by Oliver Stone
In December 2011, Chávez convened a two-day summit of Latin American and Caribbean heads of state in Caracas. The colorful and controversial Venezuelan leader let it be known that his goal was to establish a hemispheric counterweight to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States (OAS). Unlike the OAS, the new organization—the thirty-three-member Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)—included Cuba and excluded the United States and Canada. Chávez proclaimed the summit “the most important political event in our America in 100 years or more.” Cuban President Raul Castro was even more grandiose, anointing the new organization as potentially “the biggest event in our 200 years of semi-independence.” The new organization was intended to further lessen U.S. influence in the region. “We are sentencing the Monroe Doctrine to death,” announced Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, referring to President James Monroe’s 1823 assertion that the Western Hemisphere was the United States’ sphere of influence. “It’s great to be here in the land of Bolívar,” Paraguay’s President Fernando Lugo told an interviewer, in reference to Simon Bolívar, the lionized Caracas-born nineteenth-century liberator of South America. “Bolívar’s dream is becoming concrete little by little,” he added.178 Even U.S. allies like Presidents Felipe Calderón of Mexico, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, and Sebastián Piñera of Chile showed up for the inaugural event.
The United States was further isolated when Obama attended the Summit of the Americas in April 2012. Meeting in the Colombian coastal city of Cartagena, leaders of the Western Hemisphere, emboldened by the Caracas gathering, openly defied the United States in a way that was unprecedented and invigorating. Debate centered on two issues that were fundamental to hemispheric relations—the exclusion of Cuba and the U.S.-backed war on drugs. Whereas the United States had previously set the agenda and dictated the terms of the discussion, that was no longer the case. President Calderón described the change—the frankness with which the issues were discussed—as “radical and unthinkable.” An article on the summit in the Jamaica Observer was headlined, “Summit shows how much Yanqui influence had waned.”
Latin American leaders made clear that they had had it with U.S. efforts to ban Cuban participation, a stance defended only by the United States and Canada. Members of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA)—a group of Latin American states that had formed in 2004—said that they would not participate in another summit meeting without Cuba. Santos dismissed U.S. policy toward Cuba as “anachronistic” and “ineffective” and demanded Cuban inclusion, as did Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, who also indicated she would no longer attend without Cuba. Though defending U.S. policy, Obama noted that the discussion reminded him of “gunboat diplomacy and Yankees and the cold war.”
Some of the leaders also challenged the United States on its drug policy, which Obama again defended despite his own admitted youthful indulgence. Guatemala’s President Otto Perez Molina declared the forty-year-old war on drugs a failure and called for decriminalization. Santos noted that Colombia’s own successful efforts to reduce coca cultivation had only resulted in a production spike in Peru and Bolivia and that drug violence, while lowered in Colombia, had now spilled over to Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.179
And in an act of unprecedented defiance, in August 2012, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa outraged U.S., British, and Swedish authorities by offering political asylum to Julian Assange. Assange had holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was under investigation for sexual assault. He feared that once in Sweden, he would be extradited to the United States. The British were so disturbed by Ecuador’s actions that they threatened to storm the Ecuadorian embassy and arrest Assange, which would constitute a flagrant violation of international law.
In June 2012, Paraguay’s right-wing forces fought back with a parliamentary coup in that impoverished nation, impeaching left-leaning President Fernando Lugo, whose moderate program of land reform threatened Paraguay’s wealthy landed interests and multinational agricultural corporations. The International Herald Tribune went out of its way to comment on the fact that the United States, which once called the shots in Latin America, had become irrelevant to political processes in the region.180 However, by its refusal to join hemispheric neighbors in condemning the action, the United States was effectively sending a signal of support. Not so other Latin American nations. Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay voted to suspend Paraguay from the South American free trade association Mercosur and invite Venezuela to join as a full member. Paraguay had been blocking Venezuela’s membership in the trade organization, which operates by consensus.
Despite repeated setbacks in the Middle East and Latin America, U.S. military strength remained unchallenged. As Chalmers Johnson revealed years ago, the United States maintains its global hegemony not through an empire of colonies, but through an empire of bases strung across the planet. Journalist Nick Turse found it impossible to ascertain the exact number, but found evidence to indicate that the total was over 1,000. And the cost of maintaining this vast network was tens of billions of dollars. In 2010, the United States still had 124 bases in Japan, 38 of which were in Okinawa alone. South Korea still had 87.181 In 2012, anthropologist David Vine confirmed that the total number of bases, despite the closure of 505 bases in Iraq, was still more than 1,000 and the annual cost of maintaining that global network of bases and 255,000 overseas troops was around $250 billion. Forces were being shifted, in large part, from mammoth Cold War–style bases to widely dispersed smaller bases known as “lily pads” that could serve as jumping-off points for highly mobile U.S. troops. Such bases were proliferating in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.182 And the U.S. military was rapidly expanding its presence in Africa. China, America’s new global rival, had no overseas bases.
The nation faced a quandary. The post–Cold War world refused to play by its rules. Neither its unprecedented military strength nor its overwhelming economic power translated into an ability to bend history in the ways U.S. leaders desired. The world seemed to be spinning increasingly out of U.S. control. Nothing symbolized this more than the rise of China, with its 1.3 billion people, booming economy (almost 40 percent of which remained state-owned), and authoritarian Communist Party–controlled political system. China’s economic growth, while extraordinary under any circumstances, stood out even more starkly when measured alongside U.S. economic stagnation and decline. In 2011, China’s per capita GDP, though still only 9 percent that of the United States, was double what it had been four years earlier. And Chinese leaders were projecting another doubling in the next four years. China had already replaced Japan as the world’s second largest economy, having jumped remarkably from number seven in 2003. Indicative of future prospects, the Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young reported that China devoted 9 percent of its GDP to infrastructure—more than triple the portion invested by the United States.183
China’s new economic clout in October 2011 came into sharp relief when Europe asked China for help in saving the euro, inviting it to invest tens of billions of dollars in Europe’s emergency stability fund. China was, in effect, being asked to assume the role long played by the United States as the world’s financial leader. China had already bought up key economic assets in Europe, which had become China’s largest trading partner. Although China balked at investing so heavily at a time when Europe’s economic situation remained so precarious, the significance was unmistakable, especially coming just weeks after Timothy Geithner’s advice to a gathering of European finance ministers had been so rudely dismissed. The New York Times aptly titled its front-page article “Advice on Debt? Europe Suggests U.S. Can Keep It.”
Believing that recent developments had proven the superiority of its economic and political systems to those in the declining West, China had been asserting itself in other ways as well. Most troubling to U.S. leaders and Asian neighbors alike, China was rapidly modernizing its military. Defense spending had tripled to $160 billion in the cours
e of one decade. It was building a blue-water navy. It added warships, submarines, fighter jets, and offensive missiles and armed its first aircraft carrier.
The military modernization would not have been so alarming to China’s neighbors if China had not also aggressively pressed claims to disputed oil-, gas-, and mineral-rich islands and territories in the East and South China Seas. China’s claims to the South China Seas alone conflicted with claims by Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Brunei. In the East China Sea, tension remained high between China and Japan. Relations were punctuated with a series of confrontations that aroused passions on all sides. The rhetoric heated up. In October 2011, China’s widely read and stridently nationalistic Global Times wrote threateningly, “If these countries don’t want to change their ways with China, they will need to prepare for the sound of cannons. We need to be ready for that, as it may be the only way for the disputes in the sea to be resolved.”184
China’s military buildup, aggressive pursuit of energy and raw materials, and bullying of its weaker neighbors gave the United States the opening it was looking for. Instead of helping resolve the disputes amicably, U.S. leaders decided to exploit regional tensions and exaggerate the Chinese threat. In hyping China’s military buildup, U.S. officials neglected to mention that China had in the past two decades substantially decreased the size of its army, the number of planes in its air force, and its fleet of submarines, and that the proportion of its GDP devoted to defense spending was in line with that of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
The United States appeared ready to use this manufactured crisis not only to reassert U.S. hegemony in Asia and justify a bloated, if shrinking, defense budget, but to halt the overall decline in U.S. power and prestige. With all the trappings of a new cold war, the United States set out to “contain” China economically, militarily, and politically, and pressed other Asian nations to assist in the effort.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had thrown down the gauntlet with an article in the November 2011 issue of Foreign Policy magazine bluntly titled “America’s Pacific Century.” The article began, “As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point.” The dramatic change she heralded would be “a substantially increased investment—diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region,”185 which included the Indian Ocean as well as the Pacific.
Obama reinforced that message during his eight-day trip to the Pacific later that month. He informed the Australian Parliament, “In the Asia-Pacific century, the U.S. is all in. . . . I’ve therefore made a deliberate and strategic decision—as a Pacific nation the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future.” “The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay,” he said, even predicting the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party. Impending cuts in U.S. defense spending, he assured the Aussies, “will not—I repeat, will not—come at the expense of the Asia-Pacific.” Proving his point, Obama announced that the United States would deploy 2,500 marines to Australia in what amounted to the first long-term U.S. troop increase in Asia since Vietnam, reversing decades of steady decline.186 The increase would come on top of the 85,000 troops the United States already had in the Pacific, where seven of its eleven aircraft carriers and eighteen nuclear submarines were based.
From Australia, Obama went to Bali, Indonesia, for the annual meeting of the ten-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and became the first U.S. president to attend the larger East Asia Summit meeting. During the summit, Obama joined with other participants in confronting Premier Wen Jiabao over China’s South China Sea claims. Obama pledged to strengthen ties with each of the participants and announced that the United States was selling twenty-four F-16 fighters to the Indonesian air force. He also surprised attendees by unveiling plans to dispatch Secretary of State Clinton to Myanmar to repair U.S. relations with that Chinese ally.
Clinton was in the Philippines when Obama visited Australia. From the deck of a U.S. warship in Manila Bay, she signaled U.S. support for the Philippines’ position in the South China Sea dispute. The United States had previously conducted joint naval exercises with the Philippines in June and then did so with Vietnam in July. In September, the United States and Vietnam signed a memorandum of understanding on defense cooperation. The once bitter enemies even discussed possible U.S. naval access to the port at Cam Ranh Bay. Vietnam announced a 35 percent increase in defense spending in 2012. The United States had also divulged plans to station some of its littoral combat ships in Singapore.
In December, the Philippines relaunched its biggest and most modern warship, a U.S. coast guard cutter. A Thai newspaper described the scene: “As a navy brass band played, Roman Catholic priests sprinkled holy water on the deck of the newly repainted warship, equipped with antiaircraft guns and a newly refurbished surveillance helicopter on the flight deck. Three navy planes flew past and officials broke a bottle of sugarcane wine on the bow as the ship went into commission.” Officials also unveiled the Philippines’ first troop- and tank-carrying ship and announced plans to purchase another coast guard cutter and fighter jets from the United States.187 In July 2012, with tensions flaring anew over the disputed islands, President Benigno Aquino III announced plans to purchase helicopters and other aircraft that could be used in military confrontation. Malaysia, too, showed off its enhanced military strength by displaying its newly acquired submarines. Malaysia has extensive oil and gas resources in the South China Sea.
Admiral Robert Willard, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, indicated that efforts were also under way to fortify strategic ties with India to counter China’s growing strength.188 India loomed large in the effort to contain China. Despite the imposition of sanctions on India following its May 1998 nuclear tests, in March 2000 Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to visit New Delhi in twenty-two years. The New York Times described the visit as a “lovefest.” George W. Bush went much further to bolster U.S.-India ties. After 9/11, he lifted all sanctions and later established a military alliance. In 2006, he signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with India despite the fact that India was a nonsignatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Though limited to civilian uses of nuclear power, this was a clear violation of the NPT and one that freed India to enhance its nuclear weapons program. The United States first had to gain approval of the forty-five nations that comprised the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a consortium that the United States had established following India’s illegal 1974 test. “The administration bullied and wheedled international approval of the president’s ill-conceived nuclear deal with India,” charged a Times editorial. Ron Somers, president of the United States-India Business Council, called it a “tectonic shift” in relations between the two countries.189 It was also a major setback to nonproliferation efforts.
Obama accelerated the strategic partnership, hosting the Indian prime minister at his first White House state banquet, pushing ahead with implementation of the nuclear agreement despite strong opposition from some of his own advisors, and solidifying the military alliance established by Bush. Hillary Clinton declared it the joint responsibility of the United States and India to “determine the course of the world.”190 Obama’s three-day visit to India in November 2010 strengthened the partnership.
In November 2011, India’s defense ministry approved a massive $12 billion military modernization program, which would include the Indian army’s largest expansion on its border with China since the 1962 war. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that India would spend a total of $80 billion by 2015. India had already been the world’s leading arms importer between 2006 and 2011. To counter China’s growing naval power, India planned to spend $45 billion on 103 new warships over the next twenty years.191
India’s elevated levels of defense spending seemed even more objectionable in light of its persistent widespread pov
erty and the enormous gap between rich and poor. A survey of 73,000 households in nine of India’s poorer states released in early 2012 found that 42 percent of children under the age of five were malnourished. “The problem of malnutrition is a matter of national shame,” acknowledged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who continued to spend lavishly on unneeded weaponry.192
The United States had no patience for those who vacillated, as Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama learned when he tried to renegotiate the agreement to relocate the large U.S. marine air base within Okinawa from Futenma to Henoko. Obama insisted that Japan abide by its commitment, despite fierce opposition by the Okinawans themselves. When Hatoyama caved to U.S. pressure, his government collapsed.
Hatoyama’s successor, Naoto Kan, learned his lesson. In late December 2010, Japan announced a shift in military doctrine to deemphasize the threat from Russia to the north and shift resources to combating China and North Korea. Japan’s Special Defense Forces would also cooperate much more closely with the United States, Australia, and South Korea. The new National Defense Program Guidelines called for increasing Japan’s submarine fleet from sixteen to twenty-two, adding several new fighter jets, and cutting the number of tanks to create a more mobile force that could quickly dispatch troops to deal with crises in the China Seas or Korea. In December 2011, Japan announced purchase of some forty Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter jets at a cost estimated at between $6 and $8 billion dollars, despite the desperate need for funds to rebuild after the previous March’s devastating earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident.