China and the New World Order
By NOAM CHOMSKY | inthesetimes.com
As every Mafia don knows, even the slightest loss of control might lead to unraveling of the system of domination as others are encouraged to follow a similar path. Amid all the alleged threats to the world’s reigning superpower, one rival is quietly, forcefully emerging: China. And the U.S. is closely scrutinizing China’s intentions.
On August 13, a Pentagon study expressed concern that China is expanding its military forces in ways that “could deny the ability of American warships to operate in international waters off the coast,” Thom Shanker reports in The New York Times.
Washington is alarmed that “China’s lack of openness about the growth, capabilities and intentions of its military injects instability to a vital region of the globe.”
The U.S., on the other hand, is quite open about its intention to operate freely throughout the “vital region of the globe” surrounding China (as elsewhere).
The U.S. advertises its vast capacity to do so: with a growing military budget that roughly matches the rest of the world combined, hundreds of military bases across the globe, and a huge lead in the technology of destruction and domination.
China’s lack of understanding of the rules of international civility was illustrated by its objections to the plan for the advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington to take part in the U.S.-South Korea military exercises near China’s coast in July, with the alleged capacity to strike Beijing.
By contrast, the West understands that such U.S. operations are all undertaken to defend stability and its own security.
The term “stability” has a technical meaning in discourse on international affairs: domination by the U.S. Thus no eyebrows are raised when James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs, explains that in order to achieve “stability” in Chile in 1973, it was necessary to “destabilize” the country—by overthrowing the elected government of President Salvador Allende and installing the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which proceeded to slaughter and torture with abandon and to set up a terror network that helped install similar regimes elsewhere, with U.S. backing, in the interest of stability and security.
It is routine to recognize that U.S. security requires absolute control. The premise was given a scholarly imprimatur by historian John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University in “Surprise, Security, and the American Experience,” in which he investigates the roots of President George W. Bush’s preventive war doctrine.
The operative principle is that expansion is “the path to security,” a doctrine that Gaddis admiringly traces back almost two centuries—to President John Quincy Adams, the intellectual author of Manifest Destiny.
When Bush warned “that Americans must `be ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives,”’ Gaddis observes, “he was echoing an old tradition rather than establishing a new one,” reiterating principles that presidents from Adams to Woodrow Wilson “would all have understood … very well.”
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