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global south
Partners in Genocide: Israel Is Slaughtering Palestinians with Western Arms
When the U.S. urges an end to the war in Gaza while continuing to flood Israel with more weapons, the logic seems utterly flawed and entirely hypocritical.
Aug 19, 2024
While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits.
For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales.
The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity.
The blood of Arabs, Africans, Asians, and South Americans should not be spilled to sustain the economies of Western countries.
The Geneva Academy, a legal research organization, says that it currently monitors about 110 active armed conflicts worldwide. Most of these conflicts are taking place in the Global South, though many of these cases are either exacerbated, funded or, managed by Western powers or Western multinational corporations.
Of the 110, more than 45 armed conflicts are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa region, more than 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia, and six in Latin America, according to the academy.
The worst and bloodiest of these armed conflicts is currently taking place in Gaza, one of the poorest and most isolated regions in the world.
To estimate the future death toll resulting from the war in Gaza, one of the world's most respected medical journals, The Lancet, undertook a thorough research entitled "Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential."
The approximation was based on the death toll figure produced as of June 19, when Israel had then reportedly killed 37,396 Palestinians.
The Lancet's new number was horrifying, even though the medical journal said that its conclusions were based on conservative estimates of indirect deaths vs direct deaths that often result from such wars.
Should the war end today, meaning June 19, 7.9% of the population of the Gaza Strip will die because of the war and its aftermath. That's "up to 186,000 or even more deaths," according to The Lancet.
Palestinians in Gaza are not dying because of an untraceable virus or a natural disaster, but in a merciless war that can only be sustained through massive shipments of arms, which continue to flow to Israel despite the international outcry.
On January 26, the International Court of Justice resolved that it had enough evidence to suggest that genocide was being committed in Gaza. On May 20, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, added his voice, this time speaking of deliberate acts of "extermination" of Palestinians.
Yet, weapons continued to flow, mostly coming from Western governments. The main source of weapons is, unsurprisingly, the United States, followed by Germany, Italy, and Britain.
Despite announcements by some European countries that they are curtailing or even freezing their weapons supplies to Israel, these governments continue to find legal caveats to delay the outright ban. Italy, for example, insists on respecting "previously signed orders," and the U.K. has suspended the processing of arms export licenses "pending a wider review."
Washington, however, remains the main supplier of arms to Tel Aviv. In 2016, both countries signed another Memorandum of Understanding that would allow Israel to receive $38 billion of U.S. military aid. That was the third MoU signed between the two countries, and it was intended to cover the period between 2019 to 2028.
The war, however, prompted U.S. policymakers to go even beyond their original commitment, by assigning yet another $26 billion ($17 billion in military aid), knowing full well that the majority of Gaza victims, per United Nations estimates, are civilians, mostly women and children.
Therefore, when the U.S. urges an end to the war in Gaza while continuing to flood Israel with more weapons, the logic seems utterly flawed and entirely hypocritical.
The same hypocrisy applies to other, mostly Western countries, which brazenly pose as defenders of human rights and international peace.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ( SIPRI), the world's top 10 exporters of major arms between 2019 and 2023 include six Western countries. The U.S. alone has a 42% share of global arms exports, followed by France at 11%.
The total arms export of the top six Western states amounts to nearly 70% of the global share.
If we consider that the vast majority of armed conflicts are all taking place in the Global South, the obvious conclusion is that the very West that purportedly champions global peace, democracy, and international law is the very entity that also fuels wars, armed conflicts, and genocide.
For the Global South to take charge of its future, it must fight against this obvious injustice. They cannot allow their continents to continue to serve as mere markets for Western arms. The blood of Arabs, Africans, Asians, and South Americans should not be spilled to sustain the economies of Western countries.
True, it will take much more than limiting the arms trade to end global conflicts, but the free flow of weapons to conflict zones will continue to feed the war machine, from Gaza to Sudan and from Congo to Burma and beyond.
One can continue to argue that Israel must respect international law, and that Burma must respect human rights. But what use are mere words when the West continues to provide the murder weapon, with no moral or legal accountability?
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Trump, Biden, and the Crisis of the Neoliberal International Order
A hegemonic stalemate or a hegemonic vacuum opens up the path to a world where power could be more decentralized.
Jul 18, 2024
Whether we call it “polycrisis,” like Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze, or “the age of catastrophe,” like the distinguished Marxist Alex Callinicos, there is no doubt that we are living in a period where the very foundations of the contemporary world order are cracking. There is that enigmatic line Gramsci used to describe his era that is also appropriate for ours: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
This short essay will focus on a key dimension of the polycrisis: the unravelling of the global hegemony of the United States.
The downspin of the U.S. empire has had a number of causes, but key among them are military overextension, neoliberal globalization, and the crisis of the liberal political and ideological order. Let us discuss each in turn.
Overextension and Osama
Overextension refers to the gap between the ambitions of a hegemon and its capacity to achieve those ambitions. It is almost synonymous with the concept of overreach as used by the historian Paul Kennedy, the slight difference being that overextension as I use it is principally a military phenomenon. The struggling empire the United States is today is a far cry from the unipolar power it was a quarter of a century ago, in 2000. If we ask ourselves what led to this situation, it inevitably comes down to one individual: Osama bin Laden.
The aim of bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 was precisely to provoke the overextension of the empire by forcing it to fight on several fronts in the Muslim world that would be inspired to revolt by his dramatic action. But instead of igniting revolt, Osama’s act ignited revulsion and disapproval among most Muslims. September 11 would have been a big failure had not George W. Bush seen it as an opportunity to use American power to reshape the world to reflect the Washington’s unipolar status. He took Osama’s bait and launched the United States into two unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The results have been devastating for America’s power and prestige.
During the June 7, 2024, debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Trump referred to the defeat in Afghanistan as the worst humiliation ever inflicted on the United States. Now Trump, as we all know, is prone to exaggeration, but there was strong element of truth in his statement.
September 11 would have been a big failure had not George W. Bush seen it as an opportunity to use American power to reshape the world to reflect the Washington’s unipolar status.
According to CIA analyst Nelly Lahoud, “Though the 9/11 attacks turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for al Qaeda, bin Laden still changed the world and continued to influence global politics of nearly a decade after.” If the United States is the confused and groping global power it is today—one that has been, moreover, reduced to a dog being wagged by the Zionist tail—that is to a not-insignificant degree due to bin Laden.
To acknowledge the significance of 9/11 is not, of course, to endorse it. Indeed, for most of us, the attack on civilians was morally repelling. But one must give the devil his due, as they say, that is, point out the objective, world-historic impact of the deed of an individual, be this person a saint or a villain.
Trading Places
Let us turn to the second major cause of the unravelling of the hegemonic U.S. status: neoliberal globalization. Thirty years ago, U.S. corporate capital, along with the Clinton administration, envisioned globalization, achieved through trade, investment, and financial liberalization, as the spearhead of its greater domination of the global economy. Wall Street and Washington were wrong. It was China that was the biggest beneficiary of globalization and the United States one of its main victims.
Investment liberalization meant billions of dollars worth of U.S. corporate capital flowed to China to take advantage of labor that could be paid at fraction of the wages paid labor in the United States in exchange for technology transfer, voluntary or forced, that helped China comprehensively develop its economy. Trade liberalization made China the manufacturer of the world supplying mainly the U.S. market with cheap products. Both investment and trade liberalization contributed to the deindustrialization of the U.S. and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, which declined from 17.3 million jobs in 2000 to around 13 million today. Compounding the deleterious effects of deindustrialization have been the financialization of the U.S. economy, that is, making the super-profitable financial sector the leading edge of the economy, and regressive taxation, which led to an extremely inequitable distribution of income and wealth.
China’s crises are crises of growth, compared to the U.S. crises, which are crises of decline.
China has traded places with the United States in the global economy. China is now the center of global capital accumulation or, in the popular image, the “locomotive of the world economy.” According to IMF calculations, China accounted for 28% of all growth worldwide from 2013 to 2018, which is more than twice the share of the United States. What must be underlined is that while the United States followed neoliberal policies of giving full play to market forces, China selectively liberalized, with the powerful Chinese state guiding the process, protecting strategic sectors from foreign control, and aggressively demanding advanced technology from Western corporations in exchange for cheap labor.
Although in dollar terms, the United States is still the biggest economy, by some other measures, like the World Bank’s Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), China is now the world’s largest. In the United States, 11.5% of people now live in poverty, whereas, according to the World Bank, only 2% of China’s population is poor.
Of course, China has faced challenges in its rise to the world’s economic summit, but development, as the economist Albert Hirschman point out, is a necessarily unbalanced process. China’s crises are crises of growth, compared to the U.S. crises, which are crises of decline.
From De Facto to Armed Civil War?
Military overextension and the effects of neoliberal economics have contributed not simply to political disaffection but to political turmoil in the United States, with one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, becoming the spearhead of far-right or fascist politics fueled by racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, fear, and decline in economic status among white people. Politics has become severely polarized, and some warn that there is now a state of de facto civil war. In short, the political and ideological regime of liberal democracy is now in grave danger, with many liberals and progressives warning that Trump’s Plan 2025 will amount to the establishment of a fascist dictatorship. They are not wrong.
Here is what Steve Bannon, the ideological chief of the U.S. far right, says,
The historical left is in full meltdown. They always focus on noise, never on signal. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump… We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.
A second Trump presidency is now a certainty, with the strong possibility that the de facto civil war could turn into an armed civil war. Indeed, the assassination attempt on Trump on July 13 may well be a major step towards the unrestrained violence depicted in Alex Garland’s Civil War.
Crisis of the Liberal International Order
Washington has been the guardian of the international order, and with the economic and political crisis of the United States, that order has also entered into a deep crisis. What are the key aspects of what has been characterized as the liberal international order? First, of all, global leadership of the United States and the West underpinned by U.S. military power. Second, a multilateral order that serves as a political canopy for Western capital, whose mainstays are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Third, an ideology that promotes Western-style democracy as the only legitimate political regime.
This liberal order is now in trouble on two fronts: on the international front, it has lost legitimacy among the Global South, which sees the multilateral system as designed mainly to keep it down; internally, the liberal democracy that is its guiding ideology is under assault from the far right. If the far right comes to power in the United States and in key states in Europe—and it may come to power soon in France and soon after that, in Germany—the international order they would favor would probably continue to assert Western economic supremacy but adopt a much more unilateralist, protectionist approach of securing it instead of using the IMF-World Bank-WTO complex. Certainly, the far right will abandon the hypocritical appeal to liberal democracy as a model for the rest of the world.
Headed for War?
China says it is not out to displace the United States as global hegemon. To the U.S. elite, however, China is a revisionist power determined to dislodge it as the global hegemon. Especially in the Biden years, the United States has become more and more determined to use that dimension of hegemony where it enjoys absolute superiority over China, military power, to protect its status as number one.
This is why the danger of war between the United States and China is not to be underestimated, and this is the reason the Western Pacific is such a powder keg, far more than Ukraine. In Ukraine, the United States and China confront each other through proxies, Russia and NATO, while in the Pacific they confront each other directly.
The United States has scores of bases surrounding China from Japan to the Philippines, including the massive floating base that is the Seventh Fleet. The South China Sea is now filled with rival warships performing naval “exercises.” Among the latest visitors are vessels from France and Germany, U.S. allies that have been dragooned far from NATO’s traditional area of coverage to contain China. U.S. and Chinese warships have been known to play games of chicken—heading at each other and then swerving at the last minute. A miscalculation of a few feet could result in a collision, with unpredictable consequences. Fears that the South China Sea will be the next site of armed conflict are not alarmist.
In the absence of any rules of conflict resolution, the only thing preventing conflict is the balance of power. But balance-of-power regimes are prone to breakdown, often with catastrophic results—as was the case in 1914, when the collapse of the European balance of power led to World War I. With Washington aggressively marshaling Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, five carrier task forces of the U.S. Navy, NATO, and the newly created AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) alliance into a confrontational stance against China, the chances of a rupture in the East Asian balance of power are becoming more and more likely—perhaps just a collision or away.
Hegemonic Transition or Hegemonic Stalemate?
So what does the future hold? Some say a hegemonic transition, whether peaceful or not is inevitable.
But let us pose another possibility. Perhaps, we should be looking not so much at a hegemonic transition but at the emergence of a hegemonic vacuum akin to but not exactly the same as that which followed the First World War, when the weakened Western European states had ceased to have the capacity of restore their pre-war global hegemony while the United States did not follow through on Woodrow Wilson’s push for Washington to assert hegemonic political and ideological leadership.
Within such a vacuum or stalemate, the U.S.-China relationship would continue to be critical, but with neither actor able to decisively manage trends, such as extreme weather events, growing protectionism, the decay of the multilateral system that the United States put in place during its apogee, the resurgence of progressive movements in Latin America, the rise of authoritarian states, the likely emergence of an alliance among them to displace a faltering liberal international order, and increasingly uncontrolled tensions between radical Islamist regimes in the Middle East and Israel.
Yes, the crisis of U.S. hegemony may lead to an even deeper crisis, but it may also lead to opportunity for us.
Both conservative and liberal policymakers paint this scenario to underline why the world needs a hegemon, with the former advocating a unilateral Goliath who does not hesitate to use threat and force to enforce order and the latter preferring a liberal Goliath who, to slightly revise Teddy Roosevelt’s famous saying, speaks sweetly but carries a big stick.
There are, however, those, and I am one of them, who view the current crisis of U.S. hegemony as offering not so much anarchy but opportunity. Although there are risks and great dangers involved, a hegemonic stalemate or a hegemonic vacuum opens up the path to a world where power could be more decentralized, where there could be greater freedom of political and economic maneuver for smaller, traditionally less privileged actors from the Global South playing the two superpowers against one another, where a truly multilateral order could be constructed through cooperation rather than be imposed through either unilateral or liberal hegemony.
Yes, the crisis of U.S. hegemony may lead to an even deeper crisis, but it may also lead to opportunity for us. To use Gramsci’s image that I began this essay with, we may be entering an age of monsters, but like Ulysses, we cannot avoid going through the dangerous passage between Scylla and Charybdis if we are to get to the promised safe harbor.
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The US, Isolated on Ukraine and Gaza, Turns to Allies That Speak Its Language
By reserving Washington’s warmest embraces for its anglophone allies, the administration has actually been creating fresh threats to U.S. security.
Jul 06, 2024
Wherever he travels globally, U.S. President Joe Biden has sought to project the United States as the rejuvenated leader of a broad coalition of democratic nations seeking to defend the “rules-based international order” against encroachments by hostile autocratic powers, especially China, Russia, and North Korea. “We established NATO, the greatest military alliance in the history of the world,” he told veterans of D-Day while at Normandy, France on June 6. “Today… NATO is more united than ever and even more prepared to keep the peace, deter aggression, defend freedom all around the world.”
In other venues, Biden has repeatedly highlighted Washington’s efforts to incorporate the “Global South”—the developing nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East—into just such a broad-based U.S.-led coalition. At the recent G7 summit of leading Western powers in southern Italy, for example, he backed measures supposedly designed to engage those countries “in a spirit of equitable and strategic partnership.”
But all of his soaring rhetoric on the subject scarcely conceals an inescapable reality: The United States is more isolated internationally than at any time since the Cold War ended in 1991. It has also increasingly come to rely on a tight-knit group of allies, all of whom are primarily English-speaking and are part of the Anglo-Saxon colonial diaspora. Rarely mentioned in the Western media, the Anglo-Saxonization of American foreign and military policy has become a distinctive—and provocative—feature of the Biden presidency.
America’s Growing Isolation
To get some appreciation for Washington’s isolation in international affairs, just consider the wider world’s reaction to the administration’s stance on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden sought to portray the conflict there as a heroic struggle between the forces of democracy and the brutal fist of autocracy. But while he was generally successful in rallying the NATO powers behind Kyiv—persuading them to provide arms and training to the beleaguered Ukrainian forces, while reducing their economic links with Russia—he largely failed to win over the Global South or enlist its support in boycotting Russian oil and natural gas.
Despite what should have been a foreboding lesson, Biden returned to the same universalist rhetoric in 2023 (and this year as well) to rally global support for Israel in its drive to extinguish Hamas after that group’s devastating October 7 rampage. But for most non-European leaders, his attempt to portray support for Israel as a noble response proved wholly untenable once that country launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians commenced. For many of them, Biden’s words seemed like sheer hypocrisy given Israel’s history of violating United Nations resolutions concerning the legal rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and its indiscriminate destruction of homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, and aid centers in Gaza. In response to Washington’s continued support for Israel, many leaders of the Global South have voted against the United States on Gaza-related measures at the U.N. or, in the case of South Africa, have brought suit against Israel at the World Court for perceived violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
It’s hardly a surprise that the Biden administration, facing growing hostility and isolation in the global arena, has chosen to bolster its ties further with other Anglophone countries rather than make the policy changes needed to improve relations with the rest of the world.
In the face of such adversity, the White House has worked tirelessly to bolster its existing alliances, while trying to establish new ones wherever possible. Pity poor Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has made seemingly endless trips to Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East trying to drum up support for Washington’s positions—with consistently meager results.
Here, then, is the reality of this anything but all-American moment: As a global power, the United States possesses a diminishing number of close, reliable allies—most of which are members of NATO, or countries that rely on the United States for nuclear protection (Japan and South Korea), or are primarily English-speaking (Australia and New Zealand). And when you come right down to it, the only countries the U.S. really trusts are the “Five Eyes.”
For Their Eyes Only
The “Five Eyes” (FVEY) is an elite club of five English-speaking countries—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—that have agreed to cooperate in intelligence matters and share top-secret information. They all became parties to what was at first the bilateral UKUSA Agreement, a 1946 treaty for secret cooperation between the two countries in what’s called “signals intelligence”—data collected by electronic means, including by tapping phone lines or listening in on satellite communications. (The agreement was later amended to include the other three nations.) Almost all of the Five Eyes’ activities are conducted in secret, and its existence was not even disclosed until 2010. You might say that it constitutes the most secretive, powerful club of nations on the planet.
The origins of the Five Eyes can be traced back to World War II, when American and British codebreakers, including famed computer theorist Alan Turing, secretly convened at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking establishment, to share intelligence gleaned from solving the German “Enigma” code and the Japanese “Purple” code. At first an informal arrangement, the secretive relationship was formalized in the British-U.S. Communication Intelligence Agreement of 1943 and, after the war ended, in the UKUSA Agreement of 1946. That arrangement allowed for the exchange of signals intelligence between the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)—an arrangement that persists to this day and undergirds what has come to be known as the “special relationship” between the two countries.
Then, in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, that intelligence-sharing agreement was expanded to include those other three English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. For secret information exchange, the classification “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” was then affixed to all the documents they shared, and from that came the “Five Eyes” label. France, Germany, Japan, and a few other countries have since sought entrance to that exclusive club, but without success.
It’s undoubtedly convenient to use the same language when sharing secrets with your closest allies, but that should hardly be the deciding factor in shaping this nation’s foreign policy.
Although largely a Cold War artifact, the Five Eyes intelligence network continued operating right into the era after the Soviet Union collapsed, spying on militant Islamic groups and government leaders in the Middle East, while eavesdropping on Chinese business, diplomatic, and military activities in Asia and elsewhere. According to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, such efforts were conducted under specialized top-secret programs like Echelon, a system for collecting business and government data from satellite communications, and PRISM, an NSA program to collect data transmitted via the internet.
As part of that Five Eyes endeavor, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia jointly maintain a controversial, highly secret intelligence-gathering facility at Pine Gap, Australia, near the small city of Alice Springs. Known as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG), it’s largely run by the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. Its main purpose, according to Edward Snowden and other whistle-blowers, is to eavesdrop on radio, telephone, and internet communications in Asia and the Middle East and share that information with the intelligence and military arms of the Five Eyes. Since the Israeli invasion of Gaza was launched, it is also said to be gathering intelligence on Palestinian forces in Gaza and sharing that information with the Israeli Defense Forces. This, in turn, prompted a rare set of protests at the remote base when, in late 2023, dozens of pro-Palestinian activists sought to block the facility’s entry road.
From all accounts, in other words, the Five Eyes collaboration remains as robust as ever. As if to signal that fact, FBI director Christopher Wray offered a rare acknowledgement of its ongoing existence in October 2023 when he invited his counterparts from the FVEY countries to join him at the first Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit in Palo Alto, California, a gathering of business and government officials committed to progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. Going public, moreover, was a way of normalizing the Five Eyes partnership and highlighting its enduring significance.
Anglo-Saxon Solidarity in Asia
The Biden administration’s preference for relying on Anglophone countries in promoting its strategic objectives has been especially striking in the Asia-Pacific region. The White House has been clear that its primary goal in Asia is to construct a network of U.S.-friendly states committed to the containment of China’s rise. This was spelled out, for example, in the administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States of 2022. Citing China’s muscle-flexing in Asia, it called for a common effort to resist that country’s “bullying of neighbors in the East and South China” and so protect the freedom of commerce. “A free and open Indo-Pacific can only be achieved if we build collective capacity for a new age,” the document stated. “We will pursue this through a latticework of strong and mutually reinforcing coalitions.”
That “latticework,” it indicated, would extend to all American allies and partners in the region, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea, as well as friendly European parties (especially Great Britain and France). Anyone willing to help contain China, the mantra seems to go, is welcome to join that U.S.-led coalition. But if you look closely, the renewed prominence of Anglo-Saxon solidarity becomes ever more evident.
Of all the military agreements signed by the Biden administration with America’s Pacific allies, none is considered more important in Washington than AUKUS, a strategic partnership agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Announced by the three member states on Sept. 15, 2021, it contains two “pillars,” or areas of cooperation—the first focused on submarine technology and the second on AI, autonomous weapons, as well as other advanced technologies. As in the FVEY arrangement, both pillars involve high-level exchanges of classified data, but also include a striking degree of military and technological cooperation. And note the obvious: There is no equivalent U.S. agreement with any non-English-speaking country in Asia.
Aside from the extraordinary degree of cooperation on sensitive military technologies—far greater than the U.S. has with any other countries—the three-way partnership also represents a significant threat to China.
Consider, for instance, the Pillar I submarine arrangement. As the deal now stands, Australia will gradually retire its fleet of six diesel-powered submarines and purchase three to five top-of-the-line U.S.-made Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs), while it works with the United Kingdom to develop a whole new class of subs, the SSN-AUKUS, to be powered by an American-designed nuclear propulsion system. But—get this—to join, the Australians first had to scrap a $90 billion submarine deal with a French defense firm, causing a severe breach in the Franco-Australian relationship and demonstrating, once again, that Anglo-Saxon solidarity supersedes all other relationships.
Now, with the French out of the picture, the U.S. and Australia are proceeding with plans to build those Los Angeles-class SSNs—a multibillion-dollar venture that will require Australian naval officers to study nuclear propulsion in the United States. When the subs are finally launched (possibly in the early 2030s), American submariners will sail with the Australians to help them gain experience with such systems. Meanwhile, American military contractors will be working with Australia and the U.K. designing and constructing a next-generation sub, the SSN-AUKUS, that’s supposed to be ready in the 2040s. The three AUKUS partners will also establish a joint submarine base near Perth in Western Australia.
Pillar II of AUKUS has received far less media attention but is no less important. It calls for American, British, Australian scientific and technical cooperation in advanced technologies, including AI, robotics, and hypersonics, aimed at enhancing the future military capabilities of all three, including through the development of robot submarines that could be used to spy on or attack Chinese ships and subs.
Aside from the extraordinary degree of cooperation on sensitive military technologies—far greater than the U.S. has with any other countries—the three-way partnership also represents a significant threat to China. The substitution of nuclear-powered subs for diesel-powered ones in Australia’s fleet and the establishment of a joint submarine base at Perth will enable the three AUKUS partners to conduct significantly longer undersea patrols in the Pacific and, were a war to break out, attack Chinese ships, ports, and submarines across the region. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the Chinese have repeatedly denounced the arrangement, which represents a potentially mortal threat to them.
Unintended Consequences
It’s hardly a surprise that the Biden administration, facing growing hostility and isolation in the global arena, has chosen to bolster its ties further with other Anglophone countries rather than make the policy changes needed to improve relations with the rest of the world. The administration knows exactly what it would have to do to begin to achieve that objective: Discontinue arms deliveries to Israel until the fighting stops in Gaza; help reduce the burdensome debt load of so many developing nations; and promote food, water security, and other life-enhancing measures in the Global South. Yet, despite promises to take just such steps, President Biden and his top foreign policy officials have focused on other priorities—the encirclement of China above all else—while the inclination to lean on Anglo-Saxon solidarity has only grown.
However, by reserving Washington’s warmest embraces for its anglophone allies, the administration has actually been creating fresh threats to U.S. security. Many countries in contested zones on the emerging geopolitical chessboard, especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, were once under British colonial rule and so anything resembling a potential Washington-London neocolonial restoration is bound to prove infuriating to them. Add to that the inevitable propaganda from China, Iran, and Russia about a developing Anglo-Saxon imperial nexus and you have an obvious recipe for widespread global discontent.
It’s undoubtedly convenient to use the same language when sharing secrets with your closest allies, but that should hardly be the deciding factor in shaping this nation’s foreign policy. If the United States is to prosper in an increasingly diverse, multicultural world, it will have learn to think and act in a far more multicultural fashion—and that should include eliminating any vestiges of an exclusive Anglo-Saxon global power alliance.
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