I’ve covered the Zangezur Corridor in southern Armenia with some regularity here. It’s a short 42-kilometer strip of land link in a trade and energy route that stretches the length of Eurasia, and there’s a reason it’s so hotly contested not just among regional actors like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran, but also world powers like China, India, Russia, and the US.
The latter’s involvement can be viewed as an effort to control the flow of resources of the South Caucasus and Central Asia to Europe bypassing Russia and Iran and excluding Beijing. It would help cut off Russia’s access to the Middle East as well as one of the potential routes of China’s Middle Corridor.
That small piece of land is representative of a much larger geo-economic competition underway over control of infrastructure and the $9 trillion logistics industry, or as Michael Hudson argues, today’s New Cold War is a battle between finance capitalism (the Collective West) who want to privatize and financialize and the industrial capitalism of the likes of China.
The logistics great game also plays out in the mostly failed efforts to isolate Russia. The US has found success getting Europe to partially cut itself off from Russia, and sanctions have forced Moscow to largely overhaul its logistics for the country’s foreign trade, a mission at which it has largely been successful, but for the foreseeable future international transport corridors Russia relies on or is attempting to develop will occupy a central place in the minds of US neocons who look to create choke points as part of the New Cold War. One of those happens to be Zangezur, where at least for now the US finds success by burrowing its way into Armenia.
In other ways, this effort to isolate Russia is backfiring on Washington as it pushes Russia and China closer together joining them in the mission to wall off Eurasia from Western destabilization campaigns. It has forced Russia to pour as much resources as it can muster into development of its Far East regions. It drives Russia and India closer together, as well as Russia and ASEAN countries.
I’ve lost count of the number of trade corridor plans across Eurasia, but I’d like to do a 30,000-foot view here, and maybe dive more into specific cases in future posts. I’ll start with a look at the US-backed India-Middle East-EU Economic Corridor (IMEEC) and a few of its competitors supported by Russia and Iran and then turn to a brief look at one component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative that will likely be in the news more coming up soon.
IMEEC
The US is on its umpteenth plan to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The India-Middle East-EU Economic Corridor (IMEEC) that was launched with fanfare at the G20 hosted by India in September 2023 is the latest iteration. Not even a month later, it went up in flames with the Middle East — maybe.
The initiative, which involves countries like France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the US, hinged on normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. That has been put on hold indefinitely, and with the US-Israel rampage throughout the Middle East, the future prospects of IMEEC look shaky.
There are arguments that Hamas’ October 7 attack was part of an attempt by the Axis of Resistance to throw a wrench in the IMEEC plans. But then one must also consider the explanation that the attack was at least allowed to happen over the most heavily guarded border in the world in order to allow the US-Israel to enact the ongoing genocide and land grabs that reenvisions the region as part of IMEEC. Either might be too neat of explanations on their own, but the way Zionists are proceeding certainly has a fantasy component for the future of their potential conquests.
On Monday, the Israeli settler organization Nachala and members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party held a conference “Preparing to Resettle Gaza” in southern Israel. Two short months after the launch of Israel’s genocidal response to Oct. 7, the Netanyahu government was already internally circulating its future vision for Gaza.
The Jerusalem Post revealed those plans back in May. Known as “Gaza 2035,” they envision the strip remaining under long-term Israeli control with the goal to “rebuild from nothing.” Here’s how that apparently looks:
And here it is in the wider region as an “industrial production center” with access to “energy and raw materials from the Gulf while leveraging Israeli technology” and a key segment in IMEEC.
As ArtReview points out:
Before 8 October 2023, Gaza was already a modern, bustling city. It had a similar average density to London, a 97 percent literacy rate, 36 hospitals, 12 universities, parks, highrises, recreational beaches. If the goal is to ‘rebuild from nothing’, then it will be because Israel has razed the territory’s cities, towns and villages. The question is, who will it be rebuilt for?
…throughout the three ‘phases’ explained in the document, it becomes clear that the Palestinians permitted to live among the ruins of their homeland would provide cheap labour in this new ‘regional trade and energy hub’ intended for Israeli business interests.
Displacing a population and destroying their existing social, architectural and economic fabric under the guise of modernisation harks back to colonial ideas about certain races and societies being apparently unfit or incapable of extracting the maximum profit from land – an argument favoured by nineteenth-century colonisers from South Africa to North America. Three hundred years of this thinking has landed us in our grotesquely unequal present, yet former colonial powers in Europe and settler colonies like the US continue to finance the militarisation of Israel.
That’s likely why Europe and the US continue to finance Israel. There’s a long history of grand plans to remake the region and use Palestinians as disposable labor. As Laura Robson, a professor of history at Penn State University, describes in her 2023 book “Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work” the Palestinian refugee has always meant being in perpetual limbo pending a political settlement and being eligible for material aid but not legal assistance, asylum, or political advocacy. This meant keeping Palestinians confined to Arab host states and making them prime candidates for regional refugee labor — although efforts to deploy Palestinians as laborers in American-backed projects across the Middle East largely failed, not least because they agitated for more labor and political rights.
According to The Jerusalem Post, the Israeli government believes this vision for Gaza could be duplicated in the Axis of Resistance countries of Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. Those countries will obviously have something to say about that. They’re also part of the competing world powers different visions for how to include the region in logistics corridors.
Prior to the unveiling of IMEEC plans, there were already similar projects to underway in the Middle East led by Russia, Iran, and China, such as the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which like IMEEC also involves India.
The INSTC faces several challenges, including infrastructure in Iran, sanctions, the West trying to create chokepoints in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and relentless pressure on New Delhi from the Five Eyes.
In August India approved a $9 billion public-private-partnership proposal to build an enormous port on its West coast at Vadhavan. New Delhi and private investors are hoping that IMEEC and/or the INSTC will come through to make the investment pay off.
There’s also the project to connect Bandar Imam Khomeini Port with Syria’s Latakia Port:
Some background from The Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International:
Stretching 32 km and crossing the Iran-Iraq border, a new economic lifeline could potentially fuel Syrian ports. This is the Shalamcheh-Basra railway line.
The idea was first proposed in 2011 but was delayed due to the deteriorating security situation in Iraq with the rise of the terrorist group ISIS. The project resurfaced in 2023 when Iraq and Iran signed an agreement to expedite the construction of the railway, with both sides committing to complete the project within two years.
The Iranian president’s visit to Iraq on September 11 provided an additional boost, renewing high-level political support and commitments for the project’s completion. Discussions between the two sides helped resolve technical, financial, and border security issues, which may speed up the project’s progress…According to Al Jazeera, Iran places great importance on Iraq, viewing it as a vital link to Syria and Lebanon within the resistance axis. Iran also aims to connect the Shalamcheh-Basra railway to Syrian ports.
According to Arsharq Al-Awsat, establishing a railway link from Iran to the Mediterranean falls under the 25-year MoU between Iran and China signed in 2021, which includes hundreds of billions of Chinese investment in return for discounted oil. In July, Iran and China launched freight trains between the two countries via Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
As for IMEEC and Gaza 2035, even if the US-Israel were to somehow completely empty Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria of all human life so that their oligarchs have free rein to construct their capitalist utopias (dystopias for the majority), there will still be loads of other problems with IMEEC that need to be ironed out. It’s probably more likely the US and Israel settle for violent grifts rather than the ambitious IMEEC and attempt to stymie other China and Russia-backed corridors in the region. There’s only so long that can work, however, and there’s also the fact that the US-Israel barbarity in the Middle East is currently diverting trade from the region, and in the process is only encouraging other countries to seek alternative routes.
China’s Belt and Road and Georgia
Maybe nowhere is this logistics great game more evident than with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which nowadays could be viewed as an effort to diversify its trade routes to ensure the country cannot be cut off from any needed imports by the West.
As China attempts to extend its reach, the US with the frequent help of the EU have rarely offered competing infrastructure projects, but instead attempt to sever China’s links through various, typically nefarious, means. BRI countries are often the targets of pressure campaigns or coup attempts by Western-backed forces, and Chinese loans to global south countries — while far from perfect, they’re still better than what the West has on offer — have been smeared for years in attempts to get recipient countries to refuse or back out of the deals. If all that fails, destabilization is often a tool that is turned to.
Let’s just focus on one country that has been in the news recently and will likely be there a lot soon as it has an election coming up this weekend that could be accompanied by color revolution attempts. That’s Georgia. Now why is the West so concerned about this Black Sea country of less than four million people seeking better ties with Moscow and Beijing to the point some pretty ugly allegations are flying around?
PM Kobakhidze posted an official statement saying that he was being routinely blackmailed by “high ranking foreign politicians,” but was “particularly aghast” during the phone conversation with an unnamed EU Commissioner, who “listed the range of measures that western politicians… pic.twitter.com/gtHgaSHhCr
— Civil.ge (@CivilGe) May 23, 2024
The problem for the US is that Georgia making nice with Russia goes against Washington’s Black Sea Strategy, but maybe even more than that is Georgia is an important piece of the puzzle for Chinese logistics on its Middle Corridor:
Azerbaijan and China signed a Joint Declaration on establishing a strategic partnership at this year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. The economic components of that agreement focused on cooperation in oil and gas production and transport infrastructure — i.e., continuing their pursuit of connectivity through the Middle Corridor, also known as the Trans-Caspian International Trade Route. Georgia’s turn away from the West, and the current government’s decision to repair ties with Russia and selection of a Chinese consortium to build its Anaklia port has Washington on its back foot — for now. We’ll see what happens with Georgia’s upcoming election and its aftermath.
What is the West’s ultimate goal? The fact that a Chinese consortium was selected to build Georgia’s deep sea port drew the ire of the West, but the Chinese consortium submitted the sole bid. There was a past effort to build it that involved the US. Here’s some background from RFE/RL:
A previous attempt to build the port in Anaklia by a consortium formed between Georgia’s TBC Bank and U.S.-based Conti International was canceled by the government in 2020 after years of political controversy that saw TBC co-founders Mamuka Khazaradze and Badri Japaridze facing money-laundering charges.
Following the charges, the American investor pulled out and the project ground to a halt until the government canceled the $2.5 billion port contract.
The fact is the West hardly builds stuff anymore — at least not competitively.
Have you ever heard of the Three Seas Initiative (3SI)? It wouldn’t be surprising if not.It was compared to the BRI when it first came about four years ago, and then mostly faded into obscurity. It’s described as “a politically inspired, commercially driven platform for improving connectivity between thirteen EU Member States allocated between Baltic, Adriatic and Black seas.”
The problem is it doesn’t really build anything. 3SI is led by the US, Germany, and the European Commission and has an investment fund advised by Amber Infrastructure Group, which promises “an attractive return to the investors.” The Three Seas Fund was created under Luxembourg law, which means it’s liable to a subscription tax of 0.01% of the fund’s net assets and is exempted from the payment of the capital gains tax, income tax, and wealth tax.
Started in 2019, 3SI has made a lot of investments and participated in some privatizations of public infrastructure but little actual infrastructure has been built. Involved parties continue to iron out “ultimate return on investment calculation.”
If we return to IMEEC, if it ever comes to fruition after a pause in all the killing, it’s still unclear who would actually lay the rail and pipelines and who would pay for it while ensuring they get a healthy return on the investment.
Plus Ca Change…
The same pieces of land that have been fought over for hundreds of years, remain points of contention today. France and Britain vied for the island of Perim in the Bab el Mandeb back in the 19th century. Today the US and others fail to prevent the Houthis from effectively closing the “Gate of Tears.”
The Armenians emerged victorious against the Turks and Soviets for Zangezur in 1920. The strip of land is now being contested again. The powers might change, but the logistics remain the same. And here we are again.
Today while the territory doesn’t fly a new flag when conquered, If we view it through the lens of neoliberalism and financialization of infrastructure, much of the fighting is over who gets to collect the rent.
Could the “rules-based international order” mean that the Russians can mine their resources, the Chinese can process them, and the Chinese can build it, but Western oligarchs must own it?
Of course the workers don’t own it anywhere, and as far as I can see that isn’t set to change in a more multipolar world. Readers can correct me if I’m wrong, but as the BRICS kick off their meeting in Kazan, the member countries still have some of the worst economic inequality in the world. Now, some argue that they’re still developing and working to make it better, but it sure is hard to see. In India, for example, income inequality is now worse than under British rule. According to the Gini Index score, the top four countries for wealth inequality are all BRICS members: South Africa, Brazil, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia (India is seventh), and across much of the BRICS, the problem is getting worse.
Are we just going to get more global oligarchs in China and Russia and some humbled in the US? Unfortunately for all of us, by the time they come to a truce and divvy up the pie, most of the logistics infrastructure might just be worthless anyways due to the ravages of climate change and the next pandemic(s).
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In these times, we (the USA) has a choice. We can send L. Austin to Ukraine and promise more money for war while ignoring the catastrophe in the Carolinas and Florida. On the other hand, BRICS can develop the North Sea Route and the routes that Conor has written so well about. Trouble is, it’ll all be a mute point with the acceleration of climate catastrophe – the overriding concern. When Langley is underwater and the fires of Siberia reach Moscow, our priorities will have changed. In some ways, I can’t wait. I think humanity will get its comeuppance sooner than these projects can be finished. Our priorities “in these times” are askew.
Western policy has been askew for decades! This from someone ( me) who thought, at the time, that the ’60’s opened eyes to the problems that the world faced. Naive me.
You don’t just cut around a cancer to get rid of it. You have to excise the whole mass.
Your articles are amazing. You have reached the level of long ago, for me, as an Andrew Cockburn (brother of Alex), in Harpers, etc……….. as well as Nick Turse…. his early articles at Tom’s about Africa and bases and such were so important, but I think ignored too much. I’m doing what I can to spread you on FB, as well as NC of course.
Appreciate it, Tommy S.
This is Harper’s level analysis, Conor. (And once upon a time the Atlantic)
NC is providing you a platform to pull this material together and long may it continue to do so. But you might think at some point — not now but perhaps as the big picture becomes clear to you — about pitching the LRB or, just possibly, Will Dunn at the New Statesman. Sometimes it’s possible to get a piece through at a UK publication that you couldn’t get at a stateside one (cf. at the LRB, J. Mearsheimer and S. Walt and, up to a point, S. Hersh).
Yes, I too, have been duly impressed with Connor’s work!
That is a lot of infrastructure being built to mesh the world closer together. You wonder why some of it was not built years or even decades earlier. But it is true that the west does not build that much anymore. You want a US military base with drones in your country? It will be set up by the end of the month. A railway line to connect your capital with the nearest port city? Nah, we don’t do that. Ask a private equity corporation to set it up for you.
I’ll repeat a story that I gave in a comment a coupla months ago to illustrate the problem. So this US delegation landed in an African nation at an airport built by the Chinese. Then that delegation went by car to their hotel over a highway – built by the Chinese. And yes, the hotel that they stayed in was also built by the Chinese. And the reason why that US delegation was in that country? To warn them about Chinese investment.
“So this US delegation landed in an African nation…”
Description of a trip by Vice President Harris to Zambia, to warn Zambians about Chinese investment. Even now, China is modernizing the rail line running from Zambia through Tanzania that the Chinese built in 1976.
Who built the car?
Who knows, but if Mexico is any indication, when it wears out it will be replaced by a car built in a local BYD manufacturing plant.
It was a Tesla assembled in China. :)
Whatever it was, I’ll bet they didn’t offer the driver a tip.
re: “Of course the workers don’t own it anywhere, and as far as I can see that isn’t set to change in a more multipolar world. Readers can correct me if I’m wrong, but as the BRICS kick off their meeting in Kazan, the member countries still have some of the worst economic inequality in the world. Now, some argue that they’re still developing and working to make it better, but it sure is hard to see.”
very important (as of course the entire text)
I tried to talk about this recently. We realized that we absolutely lack the info.
Would be interesting to hear a response to the above quote by Monthly Review or Tricontinental Institute.
China in 1980 had a per capita income that was a third lower than that of India. Now Chinese per capita income is 144% higher than that of India, and India has grown fast since 1980. China has not just grown in per capita income, but has ended severe poverty across the 1.4 billion and is focused still on the lowest in income. The gains in well-being through China are astonishing, but seemingly resented by many Western correspondents for reasons that make no sense to me.
Think what it means that the Nature.com Index of high-quality science research publishing for the latest 12 months shows 4 of the top 5 publishing institutions are Chinese, 7 of the top 10 institutions are Chinese, and 11 of the top 15.
Harvard is at number 2. German institutions are at numbers 7 and 13. A French institution is number 10.
The average middle class person in China lives better than the average middle class person in the United States. Of course, that can never be acknowledged by the mainstream media which is all in on propagandizing the American people.
Inequality in western countries isn’t improving either. Coming from a higher level it may not be quite as obvious, but the tendency can not be denied, it has been going on for years and is inherent to the system of financialized economics.
Whereas BRICS does exist for how long now? How does one expect a turn around within such a short time? True independence from western colonisation is still being fought over. Before this fight is won, nothing can be expected to improve. Look at Ukraine and Gaza/Lebanon. Next color revolution, next (civil) war, and everything has to start from scratch. Countries are still pawns of IMF, subject to sanctions, to terror by US financed ‘rebels’. Even without reading the source of the quote, I dare say, its the usual framing to defame BRICS.
BRIC founded June, 2009
BRICS emerged in September, 2010
BRICS + Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, UAE emerged in August, 2023
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1wVNF
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China, India, Brazil and South Africa, 1977-2023
(Indexed to 1977)
That inequality in the BRICS is a matter of being the lesser of two evils.
I’d also be interested to hear, especially from Tricontinental. Vijay Prashad, a wonderful historian, has been in the ‘campist’ camp regarding China and BRICS, neglecting his Marx. Most of the people i know who are around socialist politics in the US are of the same orientation. This bloc can do no wrong, and, if it has, its America’s fault, and anyways it was worth it. Nevermind that ‘multipolarity’ led to our last several world wars, and that capitalist countries reach imperialistic stages of development (see BRI). I see this mindset as the international version of voting for Kamala Harris because Trump is the Great Satan.
Thank you for this brilliant analysis. What I find striking about the US and Chinese schemes is that they both suppose that western Europe is: (i) a desirable market; and (ii) fated to be a vent for Chinese or US/Indian goods. The traffic is essentially one-way, so what does Europe actually get in return? However, what is the basis of the exchange, or is the exchange merely that western Europe runs down its capital, which is transferred to the Sino-Russian bloc or to the US?
However, even before either of these grandiose schemes reach their full fruition I suspect that Europe soon won’t have that much surplus capital left, in which case the de facto western terminus of the Belt & Road might become Russia, whilst that of the IMEEC becomes Iraq/Syria, which barter Indian goods for oil/gas.
So, if Europe is decreasingly able to function as an effective vent to Chinese, Indian or American surpluses (which is, of course, to suppose that Indian manufacturing capacity will increase and US manufacturing capacity can be revived), who will do so? Can Russia and its adjuncts really absorb China’s surplus goods via the Belt & Road?
The Belt & Road really looks to be a bid to pull Europe into the Sino-Russian orbit, whilst the IMEEC appears altogether more confused and incoherent, but is *perhaps* intended to drain capital from Europe in order to prise India away from the Sino-Russian bloc, so that India remains in the US orbit, such that the US can still essay some form of containment, albeit at the expense of a pliable Europe (with Europe, whether via India or Ukraine, bearing much of the huge cost of that containment).
What if Europe rebels against this prospective peonage? I suspect the Europeans can be induced to buckle to US pressure, based on the assumption that even if they are running down their capital to finance the economic expansion of India, there is such a vast abundance of cheap Indian labour (either unemployed or underemployed) that the diminution of European capital will be offset by the very cheapness of Indian imports. Therefore, so the US might tell the Europeans, the welfare impact upon Europe will be ‘neutral’.
Thus the US establishment could do to the European middle and working classes (using India) what it has already done to its own middle and working classes (using China). And the US will continue to provide a diminished defence shield to the Europeans, albeit that the Europeans will be financing much of it by importing expensive US LNG and presumably because US firms will invest heavily in Indian manufacturing (i.e., transfers from Europe to India will become profits to US topcos owning subsidiaries in India). Assuming that this is indeed the plan, it is not clear how this will help resolve the internal problems of the US, as it would presumably stymie Bidenomics and simply substitute India for China. However, as Nicholas Mulder has noted in a recent article in the Yale Review, Bidenomics is fast being folded into the US class war anyway.
So, whatever happens, Europe is presumably toast. As Glenn Diesen has remarked today, the former chess players have now become the chess pieces.
The German translation of “B&R” is already giving away the colonialist mindset of European elites who know nothing about China, which is “New Silk Road”. Nothing else there. Cultural romanticism where technocratic analysis should be in place.
p.s. corresponding with your outline, Thyssen just on Oct. 7th stated they might shelve “green steel”. Which was hugely propagated for years now. Underreported in Germany due to Oct. 7th “anniversary”.
Please someone correct me, but I have the impression that German failure with “green energy transition” is of historic proportions.
There is no defense shield, just the promise of retaliation if a nuclear attack occurs. And that might not even be guaranteed, if in US minds all nuclear exchanges only hit Europe…
Air Defense systems in Europe and US are totally lacking in numbers, missiles, and ability to intercept.
“Can Russia and its adjuncts really absorb China’s surplus goods via the Belt & Road?”
Good grief, 151 countries were part of the Belt and Road Initiative at the end of 2023. China is attracted to foreign markets and capable of producing attractive goods and offering such services as well.
China is the world’s largest food producer, self-sufficient in food with advanced storage of important produce of 2 to 3 years. China however is also among the largest of food importers. Then again, China is working on agricultural projects from Madagascar through the Dominican Republic. Agricultural research programs are emphasized in China.
I would like to think the Germans, say, who have a far larger trade surplus than China, have lots to offer China. That German car companies have lost competitiveness with Chinese companies these last few years, just means Germans need to modernize and avoid feeling sorry for themselves after having had an advantage for more than a century.
Same with the British. Abusing China was no problem for the British for more than a century. Now, the British can figure out how to be attractive to China because sailing warships through the South China Sea will no longer suffice.
Yes, to be sure, and it was a rhetorical question to which I cannot claim to have an answer (assuming it is indeed a problem at all). Some Western foreign policy think tanks (such as the Lowy Institute or the Foreign Policy Research Institute, both neoliberal) have raised the issue of absorption, presumably believing that there is a risk of a crisis of overproduction, as in the 1920s. Klein and Pettis have made much of the need for China to stimulate domestic consumption in order to help resolve the absorption problem, although others (Michael Roberts comes to mind) have argued that this is a trap, as it will lead China down the primrose path towards a debt/consumption economy akin to that of the US. Certainly part of the Belt & Road initiative has concentrated on promoting infant industries in participating countries so that they can absorb Chinese surplus production. The point I was making is that a European terminus to the Belt & Road will have ever less value, given that Europe has little to offer China in exchange for Chinese goods, and this might amplify European anxieties about China and help draw it back to the US. The whole point of pumping China full of opium from the second quarter of the 19th century was precisely because Europe had nothing to offer China which China could not produce itself; the drain of specie from India to China had become intolerable and the opportunistic (and evil) British therefore had to press upon China a good – opium – which would ‘sell itself’ and so restore a balance of trade between India and China. Many thanks.
This article is to the points being made:
https://english.news.cn/20241018/757f2184963a4129a6300678b8e8a631/c.html
October 18, 2024
Uncovering facts about Xinjiang as a BRI hub
The only thing I saw was hard work.
By Hazem Samir
China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region connects China with Central Asia. Due to its location as China’s western gateway for trade with Central Asia and Europe, the government has made great efforts to develop Xinjiang into a hub of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
When I set out for a business trip to Xinjiang earlier this year, I was concerned about some 12 million Uygurs living in this region as I had read some reports on human rights abuses against them. As a journalist seeking facts, I decided to uncover the truth about these controversial reports during my 12-day stay there…
Brian Berletic/New Atlas on Uygur “issue” of the West:
“Western Media Urges Public: Believe Our Lies, Not Your Own Eyes Regarding China”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfuUqQZ1h78
Kobakhidze’s X-post brings to mind Whitney Webb’s “One Nation Under Blackmail” which links intelligence agencies (CIA-MI6-Mossad), banks and other crime syndicates in schemes to install and/or blackmail political leaders in a web of money laundering, drug trade, assassinations, honey traps, illegal surveillance, weapons smuggling, coups and terrorist acts. When combined with Ernst Wolff’s “World Economic Forum” description of the web of ruling elite connections, the “divvy up the pie” ending statement in the article seems all too fitting. So The Great Game morphed into The Grand Chessboard and then into blackmail schemes – neocon/neoliberal blackmail schemes – with the barriers between criminal mafia syndicates and Davos syndicates mostly removed. Apparently the British elites’ fascination with domination and intrigue infected the US elite in the change of hegemons between World Wars. And that sociopathic/myopic view of the world, degenerating into what can only be deemed criminal enterprises for super profits, has blinded them to the coming chaos of climate change. Or perhaps they just see a collapse of Western capitalism as just another creative destruction from which they can profit.
James McFadden: Apparently the British elites’ fascination with domination and intrigue infected the US elite in the change of hegemons between World Wars.
Comedy gold!
Yes, the US and Americans were innocent back in 1898-1902 when they occupied the Phillippines in the Phillipine-American war, in which then-president McKinley proclaimed a policy of “benevolent assimilation” for “the greater good of the governed” whereby U.S. troops slaughtered 20,000 Filipino combatants and caused the deaths of approximately 200,000 Filipino civilians, including women and children, via combat, hunger, and disease.
Sample correspondence back to the US —
…our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog..
Or –
About 1,000 men, women and children were killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War#Atrocities
Likewise, the US was innocent when in 1829 after Mexico officially abolished chattel slavery, Anglo Texans in the then-Mexican state of Texas called on the US to help them secede so they could keep their slaves. “Remember the Alamo!”
Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850
For that matter, in 1774-5 Virginia landowners like Washington and Jefferson — whose forefathers were royalists on the losing side during the English Revolution who then fled to the colonies to recreate a feudal lifestyle; go check it out — joined the independence movement only after the Somerset case in England and the Mansfield declaration indicated that the UK would abolish slavery in the colonies, and the likes of Washington and Jefferson and the other two-thirds of America’s ‘Founding Fathers’ would lose their slaves.
The counter-revolution of 1776 : slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America / Gerald Horne
…as 1776 approached, London-imposed abolition throughout the colonies was a very real and threatening possibility–a possibility the founding fathers feared could bring the slave rebellions of Jamaica and Antigua to the thirteen colonies. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War … was in large part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their liberty to enslave others….
And so on. This isn’t even to get into the relentless slaughter and dispossession of indigenous Americans — and the invariable breaking of treaties — during the 19th century.
In the words of D. H. Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”
Of course I agree. The white supremacist culture and settler-colonialist brutality and genocide was always there — even predating US formation — adapted from British supremacist culture. I was primarily thinking about the blackmail aspect of US foreign policy as implemented by the CIA (and Mossad and MI6) which I think is a relatively new tool for US empire. Although J. Edgar Hoover was developing blackmail in parallel, I think MI6 helped form the OSS/CIA culture of blackmail and intrigue — adopting crime syndicate tactics of assassination and blackmail to gain and hold power — tactics which Israel now seems fascinated at employing. I don’t recall reading about blackmail being used prior to the FBI/CIA formations in the US, but I could be wrong. But you are right that genocide and torture of those deemed “less human” by American elites has always been there – part of the DNA of American mythologies — exceptionalism and manifest destiny.
Indeed. This rather reminds me of the encounter between FDR and the acerbic, but witty, cabinet minister Oliver Stanley (then secretary of state for the colonies) in January 1945:
Roosevelt: “I do not want to be unkind or rude to the British but in 1841, when you acquired Hong Kong, you did not acquire it by purchase.”
Stanley: “Let me see, Mr President, that was about the time of the Mexican War.”
(this exchange was recorded by Charles Taussig).
This was the same FDR who in 1913, as assistant secretary of the Navy (under the fanatical segregationist Josephus Daniels) drew up a memorandum calling for the purchase of the Danish West Indies and the annexation of Dutch interests in the Caribbean or who in March 1922 wrote to his friend Leonard Wood (then governor general of the Philippines) that: “It does seem to me pity that both of our parties at home cannot get together and definitely state the American policy towards the Philippine Islands, Porto Rico, Haiti and Santo Domingo. The vast majority of people in this country, I have always been certain, understand that complete independence for all these people is not to be thought of for many years to come.”
I’m sorry to see the repetition here of the 1619 Project‘s unsupported claim that the 1772 Somerset decision / Mansfield Declaration influenced American leaders to rebel against Britain. George Washington’s resistance to British authority in the 1760s is well documented. Thomas Jefferson was just 28 at the time of the Somerset decision, and did not have much of a public record. But there is no evidence that I know of that the Somerset decision swayed his views on resistance to British rule. If you have any evidence to support this claim, please post a link.
Ad to that the peace treaties the Brits had with the natives, which also curtailed the advancement of the colonists west and stopped them to acquire new land. Check George Washington’s chequered past in this respect and how he got his wealth…
The Greed is Good credo has old roots in the US and some churches in the US even use Jesus (who tossed out the monylenders from the temple and came to bring the Jubilee) to justify the virtues of getting rich…
My view is that all natural monopolies, such as water/electricity/streets, as well as highways/railroads/ports, should be gov owned and operated. No need for oligarchs. If there’s no competition there’s no need for a private sector collecting rents.
I see the Chinese model as significantly closer to my ideal than the west. Beyond that, I’ve noticed in china/russia gov controls the oligarchs, not the other way round.
That 42km stretch of Armenian land would instantly become worthless if Turkey stopped objecting to it going through the northern strip of Iran.
I have nothing to add except that this was a meaty piece. Thanks Conor.
The map on BRI is outdated a bit. There is a high speed rail working since 2021 linking Chiana to Vientiane in Laos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boten%E2%80%93Vientiane_railway
Maybe there are other developments as well already in place.
And when it comes to western proposals, I remember that the west wanted to build the ISS in the 1980s and for years they have invested billions and they managed to come up with a model. Only after Russia, after 1991 came on board with their know how, the ISS could be developed…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station
Thank you for pointing out the oligarchic, deeply unequal nature of the BRICS countries. God bless them in their quest to build an ‘alternative’ to the US-dominated economic order, which richly deserves to be challenged and supplanted… but their adversarial relationship to that order seems to have persuaded many people that this means that they are qualitatively different, that they’re somehow more egalitarian, more likely to redistribute wealth across all levels of society. The upstart is just as thoroughly capitalist as the old guard; it’s just demanding a recutting of the pie. Too many seem to have forgotten this – or have chosen to overlook it – in their delight at seeing the old guard get its comeuppance.