In Afghanistan, the half-life of U.S. imperial war continues its deadly radiation. Amid ahistorical comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam and distressed calls for the protection of the U.S. military’s Afghan collaborators and women and girls, audiences in the Global North resort to a language of humanitarian benevolence with little regard to the role of the U.S. within the contemporary history of Afghanistan—starting with the U.S.-backed coup of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1978 and covert CIA funding for the Taliban in 1979, to the last twenty years of U.S. occupation in the name of security and democratization. Global North audiences’ misguided belief of individualist harm reduction miss the structural and materialist forces of empire in the culmination of the present crisis. Real solidarity with the Afghan people emerges not from the occasional mutual aid campaign but the organized political power of the masses against the U.S. empire, its financial institutions, and military allies.
After a June trip to Guatemala in which she urged migrants “do not come” to the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris has embarked on a visit to Singapore and Vietnam. Following close on the heels of “frank talks” between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and State Councillor Wang Yi and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s visit to Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines in July, Harris’ impending visit is expected to continue the Biden administration’s aggressive push to strengthen collaboration with client states and potential client states in Southeast Asia. Among the overtures of Austin’s visit to the Philippines was the renewal of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), originally signed in 1988, that “gives U.S. military aircraft and vessels free entry into the Philippines and relaxes visa restrictions for U.S. military personnel.” The VFA’s thinly-veiled sanction of the ongoing U.S. military presence in the Philippines continues the paternalistic mission of the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty between the Philippines and the U.S., signed a mere five years after the independence of the Philippine Commonwealth, following a combined three centuries of colonial occupation by the Dutch, Spanish, and the U.S. Complementing a century of U.S. military occupation in Subic Bay and the Clark Air Base, the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty designated the Philippines as a military ally in the Pacific, subject to U.S. military protection and obliged to conscript its human and natural resources should the U.S. military face conflict in the region.
As with the U.S.’s Mutual Defense Treaties with Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia, the 1951 MDT between the U.S. and the Philippines guarantees the continued presence of U.S. military personnel and bases in the name of “mutual” security. More often framed in terms of U.S. “protection,” the U.S.’s numerous Mutual Defense Treaties in Asia and the Pacific entails the establishment of a massive garrison empire in which host governments pay for the active U.S. military presence within their own borders, as is the case with the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea. In other client states, such as Singapore, which hosts two bases for the U.S. military, including one custom-built for the U.S. Navy but paid for by the Singapore government, the U.S. military and economic presence replaces that of the previous British empire.
Read more: Neocolonialism and the Ruse of “Chinese Privilege” in Singapore
Why have so many Asian states sought dependency with U.S. empire above the welfare and desires of their citizenry and the integrity of their national sovereignty? The U.S. would like us to believe that it is because of the looming “Chinese economic and military threat” in the region—a key point in both Austin and Harris’ agendas, continuous with the softer rhetoric of Obama’s 2012 Pivot to Asia. But a closer look at the history of U.S. empire in the “American Lake” reveals a much longer and nefarious plot by U.S. foreign policy architects that have sought to cement permanent U.S. economic hegemony over the region since Naval Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan famously strategized the impending achievement of 20th century U.S. Pacific hegemony in his influential 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History.
Armed with the counterinsurgency strategies of both the long 20th century and the War on Terror, in which U.S. imperial warfare rapidly extended economic and political domination over large swaths of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, the U.S. now aims to corral its global network of neocolonies in offensive formation around China. As empire reduces entire nations to pawns on a chessboard and thus, collateral to be sacrificed for U.S. hegemonic interests, contemporary U.S. strategic interest in Southeast Asia indeed forebodes a dangerous dance with the devil for ASEAN.
Roundup of our latest
During the 1950s, the U.S. deported leftist Chinese nationals while elevating anticommunist Chinese Americans in politics and media. Amidst renewed Cold War Sinophobia, is history repeating? Qiao explores the fraught political category of "overseas Chinese,” tracing the revolutionary and reactionary framings of “Overseas Chinese” as a political category, from Qing-era anti-colonialism to 20th century Cold War liberalism and beyond.
If the branding of Yang Shuping as a “traitor” by Chinese “nationalist netizens” appears uncouth, it nonetheless speaks to an explicit strategy of the United States and other Western nations to instrumentalize overseas Chinese people in service of a paternalistic, antagonistic posture toward the People’s Republic of China…. In an era in which a renewed Cold War posture toward China is obscured through the uplifting of ethnic Chinese testimonies of Chinese depravity and U.S. excellence, historicizing the workings of multicultural empire and the strategic inclusion of the Chinese diaspora therein reveals the justifying discourses of U.S. imperialism.
On the occasion of the 100 year anniversary of the Communist Party of China’s founding, we solicited comments from our Weibo followers, asking them what they might share with our (largely Western) readership on this historical juncture. These excerpted comments, brief and assorted as they are, provide a small window into the conversations, family stories, and aspirations circulating amongst Chinese people from all walks of life at this historic juncture.
Come to our conference! In person & online on Sept. 18 @ The People’s Forum in NYC! Register now.
In partnership with The People’s Forum, Qiao Collective is thrilled to host a one-day international convening of organizers, scholars, and journalists whose work grapples with questions of Chinese socialism, Western imperialism, Global South internationalism, and the renewed Cold War consensus taking hold in the West. Speakers and events will analyze current trends in U.S.-China relations, Chinese development, and international relations through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. The conference will provide a space for those invested in challenging the rise in the U.S.-led imperialist aggression on China to meet, strategize, and discuss.
Co-sponsored by Monthly Review, the People’s Forum, and Code Pink.
The conference will be a one day hybrid in-person and livestreamed online conference. Speakers and attendees will be able to attend either in-person or via Zoom. There will be panels throughout the day as well as a short film screening, screen printing art event, and evening social mixer.
What We’re Reading/Watching/Listening
A little political education, as a treat
“The State and Socialism” by Antonio Gramsci
The socialist idea remained a myth, an evanescent chimera, a mere whim of individual fantasy until it was embodied in the socialist proletarian movement, in the defensive and offensive institutions of the organized proletariat…. It is from these institutions that it has brought into being the national socialist State.
The literature of liberalism is one long polemic against the state. The political history of capitalism is characterized by a furious and unending struggle between the citizen and the State.
“China and the American Lake” by Mark Tseng-Putterman
The continuity of nineteenth- and twenty-first-century practices of free trade imperialism may have been common sense to Chinese observers, but such comparisons have largely been maligned in U.S. discourse as the terrain of “wolf warriors” and crude nationalists. Indeed, while it is often observed that the “Century of Humiliation” remains a structuring wound in the Chinese national psyche, to speak of Chinese subalternity in Western intellectual circles is now chided as anachronistic. China, we are told, is a superpower, the “world’s factory,” a geopolitical behemoth. Descriptions of China’s hulking force not only evoke the nineteenth-century language of a “Chinese Colossus,” but evades the question of imperialism in contemporary U.S.-China relations. Through this lens, the so-called trade war has been popularly described as an “inter-capitalist competition,” not an ideological one.
Afghanistan in the Age of Empires by Farrukh Husain, trans. Zahid Husain (Silk Road Books, 2018)
And “Civilizations 36a: Islam and Imperialism” with Justin Podur!