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| October 5, 2014 Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, New Silk Roads and an Alternate Eurasian Century
During Iraq War II (2003-2011), I used to imagine that the Chinese leadership would gather weekly in the streets of the Forbidden City, singing and dancing to celebrate American idiocy. Year after year, when the U.S. might have faced off against a rising China, as its leaders had long had the urge to do, it was thoroughly distracted by its disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. I can't help but think that, with a bombing campaign revving up in Iraq and now Syria, the boots of 1,600 military personnel ever closer to the ground, and talkof more to come, with Iraq War III (2014-date unknown) predicted to go on for years, they are once again rejoicing. For all the talk in recent years about the Obama administration's military “pivot” to Asia, there can be no question that its latest Middle Eastern campaign will put a crimp on its Pacific “containment” planning.
In the meantime, the mood in China has clearly been changing as well. As Orville Schell wrote recently, after a contentious visit to Beijing by 94-year-old Jimmy Carter, the president who more than 30 years ago sponsored a full-scale American rapprochement with the new capitalist version of Communist China: “In short, what used to be referred to as ‘the West’ now finds itself confronted by an increasingly intractable situation in which the power balance is changing, a fact that few have yet quite cared to acknowledge, much less to factor into new formulations for approaching China. We remain nostalgic for those quaint days when Chinese leaders still followed Deng [Xiaoping's] admonition to his people to ‘hide our capacities and bide our time’ (taoguang yanghui). What he meant in using this ‘idiom’ (chengyu) was not that China should be eternally restrained but that the time to manifest its global ambition had not yet come. Now that it is stronger, however, its leaders appear to believe that their time has at last come and they are no longer willing even to press the comforting notion of ‘peaceful rise’ (heping jueqi).” At the moment, of course, the Chinese have their own internal problems, ranging from an economy that might be bubblicious to an Islamic separatist movement in the backlands of Xinjiang Province and the latest Occupy movement making waves in that modernistic Asian financial hub Hong Kong. Nonetheless, go to Beijing and the world looks like a different place. Pepe Escobar, TomDispatch’speripatetic wanderer on the Eurasian mainland, which he’s dubbedPipelineistan, has done just that. He's also visited other spots along the future “new Silk Roads” that China wants to establish all the way to Western Europe. He offers a vision of a different Eurasian world than the one reflected in news reports in this country. If you want to understand the planet we may actually be living on in the near future, it couldn’t be more important to take it in. Tom Can China and Russia Squeeze Washington Out of Eurasia? |
