“China has an overall goal … to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch.” Joe Biden, March 26, 2021
There it is, plain and raw, the abiding essence of the American elite’s foreign policy laid bare: maintaining their dominance over the world, for their own power and profit. (They certainly aren’t doing it for the sake of the nation, which they’ve turned into a rotting husk.)
In their mind, any perceived threat to this morally vacant domination is “evil;” any perceived ally in maintaining it is good. It doesn’t matter what other nations actually do; their role in supporting US elites is the determining factor in how they’re treated by the US government – and how they’re portrayed in the US media, including popular culture.
They can be violent tyrannies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, or an authoritarian regime backed by a fascist militia like India, or a brutally oppressive apartheid state like Israel, and still bask in US favor. They can be democracies with popular, elected leaders, yet still face the devouring wrath of American elites – like Honduras in 2009, when good old Joe and Nobelist Obama turned it over to corrupt coupsters after the elected president proposed some mild reforms to ameliorate a few of the accumulated injustices imposed by decades of US-backed thugs.
And of course, the portrayal of any given nation can change in an instant according to our elite’s agenda at any given time. Such as long-time US ally Saddam Hussein, whose vicious rule was generously supported by America for years (including not one but two CIA-assisted coups, the first to put the Baathists in power, the second to help Saddam’s faction oust internal rivals) – until our old friend tangled with the erstwhile oil business partners of the Bush family, the Kuwaiti royals. (The sordid, murderous corruption behind the first Gulf War rivals the Hitlerian machinations of the 2003 invasion. Ghastly, sickening, blood-caked creatures, these Bushes.)
In short, the political nature and behavior, good or bad, of foreign countries have nothing to do with how they are treated in US foreign policy. The bipartisan goal of that policy, stretching back for many generations now, is preserving and expanding the domination of the world by US elites.
Biden, in his usual artless way, has revealed this ugly truth. (Just as he did when, as VP, he blurted out the awkward fact that the US was supporting al Qaeda in Syria.) The current antagonism against the Chinese regime stems from the US elite’s anxiety that they might lose their economic domination of the earth. (Again, they don’t care about the economic well-being of the rest of their fellow citizens, who live in precarity and insecurity in a crumbling land.)
American elites were happy to ignore the depredations of the Chinese regime in the years when China’s post-Mao rise helped US elites prosper mightily; now that China’s economic might has taken stronger hold on its own, they are suddenly aflutter about the regime’s evils. As with Saddam, it’s the same regime; its ‘moral’ designation changes according to how it serves or threatens (or even potentially threatens) the US elite’s domination of the world.
The servitors of the elite, in media, politics and academia, take on this mindset as well. It’s so pervasive, so diffused throughout our culture that no one questions it – or even considers it something that can be questioned. Thus no one sees how utterly bizarre Biden’s declaration is.
When he says “not on my watch,” he’s not talking about preventing China from launching wars of aggression like the one he championed in Iraq, or that he and Obama assisted in Yemen. He’s not talking about China ringing the United States with military bases and nuclear weapons. He’s not talking about China spending more than the next 10 countries combined on a gargantuan, globe-spanning military empire. He’s not talking about stopping China from carrying out an endless campaign of drone strikes and “extrajudicial assassinations” all over the world.
It would indeed be good to try to prevent any nation from doing these heinous acts. (Including the nation that does do these things – the one headed by Joe Biden.) But this is not what Biden is talking about. He is saying very specifically that what ain’t gonna happen on his watch is China becoming “the wealthiest country in the world.”
Which of course begs the question: so what? What if it does? What if, by its sheer size and scale and population, it does become the “wealthiest nation in the world?” (By some arbitrary measurement or another.) Again, we’re talking about economic activity; we’re talking about human beings buying, selling and trading goods. What would be so intolerable, so unbearable, if the human beings buying, selling and trading goods on one patch of ground on the earth made a bit more money than other human beings buying, selling and trading goods on a different patch of ground?
But this scenario leaves out the most essential element in the US elite’s equation: domination. It is not enough for them to be rich and powerful (which they would still be, even if China became the “wealthiest nation on earth”). They must dominate. Their domination of the world is the bedrock of the natural order; anything that violates their sense of being dominant, anything that disturbs their deeply rooted need to be seen as dominant, is an insupportable profanation, an offense against God and nature. It is not enough for our elites to live well; others must live less well. (At home and abroad.)
And certainly, no one else, anywhere in the world, can ever be allowed to be seen as living better, by even the most miniscule margin, than the American elite. Yes, their mindset, their ruling ethos is that primitive, that juvenile. Their sense of their own specialness, their own superiority, is that fragile.
And why is it so fragile? Because it’s based on a delusion: it’s based on nothing, it has no actual substance whatsoever. They are not inherently superior, they are not inherently special; they are just ordinary human beings, stumbling through their brief passage here on the way to our common fate of death. But their psyches cannot bear the realization of this self-evident, undeniable fact. For generations, they and their servitors have been steeped in this sense of superiority, in the sense of the rightness of their domination of the nation and the world, no matter how much death and ruin and suffering this causes.
Fragile psyches in possession of immense power are extremely dangerous and destructive. (As we just witnessed in raw form during Trump’s term.) They project their unbearable anxieties outward, aggressively, seeing threats everywhere. And indeed, for our elites, there are threats everywhere: because every element of actual reality is a threat to their deluded, illusory sense of superiority. And so they lash out, violently, again and again, to preserve their position of domination and their pitiful self-delusions.
And now Biden has laid it out for all to see. The US elite will not accept China becoming the wealthiest nation in the world. So what will the US elite do about it? For many years, my greatest fear has been that the weak, fragile, sick psyches of America’s elite will lead them to provoke a nuclear war with China, preferring the destruction of civilization rather than lose their sense of domination and superiority. I think this is a genuine risk, precisely because the US elite is so primitive, so juvenile, so damaged – and it has the actual means of destroying the world in its lashing-out to preserve its delusions.
I’m not saying this will happen; obviously I hope not. But I will say that American leaders have always shown a willingness to do “whatever it takes” to ensure that any diminution of the US elite’s dominance “ain’t gonna happen on my watch.” If this means subverting the elections of other countries or overthrowing governments, they do it. If it means sending in death squads, supporting genocidal dictators and terrorist groups, drone-bombing weddings and farmers and children, they do it. If it means launching vast wars of aggression that kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, killing half a million children with murderous sanctions and, yes, dropping nuclear weapons on civilians – they do it. The bipartisan US elite has always shown its determination to preserve its domination at any cost.
In the weeks since Biden’s speech, we’ve seen a decided ratcheting up of “Cold War II” tensions with China. The maltreatment of the Uighurs – once ignored when the US elites were content to regard them as evil Muslims while applauding China’s “counterterrorism measures” – has now become, literally, a cause célèbre. China’s brutal crackdowns in Hong Kong – which at times have been almost as bad as, say, the head-bashing police riots in Ferguson or Portland or New York City (but still woefully short of the high standards of repression seen in Selma or Watts or Kent State back in the day, not to mention Gaza today) – are headlined at every turn.
And of course, most recently we have seen US elites – in politics and media – slowly drawing out the biggest sword of all: the “blood libel” of a Chinese “lab-created” origin for the Covid pandemic. Never mind the fact that labs all over the world, with the US in the vanguard, are constantly bioengineering horrific new disease variants for the ostensible purpose of combatting these same diseases if they happen to arise in nature. Never mind that US scientists were working closely with Chinese colleagues in Wuhan. Never mind that there is not any more (or less) evidence of a “lab escape” origin than there was a few months ago, when the mere suggestion of such a thing warranted immediate relegation to the lunatic fringe by the news media and actual censorship from social media – both of whom are now pushing the story for all it’s worth.
No; just as we’ve seen in so many other circumstances, the facts (or lack of them) have not changed – but the agenda of our elites has changed. And so we have the ludicrous spectacle of Biden ordering the CIA to determine the origin of SARS-COV-2 in 90 days. The CIA’s “determination” in this case will doubtless be exactly like their “slam-dunk” findings on Iraq’s WMD: whatever the president wants to hear, whatever serves the elite’s agenda at that given moment.
Just imagine the reaction from MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and, indeed, most sensible people if Donald Trump had ordered the exact same CIA investigation into the “China Virus” last year. It would’ve been seen as just another crazy, racist stunt to divert attention from his own failings, and a dangerous provocation that would destabilize world affairs and stir up attacks on Asian Americans at home. Yet now it’s considered by the great and good to be a perfectly reasonable course of action, even as it is … destabilizing world affairs and stirring up attacks on Asian Americans at home.
If it is war with China that our elites truly want, then there can be no greater “justification” than the “new Pearl Harbor” of a Covid “sneak attack” on innocent, God-fearing Americans. It would be 9/11 on steroids, an outrage that would unify an America sadly riven by partisan strife in common cause against the enemy.
I still think – hope – pray – that old Joe is too tired and too addled by his decades of ambition and corruption to actually pull the trigger on the apocalypse it would require to ensure that American elites are never “overtaken” by China. But he is setting in train developments he might not be able to control, even if he wants to. He is summoning up some very dangerous spirits from the vasty deep. And yes, Hotspur, it is indeed possible that this time, they will come.
(Chris Floyd is a columnist for CounterPunch Magazine. Courtesy: CounterPunch Magazine.)
