The Withdrawal

Well, Russia and China were bitter enemies right through the 1960s. They were, in fact, at war with each other, with their long border heavily fortified. Over the past few decades, Russia and China have developed more cooperative relations. China is trying to integrate Central Asia, Africa, and, to the extent possible, Latin America into a China-based system. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has been the official framework for this development, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the commercial axis. The SCO now includes all of the Central Asian states, along with Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, possibly soon Afghanistan, aiming for Turkey and then Eastern and maybe Central Europe. The United States applied for observer status, not membership, and was rebuffed. The SCO is building a Eurasian network in the way Gorbachev had imagined it. If the Chinese can integrate the European powers into this network through the BRI and Nord Stream 2, if Russia and China can continue to cooperate, then in the long term you will get this kind of continental integration.

The Chinese have established a thousand vocational schools in Southeast Asia and Africa to train students in the new Chinese technologies. These are efficient technologies that will integrate these countries and their development into the China-based BRI system. The Chinese are sharing this technology in very poor parts of the world at prices that are reasonable for those economies. They have developed leading technologies in robotics, green energy, and telecommunications. It’s a very personal issue, incidentally. Where I live, which is partly rural, there is very poor internet service. If we were allowed to bring Huawei technology, we’d have 5G internet. We badly need solar panels, and the most technologically advanced and cheapest ones are made in China.

Chinese leaders understand very well that their country’s maritime trade routes are ringed with hostile powers, from Japan through the Malacca Straits and beyond, backed by overwhelming U.S. military force. Accordingly, China is proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful moves toward integration. China is constructing a modernized version of the old silk roads, with the intent not only of integrating the region under Chinese influence, but also of reaching Europe and the Middle Eastern oil-producing regions.

Coal was abundant in Europe, which had no oil. If they became oil based, the United States would have “veto power” (George Kennan’s phrase, referring specifically to Japan) over Europe because the United States would control their energy supplies. Ten percent of the Marshall Plan money—about $1.2 billion—was shifted among U.S. banks as they converted Europe into an oil-based economy. This oil was not going to come from the United States, but from the Middle East; by 1950, 85 percent of Europe’s oil needs were supplied from the Middle East, which the United States controlled and profited from. The same process was imposed on Japan. As Western Europe and Japan were converted to oil-based economies, the United States had veto power over them.

These wars, which hit Mali and Nigeria, then produced its own flow of migrants toward Libya and Europe, joining migrants who had already been on the road fleeing from the utter disaster that European colonialism has left in Africa. There’s a good story by Ian Urbina in the New Yorker about the hideous concentration camps set up on the Libyan coastline, supported by the European Union, managed by criminal Libyan gangs, where they congregate refugees trying to flee to Europe.2 They are held in there to make sure that they never get to the Mediterranean Sea. The Europeans and the United States have military bases in the Sahel to interdict migrants even before they get to Libya. If the migrants reach the Mediterranean, there are legal problems for Europe, at least formally, since the prohibition against refoulment [returning refugees to places where they will be persecuted] will prevent the refusal of the migrants. Refoulment is a serious crime under international law, so the refugees who make it to European waters have to be accepted. They want to prevent that and at the same time keep the image of Europe as a decent, law-abiding place. To do so, the Europeans fund the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, which is basically a gangster operation; this operation is given boats, equipment, and money by the Europeans. So, the Europeans send the refugees either to vicious concentration camps or back to their homelands from which they have fled because they find them unlivable (the result of hundreds of years of mostly European devastation of Africa, which is quite serious). That’s Libya today.

Walking amidst the ruins of the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, about two years after the mass demonstrations in 2011, it was clear to me that a combination of local oligarchs, military top brass, and the Western countries simply did not want to see the development of democratic regimes in countries such as Egypt. It was unacceptable. A true democracy in Egypt, for instance, would annul the peace deal with Israel, since that is the general mood in the country. An Egyptian democracy would not be willing to take orders from the United States or Saudi Arabia when it came to its relations on the African continent. Even the risk of these things happening was far too much to allow. The United States tried to get President Hosni Mubarak to negotiate with the crowds. Obama’s envoy Frank Wisner Jr. arrived in Cairo as Tahrir overflowed to tell Mubarak to make modest concessions to prevent the advancement of democracy. The crowd would not have it. Mubarak went. But the United States—behind the scenes—ensured that the military remained in control, pulling the strings, preventing the start of a new constitution-writing process that would have democratized society. The fig leaf fell off two years later, when General Abd al-Fatah el-Sisi became President Abd al-Fatah el-Sisi, leaving his military fatigues but keeping in place military power. The next year, Egypt’s interior minister, General Mohammed Ibrahim, made a casual statement which offered a sense of the smugness of Egypt’s ruling elite: “We are living a golden age of unity between the judges, the police, and the army.”

OAM: The U.S. position has been very clear. It was actually formalized by Trump in his one geopolitical achievement, the Abraham Accords. Technically, these accords did not draw in Saudi Arabia, but effectively they did. This is a formal agreement among the most reactionary states in the region: Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Morocco. The UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco normalized relations with Israel. Sudan was forced into it because the United States told them that if they did not, then they would return to the terrorist list. Arms deals were cut with the UAE and Morocco to seal the deal. Part of the deal was Trump’s authorization of Morocco’s illegal takeover of Western Sahara in violation of international law. Morocco has a virtual monopoly on phosphates, an irreplaceable mineral that is vital for agriculture; Western Sahara has phosphates, which now extends Morocco’s monopoly. This Abraham alliance combined resource control with military muscle and technical capacity (the latter mainly from Israel). Egypt was not formally part of it, but Egypt has an open relationship with Israel. This is an alliance of reactionary states, which is a core part of Steve Bannon’s international program, but it is inherent in the U.S. policy of trying to create alliances of the most reactionary states, which are the basis for U.S. power.

e Zone conference to be held in Helsinki in December 2012 was scuttled by Israeli pressure. The 189 member nations of the NPT—including Iran—said they would attend. Israel refused. There are three other states, apart from Israel, that are not in the NPT: India, Pakistan, and South Sudan. In September 2013, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani told the UN General Assembly that Israel should join the NPT “without further delay.” This was met in Tel Aviv with stone silence. As you say, Noam, the scofflaw of the region—Israel—refuses to accept international agreements or to help create a zone of peace in West Asia. But it is not alone. The United States currently houses nuclear weapons in its bases along the Gulf, from Bahrain to Qatar and outward to Djibouti. A Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone would mean an end to the U.S. practice of housing tactical nuclear weapons in the waters around the region. In May 2015, the United States and the United Kingdom killed off the final document of a conference of the NPT states because of the concept of the Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. Each Arab state and Iran agreed to the concept, despite the otherwise fractious divides in the region. Only Israel and the West raised objections to it. It tells one a great deal about who maintains and monitors the roadblocks to peace in West Asia.

Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Its status as a nuclear power state is guaranteed by the NPT. It is on that basis that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors Iran’s nuclear industry. But meanwhile, Israel is not a member of the NPT, has no IAEA monitors, and yet has a growing nuclear arsenal.

Middle East. There are such zones around the world. They can’t function, because the United States violates every one of them by putting nuclear weapons on foreign military bases or by harboring submarines that have these weapons. There’s an African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty based on the Pelindaba Treaty (2009), which the United States violates by turning, with British support, the colonial island of Diego Garcia into a military base with nuclear facilities. So, it can’t be established. There’s one in the Pacific, and this can’t go into effect because the United States insists on nuclear weapons facilities on specific islands. The most important would be the Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. Why not institute it with intensive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which we know would work? We already have experience under the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), the Iran nuclear deal, which worked until the United States pulled out of it unilaterally. There are intensive inspections, including by U.S. intelligence, worked into the plan. Let’s have a nuclear weapons free zone with intensive inspections. Is there a problem instituting it? Not really. The Arab states have been demanding it for twenty-five years. Iran strongly supports it. The G77, about 130 countries of the global south, very strongly support it. Europe raised no objections. So, what’s the problem? Well, the usual one. The United States won’t allow it. The United States vetoes any suggestion of it in international forums. Obama vetoed it in 2015 when it came up during the conference of the nonproliferation treaty. Since then, the United States has blocked it.

These attacks against the Kurds were horrendous, major crimes. The worst by far were committed in the 1980s, during the Anfal campaign, including the gassing of Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988 (which came alongside the chemical warfare against Iran). The invasion of Kuwait, though a serious crime, added little to the Iraqi government’s already horrendous record. Saddam, however, in the 1980s remained a favored ally and trading partner of the United States, Britain, and West Germany, which further abetted these crimes. The Reagan administration even sought to prevent congressional reaction to the gassing of the Kurds, including the failed plea of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Claiborne Pell that “we cannot be silent on genocide again.” So extreme was Reagan’s support for Saddam that when the ABC correspondent Charles Glass revealed the site of one of Saddam’s biological warfare programs a few months after Halabja, Washington denied the facts, and the story died.

United States seems to always find a reason to remain in Iraq. It bombs Iraq in 1991, it maintains a pretty ruthless sanctions regime during the 1990s, it bombs Iraq again in 2003, and then invades and occupies it off and on for the next several years. The reasons for this long war against Iraq are legion: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the need to create democracy, the threats from al-Qaeda and then ISIS, the need to protect the Kurds, and so on.