By Pepe Escobar
The West is the best
The West is the best
Get here and we’ll do the rest
Jim Morrison, The End
June 16, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - - "Asia
Times" For
those spared the ordeal of sifting through the NATO
summit communique, here’s the concise low down:
Russia is an "acute threat" and China is a "systemic
challenge".
NATO, of course, are just a bunch of innocent
kids building castles in a sandbox.
Those were the days when Lord Hastings Lionel
Ismay, NATO's first secretary-general, coined the
trans-Atlantic purpose: to “keep the Soviet Union
out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
The Raging Twenties remix reads like “keep the
Americans in, the EU down and Russia-China
contained”.
So the North Atlantic (italics mine) organization
has now relocated all across Eurasia, fighting what
it describes as “threats from the East”. Well,
that’s a step beyond Afghanistan – the intersection
of Central and South Asia – where NATO was
unceremoniously humiliated by a bunch of Pashtuns
with Kalashnikovs.
Russia remains the top threat – mentioned 63
times in the communiqué. Current top NATO chihuahua
Jens Stoltenberg says NATO won’t simply “mirror”
Russia: it will de facto outspend it and surround it
with multiple battle formations, as “we now have
implemented the biggest reinforcements of our
collective defense since the end of the Cold War”.
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The communiqué is adamant: the only way for
military spending is up. Context: the total
“defense” budget of the 30 NATO members will grow by
4.1% in 2021, reaching a staggering $1.049 trillion
($726 billion from the US, $323 billion from
assorted allies).
After all, “threats from the East” abound. From
Russia, there are all those hypersonic weapons that
baffle NATO generals; those large-scale exercises
near the borders of NATO members; constant airspace
violations; military integration with that
“dictator” in Belarus.
As for the threats from China – South China Sea,
Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific overall - it was up to the
G7 to come up with a plan.
Enter “green”, “inclusive” Build Back Better
World (B3W), billed as the Western “alternative” to
the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). B3W respects
“our values” - which clownish British PM Boris
Johnson could not help describing as building
infrastructure in a more “gender neutral” or
“feminine” way – and, further on down the road, will
remove goods produced with forced labor (code for
Xinjiang) from supply chains.
The White House has its own B3W spin: that’s a
“values-driven, high-standard, and transparent
infrastructure partnership” which will be
“mobilizing private-sector capital in four areas of
focus – climate, health and health security, digital
technology, and gender equality – with catalytic
investments from our respective development
institutions”
The initial “catalytic investments” for BW3 were
estimated at $100 billion. No one knows how these
funds will be coming from the “development
institutions”.
Seasoned Global South observers already bet they
will be essentially provided by IMF/World Bank
“green” loans tied to private sector investment in
selected emerging markets, with an eye on profit.
The White House is adamant that “B3W will be
global in scope, from Latin America and the
Caribbean to Africa and the Indo-Pacific”. Note the
blatant attempt to match BRI’s reach.
All these “green” resources and new logistic
chains financed by what will be a variant of Central
Banks showering helicopter money would ultimately
benefit G7 members, certainly not China.
And the “protector” of these new “green”
geostrategic corridors will be – who else? – NATO.
That’s the natural consequence of the “global reach”
emphasized on the NATO 2030 agenda.
NATO as investment protector
“Alternative” infrastructure schemes already
proliferate, geared to contain “Russia bullying” and
“Chinese meddling” off from the EU. That’s the case
of the Three Seas Initiative, where 12 EU
member-states from Eastern Europe are supposed to
better interconnect the Adriatic, Baltic and Black
Seas.
This initiative is a pale copy of China’s 17+1
mechanism of integrating Eastern Europe as part of
BRI – in this case forcing them to build very
expensive infrastructure to receive very expensive
American energy imports.
The offensive against “threats from the East” is
bound to fail. Dmitry Orlov has detailed how “Russia
excels at building and operating huge energy,
transportation and materials production systems”
and, in parallel, how “the technosphere…has quietly
relocated and is now busy telecommuting between
Moscow and Beijing.”
As every geek knows, China is way ahead in 5G and
is the world's top market for chips. And now the
Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law – significantly approved
right before the G7 in Cornwall - will “safeguard”
Chinese companies from “unilateral and
discriminatory measures imposed by foreign
countries” and the US “long arm jurisdiction”, thus
forcing Atlanticist capital to make a choice.
It’s China as a rising global power that in fact
has proposed an “alternative” to the Global South in
the first place, a counterpunch to the endless
IMF/World Bank debt trap of the past decades. BRI is
a highly complex sustainable development
trade/investment strategy with the potential to
integrate vast swathes of the Global South.
That’s a direct connection to Chairman Mao’s
famous theory on the division of the Three Worlds ;
the emphasis then on the post-colonial Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM), of which China was a stalwart, now
encompasses the whole Global South. In the end, it’s
always about sovereignty against neocolonialism.
B3W is the Western, essentially American,
reaction to BRI: try to scotch as many projects as
possible while harassing China 24/7 in the process.
Unlike China or Germany, the US hardly
manufactures products the Global South wants to buy;
manufacturing accounts for only 5% of a US economy
essentially propped up by the US dollar as reserve
currency and the – dwindling – Pentagon’s Empire of
Bases.
China churns out ten top engineers for every US
“financial expert”. China has perfected what is
known among bilingual tech experts as an effective
system to make SMART (specific, measurable,
achievable, relevant and time-bound) development
plans - and implement them.
The notion that the Global South will be
convinced to privilege B3W – a hollow PR coup at
best – over BRI is ludicrous. Yet NATO will be
regimented to actively protect those investments
that follow “our values”. One thing is certain:
there will be blood.
Pepe Escobar is
correspondent-at-large at
Asia Times.
His latest book is
2030. Follow him on
Facebook.
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