RE: [A-List] Has China Become an Ally?

["Mark Jones" <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Gulick's post raises some interesting issues but I have 3 caveats. (1)
I don't think the US will attack Iraq (yeah, I know, contrarian), (2) the
PRC and the US are locked together like 2 sumo wrestlers in an economic
death-grip; it is the relationship between these 2 economies which is
largely fuelling the huge and dangerous deflationary process in the world
system, and this economic competition seems to me more dangerous than
current rivalry with the EU or earlier rivalries with either Japan or the
USSR. (3) The EU in its present fragmented state is only a danger to the US
insofar as and to the degree that the US is failing in its economic
competition with China (primarily, but also with Asia as a whole, because
Asia is the source of deflationary pressures; deflation being stealth-war
against US hegemony). The Bush agenda, as laid out in its new national
defence doctrine and analysed by Anatol Lieven in the LRB recently, as
Michael just pointed out to me, is a (probably doomed) attempt to retrieve
US hegemony from terminal decline. Now, leaving aside all other issues, the
basic point seems this: if the US is being trashed by China/Asia, is it
being argued that the EU is gonna do any better? against China/Asia? That
doesn't seem credible. Therefore the main contradiction in the world today
is still that between the declining hegemon, the US--and China/Asia. Rivalry
with the EU is not exactly a sideshow but is surely secondary.

Mark