COMMENT The contest for global domination
By W Joseph Stroupe
A long succession of post-World War II United States presidents, starting with
Harry S Truman and ending with George W Bush, has presided over the strategic
interests of the West in an epic match for domination of the globe, a grand
contest pitting the forces of US-style liberal capitalism and liberal democracy
against the post-World War II scourges of totalitarianism and communism, and
now, in the post-Soviet era, against authoritarianism ("sovereign democracy")
and Eastern-style statism ("managed capitalism").
Until the collapse of the Soviet Union circa 1989-1991, the contest was mostly
a draw, with neither side emerging in the undisputed lead. When the West did
emerge in the clear lead in 1991, it was wrongly assumed that the epic match
was over - it most certainly wasn't. Global developments, especially since
George W Bush
took office in 2001, proved the epic match over global domination continued to
be played out between the forces of East and West, with the weakened and
fractured East obliged to regroup, and to radically adapt its approach to its
much stronger Western opponent, and to refine and modify its fundamental
strategies in the enduring quest for global domination.
This epic contest is not confined to the old Cold War, because it is much
bigger than that. It is more like a boxing match, in which the West merely won
the first round in 1991, but not by a knockout as it had prematurely and
wrongly supposed. That doesn't win the match, it only wins round I. The
question is whether the now wobbly-kneed West will still be fully on its feet
at the end of the current round II, or whether it might be in the process of
getting knocked to its knees, as did the East in 1991.
Or, is it as many experts and the popular media are now supposing (apparently
under the pervasive mind-numbing influence of Obamamania), that the two
contestants, both suffering increasing hardship and knowing it is in their best
interests, will fundamentally change behavior and move to call off the match in
favor of compromise and accommodation?
History should at least be permitted to have its say here. History, though not
an absolute predictor of the future, is still a far better intellectual guide
than is the disproportionate embrace of wishful thinking, idealism and
Obamamania-inspired hyperbole, such as what we're seeing all too often in the
media these days.
The epic East-West match has always been a raw quest for global domination,
despite the gross lack of transparency on both sides with regard to their
underlying motives and goals in the game.
Since 1991, in the ongoing game, the West has continued to stridently profess
to be unselfishly interested only in spreading democratic freedom, with its
potential to help its adherents attain liberal capitalistic wealth, around the
globe in order that its peoples may choose for themselves what economic and
political systems they wish to have over them, and with emphasis on their right
to a much higher standard of living than that generally offered by the
authoritarian regimes.
Since 1997, the East has noisily professed to be interested only in an orderly
and more equitable distribution of power across the global order under the
auspices of the benign-sounding concept of “multipolarity”. Both sides have
vehemently disavowed any hidden agenda of seeking to dominate the globe.
However, throughout the epic match, both sides have extraordinarily given the
lie to their noble-sounding professions of good and unselfish motives, no
matter how they may have chosen to spin them at any point in the game. How so?
Both sides, each famously discontented with merely a "reasonable share" of
global power and dominion, and perpetually seduced by an almost drunken greed
for more and more, have sought to inflict fundamentally intolerable losses on
each other, such that the losing side would come under perpetual and
insufferable subservience to the winner, who takes virtually all. We shall see
that the supposed new era of the move toward geopolitical "multipolarity",
which proclaims that the end of such zero-sum games, has arrived, is largely an
intellectual farce perpetrated by clever propagandists.
Post-Soviet history proves the point
In 1992, US president George H W Bush proclaimed that the West had won the Cold
War and had emerged with unquestioned global power, and that the world at large
had nothing to fear from such power because the US would never abuse it the way
the Soviet Union had abused its power. History since then puts the lie to that
noble-sounding promise.
The US and the West gained immense "capital" in the form of global recognition,
credibility, favor, support and leverage when the old Cold War was won, but
that "capital", which should have been used to formulate a benign and noble
American-led world order, has instead been profoundly squandered.
Since 1991, the US, with great arrogance and insensitivity, sought to establish
an economic and geopolitical empire of such dimensions and brute economic and
military strength that no competitor, nor even any dissenter, dared resist its
onslaught. It was called "US-led unipolarity", and it was famously celebrated
in Washington and perpetuated globally through international and regional
economic and military-political institutions, organizations and alliances, and
by outright military attack, invasion and occupation, regardless of the
mounting objections of many of the governments and peoples variously impacted
by its almost unrestrained advancement. Only by massive overreach in Iraq did
the naked attempt at empire begin to come undone.
Not by accident, the attempted empire was primarily advanced in regions of the
globe where control over strategic energy resources would have been a key
prize. The attempted creation, extension and maintenance of global empire is a
cruel and bloody business. The post-1991 record of US policies, actions,
trickery and oppression in the global financial, economic, geopolitical and
military spheres provides ample witness to that fact. Virtual complete global
domination by economic, military and ideological means has been, at least up
until now, unquestionably the clear aim of the US side. Its unrestrained
triumphalism in the post-Soviet period took this shameful form.
At length, US-style liberal capitalism is being profoundly discredited,
disdained and swiftly abandoned the world over, even by its chief proponents,
thanks to the massive credibility hit inflicted on the ideology by the current
global financial and economic crisis, which arose out of the very heart of the
liberal capitalistic system, the US.
It is being abandoned in the West in favor of Western-style statism, which has
become a refuge in the mounting global crisis, and which differs less and less
from Eastern-style statism. In truth, liberal, US-style capitalism is going the
way communism went in 1989-1991 - it is dying. For the most part, communism
discredited itself, terribly plagued its own adherents, collapsed on itself,
and became disdained and even hated around the globe as a result. This is
happening now, too, with US-style liberal capitalism!
What about the recent record of the East? It is most certainly a legitimate
argument to say that the shortsighted triumphalism of the West throughout the
post-Soviet era powerfully contributed to the global backlash against US-led
unipolarity, a backlash that was born in the East (Russia-China) and continues
to be mounted predominantly from there. But this fact cannot possibly provide
justification for the nature and extent of the measures and strategies that
have been undertaken by the East, because these are ones that betray the same
kind of drunken greed for virtual total global control that the US has
displayed, as noted above.
The brutality and zeal manifested by the regimes in Russia and China in
oppressing their own peoples, in crushing virtually all dissent and in
cynically exercising the state's control over the minds of their citizens is
both shocking and repulsive. Both regimes continue to accelerate the massive
buildup of their militaries, far beyond that required for mere self-defense.
The rising East has worked around the globe to counter its Western democracy
spreading opponent by bolstering existing, and proliferating new, similarly
brutal authoritarian regimes, especially in regions of the globe rich in
strategic energy resources.
After the death of communism in 1991, both China and later Russia cleverly
amalgamated certain capitalistic and free-market principles with
authoritarianism and statism to produce what can only be sarcastically labeled
"sovereign democracy" and "managed capitalism". These ideological political and
economic systems, characterized by "democratic" elections almost entirely
managed, controlled and "poisoned" by the state via its media arm, were then
pushed and proliferated in resource-rich regions of the globe.
This was a naked attempt to sew up the globe's strategic energy resources for
control by the East as an irresistible lever of compulsion with which to extort
concessions from the West, and with which to conduct the grandest transfer of
wealth in history, from West to East.
The many sponsored authoritarian regimes have been armed to the teeth by Russia
and China in order that they can more effectively brutalize their own citizens
into submission and also resist attack and invasion by the US. This became
known as the global wave of resource nationalism, and it was engineered by
Russia and China and has enjoyed outrageous success, riding on the global
backlash against US-led unipolarity.
Control of global energy reserves has fully passed to the East, providing it a
profoundly potent lever to ultimate global dominance. Especially is that so
when one considers that Western dependence on energy imports is matched, and
even exceeded, by its massive and growing dependence on capital inflows from
its historic opponents in the East.
These players, thanks to the above-mentioned transfer of wealth that
capitalized not only on energy resources but also on cheap goods manufactured
in Asia, sit atop huge capital reserves, while the West drowns in red ink. The
fact that the West has so often foolishly played into the hands of its Eastern
opponents in these matters does not excuse the East for its brutal and
oppressive policies and strategies aimed at making the West ultimately
subservient to the East, largely via potent asymmetric energy,
financial/economic and military "equalizers" that focus the strengths of the
East on the strategic vulnerabilities of the West.
It isn't benign "multipolarity" that the East is striving for. Rather, it is
striving for the ability to checkmate the West, to credibly threaten
energy-based and/or capital-based economic strangulation, accompanied by the
credible threat of military confrontation aimed at the virtual destruction of
the ability of the US to any longer project its conventional military power
into the East's own hemisphere. The East doesn't just want a more even
distribution of power across the globe. It wants, in practice, to achieve
genuine global dominance over the policies and actions of the West.
Idealism, compromise and accommodation
In round II (Round I was the old Cold War) of the epic match, we see an East
that, despite the mounting hardships of the global economic crisis, continues
its rise. And we see an increasingly wobbly-kneed West that, because of that
very crisis, continues its rapid decline.
Consequently, if the East ultimately succeeds in seeing the West brought to its
knees, who's to say the East would not engage in the same kind of greedy
triumphalism which the West engaged in post-1991? What record of modesty,
respect for human dignity and freedom, and unselfishness exists on the part of
the East such that we can be confident it won't avariciously try to seize
virtual domination of the globe if it soon achieves a position of advantage in
round II of the match? If the US, with all its laudable principles of liberal
democracy, freedom and respect for human rights did not pass the test of
humility and benign unselfishness, why should we be assured the East would do
so?
The drunken greed for global dominance, only reinforced by colossal mutual
distrust, has run so deep on both sides for so long, and has so influenced and
complicated the thinking and policies on both sides, that sufficiently setting
these obstacles aside now in favor of real progress toward compromise and
accommodation is an enormous and incredibly complex undertaking which is
probably next to impossible, if not literally impossible, for the grossly
imperfect humans that head up the major powers in our global order.
On both sides, the culture of the epic contest for domination of the globe has
long since become an inseparable thread that is intertwined throughout almost
every level of government, policy-making, and analysis, notwithstanding the
frequent but hollow assurances to the contrary from our leaders.
Perhaps US President Barack Obama is genuine in his desire to move the global
order from contest to compromise and accommodation. I'm reasonably sure he is
genuine in his desire to do so. But the historical record is not encouraging
with respect to the ability of such individual leaders of peace to bring real
change to a longstanding world order fundamentally characterized by rivalry
between its major and minor factions, greed for power, bloodshed and war.
Throughout that record, such men and women of peace were all too often
themselves ultimately corrupted by power, or else their voices were drowned out
or marginalized by the majority, or they were literally snuffed out to make
room for someone else who would carry on in the ignoble way of the long line of
predecessors.
Oh, we like to celebrate with fond remembrance leaders of peace on their
special days each year, but within our world order the leaders actually present
at the helm of government continue for the most part in the path of their
reprehensible predecessors, and the epic match goes on. So do the disingenuous
spin and outright propaganda designed to hide the real motive and goal of both
sides in the game - namely, to achieve global dominance and acquire all the
power and wealth that go with it.
The fact that many of the most prominent and powerful world leaders likely
imbibe their own spin and deceive themselves into thinking the motives for
their policies and actions are nobler than they are greedy doesn't
fundamentally change the true picture one iota. It only conveniently masks the
true picture for the imbiber of ideology-inspired spin and propaganda, whether
it is that spewed by the East or else by the West.
This is the person who doesn't want, or is unable to admit to himself, that our
world order, at the governmental levels at least, is all about the insatiable
greed for wealth, power and dominance by almost any means, notwithstanding the
occasional and brief appearance of genuine men and women of peace who are
certainly notable, but nonetheless ineffective, exceptions to the rule.
Against this stark but honest backdrop, what are the prospects for achieving a
strategic East-West accommodation? Part II will address that question.
W Joseph Stroupe is a strategic forecasting expert and editor of Global
Events Magazine online at www.globaleventsmagazine.com.
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