The World Situation by Ragini Kistnasamy

13.02.2023

At the recent LALIT two-day Seminar, Ragini Kistnasamy outlined the fast-changing world geo-political situation. 

But before coming to the world situation itself, she gave a brief introduction on how the Coronavirus pandemic had already made us realize the extent to which the present capitalist economic system was, and still is, unable to confront a world-wide health crisis. We even saw the USA’s own economy running out of gloves and Covid tests, and being helped out by Russia. All the while the West has continued to hoard intellectual patents on the most efficient Covid vaccines, which even until now are under monopoly control by the West.

At the same time, the imbalance and degradation of the environment through industrial and agricultural pollution is provoking catastrophic climate change, which Mauritius, like Madagascar, South Africa, New Zealand and Pakistan are experiencing already – she was referring to the recent floods. 

This danger goes hand in hand with the danger of species collapse that threatens all life as habitat is gobbled up by voracious capitalist private companies.

The above three dangers – future pandemics, climate catastrophe, species collapse – were there even before the catastrophic war in Ukraine. This is a war in which both Russia and the imperialist countries that arm Ukraine are unanimous in their silence in calling for peace. They, like Russia, want, instead, “victory”.

It is in this context that we find that political change has become very difficult, especially in terms of “proze de sosyete”, or a vision of a new kind of society as a whole. Election results, whether in the USA or in Mauritius, are challenged in irrational ways. These claims of “the big steal” in the USA or “eleksyon marday” in Mauritius, to name just two cases, instead of working towards more democracy, come and undermine the little democracy our predecessors and we, ourselves, have fought for and won. The extreme right – fascistic parties and all – gain strength. Political struggle, and in particular the institution of “political parties” have been systematically discredited – with massive campaigns in favour of “civil society” and NGOs that are totally unable to accomplish the change that political parties, if controlled by their members, can.

Geopolitical situation

The present situation is highlighted by the USA moving to maintain its “unipolar” imperialist control over the world. The USA, with NATO that it controls 100%, has first encircled Russia militarily, in a big way since 2014, and now arming Ukraine to the teeth in order to defend itself against the Russian invasion, while at the same time in order to weaken Russia, and to make all the European countries become totally subservient to the USA and its NATO. The USA has even managed to put Sweden and Finland in a position where they apply to join NATO, too, and to become subservient, having avoided this for over half a century. Now, by 2023 it is impossible for any European country to have a geo-political stand that is not subservient to the USA – short of a major confrontation with the USA.

Even before accomplishing the first aim of isolating Russia, while bringing Europe to heel, the USA is preparing, once that is accomplished, to go ahead and begin encircling China, getting rid of the possibility that Russia, in the planned future confrontation, be an ally to China, while the USA already does sporadic military drills in the Taiwan Straits, which is the narrow sea, 150 km that separates one part of China from another part, Taiwan. Even the USA still recognizes the one-China policy that sees the Straits in these terms. But this will not be for long, it seems. 

To summarize, the USA is encircling Russia and further weakening it by drawing out Russia’s war against Ukraine for as long as possible, and has made Europe a dependency. 

These are, in turn, a sure sign that the USA has accepted that it is an imperial country in decline. While it does still have the military might to dominate everywhere, its economic base, its production, has begun to fail over the past 30 years.

After the Second World War, the USA took control of economic “reconstruction” of Europe. But there was the USSR that was a rising power, and that balanced the USA’s move towards total domination of the world. Over the next 50 years the defeated countries in Europe as well as Japan, also defeated, managed to recover, and hoped to become independent, although Japan and the Germany are still littered with US military bases. But recent events have shown that the USA has brought Europe and Japan to heel. Now the USA has the aim of bringing Russia to heel. 

But, the USA’s leadership of the world has not gone unquestioned. “The world” has not followed the USA blindly at all. LALIT has previously pointed out that half of the world’s population live in countries that did not even vote for the US’s resolution condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Most do condemn the invasion, but cannot bear to be roped into the “double standards” of not condemning the USA for the same and worse invasions. 

There is a will amongst the previously Non-Aligned countries – in the USA-USSR stand-off – to maintain a neutral stand relative to the USA’s growing militarism. And these countries have grown in strength.

There has been the spectacular rise of China’s economy, as can be seen in its Silk Road Economic Belt.

This rise has been in contrast with the fall in the USA’s political leadership, where the Trump Administration signalled a waning into political decadence. The main political parties in the USA are even stymied very often from acting like ordinary parliamentary parties. They block each other’s functioning. They put forward no plan, no political program, for the American people. The USA could not even get its development budget passed, but had to cut it down to one-quarter of its original size – from over 3 trillion to 1 trillion dollars. At the same time, $70 billion have been spent on military and other aid to Ukraine, while another $40 billion have been asked for by the White House from Congress. At the same time, at the end of 2021 the US passed a law called the “China Competition Act”. The American people thus become a sub-category of the aim to dominate China and the rest of the world. This Act includes “transfer of excess defense articles to Taiwan” (quote from official summary). 

While the USA has this kind of difficulty, the USA’s allies in Europe are on their knees, after having to suffer the sanctions on Russian oil and gas. Europe depended on these. Germany is paying 4 times what the US pays for fuel. (Even the pipeline from Europe to Russia has been blown up – probably by the UK-USA. Their secretive “enquiry” found that “there was no proof Russia blew up the pipe-line”.)

As China has risen, while the USA is in political decline and half of Europe is heading for recession, the USA can compete with China only militarily – not economically. The USA cannot imagine bombing the Silk Road initiative. 

So, the USA threatens the world with war instead. Europe has been obliged to spend astronomic amounts on armaments. As well as having all the big European companies putting pressure on the European governments, the big American companies within their borders add their own political, and economic, pressure to force European companies to close down and re-localize within the USA. The US aim is to de-industrialize Europe, and to link Europe’s economies so strongly to that of the USA, that the European countries cannot possibly have their own independent foreign policy, or even economic policy.

And the USA is proceeding by means of a new “arms race” – this time first against Russia, then against China.

To this effect, you can see that, as well as European countries, the USA has some “military base” countries (pei santinel), like Israel. The USA has just held its biggest ever joint military drills with Israel – on land, sea and in cyberspace. And just as the drills were in action, Israel was attacking Jenin in Palestine – at the very moment that the CIA chief was in Israel, 48-hours before Secretary of State Blinken arrived. 

And the USA is busy converting the whole of its subservient world into using two vocabularies on international affairs: when talking about what “we” demand of China and Russia, it can sometimes be “international law” that has to be respected (a high bar), but when talking about what “we” respect for ourselves to follow, it is the “rules based international order” or sometimes just, to be fuzzy, “the international order”. Or, if it suits the USA, they can say that China has not respected “the international order” – an “order” the USA makes up as it goes along. “Mwa, mo met lalwa, akoz mo larme inegalab.”  

The USA is now dismantling as much of real international law as it can, so that it is free to act, itself, and to act militarily. (On Diego Garcia and Chagos, we can see it already. It is against international law that they have a base on Diego, but gete ki u pu fer.) The USA had already used its own national law to begin to replace international law: its AGOA, for example, was notorious for giving access to the US market in exchange for Governments toing the line with regard to US “foreign policy”.

So, the USA is now reinforcing and setting up military blocs. LALIT has articles on its website on the AUKUS bloc (Australia, UK, US) and the Quad (UK, Japan, India, Australia) and so on. These regional military blocs being set up by the USA are military blocs whose agenda will be dictated by USA economic and military interests. The USA’s ultimate aim is to destroy the traditional regional organisations such as ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian States), CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), AU (African union States) which have developed, over time, regional cooperation based on equality of nations and on consensus in each of their respective regions and which have the potential to challenge USA unipolar ambitions.

Faced with this kind of “unipolar” situation, where the USA is trying to be the only power in the world, there is an attempt already in motion to counter-act it. And, by ostentatiously showing a lack of support for the US resolutions at the UN against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, the countries opposing US hegemony managed to make their stand clear – even though most do consider Russia to be an invader. These countries – that refuse to cow-tow to the USA – insist that all invasions (e.g. against Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria) be condemned. 

And looking forward, the same playbook will be used by the USA. It intends to use Taiwan, which like Israel, and then Ukraine, is another “leta santinel” to the USA, and will be much developed along these lines, as Ukraine was from the 2014 coup onwards. Tragically, the Philippines had just last month started to return to its former “santinel” role. After getting all those huge US military bases closed down, the Philippines after a series of hard-right, almost fascist governments, has signed a deal where US military will be given expanded access to its military bases. So, the Philippines will join with those encircling China for the USA, like Australia and Taiwan.

In all this, it is worth mentioning the role of France. The USA decided to insult France, and get Australia to cancel its contract to buy submarines from France, and to buy from the USA instead. This bit of “furbri” then sealed the new AUKUS treaty. At the same time, France has been kicked out of Mali and Burkina Faso, where its army was.

The new wars are in different spheres now – not just land and sea and air, but also in space and in data control. As we met we saw another new area – the one between the air and space – where balloons float.

Riposte

But the riposte is preparing itself. 

Today the countries known as the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa – have begun to resist the USA. Brazil – with other South American countries – is working towards a common currency that breaks their reliance on the US dollar. Russia has not collapsed under the Western sanctions, as predicted by the USA. Russia and China do much of their trade in a currency that is not the US dollar. India, even though in a military alliance with the USA brokered between Trump and Modi, is in the powerful and long-standing organization for co-operation called the Shanghai Co-operation Organization alongside Russia and China.(*)

So, these countries are resisting. They have not yet bowed down. The USA aims to chip away at them, one by one.

And in the midst of this world wide crisis, on the backdrop of climate breakdown, the risk of mass species extinctions, and the new high risk of nuclear war between Russia and NATO over Ukraine, there is the Diego Garcia issue that has become central to the USA’s military control of what they now call the “Indo-Pacific region”, and the USA-UK duo are illegal tenants of Chagos.

So Mauritius is, for once, in the middle of it all.

So, while we used to berate people who “think Mauritius is the navel of the world” (lonbri lemond), there is a sense in which this has become real. Every day Diego Garcia and Chagos are in the world news. If it is not for migrants being captured and held there, it is because the BIOT’s stamps are not accepted by the Universal Postal union. If it is not about military build-up on the US base, it is because the UK had been declared not a “coastal state” for the purposes of the Tuna Fishing Commission.

And, even NGOs get drawn in. After Greenpeace being hoodwinked into making a fool of itself over supporting the colonial power’s using a Marine Protected Area for a land-grab, now Human Rights Watch is being hoodwinked. Just at the moment that the UK government has announced its supposed “negotiations” with Mauritius, following the decolonization decision of the ICJ, and Britain’s continued illegal occupation of the Republic of Mauritius, this very occupying power has even managed to rope in Human Rights Watch by somehow getting it to announce publicly that it is begging a place at the UK (the colonizing power)’s table while the UK “negotiates” with the Republic of Mauritius, the very ex-colony that the UK illegally split up, forcibly and violently removed the entire population from part of, and still occupies that part that was forcibly and secretly depopulated. HRW even announces that it believes the decolonization issue to be “secondary”. Only a colonizer ever says this. This kind of recognition suits the UK state apparatus just fine. It gives a veil to cover the face of the bandit state (the UK) that has stolen part of its colony of Mauritius (Chagos), and rented part of the stolen goods (Diego) for a USA military base outside all democratic control, and had B-52s take off from there in illegal wars and go bombard civilian cities like Baghdad and a bride’s families’ wedding caravan in Afghanistan. Without HRW recognizing its sovereignty, the US-UK have only three miserable allies that voted with them to prolong the UK’s sovereignty: Netanyahu’s Israel, Orban’s Hungary and at the time of the vote, Morrison’s Australia. (The Maldives having withdrawn its support for continued colonization.) 

The only negotiations that there ought to be on Chagos, are as to when the UK-USA are getting out. Instead, what do we see? The Prime Minister, Pravind Jugnauth, is offering a 99-year lease to the USA for the base? This means that Mauritius, like Philippines, is lining up not with those seeking non-alignment, not opposing militarism and war, but as a puppet of the USA. 

The whole region is vital. Both China and India have interests to protect. India has already a Trump-Modi brokered military alliance with the USA, whereby it uses US facilities in Diego Garcia, while the US does servicing in Indian ports  – but it is careful also to be in the Shanghai Co-operation Organization alongside China, Russia, and others. Mauritius has very close relations with India, and there is the worrying opacity of the Agalega infrastructure developments that are being kept quiet by the Mauritian government. China has always had good relations with Mauritius, too. And the whole Sherry Singh saga, when he left or was ejected from Mauritius Telecom, is probably a sign that India was opposing China’s entry into the data-war, when it set up the Safe City cameras. 

To return to Diego Garcia and Chagos. The former British High Commissioner, David Snoxell, predicts publicly that the UK will release sovereignty over Chagos soon, but over Diego Garcia (part thereof), at a later date. The lease for the military base runs out in 2036 – though it was illegal, because the UK does not very well have the right to lease what belongs to Mauritius to a third party. But, Snoxell seems to be referring to the “later date” return of sovereignty, in 13 years, because it happens to coincide with the 13 years between the UK promising to return Hong Kong to China in 1984 and doing so in 1997.

Conclusion

So the world working class, in Mauritius, and everywhere, have a lot of work to do, if we intend to save the planet from the dangers of war and militarism that capitalism inevitably courts, and from the dangers of extinction through climate chaos, species extinction, nuclear war – that will all be muddled in with the eternal thirst and hunger that capitalism has for economic growth and then, as a consequence, for war and destruction.

So, it is the duty of political parties all over the world to face up to these dangers. As South African Foreign Minister put it, we should not be roped into the “double standards” of the West. Referring to the United States new colonial-style Act, the “Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act”, South African Foreign Minister said that this US law must be withdrawn as it is an intrusion that goes against international law. This US legislation must be opposed just as the AGOA before it was successfully opposed; AGOA’s conditions were rarely able to be imposed by the USA.

(*) The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is an intergovernmental organization founded in Shanghai on 15 June 2001. The SCO currently comprises eight Member States (China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), four Observer States interested in acceding to full membership (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia) and six “Dialogue Partners” (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and even Turkey, which is in NATO). In 2021, the decision was made to start the accession process of Iran to the SCO as a full member. Egypt, Qatar as well as Saudi Arabia became dialogue partners.