The Withdrawal

Well, Russia and China were bitter enemies right through the 1960s. They were, in fact, at war with each other, with their long border heavily fortified. Over the past few decades, Russia and China have developed more cooperative relations. China is trying to integrate Central Asia, Africa, and, to the extent possible, Latin America into a China-based system. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has been the official framework for this development, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the commercial axis. The SCO now includes all of the Central Asian states, along with Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, possibly soon Afghanistan, aiming for Turkey and then Eastern and maybe Central Europe. The United States applied for observer status, not membership, and was rebuffed. The SCO is building a Eurasian network in the way Gorbachev had imagined it. If the Chinese can integrate the European powers into this network through the BRI and Nord Stream 2, if Russia and China can continue to cooperate, then in the long term you will get this kind of continental integration.

The Chinese have established a thousand vocational schools in Southeast Asia and Africa to train students in the new Chinese technologies. These are efficient technologies that will integrate these countries and their development into the China-based BRI system. The Chinese are sharing this technology in very poor parts of the world at prices that are reasonable for those economies. They have developed leading technologies in robotics, green energy, and telecommunications. It’s a very personal issue, incidentally. Where I live, which is partly rural, there is very poor internet service. If we were allowed to bring Huawei technology, we’d have 5G internet. We badly need solar panels, and the most technologically advanced and cheapest ones are made in China.

Chinese leaders understand very well that their country’s maritime trade routes are ringed with hostile powers, from Japan through the Malacca Straits and beyond, backed by overwhelming U.S. military force. Accordingly, China is proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful moves toward integration. China is constructing a modernized version of the old silk roads, with the intent not only of integrating the region under Chinese influence, but also of reaching Europe and the Middle Eastern oil-producing regions.

Coal was abundant in Europe, which had no oil. If they became oil based, the United States would have “veto power” (George Kennan’s phrase, referring specifically to Japan) over Europe because the United States would control their energy supplies. Ten percent of the Marshall Plan money—about $1.2 billion—was shifted among U.S. banks as they converted Europe into an oil-based economy. This oil was not going to come from the United States, but from the Middle East; by 1950, 85 percent of Europe’s oil needs were supplied from the Middle East, which the United States controlled and profited from. The same process was imposed on Japan. As Western Europe and Japan were converted to oil-based economies, the United States had veto power over them.

These wars, which hit Mali and Nigeria, then produced its own flow of migrants toward Libya and Europe, joining migrants who had already been on the road fleeing from the utter disaster that European colonialism has left in Africa. There’s a good story by Ian Urbina in the New Yorker about the hideous concentration camps set up on the Libyan coastline, supported by the European Union, managed by criminal Libyan gangs, where they congregate refugees trying to flee to Europe.2 They are held in there to make sure that they never get to the Mediterranean Sea. The Europeans and the United States have military bases in the Sahel to interdict migrants even before they get to Libya. If the migrants reach the Mediterranean, there are legal problems for Europe, at least formally, since the prohibition against refoulment [returning refugees to places where they will be persecuted] will prevent the refusal of the migrants. Refoulment is a serious crime under international law, so the refugees who make it to European waters have to be accepted. They want to prevent that and at the same time keep the image of Europe as a decent, law-abiding place. To do so, the Europeans fund the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, which is basically a gangster operation; this operation is given boats, equipment, and money by the Europeans. So, the Europeans send the refugees either to vicious concentration camps or back to their homelands from which they have fled because they find them unlivable (the result of hundreds of years of mostly European devastation of Africa, which is quite serious). That’s Libya today.