European-American Unity Useful with Regard to China, Not Afghanistan

Roland Hureaux addresses the delicate question of international relations in the context of the G-20. The Chinese case in particular pushes the envelope a bit further with regards to solidarity, France’s return within NATO and its armed forces parachuted into Afghanistan.

The Atlanticist rhetoric, dwelt upon by the United States and by all those in Europe who are partisans of a close alliance with it, is well known: “We Westerners, who share the same fundamental values — liberty, democracy, market economy and open society — must stick together and react as one to the dangers threatening us from every direction.” For a long time this alleged threat was communism. Today it is “terrorism” pushed by Islamic fundamentalism.

It is in the name of this necessity for solidarity — from which Russia, which has not been Communist for twenty years, is curiously excluded — that France has returned to NATO and enlisted its armed forces in Afghanistan.

This rhetoric essentially operates fully in the Afghan question where, in the name of doubtful geopolitical considerations, the only play is to prevent backward tribes from living as they please deep in forgotten valleys. Because who still believes in the least in the link between Afghanistan and terrorism?

But curiously, as the last G-20 illustrated, the Western bloc does not address the question that nonetheless underlines its common and more essential interests: the survival of its industries in a globalized universe where China, by undervaluing the yuan, and through its exports and off-shoring, boldly cheats and destroys the substance of both the American and European economies, little by little. The TGV affair, where the Chinese assimilated our techniques and then the buyers became rivals, is significant. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of the aeronautics industry, then that of automobiles and machine tools.

Unwisely, the United States allowed China’s entry into the WTO (World Trade Organization) in 2001. With no monetary rules and only trade rules, the means of pressuring China — the most obvious being importation rights proportional to the estimated undervaluation of the yuan — are difficult to apply. There is little doubt, however, that pressure from a united Atlantic bloc (which includes the top two importers in the world) would lead to results. But everything happens as if Westerners were intimidated by China, which affirmed loud and strong before the Toronto summit that the exchange rate of China’s currency concerned no one but itself. Which, at its base, is obviously false.

President Obama certainly tried, timidly, to put the question of the yuan’s exchange rate on the table. But no European was heard coming to his rescue. And yet, isn’t it there, rather than in the valleys of the Hindu Kush, that solidarity should play out?

It could be that the United States is thus paying the price of its consistent policies for the last thirty-five years, as admitted by Brzezinski, which are directed toward controlling and annihilating the will of Western Europeans, transforming them, and let’s not hesitate to say it, into “wet blankets.” One only leans on that which resists. Western Europe — which already has the world’s weakest military budgets, while the rest of the planet’s are increasing — will doubtless reduce them more due to its new passion for austerity. Of course, one always hopes that arms will not be used, but possessing them provides the assurance of speaking loudly and strongly — something that Europeans are no longer capable of doing, particularly with China. Anesthetized by the globalized ideology, ceasing to have its own will and no longer being a true actor in international policies, one wonders if Europe is still a genuine ally for Washington.