War On China? – IV: Rules-Based International Order: Normalising Global State Terrorism

By Sachithanandam Sathananthan –JUNE 25, 2022

Dr. Sachithanandam Sathananthan

Barrelling Towards War

The Indo-US strategic manoeuvres to snooker the Peoples Republic of China are unlikely to bear fruit under the UN-administered International Law Regime. The Russian Federation and PRC’s veto in the UN Security Council are formidable obstacles to US ambitions to pursue the Brzezinskian Project for supremacy in Eurasia and, ultimately, global domination. The Project foretells a war without end as nation after nation firmly resists US supremacy, as Russia is doing in Ukraine.

Dr. Rosa Brooks, a Harvard, Oxford and Yale alumnus and Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, in her 2015 essay “There’s No Such Thing as Peacetime”, elaborated that in the “Forever War…[w]artime is the only time we have.” Her views echo the 1932 assertions of Benito Mussolini: “Fascism…believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism… renunciation [of war] is a sign of decay and of death”. Brooks’ position as an adjunct scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute adds weight to her End of Peace narrative, which dovetails Francis Fukuyama’s End of History Illusion.

President Jimmy Carter’s Polish-American National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski drew inspiration from “Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin [who] shared the assumption that Eurasia is the center of the world and that he who controls Eurasia controls the world” (p.4). When he crafted strategies for the US to dominate the two Eurasian powers Russia and China in his 1997 The Grand Chessboard, he posed the rhetorical question, “will America’s primacy in Eurasia endure?”(p.4) And contended first, the US Empire’s mastery over four crucial dimensions: military, economy, technology and culture (p.19) is unlike all previous empires – from ancient Roman, Chinese, Mongol and recent European Empires; and second, modern Capitalism is dynamic, innovative and ensures a flexible free market. The two conditions together, concluded Brzezinski, guarantee longevity of a stable US global primacy (p.160-61).

Brzezinski’s second contention apparently neglected John Maynard Keynes’ 1933 assessment drawn from The Great Depression of 1929: namely, western capitalism’s dynamism is flagging, that it cannot self-generate full employment (Karl Marx had reached a similar conclusion earlier for different reasons) and, consequently, requires government intervention – deficit financing – to re-float the depressed economies. Regretting governments’ “loan-expenditure” to ensure full employment was hitherto disbursed for war, which entails considerable destruction and misery, Keynes asserted the same outcome could be achieved by funnelling the debt towards wages and salaries to recruit the unemployed and underemployed civilians to build public works, such as roads, bridges and parks. That approach does not compete with private capital’s investment opportunities while the additional incomes generated by deficit expenditures would raise aggregate demand, attract competitive capital to expand consumer goods production and boost labour absorption. President Franklin D. Roosevelt resorted to consumer Keynesianism beginning with the 1933 CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) in his New Deal. Although 2.5 million men were employed between 1933 and 1943, the expected economic rejuvenation did not fully materialise.

Keynes was not wrong to assume competitive capital may respond to a deficit spending stimulus. However, he neglected the psychology of entrepreneurs: they are reluctant to make long term investments based on the short-term enhancement of purchasing power (aggregate demand), as during the New Deal. He was also blindsided by monopoly capital that increasingly dominated core sectors while pushing competitive capital to the economy’s margins. Monopoly capital is far less responsive to consumer Keynesianism; that is, it does not increase output and employment commensurate with the deficit spending stimulus. The US government fell back on war expenditure – military Keynesianism – to build up to WWII and to reach full or near-full employment.

By 1939 “The Cynical Mr. Keynes” adjusted the theory. In his BBC radio address “Will Re-armament Cure Unemployment?”, he “predicted the permanent war economy as a silver lining to war when he announced that ‘if expenditure on armaments really does cure unemployment, I predict that we shall never go back all the way to the old state of affairs. . . . Good may come out of evil’.” NATO’s industrial governments continued debt-financed defence activity during the military campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Laos, Nicaragua, Somalia, Gulf (1990s) and the Global War on Terror (2001 onwards). Their permanent reliance on war to push up employment levels is further evidence of structural impediments to economic growth and, probably, of relative decline.

As the national debt spiralled upwards, restricting competitive capital’s space to grow, the State took up the slack. Towards the end of WWII, in 1944, Walter J. Oakes identified “a war economy” in which ”the government’s expenditures for war (or ‘national defense’) become a legitimate and significant end-purpose of economic activity”. Defence funding “not only goes to giants such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman but also filters through subcontractors and supportive nonmilitary firms and organizations to influence ‘professional and business services, financial, information and administrative services, retail trade, leisure and hospitality services, education and health services, construction, and other manufacturing’” – a process that rapidly petrified the war economy into the “permanent war economy”. In it, “the private economy becomes increasingly intertwined with the state. The result is a bloated corporate state and a less dynamic private economy, the vibrancy of which is at the heart of increased standards of living. In undermining the market, the permanent war economy ultimately stifles the process of wealth creation”, leading to stagflation of differing severities since the mid-1970s that did not “cure unemployment”, as Keynes had hoped.

Consequently, the dynamism of Capitalism and the flexibility of free market that Brzezinski expected would guarantee longevity of a stable US global primacy are shaky at best; and his first contention is hardly plausible. The four conditions that enabled its rise are unique to the US Empire and may have enabled its unipolarity in the two post-USSR decades. However, history reveals that unique conditions catalysing the rise of each empire contain within them seeds of its decline and decay.

The self-proclaimed US’ mastery of the military dimension, despite the resort to robotic warfare, is questionable at the very least in the light of the unmitigated debacles in Afghanistan (2021) and Iraq (2009). They rooted even more deeply the Vietnam Syndrome – the public’s opposition to US boots on the ground in foreign wars – and have compelled the US intelligence to prosecute a proxy war in Ukraine.

The gradual degrading of competitive capitalism’s dynamism into monopoly capitalism’s stagflation, brought stunningly to the fore during the 2008 Depression, the simultaneous deepening of the US Permanent War Economy and growing market rigidities on account of the spreading Military-Industrial Complex may indicate the US Empire’s unique internal conditions for decline – sensed as the End of Exceptionalism by Jeffrey Sachs and Cataclysmic Decline by Oliver North – are very likely maturing in keeping with the Laws of History. The recent defiance by several Latin American countries at the Summit of Americas is a further pointer to the US’s weakening grip, in this instance over its so-called “backyard”.

The US’ Permanent War Economy threw up its corresponding superstructure, the Permanent War State that evidently seeks to fabricate a global legal framework, the “Rules-Based International Order”, under its control to administer the Forever War.

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