inject desperately needed revenue into its economy. But Iran has also put itself at risk of seeing its main revenue stream dry up.

“There’s definitely an extent to which Tehran has become more dependent on the likes of China or those who would be willing to deal with Iran in spite of Western sanctions,” said Spencer Vuksic, a director of the consultancy firm Castellum, which closely tracks international sanctions regimes.

Vuksic said Iran is “definitely put in a weak position by having to depend on a single external partner who’s willing to deal with and engage with Tehran.”

Oily Deficit

Iran has trumpeted its foreign trade, claiming in December that oil revenue had contributed to a positive trade balance for the first eight months of the year.

But the oil and gas sector, by far the largest part of the Iranian economy, will not be enough to save the current budget of around $45 billion that was approved last year.

The Iranian fiscal year, which follows the Persian calendar and will end in March, is expected to result in a major deficit. In presenting the draft budget to parliament in December, President Ebrahim Raisi acknowledged a $10 billion deficit.

But the shortfall could be much higher — up to $13.5 billion, the largest in Iran’s history — by the end of the fiscal year, according to Radio Farda. This is because data shows that just half of the expected oil revenues were realized, in part due to lower than expected oil prices and additional costs and discounts related to Tehran’s oil trade with China.

Whereas the budget expectations were based on oil being sold at $85 per barrel, the price of crude dipped below $75 per barrel in December and has fluctuated wildly recently amid concerns that tensions in the Middle East could disrupt shipping and production.


“Iran Dark Tanker,” Digital, Dream / Illustrator 3.0.

And while Iran expected to export 1.5 million barrels of oil per day (bpd) in 2023, it exported only 1.2 million bpd in the first eight months of last year, according to Radio Farda.

Altogether, Radio Farda estimates that Iran lost some $15 million per day in potential revenue through its trade with China, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the Iranian budget.

For the upcoming budget of about $49 billion, expectations for domestic and foreign oil revenue have dipped by 3 percent, according to Khatinoglu, even as the projected budget itself has risen by about 18 percent.

Accounting for the fluctuation of global oil prices, which fell far short of the average estimated for the current year, the peg has been lowered to $71 per barrel. Tehran is also expecting lower oil-export volumes — which only briefly met forecasts of 1.5 million bpd, the highest levels seen since 2018 — with only 1.35 million bpd forecast.

Iran is reportedly expected to plug the gap left by the lower oil revenue by increasing taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses, while Khatinoglu says Tehran will try to boost revenue by raising domestic energy prices.

Shipping Competition

Adding to the uncertainty of Iran’s finances is the potential for weaker Chinese demand for its oil and competition from Russia which, like Tehran, sends banned oil to Beijing.

And international sanctions are continuously evolving to punish countries and entities that foster Iran’s illegal oil trade, threatening to capsize the dark fleet that helps sustain Tehran’s so-called resistance economy.

On the other hand, the mercurial nature of oil price fluctuations and demand could work to Iran’s advantage. With Venezuelan oil no longer under sanctions, Russia is left as the only competitor for clandestine oil sales to China.

And Iran’s capacity to export oil is greater than ever, allowing it to more easily sell its oil to Beijing when demand is high.

This is largely due to the considerable expansion of the global “dark fleet” of oil since crippling U.S. sanctions targeting Iran’s oil exports were restored after the United States unilaterally withdrew in 2018 from the Iran nuclear deal that has been agreed with six world powers.

The deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), offered sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on Tehran’s controversial nuclear program. After the deal went into effect in January 2016, Iran more than doubled its legal oil exports in a few months, eventually reaching a high of 1.54 million bpd in 2018.

But with the U.S. withdrawal from the deal and subsequent reintroduction of sanctions that year, Iranian oil exports plummeted. And after the exceptions granted to a handful of countries — including China — that were allowed to continue to import Iranian oil expired in 2019, Iranian oil exports slowed to a trickle.

This was partly because Iran was not equipped to export its oil and had no immediate customers willing to defy the sanctions. But that changed with the fine-tuning of Iran’s efforts to defy sanctions, the fivefold rise in the number of dark-fleet tankers, and China’s willingness to take the risk of doing business with Tehran — although Beijing has not acknowledged unregistered imports of Iranian oil.

Today the dark fleet of often aging ships — nearly half of them VLCCs (very large crude carriers) — has risen to up to 1,000 vessels, according to Vortexa, which tracks international shipping. Many smaller ships are involved in Russian oil exports, which account for about 80 percent of all opaque tanker activity. But Iran had access to nearly 200 tankers, many of them supertankers, as of early 2023, according to Vortexa.

More than 20 ships, 13 of them VLCCs, joined the Iranian fleet in 2023, Vortexa reported in June, contributing to record-high Iranian oil exports under sanctions.

Vortexa attributed the rise to increased Chinese demand, the addition of the new tankers to shuttle Iranian oil after many had switched to shipping Russian oil, and the decline of Iranian inventories drawn down to boost exports amid heightened competition with Russia for the Chinese market.

While Chinese demand for Iranian oil slowed in October, Vortexa noted in a subsequent report, Washington’s removal of oil sanctions on Venezuela that month opened the possibility of higher demand for Iranian oil.

Uncertain Waters

In an October report, the global trade intelligence firm Kpler explained that tankers illegally shipping Iranian oil commonly “go dark” upon entering the Persian Gulf by turning off their transponders, technically known as the automatic identification system (AIS). After visiting Iran’s main oil terminal on Kharg Island or other ports, they then reemerge after a few days indicating they are carrying a full load.

From there, the ships offload the oil with ship-to-ship transfers that take place in unauthorized zones, mostly in the Singapore Straits. Eventually the oil, rebranded as coming from Malaysia or Middle Eastern countries, enters China, where it is processed by more than 40 independent “teapot” refiners that have little exposure to international sanctions or the global financial system.

Sanctions Revisited

The challenge for those trying to halt the illicit trade in Iranian oil as a way to hold Tehran accountable for its secretive nuclear activities and dire human rights record, is how to make the negatives of dealing with Iran greater than the financial benefits.

That has put the illicit seaborne trade of oil — both Iranian and Russian, owing to the ongoing war in Ukraine — under greater scrutiny by the international community.

“There’s continuous refining of the sanctions programs to include and expand sanctions against those involved in evasion, and that includes sanctioning so-called dark fleets,” said Castellum’s Vuksic, noting that the number of targeted sanctions against Iranian individuals and entities rose by more than 1,000 last year.

The big question is enforcement, an issue that is being debated in the United States and other countries and is leading to increased calls for countries like Panama to de-flag illegal tankers and for countries to clamp down on dark-fleet ships anchored off their shores.

“My expectation is that governments, including the United States, will take action against these dark fleets, especially the facilitators and the [ship] owners when they’re identified,” Vuksic told RFE/RL.

Other factors, including concerns about the impact of a broader Middle East conflict potentially involving Iran, could also hurt or help Iran’s financial standing.

As Kpler noted while reporting that Chinese imports of Iranian oil had dropped significantly in October, the changing global landscape can have a big effect on the independent Shandong-base refineries that purchase Iranian oil.

“Middle East tensions/threat of stricter enforcement of U.S. sanctions may have turned Shandong refiners more risk-adverse,” the global trade intelligence firm wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

In the past week, supply fears also exposed the volatility of global crude prices, potentially to Iran’s benefit.

Oil prices rose sharply on January 2 on news that Iran had sent a frigate to the Red Sea and was rejecting calls to end support for attacks by Tehran-backed Huthi rebels that have disrupted shipping in the important trade route.

Prices surged again following the deadly January 3 bombing attack in Iran, for which the Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility.

But the week ended with questions about the future of Iran’s cut-rate deal with the only country willing to help prop up its economy, with Reuters reporting that China’s oil trade with Iran had stalled after Tehran withheld supplies and demanded higher prices.

]]>
The US and China at Year’s End: Still Treading on the Precipice https://www.juancole.com/2023/12/china-treading-precipice.html Fri, 22 Dec 2023 05:02:19 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=216088 ( Tomdispatch.com) – This hasn’t exactly been a year of good news when it comes to our war-torn, beleaguered planet, but on November 15th, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping took one small step back from the precipice. Until they talked in a mansion near San Francisco, it seemed as if their countries were locked in a downward spiral of taunts and provocations that might, many experts feared, result in a full-blown crisis, even a war — even, god save us all, the world’s first nuclear war. Thanks to that encounter, though, such dangers appear to have receded. Still, the looming question facing both countries is whether that retreat from disaster — what the Chinese are now calling the “San Francisco vision” — will last through 2024.

Prior to the summit, there seemed few discernible obstacles to some kind of trainwreck, whether a complete breakdown in relations, a disastrous trade war, or even a military clash over Taiwan or contested islands in the South China Sea. Beginning with last February’s Chinese balloon incident and continuing with a series of bitter trade disputes and recurring naval and air incidents over the summer and fall, events seemed to be leading with a certain grim inevitability toward some sort of catastrophe. After one such incident last spring, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned that “the smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.”

In recent months, top leaders in both Beijing and Washington were becoming ever more concerned that a major U.S.-China crisis — and certainly a war — would prove catastrophic for all involved. Even a major trade war, they understood, would create economic chaos on both sides of the Pacific. A complete breakdown in relations would undermine any efforts to come to grips with the climate crisis, prevent new pandemics, or disrupt illegal drug networks. And a war? Well, every authoritative nongovernmental simulation of a U.S.-China conflict has ended in staggering losses for both sides, as well as a significant possibility of nuclear escalation (and there’s no reason to assume that simulations conducted by the American and Chinese militaries have turned out any differently).

As summer turned into fall, both sides were still searching for a mutually acceptable “offramp” from catastrophe. For months, top officials had been visiting each other’s capitals in a frantic effort to bring a growing sense of crisis under control. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Beijing in June (a trip rescheduled after he cancelled a February visit thanks to that balloon incident); Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen arrived in July; and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in August. Similarly, Foreign Minister Wang Yi traveled to Washington in October. Their meetings, according to New York Times reporters Vivian Wang and David Pierson, were arranged “in the hope of arresting the downward spiral” in relations and to pave the way for a Biden-Xi meeting that might truly ease tensions.

Mission Accomplished?

Not surprisingly, for both Biden and Xi, the primary objective of the San Francisco summit was to halt that downward spiral. As Xi reportedly asked Biden, “Should [the U.S. and China] engage in mutually beneficial cooperation or antagonism and confrontation? This is a fundamental question on which disastrous mistakes must be avoided.”

From all accounts, it appears that the two presidents did at least stop the slide toward confrontation. While acknowledging that competition would continue unabated, both sides agreed to “manage” their differences in a “responsible” manner and avoid conflict-inducing behavior. While the United States and China “are in competition,” Biden reportedly told Xi, “the world expects the United States and China to manage competition responsibly to prevent it from veering into conflict, confrontation, or a new Cold War.” Xi reportedly endorsed this precept, saying that China would strive to manage its differences with Washington in a peaceful fashion.

In this spirit, Biden and Xi took several modest steps to improve relations and prevent incidents that might result in unintended conflict, including a Chinese promise to cooperate with the U.S. in combating the trade in the narcotic drug fentanyl and the resumption of high-level military-to-military communications. In a notable first, the two also “affirmed the need to address the risks of advanced [artificial intelligence] systems and improve AI safety through U.S.-China government talks.” They also put their stamp of approval on a series of cooperative steps agreed to by their climate envoys John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua to mutually combat climate change.

Still, neither president agreed to any fundamental alterations in policy that might have truly shifted bilateral relations in a more cooperative direction. In fact, on the most crucial issues dividing the two countries — Taiwan, trade, and technology transfers — they made no progress. As Xue Gong, a China scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it, whatever the two presidents did accomplish, “the Biden-Xi meeting will not change the direction of U.S.-China relations away from strategic competition.”

With that still the defining constant in relations and both leaders under immense pressure from domestic constituencies — the military, ultra-nationalist political factions, and assorted industry groups — to hang tough on key bilateral issues, don’t be surprised if the slide towards crisis and confrontation regains momentum in 2024.

The Trials to Come

Assuming U.S. and Chinese leaders remain committed to a nonconfrontational stance, they will face powerful forces driving them ever closer to the abyss, including both seemingly intractable issues that divide their countries and deeply entrenched domestic interests intent on provoking a confrontation.

Although several highly contentious issues have the potential to ignite a crisis in 2024, the two with the greatest potential to provoke disaster are Taiwan and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

A self-governing island that increasingly seeks to pursue its own destiny, Taiwan is viewed by Chinese officials as a renegade province that should rightfully fall under Beijing’s control. When the U.S. established formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1979, it acknowledged the Chinese position “that there is one China and Taiwan is part of China.” That “one China” principle has remained Washington’s official policy ever since, but is now under increasing pressure as ever more Taiwanese seek to abandon their ties with the PRC and establish a purely sovereign state — a step that Chinese leaders have repeatedly warned could result in a military response. Many American officials believe that Beijing would indeed launch an invasion of the island should the Taiwanese declare their independence and that, in turn, could easily result in U.S. military intervention and a full-scale war.

For now, the Biden administration’s response to a possible Chinese invasion is governed by a principle of “strategic ambiguity” under which military intervention is implied but not guaranteed. According to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, any attempt by China to seize Taiwan by military means will be considered a matter “of grave concern to the United States,” but not one automatically requiring a military response. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of prominent Washington politicians have called for the replacement of “strategic ambiguity” with a doctrine of “strategic clarity,” which would include an unequivocal pledge to defend Taiwan in case of an invasion. President Biden has lent credence to this stance by repeatedly claiming that it is U.S. policy (it isn’t), obliging his aides to eternally walk back his words.

Of course, the question of how China and the U.S. would respond to a Taiwanese declaration of independence has yet to be put to the test. The island’s current leadership, drawn from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has so far accepted that, given the way Taiwan is slowly achieving de facto independence through diplomatic outreach and economic prowess, there’s no need to rush a formal declaration. But presidential elections in Taiwan this coming January and the possible emergence of another DPP-dominated administration could, some believe, trigger just such a move — or, in anticipation of it, a Chinese invasion.

Should the DPP candidate William Lai win on January 13th, the Biden administration might come under enormous pressure from Republicans — and many Democrats — to accelerate the already rapid pace of arms deliveries to the island. That would, of course, be viewed by Beijing as tacit American support for an accelerated drive toward independence and (presumably) increase its inclination to invade. In other words, Joe Biden could face a major military crisis remarkably early in 2024.

The South China Sea dispute could produce a similar crisis in short order. That fracas stems from the fact that Beijing has declared sovereignty over nearly the entire South China Sea — an extension of the western Pacific bounded by China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Borneo, and Vietnam — along with the islands found within it. Such claims have been challenged by that sea’s other bordering states, which argue that, under international law (notably the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea) they are entitled to sovereignty over the islands that fall within their individual “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs). In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled on a petition from the Philippines that China’s claims were invalid and that the Philippines and its neighbors were indeed entitled to control their respective EEZs. China promptly both protested the ruling and announced its intention to disregard it.

Chinese control over those islands and their surrounding waters would have significant economic and strategic implications. To begin with, it extends China’s defense perimeter several hundred miles from its coastline, complicating any future U.S. plans to attack the mainland while making a PRC assault on U.S. and allied bases in the region far easier. The South China Sea also harbors major fisheries, an important source of sustenance for China and its neighbors, as well as vast reserves of oil and natural gas coveted by all the states in the region. China has consistently sought to monopolize those resources.

To facilitate its control over the area, the PRC has established military installations on many of the islands, while using its coast guard and maritime militias to drive off the fishing boats and oil-drilling vessels of other states, even ramming some of those ships. On October 22nd, for example, a large Chinese coast guard vessel bumped into a smaller Philippine one seeking to reinforce a small outpost of Philippines Marines located on the Second Thomas Shoal, an islet claimed by both countries.

In reaction to such moves, officials in Washington have repeatedly asserted that the U.S. will assist allies affected by Chinese “bullying.” As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in July at a meeting with Australian officials in Brisbane, “We’ll continue to support our allies and partners as they defend themselves from bullying behavior.” Three months later, following that clash at the Second Thomas Shoal, Washington reaffirmed its obligation to defend the Philippines under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, should Filipino forces, ships, or aircraft come under armed attack, including “those of its coast guard — anywhere in the South China Sea.”

In other words, a future clash between Chinese vessels and those of one of Washington’s treaty partners or close allies could easily escalate into a major confrontation. Just what form that might take or where it might lead is, of course, impossible to say. But it’s worth noting that, in recent South China Sea exercises, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has conducted large-scale combat drills, involving multiple aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Any U.S. military response on such a scale would undoubtedly prompt a comparable Chinese reaction, setting in motion a potential spiral of escalation. Assuming that China continues its policy of harassing the fishing and exploration activities of its southern neighbors, a clash of this sort could occur at almost any time.

Resisting Bellicose Impulses

Given the dangers in Taiwan and the South China Sea, Presidents Biden and Xi will have to exercise extreme patience and prudence to prevent the ignition of a full-blown crisis in 2024. Hopefully, the understanding they developed in San Francisco, along with new crisis-management tools like enhanced military-to-military communications, will help them manage any problems that do arise. In doing so, however, they will have to overcome both the escalatory dynamics built into those disputes and bellicose domestic pressures from powerful political and industrial factions that view intense military competition with the other side (if not necessarily war) as attractive and necessary.

In both the U.S. and China, vast military-industrial operations have blossomed, fed by mammoth government disbursements intended to bolster their ability to defeat the other’s military in all-out, high-tech combat. In this hothouse environment, military bureaucracies and arms-makers on each side have come to assume that perpetuating an environment of mutual suspicion and hostility could prove advantageous, leaving key politicians ever more obliged to shower them with money and power. On December 13th and 14th, for example, the U.S. Senate and House, seemingly incapable of passing anything else, approved a record defense policy bill that authorized $886 billion in military spending in 2024 ($28 billion more than in 2023), with most of the increase earmarked for ships, planes, and missiles intended primarily for a possible future war with China. American military leaders — and politicians representing districts with a high concentration of defense contractors — are sure to request even greater spending increases in future years to overcome “the China threat.”

A similar dynamic fuels the funding efforts of top Chinese military-industrial officials, who no doubt are citing evidence of Washington’s drive to overpower China to demand a reciprocal buildup, including (all too ominously) of their country’s nuclear forces. In addition, in both countries, various political and media figures continue to benefit by harping on the “China threat” or the “America threat,” adding to the pressure on top officials to take strong action in response to any perceived provocation by the other side.

That being the case, Presidents Biden and Xi are likely to face a series of demanding challenges in 2024 from the seemingly intractable disputes between their two nations. Under the best of circumstances, perhaps they’ll be able to avoid a major blow-up, while making progress on less contentious issues like climate change and drug trafficking. To do so, however, they’ll have to resist powerful forces of entrenched bellicosity. If they can’t, the fierce wars in Ukraine and Gaza in 2023 could end up looking like relatively minor events as the two great powers face off against each other in a conflict that could all too literally take this planet to hell and back.

Fingers crossed.

 

 
Tomgram

Michael Klare, Another Major War in 2024?

Posted on

[Note to TomDispatch Readers: As TomDispatch finishes its 22nd year (unbelievable, right?), the support you, its readers, continue to offer moves me deeply. In response to my desperate winter funding appeal, I’ve received a wonderful flow of donations without which I simply couldn’t go on. I always see your names when the donation forms come in and it’s a thrill to spot old friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and wonderful strangers from around the world. The only sad note I’ll add here is this: given TD‘s funding problems these days, it just wasn’t enough. This site needs still more to make it through 2024. I truly hope that those of you who find what I (and all the amazing writers I’ve gathered) do here useful and haven’t yet given in this busy holiday season will visit our donation page before year’s end and offer a hand. Meanwhile, I thank you in advance from the bottom of my heart. And to all of you, here’s wishing us a better year than any of us might imagine in 2024. TD will be back on January 4th. Count on it! Tom]

Honestly, as 2021 ended, if I had predicted a Russian invasion of and unrelenting globalized war in Ukraine in 2022 and, in 2023, an explosion in the Middle East, beginning with a horrific Hamas incursion into Israel followed by the utter devastation of Gaza (while the Greater Middle East teetered at the edge of worse), you might have thought of me as the Mad Hatter of that winter season.

But of course, that’s just where we find ourselves as this year ends. The question remains: Could there be worse on a planet that may itself prove to be in the ultimate crisis, thanks to our inability to stop using fossil fuels? I mention all of this because today TomDispatch regular Michael Klare brings up yet another possibility that might seem beyond the bounds right now: the potential for an actual war (even a nuclear one) between the United States and China. Absurd, right? I mean, the two great powers left on Earth — one rising (assuming anything can truly rise on this planet anymore), the other falling — facing off on the battlefield? Wouldn’t that be a tale from hell in 2024?

And I must admit that the very thought holds a deep sadness for me, since I’ve long felt a curious warmth for China that I can trace deep into my own life. Admittedly, the closest I ever came to that country was Japan, which wasn’t exactly close. Still, to put it bluntly, China saved my life. I’m thinking here of the China that stretches back into the most ancient realms of history, a civilization and a literature that were remarkable and about which, growing up, I hadn’t learned a damn thing. (In my childhood, China was the place in downtown New York City where you went to get dinner… oh wait, that was Chinatown!) But in 1962, this Jewish kid from that city found himself, at the insistence of his parents and against his own wishes, a freshman at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, just after that then-WASPy redoubt had removed its Jewish quotas.

What saved me was stumbling into the introductory Chinese history course taught by a husband-and-wife team, Arthur and Mary Wright. (She was — a sign of those times — the only female tenured professor at Yale then.) She taught the more modern part of the course and I found myself riveted. She would later let me into a graduate seminar of hers, and her assistant, Jonathan Spence, would oversee my undergraduate thesis on Mao Zedong’s “long march.” I would then go on to Harvard graduate school in Chinese history (while returning to New Haven a summer later to help Spence write his still-superb book To Change China: Western Advisors in China).

A year or two after that, the antiwar moment of the Vietnam era swept me away and out of graduate school (but that’s another story!).

So, I must admit, as this year ends and my 23rd year at TomDispatch begins, in a world where, given the ongoing horrors in Ukraine and Gaza (not to speak of the overheating of the planet), carnage seems to be our everyday reality, it saddens me to think that my country and China might find themselves at each other’s throats. I truly hope otherwise but feel that Klare’s superb piece couldn’t be a more sadly appropriate way to end 2023 at this site. Tom

The U.S. and China at Year’s End

Still Treading on the Precipice

This hasn’t exactly been a year of good news when it comes to our war-torn, beleaguered planet, but on November 15th, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping took one small step back from the precipice. Until they talked in a mansion near San Francisco, it seemed as if their countries were locked in a downward spiral of taunts and provocations that might, many experts feared, result in a full-blown crisis, even a war — even, god save us all, the world’s first nuclear war. Thanks to that encounter, though, such dangers appear to have receded. Still, the looming question facing both countries is whether that retreat from disaster — what the Chinese are now calling the “San Francisco vision” — will last through 2024.

Prior to the summit, there seemed few discernible obstacles to some kind of trainwreck, whether a complete breakdown in relations, a disastrous trade war, or even a military clash over Taiwan or contested islands in the South China Sea. Beginning with last February’s Chinese balloon incident and continuing with a series of bitter trade disputes and recurring naval and air incidents over the summer and fall, events seemed to be leading with a certain grim inevitability toward some sort of catastrophe. After one such incident last spring, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned that “the smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.”

In recent months, top leaders in both Beijing and Washington were becoming ever more concerned that a major U.S.-China crisis — and certainly a war — would prove catastrophic for all involved. Even a major trade war, they understood, would create economic chaos on both sides of the Pacific. A complete breakdown in relations would undermine any efforts to come to grips with the climate crisis, prevent new pandemics, or disrupt illegal drug networks. And a war? Well, every authoritative nongovernmental simulation of a U.S.-China conflict has ended in staggering losses for both sides, as well as a significant possibility of nuclear escalation (and there’s no reason to assume that simulations conducted by the American and Chinese militaries have turned out any differently).

As summer turned into fall, both sides were still searching for a mutually acceptable “offramp” from catastrophe. For months, top officials had been visiting each other’s capitals in a frantic effort to bring a growing sense of crisis under control. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Beijing in June (a trip rescheduled after he cancelled a February visit thanks to that balloon incident); Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen arrived in July; and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in August. Similarly, Foreign Minister Wang Yi traveled to Washington in October. Their meetings, according to New York Times reporters Vivian Wang and David Pierson, were arranged “in the hope of arresting the downward spiral” in relations and to pave the way for a Biden-Xi meeting that might truly ease tensions.

Mission Accomplished?

Not surprisingly, for both Biden and Xi, the primary objective of the San Francisco summit was to halt that downward spiral. As Xi reportedly asked Biden, “Should [the U.S. and China] engage in mutually beneficial cooperation or antagonism and confrontation? This is a fundamental question on which disastrous mistakes must be avoided.”

From all accounts, it appears that the two presidents did at least stop the slide toward confrontation. While acknowledging that competition would continue unabated, both sides agreed to “manage” their differences in a “responsible” manner and avoid conflict-inducing behavior. While the United States and China “are in competition,” Biden reportedly told Xi, “the world expects the United States and China to manage competition responsibly to prevent it from veering into conflict, confrontation, or a new Cold War.” Xi reportedly endorsed this precept, saying that China would strive to manage its differences with Washington in a peaceful fashion.

In this spirit, Biden and Xi took several modest steps to improve relations and prevent incidents that might result in unintended conflict, including a Chinese promise to cooperate with the U.S. in combating the trade in the narcotic drug fentanyl and the resumption of high-level military-to-military communications. In a notable first, the two also “affirmed the need to address the risks of advanced [artificial intelligence] systems and improve AI safety through U.S.-China government talks.” They also put their stamp of approval on a series of cooperative steps agreed to by their climate envoys John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua to mutually combat climate change.

Still, neither president agreed to any fundamental alterations in policy that might have truly shifted bilateral relations in a more cooperative direction. In fact, on the most crucial issues dividing the two countries — Taiwan, trade, and technology transfers — they made no progress. As Xue Gong, a China scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it, whatever the two presidents did accomplish, “the Biden-Xi meeting will not change the direction of U.S.-China relations away from strategic competition.”

With that still the defining constant in relations and both leaders under immense pressure from domestic constituencies — the military, ultra-nationalist political factions, and assorted industry groups — to hang tough on key bilateral issues, don’t be surprised if the slide towards crisis and confrontation regains momentum in 2024.

The Trials to Come

Assuming U.S. and Chinese leaders remain committed to a nonconfrontational stance, they will face powerful forces driving them ever closer to the abyss, including both seemingly intractable issues that divide their countries and deeply entrenched domestic interests intent on provoking a confrontation.

Although several highly contentious issues have the potential to ignite a crisis in 2024, the two with the greatest potential to provoke disaster are Taiwan and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

A self-governing island that increasingly seeks to pursue its own destiny, Taiwan is viewed by Chinese officials as a renegade province that should rightfully fall under Beijing’s control. When the U.S. established formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1979, it acknowledged the Chinese position “that there is one China and Taiwan is part of China.” That “one China” principle has remained Washington’s official policy ever since, but is now under increasing pressure as ever more Taiwanese seek to abandon their ties with the PRC and establish a purely sovereign state — a step that Chinese leaders have repeatedly warned could result in a military response. Many American officials believe that Beijing would indeed launch an invasion of the island should the Taiwanese declare their independence and that, in turn, could easily result in U.S. military intervention and a full-scale war.

For now, the Biden administration’s response to a possible Chinese invasion is governed by a principle of “strategic ambiguity” under which military intervention is implied but not guaranteed. According to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, any attempt by China to seize Taiwan by military means will be considered a matter “of grave concern to the United States,” but not one automatically requiring a military response. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of prominent Washington politicians have called for the replacement of “strategic ambiguity” with a doctrine of “strategic clarity,” which would include an unequivocal pledge to defend Taiwan in case of an invasion. President Biden has lent credence to this stance by repeatedly claiming that it is U.S. policy (it isn’t), obliging his aides to eternally walk back his words.

Of course, the question of how China and the U.S. would respond to a Taiwanese declaration of independence has yet to be put to the test. The island’s current leadership, drawn from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has so far accepted that, given the way Taiwan is slowly achieving de facto independence through diplomatic outreach and economic prowess, there’s no need to rush a formal declaration. But presidential elections in Taiwan this coming January and the possible emergence of another DPP-dominated administration could, some believe, trigger just such a move — or, in anticipation of it, a Chinese invasion.

Should the DPP candidate William Lai win on January 13th, the Biden administration might come under enormous pressure from Republicans — and many Democrats — to accelerate the already rapid pace of arms deliveries to the island. That would, of course, be viewed by Beijing as tacit American support for an accelerated drive toward independence and (presumably) increase its inclination to invade. In other words, Joe Biden could face a major military crisis remarkably early in 2024.

The South China Sea dispute could produce a similar crisis in short order. That fracas stems from the fact that Beijing has declared sovereignty over nearly the entire South China Sea — an extension of the western Pacific bounded by China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Borneo, and Vietnam — along with the islands found within it. Such claims have been challenged by that sea’s other bordering states, which argue that, under international law (notably the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea) they are entitled to sovereignty over the islands that fall within their individual “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs). In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled on a petition from the Philippines that China’s claims were invalid and that the Philippines and its neighbors were indeed entitled to control their respective EEZs. China promptly both protested the ruling and announced its intention to disregard it.

Chinese control over those islands and their surrounding waters would have significant economic and strategic implications. To begin with, it extends China’s defense perimeter several hundred miles from its coastline, complicating any future U.S. plans to attack the mainland while making a PRC assault on U.S. and allied bases in the region far easier. The South China Sea also harbors major fisheries, an important source of sustenance for China and its neighbors, as well as vast reserves of oil and natural gas coveted by all the states in the region. China has consistently sought to monopolize those resources.

To facilitate its control over the area, the PRC has established military installations on many of the islands, while using its coast guard and maritime militias to drive off the fishing boats and oil-drilling vessels of other states, even ramming some of those ships. On October 22nd, for example, a large Chinese coast guard vessel bumped into a smaller Philippine one seeking to reinforce a small outpost of Philippines Marines located on the Second Thomas Shoal, an islet claimed by both countries.

In reaction to such moves, officials in Washington have repeatedly asserted that the U.S. will assist allies affected by Chinese “bullying.” As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in July at a meeting with Australian officials in Brisbane, “We’ll continue to support our allies and partners as they defend themselves from bullying behavior.” Three months later, following that clash at the Second Thomas Shoal, Washington reaffirmed its obligation to defend the Philippines under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, should Filipino forces, ships, or aircraft come under armed attack, including “those of its coast guard — anywhere in the South China Sea.”

In other words, a future clash between Chinese vessels and those of one of Washington’s treaty partners or close allies could easily escalate into a major confrontation. Just what form that might take or where it might lead is, of course, impossible to say. But it’s worth noting that, in recent South China Sea exercises, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has conducted large-scale combat drills, involving multiple aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Any U.S. military response on such a scale would undoubtedly prompt a comparable Chinese reaction, setting in motion a potential spiral of escalation. Assuming that China continues its policy of harassing the fishing and exploration activities of its southern neighbors, a clash of this sort could occur at almost any time.

Resisting Bellicose Impulses

Given the dangers in Taiwan and the South China Sea, Presidents Biden and Xi will have to exercise extreme patience and prudence to prevent the ignition of a full-blown crisis in 2024. Hopefully, the understanding they developed in San Francisco, along with new crisis-management tools like enhanced military-to-military communications, will help them manage any problems that do arise. In doing so, however, they will have to overcome both the escalatory dynamics built into those disputes and bellicose domestic pressures from powerful political and industrial factions that view intense military competition with the other side (if not necessarily war) as attractive and necessary.

In both the U.S. and China, vast military-industrial operations have blossomed, fed by mammoth government disbursements intended to bolster their ability to defeat the other’s military in all-out, high-tech combat. In this hothouse environment, military bureaucracies and arms-makers on each side have come to assume that perpetuating an environment of mutual suspicion and hostility could prove advantageous, leaving key politicians ever more obliged to shower them with money and power. On December 13th and 14th, for example, the U.S. Senate and House, seemingly incapable of passing anything else, approved a record defense policy bill that authorized $886 billion in military spending in 2024 ($28 billion more than in 2023), with most of the increase earmarked for ships, planes, and missiles intended primarily for a possible future war with China. American military leaders — and politicians representing districts with a high concentration of defense contractors — are sure to request even greater spending increases in future years to overcome “the China threat.”

A similar dynamic fuels the funding efforts of top Chinese military-industrial officials, who no doubt are citing evidence of Washington’s drive to overpower China to demand a reciprocal buildup, including (all too ominously) of their country’s nuclear forces. In addition, in both countries, various political and media figures continue to benefit by harping on the “China threat” or the “America threat,” adding to the pressure on top officials to take strong action in response to any perceived provocation by the other side.

That being the case, Presidents Biden and Xi are likely to face a series of demanding challenges in 2024 from the seemingly intractable disputes between their two nations. Under the best of circumstances, perhaps they’ll be able to avoid a major blow-up, while making progress on less contentious issues like climate change and drug trafficking. To do so, however, they’ll have to resist powerful forces of entrenched bellicosity. If they can’t, the fierce wars in Ukraine and Gaza in 2023 could end up looking like relatively minor events as the two great powers face off against each other in a conflict that could all too literally take this planet to hell and back.

Fingers crossed.

 

Via Tomdispatch.com

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The Gaza Conflict Opens up New Opportunities for China in the Middle East, Global South https://www.juancole.com/2023/11/conflict-opportunities-middle.html Thu, 16 Nov 2023 05:04:52 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=215416 Shaun Narine, St. Thomas University (Canada) | –

(The Conversation) – The western world’s support for Israel as it attacks Gaza has provoked fury across the Arab world and much of the Global South.

This situation undermines the West’s international standing and offers opportunities for China to enhance its regional and global diplomatic influence. Whether and how it will seize them remains to be seen.

Led by the United States, the West has presented itself as following a “rules-based liberal international order” that ostensibly protects human rights and international norms.

On this basis, the West has opposed Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine. However, it isn’t applying these rules to Israel and Palestinians.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. supports a humanitarian pause but not a ceasefire. The White House says Israel has now agreed to four-hour daily pauses in military operations in Gaza.

Children’s ‘graveyard’

Most western governments have thrown their support behind Israel as it launches a devastating attack on Gaza. In response to Hamas’s brutal attack and hostage-takings on Oct. 7, Israel has bombed schools, hospitals, ambulances, refugee camps, bakeries, mosques, churches, flattened neighbourhoods and killed thousands of people, possibly 40 per cent of them children.

UN Secretary General António Guterres has said “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” About 1,300 children are believed buried under rubble. Hospitals are collapsing. The perception in the Global South is that Palestinian lives are virtually worthless to the West.

“Enough Is Enough, Says Chinese Envoy To UN At UNSC’ | Israel Gaza | Dawn News English

Some western governments’ efforts to censor and criminalize public demonstrations supporting Palestinians adds another perceived dimension of hypocrisy to the West’s actions.

Even mild statements of support for Palestinians can be enough to endanger peoples’ careers, especially in the U.S.

A boon to China?

In this environment, the war in Gaza provides China with diplomatic and political opportunities.

From the Chinese perspective, one political benefit is that the U.S. has lost any credibility in its criticism of China’s treatment of the Uyghur people.

The U.S. argues that Israel has the right to protect itself from terrorism. China has claimed the same right in its oppression of the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.

China’s actions against the Uyghurs are certainly disturbing, but they aren’t as devastating as what Israel is doing to Palestinians. And unlike Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, Xinjiang is China’s sovereign territory.

China also has a strong interest in promoting peace in the Middle East given about half of its imported oil comes from the region. China helped Saudi Arabia and Iran normalize their relations.

Four Middle Eastern countries have joined BRICS, the international forum representing the world’s rising powers founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Saudi Arabia is also considering selling China oil in its own currency, the yuan.

Bypassing Palestinians

Ongoing American efforts under President Joe Biden to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel were partly motivated by fear of China’s diplomatic and economic progress in the Middle East.

Some have argued this American attempt to bypass the Palestinians may have played a role in Hamas’s attack on Israel. The U.S. has fomented conflict in the Middle East to keep the Islamic world divided and empower Israel, in contrast to China’s imperative for regional stability.

The U.S. has promoted the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor to enhance its presence in the Middle East, more fully integrate Israel into the regional economy and counteract China’s growing regional influence.

But Arab states don’t share the American desire to contain China. They prefer a multi-polar world where they can leverage several larger powers against each other and increase their own global geopolitical influence.

The longer Israel’s assault on Gaza continues, the higher the civilian death toll climbs and the more politically difficult it will be for the Arab world to co-operate with Israel or the U.S. That will push the Gulf states even closer to China.

In the current Gaza conflict, China has emphasized the need to avoid civilian casualties while rejecting Israel’s demand that it specifically condemn Hamas. China’s position reflects the consensus of the Global South, which considers the recent historical context of the conflict and Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Americans distracted

The Israel-Gaza war is also distracting the U.S. from the Indo-Pacific region, further working to China’s advantage.

The U.S. is mired in the Middle East. Biden’s administration supports the two-state solution to the conflict, but that solution may no longer be viable.

The U.S. appears unprepared to use its leverage over Israel to force it to accept a two-state solution. Any Israeli government that tried to move huge numbers of illegal settlers out of their settlements would face massive domestic criticism, even a potential civil war.

China’s diplomatic successes in the Middle East have involved reconciling states that were already inching towards restoring relations. Nonetheless, China could position itself as the superpower that champions the interests of the Arab world and the perspective of the Global South in future negotiations.

China will therefore likely be much more even-handed in its approach to the conflict than the U.S.

Is China willing to play a more active role in the Israel-Palestine dispute? It may be tempted to let the U.S. stew in a problem of its own making, but regional peace and stability benefits China’s economic development.

While some scholars are skeptical of China’s potential role in any ceasefire or peace negotiations, the Chinese have more credibility in the region than the Americans do.

The U.S. has mismanaged and damaged the Middle East for decades. It would benefit the region if a superpower more inclined towards diplomacy than violence played a balancing role.The Conversation

Shaun Narine, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, St. Thomas University (Canada)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Israel-Hamas Conflict puts China’s Strategy of ‘Balanced Diplomacy’ in the Middle East at Risk https://www.juancole.com/2023/11/conflict-strategy-diplomacy.html Sun, 05 Nov 2023 04:08:09 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=215192 By Andrew Latham, Macalester College | –

On Oct. 30, 2023, reports began to circulate that Israel was missing from from the mapping services provided by Chinese tech companies Baidu and Alibaba, effectively signaling – or so some believed – that Beijing was siding with Hamas over Israel in the ongoing war.

Within hours, Chinese officials began to push back on that narrative, pointing out that the names do appear on the country’s official maps and that the maps offered by China’s tech companies had not changed at all since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. Indeed, the Chinese Foreign Ministry took the opportunity to go further, emphasizing that China was not taking sides in the conflict. Rather, Beijing said it respected both Israel’s right to self defense and the rights of the Palestinian people under international humanitarian law.

This assertion of balance and even-handedness should have come as a surprise to no one. It has been the bedrock of China’s strategic approach to the Middle East for more than a decade, during which time Beijing has sought to portray itself as a friend to all in the region and the enemy of none.

But the map episode underscores a problem Beijing faces over the current crisis. The polarization that has set in over this conflict – in both the Middle East itself and around the world – is making Beijing’s strategic approach to the Middle East increasingly difficult to sustain.

As a scholar who teaches classes on China’s foreign policy, I believe that the Israel-Hamas war is posing the sternest test yet of President Xi Jinping’s Middle East strategy – that to date has been centered around the concept of “balanced diplomacy.” Growing pro-Palestinian sentiment in China – and the country’s historic sympathies in the region – suggest that if Xi is forced off the impartiality road, he will side with the Palestinians over the Israelis.

But it is a choice Beijing would rather not make – and for wise economic and foreign policy reasons. Making such a choice would, I believe, effectively mark the end of China’s decade-long effort to positioning itself as an influential “helpful fixer” in the region – an outside power that seeks to broker peace deals and create a truly inclusive regional economic and security order.

Beijing’s objectives and strategies

Whereas in decades past the conventional wisdom in diplomatic circles was that China was not that invested in the Middle East, this has not been true since about 2012. From that time onward, China has invested considerable diplomatic energy building its influence in the region.

Beijing’s overall strategic vision for the Middle East is one in which U.S. influence is significantly reduced while China’s is significantly enhanced.

On the one hand, this is merely a regional manifestation of a global vision – as set out in a series of Chinese foreign policy initiatives such as the Community of Common Destiny, Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative and Global Civilization Initiative – all of which are designed, in part at least, to appeal to countries in the Global South that feel increasingly alienated from the U.S.-led rules-based international order.

Israel-Hamas war ‘top priority’ as China assumes UN Security Council presidency | ANC

It is a vision grounded in fears that a continuation of United States dominance in the Middle East would threaten China’s access to the region’s oil and gas exports.

That isn’t to say that Beijing is seeking to displace the United States as the dominant power in the region. That is infeasible given the power of the dollar and the U.S.‘s longstanding relations with some of the region’s biggest economies.

Rather, China’s stated plan is to promote multi-alignment among countries in the region – that is to encourage individual nations to engage with China in areas such as infrastructure and trade. Doing so not only creates relationships between China and players in the region, it also weakens any incentives to join exclusive U.S.-led blocs.

Beijing seeks to promote multi-alignment through what is described in Chinese government documents as “balanced diplomacy” and “positive balancing.”

Balanced diplomacy entails not taking sides in various conflicts – including the Israeli-Palestinian one – and not making any enemies. Positive balancing centers on pursuing closer cooperation with one regional power, say Iran in the belief that this will incentivize others – for example, Arab Gulf countries – to follow suit.

China’s Middle East success

Prior to to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Beijing’s strategy was beginning to pay considerable dividends.

In 2016, China entered a comprehensive strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia and in 2020 signed a 25-year cooperation agreement with Iran. Over that same timespan, Beijing has expanded economic ties with a host of other Gulf countries including Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman.

Beyond the Gulf, China has also deepened its economic ties with Egypt, to the point where it is now the largest investor in the Suez Canal Area Development Project. It has also invested in reconstruction projects in Iraq and Syria.

Earlier this year, China brokered a deal to re-establish diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran – a major breakthrough and one that set China up as a major mediator in the region.

In fact, following that success, Beijing began to position itself as a potential broker of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The impact of the Israel-Hamas War

The Israel-Hamas war, however, has complicated China’s approach to the Middle East.

Beijing’s initial response to the conflict was to continue with its balanced diplomacy. In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, China’s leaders did not condemn Hamas, instead they urged both sides to “exercise restraint” and to embrace a “two-state solution.”

This is consistent with Beijing’s long-standing policy of “non-interference” in other countries’ internal affairs and its fundamental strategic approach to the region.

But the neutral stance jarred with the approach adopted by the United States and some European nations – which pushed China for a firmer line.

Under pressure from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, among others, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reiterated China’s view that every country has the right to self-defense. But he qualified this by stating that Israel “should abide by international humanitarian law and protect the safety of civilians.”

And that qualification reflects a shift in the tone from Beijing, which has moved progressively toward making statements that are sympathetic to the Palestinians and critical of Israel. On Oct. 25, China used it veto power at the United Nations to block a U.S. resolution calling for a humanitarian pause on the grounds that it failed to call on Israel to lift is siege on Gaza.

China’s U.N. ambassador, Zhang Jun, explained the decision was based on the “strong appeals of the entire world, in particular the Arab countries.”

Championing the Global South

Such a shift is unsurprising given Beijing’s economic concerns and its geopolitical ambitions.

China is much more heavily dependent on trade with the numerous states across the Middle East and North Africa it has established economic ties than it is with Israel.

Should geopolitical pressures push China to the point where it must decide between Israel and the Arab world, Beijing has powerful economic incentives to side with the latter.

But China has another powerful incentive to side with the Palestinians. Beijing harbors a desire to be seen as a champion of the Global South. And siding with Israel risks alienating that increasingly important constituency.

In countries across Africa, Latin America and beyond, the Palestinians’ struggle against Israel is seen as akin to fighting colonization or resisting “apartheid.” Siding with Israel would, under that lens, put China on the side of the colonial oppressor. And that, in turn, risks undermining the diplomatic and economic work China has undertaken through its infrastructure development program, the Belt and Road Initiative, and effort to encourage more Global South countries to join what is now the BRICS economic bloc.

And while China may not have altered its maps of the Middle East, its diplomats may well be looking at them and wondering if there is still room for balanced diplomacy.The Conversation

Andrew Latham, Professor of Political Science, Macalester College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Swarms vs. Swarms: How Intelligent, Artificial or Otherwise, is any of This? https://www.juancole.com/2023/10/intelligent-artificial-otherwise.html Tue, 17 Oct 2023 04:08:53 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=214900 ( Tomdispatch.com) – A war with China may not be inevitable, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks observed recently, but it’s a genuine possibility and so this country must be prepared to fight and win. But victory in such a conflict will not, she suggested, come easily. China enjoys an advantage in certain measures of military power, including the number of ships, guns, and missiles it can deploy. While America’s equivalents may be more advanced and capable, they also cost far more to produce and so can only be procured in smaller numbers. To overcome such a dilemma in any future conflict, Hicks suggested, our costly crewed weapons systems must be accompanied by hordes of uncrewed autonomous ships, planes, and tanks.

To ensure that America will possess sufficient numbers of “all-domain attritable [that is, expendable] autonomous” weapons when a war with China breaks out, Hicks announced a major new Pentagon program dubbed the Replicator Initiative. “Replicator is meant to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people,” she told the National Defense Industrial Association as August ended.

Because we can’t match our adversaries “ship-for-ship and shot-for-shot,” given the prohibitive costs of traditional weapons systems (which must include space for their human crews), we’ll overpower them instead with swarms of autonomous weapons — unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs and UASs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned surface vessels (USVs), and unmanned subsea vessels (UUVs, or drone submarines), all governed by artificial intelligence (AI) and capable of independent action.

“We’ll counter the [Chinese military’s] mass with mass of our own,” she declared, “but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat.”

Needless to say, Hicks’ announcement of the Replicator Initiative has raised many questions in the military-industrial-congressional complex and elsewhere about this country’s ability to produce such a vast array of technologically-advanced weaponry in a short period of time. The U.S. military does, of course, already possess an array of remotely piloted drones like the infamous Predator and Reaper aircraft used in this country’s Global War on Terror to hunt and kill enemy militants (and often nearby villagers as well). Those are not, however, capable of operating autonomously in swarms, as envisioned by Hicks. Even if Congress were to vote the needed hundreds of billions of dollars to develop such weapons — and, at the moment, there’s no certainty of that — and even if the Pentagon could overcome its own bureaucratic inertia in passing such funds on to defense contractors, will those companies be capable of developing the necessary advanced software and hardware anytime soon? Who knows?

After all, the Department of Defense has already awarded many millions of dollars to assorted AI start-ups and traditional contractors over the past half-dozen years to develop advanced UAVs, UGVs, USVs, and UUVs, and yet not a single one is in full-scale production. The Navy, for example, first began funding the development and construction of a prototype Extra-Large Unmanned Undersea Vessel (XLUUV) in 2019. But as of today, no finished submarine has yet been delivered, and none are expected to be combat-ready for years. Other major autonomous weapons projects like the Air Force’s “loyal wingman” drone, intended to accompany fighter planes on high-risk missions over enemy territory, seem to be on a similar track.

Still, questions about this country’s ability to deliver such systems on the tight timetable Hicks announced should be the least of our concerns. Far more worrisome is the likelihood that such a drive will ignite a major new global arms race with China and Russia, ensuring that future battlefields will be populated with untold thousands (tens of thousands?) of drone weapons, overwhelming human commanders and increasing the risk of nuclear war.

The Illusion of U.S. Drone Dominance

In making the case for the Replicator Initiative, Hicks touted America’s advantage in technological creativity and know-how. “We out-match adversaries by out-thinking, out-strategizing, and out-maneuvering them,” she insisted. “We augment manufacturing and mobilization with our real comparative advantage, which is the innovation and spirit of our people.”

From her perspective, China, Russia, and this country’s other adversaries are more reliant on traditional forms of military mass (“more ships, more missiles, more people”) because they lack the natural birthright of all Americans, that “innovative spirit.” As she asserted, “We don’t use our people as cannon fodder like some competitors do,” we win by “out-thinking” them.

Putting aside the ethno-nationalism, even racism, in those remarks (bringing up centuries-old Western claims that Asians and Slavs are intellectually inferior and so more submissive to czars and emperors), such an outlook is still dangerously flawed and inaccurate. China and Russia have no lack of smart, creative scientists and engineers and, far from trailing the United States in the development of autonomous weaponry, have actually taken the lead in certain areas.

You need look no further than the Pentagon’s own publications to learn about China’s advances in autonomous weapons systems. In the 2022 edition of its annual report on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China [PRC],” it affirmed that China is continuing with its “comprehensive UAS [unmanned aerial system, another term for UAVs] modernization efforts, highlighted by the routine appearance of ever more sophisticated UASs across theater and echelon levels.”

That report also indicated that China is making rapid advances in the development of AI software for use by autonomous weapons systems in complex combat operations of exactly the sort envisioned by Deputy Secretary Hicks:

“In addition to maturing their current capabilities, China is also signaling its efforts in next generation capabilities… In these concepts, PRC developers are demonstrating an interest in additional growth beyond [intelligence and electronic warfare missions] into both air-to-air and air-to-ground combat, with a substantial amount of development displaying efforts to produce swarming capability for operational applications.”

The Department of Defense seldom reveals its sources for such assertions, making it difficult for outside analysts to assess their validity. As a result, it’s hard to know how far ahead (or behind) the Chinese actually are when it comes to the critical AI software needed to manage such complex drone operations. However, many Western analysts do believe that China leads in certain areas of AI and autonomy. Its military has, in fact, regularly flown advanced UAVs in large-scale combat maneuvers around the island of Taiwan, demonstrating a capacity to employ such systems in complex operations.

Russia is thought to lag behind China and the U.S. in developing and fielding advanced autonomous weapons but has nevertheless demonstrated a significant capacity to use UAVs in its war on Ukraine. It has deployed large swarms of semi-autonomous Iranian-made Shahed-136 suicide drones in attacks on its cities and electrical systems, causing widespread death and destruction. In August, the New York Times reported that Russia was producing and flying a homemade version of the Shahed-136, dubbed the Geran-2 (as in Geranium-2). The Russians have also used the Orlan-10 reconnaissance drone to identify Ukrainian military positions for future attacks by artillery and rockets.

Recognizing the important role played by UAVs of all types in its present war, Russia’s leaders have initiated a crash program to vastly multiply its production of such devices. On June 28th, the government approved a “Development Strategy for Unmanned Aviation Until 2030.” It called for exponential growth in UAV output, which, according to reports, is expected to increase from approximately 13,000 per year between 2023 and 2026 to 26,000 annually from 2027 to 2030 and 35,500 after that.

Of course, many Western analysts believe that Russia is incapable of fulfilling such a plan thanks to Western sanctions and an insufficient number of skilled personnel. Those sanctions have, for instance, dried up supplies of computer chips and other vital components for advanced UAVs. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war’s insatiable manpower requirements and the flight of so many tech-savvy Russians from the country to avoid military service could make scaling up UAV design and production more difficult. Nonetheless, placing a high priority on such weapons, the Russians will undoubtedly seek workaround strategies to increase their production.

On the Future Great-Power Battlefield

Given all of this, it should be evident that going to war with China or Russia in the not-so-distant future on the assumption that the U.S. will enjoy a significant advantage in autonomous weaponry would be delusional — and very dangerous. Yes, both of those potential adversaries currently trail the U.S. in certain categories of autonomous weapons like uncrewed surface and sub-surface combat systems, but they will still be capable of filling the skies with multitudes of drones and seeding any battlefield with hordes of autonomous combat vehicles, including uncrewed tanks and artillery systems.

It would, in fact, be reasonable to assume that any future great-power conflict — a U.S.-China war over Taiwan, for example — will be characterized by the concentration of approximately equal formations of traditional military mass (composed largely of crewed weapons systems) and uncrewed autonomous versions of the same, incorporating multitudes of AI-governed drones.

How would such a conflict play out? It seems unlikely that either side would achieve a swift, one-sided victory. Instead, both would be far more likely to experience massive losses of weapons systems and warriors, with vast swarms of drones only intensifying the destruction by attacking anything left unscathed by traditional weaponry. Many, if not most of those drones would undoubtedly also be destroyed in the process — they are, after all, designed to be “attritable” — but enough would survive to decimate remaining enemy formations.

The toll of such a conflict would surely be colossal. Last year, to get some sense of what might be expected from a war over Taiwan, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) conducted repeated “tabletop” exercise versions of such a war (using assorted tokens to represent the brigades, fleets, and squadrons of the opposing sides). Each time, they assumed that China had launched an amphibious invasion of Taiwan and that the U.S. and Japan would come to that island’s aid. Each time, the outcome was similar: China was thwarted in its attempt, but the island itself was utterly devastated and the U.S. and Japanese militaries suffered losses of a sort not experienced since World War II.

Under the rules of the exercise, the commanders on both sides (actually, former American military and diplomatic personnel) were prohibited from using nuclear weapons when faced with major setbacks. But was that realistic? Not so, say the authors of a report on a similar exercise conducted by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), also in 2022. Its version, like the CSIS one, involved an attempted Chinese invasion of Taiwan followed by an all-out American drive to eject the invaders, resulting in a Chinese defeat accompanied by massive losses on both sides. Not constrained, however, by rules banning the use of nuclear weapons, the “red team,” simulating China and growing increasingly desperate, issued nuclear threats of the sort employed by Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the war in Ukraine. They finally detonated a nuclear explosion off the coast of Hawaii to demonstrate China’s willingness to inflict far greater harm (at which point the game ended).

By then, however, the exercise had demonstrated “how quickly a conflict could escalate, with both China and the United States crossing red lines.” The CNAS report further suggested that, in an actual war, “China may be willing to brandish nuclear weapons or conduct a limited demonstration of its nuclear capability in an effort to prevent or end U.S. involvement in a conflict with Taiwan.” (Nothing was said about the possibility that the Americans could do anything similar.)

Neither of those exercises specifically dealt with the role of autonomous weapons in their imaginary battle scenarios, but they both suggest that any party in such a confrontation would employ every weapon at its disposal in a desperate bid to achieve victory (or avert defeat). The result would likely be ever-spiraling losses and increasingly dangerous escalatory measures. As growing numbers of autonomous weapons become available, they, too, will be thrown into the fight, further magnifying those very escalatory pressures. With swarms of such devices battling other swarms — at sea, in the air, and on the ground — the risk of catastrophic defeat will loom ever larger and the temptation to employ nuclear weapons that much harder to resist. Whatever fantasies of American dominance Deputy Secretary Hicks might be harboring in promoting the Replicator Initiative, a safer, more stable world is not among the likely outcomes.

Via Tomdispatch.com

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AI Goes to War: Will the Pentagon’s Techno-Fantasies Pave the Way for War with China? https://www.juancole.com/2023/10/pentagons-techno-fantasies.html Wed, 04 Oct 2023 04:04:12 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=214662 ( Tomdispatch.com) – On August 28th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks chose the occasion of a three-day conference organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), the arms industry’s biggest trade group, to announce the “Replicator Initiative.” Among other things, it would involve producing “swarms of drones” that could hit thousands of targets in China on short notice. Call it the full-scale launching of techno-war.

Her speech to the assembled arms makers was yet another sign that the military-industrial complex (MIC) President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about more than 60 years ago is still alive, all too well, and taking a new turn. Call it the MIC for the digital age.

Hicks described the goal of the Replicator Initiative this way:

“To stay ahead [of China], we’re going to create a new state of the art… leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains which are less expensive, put fewer people at risk, and can be changed, upgraded, or improved with substantially shorter lead times… We’ll counter the PLA’s [People’s Liberation Army’s] with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.”

Think of it as artificial intelligence (AI) goes to war — and oh, that word “attritable,” a term that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue or mean much of anything to the average taxpayer, is pure Pentagonese for the ready and rapid replaceability of systems lost in combat. Let’s explore later whether the Pentagon and the arms industry are even capable of producing the kinds of cheap, effective, easily replicable techno-war systems Hicks touted in her speech. First, though, let me focus on the goal of such an effort: confronting China.

Target: China

However one gauges China’s appetite for military conflict — as opposed to relying more heavily on its increasingly powerful political and economic tools of influence — the Pentagon is clearly proposing a military-industrial fix for the challenge posed by Beijing. As Hicks’s speech to those arms makers suggests, that new strategy is going to be grounded in a crucial premise: that any future technological arms race will rely heavily on the dream of building ever cheaper, ever more capable weapons systems based on the rapid development of near-instant communications, artificial intelligence, and the ability to deploy such systems on short notice.

The vision Hicks put forward to the NDIA is, you might already have noticed, untethered from the slightest urge to respond diplomatically or politically to the challenge of Beijing as a rising great power. It matters little that those would undoubtedly be the most effective ways to head off a future conflict with China.

Such a non-military approach would be grounded in a clearly articulated return to this country’s longstanding “One China” policy. Under it, the U.S. would forgo any hint of the formal political recognition of the island of Taiwan as a separate state, while Beijing would commit itself to limiting to peaceful means its efforts to absorb that island.

There are numerous other issues where collaboration between the two nations could move the U.S. and China from a policy of confrontation to one of cooperation, as noted in a new paper by my colleague Jake Werner of the Quincy Institute: “1) development in the Global South; 2) addressing climate change; 3) renegotiating global trade and economic rules; and 4) reforming international institutions to create a more open and inclusive world order.” Achieving such goals on this planet now might seem like a tall order, but the alternative — bellicose rhetoric and aggressive forms of competition that increase the risk of war — should be considered both dangerous and unacceptable.

On the other side of the equation, proponents of increasing Pentagon spending to address the purported dangers of the rise of China are masters of threat inflation. They find it easy and satisfying to exaggerate both Beijing’s military capabilities and its global intentions in order to justify keeping the military-industrial complex amply funded into the distant future.

As Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight noted in a December 2022 report, while China has made significant strides militarily in the past few decades, its strategy is “inherently defensive” and poses no direct threat to the United States. At present, in fact, Beijing lags behind Washington strikingly when it comes to both military spending and key capabilities, including having a far smaller (though still undoubtedly devastating) nuclear arsenal, a less capable Navy, and fewer major combat aircraft. None of this would, however, be faintly obvious if you only listened to the doomsayers on Capitol Hill and in the halls of the Pentagon.

But as Grazier points out, this should surprise no one since “threat inflation has been the go-to tool for defense spending hawks for decades.” That was, for instance, notably the case at the end of the Cold War of the last century, after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, when then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell so classically said: “Think hard about it. I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to [Cuba’s Fidel] Castro and Kim Il-sung [the late North Korean dictator].”

Needless to say, that posed a grave threat to the Pentagon’s financial fortunes and Congress did indeed insist then on significant reductions in the size of the armed forces, offering less funds to spend on new weaponry in the first few post-Cold War years. But the Pentagon was quick to highlight a new set of supposed threats to American power to justify putting military spending back on the upswing. With no great power in sight, it began focusing instead on the supposed dangers of regional powers like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It also greatly overstated their military strength in its drive to be funded to win not one but two major regional conflicts at the same time. This process of switching to new alleged threats to justify a larger military establishment was captured strikingly in Michael Klare’s 1995 book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws.

After the 9/11 attacks, that “rogue states” rationale was, for a time, superseded by the disastrous “Global War on Terror,” a distinctly misguided response to those terrorist acts. It would spawn trillions of dollars of spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a global counter-terror presence that included U.S. operations in 85 — yes, 85! — countries, as strikingly documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

All of that blood and treasure, including hundreds of thousands of direct civilian deaths (and many more indirect ones), as well as thousands of American deaths and painful numbers of devastating physical and psychological injuries to U.S. military personnel, resulted in the installation of unstable or repressive regimes whose conduct — in the case of Iraq — helped set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) terror organization. As it turned out, those interventions proved to be anything but either the “cakewalk” or the flowering of democracy predicted by the advocates of America’s post-9/11 wars. Give them full credit, though! They proved to be a remarkably efficient money machine for the denizens of the military-industrial complex.

Constructing “the China Threat”

As for China, its status as the threat du jour gained momentum during the Trump years. In fact, for the first time since the twentieth century, the Pentagon’s 2018 defense strategy document targeted “great power competition” as the wave of the future.

One particularly influential document from that period was the report of the congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission. That body critiqued the Pentagon’s strategy of the moment, boldly claiming (without significant backup information) that the Defense Department was not planning to spend enough to address the military challenge posed by great power rivals, with a primary focus on China.

The commission proposed increasing the Pentagon’s budget by 3% to 5% above inflation for years to come — a move that would have pushed it to an unprecedented $1 trillion or more within a few years. Its report would then be extensively cited by Pentagon spending boosters in Congress, most notably former Senate Armed Services Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-OK), who used to literally wave it at witnesses in hearings and ask them to pledge allegiance to its dubious findings.

That 3% to 5% real growth figure caught on with prominent hawks in Congress and, until the recent chaos in the House of Representatives, spending did indeed fit just that pattern. What has not been much discussed is research by the Project on Government Oversight showing that the commission that penned the report and fueled those spending increases was heavily weighted toward individuals with ties to the arms industry. Its co-chair, for instance, served on the board of the giant weapons maker Northrop Grumman, and most of the other members had been or were advisers or consultants to the industry, or worked in think tanks heavily funded by just such corporations. So, we were never talking about a faintly objective assessment of U.S. “defense” needs.

Beware of Pentagon “Techno-Enthusiasm”

Just so no one would miss the point in her NDIA speech, Kathleen Hicks reiterated that the proposed transformation of weapons development with future techno-war in mind was squarely aimed at Beijing. “We must,” she said, “ensure the PRC leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, ‘today is not the day’ — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond… Innovation is how we do that.”

The notion that advanced military technology could be the magic solution to complex security challenges runs directly against the actual record of the Pentagon and the arms industry over the past five decades. In those years, supposedly “revolutionary” new systems like the F-35 combat aircraft, the Army’s Future Combat System (FCS), and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship have been notoriously plagued by cost overruns, schedule delays, performance problems, and maintenance challenges that have, at best, severely limited their combat capabilities. In fact, the Navy is already planning to retire a number of those Littoral Combat Ships early, while the whole FCS program was canceled outright.

In short, the Pentagon is now betting on a complete transformation of how it and the industry do business in the age of AI — a long shot, to put it mildly.

But you can count on one thing: the new approach is likely to be a gold mine for weapons contractors, even if the resulting weaponry doesn’t faintly perform as advertised. This quest will not be without political challenges, most notably finding the many billions of dollars needed to pursue the goals of the Replicator Initiative, while staving off lobbying by producers of existing big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, bombers, and fighter jets.

Members of Congress will defend such current-generation systems fiercely to keep weapons spending flowing to major corporate contractors and so into key congressional districts. One solution to the potential conflict between funding the new systems touted by Hicks and the costly existing programs that now feed the titans of the arms industry: jack up the Pentagon’s already massive budget and head for that trillion-dollar peak, which would be the highest level of such spending since World War II.

The Pentagon has long built its strategy around supposed technological marvels like the “electronic battlefield” in the Vietnam era; the “revolution in military affairs,” first touted in the early 1990s; and the precision-guided munitions praised since at least the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It matters little that such wonder weapons have never performed as advertised. For example, a detailed Government Accountability Office report on the bombing campaign in the Gulf War found that “the claim by DOD [Department of Defense] and contractors of a one-target, one-bomb capability for laser-guided munitions was not demonstrated in the air campaign where, on average, 11 tons of guided and 44 tons of unguided munitions were delivered on each successfully destroyed target.”

When such advanced weapons systems can be made to work, at enormous cost in time and money, they almost invariably prove of limited value, even against relatively poorly armed adversaries (as in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century). China, a great power rival with a modern industrial base and a growing arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, is another matter. The quest for decisive military superiority over Beijing and the ability to win a war against a nuclear-armed power should be (but isn’t) considered a fool’s errand, more likely to spur a war than deter it, with potentially disastrous consequences for all concerned.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, a drive for the full-scale production of AI-based weaponry will only increase the likelihood that future wars could be fought all too disastrously without human intervention. As Michael Klare pointed out in a report for the Arms Control Association, relying on such systems will also magnify the chances of technical failures, as well as misguided AI-driven targeting decisions that could spur unintended slaughter and decision-making without human intervention. The potentially disastrous malfunctioning of such autonomous systems might, in turn, only increase the possibility of nuclear conflict.

It would still be possible to rein in the Pentagon’s techno-enthusiasm by slowing the development of the kinds of systems highlighted in Hicks’s speech, while creating international rules of the road regarding their future development and deployment. But the time to start pushing back against yet another misguided “techno-revolution” is now, before automated warfare increases the risk of a global catastrophe. Emphasizing new weaponry over creative diplomacy and smart political decisions is a recipe for disaster in the decades to come. There has to be a better way.

Tomdispatch.com

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New Cold War, Ever-Hotter Planet: What could Possibly Go Wrong? https://www.juancole.com/2023/10/hotter-planet-possibly.html Mon, 02 Oct 2023 04:02:03 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=214628 ( Tomdispatch.com) – Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a “hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything.

But today? In case you haven’t noticed, the phrase “new Cold War” or “second Cold War” has indeed crept into our media vocabulary. (Check it out at Wikipedia.) Admittedly, unlike John F. Kennedy, Joe Biden has not actually spoken about bearing “the burden of a long, twilight struggle.” Still, the actions of his foreign policy crew — in spirit, like the president, distinctly old Cold Warriors — have helped make the very idea that we’re in a new version of just such a conflict part of everyday media chatter.

And yet, let’s stop and think about just what planet we’re actually on. In the wake of August 6 and August 9, 1945, when two atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was little doubt about how “hot” a war between future nuclear-armed powers might get. And today, of course, we know that, if such a word can even be used in this context, a relatively modest nuclear conflict between, say, India and Pakistan might actually obliterate billions of us, in part by creating a — yes, brrr — “nuclear winter,” that would give the very phrase “cold” war a distinctly new meaning.

These days, despite an all too “hot” war in Ukraine in which the U.S. has, at least indirectly, faced off against the crew that replaced those Soviet cold warriors of yore, the new Cold War references are largely aimed at this country’s increasingly tense, ever more militarized relationship with China. Its focus is both the island of Taiwan and much of the rest of Asia. Worse yet, both countries seem driven to intensify that struggle.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Joe Biden made a symbolic and much-publicized stop in Vietnam (yes, Vietnam!) while returning from the September G20 summit meeting in India. There, he insisted that he didn’t “want to contain China” or halt its rise. He also demanded that it play by “the rules of the game” (and you know just whose rules and game that was). In the process, he functionally publicized his administration’s ongoing attempt to create an anti-China coalition extending from Japan and South Korea (only recently absorbed into a far deeper military relationship with this country), all the way to, yes, India itself.

And (yes, as well!) the Biden administration has upped military aid to Japan, Taiwan (including $85 million previously meant for Egypt), Australia (including a promise to supply it with its own nuclear attack submarines), and beyond. In the process, it’s also been reinforcing the American military position in the Pacific from Okinawa, Guam, and the Philippines to — yes again — Australia. Meanwhile, one four-star American general has even quite publicly predicted that a war between the U.S. and China is likely to break out by 2025, while urging his commanders to prepare for “the China fight”! Similarly, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has called China the “leading and most consequential threat to U.S. national security” and the Biden foreign policy team has been hard at work encircling — the Cold War phrase would have been “containing” — China, both diplomatically and militarily.

On the Chinese side, that country’s military has been similarly ramping up its air and naval activities around and ever closer to the island of Taiwan in an ominous fashion, even as it increases its military presence in places like the South China Sea (as has the U.S.). Oh, and just in case you hadn’t noticed, with a helping hand from Russia, Beijing is also putting more money and effort into expanding its already sizable nuclear arsenal.

Yes, this latest version of a Cold War is (to my mind at least) already a little too hot to handle. And yet, despite that reality, it couldn’t be more inappropriate to use the term “new Cold War” right now on a globe where a previously unimagined version of a hot war is staring us all, including most distinctly the United States and China, in the face.

As a start, keep in mind that the two great powers facing off so ominously against each other have long faced off no less ominously against the planet itself. After all, the United States remains the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, while China is the greatest of the present moment (with the U.S. still in second place and Americans individually responsible for significantly more emissions than their Chinese counterparts). The results have been telling in both countries.

In 2023, the United States has already experienced a record 23 billion-dollar weather disasters from Hawaii to Florida with the year still months from ending. Meanwhile, China has been clobbered by staggering heat waves and stunning flooding, the heaviest rains in 1,000 years, displacing 1.2 million people in areas around its capital, Beijing. Given the past summer, this planet and all its inhabitants are no longer in anything that could pass for a cold war state.

The Freedom to Fuel?

As it happens, industrializing countries first began to, in essence, make war on our world in the late eighteenth century, but had no idea they were doing so until deep into the twentieth century. These days, however, it should be anything but a secret that humanity is all too knowingly at war — and there’s nothing “cold” about it — with and on our very own world. Sadly enough, however, in the United States, the leading politicians of one of the two major political parties seem remarkably intent not just on refusing to recognize that reality, but on supporting the release of carbon into the atmosphere in ever more major ways. Its presidential candidates, especially Donald Trump (whose last presidential campaign was heavily financed by the fossil fuel industry) and the failing, flailing Ron DeSantis, are, in fact, remarkably eager to deny the reality of our present world. Worse yet, they seem hell-bent on encouraging the further development and use of coal, natural gas, and oil on a staggering scale, while shredding what regulations exist to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, from the heart of Texas oil country, as the New York Times recently reported, DeSantis announced a plan he called “the freedom to fuel.” He promised “to remove subsidies for electric vehicles, take the U.S. out of global climate agreements — including the Paris accords — and cancel net-zero emission promises. He also vowed to increase American oil and natural gas production and ‘replace the phrase climate change with energy dominance’ in policy guidance.”

And in such blindness, Trump and DeSantis are anything but alone. In 2022, those major G20 nations that met in India recently poured a record $1.4 trillion (yes, that is not a misprint!) into subsidizing fossil fuels in various ways, more than double the figure for 2019. Meanwhile, the profits of the major fossil fuel companies have risen precipitously, thanks in part undoubtedly to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And China, despite leading the way in developing green alternative energy sources, also continues to use more coal than the rest of the planet combined, while building yet more coal power plants.

The results of such a — yes, warlike — approach to the planet have been painfully obvious this year. After all, the northern hemisphere just broiled through its hottest summer in recorded history and the southern hemisphere the hottest winter. Each summer month — June, July, and August — also broke its own previous global record for heat and 2023 is almost guaranteed to be the hottest year ever recorded.

In addition, in the last five months, the world’s ocean waters also broke temperature records, heating up if not literally to the boiling point, then at least to stunning levels. Off southern Florida, water temperatures recently passed 101 degrees Fahrenheit! That increasingly warm water helped produce ever more powerful storms with ever more rainfall. Meanwhile, sea ice levels in Antarctica fell to new lows. This summer, countries like Greece got devastating versions of both fire and flood, while an ever more parched Libya recently experienced a storm that climate change had made 50 times more likely with such staggering rainfall that two dams collapsed and the ensuing waters swept away a quarter of the coastal city of Derna.

These days, though, it hardly matters where you look. Even Australia just experienced its hottest winter ever and already potentially “catastrophic” spring fire conditions are developing there. Evidence also suggests that, whatever the extremes of the present moment, the future holds far worse in store.

In that context, think about the fact that the planet’s two greatest carbon emitters, China and the United States, now fully knowledgeable about what they’re doing, can’t seem to imagine working together in any fashion to deal with a catastrophe that may prove, in the decades to come, the slow-motion equivalent of a nuclear war.

The New Hot War

So, a new Cold War? Don’t count on it. I mean honestly, how can anyone anywhere talk about a new cold war with a straight face on a planet where nature’s increasingly hot war is the order of the day — and where far too little is being done. Meanwhile, as of this moment, the distinctly hot war in Ukraine is only worsening, as the Russian and Ukrainian militaries emit ever more carbon, which, it turns out, is what militaries do. After all, the U.S. military is the largest institutional greenhouse emitter on the planet, larger than some countries.

It tells you something painful about our world that the president waging a new Cold War with China looks like a beacon of sanity compared to the utter climate madness of the Republicans. At least, he’s taken some necessary steps to rein in fossil fuels, unlike his presidential predecessor. And yet, in a world that’s growing hotter by the month, sanity would — or at least should — suggest that the planet’s two largest carbon emitters demilitarize their relations and form an alliance to take on the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. Otherwise, the rise and fall of great powers could itself become a thing of the past. And yet few are the American politicians who would support that.

On a planet burning up ahead of schedule — and where, no matter how you look at it, humanity is reaching beyond some of the boundaries set for life itself — isn’t it time to refocus in a major way on the new Hot War (and not the one in Ukraine) that has this planet in its grip? Isn’t it time for the American and Chinese leaderships to cut the war-like posturing and together face a world in desperate danger, for the sake, if nothing else, of all our children and grandchildren who don’t deserve the planet we’re heating up for them in such a devastatingly rapid fashion?

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Expansion of BRICS, the anti-G7, in the Mideast: Is the Oil Gulf no Longer Pax Americana? https://www.juancole.com/2023/09/expansion-mideast-americana.html Sat, 16 Sep 2023 04:15:34 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=214375 Exeter (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – BRICS, a group of five developing countries that include China, Russia, and India, has invited another six countries to join the bloc, making the group 11 if all accept the invitation. Among 40 interested states in membership, of which 22 had already officially asked for admission, BRICS leaders agreed upon five Middle Eastern and African (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Ethiopia) and South American (Argentina) countries. Among these invited states, three are from either side of the Gulf, a significant signal to show the rise of Gulf states in global politics.

Analysts rushed to comment that the enlargement is anti-democratic and China-centric; however, a close look at the enlargement shows that the enlargement is not only about China but more of a consensus of the five powers, including, more importantly, India and Russia in addition to China. Of course, China is the most potent power in the bloc and might increase its influence over time. However, the current expansion shows that none of these countries are states that India and Russia reject, as they include Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two powers that have warm relations with India and an increasingly close relationship with Russia. Moreover, Brazil was already willing to accept Argentina as a member of BRICS in case it would help the neighbouring country in its quest for foreign reserves.

Indeed, these analysts ignore the warm relations between India and the two Gulf states, underestimate the tension between China and India, and tend to show the current members of BRICS under great Chinese influence, which is not necessarily true as India and China have significant issues, including but not limited to border crises. Otherwise, China President Xi Jinping’s meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the BRICS Summit in South Africa would not present a significant diplomatic incident.. The tension worsened in 2020 and cost the lives of 20 Indian soldiers.

Is BRICS+ the new G7?

In its current form, BRICS represents around 40.72 percent of the world population; if the new members accept the offer, the representation will rise to 45.95 percent, a significant rate as China and India’s share is around 35.48 percent. Similarly, the current GDP share of the BRICS is around 25.77 percent, while the expansion would bring it to around 28.99 percent, another significant increase as 17.86 percent of the current club’s GDP comes from China alone. On the other hand, the G7 represents around 27 percent of the world’s GDP and around 10 percent of the world’s population.

BRICS has long been considered an alternative initiative to the Western system as it includes Russia and China as leading powers, despite its loose institutionalization. One of the BRICS targets is to de-dollarise trade and bypass US sanctions on global trade. Indeed, BRICS created a development bank to encourage trade in local currencies and support developmental projects, an alternative to the Western-centric IMF and World Bank.

While BRICS, in its current form, does not challenge UN-based institutions, it can be considered an alternative to the G20 or G7, if not a rival. The G20, too, is not a very effective platform but a place where world leaders discuss significant issues and attempt to form a global agenda. Indeed, G20 meetings have recently been defined as “empty talks” by analysts.

China and the Gulf

Article continues after bonus IC video
Reuters: “BRICS: What is it, who wants in and why?”

While none of the new members states that China would reject their membership, showing their membership as pure Chinese influence is inherently wrong as they include two members of the GCC with India who already share close ties. The close ties between India and the GCC can be seen from the G20, too, as India invited the UAE and Oman as this year’s G20 guests, in addition to Saudi Arabia, a permanent member of the G20.

 

While India is particularly close to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates because of the number of expatriates in the Gulf, China is interested in these states for more strategic reasons. China made headlines in May when it brokered a normalisation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. However, inviting Iran and its regional rivals Saudi Arabia and the UAE together to the bloc is interesting as the bloc does not want to include only the “isolated” countries from the Western system, preventing it from being a platform of excluded powers.

Even though the existence of Russia and China and their influence in the bloc signal anti-Americanism, BRICS, even in its 11-member form, is not inherently anti-American. Indeed, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, stated, “We do not want to be a counterpoint to the G7, G20, or the United States.” This is an important message for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as they do not want to exclude themselves from the American security umbrella but also want to diversify their security and strategic importance to gain leverage against the US. Thus, by joining this kind of organisation, they hit two birds with one stone.

Not long ago, in 2022, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were granted dialogue partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, an even bigger anti-Western organisation than the BRICS. Iran was granted full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Council in 2023. Therefore, despite Iran and its Gulf rival Saudi Arabia and the UAE not sharing warm relations and having situated themselves on different poles, if Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s role is upgraded to full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Council and Saudi Arabia accepts BRICS offers, these two non-Western organisations would be platforms where they can have dialogue and use it as leverage with the West. As these two clubs will be new platforms where non-Western states have leadership, they can offer more equal negotiations between Iran and its Gulf neighbours, as none would have better privileges over others.

Of course, considering the new members, including the closest US MENA partners such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, one wonders if they are really asking for an alternative to US hegemony. In its 11-state form, the new bloc can benefit the organisation and the new members, including those directly linked to the US security umbrella. While Russia and China attempt to counterbalance the US-based Western system, most of the new members, most importantly in our case, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, attempt to diversify their geopolitical engagements with the rest of the world while still giving greater attention to the US and the West. The greater attention paid to the US and the West can be seen from their reactions to the offer, particularly Saudi Arabia’s. While UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed published a statement showing his appreciation of the offer, Saudi Arabia is yet to accept the offer and stated it will study the deal and give an appropriate decision,” a message to its Western allies that their priorities are still the West and also could be a bit disappointed by the offer to Iran too.

In short, considering the share of China and India’s oil and gas exports from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, along with India’s warm relations with these states, the invitation of these two states can be considered Indian-influenced as much as Chinese. Moreover, considering South Africa’s relations with Ethiopia and Brazil’s relations with Argentina, one can say BRICS’s enlargement is not solely Chinese dictation but more of a common ground for all members.

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As US drags out Israel Normalization Deal with Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Drifts toward China https://www.juancole.com/2023/09/israel-normalization-riyadh.html Fri, 15 Sep 2023 04:15:55 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=214355 Cairo (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – With the announcement of the expansion of the BRICS bloc many were surprised to see traditional US allies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE inducted as new members. Pundits were quick to exclaim the monumental shift, heralding the move as Saudi Arabia charting an independent path and the end to the petro-dollar relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia that defined relations since the Second World War.

However, it appears that Saudi Arabia is using its growing ties with China and Russia as a bargaining chip in relations with the US and Israel, and that it is not that Saudi is seeking an end to the petro-dollar relationship but its continuation, and that it is the USA that wants less of a commitment. As a result, a feigned move to the East might snowball into a real one if Gulf security and economic interests are not met in the West.

As the BRICS meeting was being celebrated, in the background Saudi Arabia and the US have been in intense discussions over a host of issues; recognition and normalization of relations with Israel on the US side and security assurances for the Kingdom and some assurances for the Palestinians that stop short of a Palestinian state.

The Saudis are mainly interested in a NATO style defense pact, obligating the US to defend the country in case it is attacked. In the interests of assuring security, the Kingdom has also been pushing for the ability to enrich uranium which would allow for the development of nuclear weapons.

The main sticking point has been the US’s unwillingness to provide these security guarantees. Promising to fight and die for the survival of Saudi Arabia is not a popular position in the US, from not wanting to get involved with another war, to the Kingdoms human rights violations, both domestically and abroad in Yemen, has made Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) unpopular in the US.

However, on the Saudi’s side there has been a long history of failure in the US fulfilling its side of the long and close relationship the two countries have shared, a relationship based on oil and security. Since the US pullout from Iraq leaving instability and an empowered Shia government with close ties to Iran, the support for the removal of long time Gulf allies in the Arab Spring, the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the attacks on Abqaiq and Khurais oil fields in 2019 which knocked out 50% of oil production, and the pullout from Afghanistan Saudi Arabia has been deeply questioning US commitment in the region.

Since then Saudi Arabia has embarked on a diplomatic reset with its neighbors, particularly detente and a reopening of diplomatic relations with Iran. However, Saudi still seeks to ensure its security in the long term which Riyadh sees hinges on US NATO style commitments and/or nuclear weapons for normalization with Israel. So far the US has been reluctant to give either, but with Saudi Arabia reducing its ties to China as part of the normalization deal with Israel, the more Saudi Arabia warms to China, the more pressure the US is under to give into at least one of these demands.

On the nuclear issue, despite being a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Saudi Arabia has publicly stated its desire to have the rights to build the full cycle of nuclear production, which would break Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy pact mandating an obligation on recipient countries to renounce their ability to enrich uranium along with a number of treaties. Beyond that, the US would have to consider what making an exception to the Saudis would indicate to the wider region. These are in line with comments the Crown Prince made, confirming that if Iran obtains nuclear weapons the kingdom would seek them in kind.

With the fact that the Senate showed bipartisan support for an explicit ban on Saudi Arabia’s ability to enrich uranium in any deal made with the kingdom, the US is unlikely to make any bold move like making an exception for the Saudis, especially not before the election, if ever.

In an op-ed for the WSJ, Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen encouraged the US to provide NATO style security guarantees so that Saudi Arabia does not feel the need to pursue nuclear weapons, this aligns with Israel’s interest as they have been pursuing a security alliance with the US as well, and seek to limit the spread of nuclear weapons in the region.

Still, beyond security, Saudi Arabia is increasingly being dominated by the interest to diversify its economy away from oil by using the revenue to fund megaprojects across the country. Currently more than a trillion dollars of real estate and infrastructure projects are ongoing, which requires high oil prices to maintain.

Hence, on the other side of the historic Saudi-US relationship, it is the US that sees its ally backsliding on its role in using its oil supply in the interests of the global economy.

Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war the US has pleaded with Saudi Arabia for an increased production of oil, not just to offset Russia’s income source but also as a way to reduce inflation globally. Saudi Arabia has in fact went the other direction, making a deal with Russia to reduce production to increase the price of oil. Saudi Arabia needs this oil revenue now more than ever as the massive investments required for its new economy dictate. Furthermore, as China and India are increasingly the kingdom’s biggest oil purchaser, it is very likely Saudi Arabia will increasingly move towards the BRICS bloc, deepening its economic relations with these countries.

For the US and its interest in moving to potentially confront China over the Taiwan straits issue, disengage from the Middle East “forever wars,” as a result of the perceived lack of strategic importance, it seems that to not get a deal with Saudi Arabia will cost more economically, politically, and strategically now more than ever.

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