By Jorge Elbaum on June 8, 2024
US Southern Command General Laura Richardson, photo: AFP
The hybrid war planted by the United States against China has one of its combat scenarios in Eastern Europe. A decade ago, Beijing invested $6 billion in acquiring 5% of Ukraine’s arable land. A few months later, in 2014, a Washington-driven coup prevented the Asian giant from accessing those natural resources.
At the beginning of the 21st century, China deepened its ties with Libya, and Beijing began a process of oil investments. A decade later, NATO-sponsored revolts executed Mohamed Gaddafi and turned the most developed country in the Maghreb into a failed state. From 2011 to date, Tripoli’s GDP fell by 50% and much of the investments were classified as bankrupt.
The primary objective of the United States, in the current historical stage, is to restrict, hinder, condition and – if possible – circumscribe Beijing to an area of influence limited to Southeast Asia, encircled by the security architecture known as AUKUS (acronym of Australia, United Kingdom and United States), instituted to militarize relations with Beijing in the Indo-Pacific and to condition its international trade. To this end, it interferes in its internal affairs, empowering sectors of Taiwan that seek the disintegration of China, and forms the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, also known as QUAD, made up of the United States, Japan, Australia and India to break India’s association in the BRICS and, at the same time, intimidate the armed forces commanded by Xi Jinping.
The State Department is also developing offensive actions in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. It promotes diplomatic policies aimed at sabotaging Chinese cooperation in critical infrastructure areas such as hydroelectric dams, ports or water treatment plants. Thanks to these pressures, Argentina – the government of Javier Milei – decided not to join the BRICS+, ruled out possible financing to establish a deep water port in Tierra del Fuego and paralyzed the works related to the construction of the Néstor Kirchner and Jorge Cepernic hydroelectric dams, planned in collaboration with the Chinese corporation Gezhouba.
The diplomatic guidelines provided by the Secretary of the State Department Antony Blinken, repeatedly endorsed by General Laura Richardson, explain the statements made by the current Argentine President, who said in November 2024 that he would not enter into trade agreements with Beijing. The provocation to the Asian giant deepened with the reception -by the Foreign Minister Diana Mondino- of Taiwan’s trade representative, Miao-hung Hsie. In response, Xi Jinping’s government questioned the continuity of the financing agreement of 6.5 billion dollars, agreed in October 2023 with the then Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa.
The US strategy is similar to that carried out against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, half a century ago, Henry Kissinger promoted the alliance with Mao Tse Tung as a way to prevent Beijing’s potential alliance with Moscow.
That decision allowed investments in China and the gradual reverse engineering process that catapulted its industrialization, innovation and technological development. Today, the Asian giant is the priority trading partner of 144 countries – 73 percent of all countries in the world – and the world’s leading producer of goods. When Xi Jinping assumed leadership in 2012, the Belt and Road Initiative was mooted, and – shortly thereafter – the Asian Investment Bank.
Immediately, U.S. foreign policy abandoned the war on terrorism and decided to install a global contradiction; the dispute against the autocratic regimes represented by Vladimir Putin and the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. However, none of the absolute monarchies of the Persian Gulf was placed in this new regime of evil.
The confrontation proposed by Washington seeks to prevent the structuring of a more horizontal and multipolar world, based on the configuration of horizontal international relations based on the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of countries. On the contrary, the model that the Western obsession seeks to perpetuate is that of imposing unilateral rules consisting of blockades, sanctions, espionage operations, media manipulation and extrajudicial executions on countries and/or leaders capable of questioning the global order based in Washington and Brussels.
This conflict synthesizes the fundamental contradiction of the times: the dispute between the globalization model (governed by the triad of the Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street and the transnationals) and a multipolarity that has the BRICS+ and the Global South as its clearest exponents. Latin America, within this framework, will be a simple scenario of the dispute or a potential relevant actor. It depends on how much sovereignty it is willing to obtain.