11/21/11 – Pepe Escobar – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest today is Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times Online, that's atimes.com, and of course he also writes for Al Jazeera.
The piece I'm most interested in is from last week, maybe a couple weeks ago, China and the U.S., the roadmaps.
It's the only one on China I could find.
Welcome back Pepe, how are you doing?
Wonderful Scott, great to be with you again.
I'm very happy to have you here and you know, Pacific issues, I'm not the best on them, but I've learned recently that Exxon has some quote-unquote oil rights, or maybe oil quote-unquote rights, in the Spratly Islands off the coast of the Philippines, and this is a big problem for the Chinese and Barack Obama and President Clinton and all the rest of these people want to escalate, build a marine base in Australia, and Obama and Hillary both have been making all these declarative statements against China and how they better learn how to play by the rules and all that kind of thing, so I was hoping you could help explain to myself and my audience, what are the rules?
And where in the hell does President Clinton and Secretary of State Obama get off trying to tell the people of China what to do?
Or the government of China either?
You could ask that question to one of the nine guys of the standing committee of the Politburo in Beijing, you know.
I wish we could all ask them this question.
Well, you know, Justin Armando pointed out that the Chinese response to the provocations from the Americans, you know, saying we need to talk about this and we have to settle these South China Sea issues and whatever their response was, you know, we don't really think this is the right venue for that, and I guess eventually they gave in enough to sit there and hear it, but basically they don't seem to be feeling the pressure that they need to answer.
Of course, and you know, the official response by the foreign ministry, they said exactly that.
We don't think this is the appropriate time or venue to discuss something like this.
In other words, talk to the hand, we don't care what you say.
Yeah, talk to the hand, absolutely.
First of all, they see the South China Sea, the name that says it all is the South China Sea.
Yes, like the Gulf of Texas.
Exactly.
What is the business of the Obama administration trying to dictate how do we exploit the wealth in our backyard, in fact?
Because the key thing about the South China Sea is unexplored oil and gas.
Okay, it's in the coast of the Philippines, in the coast of Vietnam, in the coast of China, but it's relatively similar to the Caspian Sea, where you have five literal states and lots of unexplored gas as well.
So they're going to sit down, they're already sitting down, they have a mechanism called ASEAN plus three, that's the ten ASEAN countries in Southeast Asia, plus China, Japan, and Korea.
They have a periodical meeting, and one of the things that they discuss is how to exploit the South China Sea.
So eventually, they will solve this problem by themselves.
They don't need the Americans.
Like you said, of course, there are interests, especially American companies that are based in the Philippines.
And obviously, they pressure the Philippine government to get tough on China.
It's impossible.
You don't pressure China in matters of trade and commerce.
It's absolutely the other way around.
If China gets angry for some reason, they divert that trade and commerce to other countries.
I'll give an example.
After Obama, after the APEC summit, which is an economic cooperation summit, he goes to Australia, and he tells the world, look, we're going to send 250 marines rotating 2,500 troops.
We're going to set up a base in Darwin, which is a stone's throw from Indonesia.
On the other side of Southeast Asia, practically.
And the Chinese, like yesterday, they said, okay, maybe we're going to start revising our commercial deals in Australia.
This means instead of buying stuff from Australia, they're going to start buying from the BRIC countries.
So, you know, it's impossible to pressure China on trade and commerce.
Well, you know, the problem is, and I'm not saying it's really any worse than if we have Republicans in power.
We saw George Bush put tariffs on Chinese steel and all these kinds of things.
But these Democrats are crazy, man.
I mean, Paul Krugman at the New York Times and all these Democrats who listen to him are talking about how, oh, the Chinese are cheating by devaluing their currency as though they're not just trying to keep up with the United States on the issue.
And so, therefore, we need to put tariffs on all these Chinese goods.
Like, Holly, they want to repeat the whole Great Depression here and start a trade war in the middle of this economic crisis, Pepe.
You're right.
And the Chinese, it's fantastic because it's like they have all their reclining chairs in Beijing and they're just watching from a distance, barely suppressing their giggles, in fact, because their planning is long term.
Their plan is five-year plans and everything was more or less planned until 2040.
If there is some kind of disturbance in the U.S., internal U.S. market or European market, they're going to start exploiting South American markets, African markets, and Southeast Asian markets as well.
The mercantilist Chinese system, state, they are very happy with the status quo as it is.
They are very worried of an extending depression in Europe because it's still their number one trade partner.
But they have so many other options.
And that's why they're making inroads in South America.
In fact, they are buying parts of Brazil and Argentina, literally.
You know, this is something that you never saw, I would say, five years ago.
In Africa, they have deals with at least 25 governments and their companies are installed already all across Africa.
So, they have their margin of maneuver is immense.
And now, for the past three or four years, they come to the conclusion, no, forget about bullying by the West.
Now, we start to dictate our own rules, who we want to trade with, how do we want to change the international system, the Bretton Woods system.
So, you know, the pressure on them is ridiculous.
And in terms of energy as well, they are diversifying their energy sources to an extent that soon, I would say, when I say soon, it's in Chinese terms, of course, let's say, before 2020, they will divert what they import from the Persian Gulf to African sources, or even South American sources, including Venezuela, and later on from Brazil as well, when Brazil started exploiting the pre-South deposits over here.
So, you know, when you mention about the pressure, it's bipartisan, the way I see it as well.
These Democrats are crazy, but wait till we get a Republican government in November 2012, that happens.
Then the war against China is going to become a hot war, in fact, instead of a cold war.
Yeah, well, I don't disagree with that being a major danger.
Of course, if it was just the Wall Street, you know, old Rockefeller Republicans or something, I think we could probably count on them trying to maintain the situation as it is.
But instead, it's the neocons, and the neocons love to just join arm and arm with the AFL-CIO and demonize China and try to come up with an excuse.
Of course, a lot of them used to work for Lockheed, still collect big dividend checks from them and whatever, and so it's in their interest to, you know, put forward this sort of, you know, Top Gun movie, Cold War sort of idea about the danger of the rise of China, so they can sell F-22s and F-35s.
Exactly, but the problem is in the U.S., you cannot blame U.S. corporations, because this is the root of the problem.
All the major U.S. corporations, they delocalize to China.
The best possible way, you know, you have a cheap workforce, relatively skilled, with very, very low wages, and it's an exporting machine all over the planet.
So, American corporations, in fact, are profiting from all this.
Except for maybe Lockheed and Raytheon and General Dynamics, they like Cold Wars.
Oh, yeah, that's different.
I'm not talking about industrial military complex.
Right, yeah, just business in general, absolutely.
I mean, hey, you look at the one fight that Colin Powell ever won in the Bush Jr. administration was the fight over the downed spy plane, where he said, no, we are not going to be hawkish about this.
We're going to say we're sorry and ask politely for our plane back, because he was representing that, you know, old kind of Republican that was soon replaced with Bill Kristol and family.
Anyway, sorry, I talked you right up into the music here.
We've got to go out to this break, everybody.
We'll be back with Pepe Escobar, talking about America's relationship with China and the rest of the Pacific Rim there.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Pepe Escobar, as I often am.
He writes for Al Jazeera and the Asia Times.
And I'm looking at this piece, China and the U.S., the roadmaps.
And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about them.
Exhibit A is China's peaceful development.
That sounds like a dastardly chai-com plot to attack Pearl Harbor at dawn.
Well, definitely not.
The problem is this is a white paper.
They released that two months ago in September.
And the coverage in U.S., the corporate media, was virtually nil.
Nobody talked about it.
You know, this was covered in Southeast Asia and, of course, in Asia in general.
The Middle East, they didn't touch about it.
And it's like what we want to do for the next 10 years or so.
Basically, it's expanding on the official doctrine by President Hu Jintao, which is harmonious society.
OK, this doesn't mean anything in itself, but applied to international relations means China wants to have harmonious relationships with virtually everybody, not only their close commercial partners, not only with Asia, not only with Europe and U.S., the BRIC countries, but with everybody.
The problem is the U.S. doesn't want it.
When I say the U.S., I mean the Pentagon.
Because in my view, what is happening now, remember the arc of instability, right?
The Pentagon self-described arc of instability.
Central Asia, in other words.
Exactly.
And the Near East.
Which happens to overlap with the oil source, major oil sources in the world.
Right.
We'll get Northern Africa, Horn of Africa, across the Middle East, across Central Asia, up to the western border of China, Xinjiang province.
So now what the Pentagon is actually doing, very, very subtly, but if you can read what's going on, that's more or less what you're going to find.
They are expanding the arc of instability to the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific.
And that's the meaning of this base that Obama talked about installing in Darwin, in northern Australia, in the northern territories in Australia.
It's another base, apart from bases in Japan, bases in Korea, you name it, all across Asia, to police this intersection.
Because this, for China, this is a crucial intersection between the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific.
You will find the Java Sea and the South China Sea.
So all these four seas, they intersect in that area.
And for China, it's crucial.
It's their backyard.
Can you imagine, like I wrote in jest, of course, in another piece for Al Jazeera, maybe they'll publish in the next few days.
Can you imagine if the Chinese set up a base in Hawaii to patrol the coast of California, or even in Catalina Island off the coast of California, to patrol California?
This is more or less what the US is doing in Australia.
Yeah, well, if they did that, we would drop hydrogen bombs on Beijing.
That's what would happen.
Americans and the American people would insist on it, too.
It's not just, that's what our politicians would do.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is what's very dangerous.
The arc of instability, now it's the whole world.
And it's also a very interesting development.
The only area that is not part of the arc of instability at the moment is South America.
Why?
Because since the beginning of the 2000s, with the election of Lula in Brazil in 2002, South America started to integrate, to organize, to get their act together for the first time in their history, in fact.
And now most governments in South America are center-left.
They are relatively progressive, depending on, you know, you can say that Ecuador and Bolivia are much more progressive than Brazil and Argentina, in ideological terms, let's put it this way.
But they are free market governments, but they care for social inequality in all these countries.
And they are getting their act together in terms of institutions, like the UNASUR, for instance, which is more integration in South America to stand up together against bullying from the US, which has been the case since until eight, nine years ago.
But the rest of the world, Europe included, Europe in terms of financial crisis.
Goldman Sachs rules Europe now, by the way.
Mario Draghi, Mario Monti, all these guys, they are former Goldman Sachs vice presidents, international relations, you name it.
You're talking about the people being installed in power in Greece right now, for example.
Exactly.
Papademos, the banker, is a former Goldman Sachs as well.
Everywhere.
And, you know, a lot of people in Europe are going to say, look, the next are going to be the French within the next few months, and they're going to put a Goldman Sachs man in charge of a French economy sooner or later.
So it is completely, it's completely crazy in terms of this blitzkrieg of neoliberalism, which is coupled with the Pentagon blitzkrieg, which started with Libya.
Now that they secured a victory in Libya, which is a NATO African victory, in fact, they're going to have their base in Libya for sure.
In fact, what are we learning is maybe they're going to be a huge base in Cyrenaica, a NATO African base, sorry, with over 20,000 people in that base to monitor the whole thing, to monitor the Mediterranean, to monitor the Horn of Africa and Central Africa as well.
Well, back in the days of King Idris, the United States had its largest air base there in Libya.
You're right!
So we are back to King Idris over 40 years ago, can you believe it?
And it's very funny because in the beginning of the uprising in Benghazi, I was discussing with some university professors that I know, and they were wondering, is this a monarchic revolution?
Nobody was sure at the time.
But now everybody knows that it's partly monarchic as well.
Like ideally, what Saudi Arabia would want for Libya is another emirate, the return of the monarchy, definitely.
Of course, they cannot sell this to NATO, they cannot sell this to a lot of Libyans.
Well, yeah, let me know when the fighting stops over there, who won out.
It doesn't look like it's going to be the monarchists to me.
Oh, yeah, look, and the fact that the fighting won't stop, it's only the beginning, as we know.
Have you noticed how Libya disappeared completely from the news?
Yeah, well, mission accomplished, everything's fine, al-Qaeda won.
Exactly.
Remember when Egypt disappeared from the news after Tahrir Square as well?
And what's happening now in Egypt?
Everybody noticed that there was no revolution.
In fact, they cut off the head of the snake, but the snake is still there, and the snake is dictating the whole thing.
And what they did this past weekend in Tahrir Square was typical.
It was crazy, because they had a protest on Friday, basically Muslim Brotherhood, and then most people left.
And on Saturday, there were like 150 people left in Tahrir Square.
So the military junta, in fact, they sent riot police, and they killed some of these people.
And then the next day, on Sunday, you had thousands and thousands of people back to the square again, because then they noticed that, look, you cannot deal with it.
This is a military junta.
They want to perpetuate themselves in power.
I'm sorry to stop you here, Pepe, but the thing is, I'm going to have Adam Oro live from Cairo here in a few minutes to talk about just that.
But I wanted to get back to China real quick and ask you whether America is, at this point, opposed to or cooperating with the anti-communist party Muslims in western China.
I know we switch off back and forth.
Yeah, okay, but that's a very good question.
I mean, if they're supporting the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, look, as far as we know, it's covert, but it's ultra covert, in fact, because it's practically impossible for the Uyghurs to mount, let's say, a raid against Chinese military installations in Xinjiang.
You know how many PLA troops there are in Xinjiang?
Over 500,000.
It's the most policed province and militarized province in China.
Yeah, well, as Robert Pepe has explained, terrorism doesn't really work against dictatorships, because they don't really care how many people you kill.
Exactly, exactly.
So, you know, and the Uyghurs, they are very disorganized.
They don't have a, like, a Uyghur transitional council invented in Libya, or they just invented one in Syria a few days ago.
Well, now, is the loss of the airbase in Kyrgyzstan going to be a big deal?
Look, this is another, well, it's related, and it's another interesting question, because you know what was going to happen?
The Chinese were trying to convince the Kyrgyz to build a Chinese base in Bishkek as well.
Can you imagine that we will have three bases within a radius of 25 miles?
Right, right now there's an American and a Russian base right over the hill from each other.
You bet.
The American base is at Bishkek airport.
Every time that I go there, it's very funny, because when you land, the first thing that you see is American cargo plane.
The airport is very small, in fact, you know.
And then, like, 10 miles, 15 miles away, in a small place called Manas, there's the Russian base.
And the Chinese were saying to the Kyrgyz, look, we want our bases as well, because you're part of the SCO, we want to fight terrorism together, so we need to have some of our troops here.
Well, and they are kicking the Americans out, correct?
Exactly.
So the new government in Kyrgyzstan, they are taking the Americans out from the base at Bishkek airport.
And that's one of the reasons that Hillary Clinton rushed to Central Asia, what, a month ago or so, three or four weeks ago, trying to convince the Kyrgyz government, look, how much money you want, in fact.
But no, this is practically a done deal.
So this means the U.S. loses a base near the borders of China.
Obviously, China offered anything the Kyrgyz want.
Okay, even if we don't build a Chinese base, but we offer anything you want, so you get rid of the American base.
And that's what's going to happen.
And the Russian base stays there.
It helps that the Kyrgyzstan, the Russians still call Kyrgyzstan, you know, it's a baby from Stalinist times, you know, everybody speaks Russian, the Kyrgyz speak Russian with the Russians, so they get along very well, and they know themselves for 80 years.
So, you know, it's in the family, you know.
But now this outside interference, let's put it that way, which is the American base, will be gone.
In Uzbekistan, they're trying to convince Karimov to have an American base back.
Remember when he cancelled that American base in Karimabad two or three years ago?
Now the Americans want a base back in Uzbekistan.
Look, man, it's totally impossible, because there are no bases over there.
The guy's so he's a surrealist dictator, he doesn't do military deals.
Well, that's more about encircling the Russians than the Chinese, right?
Yes, that's certainly, yeah.
The strategy for the US in the Central Asia is to encircle the Russians, but there's nothing to encircle the Russians with at the moment, especially because in terms of oil and gas, they are losing everything.
Russia's doing deals with China, Russia's doing deals with Iran, Turkmenistan is doing deals directly with China, they built a pipeline together.
So I'm going to write about this soon for Tom Dispatch.
So in a few weeks, you're going to have a long story about what's been happening in pipeline terms in this area.
Very, very interesting.
And there's one, just to, like, you know, to advance the gift of the whole thing.
There's one winner in all this story, Vladimir Putin, he's getting everything he wants.
It's amazing.
Well, that doesn't surprise me at all.
You know, I talked with Andrew Bacevich the other day, and Bacevich was saying, you know, as the empire falls apart, DC's the last to know.
And they'll just keep lashing out like this, trying to expand further at the same time, everything's falling apart from beneath them.
And we can all see it.
But in DC, they're immune from reality till it's way too late, apparently.
No, it's totally right.
In fact, when I was living in DC, in 2008, I was following the campaign.
Every independent observer I talked to, including my two great friends, Gareth Porter and Ray McGovern, they were always telling me, look, it's, it's impermeable to reality.
It will never strike them as something as real, you know, it's, it's a makeup, make believe world, in fact, like they're living in a Land of Oz or Disneyland or Hollywood or whatever, forever.
And still, the doctrine is full spectrum dominance.
We have to go back to it over and over again.
Because what we were discussing a few minutes ago about the Pentagon expanding the arc of instability to Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, it's part of full spectrum dominance.
Always goes back to the same thing, you know.
Would you say that there's a split at all between those who would prefer to continue to roll back what's left of the Soviet Union and those who would prefer to strike Iran?
Or is this all just the same thing?
You know, I saw Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations and supposed old big business Rockefeller type guy sounding just like Benjamin Netanyahu on the Iran issue the other morning on MSNBC.
I used to like to believe there was a split between these two different, you know, factions in DC and who they want to bomb next.
But maybe they're all just agreed about all this stuff.
Exactly.
If I could disagree with who we're going to bomb next, most of them, from neocons to Clinton Democrats, let's put it this way, they all agree it should be Iran.
But I think most of them would agree that in the long term, the real enemy is China, much more than Russia, in fact.
Because Russia, there's nothing you can do against Russia in terms of oil and gas, because they are an energy republic.
And they have the largest sources of both oil and gas.
So you cannot do anything about them on this.
China, on the other hand, is vulnerable to imports of energy.
So these people, they basically believe that if we block China's access to new oil and gas fields in Southeast Asia, or in the Indian Ocean, building a port in Myanmar, for instance, that's one of the reasons of the rapprochement between the U.S. and Myanmar.
They're going to try to influence the dictatorship, which in my opinion is the worst dictatorship in the world, in Burma, to, you know, okay, why don't you do deals with us instead of doing deals with the Chinese?
And the dictatorship is going to say, forget it, we've already done the deals with the Chinese.
And, you know, so to encircle China in terms of blocking access to sources of energy, like Libya, was a detail in this big picture.
Well, and now we're going into Uganda and all the rest of this too.
South Sudan is one of the top, I think it's the sixth or seventh largest oil exporter to China.
So Sudan is part of the whole thing.
So one of these days they're going to start thinking of making roads into Angola, which is the third largest Chinese supplier.
So this is what they're thinking.
And encircling them in their own backyard, and that's the South China Sea strategy, trying to manipulate government, especially in the Philippines, or Vietnam, because of the historical enmity between Vietnam and China.
So, you know, the Pentagon is fabricating a conflict, a large conflict with China.
And this is what's been happening over this year, I would say.
Well, it's 40 years too late, but at least they're recognizing the historical enmity between Vietnam and China, right?
You're right.
No, I heard that the communists in Vietnam are just puppets of Mao Zedong.
Everybody knows that.
We're way over time here.
I gotta let you go.
But thank you so much for your time, man.
You're the best.
Appreciate it.
Wonderful, Scott.
See you next time.
Cheers.
All right, everybody.
That's the heroic Pepe Escobar from Al Jazeera and from IPSnews.net.