In the Shadows of the American Century by Alfred W. MCCoy

Author:Alfred W. MCCoy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Part III

Dynamics of US Decline

Chapter Seven

Grandmasters of the Great Game

Washington’s moves, whether in Asia, the Greater Middle East, Europe, or for that matter space, and its attempts to control what Sir Halford Mackinder once called the “world island” represent something old and familiar in the history of empires, even if on a previously unimaginable scale. By contrast, the rise of China as the world’s largest economy, inconceivable a century ago, represents something new and threatens to overturn a geopolitical balance that has shaped the world for the past five hundred years. Indeed in 2012, the National Intelligence Council, Washington’s supreme analytic body, summarized this infinitely complex historical process in a single succinct chart. From 1820 to 1870, Britain increased its share of global gross domestic product by 1 percent per decade; the United States raised its share by 2 percent during its half-century ascent, 1900 to 1950; at a parallel pace, Japan’s grew about 1.5 percent during its postwar resurgence, from 1950 to 1980. China, however, raised its slice of the world pie by an extraordinary 5 percent from 2000 to 2010 and is on course to do so again in the decade ending in 2020, with India not far behind. Even if China’s growth slows by the 2020s, US economic leadership is expected to be decisively “overtaken by China.”1

The impact of this economic juggernaut has been profound. As China’s exports surged, its foreign exchange reserves soared from $100 billion in 1996 to $4 trillion in 2014, many times more than any other nation.2 Once China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it soon became the largest US trading partner, with $500 billion in exports in 2015 alone. China’s low-cost products devastated labor-intensive industries across America, destroying ten thousand apparel jobs in the South, shutting down paper mills in the country’s midsection, and putting pressure on steel production nationwide.3

Instead of focusing purely on building a blue-water navy like the British or a global aerospace armada akin to America’s, China is using its cash reserves to reach deep within the world island to the heart of Eurasia in an attempt to thoroughly reshape the geopolitical fundamentals of global power, using a subtle strategy that has so far eluded Washington’s power elites. Following Hannah Arendt’s dictum that there are two types of imperial expansion, overland like Russia’s or overseas like Britain’s, China is clearly of the landed variety, as it has attempted to expand its dominion into adjacent territories—first Tibet and now Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the South China Sea.4

After decades of quiet preparation, Beijing has recently revealed its grand strategy for global power, move by careful move. Its two-step plan is designed to build a transcontinental infrastructure for the economic integration of the three continents that comprise the world island, while mobilizing military forces to surgically slice through Washington’s encircling containment.

The initial step has involved a breathtaking project to put in place a costly infrastructure for Eurasia’s economic integration. By laying down an elaborate and enormously expensive mesh of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.