"The geopolitical role of the United States, operating under the disciplinary regime of military neo-imperialism, may be seen as an effort to shore up fading economic hegemony."

A defining historical feature of the decline of specific empires in the world capitalist system has been the conflict surrounding the emergence of a successor. The United States and Germany engaged in a protracted struggle in the first half of the twentieth century to determine which country would replace Great Britain as the dominant hegemon. After Germany's second defeat in a world war in 1945, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. contended for global hegemony even though the U.S. was the pre-eminent power in economic and military terms throughout the four decades of the Cold War. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has attempted to use its unrivaled military power as a weapon to retain an eroding hegemony. However, given extensive internal and external contradictions, the U.S. Empire faces global competition and realignment, especially, but not exclusively, as a consequence of the rise of Chinese power. [1] This essay will focus on those sites of U.S./China conflict in the present period and project, albeit tentatively, where such conflict may lead in the future.

While it may be that global capital has, to a certain extent, delinked itself from the nation-state, in the case of the United States, in particular, the state and state apparatus, especially in the form of military neo-imperialism, still perform essential geostrategic functions. [2] A fully realized deterritorialized and decentered global system, whether envisioned by Hardt and Negri on the left or Thomas Friedman on the right, does not yet exist. Indeed, the "dialectical relation between territorial and capitalist logics of power," which David Harvey identifies as the defining characteristic of the "new imperialism," still persists. [3] That persistence of territorial logic, described by Chalmers Johnson as an "empire of bases," [4] i.e., military neo-imperialism, more than a predetermined inter-imperialist rivalry or an emergent transnational capitalist class, underscores the growing geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China. Nonetheless, it is necessary to account for both elements in Harvey's dialectic in order to demarcate those sites of US/Chinese competition and conflict.

While the United States no longer dominates the global economy as it did during the first two decades after WWII, it still is the leading economic power in the world. However, over the last few decades China, with all its internal contradictions, has made enormous leaps until it now occupies the number two spot. In fact, the IMF recently projected that the Chinese economy would become the world's largest in 2016. In manufacturing China has displaced the US in so many areas, including becoming the number one producer of steel and exporter of four-fifths of all of the textile products in the world and two-thirds of the world's copy machines, DVD players, and microwaves ovens. Yet, a significant portion of this manufacturing is still owned by foreign companies, including U.S. firms like General Motors. [5]

On the other hand, China is also the largest holder of U.S. foreign reserves, e.g. treasury bonds. This may be one of the reasons mitigating full-blown conflict with the U.S. now, since China has such a large stake in the U.S. economy, both as a holder of bonds and as the leading exporter of goods to the U.S. Nonetheless, "the U.S. has blocked several large scale Chinese investments and buyouts of oil companies, technology firms, and other enterprises." [6] In effect, there are still clear nation-centric responses to China's rising economic power, especially as an expression of the U.S. governing elite's ideological commitment to national security.

At the same time, China is now the world's largest consumer of essential metals (copper, zinc, platinum) and one of the most voracious importers of hydrocarbons. Essential investment and trade by China in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, plus engagement with a host of Central Asian countries, indicates China's growing need for oil and natural gas, as well as its growing challenge to U.S. geostrategic interests in these aforementioned countries and regions. [7] With China's energy consumption approaching 20% of the world's total, it may well overtake the U.S. as the largest hydrocarbon consumer in the next decade or so. It is already the number one producer of greenhouse gasses although the U.S. is still the per capita leader. Nonetheless, as Michael Klare points out, the scramble for more oil will lead to extracting what he calls "tough oil," resulting in more expensive and environmentally destructive production. [8]

Compounding the energy strains and resource competition are additional environmental catastrophes in the form of global warming and desertification. As one skeptical analysis of China's rise warns: "By impinging on the very process of world-systemic reproduction itself, the mutually interpenetrating character of energy resource bottlenecks and extreme climate perturbations should make an already unlikely transition in world-systemic leadership between a declining U.S. and a rising China even more inconceivable - especially considering these bottlenecks and perturbations will both compound China's well-documented explosion of peasant and worker protests and hamstring the capacity of the Chinese state to respond to myriad crises." [9]

Beyond the internal and external environmental crises facing China and the United States, the resource competition between these two powers will invariably lead to geostrategic conflicts. The U.S. obsession over the growing Chinese economic and geopolitical threats deliberately obfuscates those factors that have led to a declining global hegemony. James Petras captures the global contradictions that flow from these differing geostrategic postures in the world:

1. Washington pursues minor military clients in Asia; while China expands its trading and investment agreements with major economic partners - Russia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.

2. Washington drains the domestic economy to finance overseas wars. China extracts minerals and energy resources to create its domestic job market in manufacturing.

3. The US invests in military technology to target local insurgents challenging US client regimes; China invests in civilian technology to create competitive exports.

4. China begins to restructure its economy toward developing the country's interior and allocates greater social spending to redress its gross imbalances and inequalities while the US rescues and reinforces the parasitical financial sector, which plundered industries (strips assets via mergers and acquisitions) and speculates on financial objectives with no impact on employment, productivity or competitiveness.

5. The US multiplies wars and troop build-ups in the Middle East, South Asia, the Horn of Africa and Caribbean; China provides investments and loans of over $25 billion dollars in building infrastructure, mineral extraction, energy production and assembly plants in Africa.

6. China signs multi-billion dollar trade and investment agreements with Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, securing access to strategic energy, mineral and agricultural resources; Washington provides $6 billion in military aid to Colombia, secures seven military bases from President Uribe, backs a military coup in tiny Honduras and denounces Brazil and Bolivia for diversifying its economic ties with Iran. [10]

Given the reactionary political trends in the U.S. and the continuing commitment to preserving the empire at the expense of necessary major investments in infrastructure, education, health-care, etc., it is hard to imagine a different trajectory. Indeed, as James Petras contends: "The U.S. Empire will continue to wallow in chronic stagnation, unending wars and increased reliance on the tools of political subversion... The U.S., unlike the established colonial powers of an earlier period, cannot deny China access to strategic raw materials as was the case with Japan. We live in a post-colonial world where the vast majority of regimes will trade and invest with whoever pays the market price." [11] Moreover, given the global realignment that is emerging in the wake of a declining U.S. empire, other countries, like Brazil and Turkey, will take the initiative on the global stage to address geopolitical concerns that the U.S. continues to impede and/or neglect. In addition, global powerhouses, like the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), will look for ways to affirm their own self-interest in trade and geopolitical alignments.

As much as the competition over essential resources contains a component of the capitalist logic of the "new imperialism," it is at the level of military rivalry and geopolitics that the U.S. and China are positioning themselves to claim certain geostrategic objectives. The Pentagon continues to assert its military prerogatives in the Pacific and the South China Sea. Conducting naval exercises recently in that region, the U.S. staked out its commitment to what a previous national security strategic document called "full spectrum dominance." In response to these naval exercises one Chinese newspaper trumpeted: "The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be." [12] When General Chen Bingde, Chief of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army, visited military facilities in the United States in May of 2011, he noted that the Pentagon "has far more advanced weapons and equipment" than China "targeted at some country." He was, therefore, led to conclude that it was "very strange for questions to be raised only to China but not the United States." [13]

Although China seems dedicated to expanding its regional military hegemony, it also appears committed to bilateral military relations with the United States. However, those relations require, according to China, a change in certain U.S. policies, from large sales of military equipment to Taiwan to U.S. reconnaissance flights over China. According to Qian Lihua, director of the Foreign Affairs Office with the National Defense Ministry, China has its bottom line when it comes to these bilateral military ties: they must be developed on the basis of mutual respect, mutual trust, equality and reciprocity. [14]

While China may be prepared to engage the U.S. on such a basis, there are institutional and ideological resistances both within the military-industrial complex and major segments of the governing elite that still seem wedded to forms of military neo-imperialism that guarantee antagonism towards China's geostrategic interest, even in its own regional sphere of influence. When Condoleezza Rice was George W. Bush's national security advisor, she contended that "China resents the role of the United States in the Asia-Pacific region... (and) would like to alter Asia's strategic balance in its own favor." [15] Ironically, according to one leading Sinologist, "most nations in the (Asia) region now see China as a good neighbor, a constructive partner, a careful listener, and a non-threatening regional power." [16] The same cannot be said about the United States, which is seen as a regional and global threat by many countries.

Certainly, there are efforts under Obama to rebrand the role of the USA and appear to be more conciliatory towards certain regional powers and realignments. Indeed, there are even some Pentagon officials, from Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on down, who, while committed to maintaining and even expanding U.S. presence in the Pacific, consider China's rise as part of a regional alignment that can be managed. Of course, there are others, more numerous, such as President Obama's National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, who are worried about China's "unchecked influence in the region." [17]

Although China's economic prowess has attracted the interest of other countries in the region, it also has greatly expanded its investment in the military, especially with naval vessels and sophisticated electronic equipment. Some analysts, such as Alfred McCoy, foresee an eventual U.S./China military conflict that may very well be resolved in favor of China, especially as a consequence of its growing network of supercomputers and cyber warfare. [18] On the other hand, there are those scholars like Giovanni Arrighi who, taking the long view of China's geopolitical role in the world, see an alternative outcome. According to Arrighi,

Would it not be in China's best interest, one, to let the U.S. exhaust itself militarily and financially in an endless war on terror; two, to enrich itself by supplying goods and credits to an increasingly incoherent U.S. superpower; and three, use its expanding national market and wealth to win over allies (including some U.S. corporations) in the creation of a new world order centered on China, but not necessarily dominated militarily by China? [19]

Given the classical and more recent articulation of China's military and geostrategic posture in the world, it is hard to imagine why and how China would directly engage the United States in any armed conflict. From Sun Tzu and other classic treatises on military strategy, the focus is on understating one's power and outmaneuvering an opponent by stealth and patience. These strategic insights have been re-articulated in the directives of Deng Xiaoping to "observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at manipulating a low profile, never claim leadership." [20]

While it is not hard to imagine that China may wish to bide its time and remain an economic powerhouse without exacerbating geopolitical flashpoints, such as Taiwan, it is more difficult to assume that the US will renounce its "indispensable" leadership and step down from its military pre-eminence. Aggressive expansion and intervention is deeply rooted in the development and maintenance of the US Empire. [21] Moreover, as one study of US/China dynamics points out, "it is more difficult for the leaders of a declining hegemon to accept the reality or prospect of their country's diminished influence and status." [22]

One must turn, therefore, to prior historical examples of the conflicts between rising and declining hegemons or competing hegemons in order to provide more context to the present and future conflict between the U.S. and China. In Paul Kennedy's recounting of the growing antagonism between England and Germany leading up to WWI, geopolitical conflicts and military imperatives played a significant, if not solely determining, role in their eventual clash. [23] The history of the Cold War was replete with geopolitical conflicts that were proxy or surrogate battles between the U.S. and Russia. [24] Perhaps, as in the case of the Cold War, containment will be the preferred strategy of the U.S. and direct military conflict will not occur. On the other hand, the Soviet Union was never an economic threat to the U.S., nor was the U.S. in the dire circumstances of imperial overstretch.

During the Cold War, the United States and China did come into direct military conflict on the Korean Peninsula. [25] Certainly, North Korea remains a potential site of conflict between the U.S. and China, especially given the tens of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in both South Korean and Japan. More likely, conflicts between the U.S. and China will be reflected in U.S. military interventions as a consequence of new geostrategic maneuvers. Following Pepe Escobar's analysis in Pipelineistan, one could plausibly contend that the on-going U.S. military presence in Afghanistan is, in part, an effort to check the geostrategic interests of China, as well as Russia and Iran. Moreover, given the growing military alliance between Pakistan and China (China is the primary supplier of planes for the Pakistan Air Force and a possible partner for constructing a naval base at the Pakistan port of Gwadar) and the ongoing tensions in Pakistan caused by U.S. drone attacks and other covert and overt interventions, this area of the world could see increasing tensions. [26]

Already, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in horrendous death and destruction to the residents of both countries while bleeding the U.S. treasury of trillions of present and future dollars. Ironically, Washington's geostrategic objectives in both countries have been, to a certain extent, impeded with a much more pro-Iranian government in Iraq and a failed state in Afghanistan. According to Giovanni Arrighi, the war and occupation of Iraq may be seen as one of the key components of the terminal crisis of U.S. hegemony. [27] Fighting debilitating and self-destructive wars, albeit profitable to disaster capitalism firms like Halliburton and others, only adds to the contradictions confronted by imperial overstretch and the decline of the U.S. Empire. [28]

While U.S. hegemony, according to Samir Amin, "rests far more on its excessive military power than on the advantages of its economic system," [29] both elements are in deep trouble, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. From a particular perspective, the geopolitical role of the United States, operating under the disciplinary regime of military neo-imperialism, may be seen as an effort to shore up fading economic hegemony. While it is true to a certain extent that transnational capital performs global functions unbound by the nation state, the calculus by which Washington attempts to exercise global dominance and hegemony is firmly rooted in the practice of military neo-imperialism. In fact, as some level, once could agree with the formulation by Emmanuel Todd that the United States "is battling to maintain its status as the world's financial center by making a symbolic show of its military might in the heart of Eurasia, thereby hoping to forget and have others ignore America's industrial weakness, its financial need, and its predatory character." [30]

As the domestic analogue of military neo-imperialism, the national security state apparatus, created as part of the Cold War, has persisted and expanded into an institutionalized massive surveillance bureaucracy, even in the absence of the original rationale, the Soviet Union. In fact, what has occurred is the morphing of that enemy-other into another supposed global challenge - Islamic jihadists. Indeed, as argued by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, "the war on terrorism instills a regime of fear and creates an enemy narrative that serves as a successor to the Cold War and does everything the Cold War did. It upholds executive power, sustains the national security state, consolidates secrecy, instills patriotism, dims criticism, cements alliances and creates a discursive and ideological framework." [31]

Whether China will supplant this most recent iteration of the enemy other is an open matter. Certainly, the effort to cast Wen Ho Lee as a nuclear spy was an instance, albeit a failed one, of constructing an internal Chinese enemy. Still, the machinery of the national security state, as the domestic representation of U.S. imperial policy, remains intact. Moreover, as argued by Mahmood Mamdani, "Humanity is now left with a challenge: how to subdue and hold accountable the awesome power that the United States built up during the Cold War." [32]

While it remains unclear what the ultimate outcome might be of growing competition and conflict between the United States and China, it is very clear that the U.S. is a dying empire with declining hegemonic power in the world. Whether that hegemonic power is replaced is an open question. There are those who see the emergence of a multi-polar world where China and other regional powers supersede U.S. global hegemony. [33] In this scenario, Washington, recognizing the detrimental domestic and foreign effects of imperial overstretch, accommodates itself to such a multi-polar world. Along with others, however, I cannot envision any tendency within the political governing elite who would be prepared to eschew continuing U.S. global dominance and measuring U.S. geopolitics in the discourse and practice of the "necessity" of "strategic alliances." [34] Certainly, there are divisions in the governing political elite over geostrategic operations. However, as Gary Dorrien's study of neoconservative political forces demonstrates, there are underlying delusions and imperatives, shared by rulers and ruled alike of various ideological tendencies, about U.S. exceptionalism and the essential deployment of military neo-imperialism. [35] In effect, unless and until there are radical changes in how the U.S. is governed and how it operates militarily in the world, permanent war and geopolitical conflict, including at some level with China, will be a defining feature of the global role of the United States.

Fran Shor teaches in the History Department at Wayne State University. He is the author of Dying Empire: US Imperialism and Global Resistance (Routledge 2010).

Endnotes

1. As noted by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, "U.S. hegemonic expansion stimulates regrouping on the part of social forces and countries that increasingly work around the USA, so in effect empire accelerates global realignments." 'Beyond the American Bubble: Does Empire Matter', Third World Quarterly 27:6, 2006, 999. For a concise overview of the trajectory of U.S. hegemony in the post WWII period, see Immanuel Wallerstein, 'The Curve of American Power', New Left Review 40, July-August, 2006, 77-94.

2. On Marx's failure to account for the integral role of militarism as part of the logic of capital, see Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing (New York: Verso, 2007), 77. On military neo-imperialism, see Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2006).

3. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 183.

4. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Owl Books, 2004), 151-185.

5. John Gulick, 'The Long Twentieth Century and Barriers to China's Hegemonic Accession', Journal of World-Systems Research 17:1, 2011, 17.

6. James Petras, 'War with China? The Dangers of a Global Conflagration', Global Research, April 29, 2010.
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18913

7. For several perspectives on China's importing of essential resources, see Dilip Hiro, After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World (New York: Nation Books, 2010), esp. 147-185; Paula Cerni, 'Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century', Theory and Science, 8:1, Winter, 2006;
theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol8.1/cerni.html
and Pepe Escobar, 'China's Pipelineistan 'War'', TomDispatch.com, October 12, 2010.
www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175306

8. Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2009).

9. Gulick, 'The Long Twentieth Century', 25.

10. James Petras, 'The US and China: One Side is Losing, the Other is Winning', Information Clearing House, January 3, 2010.
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24310.htm

11. James Petras, 'War with China?'.

12. Quoted in Alfred W. McCoy, 'The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century by 2025', Huffington Post, December 6, 2010.
www.huffingtonpost.com/alfred-w-mccoy/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-american-empire

13. Elisabeth Bumiller, 'General Says Beijing Won't Challenge American Military', New York Times, May 18, 2011.

14. Xinhua News Agency, May 12, 2011.
English.people.com.cn/9000d1/90776/90883/7377430.html#

15. Quoted in Steve Chan, China, The U.S. and the Power-Transition Theory: A Critique (London: Routledge, 2008), 26.

16. Chan, China, The U.S., 36.

17. John Feffer, 'After Osama: China?', Foreign Policy in Focus, May 11, 2011;
www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/11-7
Also, see Edward Cody, 'Shifts in Pacific Force U.S. Military To Adapt Thinking', The Washington Post, September 17, 2005.

18. McCoy, 'The Decline and Fall'. For a balanced overview of numerous perspectives within the field of international relations on potential US/China conflict, see Aaron L. Friedberg, 'The Failure of U.S.-China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable?', International Security 30:2, Fall, 2005, 7-45. Also, see Chan, China, The U.S..

19. Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 312.

20. Chan, China, The U.S., 98.

21. See, for example, Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (New York: Vintage, 2009); and William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

22. Chan, China, The U.S., 50.

23. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982).

24. For an excellent concise overview of the Cold War, see Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For histories of the Cold War that explore the U.S./Soviet competition and the geopolitical context, see Mary Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Understanding the East-West Conflict (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), and Walter LeFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1992 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993); David Painter, The Cold War: An International History (New York: Routledge, 1999), and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

25. See Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2010).

26. For Pepe Escobar's most recent analysis of the growing alliance between China and Pakistan, see 'Do the China-Pakistan Pipeline Shuffle', AlJazeera.net, 27 May, 2011.

27. Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 175-274.

28. Michael Mann, 'The First Failed Empire of the 21st Century', Review of International Studies 30:4, October, 2004, 631-53. On disaster capitalism in Iraq, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), esp. 341-82.

29. Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 76.

30. Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, trans. C. Jon Delogu (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xviii.

31. Pieterse, 'Beyond the American Bubble', 990.

32. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 255. On the national security state, see Douglas T. Stuart, Creating the National Security State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

33. Hiro, After Empire; and Parag Khana, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (New York: Random House, 2008). On the dying empire, see Francis Shor, Dying Empire: US Imperialism and Global Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2010).

34. Pieterse, 'Beyond the American Bubble', 992. For one such analysis of the persistent commitment of the U.S. political elite to global dominance, see Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).

35. Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 18-22 and passim.