New strategic directions on the part of the United States
The second cold war and South America

Raúl Zibechi
http://www.alainet.org/active/51794&lang=en

The "war against terror" inaugurated by George W. Bush as
a response to the September 11 2001 attack is now giving
way to a strategy of "containment" of China,  the new
strategy laid out by the Pentagon to encircle, and
eventually stifle the asiatic power, with the objective of
maintaining US global supremacy.  The new course of the
Empire includes South America.
 
The change of course appeared in November.  "In our plans
and proposals for the future, we shall dedicate resources
to maintain our strong military presence in the region",
said Barack Obama on November 17 to the Australian
parliament.  In the November edition of Foreign Policy,
secretary of State Hillary Clinton filled in some of the
gaps.  "During the past ten years we have dedicated
considerable resources to Irak and Afghanistan.  During
the next ten years,  we have to look carefully at an
intelligent use of our time and energy,  in a way that we
establish the best possible position to maintain our
leadership."
 
During the next decade, according to Clinton, the United
States will realize major "diplomatic, strategic and
other" investments "in the Asia-Pacific region."  As with
all U.S. strategies, the economic and the military form
one policy.  In the short term,  250 Marines are to be
based in Darwin (North Australia), towards an eventual
2.500 military personnel. At the moment the Pentagon has
bases in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Guam,  but on
setting up base themselves in Australia they will
establish a vice around the Chinese opening to the Pacific
Ocean.  This policy forms part of an undeclared objective
of forming a "Nato of the Pacific" to pressure and fence
in China.
 
The second step is not military but economic.  It consists
of an ambitious free trade agreement among various Pacific
countries called the TransPacific Association Agreement,
TPP (1).  At the moment it is a question of nine
countries: Australia, Brunei, Chile, the United States,
Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.  China
is left out and the plan is to break ASEAN,  the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations, where China enjoys
a  hegemonic role.
 
According to Michael T. Klare, the new centre of gravity
of US policy presupposes the abandonment of the Middle
East, which for half a century was  its priority,  to
focus on what is now considered its principal adversary.
The Pentagon theory is that the Aquiles Heel of the
Chinese economy are the oil imports that come to the
country through the South China sea, where Obama  foresees
the greatest US military concentration (2).
 
The response on the part of China continues to be one of
dialogue,  but strengthening their defensive capacity.
Contrary to the Western powers, who established their
hegemony through aggressive wars (from Spain and Portugal
to England and the United States),  the Chinese ascendency
is based on commerce and diplomacy.  This difference is at
once their major strength, in the measure in which it is
not an aggressive power, but at the same time its
weakness,  since it can be displaced by force as happened
in Libya.
 
Structural weakness
 
The crisis facing the United States is worse than that of
the European Union.  "As it is financially insolvent the
country becomes ungovernable, bringing the people of the
United States and those who are dependent on them to
economic, financial,  monetary, geopolitical and social
upheaval, which is  at once violent and destructive",
according to the European Bulletin of Political
Forecasting (Geab No. 60, December 16).
 
In the next four years the country that dominated the
global map since 1945 will, according to this analysis,
undergo an "institutional paralysis and the destruction of
traditional bi-partisan rule",  a spiral of
recession-depression-inflation and the "decomposition of
the socio-political network."  While this prognostic
sounds apocalyptic,  who would have ever thought that
Standard and Poor would downgrade their rating of the
country?
 
On the international scene, the United States has fewer
allies than ever. Immanuel Wallerstein recalls that in
November and the first part of December alone the White
House "has had confrontations with China, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, Israel, Germany and Latin America." (La Jornada,
December 18th). The failures have been amplified.  Obama
sent the secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner to
Europe to suggest alternatives to the crisis that were
haughtily ignored;  he was humiliated by Pakistan and then
by Iran,  since apparently the drone that "landed" in that
country did not suffer an accident but was brought down by
a cyber-attack.
 
But the most serious situation is internal.  One US
citizen in six is in receipt of food aid, as well as one
in four children.  Fifty-seven percent of children live in
poor households; forty-eight and a half percent live in
family groups dependent on State welfare, compared to
thirty percent in 1983 (The Economic Collapse, December
16).  This calls attention to the serious social decline
in a few years: since 2007 family income has fallen by
seven percent;  in parts of California housing prices fell
by sixty-three percent. The average price of a house in
Detroit is 6.000 dollars and eighteen percent of houses in
Florida are vacant.  One child out of five experiences
life-threatening events in the streets.
 
Every day new data appears that reveals the social and
moral decline of the country.  The journal Pediatrics,  of
the Pediatric Academy,  revealed that by the age of
twenty-three years one of three US inhabitants has at some
time been arrested.  In 1965  this was the case for only
twenty-two percent (USA Today, December 19).  According to
the authors of the study, this data does not indicate a
real rise in juvenile crime, but "responds to stricter
legislation" on situations of public scandal or the
consumption of prohibited substances.  They conclude that
these arrests of young people have serious impact on their
development and lead to "violent and anti-social conduct."
If the study had controlled for arrests suffered by black
and Hispanic youth,  the results would have been
scandalous.
 
A fence around integration
 
Given such a serious internal and international situation,
the strategic change of course could, as Klare points out,
bring the world to an "extremely dangerous" situation. In
his opinion, which is shared by other analysts,  we are
moving into another cold war that does not exclude
"domination and military provocation",  with a strong
emphasis on the control of hydrocarbons on the planet. If
the objective of the United States vis-a-vis China is to
"bring their economy to its knees, through a blockade of
their energy supplies" this policy,  which is not new,  is
in fact a warning to the rest of the world. We must
remember two things:  South America supplies twenty-five
percent of oil imports to the United States, and the
biggest crude oil discoveries in the past decade are in
territorial waters of Brazil.
 
Venezuelan exports to China are in view.  Chinese
investment in this country amounts to forty billion
dollars since 2007.  PDVSA exports 530 thousand barrels of
petroleum to China every day,  but the state industry CNPC
and Sinopec plan to multiply their pumping of crude by ten
to reach 1,1 million barrels daily by 2014,  for which
they have targeted five areas in the Petroleum fringe of
the Orinoco, which require some twenty billion dollars of
investment for each of these five areas (Reuters, December
20).
 
The change of course for Obama when he insists that "the
United States is a Pacific country" while it had always
been an Atlantic one, not only implies patching together
alliances in Asia but also in Latin America.  The TPP
includes Chile and Peru and hopes to include Mexico.  At
the same time, in Merida on December 5,  the four
countries of the Pacific Alliance (Chile, Mexico Peru and
Colombia) agreed to launch a commercial block in June of
2012,  to create an integrated market with its stock
markets and the elimination of customs duties as of 2020.
 
For Andres Oppenheimer, "we will see a de facto division
of Latin America, between a Pacific block and an Atlantic
block" (La Nacion, December 13). Conservative analysis
underestimates the recently created Community of Latin
American and Caribbean States (CELAC).  In effect,  the
columnist of La Nacion (who also writes for the Miami
Herald and is a political analyst for CNN in Spanish)
maintains that in the presidential summit of Caracas there
was only some "poetical discourse on regional unity"
without any economic consequences.
 
One of the most importent tendencies that has appeared
since the crisis of 2008,  is  toward the formation of
regional and commercial blocks, that involve a return to
protectionism.  The recent decision of Mercosur to raise
the external duties from 14 to 35 percent, forms part of
this tendency to protect the region in the face of central
countries exports of products that they cannot consume
internally.
 
With the crisis, internal demand has fallen in Europe and
the United States, which is causing emerging countries
such as China and India to accumulate stocks of
merchandise that they move at very low prices, which is
affecting industries in the region, in particular those of
Brazil and Argentina. Countries such as Paraguay and
Uruguay, who do not have an important industrial sector,
will not benefit from these measures, but they may
nonetheless obtain large export quotas with respect to the
big countries of the region.
 
Brazil takes note
 
In Brazil there is an increasing realization that they
must face new threats and that these come from central
countries,  and in particular from the United States.  It
is interesting that this conviction is shared by the whole
society, from top to bottom.
 
Five days after Obama's speech to the Australian
parliament,  Brazilian military  leaked to the press an
internal memo from the Ministry of Defence on the
situation of military equipment.  The conservative press
headlined that a good portion of military equipment was
"junk" and assured that of the one hundred combat ships of
the Navy only fifty-three were navigating and that only
two or their twenty-four A-4 aircraft were operational (O
Estado de Sao Paulo, November 22).
 
The circulation of the "secret memo" took place at a time
when diverse sectors, including the Minister of Defence,
Celso Amorim, were exerting pressure to accelerate the
process of modernization and equipping the armed forces,
and in particular those of the Navy charged with defending
the green and blue Amazonia, referring to the two
principle sources of wealth of the country: biodiversity
and oil. Another tender point is the purchase of 36
fighter aircraft from France, which has been paralyzed for
two years. Nevertheless,  the press does not underline the
important advances that are being made in the building of
submarines with important transfers of technology.
 
Brigadier (retired) Luiz Eduardo Rocha Paiva,  a member of
the Centro de Estudios Estrategicos of the Army who has a
serious military and strategic formation,  analyzed the
recent US change of course noting that the "loss of
spaces" of the superpower and its allies has a direct
repercussion on South America and Brazil.  It is worthy of
note, since it reflects the vision of a good part of
governing classes, both military and civilian, of the
country. "These conflicts may involve us.   The failure or
limited successes of the United States and its allies in
distant areas will result in pressure to impose conditions
to ensure privileged access to the wealth of South America
and of the South Atlantic" (O Estado de Sao Paulo,
December 20).
 
Rocha Paiva underlines the growing influence of China in
the region, the Russian and Iranian presence in countries
such as Venezuela and concludes: "The United States will
react to the penetration of rivals in their own area of
influence and this will affect Brazilian leadership in the
process of regional integration and in the defence of her
patrimony and sovereignty." Because of this there is an
effort to reinforce the defensive military power in face
of this reality.
 
The views presented here on the region are as interesting
as those on the global situation. "Our neighbours are not
the reason for the need to reinforce the military power of
the country,  but the country's ascent as a global
economic power,  the position of the country as a global
economic power, its position in international commerce and
the desire [on the part of others] for our resources and
our geostrategic position.  All this brought Brazil out of
the periphery and placed it in a position of cooperation
and conflict." He ends noting that Brazil could see in the
twenty-first century what China saw in the nineteenth:
"Rival powers could unite to pressure and threaten the
country."(3)
 
This perception concerning the threats facing the country
is shared by a majority of Brazilians.  A recent study
done by; the Institute of Investigation of Applied
Economics (IPEA for its Portuguese acronym), with a sample
of nearly four thousand people, indicates that sixty-seven
percent believe that a foreign military threat exists
because of the natural resources in Amazonia.  Sixty-three
percent believe that the hydrocarbon deposits under the
sea could give rise to external military action (4).
 
The replies are even more interesting when the question
concerns the country which posts a military threat to
Brazil in the next twenty years. Thirty-seven percent
think of the United States.  Far down on the list is
Argentina at fifteen percent.  It should be noted that
this was the most probable hypothesis for war from
independence to the creation of Mercosur, including the
period of the military dictatorship (1964-1985),  whose
principal unfolding was towards the south.  This
perception reveals that the changes in military strategy
in Brazil,  which took shape in the last decade and above
all with the "National Defence Strategy" published in
2008, have ample support from the population.
 
The strategic position of a country matures over long
periods of time and the application of a new strategy
takes decades.  Brazil, from top to bottom is in agreement
that the country is vulnerable to external threats.  It
may well be that this take on the reality began December
8,  when the welders of the Franco-Brazilian team working
in the DCNS (Directory of Naval Construction) shipyards in
Cherbourg,  with a total of 115 apprentices working on
technological transfer,  began welding operations on the
final union of diverse section of the first of four
Scorpene submarines destined for Brazil.  In the future,
these will be built in the Naval Shipyard in Rio de
Janeiro.
(Translation: Jordan Bishop).
 
- Raul Zibechi,  an Uruguayan journalist,  is a teacher
and researcher in the Multiversidad Franciscana de America
Latina,  and an advisor for a number of social
institutions.
 
Notes
 
1) The Trans-Pacific Strategic Agreement of Economic
Association was signed in 2005 by four countries:  Brunei,
Chile, New Zealand and Singapore.  The rest, including the
United States, were incorporated later.
 
2) "Playing with fire. Obama threatens China",   Sin
Permiso, December 11.
 
3) The reference is to the two Opium Wars when England and
France united against China.
 
4) "O sistema de indicadores de percepcao social. Defensa
Nacional", IPEA, 15 de diciembre de 2011.

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