The Geneva Stakes And The Politics Of Global Geo-Political Rivalry

By Surendra Ajit Rupasinghe -April 9, 2014 

Ajit Rupasinghe

The Geneva stakes center around the 3^rd US resolution presented to the UNHRC against the Mahinda Rajapaksa Regime that was adopted by 23 countries voting in favor, 12 abstaining and 12  voting against. The resolution established an international mechanism for investigating violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, including war crimes, to be supervised by the Commissioner of the UNHRC.

For the US, the so-called Western bloc, and including Japan and India, the agenda is set on either prying the Rajapaksa Regime from its increasing gravitation into the Chinese sphere of influence, or to replace it by a more pliant Regime. It is to be recalled that following a recent visit by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to China, both states declared that they had decided to raise their relationship to one ofstrategic cooperation.  Already, China, a rising imperialist power, has gained effective financial, economic and strategic influence over the island, as a vital link in its ‘string of pearls’.

This development contributed towards a signal change in the strategic balance of power in the whole Asian Pacific/ Indian Ocean region in favor of China. China is now a rising imperialist power with a growing potential to challenge US global hegemony and Indian regional hegemony and to dictate the structure of a new international order. At the same time, the US, EU, Japan, Russia, China and India are locking horns to establish their domain as against rival imperialist blocs and their coalitions. There is both collusion and contention between and within these rival imperialist blocs in their struggle for survival, ruled by the law : ”Expand or Die”. This rivalry and contention between and among imperialist blocs for supremacy drives all imperialist states towards the need to re-divide the world and  recast the international political order. This is the law and logic of Capital under imperialism – a permanent state of intensifying competition for the ever expanding need to secure raw materials, harness exploitable labor and conquer new markets to maintain an average of profit. Those that fail to advance shall be devoured. This basic contradiction of the system of imperialism is ultimately resolved through world wars for the violent re-division of the world- as two world wars have already attested. This law and logic of inter-imperialist rivalry  underlies the emerging political conjuncture, the emerging global geo-political configuration and defines the Geneva Stakes.  More fundamentally, this logic defines the basic dynamic in the politics of the Middle-East, and now, in the Ukraine, where the contest is between two rival imperialist blocs represented by the US/EU alliance and Russia.               Read More