This article appeared in the April 9, 1999 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Will America join the China-Russia `Survivors' Club'?
by Jonathan Tennenbaum
This speech was given to an EIR seminar in Washington, D.C. on March 24. It has been edited and expanded for publication. Dr. Tennenbaum works with EIR's bureau in Wiesbaden, Germany, and is director of the Fusion Energy Forum there.
I think as we meet here, all of us are aware, that we're in a period of historical decisions, and we've experienced in the last 48 hours, something which is certainly no less than an earthquake, and an event of potentially great historic dimensions. We're in a period of earthquakes. We're in a period when I think that everyone must do a lot of hard thinking about the basic assumptions and directions of policy, both policies in the United States, foreign policies, policies of other nations, directed toward how we are to get out of the strategic and economic mess which has been created in the world.
I shall address you primarily on the issue of United States relations to China, and the relations between the United States and what Mr. LaRouche has called "the Survivors' Club," a growing collaboration among Russia, China, India, and a growing circle of other nations, which, in this crisis, are looking for ways, in cooperation with each other--various types of cooperation--to ensure the survival and the development of their populations.
Although, as I say, I'm addressing this part--I think, a very crucial part--of the world situation, I think what I have to say will shed a great deal of light on the global strategic situation, and what is behind events which we're experiencing, such as the action which I would describe as an act of sabotage, which has succeeded, for the moment at least, in preventing a crucial meeting between our President and the Prime Minister of Russia.
The background to these events, and what I shall have to say to what has been going on, concerning U.S.-China relations and U.S. relations to the Survivors' Club, will throw some light on a very, very dangerous process. We will be able to see, right in front of our eyes, how from a certain group, a policy group, a very powerful policy group, actions one after the other, are being taken, which, if they're not stopped, are driving the world toward war, toward first a proliferation of wars; as LaRouche has said, nucleating conflicts which are not just disciplinary actions, as some people are describing them, but are real wars, in a process which is leading us--if it continues--to World War III.
If we take this issue of the extraordinary campaign in the U.S. media and in politics against China--if we look at that, and what's behind it, we can learn a great deal about what's happening also in other areas of the world.
So, we have, in the media, an unprecedented campaign of hysteria against China--it reminds some people I've talked to of the McCarthy period in the United States. There's a drumbeat about "the Chinese threat." There are accusations. There's contradictory information. There's an atmosphere of mind wars, which led through the Monica Lewinsky period, without any break, into this extraordinary McCarthyite type of campaign.
Unfortunately, many people in the United States, who are used to the way the media lies to the population, the way the media conducts a kind of psychological warfare, will say, "Oh, yes, I know the media lies to me. But I think we should be suspicious of the Chinese. Aren't they communists, after all? Don't they have nuclear missiles pointed at us? Didn't they fire on students in Tiananmen Square?" There's a certain tendency for people to allow themselves, although they know they're being lied to, to be influenced emotionally by these kinds of campaigns.
But when we look at this, we have to have a very clear head. We have to ask ourselves, "Wait a minute What's really going on?" And there's something going on behind this, which is much, much bigger than an issue of a relationship between the United States and China. Much bigger, much more serious.
Let's not kid ourselves. We're on the eve of the greatest financial disaster in modern history. It's already happening--it's a process that's ongoing. It's not just a financial collapse; it is the collapse of an entire world order, of an entire world economic and political system. And we're on the threshold of earthquakes and changes which hardly anyone here could even dream of, and we were just discussing that neither Michael [Liebig, who also spoke at the seminar--ed.] nor myself dreamt that Primakov's plane was going to turn around on the way to the United States--this is an absolutely extraordinary and unexpected event.
So, earthquakes.
We're on the Titanic. The Titanic is sinking. The eastern end of the ship is going nose-down into the water. It's called "the Asia crisis." The emerging markets of Asia and Russia are underwater already. Europe is half underwater. When we left there, it was still partly underwater, partly above water.
As the ship of the world financial system goes down, the back end is thrust upward--that's the New York Stock Exchange. People say, "Oh, it's going up!" As people shout, the orchestra plays faster and faster. In the mad attempt to save the ship, the U.S. Federal Reserve and the central banks of various nations are pumping hot air into the ship as fast as they can--that's liquidity--and the whole system is about to blow out, in probably a hyperinflationary blowout.
But as I said, this is not just the financial system. This is the entire world order as we have known it in the post-world war period.
Now, there are essentially three reactions to this ongoing crisis of the sinking of this Titanic.
One has been identified by Mr. LaRouche as the Survivors' Club, led by China, Russia, and India, but also, associated with that in various ways, Mahathir's Malaysia (Mahathir is kind of a spokesman for part of this), Khatami's Iran, and others to a growing extent, who are saying, "We don't want to go down with this ship." These are countries that under the conditions of the obvious failure, the total failure of the International Monetary Fund, of the present world financial system, the obvious failure--gross failure--of the globalization, of the free-market policy, of the shock therapy reforms in Russia, and the failure up to now of the United States and other leading industrial nations to carry out an urgently necessary bankruptcy reorganization of the world financial system--they look at this, and they say, "We've got to survive. What do we do to survive? How can we protect ourselves?"
And the crucial element of this Survivors' Club, in terms of policy, is national sovereignty--a return to the principle of the role of sovereign nations and their governments, and their responsibility to manage their own economic affairs, and to do whatever is necessary to ensure the well-being of their populations.
Asserting their right, for example, to impose capital controls, if necessary; to apply reasonable protectionism, to protect their own domestic producers from being destroyed; to apply the right to generate credit for state investment and other types of investment in infrastructure, to build up their economy; and similar things.
This notion of going back to the sovereign nation-state, of saying, "That's the important thing. Globalization, the free market--we don't permit these to dictate to us policies which were leading to the destruction of our nations."
And these nations who look at things that way, are coming together more and more to cooperate in mutually beneficial ways. Now, these are not intrinsically enemies of the United States. All these nations actually would like to have good relations with the United States. They're searching, they're coming here, they're seeking out discussions with the United States in order to improve their relations. I'll come back to where that's going.
But above all, the characteristic of these governments is that they are sane. And we've had something to do with people in these governments, and I must say, the Chinese government is sane, the Russian government of Primakov is sane, the Iranian government has a sane approach, as the recent visit to the Pope indicates. It's looking for a new era of improving relations between, for example, Islam and Christianity.
There are sane people in the United States. I think President Clinton is sane, and that's one of the reasons why he is being targetted.
However, there's a second reaction, which I'll begin to indicate. Unfortunately, not all people and not all governments--well, not all leaders in government--are sane. What we're seeing coming out of a group centered around the City of London and Wall Street financial interests, a group that is in a flight forward--they're in a completely insane state of mind. And Lyndon LaRouche put it very, very clearly a few weeks ago in a discussion, saying the following: The Wall Street/London City crowd, when they're going bankrupt, they always try to start a war somewhere. And if there's no convenient enemy around, they try to create one. They're culturally conditioned to think that way.
So, this is a very dangerous, very special form of hysteria coming out of what we have called in EIR the British-American-Commonwealth (BAC) faction. It's an interwoven network of powerful families and financial interests who have great control over the British Commonwealth, and unfortunately, a great degree of control also in the United States. They're in an hysterical state, due to the impending destruction of the world financial system, and also at seeing the emergence of the Survivors' Club, the emergence of a potentially viable alternative to this collapsing world financial system which they have built up to a bubble of something on the order of $150 trillion of derivatives, which is about to blow up.
So, this is the background to the insane flight forward which we're seeing around the so-called globalization of NATO, the targetting of the so-called "rogue states"--the idea that now we have to go after all of these so-called "rogue states" around the world--the actions of what I call the Gang of Four in the U.S. government: Gore, Cohen, Shelton, and Albright. And I think that the remarks by [Chinese Prime Minister] Zhu Rongji at a press conference a little while ago are very much to the point, when Zhu Rongji stated, in looking at the hysteria around China in the United States, that there are some periods in history when hysteria becomes the norm. We had such a period in the Cultural Revolution in China, he said; and he implied that in the United States, something like that is going on right now.
So, we have this wild, crazed, McCarthyite campaign, the Gang of Four. The media's standing up like the Queen in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, shouting, "Off with his head! Off with his head! They're threatening our interests, they're threatening our interests!"
And unfortunately, although it's farcical and tragicomical if one views it abstractly, this kind of behavior is having very concrete effects on the world, and if this gang is allowed to continue this kind of rampage, it will lead us to a proliferation of wars and to World War III--particularly because the United States and NATO, to the extent that we're locked into this kind of craziness, we are going to find ourselves involved in wars--real wars, simultaneously, on different points of the Earth, which we neither have the capability nor the political will to resolve. And that means a rapidly growing danger of miscalculation and a drastic lowering of the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
How big is the `Chinese military threat'?
But now, before going further, I want to dispose of one issue: What is the real, physical, military threat, which China poses to the security of the United States? I am not talking about Chinese intentions, whether good or bad, but what China's actual military capability is.
First, to get some perspective on this, let's compare China's military spending with that of the U.S. and several other countries (Table 1). Naturally, given the very different economic structures and the complexities of direct and indirect financing (which apply to many countries, not just China), we can only talk about ballpark estimates. Here I should mention, that the figure given in the table for China includes not only the direct allocation of the Chinese Ministry of Defense, but also other government organizations and units.
TABLE 1
Military spending
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Total Per $1,000
Country (billions) Per capita Per km2 GDP
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U.S. $265 $988 $29,000 $32
China 32 26 3,500 30
India 8 8 2,690 21
Israel 7 1,166 333,000 80
Japan 45 357 947,000 9
U.K. 33 559 136,000 27
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I should note that estimates by Russian experts of total Chinese military expenditures, agree broadly with the figure given above. I think the Russian view should be taken seriously, since Russian experts know China very well, and since Russia has a 4,375 km border with China. Although Russia now has very good relations with China, and a growing strategic partnership, it is natural for Russian experts to pay careful attention to military developments in China. But there is nothing comparable to the present U.S. fear of a "China threat" in Russia--nor in Europe, by the way.
But in contrast to the official evaluations, reiterated by Defense Department officials, and agreeing with Russian published estimates, Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro in their propaganda book The Coming Conflict with China, put forward various arguments, claiming that Chinese military expenditures are vastly larger--they claim between $86 billion and double that, $172 billion! They don't account for where all the hardware is, that that money is supposed to be paying for. We must assume--I suppose--that Communist Chinese sympathizers, deeply infiltrated throughout our military and intelligence community, are simply and grossly lying to us. It is not credible, that such a grossly larger expenditure, could be hidden from the extremely sophisticated surveillance capabilities now available.
Now let us look at China's strategic nuclear armament, compared with some other countries--again according to the generally held estimates (Table 2).
TABLE 2
Nuclear arsenals
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Deployed Total
strategic nuclear
Country warheads ICBMs SLBM stockpile
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U.S. 7,450 580 432 12,070
Russia 6,250 745 440 20,000
China 149* 20 12 400
France 384 64 450
U.K. 192 48 192
Israel 100+? some ** 100+
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* Including on bombers.
** Israel is in the process of preparing several submarines
as launch platforms for nuclear-capable cruise missiles.
At present, according to credible Western as well as Russian sources, China's only true ICBM, able to reach the continental United States, is the silo-based Dong Fang 5, of which no more than about 20 are deployed. There also exist 20 of the older DF-4 ICBMs, whose range is about 4,750 km, too small to reach the United States. Both DF-4 and DF-5 missiles are liquid-fueled, and stored empty, with the warheads stored separately. Hardly comparable to the solid-fuel missiles of the U.S. and Russian ICBM arsenals. On the other hand, China is testing a solid-fuel ICBM DF-41, with MIRV capability to replace the strategically virtually obsolete DF-5.
At present, China has only a single type of submarine capable of launching strategic missiles, namely, the nuclear-powered Xia SSBM, of which only one or maybe two are actually operational. The Xia can carry 12 medium-range JL-2 missiles. A longer-range (about 8,000 km) JL-2 is being developed. China's only long-range bomber, the Hong-6, is totally antiquated and of no strategic significance, and it does not appear now that China is looking to replace it. Instead, they are concentrating on the missile force.
All that is really known--except for wild speculations and unproven, propagandistic assertions--simply confirms what the Chinese government has been saying very directly and openly: namely, that they are in the process of modernizing their strategic nuclear force to make it a still quite small, but nonetheless credible deterrent.
China's conventional Army, Air Force, and Navy are only large in sheer numbers; generally speaking, they are extremely poorly equipped by modern standards. China is in the process of greatly reducing the Army's numerical strength, while trying to improve its quality, which is a long and expensive process. Most of the Chinese Air Force consists of obsolete, 1960s or earlier-vintage aircraft; recent acquisitions of Russian aircraft are a very small step. The Navy has no significant war-fighting capabilities outside the immediate vicinity of China. It is nearly entirely oriented toward the task of defending China's very long coastline. China has no aircraft carriers, no significant logistical base outside its own borders, no significant mid-air refueling capability, no global network of military satellites, etc.
By no stretch of the imagination is the Chinese military capable, nor will it in the foreseeable future become capable, of "projecting" significant military forces beyond its immediate neighboring environment.
The only actual physical threat posed to the United States proper lies in its nuclear deterrent force, which is only that--a small, deterrent force. But by no stretch of the imagination could China challenge the United States in a war. This is a very different situation, than the Soviet Union at the beginning to middle of the 1980s; the Soviet Union was seriously prepared, if necessary to wage, and actually win a nuclear war against the United States. But China is light-years away from the kind of massive in-depth capabilities such a proposition would require.
Furthermore for China, with its highly concentrated population and high concentration of industry and infrastructure in a network of key centers, a nuclear exchange with the United States would mean a virtually total destruction of the country. You have to suppose that the Chinese leadership is totally, suicidally insane. But there is no evidence for that, quite the opposite. And a nation that is preparing to go to war, does not put massive investment into long-term projects, such as the Three Gorges Dam and many others.
For some people, the present Chinese military spending is already menacing. But what level of spending is appropriate to defend a country of the size and population of China? What would you do, if you were in the Chinese leadership, looking at the anti-China drumbeat coming from the world's only superpower, and reading the insane, delirious fantasies coming out of the mouths of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the U.S. Gang of Four? Wouldn't you want to make sure China had a credible deterrent? President Clinton was absolutely correct, recently, in warning that the anti-China hysteria in the U.S. can provoke a mirror-image reaction. And perhaps that is part of the purpose, to get a new Cold War going.
(What is the hysteria about alleged Chinese spying? The friends of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon in Israel have for decades been wholesalers of U.S. military secrets. And they even want us to give back one of their lawfully convicted spies.)
British geopolitics: the key to the anti-China hysteria
What we're looking at, and I will document this, is a classic case of what we call British geopolitical manipulation. And I want to say a couple of words about what I mean by "British geopolitics."
What we're looking at, is a force in the world--an oligarchical force in the world--that is composed of an interlocking network of families and powerful financial interests--by no means only British. Some are American, some are Canadian, some are German, French. Some in Asia. But it's an interwoven network of families and interests, of banking and trading companies that operate as a kind of global force, manipulating world events to a significant extent. We call it the British-American-Commonwealth faction.
The characteristic of this, as illustrated by the role of the British themselves in history, is always to play all sides of every conflict. There are no moral criteria that deter them from playing all sides at once. They manipulate religious, ethnic, and other cultural differences. They are greatly experienced at triggering wars, at driving wedges between allies, of weakening governments, and so on.
There are certain ideological tools that are used in this geopolitical manipulation. These are ideologies which are spread. They're not necessarily the same as the ideologies of those who spread them, but they are used as weapons to manipulate people, regardless of how those people in different countries might evaluate their own interests, their own allies, and so forth.
One key component--and you'll see very clearly in the examples that I mention how this works--is the ideology of Malthusianism, the idea that the world is limited, resources are limited, and therefore, the growth of any one nation is by definition a restriction on the other nations. The richer one nation becomes, the poorer the others. The wealth of one nation is always gained at the expense of the others. Limited resources--which is a lie. We know from human history that the development of technology, of science and technology, expands the base of resources we can use for economic development. Therefore, there aren't any limited resources! And therefore also, no fundamental law whereby one nation becoming prosperous, is in any way a detraction from the possibilities of other nations.
A second point, directly related to that, is the doctrine of competitive interests and the balance of power. Typical British geopolitics, is the idea that there is no common interest between nations. There is no common interest of humanity; every nation is potentially a threat to every other nation, especially when they begin to become powerful.
So, since there's no common interest there, just shifting blocs and alliances, where A and B go together to destroy C; later, C and B go together against A, and so forth. So I call it "political Darwinism"--the survival of the fittest.
And the third very important example is the doctrine of free trade and globalism, the notion that we're moving toward a global--they don't say British Empire, not the model of the British Empire, but that's what it really is--free trading system, where individual nations and sovereign governments are obsolete. The real power is the power of the market. The market votes, the market decides, the market evaluates governments. And governments become merely administrators for the policies of the leading international financial institutions and the so-called global players of the market.
So, these are the kinds of ideological tools which are used by this oligarchical faction, which plays world politics just like the gods of Olympus, who play their Great Game with human players, playing one religion off against another, one ethnic group off against another, playing all these different so-called isolated issues.
And so, we've seen--and we've documented this--how this faction has orchestrated, in history, essentially all of the major conflicts. EIR has documented how, in the United States Civil War, this faction brought up the Confederacy, orchestrated the secession, supported the southern states. How at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of this century, they manipulated Japan to attack Russia and China; how they created World War I, to stop the development of the continental railroad building and the economic development among Germany, France, Russia, and China. How they deliberately brought Hitler into power, did various things that ensured that the resistance against Hitler in Germany was crushed. How they manipulated two longtime allies, the United States and Russia, which had been allies in key periods of U.S. history--how they manipulated a Cold War between those two allies after World War II--by Churchill's famous Fulton, [Missouri] speech and other things.
And now, we're experiencing it once again. And when you have studied these other cases and you look at the present events, particularly the anti-China hysteria and other things which are happening, you see that they're doing it again, right in front of our eyes.
So, how does this work? I want to show you a gentleman named Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would like to be a successor to Haushofer and Mackinder, the geopoliticians who inspired some of the unpleasant things that Hitler did. He hopes, with his new book, that he is going to ascend to the heights of geopolitics.
Look at this pamphlet [see photo, this page] from 1977, I believe, an essay by Lyndon LaRouche on "The Hostile Fantasy-World of Zbigniew Brzezinski," in which LaRouche reviews an article by Zbigniew Brzezinski that had been written a few months before, titled "America in a Hostile World." It corresponds very well to the present situation, where behind every tree there is a "rogue state" or a terrorist about to hit us with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
LaRouche makes the diagnosis of Brzezinski, and comes to the conclusion, "He is unquestionably a paranoid-schizophrenic in the rigorous epistemological sense of the term."
Well, what does Brzezinski do in his latest book, The Grand Chessboard? He very clearly tries to formulate a very nasty, very virulent form of British geopolitics, for the purpose of formulating an imperial identity for the United States. I'll read a couple of quotes, and you'll see what I mean.
Brzezinski writes, "The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and indeed first truly global power. America's capacity to exercise global supremacy"--that word I don't like very much, the "supremacy" word. And then he says, "It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America."
And he writes, at the very beginning of the book, "The exercise of American imperial power"--American imperial power!--"is derived in large measure from superior organization." I think he means the Internet. "From the ability to mobilize vast economic and technological resources"--well, I don't know how vast, if you look at the budgets, but anyway--"for military purposes."
"Earlier empires, too, also partook of these attributes." So Mr. Brzezinski, speaking for British geopolitics, has just announced that the United States is an imperial power, trampling thereby on everything that the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution was intended to mean, to signify.
So, these are what you might call the intellectual underpinnings--I wouldn't quite call them "intellectual"--of the activities of this Gang of Four: Gore, Shelton, Cohen, and Albright, and other similar products.
Now, what's interesting about the book, among other things, is that Brzezinski, in the book, does not target China as the number-one enemy. Quite the opposite, he accords China a possible potential role in the balance of power in Eurasia. And Brzezinski is in fact very close to the Anglo-American oligarchical groupings that for some time now have been playing a double game with China, and also with other nations.
They're playing a game which is very well known to Americans, called "hard cop-soft cop." Two teams approach China, in this case--but it's done to other nations also. And it's the soft cop, the Team A, that says to the Chinese, "Join the club. Join the global club. We helped you get into the UN Security Council, we built up your prestige. And now if you play our games, we'll get our financial groups to come and pump in more money than you've ever seen into China's economy. We'll pump billions into your economy. We'll make you a big-league player. Just sign this agreement with the World Trade Organization (WTO). Just sign here, and agree to play by our rules. If you play by our rules, we'll make you rich. But just don't adopt the kinds of dirigistic, protectionist measures which the United States, France, Germany, Japan, and other nations used in their history to develop their national economy. But join the club with us."
The other team--the hard-cop team--says, "If you don't behave, we'll destroy you. We're going to send the Japanese after you. We're going to take Taiwan from you. We're going to organize the whole U.S. population against you. We're going to organize the Christian fundamentalists against you. We're going to cut off your flow of technology. We're going to hit you with human rights campaigns. Watch what we're doing to Clinton. Watch how we're going to destroy his policy of partnership with China. Look at that. You deal with us. We're the ones, we're the people in the driver's seat, and maybe if you do what we say, we'll let you survive." That's the hard cop.
So these two methods--both of which are actually coming out of the same faction--have been applied to China and other nations.
Yesterday Germany, today China
Now, let's look at the anti-China campaign in the United States, which is an integral part of the game on both sides. And if you have understood what I said about the axioms of British geopolitics, all I have to do is to read you some relevant quotes from the various signal articles and statements in the campaign, and mention a few relevant facts, and the whole operation becomes quite transparent.
First of all, we can learn a great deal from another historical example, namely what happened in Europe in 1989, when the Berlin Wall dividing East and West Germany was opened up and the process of German reunification started. At that time, the British press and political circles launched a hysterical campaign, based on the absurd notion that the reunified Germany was becoming a so-called "Fourth Reich" that would revive the expansionist ambitions of the Third Reich of Hitler and the Nazis. Ignoring the truth, that it was Anglo-American financial circles who, through their friend Hjalmar Schacht, brought Hitler to power in Germany.
Already on Oct. 31, 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this line was launched by Conor Cruise O'Brien, in a signal article in the London Times. He wrote:
"We are on the road to the Fourth Reich, a pan-German entity commanding the full allegiance of German nationalists. . . . Nationalist intellectuals will explain that true Germans should not feel guilt, but pride about the Holocaust, that great courageous and salutory act--I fear that the Fourth Reich, if it comes, will have a natural tendency to resemble its predecessor."
On Nov. 12, 1989, just after the fall of the Wall, the London Sunday Times ran an editorial on "The Fourth German Reich," writing, among other things:
"The result [of reunification] will be a German economy twice as big as any other. . . . A united Germany will then become the locomotive in the rebuilding of the newly free market economies of Eastern Europe, for Germany is preeminent in the capital, industrial know-how, and management skills that these countries need. The Fourth Reich is set to boom, becoming Europe's economic superpower in the process. . . . Where does that leave Britain?"
That summer, this theme was taken up by the leading figures of the British government, beginning with inflammatory statements of Minister of Trade and Industry Nicholas Ridley, given in a July 12 interview with The Spectator. The Spectator illustrated the interview with a cartoon showing German Chancellor Kohl with a Hitler mustache and the caption, "Saying the unsayable about the Germans." The interview caused an international uproar, in the middle of which British Prime Minister Thatcher intervened to support her Minister's point of view.
Asked for comment on a proposal by German Central Bank head Hans Tietmeyer for a common European monetary policy, Ridley said: "This is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe. It has to be thwarted. . . . You might as well give up [sovereignty] to Adolf Hitler, frankly."
After making clear that he was comparing today's Germany to Nazi Germany, and Kohl to Hitler, Ridley made a revealing comment:
"We have always played the balance of power in Europe. It has always been Britain's role to keep these various powers balanced and never has that been more necessary than now, with Germany so uppity."
Now let's see exactly the same British geopolitical axioms at work in building up the 1990s campaign against China, step-by-step. And in the cast of characters we find the typical combination of Anglo-American institutions and press cartels: the New York Council on Foreign Relations' (CFR) journal Foreign Affairs, the Hollinger Corp. and other British press, the New York Times, Washington Post, Trilateral Commission, etc. Essentially, the same institutions which, together with the neo-conservative cultural revolutionaries in the Republican Party, have run the campaign to destroy the Clinton Presidency.
In 1992, Samuel Huntington published his infamous thesis about the "Clash of Civilizations" in the CFR's Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece of the Anglo-American establishment. The piece was an exercise in classic British cultural warfare, rejecting the notion of a universal, and putting forward as a central thesis the idea of an intrinsic deadly conflict between the Christian world on the one hand, and a supposed "Confucian-Islamic axis" on the other. Note the recent audience of Iranian President Khatami with the Pope, where Khatami affirmed, from his Islamic standpoint, that the great religions in their essence do not conflict. Also, note that Chinese President Jiang Zemin's repeated affirmation of "universal human values," and the foreign policy course that President Clinton has tried to pursue, are based on the opposite axiomatic standpoint from Huntington's Clash of Civilizations.
Nevertheless, the Huntington piece, elaborated in nauseating detail in his subsequent book, was certainly a preparation for, among other things, the operation to mobilize the so-called "Christian right" in the United States and elsewhere against Sudan, Iran, China, and other countries for alleged "persecution of Christians." And whatever you may think about those countries, if you look into the matter you will discover without any doubt, that this is a deliberate, highly coordinated operation being run, centered around British Baroness Cox's Christian Solidarity International (CSI), which was founded by an adviser of the Archbishop of Canterbury out of Oxford, and which includes leading anti-China hysterics such as U.S. Reps. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Chris Smith (R-N.J.) on its board. A whole "food chain" of newsletters and institutions, reaching millions of Americans, leads from Baroness Cox to the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council of Gary Bauer, and so on.
A signal for the broader campaign was a December 1993 article by New York Times Asia expert N.D. Kristol in Foreign Affairs, entitled "The Rise of China." Here you can immediately see the commonality with the British "Fourth Reich" campaign against Germany. He wrote:
"Almost nothing is so destabilizing as the arrival of a new industrial and military power on the international scene; consider Japan's history in this century or Germany's in the decades leading up to World War I . . . there appears to be at least a realistic possibility that China will be able to sustain its boom for decades to come, and it would be foolish--and perhaps dangerous--to neglect this likelihood.
"Growth is destabilizing. [Malthusian thesis] For all the differences between China and Germany, the latter's experience should remind us of the difficulty that the world has had accommodating newly powerful nations."
In March 1994, Gerald Segal of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), who is a typical "hard-cop," predicts the split-up of China. In an article in Foreign Affairs in May/June 1994, Segal publishes a map of China with a dividing line. Interestingly, the map is very similar to one put out by the Dalai Lama in his autobiography, first published in Great Britain in 1990. The Dalai Lama, darling of Hollywood, is a long-standing British agent of influence. And, if you look at the inside cover of the American edition of his book, you can see that he is a bit more than an innocent monk. There you see a map "Tibet and its neighbors," where greater Tibet, an area labelled "East Turkestan" (Xinjiang), "Inner Mongolia," and "Manchuria" (all presently parts of China), are separated off from the P.R.C., the latter having been reduced to less than half its present size. In Segal's book there are divisions even in that reduced stub.
Segal and others were partly banking on the "bubble" economy which had been built up in many coastal regions of China, in the "emerging markets" and elsewhere in China, in helping to break apart the country. In 1994-95, to the great disappointment of Segal, who has many times argued that the central government in Beijing had lost control of the economy, the Chinese leadership, especially Zhu Rongji personally, accomplished what is now referred to as the "soft landing" of the Chinese economy. They dirigistically pushed down inflation, collapsed a major part of the "bubble economy" which had built up, closed down speculative operations, and began to redirect investment flows into infrastructure and basic industrial development. China's growth continued to boom, on a healthier line, with no sign of breaking up. Furthermore, the promised political instability, at the death of Deng Xiaoping, did not materialize. The transition to the new leadership was smooth, and Jiang Zemin and the others began to show ever more self-confidence and creativity. At the same time, China begins to promote the concept of the Eurasian Land-Bridge as a major foreign policy initiative, as well as a means to develop its interior regions.
As a result of these successful Chinese policies, the geopoliticians on the Anglo-American side became more and more hysterical.
In May 1994, the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller, published a report, "An Emerging China in a World of Interdependence," by Funabashi Oksenberg (former China staff member of the U.S. National Security Council). The line presented there, a mixture of hard and soft cop, is significant, as it set the direction for the whole subsequent conflicts with China over membership in the WTO:
"The strategy entails approaching China from positions of strength, weaving China into webs of economic interdependence. The positions of strength include a forward-deployed American military presence, vibrant Japanese-American and Korean-American alliances, the continued prosperity and stability of Taiwan and the ASEAN states."
The report concludes:
"Both China and the Trilateral nations must work together to build sustainable, rather than astronomical growth in China. . . . But the Trilateral countries must also recognize that a cooperative approach may not elicit a constructive Chinese response. . . . Such classic considerations as balance of power . . . must also govern western and Japanese thinking about China."
Argued in terms of a totally incompetent treatment of Chinese history and culture, the strategy put forward by the Trilateral Commission, is to force China to give up the protectionist policies which are permitting China to develop its domestic industry and agriculture. Indeed, the industrial development of the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and other nations was always based on dirigistic, protectionist policies. But, the Trilateral Commission insists, China and other developing countries should never be permitted to apply the same methods today. "The most pressing problem," the report says, is "getting China into the fold of the World Trade Organization . . . as rapidly as possible, by agreeing to the GATT rules." The problem for the Trilateral Commission was that, under those rules, developing countries countries are permitted to join WTO without having to abandon all protection of their domestic producers. In order to neutralize this provision for China, the Trilateral Commission relied on an accountant's trick introduced in spring 1993 by the International Monetary Fund, called "purchasing power parity," to redefine the criteria for comparing nations' economic parameters. The purpose of the exercise, was to bolster the claim that "China is no longer a developing country," and should no longer be permitted to use protectionist policies. The Trilateral Commission report lets the cat out of the bag:
"China's insistence that it be characterized as a `developing country' is another potential problem. This would allow China to maintain tariff protection for `infant industries' such as automobiles, machinery, electronics."
In 1995, a new theme was added to the growing "China threat campaign," when Lester Brown of the World Watch institute warned that China's growth could lead to a global food crisis. Typical of the popularization of this new campaign was an article in the London Sunday Telegraph, on May 21, 1995, by Graham Hutchins, titled "Too-Rich China Threat to World Food Supplies":
"The specter of Thomas Malthus is stalking China. . . ." Lester Brown of World Watch institute is quoted, "`Suddenly, China is losing the capacity to feed itself.' Mr. Brown argued that China was growing too rich, too fast. `The bottom line is that when China turns to world markets on an ongoing basis, its food scarcity will become the world's scarcity.'"
Whipping up the hysteria even more, Hutchins wrote in the Daily Telegraph on June 2, 1995, under the headline "Why They Could Devour the World":
"There is a potential monster in our midst. . . . The real challenge to the international order comes from the Far East. It comes from the rise of China: a continental-size country whose economy is growing at such a pace as to make unsustainable demands on the world's resources, whose swelling military might is reconfiguring the balances of power in East Asia; and whose Communist leaders remain stubbornly hostile to Western ideals of democracy and freedom. The twentieth century offers unhappy testimony of the problems involved in accommodating the rise of a new power. Yet, as the 1990s draw to a close, the world is facing the rise of potentially the greatest power of them all. . . . The search for natural resources, when conducted by expanding, industrializing, fiercely nationalist powers has often been the cause of war."
This strident "hard-cop" line became more and more pronounced. This is from Time magazine, on July 31, 1995, by Charles Krauthammer:
"A rational policy toward a rising, threatening China would have exactly these two components: 1) containing China as it tries relentlessly to expand its reach, and 2) undermining its dictatorship. . . . Responsible statesmen are not allowed to say this. Essayists are. . . . China is more an old-style dictatorship, not on a messianic mission, just out for power. It is much more like late nineteenth century Germany, a country growing too big and too strong for the continent it finds itself on [as if there were no British Empire!--JBT]. Containment of such a bully must begin early in its career. . . . Containment . . . is a principle of power politics going back centuries. After the Napoleonic wars, the Congress of Vienna created a system of alliances designed to contain a too dynamic France. In our time the Atlantic Alliance contained an aggressive Soviet Union. In between, the West failed to contain an emergent Germany. The result was two world wars. We cannot let that happen with the emerging giant of the twenty-first century. But containing China is not enough. . . . Even more important is undermining its aggressively dictatorial regime."
We can see how the "hard-cop" and "soft-cop" groupings work together as a single entity, if we look at a gathering which took place on May 10-12, 1996 in Prague, sometimes referred to as the "Prague initiative." Soft-cop Henry Kissinger and hard-cop Margaret Thatcher gave keynote speeches, but also Brzezinski, Lord Chalfont, Lane Kirkland (who helped maneuver the AFL-CIO into an anti-China stance), Donald Rumsfeld (the chairman of the Rumsfeld Commission on ballistic-missile threats to the United States, which is now a focal point of the hysteria about "rogue states"), and others. Coming out of this conference, Baroness Thatcher went on an Asia tour, including to Taiwan, where she made one outrageous China-baiting statement after another.
Nearly simultaneously with the Thatcher-Kissinger meeting, Helga Zepp-LaRouche led a Schiller Institute delegation to participate in an historic Eurasian Land-Bridge conference in Beijing. Subsequently, the Institute elaborated the Eurasian Land-Bridge concept to encompass the entire network of transcontinental development corridors, including Siberia to the north, central lines via Central Asia, and a southern tier through Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent--a concept that is the exact opposite of Brzezinski's "Grand Chessboard."
After Clinton's reelection in November 1996, by the end of December a new chorus of attacks in the New York Times and Washington Post began the first of an endless wave of "Chinagate" scandal-mongering.
A clear signal came in a Daily Telegraph article on Feb. 16, 1997 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the up-front British intelligence operative in the attempted destruction of the Clinton Presidency, since even before Clinton took office:
"China replaced the old Soviet Union as the number one enemy in the eyes of the U.S. political establishment. If one could date the beginning of the new Cold War, it would be Thursday, Feb. 13, 1997, the day that the Washington Post reported that U.S. counter-intelligence had caught the Chinese embassy conspiring to subvert the U.S. political system."
The new Cold War idea was then reiterated, in more systematic form, in an article by Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro in Foreign Affairs, March/April 1997 (summarizing a longer presentation in book form). This article declared China to be--axiomatically!--a long-term enemy of the United States:
"Since the late 1980s Beijing's leaders, especially those who have taken over national policy in the wake of Deng Xiaoping's enfeeblement, have set goals that are contrary to American interests. Driven by nationalist sentiment, a yearning to redeem the humiliations of the past, and the simple urge for international power, China is seeking to replace the United States as the dominant power in Asia. . . . It has worked, therefore, to reduce the American influence in Asia, to prevent the U.S. and Japan from creating a `contain China' front, to build up a military with force projection capability. . . . China's willingness, even eagerness, to improve the Sino-American mood represents a tactical gesture rather than a strategic one. . . . China's goal of achieving paramount status in Asia conflicts with an established American objective: preventing any single country from gaining overwhelming power in Asia. The United States, after all has been in major wars in Asia three times in the past half-century, always to prevent a single power from gaining ascendancy. . . . China, rapidly becoming the globe's second most powerful nation, will be a predominant force as the world takes shape in the new millennium. As such, it is bound to be no strategic friend of the United States, but a long-term adversary."
Now, I want to break off this chronological series here, at the point a new period begins, marked by Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit to the United States in October 1997, followed by the June 1998 Clinton visit to China. President Clinton's actions toward building a real strategic partnership between the United States and China, however flawed or weak in certain respects, clearly embodies the opposite standpoint to the British geopolitics we just saw in action. The real issue, thus, is not China per se, but the fact that no common ground exists between British geopolitics and the principle of the common good, which Clinton has endeavored to put into practice (however imperfectly) in his China policy.
In the meantime, a series of events, leading to a rapid consolidation of the Survivors' Club, has thrown the BAC's geopolitical calculations significantly off balance and triggered, together with other developments, the new outbursts of anti-China hysteria which we have experienced, in waves, over the last 20 months. Let me quickly review some of those crucial events:
May-June 1997: The so-called Asia financial crisis breaks out. Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia breaks ranks with the Anglo-Americans, denounces speculator George Soros, calls for action to defend national economies. Later, Mahathir claps on currency controls, with clear support from Beijing.
A half-year later, Zhu Rongji makes a surprise announcement of a "Chinese New Deal": In order to offset the potentially disastrous effects on China's export economy from the Asian currency crisis, the Chinese government decides to drastically increase the rate of investment into the economy, above all in the area of housing and infrastructure.
Aug. 1-2, 1998: Jiang Zemin proclaims the principle of "national economic security" in the face of the Asian crisis.
Aug. 14, 1998: "The Battle of Hong Kong": This is the real turning-point, when the Hong Kong authorities, with the support of Beijing, break the rules of the "globalization" game, intervening into the financial markets to deliver stunning losses to international speculators. This assertion of the principle of national sovereignty sends an earthquake throughout the world, leading to the Russian crisis and, very significantly, the collapse of the huge LTCM hedge fund in the "heartland," the United States itself.
Aug. 17, 1998: Collapse of the Russian financial system, the final, decisive failure of International Monetary Fund (IMF) shock therapy. After the failure of an attempt by Vice President Al Gore to bring the corrupt Viktor Chernomyrdin back into power, Yevgeni Primakov takes office as Russia's new Prime Minister. He immediately announces that the well-being of the Russian population takes priority, condemns the IMF reforms as incompetent. For the first time since Mikhail Gorbachov came to power in the Soviet Union, Russia has a government which places the highest priority on the survival of Russia as a sovereign nation.
Nov. 24, 1998: Jiang Zemin's speech in Novosibirsk, Russia signifies a strategic revolution, injecting the crucial element of a rapid scientific and technological progress into the growing momentum toward the Survivors' Club.
Dec. 21-22, 1998: Russian Prime Minister Primakov visits India, proposes the formation of a "strategic triangle" among Russia, India, and China.
February 1999: "Bus diplomacy" signals a breakthrough in relations between India and Pakistan, a stunning blow to British geopolitics and the beginning of opening up the "southern tier" of the Eurasian Land-Bridge.
Feb. 24-28, 1999: Zhu Rongji visits Moscow to consolidate the economic base of the new relationship between Russia and China.
This process is ongoing.
Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji will be in the United States soon. Given the other events occurring around the world, these weeks may be decisive for the future of the world. But to understand what is at stake, we have to take a closer view at the Survivor's Club whose core, at the moment, is the Russia-China relationship.
The Survivors' Club
Russia, China, and India represent 22% of the Earth's land mass and 42% of the world population. China and India are the largest concentration of population on the Earth, and both need advanced scientific and technological capabilities, which they do not themselves possess to an adequate extent, in order to maintain their economic and social stability. I stress, this has nothing to do with military requirements; this is strict economic necessity.
Russia, on the other hand, in spite of the devastation caused by shock therapy, still has an enormous scientific-technological capability, concentrated above all in its military-scientific-industrial complex, as typified by the phenomenon of the formerly "closed cities." In order to survive as an industrial nation, to keep its scientific-industrial complex alive, and to obtain desperately needed export earnings, Russia needs large, stable trading partners that can absorb large quantities of the industrial goods Russia can produce. More profoundly, Russia possesses a highly developed scientific culture.
The three nations are also complementary in economic-geographical terms. Russia's thinly populated Asian regions have gigantic reserves of natural resources: oil, natural gas, wood, strategic metals, water resources, hydroelectric potential, and so forth. India and China are rich in population, but relatively poor in economically exploitable raw materials, above all in per-capita terms.
Thirdly, for climatic reasons, Russia, and especially the Asian part of Russia--Siberia and the Russian Far East--is poorly suited for growing many types of crops, plus there are weaknesses in Russian agriculture, which will take time to remedy. India and China, on the other hand, are strong in agriculture, and have excellent climates for intensive cultivation of fruits, vegetables, fish, and so forth.
This natural complementarity of economic strengths and weaknesses provides a very strong basis for an economic partnership among the three countries. Furthermore, such cooperation has important historical precedents. The early post-war industrial development of China (during the 1950s), and to a lesser extent India (late 1950s and 1960s), profitted greatly from large-scale transfers of industrial equipment, and scientific and technological know-how from the Soviet Union.
Naturally, the Survivors' Club is not limited to the triangle Russia-China-India; already, such nations as Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan, and many others are orienting toward this grouping, for cooperation along the Eurasian Land-Bridge.
There is, of course, also a strategic component, which, however, does not mean an anti-American alliance, as many have tried to portray it. From the Chinese side, the government has repeatedly stressed, that the strategic relation with Russia is "not directed against any third party." In fact, from the very outset of the Jiang Zemin-Yeltsin summit which began that process, the Clinton administration has stressed that it supports a strategic partnership of Russia and China. But following the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq in December 1998, the idea of counterbalancing the "imperial" tendencies coming out of Washington and London, began to play a much greater role, in the form of cooperation to ensure a so-called "multipolar world." Many developing countries would surely agree with an interesting remark by Malaysia's Dr. Mahathir in a recent interview: As long as there was a rivalry between the Soviet Union and the West, he said, the worst aspects of capitalism were restrained, and developing countries had some room for maneuver. Now, the worst sides of capitalism are rampant, and the developing countries have no base for resistance. Thus, seeking mutual support in resistance to Brzezinski's imperial policy is an included motivation of the Survivors' Club.
Ironically, the situation Mahathir referred to applies to the crucial points in the history of the United States itself. The U.S. would have lost the Independence War and the Civil War, if there had not been support from Russia and some continental European nations, to break the grip of the British Empire. Yet the attitude of Gore, Albright, et al. toward developing countries today, is no different from the way the British Empire saw the young "rogue state," the United States.
How the United States can survive
Now, I want to say a couple of words about U.S.-China relations from a positive side.
The economic aspect of the problem in U.S.-China relations, which is really significant, we can see reflected in the trade figures, and particularly in the structure of trade. I have not had the opportunity yet to make a really careful study of this question, but I do want to point out some things which are evident just from a glance at the figures.
In 1998, total U.S. exports to China were $14.2 billion, while the imports from China were $71.2 billion--for a whopping deficit of $57 billion, making China the second-largest-deficit trading partner of the United States, just behind Japan (deficit $64 billion).
Now, we can go and blame China, as we have been blaming Japan for decades, for discriminatory trading practices. But we will have to blame the whole world, I guess, for the fact that last year the United States recorded the largest trade deficit in American history. The total trade deficit in goods and services was $169 billion. Leaving out the dubious category of "services," we get an even more dramatic picture. In 1998, the U.S. imported $248 billion more physical goods, than it exported, up a whopping 25% ($50 billion) from the previous year's physical goods deficit. The United States is not supporting itself in physical terms, but is drawing net physical wealth from the outside world at a rate corresponding to about $925 per year for every man, woman, and child of the U.S. population. Actually, this is a gross underestimate, because the prices many developing countries are receiving for their exports to the United States have been artificially collapsed to levels which mean virtual slave labor for the people who have to produce those goods. Furthermore, this physical goods deficit is not new, but has been growing in waves since the beginning of the 1980s. The United States has become more and more a parasite on the world economy, or as some say in the developing countries: "The U.S. prints money in exchange for our goods."
Now if we look at the breakdown of U.S. exports to China, we can see the problem even more clearly (Table 3).
TABLE 3
U.S. exports to China, 1997
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$ billions Percent
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Crude materials and fuels $1.8 14%
Food, animals and food products 0.5 4%
Fertilizers 1 8%
Other chemicals 0.9 7%
Various manufactured materials 0.8 6%
Subtotal 5 39%
Aircraft and aircraft equipment 2.1 16%
Other machinery and transport equipment 4.4 34%
Miscellaneous manufactures 0.9 7%
Subtotal 7.4 57%
Total $12.8
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What we see here, is that the United States, formerly the world's leading industrial nation, only manages to export a pathetic $6.5 billion per year of machinery and equipment to China, a rapidly growing economy of over 1.2 billion people which has an enormous requirement for modern capital goods. And nearly a third of that was accounted for by sales of a single type of commodity--aircraft and related equipment. In the crucial category of capital goods, which should be the core of U.S. exports to China--namely, production machinery--U.S. exports to China in 1997 were a pitiful $296 million. (Cf. Table 4.) If the problem lies on the Chinese side, with allegedly restrictive trade policy, then why does China import nines times as much industrial equipment from Germany, as it does from the United States?
TABLE 4
Trade with China in production
machinery, Germany and U.S compared
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Trade
Production machinery ($ millions)
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German exports to China $2,700
U.S. exports to China 300
U.S. net imports from Germany 1,100
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The real problem here is, that the United States no longer produces the kind of machine tools and other modern capital goods which China and other developing countries desperately need for their industrial and infrastructural development, and those the United States does produce, American firms are often prohibited from exporting to China by silly "dual use" regulations. Meanwhile, enormous efforts are wasted bickering over CDs and pornographic videos, whose export some jokers think is vital to the U.S. national interests.
Therefore, I propose we should look at China's infrastructure demand, which is hundreds of billions of dollars. We should look at China's New Deal; we should look at the kinds of technologies that China, India, and other developing nations are going to need going into the twenty-first century. What kinds of technologies? Hypersonic planes, magnetic levitation trains. New safe forms of nuclear energy. New types of city infrastructure. New production processes, using plasmas and lasers.
What kind of technologies does the world need going into the next century? Let's make the commitment--I'm speaking as an American here--that we're going to develop a large part of those technologies and produce them and export them to the world.
So, in closing, I think what's necessary is a kind of revolution against this dirty, filthy British geopolitics. We have to get that out of our system. We're destroying ourselves and destroying the world with it. And to make a revolution to introduce LaRouche's New Bretton Woods, and make a political evolution to make sure that the United States joins the Survivors' Club. Thank you.
