Our readers already know that we have been pointing out for some time that one of the scenarios taking place in the world is an order in blocs which, in the context of the new Industry 4.0 and in the face of the transition of hegemony of the United States, just as happened to the United Provinces of the Low-Countries and the British Empire, we are immersed in the formation of new large blocs with complete capabilities, adapted to the new Industry 4.0, and which are going to become fierce competitors for the new global hegemony.
You also know, if you are regular readers of this section, that we have been pointing out the different negotiation pulses between the different major players, namely China and the United States, and how they are forming their spaces in extreme competition (strategic minerals, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, robotics, social-productive model, data, capture of demographic masses, development of large regions, etc.). ... the list is long and requires each actor to develop it to the full, something in which China has important assets); added to this is the context of the need for a new Bretton Woods, something assumed by the United States, which was counting on China itself and its policies of capturing and reorganising the Middle East, Central Asia and certain parts of Africa in order to be able to sit down to negotiate with a stronger position. ... and now we have reached the point where these strategies have failed, and a new Bretton Woods is unavoidable in order to deal with all the consequences of the delay in adopting it, to which has been added the pandemic and the transformation of China into a great rival instead of a sort of British Raj 2.0 that should cooperate in the Great American Strategy, and which is advancing in areas such as the Middle East where the United States is leaving space of great connection with Europe in order to prevent China from monopolising the region.
In this sense, our readers know that we maintain that as a result of these searches for negotiating spaces, zones of influence for the pillars on which to build hegemony in opposition to China, just as China is doing the same, we have the question of Iran, Lebanon, Ukraine, Russia, North Korea, France, Turkey, Israel, and so on. Thus, Anton Troianovski wrote a column in The New York Times along the lines we are advocating here: we are facing a long and tough negotiation on the Ukraine issue, in which the parties are trying to take advantage of each other by using the various means at their disposal, as is happening in other areas, such as the Strait of Gibraltar and the southern Mediterranean, where Algeria and Morocco are the intermediaries of Iran and Israel, respectively, with Turkey seeking their trump cards, respectively, with Turkey seeking its bargaining chips in various directions until it finds its most favourable bargaining position, and so on, and where each actor seeks to escape the actions of its rival(s) to undermine its bargaining capabilities and take advantage of its rival's mistakes.
All of this revolves around one fact: either with China or against China; either with the United States or against the United States, with the respective pivots for the great spaces: Brazil; Europe, which has to manage its own space by configuring itself as a great pivot with France and its space at the head and its allies changing the balance of power with a Germany that has missed its train to the Industry 4. 0 and where everything is too big for it in this world that is already here and is also seeking to negotiate its place; Russia; India; AUKUS; the North American trade region with Mexico, the United States and Canada...
The structure of the Indo-Pacific is key, but it is so if we contemplate it as I have also pointed out in this piece of analysis, as an area that is connected to the American continent, to Africa and to the Mediterranean and its passage to the Atlantic, generating a triple continental mass with a concentration of Mahan choke points and the new Mahan choke points applied to the data, as I have also pointed out, which are concentrated and interconnected creating a great rope, extending the phenomenon that marked the emergence of the Roman Empire, the Persian/Parthian zone, the great empires of India, and China, but now expanded to a global point; but now expanded to a global point, with greater impact in areas that at the time had some impact, but now increasingly greater, as would be the case of the ancient kingdom of Aksum, extending to all of Africa and, of course, America, and the poles.
By the way, and speaking of choke points, we can only commend the accuracy of the vision that the American admiral, historian and strategist Alfred Mahan had at the end of the 19th century when he wrote: "The power that dominates the Indian Ocean will control Asia. Asia and the future of the world will be played out in its waters".
This is the scenario in which we are moving at the will of the United States and China. We will see if there is a pulse in the West and then it moves to the East, or if it is resolved in the West in another way that does not involve violence. There are factors such as the de facto horizontal concentration of the big funds, a generalised corporatism in which the big corporations of the expanded West are linked... there are many factors, including globalisation, which has not stopped, but rather has become multivectorial, that herald the creation of large spaces of hegemony, as we explained in this paper dedicated to Gramsci.
It is in this context that, with all the media noise focused on Ukraine, the United States comes out with its new Indo-Pacific Strategy. In the document, the United States defines its rival, not only for this region, but for all regions of the world: it is not the European Union, it is not Russia... it is China. And it begins by claiming to be the main actor in the Indo-Pacific, and by arguing that China is the hegemonic bloc in the Indo-Pacific and in all the major regions. In the same way that the United States claims to be more and more like Europe and is moving in the direction of "joining in spirit" with Europe to take over this space and its projection zone (Africa and the Levant), the formulation of American power affirms its desire to contain China and maintain Brazil, which China intends to dispute, and which it has already begun to do so via Argentina, as we explained here last week. The possession of the Alaskan territory, and its alliance with Canada and the European Union projects it into the Arctic, to which China replies with Greenland and its desire to spread its tentacles over Europe by exploiting Germany's almost schizophrenic dichotomy in commercial terms (and which is coming to an end, not by its will, but by the fait accompli). ... by means of the AUKUS it projects itself into that space and with France it completes it throughout the Earth, adding its projection into Antarctica, where China's alliance with Argentina replicates its actions in the north with Greenland.
But the United States needs a charter in the Indo-Pacific that Global Britain and France do have, and that has to do with their post-World War II situation, a historical reference that they cite in their new Indo-Pacific Strategy document.
Hence, they state in their Indo-Pacific Strategy paper:
The United States is an Indo-Pacific power. The region, which stretches from our Pacific coast to the Indian Ocean, is home to more than half the world's population, nearly two-thirds of the world's economy and seven of the world's largest militaries. There are more members of the US military in the region than in any other outside the United States. The region supports more than three million American jobs and is the source of nearly $900 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States. In the coming years, as the region drives up to two-thirds of global economic growth, its influence will only grow, as will its importance to the United States.
The United States has long recognised that the Indo-Pacific is vital to our security and prosperity. Our ties were forged two centuries ago, when Americans came to the region in search of trade opportunities, and grew with the arrival of Asian immigrants to the United States. World War II reminded the United States that our country could only be secure if Asia was secure. So in the post-war period, the United States strengthened its ties with the region through strong alliances with Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines and Thailand, laying the security foundations that allowed regional democracies to flourish. These ties expanded as the United States supported key organisations in the region, notably the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); developed close trade and investment relations; and committed itself to upholding international law and norms, from human rights to freedom of navigation.
The use of the US population, a place that already starts with the realisation that a federal rather than confederal Europe could be built, despite its vicissitudes, was proven; to this is added the claim of the Asian legacy of its population to take its place, in the same way that the Hispanic community serves to project itself into the Spanish-speaking world.
From what is written in the Indo-Pacific Strategy, the following historical path of transition from the hegemony of the British Empire to the hegemony of the United States can be inferred. If in the 19th century the British Empire turned the global order upside down by destroying the Indian and Chinese matrices, and with the latter favouring the collapse of a hierarchical power structure in the region around China and its civilisational-moral aspect, creating or driving cultural-moral-philosophical movements towards the region on which it is constituted in the "Empire of the Centre", with a hierarchy of powers around which Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc. revolved.
The British Empire put an end to this model by dismantling it and dominating the region in a commercial sense as a definitive and defining element of its hegemony. In turn, its hegemony led to two things: a power vacuum and a questioning of the age-old hierarchy in the region that a Japan humiliated by the United States took advantage of to launch a Western-style imperialism but threading it into the regional tradition as a justifying element and ended up shaping the slogan "Asia for the Asians"; the second element that created the British Empire, which has an impact to this day, was the Chinese diaspora. When the British Empire lost its hegemony in East Asia, Japan ascended, seeking to reunite the whole around itself with the American challenger: an indelible lesson, since the British Empire struck that heavy blow on India and China, the world has changed forever, and what kept Asia protected from Western European cycles of hegemony... that factor is gone forever and ever, and already played a growing role in the First and, above all, the Second World War.
The United States, as a substitute in the region for the Western hegemony of the British Empire, sought to dominate the scene not on the basis of trade, relegating it to local allies: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, but on the basis of arms, given the pre-eminence of the industrial-military apparatus, and it sought to do so in competition with the Soviet Union once the British and French were expelled from the region, above all, in the 1950s and 1960s.
The other key fact for understanding the region and its strategic and hegemonic games comes from the fact that around 1970 is the time when the economic constraints on the freedom of the two neo-Kantian superpowers worsened, and with a strong industrial-military apparatus, although it was devastating for the USSR, it did not favour the United States, quite the opposite in this aspect, being really in finance and in its great expansion the key element that allowed the United States to win.
In these dynamics, what one superpower gained from the other, economically rather than politically, did not compensate for the joint losses of both in relation to the extra-Western world, with East Asia and its rise being the clearest element in this process as it became the most dynamic centre of the processes of capital accumulation on a global scale, It has become the real constituent element of the initial phase of the transition of hegemony and of the form that the next hegemony beyond the US will take to a much greater degree than the fall of the Soviet Empire, which has mutated into other forms and focuses on energy as a grand strategy in three directions: European Union, India, China (and will seek to expand towards Japan... if possible, without taking its eye off Korea).
This scenario is beginning to be shaped and predetermined by the events that made it difficult for the United States to impose the Cold War order in this region of the world. The defeat of the Japanese Empire, tempered immediately afterwards by Mao's victory in mainland China, left the Western hegemonic power, which at the time was building its hegemony, the United States, and the People's Republic of China at loggerheads in a struggle for centrality in the region. Initially, the US entry into the Korean conflict served to impose US hegemony in the region more broadly, with the configuration of two antagonistic blocs, creating a top-down US regime, which was quickly consolidated using bilateral defence treaties with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, thus containing the crown regime around China, and with the French in Indochina the containment of China was done, all directed by a US State Department that actually directed the foreign ministries of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines.
The interpenetration of tributary and trade relations, reinforced by presence in the area, and even wars, favoured this scheme with an imperial centre whose domestic economy was disproportionately larger than that of its vassals, being a replica of the millennia-old synocentric system: that is, the United States masqueraded as Imperial China and did so through war and arms, leaving trade and the pursuit of profit to the vassals.
The paper adds to this order we have traced Thailand and Australia, two elements of space capture that strategically enclose China and serve to contain it in different ways.
As can be seen, the document makes it clear that the guidelines of U.S. Strategy are immovable: no matter the administration, whether Republican or Democratic, the Biden administration is presented as what it is, that is, the continuation of U.S. foreign policy in the region.
The White House plan makes repeated explicit references to an increasingly influential China, officially known as the People's Republic of China (PRC), which is said to be "combining its economic, diplomatic, military and technological might in its pursuit of a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and seeks to become the world's most influential power".
The Strategy document also states and underlines what we explained above that China's "coercion and aggression is spread throughout the world, but is most acute in the Indo-Pacific".
It adds:
"From Australia's economic coercion to conflict along the Line of Actual Control with India to increasing pressure on Taiwan and intimidation of neighbours in the East and South China Seas, our allies and partners in the region bear much of the cost of the PRC's harmful behaviour (...) In the process, the PRC is also undermining human rights and international law, including freedom of navigation, as well as other principles that have brought stability and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific."
Now, at this critical juncture, the Biden administration's Strategy adds that "our collective efforts over the next decade will determine whether the People's Republic of China succeeds in transforming the rules and norms that have benefited the Indo-Pacific and the world".
Aspects of the Indo-Pacific Strategy
The document on the US Indo-Pacific Strategy continues, and I quote verbatim because I deem it indispensable:
"The United States is committed to a free and open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient Indo-Pacific. To realise that future, the United States will strengthen our own role while strengthening the region itself. The essential feature of this approach is that it cannot be pursued alone: changing strategic circumstances and historic challenges require unprecedented cooperation with those who share this vision.
For centuries, the United States and much of the world have viewed Asia too narrowly, as an arena of geopolitical competition. Today, the nations of the Indo-Pacific are helping to define the very nature of the international order, and US allies and partners around the world have a stake in its outcomes. Our approach is therefore inspired by and aligned with those of our closest friends. Like Japan, we believe that a successful Indo-Pacific vision must promote freedom and openness and offer "autonomy and choice". We support a strong India as a partner in this positive regional vision. Like Australia, we seek to maintain stability and reject coercive exercises of power. Like the Republic of Korea, we seek to promote regional security through capacity building. Like ASEAN, we see Southeast Asia as a central element of the regional architecture. Like New Zealand and the United Kingdom, we seek to foster resilience in the rules-based regional order. Like France, we recognise the strategic value of a growing regional role for the European Union (EU). Like the approach the EU has announced in its Indo-Pacific Cooperation Strategy, the US Strategy will be principled, long-term, and anchored in democratic resilience".
In other words, the US assumes the same role in this transitional phase of hegemony as the British Empire did when it faced its own: to seek out those who could partner from different perspectives and dare to introduce whatever changes were necessary, in every order, including social and labour, to transcend into a higher structure towards the new global hegemony. Likewise, the United States recognises that it will not do this just because it cannot. Hence, it takes and aligns itself to transcend and seek the same unity of destiny that the British Empire had to seek with the United States, and does so with Japan; India; Australia; South Korea (and its reunification with North Korea, also of a strategic nature); ASEAN as a whole (which is currently divided between pro-US and pro-China positions); New Zealand and the United Kingdom; France, which recognises the leadership and guiding role of the European Union; and the European Union itself, as an entity in profound transformation and with the need to find a way for Europe's post-Cold War security architecture to be reshaped, which, as I have already explained, President Emmanuel Macron is absolutely correct in his assessment: first the Europeans must reach an agreement, present it to the Americans and negotiate it with President Vladimir Putin.
As for Russia's role, it turns out to be multidirectional and is absolutely key, as I explained in this document. In addition to having expressed at noon on 14 February 2022 its readiness to reach an agreement with the United States and NATO, to which must be added President Emmanuel Macron's assessment of adapting the security architecture by reaching an agreement with the Europeans, presenting it to the Americans and negotiating it with the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. Since the end of World War II, Russia has been an overlooked and forgotten Pacific power, with few exceptions. But Russia has the capacity to project power across the Indo-Pacific if it chooses to do so. In a sense, it is an aggressive China and the US response that attracts all the attention. Russia is really a European power projecting across the land surface into the Pacific, where its engagement with Japan and its capabilities over North Korea are also required to close the strategic line... or open it irretrievably, to which we have to add, the Sahel, the Middle East, Central Asia, Latin America as a whole, and so on. I think Russia in the context of the Indo-Pacific in 2021, with ASEAN and the pursuit of smart deals with Europe pushes towards a different picture and sets the stage for 2022 and beyond, how it is done is definitely key, adding, of course, its fit with India.
Returning to the US Indo-Pacific Strategy document, the US proposes to pursue five goals in the Indo-Pacific, each in concert with its allies and partners, as well as regional institutions, which are:
- PROMOTING A FREE AND OPEN INDO-PACIFIC
- BUILDING CONNECTIONS WITHIN AND BEYOND THE REGION
BOOST REGIONAL PROSPERITY - STRENGTHEN INDO-PACIFIC SECURITY
- BUILDING REGIONAL RESILIENCE TO TRANSNATIONAL THREATS.
Although it is not possible to find a direct reference in the Indo-Pacific Strategy document that seeks direct change for China and the ruling Communist Party of China, it framed the Strategy in terms of the high-stakes rivalry between the world's two major powers, a contest that Washington seeks to win because we are in a phase of hegemony transition and now begin the phase of maximum competition between geopolitical blocs until only one great global hegemony remains, one like we have never seen before and one that could be the final one.
In the document we can read:
"Our goal is not to change China, but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates, building a balance of influence in the world that is as favourable as possible to the United States, our allies and partners, and the interests and values we share (...) We will also seek to manage competition with the People's Republic of China responsibly. We will cooperate with our allies and partners as we seek to work with the People's Republic of China in areas such as climate change and non-proliferation."
They add:
"We believe it is in the interest of the region and the world at large that no country holds back progress on existential transnational issues because of bilateral differences."
But with the deterioration of relations between Beijing and Washington, signs of cooperation between the two powers have been few and far between, and their disputes have only intensified, as befits this historic moment, something that will go much further in the immediate future, until only a single global hegemony remains. In comments that coincide with the new plan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that "China has been acting more aggressively at home and more aggressively in the region and, indeed, potentially beyond".
The Indo-Pacific Strategy document concludes as follows:
"We have entered a consequential new period of US foreign policy that will demand more of the United States in the Indo-Pacific than has been asked of us since World War II. Our vital interests in the region are becoming clearer, while becoming harder to protect; we will not have the luxury of choosing between power politics and countering transnational threats; we will have to live up to our leadership in diplomacy, security, economics, climate, pandemic response and technology.
The future of the Indo-Pacific depends on the decisions we make now. The decisive decade ahead will determine whether the region can confront and address climate change, reveal how the world rebuilds after a once-in-a-century pandemic, and decide whether we can maintain the principles of openness, transparency and inclusiveness that have fuelled the region's success. If, together with our partners, we can strengthen the region for the challenges of the 21st century and seize its opportunities, the Indo-Pacific will prosper, strengthening the United States and the world.
Our considerable strategic ambitions stem from the belief that no region will be more important to the world and to ordinary Americans than the Indo-Pacific, and that the United States and our allies and partners have a common vision for it. By pursuing a strategy whose fundamental pillars are shared, and by strengthening the region's capacity to realise them, the United States can lead with others toward an Indo-Pacific that is free and open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient for generations to come."
