Bush's tax cuts & "free market/free trade" policies were supposed to turbo-charge America's economy, while the neo-conservative foreign policy laid out by the Project for a New American Century in "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (pdf) was supposed to be a blueprint for extending American hegemony across the globe, indefinitely, with the containment and subordination of China as a key strategic goal. Conveniently, those lofty promises of yesteryear have been entirely forgotten. Otherwise it would have been impossible to cover Obama's recent visit to China without starkly confronting the utter failure of conservative ideology, given its first unfettered shot at power since the 1920s, when it brought us the Great Depression.
It's been a very good decade for China. For the US? Not so much,
since the lion's share of that growth went to the top 1%.
What's still missing from American political life is anything vaguely resembling a coherent progressive narrative-or even a coherent criticism of the dominant-hegemonic-conservative narrative. It's not that progressives are individually or organizationally incoherent, it's that they don't share a coherent narrative among all or most of them, so the net result in terms of the liberal/conservative balance of narrative dominance has not changed appreciably despite the de facto total collapse of the conservative ideological project and the election of Barack Obama.
This is why Obama's trip to China failed to register-as it should have-the utter and total failure of the Bush presidency in particular, and conservative ideology/fantasy in general. The Bush Administration has vastly accelerated the decline of American power and influence in the world, guided by three different strands of conservatism that have contributed to that failure: (1) neo-conservative foreign policy built on the fantasy of go-it-alone military world dominance. (2) The "free market" economic fantasy of tax cuts and deregulation as a cure-all for everything and a propaganda front for massive give-aways to powerful elites. (3) Christian identity politics fantasy that as a people white Christian Americans can do no wrong, and that anyone opposed to us is purely and simply an "evildoer", who must either be killed, converted or bent to our will.
It's important to fully expose the depth of these failures, because far from being discredited by their failures, these three fantasy policy frameworks are not just still intact, and still considered legitimate, they are still dominant, still the default condition, still constitute the framework of background assumptions against which specific actions or proposals are judged, and still inform the decision-making of the President, even though he is a Democrat who was elected primarily as a repudiation of all things Bush. |
| The China trip directly confronts two of these three fantasy frameworks-the neo-conservative world dominance fantasy and the "free market" economic fantasy, so this diary will focus its attention specifically on them. When Bush was elected by the Supreme Court, he proclaimed his popular vote loss to Al Gore as a "mandate" for massive tax-cuts for the rich. He took office as the first President to inherit a budget surplus since Richard Nixon? Before his tax cuts were enacted, the Congress Budget Office was predicting a 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion-enough to substantially wipe out the debt accumulated by Reagan and Bush I, and virtually eliminate any dependency on foreign creditors such as China. It was known at the time that those figures were inflated-mandated by law to reflect "current law" which everyone knew had to be changed, if nothing else to deal with bracket creep of the Alternative Minimum Tax. But even a surplus half as large could have protected the Social Security trust fund while funding modest reductions in the size of national debt, which would have translated into substantial reductions of the debt as a percentage of a growing economy-the crucially important debt-to-GDP ratio.
Bush's tax cuts immediately changed that, and skyrocketing military spending after 9-11-a fighting-fire-with-gasoline response to his own massive intelligence failure (which should have mandated a tax increase to pay for it)-only made matters substantially worse. There was also an orgy of special interest domestic spending to compound the budget mess, perhaps best symbolized by the Ted Stevens/Sarah Palin "Bridge To Nowhere", though its actual costs was but a tiny fraction of the total involved.
The momentum from all those destructive policies choices is still driving our politics today. Even more fundamentally, the assumptions behind those destructive policy choices are actively still driving our politics today--as when Obama expresses the McCain/Palin economic Neandertahlism that stimulus spending could cause a double-dip recession.
So let's clear our heads a bit, shall we? And consider just what the conservatives have missed.
China As Rising World Power
Democracy Now! covered Obama's trip to China with an interview of Martin Jacques, British journalist, academic and author of When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, and a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics and a columnist for The Guardian and New Statesman in the UK. Here's an extended excerpt, which gets right at the heart of the matter--precisely the future that Bush's conservative policies were meant to prevent from happening:
AMY GOODMAN: Your book is called When China Rules the World. Explain.
MARTIN JACQUES: Well, quite simply, we're living in extraordinary new times, characterized by the rise of the developing world as opposed-and the relative decline of the developed world, the rich world. And the most important example of this trend is the rise of China, which is projected to overtake the size of the American economy around 2027. And by 2050, the Chinese economy will be twice the size of that of the American economy. This represents-of course, it's quite a long and protracted process, but will fundamentally shift the economic center of gravity in the world and will have also profound political and cultural implications.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about those implications.
MARTIN JACQUES: Well, there's been a funny old assumption in the West somehow that China's rise is just an economic story. If you go to the bookstores and look at what's been written about the rise of China, it's almost solely economic, in a contemporary sense. But this is obviously ridiculous, because the rise of a new global power always ushers in the expression of a much more comprehensive political, cultural, intellectual, military, moral influence, and this will in time happen in China.
And that's why I argue the end of the Western world, not that the West is going to meet its maker and, you know, there's going to be the demise of the West. On the contrary, I mean, America will get richer, as other Western countries will get richer. But it will no longer shape the world, as it has in the last sixty years, or the West, in general. For 200 years, we've lived in a Western-shaped world. That era is progressively going to come to an end, as China becomes more and more influential. And you can see this already happening in certain parts of the world, much more than in the West. I mean, East Asia is already being increasingly shaped by Chinese influence of many different kinds.
AMY GOODMAN: Like?
MARTIN JACQUES: Well, for example, the rise of Mandarin in the region. I mean, it's already a compulsory language in several countries-Thailand, for example, and South Korea. And I would expect Mandarin to become, over the next fifty years, a second language in the region, alongside English, maybe usurping English in the longer run. What we've got to remember about East Asia is it's home to one-third of the world's population, and it's already the largest economic region in the world. It's bigger than North America, and it's bigger than Europe.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you've got the issue of language. What are the other issues where you'll see this dominance? And also, what about China in Africa?
MARTIN JACQUES: Well, I think that we'll-in all sorts of ways, we'll see Chinese ways of thinking, which are drawn from, you know, a very powerful sense of its own history, influencing the world. I mean, let me throw something out, you know, that China is not really even a nation state in any conventional sense. Now, we're so used to thinking of countries as nation states. They arrived at something which isn't really a conventional nation state. It's really a civilization state, which thinks and acts in a completely different way to the way in which Western states have operated. So this kind of-the Chinese way of thinking will become-will begin to permeate those areas of the world in which it-with which it comes into contact.
And, of course, over the last ten years, there's been an extraordinary change, which is that China has become extremely active, proactive with many regions. Latin America is one example, but the most dramatic, in a way, is Africa, which is a very short period of time. But China is really becoming very rapidly the most important economic partner of the African continent.
You want proof? First, here are some charts showing first how China's economy is growing by leaps and bounds, and second how it has come to hold a major chunk of America's federal debt--a debt that has ballooned under Bush, and which was
actually shrinking when he came into office:
In summary, while America's attention has been distracted by any number of questionable issues (Terri Schiavo, anyone?), the momentum of future economic and cultural leadership has shifted dramatically toward China, and we have not even begun to seriously think about what that means, much less respond to it, much less craft a proactive posture and strategy. The depth of conservative failure here is so deep as to defy imagination.
China As Military Threat
Second, here's a summary overview, and then some choice quotes from Rebuilding America's Defenses showing how utterly unconcerned the neo-cons were with terrorism, and how obsessed they were with China:
Mentions of "China" or "Chinese": 25 times.
Mentions of "Terror" or "terrorist": 7 times.
Most of these are "false positives," however: - "balance of terror" between US & USSR during Cold War-2 times.
- [Israerli] "terror" of Scud attacks -1 Time
- "terrorist camps in Afghanistan" - 1 Time in describing declining staffing levels from one tour of duty to the next. Nothing said about the camps themselves.
- "the general stability of the international system of nation-states relative to terrorists, organized crime, and other "non-state actors." - 1 Time, something that only neocons might think to mention in arguing for the need for a massive military buildup.
- "And advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may
transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." - 1 Time, "terror" as something relatively innocuous.
- "In fact, national military forces, paramilitary units, terrorists, and any other potential adversaries will share the high ground of space with the United States and its allies." - 1 Time, terrorists in space.
- Serious discussion of actually existing terrorist threats as they had manifested in the previous 8 years? 0 Times.
And how did the neocons see China in this same report? In sharp contrast to their profoundly unserious view of terrorism, they were obsessed with China, seeing it both as a technological and a strategic threat.
First, China as a technological threat:
p. 4
Potential rivals such as China are anxious to exploit these transformational technologies broadly, while adversaries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea are rushing to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention in regions they seek to dominate.
p.8:
U.S. nuclear force planning and related arms control policies must take account of a larger set of variables than in the past, including the growing number of small nuclear arsenals - from North Korea to Pakistan to, perhaps soon, Iran and Iraq - and a modernized and expanded Chinese nuclear force.
P 9:
The Kosovo air campaign eventually involved the level of forces anticipated for a major war, but in a theater other than the two - the Korean peninsula and Southwest Asia - that have generated past Pentagon planning scenarios. Moreover, new theater wars that can be foreseen, such as an American defense of Taiwan against a Chinese invasion or punitive attack, have yet to be formally considered by Pentagon planners.
p. 12:
without the driving challenge of the Soviet military threat, efforts at innovation have lacked urgency. Nonetheless, a variety of new potential challenges can be clearly foreseen. The Chinese military, in particular, seeks to exploit the revolution in military affairs to offset American advantages in naval and air power, for example.
p.65:
Already potential adversaries from China to Iran are investing in quiet diesel submarines, tactical ballistic missiles, cruise and other shore- and sea-launched anti-ship missiles, and other weapons that will complicate the operations of U.S. fleets in restricted, littoral waters. The Chinese navy has just recently taken delivery of the first of several planned Sovremenny class destroyers, purchased along with supersonic, anti-ship cruise missiles from Russia, greatly improving China's ability to attack U.S. Navy ships.
China as a strategic threat:
p. 14:
In East Asia, the pattern of U.S. military operations is shifting to the south: in recent years, significant naval forces have been sent to the region around Taiwan in response to Chinese provocation, and now a contingent of U.S. troops is supporting the Australianled mission to East Timor
p. 18-19
The prospect is that East Asia will become an increasingly important region, marked by the rise of Chinese power, while U.S. forces may decline in number...
Finally, Southeast Asia region has long been an area of great interest to China, which clearly seeks to regain influence in the region. In recent years, China has gradually increased its presence and operations in the region.
Raising U.S. military strength in East Asia is the key to coping with the rise of China to great-power status.
By guaranteeing the security of our current allies and newly democratic nations in East Asia, the United States can help ensure that the rise of China is a peaceful one. Indeed, in time, American and allied power in the region may provide a spur to the process of democratization inside China itself....
No U.S. strategy can constrain a Chinese challenge to American regional leadership if our security guarantees to Southeast Asia are intermittent and U.S. military presence a periodic affair.
p.45:
The one recent operation where naval forces, and carrier forces in particular, did play the leading role is also suggestive of the Navy's future: the dispatChing of two carrier battle groups to the waters off Taiwan during the 1996 Chinese "missile blockade."
Several factors are worth noting... Second, the potential enemy was China....
Had the Chinese actually targeted missiles at Taiwan, it is doubtful that the Aegis air-defense systems aboard the cruisers and destroyers in the battle groups could have provided an effective defense. Punitive strikes against Chinese forces by carrier aircraft, or cruise missile strikes, might have been a second option, but a problematic option.
p.73:
The reckoning for such a strategy will come when U.S. forces are unable to meet the demands placed upon them. This may happen when.... Or it may happen when a new great power - a rising China - seeks to challenge American interests and allies in an important region.
In summary, the neo-cons never even saw the terrorist coming. They were taken completely by surprise, and now insist the Obama must continue on the doomed path of failure that they have constructed...not even thinking about the number one challenge that they themselves were obsessed with before getting blind-sided by al Qaeda.
Is there any way to even begin to grasp how utterly foolish this state of affairs is?
There are people in lunatic asylums who deserve to be taken more seriously than this sorry crowd of losers.
Conservatism as an ideology has failed as utterly and completely as Soviet Communism. It's time to toss it onto the dustheap of history, before America itself winds up there.
It's just that simple. |
