Imperialism with a human face?

David Lammy’s recent article, The Case for Progressive Realism. Why Britain Must Chart a New Global Course in Foreign Affairs claims to base itself on a “politics based on respect for facts”, to look for “realist means to pursue progressive ends” and seek “the pursuit of ideals without delusions”. His problem is that the “facts” he uses are filtered by and seen through an ideological lens that distorts them, turns things upside down and inside out; and it rapidly becomes clear that the “new course” he proposes is a reprise of the old one; as the “chart” he is using is marked up with the same old, same old Foreign Policy Shibboleths that have defined UK policy since Suez. Primarily being most favoured auxiliary for the USA during the “American Century”, and a willing supporter of attempts to prolong it for another.

Lammy aims to square a lot of circles, because that course is now increasingly unviable, and the contradictions are starting to creak. In the attempt he skates at speed across a thin ice of delusions about the world that make the ideals he touches on in places unattainable. The “means” that he defines as “realistic” are incompatible with the ends he describes as “progressive”. It is therefore not entirely coherent. Andrew Fisher, possibly kindly, describes his article as a “word salad”.

Before going through this point by point, more or less in his order, I’d like to examine one extraordinarily strange phrase that crops up near the end but, in its way, summarises the fundamental contorted distortions of his world view.

He writes “at times in the Twentieth Century, Western powers undermined the sovreignty of weaker states, especially in the Global South”.

Where do you start with this?

“At times”. As if this were an occasional aberation. An uncharacteristic lapse from an otherwise egalitarian norm of sunny mutual respect. As in, the people of the Congo had their sovreignty “undermined” “at times” by Belgium and “at times” died in their millions. Or, “at times”, Britain presided over famines in India that it took independence to stop. I could go on.

Do I really have to point out that, for the first half of the Twentieth Century, most of the Global South had no sovreignty at all, as they were under the direct territorial control of “Western” Imperial powers.

Nor that this was not abandoned willingly by the “West” in the second half of the century either.

• The UK, France and Portugal fought a series of viscious post colonial rearguard actions against independence movements right up to the 1970s; Vietnam, Malaya, Aden (Yemen), Algeria, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Guinnea-Bissau.
• Settler colonial regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa kept this up to the 1980s and 90s, and Israel is still doing it today.
• The United States picked up “the white man’s burden” from France in Vietnam with lethal effect (2 million killed) backed coups and military take overs in Indonesia (600,000 killed) and all over Latin America; Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile.
• The “neo colonial” settlement that allowed formal independence for former colonies left them at the mercy of their former colonial overlords, sometimes embodied in formal structures ensuring financial control and military presence, as in France Afrique until recently; leaving most of the Global South for most of the rest of the twentieth century hog tied by debt and unequal exchange, and sometimes fought over for resources.
• Within this, the US gained greater weight over its imperial rivals via economic domination (the US notion of “decolonisation” being the removal of barriers put in the way of their trade by the territorial control of imperial competitors).
• This has led to a process of incorporation and subordination of European powers and Japan into a dominant US centred imperial bloc with a parasitic relationship to the rest of the world; which is where we are now.

Western powers “undermine the sovreignty of weaker powers, especially in the Global South”, not just “at times”, but do so all the time as a structural norm. This is underpinned by an unparallelled capacity to unleash violence on anyone who steps out of line. Recognising this is “realism”. Failing to see it is “delusion”. Accepting or supporting it is siding with the oppressor against the oppressed, the exploiter against the exploited. Always.

Things ain’t what they used to be

Lammy, however, starts his essay by bemoaning how this has began to change; comparing the world at the time of the last Labour landslide in 1997 with the one that will greet the next in 2024.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was possible to believe in an eternal Pax Americana, in which the entire world would eventually turn into one gigantic American suburb, through US led globalisation and the wonders of the free market. This was a fantasy, even at the time.

What Lammy describes as “the liberal democratic model” – in which all countries would eventually become wealthy clones of the US (just later in the fullness of time, after a little bit of inevitable gradualism) – meant for most of the world to continue living under the crushing weight of the Washington consensus; which policed all development in US interests, guaranteeing that millions were trapped in extreme poverty, forced to live in teeming self built slums, or rural desperation, their resources extracted for little or no benefit by Western multinationals, essential services like water supply privatised; with the threat of military intervention standing permanently behind the IMF and the World Bank.

In 1997, with a slight whiff of “Good Old Days” nostalgia, he notes that the UK had an economy that was larger than those of China and India combined; and it still adminstered Hong Kong as a colony. Not any more. Never again.

Bull in a China shop

Now, as Lammy notes, “China is a superpower”. It has a larger economy than the US, in Purchase Power Partity terms. Lammy does not note, but we should, that it has been mostly in this period from 1997 that China lifted 850 million of its people out of poverty, and eliminated extreme poverty altogether in 2020. A feat described by a Labour Foreign Policy Group report in 2021 as “perhaps the single most significant contribution to human wellbeing in world history”. Something that you’d think someone with “ideals” and “moral purpose” might welcome, or even seek to learn from.

But not a bit of it. Lammy chooses to interpret this as a threat and a “systemic challenge to British interests” (a phrase that begs more than one question).

“Democracies” – a word he uses as a euphemism for the core Imperial powers which are tightly allied to, and coralled, by the United States – are “on the back foot” and losing the “hearts and minds” of the Global South “middle class”; such that “countries described … by CIA Director William Burns as the “hedging middle” are striking bargains and setting their own agendas in Africa, Asia, and Latin America” and, even worse, “they ignore the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States ever more frequently”.

They are just not doing what they are told anymore, dammit!

It is the rise of China, and the failure of the US to contain it, that has sent US politics into such a delirious tailspin. Because, if the US truly is the one indispensible nation, with a political and economic system that is the best in the world, then this should not be happening. But, happening it is. And, if everything you believe about the world is being shown to be false, but you can’t bring yourself to break with your beliefs, it becomes possible, even necessary, to believe ten impossible things before breakfast to try to make sense of it. An impulse to seek truth from anything other than the facts is characteristic of the MAGA movement, but not confined to them. “Realism” is too unbearable to be acceptable. So, dangerous fantasies take its place.

We should note at this point that more people in China think that their country is a democracy – a country run in the interests of the people – than people in the US do. In a study published by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation and Latana data tracking firm, when asked whether they believe their country is democratic, those in China topped the list, with 83% saying it is, and 91% also saying that this is important to them. In the US, only 49% of those asked said their country was a democracy and 76%, said it was important.

That looks like this.

Percentage of people in each country that consider it to be a democracy

We should also note that Lammy’s concern with the “middle class” in the Global South is an odd one if his major concern is with development. A striking feature of most of the Global South is the class polarisation, with very extreme Gini coefficients which show a wealthy layer with living standards comparable to those in the “West” sitting on top of a much larger number of impoverished people living in varying degrees of desperate precarity. Rajiv Ghandi’s formula of “France in India” is quite a good way to envisage this; that India contained a nation with roughly the same population and wealth as France – about 65 million – atop over a billion living in desperate straits. This polarity explains the extremity of Rightist Global South politics, producing figures like Bolsonaro or Milei. Wealthy people living in close proximity to teeming masses that they feel threatened by often feel the need to keep in their place with extreme violence. I suspect that when Lammy talks of the “middle class”, he is refering to the wealthier sort, who are in no way middling, economically or politically, but he never clarifies.

Lammy comes back down to Earth to note, appropriately, that “Climate breakdown is no longer a future worry. It is here”. He also notes that China, the US and EU all have green transition plans that require large amounts of state led investment, to a degree that the UK does not, but without digging into the figures that show that only China is doing this on the necessary scale. This is from Adam Tooze. “Measured against the $ 4 trillion per annum benchmark, the only country (my emphasis) that over the last decade has come anywhere close to spending, lending and investing on the required scale is CCP-led China“.

Bloomberg’s tabulation of the $1.1 Trillion investment in energy transition in 2022 shows the following.

China’s investment in energy transition in 2022 was almost double that of the US and EU put together. And this gap is accelerating.

It might be fair to conclude from this that it is just as well that China did not follow the Western economic model, and that its state directed economy is better able to deal with this challenge. Without their investment in renewables, having made them cheaper than fossil fuels, we would already be sunk.

Lammy however regrets that China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation did not lead to the adoption of “liberal democratic values”, putting the private sector in the driving seat of the economy and polity. Had they done so, China could be just as succesful as we are with our neo liberal model that crashed in 2008, is now leading to ever greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority; while infrastructure crumbles and standards of living for the majority stagnate or decline. In fact, China is the only large economy in the world in which wage rates have risen consistently for workers in the last decade, such that these are now higher than they are in Portugal and Greece and comparable with Poland.

I think Lammy is being a bit previous in stating that “the rise of China has ended the era of US hegemony”, but it certainly challenges it in trade, technology and scientific innovation – all of which flows from China’s refusal to accept permanent status as a low grade mass manufacturer, most favoured sweat shop providing cheap imports for Western consumers, while stuck in a middle level development trap for its own citizens.

Most countries around the world now trade more with China than the US, and this is a trajectory that is increasing, making attempts to “decouple” an act of self harm. This is true even when defined as “derisking” (a phrase based on the paranoia that its so much worse if a Chinese smart fridge company knows when you need to buy more milk than when Google does). Cutting Chinese tech out of 5G broadband – the most advanced in the world – is an example of voluntarily adopting additional costs for a slower service, which has the additional negative consequence of increasing unnecessary tensions. Partly because of US high technology sanctions, China has increasingly innovated and is now considered to have a lead in 37 out of 44 key technological indicators. This is particularly crucial in green transition, so “derisking” in this area carries with it a lot of serious risks that we can’t afford.

The key area in which the US maintains a crushing dominance is precisely the one that Lammy tries to present as the most threatening; the military. Lammy warns that the Chinese Navy has more ships than any other, but, as World Population Review points out, counting a small patrol vessel as having the same significance as an aircraft carrier “is akin to saying a squirrel is the same as a rhino, or a scooter is the same as an 18-wheel semi-truck”, so, “to better estimate the overall power of a given navy, some analysts turn to tonnage, which is a measure of the amount of water a ship displaces or the amount of cargo it can carry”. By this measure, the US Navy, at 3,415,893 tonnes, is just under five times bigger than the Chinese Navy, at 708,886 tonnes. As Shadow Foreign Secretary, you’d expect Lammy to know that. Perhaps he does, and is just chancing his arm in the hope that no one will check.

We can also look at this in terms of the scale of overall military spending. This year, the US is spending $831,781,000,000 on its front line military. Monthly Review has argued for some years that US military spending figures underestimate the true quantity by about half, but, even if we go with the declared amount, China’s spend of $227,000,000,000 is less than a third of the US total.

This understimates the balance, however, as direct US allies in the region, like Australia (which has a collosal military budget for a country its size), Japan and South Korea add an additional $150 billion; and some proportion of the UK’s $62 billion has to be allocated through its commitments to the AUKUS Treaty. And we should note that all these allies are under intense US pressure to increase and coordinate this spending, and other NATO allies like Italy are entering into joint projects with Japan, which is doubling its expenditure at the present time.

You can look at it in terms of overseas bases too. The US has 750 bases in 80 countries. China has 1 (in 1). The US bases near China encircle it, as we can see here. There are no Chinese bases anywhere near the United States.

The same applies to deployment. US aircraft carrier task forces, sometimes with the Royal Navy’s new carriers (probably the ugliest boats in the world, not an essential point, but they really are hideous looking) as auxiliaries regularly steam up and down the South China Sea. No Chinese Navy forces at all deploy to the Gulf of Mexico or English Channel. Imagine the headlines in the Daily Mail or USA Today if they did. In that light, it is quite amazing how calmly China takes this.

You can also look at it in terms of balance of nuclear power. The United States has 5,244 nuclear weapons. China has 500, a tenth as many. China also has a defensive, no first strike policy – the only nuclear power to have one. A First Strike policy has been US military doctrine since the 1960s, and remains so, even though it has been known since the 1980s that this would be suicidal even if it worked. The explosion of smoke and debris above the cloud layer from the first overwhelming salvo of missiles would blot out sunlight for several years; causing a nuclear winter that would obliterate the “victorious” powers through temperature collapse and starvation, just as surely as the defeated would be incinerated and blasted to death. For a sobering and essential examination of this see John Bellamy Foster’s Notes on Exterminism.

Characteristically, Lammy does not note that no one in China is arguing for a war with the United States. In fact they argue for “win, win cooperation” and “a common home for humanity” as we move towards an “ecological civilisation”; all of which seem both reasonable and essential positions that it would be helpful for humanity if the West were to respond to positively. Nor does he point out that arguing for such a war within the next decade as the only way to stop a peaceful rise by China is now a live debate in mainstream US Foriegn Policy circles; and that maybe this is more than somewhat unhinged.

Arising from all this, the question that has to be realistically asked is, who is threatening whom? Who is posing the “real security threat” and how dangerous is this, realistically? And shouldn’t Labour be seeking to restrain this rather than hype it up and cheer it on? Instead Lammy argues for AUKUS to be “a floor not a ceiling”. This is, realistically, a path to war; the consequence of which cannot be considered to have any “moral purpose” whatsoever.

It is slightly mind boggling that, while he pushes this antagonistic and confrontational military alliance, he thinks positive engagement with China on economic development, climate breakdown and AI (particularly as China is leading on this) can pootle along happily in a sort of paralell universe, not distracted at all by the war drums he is so busily beating, nor thrown off course by the diversion of necessary investment into the suicidal dead end of an arms race. You can make up your own mind about whether this is remotely “realistic” or contains a scintilla of “moral purpose”.

Little Britain blues

More parochially, in an attempt to have “tough minded honesty about the UK”, Lammy goes on to note what he sees as its three key problems.

1. Its economy is stuck in a low growth, low productivity, low investment slump. Which, given his concern with green transition and positive remarks about state led investment in China, the EU and US, should make him question why Labour has shrunk its green investment plan to little more than is already on the stocks from the Conservatives. He notes that the UK has the lowest level of investment in the G7, but seems to think that Keir Starmer’s “mission” to get the highest growth is possible without this investment, if only the country would have enough self belief. As delusions go, this is a big one.
2. Its armed forces are too small; which is only the case if you want to prepare for a war that could easily kill us all instead of taking active steps to avert it.
3. Public Services are crumbling. He could have noted that this also goes for infrastructure, which brings us back to the need for investment which the “realism” of the Shadow Treasury team rules out. So, do not pass Go…

Realism is for him embodied by Ernest Bevin’s actions as Foreign Secretary in the post war Labour government. The flip side of the progressive measures taken by that government, founding the welfare state and NHS, nationalising key industries, was its resolute continuity in Imperial Foriegn Policy; which led it to resist decolonisation, form NATO, aquire atomic bombs, join in the Korean war: and maintain military spending at such a high level that it had to sustain austerity to a degree that got it voted out of office in 1951.

Recognising that “realism alone will not be enough to save the planet” – which essentially means that “realism” defined in this way is anything but realistic – and that the “West” has “to cooperate with its rivals on climate change and AI” leads him to disinter the ghost of Robin Cook as the Push Me to Ernest Bevin’s Pull You. Cook is lauded for his promotion of “human rights” and “soft power”, embodied in the 0.7% of GDP allocated to development aid (a figure that Lammy notes, but does not commit to restoring) and his “realism” in making “hard choices” about “arms exports”, ie letting them go ahead. Lammy’s subsequent assertion that “governments don’t have to choose between values and interests” is belied by this.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t

So far so confusing; but Lammy’s attempt to have his bomb and drop it continues. The “West” made mistakes. Its interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the whole war on terror, became “seen as” a “recipe for disorder” because, despite initial military wins, it was unable to stabilise a viable pro Western regime anywhere. Its power lasted just as long as it could sustain boots on the ground, which is not indefinitely. The resulting chaos and impoverishment has not gone unnoticed across the world. The “moral purpose” that Lammy argues for, loses out to “self interest” every time. And because, of the decadent, parasitic stage they are now in, the US and its allies are sucking capital in, not spreading it out, and are therefore incapable of “nation building”.

Four and a half million people were killed in these wars, which I think should be categorised as the first phase of the Wars for the New American Century. Ukraine and Gaza are the start of an even more dangerous second phase, as a more desperate US takes greater risks.

The Rules are for the Little People

Lammy takes the Rules Based International Order as the embodiment of a viable global civilisation, but it is widely understood in the world that the rule that defines the rules is that Washington makes all them, none of them apply to the USA (and select few of its closest allies) and they will be changed on a whim.

A small example of this was the 1984 case at the International Court of Justice in 1984, when Nicaragua won compensation of £17 billion from the US for the damage done by the US-funded Contra war and the mining of its ports. Not a cent was paid. Who was going to make them?

A more recent example is the reaction to the ICJ ruling that Israel has a case to answer that it is commiting genocide in Gaza. The instant reaction from the US and its allies was to defund UNWRA on the back of unsubstantiated accusations from Israel that some of its workers took part in Oct 7th. That is a direct act of collusion in the attempt to starve Palestinians, and two fingers up to the formal structures of international law.

So, the failure of these interventions were a blow to Western hegemony. As Tom Tugendhat put it after the Afghan withdrawal “This feels like defeat”. But, in a quick pivot, Lammy asserts that Western standing was also damaged by the failure to intervene in Syria, or take a harder line in Ukraine in 2014.

What Lammy is describing here, without thinking it through, is that whatever the “West” does, deepens its crisis. It loses ground when it doesn’t intervene, causes chaos when it does.

Pursuing War not Peace in Ukraine

This is demonstrably the case in Ukraine. The West is supporting Ukraine like a rope supports a hanging man. The country is being destroyed. More than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died so far. A great investment according to David Cameron, as “not a single American life has been lost”.

If their concern were genuinely with peace and security in Europe, NATO would at least have been prepared to negotiate with Russia about mutual security arrangements in the Winter of 2021. Instead, we had a hubristic refusal to engage to ease off tensions, which has led to the war which NATO is now visibly losing, amidst appalling casualties and damage.

The sanctions against Russia have failed. Most of the world does not support them, because, as Lammy notes, they see the conflict as between “the West vs the rest”; and have long experience of not being “at the table” with the US, and therefore being “on the menu”, as Antony Blinken put it recently. And they are no longer so securely under the West’s thumb.

Lammy’s support for military “burden sharing” for “as long as it takes to secure victory” is hard to square with any notion of “realism” if “victory” means Ukraine reconquering parts of its pre 2014 territory which actually see themselves as Russian. Even people who consider that to be desirable, have a hard job arguing that its possible. Phrases like “once Ukraine has prevailed” are evidently hollow.

Instead of looking to a peace agreement, as outlined here, that would allow all people in all parts of Ukraine to live in the state they wish to, secure neutrailty and reduce military tensions across the continent, Lammy argues for a “long term generational response” to the “Russian threat”. Again, this is playing on fantasies, as NATO at present already spends more than eleven times as much as the Russians do on its military. That looks like this.

Total military spending 2024

The NATO bloc on this is approprately reminiscent of Pacman, and should probably have teeth drawn on it

What Lammy is proposing is a long term “generational” increase in the military industrial complex and militarisation of society, with some military sources floating the reintroduction of conscription, at a time in which the “realism” of the Treasury team will impose freezes and austerity on everything else.

The (Republican) Elephant in the room

Lammy’s argument for closer links with EU powers, and bilateral pacts to supplement NATO, are the only hint of the nervousness that all the Labour front bench feel that they could be coming into power at the same point that Donald Trump takes back possession of the White House.

Its not surprising that Lammy – with stopping climate change one of his progressive aims – does not explore this possibility; as the US under Trump would go full rogue state on climate change, pull out of the Paris Agreement like they did before and “drill, drill drill” – with an overall impact of an additional 4 billion tonnes of CO2 released by the US the end of his second term. This would make a 1.5C limit completely unachievable, and the damage globally would be horrific.

Lammy, as potential Foreign Secretary would therefore either have to straddle an impossible contradiction in which the main perceived “threat”, China, was investing in the necessary transition, while the “foundation of UK security”, the US, was sabotaging it. As he says, “no country can go green without cooperation”. So, who would he seek to cooperate with? He could only resolve this contradiction by dropping concern with climate change and playing down its significance so as not to upset the “special relationship”, or break with US policy in pursuit of the only realistic understanding of its consequences. It might be argued that Labour’s downgrade of its $28 billion green investment pledge is a pre emptive move to anticipate a Trump Presidency, not just pusillanimity in the face of Neanderthal Tory attacks. This is a concrete choice that has neither “moral purpose” nor “realism”.