Editor’s Note: Revolutionaries must study each revolutionary tradition and learn from it. We don’t believe that PPW is a “magic bullet” for current pre-revolutionary conditions, but it is worth studying.
By JP
Protracted People’s War (PPW) is a military theory developed by Mao Zedong during the Chinese Civil War and the war against the Japanese in China. What Mao puts forward is that a guerrilla movement must be able to maintain the support of the people for long enough to wage a long war against an enemy, hence protracted. Mao said also that by moving into the countryside, the people’s army could stretch the supply-lines of the enemy thin and break their will to fight. This is a very broad definition and we will go into a more detailed one later on. PPW has moved beyond being a military theory for a revolution in China since Mao conceived of it. It’s principles have been used in numerous countries from Vietnam and Cuba to India and the Philippines today. It has also become a fundamental tenet of the modern ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism which proclaims its universality. There are also those who decry it as a theory solely for the conditions of China. Both of these claims are right and wrong in their own ways as they are both ideological arguments. They both ignore critical analysis of military theory and material conditions. One must remember that war is complex and different, especially in the context of revolutionary warfare. All military theories need to be analysed and adapted to material conditions or they cease to be effective. Warfare develops as fast as technology does and that sometimes makes it difficult to study. Keep this in mind.
What is Protracted People’s War?
As stated earlier, protracted people’s war is a theory of revolutionary warfare centred on the building up of popular support for a long and drawn out war against an enemy. It is, like most Marxist military theories, rooted in politics. That does not detract from it, however. In fact, it makes it a smarter theory in that it accounts for such things. Mao divided the protracted war into three basic stages:
The Strategic Defensive
The Strategic Stalemate
The Strategic Offensive
During the strategic defensive, the army will go into the countryside with difficult terrain and establish revolutionary base areas. From these base areas, the army will carry out attacks on the enemy through guerilla means. This mostly includes attacking patrols, crippling supply lines, and destroying key military infrastructure. During this period the army also begins to gain strength from in and around the revolutionary base areas. Once enough strength is gained, the second stage can begin. In the strategic stalemate, the army begins to spread from its initial bases and establishes new ones. The army also begins to strategically engage the enemy in more conventional warfare. The assumption is that by this time the army is strong enough, and the enemy is weak enough to begin strategic confrontation on a larger scale. During this, the army gains a sizeable amount of territory but, the enemy does not lose much of value, hence a stalemate. Following another period of building strength, the army enters the third and final stage of the war; the strategic offensive. This is when the army goes into high gear against a weak and tired enemy. It first drives them out of the countryside and encircles the cities. From there is routs them and takes major population centres. It then proceeds to defeat the enemy obliterating the will of the enemy or destroying them. From there is victory for the army.
While it can be easy to describe this process in a relatively condensed manner, PPW is anything but short. It is a long and ruthless conflict. The amount of time an army spends in any of the stages depends on the conditions and ability of the army. Mao was aware of this and in his work “On Protracted War” (1938), gives a summation of the nature of protracted war:
“It is thus obvious that the war is protracted and consequently ruthless in nature. The enemy will not be able to gobble up the whole of China but will be able to occupy many places for a considerable time. China will not be able to oust the Japanese quickly, but the greater part of her territory will remain in her hands. Ultimately the enemy will lose and we will win, but we shall have a hard stretch of road to travel”.
PPW is a long-term affair and Mao developed many theories as to how each stage would be carried out, specific tactical objectives for each stage, and the discipline of the army as a whole. What ties these all together is the role of politics. PPW is not just a war against an enemy, but also a war for the hearts and spirits of the people. One of the key goals of the army in PPW is establishing a democratic order in the areas it occupies. In China, this was done via land reform and the establishment of peasant councils in the countryside. Political education is also a must of the army (PPW assumes the army has a political force behind it). Political education in the Chinese context was the promoting of Marxism-Leninism and anti-reactionary views among the Chinese people. Mao also was working with a united front against the Japanese and accounted for the politics of that situation into his theory. He maintained that only through the united front of anti-reactionary groups could the war succeed in its final victory. This was important because the main base that PPW relies on is popular support. Such a long conflict and process can only succeed if the people are on board and are able to unite. This is not just true of the army but of the nation as well. The people must be willing to live through struggle and destruction in order to obtain victory. In Mao’s case, he was right. The Chinese people persevered and won their victory; both against the Japanese and the Kuomintang. It was from this victory that people across the world would take inspiration.
PPW would be taken by others across the world and used to wage revolutionary conflicts. Although, none of them would be exactly the same; all would be similar situations. Vietnam and Cuba both took aspects of PPW but morphed them with more conventional tactics. For Vietnam specifically, Vo Nguyen Giap wrote a book titled “People’s Army, People’s War” which outlines much of the strategy used by the Viet Minh and Viet Cong. In Cuba aspects of PPW were fused with Foco Theory by Che Guevara. More Maoist oriented people’s wars would be carried out by guerrillas in Nepal, India, Peru, Turkey, and the Philippines. Of these Maoist-based PPWs, only Nepal was a complete success with the establishment of democracy in Nepal. The Shining Path in Peru failed due to their reliance on and cult of personality surrounding Abimael Guzman (Presidente Gonzalo). The failures of many people’s wars are due mainly to mistakes within guerrilla organisations and the will of the enemy to crush them. However, in India, Turkey, and the Philippines the conflicts are still ongoing so, it would be unfair to judge them. In all three of these, the groups have been progressive forces for revolutionary change against reactionary governments. The NPA in the Philippines is especially successful and constantly gaining support.
On the Universality of Protracted People’s War
One of the central tenets of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the universality of PPW, claiming that it can be applied everywhere and be successful. This claim is ideological and not driven by concrete analysis of material conditions or military theory in general. In military theory and Marxism in general, there is no universal plan that works 100% of the time. There are things that will probably work most of the time depending on the conditions. This is true of most methods. PPW works in places dominated by a non-urban population with military infrastructure based within population centres with minor bases outside of them to maintain a presence. In China and most places back in the 20th Century, this worked because that was how militaries operated. Today one would be hard pressed to find a military that operated in this way, even outside of the imperialist centres in the Third World. That is because governments have developed around the threat of insurgencies and accommodated themselves to them or in the case of countries like the United States, the military never operated that way.
While the argument can be made that PPW could work successfully in the Third World is legitimate (for now), the argument of complete universality falls apart when one looks at the United States or any other Western country. The United States runs the largest military in the world in terms of budget. This has led to a completely monstrous military with a large international presence. The US military is also political in that most soldiers are devoted volunteers, different from the forced conscripts of Chiang Kai-shek. Other aspects such as level of training and experience also do not look good when applying PPW to the United States. The one primary problem, however, is the way the military operates domestically. US military bases are everywhere in almost every state and region of the country. The only place they are not is where there are no people. Needless to say, the United States does not look ideal for the establishment of revolutionary base areas. One other key issue is that of technology. Modern armies are technologically equipped almost to the point where soldiers are not always necessary. Drones, missiles, aircraft, and explosives make modern warfare different from the warfare of the past century. Unless a people’s army could adapt to or obtain that technology, it is almost impossible to win.
Now those who support the argument of the complete universality of PPW have many responses to the situation of modern warfare. One of the most prevalent is the idea that the revolution will not start in the imperialist centres and that the effects of revolutions in the Third World on the economies of Western countries will weaken them, making revolution and PPW possible. This argument assumes too much and is too dependent on the success of Third World revolutions. Also, revolutionaries in the Third World would not just be fighting one enemy but, a multitude of enemies if there were any possibility of success. The US empire is global and can move on any threat to its hegemony or economic situation. While the best hope is in the Third World, one must not be so arrogant and confident in that all hopes lead to success. Another thing people often try to do is change PPW to fit modern conditions without actually doing a material analysis. One proposed change for PPW in the West is for it to stem from cities. This still suffers the same difficulties as regular PPW in that the army would still be subject to the same problems, just in a city. Cities are also easy to close off and prevent movement from if need be. This threatens the need for mobility in a guerrilla war. Not that urban guerrilla warfare cannot work, look at the IRA, but, urban PPW seems farfetched.
Finally, the largest argument often made in support of the complete universality of PPW is that if the people’s army maintains popular support, it cannot be defeated. This is correct depending on what they mean by never be defeated. Ideas and causes, such as that of the workers, can never be defeated by brute force. Armies can be defeated by brute force. An army can be completely routed and obliterated as long as their enemy has the will and the ability to do so. This strikes at the main problem with PPW; it assumes it cannot lose. It assumes that an army will always be unable to cope with the effects of guerrilla warfare. This is simply not true, especially today. People’s wars worked because of the enemy’s inability to cope with the conditions. The army made it so the enemy could not adapt easily and with the level of technology available then, it was much easier to do that. Today we have modern armies fully equipped with modern technology ready and willing to obliterate their enemies. The sheer size and protection given to military infrastructure today make it nearly impossible to sabotage the enemy to the level of weakness needed to wage an effective war. Also, people’s wars depended on the enemy not having the will and means to crush them. If there is an army with the will and means to snuff out an insurgency, it will and that is all it would take. If the enemy went to the base areas and drone struck them all, that is the end of the war. There is no assurance of victory in any military strategy or theory, all are subject to material conditions. People need to remember this.
Conclusion
This essay is not meant to be pessimistic or discouraging of revolutionary action, on the contrary, it is meant to try and get people to think more about how a revolution would be conducted in certain settings. This also is not meant to put down Protracted People’s War as a concept either. It is a genius concept and Mao is a genius for formulating it. People just need to accept that revolution is different everywhere and there is never a method that is always successful. All this being said, revolutionary tactics should not be the main focus in the present time. Much of the world still has a long way to go. That does not mean ignore them but, there are more pressing issues. Something key to PPW and any revolution is unity. Maybe start there.
Today on Facebook I came across an article celebrating the fact that NASA has found that the earth has greened up over the past 20 years thanks to massive tree planting in China and India.
Surely not, I thought. So I googled the phrase “NASA says world greener” and found a slew of articles published over the past 24 hours all trumpeting the news. The first 20 or so all had variations on the same headline praising China and India’s tree planting. So it must be true, right?
Unfortunately no. This is a really good example of bad science reporting, spin and “greenwashing”.
Over the last two decades, the Earth has seen an increase in foliage around the planet, measured in average leaf area per year on plants and trees. Data from NASA satellites shows that China and India are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries. Credits: NASA Earth Observatory [Image and caption copied directly from the NASA Ames Research Centre article linked below]
Regrettably, even the NASA web page about the research – which was NOT conducted by NASA at all but merely used publicly available data from NASA’s satellites – is highly misleading. And it’s all in the spin. When you talk about “China and India leading the increase” and China’s “ambitious tree planting programs” as in NASA’s caption above, you can certainly see where the commonly reported headline comes from. While the NASA article isn’t technically incorrect, the wording is very misleading. Unless you have been trained to focus on the precise meaning of every single word (as scientists like me have), you are simply not going to pick it up. But it’s spin. Fake news. Greenwash. Given an aura of legitimacy by the NASA badge.
YES, it’s true, there have been massive tree plantings in China and, to a lesser extent, India. And we should certainly be happy about that.
And YES, scientist Chi Chen and colleagues from Boston University in Massachusetts are reporting a 5% increase in average total leaf area across the entire planet over the period 2000-2017.
But tree plantings in China and India are NOT chiefly responsible for the increase in planetary greenness. What the headline should probably have said is what the scientists actually reported in their paper, namely
“Earth is 5% greener since 2000 due to the Greenhouse Effect”.
But that’s not quite as sexy, is it. Nor is it good news. In fact it’s quite the opposite.
What Chi Chen and colleagues actually found (as reported in Nature Sustainability volume 2, pages 122–129 (2019)) was:
the earth’s Greenness Index (something detected by sensors on NASA’s MODIS satellites) has increased over the period 2000-2017 and this equates to a 5% increase in annual average total leaf area across the entire planet
over the period 2000-2017 the total surface area covered by leaves in the planet’s vegetated zones has grown. The increase is spread out across the world but if put together would be roughly equal in size to the Amazon rainforest.
in addition to this, about 30% of land that was already green in 2000 is even greener now and about 5% is less green now
the “dominant drivers” of this overall increase in greenness are “climate change and CO2 fertilization effects”. In other words – the Greenhouse Effect. These indirect effects of human activity account for 70% of the increased greenness across the planet.
the remaining 30% is due to direct effects of human activity and this is concentrated in China and India
in China:
42% of the increase in greenness is due to large scale tree plantings.
32% of the increase in greenness is due to agricultural intensification
(that is, greater use of irrigation, fertiliser (particularly Nitrogen), pesticides and fossil fuels.)
in India:
only 4% of the increase is due to large scale tree plantings.
and fully 82% of the increase is due to agricultural intensification.
A worker in China plants a pine sapling as part of the country’s ambitious plan to reforest its landscape. Credit: Xinhua/ZUMA Wire
Now, if you’ve made it this far through the article and all that accurate science reporting hasn’t put you to sleep, you’ll see that this tree story isn’t half as green as it seemed. Indeed its only 42% of 25% of 5% as green as it seemed. It’s precisely 0.525% as green as it seemed.
So the great news about the tree plantings in China (and it really IS great news) is sadly only the thin silver lining on an otherwise dark cloud of climate change and ‘business-as-usual’ industrial agriculture.
Am I disappointed the world isn’t 5% greener due to tree plantings? Yes, I am. But I am much more disappointed that the research has not been reported honestly by a respected scientific institution, and that literally dozens of news services that trust that institution are now promulgating the spin, fake news, and greenwash of its story. Why would the Ames Research Center spin the story this way? Who knows. Maybe it’s just a staffer in their communications department with a particularly optimistic disposition, who lacks the skills to actually read the original article properly. Maybe it goes much deeper than this and comes down to political influence. But regardless of where it sits on the spectrum, from inept to devious, it stinks!
If, like me, harsh realities like this tend to make you sad, angry and perhaps despairing, let me encourage you to take that energy and invest it in a positive way. Do what you can – everything you can – to stop being part of the problem and, as much as is within your power, every day strive to be part of the solution.
Featured image: Demonstration against TTIP. Sebastian Heidelberger, creative commons licence
Editor’s note: This is the second part an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 10, 2017 Resistance Radio interview with Alfred McCoy. Read Part One here. McCoy’s first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block publication. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the “classic” work on the global drug traffic. His more recent cover on covert operations, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror explores the agency’s half-century history of psychological torture. A film based in part on that book, “Taxi to the Darkside,” won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008.
His most recent book, In the Shadow of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, focuses on the key instruments in its exercise of this hegemony, including geopolitical dominion, control of subordinate states, covert operations, worldwide surveillance, torture, and military technology. The work concludes by analyzing China’s challenge and the complex of forces that will likely lead to an eclipse of U.S. hegemony by 2030.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
DJ: Let’s talk about the American response and the question of some commonalities of the response to empires on the decline of their own power, if you could fit those two together.
AM: First of all the American response. This is where the White House actually matters. You can make an argument that the Presidency doesn’t make that much difference in the fabric of American life, but when it comes to foreign policy, and particularly military power; the presidency matters. The man in charge makes a difference. Because you’ve got the economic apparatus, the diplomacy, the military, all of these concerted forces arrayed at the fingertips of a single person.
Under the Obama administration: Obama was what I call a geopolitical genius. He’s one of three Americans in the past 120 years who understood geopolitics and knew how to play it. Obama sensed the nature of the Chinese challenge, and he came up with an explicit strategy to counter it, a three-fold strategy. First of all, he realized that the logic of the Chinese infrastructure and their big new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, was basically to make sure that the trade of the Eurasian landmass was heading towards China. Obama countered that very deftly. He negotiated, mostly in the course of his second term in office, two international trade pacts. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, with a dozen nations who together account for about 40% of world trade. He also launched negotiations for another pact called the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or T-TIP, with the European Union, that controlled about another 20% of trade.
Through these two trade pacts, Obama had the idea of draining the world island the life blood of commerce. China could build its railroads and its pipelines to its heart’s content, but if Obama’s plans had gone through, these preferential trade pacts would have diverted the trade from Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, across the Atlantic, across the Pacific towards the United States.
The second part of Obama’s strategy was that because of the energy independence of the United States through fracking and the Canadian oil boom, we no longer needed Middle Eastern oil. He felt that we were energy-self-sufficient, and indeed we’re going to start exporting pretty soon. He said basically “We’re going to pull our surplus forces out of the Middle East where we don’t really have any real interests anymore, and we’re going to shift them to rebuild the U.S. position on the axial end of Eurasia” along that Pacific island chain from Japan through South Korea down to the Philippines and Australia.
He went to Australia in 2011 and announced what was called the Pivot to Asia. He then arranged for a U.S. Marine battalion to be based at Darwin along with some Navy vessels, giving the United States ready access to the South China Sea through the Indonesian archipelago. His diplomats negotiated the right of U.S. forces to position equipment and have ready access to five Philippine bases in the South China Sea, renewing that long but now fated strategic alliance. He worked with South Korea to build a new base at Jeju and he renewed the strategic alliance with Japan. He got Japan to back the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to the hilt. And by the time Obama left office, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was running into trouble, but it still had a chance of passing. The European treaty ran into the populism in Europe, which was rising very strongly. That was going to have a much more problematic passage.
The other part of Obama’s strategy was his major Africa diplomatic initiative. He had a summit meeting for about 50 African leaders. He made a major Presidential visit to Africa, which was not the sentimental journey that people imagined, but serious diplomacy. He was hoping to use diplomacy to get African nations to redirect their trade and investment toward the United States. So he had a systematic strategy.
President Trump intuited the pillars of U.S. power and began attacking them systematically in a kind of demolition job with almost a kind of unerring instinct, a malign design, if you will. In his first week in office, despite the pleas of Japan’s Prime Minister by phone call and personal visit to Trump Tower, Trump canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Prime Minister Abe of Japan said “This is a serious mistake, because China has its own regional cooperation pact with 16 members, that’s going to capture all the trade. So if you don’t have the Trans-Pacific Partnership, China’s going to direct all that trade towards it. You’ll lose out.” Trump didn’t pay any attention, he went ahead with that.
The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was already fading before Obama left office. The other thing that Trump has done is he’s systematically damaged our relationship with all of the four pillars underlying those axial ends of the Eurasian landmass. When he made his visit to NATO in May of this year, he refused to defend the mutual defense clause in NATO. Without that clause, there is no NATO. It was a major blow. Then we have the transcript of his first presidential phone call with the Prime Minister of Australia, in which Trump says it’s the worst phone call he’s ever had and slams the phone down. That accelerated the alienation of the Australian people away from the United States and towards a primary alliance with China.
We have the transcript of his presidential phone call last April with President Duterte of the Philippines. Trump’s calling up about the North Korean missile launches. It’s a very interesting transcript and it has a significance that nobody realized. Trump says “Kim Jong Un’s a real problem” and Duterte says “I’m going to call China.” President Trump says “Look, I got two nuclear subs right in the area. Very powerful subs.” Duterte says “I’m going to call China.”
And Trump says “You know, we got 20 times the bombs of North Korea.” President Duterte says “I’m going to call China.” It’s very clear. The Philippines is gone. The Philippines has moved into China’s orbit. That treaty for access to the five bases in the Philippines is basically a dead piece of paper.
Trump systematically attacked Korean history and politics, alienating Korea, so that the current President of South Korea, President Moon Jae-in, ran on a campaign slogan of “Say No to America.” I think that in the fullness of time, the tensions in the Korean peninsula are going to play out in a way that the U.S. bilateral pacts of both Korea and Japan are going to be very seriously diminished. I don’t know if they’ll become dead letters, but very pretty close to it.
Through his inept leadership on the global stage, Trump is accelerating the decline of the U.S. geopolitical position. He’s undercutting those axial ends of Eurasia that have been the pillars of U.S. geopolitical power for the past 70 years.
DJ: What are some commonalities of the end of empire that we can see manifesting in the U.S.?
AM: Empires decline through a complex series of processes. First of all, the numbers. The trade, the military dominance, the technological primacy that a rising empire has at its start, is inevitably eroded over time as other powers acquire similar skills, or they become more vital and newer economies. So the long-term trends are for any empire, at some point, they start to head downward. When the power is fading, the elites of a society who’ve enjoyed this kind of psychological sense of empowerment and dominion — the masters of the globe, the titans astride the planet – get irrational. They then can conduct military operations that are called by historians “micro-militarism.” The prime example is the United Kingdom. In the mid-1950’s, the United Kingdom had full employment, had dug themselves out of the rubble from the bombing of World War II. They had organized a systematic and very disciplined liquidation of their empire. They were giving up, through negotiations, political control over India, Malaya, etc. They were retaining the substance of their trade and investment as they negotiated their way out of colonial rule. It looked like Britain, in the mid-1950s, was on a path of comparative decline, but it was carefully managed, it was a slow decline that was leaving Britain in a pretty good position economically and diplomatically.
Then came Sir Anthony Eden in the Conservative Party. Somehow, the process of losing empire produced a psychological crisis. So when Gamal Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, the British Conservative Party collectively reacted in an irrational fury. They secretly plotted with the French and the Israelis to launch the massive Suez invasion, concealing this operation from the United States, Britain’s prime ally: 300,000 troops, six aircraft carriers, and the Israeli Army launched itself across Sinai. They occupied half the Canal before the operation began to fall apart diplomatically. The British pound in Britain couldn’t sustain this operation. It was the global reserve currency and it began to lose value. The first bailout by the IMF was not done for Mexico or some impoverished third world country. It was done for Britain in the aftermath of Suez. That’s where the bailout came from. Because the world’s global reserve currency was trembling at the brink of collapse.
Suddenly Britain went from the mighty imperial lion to kind of a toothless tiger that would now roll over when America cracked the whip. And that all happened in the space of a month, through this micro-military invasion. Clearly, leaders can accelerate the decline of imperial power. Leaders that are reacting irrationally, that are brash and bold and kind of thunder and trumpet, laying claim to power that’s slipping away from them. In doing so, they actually accelerate the loss of power.
If there were ever a Sir Anthony Eden figure to take over the United States government, that would be Donald Trump. And the micro-military disaster can occur in the South China Sea, in the Korean peninsula, or somewhere in the Middle East. It awaits us. In fact, there are those who would argue 30 years from now, that America’s real micro-military disaster was the Iraq invasion of 2003. That was the same thing. American conservatives feeling a loss of U.S. global power, decided on a bold military strike. Capture Baghdad; build a massive embassy, the Green Zone; insert the U.S. in the heart of the Middle East; unleash the tides of democracy and capitalism. Break down these kind of socialist autocracies and bring the Middle East firmly into the American camp. Didn’t quite work out. Proved to be closer to Suez than a brilliant imperial coup.
So that pathology of power that’s so rational when the empire’s on the ascent, becomes dangerously irrational when an empire’s in decline.
DJ: Leaving off the sort of immorality of having an empire in the first place, and acting in the self-interest of the imperial power in decline, how would you see a reasoned and rational response to a decline of empire playing out? What would those at the center of empire do if they were continuing to act in their imperial self-interest and perceiving the decline? How would they age gracefully?
AM: First of all, we not talking about colonies anymore. We’re talking about the U.S., what’s known in the rubric as an informal empire, where we don’t actually control the sovereignty of nation-states. Back in the heyday of the British empire, a quarter of the globe, both population and territory, were British colonies, painted red on the map. But another quarter of the globe were part of the British informal empire. From the 1820’s to the 1890’s that included Latin America. At one point it included Egypt, Iran, and China. So there was another quarter of humanity that was in the British informal empire.
The U.S. iteration of empire looks like that British informal empire. The 190+ sovereign states of the world all have presidents and prime ministers, they have sacrosanct boundaries and national sovereignty. And yet, the United States exercises hegemony over them. The U.S. empire has overtones like the British.
Now, the question is not “whether empire.” It’s what kind of empire are you going to have? You take Professor Niall Ferguson’s point, that there have been 69 major empires over the last 4000 years of human history. The possibility of the next 100 years being without an empire seems pretty remote. Think back to one of the great events that shaped the world we live in: World War II. That was a clash between two powers: the British empire – Churchill was very proud, he didn’t talk about Britain, he talked about the British empire, – and the U.S. as an ascendant imperial power on one side. And there were the Axis powers on the other. Hitler had the largest control over Europe, a continental empire. Even larger, through his allies, than Napoleon. And the Japanese empire, if you count the population, through their conquest of China and Southeast Asia, and their occupation of Korea and Taiwan, had in terms of population the largest empire in human history.
So World War II was a clash of empires. Personally, I think most of us would agree that it’s probably a good idea that the British empire and the American hegemony defeated the Axis empires Japan and Germany. Because they didn’t offer much except exploitation of the subject peoples to benefit the metropole.
The U.S. empire has not only had its dark chapters, as every empire does, but we’ve been a distinctive empire in several ways. One of them has been that at the peak of our power, right after World War II, when the world was in ruins and rival industrial powers were heavily damaged, we had something like 50% of the world’s industrial production under our control. The United States presided over the construction of a new international order: The United Nations. Then they established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was the predecessor of the World Trade Organization. They created the instruments for the management of the global economy; the IMF and the World Bank.
The United States also believed in the rule of law. There was an international court that was linked to the United Nations, and instead of lining up the defeated heads of the Axis empires, the Germans and the Japanese, and just shooting them, or throwing them into some prison island, the United States conducted tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo. Those established, admittedly somewhat problematically but nonetheless established certain international rules of law. The Nuremberg Medical Code, for example.
This was an international order, grounded in the idea of inviolable national sovereignty. Every nation was sovereign. Second, nations did not conduct their affairs via conflict and war but by the rule of international law. Third, that there were human rights, and the object of this international order was to realize the human potential, the liberation of every individual. Though we all can list, chapter and verse, all the times we failed our own values, nonetheless, those values stand. So it’s important to have a kind of slow, managed transition, so that even as U.S. global power fades, that liberal international order that we built up at the peak of our power survives us.
That’s I think the troubling part of China’s rise. Because China does not stand for those principles.
DJ: What we can do to maintain these efforts toward human rights in the decline of the U.S. empire?
AM: I think that one of the most positive signs that we saw was when President Trump imposed his initial ban on travel from predominantly Muslim nations. That looked very clearly like a betrayal of the Constitutional protection of religious liberty, and furthermore a betrayal of the part of the mission of the U.N.: to deal with refugees. There’s a U.N. High Commission for Refugees. It manages what happens when people leave their state and they’re in the kind of limbo between states. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees moves in and does human rights work, provides food, clothing, shelter, education; and ultimately tries to get other states to take in people that have left their own state. This is a very important part of the maintenance of international order. In many ways, it’s the realization of the belief in human rights. We manifest it, we prove it by the way we treat those that are within the International order, who are stateless.
President Trump was challenging that very important international principle, imposing that Muslim ban and keeping the refugees out. This is triumphant nationalism: in his endless talks about sovereignty at the U.N. he undercuts the international community of nations, the rule of law, and the commitment to human rights. Sovereignty and boundaries transcends all. So there are Americans fighting that: hundreds of thousands of people across the country turned up at airports, lawyers came out and sat in the arrivals lounge with their laptops, filing appeals on behalf of people that were in INS holding behind the Customs barrier. That sort of popular outpouring in the United States represented a very deep commitment from a certain sector, I think a majority of the American people, to these principles and ideals. I think it’s important to keep up that kind of activity to defend these principles.
Sometimes our small actions, fighting for a refugee to get a visa, seems very small, just one individual or family. But it has profound implications for the principles of the U.S. liberal international order.
Then there is the resistance against some of the more excessive moves by the Trump administration. People who are fighting the wall, for example, which is a visible symbol of the closed nation-state, nationalism above all else. There are all kinds of manifestations of opposition to Trump that are ongoing. And that’s important, because whether consciously or unconsciously, all of the impacts upon the liberal international order.
DJ: I understand what you’re saying about the importance of resistance to Trump. That makes sense. With an ascendant Chinese imperial form, how does one maintain those human rights associated with the United States internationally? How does one extend that across the world?
AM: In very real terms, there was a lot of popular opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Nobody liked the secret arbitration tribunals that were going to be created by it. The Obama administration argued that in fact labor rights, environmental protections were inbuilt in the treaty far more than any other trade treaty. So there was a heavy debate on that issue. But basically, progressives joined nationalists and conservatives in an attack on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And at the time, when we were titans standing astride the globe, with our power seemingly unchallenged, I don’t think people realized what was at stake. That 40% of world trade was at stake. And that if we gave it up it would go to China.
So the issue on the left, and even on the right was just “stop the TPP.” People were unaware of the implications of what would happen when you did that. That it would represent a kind of retreat of the United States from international trade. It would weaken our relationships with those 11 other nations, which were critical trade and strategic partners for the United States.
People looked just at the domestic side of the equation, and they didn’t realize the very important international implications. I would argue that, on balance, a kind of liberal response, maybe a centrist response to the TPP should not have been “stop it.” It should have been “Reform it, revise it.”
There will be other treaties like that. Something will come again, it has to. Because another administration is going to realize that China is capturing all this trade through these preferential agreements, and there will be a revival of these negotiations.
At that point I would say that we should have learned our lesson from the TPP. That popular forces should go in eyes wide open, realizing the trade-offs. You want to reform it, you want to revise it, you want to get the best deal possible, but if you kill it, China’s going to capture the trade and they are not concerned about the environment or the working conditions of workers. There will be no protections in the Chinese trade pacts. So if you’re concerned about the people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and in the future, Burma, who are going to be working in those factories, producing goods for export; better that they’re in an American trade pact with sensitivity to those kinds of environmental and human rights and labor protections, than in a Chinese trade pact where it’s all realpolitik cash and carry, and the Chinese don’t care about those conditions.
I think we’re going to miss the American liberal international order, now that it’s fading and disappearing. We are going to come to appreciate it. We know its excesses to a fare thee well: manipulations of elections, torture, abortive wars, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the rest. But there’s the other side. The principles we stood for, and the international community we tried to build. We’re going to miss American hegemony as it fades away. We are going to miss the international rule of law, the environmental protection, the human rights, the community of nations that the U.S. has constructed. For that reason, it’s very important to realize the stakes, and to campaign in a way so that we manage this transition to a more multipolar world carefully and cautiously.
Featured image: Gwadar, Pakistan, site of a $200 billion Chinese infrastructure investment.
Editor’s note: This is the first part of an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 10, 2017 Resistance Radio interview with Alfred McCoy. Read the Part Two here. McCoy’s first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block publication. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the “classic” work on the global drug traffic. His more recent cover on covert operations, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror explores the agency’s half-century history of psychological torture. A film based in part on that book, “Taxi to the Darkside,” won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008.
His most recent book, In the Shadow of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, focuses on the key instruments in its exercise of this hegemony, including geopolitical dominion, control of subordinate states, covert operations, worldwide surveillance, torture, and military technology. The work concludes by analyzing China’s challenge and the complex of forces that will likely lead to an eclipse of U.S. hegemony by 2030.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Derrick Jensen: In the new book you mention the word “empire” a couple of times. Can you talk about the fact that the United States has been and is an empire? What is an empire?
Alfred McCoy: First of all, the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson said that basically there have been about 69 or 70 empires in world history over the last 4000 years. It’s essentially a system whereby a dominant power exercises control, whether directly, through what was known as colonization, or indirectly through what is called “informal empire.” Those mechanisms of control include financial; political, sometimes through political manipulations of various sorts; military; and very importantly, cultural. It is the soft power, the salve, if you will, that makes all of the above a little bit more palatable for the peoples that are subordinated.
The United States has not only been an empire, but in the opinion of British imperial historians like John Darwin of Oxford University, it has been the most prosperous and powerful empire in human history. Americans, during the long years of the Cold War, particularly American historians, were a population in denial of this fundamental political reality. To summarize and simplify the politics of that period, basically the Soviet Union used the Marxist-inflected term “imperialist” to denigrate the United States. They aggressively promoted anti-imperialism, they made heroes of people like the liberator of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. In the Soviet propaganda, we were the bad empire, the pernicious, dominant, exploitative empire. For historians in the United States the United States was a world leader, a superpower, a global hegemon. But not an empire, because it contained that pejorative.
Once the Cold War was over, within a decade, when we were mired in the Middle East and Iraq intervention and the ever-more difficult pacification of Afghanistan – when it looked like U.S. global power was being challenged, like our massive military intervention in Iraq was going very badly indeed, when it looked like our power was challenged; right across the political spectrum, from very conservative all the way over to very liberal and radical, everybody started using the term “empire.” Now it was shorn of its pejorative, its propaganda value.
And they were using it to ask the question: “Was the U.S. empire over?” And the answer, generally, under the Obama administration was “No, the United States would be an empire for as long as it wanted to be.” The U.S. was the maker, the shaper of world history. We would decide when we wanted to give up our empire. Nobody could challenge us. Well, that’s changed.
DJ: What has changed?
AM: In a word: China. From the beginning of 2004 to 2012, a period of eight or nine years, in the midst of this revival of this discussion of empire, what historians found, myself included, was that the United States was the most powerful and prosperous empire in human history. But because of that evasion and denial, we weren’t the empire, the Soviet Union was the empire, we were the exceptional nation, we had American exceptionalism. The belief in American exceptionalism and its many manifestations was an article of faith, literally, among American historians during the Cold War. Not only was the United States empire the most powerful in human history, but it was arguably the least studied of them all.
I got together with some colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, and very quickly we created a global network called “Empires in Transition.” We had, at our peak, about 140 historians on four continents. We probed the comparative rise of the U.S. empire to global power. That was our first volume, a real door-stopper. In our second volume, after our conference in Barcelona, Spain, held in collaboration with the Pompeu Fabra University, we did a volume called Endless Empires about the decline of various empires; Spanish, European and American.
Although we could see the signs in 2012 when that book came out, that U.S. global power was fading, there wasn’t at that time a challenger. What’s happened in the last four or five years, particularly events in the South China Sea have made China’s challenge blindingly clear. In my book In the Shadow of the American Century that just came out last month, I drew upon that decade of study by 140 scholars on the comparative history of empires and boiled it all down into terms that ordinary readers could understand. Then explored, in a comparative sense, the rise of the U.S. to global power. What kind of empire were we at our peak, what were the bases of our power, and then how were the bases of our power being challenged by China’s rise? Those are the two problems I explore in the book.
Now China’s challenge is straightforward. It’s a strategy that most Americans don’t understand. Those that claim that the American empire will last forever, the sun will never set on the American empire, to paraphrase. The people who believe that simply don’t understand the nature of the Chinese challenge, how fundamental it is.
The Chinese challenge is twofold. And to appreciate it, we have to go way back to a cold London night in January, 1904. That night, at the Royal Geographical Society on Savile Row in London, the head of the London School of Economics, a guy named Sir Halford Mackinder, stood up and gave a paper boldly titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” He proposed, by looking at the map, that Europe, Asia and Africa were not three separate continents. In fact, if you looked at them a certain way, as a geographer could and should – and he was a geographer – they were a single continent, a single land mass that he called “the world island.” And he said that the epicenter of world history, of global power, lay at the heartland of the world island: a vast zone stretching for 4000 miles, from the Persian Gulf north and east, all the way to the East Siberian Sea.
Then he said that the human history for the past five centuries had been changed by something very simple. The people of western Europe learned to sail around the world island, from Europe all the way to Asia. And by doing so, they conducted a kind of strategic flanking maneuver over the great nomadic peoples of the heartland of the world island. The Mongols, the Manchus, the Turks, the Arabs; that had pounded at the gates of great empires: China and Europe. And by sailing around the world island, we saw then the rise of a half dozen European maritime empires.
“But now,” said Sir Halfred Mackinder, and he was alluding to an event that everyone in that audience that night in 1904 knew well – “Now the world is changing.” Because, as he was speaking, the Trans-Siberian Railway was being built by the Czarist empire, and it was stretching from Moscow for 5000 miles, all the way to Vladivostok. For the first time, Europe and Asia were actually a single landmass. They were only two continents because of the vast distances in the great empty center of this, places like the Gobi Desert. But now that this was being crossed by a railroad, Sir Halfred Mackinder predicted that there would be more railroads and that the power that learned to tap into the resources of the heartland of the world island would be the source of a new empire.
Mackinder not only made an observation about the past five centuries and a prediction about the future of global power, but in that single lecture he invented, by the application of geography to global power, the science of geopolitics. It’s in that single lecture. Everybody that’s been good at geopolitics ever since has really been basically an intellectual acolyte of Mackinder.
Of course, it took a long time for Mackinder’s prediction to come true because World War II intervened. Hitler tried to penetrate, break through at Stalingrad and capture Lebensraum, in the heartland, because Hitler was tutored by Mackinder’s German acolyte, a guy named Haushofer at Munich University. When Hitler was in prison, after his aborted Beer Hall Putsch, he was tutored by an expert in geopolitics. That’s where Hitler got the idea of Lebensraum. And then the Cold War came and dropped the Iron Curtain right across the would-be world island.
Ten years ago China began realizing Mackinder’s vision. With their $4 trillion in profits from world trade, much of it with the United States, the Chinese spent a trillion dollars, starting roughly in 2007, to lay down an amazing grid – first of all, 9000 miles of high-speed rail all across China. Then transcontinental rail links that stretch from western China all the way to western Europe, right across the world island. More importantly, they laid down a grid of gas and oil pipelines from Siberia in the north to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the center, all the way down to Burma in the south. They are bringing the oil and gas resources of central Asia and the Persian Gulf via that southern pipeline, into China. The net result of this grid is to realize Mackinder’s vision for infrastructure that will tie this vast land mass together, and shift the epicenter of geopolitical power to the nation that dominates the heartland of the world island, in this case China.
China has overlaid that physical infrastructure. Last year they opened the Infrastructure Development Bank with 57 nations, including many of our closest allies. They contributed on opening day $100 billion, which is about half the capital of the World Bank. They have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and they had a big conference earlier in the year, where President Xi Jinpin announced another trillion dollars to tie together the world island, to continue this massive infrastructure investment.
China is also going to have about $1 trillion of capital invested in Africa by 2025. Already they have three times the trade of the United States with Africa. So they’re really fully realizing Mackinder’s vision of the world island.
That’s part one. Part two is that China is very deftly threatening to undercut the basis of U.S. global power. 70 years ago the United States emerged as the world’s greatest power. In the first decades after World War II, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower laid down the instruments of U.S. global power. But everybody’s forgotten about how they did it. We no longer understand what the pillars of U.S. global power are. That same historian I talked about earlier, John Darwin, wrote a book that surveyed a thousand years of imperial clashes in the Eurasian landmass. He said that the United States after World War II became the most powerful empire in human history, because we were the first empire in history to capture what he called the axial ends of the Eurasian landmass.
By that he meant that in 1949 the United States established the NATO alliance, which gave us a firm control over western Europe, one of the axial ends. Then in 1951, we signed four mutual defense treaties with a string of nations running down the Pacific island chain running down off the Asian landmass; Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia. This gave us the other axial end of control. And then, between these two axial points in western Europe and the Pacific littoral, the United States laid down successive circles of steel. The first was a series of mutual defense treaties: NATO in the west, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in the east, and those four mutual defense treaties that I mentioned.
On top of that we had massive fleets. The 6th Fleet, based at Naples in the Mediterranean. The 7th Fleet, based at Subic Bay, Philippines, in the western Pacific on that Pacific littoral chain. After Britain pulled out of the Persian Gulf in the 1970’s, we established the 5th Fleet at Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. Our most recent addition, on top of hundreds of air bases and strategic bombers and fighters and all the rest, our latest circle of steel is: a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily all the way to Guam in the western Pacific the United States has built over the last ten years. That allow us to strike over much of the world island.
Now, the second part of the Chinese strategy is to slice through those circles of steel and break the U.S. geopolitical encirclement of Eurasia. They’ve done it over the last three years by building seven bases in the South China Sea, using dredges to convert atolls to military bases. They’ve now got antiaircraft missiles and jet landing strips on those military bases.
There is also something that Americans haven’t paid too much attention to. The Chinese have actually got even a stronger position in the Arabian Sea, which is geopolitically very important because that’s where the mouth to the Persian Gulf lies. Ten years ago, China invested $200 billion to transform a sleepy fishing village in western Pakistan, at Gwadar, which is just about 300 miles from the mouth of the Persian Gulf; about a day and a half sail, or steam. Then, a little over a year ago, President Xi Jinping went to Pakistan and he announced, with the Prime Minister of Pakistan, that China would invest $46 billion to build a road, rail, and gas oil pipeline corridor stretching from western China down the length of Pakistan all the way to Gwadar.
Then just last year, China opened a big naval base at Djibouti, at the other end of the Arabian Sea. So with their position in the South China Sea, and these two big bases in the Arabian Sea, China is slicing through that geopolitical encirclement. China is also using its trade to drive a wedge between America and its four major Asia-Pacific allies that are the foundation for the Pacific littoral that’s the axial end of U.S. geopolitical power.
So that’s the nature of the Chinese challenge. The American response has been mixed.
Outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, nearly 40 percent of the global total, according to a new summary of data from a scientific study on leading causes of death worldwide.
Figured another way, the researchers said, China’s toll from pollution was the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population.
The data on which the analysis is based was first presented in the ambitious 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study, which was published in December in The Lancet, a British medical journal. The authors decided to break out numbers for specific countries and present the findings at international conferences. The China statistics were offered at a forum in Beijing on Sunday.
“We have been rolling out the India- and China-specific numbers, as they speak more directly to national leaders than regional numbers,” said Robert O’Keefe, the vice president of the Health Effects Institute, a research organization that is helping to present the study. The organization is partly financed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the global motor vehicle industry.
What the researchers called “ambient particulate matter pollution” was the fourth-leading risk factor for deaths in China in 2010, behind dietary risks, high blood pressure and smoking. Air pollution ranked seventh on the worldwide list of risk factors, contributing to 3.2 million deaths in 2010.
By comparison with China, India, which also has densely populated cities grappling with similar levels of pollution, had 620,000 premature deaths in 2010 because of outdoor air pollution, the study found. That was deemed to be the sixth most common killer in South Asia.
The study was led by an institute at the University of Washington and several partner universities and institutions, including the World Health Organization.
