America set to slid into a political chaos

By: Azhar Azam

Even though Democrats have dashed Republicans’ hopes to control the Senate after flipping an upper-house seat in Pennsylvania, the balance of power in the House of Representatives is complex rather than elusive as elephants are to gain a small majority in the House of Representatives, so far sealing 218 seats against donkeys’ 2211.

The US President Joe Biden may blow his own horn of having “lost fewer seats” in the House that any Democrat president over the last 40 years; he cannot get away with the fact Americans have voted Democrats out from the House for his failure to meet economic pledges and efforts to lift his global stature by representing himself as the international guardian of democracy or touching flashy subjects relating to the sovereignty of other countries.

Americans were grappling with soaring inflation, the US was sliding into polarization and the country encountered serious economic and human fallouts of the Covid-19, Biden put all energy into defining an era of great power competition, promoting the US governance system and outcompeting China in economy and technology. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan almost pushed the world into the cold-war camps.

Contrary to expectations he would moderate his view over time, Biden clung to a lose-lose proposition of a new cold war to counter economically and technologically powerful China. The approach didn’t solve the US real domestic problems or restore Americans’ trust in democracy, instead increased their cost of living, compounded the US economic anxieties and made a majority of Americans pessimistic about the state of democracy in the country.

Once failed to lure voters despite his reassuring talk on economy and inflation and realized the US democracy crisis was homegrown, the Democrat president acknowledged: the country’s governance system faced risks from within. Of late, he believed democracy was in danger from the threats of “dangerous rise of political violence and voter intimidation.”

Biden, of course, seemed worried about the reelection of hundreds of Republican lawmakers who earlier rejected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and may be joined by a new group of the Congressmen to refuel controversies and question the integrity of America’s electoral system and his win.

Just a few hours after the deadly January 6 riots on the US Capitol in Washington, some 147 Republican lawmakers (139 House Representatives and 8 Senators) would dispute the reliability of the US presidential election and sought to overturn it over remarkable allegations of voter fraud and cheating.

Democrats went into the elections with their president posing perpetual threats to international peace, stability and prosperity. In midterms, the “red wave” didn’t materialize but there are more challenges to come and test the US democracy with more than 140 Trump-backed Republican candidates winning their races. These election deniers had a big night and the number indicates “an erosion of trust” in the country’s governance system and institutions.

In 2022, the US is far more polarized and divided following the Supreme Court’s revocation of its landmark 1973 verdict that guaranteed abortion rights in all states. The widening gulf between the right and the left, amid conservative-liberal race to grab power, won’t stop post-midterm election and could spark another political crisis, raising alarms about crime surge, inflation, economic slowdown and a possible recession.

Polls revealed inflation and the economy were the top voters’ issues. Republicans read the pulse and campaigned against Democrats’ poor record on economy, blasting their rival’s economic approach to whip "individual prosperity." Biden offers nothing on the economy or other challenges and keeps portraying threats to the US democracy, if Republicans win.

Eventually, it is Biden’s approach that has allowed Republicans to hammer him on high inflation and increased crime. Given control of even one chamber would embolden Republicans to thrash Biden’s legislative measures; the US could head toward an economic and political turmoil in the coming months. Biden boasted democracy and job growth but just a fraction of Americans approved of his performance and wanted something practical to relieve them from harrowing inflation.

He considered removing some tariffs on China to tame inflation; the Federal Reserve chose to slash prices through higher interest rates, which are making Americans poorer by bringing their asset value down. Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers last month warned the recession was “almost inevitable” once inflation exceeds 5% and reducing prices would require a jobless rate of more than 6%, which likely meant millions of Americans losing their jobs.

In 2020, Biden vowed to unite America and Americans hoped he would defeat the pandemic, protect lives and communities and revitalize economy. Yet by focusing on building unholy international alliances, advocating democracy abroad and embracing his predecessor’s frame of great power competition with China, the US president soon abandoned his promises and voters and let the real US challenges dilate.

Just two years later Republicans campaigned on the economy and upended Democrats' majority in the House, though by a thin margin. But even a small lead will authorize the elephants to muck up donkeys’ legislative enactments. This makes the emerging political scenario in the Congress extraordinarily complex in which partisan politics will peak and Biden may not be able to deliver benefits to Americans as well as protect them and the US economy from the forthcoming eternal and horrific economic consequences.

Why is Biden's security doctrine self-defeating and self-destructive?

By: Azhar Azam

The U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken unveiled the U.S. strategy toward China last May and summed up the Biden administration's cold war mindset in three terms: invest, align and compete. America's new National Security Strategy (NSS) interlinked all three elements to reestablish a unipolar international order to outcompete China across the realms of technological, economic, political, military, intelligence and global governance.

The White House Fact Sheet insists the U.S. doesn't see the world "through a competitive lens." This is an empty-worded statement, since Biden's doctrine identifies China as America's "most consequential geopolitical challenge" and "most consequential competitor" for it's the "only competitor," which can stymie the American hallucination through a collaborative arrangement of promotion of international peace and global economic growth.

In his NSS, former U.S. President Donald Trump portrayed Beijing as a "strategic competitor" and wanted to transform the Asia-Pacific into a region of "geopolitical competition." By accusing China's economic and peaceable approach vis-a-vis states in the Asia-Pacific as an effort to stretch its "sphere of influence," describing the region as the "epicenter of 21st century geopolitics" and declaring its competition with China more pronounced in the region – there are broad echoes of his predecessor's rhetoric in Biden's strategy to undermine the regional economy and peace.

Biden's White House wants the Asia-Pacific to play a vanguard role for the U.S. to implement its unruly policy across the wider expanse. But threats to its regional autonomy, security and prosperity do not emanate from China, since the U.S. is blowing up regional harmony, growth and peace by conducting high-wire acts of military exercises, challenging the sovereignty of China and meddling in its internal affairs.

Trump's NSS argued that the U.S. showed "strategic complacency" in the 1990s when the country assumed the collapse of the Soviet Union had guaranteed its military superiority and the world would chart the course of a liberal-democratic engagement. He alleged that China attempted to erode the U.S. security and prosperity and stole U.S. intellectual property to justify his tariff and tech crusade against the Chinese government, companies and people including science students.

The belief was misleading. It has been America's arrogance and craving for global dominance through its invasions of independent nations with the intent to impose its governance system on them, which devoured trillions of American taxpayers' dollars.

Biden is treading on the same dangerous path. His "strategic competition with major powers," according to his NSS, is a much riskier proposition than his predecessor's "great power competition." Indeed, the latest NSS is a continuation of the U.S. aspiration of world dominance and goes beyond China, since it intends to coerce an "unrivaled" network of allies and partners to advance America's interests the world over.

Apparently, Washington is too optimistic in expecting sovereign nations to cede their own national interests and act as the U.S. instrument to challenge its rivals on America's behalf. Hence, the growing notion of a multipolar world can be receded to the distance and a U.S.-centric international order could be restituted. The U.S. containment strategy against China, particularly in technology and economy, is just a foot in the door to implement a sweeping U.S. global offensive plan.

The U.S. pledges to replenish the "reservoirs" of national power through "targeted" investments in areas such as foundational technologies and innovation; the "targeted" export controls from the U.S. Commerce Department just a week prior to the release of the NSS pointed out America was putting full-throttle attacks to limit Chinese peaceable technology advancement.

At a time when the world needs global cooperation on science, technology and innovation to achieve economic diversification and higher levels of productivity, a slew of new aggressive restrictions on Chinese companies impedes international tech collaboration and threatens the global industrial and supply chains. The high-tech containment could backfire over non-support from the U.S. allies and partners and will inflict harm to America's innovation from the growing muscle of this increasing nationalism.

China's phenomenal growth rates in the past have allowed it to lift over 800 million people out of extreme poverty and improve their quality of life. The achievements fascinate the developing countries to draw closer to the country and learn how to handle the complex development challenges including transitioning to a new growth model, building a cost-effective health system and promoting a low-carbon energy path, all of which the world's second largest economy has successfully encountered.

Despite concerns over a slowdown in China's growth, it continues to exceed the leading economies, holding a bright spot for multinational consumer conglomerates. Given that the developed world's markets are stagnated by rising interest rates and higher energy costs, the Chinese economy is estimated to account for about one-third of the global growth next year, more than three times than the U.S.

China's economy is projected to take over the U.S. within this decade. In order to prevent this shock from happening, Biden's NSS declares the next 10 years as "decisive" and tries to replace global values with America's.

Biden's NSS can be anything but rational. It strives to stir dissent among the regions yet provides no layout to unite the divided America and doesn't address the plight of inflation-battered Americans. The U.S. cannot secure itself by defining the era of international development and economic and technological cooperation as a contest between "democracy and autocracy;" the new strategy is self-defeating and self-destructive right from the outset.

*This is my opinion piece that first appeared at "China Global Television Network (CGTN)":

Democratic peace theory perpetuates US's invasive and meddlesome foreign policy

By: Azhar Azam

The empirical and theoretical variants of the U.S. political philosophy, democratic peace theory – "monadic" (democracies generally are pacific in their relations with other states), "dyadic" (democracies do not go at war with other democracies) and "systemic" (the existence of more democracies makes a region or the international system more peaceful) as well as the proposition the democracies tend to fight shorter and win wars or avoid military aggression – are conceptually crude and no less than an intellectual gaffe.

Washington's covert intervention in foreign democracies is one fine example. An overriding principle of the democratic peace theory is: the democracies do not use force against each other. But the researches show the U.S. has not only been involved in use of force to topple a number of democracies by use of force; it also attempts to influence the results of foreign elections.

Just a couple of years before the establishment of the UN, the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt joined British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin in the Tehran Conference in 1943. During the summit, he outlined his vision of "Four Policemen" to Stalin, comprising China, Soviet Union, Britain and the U.S. , that "would have the power to deal immediately with any threat to the peace and any sudden emergency which requires action."

Soon the U.S. flouted its own proposal and ganged up an alliance against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which it believed posed a challenge to promotion of the so-called liberal democracy around the world. The Soviet Union collapsed, marking the official end of the Cold War; international governments' and the public's concerns about "hypocrisy costs," a "real or perceived disparity between a professed commitment to liberal values and norms and demonstrated actions that contravene such commitment," drove the U.S. decision makers conducting military operations secretly in the post-Cold War.

On the onset of the 21st century, the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S. strengthened the world's memory that the terrorism was a genuine threat to global peace and security. Yet for America, one of the greatest catastrophes in the country's history provided an opportunity to coerce its democratic peace model on other states. It unlawfully invaded Iraq in 2003 without authorization of the UN Security Council in violation of the organization's UN charter that remained the bedrock of international relations since the end of the World War II.

Quite a few in the U.S. continue to be in a state of denial any other democratic system can offer a better substitute to America's governance model, fearing it will end their already shaking liberal hegemony. They label rivals as "autocratic," "authoritarian" or "totalitarian."

Such observations fail to notice the U.S. was shooting itself in the foot by trying to implement its democratic peace theory internationally. The U.S. covert military actions failed to encourage "democratic accountability" in the post-Cold War countries; its grievous invasions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states left them more destabilized.

This "false promise" to mete out liberal democracy to the world for restoring America's dominance ruined Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and many African countries; the U.S. disregard of the Mideast's grandeur and long history overwhelmed the region's cultural heritage, allowing the terrorist organizations to reconsolidate power.

Another essential tool to push America's democratic peace and strategic interests is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The U.S. quasi-governmental organization was created in 1983 and channeled millions of taxpayers' dollar to counter the USSR. In recent years, it has expanded its network to other parts of the world.

But nations and domestic groups are standing up to the U.S. for resorting to democratic interference. While people in Thailand demand America to stop "hybrid war," rights activists of Malaysia seek their political parties to stop accepting funds from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s "soft power front," referring to the NED. The CIA "sidekick" has even ploughed millions into seven British media groups, according to investigative media organization the Declassified UK.

At present, China is the specific target of the NED. Counting on relentless financial support of the White House and Congress, it has been approaching the opposition parties, groups and organizations in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

For decades, democratic peace theory fueled up the struggling neoliberals to destabilize the world states, allies or non-allies, through global spread of capitalism and expand the U.S. hegemony. Yesterday, Latin America and the Caribbean was the target of the U.S. invasive foreign policy; today it is the MENA region and China and tomorrow, it seems to be Europe. Even as America fails to achieve objectives, international solidarity should be strengthened against threats to state sovereignty and global peace from the U.S. to pressure Washington mend the invasive character of its hawkish and predatory posture.

*This is my opinion piece that first appeared at "China Global Television Network (CGTN)":

Bolsonaro or Lula: Brazil’s real test is about to begin

By: Azhar Azam

*This article was written prior to the final round of the Brazilian election

In the last few years, Brazil, under the President Jair Bolsonaro has degenerated into a diplomatic isolation due to a bolshie, radical foreign policy of attacking China, pursuing an anti-environmental and “anti-globalist” approach and supporting Donald Trump’s voter-fraud theories. This affected Brazil's relations with the coming Biden administration and his ambitions to revitalize the Brazilian economy.

According to the World Bank's updated review, Brazil’s economic recovery including inflation and rising policy rates in 2022 faces significant downside risks over low labor force participation, fewer job opportunities and higher poverty. As fiscal sustainability poses a serious economic challenge, Brazil – set to hold the presidential runoff on October 30 –needs to strengthen ties with China, its most important trade partner since 2009.

Brazil, a key member of the regional economic bloc – the Southern Common Market known as Mercosur in Spanish or Mercosul in Portuguese – boasts a significant trade surplus with China. Several South American countries are Beijing's comprehensive strategic partners; Brasilia stands out from the rest for it became the first regional state to enter in a strategic partnership with Beijing in November 1993.

Much is debated about China’s policy of cooperation and engagement. But it’s a fact the Chinese approach has successfully moderated the brusqueness of some international leaders who seem to be less-friendly to the world’s second largest economy. Brazil’s Bolsonaro is one of such examples.

On his fiery campaign trail in 2018, the outspoken Brazilian leader criticized China for “buying” the country; still, Beijing defended Brasilia’s sovereignty very next year when Bolsonaro faced raging western criticism in wake of Amazon fires. The “grand gesture” buoyed up the Brazilian president to visit China and pronounce it an “ever greater part” of his nation’s future.

Despite scathing opposition on federal level and diplomatic isolation of the “Trump of the Tropics” in the West, China provided “fantastic” vaccines and medical supplies to the Brazilian states and helped Bolsonaro project himself internationally through the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summits. This again drove him into taking a more pragmatic stance vis-à-vis Beijing.

As the presidential race between Bolsonaro and former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva draws near – the latter has a long history of being close to China. In his first official trip to China, Lula in 2004 would take along the largest caravan of businessmen ever present abroad to have a foothold in a market of 1.2 billion people and institutionalized the Brazil-China relationship.

During his presidency, China became Brazil’s top trading partner in 2009 and subsequently emerged as the world’s sixth-largest economy in 2011. His then-foreign minister Celso Amorim, who played a role in the BRICS formation and is now Lula’s foreign policy adviser, in January emphasized a “pragmatic” foreign policy regarding China and recently warned “isolation, sanctions, blockades (and) threats of force” were exacerbating the global peace and economic situation.

Even as more than half of the Brazilian networks were built by Huawei, the government caved in to the US pressure and shunted the Chinese telecom giant out of the competition for government sector. The Latin American country, however, allowed Huawei to continue providing service to its 242 million active mobile connections (more than Brazil’s population), leaving the window open for Huawei to enter the game in future.

As the two nations celebrate the 10th anniversary of the China-Brazil Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, bilateral trade between Beijing and Brasilia, according to the Brazilian government’s statistics, has swollen from $9 billion in 2004 to $135 billion in 2021. Brazil is also the top recipient of Chinese foreign investments in Latin America with an accumulated stock of $66 billion between 2007 and 2020.

Brazil seeks to expand and diversify trade and investment with China and Beijing is willing to boost cooperation across all sectors including in agriculture, low-carbon and clean-technology and digital economy. The stage may be set to bolster bilateral economic and strategic ties; further high-level engagements are the key to bridge differences and make fast progress on mutual interests.

As Lula follows the footsteps of Bolsonaro and accuses China of “occupying Brazil” – whether to mobilize electoral support or make Beijing a “scapegoat” of the country’s lack of competitiveness internationally – it appears as if, irrespective of whoever wins, will look at Beijing through the US perspective. Yet the cost may be too high. While this approach can put the Brazilian economy at a disadvantage, it leaves the country at the mercy of America and the West without any guarantee of ending its diplomatic isolation.