PAUL JAY: Welcome back to The Real News Network, and welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself.
I'm Paul Jay.
We're continuing our discussion about who makes and what drives U.S. foreign policy.
And joining us again in the studio is Larry Wilkerson.
Larry is a retired United States Army officer, a former chief of staff to United States Secretary
of State Colin Powell. He teaches now at the College of William & Mary. And he's an often
contributor at The Real News.
Thanks for joining us again.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Thanks, Paul.
JAY: So there seems to be kind of two parallel processes going on. And I'm talking about--I
mean, it relates to U.S. foreign policy almost with all countries, but right now I'm interested
and I think everyone's interested in relations with China, even though the heat is with Russia
right now. Certainly President Obama's Asian pivot in the long-term strategic thinking
of the United States is: how do you manage the relationship with China?
And what I mean by two different processes. There's a tremendous amount of economic integration.
China holds more U.S. Treasury bills, I think, than anyone--any single place on earth. They
have--
WILKERSON: A little more than Japan.
JAY: --massive amounts of U.S. cash, tremendous integration in terms of the labor, Chinese
labor providing commodities for the American market, and so on and so on, a great deal
of economic integration, you can say even codependence on each other. On the other hand,
over here there's the Asian pivot on the American side. There's the strategy--what most people
call an encirclement of China.
WILKERSON: Hedging. That's what we call it.
JAY: Called hedging.
WILKERSON: Hedging strategy. Yes. We want peace, we want peaceful cooperation, we want
stability, but we're hedging our bets.
JAY: Well, hedging on both sides is pretty massive, the buildup of the American military
and the buildup of the Chinese military.
WILKERSON: And China's sort of machinations with Moscow.
JAY: And if this Cold War with the Russians gets even hotter and the sanctions start to
really threaten Russia's ability to export its energy, the obvious thing is we'll sell
it all to China.
WILKERSON: One of the interesting developments in this, Paul, has been India's posture. India
has remained more or less neutral in this business of pontificating about Ukraine, which
is probably disturbing to those in Washington who feel like India is the ultimate partner
encircling China or hedging our bets.
JAY: Yeah. We're the ones that gave them a nuclear submarine. How dare they not be on
board for this?
But in terms of the danger of war, which process is kind of more dominant? 'Cause it each has
its own logic. You would think the commercial integrations logic would trump that there
ever really would be that kind of confrontation. On the other hand, when you have these enormous
military buildups, the logic is somehow, someday, something happens.
WILKERSON: I think you're right, and it's something to watch very carefully and something
to try to form policies to prevent, I think. Hedging strategies can get out of hand on
both sides. China's almost preposterous, grandiose claims in the South China Sea can get out
of hand. These sorts of things have their own momentum, and before you know it, you're
staring at something that looks like you can't get out of it, whether it's over Taiwan, the
most likely fire point, or whether it's over something else we can't even see now, like,
for example, Filipino occupying a rock in the South China Sea. It's not a situation
that I would say is fraught with danger and potential for danger right now, but it could
be easily. It doesn't have the in-your-face aspect of Ukraine, this sort of great-power
standoff, Russia or Moscow and Washington, but it has, I think, a much longer term ability
to ruin not only U.S.-China relations, ultimately, but to impact the entire globe.
JAY: And how much is this driven by a real concern that this rivalry with China over--what?--markets,
over raw materials, and such and such really requires a military alternative versus how
much is this driven by what you were saying in the first segment, oligarchs (on both sides,
really, but I would say here it's more the American side) who just need another place
to have a military buildup, because everybody makes a killing out of this?
WILKERSON: Yeah, well, the president of China right now is having a hard time trying to
go after some of his oligarchs, who are just too corrupt for his own liking. And this is
reaching a point where it may be destabilizing for the Communist Party in and for China ultimately.
So I'm watching that very closely.
But at the same time, you have a situation here that's ripe for a great-state relationship.
What do I mean by a great-state relationship? Well, you sort of had that in 1648 with Westphalia,
which sort of set the road for monarchs and their peoples to, you know, be sovereign and
to exercise some tolerance and so forth, a state system you could argue we're still operating
under. You had the Atlantic Charter, too. The Atlantic Charter was--here's the greatest
empire in the world, receding, to be sure, and the nascent empire meeting and saying,
we're going to get together and have a great-state relationship to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial
Japan. And it worked. And the world had sort of a Pax Americana for half a century, virtually.
We need some sort of relationship like that between Washington and Beijing today, I think.
And I do not mean in any way that we should rule the world together. What I mean is the
challenges that we're going to confront in the 21st century, challenges that could be
existential, challenges like climate change, challenges like enough water to drink, enough
food to eat, and so forth--I've seen some projections that say--by climatologists whose
views I respect, that say by the end of this century we could have only arable land and
water enough for some half-billion people. What we do with the other 9 billion? Where
do we bury them, even? How do we deal with that kind of massive change in human relationships
with this planet? So these are huge challenges. So what I'm saying is you need this kind of
great-power relationship, this great-state relationship to begin to lead the way for
others to follow, others who are already doing a good job of it, like Germany, for example,
to meet these challenges which are much bigger than whether or not Taiwan is a part of China
or whether or not Ukraine is a part of Russia. These are tactical skirmishes on the fringes
of challenges that may have major impact on human life on this planet, and yet we don't
seem to be able to get the leadership to move to face and confront these challenges.
JAY: We were talking earlier before we started the interviews, and the kind of--I guess the
question came down to is capitalism as we know it out of these kinds of answers and
not capable of producing this kind of leadership. You know, this concentration of power in--I
should say the concentration of ownership, and so much in the hands of a section of capital
that's, you know, essentially parasitical, betting on derivatives markets and just gambling,
you know, with no interest in really strengthening the real economy of the United States and
taking advantage, wherever they can, around the world, the politics that reflects that,
I mean, to get to what you're talking about, that kind of relationship between states that
will face up to climate change and, I think, a looming, very deep economic crisis that's
going to hit that's going to be, you know, 1930s styles or worse--.
WILKERSON: Yes, and set everyone back in terms of their wanting to deal with climate change,
because it's going to be initially resource-intensive, probably.
JAY: So in terms of the discussion, discourse that ordinary people need to start getting
their heads around, I mean, does it not--you have to start talking about who owns stuff,
who has power in the United States, and what to do about it.
WILKERSON: Adam Smith's invisible hand in Wealth of Nations is now not an invisible
hand. It's the hand of oligarchs. So if you want a succinct answer, if capitalism is going
to help--going to be the economic, philosophical engine of this, meeting these challenges,
it's going to have to return to Adam Smith, but not just in Wealth of Nations, but also
in his moral sentiments. You've got to have a different version of capitalism. It cannot
be predatory capitalism, which both China and the United States are exemplifying massively
today, China like the U.S. did in the 1890s, 1880s, 1890s, and the United States in this
new form of collateralized debt obligations and all the rest of these financial innovations
that do nothing but make the rich richer and the poor poorer. So it's got to be a different
brand of capitalism or it's got to be a new economic system.
JAY: Yeah. And do we not have to then jettison all the baggage and shadow of the Cold War
rhetoric--McCarthyism, House un-American activities committees, all the stuff that has such weight
to stop you from discussing a new economic system?
WILKERSON: This is the huge component of a great-state relationship that would have to
be--it would have to manifest itself and it would have to do so before you get into the
challenges and the way you're going to meet them. And what do I mean by that? I mean what
Malcolm Byrne and John Tirman--at MIT, Malcolm at George Washington--have called empathy:
you have to understand the other person's side. Think of the Ukraine today. Think of
Iran today. You have to call crawl into the other person's shoes and understand their
side. And that means you have to recognize their culture. You have to, to certain extent,
honor the right they have to have that culture. You have to honor the right they have to design
their own political system and so forth, and quit this messianic desire to bring, you know,
these people down, those people down 'cause they're evil and contemptible. You have to
eliminate the politics of fear as much as possible. And you have to work together. You
have to genuinely work together.
That doesn't mean--Admiral Locklear said this recently, United States commander in the Pacific,
probably the most influential man in terms of immediate U.S.-China policy, U.S.-Asia
policy: he said China and the United States have more in common than they do have differences.
It's not a large majority, but it's a majority. The problem we have, the challenge we have
is to deal with the friction created by that minority of issues where we don't agree. Well,
that's what a great-state pact does. It says, we are going to push those issues aside, work
on them if we can in the corridors, and try to fix what we can. But we've got to have
a relationship that basically begins together (because you can't do it alone; you can't;
no country can do it alone), meets the challenges that we're confronting in this century, which
are huge.
JAY: But is part of the problem is that the people that are making policy here in the
United States, they do put themselves in the other shoes, in this sense? They look at themselves--.
WILKERSON: Well, the John McCains and the Lindsey Grahams, who are Luddites, they do.
JAY: Well, they look at themselves and they said, well, you know, we're predatory, so
they are too, so let's just do worst-case scenarios dealing with predatory supposed
allies that we know eventually--like we did with with the Germans, we may have economic
integration, we may trade with them, but we're also ready to go to war with them because
we're all really predators and that's what predators do.
WILKERSON: If that's the case, then let's just keep being predators and watch the planet
cast us off, because the planet is going to cast a soft, or at least a sizable majority
of us. There's no question in my mind about that. The planet will go on as it went on
after the dinosaurs, but human life might not. And that's the nature of the challenge
that we confront in this century.
In this century, in my grandchildren's lifespan, major, major impacts will begin to occur,
indeed may already be occurring. Pacific nations, for example, like Palau understand they're
going to be underwater and they have to relocate their whole populations. These kinds of things
are going to happen with a frequency and a drama that is going to convince everyone.
But is it going to be too late?
JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Larry.
WILKERSON: Surely.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network and Reality Asserts Itself.