[A-List] US imperialism: bilateral trade deals

["John Gulick" <john_gulick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Keaney wrote:

Behind the very visible scenes of military build-up, sabre-rattling,
Republican electoral victory and the like, Robert Zoellick is working very
quietly but assiduously in clinching bilateral trade deals with various
states as part of a US strategy to force the development of WTO talks down
pathways more amenable to US interests than might otherwise have been the
case. This is a development that deserves our closer attention, since it is
designed to outflank the EU whilst challenging ultimately China, which is
quietly pursuing its own regional hegemon policy. In other words, Mark is
right on the money in his statement that

"...whatever the contingent, fortuitous or surface-form of mutual needs,
tactical alliances etc between China and the USA are right now, objectively
and in value-terms *these two states are the principal rivals on the world
stage* and the competition between them is the main dynamic now configuring
the driving the whole global conjuncture. And within that dynamic, the US
and China are enemies: and China and the EU are fundamental allied."

I now write:

I wanted to address Mark's riposte earlier, couldn't find the time, and this
reopens an occasion to do so, however miserably. I grant that one has to
look behind shimmering surfaces and whatnot, but doesn't a hegemon in
inexorable decline usually cut a deal with that very rival
bloc which offers it the last best chance for sustaining it through its
twilight years ? China is more receptive to and offers a better rate of
return on U.S. FDI than does the EU. China may soon yet be a better place
for Wall Street to stash speculative capital than the EU, what with
step-by-step financial market liberalization in the PRC. China is squabbling
with the U.S. over trade disputes no less than the EU. China can be more
easily prized open for direct and porfolio investment
and import penetration by the U.S. because of its dependence on its
trade surplus with the U.S. and its dependence on the U.S. navy for its
burgeoning hydrocarbon needs. Mebbe smart people in the U.S. security
establishment also recognize, as do Mark and I, that for ecological reasons
and "social stability" reasons that will play out in the long-run, China is
a pretender to the throne. In the meantime, China breathes new life into the
most advanced sectors of U.S. manufacturing and parasitic capital, even as
it cuts the footing from under the last
textile shops in the American Piedmont and the last furniture makers in
South Central L.A.'s "Lost Quarter."

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to the U.S.-China play are
contradictions among the class fractions that make up the Bush regime
--after all, low-productivity, profit-squeezed, domestically-oriented
productive capital (the likes of which are organized into the National
Alliance of Manufacuturers, the Roger Millikens of the world) has always
been a stronger force in the Republican than the Democratic Party. Reagan
and Bush the 43rd are bigger protectionists than was Clinton, etc.. Bush and
team can and will marginalize this element, in the interest of taking a
"good cop" stance toward China (the "good cop" stance being backed by
serious "bad cop" potential, of course). The U.S. deepening what the liberal
internationalists blithely call "economic interdependence" with the PRC is
also necessitated by the fact that not much more juice can be squeezed out
of the Latin American lemon, Argentina and Brazil having been finally and
fatally bled dry by the Washington Consensus (no more state-owned firms to
snap up, actual and possible debt defaults, Lula's "neo-ISI'ism," etc.).

Of course, I'm not at all soundly convinced of this, just testing
propositions.

John Gulick

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