New Cold War

Trump’s ‘America first’ versus Xi Jinping’s ‘global community’: how China is outthinking the West

Note: This article appeared first in Transform, Issue no 5, November 2018 which can be ordered from the Public Reading Rooms website at www.prruk.org 

The general direction of Trump’s foreign policy was clear from the very beginning. His campaign slogans were well known: ‘America First’ in order to ‘Make America Great Again’; and rhetoric against multilateral agreements and threats of protectionist trade measures had been etched into his election campaign. And the promised sharpening of conflict with China in particular was evident from day one.

In his inaugural speech Trump formulated the US’s global role in terms starkly different from the traditional ‘one indispensable nation’ trope of post-1945 American exceptionalism.[1]

‘From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families…We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world – but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.’[2]

Trump also used Twitter to inveigh against all forms of multilateralism in international relations, attacking the UN, WTO and NATO, trade agreements like the TPP but also NAFTA, multilateral policies like the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran nuclear deal, and berated the intrinsic unfairness of the EU in preventing the US negotiating one to one deals with Germany and France.

If Trump truly meant all this, then he was calling time on the whole post-1945 US approach to its role in the world.

Whether or not Trump would follow through on this new US unilateralism took some time to clarify due to the chaos in the first year of his White House – but such statements immediately created an ideological vacuum in the rest of the West, which remains committed to the benefits of multilateral agreements, free trade and globalisation. But no Western leader was prepared to speak out directly against Trump.

Prior to Trump’s election the fact that China had the world’s most rapidly growing economy and had overtaken the US to become the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity terms meant that it was already having an increasing global impact. China had long been influential among developing countries but from the 2007 financial crisis onwards this influence began extending even to traditional US allies. The most telling example was when, in 2015, Britain enraged Obama by rushing to join China’s Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank without even informing the White House in advance. After a little more hesitation Germany and Australia also signed up. Other initiatives – such as the Belt and Road, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the regular meeting of the BRICS countries, the establishment of the 16-country bloc of Central and Eastern European countries in the ‘16+1’ meetings with China, and China’s improved relations with traditionally less supportive countries such as Singapore, the Philippines and South Korea underlined this.

From early 2017 China began to take this to another level, by directly entering into the battle of ideas with Trump and his supporters by putting forward an alternative vision of global politics. This kicked off with Xi Jinping’s speech at the 2017 Davos forum, where he put forward a coherent defence of globalisation, contra Trump but without mentioning him:

‘Countries have extensive converging interests and are mutually dependent. All countries enjoy the right to development. At the same time, they should view their own interests in a broader context and refrain from pursuing them at the expense of others.’ [3]

The Western media fell over itself to praise the speech. Nor was the meaning lost on Trump’s team. Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, urged that ‘…people [should] compare Xi’s speech at Davos and President Trump’s speech in his inaugural…. You’ll see two different world views.’[4]

They would indeed. But between these two world views, most of the US’s chief friends and allies preferred that put forward by Xi Jinping rather than Donald Trump. Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, put it succinctly: ‘Xi Jinping, president of China, made a speech last week on globalisation at the World Economic Forum that one would have expected to come from a US president. At his inauguration, Donald Trump made remarks on trade that one would never have expected to come from a US president. The contrast is astounding.’[5]

In May 2017 two senior Trump aides wrote a seminal piece for the Wall Street Journal that took the debate further. Jointly authored by National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, and director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, it clearly had the approval of the Oval Office. Most fundamentally the article directly countered Xi Jinping, also without naming him:

‘…the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage… Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.’[6]

In Britain we are familiar with such formulations, rooted in right-wing neo-classical economics, because Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s became notorious for the similar statement that ‘there is no such thing as society’, only ‘individual men and women’. This ideology was used as the basis for cutting welfare programmes, ending public housing, restricting trade unions and so on.

In foreign policy, as McMaster and Cohn draw out, this philosophy means the pursuit of American interests irrespective of others. ‘America First’, they argue, signals the intention ‘to use the diplomatic, economic and military resources of the US to enhance American security, promote American prosperity, and extend American influence around the world’. 

This is different from the ideological underpinning of the US-led post-1945 international system, which is based on the pretension that the US would use its weight, in line with the common interests of all as expressed through institutions like the UN, to mitigate political conflicts, and further to provide resources to even out dangerous economic hiccups through its contributions to the IMF. The averred aim was to create a harmonious global community, in which – it was claimed – the strong protected the weak thus avoiding the type of conflict and economic crisis of the World Wars and the Great Depression.

Of course the definition of ‘common interests’ substituted the interests of maintaining the position of the US and its allies, particularly in preventing any advance of communism or even genuine post-colonial independence, for the real common interests of all in peace and development. But it was not an entirely empty ideology either. As Perry Anderson analysed, in the US-led world created in 1945, the US projected itself globally primarily ‘…as a guardian of the general interest of all capitals, sacrificing – where necessary, and for as long as needed – national gain for international advantage, in the confidence of ultimate pay-off’.[7]

For Trump, this was over: no longer affordable for a US in relative decline, if it ever had been.

But despite Trump’s statements and those of his key advisers, the liberal Western media, and probably most of their political masters, hung on to the hope that this was simply rhetoric to shore up his electoral base.

For the first six months it seemed this might be true; sturm und drang on Trump’s twitter-feed led to very little action. The early abandoning of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was not definitive proof of a general course, as Clinton had promised she would too. Demands that South Korea and Japan should pick up more of the US’s military costs in East Asia were dismissed as mainly bluster and anyway negotiable. Similarly Trump’s challenges to NATO were unwelcome, but no one believed the US would actually pull out of its main military alliance.

But Trump was not just letting off hot air. He is not a joke, but the outspoken representative of a powerful revanchist strand of opinion in the US ruling elites that believes the US has long made too many concessions to its allies, taken on too great a share of global military expenditure, and at the same time been squeezed on trade not just by China, but close allies as well. This is Trump’s explanation for the German and Chinese trade surpluses with the US, and, to a lesser extent, those of Korea and Japan.

Trump has been open that he wants a large share of these surpluses transferred to the US, through a combination of means: imposing terms of trade and insisting upon exchange rates that preference the US over its competitors; demanding successful economies invest in the US or take up more US debt; and insisting that allies increase their contribution to the West’s military budget.

This is already being met with resistance from key targets China and Germany, which have offered strikingly few concessions to Trump. Therefore it is clear that Trump’s project requires greater leverage than the state of the US economy or its present alliances can necessarily deliver. This is the context for Trump’s remarkably consistent pursuit of an opening to Putin’s Russia, despite huge opposition from Pentagon and foreign policy elites, and from within his own White House.

There has long been a serious current of opinion in the US and beyond, that argues that a US-Russia link up could be a reverse ‘Nixon goes to China’, with a US-Russia axis able to bring sufficient pressure to bear on China that it is forced to concede to US demands. In particular, Henry Kissinger, the original engineer of this 1970s Cold War tactic – whereby the US established diplomatic relations with China in order to isolate the USSR – urged the inverse of this tactic upon Trump in a series of meetings they held during the presidential transition.[8] But secondly, of course, such an alliance with Russia could encircle Germany, squeezing the EU from East and West; both Trump’s political agent, Steve Bannon and Putin have been actively aiding right wing and anti-EU political forces across the continent. This is why, Angela Merkel, by contrast with other Western leaders, was quick to realise that Trump and his advisors threats to Germany and the EU were not just rhetoric but constituted a dangerous, disintegrative force in Europe.

In mid-2017, with the new team in the White House finally more or less settled, residual hopes in the emergence of a tempered Trump were abruptly ended when he walked the US out of the hard-won Paris Climate Change Agreement. Amid global disapprobation of Trump’s wilful sabotage on such a vital issue, China again stepped into the vacuum. Xi Jinping used a major speech in October to stress that China would be ‘Taking a driving seat in international cooperation to respond to climate change’, and that it would be a ‘torch-bearer in the global endeavour for ecological civilisation’.[9] In the same speech he again drew a line against Trump’s approach, remarking that: ‘No country can alone address the many challenges facing mankind; no country can afford to retreat into self-isolation.’

The unilateral move of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and abandoning the Iran nuclear agreement reduced multilateral approaches to the region to tatters. Withdrawal from UNESCO and the UN Human Rights Council followed.

Finally in spring 2018, the threatened new US protectionism was launched with tariffs imposed on aluminium and steel not just from China, but also Canada, Mexico and the EU.

The growing ideological and political disorganisation in the West that flowed from these actions was reflected in the chaos at the June 2018 G7 summit in Canada; a meeting which happened to take place almost contemporaneously with the 2018 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Qingdao, China.[10] The smooth functioning and productive outcomes of the SCO meeting – the first to include India and Pakistan as full members meaning it represented a majority of the world’s population and countries responsible for a majority of annual GDP growth – was inevitably contrasted with the tensions and dysfunction at the G7.

The G7 meeting started in acrimony and ended in farce with Trump removing his signature from the proposed closing statement – meaning that the meeting dispersed without one for the first time since its inception – and trading insults with its host, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who hep described as ‘very dishonest & weak’.

The ensuing media firestorm highlighted growing concerns for the future of the US-led Western world order, contrasting the G7 to the harmony at the SCO. So the Diplomat headlined its analysis ‘A West in crisis, and East rising?’; The Atlantic asked ‘Has the Western world started shunning America?’.[11]

This crisis of relations in the West as a result of Trump’s policies has pushed not only Europe (with the exception possibly of the UK) and Canada in particular closer to China, but has also begun to shake up Sino-Japanese relations. Trump’s current and projected tariffs, on European steel, but particularly the prospect of duties on German and Japanese cars, makes China’s growing market potentially even more important in the long term for both these countries. German relations with China had been generally good and improving for some time, but from the G7 summit onward Abe in Japan also made a turn to improving relations with China. Proposed reciprocal visits between Abe and Xi Jinping in Autumn 2018 have trade at their centre.[12]

Of course, the key target of Trump’s tariff war is China itself, which having been hit with 25% tariffs on $50bn of its exports to the US and 10% tariffs on a further $200bn worth of goods in September 2018, is threatened both with an increase in the 10% tariff to 25% (probably not until after the mid-terms) and the threat of tariffs on a further $267bn of goods at a later date ‘if China retaliates’. If all this is implemented it would effectively mean China’s entire export trade to the US was subject to tariffs. Trump embarked on this tariff war with China despite very reasonable alternative proposals from the Chinese and urging from key members of his administration to accept a deal.

China’s negotiators offered the US a ‘win-win’ compromise, aiding the US economically while not damaging China. Rather than tariffs or other measures to reduce its exports to the US, China proposed to reduce the trade deficit through increasing its own imports from the US in areas where there is rising demand in China, such as luxury foods – for example cherries, lobsters, beef. China also offered reduced tariffs on US cars. This deal would have aided the US’s farming and manufacturing sectors, presenting an attractive proposition from several perspectives.

Trump snubbed this proposal; demonstrating that ‘reducing the trade deficit’ is not the main goal of this tariff war with China; its real aims are to stifle its technological development, stall growth and therefore encourage political discontent and instability.

At the time of writing it is not clear what the final outcome of the trade dispute will be. The impact of the tariffs on the US consumer has only just begun to be felt, although earlier tariffs on imported washing machines has already led to a 17% price inflation for these white goods in spring 2018. Moreover the inflationary impact of the tariffs is currently mitigated by the fact that the US economy is still in the upswing of the business cycle, with employment high – although inflation is already beginning to impact on real wages. The economic upswing will however not last long into next year, so the political fallout will tend to become clearer later, as both prices push up as a result of the tariffs and the economy slows.

The mid-term elections are also likely to prove a turning point. First it will be an initial electoral judgement upon Trump, which may lead to the Democrats taking control of Congress – although the exact implications of that are also unclear as the Democrats have generally supported the tariffs on Chinese imports. But second, Trump is also likely to delay any further ramping up of the level of tariffs until after November, in order to avoid any larger negative electoral impact.

As for China, on the one hand it is less vulnerable to domestic inflation resulting from the tariffs it has imposed on US goods, as fewer goods are involved. Even the tariff on US soybeans has so far had little impact. However, rather than domestic inflation, China faces the problem of finding new markets as its exports to the US slow; and the danger that many manufacturing companies will cut their losses and simply move elsewhere – although that is a costly option and not all countries can offer China’s experienced and skilled workforce. Mitigating these threats is the fact that China controls its own banking and finance system and many of its major industries meaning that its government has more options for intervention to relieve the impact of the trade war through shifting production into new areas and other measures, which are not available to the small-state ideologues of the West.

But while the outcome of the trade war remains an open question, it is already clear who is winning the overall propaganda and ideological war, and that is China.

While the other Western leaders have been more or less silent, it has been left to China to assume the mantle of global ‘thought leadership’ that the US is abandoning, at each point advancing, in words and in deeds, an alternative vision of a ‘global community’ run on the basis of mutual benefit and ‘win-win’ diplomacy.

The reason that China is increasingly thrust into the ideological leadership of the response to Trump is not simply because the Western countries are too mired economically and strategically with the US to take on Trump, even though they know he represents a coherent, aggressive and ultimately deeply dangerous international force. But it is also because they do not have the philosophical and theoretical armoury to take on the neo-liberal, ‘winner takes all’ ideology that Trump and co avow.

This is the irony of why China is increasingly able to assume ‘thought leadership’, not just for the developing world, but even for the higher interests of the advanced West; because Xi’s thinking about the world rests not on the unscientific, neo-classical mumbo-jumbo of Trump, Cohn and Bannon, but on the understandings of Smith and Marx about the development of production and society.

Xi’s key concept for international relations is that of ‘a common future for humanity’, which is in turn based on the economic foundation of unequivocal support for globalisation. For example he notes: ‘economic globalisation is a result of growing social productivity, and a natural outcome of scientific and technological progress.’[13] He acknowledges there are problems with globalisation, from inequality to governance, but these are outweighed by the benefits, therefore, following an old Chinese proverb: ‘One should not stop eating for fear of choking’.[14]

This is a coherent view, and is drawn from the core ideas on economic development of Adam Smith, later developed by Marx. Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’, the founding work of modern economics, opens with the statement that the greatest development in human productivity seems ‘to have been the effect of the division of labour’. The rest of the work is built on this understanding. Marx took over this concept, which he later reformulated as the increasing ‘socialisation of labour’ being the crucial contribution to raising human productivity and economic growth.[15] Fully internationalised socialisation of labour - that is globalisation - is thus the greatest, most advanced scope that can be achieved by the socialisation of labour and the basis for the most productive development of human labour. In other words, Smith and Marx show that, rather than there is no such thing as society and that individualism of persons and countries is the only way forward, it is human beings as producers interacting in production that has been the basis for the entire advance in wealth and economic output in human history; upon which base is built culture, science and other advances. In other words collectively, socially organised production means that overall output is much greater than the sum of each person’s individual efforts.

Or as Xi put it: ‘one plus one can be greater than two.’[16] And that is why China is winning the battle of ideas with the Trump; because this is scientific and true, whereas the dog-eat-dog world of Trump will just lead to conflict and economic destruction.

 

* Jude Woodward is the author of The US vs China: Asia’s New Cold War?, MUP 2017. This article is an edited version of the introduction to the Dutch/Flemish edition of the book due out in December 2018

 

 

[1] See J. Woodward, The US vs China: Asia’s New Cold War, MUP 2017, Chapter four

[2] Remarks Of President Donald J. Trump – as prepared for delivery, Inaugural Address, 20th January 2017, Washington, DC. Available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/ (Last accessed 8^th August 2018)

[3] President Xi’s speech to Davos in full, World Economic Forum, 17^th January 2017, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/full-text-of-xi-jinping-keynote-at-the-world-economic-forum (last accessed 12th September 2018)

[4] Costa, R. ‘Bannon calls Trump’s speech “Jacksonian”’, 21^st January 2017, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/2017/live-updates/politics/live-coverage-of-trumps-inauguration/bannon-calls-trumps-speech-jacksonian/ (last accessed 3^rd August 2018)

[5] Wolf, M. ‘Donald Trump and Xi Jinping’s battle over globalisation’, 24^th January 2017, Financial TImes

[6] McMaster, H. R. & Cohn, G. D. ‘ America First Doesn’t Mean America Alone ‘, 20^th May 2017, Wall Street Journal

[7] P. Anderson, ‘Imperium and consilium’, New Left Review, 83, Sept–Oct 2013, p. 43

[8] A. Suebsaeng, A. Desiderio, S. Stein, B. Allen-Ebrahimian, ‘Henry Kissinger Pushed Trump to Work With Russia to Box In China’, The Daily Beast, 25^th July 2018

[9] ‘CPC advocates joint building of a clean, beautiful world’, China Daily, 18^th October 2017, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/19thcpcnationalcongress/2017-10/18/content_33404676.htm (last accessed 4^th September 2018)

[10] Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is the Eurasian political, security and economic alliance originally convened in Shanghai in 2001 and now comprising, as full members, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan and observers, Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus and Mongolia. The UN and ASEAN, inter alia, attend as guests

[11] C. Putz, ‘‘A West in crisis, and East rising?’, the Diplomat, 12 June 2018; K. Calamur, ‘Has the Western world started shunning America?’, The Atlantic, 7^th June 2018

[12] Reuters, ‘Japan's Abe tells paper that relations with China are back on 'normal track’, CNBC, 1^st September 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/02/japan-pm-abe-says-relations-with-china-back-on-normal-track-paper.html (last accessed 8^th September 2018)

[13] Xi, J. (2017, 17 January). Shoulder the Responsibilities of Our Time and Promote Global Growth Together. In J. Xi, The Governance of China Vol.2 (pp. 519-532). Beijng: Foreign Languages Press.

[14] ibid

[15] For a fuller exposition of these points see J. Ross, ‘How Xi Jinping’s Marxism outthinks the West’, L’Humanité in English, 7^th May 2018, http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article3184 (last accessed 1^st September 2018)

[16] Xi, J. (2014, 23 March). Follow the Trend of the Times and Promote Global Peace and Development. In J. Xi, The Governance of China (Kindle Edition) (pp. Location 3972-4094). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

US launches ‘all-front’ offensive against China

In the course of 2018 the US launched an offensive against China on multiple fronts. After Trump had spent much of 2017 flattering Xi Jinping and ‘thanking’ China for its help on North Korea, in 2018 the tone coming from the US abruptly harshened, and increasingly hostile acts – on both the trade and military fronts – have been taken or threatened.

Vice President Mike Pence spelt out the rationale for this sharp turn in a seminal speech at the Hudson Institute on 4^th October setting out the administration’s policy towards China. The speech brought together every preceding critique of China whether for its alleged damage to US national interests or its failure to meet Western norms on ‘democracy’ and human rights. Pence spun through China’s alleged crimes on trade, intellectual property, security, cyber attacks, the South China Sea, military spending, ‘debt diplomacy’, support for the ‘wrong’ regimes (e.g. Venezuela) and so on. And he threw in some new ones, particularly the claim that: ‘China has initiated an unprecedented effort to influence American public opinion, the 2018 elections, and the environment leading into the 2020 presidential elections…’[1]

The speech was a major statement of current US policy towards China, and signalled that the aggressive steps towards China that have characterised US actions this year are not a temporary blip to apply pressure on this or that issue, but that competition not cooperation is the strategic direction of US thinking on China for the long term.

‘America had hoped that economic liberalization would bring China into greater partnership with us and with the world. Instead, China has chosen economic aggression, which has in turn emboldened its growing military’, he argued, and that while ‘…previous administrations all but ignored China’s actions – and in many cases… abetted them…those days are over.’ Spelling out that the aim is ‘to reset America’s economic and strategic relationship with China…to finally put America first’.

Many commentators pointed to parallels between Pence’s speech and Winston Churchill’s 1946 Iron Curtain speech in 1946, which announced the Cold War. In China there was especial concern with Pence’s suggestion that there is a growing consensus in both the Republican and Democratic parties on adopting a more confrontational approach to China. Certainly Nancy Pelosi, likely to continue to serve as leader of the House Democrats after the midterms, is a noted hard-line China hawk, who has supported Trump’s tariff war for example. This implies that this new aggressive stance could outlast a Trump presidency, and what is opening is a new era of Cold (and even possibly hot) War between the West led by the US and China.

National Defence Strategy – China not ‘terrorism’ now US primary concern

Pence centrally referred to the major reformulation of the priorities in US foreign policy that was set out in the US Defence Department’s new National Defence Strategy published in January. Titled ‘Sharpening the American military’s competitive edge’ it bluntly placed ‘strategic competition’ with key rivals, i.e. China, ahead of the previous priority to the so-called ‘war on terror’. ‘Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security’, it says. [2]

The Defence Strategy document clarifies precisely what this means: ‘The central challenge to US prosperity and security is the re-emergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers’. And in case the message has not fully got through: ‘Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities for the Department, and require both increased and sustained investment, because of the magnitude of the threats they pose to US security and prosperity today, and the potential for those threats to increase in the future.’

It concludes that the US has to ‘build a more lethal force’, with the capacity to fight and win a war with any enemy. The detailed defence procurement proposals to achieve this are set out in the full strategy document, which is classified. But apparently these precise proposals were developed through giving detailed consideration to which military programmes would be essential, and which would not, if the US were to be able to win in an all-out war with China and/or Russia.

In line with this, in the summer the new defence budget was finally agreed on the basis of a bipartisan vote in Congress that increased US defence spending to $718bn in the coming year, an increase of 13% in one year. This compares to China’s defence budget in 2017 of $228bn.[3]

Nuclear weapons and withdrawal from the INF

Part of this budget is allocated to updating and improving the US nuclear arsenal. In October Trump announced that he intended to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). This treaty was signed between Gorbachev and Reagan and resulted in the removal of Cruise missiles and Soviet SS-20 missiles from sites in Europe and Western Russia, and a commitment by both sides not to develop or deploy land-based intermediate and short-range missiles.

Trump’s withdrawal from the INF is widely seen as mainly targeted at China, which was exempt from the Treaty and so has been able to develop short and intermediate range missiles as the heart of its Eastern and Southern defences. While the US does have sea and air based intermediate range missiles in the region, as these are not permanently stationed they do not present a real capability to defeat China, and would rely on US allies allowing ‘transit rights’ to get missile laden aircraft into combat position.

Commentators consider that the US would like to develop new intermediate range missiles and permanently base these in Guam, Japan or even South Korea. This would strengthen the US’s military position to attack China and potentially force China into an economically damaging arms race. However it would also dramatically increase the military tensions in the region and create major political divisions in Japan and/or South Korea if they were asked to host such US missiles.

Nonetheless, creating the military capacity to ‘win’ a war against China on its home territory is clearly the goal of the Defence Department, one aim of the hike in US defence spending and a strong motivator for the decision to leave the INF.

Militarisation of China’s seas

In advance of any substantive steps to change the military relationship of forces with China in the region, the US has been behaving more aggressively in the South China Sea and the Straits of Taiwan. Using the feeble excuse of defending ‘freedom of navigation’ – which has never been threatened by China which urgently needs free navigation through international waters to conduct its vast international trade – flotillas of US warships have sailed within 12 nautical miles of Chinese islands in the South China Sea.

In 2017 Trump suspended these so-called Freedom of Navigation operations when he was pursuing a softer policy towards China, but since late last year they were reinstated and on a more frequent basis than under Obama. In mid-2018 France and the UK announced that they intended to join the US FONOP operations. Australia is already a participant in this US-instigated militarisation of the South China Sea.

In July this year the US stepped up its aggressive military stance by sending US warships through the Straits of Taiwan, again on the trumped up grounds of defending free navigation. China has never objected to the passage of any commercial shipping through the Straits, but it does object to hostile navies sending warships so close to Chinese home shores. The only ‘freedom of navigation’ this defends is the right of the US to send its Navy right up to China’s coasts; a freedom that the US would hardly accept around its shores.

All these military steps are directed to two goals. Firstly to change the military balance in the region to make it possible for the US to wage an offensive war against China, which the present state of China’s defences compared to the US presence in the region makes very difficult if not impossible with any hope of success. And secondly to force the Chinese to divert economic resources into a damaging arms race that would reduce its competitivity internationally, and with the US in particular. The US hopes this would eventually create a domestic economic squeeze that would undermine support for the regime and provoke popular feeling in favour of caving in to the US based on the illusion that the US would then ‘allow’ China to develop again. Not only is this an illusion, as the US’s chief aim is that China’s growth should be slowed or halted so that it can present no challenge to the US, but, fortunately, China is showing no sign of falling into an ‘arms race’ trap.

Trade wars

However the US’s offensive against China this year has been most concentrated on seeking to apply pressure on its trade. This has correctly commanded most international attention. This has involved Trump’s escalating imposition of up to 25% tariffs on over $250bn worth of Chinese imports into the US. At present there is no sign of the US backing off on this tariff war, despite its negative effect on world trade and boomerang impact on the US economy in pushing up prices and pushing down stocks and shares. Nor has China shown any signs of giving in – although it has offered reasonable concessions and compromises which have been turned down.

So far Trump’s rhetoric has remained bullish; with exaggerated claims that the tariff war is already damaging China and the US is ‘winning’. But this does not hold up against the pressure on the US itself, which is set to worsen. So far the impact on the US economy has been muted by the fact the imposition of tariffs has coincided with the upswing of the business cycle, a happy circumstance that is unlikely to last long into next year. Moreover, Trump was always unlikely to change course before the midterms for political reasons.

Thus it remains is possible that Trump will retreat from the tariff war at some point if the problems it creates domestically begin to outweigh its value in putting pressure on China. But the US economic offensive does not just take the form of a tariff war.

ZTE and attacks on Chinese companies

The imposition of the first tranche of tariffs in April was preceded by an unprecedented US attack on ZTE, one of the top Chinese telecoms’ companies. The company was found to have broken a previous agreement with the US on trade with Iran, a stupid step that was bound to provoke a response from the US. But the level of sanction that the US imposed in punishment – prohibiting ZTE from using US parts or technology for seven years – threatened to completely destroy the company.

After intense negotiations and the departure of the entire management team at ZTE, China managed to get the sanction lifted in July. But not only had the company itself been seriously damaged, possibly fatally, but the confrontation had been an object lesson in how the US’s lead in major technologies gives it huge international leverage, even as its growth rates falter and it runs major trade deficits with key competitors.

US vs China: a new Cold War?

If this shift to all-front aggressive campaign against China is carried through by the Trump administration it will mark a fundamental change in the US’s China policy towards China for the last 20 years or more.

After the tensions of the late 80s and the US sanctions on China following the events of 1989, from Bill Clinton’s administration in the mid-90s onwards, the various incumbents of the White House sought to maintain relatively neutral relations with China. Trade ties were increased, China was brought into the World Trade Organisation, US investment contributed to China’s economic modernisation, and many major US companies shifted their production to China. At the same time the US used its influence to urge China to keep out of the disputes that increasingly wracked the UN Security Council and NATO as the US launched its ‘war on terror’. To maintain this position the US was prepared to meet China halfway on issues of most strategic concern to it – the status of Taiwan in particular.

Already under Obama there was strong pressure from within the US foreign policy and security establishment to toughen up the US’s stance as China grew in economic strength and it began to pose a perceived threat to the US’s pre-eminent position in East and Southeast Asia – hence Obama and Hillary Clinton’s launch of the so-called ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2010. But with the US still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, the challenges and opportunities for US interests presented by the ‘Arab spring’ and the civil war in Ukraine, Obama was never really able to fully follow through on the realignment of priorities that the ‘pivot’ envisaged.

There are still many similar issues confronting Trump before an all-front anti-China policy can be implemented. The US is far from out of the Middle East and Trump has stepped up US involvement in Yemen. The US is also extensively engaged in many unstable African states. Despite Trump’s own preference for a détente with Putin’s Russia, this has not been delivered against opposition within his administration and the Pentagon. Army chief-of-staffs warn that the US military remains over-extended globally and even the large budget hike cannot allow it to upscale sufficiently to believably challenge China and force it to respond without full-blown retreats elsewhere.

But, even if obstacles remain to the launch of a full-blooded Cold War with China, there is now no equivocation that this is the intent of major sections of the current administration and is at the heart of Pentagon strategising. The recently retired Commander of US forces in Europe, Lt Gen Ben Hodges, told the Warsaw Security Forum in October, that he thought ‘it is a very strong likelihood that we will be at war with China’ within 15 years. This is not just dangerous thinking for China, but  for the whole world. No one should be in any doubt that if the US launched a war or generalised aggression towards China that this could be confined to a ‘Pacific theatre’; it would present a threat to the whole world.

This proposed ‘all-front’ offensive against China should be unequivocally opposed in all its aspects: it is unjustified; it is deeply dangerous; its only goal is maintaining US preeminence globally. The Chinese people have the right to live in peace and develop their economy without the malign interference of the US.

 

[1] Vice President Pence’s remarks on the administration’s policy towards China, Hudson Institute, Washington DC, 4^th October, 2018. https://www.hudson.org/events/1610-vice-president-mike-pence-s-remarks-on-the-administration-s-policy-towards-china102018

[2] Summary of the 2018 National Defence Strategy of the USA, ‘Sharpening the American military’s competitive edge’, January 2018. https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf

[3] Figures from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, constant 2016 dollars. China’s defence spending has been rising by about 10% a year, meaning its likely spending in 2019, when the US will spend $718bn, will be around $275bn

Kim plays a blinder in Korea

The one thing that can be said with absolute certainty about the historic first meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in is that it took place despite Donald Trump’s policies towards North Korea, not because of them. It was not sanctions or Trump’s threats that drove Kim to seek rapprochement with South Korea; it was the fact that the North’s nuclear programme was complete and with a deterrent in place, the DPRK[i] could negotiate from a position of strength. Despite Trump’s own inflated claims and those of his international supporters, the only sense in which Trump can be held to have contributed to the current détente is that the population of South Korea became so horrified by his apparent push to war on the peninsula that Moon – elected anyway on a platform of rapprochement with the DPRK – felt strong enough to drive ahead with the opening to the North despite Trump’s belligerent stance.

At no point has the US even particularly encouraged the rapidly unfolding peace process; it has been dragged behind developments on the peninsula, not driven them. At the opening ceremony for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, US Vice President Pence both demonstratively remained seated for the joint North and South Korea teams entry into the stadium, and studiously avoided even acknowledging Kim’s sister who was sitting close by him as guest of honour from the DPRK. This behaviour from the US was met with near universal vilification. Outside a war-mongering coterie within the Beltway, across the globe this initial thawing of relations on the peninsula was greeted with delight and genuine emotion, not least because it alleviated real fears that the world was teetering on the brink of nuclear war. By the closing ceremony Trump had learned the lesson, and Ivanka, his representative stood for the Korean teams – though still avoided interaction with the DPRK delegation.

From the Winter Olympics the momentum towards substantive talks snowballed, without any help from the US. Indeed, when in late February Moon Jae-in suggested that the US should lower its threshold for talks with the North – which was to demand a commitment from the DPRK for total denuclearisation with no preconditions – Trump’s response was to impose the largest package of sanctions to date on North Korea, despite it having carried out no new nuclear tests and already being engaged in a process heading to negotiations with the South.

Meanwhile, Kim’s March visit to China was a clear indication that the DPRK was serious about seeking a thaw on the peninsula. He would not have made the effort to go to Beijing – or been invited in the first place – if he was not offering the Chinese something they seriously wanted to hear.

China’s concerns on the Korean peninsula are twofold: to avoid an escalation in military tensions – not just because of the actual threat of war, but the cover this gives the US in undertaking a regional military build-up actually aimed at China; and also to avoid any devastating economic or political collapse in the DPRK that could allow a US-led reunification of the peninsula, giving it military access to the Chinese border. For nearly 70 years it has been the existence of the DPRK that has prevented US troops being stationed on the Yalu River overlooking China’s northeastern industrial heartland and only 1000km from Beijing.

Thus Xi would have wanted to hear Kim’s proposed steps to reduce the nuclear tensions, but he almost certainly also received some commitments to engage with China to further ‘market socialist’ reforms in the DPRK, which China sees as crucial to deliver the kind of growth in living standards that can ensure stability in the North.

Over the last five years Kim has already carried through significant steps in this direction, which have included infrastructure investment and ‘privatisation’ of some kinds of small business. This has underpinned a healthy rise in DPRK GDP growth rates – 3.9% in 2016, its highest growth rate for 17 years, and after 7 years when its growth has averaged little over zero. 2016 also registered 4.6% export growth, despite tightening of international sanctions. But this has stalled over the last 18 months with the impact of increased international sanctions and deteriorating relations with China inhibiting mutually beneficial economic relations.

China’s drive for the further opening up of the DPRK economy to Chinese investment is not motivated by any potential, tiny, economic benefit to China, but by its political concern that any future reunification of the Korean peninsula should be the outcome of equal negotiations between North and South, explicitly limiting the US military presence, which requires a successful and dynamic DPRK.

Thus, despite Trump’s self-congratulatory tweets following the Kim-Xi meeting, more perspicacious international commentators pointed out that the meeting in fact created problems for Trump, underlining that the China-DPRK axis will drive any terms or settlement on the peninsula, not the US. For example, in an interview with The Atlantic, Yun Sun, director of the Chinese Programme at the Stimson Centre, explained: ‘Last week the assumption was that North Korea’s relationship with China was very bad, so going into the [Trump-Kim] summit we could assume that North Korea would be more desperate to have a deal.’ Following the meeting North Korea has more leverage: ‘… the less isolated North Korea is, the less able the US will be to coerce North Korea in any direction.’

The Xi-Kim meeting in Beijing led directly into the historic Moon-Kim meeting on the North-South border, again without any role for the US – beyond Trump giving his endorsement to a process that was already proceeding.

The Moon-Kim meeting was an evident success at every level. The meeting has increased the popularity of Moon Jae-in, currently polling at an astounding 75% in South Korea, and has amplified support for the peace process with the North. Prior to these recent developments support for Korean reunification in the South had been declining, particularly among younger South Koreans, with a recent survey showing that 71.2% of South Koreans in their 20’s opposed reunification. The meeting in April between Moon and Kim has reportedly had an impact on this already, not least because Kim himself made a favourable public impression; the evident rapport between him and Moon was reinforced by positive responses to his confident and relaxed manner of speaking – the first time most South Koreans had heard the North Korean leader speak in his own voice.

The success of the meeting has left Trump little choice but to agree to start serious planning for his own meeting with Kim. Driven by his notorious amour-propre, Trump would no doubt like the accolade of being the first US president to meet with a leader of the DPRK. But there have been numerous voices of caution from hardliners in the administration who believe the US is being rushed into talks with the North without any guarantees as to what it is really prepared to offer on denuclearisation. And, from their own point of view, they are right.

Kim has promised an end to tests and the destruction of North Korean test site(s), and he has pledged to discuss full denuclearisation. But he has not agreed to abandon any of the DPRK’s existing nuclear weapons or missiles, which Kim sees as a necessary deterrent to any Iraq, Libya or Syria type operation by the US against the North. This is a long way from the verifiable full denuclearisation that has been the US precondition for talks right up until the last couple of weeks. But when NBC journalist, Chuck Todd, pointed this out, it provoked Trump into a typically hyper twitter response to ‘sleepy eyes Chuck Todd of fake news NBC’ , where Trump claimed that North Korea had agreed to ‘Wow…denuclearisation’ when this was manifestly untrue.

This is all further evidence that it is not the US, but careful tactics by Kim and the North, aided by the desire for a peaceful solution in the South, that is driving the process towards talks.

The underlying problem for the US in this unfolding peace process is the threat that it poses to the US military presence in South Korea. South Korea’s strategic location has always placed it at the heart of US military policy in East Asia, both in relation to the USSR in the past, and currently primarily towards China. The US bases in South Korea are its only ones actually on the continent of Asia east of Islamabad; geographically they are the most proximate to China of all its bases, and its annual naval exercises with South Korea take place the closest to China’s shores.[ii] Only Japan is as militarily and strategically significant as South Korea.

The 28 US army and air bases in the country are critical for the US’s strategic position in northeast Asia. Comprising 23,500 US troops in 2017, this is its third largest permanent overseas deployment after Japan and Germany; and will become its second largest, as its drawdown from Germany continues. Fort Humphreys, a new US base, will become the largest single US garrison in Asia. A Senate Report found that the costs to the US of its military presence in Korea in 2012 amounted to nearly $3.1 billion, not including the South Korean contribution of $765 million.[iii]

From 1950 until 1994 the US had complete day-to-day operational control – OpCon – over the South Korean army. This was ended for peacetime operations in 1994, but OpCon would still revert to the US in the case of war. The transfer of wartime command over its own army to South Korea has been serially postponed.

Since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, opposition to the US’s military role and presence in South Korea has grown, sometimes erupting into major street demonstrations – most recently against the installation of the US’s anti-missile THAAD system.

The US’s winning card in seeing off opposition to its military role in South Korea has always been the ‘threat’ from the DPRK; its image in the West as an irrational rogue state and exaggerating the threat from its primitive nuclear weapons programme have ensured both the South Korea’s compliance and Congressional support for the huge budgets required.

Periodically the actions of the DPRK have indeed seemed to confirm allegations that it challenges regional security. But US inflexibility on the DPRK has been driven less by the actions of Pyongyang than by concern to maintain an internationally acceptable cover for the US military position in the South. It is the US that has scuppered every previous attempt to engage in a peace process.

For example, in June 1994, former president Carter, during a visit to the North, persuaded the ageing Kim Il-sung to agree points for a treaty with the US, under which the US agreed to lift some sanctions, help the North build light water reactors and supply it with domestic fuel oil in return for ending its nuclear arms programme. But the US never implemented it, with the Clinton administration believing the desperately weakened post-Cold War situation of the state would mean it collapsed before the US had to make good on its side of the deal. The North, however, did suspend its weapons programme.

Alongside these developments in the US, the impact of the end of the Cold War on South Korea was a greater sense of security due to the absence of the threat from an alliance between the USSR and DPRK. In this context the South adopted a new spirit of engagement towards the North, with successive presidents – from right and left – pursuing rapprochement with the North, culminating in the historic summit between President Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang 2000.

Unsurprisingly, parallels have been drawn between that summit in 2000, and the April meeting between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un, with right-wing commentators arguing that nothing came of that summit in terms of denuclearisation and therefore nothing can be expected from this one either. This is to ignore the context and the role of the US in derailing the process.

Despite the DPRK having closed its nuclear programme and signed up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in his 2002 State of the Union address announcing the ‘war on terror’, Bush included North Korea as part of a global ‘axis of evil’. A year later Iraq was invaded, and fearing it was the next target the DPRK withdrew from the NPT and relaunched its nuclear weapons programme. It was the US offensive against the DPRK that scuppered the peace process unfolding from the 2000 North-South summit, not the obstructionism of the North.

The return to a nuclear programme in the North was however viewed with alarm in South Korea, as it was also in China, which was on the brink of becoming the South’s main export market (which it did in 2003). The two countries came together to try to persuade Washington back into negotiations.

Together they initiated the framework for ‘six-party talks’ involving the US, China, Russia, Japan and both Koreas, with the aim of getting the US to the table with the DPRK. The US agreed to participate and several rounds of talks were held between 2003 and 2007. But Bush constantly intervened to scupper any agreement. In 2006 the US blew up the talks by refusing to release North Korean foreign assets, and when they resumed they were blocked again by the US claiming the DPRK had failed to fully disclose nuclear facilities.

Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun, had been elected in 2002 on a pledge to continue to seek openings to the North despite Bush’s positions on the ‘war on terror’. His government increasingly worked with China to keep the talks going despite US sabotage them, and a summit between Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang in 2007 proposed to continue this dialogue towards a peace settlement. But any progress from this meeting was ended by the election of the right-wing Grand National Party’s presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak in 2008 pledged to take a hard line on the North and reprioritise relations with the US. Relations with the North deteriorated rapidly, only beginning to stabilise after the election of Park Geun-hye in 2013. But she took no initiatives towards the North, and agreed to an increase in the US military presence in the South. An increasingly isolated North decided to accelerate its development of a nuclear deterrent, with the stepped up missile and nuclear tests leading to the recent sharpening of tensions on the peninsula.

The question is now whether the US will once again scupper the positive progress towards a peace deal in Korea? The problem for the US, for all its talk of peace and deals, is that every actual step towards a settlement in Korea undermines the case for its high level military presence in the South and the aggressive military exercises it stages in northeast Asia each year.

Although Kim has been careful not to say it – as it would give the US an excuse to walk away – any scrapping of the North’s existing nuclear weapons would clearly have to be tied to a US withdrawal from the peninsula. The US is utterly unwilling to concede an inch on this, as its military presence in South Korea is crucial to maintaining its strategic position vis-à-vis China. Hence why it has always scuppered any progress in talks.

The deeper the US is drawn into these new talks, and with growing sentiment in South Korea both for a peace process and against the US military presence, the harder it will be for it to refuse concessions without losing status, and friends in the region.

It is not Trump that has pulled off a blinder in Korea, that honour rests, somewhat surprisingly, with Kim Jong-un. Watch this space. It will be interesting.

 

[i] DPRK, Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, North Korea; ROK, Republic of Korea, South Korea

[ii] The US has a small military presence in Thailand of c.100 personnel.

[iii] ‘Inquiry into the US costs and allied contributions to support the US military presence overseas’, Report of the Committee on Armed Services, US Senate, 15 April 2013.

Trump’s tour of Asia: an emperor with no clothes

 

Despite the razzamatazz of Trump’s visit to Asia, the verdict of the international news media was unanimous: the trip had simply served to underline the US’s declining influence in Asia; a decline that Trump is blamed for accelerating by ceding leadership to China on the crucial issues of contemporary geopolitics: trade, climate change, development and multilateral agreements.

This was reflected most clearly towards the end of the trip at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Vietnam. Trump cut an almost irrelevant and isolated figure, whose bombastic speech was peppered with dire threats on trade that were simply ignored by his audience. In telling contrast, speaking soon after Trump, China’s president Xi Jinping, talked about the positive role of globalisation and the contribution of a ‘multilateral trading regime’ to ensuring developing countries ‘benefit more from international trade and investment’ in which China pledged to play a key role.

Thus, while the changing relationship of forces between China and the West is primarily down to the continuing contrast between China’s rapid growth and the West’s relative stagnation, which predated Trump, there is no doubt that his ‘America First’ framework and isolationist foreign policy have further weakened the position of the US internationally and especially in Asia.

A recent survey conducted in 37 countries by the Pew Research Center showed that international confidence in American leadership has declined sharply in the last year, particularly in some of the key countries of the Asia-Pacific. In South Korea and Japan confidence in the US president to make the right decisions internationally fell by 71 and 54 percentage points respectively. In Indonesia it fell by 41 percentage points and even in pro-US Philippines it fell by 25 points. As the Washington Post put it: ‘This is nothing short of a disaster for American soft power’.

It is a contradictory fact for those sections of the international and American left that still have illusions in Clinton that despite Trump’s appeal to right-wing populism, racist immigration policies and proposed tax cuts for the rich, there is no doubt that if Hillary Clinton had become president she would have pursued a more aggressive US line internationally, against China, Russia and in the Middle East, not just in words – à la Trump – but in deeds.

Probably the most decisive single act in weakening the US position in Asia was Trump’s decision to pull out from the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Clinton may have also said that the deal was flawed, but she had left herself a number of let-out clauses that suggested if elected President she would probably have found a way to go ahead. The US abandoning the TPP was a major blow to its standing in the region, not least because most of the other signatories had ridden out substantial domestic oppositions to get agreement through their respective legislatures. They did not like being marched up to the top of the hill only to be left standing exposed.

Moreover, despite correct criticisms of the TPP by oppositions within the signatory countries, the deal did put something on the table for both sides. Obama’s administration, which had driven the entire process, had also faced resistance in getting the TPP through Congress, precisely because it pledged the other signatories significant new openings to the US market – albeit in return for accepting effective US regulation of their domestic economic policies, opening up their own markets to US imports and, of course, distancing themselves from China.

Trump’s alternative vision of new bilateral trade negotiations with the US has gone down like a lead balloon with potential partners. As the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee, put it entirely accurately when on a visit to Washington: ‘I think [the Trump administration] believe that, bilaterally, you are bigger than any other partner that comes along and so you get a better deal. As a result of which I think not that many partners will be keen to deal with you bilaterally.’[i] Even Japan has resisted Trump’s blandishments to enter bilateral trade talks.

Thus while US domestic protectionist lobbies and others applauded Trump for pulling out of the TPP, it was greeted with consternation in US foreign policy circles, as it left the US with no economic or trade initiative to counter China. As if to underline this, it was while most of the original TPP signatories were with Trump at the APEC summit in Vietnam that they chose to announce their plans to resuscitate the deal without the participation of the US.

Worse, immediately after Trump left the ASEAN meeting in the Philippines, the first full summit of the 16-country Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership convened also without the US. The RCEP, which has been driven by China, would be an even wider trade deal than the TPP, including China, India and South Korea, which are not partners to the TPP. This RCEP, likely to be agreed next year, will involve tariff reductions in economies that together constitute a quarter of the world economy.

The announcement that the TPP would go ahead without the US and the first summit of the RCEP were graphic illustrations of just how little the US is seen to contribute to the economic development of the Asia-Pacific region. But the TPP and RCEP were just the ones that came up during the trip. Other China-led investment and development initiatives are setting an entirely new economic agenda in Asia. These include the establishment of the $100bn Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which the US tried and failed to bloc in 2015; and the gigantic Belt and Road Initiative to develop land and sea transport and communications infrastructure from East Asia to Europe, involving 60 countries and projecting upwards of $4tr in investment over coming years.

While everywhere Trump went he was treated to a charm offensive, the pomp was almost in inverse proportion to his actual influence. In Japan Prime Minister Abe described Trump as his ‘favourite guy’ (to play golf with!) – before announcing the relaunch of the TPP without the US a few days later. In South Korea he was introduced at the National Assembly as ‘leader of the world’, while President Moon oiled that Trump was ‘already making America great’ again. But immediately on Trump’s departure South Korea announced a reset of its relations with China and limits to the deployment of the US THAAD anti-missile system that China objected to. In the Philippines President Duterte sang Trump a Filipino love song at their gala dinner, but continued to reorient his country to China and turned down any role for the US in the South China Sea.

For its part, China did not throw around such personal praise during Trump’s visit, but the red carpet was rolled out for him in every respect.

But despite the glitz, Trump will find it hard to show what he brought home from the trip, either on trade – which he had declared was the number one issue for his Asian tour – or on strengthening the US’s military position in the region.

The exception is that he can say he signed trade and investment deals with China worth $250bn – a very considerable sum. However, scratching the surface reveals that these deals are all in the form of Memoranda of Understanding, reflecting aspirations, future potential projects and expressions of interests rather than definite commitments. This is not to say that the Chinese are acting in bad faith and do not intend to meet at least some of what has been proposed – and even if only 25% came to fruition, $60plus billion is a lot of investment. But it does leave open what would happen to these deals if the US were to ratchet up the military pressure over North Korea or in the South China Sea?

As outlined above, it was when Trump reached Vietnam for the APEC summit that the pomp accompanying his Asian tour fell away and the emperor was seen to have no clothes. His speech to APEC was to all intents and purposes ignored. Perhaps as a result, or because the trip was almost over, Trump, whose tweets had been more measured than usual during his visit, returned to using Twitter to trade insults with North Korea and launch unexpected policy initiatives. But apart from provoking a North Korean death threat for describing Kim Jong-un as ‘short and fat’, even his tweets brought little interest.

This was most striking in the lack of any response to his tweeted and off-the-cuff suggestion that the US ‘mediate’ on the South China Sea disputes: ‘I’m a very good mediator’ he claimed. The silence with which this was greeted was in sharp contrast to the flurry of diplomacy, protests from China, remilitarisation and stepped up conflict that flowed from Hillary Clinton’s offer made in the same terms – in the same country – in 2010. That Clinton speech in Hanoi marked the launch of Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, which led in particular to a heating up of conflict between the various claimants to islets in the South China Sea, which in turn was used to justify a sharply stepped up US naval presence in the Sea.

This time Trump’s audience simply shrugged and moved on. On the one hand this was partly because the experience of stepped up US intervention in the region after 2010 had not been positive. US involvement had led to disruptive tensions and military threats compared to the relative stability of the preceding period when the disagreements over territory in the South China Sea had been successfully managed bilaterally or under the auspices of ASEAN.

IMF projected growth rates for the key South China Sea economies – not just China – suggest they will massively outstrip growth in the US (and EU) over the next five years.[ii] Given that military conflict in the region is about the only thing that could disrupt this, there is no appetite among these countries for signing up to a US policy of ratchetting up tensions with China over disputes in the Sea.

But above all, it is because the countries of the region increasingly no longer feel obliged to answer when the USA calls or jump when it says ‘Attention!’

It is true that US still has a substantial military advantage over China, and is still accepted as key security guarantor by most countries in the region. But as these countries do not believe the Western hype that China is engaged in a dangerous expansionist policy in the region and do not feel under military threat from their neighbours, the US’s military might has limited clout in determining priorities. As former Philippines president Gloria Arroyo said during the ASEAN summit: ‘[In the 1980s] everybody thought China would become a competitor. Today, we see China is not a …competitor. It’s a collaborator, a donor and a market.’

By contrast with Trump’s blundering and bombast, China has shown an increased sureness of foot in the international arena, sidestepping Trump’s rhetorical excesses and relentlessly pursuing stable international relations, demonstrating subtlety and effectiveness in dealing with the series of tensions that have emerged in the last year as a result of the big changes in the White House.

On the one hand China has drawn clear ‘red lines’ which have been accepted – for example, in turning around Trump’s early suggestions that the US might break with ‘one China’ on relations with Taiwan. On the other, China has been prepared to meet the US ‘half-way’ on such issues as sanctions on North Korea, some liberalisation of trade, for example allowing the import of more US beef and the MOUs signed during Trump’s visit.

China’s success can be measured by a real retreat by Trump from his ultra-hostile starting point on relations with China. Personally Trump has appeared wrong-footed by China, overly keen to assert that he and Xi have a special relationship and that China is a ‘good friend’. During the trip Trump went further, taking the Western media aback by saying ‘I don’t blame China’ for ‘unfair’ trade relationships with the US, instead reproaching previous US administrations. And it is not just a matter of words. In the White House, extreme China hawks, like Peter Navarro, have been sidelined, while others, like Steve Bannon, have departed.

While this success is considerably down to China’s effective foreign policy responses, not just towards the US but also its Asian partners, Trump’s policies have isolated the US further. China’s success in building partnerships in Asia is because it is consistently putting forward solutions to complex regional problems that offer mutual benefit in securing stability for trade and economic development.

It is precisely on these decisive issues for the fast developing economies of Asia that Trump’s ‘America First’ protectionism is empty. Thus perhaps the most telling assessment of Trump’s Asia tour was the despairing The Washington Post headline: ‘This is how a superpower commits suicide’.

Jude Woodward is the author of ‘The US vs China: Asia’s new Cold War’, Manchester University Press, 2017

 

[i] Donnen, S. ‘Globalisation marches on without Trump’, Financial Times, 6 November 2017

[ii] The cumulative IMF growth rate projections for 2016-22 for these countries are: Philippines 48%, China and Vietnam 44%, Indonesia 37%, Malaysia 34%, Hong Kong SAR 20%, Singapore 17%, Province Taiwan 13%, compared to the US and EU on 12% apiece. Source: IMF World Economic Outlook October 2007, calculations courtesy John Ross

The US is to blame for the crisis with North Korea, and the US could solve it

 

Once again tensions between the US and North Korea over the latter’s nuclear programme have reached a dangerous boiling point, as North Korea carried out its largest-ever nuclear test in early September.

As with previous missile and nuclear tests by the DPRK, this test was accompanied by provocative rhetoric, threats and counter-threats from both sides. But evidently this is of most concern coming from the US, as the US actually has the capacity to carry out its threats, whereas despite the blood-curdling warnings in the Western media, Kim Jong-un does not.

North Korea’s claims have included that US cities are now within the reach of its missiles, that it plans to ‘contain’ the US base in Guam and it would respond to US attack by putting ‘an end to the US’. However these threats are in reality preposterous; North Korea does not have the arsenal to inflict any damage whatsoever to the US mainland or Guam. Such threats are however very dangerous as they are used in the West to whip up public opinion against North Korea, and in support of any response made by the US.

The US, on the other hand, definitely does have the capacity to obliterate the DPRK many times over. It is therefore of great concern that, in response to the latest test, US defence secretary Mattis threatened North Korea with a ‘massive military’ reaction; and that hardline Republican senators like Lindsey Graham, told the BBC that the US should be willing to contemplate 100,000s of civilian deaths to bring North Korea to heel.

Regarding the fundamental background to these events it is US foreign policy, particularly since the 2002 launch of the so-called ‘war on terror’, that has led to this crisis. In 2003 Bush, backed by Tony Blair, faked evidence of a continuing Iraqi nuclear programme to justify by-passing the UN to pursue illegal ‘regime change’ in that country. After defeating the regime through its military policy of ‘shock and awe’, Saddam Hussein and his family were hunted down and he hanged by a kangaroo court.

In Libya, Gaddafi drew the lesson from this that he must make a deal with the US and actually close down the Libyan nuclear programme; but this did not protect Libya from NATO bombing, nor Gaddafi also being hunted down like an animal and murdered with the tacit backing of the West.

The same was intended for Assad; but with Russia backing the regime, and the populations of the US and Europe growing wary of both the costs and domestic blowback from such wars, the US was unable to simply bomb its way to overthrowing Assad.

Putin analysed the situation rather accurately, identifying the US’s repeated violations of the UN Security Council as the prime cause of the uncomfortable bed in which the US and the rest of the world is now lying: 'Foreign [US] interventions in Iraq and Libya had convinced the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, that he needed nuclear weapons to survive, Putin said. “We all remember what happened with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. His children were killed, I think his grandson was shot, the whole country was destroyed and Saddam Hussein was hanged ... We all know how this happened and people in North Korea remember well what happened in Iraq.”'

In other words, the main threat to world peace comes from the US’s record of unilateral military actions – exactly as those who opposed them warned at the time.

For small states that are in the crosshairs of the US the lessons are crystal clear. There is no persuasion, no talking, no UN that will protect you if the US decides to come for you. The only solution is to do what is possible to deter the US by building up a sufficient arsenal, including nuclear weapons, so that the threatened collateral damage acts as a brake.

And North Korea has plenty of reasons to feel threatened. Obama’s 2010 ‘pivot to Asia’ – which is one Obama policy that Trump is not reversing – was universally understood to be aimed at containing China, but within this North Korea was set up as a convenient scapegoat and cover for the US’s real intentions. For example, the stationing of the THAAD missile defence system in South Korea was proposed in response to North Korea, although its main target is really China and Russia – THAAD is a far too powerful system, with radar ranges of thousands of kilometres, to be aimed purely at North Korea.

From 2010, US bases in South Korea were expanded, with a new base, Fort Humphreys, slated to become the largest US base in Asia. Meanwhile North Korea’s other unfriendly neighbour, Japan, embarked on a sharp increase in its military spending and deepened its military collaboration with the US.

The DPRK’s August firing of an unarmed missile over Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island took place the day after the conclusion of US-Japan Northern-Viper-II wargames on the island that simulated invasion of North Korea and a ‘decapitation’ operation to remove the regime.

The US has also stepped up the scale of its annual Key Resolve/Foal Eagle land and sea based training exercises held jointly with South Korea, which the North Korean government had regularly objected to. The annual training exercise was already the largest held globally by the US, and from 2010 it was upgraded continuously. In 2013 B-2 and B-52 bombers were included; the exercise in 2016 was the largest to date.

The sea-borne element of these exercises often close in on the North Korean Yellow Sea coast, where the offshore border between North and South Korea is disputed. While the land border at the 38 parallel was de facto agreed by both sides in 1953, the western sea border was not. Despite North Korea’s reasonable objections, the UN, at the behest of the US, which entirely dominated it at the time, unilaterally imposed a sea border curving up the western coast of North Korea, rather than extending the line of the land border out to sea. (see link for map)

The threatening mien of this escalating US military presence, plus the evidence of the US’s practical implementation of ‘regime change’ since 2003, is the reality that has driven the North Korean nuclear programme, which was restarted in 2003 after being suspended under the ‘Agreed Framework’ with the US in the late 1990s. The DPRK knows its nuclear weapons cannot defeat the US, but they can offer sufficient threat to South Korea and Japan that they will act to stay the US’s hand on military action. And threaten some damage to US assets as well.

However, the real defence of the DPRK is that offered by China and Russia. Quite apart from the fact that China has no more intention today that it showed in 1950 of allowing the US to be able station its troops on the Yalu river that runs along its border with the DPRK, both China and Russia are determined that the US will not spread its policies of devastation and instability (as seen in the Middle East) to their backyard.

And it is in this regard that the behaviour of North Korea becomes rather less reasonable or defensible, and more straightforwardly provocative, as despite China’s role as its chief international defender – alongside Russia – and key economic and trading partner, North Korea refuses point blank to listen to its advice or take account of its concerns.

China does not make a big campaign against the DPRK’s nuclear programme, but does suggest that the DPRK should proceed quietly and calmly, refrain from provocative rhetoric and unrealistic threats, and present itself as reasonable, balanced and prepared to talk. China would have liked to see more positive signs in response to openings like the election of a South Korean president committed to easing tensions with the North, which might have positively impacted on Moon’s own wavering.

China’s – and Russia’s – proposal in relation to the current crisis has been dubbed ‘freeze-freeze’: that the US agrees to refrain from holding military exercises off the North Korean coast and that North Korea suspends its nuclear programme to allow talks to take place.

China has stood up to the West’s demands that it impose comprehensive sanctions on North Korea, which would wreck the DPRK’s economy. But China is also concerned to avoid a complete breakdown with the West, so earlier in 2017 it agreed to a figleaf of some limited sanctions on North Korea.

Rather than showing understanding of the corner that China had been placed in, North Korea’s state media denounced China for crossing a ‘red line’ and for ‘dancing to the tune of the US’.

North Korea followed this up by scheduling missile and nuclear test at times chosen to most embarrass and create difficulties for China.

Thus, in May, a missile test was launched hours before president Xi was due to open China’s key 2017 international event, the ‘Belt and Road Forum’ in Beijing, convened to take forward proposals for improved overland and sea communication links across Asia to the West. Similarly, early September’s nuclear test was timed for the eve of the 2017 BRICS summit that was convening in Beijing.

There is no doubt that these tests were deliberately timed as a snub to China.

This is completely unreasonable behaviour by North Korea and makes its defence against the US harder.

Rather than berating China, Kim Jong-un should learn from how it handles its international relations, and listen rather more to its well-judged advice on how North Korea should conduct itself internationally.

However, in the final analysis, it is the US that holds the key to the situation on the Korean peninsula. The speeded up development of North Korea’s, still very primitive, nuclear arsenal and its missile tests are not the real threat to peace in the region. Rather its is the US’s evident capacity to inflict nuclear annihilation, and a White House that is making escalating threats to actually use it, that creates fear in every thinking person’s breast.

Overall, the US will probably not make such a reckless step, primarily because China and Russia stand behind North Korea – which together could inflict great damage on the US, even if the DPRK cannot – and Trump cannot be sure what they would do in response.

But that just means ongoing crisis and tension in the region. If the US really wanted peace and to persuade North Korea to mothball its nuclear programme it would not only have to eschew ‘regime change’, but offer clear security guarantees on the ground, including ending its provocative war games off its coasts.

The US vs China: Asia’s new Cold War by Jude Woodward, Manchester University Press., 2017. Available to order in the UK and USA through bookshops and online

Is Trump losing South Korea?

A significant initial impact of the crisis that Trump has whipped up over North Korea was to push security issues up the agenda in South Korean politics, aiding the US in speeding up the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) and boosting the poll ratings of the more pro-US candidate in the Presidential elections due on 9 May. But Trump’s more recent statements about this key US Northeast Asian ally have been so casually insulting that they have led to an upsurge in anti-US sentiment as the elections draw closer.

An exclusive Oval Office interview with Reuters on Thursday 27^th April, was widely flagged under headlines referring to Trump’s portentous warnings that ‘There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea’.

What was less widely reported in the West – but hit the headlines in South Korea – was the fact that he went on to suggest that he may ‘terminate’ the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (known at KORUS), which he described as a ‘horrible deal’ and as ‘a Hillary Clinton disaster… that should’ve never been made’.

So far so not new; Trump has repeatedly put a question mark over all existing US trade deals, especially those with countries with which it runs a trade deficit. But when the interviewer asked when he would decide to renegotiate the agreement, he declared: ‘I am announcing it now’, threatening to unilaterally cancel it if the US could not get a ‘fair deal’. Announcing the renegotiation of a trade deal with a critical ally, and major trading partner, via an interview with Reuters may be par for the course for a US president that announces bombings on his personal twitter account; but this did not go down well in South Korea where the issues of the US military presence and its influence over South Korea’s security policy are already not universally popular to say the least.

But this was not the end of the blunders in Trump’s interview. He went on to say that he wanted South Korea to pay $1bn for the THAAD anti-missile system. This caused outrage, particularly as South Korea only agreed to host the system at all because of unrelenting US pressure, riding out both domestic opposition and strong objections from neighbouring China to meet this US demand; and that the agreement was explicitly on the basis that the South Koreans provided the locations, while the system itself remained both the property and the economic responsibility of the US.

Both the presidential front-runner, Moon Jae-in – who opposes THAAD – and the second place candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo – who supports it – responded angrily, renewing calls that the stationing of THAAD should be slowed until after the elections to allow the new government to reconsider the matter. This undoubtedly boosted the numbers already participating in major protests and sit-downs attempting to block the US convoys installing the THAAD system.

By Saturday 29^th April, Trump’s security advisor McMaster, was on the phone to the acting president of South Korea to reassure him that the US expected no payment for THAAD, and that Trump’s comments had been made in the ‘general context’ of expectations of ‘defence cost burden-sharing with allies’.

This Trump blunder however had already compounded the fury in South Korea at the insulting level of ignorance he had shown when, in a 12 April interview with the Wall Street Journal, he claimed that ‘Korea actually used to be a part of China’!

Nor had South Korea been consulted prior to Trump’s mid-April Twitter announcement that he was sending an ‘armada’ to the Korean peninsula. In the light of this blatant disrespect, not surprisingly the South Korean media were especially excoriating when it emerged that this alleged armada – the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group – was in fact heading for the Indian Ocean at the time.

The upshot is that while Trump has continued to apply stepped up pressure to China and sent envoys on a charm offensive to win Asian allies support for a tougher line on North Korea – senior White House officials visited Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines over the last few days – in reality it is key ally, South Korea, that this policy chiefly impacts upon and whose support is decisive. But the effect is that South Korea is becoming progressively more alienated from the US.

Both front-running presidential candidates in South Korea have strengthened their calls for the resumption of talks with, rather than threats against North Korea. A Moon presidency in particular spells a potential problem for Trump’s ‘get tough’ policy on the North. Not only is Moon committed to trying to restart the six-party talks, but he has promised a new version of the 1998-2008 ‘sunshine policy’ towards the DPRK that successfully bought stability on the peninsula in return for talks, international advocacy for the North, aid, trade and other openings.

Moon currently looks unbeatable given that the climb in the polls of the more pro-US Ahn stalled in the face of the erosion of popular support for Trump’s interventions.

Trump’s military threats are genuinely dangerous in the context of North Korea’s isolation and understandable paranoia, with an unintended conflict not impossible. But his bluster, bombast and incivility is not winning friends in South Korea and therefore are not bringing together a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Northeast Asia that includes the US ally most central to the issues.

China is the real target for Trump’s menaces on North Korea

Trump’s dramatic escalation of sabre-rattling over North Korea from mid-April was not triggered by any new provocative action by North Korea nor any notable advance in its nuclear or missile programme, although in the din of overwrought rhetoric emanating from Mar-a-lago it appeared that the US and North Korea's neighbours faced an imminent threat. But this crisis was conveniently timed to influence the outcome of the South Korean presidential elections due on 9^th May.

The sudden heightening of US rhetoric on North Korea, with unnerving suggestions that the US might imminently launch a pre-emptive strike, did not relate to any specific actions by the North. The DPRK had indeed run several missile tests on 6^th March, which led to protests, especially by Japan, but there were no threats of imminent action by the US. It was not until five weeks later, on 12^th April – shortly after Xi’s visit to the US – that the crisis was kicked off by Trump's boastful claim that he had despatched a US ‘armada’ to the peninsula. The following day the tensions escalated when a White House representative was quoted as saying the US was considering retaliatory action against the North, which was given additional weight when set against the dropping of the so-called 'Mother of all bombs' in Afghanistan on the same day. It is true that two days after this, on 16^th April, the North did make a further missile test – which ignominiously failed. But this was after the crisis had broken out and anyway showed the opposite to the White House contention that the North Korean programme was now dangerously advanced.

However, what this furore did create were great fears in the region that war might be on the horizon, pushing national security issues right up the agenda in South Korea. Until this crisis began to unfold, the clear front-runner in the presidential race, was Moon Jai-in, the left-leaning Democratic Party candidate. Moon was opposed to the US stationing of the THAAD missile defence system, and is strongly oriented to China and seen as more distant from the US.[i] The sudden increase in tension with the North allowed the US to insist upon the speeding up the deployment of THAAD, so that it will be sufficiently advanced by the elections that it is hard to roll it back. Moon himself also backed off from outright opposition to THAAD as the sabre-rattling and fears of war boosted the poll ratings of the more centrist and pro-American candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo, who is now running neck-and-neck with Moon. Both of these outcomes clearly suit the US.

Not only this crisis, but the whole ongoing crisis in relations with North Korea and the very existence of its nuclear weapons programme, are problems entirely of the US’s own making. For 67 years, since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the US has refused to enter into diplomatic relations with the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), while maintaining a continuous sanctions regime against it – the longest by any state against another. It has repeatedly sabotaged attempts by China and South Korea to facilitate international talks that could bring the North in from the cold and persuade it to close down its nuclear weapons programme in return for security guarantees, trade and normalisation of relations. Instead the US has demonised the North as an irrational rogue state, which it refuses to deal with, accompanied by frequent direct threats of military action.

This US inflexibility on the DPRK and its constant sabotage of talks for nearly 70 years have not been driven by the actions of Pyongyang, but by US concerns to maintain local support for it military presence in South Korea – which has never been universally popular – and latterly to provide an internationally acceptable cover for the extensive and growing US military deployments in North-east Asia. The original Cold War case for its huge presence in the region had ceased looking so reasonable after the fall of the USSR, especially with China increasingly on very good terms with its neighbours and beyond. Thus caricaturing North Korea as a dangerous, unpredictable, failed state, and exaggerating the threat from its still rather primitive nuclear arms programme have served to justify an on-going US presence in South Korea and Japan, the real target of which is to ensure ongoing US military dominance in the region, particularly in the context of the rise of China.

It is true that some of the actions of Kim Jong-un, who came to power in North Korea in 2011 following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, have indeed played into this US agenda, such as the provocative timing of missile launches, the use of belligerent and threatening language and overblown claims for its nuclear weapons capacity.

But this is a recent development. Although North Korea has always had a bad press in the West, in reality under its two previous leaders, Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il, its actions could be well understood by anyone who bothered to give it sufficient attention to get beyond the media caricatures. But this requires understanding Korea’s unresolved post-1945 history.

In 1945, with Germany defeated in the west, the USSR joined the Allied effort against the Japanese. To the enthusiastic welcome of the local population, it subsequently swept through the Korean peninsula liberating it from Japanese colonial occupation. However the USSR halted its advance at the 38^th parallel, as it had previously agreed with the Allies, and allowed the US time to move its own army into the remainder of the country. This temporarily divided Korea between the areas under USSR and US administration, north and south of the 38^th parallel.

In the northern part of partitioned Korea the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) then led a thoroughgoing revolution to overturn the old elites. With backing from the USSR, first the lands of Japanese collaborators were seized, then of all large landlords; their lands were redistributed to the peasants. This was immensely popular and made Kim Il-sung, already well known for his role in the resistance to Japan, into a national hero. The land reform was followed by nationalisations, the introduction of extensive social, welfare and workers’ rights and, on the model of the USSR, the attempt to embark upon building ‘socialism in one country’.

In the South, by contrast, the US occupying force was forced to rely on the landlords and ruling elites – many of whom were hated collaborators with the Japanese – in order to prevent the widespread mobilisation of the southern population linking up with developments in the North and extending the revolution to the whole peninsula. Amid riots and rising popular opposition to the US occupation force, which was widely viewed as just another colonial army replacing the Japanese, the US staged rigged elections which installed pro-US strongman Syngman Rhee at the head of a de facto military government of the ‘Republic of Korea’ (ROK) in the South. The US then withdrew from Korea (as did the USSR), having ensured it had left a puppet government in the South that would resist the extension of the revolution in the North to the rest of the country.

The North’s 1950 attempt to overcome the division of the peninsula arose directly from these developments in the South. Repression of popular movements, failure to address the post-war devastation of the economy, and the continuing role of known collaborators in his government soon made Syngman Rhee even more unpopular in the South than he had been to start with. With Rhee’s regime looking extremely shaky Kim Il-sung, almost certainly with the backing of the USSR, invaded the South, meeting little resistance and much support from the local population. But as Rhee’s army disintegrated the US gained approval from the newly established UN for an intervention (the USSR was boycotting the Security Council at the time) and soon drove Kim’s army back. Only China’s intervention in support of the North prevented the ‘reunification’ of the peninsula by the US army. Instead the status quo ante was re-established when war ended in 1953, with a demilitarised border between pro-communist North and effectively US-occupied South along the 38^th parallel.

For the next three decades the DPRK openly nursed the aim of at some point driving into the South, to reunify the country and expel the US from the peninsula. But it never again had Soviet (or Chinese) backing for such an attempt, and at the same time the relationship of forces with the South progressively deteriorated. First, the US army established permanent bases in the ROK, backed by the US Navy Seventh Fleet. Second, the North progressively fell behind South Korea economically, as the South became the premier post-colonial economic success story.

However, the South’s economic success took time to appear, and initially it was not at all clear that it wasn’t the North that would be the economic success story. When Korea was partitioned, the North was home to most of Korea’s pre-war heavy industry and mineral resources, and had been spared the Japanese sabotage that had reduced 1948 production in the South to 20% of 1940 levels. Using centralised control and Soviet aid to get the economy going again, for the two decades after the war it grew somewhat faster than the South overall. From 1950-70 the DPRK’s economy grew from $7bn to $27bn, while with slightly more than double the population South Korea grew from $16bn to $63bn.[ii] GDP per head was roughly similar, but social provision and workers’ conditions in the North were generally much better.

However from the mid-1970s the DPRK’s growth slowed sharply, reflecting underlying problems in its ultra-centralised, self-enclosed economic model. This coincided with South Korea’s take-off, with its high investment and export led growth making it the quintessential Asian ‘tiger’. By 1990 the DPRK’s GDP was only $57bn compared to the ROK’s stunning $373bn.

Thus from the mid-1970s the North understood it was neither militarily nor economically in a position to lead a reunification of the peninsula and its attempts to recruit China or the Soviet Union to that cause also ended. But Kim Il-sung did not abandon the hope of turning this relationship of forces around again. However with few resources to achieve this, the DPRK began to sponsor sabotage aimed at undermining stability in the South. This DPRK ‘terrorism’ of the 1980s included hijackings of civilian aircraft, the attempted assassination of ROK president Chun Doo-hwan in 1983 and the downing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987. This strategy did not work, made relations with the South exceedingly tense and handed the US a perfect excuse for its continuing campaign of isolation.

Additionally, as the North fell behind economically, becoming more internationally isolated and with Soviet support declining as a result of its own 1980s reforms, an increasingly vulnerable DPRK decided to shore up its position by speeding up its nuclear programme through investing in uranium enrichment technologies.

After 1989-91 with the end of the Cold War and fall of the USSR, the US turned its attention to the surviving ‘communist’ countries, applying carrot and stick pressure to ‘aid’ their progress towards 'reform'. But North Korea was only offered the stick. The US stepped up the campaign against its nuclear programme, particularly through deeper sanctions, and jacked up the direct military threat to the North, increasing the US forces stationed in the South and holding more aggressively framed joint military exercises on land and sea.

The impact of this international pressure combined with the end of economic support from the USSR and a series of natural disasters resulted in a devastating economic crash in the DPRK. Annual GDP growth between 1990-97 averaged -4.6%, and GDP fell by more than half to $25bn leading to widespread famine.

The US believed that North Korea was on the point of collapse and only needed a final push. In June 1994, Clinton despatched former president Carter on a ‘private’ visit to the North to try to negotiate a face-saving climb down for the DPRK. However the agreement Carter negotiated with the aging Kim Il-sung, although perfectly reasonable, was not the complete capitulation that Clinton had been looking for; in return for the DPRK’s nuclear disarmament the US would lift some sanctions, help the North build light water reactors and supply it with domestic fuel oil. Clinton’s administration had little choice but to sign up to this ‘Agreed Framework’ in December of that year. But it was never implemented: Congress openly opposed it; and the Clinton administration did not take it seriously still believing the famine-struck state would collapse before the US had to implement it. The North however did suspend its nuclear weapons programme and sign up to the NPT.

The DPRK only returned to developing a nuclear weapons programme in 2003. This was provoked first by Bush’s post 9/11 State of the Union address, which labelled the DPRK part of an ‘axis of evil’ and a legitimate target of his war on terror; and secondly by the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom which overthrew Saddam Hussein in a display of military and technological might. The next targets of the US war machine appeared to be Iran and the DPRK.

Pyongyang withdrew from the NPT and relaunched its nuclear weapons programme. Which, of course, in turn became the basis on which the US launched a new round of threats against the DPRK and persuaded South Korea to agree to an expanded US presence on the peninsula.

However, while relations between the US and the North deteriorated, the end of the Cold War had had the opposite impact on South Korea itself, which, following the end of military rule in 1988, adopted a new spirit of engagement with the DPRK. This trend dominated the politics of South Korea’s first democratically elected governments from the elections in 1988 right through until 2008, during which period – despite the DPRK’s resumption of its nuclear programme in 2003 and first nuclear test in 2006 – relations on the peninsula remained calm and the US found little leverage to whip up an international campaign against the North. In 2003 South Korea and China worked together to launch the Six-Party talks, which forced the US to grudgingly come to a multilateral table with the DPRK.[iii]

This policy changed with the election of the right-wing Grand National Party’s presidential candidate Lee Myung-bak in 2008 on a pledge to take a hard line on the North against its nuclear programme and reprioritise relations with the US. The Six Party talks were de facto suspended. As relations deteriorated under Lee the North began to more seriously step up its nuclear arms programme with missile and nuclear tests in 2009 and 2013. Other signs of rising tension included the 2010 incident when the DPRK shelled a South Korean held island during US-South Korea naval exercises in disputed waters. Also in 2010 the South Korean ship Cheonan sank during exercises, allegedly due to a North Korean torpedo – a story that is strongly disputed.[iv]

Lee’s successor in 2012, Park Geun-hye, came from the same right wing political tradition and quickly pledged to pursue reunification of the peninsula on a ‘democratic’ i.e. capitalist, basis, but her actual course was more conciliatory than Lee as she particularly sought good relations with China, which demanded stability with the North. However, Park’s generally weak presidency achieved little; she took no substantive initiatives to alleviate international pressure on the North. The Six Party talks were flagged to restart in 2012 and in 2014 but did not actually happen.

Park’s election had also coincided with a change of leadership in the North. Since Kim Jong-un’s accession to the leadership of the DPRK above all its rhetoric, but also its tactics, have become less reasonable – although still far from providing justification for the US campaign of threats and intimidation.

Despite being highly dependent upon China economically – 76% of all North Korea’s trade is with China – which has also extended substantial direct aid and investment and has defended it internationally, Kim Jong-un has tested relations with his country’s only real international friend to breaking point. The arrest and execution of his uncle, Jang Song-thaek in 2013 may have been triggered by more personal power struggles, but Jang was also particularly well connected in Beijing. He was a key advocate of the line that the DPRK should prioritise economic development, using China’s support to pursue a Chinese style development model, while playing down its ambitions in missile and nuclear weapons technology. Instead a hardline political faction that is anti-reform, pro-nuclear and somewhat antagonistic to China seems to have taken control.

Many of the actions Kim Jong-un has pursued, particularly regarding nuclear and missile tests, have been directly in the face of counter-advice from China. Kim has clearly bargained on the fact that China has little choice but to defend North Korea, whatever his provocative actions, as it is only the DPRK that stands between China and the US bases in South Korea, which could be moved to the border of China if the DPRK fell.

Kim is also directly calling the US’s bluff – a particularly dangerous course when facing an unknown quantity like Donald Trump. Kim’s hubris could run into the braggadocio of Trump to unleash a disastrous confrontation. But outside that, Kim is reckoning that the risk of nuclear war with China is enough to mean that threats from the US will remain angry words rather than missile strikes. Moreover he understands that the US’s chief target is not really the DPRK but an excuse to accelerate its regional military build-up for which the real target is China. Some of China’s anger with North Korea is precisely that Kim’s tactics aid this US agenda against China.

Nonetheless, for the moment, however ill advised, Kim’s wager appears to be correct, particularly as it has emerged that the ‘armada’ that Trump claimed was on its way to Korea was in fact heading in the opposite direction to exercises in the Indian Ocean!

But what Kim’s brinkmanship has actually achieved is to aid the US in gaining the agreement of South Korea to speed up the stationing of the THAAD missile defence system. The Pentagon has been warning for nearly a decade that China’s land to sea missile systems are now sufficiently comprehensive that China is close to being capable of repelling a putative US invasion force. Although the US claims that the THAAD system is necessary to repel the threat from the North, it is widely acknowledged that it is in fact primarily aimed at restoring the US capacity to knock out China defences. Hence why China’s objections to the stationing of THAAD are so strong, and why it is particularly furious with North Korea for having de facto facilitated the US in winning agreement to this in South Korea.

The US’s key lever in seeing off opposition within South Korea to the US’s extensive military presence has always been to play up the alleged threat emanating from the DPRK. The old film is just being rerun by Trump, this time de facto aided by belligerent language from North Korea.

Despite Kim Jong-un’s confrontational tactics, the situation could still be settled if it was clear that the US was willing to offer a reasonable peace deal with security guarantees, underwritten by China and South Korea, in return for Pyongyang ending its nuclear weapons programme. This is exactly what North Korea agreed to in 1994 when former US president Carter negotiated precisely such a deal, and which foundered on US bad faith not the DPRK’s. As Carter himself has continued to argue, an agreement with North Korea to end its nuclear weapons programme ‘could be worked out… in half a day’, if the US was prepared to lift its state of siege on this small and relatively weak country.[v]

[i] Terminal High Altitude Area Defence

[ii] A. Maddison, The world economy: a millennial perspective, Vol. 2: Historical statistics, OECD, Paris, 2006. Figures expressed in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars.

[iii] The six parties are US, China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan and Russia

[iv] See Beal, T. 2014, Crisis in Korea: America, China and the risk of war, Pluto Press, London

[v] Beal, T. 2014, Crisis in Korea. p.71

It’s China, stupid: Trump and US foreign policy

The furore in the US and Europe over Trump’s relations with Russia is not just a storm in a teacup but the manifestation of a serious fight at the heart of the US foreign policy establishment over how the US should orient strategically to Russia in the context of the chief question that the US confronts internationally – the rise of China.

That the rise of China is a threat to the global position of the US and that therefore the US must try to contain China is a premise shared by virtually the entire US foreign policy establishment. It was a priority for the Obama administration as much as it now is for Trump. The difference between Obama and Trump on China is not on their goals, but on tactics. Whereas Obama’s administration primarily pursued its anti-China policy through using proxies – chiefly Japan and the Philippines – to whip up conflicts with China, allowing the US to assume the guise of ‘honest broker’, Trump and his team have indicated that the US itself will lead the charge.

Trump’s more aggressive tactics towards China were flagged up from the moment he accepted the congratulatory phone call from President Tsai of Taiwan – breaching the ‘one China’ protocols that have governed US-China diplomatic relations since the Nixon thaw, whereby Taiwan’s international status is not as a recognised state, but as a province of the People’s Republic. Since the 1970s therefore the president of Taiwan has had the status of a provincial governor, and does not meet with the president of the US.

This step was followed by various threats and provocations including: appointing the extreme anti-China hawk, Peter Navarro, to head trade policy; threatening to impose a 45% tax on Chinese imports; while his nominee for Secretary of State, Tillerson, suggested the US navy might blockade China in the South China Sea. Inter alia, Trump has accused China of currency manipulation, cheating on trade, stealing jobs and failing to help deal with the North Korean nuclear program.

In this context, and contrary to the implications of much of the Western media, Trump’s friendly overtures to Putin and Russia are not the addled thinking of an unpredictable maverick, but are a central component of how he proposes to deal with China.

Since 2010, when Obama announced the new turn in US foreign policy priorities towards the Pacific to counter the growing influence of China, a highly influential strand, particularly in the Pentagon, but across US foreign policy circles – and beyond – has argued that a resetting of US-Russia relations is crucial to this. This cohort argues that the US has to seek a rapprochement with Russia in order to prevent the formation of a China-Russia axis that would be an effective counter to any US strategies against China.

Some of the most intelligent proponents of the US’s policy in Asia were therefore strongly opposed to what they saw as the unnecessary alienation of Russia through what was understood as an attempt to expand NATO to include the Ukraine by installing a pro-NATO government in 2014.

As Kishore Mahbubani, an influential Singapore intellectual and foreign policy expert put it at the time: ‘Unwise western expansion of NATO has not enhanced western security. It has only alienated Russia. Yet when the West finally wakes up to deal with a rising China, Russia would provide just the sort of geopolitical heft needed to balance Beijing’s power. Today, in direct violation of its own long-term geopolitical interests, the west is driving Russia towards China… This compulsion to act against its own interests perfectly illustrates declining western geopolitical wisdom.’^[i]

Or as Zachary Keck, now editor of the National Interest, argued: ‘… at some point the US will have to make a choice about whether the issues in other regions are important enough to scuttle ties with Russia in the Pacific. In the Asian Century, the answer to this question should almost always be ‘no’.’^[ii]

The call for a reset on Russia is explicitly based on the lessons of US strategies in the Cold War when US administrations successfully ‘triangulated’ relations between the US, Russia and China, ensuring that, apart from a few years immediately after 1949, the two Communist giants were pitted against each other, alternately courted and isolated by the US in the service of its aim to bring both regimes down.

Hence today, as a 2012 article in the Atlantic Sentinel put it, what the US needs is to deploy a ‘reverse “Nixon goes to China”’, when in the 1970s, deft American tactics and diplomacy, playing into Sino-Soviet fears and rivalries, had allowed it to draw China into its global Cold War containment of the USSR: ‘…much as Nixon and Kissinger sought the “dragon” to balance against the stronger “bear”, the United States must consider the reverse.’^[iii]

However any such reorientation of US policy towards Russia was completely blocked under Obama by the dominance of the existing Democrat, Pentagon and security service foreign policy establishment – supported particularly by their British counterparts – for whom the priority vis-à-vis Russia remained NATO and the US’s alliances in Europe, not China. These establishment Atlanticists and their European allies agreed on the need to confront China, but not at the expense of bringing Russia in from the cold. Strategically they feared this would encourage the emergence of a Germany-Russia axis, with support elsewhere in Europe, which in turn would give Germany too much leverage against the US internationally and might even threaten to displace the primacy of the US-Europe alliance in the future.

Germany had long pursued a policy of strategic partnership with Russia, and acted as its advocate in Europe even during the Cold War. Although since coming to power in 2005 Merkel had been more outspoken on human rights issues in Russia than previous German Chancellors, she had essentially continued this traditional German ‘ostpolitik’ towards Russia. The Atlanticist hawks in the state department and CIA were looking for an opportunity to bring this to an end.

Thus it was entirely the decisions of the US that led to the breakdown in relations with Putin’s Russia and the growth of an increasingly strong China-Russia axis in Asia and internationally. 

Putin – although a self-professed Russian nationalist – was not elected in 2000 on a platform of changing Yeltsin’s 1990s policy of orientation the West. He did pledge to take a firmer position against further NATO expansion, preventing the growth of ‘external’ i.e. Western, influence in the disputed territories around Georgia, and defeating the challenge in Chechnya. He had good reason to believe that a compromise was possible with the West on such a basis, as Yeltsin had received clear guarantees that NATO would not seek to expand to Russia’s borders, Russia and the US had a shared interest in defeating terrorist currents like that operating in Chechnya and the Russian areas around Georgia were far from the US’s current sphere of operations or interests.

In 2002 Putin supported the US invasion of Afghanistan – despite its proximity to Russia’s sensitive Central Asian backyard – and even helped broker the agreement to US bases for its Afghanistan operations in the Central Asian states.

However relations with the US broke down progressively after 2002 with NATO’s decisions to incorporate the Baltic states and to develop the European ‘Missile Defence Shield’ – essentially an updated variant of 1980’s Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ proposal aimed at delivering NATO a first strike nuclear capability.

Early in Obama’s presidency he appeared to seek a reset with Russia. With the more superficially pro-Western Medvedev having temporarily replaced Putin as Russian president in 2008, and a new president in the White House the door seemed open to improved relations. Obama’s 2009 announcement that NATO missile interceptor deployments in the Czech Republic and Poland would not go ahead seemed a step in this direction. In return for Russian support in persuading China not to veto a 2010 Security Council resolution expanding sanctions on Iran, Obama lifted US sanctions on the Russian arms export agency. Russia, and therefore China, also supported the 2011 UN no-fly zone over Libya.

But Obama took no more fundamental initiative and US relations with Russia continued to be run by the old hands of the CIA and state department, and soon the pattern of tensions had re-emerged with clashes over renewed missile defence deployments, disagreements over the scope of the UN resolution on Libya, and most seriously over Syria. Assad is a key Russian ally, and Russia’s interests in Syria include access to the Mediterranean port of Tartus where the Russian navy has a facility.

But it was the threatened expansion of NATO to include Ukraine – provoking an inevitable fierce confrontation with Russia – that brought relations crashing down. The policy was driven through by the US in the face of pleading by Merkel, who made a special trip to the White House to urge caution, and most of the EU, who preferred a more conciliatory policy.  The bullish approach of the US was revealed in a leaked phone-call between US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine at the time, in which her response to the attempts by the EU to defuse the crisis and broker a compromise was to say ‘fuck the EU’.

The upshot was the Ukraine crisis, with predictable Russian intransigence especially over Crimea, creating the excuse for a new round of international sanctions and a breach in relations between Russia and Germany.

But, as the China hawks had feared and predicted, it led also to a sharp turn in the priority Russia attached to its relations with China, with the rapid announcement of a series of new oil pipelines, east-west transport links, greater resources to their existing cooperation on security issues in central and northeastern Asia, more joint military and naval exercises and closer coordination in the UN Security Council.

Trump has signalled a different orientation to this series of interconnected international questions, breaking with the European preoccupations of the current chiefs of the security services and pursuing a policy more in line with that advocated by the Pentagon and the China hawks who now surround him. Essentially this means a reset with Russia, attempting to draw Russia away from its close coordination with China, while also supporting the most explicitly anti-EU forces in Europe to weaken Germany and project a US-Russian alliance to Putin over the heads of the European states. The aim is to free up the US’s hands to concentrate on China, while weakening the EU against any potential challenge to US hegemony from that quarter.

As such a pro-Russia policy flies in the face of that pursued by the US foreign policy establishment and the security services since the Cold War, and because they are convinced that soft-pedalling on Russia will allow Germany to strengthen unacceptably, Trump’s reorientation on Russia has met an unprecedented and relentless campaign to derail it. This has involved not just the CIA but also the British security services, and has included the claims that Putin interfered in the US presidential elections and the presentation of a dossier, compiled by a British ex-spy, of alleged extraordinary behaviour by Trump in Russia, meant to imply he is therefore susceptible to blackmail by Russia.

So far none of this has made Trump change his mind on how to approach Russia or China. Some of his appointees have been more conciliatory in their confirmation hearings, but Trump himself has been unapologetic. He has ramped up the rhetoric against China, fired shots at the EU and continued to reach out to Russia. If he is determined on this course, then heads will have to roll in the CIA and elsewhere in the US establishment – another reason for the breath-taking determination of the campaign to stop it.

Trump ran his campaign on the slogan of ‘making America great again’ and while this could mean different things to different people, on one question it was entirely clear: China is a threat to America’s global position and to blame for the decline of many of its industries; China is the main enemy and has to be stopped. He sneered at Obama for being weak on China, and promised that at a foreign policy level all other questions were to be subordinated to bringing down China. That included a reset with Putin.

The next months will show whether this Trump reorientation holds or whether the unrelenting campaign against Russia forces a reverse turn.

But even if Trump holds to his course on Russia, a stable deal is far from easy to achieve. There would have to be some agreement over Syria, which does look possible now that much of the opposition has been defeated. But agreements on Iran and Ukraine would also be needed. Trump could back down on his pledge to reimpose sanctions on Iran, but Israel would strongly oppose a settlement in the region that both stabilised Assad in Syria, and allowed a strengthening of Iran. And there is not an obvious deal that could be imposed on Ukraine that both Russia and Germany would accept.

Trump has promised a major turn in US foreign policy in order to concentrate on China. But this is already proving far from easy to carry out.

[i] Mahbubani, K. 2014, Look to China for wisdom on dealing with Russia, FT, 21 March

[ii] Keck, Z, 2013, Russia as a US-China battleground state, The Diplomat, 20 November

[iii] Lawson, GR. 2012, Beyond the reset: reverse ‘Nixon goes to China’, The Atlantic Sentinel, 12 May

US election: Trump won, but only because Clinton lost

Note: this article is not quite on the usual topic of this blog but given the importance of the election to future US-China relations have posted by views here. This has already appeared on the website www.socialistaction.net. I don't have the facility to include the figures referred to on this blog, so if you are interested you can find them at the website above. The article may have a different title.

The victory of Donald Trump has handed the most powerful office on earth into the hands of someone whose promises include a giant wall across the Mexican border, the expulsion of 11 million ‘illegal immigrants’ – roughly 6% of the US workforce – ‘extreme vetting’ for any Muslim seeking to enter the country, the repeal of Obamacare, keeping existing gun laws and punishing women who seek an abortion. He denies the existence of climate change, proposes to engage in a new era of protectionist trade policies, professes to ‘love war’, and is prone to casual racism, misogyny and bigotry towards Jews, LGBT people, Latinos and any other minority group.

Despite the fact that Hillary Clinton is a hard-line right-wing Democrat, with a particularly hawkish approach to foreign policy, anyone who did not understand that it mattered whether she or Trump got elected are now going to learn a very harsh lesson.

With Republican control over the Presidency, House of Representatives and Senate, and therefore over appointment to the outstanding vacancy on the Supreme Court, Trump will have few checks in pursuing his personal variant of far right Tea Party politics in the US. Moreover the triumph for these extreme right politics in the US – the most powerful country on the planet – will be a huge boost to the exponents of similar politics elsewhere. The carnival of racist reaction unleashed by the Brexit vote in Britain will be insignificant compared to the wave of racism that will sweep the US itself and across Europe.

So how did this happen?

Fundamentally, despite the rosy spectacles with which most of the world now views Obama’s eight years, with the exception of Obamacare, his presidency saw no measures that addressed the falling living standards and growing inequality that have beset the US since the financial crisis in 2008 and before.

The fall in living standards and rise in inequality in the US is quite shocking, and underpins the disruptions that have rocked US politics and brought a maverick, right-wing outsider like Trump to the presidency.

As Figure 1 shows US median household incomes by 2015 were still below the level of 1999, 16 years previously. At their lowest point following the crisis, in 2012, US median household incomes were more than 9% below their 1999 peak level. The improvement after approximately 2012 was not due to any measure taken by Obama but solely due to the anaemic economic recovery meaning median incomes remained depressed compared to prior to 2008.

The US population has therefore suffered more than a decade and a half fall in incomes – which would produce deep political discontent and anger in any country.

Figure 1

The political consequences of this fall in median incomes have been exacerbated by the huge rise in income inequality in the US and the falling share of incomes received by the great majority of the US population. This trend has been continuing for over three decades, having begun with the introduction of neoliberal ‘Reaganomics’ in the 1980s. Figure 2 shows that the share of total US incomes received by the bottom 80% of the US population fell from 56% in 1967 to 49% in 2015. Over the same period the share of total incomes received by the top 20% of the population rose from 46% to 51%. In other words, by 2015, the top 20% of the US population was receiving a more than half the US total incomes.

In monetary terms, the total income of the top 20% of US households in 2015 was $5.1 trillion while that of the entire bottom 80% was only $4.9 trillion. The total income of the top 5% of the US population in 2015 of $2.2 trillion was over seven times that of the bottom 20% of the US population of $0.3 trillion.

Figure 2

These trends, which had begun with Reagan in the 1980s, were not reversed or addressed under Obama. The fundamental economic tenets of neoliberalism were maintained – eschewing state intervention in the economy, relying on the ‘hidden hand’ of the market to deliver growth, and ‘trickle down’ benefits rather than redistributive measures to deliver support for less well off. This was stuck to even in the face of the 2008 economic crisis that these policies eventually spawned. The refusal to make a state-led intervention into the economy to boost growth through a coordinated investment programme aimed at stimulating the productive economy meant the Obama administration’s remedies were limited to ‘quantitative easing’ to prop up the financial markets. US growth averaged only 1.27% since the onset of the crisis in 2007, and only just cleared an average 2% per annum since emerging from recession in 2010. (UNCTADStat 2007-2015 GDP growth rate) Without growth in the economy there could be nothing to ‘trickle down’ – even if the trends in inequality since 1980 hadn’t already clearly demonstrated that this did not work.

In this context discontent has fermented across all sections of the US working class – white, black and Latino – reflected in the emergence of movements like Black Lives Matter as well as in the increasingly polarised politics of the Republican and Democrat parties.

This discontent across the entire working class was reflected in the political divisions that opened up in the Republican and Democrat primaries, but with contrary outcomes.

In the Democratic Party for the first time for almost a century a candidate openly calling themself a socialist, Bernie Sanders, won mass support and very seriously challenged Clinton, despite coming up against the full weight of the party machine that organised to ensure that Clinton won. In the end the Democratic Party selected the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. However polls have consistently shown that Bernie Sanders would have won a higher share of the popular vote in Tuesday’s election and would almost certainly have defeated Trump. Whatever the weakness of Sanders politics – he is certainly not a ‘socialist’ in any sense it is understood in Europe – this would have presented the oppressed and disenfranchised American working class an alternative between the mainstream neoliberalism of Clinton and the racist, protectionist neoliberalism of Trump. This could have galvanised a higher turnout among black and Latino voters, and even won over some of those white voters that supported Trump.

In the Republican Party the outcome was the opposite. One after another the establishment candidates fell before the rising wave of Tea Party, right-wing support for Trump, and the radical, ‘change’ candidate emerged victorious.

The election on Tuesday therefore saw the American working class faced with a choice between a candidate representing continuation of the same policies that had led to falling living standards, and a candidate claiming to stand for fundamental change: to ‘make America great again’, which in the minds of his supporters meant delivering rising living standards through driving out illegal immigrants, erecting real or figurative walls against Mexicans and Muslims, and protecting jobs through tariff barriers and punitive measures against cheap Chinese (in particular, but not exclusively) imports. As with the similarly suicidal vote for Brexit in Britain, a section of white working class voters were deceived into blaming immigrants, black people, Muslims, refugees and ‘foreign countries’ for the rundown of their communities and the pressure on their living standards. (Also in the UK a similar polarisation to that around Sanders propelled an actual socialist, Corbyn, into the leadership of the Labour Party.)

However despite the hype, Trump did not galvanise a new electorate for the Republican Party. His total vote is projected to be lower than that of either McCain or Romney when they lost in 2008 and 2012 respectively. He may have fired up existing Republican voters on a racist basis and created a greater personal commitment among his supporters, but he did not win over a new section of voters. His success in the north central states where the media has drawn attention to the tribulations of the rust-belt white working class is less down to any increase in support for the Republicans that a stay-at-home disillusionment among Democrat supporters, whose vote fell.

While the racism and casual misogyny of Trump’s campaign repelled black and Latino and most women voters, Hillary Clinton’s campaign failed to mobilise them behind her campaign. According to exit polls only 8% of Black Americans who voted supported Trump, and only 29% of Latinos (which would include the hard right Cuban émigré community in Florida that opposed Obama’s partial lifting of the US blockade on the island). 52% of women voters supported Clinton, with 42% voting Trump; whereas 53% of men voted Trump and 41% Clinton.

But despite leading in these sectors, and among poorer white workers, overall Clinton’s vote fell by about 6 million votes compared to Obama in 2012. These voters did not go to Trump – they just stayed home. The turnout in this presidential election – 48.6% – is the lowest since Coolidge was elected in 1924, and compares to 54.9% in 2012, about 7-8 million voters down. The most accurate summary of the outcome of this presidential election is not that Trump won – he did not win over a big swathe of Democrat votes on a racist basis, he lost votes overall – but that Clinton lost. Her right wing, establishment politics could not galvanise an electorate that rejects Trump, but wants a radical change that offers hope for the future. Clinton only offered business as usual.

However, the degree of disdain for Trump is reflected in the fact that – despite the momentum behind his campaign and Clinton’s failure to enthuse the electorate – with a small number of votes left to count it looks almost certain that he lost to Clinton in the overall popular vote, despite winning handsomely in the electoral college. This will be only the fourth time this has happened in a presidential election since the civil war, on each occasion a Republican becoming president having lost in the popular vote to the Democrat contender.

The electoral college itself is of a piece with other undemocratic features of the US’s two-party system – such as the role of the ‘primaries’ in selecting candidates, the function of the ‘super-delegates’ in the Democratic Party convention, and the entire way the system excludes any real chance of representation for third parties – that are precisely designed to thwart the full expression of popular opinion in US politics, even if this time they did not work to the establishment’s advantage.

In fact one of the most telling things about this US election was the inability of the ultra-powerful US ruling class to get the electoral outcome it wanted, despite a very large majority, including most of the Republican Party establishment, opposing Trump. Of course, it would be a mistake to underestimate its continuing strength and to confuse the outcome of an election with the ability of the US ruling class to fundamentally control the situation. Having been elected, Trump in office will undoubtedly drop many of the things he said during the election and on key policies will adjust to the priorities of the US establishment, including on foreign policy (his admiration for Putin for example) and globalisation. But nonetheless it signals the increasing political problems for the US ruling class as its declining relative economic weight means it is increasingly unable to deliver prosperity at home purely on the basis of its international position. The US has lived beyond its means since the 1970s, maintaining an artificially high standard of living for American workers compared to its real economic growth rate and negative trade balances through borrowing secured by the role of the dollar and the US position as military and economic guarantor of the world capitalist system, with all the consequences that eventually came home to roost in 2007-8. As the US ruling class has no intention of taking steps that could seriously turn around the fortunes of the US economy – as this would imply breaking from neoliberalism and the Washington consensus by stepping up the role of the state – it has no choice but to progressively squeeze working class incomes, with all the political consequences that are signalled by Trump’s election.

The consequences of Trump’s victory for the rest of the world are both frightening and painfully clear. A president who claims to ‘love wars’ and question why the US has not used its nuclear weapons, can be relied on to provoke new conflicts and wars. Standing up to US imperialism and its war-mongering will remain an absolutely central task.

At the same time the myth still beloved of Western liberals – and peddled in the rest of the world – that the US is the uniquely reliable source of progressive ideas, democracy and human rights is evidently no longer tenable.

The claims of American exceptionalism are debunked by Trump. With the politics of Trump at the helm, who can seriously content that, in the words of American founding father, Thomas Paine, ‘The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind’. Or who would give any credibility to George W Bush’s claim of 200 years later: ‘Our nation’s founding commitment is still our deepest commitment: In our world and here at home we will extend the frontiers of freedom’. Or believe, along with Bill Clinton and Obama, that America remains the ‘one indispensible nation’.

There is no good to be expected from the victory of Trump, only the need to struggle more determinedly against US imperialism, backwardness and racism and their apologists and acolytes at home. But at least no one should be allowed to claim that the US represents the source of progress in a fallen world or that its wars are fought for the good of humanity and the rights of all.