The EU has begun a probe into Chinese wind turbine companies. Then-Commission Executive Vice-President for Competition Margarethe Vestager warned that a wave of subsidised Chinese wind turbine exports: “is not only dangerous for our competitiveness. It also jeopardises our economic security.” The EU remains scarred by its loss of a trade war to China over the bloc’s solar power industry a decade earlier. Western governments and activists have also expressed concerns that China’s green sector is tied to human rights abuses like forced labour in Xinjiang.

In the Middle East, however, many governments remain open to Chinese green sector exports and have struck commercial agreements to gain investment from its major firms. In July, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund struck joint investment deals with Chinese solar power companies Jinko Solar and TCL Zhonghuan. Meanwhile, Saudi investment business ALGIHAZ signed a contract to build an energy storage facility with Chinese company Sungrow. The Australian Griffith Asia Institute calculated that altogether Chinese firms worked on green energy projects across the Middle East worth about $9.5 billion over 2018-2023.

Middle Eastern States Piggyback Off China

China’s government and Chinese state-owned or state-linked companies have been able to offer commercial and political advantages to Middle Eastern governments seeking to decarbonize their economies. Western engineering and manufacturing firms’ projects are regulated by numerous rules intended to prevent corruption, environmental harm and other negative development outcomes. Chinese companies under the direction of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) face no such restraints, though the quality of the infrastructure they have produced under China’s signature Belt & Road Project (BRI) initiative has varied. For autocratic Middle Eastern governments like the Gulf monarchies, however, Chinese companies have the ability to build high-technology critical infrastructure without the need to appease external stakeholders like the human rights groups or independent media outlets found in Western countries.

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Chinese companies are also generally happy to operate in a Middle Eastern business environment that still often relies on patronage to get deals done. The CCP has cultivated particularly close ties with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Egypt, and Algeria, with whose governments Beijing has signed comprehensive strategic partnerships (the most elevated type of bilateral agreement with China). These relationships have borne increasing fruit as the BRI has matured and new technology has widened the appeal of clean energy and other green industries. Petrostates like Saudi Arabia have belatedly woken up to the threat of climate change and their own potential ability to take advantage of clean energy like solar power.

Doing Deals to Decarbonize

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Beijing in June. Xi promised his government would cooperate more closely with the Arab country on a range of industries including “information technology, artificial intelligence, the digital economy, and new energy.” China was already the UAE’s biggest trading partner in 2022 while the Arab state was Beijing’s biggest Arab trading partner, the UAE’s economy ministry said in 2023. While renewable energy development is only one aspect of the burgeoning diplomatic and trading relationship between the two sides, it is an important consideration for the UAE and its Net Zero 2050 strategy to decarbonize the country’s economy. Given China’s private sector is subordinate to the political aims of the ruling CCP, further Chinese green investment is likely to flow to the UAE in 2025. The UAE is also investing in renewables in East Asia, with its green energy firm Masdar aiming to install 2 gigawatts of renewable power in ASEAN countries by 2025. The firm was invited by the Philippines government to invest in Manila’s green sector too.

In May, the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Trade Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, said “new energy” and “critical minerals” were among the areas the country was interested in engaging with Beijing. Chinese CEOs held meetings with UAE officials in July following the UAE president’s state visit to discuss bilateral cooperation in various areas, including solar power and renewable energy. The UAE’s example is being replicated by other Middle Eastern governments with whom China has cultivated close relations. At the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in September, Egypt signed agreements worth more than $1.1 billion with Chinese companies, which included the country’s first green chemical plant. China’s Befar Group will build a $500 million facility powered energy sources including natural gas, wind and solar energy. A second deal involves the creation of a $100 million solar panel factory. Chinese companies are building solar power plants in Algeria and becoming investors and co-investors in Saudi and UAE solar and wind projects as these two countries decarbonise their power grids.

China Seeks to Refute Dumping Narratives

Meanwhile, Middle Eastern demand for Chinese clean energy infrastructure and products allows Beijing to claim it is not engaged in overproduction in sectors like EV manufacturing or renewable energy products and dumping the resulting excess on foreign markets. Much criticism of Chinese trade practices in the country’s green industries has come from the US and other Western governments. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in April that excess Chinese manufacturing capacity in sectors like EVs and solar panels was intensifying. Chinese state media and CEOs like the head of vehicle manufacturer Great Wall Motor International have denied this, although non-Western countries like Turkey have also imposed tariffs on Chinese exports like EVs. China has taken Turkey to the World Trade Organization in response.

Trade tensions between China and governments under pressure to restrict Chinese green technology exports are likely to endure in many parts of the world. In the Middle East, however, Beijing and local regimes continue to discover synergies between their development needs. China’s sluggish economy and growing trade tensions with the Global North have left it in need of new markets for its goods. Meanwhile, Middle Eastern governments need the country’s know-how and deep pockets if they are to overhaul their own 20^th-century fossil fuel infrastructure and create new jobs in the emerging green economies of the 21^st century. 

Recent events illustrate the rising tensions of the new Cold War in the Pacific. From June to September of this year, for instance, the Chinese and Russian militaries conducted joint maneuvers that ranged from live-fire naval drills in the South China Sea to air patrols circling Japan and even penetrating American airspace in Alaska. To respond to what Moscow called “rising geopolitical tension around the world,” such actions culminated last month in a joint Chinese-Russian “Ocean-24” exercise that mobilized 400 ships, 120 aircraft, and 90,000 troops in a vast arc from the Baltic Sea across the Arctic to the northern Pacific Ocean. While kicking off such monumental maneuvers with China, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of “trying to maintain its global military and political dominance at any cost” by “increasing [its] military presence… in the Asia-Pacific region.”

“China is not a future threat,” the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall responded in September. “China is a threat today.” Over the past 15 years, Beijing’s ability to project power in the Western Pacific, he claimed, had risen to alarming levels, with the likelihood of war “increasing” and, he predicted, it will only “continue to do so.” An anonymous senior Pentagon official added that China “continues to be the only U.S. competitor with the intent and… the capability to overturn the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of the Second World War.”

Indeed, regional tensions in the Pacific have profound global implications. For the past 80 years, an island chain of military bastions running from Japan to Australia has served as a crucial fulcrum for American global power. To ensure that it will be able to continue to anchor its “defense” on that strategic shoal, Washington has recently added new overlapping alliances while encouraging a massive militarization of the Indo-Pacific region. Though bristling with armaments and seemingly strong, this ad hoc Western coalition may yet prove, like NATO in Europe, vulnerable to sudden setbacks from rising partisan pressures, both in the United States and among its allies.

Building a Pacific Bastion

For well over a century, the U.S. has struggled to secure its vulnerable western frontier from Pacific threats. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Washington maneuvered against a rising Japanese presence in the region, producing geopolitical tensions that led to Tokyo’s attack on the American naval bastion at Pearl Harbor that began World War II in the Pacific. After fighting for four years and suffering nearly 300,000 casualties, the U.S. defeated Japan and won unchallenged control of the entire region.

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Aware that the advent of the long-range bomber and the future possibility of atomic warfare had rendered the historic concept of coastal defense remarkably irrelevant, in the post-war years Washington extended its North American “defenses” deep into the Western Pacific. Starting with the expropriation of 100 Japanese military bases, the U.S. built its initial postwar Pacific naval bastions at Okinawa and, thanks to a 1947 agreement, at Subic Bay in the Philippines. As the Cold War engulfed Asia in 1950 with the beginning of the Korean conflict, the U.S. extended those bases for 5,000 miles along the entire Pacific littoral through mutual-defense agreements with five Asia-Pacific allies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia.

For the next 40 years to the very end of the Cold War, the Pacific littoral remained the geopolitical fulcrum of American global power, allowing it to defend one continent (North America) and dominate another (Eurasia). In many ways, in fact, the U.S. geopolitical position astride the axial ends of Eurasia would prove the key to its ultimate victory in the Cold War.

After the Cold War

Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War ended, Washington cashed in its peace dividend, weakening that once-strong island chain. Between 1998 and 2014, the U.S. Navy declined from 333 ships to 271. That 20% reduction, combined with a shift to long-term deployments in the Middle East, degraded the Navy’s position in the Pacific. Even so, for the 20 years following the Cold War, the U.S. would enjoy what the Pentagon called “uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, operate how we wanted.”

After the September 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S., Washington turned from heavy-metal strategic forces to mobile infantry readily deployed for counterterror operations against lightly armed guerrillas. After a decade of fighting misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington was stunned when a rising China began to turn its economic gains into a serious bid for global power. As its opening gambit, Beijing started building bases in the South China Sea, where oil and natural gas deposits are rife, and expanding its navy, an unexpected challenge that the once-all-powerful American Pacific command was remarkably ill-prepared to meet.

In response, in 2011, President Barack Obama proclaimed a strategic “pivot to Asia” before the Australian parliament and began rebuilding the American military position on the Pacific littoral. After withdrawing some U.S. forces from Iraq in 2012 and refusing to commit significant numbers of troops for regime change in Syria, the Obama White House deployed a battalion of Marines to Darwin in northern Australia in 2014. In quick succession, Washington gained access to five Philippine bases near the South China Sea and a new South Korean naval base at Jeju Island on the Yellow Sea. According to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, to operate those installations, the Pentagon planned to “forward base 60 percent of our naval assets in the Pacific by 2020.” Nonetheless, the unending insurgency in Iraq continued to slow the pace of that strategic pivot to the Pacific.

Despite such setbacks, senior diplomatic and military officials, working under three different administrations, launched a long-term effort to slowly rebuild the U.S. military posture in the Asia-Pacific region. After proclaiming “a return to great power competition” in 2016, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional American advantage in the region. “The competition is on,” the admiral warned, adding, “We must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.”

Responding to such pressure, the Trump administration added the construction of 46 new ships to the Pentagon budget, which was to raise the total fleet to 326 vessels by 2023. Still, setting aside support ships, when it came to an actual “fighting force,” by 2024 China had the world’s largest navy with 234 “warships,” while the U.S. deployed 219 — with Chinese combat capacity, according to American Naval Intelligence, “increasingly of comparable quality to U.S. ships.”

Paralleling the military build-up, the State Department reinforced the U.S. position on the Pacific littoral by negotiating three relatively new diplomatic agreements with Asia-Pacific allies Australia, Britain, India, and the Philippines. Though those ententes added some depth and resilience to the US posture, the truth is that this Pacific network may ultimately prove more susceptible to political rupture than a formal multilateral alliance like NATO.

Military Cooperation with the Philippines

After nearly a century as close allies through decades of colonial rule, two world wars, and the Cold War, American relations with the Philippines suffered a severe setback in 1991 when that country’s senate refused to renew a long-term military bases agreement, forcing the U.S. 7th Fleet out of its massive naval base at Subic Bay.

After just three years, however, China occupied some shoals also claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea during a raging typhoon. Within a decade, the Chinese had started transforming them into a network of military bases, while pressing their claims to most of the rest of the South China Sea. Manila’s only response was to ground a rusting World War II naval vessel on Ayungin shoal in the Spratly Islands, where Filipino soldiers had to fish for their supper. With its external defense in tatters, in April 2014 the Philippines signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with Washington, allowing the U.S. military quasi-permanent facilities at five Filipino bases, including two on the shores of the South China Sea.

Although Manila won a unanimous ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague that Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea were “without lawful effect,” China dismissed that decision and continued to build its bases there. And when Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016, he revealed a new policy that included a “separation” from America and a strategic tilt toward China, which that country rewarded with promises of massive developmental aid. By 2018, however, China’s army was operating anti-aircraft missiles, mobile missile launchers, and military radar on five artificial “islands” in the Spratly archipelago that it had built from sand its dredgers sucked from the seabed.

Once Duterte left office, as China’s Coast Guard harassed Filipino fishermen and blasted Philippine naval vessels with water cannons in their own territory, Manila once again started calling on Washington for help. Soon, U.S. Navy vessels were conducting “freedom of navigation” patrols in Philippine waters and the two nations had staged their biggest military maneuvers ever. In the April 2024 edition of that exercise, the U.S. deployed its mobile Typhon Mid-Range Missile Launcher capable of hitting China’s coast, sparking a bitter complaint from Beijing that such weaponry “intensifies geopolitical confrontation.”

Manila has matched its new commitment to the U.S. alliance with an unprecedented rearmament program of its own. Just last spring, it signed a $400 million deal with Tokyo to purchase five new Coast Guard cutters, started receiving Brahmos cruise missiles from India under a $375 million contract, and continued a billion-dollar deal with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries that will result in 10 new naval vessels. After the government announced a $35 billion military modernization plan, Manila has been negotiating with Korean suppliers to procure 40 modern jet fighters — a far cry from a decade earlier when it had no operational jets.

Showing the scope of the country’s reintegration into the Western alliance, just last month Manila hosted joint freedom of navigation maneuvers in the South China Sea with ships from five allied nations — Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States.

Quadrilateral Security Dialogue

While the Philippine Defense Agreement renewed U.S. relations with an old Pacific ally, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S., first launched in 2007, has now extended American military power into the waters of the Indian Ocean. At the 2017 ASEAN summit in Manila, four conservative national leaders led by Japan’s Shinzo Abe, India’s Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump decided to revive the “Quad” entente (after a decade-long hiatus while Australia’s Labour governments cozied up to China).

Just last month, President Biden hosted a “Quad Summit” where the four leaders agreed to expand joint air operations. In a hot-mike moment, Biden bluntly said: “China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region. It is true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits.” China’s Foreign Ministry replied: “The U.S. is lying through its teeth” and needs to “get rid of its obsession with perpetuating its supremacy and containing China.”

Since 2020, however, the Quad has made the annual Malabar (India) naval exercise into an elaborate four-power drill in which aircraft carrier battle groups maneuver in waters ranging from the Arabian Sea to the East China Sea. To contest “China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region,” India announced that the latest exercise this October would feature live-fire maneuvers in the Bay of Bengal, led by its flagship aircraft carrier and a complement of MiG-29K all-weather jet fighters. Clearly, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi put it, the Quad is “here to stay.”

AUKUS Alliance

While the Trump administration revived the Quad, the Biden White House has promoted a complementary and controversial AUKUS defense compact between Australia, Great Britain, and the U.S. (part of what Michael Klare has called the “Anglo-Saxonization” of American foreign and military policy). After months of secret negotiations, their leaders announced that agreement in September 2021 as a way to fulfill “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”

Such a goal sparked howls of diplomatic protests. Angry over the sudden loss of a $90 billion contract to supply 12 French submarines to Australia, France called the decision “a stab in the back” and immediately recalled its ambassadors from both Canberra and Washington. With equal speed, China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the new alliance for “severely damaging regional peace… and intensifying the arms race.” In a pointed remark, Beijing’s official Global Times newspaper said Australia had now “turned itself into an adversary of China.”

To achieve extraordinary prosperity, thanks in significant part to its iron ore and other exports to China, Australia had exited the Quad entente for nearly a decade. Now, through this single defense decision, Australia has allied itself firmly with the United States and will gain access to British submarine designs and top-secret U.S. nuclear propulsion, joining the elite ranks of just six powers with such complex technology.

Not only will Australia spend a monumental $360 billion to build eight nuclear submarines at its Adelaide shipyards over a decade, but it will also host four American Virginia-class nuclear subs at a naval base in Western Australia and buy as many as five of those stealthy submarines from the U.S. in the early 2030s. Under the tripartite alliance with the U.S. and Britain, Canberra will also face additional costs for the joint development of undersea drones, hypersonic missiles, and quantum sensing. Through that stealthy arms deal, Washington has, it seems, won a major geopolitical and military ally in any future conflict with China.

Stand-Off Along the Pacific Littoral

Just as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine strengthened the NATO alliance, so China’s challenge in the fossil-fuel-rich South China Sea and elsewhere has helped the U.S. rebuild its island bastions along the Pacific littoral. Through a sedulous courtship under three successive administrations, Washington has won back two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines, making them once again anchors for an island chain that remains the geopolitical fulcrum for American global power in the Pacific.

Still, with more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the United States, China’s advantage in warships will almost certainly continue to grow. In compensating for such a future deficit, America’s four active allies along the Pacific littoral will likely play a critical role. (Japan’s navy has more than 50 warships and South Korea’s 30 more.)

Despite such renewed strength in what is distinctly becoming a new cold war, America’s Asia-Pacific alliances face both immediate challenges and a fraught future. Beijing is already putting relentless pressure on Taiwan’s sovereignty, breaching that island’s airspace and crossing the median line in the Taiwan Straits hundreds of times monthly. If Beijing turns those breaches into a crippling embargo of Taiwan, the U.S. Navy will face a hard choice between losing a carrier or two in a confrontation with China or backing off. Either way, the loss of Taiwan would sever America’s island chain in the Pacific littoral, pushing it back to a “second island chain” in the mid-Pacific.

As for that fraught future, the maintenance of such alliances requires a kind of national political will that is by no means assured in an age of populist nationalism. In the Philippines, the anti-American nationalism that Duterte personified retains its appeal and may well be adopted by some future leader. More immediately in Australia, the current Labour Party government has already faced strong dissent from members blasting the AUKUS entente as a dangerous transgression of their country’s sovereignty. And in the United States, Republican populism, whether Donald Trump’s or that of a future leader like J.D. Vance could curtail cooperation with such Asia-Pacific allies, simply walk away from a costly conflict over Taiwan, or deal directly with China in a way that would undercut that web of hard-won alliances.

And that, of course, might be the good news (so to speak), given the possibility that a growing Chinese aggressiveness in the region and an American urge to strengthen a military alliance ominously encircling that country could threaten to turn the latest Cold War ever hotter, transforming the Pacific into a genuine powder keg and leading to the possibility of a war that would, in our present world, be almost unimaginably dangerous and destructive.

Copyright 2024 Alfred W. McCoy

Via Tomdispatch.com

According to the UAE’s al-Khaleej, Wang told Pezeshkian, “No matter how the international and regional situation develops, China will always be a reliable partner of Iran.” This statement seems to have been intended to reassure Tehran in the wake of the Israeli attack on Lebanon, where the Hezbollah party-militia is a close ally of Iran.

Wang continued, “China will continue to support Iran in maintaining its sovereignty, security, territorial integrity and national dignity.” He insisted that China will take a strong stand against all those who “interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and impose sanctions.” The latter is a slam at the United States.

Wang is not only the foreign minister but also serves on the 24-member Chinese Communist Party Politburo

Iraq’s Shafaq newspaper reports that China is more dependent than in the past on Iranian and Russian petroleum exports. About 17% of its oil comes from Iran now. These two countries have cut their prices for China and so have displaced Saudi Arabia and Iraq as the largest oil exporters to China.

China is investing billions in the Iranian economy, especially in the transportation and industrial sectors.

On Monday, Yi had met with his Lebanese counterpart Abdallah Bou Habib (a Christian), and attacked Israel for its invasion of Lebanon, Lebanon’s al-Ghad News reports.

Wang pledged that no matter what changes take place, China will persevere in standing “on the side of justice and on the side of our Arab brothers, including Lebanon.”

Wang added, “We are closely following developments in the regional situation, especially the recent detonation of telecommunications equipment in Lebanon, and we firmly oppose indiscriminate attacks on civilians.”

He expressed the conviction that replying to violence with more violence will just lead to increased humanitarian catastrophes in the region. He called for a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of forces (including, he seemed to say, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied Palestinian territories), so that a two-state solution can be practically implemented.

For his part, Pezeshkian addressed the UNGA on Wednesday concerning the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon, saying that the global community must urgently halt the violence and establish a lasting armistice immediately, bringing an end to Israel’s extreme brutality in Lebanon before it incites further chaos in the region and across the globe.

The Iranian president implied that the Israelis are now attacking Lebanon in a bid to cover up their failures in Gaza and the loss of their myth of invincibility. He vowed that the “indiscriminate and terroristic actions of recent days, along with the extensive aggression against Lebanon, which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent individuals, will not go unpunished.”

He implicitly slammed the US for forestalling any international effort to resolve the appalling crisis, while posing as a champion of human rights.

He said that the only solution was to reinstate the Palestinians’ right to self-determination through a referendum in which all Palestinians, including expatriates in the diaspora, could participate. This is a reference to Iran’s long-standing proposal for a one-party state in which both Palestinians and Israelis could vote equally. He concluded, “Only through this approach can Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexist harmoniously in a united land, free from racism and segregation.”

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

South China Morning Post: “China voices support for Lebanon as Israeli strikes kill hundreds”

(The Conversation) – China-Africa relations have deepened over the past two decades, characterised by increased economic cooperation, investment and infrastructure development. China is now Africa’s largest trading partner, with partnerships focused on building roads, railways and energy projects.

As the ninth Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) kicks off this week in Beijing, a new, green theme is shaping their relationship: the global renewable energy race.

We asked Lauren Johnston, a development economist with expertise in China-Africa relations, to provide some insights into this development as it positions both regions as key players in the global shift towards green energy.

How is the race for green energy shaping relations between China and Africa?

The global climate crisis has created a push for renewable energy technology – like solar or wind power – which would lessen reliance on polluting energy sources. China saw some years ago it had a chance to lead in such a new industry.

Africa is home to a lot of the important minerals needed to create renewable technologies – like copper, cobalt and lithium, key ingredients in battery manufacture.

The race for green energy is therefore leading to a rush for these minerals in Africa, led by China, the US and Europe.

Chinese mining presence in Africa, which is much lower than western presence, is concentrated in five countries: Guinea, Zambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Among them, the DRC, Zambia and Zimbabwe are the crucible of the new green energy race in Africa. They are home to Africa’s copper belt and the greatest store of lithium, copper and cobalt.

The DRC is particularly important. It has significant reserves of cobalt and high grade copper, as well as lithium. Cobalt is an unusually hard metal with a high melting point and magnetic properties. It is a key ingredient in lithium batteries.

More than 70% of the world’s cobalt is produced in the DRC and 15%-30% of that is produced by artisanal (informal) and small-scale mining.

China is the leading foreign investor – it owns some 72% of the DRC’s active cobalt and copper mines, including the Tenke Fungurume Mine – the world’s fifth largest copper mine and the world’s second largest cobalt mine.

China’s CMOC Group is the world’s leading cobalt mining company. It could produce up to 70,000 tonnes, thanks to the new Kisanfu mine.

In 2019, the DRC and China were responsible for about 70% of global production of cobalt and 60% of rare earths.

Zimbabwe is another country in which China has been investing within the context of the green energy race. Zimbabwe is home to Africa’s largest lithium reserves, a critical element in electric-vehicle battery production. In 2023 Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe, a subsidiary of Chinese company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, opened a US$300 million lithium processing plant. It has capacity to process 4.5 million tonnes a year of hard rock lithium into concentrate for export, against a global backdrop of some 200 million tonnes produced annually.

Digital, Midjourney, PS Express, 2024

There are a couple of other developments on the continent that are worth watching.

China is investing in the first mega-scale battery factory on the continent, in Morocco.

Chinese interests also have permission to develop the world’s largest untapped high-grade iron ore deposit, in Guinea. Iron ore, used in steel production, plays a crucial part in the renewable energy sector in several ways – for instance, steel is used in wind turbines and in mounting structures for solar panels. The agreement to exploit the Simandou iron ore deposit involves various countries. China’s steel-making giant Chinalco is among the players. Production is due to begin in early 2026.

As China ramps up investments in these green minerals, what concerns exist for African countries?

China’s growing control over key renewables minerals brings several challenges to African minerals suppliers.

For African countries it generates concerns for development – many want to add value to their minerals endowment at home rather than export raw materials to China and then import manufactures. China has been criticised for abandoning African interests by adding value in China and not in Africa. Many people and industries on the African continent lack access to reliable and affordable energy – and local industry is keen to capture that market.

For instance, according to the International Energy Agency, China controls over 80% of the global manufacturing steps involved in making solar panels. The concentration of production in China, alongside competition, has pushed down global solar panel prices.

China’s solar industry is keen to close Africa’s energy gap, providing sustainable energy to the millions that don’t have access. For instance, at this year’s Forum on China–Africa Cooperation gathering, China is expected to advance its Africa Solar Belt Programme. This is an agenda supported by the World Resources Institute which not only seeks to use solar energy to close Africa’s energy gap, but also to focus on powering schools and healthcare facilities with solar too.

Some countries, like South Africa, are pushing back by imposing tariffs on solar imports to protect their local industries.

There are also fears that the race to renewables, and the approach of Chinese mining-sector firms in Africa, is setting back workers’ conditions. Expansion of mines in some countries has also led to forced evictions and human rights abuses.

What can African countries do differently to take advantage of China’s mineral rush?

There are several steps they can take.

First, they can pay more attention to basic labour standards and human rights.

Second, African firms should aim to learn from their Chinese partners. They can develop the industrial knowledge and understanding of the skills and capabilities needed on the continent, similar to how China learned from Japanese, Taiwanese, Singaporean and western companies in the past.

Third, learn from how other emerging markets manage their relations with China. For instance, with China’s help, Indonesia has taken control of the global nickel market. Indonesia started by banning nickel exports in 2014, aiming to build up its own industries for processing and manufacturing. This plan was supported by Chinese investments.

Lastly, what I call China’s Hunan Model for Africa has a focus on agriculture, mining, transport and construction industries, and on building talent. This includes technical and vocational training.

The more African nations position themselves to take advantage of training programmes from other countries, the better their young people will be prepared to drive industrial growth and economic development in Africa.

Lauren Johnston, Associate Professor, China Studies Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Just this year, EV sales are up 37%. These statistics count both pure EVs and plug-in hybrids.

It is true that the Chinese government offers a $2,785 bonus for EV purchases. But that is less than the $7500 federal tax break Americans can receive on some models of EVs because of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The key difference, Gavin argues, is that “China invested at least $230.8 billion to develop its NEV industry between 2009 and 2023,” and $121 billion of that was put in during the past three years. This research and development program allowed the Chinese to make advances in battery technology unmatched by American engineers, which is one reason that Ford wants to partner with a Chinese firm for its planned big battery plant.

America’s capitalist model has so far failed to keep up with China’s demand economy in this sector. Only in the past couple of years has the Biden administration adopted an industrial policy that has any hope of playing catch up.

Anyway,the Chinese are presently eating America’s lunch on the EV front. Their advanced batteries and other technological breakthroughs have allowed Chinese firms to offer EVs at an average price of $34,400, as opposed to the $55,242 average cost of an EV in the US.

In fact, BYD, the biggest EV maker, is planning to offer a $15,000 EV in 2024. The plug-in hybrid version of the new platform is even less expensive, at $11,000. This platform is an ICE-slayer.

BYD is hoping to get an agreement by the end of this year from Mexico on opening a manufacturing plant there. The cars it makes in that country would be eligible under NAFTA for special access to the US market, unless Congress makes a law targeting this one company. The US Big Three automakers are petrified of this plan, since BYD’s inexpensive EVs have great range.

That is, the Chinese advances in green transportation could position that country to dominate the world automobile market and deindustrialize its rivals. For this reason, Europe has slapped high tariffs on Chinese EVs, but Beijing is appealing this move to the World Trade Organization.

—–

Bonus Video:

Vox Video: “Why China is winning the EV war”

In other venues, Biden has repeatedly highlighted Washington’s efforts to incorporate the “Global South” — the developing nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East — into just such a broad-based U.S.-led coalition. At the recent G7 summit of leading Western powers in southern Italy, for example, he backed measures supposedly designed to engage those countries “in a spirit of equitable and strategic partnership.”

But all of his soaring rhetoric on the subject scarcely conceals an inescapable reality: the United States is more isolated internationally than at any time since the Cold War ended in 1991. It has also increasingly come to rely on a tight-knit group of allies, all of whom are primarily English-speaking and are part of the Anglo-Saxon colonial diaspora. Rarely mentioned in the Western media, the Anglo-Saxonization of American foreign and military policy has become a distinctive — and provocative — feature of the Biden presidency.

America’s Growing Isolation

To get some appreciation for Washington’s isolation in international affairs, just consider the wider world’s reaction to the administration’s stance on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden sought to portray the conflict there as a heroic struggle between the forces of democracy and the brutal fist of autocracy. But while he was generally successful in rallying the NATO powers behind Kyiv — persuading them to provide arms and training to the beleaguered Ukrainian forces, while reducing their economic links with Russia — he largely failed to win over the Global South or enlist its support in boycotting Russian oil and natural gas.

Despite what should have been a foreboding lesson, Biden returned to the same universalist rhetoric in 2023 (and this year as well) to rally global support for Israel in its drive to extinguish Hamas after that group’s devastating October 7th rampage. But for most non-European leaders, his attempt to portray support for Israel as a noble response proved wholly untenable once that country launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians commenced. For many of them, Biden’s words seemed like sheer hypocrisy given Israel’s history of violating U.N. resolutions concerning the legal rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and its indiscriminate destruction of homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, and aid centers in Gaza. In response to Washington’s continued support for Israel, many leaders of the Global South have voted against the United States on Gaza-related measures at the U.N. or, in the case of South Africa, have brought suit against Israel at the World Court for perceived violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In the face of such adversity, the White House has worked tirelessly to bolster its existing alliances, while trying to establish new ones wherever possible. Pity poor Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has made seemingly endless trips to Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East trying to drum up support for Washington’s positions — with consistently meager results.

Here, then, is the reality of this anything but all-American moment: as a global power, the United States possesses a diminishing number of close, reliable allies – most of which are members of NATO, or countries that rely on the United States for nuclear protection (Japan and South Korea), or are primarily English-speaking (Australia and New Zealand). And when you come right down to it, the only countries the U.S. really trusts are the “Five Eyes.”

For Their Eyes Only

The “Five Eyes” (FVEY) is an elite club of five English-speaking countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States — that have agreed to cooperate in intelligence matters and share top-secret information. They all became parties to what was at first the bilateral UKUSA Agreement, a 1946 treaty for secret cooperation between the two countries in what’s called “signals intelligence” — data collected by electronic means, including by tapping phone lines or listening in on satellite communications. (The agreement was later amended to include the other three nations.) Almost all of the Five Eyes’ activities are conducted in secret, and its existence was not even disclosed until 2010. You might say that it constitutes the most secretive, powerful club of nations on the planet.

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The origins of the Five Eyes can be traced back to World War II, when American and British codebreakers, including famed computer theorist Alan Turing, secretly convened at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking establishment, to share intelligence gleaned from solving the German “Enigma” code and the Japanese “Purple” code. At first an informal arrangement, the secretive relationship was formalized in the British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement of 1943 and, after the war ended, in the UKUSA Agreement of 1946. That arrangement allowed for the exchange of signals intelligence between the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — an arrangement that persists to this day and undergirds what has come to be known as the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Then, in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, that intelligence-sharing agreement was expanded to include those other three English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. For secret information exchange, the classification “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” was then affixed to all the documents they shared, and from that came the “Five Eyes” label. France, Germany, Japan, and a few other countries have since sought entrance to that exclusive club, but without success.

Although largely a Cold War artifact, the Five Eyes intelligence network continued operating right into the era after the Soviet Union collapsed, spying on militant Islamic groups and government leaders in the Middle East, while eavesdropping on Chinese business, diplomatic, and military activities in Asia and elsewhere. According to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, such efforts were conducted under specialized top-secret programs like Echelon, a system for collecting business and government data from satellite communications, and PRISM, an NSA program to collect data transmitted via the Internet.

As part of that Five Eyes endeavor, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia jointly maintain a controversial, highly secret intelligence-gathering facility at Pine Gap, Australia, near the small city of Alice Springs. Known as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG), it’s largely run by the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. Its main purpose, according to Edward Snowden and other whistle-blowers, is to eavesdrop on radio, telephone, and internet communications in Asia and the Middle East and share that information with the intelligence and military arms of the Five Eyes. Since the Israeli invasion of Gaza was launched, it is also said to be gathering intelligence on Palestinian forces in Gaza and sharing that information with the Israeli Defense Forces. This, in turn, prompted a rare set of protests at the remote base when, in late 2023, dozens of pro-Palestinian activists sought to block the facility’s entry road.

From all accounts, in other words, the Five Eyes collaboration remains as robust as ever. As if to signal that fact, FBI director Christopher Wray offered a rare acknowledgement of its ongoing existence in October 2023 when he invited his counterparts from the FVEY countries to join him at the first Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit in Palo Alto, California, a gathering of business and government officials committed to progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. Going public, moreover, was a way of normalizing the Five Eyes partnership and highlighting its enduring significance.

Anglo-Saxon Solidarity in Asia

The Biden administration’s preference for relying on Anglophone countries in promoting its strategic objectives has been especially striking in the Asia-Pacific region. The White House has been clear that its primary goal in Asia is to construct a network of U.S.-friendly states committed to the containment of China’s rise. This was spelled out, for example, in the administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States of 2022. Citing China’s muscle-flexing in Asia, it called for a common effort to resist that country’s “bullying of neighbors in the East and South China” and so protect the freedom of commerce. “A free and open Indo-Pacific can only be achieved if we build collective capacity for a new age,” the document stated. “We will pursue this through a latticework of strong and mutually reinforcing coalitions.”

That “latticework,” it indicated, would extend to all American allies and partners in the region, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea, as well as friendly European parties (especially Great Britain and France). Anyone willing to help contain China, the mantra seems to go, is welcome to join that U.S.-led coalition. But if you look closely, the renewed prominence of Anglo-Saxon solidarity becomes ever more evident.

Of all the military agreements signed by the Biden administration with America’s Pacific allies, none is considered more important in Washington than AUKUS, a strategic partnership agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Announced by the three member states on Sept. 15, 2021, it contains two “pillars,” or areas of cooperation — the first focused on submarine technology and the second on AI, autonomous weapons, as well as other advanced technologies. As in the FVEY arrangement, both pillars involve high-level exchanges of classified data, but also include a striking degree of military and technological cooperation. And note the obvious: there is no equivalent U.S. agreement with any non-English-speaking country in Asia.

Consider, for instance, the Pillar I submarine arrangement. As the deal now stands, Australia will gradually retire its fleet of six diesel-powered submarines and purchase three to five top-of-the-line U.S.-made Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs), while it works with the United Kingdom to develop a whole new class of subs, the SSN-AUKUS, to be powered by an American-designed nuclear propulsion system. But — get this — to join, the Australians first had to scrap a $90 billion submarine deal with a French defense firm, causing a severe breach in the Franco-Australian relationship and demonstrating, once again, that Anglo-Saxon solidarity supersedes all other relationships.

Now, with the French out of the picture, the U.S. and Australia are proceeding with plans to build those Los Angeles-class SSNs — a multibillion-dollar venture that will require Australian naval officers to study nuclear propulsion in the United States. When the subs are finally launched (possibly in the early 2030s), American submariners will sail with the Australians to help them gain experience with such systems. Meanwhile, American military contractors will be working with Australia and the UK designing and constructing a next-generation sub, the SSN-AUKUS, that’s supposed to be ready in the 2040s. The three AUKUS partners will also establish a joint submarine base near Perth in Western Australia.

Pillar II of AUKUS has received far less media attention but is no less important. It calls for American, British, Australian scientific and technical cooperation in advanced technologies, including AI, robotics, and hypersonics, aimed at enhancing the future military capabilities of all three, including through the development of robot submarines that could be used to spy on or attack Chinese ships and subs.

Aside from the extraordinary degree of cooperation on sensitive military technologies — far greater than the U.S. has with any other countries — the three-way partnership also represents a significant threat to China. The substitution of nuclear-powered subs for diesel-powered ones in Australia’s fleet and the establishment of a joint submarine base at Perth will enable the three AUKUS partners to conduct significantly longer undersea patrols in the Pacific and, were a war to break out, attack Chinese ships, ports, and submarines across the region. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the Chinese have repeatedly denounced the arrangement, which represents a potentially mortal threat to them.

Unintended Consequences

It’s hardly a surprise that the Biden administration, facing growing hostility and isolation in the global arena, has chosen to bolster its ties further with other Anglophone countries rather than make the policy changes needed to improve relations with the rest of the world. The administration knows exactly what it would have to do to begin to achieve that objective: discontinue arms deliveries to Israel until the fighting stops in Gaza; help reduce the burdensome debt load of so many developing nations; and promote food, water security, and other life-enhancing measures in the Global South. Yet, despite promises to take just such steps, President Biden and his top foreign policy officials have focused on other priorities — the encirclement of China above all else — while the inclination to lean on Anglo-Saxon solidarity has only grown.

However, by reserving Washington’s warmest embraces for its anglophone allies, the administration has actually been creating fresh threats to U.S. security. Many countries in contested zones on the emerging geopolitical chessboard, especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, were once under British colonial rule and so anything resembling a potential Washington-London neocolonial restoration is bound to prove infuriating to them. Add to that the inevitable propaganda from China, Iran, and Russia about a developing Anglo-Saxon imperial nexus and you have an obvious recipe for widespread global discontent.

It’s undoubtedly convenient to use the same language when sharing secrets with your closest allies, but that should hardly be the deciding factor in shaping this nation’s foreign policy. If the United States is to prosper in an increasingly diverse, multicultural world, it will have learn to think and act in a far more multicultural fashion — and that should include eliminating any vestiges of an exclusive Anglo-Saxon global power alliance.

Copyright 2024 Michael Klare

Via Tomdispatch.com

( RFE/RL ) – Iran is one of the most sanctioned countries in the world. But restrictions imposed by the United States have largely failed to stymie Iran’s oil exports, the backbone of its flailing economy.

U.S. sanctions have cut off Iran from most of its traditional customers, forcing Tehran to find new buyers and sell its oil at discounted prices.

But China’s willingness to buy record amounts of Iranian oil, Tehran’s mastery of sanctions-evading tactics, and Washington’s reluctance to strictly enforce sanctions have made U.S. measures against Iran’s energy exports ineffective, analysts say.

‘Dark’ Fleet Of Tankers

The lifting of U.S. sanctions as part of the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers allowed Iran to sell its oil to customers in Europe and East Asia. Oil exports reached a peak in 2018.

But exports plummeted after then-President Donald Trump reneged on the nuclear agreement later that year.

Iran has boosted its sales in recent years by circumventing sanctions, including using its “dark fleet” of tankers to illegally transport oil shipments to China.

The tactic involves ship-to-ship operations to offload the oil, middlemen, hidden money transfers, and rebranding the oil to mask its Iranian origin and make it appear to come from a third country.

“Iran is continuously developing and expanding not just the network of middlemen and trading companies involved in the sale of its oil, but also its own fleet of tankers that it predominantly uses to move its crude,” said Nader Itayim, the Middle East editor at the U.K.-based Argus Media.

Chinese Appetite

Growing demand for Iranian oil in China has been key to the surge in Iran’s oil sales.

Ship tracking data collected by Argus shows Iran’s oil exports currently hovering at 1.5 million barrels per day, with around 85 to 90 percent going to China.

Tehran gives China a steep discount to take its banned oil, taking up to 15 percent off the price of each barrel to make it worthwhile for Beijing to take on the liability of skirting sanctions.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Latest round of sanctions against Iran unlikely to make major impact”

The discounts have raised questions about the long-term profitability of Iran’s business with China. But experts said that Tehran still stands to gain.

“Even at heavy discounts, selling Iranian oil is extremely profitable and sustainable,” said Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University. “That’s because the marginal cost of production in Iran is roughly $15 or less per barrel.”

Gregory Brew, an Iran and energy analyst at the U.S.-based Eurasia Group, says U.S. sanctions were once effective at blocking oil exports to China, but that is no longer the case.

“China’s rising stature as a new global power lends it greater freedom to defy U.S. sanctions,” Brew said.

Reluctance To Enforce Sanctions

Some analysts said Washington has been reluctant to strictly enforce sanctions, while others maintain that sanctions in general have failed.

Resources are required to enforce restrictions while new sectors would need to be sanctioned to keep up the pressure, according to Itayim of Argus Media.

“Otherwise, the target finds ways to evade the sanctions, while at the same time the buyer becomes more complacent as it sees enforcement waning. In the case of Iran and China, I think we have seen a bit of both,” Itayim said.

Analysts also argue that Washington is reluctant to strictly enforce sanctions due to the risks associated with forcing Iranian oil off the world market.

“Apart from the impact such action would have on the price of oil, which carries political and economic importance to [U.S. President Joe] Biden in an election year, aggressive enforcement would provoke both Iran and China, at a time when the United States is trying to manage escalatory risk both in the Middle East and East Asia,” Brew said.

The lax enforcement of oil sanctions also extends to Venezuela and Russia, Itayim says, noting that it “has been key to keeping a lid” on oil prices.

U.S. Congress last month passed a security package that included the Iran-China Energy Sanctions Act, giving the government the authority to further restrict Iran’s oil exports.

But experts are not convinced that more sanctions will have an impact.

Hanke said any new measures “will join the long list of failed Western sanctions” on the Islamic republic.

“Sanctions are always subject to workarounds that render the enforcement of sanctions futile,” he added.

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ]]> https://www.juancole.com/2024/03/american-empire-ultimate.html Wed, 13 Mar 2024 04:04:33 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=217540 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

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Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

Copyright 2024 Alfred W. McCoy

Via Tomdispatch.com

( RFE/RL ) – More than 6,000 kilometers from Tehran, in treacherous waters off the shores of Singapore, a “dark fleet” of oil tankers waits to offload the precious cargo that helps keep Iran’s economy afloat — a dependency that could also sink it.

The fleet has grown steadily over the past five years, delivering Iranian crude to China as the countries work in concert to circumvent international sanctions that target Tehran’s lucrative oil exports. But while the clandestine trade has buoyed Iran’s budget, it also comes at tremendous cost and risk to Tehran.

Iran gives China a hefty discount to take its banned oil, taking 12 to 15 percent off the price of each barrel to make it worthwhile for Beijing to take on the liability of skirting sanctions, according to research by the data analysis unit of RFE/RL’s Radio Farda.

Additional costs add up as well: ship-to-ship operations to offload the oil, middlemen, hidden-money transfers, and rebranding the oil to mask its Iranian origin and make it appear to come from a third country, said Dalga Khatinoglu, an expert on Iranian energy issues.

Altogether, said Khatinoglu, who contributes to Radio Farda’s data analysis unit, Iran’s budget figures and official statements indicate that 30 percent of the country’s potential oil revenue was wasted last year.

And with the draft budget for the next fiscal year currently being debated by the Iranian parliament, there are no guarantees that Tehran’s bet on quenching China’s thirst for oil will continue to be a panacea.

With Iran almost entirely dependent on Beijing to take its oil and on other entities to facilitate the trade, Tehran has managed to inject desperately needed revenue into its economy. But Iran has also put itself at risk of seeing its main revenue stream dry up.

“There’s definitely an extent to which Tehran has become more dependent on the likes of China or those who would be willing to deal with Iran in spite of Western sanctions,” said Spencer Vuksic, a director of the consultancy firm Castellum, which closely tracks international sanctions regimes.

Vuksic said Iran is “definitely put in a weak position by having to depend on a single external partner who’s willing to deal with and engage with Tehran.”

Oily Deficit

Iran has trumpeted its foreign trade, claiming in December that oil revenue had contributed to a positive trade balance for the first eight months of the year.

But the oil and gas sector, by far the largest part of the Iranian economy, will not be enough to save the current budget of around $45 billion that was approved last year.

The Iranian fiscal year, which follows the Persian calendar and will end in March, is expected to result in a major deficit. In presenting the draft budget to parliament in December, President Ebrahim Raisi acknowledged a $10 billion deficit.

But the shortfall could be much higher — up to $13.5 billion, the largest in Iran’s history — by the end of the fiscal year, according to Radio Farda. This is because data shows that just half of the expected oil revenues were realized, in part due to lower than expected oil prices and additional costs and discounts related to Tehran’s oil trade with China.

Whereas the budget expectations were based on oil being sold at $85 per barrel, the price of crude dipped below $75 per barrel in December and has fluctuated wildly recently amid concerns that tensions in the Middle East could disrupt shipping and production.

“Iran Dark Tanker,” Digital, Dream / Illustrator 3.0.

And while Iran expected to export 1.5 million barrels of oil per day (bpd) in 2023, it exported only 1.2 million bpd in the first eight months of last year, according to Radio Farda.

Altogether, Radio Farda estimates that Iran lost some $15 million per day in potential revenue through its trade with China, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the Iranian budget.

For the upcoming budget of about $49 billion, expectations for domestic and foreign oil revenue have dipped by 3 percent, according to Khatinoglu, even as the projected budget itself has risen by about 18 percent.

Accounting for the fluctuation of global oil prices, which fell far short of the average estimated for the current year, the peg has been lowered to $71 per barrel. Tehran is also expecting lower oil-export volumes — which only briefly met forecasts of 1.5 million bpd, the highest levels seen since 2018 — with only 1.35 million bpd forecast.

Iran is reportedly expected to plug the gap left by the lower oil revenue by increasing taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses, while Khatinoglu says Tehran will try to boost revenue by raising domestic energy prices.

Shipping Competition

Adding to the uncertainty of Iran’s finances is the potential for weaker Chinese demand for its oil and competition from Russia which, like Tehran, sends banned oil to Beijing.

And international sanctions are continuously evolving to punish countries and entities that foster Iran’s illegal oil trade, threatening to capsize the dark fleet that helps sustain Tehran’s so-called resistance economy.

On the other hand, the mercurial nature of oil price fluctuations and demand could work to Iran’s advantage. With Venezuelan oil no longer under sanctions, Russia is left as the only competitor for clandestine oil sales to China.

And Iran’s capacity to export oil is greater than ever, allowing it to more easily sell its oil to Beijing when demand is high.

This is largely due to the considerable expansion of the global “dark fleet” of oil since crippling U.S. sanctions targeting Iran’s oil exports were restored after the United States unilaterally withdrew in 2018 from the Iran nuclear deal that has been agreed with six world powers.

The deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), offered sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on Tehran’s controversial nuclear program. After the deal went into effect in January 2016, Iran more than doubled its legal oil exports in a few months, eventually reaching a high of 1.54 million bpd in 2018.

But with the U.S. withdrawal from the deal and subsequent reintroduction of sanctions that year, Iranian oil exports plummeted. And after the exceptions granted to a handful of countries — including China — that were allowed to continue to import Iranian oil expired in 2019, Iranian oil exports slowed to a trickle.

This was partly because Iran was not equipped to export its oil and had no immediate customers willing to defy the sanctions. But that changed with the fine-tuning of Iran’s efforts to defy sanctions, the fivefold rise in the number of dark-fleet tankers, and China’s willingness to take the risk of doing business with Tehran — although Beijing has not acknowledged unregistered imports of Iranian oil.

Today the dark fleet of often aging ships — nearly half of them VLCCs (very large crude carriers) — has risen to up to 1,000 vessels, according to Vortexa, which tracks international shipping. Many smaller ships are involved in Russian oil exports, which account for about 80 percent of all opaque tanker activity. But Iran had access to nearly 200 tankers, many of them supertankers, as of early 2023, according to Vortexa.

More than 20 ships, 13 of them VLCCs, joined the Iranian fleet in 2023, Vortexa reported in June, contributing to record-high Iranian oil exports under sanctions.

Vortexa attributed the rise to increased Chinese demand, the addition of the new tankers to shuttle Iranian oil after many had switched to shipping Russian oil, and the decline of Iranian inventories drawn down to boost exports amid heightened competition with Russia for the Chinese market.

While Chinese demand for Iranian oil slowed in October, Vortexa noted in a subsequent report, Washington’s removal of oil sanctions on Venezuela that month opened the possibility of higher demand for Iranian oil.

Uncertain Waters

In an October report, the global trade intelligence firm Kpler explained that tankers illegally shipping Iranian oil commonly “go dark” upon entering the Persian Gulf by turning off their transponders, technically known as the automatic identification system (AIS). After visiting Iran’s main oil terminal on Kharg Island or other ports, they then reemerge after a few days indicating they are carrying a full load.

From there, the ships offload the oil with ship-to-ship transfers that take place in unauthorized zones, mostly in the Singapore Straits. Eventually the oil, rebranded as coming from Malaysia or Middle Eastern countries, enters China, where it is processed by more than 40 independent “teapot” refiners that have little exposure to international sanctions or the global financial system.

Sanctions Revisited

The challenge for those trying to halt the illicit trade in Iranian oil as a way to hold Tehran accountable for its secretive nuclear activities and dire human rights record, is how to make the negatives of dealing with Iran greater than the financial benefits.

That has put the illicit seaborne trade of oil — both Iranian and Russian, owing to the ongoing war in Ukraine — under greater scrutiny by the international community.

“There’s continuous refining of the sanctions programs to include and expand sanctions against those involved in evasion, and that includes sanctioning so-called dark fleets,” said Castellum’s Vuksic, noting that the number of targeted sanctions against Iranian individuals and entities rose by more than 1,000 last year.

The big question is enforcement, an issue that is being debated in the United States and other countries and is leading to increased calls for countries like Panama to de-flag illegal tankers and for countries to clamp down on dark-fleet ships anchored off their shores.

“My expectation is that governments, including the United States, will take action against these dark fleets, especially the facilitators and the [ship] owners when they’re identified,” Vuksic told RFE/RL.

Other factors, including concerns about the impact of a broader Middle East conflict potentially involving Iran, could also hurt or help Iran’s financial standing.

As Kpler noted while reporting that Chinese imports of Iranian oil had dropped significantly in October, the changing global landscape can have a big effect on the independent Shandong-base refineries that purchase Iranian oil.

“Middle East tensions/threat of stricter enforcement of U.S. sanctions may have turned Shandong refiners more risk-adverse,” the global trade intelligence firm wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

In the past week, supply fears also exposed the volatility of global crude prices, potentially to Iran’s benefit.

Oil prices rose sharply on January 2 on news that Iran had sent a frigate to the Red Sea and was rejecting calls to end support for attacks by Tehran-backed Huthi rebels that have disrupted shipping in the important trade route.

Prices surged again following the deadly January 3 bombing attack in Iran, for which the Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility.

But the week ended with questions about the future of Iran’s cut-rate deal with the only country willing to help prop up its economy, with Reuters reporting that China’s oil trade with Iran had stalled after Tehran withheld supplies and demanded higher prices.