War on all fronts for Australia?

“War On All Fronts: Washington's three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, Russia in Europe”, was the title of the 18 July 2012 article by Dr. Paul Craig Robert, which appeared on Global Research and other websites.

Dr Roberts, has held positions as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan and as associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, was awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for “his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy” and was chosen as one of the ten most respected columnists in the alternative media in2011. He has become perhaps the most insightful, informed and persistent critics of both the Bush and Obama Presidencies.

Dr Roberts finished his article with the following passage:

It looks as if an over-confident US government is determined to have a three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, and Russia in Europe. This would appear to be an ambitious agenda for a government whose military was unable to occupy Iraq after nine years or to defeat the lightly-armed Taliban after eleven years, and whose economy and those of its NATO puppets are in trouble and decline with corresponding rising internal unrest and loss of confidence in political leadership.

In a subsequent article on 20 July 2012 Dr Roberts addressed the financial situation contributing to the above “over-confident” military postures in the following words:

To sum up, what has happened is that irresponsible and thoughtless–in fact, ideological–deregulation of the financial sector has caused a financial crisis that can only be managed by fraud. Civil damages might be paid, but to halt the fraud itself would mean the collapse of the financial system. Those in charge of the system would prefer the collapse to come from outside, such as from a collapse in the value of the dollar that could be blamed on foreigners, because an outside cause gives them something to blame other than themselves.

On 18 July 2012 Peter Schiff, who is CEO of Europacific Capital, offered another perspective on the evolving financial crisis:

My biggest worry is that capitalism and the free markets will get the blame when it really hits the fan.  When we get the real crash and everything implodes, and it’s really an Armageddon style collapse, my fear (again) is that capitalism and free markets take the blame for problems that were created by government.

Neither of these men is in a position to make a final judgement on the future of the United States. Yet each expresses views that are being expressed in growing volume on a daily basis. This sense of an imminent crisis of American political and economic authority can only cause distress and denial amongst political leaders in a country like Australia. There is no Australian historical experience of a world where British or American power did not define Australia’s understanding of the global community. Not surprisingly, Australians are psychologically and fundamentally dependent on “certainties” that derive from such an Anglo-American global order.

Concern about this evolving crisis, the origins of which can be traced back at least half a century, provided the background to my exploration last week of “Why is the West Unprepared for China’s Rise?” Not surprisingly, this piece prompted remarks that reveal the extent of innocence in Australia about China’s “peaceful rise” and the approaching Asian Century. It seems that educated Australian readers do not know that rote learning of the Chinese classics includes the Yijing and Daodejing, two texts that inform a culture of fluid, dynamic and strategic thinking that is absent in the Platonic tradition. This culture is in no way captured by popular Western stereotypes like “totalitarian brainwashing”.

The Platonic tradition, which is of increasingly questionable value, has subjected almost everything in the modern West to some mutation of the transcendental authority of Plato’s “Forms”. Neo-platonic thinking informed the Medieval Roman Church’s religious doctrine and dogma, and the European Enlightenment moved such transcendental authority from the spiritual to the secular, giving birth to contemporary “universal values”. Perhaps the most insidious and pervasive contemporary mutation of Platonic thought is “rational economics” with its abstract rationality or railway line thinking, which has facilitated the movement of most Western manufacturing and technological capacity to Asia.

As someone who is old enough to recall maps covered in red for members of the British Empire and phrases like “the Sun never sets on the Empire”, I do not find it hard to envision in my lifetime the conclusive rise of China to commanding economic and related authority. Moreover, pieces with headlines like “Corruption and mismanagement see much of the US without power: The entire US electricity system could collapse by 2020 without an immediate investment of $673 billion”, in Online Opinion of 20 July 2012, suggest the United States is on the brink of exhausting itself with no little or no help from other powers.

As someone who foreshadowed China’s explosive growth in 1976 when serving in the Australian Embassy in Beijing while Mao was still alive and who co-authored “The Confucian Renaissance” in 1989 when such an idea was heresy and “The Tyranny of Fortune: Australia’s Asian Destiny” in 1997 at the time of the Asian Financial Crisis, all documented at a site accessible with a Google search for “confucian daoist millennium”, I am familiar with the effectiveness of Anglo-American “intellectual apartheid”. This was identified in John Hobson’s “The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation” but has been caricatured most effectively in George Orwell’s “1984”, a novel that when written in 1949 addressed the past as much as the future.

“Intellectual apartheid”, which marginalises and derides all but the West’s “universal values”, was a tool of genius in constructing the British Empire and in consolidating an Anglo-American global order. Sadly, it is today a legacy of the past that only works to condemn the mainstream English speaking people to a very limited and distorted understanding of emerging powers.  In a worst case, it could condemn them to the type of “coolie” future that Singapore’s then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew suggested several decades ago for Australia.

If, in the midst of turbulent and rapid global change, its leaders are to construct a future for Australia in some form close to present expectations and avoid entanglement in American strategies that do little more than precipitate the dissipation of what lingers of Western authority, there is an urgent need to address the deadening legacies of ‘intellectual apartheid”. There is a pressing need to put the influence of London and Washington, exercised through subservient global media and academia, in a proper geo-political, geo-commercial and historical perspective. Most Australians desperately need a crash education in the subtleties of major contrasting and contesting intellectual, cultural and historical traditions.

The alternative is to approach the future with little or no understanding of the major forces bringing about a shift in global power possibly greater than that which led to the British Empire. This time, however, the world’s most experienced political civilisation will be inheriting, or demolishing, a global structure that has defined all of Australia’s history as a nation of Western heritage.  

An article by Brian Toohey in The Financial Review of 14 July 2012 headed “Judgement goes AWOL on Defence Purchases” suggests the innocence of Australian Ministers of Defence when dealing with the American military-industrial culture. More than half a century ago, retiring President Eisenhower warned against the dangers of this culture taking command of American government. Today, arguably, it rivals Wall Street in terms of rampant corruption. Together the Pentagon and Wall Street cultures present a long term alliance partner like Australia, uncertain about China’s rise, an Asian Century and an increasingly troubled Anglo-American global order, with daunting challenges.

Australians can complain or be indignant about none of the above. These are just a reflection of the world in which we have lived and the influences that have shaped us. If we desire a future as satisfactory as our past, however, we must recognise, even if belatedly, the challenges ahead. We have little choice but to prepare for a very different world with many qualities that we will initially find unfamiliar and unwanted. Otherwise, transparently corrupt financial and military cultures that have debilitated our traditional friends and allies in distant parts of the world are likely to drag us into ill-conceived and self-destructive actions of which we have little understanding.

In recent years, China has demonstrated its mastery of superior space, deep sea and overland or fast rail transport technologies. It is naïve not to have expected it to have made comparable progress in other critical areas where it has chosen to be more discreet. America’s NATO allies have not been strengthened by the Afghanistan experience and key American Asian allies like Japan show, for those with eyes to see, many signs of disillusionment with the rewards of the alliance.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this time of rapid global change will in future be labelled as that marking the end of Anglo-American empire, or global order. Australia cannot and should not abandon many of the forms of its long term friendships and alliances. It must, however, be increasingly wary of the perils of any sort of war on all fronts where enemies are defined by little more than their failure to adhere to the imperatives of Platonic “universal values”. Sadly, these values are becoming hard to separate from a dysfunctional and increasingly destructive financial and political culture.The way ahead will require many difficult choices from our leaders.