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The Rise of China and World Order: AnInterview with F. William EngdahlF. William Engdahla & Wang Zhenb

a Independent Economist, Wiesbaden, Germanyb Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, ChinaPublished online: 28 May 2014.

To cite this article: F. William Engdahl & Wang Zhen (2014) The Rise of China and WorldOrder: An Interview with F. William Engdahl, International Critical Thought, 4:2, 131-141, DOI:10.1080/21598282.2014.906536

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The Rise of China and World Order: An Interview with F. WilliamEngdahl

F. William Engdahla∗

and Wang Zhenb

aIndependent Economist, Wiesbaden, Germany; bChinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

In order to encircle the German Reich in the period from the 1880s to World War I, Britain’sstrategies included the inciting of war itself to defeat the growing might of Germany. It used allfinancial, military, and political means simply because Germany had emerged as an economicchallenger to British hegemony. Mr Engdahl’s understanding of that history and how tragic itwas for the world prompted him to write Target China (Engdahl 2013) as he realized that a verysimilar strategy has been adopted by the West, with Washington today replacing London,against the emergence of a sovereign Chinese economic great power. In the context of hisbook, Mr Engdahl shares his views on some significant issues of the contemporary worldgeopolitical situation in this interview.

Wang Zhen (abbr. WZ): In the early twentieth century, Lenin (1964) believed that the world hadentered the age of imperialism and socialist revolution. Do you think we are still in this era in thetwenty-first century? And what’s your comment on the attitude held by China since the 1980s, thatpeace and development remain the overriding themes of the times?

F. William Engdahl (abbr. WE): In my view, the world economic system has undergone achange in degree though not in kind, in the sense that despite the collapse of the Soviet Unionin 1989–1991 and the purported end of the Cold War we see wars in greater intensity thanever, albeit regional for the time being. The core of this dynamic arises from the attempt of theone hegemon, the United States—steered by leading circles in Wall Street and in the military-industrial complex/big oil—to go all out for global control. The Pentagon prefers to call it fullspectrum dominance; some call it global empire. That absolute global hegemony is somethingthat eluded even the British more than a century ago. That obsession drives the USA to toppleregimes opposing their order, which they euphemistically call the “globalized new world order.”

We can notice that unfortunately, far from peace and development, a group of Western powersled by the USA and Britain has pursued an agenda since the end of the Cold War that increasesglobal conflict and hinders national economic development. Behind the governments in the Weststand very powerful corporate interests in Wall Street and the military-industrial complexespecially who are determined to destroy every obstacle to the establishment of their singleworld order. The secret negotiations now ongoing for Washington’s Trans-Pacific Partnershipare one example of this supranational pursuit of power. That, ultimately, means destroying

# 2014 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

∗Corresponding author. Email: engdahl@t-online.de

International Critical Thought, 2014Vol. 4, No. 2, 131–141, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2014.906536

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what national sovereignty remains in China, Russia, Iran and any other countries in such group-ings as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), SCO (Shanghai CooperationOrganization) and ECO (Economic Cooperation Organization) that are trying to create a sover-eign economic identity. If we look closely at economic development in places where they haveforced regime change to suit their agenda, such as Libya, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan, it isclear that for those leading powers, let’s call them the Anglo-American hegemony, peacemeans total subjugation to their agenda, the “peace” of total subjugation.

WZ: The foreign policy guru of former British Prime Minister Blair advocated a “new empire”and the law of the jungle in the field of foreign policy. However, David Harvey has published awork entitled The New Imperialism, and Samir Amin also has an article in the Monthly Reviewtreating the European Union as collective imperialism. What is your opinion on these points ofview?

WE: Robert Cooper’s (2002) vision of a new modern imperialism, espoused in 2002 on the eve ofthe Iraq war in which Britain was one of the few eager participants along with Washington, is littlemore than an apologia for the state of affairs in which the US and its special partner Britain, alongwith a handful of other EU states, impose their rules and their order, sometimes with raw militaryforce as in Libya or Afghanistan. As a vision of a more peaceful world it is fatally flawed, as wasthe earlier British vision—its attempt to rationalize raw imperial conquest and subjugation,including the Opium Wars with China, by claiming it was all a part of what Kipling called“the White Man’s Burden,” to bring European “civilization” to the primitive peoples of theworld. Cooper’s new imperialism is simply a justification for global looting to prop up the collap-sing Anglo-American system.

Professor Harvey’s The New Imperialism (2005), while a very useful book to give generalreaders some idea of how the world is going wrong, is somewhat dated in that it was writtenin 2003 before the US financial crisis involving the sub-prime mortgage scandals had eruptedinto what has become the most severe crisis in the United States since the 1930s Great Depression,a crisis which is nowhere near being resolved in terms of reestablishing the healthy functioning ofthe US real economy. He also, in my view, does not clarify precisely enough how the twin pillarsof post-1945 US hegemony function in tandem to advance that hegemony. One of these pillars isthe dominant financial role of the US dollar as THE world reserve currency. That has allowed onenation, the United States, since the Nixon break with Bretton Woods and the dollar’s convertibil-ity into gold, to run seemingly endless trade deficits.

The US has been able to do this knowing the deficits will be financed by large trade surpluscountries with nowhere else to invest their huge volumes of surplus US dollars other than in USTreasury debt. During the 1980s, that financing source was primarily Japan, which financed USexcesses and with them the flawed US economic policies. Pressure on Japan to follow US finan-cial dictates led to Japan’s remarkable asset bubble in the real estate and stock market process,which burst with a vengeance in 1991 and has left Japan not fully recovered more than twodecades later.

Over the past decade or so it has largely been China’s buying of US Treasury debt that hasfinanced American foreign wars. More recently, as China pulled back, Japan again moved tofill some of the vacuum. In effect, since 2000 China has financed US wars in Afghanistan andIraq and elsewhere, wars which de facto go against China’s national security and national interest,merely by virtue of the fact that the Chinese were buying US Treasury debt with their tradesurplus dollars and thus allowing Washington to run US$1 trillion annual deficits (Masters2012), something unprecedented in history. It is a troublesome paradox of which Chinese officialsare clearly aware, yet the question is what to do about it. Here I save some modest suggestions foranother forum.

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Samir Amin’s work has in some ways echoed aspects of my own, especially his understandingof the hegemonic center countries (North America/EU/Australia/New Zealand) and how thespread of their notion of agribusiness threatens to pauperize some half of the human race incoming years if allowed to expand via the World Trade Organization (WTO) and related rulesof trade competition. In my experience, China itself faces a critical situation in its domestic agri-culture production and food security, which I have discussed in detail in my Target China(Engdahl 2013). If China continues to follow the American model of complete industrializationof agriculture and development of agribusiness as a pure for-profit process where the familyfarmer is destroyed, it will face a grim future indeed.

As to whether the EU acts as a collective imperialist, I see it more as one of a group of smallerpowers with combined and at the same time conflicting goals. One may see that, insofar as itseconomic relations with developing countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East or Central Asiaare based on the debt structures of the dollar system (despite the introduction of the euro in1999–2000), the EU invariably supports Washington’s destructive use of the IMF conditionalitiesin Africa.

On a deeper level, the leadership of EU corporations and political policy circles are in a ter-rible dilemma over where their future security and development truly lies. On the one side theyintuitively realize, perhaps most clearly to date in the case of Germany’s industrial elite, thatfuture economic development opportunities in the immediate coming decades or more nolonger lie across the Atlantic, but rather in the East, in Eurasia.

On the other hand, those same EU policy elites are painfully aware that Washington will notwillingly allow Europe to follow an independent policy of Eurasian development withoutputting up a horrendous fight. President Obama’s Asia (China) pivot policy is one reflectionof that. The heart of the present global crisis and the driver of wars and primitive accumulationprocesses is the US dollar debt system, as I describe in detail in my book Gods of Money(Engdahl 2010).

The EU states are tolerated as what Zbigniew Brzezinski once termed “vassal states” of theUnited States. The core driving the global process of de facto informal imperialism is theUnited States and its Wall Street-Federal Reserve-US Treasury dollar debt system. And thatdollar debt system, while no longer backed by gold as before 1971 or even by oil as after1973, is today backed by F-16 fighter jets, drones, Abrams tanks—the “soft power” methodsof the 1970s or even the 1990s have given way to the hard power of US military might as theeconomic foundations of America deteriorate at a breathtaking speed.

WZ: Could you briefly explain, in your opinion, what are the main content and substance ofglobal energy and oil issues and the competition related to them?

WE: Since the United States emerged from the ashes of World War II as the major hegemonicforce globally, leading establishment policy elites there decided to use oil and control of oil asa key “governor” or control device, in order to regulate global economic growth. The majorUS oil companies (originally most tied to the powerful Rockefeller group) were at the heart ofthis strategy—Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, ARCO, Gulf Oil. FDR (Franklin Delano Roose-velt) managed to “steal” Saudi Arabia out from under Churchill and the British and the USAramco partners developed the vast Saudi oilfields. When one or another rival tried to carveout an independent track, such as Enrico Mattei of ENI (Ente Nazionale ldrocarburi, an energycompany) in Italy, he mysteriously “died” and the challenge to US oil domination died with him.

The role of controlling oil globally became so central to US power that the Pentagon-intelli-gence community and Big Oil became in effect one giant power conglomerate, with the US mili-tary acting on behalf of extending US Big Oil control, later in a special partnership with the twoBritish giants BP and Shell.

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By the end of the 1960s the basis of the US global economic and financial domination thatexisted in 1944 was de facto over. Germany and a resurgent economically vibrant Franceunder de Gaulle decided to redeem their trade surplus dollars for gold, as then allowed underBretton Woods rules. When the claims from abroad on US gold exceeded the total of US reservesby August 1971, Nixon, on the advice of Paul Volcker and David Rockefeller, simply tore up theBretton Woods agreement and told the world the dollar had ceased to be redeemable in gold. Itfloated freely until 1973.

At that point—and this is very crucial to understanding the nature of this establishment elite inthe United States centered on Rockefeller and the oil giants—when the dollar seemed to be facingfree fall in early 1973, a top level ultra-private secret invitation-only gathering was convened inSaltsjoebaden, Sweden, at the Wallenberg family’s Grand Hotel there, of some 88 select US andEuropean policy-makers. The top-secret gathering in Sweden that May 1973 included the headsof the major US and British oil giants, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Lord Rothschild andothers of that rank. Here I must refer readers to the detailed description in my book, Myths, Liesand Oil Wars (Engdahl 2012a). There I describe, from confidential papers I have, how that privategroup in effect planned the oil price shock of 1973–1974, with Kissinger as secretary of statedeployed by Rockefeller and friends to manipulate Middle East events in what came to becalled the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. He unilaterally delivered arms to Israel but notto Arab states, knowing that would provoke a Saudi threat to embargo OPEC (Organization ofPetroleum Exporting Countries) oil going to the US and Europe. The result was a 400% oilprice rise in six months (BBC 2008). The world economy went into deep recession, includingthe US. As for Big Oil, they had no interest in the domestic US economy or US jobs.

Theirs was a Wall Street agenda of saving the dollar as world reserve currency. Then, to besure that high oil prices would continue to support the dollar, Washington sent a top level Treasuryofficial to speak with the Saudi King and guarantee US arms deliveries to Saudi Arabia inexchange for a promise that the King would ensure that OPEC would never sell its oil in any cur-rency other than the dollar. In effect, after 1973 until the mid-1980s, the gold dollar became thepetrodollar. Oil markets today are controlled in a different way via Wall Street and financialderivatives in ways we saw in 2008, when oil for no reason soared to US$147 a barrel (The Econ-omic Times 2008) before crashing a few months later. That manipulation was carried out by ahandful of Wall Street big banks in league with key US and UK oil giants. JP Morgan Chaseat the time told Air China that oil would soon exceed US$200 a barrel (The Economic Times2008) and urged the company to buy every drop of real oil it could get its hands on, in effectfurther feeding the sharp price rise. Wall Street in effect lied, cajoled and manipulated the pricerise. This same Wall Street manipulated the price crash some months later, making a fortuneboth ways.

For several years now a new era in oil has emerged, namely controlling oil flows to the emer-ging economic rival (as Washington sees it) to US sole superpower hegemony, namely thePeople’s Republic of China. This has been done in countless ways as China has exploredevery avenue in the last decade to secure reliable oil supplies from abroad. The United States insti-gated a southern Sudan separatist movement to control a major China oil source and created anentire new Pentagon command, AFRICOM (United States Africa Command), purely to opposeChina’s economic relations with resource-rich African countries. The US occupation of Iraqwas in large part about keeping Iraq from getting closer to China, the same with Libya, andthe list goes on.

The one issue which Washington and Big Oil in the US and the UK do not want to becomewidely known is the alternative scientific theory developed by Soviet scientists during the ColdWar on the origins or genesis of hydrocarbons—oil and gas. The Russians demonstrated inrepeated scientific experiments, peer reviewed and published, that oil can be and is generated

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in the deep earth core and forced up through the mantle under specific temperature and pressureconditions. Big Oil financed a bogus theory, peak oil, which claimed that oil was a fossil fuel gen-erated by dinosaur detritus or dead algae hundreds of millions of years ago and that therefore oil isfinite. The Russians developed a revolutionary method proving just the opposite, indicating thatcountries such as China with vast tectonically active regions are likely to hold vast untappedresources of oil and gas which, unlike the dangerous and costly shale oil/gas bubble, is conven-tional and environmentally friendly.

WZ: Could you briefly explain, in your opinion, what are the main content and substance ofglobal food issues, including the genetically modified food issue, and the competition relatedto them?

WE: The fundamental global food issue of importance to the survival of the human species is thereversal of the 45-year trend of globalized agribusiness dominated by perhaps 20–30 giant cor-porate cartels in grain, beef, poultry and pigs. The WTO, with its Agreement on Agriculture, wasin a large degree established to promote the interest of this agribusiness cartel in literally control-ling the world food chain. This is no exaggeration, as an examination of the leading corporationsin food production and distribution will show.

In this context, the patenting of seeds contaminated with foreign bacilli or other foreign bodiesis the ultimate goal of the monopolization of the global food chain. There are at present no morethan three to four giant GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) players, three of them essentiallyagrichemical companies which turned to patented seeds which would “accept” their chemical pes-ticides and herbicides. I have written extensively on the health problems of GMO and the relatedchemicals which by licensing agreement MUST be used on it. The most widely used, Monsanto’sRoundup herbicide, has been demonstrated to kill human embryo cells in tiny concentrations wellbelow permitted US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) levels. There have also been proved tobe severe limits on the reproduction of animals fed a diet of GMO.

In today’s world of global agribusiness aided by WTO, individual countries in Africa, LatinAmerica and Asia, including China, hardly have a chance to resist demands to open their marketsto “free trade” in agriculture. That in turn is destroying local natural food producers and pro-duction. Countries like Zambia must buy imported mass factory-produced chicken fed withGMO soy and corn, rather than their own locally produced chicken. GMO was initially the brain-child of the powerful Rockefeller Foundation. Their goal was to create a global monopoly cartelfor food as they had for oil. As Henry Kissinger remarked in the 1970s, “Control oil and youcontrol entire nations; control food and you control the people.” That is what GMO and US-domi-nated agribusiness are essentially about in my view.

WZ: Could you briefly explain, in your opinion, what are the main content and substance ofglobal financial issues and the competition related to them?

WE: I have completed a trilogy, available in Chinese, drawing on a very revealing quote fromHenry Kissinger from the 1970s. As then secretary of state and NSC (National SecurityCouncil) presidential adviser, Kissinger told a friend, “Control oil and you control entirenations; control food and you control the people; control money and you control the world.”Since 1944, when Bretton Woods established the financial and monetary underpinnings of anAmerican “informal empire,” as noted, US hegemony has always rested on two pillars. Thefirst pillar was the role of the US as unchallenged military hegemon even during the Cold War.And, intimately interlinked, there was the second pillar, the US as the dominant financialpower through the role of the Wall Street banks, the rating agencies they control, the privatelyowned Federal Reserve the banks control and the US Treasury which the same banks control.There the role of the US dollar as the leading world reserve currency, even long after the US

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economy ceased to be the world’s leading economy, often depended at key junctures on the role ofthe Pentagon in providing Japan, for example, with a US nuclear umbrella, or giving Saudi ArabiaUS arms in exchange for control, behind the curtain, of OPEC policy up to the present.

When the US “sub-prime” real estate mortgage securitization crisis broke in spring 2007, longbefore the Lehman Brothers collapse, much of the world lost confidence in the dollar and in USbanks. By 2009, the Chinese and other governments were loudly signaling their concern over theextremely high rate of US Federal Government debt increases that jeopardized their dollar bondassets. As the dollar faced a free-fall crisis in late 2009, news “conveniently” leaked out of hiddenGreek government debts that had allowed Greece to qualify to join the euro in 2002. From thatpoint, up to and including the political role played by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, George Sorosand a handful of New York hedge fund managers and the key role of the US credit rating agencies,especially Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, in downgrading Greek sovereign debt to “belowinvestment grade,” or “junk,” as it is known in the trade, the dollar crisis was transformed intothe “euro crisis” and the dollar had once more risen from the ashes for the moment. True under-standing of the real power of Wall Street is essential to grasp how that power manipulates entirenations and organizations today, even ones as large as China or the EU. The leading Wall Streetbankers learned their craft from the leading figures of the City of London beginning around thetime of the First Opium War in the1840s.

WZ: Could you briefly explain, in your opinion, what are the main content and substance ofglobal military spending issues and the competition related to them?

WE: Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, for Washington the Cold War did not cease foreven a second. Contrary to their solemn pledges to Gorbachev’s USSR in 1990, Washingtonpushed the new former communist countries of the Warsaw Pact, one by one, to join NATO.After 1991 NATO should have become a museum piece alongside the Warsaw Pact. Instead ithas expanded to become the global military police force controlling nations from Afghanistanto Libya and beyond.

On the basis of simple dollar outlays for military spending, leaving aside the huge budgets forsuch national security and defense-related agencies of the US Government as the Department ofEnergy, the US Treasury and other agencies, the US Department of Defense spent some US$739billion in 2011 on its military requirements. Were all other spending tied to US defense andnational security included, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies esti-mates annual military spending of over US$1 trillion by the United States. That is an amountgreater than the total defense-related spending of the next 42 nations combined, and more thanthe gross domestic product of most nations (Engdahl 2013).

China officially spent barely 10% of what the US spent on its defense, some US$90 billion, orif certain defense-related arms imports and other costs are included, perhaps US$111 billion ayear. Even if the Chinese authorities do not publish complete data on such sensitive areas, it isclear China spends a mere fraction of what the US does, and it is starting from a military-technol-ogy base far behind that of the United States (Engdahl 2013).

The US defense budget is not just by far the world’s largest. It dominates everyone else, and iscompletely independent of any perceived threat. In the nineteenth century, the British Royal Navybuilt up its fleet in line with the size of the fleets of Britain’s two most powerful potential enemies;America’s defense budget strategists declare it will be “doomsday” if the United States builds itsnavy to anything less than five times the size of the navies of China and Russia combined.

If we include spending by Russia, China’s strongest ally within the Shanghai CooperationOrganization, their combined total annual defense spending is barely US$142 billion (Shaugh-nessy 2012). The world’s top 10 defense spending nations in addition to the United States asthe largest and China as the second largest include the UK, France, Japan, Russia, Saudi

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Arabia, Germany, India and Brazil. In 2011, the military spending of the United States totaled astaggering 46% of total spending by the world’s 171 governments and territories, almost half theentire world (Engdahl 2012b).

Clearly, for all its rhetoric about peace-keeping missions and “democracy” promotion, thePentagon is pursuing what its planners refer to as “Full Spectrum Dominance”: the totalcontrol of all global air, land, ocean, space, outer-space and now cyberspace. It is clearly deter-mined to use its military might to secure global domination or hegemony, a global US “caliphate”or empire, where it increasingly appears that the American population is slated by the power elitecircles to be the “cannon fodder” of their imperial quest. No other interpretation is possible.

WZ: Do you believe that the population of the world is growing excessively? If so, is there anurgent need for China to control this issue and reduce population? What would be the bestway to do it?

WE: One of the most persistent and most dangerous myths in recent decades has been the notionof “over-population.” First, the very term is unscientific. It creates horror images in the minds ofpeople in advanced industrial countries like the United States and Europe of “billions of peoplescrambling to get our high living standard.” Properly viewed, the greatest single crisis the worldfaces today is the dramatic tendency of the rate of population growth worldwide to fall. This is inlarge part a consequence of deliberate Malthusian population control policies promoted since the1950s, above all by the United States through its influence in relevant organs of the UnitedNations and USAID (United States Agency for International Development).

The problem is not, in my view a surplus population or “over-population,” but rather, a deficitof the proper economic organization of societies that would allow a natural increase in population,at whichever rate befits a given society, to be adequately provided for. If we look around the worldover the past three or more decades we see rather than over-population, a trend toward “under-population.” Even in Africa, the rate of live births per woman of child-bearing age is justbarely above zero net growth. In Western Europe, one of the gravest problems today facingGermany, France, Italy and other EU industrialized countries is the dramatic collapse of percapita births since the introduction of the birth control pill in 1966, which greatly exacerbatedthe reduction in fertile males caused by the war.

China’s extraordinary economic rise since 1979 is to a great degree owing to its then large andgrowing population which gave the world economy an incredible pool of labor. As the birth rate inChina has fallen from 5.9 in the early 1970s to 1.7 more or less today (The Star Online 2013),China is at the dawn of a vast range of new social problems including for whatever reasons arapidly growing surplus of males with no mathematical possibility of finding a female partnerwithin China. In Europe, the current “baby bust,” as some economists call it, is causing huge ten-sions in state pension systems as not enough young people are entering the labor force to supportthe retired. If anything today there is a growing worldwide urgency to find ways to convince thehuman population to increase live births. Data from the Population Reference Bureau shows thatthere are 20 countries in the world with negative or zero natural population growth. This is unpre-cedented in history. The countries include Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Italy, Japan and Poland.

WZ: In your view, what could be seen as the main obstacles to the peaceful and positive devel-opment of the world today?

WE: This is a very sensitive question. I will try to answer it openly and honestly. In today’s world,especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the de facto bipolar world balance in 1991,there has been one sole superpower, the United States. That country’s global power is based on itsdevelopment of a system of global debt and its overwhelming military advantage. If we trace thedebt crises only from the Latin American debt crisis of the 1970s to the sovereign debt crisis of

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today, the main obstacle to real economic development globally is the dollar system whose epi-center is the six or eight mega-banks of Wall Street, the so-called “Too Big To Fail” banks such asGoldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America. Those half dozen overwhel-mingly control world financial markets through their control of financial derivatives and the inter-national credit rating agencies as well as the Federal Reserve.

When the pyramid of dollar debts reached a crisis of confidence in March 2007, a chain reac-tion ensued across Europe into Russia, China and the entire world, most notably after the calcu-lated decision by former Wall Street Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen in September 2008 tobankrupt Lehman Brothers and use the predictable financial market panic to terrify a reluctantCongress into giving him carte blanche and a bank account of US$700 billion to use as hesaw fit to rescue his Wall Street cronies (Schlesinger 2008). The implosion of financial papervalues since has driven a far more aggressive US foreign policy including, in my view, thehighly risky decision by the Obama Administration to launch its “Arab Spring” in hopes offorcing open for Western banks the economies of the Islamic world, with its 1.5 billion peopleand untold wealth. So long as the US government and the rest of the world continue to honorthe US dollar system and its debt paper as sacrosanct, there can be no real economic developmentand certainly no stability in the world.

WZ: Do you believe that the United States is a truly free and democratic country?

WE: Certainly not. If we merely look at laws such as the Patriot Act or the National DefenseAuthorization Act signed into law by President Obama allowing indefinite detention of any UScitizen without charges, and the dramatic erosion of the Constitutional Bill of Rights since Sep-tember 11, 2001, no objective observer could seriously accuse the United States of being a trulyfree and democratic country. There has been an alarming trend in recent years for Congress andthe White House to insert into Defense Authorization bills provisions for dramatic reduction ofdemocratic citizen rights with little or no debate, as they are typically buried amid militaryissues. For example, the National Defense Authorization Act for the fiscal year 2008 includeda signing statement in which President George W. Bush asserted the right to a “strong” unitaryexecutive, a theory intended to consolidate and expand executive branch power, in violation ofthe Constitution’s checks and balances and the division of power between the executive, legisla-tive and judicial branches of government. The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year2010 contained important and vaguely formulated “hate crimes” legislation that can be used tostop legitimate free speech. The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012 containsprovisions authorizing the indefinite military detention of civilians, including US citizens. Thistrend to use the cover of a war on terror to justify shrinking fundamental citizen freedoms is inmy view a very tragic development.

WZ: The US Secretary of Defense announced that 60% of America’s warships, including six air-craft-carrier groups, would be stationed in the Asia-Pacific theatre by 2020 to implement the so-called “rebalance to the Asia-Pacific” strategy (The Economist 2012). What do you think of thesubstance of these operations?

WE: The sole purpose of the “Asia Pivot” policy is to contain China and make certain China“behaves” in the future as the leading circles of the Anglo-American global order demand.This can be compared with the British Empire’s encirclement of Germany between the 1880sand 1914 as the German economy emerged as the world’s most dynamic growth engine, far sur-passing England. As I describe in considerable detail in my A Century of War (Engdahl 2004)book, World War I was largely a British-engineered response to that German economic challenge.So today, some influential policy circles in and around Washington, especially neo-conservativesin the US military-industrial complex, see China’s mere existence as a robust and huge economic

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challenge to a dying American economic power, as a mortal threat to be met with deadly force ifnecessary. It should properly be named for what it is, China Pivot and not Asia Pivot. At its heartis the neo-conservative doctrine of the so-called Pentagon Air-Sea Battle. The Pentagon strategyto defeat China in a coming war, the “Air-Sea Battle,” calls for an aggressive coordinated USattack in which American stealth bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country. Theinitial “blinding campaign” would be followed by a larger air and naval assault on Chinaitself. Crucial to the advanced Pentagon strategy, deployment of which has already quietlybegun, is US military navy and air presence in Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam,and across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. Australian troop and naval deployment isaimed at accessing the strategic Chinese South China Sea as well as the Indian Ocean. Thestated motive is to “protect freedom of navigation” in the Malacca Straits and the South ChinaSea.

Air-Sea Battle’s goal is to help US forces to withstand an initial Chinese assault and to coun-terattack to destroy sophisticated Chinese radar and missile systems built to keep US ships awayfrom China’s coastline.

No less a respected US military figure than General (Ret.) James Cartwright, a four stargeneral who served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until August, 2011, has expressedsimilar views in a recent speech where he stated: “Today we talk about ‘Air-Sea Battle,’” (theaggressive US Air Force and Navy concept for operations to cripple China before a decisiveUS nuclear attack). “To some, it’s becoming the Holy Grail.” Cartwright added, “But it’sneither a doctrine nor a scenario . . . Air-Sea Battle is demonizing China. That’s not in anybody’sinterest” (The Economist 2012). He added a sharp criticism of the Obama Administration’svaunted “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific. I agree with the former US general on this.

WZ: What’s your comment on the dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu Islands?How do you view the self-contradictory expressions and military actions of the United Stateson the issue of the Diaoyu Islands?

WE: A weak Japan would never attempt such a brazen provocation as it has staged over theDiaoyu Islands had it not had secret prior assurances from Washington. It is designed as a keypart of the Pentagon China pivot, to provoke an enraged emotional response from China thatwould give the West the pretext to impose serious retaliatory measures. To date Beijing haswisely not taken the bait. As I suggested in a recent private foreign affairs seminar in Beijingonly partly in jest, China’s response should be “If Japan buys the island, buy Japan.” I thinkthe point is clear—Japanese industry needs China still more than China needs Japan in economicterms.

WZ: Recently, your excellent work, Target China (Engdahl 2013), has been published in Chineseand drawn great interest. Since the subheading of the Chinese version implies that the US willtake some measures to “slay the dragon,” what is your main attitude towards these measures?And is there any significant advice on policy you would like to offer to China, which has torespond to them?

WE: Well first thank you for the friendly reception you give the work. I would say the mostimportant reason I wrote the book as I did after numerous discussions and visits to China overrecent years, was the awareness that many of the most potent “weapons” used by Washingtonto guarantee that China becomes a pliant “vassal” state and does what it is told were not reallyunderstood, even by some of the most sophisticated Chinese strategic analysts I had discussionswith. That is definitely the case with the Washington-led industrialization of the Chinese “ricebowl,” which will result in a dangerous loss of national food security. It is the case with US

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policies to control China’s access to imported energy—oil and gas. It is the case with China’sdependency on the dollar system, where it has little or no control. It is the case with themassive introduction of Western drugs and medicines, especially needless vaccines that ineffect weaken not strengthen the overall health security of the Chinese people. It is the casewith the massive Western attempts to break into Chinese media and cyberspace, including theInternet, via Google and other technologies.

When understood as a coherent totality, although many of the parts are by no means uniquelybeing imposed on China alone, the extent of the true threat to a healthy and economically prosper-ous peaceful China today becomes clearer. Only when we understand this can effective counter-measures be truly considered. In a number of policy areas I describe in the book I see veryencouraging signs of official Chinese reaction in taking positive measures to lessen the threat.In the areas of GMO seeds, agribusiness and true national food security as well as nationalenergy security, I fear the full extent of the threat is not fully understood.

Chinese soils are being rapidly depleted by industrialized farming technologies, whichproduce food of a far lower nutritional quality than formerly—quantity is replacing quality. Iam not certain but strongly suspect the recent serious air pollution problems in Beijing andother parts of China are directly related to growing “desertification” in the northern areas and else-where, and certainly not because of any manmade global warming.

In the area of energy security, China has yet to fully explore alternative methods to detect oiland gas and seems to be dangerously inclined to follow Western oil and gas companies in devel-oping oil and gas from shale by fracking, a highly dangerous move that threatens more earth-quakes in unstable Sichuan Province and depletes and possibly renders toxic already scarcewater. There are other points but I will close by saying that the most impressive quality of nationalcharacter that I have come to know in the Chinese friends I have made over the years is a deter-mination, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, to find successful solutions to pressing pro-blems. That inventive genius is what makes me optimistic about China’s future and her futurerole for peace and development in the world.

Notes on ContributorsF. William Engdahl is an independent political economist specializing for more than 30 years in the geopo-litical analysis of international political economy, food security, economics, energy and international affairs.He is author of many international best-selling books, including A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Poli-tics and the New World Order (2004), Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation(2007), Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (2009), and Gods ofMoney: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century (2010). He won a “Project Censored Award”for Top Censored Stories for 2007–08 because of his provocative analyses. He is active as a consulting pol-itical risk economist for major European banks and private investors.

Wang Zhen is an assistant professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China. Her researchfocuses on international economics and politics.

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globalresearch.ca/obama-s-geopolitical-china-pivot-the-pentagon-targets-china/32474.Harvey, D. 2005. The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press.Lenin, V. I. 1964. “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination.” In Lenin

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