Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific — An Introduction

 

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark
 

As the highly respected international relations scholar David C. Kang has argued in American Grand Strategy and East Asian Security in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and other works, there has been a general decline in military expenditures as a share of GDP in the largest East Asian states over the last couple of decades. Taking the eleven largest states, it has dropped to roughly half of what it was two and half decades before, declining from an average 3.35 percent in 1990 to an average of 1.8 percent in 2015—a trend that has continued. This objectively points toward a sense of increasing, rather than decreasing, national security in the region. It is this climate of peace that the United States is threatening to disturb, not for the sake of East Asia but aimed at the preservation at all costs of its preeminence as a world power.

C. Wright Mills famously said, “the immediate cause of World War III is the preparation of it.” The United States, facing the demise of its global hegemonic imperialism, is not only preparing for a Third World War; it is actively provoking it. There are signs, however, that a mass anti-imperialist movement is again emerging in the United States and in the other countries of the imperial core of the capitalist world economy, beginning with the Free Palestine movement in response to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza supported by Washington. The world movement today must be anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, antiwar, and ecological. Since the alternative is global exterminism, it is a struggle that only humanity can win.

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