While the world watches in horror and disgust at the non-stop genocidal war in Palestine by a combination of client coloniser military operations and Great Power military resources, the larger global geopolitics is subtly, but surely, shifting. The reality of this seismic shift is in plain sight – in un-winnable Ukraine – but the West, busy on the Palestinian front, has yet to realise the implications for its “Middle East” (West Asia) power project.
How much is the Western power bloc, at whose bidding Israel bloodily enforces its presence in West Asia, blind to this shift in the global balance of power? It is a shifting balance that speedily dilutes the vestiges of unpopular hegemony still remaining after the Cold War and, more immediately, undermines any success for the West’s coloniser project in Palestine.
It is baffling that the Western bloc’s leadership is deaf to the loud cries of revulsion and complete strategic rejection reverberating around the world, from archaic but super-rich monarchies, to weak developing democracies, to emergent new great powers and, to their own, smaller, First World allies. The US campus protests, crudely broken up by Police, indicate that the public at large is wary of their country’s support for Israel.
Of course, there are those ‘liberal’ idealists around the world – including this country – who insist that Washington (and London, Brussels, Berlin & Co.) is, indeed, sensitive to geopolitical and military realities, but cannot explicitly change policy in the midst of electoral politics. There are many in the US itself who ask friends and colleagues in the Global South to simply wait till Joe Biden returns to the White House.
They argue that Biden must chant his pro-Zionist mantra to keep the Jewish and conservative vote banks away from rival Donald Trump in what is likely to be a tight electoral contest in November’s US Presidential election. There is a presumption that, once that heated domestic power contest is past, Biden – presuming that he wins – will actively put the brakes on the currently Western-financed and armed Israeli offensives. There is also an expectation that Washington will move away from war with Moscow.
But November is yet half a year away. And the White House’ election-oriented mantra of sustaining military support for the war in Gaza and its neighbourhood means the sustaining of the ongoing killings of civilians. Over 30,000 Gazans were killed in the last six months. This logic of election-oriented foreign policy could mean another 30,000 dead. And, what about further provocations and military clashes in the neighbouring countries?
Lines of conflict
The larger implications are the further worsening of the West Asian conflict overall even before November and a resulting greater hardening of current lines of conflict. In such an evolving situation, there is more the likelihood of continuing war rather than a move towards a ceasefire and peace diplomacy.
And what if Donald Trump and the Republican Party win the Presidency? In what way will there be a change, if any, in US foreign policy? If we look back at the continuity of US foreign policy and the sustained tendency of military enforcement of Western dominance in various parts of the world despite political party changes in Washington, we can see that both political parties are operating within the same American geopolitical doctrine. It is a doctrine of enforcing the West’s and especially the United States’, supremacy, politically, economy and militarily.
In fact, this doctrine has been broadly consistent for over half a century, since the end of World War II, throughout the Cold War and persisting after that. Some analysts would argue that the Washington doctrine of global supremacy began with the shock of the unannounced Japanese attack on the US’ naval bases in Hawaii in 1941.
Yet other western analysts have argued that Washington has harboured an imperial geopolitical doctrine since it began entrenching its dominance in South America as far back as the 1890s to fill the power vacuum after the withdrawal of Spanish colonial rule (Recently Imperial? Assessing Supposed Discontinuities in U. S. Foreign Policy – David Sylvan & Stephen Majeski, 2004).
President Barack Obama continued the practice of outright military interventionism, wreaking chaos in Somalia, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. While Donald Trump did not launch any new military ventures, he took an aggressively hostile line against Iran, completely antagonising that emerging West Asia power (a one-time US military ally), while encouraging Israel’s dangerously provocative ethnic cleansing and illegal territorial expansion.
Military occupation
The entirety of the Biden Presidency has seen simply a continuation of an US aggressive militarism. There was a continued encouragement of Israeli settlement expansion and tough military occupation regime across Palestine, at least until the events of October 7.
We all know the tragic story since then.
Ukraine is a similar tragedy – the result of over a decade of US-instigated NATO ploys to draw Ukraine into the military alliance, an alliance that was created as military opposition to Soviet Russia and maintained after the Cold War. Just as much as Palestinian armed resistance was predictable any time in the volatile conditions of unresolved Israeli military occupation and equally unresolved refugee crisis, so was Russia’s reaction to neighbouring Ukraine’s slant toward NATO.
The number of Western analysts who have been warning of both possibilities for years, are many. That is not to mention the even larger number of non-Western analysts, many from Arab countries friendly with the West who today can only say “I told you so”.
If the arguments and warnings of friendly analysts and political allies have been ignored by the West, especially Washington, it is not surprising that Washington has also ignored similar assertions by other great powers in the world, or emerging regional powers.
South Africa, which emerged from a colonial settler history that included the most racist State system since Nazi Germany – although nowhere as murderous – has been warning against Israel’s racist misbehaviour long before the Gaza War broke out. Pretoria had been intensively involved in the UN system in support of the occupied, stateless Palestinians for years – since the South Africans overthrew their own racist State. It was among the first of UN Member States to acknowledge the ‘racism’ charge against Israel by UN investigators.
Many other, westward leaning allies of the US, including both popular as well as unpopular Arab and Muslim regimes, have, for years been asking for a change of policy in Washington in relation to West Asia.
All this fell on Washington’s deaf ears. The first ‘excuse’ for a policy continuation was the need to support Israel. Another excuse was ‘terrorism’. The unspoken reasons are known but never mentioned – the need to maintain dominance over that oil-rich region.
Most recently, however, the US and the West have had to sit up and take notice of bigger political forces who also say the same thing: that in a changing world, the old Western power bloc should no longer think of dominance and military enforcement.
Russia was the first with its “special military operation” against Ukraine. Simply external military aid, however powerful in hardware, cannot ensure Ukrainian victory over a former superpower many times its size in territory and population and incomparable also in military strength. Thus Ukraine is now the typical rut of a client State that, actually, not that much of a client. Not as much as Israel is a client of the West.
But the world’s second biggest power, China, has also been repeatedly urging Washington to cease looking at emerging powers as rivals in a kind of sporting contest to be ‘No.1’ (President Ronald Reagan’s election campaign slogan). That disease of supremacy is being sustained by Donald Trump’s slogan: ‘Make America Great Again’ or MAGA. Chinese leaders recently had the opportunity to push their arguments when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Shanghai and Beijing. Secretary Blinken soured the whole visit with his media accusations against China: on Beijing’s close dealings with Moscow and China’s competitive trading strategies.
Even in his talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Blinken reportedly went on a tirade against China’s dealings with Moscow. He also made matters worse by accusing Beijing of racism against the ethnic Uighurs. Chinese officials promptly publicly responded by reminding Blinken of racism issues in his own country, specifically referring to anti-Black violence and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
When President Xi Jinping met Blinken, he strove to convince the US top diplomat of the reality of a multi-polar world and the need for a return to collective interactions and diplomatic action rather than the unilateral wielding of military power.
On his statements on his return from the East, Blinken gave no hint whatsoever that Washington would even begin to acknowledge the world’s new realities: an emerging global order of many centres of power but with opportunities for all to thrive without rivalry.
Given the heated election campaign discourse in America, aggravated by the ongoing spectacle of several Court cases featuring former President Trump, it is difficult to expect much change right now.
