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Introduction:  The Neo-con Project for a New American Century and its Implications

A document bearing the signature of Donald Rumsfeld was disseminated by the Pentagon at the end of 2002. That document was part of a larger study entitled Project for a New American Century (PNAC) which is a kind of global strategic manifesto written by some of the leading neo-conservative intellectuals, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Stephen Hadley, Bill Kristol, Bob Zoellick and, of course, Dick Cheney (even though he is not strictu sensu an intellectual). 1

As its title indicates, according to the larger study, America’s ‘manifest destiny’ is to be the world’s supreme political and economic power: a kind of Roman Empire of the 21^st century which will impose upon the world a Pax Americana based on freedom and prosperity. What distinguishes the neo-cons from liberals is that they believe that the United States should not shy from using force to achieve that overarching goal. More specifically the Pentagon document identifies China as an ‘emerging economic giant’ which will be America’s main rival in the near future. So for the neo-con intellectuals, it is not fundamentalist Islam and the international terrorists of Al Qaida that are America’s most serious future enemy but China. Furthermore, the Pentagon document gives a precise date as to when China will become an unacceptable threat to the US. That date is the year of 2017. Why 2017? And: What is the precise nature of that threat?

The Pentagon document is based on the findings of a massive computer study that has analysed a myriad of economic, demographic, technological and military data that have been fed into it. Its conclusion is that, at the beginning of 2017, China – which will have then the largest middle class of the world, perhaps 500 million people, or more  – will be consuming too much: too many energetic and mineral resources, and too many consumer products, and there simply will not be on the planet enough room for both China and the United States, if China is to enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of the United States (or even to that of Western Europe). So that is the conclusion of the Pentagon document. In reality, the ‘situation’ is worse, far worse, in fact, because, owing to the neo-liberal globalisation that is spreading around the planet like a bushfire, China is not alone in that hungry quest for advanced consumerism. It is closely followed by India, Russia and Brazil (the other three ‘emerging’ economic giants; together these ‘big four’ are often referred to as the CRIB countries (C for China, R for Russia, and so on) which have a combined population of about 2,800 million, or more than forty per cent of the world’s total. And even the rise of the CRIB countries does not represent the whole ‘scramble’ for advanced consumerism, for behind them are  important middle-sized countries -- like Turkey, South Africa, Thailand, Vietnam, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, and so on. In fact a fierce and worldwide competition for scarce energetic and mineral resources in which the US and China are playing the leading roles has already started. The US invasion of Iraq was mainly motivated by a wish to control the energetic resources of the Middle East, Iraq happens to be at the very heart of the Middle East, and a large military base there (now that the American military had to leave Saudi Arabia) is indispensable for that control. China is very active buying energetic resources in Africa, Latin America, and even Asia (its preferred method is long term contracts often covering the production of the next 25 years; it has already signed such contracts with Iran, Angola, Nigeria and Venezuela). It is also heavily investing all over the world (it has a treasure chest of about a trillion dollars). At the China-Africa economic summit of Beijing, in November 2006, contracts worth about $ 16 billion were signed between China and the heads of state or of government of the 43 African countries that participated.

It is ironical -- even though frightening, given the potentially explosive consequences -- that the rise of China (and of the other three CRIB countries), and the decline of America, are, in large part, due (as mentioned in the above paragraph) to the irresistible spread around the world of neo-liberal globalisation based on the Washington Consensus. 2  So, perhaps, after all, Lenin’s famous dictum that ‘The capitalists will sell us the rope that we will use to hang them’ will in the end prove to have been correct, but in a form that neither Lenin nor, for that matter, Marx and Engels, could have imagined. I can hear them turning in their graves. …

So, if the goal is indeed A New American Century which would preserve the American supremacy in the world and the very high American standards of living (more about this crucial ‘variable’ below), is, after 2017, war the only logical option for the Americans? The neo-cons believe it is the only way to ‘stop China’. But, some analysts will object: The neo-cons will soon be out of power; George W. Bush will be gone; and the ‘Dems’ will be in. And, what is more, it is possible that, for the first time in American history, the new president will be a woman. So the nightmarish neo-con interlude will come to a definitive end, the American foreign policy will be set right. How convincing is that rosy scenario? Two questions come to mind at this juncture: One: Can and will China really catch up with America?  And, two: Is the neo-con objective of A New American Century truly an ‘aberration’ or has it been, historically, a legitimate goal of American foreign policy?

‘It is the economy, stupid! (Read my lips.)’ Dixit Bill Clinton, American President                          

In the past, whatever the ostensible reasons for going to war -- territory or boundary disputes, historical grievances, megalomania of the leaders -- often the real reasons  (the ‘hidden agenda’) were economic. These were: conquering, and then defending, new ‘markets’, be they colonial or ‘free’; controlling sources of energetic or mineral resources; and access to cheap and abundant labour. The First and the Second World Wars were fought primarily for economic reasons. Economic recessions, and even depressions, preceded them. Germany lost the First World War and was imposed, at the Versailles Conference, terrible conditions  – enormous war reparations, prohibition to rearm, limitations to industrialise, etc – which enabled Hitler to come to power and to launch the Second World War. At the end of that war, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the big victors, and engaged in superpower rivalry. The cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the only superpower. The latter, taking advantage of that new position of world supremacy, launched the neo-liberal globalisation to control world markets and to maximise the profits of its large multinational corporations. 3 Surprisingly, however, that American world supremacy did not even last two decades. China has already ‘emerged’ as an ‘economic giant’ with significant political power – based on nuclear weapons, a UN Security Council veto, and a population of 1,300 million.

So what hold the future?  There will be probably a transitional period which may last two decades or more during which several great powers -- the United States, China, the European Union, and, increasingly, India, Russia and even Brazil -- will compete in a multi-polar world. That ‘situation’ will be further complicated by the ‘emergence’ of additional power centres formed by new regional blocs, such as, a group of left-wing or progressive Latin American countries coalescing around Venezuela (Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador are already members; other countries may join it in the following years); and a Shi’a ‘belt’ of Islamic countries in the Middle-East, dominated by Iran. But that transitional period will pass and China will probably emerge as the principal rival of America. So, back to the question I have asked above: Can the Chinese economy catch up with that of the US? And, if the answer to that question is Yes, then: When is that likely to happen?

This is what the most recent statistics and their (I believe reasonable) extrapolation tell us:

At the end of 2005, the American Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $ 12,485 billion; the Chinese GDP, $2,225 billion. 4  So, in nominal terms, the U.S. had, at that point, an economy that was more than five-and-a-half times larger than that of China. But these two statistics are highly misleading, for the following reasons: one, the yuan (China’s national currency) is seriously undervalued at the present time; two, it is the opposite for the US dollar, which is seriously overvalued (potentially even more so). Just how undervalued is the Chinese yuan? Here we must enter the realm of speculation. Currently the US dollar is worth close to eight yuans. But most economists agree that the yuan is worth a lot more, perhaps around seven yuans for a dollar, perhaps even more, six yuans for a dollar. Most economists also agree that the US dollar is overvalued and, what is more, it is headed for a serious fall against the other two major currencies: the euro and the yen. Against the euro, the dollar hit a new low at the end of November 2006, crossing the psychological boundary of $1.30 to one euro. How overvalued is the dollar presently? $ 1.40 to one Euro? $ 1.50 to a Euro? How much more does it need to fall before the United States can start correcting, and even reversing, its present trade and current account deficits with the rest of the world, and especially with China, the EU, Japan, and even Russia? These two questions cannot be answered precisely but, tentatively, it seems to me that the combined effect of the under-valuation of the yuan and the overvaluation of the dollar could mean that the Chinese GDP is in reality perhaps around $ 3,000 billion at the present time. A second important relevant element is the economic growth rate. In the last few years the Chinese economy has been growing at a breakneck speed of about 10 per cent a year. Obviously that phenomenal rate, for many reasons, cannot be maintained. Perhaps an average annual GDP growth rate of about 7 to 8 per cent in the next, say, fifteen to twenty years,will be possible. During that time, we can probably assume that the American GDP will be growing, at best, at an average annual rate of about 2 to 3 per cent. To the extent that these two estimates are in the ‘ball park’, we can conclude that China will need, roughly, probably less than thirty years to economically catch up with the United States.

But, some analysts will object, this is strictly a quantitative analysis. What about the qualitative difference between the American and the Chinese economies? There is presently a very great scientific and technological gap between the US and China, and the US will never allow that gap to close entirely, and so its technological superiority, which translates into military superiority, will ensure that the US remains the pre-eminent superpower in the world. How good is that argument? Not very, it seems to me, for the following reasons. Firstly, the Chinese have always insisted when entering in joint ventures with the big multinational corporations that the latter must share their technology. Secondly, the Chinese are heavily investing in advanced scientific research, at rates that are already comparable to those in the US, EU and Japan. Thirdly, and very importantly, they have a large reservoir of Chinese-American scientists who currently work in the US. With China gradually getting richer – there are already 25 dollar billionaires in China and 255,000 millionaires –  it is likely that China will be able to lure a significant number of these Chinese-American scientists back to the mother country.

A Decisive Element:  The American Loss of Soft Power

One of the essential changes regarding the relevance and efficacy of power that has occurred in the last decade or so is the important shift in the relative importance between hard and soft power. Three forms of hard power can be distinguished: military power, that can be used directly to beat an enemy to submission; economic power, that can be utilised to establish sanctions, embargoes and boycotts; and political power, that is applied to keep the enemy isolated or marginalized. In the past, America used military power routinely to engineer brutal changes of governments in recalcitrant countries. Direct military interventions and coup d’Etats planned and implemented by the CIA were commonplace. Two of the best-known examples are that of Iran in 1953, when the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown and replaced by the Shah Reza Pahlavi, and that of Chile, in 1973, when Salvador Allende was killed in a military coup d’Etat and General Pinochet came to power. As for the economic and political forms of hard power, they can be used in tandem, as they were in the case of Cuba, for example. Despite all the efforts in more than half-a-century to overthrow the Cuban government, Cuba is still there and its fortunes have recently improved (thanks significantly to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez). Recent developments have shown that hard power, used recklessly as in the past, is no longer, for various reasons, a favourite or preferred method. The Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars have demonstrated the limitations of military power.

In striking contrast, the importance of soft power is generally acknowledged to have been sharply on the rise. Popular culture -- Jazz, jeans, Coca Cola, American movies and television series, shopping malls, etc., and the English language as the world’s lingua franca -- is an important component of soft power. That is one area of soft power that is a big plus for the United States. But it is increasingly being challenged in the name of cultural diversity and the increasing importance of China and the Islamic world. Even in the United States, the number of students learning Chinese and Arabic is growing rapidly. Money is another instrument of soft power. It can be utilised to reward ‘friends’ and punish ‘enemies’. That can take several forms: American aid money for ‘development’, for example, is directed to those poor countries whose governments promote ‘free’ trade, and support the ‘war’ against terrorism; right-wing and pro-business candidates are helped financially (and otherwise) in Latin American elections. But, the $ 25 million reward offered for information leading to Osama Bin Laden’s arrest has not led to his capture. Other important areas of soft power are democracy and human rights. It is in these areas that the sharpest losses have occurred for the United States. American democracy has seriously deteriorated in the last two decades or so, turning, for all intents and purposes, into a plutocracy that serves the interests of the rich and the very rich. Most ‘big time’ politicians -- senators, governors, mayors, and even congressional representatives -- are very rich men (and sometimes women) who use their own money to get elected. The number of the rich and (especially) the very rich is growing rapidly while the number of the poor, some 13 per cent of the American population, more than 40 million people, has remained stable in the last twenty years. Moreover, as the champion of neo-liberal globalisation, America is directly responsible of the creation of a new class of superrich, the famous oligarchs, that increasingly control economic life on the planet. At the same time 850 million people in the world have to make do with less than a dollar a day, and three billion, with less than three dollars a day; 40,000 children die every day from preventable diseases, malnutrition and starvation. The Iraq war has driven the last nail into the coffin of American credibility. The American leadership, including the president, has consistently lied about the real motives for going to war. A war which has been proven to be a major disaster, with perhaps 200,000 Iraqis (and close to 3,000 Americans) killed, and the only prospect a bloody civil war that will probably dismember that country and destabilise the whole region for a long time to come. The claim of ‘spreading democracy’ around the world sounds hollow. The loss of American moral capital is thus tremendous, and the hatred of America and Americans in the Muslim world will probably take generations to repair.                                              

The Democrats: A Deus ex machina?

Does it really make a difference whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in power in America regarding the really fundamental orientations (the famous ‘hidden agenda) of American foreign policy? I tend to agree with Harold Pinter and Günter Grass, both Nobel Prize laureates for Literature, that it does not.

This is what Pinter wrote, in 2005, in his acceptance speech: 5

‘I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean (the) United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. … The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. … (T)he US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. … The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.’

In his Inaugural Speech of PEN International’s 72^nd Congress in Berlin, in June 2006, Grass quoted Pinter at length, and then added: 6

‘Today we find ourselves at the mercy of hubris of only one superpower … (which) engaged in criminal activities. … Whether Bush or Blair, hypocrisy is written all over their faces. In this respect they are like the priests and missionaries of old who used to bless weapons and carry death with their bibles into distant countries.’ 

China: Not a Beacon of Human Rights

China’s rise to power has been based on the co-habitation, or co-existence, of an autocratic political system with a capitalist market economy. The policy has as  centrepiece (as explained above) the under-valuation of the yuan which enabled multinational corporations to put massive investment on the mainland to very good account, making enormous profits by means of starvation wages – on average $ 150 a month – paid for very hard work by a vast and disciplined labour pool. At the same time, China has rapidly mastered foreign technology, by making technology transfer a mandatory part of foreign investment, created a new class of entrepreneurs, and accumulated enormous currency reserves, now equalling close to one trillion (one thousand billion) dollars (larger than those of Japan), much of it invested in American treasury bonds. To succeed in its grand ambition, China needed stability to control a population of 1.3 billion. So the human rights – including democracy and freedom of expression – of a large part of its population were sacrificed, perhaps for a generation, perhaps for even for two. But the result, as everyone can see, has been nothing short of striking: a massive development that has completely transformed the country. As a result, a Chinese middle class came into being which is (perhaps somewhat hyperbolically) estimated to number some 200 million people presently, and there are, already! 25 billionaires and 255,000 millionaires in dollars in China (as opposed to: 400 billionaires and about 3 million millionaires in the US, and, in India, a middle class estimated to about 50 million, 15 billionaires, and 83,000 millionaires). Nonetheless, poverty persists for hundreds of million Chinese, particularly in the rural areas and among the so-called ‘floating class’: rural migrants seeking work in the cities where they are cut off from social services, peasants expelled from their homes and land without adequate compensation, civil servants faced with unemployment. And brutal repression continues of activist students, artists and intellectuals who fight for democracy and various other personal freedoms. The crackdown of the Tienanmen uprising is still alive in our memory. 7

Growing prosperity in China will increase the demands for the satisfaction of human rights --  political, economic, social and cultural rights. Will China follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union, causing the end of the Communist Party which will disappear into the dustbin of history, and will a multi-party democracy emerge in China to replace it? My guess is that it is inevitable in the long run. But what is long run? Five years, ten years, more? Difficult to say. But I also think that the transition to democracy in China will occur in a relatively orderly fashion. This is, after all, the country of Confucius and respect for authority is deeply rooted. And nobody wants to destabilise the country, and put at risk all that has been achieved so far. My point, however, is that, whatever time it takes, the transition to democracy will not change much the main argument of this essay, which is that: China, already one of the four or five great powers in the world, will be, in the near future, one of the two superpowers.

Conclusion:  Can the Coming War be Stopped and How?

I believe that Americans would not mind living in a bipolar world in which they share power with China as long as American multinationals continue to make big profits and, even more importantly, the very high American standard of living is preserved. I believe, ultimately, that will be the deciding factor of whether or not the Americans will go to war against China. The very high American standard of living is not negotiable. If it begins to go down significantly, then I think that all bets will be off and Americans will go to war. So the relevant question is: What are the chances that the very high American standard of living will not go down significantly? Not great must be the answer based on reasons that I have already discussed in the Introduction: there simply are not enough energetic and mineral resources in the world for the US, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and many other middle-sized powers that I have earlier mentioned. I believe, theoretically at least, there is only one way to stop the coming war between the US and China, and that is a deep transformation of the profit-based neo-liberal globalisation, by making it more people-based. Ultimately it is a matter of sharing the world’s resources more fairly. To do that representative democracy, which is not working because it has been subverted, must be replaced by a participative democracy. This in fact is already happening, to a certain extent, in several Latin American countries – Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, for example. Surprisingly, participative democracy is also part of the political platform of Ségolène Royal, the socialist candidate in the French presidential election that will take place in the spring of 2007. In America the dominant role of big money in politics must be done away with. At the international level: extreme poverty must be eradicated; and the major challenge of climate change due to pollution must be squarely faced. 8                                  

* A writer, scholar and social activist, Zeki Ergas was a visiting scholar for three years at the Institute of International Studies of the University of California, at Berkeley (1981-3, 1987-8), and for four years at the at the African Studies Program of the School of Foreign Service, at Georgetown University (1983-7). He is presently the Secretary General of PEN International’s Swiss Romand Center and lives in Geneva.   

Dr Zeki Ergas ~ STWR member

Dr Zeki Ergas is the founder of Millennium Solidarity Geneva Group. Secretary General of PEN International's Swiss Romand Center.

Published on 5th December 2006, by Share The World's Resources (www.stwr.org)

Notes

1 See Giulietto Chiesa, La Guerra Infinita (Milan, Feltrinelli, 2006) The same author has also published a small booklet entitled Guerre et Mensonge: Terrorisme d’Etat Americain (Genève, Editions Timéli, 2004)

2 The main elements of the Washington Consensus are: free financial flows, freely floating currencies, free trade, free investment, least state intervention in the economy, and the privatisation of social services. The World Bank, the IMF and the WTO have played a key role to impose it on the developing world.

3 Five of the six largest multinational corporations in the world are American:

1 Exxon Mobil, market value of $ 434.1 billion; 2 General Electric, $ 362.5 billion; Microsoft, $ 287.4 billion; 5 Citigroup, 248.8 billion, and 6 Bank of America, $ 246 billion (5 is Gazprom, $ 259.6 billion, a Russian company). As a comparison, Russia’s whole GDP is $ 766.2 billion, and India’s is $ 775.4 billion.  Sources: Bloomberg, IMF, local government agencies. 

4 The GDPs of the other three members of the CRIB Quartet are about a third of China’s. Surprisingly Brazil leads with $ 793 billion, followed by India with $ 775 billion, and Russia, with $ 766 billion. Japan’s GDP, with $ 4,571 billion, is more than double of Chinese GDP, and the European Union’s, at $ 9,927 billion, is more than double of  Japan’s. Astonishingly, Germany’s GDP, $ 2,797 billion, is still bigger than China’s. And Canada’s, with $ 1,130 billion, is some fifty per cent higher than Brazil’s, India’s and Russia’s. Source: Bloomberg, IMF and local government agencies.

5 Entitled ‘Art, truth and politics’. The Nobel Foundation, 2005

6 ‘Writing in an Unpeaceful World’. Translation, Susanne Höbel. PEN International, 2006.

7 Among the several papers presented at PEN Swiss Romand’s  annual Writers in Prison meeting in Geneva, in November 2006, on Human Rights in China, were: Zeki Ergas, China Facing its Destiny: The High Price Paid to Recover Greatness’; Dinah Lee Küng, ‘What Trend in China’s Speech-Squeeze’; and Claude Levenson, Lhasa, Massacred Memory’.

8 Building ‘a better world’ will require more radical philosophical changes, of course, four of which are: scrapping of the idea of endless economic growth; limits to income and wealth; the abolition of war as means of conflict resolution; and the destruction of all nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons. See my series of essays published on the net on these issues, particularly: The Political Economy of Love and the Eradication of Extreme Poverty. In: www.globalmarchallplan.org, www.stwr.org and www.peacejournalism.com 

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