All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
It's Michael Clare, Michael T.
Clare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a regular for Tom Dispatch.
He's the author most recently of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, and there's a documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, which you can find the link at tomdispatch.com.
I think it's a pretty safe assumption this piece will be running at antiwar.com tomorrow under Tom Englehart's name.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Thanks for having me.
Well, very happy to have you here.
Very interesting article about the Pacific Pivot, as Obama calls it, or was it Hillary Clinton?
I forget.
Maybe both.
I don't know.
I didn't realize that we needed to build up in the Pacific.
I thought that the Pacific had been an American lake since at least World War II.
No?
Oh, long before that.
Long before that.
That goes back to Teddy Roosevelt's days and the Spanish-American War.
It's been an American outpost out there.
That's funny.
I was just about to say, I saw this headline that Obama's going to give a Theodore Roosevelt speech, and I was going to joke that Newt Gingrich ought to like that.
And then now here we're talking about how TR and the empire and all that back then.
Yeah.
Anyway, sorry.
Yeah, no.
What's happened, though, is that China, which sits on the edge of this so-called lake, is now a rising power, obviously, and is building up its own navy.
So for the first time since the rise of Japan in the 1930s, we have a real challenger, and that has the people in Washington very worried.
Well, they seem to, I don't know, in my eyes anyway, it seems like pretty bad overreaction when they're trying to really muscle in on lands that are, you know, lands beneath the sea that are just off the coast of China.
I mean, they're pushing really close here, huh?
Well, that's the way I would interpret it.
This is, you know, not our backyard exactly.
It's their backyard.
It's as if the Chinese navy was taking out the Gulf of Mexico or San Francisco Bay, really.
The way they look at it, we're really coming up very close and in a very provocative manner.
And so I think this is bound to provoke a very hostile reaction from China, and we don't need this now at a time when our economy is in such bad shape.
Well, how much of the war in Central Asia do you think has to do with staying on China's western flank?
Well, I think not so much the war in Afghanistan, but the U.S. determination to hold on to the bases that we've established out there.
The U.S. has bases or basing rights in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and flyover rights and all of that, supposedly to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
But the U.S. would like to keep those indefinitely.
And this is very threatening to China because it comes right in their rear, where they're very vulnerable.
Well, when people chant no blood for oil and whatever, it seems to me they're kind of missing the point.
It's not so much, and correct me if you disagree or whatever, feel free, but it seems like this is never really about the price of a gallon of gas so that we can get to work, so much as it's about making sure that, say, for example, if we ever did have a war or some kind of very heated brinksmanship, Cold War-type situation with the Chinese, that we could cut off their oil supplies.
This is about Pentagon strategy, the Wolfowitz Doctrine, that kind of thing, rather than James Baker and Houston, Texas' plan to just suck up all the oil to sell it.
Yes, I agree with you.
I think that you have to view oil both as a fuel for cars, and as a source of power, because oil is the leading commodity in the world economy.
The world economy cannot run without oil.
So whoever controls the flow of oil, in a sense, has their hands on the arteries of the world economy, and its US policy has been for a while to control those arteries as a way of threatening and coercing the rest of the world.
And I think what Obama is doing now is extending that policy from the Middle East, where it's always been US policy, and extending that now to the Pacific, specifically to the South China Sea.
And this is directly aimed at China, and I think it's going to make the Chinese very anxious and lead to who knows what kind of dangerous reaction.
Well, I guess, how about, we got to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here, that kind of thing.
If we didn't maintain our monopoly, or almost monopoly on power in the Pacific, then China would just take everything.
Why wouldn't they?
Yeah, well, that's one way to look at it, except that the real battlefield today, as I think everyone understands, is not a military battlefield.
If that were the case, we could rest easy, because the US obviously dominates the sea lanes.
But we all understand that the battle is an economic battle for who can prevail in the world economy, who can out-trade, out-export, out-manufacture the others.
And the United States isn't doing very well right now in that regard.
China's doing a lot better job at all of this, and we need to do a better job of mending our own economy, and we're going to need China's cooperation in that.
They're our leading creditor.
So it doesn't make sense to provoke China militarily when we need their cooperation in terms of improving the global economy.
It just doesn't make sense for our own good interests.
Well, it depends who our interests are, right?
Yeah.
Well, I mean the interests of people in this country who need to have a job and earn an income.
We need to grow the economy.
We all know that.
And we can't do that if we're in a cold war with China.
It's not going to happen that way.
Well, you know, it seems like there's a lot of... and I don't even think you're bothering to address sort of the fear-mongering propaganda about China and their terrible rise and that kind of thing.
But it seems like the Americans would have learned the lesson by now that central planning doesn't work, and it's not really a communist country there anymore.
But there's a lot of corruption and crony capitalism, and they've got a phony paper money system like ours, pegged to ours, and they have a huge housing and construction bubble over there.
I was reading a thing about ghost cities, like where they built entire Houstons, or at least downtown Houston-sized things out in the middle of nowhere, and nobody lives there.
65 million unoccupied houses, something like that.
So they have this huge bubble that's waiting to pop, and malinvestments in the uncounted billions of dollars still to come due.
There's no reason that we ought to think that they're safe from their own economic dislocations as they follow our lead, really.
Yeah, well, I'm in complete agreement with you, Scott, that China has its own economic problems, no question about it.
And in particular, going along with what you say, is terrible environmental practices.
They relay way too much on coal to produce their energy, and as a result, they have terrible pollution, and they're the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide.
They have terrible pollution of their rivers.
So their economic policies are not one that we should necessarily look to as an example.
However, their economy is growing, and ours is not, or it's growing only feebly.
And if we're going to get out of the bad unemployment situation we have, we're going to have to grow our economy, and we're going to have to do that in a world that is right now not doing... a world economy.
We're part of a world economy.
So we need China's growth to stimulate, along with Europe, which is not doing well either.
We're all in this together, is what I'm trying to say.
The U.S. can't grow by itself in a vacuum.
So we do need China's growth as part of a larger picture of world economic health.
That's all I'm saying.
But I do not deny for a minute the problems that China has, and they're going to have their own problems, for sure.
Right.
Yeah, well, yeah, I was just trying to say that there sure isn't any reason to be afraid of them.
And you think about all the money that we waste, you know, trying to hem in would-be competitors and all this kind of thing.
We'd be doing a lot better if we weren't spending all our money on carrier battle groups all the time, maybe.
Yeah, well, that's kind of what I was getting at.
There we're in agreement.
I don't think that provoking a military arms race with China is going to do us any good, China any good, and it's not going to help our economic problems at home.
All right.
Well, this is a very great article, a very interesting article.
Michael Clare, A New Cold War in Asia.
It's at TomDispatch.com right now.
It'll probably be on Antiwar.com tomorrow, I bet you.
And after this long break, we're going to be back with one more segment with Michael T. Clare from TomDispatch.com.
Hold it right there, y'all.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Michael T. Clare.
He's got a new one at TomDispatch.com, A New Cold War in Asia, Playing with Fire.
And of course, it's all about preventing the rise of any near-peer competitor, which doesn't seem to be a real danger anyway.
I wanted to mention here, Professor Clare teaches at Hampshire College and is the author of Rising Power, Shrinking Planet.
And now, you do a real good job in this article of breaking down for us who's got how much oil and how much reliance on the Middle East the United States even has, or say, like, for example, I don't know if...
I don't think you mentioned...
Oh, yeah, you do mention a little bit of Africa here.
Obviously, we're sending troops in all over the place in Sub-Saharan Africa now as well, trying to hem that in, especially in South Sudan.
But I was wondering if you could just kind of help give the audience a little bit of the overview of who's all reliant on what, and maybe from the point of view of, you know, the Pentagon, who needs what on any given day?
Well, you know, historically, the United States has relied heavily on the Middle East, and also Venezuela has been a major supplier of oil for a very long time, and to some degree Mexico and Canada for our imports of oil.
But our allies are very heavily dependent on the Middle East, NATO countries in Japan.
Increasingly, however, it's China that's most reliant on the Middle East and on Africa, and the tables are beginning to turn.
The United States is becoming less dependent on the Middle East, and China more so.
So they're more vulnerable to whatever happens in the Middle East or in the sea lanes connecting the Middle East to China.
The United States is becoming more dependent, or will so in the future, potentially on oil from the western hemisphere, from Brazil, as Brazil starts developing its offshore oil, and from Canada, from Canadian tar sands.
Now, there are a lot of environmental problems with that, but potentially the U.S. could become more reliant on western hemisphere oil as China becomes more dependent on oil from the Middle East and Africa.
So it's going to inherit all the problems that the United States has had for so long of trouble in the Middle East that have led us into so many wars and other upheavals in the Middle East and cost us so dearly over the years in blood and treasure.
Let them have it, I say.
Yeah, well, you know, I would say that too.
Well, I mean, it just goes to show what a fool's errand all this is.
We don't even need that oil.
It's, this is only about maintaining the ability to deny it to them if we ever want to someday.
Well, I think it's, all this is meant to act as a threat, you know, where we're saying, well, as you become more dependent on oil, we're the ones who have the power to cut the arteries, to cut the valve, the spigot, and bring you down.
So I don't think that anybody ever has any intention of doing it, but it's a way of telling China, don't go too far, don't push us too far, because we have this power over you.
And I know that that very fact has the Chinese very, very worried.
Well, and you know, it seems like the ultimate hubris, if you watch TV and they ever talk about any of this, it comes up the fact that you mentioned there are most significant creditor, more than Japan, more than South Korea, the Chinese buy American debt by the trillions.
And so they have that over us back, but the American, at least the imperial response is, well, they would never dump their dollars, because that would just make the ones that they were still holding worth that much less.
And so it's mutually assured destruction.
But if we're actually borrowing money from them, just so we can build up our empire to hem them in, at some point, it seems like they might look for a little bit longer term interest and go ahead and take the hit if it could deliver one on us, you know?
Well, you know, they have to, you just have to assume, Scott, that they're meeting in their compounds on the western side of the Forbidden City, having this conversation at this very moment, while we're talking, they have to be having that conversation.
Now, whether they're going to act on it right away, or slowly over time, we don't know.
But there's all kinds of evidence that they are shifting away from the dollar towards other currencies.
And I think we're going to see more of that in the future.
And that's not going to be good for us.
Another thing, well, if there's time, I still would like to give you a chance to really describe the kind of overview of the build up, you know, the marines in Australia, which I'm not sure what good that's supposed to accomplish.
But the most important thing, I think, to make sure we get covered on the show here today, is what you talk about the kind of Black Swan events where, in this case, a US anti-submarine warcraft surveillance ship was surrounded by the Chinese Navy, it almost became a shooting incident.
And then of course, there was the spy plane incident of early 2001.
You have these kinds of things where the more we build up in general, the more likelihood you can have people dying out there in the sky or at sea and have, you know, heated responses get out of control from there.
I mean, we're really playing with hydrogen bomb fire ultimately here with this.
Absolutely.
And what our listeners have to grasp is, yes, this sounds like the Chinese are being provocative, but we're talking about Chinese coastal waters, essentially.
Imagine if the Chinese ships and planes were operating a few dozen miles off of the Pacific coast.
We would respond the way they do, probably much more aggressively than they do.
In fact, they feel that they are being threatened on their very borders right offshore.
And so, yes, they're sometimes going to behave in an aggressive way to push away American ships and planes.
And if we keep pushing them harder and harder, that is going to lead sooner or later to miscalculation, to escalation and crisis.
And so we're going to get closer and closer to war.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the whole opposite theory, you know, as probably the war party would put it, would be, you know, some utopian view that if America just brought all of its Navy ships home to L.A. Harbor or whatever and left the Pacific region alone, that the Chinese would be nothing but the nicest guys from now on or whatever.
But that's not really the point.
The point is simply when we're acting in a brinksmanship sort of a strategical so-called fashion over here on our side, all that does is provoke them.
It doesn't mean everything will be perfect the other way.
But like you're saying, when you when you invoke a meeting of a Politburo on the east side of the Forbidden City there or whatever, that's actually what's going on is you have a group of flawed humans picture an American jury, you know, sitting there deciding what ought to be done next.
They might well react badly to some provocation on our side.
Well, I think you got the gist of it.
If you push things into the military arena, the risk of miscalculation is going to be of a very dangerous nature.
We're never going to get free of conflict with China.
That's not going to go away.
We're going to have disagreements.
That's for sure.
The disagreements are mainly economic.
We don't have territorial disputes with China.
This is not the 19th or 20th century.
Our disagreements are economic and we should keep our disagreements in the economic zone where the risk of somebody pulling a trigger and starting a nuclear war don't arise.
But when you use military forces to work out your differences, that's that's when you risk catastrophe.
And that's what I'm objecting to here.
And, you know, it seems like we also just with all of this, we end up pushing people who are, you know, would be adversaries together.
But meanwhile, if you leave the nation states out and people are people, then it's in every American's interest for the Chinese to be as rich as possible, all the better to trade with them.
You know, there's no reason that the people of either country ought to have conflict at all, seems like.
Well, if we could all trade together, that would be the best.
Yes.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your great article and your time on the show today.
My pleasure.
Take care.
Michael T. Clare, everybody's at TomDispatch.com today.
A new Cold War in Asia.
Look forward on Antiwar.com tomorrow.
