Three Oceans Two Fronts
Three Oceans Two Fronts
Across three oceans; Atlantic & Indo-Pacific; &, two fronts; First Island Chain centred on Taiwan, & Baltic to Black Sea Cordon centred on Ukraine, the United States seeks hegemonic resurrection
UPDATE: Today, the Long Mekong Daily publishes a single article on the evolution of US Grand Strategy and the rapidly expanding oppositional political and economic forces coalescing in the Global South.
Across three oceans; the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific; and, two fronts; the First Island Chain centred on Taiwan, and the Baltic to Black Sea Cordon centred on Ukraine, the United States is attempting to regain global military predominance and political pre-eminence after the disastrous ‘War on Terror’. US grand strategy, - to thwart any power with the potential to become a regional hegemon and threaten US global primacy - is focused on the Eurasian super-continent in eastern Europe to counter Russia and the western Pacific to counter China.
The 1972 One China Principal was an acknowledgement of Washington’s need for detente with China before it could disengage from Southeast Asia (Vietnam) in order to concentrate its efforts on thwarting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The 2016 Indo-Pacific strategy is acknowledgement that the United States cannot attempt to thwart China without the collaboration of Japan and India. The Quadrilateral Dialogue (Quad; Australia, India, Japan, United States) and AUKUS alliance (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) are testament to the fact that, unlike Australia and the UK, Japan and India and are not mere US auxiliaries in the implementation of the US Indo-Pacific strategy.
Despite US inducements and invectives, India openly promotes multipolarity and de-dollarisation and has maintained its energy and arms trade with Russia during the Ukraine crisis. Moreover, India has gained considerable international influence within the Quad, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) arrangements. While India has limited participation in the US-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), it has not joined regional multilateral trade arrangements, such as the ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) or the Japan-led Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).
Japan has much to gain from promoting trade and investment with India and sees mutual security benefits for its Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs) across the Indian Ocean. However, Japan faces deep structural challenges including, a depreciating currency and rising import costs for food, energy and industrial inputs, decreased exports, expanding current account deficits and massive public debt. For example, Japan’s vehicle export industry lags years behind China’s BYD and the US’ Tesla in electric vehicle manufacture and export. Furthermore, as Japan’s Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle exports drop, Toyota has become the world’s most indebted corporation. While Abenomics failed to revive Japan’s economy, Shinzo Abe’s quest to remove Article 9 (prohibiting war as a means for Japan to settle international disputes) from its US imposed post-WWII constitution and embark on full rearmament has progressed with tacit US support. Japan’s refusal to sign a peace treaty with the USSR and current support for the US-led sanctions regime, point to its long-held hope to take from Russia, the four offshore islands of Hokkaido and the entirety of Sakhalin island in its north, all of which have important security advantages and significant economic resources.
The US retreat from Afghanistan and collapse of its Central Asia campaign moved NATO’s line of operations to Russia’s western periphery along a line of NATO states from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Türkiye. Despite the reticence of Hungary and Türkiye, the proxy war in Ukraine, portrayed by NATO as “self-defence” and by Russia as a continuation of NATO enlargement and the consequence of the US backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, is sustained by Ukrainian blood and the supply of material, money, arms, intelligence, mercenaries and training by the US, NATO and other allies. The flow of material support is aided via the most stringent sanctions campaign ever implemented and the US theft of Russian foreign reserves.
However, the Ukraine war can also be viewed as a NATO rear-guard action to counter the growing vitality, cohesion and influence of the eight countries that constitute the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO); China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Of particular concern to the US and NATO is Europe’s durable import of energy from Russia and increasing supply of manufactured goods and advanced telecommunications equipment from China. Also causing concern for Washington was the expanding infrastructural connectivity of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that links SCO states and EU states and sustains increasing volumes of east-west trade and investment.
Moreover, the growing desire for European “strategic autonomy” during the War on Terror, under the leadership of Angela Merkel and later, Emmanuel Macron, was seen in Washington as a serious threat to NATO cohesion and US ability to counter Russia and China’s growing influence. Thus, the United States expanded the reach and sophistication of its political campaigns in the EU to reimpose US centrality, strengthen the NATO military alliance and promote US energy sales. Brexit, which was overtly supported by Washington, accelerated the UK’s economic decline, but ensured the retention of its United Nations Security Council (UNSC) seat. However, for the EU, it was inconsistent that the wider interests of its 27 member states were subsumed to the national interests of Britain and France within the UNSC. Moreover, Brexit had strengthened US influence in the EU and NATO by diminishing the EU and increasing UK dependency on the United States. In fact, US support for EU expansion, and the Euro currency, has always been given only with EU support for NATO enlargement.
US propaganda about German dependency on Russian energy and the importance of NATO was actively propagated before the resignation of Angela Merkel, which saw the CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands), replaced by a weak “traffic light” coalition of the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei), and Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen); the first three-party coalition in Germany’s post-WWII federal government. The new coalition immediately acquiesced to US demands and reversed course on both Nordstream II and NATO involvement in Ukraine.
However, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has resisted, for a time, US demands for ever more German weapons and money for the Ukraine, but has increased defence spending, especially on the F-35 fighter, which undermines the EU’s defence/aero-space sector and creates long-term dependency on US defence industry and the Pentagon. Germany’s economy remains durable despite rising energy costs and greater global competition. However, like Japan, Germany’s auto-manufacturing sector, the country’s largest industry, lags years behind BYD and Tesla. In fact the entire European auto-sector is likely to experience a wave of bankruptcies and restructuring and Volkswagen (VW) has become the world’s second most indebted corporation behind Toyota. Many of Germany’s largest auto-manufacturers have struck commercial arrangements with China to supply cars, car parts and car systems. Chancellor Scholz visited China before the Bali G20 in 2022 to strengthen Sino-German commercial ties and has more recently, with support from the French, complained bitterly about US re-industrialisation subsidies and the inflated price of US energy that undermine EU restructuring efforts and post-pandemic recovery.
In France, president Emmanuel Macron’s strong support for EU strategic autonomy and opposition to US policy on NATO and Russia was targeted by a US campaign to undermine his re-election in the 2022 French presidential election. The US engineered the cancellation of two multi-billion euro defence contracts; Australia cancelled its AUD90 billion submarine contract and agreed to acquire US-UK nuclear submarines, sometime in the mid 2030’s and selected the US-built Blackhawk helicopters to replace the Airbus MRH90 Taipans currently used by Australian defence forces. The US also attempted to induce Greece to cancel a €3 billion purchase of French frigates to buy US made combat frigates, which the Greeks eventually declined. However, Macron went to the polls with the loss of tens of billions of revenue and thousands of jobs and an active Yellow Vest protest movement that originated over petrol tax increases. While Macron won the presidential election in the second round, his party lost support at the legislative elections resulting in France’s first hung-assembly (no party had an absolute majority) since 1988; thus, constraining his political program for the entirety of his second term and strengthening US influence.
In ASEAN, the US also seeks centrality by the inducement, coercion and/or cajoling, of six member states (Singapore, Brunei, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia) to sway the bloc toward isolating Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos; thus, creating a divisive wedge in ASEAN affairs, and to delay or refuse the signing of the China-sponsored South China Sea Code of Conduct and to develop closer diplomatic and commercial ties with Taiwan. Indonesia, the 2023 ASEAN Chair, is firmly opposed to the AUKUS alliance and nuclear proliferation. In fact, the US plan to provide nuclear capability to Australia has unleashed pro-nuclear forces in Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea.
While China and ASEAN are each other’s largest trade partners, the US claims to be the largest source of investment (re-investment) for the region while simultaneously condemning China’s economic influence. To counter China and gain influence across the region, the US has established a growing network of political socialisation programs that target ASEAN youth, spreads negative narratives about China, Russia and Myanmar via mass media and social media campaigns, gives open support to opposition parties and candidates and selectively uses human rights to justify restrictions and sanctions to coerce uniformity. Thus, political elites across the region worry that the US narrative of democratic promotion/expansion wrapped in human rights and a rules based order threatens the regions political stability and is merely an attempt to gain US centrality in ASEAN and to counter China at the expense of the regions dynamic economic development.
The simplistic US narrative of a Hobbesian struggle between democratic and authoritarian states obscures the US grand strategy of divide and rule that it has employed, with some success, to embroil itself and Europe in a proxy war over Ukraine. The US-NATO proxy war is designed to weaken and/or subjugate Russia, so the United States can concentrate its still formidable resources towards the diminishment of China with a view to its eventual subjugation.
However, the tide of history does not support the thesis that US power will eventually overcome all opposition in its quest for hegemonic resurrection. The political, economic and social structural decline of the United States must increasingly contend with the shrinking wealth and power of its allies and the rapidly expanding political and economic forces coalescing in the Global South. The US will remain a key pole in the global order, but shorn of its exorbitant privilege controlling the global reserve currency. In the final analysis, the United States’ Three Oceans and Two Fronts grand strategy is the final grasp of a paper tiger as its century of global predominance, manifested in the “rules based order”, transitions to a multipolar world dedicated to a more equitable distribution of global resources and a proportional voice for all states in the organisation of world order.
The Editor