Asia and US Global Strategy

Sumanta Banerjee
EPW,October 12, 2002

To resist Washington's military and economic globalisation, it is essential to build up an equally globalised offensive. Terrorism that masquerades as anti-US war has to be ousted from the site of the contest and replaced with ideals of equality, democracy and social justice. For peace activists in Asia today it will obviously be a long haul.

Inaugurating the cold war era, the then US president Harry Truman in 1947 had declared: “The American system can survive in America only if it becomes a world system.” This was no idle rhetoric. It initiated a three-pronged strategy in the changed post-world war political arena. First, not only to ensure the survival, but to satisfy the growing appetite of US capitalism which had to depend on resources from outside, Washington sought to bring these resources under its economic control (as was evident in its interventionist policies in Iran from 1951 to 1953). Second, the fear that countries either producing these resources or occupying a crucial position in the US’s geopolitical strategy might fall under Soviet control or influence led Washington to pre-empt such a possibility through political and military interventions (as in the setting up of dictatorial banana republics in South America and satellite governments in south-east Asia). Third, to suppress the growth of public opinion in favour of socialism within the US (particularly in the wake of widespread sympathy and support for Soviet heroism during the world war), the administration inaugurated the notorious witch-hunt led by Joseph McCarthy, which whipped up a spy-mania against communists as well as liberal-minded intellectuals. The roles played by the CIA in thrusting the first two prongs and by the FBI in the last are by now well-documented by US historians themselves, whose works are easily available.

All these revelations should have disabused the liberal mindset, both in the West and India, of the illusion that past allegations of covert and overt interventions against the US were mere ‘Soviet propaganda’. They should have also helped this mindset to change itself and question the present US motives – given the disreputable role of the US in the past.

But illusions die hard – particularly among the political elite in Asia. This dawned upon me as I sat listening to the warnings delivered by peace activists from all over Asia who had gathered at a conference in the University of Philippines in Quezon City in August-September this year. They came from countries who are economically as far apart as an affluent Japan and an impoverished Kampuchea, neighbours who are militarily fighting each other like India and Pakistan, states who are territorially distant as Nepal in the north and Malaysia in the south. But they voiced a common concern – how the US is now requiring all states to restructure their coercive apparatus to fit America’s strategic concerns, to reinforce its earlier requirement that they restructure their economic apparatus to fit with Washington’s plans of neo liberal globalisation. As I listened to their narratives, I realised all of a sudden that the Truman Doctrine had come alive – and this time with a vengeance!

During Truman’s time, his doctrine failed to bring the entire world under the US system – primarily because of the countervailing impact of the alternative system represented by the Soviet-led socialist block, and the nationalist aspirations of the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa which formed the non-aligned block. But with the collapse of the socialist block, and the popular frustrations with the economic policies of the corrupt regimes in the non-aligned block, the ideological and political vacuum created in the present global scenario has provided Washington with a sort of tabula rasa on which it can at its will imprint Truman’s unfinished strategy. The long-term US objective is to use the ‘war on terrorism’ as a stepping stone to encircle China – which according to Pentagon is expected to emerge as a regional economic and military power in the next 10 years.

Crucial to the success of this strategy is the integration of the entire Asian region – from Central Asia to South Asia, from Asia Pacific to South-east Asia – into the Washington-led global order and military operations. Afghanistan has already become a cog in the wheels of the American juggernaut that plans to march into the oilfields of central Asia. As for the other parts of Asia, the extent of US military presence can be gauged from the following facts: there are some 1,00,000 US troops based in the Asia Pacific region, with 60,000 in Japan, 37,000 in South Korea and the rest in Guam, afloat or on various attachments; the US air force and navy enjoy transit, docking and logistics facilities in Australia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. The rest of Asia lies supine, ready to welcome the conqueror.

This was the pathetic picture that emerged, as one after another delegate from the Asian countries presented their country reports at the inaugural assembly of the Asian Peace Alliance in Quezon City from August 29 to September 1. It was obvious from the reports that the linchpin of the present US strategy in Asia is its military alliance with Japan. The 1997 Guidelines for US-Japan Cooperation allows Japan to play a more aggressive role in the guise of ‘peacekeeping missions’ and supporting role as the US’s junior military partner in areas outside Asia (such as in the Persian Gulf, Golan Heights, Central Europe, East Timor and of late in Afghanistan). These operations give Japan a military role that far exceeds the constitutional limitations that provide only for a self-defence force. In fact, the US government’s Armitage Report recommends the amendment of Japan’s Peace Constitution to allow the Japanese government to exert the right of collective defence (which is prohibited under the 9th clause of the Constitution that disallows any form of engagement in war by the Japanese army). Quite predictably, the Armitage report has encouraged the extreme nationalists of Japan to demand the independence of the army from the constraints of the Peace Constitution. As the Japanese delegates warned at the conference, the real threat to the Asian people is not North Korea, as made out to be by the US which demonises it, but the revival of Japanese military-nationalism under US aegis.

South-east Asia is the next region where Washington wants to restore the US military hegemony which it lost after its defeat in Vietnam. Soon after the September 11 events, the Bush administration sought to make this region the second front of its global war on terrorism. The excuse trotted out by it was that the region has the largest concentration of Muslims in the world with the majority (about 60 per cent) concentrated in Malaysia, over 200 million in Indonesia and significant numbers in Thailand and the Philippines, and therefore it was a potential host to Islamic terrorists. In the Philippines, for instance, the US military has found a convenient excuse for restoring its presence (after its troops were forced to vacate the Subic bay and Clark airfield bases there following an anti-US upsurge in 1991) by linking the Abu Sayyaf bandit group operating in the Mindanao region of southern Philippines with Al Quaida. Incidentally, the Abu Sayyaf group was spawned in the 1980s with covert CIA support for recruiting young Filipino Muslims to fight the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. With that military mission lost, the group has now turned to banditry in Mindanao. Here is yet another CIA-created Frankenstein, boomeranging like Osama bin Laden. But it has provided the US with the opportunity to induct some 4,000 troops, including Special Operations Forces to southern Philippines, purportedly to flush out the Al Quaida-cum-Abu Sayyaf bandits. On this plea, they are training Filipino soldiers in counter-guerrilla operations. Their targets are not a handful of bandits, but those who pose a real political threat to US hegemony in the Philippines – the Communist-led National People’s Army (NPA) which still wields power over large parts of the Philippines, and holds out the promise of a better future for the poor – however faded the dream of socialism might have become for the once-radical middle class groups in Asia. It is no wonder therefore that the Communist Party of the Philippines features high in the US list of terrorist groups.

In the Indian subcontinent, at the moment several continuing joint military exercises and deals are under way in Pakistan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, ostensibly to fight terrorism, but with the real objective of providing a permanent stay of US ground forces to complement US air and naval access privileges. In Sri Lanka, for instance, behind the euphoria generated by the peace talks with the LTTE, what has attracted little public and media attention is a new Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) between Washington and Colombo which offers the US access to military facilities in Sri Lanka. Its strategic location in a huge area of the Indian Ocean from the west Asia to south-east Asia, needless to say, is of vital importance to the US.

The increasing US military presence on the plea of fighting terrorism of course suits the leaders of these governments in Asia. They are all too willing to barter off independence in exchange of billions of dollars of US economic aid which will be siphoned off into the coffers of the elite, their touts and hangers-on, who will eventually develop stakes in the continuation of US domination over their country.

Moreover, the US-led global war on terrorism has provided them with a pretext to extend and intensify the use of national security laws to suppress movements for democracy and human rights. Almost all these laws and their operation – whether in South Korea or Pakistan, Nepal or Sri Lanka, Indonesia or the Philippines – bear uncanny similarity with our POTA and the manner of its implementation. The common features are: arbitrary detention without charge or trial; criminalisation of communities and organisations by labelling them terrorist; undermining of the due process of law; repressive practices by state authorities like torture; restriction on freedom of movement; intensification of all forms of racism and discrimination, including those based on caste, religion, and gender, and against refugees and minorities.

But it is no use blaming the US only for the present sorry state of affairs. The debauchery of the ideal of socialism by the Soviet leadership has offered the US on a platter the unique opportunity to establish capitalist hegemony on a global scale. It is not only the amoral cynicism among the general public typified by a high degree of depoliticisation, but also the well-oiled media propaganda that privileges consumerism, crass materialism and individual pursuit of money and trivialises political activity and civic values, which paralyse any attempt to resist this US hegemony. Let me quote as an example the observations made by a taxi-driver who drove me recently from Quezon to metro Manila. When I asked him how he felt about the return of the US troops to his country, he was all gaga over the prospects of the reopening of massage-parlours and brothels to which he could carry his American customers, whose tips would amount to more than his daily earnings. This attitude shared in common by the elite and the urban populace is not peculiar to the Philippines, or other parts of south-east Asia. The desire to accept the ‘American way of life’ – the term used by the US during Truman’s time – is prevalent among various sections of the people of the Indian subcontinent also, which provides a fertile soil for US hegemonistic designs.

It is obvious that it will be a long haul for peace activists in Asia today. To resist Washington’s military and economic globalisation, it is essential to build up an equally globalised offensive. But that requires the stiffening of the moral fibre of the resistance, and restoration of human values like self-respect and dignity among the people. Terrorism that masquerades as anti-US war has to be ousted from the site of the contest and replaced with ideals of equality, democracy and social justice. The setting up of the Asian Peace Alliance could be a major step in that direction.