The pandemic and Trump’s coup attempt

Andre Damon

On Wednesday, 4,100 people died from COVID-19 in the United States, the fifth day that the death toll surpassed 4,000. The number of daily new cases has surged to more than 200,000 every single day so far this year.

In the first two weeks of 2021, more than 43,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) projects that as many as 90,000 more people could die in the next three weeks.

Globally, the death toll has surpassed two million. However, the official statistics only offer a partial expression of the horrific reality, with one recent analysis showing that “excess deaths” around the world have been more than 30 percent higher than the official count of COVID-19 fatalities.

On top of this already disastrous level of mass death and infection, experts are now warning that new, more infectious variants of COVID-19 will lead to an even greater surge in deaths. An article in the medical journal Stat noted Thursday, “As horrific as the U.S. Covid-19 outbreak looks right now, it is almost certainly about to get worse.”

The report continued, “They’ve raced through South Africa, the United Kingdom, and, increasingly, elsewhere, and now, new, more infectious variants of the coronavirus have gained toeholds in the United States. If they take off here — which, with their transmission advantages, they will, unless Americans rapidly put a brake on their spread — it will detonate something of a bomb in the already deep, deep hole the country must dig out of to end the crisis.”

This massive health care catastrophe is taking place simultaneously with the unprecedented political crisis in the United States following the January 6 fascistic insurrection incited by Donald Trump and the ongoing threats of fascist violence throughout the country prior to and on Inauguration Day, January 20.

Amidst the endless coverage in the media on the events in Washington, however, there is no attempt to connect the two. It is as if the effort by Trump to overthrow the Constitution bears no relationship to the central element of the administration’s policy over the past year: the insistence that no measures be taken to stop the spread of the virus.

It is a political fact that the main programmatic demand of the fascistic organizations cultivated by Trump over the past year has been the removal of all restrictions on economic activity to save lives. This was the demand of the rallies organized in April and May, in the aftermath of the bailout of Wall Street in late March. It was this that motivated the fascistic conspiracy in Michigan to kidnap and assassinate the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, exposed in October.

In his first public remarks after the election in November, Trump doubled down on his administration’s response to the pandemic while making a case to the ruling class that he should remain in power. As the death toll was rising, he insisted on November 16, “This administration will not be going to lockdown.” While “time will tell” who ends up in office on January 20, Trump repeated his earlier insistence that “the cure cannot be … worse than the problem itself.”

Emphasizing the central class interests motivating this homicidal policy, Trump pointed to the rise of the stock markets, noting that “it’s ready to break the all-time record.”

There is an essential connection between the policy of the ruling class in response to the pandemic and the breakdown of democracy in the United States. As the WSWS wrote in October:

The homicidal policy of the ruling class in response to the pandemic is at the center of the unprecedented political crisis in the United States. To implement this policy, the ruling elite is resorting to ever more violent and dictatorial forms of rule.

The reality of the pandemic also underlies the Democrats’ response to the coup. Since the events of January 6, the Democrats, led by President-elect Joe Biden, are doing everything they can to cover up the extent of the conspiracy. Biden has insisted on the need for a “strong” Republican Party and has appealed to his “Republican colleagues”—that is, Trump’s coconspirators—for “bipartisanship,” particularly in any legislative response to the pandemic.

As a party of Wall Street, the Democrats’ greatest fear is the emergence of a movement of the working class against Trump’s coup attempt that will develop into a conflict with the entire ruling class and the capitalist system. It is necessary to move on with the policy of the oligarchy, to “look forward, not backward.”

One bank CEO quoted by Politico (“Wall Street’s big wish: Please move on”) summed up the attitude of the ruling class. Speaking of the fascist coup, he said: “I understand all the emotions around it and how strongly people feel about it. And I don’t discount any of it. But I think Joe Biden’s folks would agree with me on this, we have to get serious about moving forward right now.”

“Moving forward” means continuing the policy of “herd immunity.” Far from responding to the disastrous surge in COVID-19 deaths to press for measures to save lives, the entire US political establishment is demanding a further reopening of the economy, aimed at protecting the profits of major corporations at the expense of human lives.

Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Thursday she wants the city’s bars and restaurants to reopen for indoor service “as soon as possible.” On Wednesday, Whitmer herself announced the resumption of group fitness classes, reaffirming that the state is planning to reopen indoor dining in two weeks.

The most explicit argument for reopening businesses was provided by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, another Democrat, who declared in his State of the State address, “We simply cannot stay closed until the vaccine hits critical mass. The cost is too high. We will have nothing left to open. We must reopen the economy.”

Cuomo presides over a state containing New York City, the most unequal place in the world, home to 113 billionaires.

Almost without exception, US billionaires are now far, far wealthier than they were a year ago. Topping the list is Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who this week became the wealthiest man in the world, at $201 billion. In the past year alone, Musk has made a shocking $170 billion, even as close to 400,000 Americans died from the pandemic, and 10 million jobs have been destroyed.

The claim that society cannot afford the cost of saving human lives, yet has $170 billion to dole out to a single man in one year, is absurd.

Every aspect of the response to COVID-19 has been based on ensuring the availability of cheap labor in the midst of a raging pandemic, allowing the uninterrupted extraction of profits from the labor of the working class. This week, Brian Deese, Biden’s incoming director of the National Economic Council told a Reuters conference, “We need to get the schools open so that parents … can get back to work.”

In other words, the lives of teachers and students are to be sacrificed to maximize what the New York Times, commenting on the remarks, called “labor force participation.”

In the mist of mass death and a general breakdown of democracy in the United States, it is noteworthy that the US markets surged throughout the entire week. In an article, “Why the Stock Market Doesn’t Care About the Capitol Riot” the Washington Post cited one Wall Street trader as saying, “The market is agnostic about politics… We like to think democracy is better. But at the end of the day, investors don’t seem to care so much about that.”

Agroecology and Post-COVID Plunder

Colin Todhunter

Contingent on World Bank aid to be given to poorer countries in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns, agrifood conglomerates will aim to further expand their influence. These firms have been integral to the consolidation of a global food regime that has emerged in recent decades based on chemical- and proprietary-input-dependent agriculture which incurs massive externalised social, environmental and health costs.

Reliance on commodity monocropping for global markets, long supply chains and dependency on external inputs for cultivation make the food system vulnerable to shocks, whether resulting from public health scares, oil price spikes (the global food system is fossil-fuel dependent) or conflict and war. An increasing number of countries are recognising the need to respond by becoming more food self-sufficient, preferably by securing control over their own food and reducing supply chain lengths.

The various coronavirus lockdowns have disrupted many transport and production activities, exposing the weaknesses of the food system. If the current situation tells us anything, it is that structural solutions are needed to transform food production, not further strengthen the status quo.

Agroecology

In 2014, UN special rapporteur Olivier De Schutter’s report concluded that by applying agroecological principles to democratically controlled agricultural systems we can help to put an end to food crises and poverty challenges. He argued that agroecological approaches could tackle food needs in critical regions and could double food production in 10 years.

The 2009 IAASTD peer-reviewed report, produced by 400 scientists and supported by 60 countries, recommended agroecology to maintain and increase the productivity of global agriculture. And the recent UN FAO High Level Panel of Experts concluded that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture.

Agroecology is based on traditional knowledge and modern agricultural research, utilising elements of contemporary ecology, soil biology and the biological control of pests. This system employs sound ecological management by using on-farm solutions to manage pests and disease without the use of agrochemicals and corporate seeds. It outperforms the prevailing industrial food system in terms of diversity of food output, nutrition per acre, soil health, water table stability and climate resilience.

Academic Raj Patel outlines some of the basic practices of agroecology by saying that nitrogen-fixing beans are grown instead of using inorganic fertilizer, flowers are used to attract beneficial insects to manage pests and weeds are crowded out with more intensive planting. The result is a sophisticated polyculture: many crops are produced simultaneously, instead of just one.

Much has been written about agroecology, its successes and the challenges it faces, not least in the 2017 book Fertile Ground: Scaling agroecology from the ground up, published by Food First. Agroecology can offer concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems. It challenges – and offers alternatives to – the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system of industrial agriculture.

By creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work in both richer and poorer countries, it can address the interrelated links between labour offshoring by rich countries and the removal of rural populations elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out offshored jobs: the two-pronged process of neoliberal, globalised capitalism that has hollowed out the economies of the US and UK and which is displacing existing indigenous food production systems and undermining the rural infrastructure in places like India.

Agroecology is based on the principle of food sovereignty, which encompasses the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems. ‘Culturally appropriate’ is a nod to the foods people have traditionally produced and eaten as well as the associated socially embedded practices which underpin community and a sense of communality. But it goes beyond that.

Modern food system

People have a deep microbiological connection to soils, food processing practices and fermentation processes which affect the gut microbiome – up to six pounds of bacteria, viruses and microbes akin to human soil. And as with actual soil, the microbiome can become degraded according to what we ingest (or fail to ingest). Many nerve endings from major organs are located in the gut and the microbiome effectively nourishes them. There is ongoing research taking place into how the microbiome is disrupted by the modern globalised food production/processing system and the chemical bombardment it is subjected to.

Capitalism colonises (and degrades) all aspects of life but is colonising the very essence of our being – even on a physiological level. With their agrochemicals and food additives, powerful companies are attacking this ‘soil’ and with it the human body. As soon as agri-food corporations undermined the capacity for eating locally grown, traditionally processed food, cultivated in healthy soils and began imposing long-line supply chains and food subjected to chemical-laden cultivation and processing activities, we not only lost our cultural connections to food production and the seasons, but we also lost our deep-rooted microbiological connection with our localities. Corporate chemicals and seeds and global food chains dominated by the likes of Monsanto (now Bayer), Nestle and Cargill took over.

Aside from affecting the functioning of major organs, neurotransmitters in the gut affect our moods and thinking. Alterations in the composition of the gut microbiome have been implicated in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including autism, chronic pain, depression and Parkinson’s Disease. In addition, increasing levels of obesity are associated with low bacterial richness in the gut. Indeed, it has been noted that tribes not exposed to the modern food system have richer microbiomes.

To ensure genuine food security and good health, humanity must transition to a notion of food sovereignty based on optimal self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and local ownership and stewardship of common resources – land, water, soil, seeds, etc.

However, what we are seeing is a trend towards genetically engineered and biosynthetic lab-based food controlled by corporations. The billionaire class who are pushing this agenda think they can own nature and all humans and can control both. As part of an economic, cultural and social ‘great reset’, they seek to impose their cold dystopian vision that wants to eradicate thousands of years of culture, tradition and farming practices virtually overnight.

Consider that many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories and myths that helped them come to terms with some of the most basic issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.

As agriculture became key to human survival, the planting and harvesting of crops and other seasonal activities associated with food production were central to these customs. Freyfaxi marks the beginning of the harvest in Norse paganism, for example, while Lammas or Lughnasadh is the celebration of the first harvest/grain harvest in Paganism.

Humans celebrated nature and the life it gave birth to. Ancient beliefs and rituals were imbued with hope and renewal and people had a necessary and immediate relationship with the sun, seeds, animals, wind, fire, soil and rain and the changing seasons that nourished and brought life. In addition to our physiological connection, our cultural and social relationships with agrarian production and associated deities had a sound practical base.

We need look no further than India to appreciate the important relationship between culture, agriculture and ecology, not least the vital importance of the monsoon and seasonal planting and harvesting. Rural-based beliefs and rituals steeped in nature persist, even among urban Indians. These are bound to traditional knowledge systems where livelihoods, the seasons, food, cooking, processing, seed exchange, healthcare and the passing on of knowledge are all inter-related and form the essence of cultural diversity within India itself.

Although the industrial age resulted in a diminution of the connection between food and the natural environment as people moved to cities, traditional ‘food cultures’ – the practices, attitudes and beliefs surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of food – still thrive and highlight our ongoing connection to agriculture and nature.

If we go back to the 1950s, it is interesting to note Union Carbide’s corporate narrative based on a series of images that depicted the company as a ‘hand of god’ coming out of the sky to ‘solve’ some of the issues facing humanity. One of the most famous images is of the hand pouring the firm’s agrochemicals on Indian soils as if traditional farming practices were somehow ‘backward’.

Despite well-publicised claims to the contrary, this chemical-driven approach did not lead to higher food production according to the paper New Histories of the Green Revolution written by Prof Glenn Stone. However, it has had long-term devastating ecological, social and economic consequences as we saw in Vandana Shiva’s book ‘The Violence of the Green Revolution’ and Bhaskar Save’s now famous and highly insightful open letter to Indian officials.

In the book Food and Cultural Studies’ (Bob Ashley et al), we see how, some years ago, a Coca Cola TV ad campaign sold its product to an audience which associated modernity with a sugary drink and depicted ancient Aboriginal beliefs as harmful, ignorant and outdated. Coke and not rain became the giver of life to the parched. This type of ideology forms part of a wider strategy to discredit traditional cultures and portray them as being deficient and in need of assistance from ‘god-like’ corporations.

Post-COVID plunder

What we are seeing in 2020, is an acceleration of such processes. In terms of food and agriculture, traditional farming in places like India will be under increasing pressure from the big-tech giants and agribusiness to open up to lab-grown food, GMOs, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.

This vision includes farmerless farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. What will happen to the farmers?

Post-COVID, the World Bank talks about helping countries get back on track in return for structural reforms. Are tens of millions of smallholder farmers to be enticed from their land in return for individual debt relief and universal basic income? The displacement of these farmers and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and their cultures was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.

Cut through the euphemisms and it is clear that Bill Gates – and the other incredibly rich individuals behind the great reset with their ‘white saviour’ mindset – is an old-fashioned colonialist who supports the time-honoured dispossessive strategies of imperialism, whether this involves mining, appropriating and commodifying farmer knowledge, accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations or facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations.

In India – still an agrarian-based society – will the land of these already (prior to COVID) heavily indebted farmers then be handed over to the tech giants, the financial institutions and global agribusiness to churn out their high-tech industrial sludge?

With the link completely severed between food production, nature and culturally embedded beliefs that give meaning and expression to life, we will be left with the individual human who exists on lab-based food, who is reliant on income from the state and who is stripped of satisfying productive endeavour and genuine self-fulfilment.

Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined cultural diversity, meaningful social connections and agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined for example in the 2017 article Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India in the Journal of South Asian Studies.

Such a pity that prominent commentators like George Monbiot, who writes for the UK’s Guardian newspaper, seems fully on board with this ‘great reset’. In his 2020 article ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’, he sees farmerless farms and ‘fake’ food produced in giant industrial factories from microbes as a good thing.

But Vandana Shiva says:

“The notion that high-tech ‘farm free’ lab food will save the planet is simply a continuation of the same mechanistic mindset which has brought us to where we are today – the idea that we are separate from and outside of nature… it is the basis of industrial agriculture which has destroyed the planet, farmers livelihoods and our health.”

She adds:

“Turning ‘water into food’ is an echo from the times of the second world war, when it was claimed that fossil-fuel-based chemical fertilisers would produce ‘Bread from Air’. Instead we have dead zones in the ocean, greenhouse gases – including nitrous oxide which is 300 times more damaging to the environment than CO2 – and desertified soils and land. We are part of nature, not separate from and outside of nature. Food is what connects us to the earth, its diverse beings, including the forests around us — through the trillions of microorganisms that are in our gut microbiome and which keep our bodies healthy, both inside and out.”

As an environmentalist, Monbiot supports lab-based food because he only sees a distorted method of industrial farming; he is blind to agroecological methods which do not have the disastrous environmental consequences of chemical-dependent industrial agriculture. Monbiot’s ‘solution’ is to replace one model of corporate controlled farming with another, thereby robbing us of our connection to the land, to each other and making us wholly dependent on profiteering, unscrupulous interests that have no time for concepts like food democracy or food sovereignty.

Moreover, certain lab-engineered ‘food’ will require biomatter in the form of commodity crops. This in itself raises issues related to the colonisation of land in faraway countries and the implications for food security there. We may look no further to see the adverse health, social and environmental impacts of pesticide-dependent GMO seed monocropping in Argentina as it produces soy for the global market, not least for animal feed in Europe.

Instead of pandering to the needs of corporations, prominent commentators would do better by getting behind initiatives like the anti-imperialist Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology, produced by Nyeleni in 2015. It argues for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on genuine agroecological food production. It adds that agroecology requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.

It would mean that what ends up in our food and how it is grown is determined by the public good and not powerful private interests driven by patents, control and commercial gain and the compulsion to subjugate farmers, consumers and entire regions to their global supply chains and questionable products (whether unhealthy food or proprietary pesticides and seeds). For consumers, the public good includes more diverse diets leading to better nutrition and enhanced immunity when faced with any future pandemic.

Across the world, decentralised, regional and local community-owned food systems based on short(er) food supply chains that can cope with future shocks are now needed more than ever. But there are major obstacles given the power of agrifood concerns whose business models are based on industrial farming and global chains with all the devastating consequences this entails.

Following the devastation caused by coronavirus-related lockdowns, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet – on the condition that further neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.

He says that countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery and create confidence that the recovery can be strong:

“For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.”

For agriculture, this means the further opening of markets to benefit the richer nations. What journalists like George Monbiot fail to acknowledge is that emerging technology in agriculture (AI drones, gene-edited crops, synthetic food, etc) is first and foremost an instrument of corporate power. Indeed, agriculture has for a long time been central to US foreign policy to boost the bottom line of its agribusiness interests and their control over the global food chain.

In the words of economics professor Michael Hudson:

“It is by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.”

It is naïve to suggest that in the brave new world of farmerless farms and lab-based food, things would be different. In the face of economic crisis and stagnation at home, exacerbated by COVID lockdowns and restrictions, whether through new technologies or older Green Revolution methods, Western agricapital will seek to further entrench its position across the globe.

Looming Large: The Middle East Braces for Fallout of US–China Divide

James M Dorsey

China would like the world to believe that the Middle East and North Africa region does not rank high on its totem pole despite its energy dependence, significant investment and strategic relationships with the region. In many ways, China is not being deceptive. With relations with the United States rapidly deteriorating, China’s primary focus is on what it views as its main battleground: the Asia–Pacific. China is nonetheless realising that remaining aloof in the Middle East may not be sustainable.

In assessing the importance of the Middle East and North Africa region to China, the glass seems both half full and half empty with regard to what it will take for China to secure its interests. In the final analysis, however, the glass is likely to prove to be half full. If so, that will have significant consequences for Chinese policy towards and engagement in the region.

Indeed, measured by Chinese policy outputs such as white papers or level of investment as a percentage of total Chinese overseas investment, the Middle East and North Africa region does not emerge as a priority on Beijing’s agenda even if virtually all of it is packaged as building blocks of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

It was only in 2016 that China published its first and only Middle East-related white paper, devoted to the Arab states rather than the region as a whole. Apart from rehashing China’s long-standing foreign policy principles, the paper highlighted opportunities for win-win cooperation in areas ranging from energy, trade and infrastructure, but also technology, nuclear development, and space.

Investment figures tell a similar story. Of the US$2 trillion in Chinese overseas investment between 2005 and 2019, a mere US$198 billion or under 5 per cent went to the Middle East and North Africa.

The region is unlikely to climb Beijing’s totem pole any time soon, given the dramatic decrease in Chinese foreign investment in the last four years to about 30 per cent of what it was in 2016 and expectations that Middle Eastern and North African economies will significantly contract as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and sharp downturn in energy markets.

Half Full Rather Than Half Empty

What turns the glass half full is the fact that the Middle East fulfils almost half of China’s energy needs. Moreover, some of China’s investments, particularly in ports and adjacent industrial parks in the Gulf, Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, are strategically important. What was once primarily a Belt and Road “string of pearls” linking Indian Ocean ports has evolved into a network that stretches from Djibouti in east Africa through Oman’s port of Duqm and the United Arab Emirates’ Jebel Ali port into a near dominant position in the eastern Mediterranean and onwards into the Indo–Pacific.

China already exerts influence in the eastern Mediterranean region through its involvement in ports in Greece, Turkey, Israel and Egypt. It has expressed interest in the Lebanese port of Tripoli and may well seek access to the Russian-controlled ports of Tartus and Latakia if and when it gets involved in the reconstruction of war-ravaged Syria. This was one reason that the Trump administration warned the Israelis that China’s engagement in Haifa, where they have built their own pier, could jeopardise continued use of the port by the US Sixth Fleet.

Asserting the importance of the Middle East, Niu Xinchun, director of Middle East Studies at China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), wrote back in 2017: “The politics and security of the Middle East [are] inextricably related to China. This is the first time in history that China has possessed political, economic and security interests in the Middle East simultaneously.” CICIR is widely viewed as China’s most influential think tank.

More recently, however, Niu has taken what seems like an antipodal position, maintaining that the Middle East does not feature prominently in China’s strategic calculations. In a webinar in May 2020, he said: “For China, the Middle East is always on the very distant backburner of China’s strategic global strategies … Covid-19, combined with the oil price crisis, will dramatically change the Middle East. [This] will change China’s investment model in the Middle East.” Niu emphasised that China considers the Asia–Pacific rather than the Middle East as its primary battleground for differences with the United States.

This shift was part of a game of shadow boxing to subtly warn the Gulf, and particularly Saudi Arabia, to dial down tension with Iran to a point where it can be managed and does not spin out of control.

To ensure that its message is not lost on the region, China could well ensure that its future investments contribute to job creation, a key priority for Middle Eastern states struggling to come to grips with the economic crisis as a result of the pandemic and the sharp fall in oil demand and prices. Middle East political economy scholar Karen Young noted that Chinese investment has so far focused on a small number of locations and had not significantly generated jobs.

Subtle Messaging

Subtle Chinese messaging was also at the core of China’s public response to Iranian leaks that it was close to signing a 25-year partnership with the Islamic republic that would lead to a whopping US$400 billion investment to develop the country’s oil, gas and transportation sectors.

China limited itself to a non-committal on-the-record reaction and low-key semi-official commentary. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, a “wolf warrior” or exponent of China’s newly adopted more assertive and aggressive approach towards diplomacy, was exceptionally diplomatic in his comment. “China and Iran enjoy traditional friendship, and the two sides have been in communication on the development of bilateral relations. We stand ready to work with Iran to steadily advance practical cooperation”, Zhao said.

Writing in the Shanghai Observer, a secondary Communist party newspaper, Middle East scholar Fan Hongda was less guarded. Fan argued that the agreement, though nowhere close to implementation, highlighted “an important moment of development” at a time that US–Chinese tensions allowed Beijing to pay less heed to American policies. In saying so, Fan was echoing China’s warning that the United States was putting much at risk by retching up tensions between the world’s two largest economies and could push China to the point where it no longer regards the potential cost of countering US policy as too high.

Diplomacy with “Chinese Characteristics”

Nonetheless, China’s evasiveness on the Iran agreement constituted a recognition that the success of its Belt and Road initiative and its ability to avoid being sucked uncontrollably into the Middle East’s myriad conflicts depends on a security environment that reduces tension to manageable proportions and ensures that disputes do not spin out of control.

“Beijing has indeed become more concerned about the stability of Middle Eastern regimes. Its growing regional interests combined with its BRI ambitions underscore that Middle East stability, particularly in the Persian Gulf, is now a matter of strategic concern for China,” said Mordechai Chaziza, an expert on China–Middle East relations.

Reflecting what appears to be a shift in China’s approach to regional security, Chinese scholars Sun Degang and Wu Sike described the Middle East in a recently published article as a “key region in big power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics in a new era”. Sun and Wu suggested that Chinese characteristics would involve “seeking common ground while reserving differences”, a formula that implies conflict management rather than conflict resolution. The scholars said Chinese engagement in Middle Eastern security would seek to build an inclusive and shared regional collective security mechanism based on fairness, justice, multilateralism, comprehensive governance and the containment of differences.

A Blunt Rebuke

But China’s conflict management diplomacy may not go down well with the Gulf Arabs, notably Saudi Arabia, judging by what for Saudi media was a blunt and rare recent critique of the People’s Republic. In a game of shadow-boxing in which intellectuals and journalists front for officials who prefer the luxury of plausible deniability, Saudi Arabia responded bluntly in a column authored by Baria Alamuddin, a Lebanese journalist who regularly writes columns for Saudi media.

Alamuddin warned that China was being lured to financially bankrupt Lebanon by Hizballah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shi’a militia. She suggested in a column published by Arab News, the kingdom’s primary English-language newspaper, that Hizballah’s seduction of China was occurring against the backdrop of a potential massive 25-year cooperation agreement between the People’s Republic and Iran. “Chinese business and investment are welcome, but Beijing has a record of partnering with avaricious African and Asian elites willing to sell out their sovereignty. Chinese diplomacy is ruthless, mercantile and self-interested, with none of the West’s lip service to human rights, rule of law or cultural interchange”, Alamuddin charged. She quoted a Middle East expert from a conservative US think tank as warning that “vultures from Beijing are circling, eyeing tasty infrastructure assets like ports and airports as well as soft power influence through Lebanon’s universities.”

Abandoning Saudi official and media support for some of the worst manifestations of Chinese autocratic behaviour, including the brutal crackdown on Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang and the repression of democratic expression and dissident, Alamuddin did not mince words.

Alamuddin went on to assert that “witnessing how dissident voices have been mercilessly throttled in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, Lebanese citizens are justifiably fearful that their freedoms and culture would be crushed under heavy-handed, authoritarian Chinese and Iranian dominance, amid the miserable, monolithic atmosphere Hizballah seeks to impose.”

A Hair in the Soup

Further complicating Chinese efforts to nudge the Middle East towards some degree of stabilisation are China’s technology and military sales with no constraints on their use or regard for the potential geopolitical fallout. The sales include drone and ballistic missile technology as well as the building blocks for a civilian nuclear programme for Saudi Arabia, which would significantly enhance the kingdom’s ability to develop nuclear weapons should it decide to do so at some point in future.

These sales have fueled fears, for different reasons, in Jerusalem and Tehran of a new regional arms race in the region. Israel’s concerns are heightened by the Trump administration’s efforts to limit Israeli dealings with China that involve sensitive technologies while remaining silent about Chinese military assistance to Saudi Arabia.

Washington’s indifference may be set to change, assuming that the recent rejection by the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi of an offer by the UAE to donate hundreds of Covid-19 test kits for screening of its staff was a shot across the Gulf’s bow. A US official said the tests were rejected because they were either Chinese-made or involved BGI Genomics, a Chinese company active in the Gulf, which raised concerns about patient privacy.

The American snub was designed to put a dent in China’s “Silk Road” health diplomacy centred on its experience with the pandemic and predominance in the manufacturing of personal protective and medical equipment as well as pharmaceutics.

A Major Battlefield

Digital and satellite technology in which Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei’s 5G cellular technology rollout is but one component seems set to be a major battlefield. US officials have warned that the inclusion of Huawei in Gulf networks could jeopardise sensitive communications, particularly given the multiple US bases in the region, including the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and the forward headquarters of the US military’s Central Command, or Centcom, in Qatar.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker said the United States had advised its Middle Eastern partners in the region to take “a careful look at investment, major contracts and infrastructure projects.” He warned that certain engagements with China could “come at the expense of the region’s prosperity, stability, fiscal viability and longstanding relationship with the United States.”

Schenker cautioned further that agreements with Huawei meant that “basically all the information and your data is going to Huawei, property of the Chinese Communist Party”. The same, he said, was true for Chinese health technology. “When you take a Covid kit from a Chinese genomics company, your DNA is property of the Chinese Communist Party, and all the implications that go with that.”

The rollout of China’s BeiDou Satellite Navigation System (BDS), which competes with the United States’ Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia’s GLONASS and Europe’s Galileo, sets the stage for battle, with countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Turkey having signed up for what is known as China’s Digital Silk Road Initiative. So far, Pakistan is the only country known to have been granted access to BeiDou’s military applications, which provide more precise guidance for missiles, ships and aircraft.

Promoting “the development of the digital service sector, such as cross-border ecommerce, smart cities, telemedicine, and internet finance (and) … technological progress including computing, big data, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and quantum computing,” the initiative will enable China to enhance its regional influence and leverage in economics as well as security. China’s state-owned international broadcaster, China Global Television Network (CGTN), implicitly anticipated US resistance to its Middle Eastern partners being roped into a Chinese digital world when it declared that “a navigation system is like a gold key of your home that should be kept only in your own hands, not others.”

The successful launch in July of a mission to Mars, the Arab world’s first interplanetary initiative, suggested that the UAE was seeking to balance its engagement with the United States and China in an effort not to get caught in the growing divergence between the two powers. The mission, dubbed Hope Probe, was coordinated with US rather than Chinese institutions, including the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG). It launched from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center.

You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide

A continuously deteriorating relationship between the United States and China is a worst-case scenario for Middle Eastern states. It would progressively reduce their ability to walk a fine line between the two major powers. That would be particularly true if US efforts to force its partners to limit their ties to the People’s Republic compel China into defiance by adopting a more geopolitically assertive posture in the region.

Ironically, the US desire to recalibrate its engagement with the Middle East and a realisation on the part of Saudi Arabia and Iran that their interests are best served by a reduction of tension rooted in an arrangement based on a non-aggression agreement could serve as a catalyst for a new Gulf security architecture. This could involve embedding the US defence umbrella, geared to protect Gulf states against Iran, into a multilateral structure that would include rather than exclude Iran and involve Russia, China and India.

A more multilateral security arrangement potentially could reduce pressure on the Gulf states to pick sides between the United States and China and would include China in ways that it can manage its greater engagement without being drawn into the region’s conflicts in ways that frustrated the United States for decades.

None of the parties are at a point where they are willing to publicly entertain the possibility of such a collective security architecture. Even if they were, negotiating a new arrangement is likely to be a tedious and tortuous process. Nonetheless, such a multilateral security architecture would ultimately serve all parties’ interests and may be the only way of reducing tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran and managing their differences, which would in turn help China secure its energy and economic interests in the region. This reality enhances the likelihood that the glass is half full in terms of China ultimately participating in such a multilateral security arrangement, rather than half empty, with China refraining from participation.

Irish health system on brink of collapse as COVID-19 figures surge

Dermot Quinn

The Irish health system was on the brink of being overwhelmed last weekend by the upward spiral of admissions to Intensive Care Units (ICU).

Micheál Martin (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

On January 8, a record 8,248 COVID-19 infections and 20 deaths, were registered. Eight further deaths and 6,888 new cases were reported on Monday. In total, there have now been a staggering 135,884 infections and 2,237 people have died. In the last two weeks, more than 50,000 cases have been reported, accounting for 40 percent of all cases recorded since the outbreak of the pandemic last year.

Professor Philip Nolan of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) warned last week, “The number in hospitals is now increasing exponentially, so we’re at the point now where our health services are under threat”.

The number of people with coronavirus in hospital has more than quadrupled in the last two weeks. Latest figures from the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) put the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in hospital at 1,575, with 146 of these in ICUs. Of the 274 open and staffed ICU beds, 232 of these are occupied and only 40 available.

The head of the ICU at Mid-Western University Regional Hospital in Limerick, Dr Catherine Motherway, questioned last week whether the ICU's would be able to cope.

Speaking to the Irish Mail she said, “I don't know, nobody knows. We have a finite health resource, there are only a certain number of beds. We are hoping in some hospitals where possible to continue time-critical cases—i.e., cancers, high-risk vascular etcetera—where the patients can't wait."

She warned, “In a surge scenario contingency standards of care replace normal standards of care, and outcomes may not be as good for patients.”

Enda O' Connor, ICU director at St James's Hospital in Dublin, issued a statement last weekend saying that the surge in ICU admissions could be “longer and more severe than the first wave last March due to the increase in cases, and it's possible we could see scenes here like they had in Italy during the first wave.”

Dr Anthony Staines, a leading expert on the coronavirus, stated last week that the projected August deadline for vaccinating most of the population could be extended to December this year due to the slow rollout of the vaccine. The rate at which the Irish state is currently vaccinating people against COVID-19 is nowhere near what is needed to give the population immunity before next year.

Research by the Our World in Data website which is linked to Oxford University showed that Ireland now has the highest daily number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases per capita in the world.

The state broadcasting service RTE reported on January 11 that Ireland’s seven day rolling average is 1,394 cases per million, compared to the UK on 810, Portugal on 735, and the United States on 653.

The current Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil/Green Party coalition government presided over by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin has played Russian roulette with the lives of working people at the behest of business interests and the super-rich. Its priority throughout the pandemic has been to keep the economy open for as long as possible, whatever the risks to the population, in line with the interests of US and European capital, and the dictates of the local ruling elite who support Martin's government as a broker for their class.

In early October 2020, Martin's government rejected a call from NPHET and other health experts for the immediate imposition of the highest grade Level 5 restrictions.

Two weeks later, October 19, they reversed course and imposed a six-week lockdown to suppress rising infection rates. Even with these new restrictions the government let construction sites remain open and refused to close schools. The restrictions had a downward impact on the number of infections, but these gains were squandered in late November when Martin's government opened the economy again under pressure from business.

As infections accelerated over the Christmas period to a thousand a day, Martin's coalition government imposed a third lockdown on December 30. This is planned to last till early March, with periodic reviews. Bars and restaurants have been shut down along with retail outlets. Travel between counties and home visits have been banned. Construction sites closed from January 8 for all but essential building projects.

Most schools are closed until the end of January, but secondary school pupils in preparation for their final exams will attend three days a week and roughly 15,000 pupils in special schools and classes remain in school full-time. Martin insisted, “All the scientific and public health evidence shows [schools] remain safe environments” and Minister for Education Norma Foley promised “we are looking at the review [of the school closure policy] at the end of January.”

The effect of the pandemic is exacerbated by Ireland’s social and economic crisis. Growing social inequality and the worst housing crisis in the country’s history, as well as a severe deterioration in the health care system, has left the Ireland woefully unprepared for the latest surge in COVID-19 infections.

Between 2008 and 2014, successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael governments carried out massive health spending cuts worth €2.7 billion, which left the health service understaffed and with reduced bed capacity.

A decade of attacks on the living standards of the working class has left swathes of society extremely vulnerable. By the end of last month there were almost 529,300 people on the live unemployment register or claiming the pandemic unemployment payment. The housing and homeless crisis has accelerated. Data from the Central Statistics Office which was published by the Saint Vincent De Paul charity showed recently that there were more than 140,000 children living in homes that are cold and damp, with 12.3 percent of Irish children living in fuel poverty.

While living standards plummet amid the health and social emergency, the coalition government has looked after its financial backers and friends. Over €4.5 billion have been handed to employers since the pandemic began through the Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme. Under the current lockdown introduced at the beginning of this month, a double payment of the Covid Restrictions Support Scheme (CRSS) was made to businesses, up to a maximum of €5,000 a week. Businesses affected will also be eligible commercial rates relief for the first three months of 2021.

Poorest UK schoolchildren sent meagre pandemic food parcels, as contractors reap massive profits

Robert Stevens

Millions responded with shock as the appalling contents of the “food parcels” being delivered to the families of 1.7 million schoolchildren who receive free school meals was exposed on social media.

Many expressed disgust and denounced the profiteering from poverty during the school closures necessitated by the pandemic.

One mother, using the handle “Roadside Mum” posted a photo of the contents of her food parcel which contained a loaf of bread, two carrots, two potatoes, a tomato, a tin of baked beans, some individual cheese slices, two mini cake bars, three snack tubes of fromage-frais and a small bag of pasta. The fruit in the parcel was bruised. The mother said that the parcel was supposed to last for two weeks and be worth £30.

Food parcel sent to UK school child receiving free school meals (Picture: @Roadside Mum/Twitter)

“I priced that like-for-like from Asda [supermarket] and it came to £5.22. Where’s the other £25?” Her photo was shared more than 30,000 times. She added, “The private company who have the #FSM [free school meals] contract made good profit here.”

She told BBC Breakfast, “As I unpacked that food parcel in my living room and looked at the contents, it felt very sad and very depressing. One of my children came in and saw me laying this out on the floor, and I said I was going to picture it because it didn't look like a lot. I could see the child's realisation that this is what I've been given to eat for a week and the sense of sadness.”

Other photos showed even less. Lisa T received meagre portions that looked like the modern-day equivalent of the slop served in Victorian workhouses. She explained in a twitter post, “We were given this in a paper bag. It consisted of a bag of pasta, granola, cheese and tomato soup mix (both in money bags!) etc.” The onion (quartered), tomato (halved) and pepper (halved) and carrot (a tiny piece) had been cut up and put into cling film. Lisa commented, “Our school was disgusted by our caterers! Food in money bags!!! Pathetic carrot stub.”

Food wrapped in money bags sent to Lisa (Picture: @LMT1180/Twitter)

Another image from Christa Lee showed food contents also packed in bank money bags for her 17-year-old daughter. Her school is in one of the ten most deprived areas in England. Christa told the Daily Mirror, “This tells our children that they do not matter. That all they are worth is food in unsafe packaging that will leave them hungry. Children as young as 11 years old are being given this and expected to be able to prepare it. Many of them will be preparing it alone due to parents having to work. Those on low incomes rarely have the luxury of a job that can be done from home."

Mother Faye Emery shared a picture showing five small bottles of water, a cheap loaf of white bread, a few slices of processed ham, a small package of cheese and four small, prepacked fruit cakes. Each of her two children received this package from their academy school in Norfolk.

According to government guidelines, food parcels should take into account family’s dietary requirements. Faye said that this had not been followed in the case of her children. “My daughter has a musculoskeletal disorder and severe joint issues and there is no way she’s getting the protein she needs from the package so it’s going to end up costing me the same amount as what the government is paying the school to feed her at home, which I obviously don’t have.”

Stating that “I don’t know if I’d feed the ham to my dog,” as “what I’ve got is a bunch of gristle,” Faye asked the school to use the £30 to provide her with ingredients to cook a hot meal instead. The Metro said she was told, “you either get it or get nothing.”

Amy Weldon was delivered a few rations in a black refuse bin liner. She said, “Every parent in the country needs this to be reverted back to the vouchers as some children will starve. The food companies are profiting massively from this. It's outrageous at what they've given for my daughter and considering it's meant to be a pandemic because of a virus they shouldn't be opening food and touching it to repackage it.”

Many of the parents shared the images of the parcels with Manchester United and England international footballer Marcus Rashford. Rashford, now 23 years old, had himself suffered from hunger as a child. In the summer, the government were forced into a series of U-turns after Rashford used his massive social media presence to demand that children from poor families be provided with free school meals during school holidays.

Despite having to back down, the Tories ensured a financial killing for their mates in the private sector. Government guidance was issued that instead of cash vouchers schools should be “strongly encouraged” to adopt a “food parcel first approach” sourced from existing catering providers, with a budget of £15 per pupil per week. It was only last week, as Britain entered its latest partial lockdown, that Education Minister Gavin Williamson announced that the national supermarket vouchers scheme would be re-introduced, but only if schools could not provide “food parcels or meals” for eligible children.

One of the main firms profiting is Chartwells, a subsidiary of the Compass food group. Compass serves more than 5.5 billion meals annually across 45 countries and is described by the Financial Times as the “world’s largest caterer”.

Entire tranches of services previously provided by the state have been handed over to the private sector for profit in the last decades. The Guardian reported, “Compass and its subsidiary [Chartwells] have won contracts worth almost £350m for school catering, typically including free school meal provision…” Chartwells has a multiyear contract with the Harris Federation, which runs 50 schools in the UK, worth £40 million. Other firms cashing in are Worcester-based Aspens Services who were “awarded contracts worth £75m between 2016 and 2020, followed by Cater Link with contracts worth £72m.”

Chartwells has close links to the Tory Party. Former chairman Paul Walsh stepped down as a director only last month and previously served as a member of the business advisory group to Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Walsh donated £10,000 to the Tories in 2010, the year Cameron took office.

Chartwells commented in response to Roadside Mum’s photo: “For clarity this shows five days of free school lunches (not ten days) and the charge for food, packing and distribution was actually £10.50 and not £30 as suggested.”

The wretched parcels sent out to the poorest are a far cry from the lavishly prepared gourmet food provided by the “Chartwells Independent” arm of the company to private prep and boarding schools. Social media was flooded with photos of the luxuries that Chartwells provides for the scions of the ruling elite. They included a canapés table and a dessert of oatmeal and panna cotta with orange and chocolate provided to Norwich School. Pupils at New Hall School were served up a dish of coconut, lemongrass and banana leaf wrapped salmon. One private boarding school had an entire gingerbread town created by Chartwells.

Rashford this week denounced the situation as “unacceptable.” This forced Prime Minister Boris Johnson into a hand wringing declaration that he would carry out a review as “these food parcels do not meet the standards we set out and we have made it clear to the company involved that this is disgraceful.” He admitted that the rations being delivered by private contractors are based on government guidelines.

Johnson’s abasing himself before Rashford to placate public anger highlights how the Labour Party and their trade union partners are refusing to lift a finger against the austerity programme and homicidal herd immunity agenda of the Tories that has already cost over 100,000 lives.

In Parliament, Johnson even declared cynically, “I’m grateful for Marcus Rashford who highlighted the issue and is doing quite an effective job by comparison with the right honourable gentleman [Starmer] in holding the government to account for these issues.”

Canada deepens support for US-led anti-China offensive

Laurent Lafrance & Roger Jordan

Tensions between Canada and China are growing sharper, as Ottawa swings ever more openly behind US imperialism’s aggressive diplomatic, economic and military-strategic offensive against Beijing.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to the media at a hotel in Beijing, China on Dec. 5, 2017 (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

The federal government of Justin Trudeau directly intervened last month to prevent the takeover of gold miner TMAC Resources Inc. by China’s state-owned Shandong Gold Mining Co. Ltd. While the Canadian government refused to explain its rejection of the C$230 million transaction, a senior government official told the Globe and Mail it was motivated by “national security” concerns. Another source said Washington, which has responded to the capitalist breakdown precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic by doubling down on its efforts to militarily and economically counter China, had pressed Trudeau to block the deal. In 2018, the Trudeau government similarly cited national security concerns to block the $1.5-billion buyout of the construction and engineering firm Aecon Group Ltd. by a Chinese state-controlled firm.

The underlying claim that the acquisition of the Doris gold mine could serve as a means for the Chinese regime to conduct spying operations is rather absurd, considering that TMAC’s mine is located in Hope Bay, Nunavut, an inlet on the Northwest Passage more than 100 kilometers from the closest North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) radar station.

Trudeau’s decision is part of the tougher stance his Liberal government has adopted in recent years against China, under pressure from Washington, the most right-wing sections of the Canadian ruling class, and the corporate-controlled media. The leader of the official opposition Conservative Party, Erin O’Toole, is leading an hysterical campaign against China, repeatedly invoking the “threat to national security” posed by the presence of Chinese companies in Canada.

O’Toole’s criticisms notwithstanding, Canada under Trudeau has been increasingly involved in the vast US-led campaign against China that was initiated under Obama in 2011 with his Pivot to Asia, and intensified over the last four years under the Trump administration. Trudeau has also made clear that he is eager to work closely with a Democratic administration led by Joe Biden, who has pledged to intensify aggression against both Russia and China. Should Biden successfully enter the White House next Wednesday, one of his first foreign policy priorities will be the creation of a “coalition of democracies” against China. This proposal, which the Trudeau government is enthusiastic to join, is aimed at giving a phony “human rights” veneer to Washington’s bullying and threatening of Beijing. It involves the embrace of such paragons of democratic rights as the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi of India, and Australia’s Scott Morrison, who has refused to denounce the January 6 Trump-incited and orchestrated coup attempt in Washington.

The US’ provocative campaign against China includes growing trade-war measures such as the push to exclude Huawei from the 5G networks of NATO states, as well as the announced deployment of nuclear-capable medium-range missiles targeting Beijing. For both economic and strategic reasons, Washington is determined to block China emerging as a dominant player in high-tech industries.

Canada—unlike its Five-Eyes partners, the US, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand—has not yet officially barred local companies from using Chinese giant telecom firm Huawei’s components in their 5G networks. However, in expectation of such a move, Bell, Telus and all the other major Canadian telecommunications companies have already taken the step of excluding Huawei, whose technology is in certain respects more developed than that of its US and European competitors, from their networks.

The offensive against Huawei is directly connected to the political aggression against China. In 2018, at the behest of the Trump administration, Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, on bogus charges of breaking US sanctions against Iran. China retaliated to what was in fact a political kidnapping by detaining two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur operating in North Korea. Two years on, Trudeau is more forthright than ever in defending Meng’s seizure. He has repeatedly spurned calls for Canada to end the extradition proceedings in exchange for the return of Spavor and Kovrig.

To pressure Ottawa to adopt an even more hardline stance towards Beijing, the Trump administration has attacked Dominic Barton, Canada’s current ambassador to China, for his alleged close relationship with the regime of president Xi Jinping. Before his current role, Barton was for nine years global managing partner for New York-based consulting firm McKinsey and Co. Senator Marco Rubio, a close associate and supporter of Trump, has denounced Barton for acting against US “economic and national security interests” by helping China advance its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) when he worked for McKinsey. The BRI, a mega Chinese-led infrastructure program that seeks to expand commerce through Eurasia and beyond, is viewed by Washington with deep hostility.

Trudeau chose Barton, a former advisor to the state-controlled China Development Bank, as his government’s envoy to Beijing in 2019 in an attempt to prevent a total collapse of bilateral ties. When he took power in 2015, Trudeau had raised the prospect of a free trade deal with Beijing, a proposal which enjoyed support among a faction of big business due to the potential to access new markets and profits in China and through the BRI. China is Canada’s second most important bilateral commercial partner after the US (or third if the 27 European Union member states are counted as a whole). However, under conditions of the rapid intensification of the US-China conflict, and due to the Canadian bourgeoisie’s dependence on access to the US market and reliance on its decades-long military-strategic partnership with Washington to advance its global imperialist ambitions, the free trade proposal rapidly unraveled. As part of the revised NAFTA or Canada-US-Mexico trade agreement, the US extracted from its partners the right to review any free trade deal they might sign with China in advance, and to abrogate the North America trade pact if such a deal was implemented against their wishes.

Canada is fully integrated in US imperialism’s three main military-strategic offensives: in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe against Russia and in the Asia-Pacific against China. To step up its role in these US-led offensives, the Liberals announced a 70 percent increase in military spending in 2017 as part of its new national defence policy. Significantly, that defence policy also identified China, together with Russia and Islamist terrorism, as a “global threat” to Canada.

Powerful sections of the military-security establishment, which is so closely tied to the United States that high-level military talks were held in 2013 on the possibility of merging the Canadian and US militaries, want Ottawa to go even further. In a Globe and Mail interview published this week, Gen. Jonathan Vance, the outgoing Chief of Defence Staff, called for Canada to adopt a “grand strategy” for dealing with China. The clear implication of this remark was that while Trudeau has accommodated himself to the bipartisan US-led offensive against Beijing, Canadian imperialism has yet to do what is required in terms of military rearmament and geostrategic planning to wage war.

Vance is not alone. Leading Defence Department and military officials have been complaining for months that Canada’s defence and foreign policies are out of date. Canada is already committed to spending untold billions of dollars on modernizing NORAD, the bilateral US-Canada military alliance that defends the North American continent against their geopolitical rivals, above all Russia and China. Many are arguing that a critical element of this modernization must be Canada’s joining Washington’s ballistic missile defence shield, the main goal of which is to wage a “winnable” nuclear war.

The Globe recently revealed that in 2019, Vance, at Washington’s urging, took the “unilateral” decision to cancel winter military exercises between the Canadian Armed Forces and China’s People’s Liberation Army. The secret documents show that government officials from Global Affairs Canada rebuked Vance due to their concern that this would be seen as an act of retaliation for the arrest of the Kovrig and Spavor, and could exacerbate tensions with Beijing. More significant, however, is a passage in the document that includes deliberations about how China might react if Canada took the provocative decision to send a warship through the Taiwan Strait. This it subsequently did, first in September of 2019 and then again in October of last year.

In its anti-China campaign, the Trudeau government has the full support of the union-backed New Democratic Party (NDP). Last November, this ostensibly “left” organization presented a motion supported by all parties of Parliament congratulating Joe Biden for his electoral victory and inviting the future president to visit Canada and address a joint session of the House of Commons and Senate. Some days later, the NDP supported a Conservative motion calling for action against Chinese “foreign interference” and urging the Trudeau government to make a quick decision on whether Chinese-based Huawei should be banned from Canada’s 5G networks.

For their part, the Conservatives are pushing for an even more confrontational policy towards China. This includes mimicking Trump, both by trying to maliciously scapegoat China for the pandemic, and by calling for “Canada First” measures to protect “Canadian jobs” from Chinese competition. In a piece last month for the rabidly right-wing National Post, O’Toole asserted that “standing up to China” is critical “for the safety of Canadians, both here and abroad.”