The US and its faux ârules-based orderâ
A recent UN meeting about the Iran nuclear deal showed how Washington doesnât live up to the standards itâs constantly preaching.
You never refer to a rules-based order without ironic quotes. Is that because you dismiss the concept; i.e. you think a rules-based order s a bad idea, or something else?
The US and its faux ârules-based orderâ
A recent UN meeting about the Iran nuclear deal showed how Washington doesnât live up to the standards itâs constantly preaching.
The contradictions of China-bashing in the United States begin with how often it is flat-out untrue. The Wall Street Journal reports that the âChinese spyâ balloon that President Joe Biden shot down with immense patriotic fanfare in February 2023 did not in fact transmit pictures or anything else to China. White House economists have been trying to excuse persistent U.S. inflation saying it is a global problem and inflation is worse elsewhere in the world. Chinaâs inflation rate is 0.7 percent year-on-year. Financial media outlets stress how Chinaâs GDP growth rate is lower than it used to be. China now estimates that its 2023 GDP growth will be 5 to 5.5 percent. Estimates for the U.S. GDP growth rate in 2023, meanwhile, vacillate around 1 to 2 percent.
China-bashing has intensified into denial and self-delusionâit is akin to pretending that the United States did not lose wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and more. The BRICS coalition (China and its allies) now has a significantly larger global economic footprint (higher total GDP) than the G7 (the United States and its allies). China is outgrowing the rest of the world in research and development expenditures. The American empire (like its foundation, American capitalism) is not the dominating global force it once was right after World War II. The empire and the economy have shrunk in size, power, and influence considerably since then. And they continue to do so. Putting that genie back into the bottle is a battle against history that the United States is not likely to win.
Denial and self-delusion about the changing world economy have led to major strategic mistakes. United States leaders predicted before and shortly after February 2022âwhen the Ukraine war beganâfor example, that Russiaâs economy would crash from the effects of the âgreatest of all sanctions,â led by the United States. Some U.S. leaders still believe that the crash will take place (publicly, if not privately) despite there being no such indication. Such predictions badly miscalculated the economic strength and potential of Russiaâs allies in the BRICS. Led by China and India, the BRICS nations responded to Russiaâs need for buyers of its oil and gas. The United States made its European allies cut off purchasing Russian oil and gas as part of the sanctions war against the Kremlin over Ukraine. However, U.S. pressure tactics used on China, India, and many other nations (inside and outside BRICS) to likewise stop buying Russian exports failed. They not only purchased oil and gas from Russia but then also reexported some of it to European nations. World power configurations had followed the changes in the world economy at the expense of the U.S. position.
War games with allies, threats from U.S. officials, and U.S. warships off Chinaâs coast may delude some to imagine that these moves intimidate China. The reality is that the military disparity between China and the United States is smaller now than it has ever been in modern Chinaâs history. Chinaâs military alliances are the strongest they have ever been. Intimidation that did not work from the time of the Korean War and since then, will certainly not be effective now. Former President Donald Trumpâs tariff and trade wars were aimed, U.S. officials said, to persuade China to change its âauthoritarianâ economic system. If so, that aim was not achieved. The United States simply lacks the power to force the matter.
American polls suggest that media outlets have been successful in a) portraying Chinaâs advances economically and technologically as a threat, and b) using that threat to lobby against regulations of U.S. high-tech industries. Of course, business opposition to government regulation predates Chinaâs emergence. However, encouraging hostility toward China provides convenient additional cover for all sorts of business interests. Chinaâs technological challenge flows from and depends upon a massive educational effort based on training far more STEM scientists than the United States does. Yet, U.S. business does not support paying taxes to fund education equivalently. The reporting by the media on this issue rarely covers that obvious contradiction and politicians mostly avoid it as dangerous to their electoral prospects. (...)
President Joe Biden on Monday quietly nominated Elliott Abrams to serve on a bipartisan diplomacy commission, a move that human rights advocates condemned as outrageous given the longtime Republican officialâs past as a defender of Latin American death squads and cheerleader for murderous U.S. foreign policy interventions. (...)
