Waiting By The River.

Looking Sideways: To the Peoples Republic of China, and its friends around the world, the United States must remind them of the flailing and failing Chinese Empire of 1900.

WATCHING THE SCREEN in Oamaru’s Majestic picture theatre, I struggled to make sense of Fifty-Five Days At Peking. Yes, it was exciting, but it was also, for a seven year-old, extremely confusing. What war was this? Not the First World War, and certainly not the Second. More to the point, why were the nations I had grown up regarding as enemies – the Germans, the Japanese, and the Russians – all counted among the “goodies” in this movie? Turns out that I was not the only person confused by Fifty-Five Days At Peking. In spite of an all-star cast, including Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven, it was not a box-office success.

In 1963, a well-informed New Zealander in their seventies would not, however, have had anything like as much trouble understanding the plot. The blood-curdling “Boxer Rebellion” of 1899-1901; the consequent 55-day siege (20 June-14 August 1900) of the foreign legations in the Chinese capital; and the Eight Nation Alliance that lifted the siege and then proceeded to humiliate and punish the Chinese Empire; that was not an historical sequence any youngster following it in the newspapers was likely to forget. Certainly, it has never been forgotten by the Chinese, whose irreplaceable cultural treasures were destroyed by the armies of the “imperialists”.

Hardly surprising, when one considers how loudly those imperialists boasted of their victory. The intervention of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the United States, and Japan, had demonstrated to the whole world, or at least those few remaining parts of it not under the Eight’s complete control, what lay in store for any people who dared to raise their “harmonious fists” against them. The deliberate destruction of the Chinese emperors’ beautiful Summer Palace constituted a pretty big hint.

As always, the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, offered the most memorable quote:

Just as the Huns under their king Attila created for themselves a thousand years ago a name which men still respect, you should give the name of German such cause to be remembered in China that no Chinaman will dare look a German in the face.

That was the way the world was in 1900. The German Kaiser merely put into words (the “Huns” reference coming back to haunt him in 1914) what all the other leaders of the great imperial powers were thinking. The nations of Europe (and Japan) dominated the globe. Their cultures, and their technologies, were in every way superior.

Lest any reader assume that all such unabashed imperialist notions, following the horrors of World War II, had been set aside by the “international community”, here’s a memory-jogger from 1990-1991 – the Gulf War.

When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait in 1990, the American President, George H.W. Bush, sternly informed him, and the rest of the world, that “this will not stand”.

He was as good as his word. With China still dealing with the fall-out from Tiananmen Square, and the Soviet Union in the process of disintegration, the United States was able to pull together a “coalition” of 42 nation states to intervene on behalf of the Kuwaiti government and drive the Iraqis back across the border. Dominated, overwhelmingly, by the military resources of the United States, the Coalition made short work of Saddam’s army. It was a stunning demonstration of the USA’s uncontested global hegemony.

Savouring his victory, George H.W. Bush made no reference to the Huns, but he did proclaim the arrival of a “New World Order” – one in which any nation bold and/or foolish enough to flout Washington’s rules of international engagement should expect to pay a very heavy price.

How the events of the last thirty years have changed the world’s geopolitical architecture!

When Bush senior’s “New World Order” still meant something, the idea of a rebel regime in Yemen forcing the world’s shipping companies to abandon the Suez Canal would have been dismissed as absurd.

With the Cold War won, and American hegemony an accomplished fact for most of the 1990s, the idea that the Suez Canal could be closed – as it was for seven years in the wake of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 – would not have stood. The impact on global oil prices, and the disruption of the international supply-chains so vital to the world’s increasingly interconnected economy, would have been regarded as unacceptable. The United States, the nations of Western Europe, and many of the Arab oil-states, would have unleashed upon Yemen the same overwhelming force that pummelled Iraq.

After 11 September 2001, however, the global game changed dramatically. Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States (itself an outgrowth of the USA’s co-option of the Saudi Kingdom in 1991) took place in an international setting very different from that which prevailed at the time of the Gulf War.

For a start, Russia and China were back in the game, stronger and more focused than they had been ten years earlier. Much of that strength was born out of both nations’ burgeoning trade with the European Union. Other states, Brazil, India and Iran in particular, were impatient to claim a more equitable share of the global economy. The USA remained strong – but not as strong as it had been at the end of the Cold War. It was an open question, in 2001, as to how many countries would respond to an American summons.

While joining the United States in a Global War on Terror made perfect sense in a world containing terroristic forces on the scale of Al Qaeda, partnering-up with Uncle Sam for what were obviously little more than punitive expeditions intended to slake the American thirst for vengeance after 9/11 was much less appealing. While the American overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan was given a pass (the regime had, after all, provided a base for Al Qaeda) the invasion of Iraq stepped over a line that most of the rest of the world would, ultimately, refuse to cross.

It would take twenty years for the Americans to comprehend, finally, that they were no longer in a position to issue orders to the rest of the world. Nor could they rely on the sort of racial and religious solidarity that prompted the world’s leading imperial powers to join together for yet another demonstration of White Supremacy on Chinese soil.

After the USA’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, the Russians and the Chinese must have exchanged knowing glances, and prepared to up-the-ante. The Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, while demonstrating the astonishing courage and resilience of the Ukrainians, also revealed the vacillation and disunity of the Nato states and, in the aftermath (and facing the possible return) of Donald Trump, of the USA itself.

In Fifty-Five Days At Peking the Chinese were the baddies, and the white imperialists (alongside their plucky Japanese ally) represented the clear moral and technological superiority of Western Civilisation. If, in American, Australian and, increasingly, in New Zealand eyes, the Chinese are still the baddies, the perspective from Beijing, and a large part of the rest of the world, is rather different.

To the Peoples Republic of China, and its friends, the United States of 2024 must remind them of the flailing and failing Chinese Empire of 1900. In their own estimation, however, the Chinese people, once on their knees, have stood up.

And all those great empires that ravaged China in 1900, where are they now? Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria, Japan: all of them have become second-rate powers – at best. Even the United States, the great hegemon, is no longer equal to the task of preserving freedom of navigation along the Suez Canal.

In the words of China’s greatest sage, Confucius: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 7 October 2024.

The Failure Of The West.

Kabul, Afghanistan. 16/8/21:  There is always an enthusiastic audience for tales of imperial ruin. The Western Left will have watched the helicopters circling the American Embassy in Kabul with the same grim satisfaction as it watched the Hueys taking-off from the US Embassy roof in Saigon forty-six years ago. Such is the fate of all empires, the wise old intellectuals will opine. The only lesson of history is that men never learn the lessons of history.

THE WEST HAS FAILED. It is unlikely that we shall ever again see North American, European and/or Australasian ground troops deployed “overseas”. Naval and air forces, yes, but not “boots on the ground”. The Western powers no longer possess the ruthless conviction necessary to impose their will on weaker nations face-to-face. From 15 kilometres offshore, or 30,000 feet above the target, the West may still make its mark. (Although, with cruise missiles and drones, distances hardly matter anymore.) But the brutal confidence that once allowed illiterate British redcoats to make a gift of the world to their lords and masters. For better or for worse, those days are gone.

There is always an enthusiastic audience for tales of imperial ruin. The Western Left will have watched the helicopters circling the American Embassy in Kabul with the same grim satisfaction as it watched the Hueys taking-off from the US Embassy roof in Saigon forty-six years ago. Such is the fate of all empires, the wise old intellectuals will opine. The only lesson of history is that men never learn the lessons of history.

Before the Western Left breaks out the Champagne, however, it should pause for a few moments to consider what it has just witnessed in Afghanistan. For Afghan women, the withdrawal of United States and Nato ground forces represents an historic betrayal and abandonment. For 20 years, the emancipation of the women and girls of Afghanistan was held up to the world as the single greatest achievement of western intervention. Like Saddam Hussein’s “human shields”, they were paraded before the world. “Look!” cried the Americans and the Europeans, the Australians and the New Zealanders. “This is why we are here. This is why we cannot leave.”

Billions of dollars were spent to lift Afghan women from sexual abjection to full personhood and independence. “Girls can do anything!” The hip slogan of western societies which had long ago enfranchised and liberated the female half of their populations, became in Afghanistan a revolutionary rallying cry against the brutal “medieval theocracy” (hat-tip to Helen Clark) that first the Soviets, and then the West, expended so much blood and treasure attempting to supplant.

And it worked. Women and girls were uplifted. They thrived in the classrooms, filled the lecture theatres, took charge in shops, offices and factories. Like proud parents, the Western Occupiers looked on. Here, they told themselves, was the proof of the West’s moral superiority. Here was the vindication of neoliberal modernity.

Almost – but not quite. Because if the West had truly been committed to sexual equality; if it had truly wanted a democratic and modern Afghanistan to emerge from the theocratic brutality of the Taliban; then it would have driven through the one truly revolutionary reform that might have made that possible: it would have inducted women into the Afghan Army.

Why is the Taliban in Kabul? The answer is brutally simple: because the men of the Afghan Army were given nothing to fight for. The president of their country was a corrupt crook and coward. The ministers and provincial governors of the Afghan regime took their lead from the President. The Army commanders stole their troops wages and sold their rations in the marketplace. For what, then, were the men of the Afghan Army being asked to lay down their lives? Democracy? There was none. Freedom? They had none. A better life? After 20 years – where was it? Who was to say their lives would not be better under the Taliban?

Kurdish Female Fighter.

Only Afghanistan’s women had something to fight for – something to die for – and nobody from the armies of the West, let alone their own fathers, brothers and husbands, were willing to give them something to fight with – and teach them how to use it.

Had the West still possessed a skerrick of imperial statecraft, it would have recognised and armed the nation state of Kurdistan, and encouraged it to send its best female troops to teach the Afghan women how to fight. That it did none of these things proves that the billions it spent “liberating” the women of Afghanistan were drawn exclusively from the Public Relations Budget. Having decided it was time to leave Afghanistan, Donald Trump and Joe Biden simply turned their backs on the women and girls of that blood-stained country – and withdrew. The Taliban would look after them.

For more than two thousand years, the people of the West (among others) have built empires. Mysteriously, the more removed in time they became from the imperial powers of the past: Greece, Rome, Spain, France, Britain; the less adroit they became at holding on to their conquests.

The key objective of empire is not to occupy territory, but to prevent your enemies from occupying it. In other words, to make sure that, having conquered a people, you make it worth their while to stand with you, not against you. Peace, security and prosperity is what a clever imperial power offers: overseen and administered as far as possible by the locals themselves. (Or, at least, the local elites.) The British and the French got to be quite good at this. The Americans never got the hang of it.

Having been out-waited and out-fought in Afghanistan, the United States will now have to endure watching the Chinese play the role of the Afghan people’s new best friend. Aid will pour in from Beijing, infrastructure projects will proliferate, peace, security and prosperity will cement the new friendship in place. More to the point, not a single Chinese combat-boot will disturb the Afghan dust.

And the Uighurs languishing in concentration camps across the border in Xinjiang Province? Why, the Taliban will expend about as much energy on their behalf, as the Western Left will expend on helping the women and girls of Afghanistan.

Because it’s not just the statesmen, diplomats and generals of the West who have failed to live up to the achievements of their forebears; the aspirations and ideals of its revolutionaries have similarly dwindled. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ended The Communist Manifesto with the ringing declaration: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” What would the Western Left cry today? “Persons of every identity (except White, Cis-Males) make full use of intersectional opportunities whenever practicable. Break free from all imposed moralities, but do not attempt to impose your personal notions of right and wrong on the rest of the world.”

Especially not in Afghanistan.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 August 2021.