Backing Up Globalization
with Military Might

by Karen Talbot

CovertAction Quarterly, Fall / Winter 1999

The U. S. Senate recently labeled Serbia a "terrorist state,'' in an act of obscene hypocrisy-yet another case of blaming the victim for the crimes of the perpetrator What could be more "terrorist" than the relentless blitzkrieg of 23,000 bombs and missiles rained upon Yugoslavia for 79 days by U.S.-led NATO forces? Is it not terrorism to drop on civilians radioactive depleted uranium weapons and outlawed cluster bombs designed to rip human flesh to shreds, from the sanctuary of thousands of feet in the air, or using terrain-hugging computer-guided missiles? Is it not terrorism to target deliberately the entire infrastructure of a small sovereign nation, including electrical and water filtration systems critical to the survival of civilians? Is it not terrorism to ferociously obliterate 200 factories and destroy the jobs of millions of workers? What of the constant air assault-"fire from the sky"-against cities, villages, schools, hospitals, senior residences, TV towers and studios, oil refineries, chemical plants, electrical power plants, transmission towers, gas stations, homes, farms, schools, marketplaces, buses, trains, railroad lines, bridges, roads, medieval monasteries, churches, historic monuments-destruction amounting to more than $100 billion? What of eco-terrorism, biological and chemical warfare, the incalculable result of the destruction of the environment, including the deliberate bombardment of chemical plants? Above all, is it not terrorism to kill, maim, traumatize, impoverish, or render homeless tens of thousands of men, women, and children?

Not only was NATO'S war a reprehensible act of inhumanity, it was in contravention of all norms of international law, including the Charter of the United Nations. This was an unprecedented war by the most powerful military force in history involving the 19 wealthiest nations with 95% of the world's armaments against a small sovereign nation that ultimately had little chance of countering such an attack.

WHY THE BALKANS?

Yugoslavia is strategically located. The peoples of this region have had the great misfortune of living on real estate coveted by empire after empire, all of which employed classic divide and conquer tactics by pitting one people against another. Not much has changed.

The determination by the U. S and NATO to occupy Kosovo and virtually all of Yugoslavia is spurred on by the enticement of abundant natural resources. Kosovo alone has the richest mineral resources in all of Europe west of Russia. The New York Times observed that "the sprawling state-owned Trepca mining complex, the most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans, is worth at least $5 billion," producing gold, silver, lead, zinc, and cadmium, as well as tens of millions of dollars in profits annually. The New York Times also revealed that a "number of unofficial partition plans have been drawn up for Kosovo all raising the question of who would control an important northern mining region." Trepca was also a glittering prize taken over by Hitler to fuel the Nazi war machine during W.W.II. "Kosovo also possesses 17 billion tons of coal reserves and Kosovo (like Serbia and Albania) also has oil reserves."

Serbia as a whole is rich in minerals and oil including in Vojvodina, the northern part of the Yugoslavia. That coveted area of Vojvodina is also extremely fertile land-a major "breadbasket" for Europe. Then there is the allure of enterprises to be privatized at bargain prices, and the anticipation of exploiting very cheap and highly skilled labor potentially available to work in sweatshop conditions.

Perhaps most significant is the fact that Yugoslavia has strong elements of a socialist economy-the last in Europe, however tattered it may have become by years of economic destabilization by the West and financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. Sixty-five percent of all firms are either state-owned or self-managed cooperatives. s Most heavy industry is state-owned. The factories bombed during the 79 days of NATO attacks were exclusively state-owned. The banking and financial system is also state-controlled. Only 20 percent of the workforce was in the private sector 6

The U.S. had joined Belgrade's other international creditors in imposing a first round of macroeconomic reforms in 1980, shortly before the death of Marshal Tito. "Successive IMF-sponsored programs since then continued the disintegration of the industrial sector and the piecemeal dismantling of the Yugoslav welfare state. Debt restructuring agreements increased foreign debt and mandated currency devaluation also hit hard at Yugoslavia's standard of living.... [The] IMF prescribed further doses of its bitter economic medicine periodically... Industrial production declined to a negative 10 percent growth rate in 1990- with all its predictable social consequences. "7

ABOVE ALL IT'S ABOUT OIL

Perhaps above all, this U.S.-led onslaught is about oil. It is related to the drive to extend and protect the investments of the transnational corporations in the Caspian Sea region, especially the oil corporations.

The Balkans are strategic for the transshipment of oil and gas to Europe and beyond. They are critical in the competition between Europe and the U.S. over these riches. Time is of the essence. The first tanker shipment from the port of Supsa in Georgia on the eastern Black Sea coast- the terminus of a pipeline from the Caspian Sea oil fields-took place recently Another pipeline passing through Russia, in particular Chechnya, and also ending at the eastern shore of the Black Sea at Novorossiysk, will add to the tanker traffic.

The predicament is how to get that oil beyond the Black Sea. The Bosporus straits, at Istanbul, are narrow and pose considerable hazards, especially for the tremendously heavy tanker traffic expected. And so far plans to build a pipeline through Turkey (Kurdistan) are thwarted by the struggles of the Kurds and by competing interests Hopes for a pipeline through Iran are also on hold. Though preferred for several reasons, those routes would not provide the best access to Europe and the Western Hemisphere. The oil can be shipped by tanker up the Danube River, a waterway crossing Europe from the Black Sea where a short canal connects it to the port of Constanza in Romania. The Danube runs through Belgrade and Novi Sad in Yugoslavia. The recent completion of a grand canal-about the time the turmoil started in the former Yugoslavia-between the Danube and Rhine Rivers now makes it possible to ply those waters through a great inland system of canals and waterways to the industrial Ruhr Valley and clear to the North Sea. Undoubtedly this route is favored by the Europeans in the competition over the Caspian Sea treasure chest.

PIPELINES ACROSS THE BALKANS

There are also plans to build pipelines across the Balkans. One from Romania- which has considerable oil wealth itself- would extend from Constanza to Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. At Trieste, the oil would be piped northward or shipped westward out of Europe by tanker. A pipeline through Bulgaria from the port of Bourgas on the Black Sea to the Vlore port on the Adriatic in Albania is a project of the U.S.-owned Albanian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian Oil Corporation (AMBO).

These would be part of a multiple pipeline system in the Balkans, some connecting with existing "Soviet-era" pipelines from Russia that would need upgrading. But these oil and gas pipelines extending through Serbia from Russia to Central Europe, are extremely valuable. In the competition with European-based companies, the U.S. backs the Caspian Pipeline consortium led by Mobil.

As noted, Serbia also has oil reserves. And the port of Bar on the Montenegrin coast is the most valuable, cost-efficient, deep water port in the entire eastern Mediterranean Sea-the cheapest route for the flow of goods in and out of Eastern Europe and beyond.

Also, Kosovo is in a corridor used for centuries, even by the Crusaders, as a route between Europe and the Middle East. The route follows river valleys connecting with the Danube River Valley near Belgrade. The southern arm of the trans-Balkan railway runs along these valleys. Control of this overland passageway was critical to the German fascist war machine in World War II, and to other conquerors. It remains vital to getting the oil riches into Europe from the Middle East and for other two-way commerce.

Neighboring Albania, whose economy has been completely transformed to the "free-market," with domination by western transnational corporations and banks, has vast untapped mineral resources including oil reserves. These are already being gobbled up by transnationals including the major oil companies.

The application of strong structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and IMF "had contributed to wrecking Albania's banking system and precipitating the collapse of the Albanian economy The resulting chaos enabled American and European transnationals to position themselves carefully Several western oil companies, including Occidental, Shell, and British Petroleum, had their eyes riveted on Albania's abundant and unexplored oil deposits. Western investors were also gawking at Albania's extensive reserves of chrome, copper, gold, nickel, and platinum. The Adenauer Foundation had been lobbying in the background on behalf of German mining interests."

So this entire region is bubbling with activities over the profits to be had, particularly from oil.

STOKING CONFLICT IN THE CAUCASUS / CASPIAN SEA REGION

There is a growing contention between Russia and the West over the oil wealth of the Caspian Sea basin. This was manifested not only in the NATO war against Yugoslavia, but also increasingly in the Baltics, the Ukraine, the region of the Caucasus Mountains, and among all the littoral nations of the Caspian Sea. The main pipelines for the Central Asian oil, the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline and the Baku-Supsa pipeline, pass through the Caucasus. In the mounting disputes, Russia allies itself with Armenia and, it is suspected, with the Abkhaz separatists, to counterbalance NATO influence in Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Chechnya and Dagestan are also critical in this struggle as the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline passes through its territory. Recently separatist military actions by Dagestan against Russia have flared up in Dagestan and in Chechnya. Dagestan is located between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea.

"For Russia, Dagestan retains an important strategic value. Dagestan commands 70 percent of Russia's shoreline to the oil-producing Caspian Sea and its only all-weather Caspian port at Makhachkala. It provides the crucial pipeline links from Azerbaijan, where Russia maintains important oil interests...."

The recently opened Baku-Supsa route through Georgia, favored by the West, bypasses Russia altogether, undermining Russian influence on the region's oil and Russian revenue from that oil. This route was opened following military maneuvers for training to defend the line by Ukrainian, Georgian, and Azen troops, as part of the GUUAM alliance.

Intensifying competition between Russia and NATO has escalated after a battle with heavy losses, June 14, between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Another pipeline route favored by the U.S. is the one between Baku and Ceyhan passing through Turkey However this is more expensive and transverses the area of intense struggles by the Kurdish people. This is leading the U.S. oil companies to revive their interest in other routes. One of these is through western Afghanistan, the other, south through Iran.

Richard Morningstar, former special adviser to the President and Secretary of State for Caspian Basin energy issues, said it was essential that the two Caspian states-Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan- agree as soon as possible about a trans-Caspian gas pipeline to transport oil from Turkmenistan to Turkey via the Caspian Sea. Washington has urged these governments to ignore Russian and Iranian hostility and move ahead with this pipeline even if it means violating the existing legal status of the Caspian Sea in which all the littoral states are to be consulted about its future. Russia and Iran "feel increasingly irritated by the U.S. activities in Central Asia, aimed at preventing Moscow and Teheran from reasserting their economic and political grip over the former Soviet republics in the Caspian region."

Also at stake in this region is the growing competition from China which recently has established significant military and economic ties with Turkmenistan. China's National Petroleum Company has helped rebuild over 100 wells in Turkmenistan resulting in an increase in the nation's export production. It is estimated that Turkmenistan soon will be the third largest gas exporter in the world.

China, the second largest energy consumer in the world, is expected to require 40 percent of its oil through imports by 2010 up from less than 20 percent today.

According to a report in the Journal of Commerce: "A bitter ethnic battle in the Caucasus spilled over into Congress this week as U.S. corporate and oil interests won a key vote on aid to the region in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The panel approved the Silk Road Strategy Act...[which] would 'target assistance to support the economic and political independence of the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia.' But behind the measure's bland title is a widening web of international and U.S. business alliances with stakes in the outcome of a 10-year old war...."

So once again we can expect that oil interests will lead to interventions predicated on "national liberation" or "human rights concerns."

NEW WORLD ORDER ONSLAUGHT

This information age of high technology communications and transportation is catapulting globalization forward at warp speed. A borderless world is increasingly attractive to profit-driven corporations seeking to extend their tentacles without impediment into every conceivable niche on Planet Earth. Indeed the pundits of the "new world order" speak openly now about the demise of national sovereignty as necessary and inevitable to permit capital to flow anywhere free of restrictions. The U.S./NATO destruction of Yugoslavia established the desired precedent for military attack, cloaked in a democracy and human rights disguise, against any sovereign country that might have the temerity to stand up to the encroachment of the transnational corporations (TNCs).

The U.S. and NATO will thus be vastly emboldened by their latest "success" in the Balkans, continuing to destabilize what's left of the federal structure, while disciplining the breakaway states of Croatia and Slovenia. We can also expect the new declared mission of nuclear-armed NATO- its commitment to override the principle of national sovereignty and intervene in the name of "humanitarian concerns,"-to be implemented elsewhere, possibly in the Caspian Sea/Caucasus areas of the former Soviet Union.

Burgeoning military alliances, with the U.S. at the helm, will similarly target North Korea, China, Congo, Colombia, and elsewhere. Any country refusing to be incorporated into the "New World Order" by allowing its wealth and labor power to be plundered by the transnational corporations will be vulnerable to attack. The assault against Yugoslavia threw open the floodgates for new wars, including wars of competition among the industrial powers, with nuclear weapons part of the equation.

An article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times entitled "What the World Needs Now" tells it all. Illustrated by an American Flag on a fist it said, among other things: "For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is.... The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist-McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

There could not be a better description of how the U.S. armed forces are seen as the military arm of the globalizing TNCs.

President Clinton, in a speech delivered the day before his televised address to Americans about Kosovo, admitted: "If we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key... That's what this Kosovo thing is all about.

After the war, Clinton praised NATO for its campaign in Kosovo, saying the alliance could intervene elsewhere in Europe or Africa to fight repression. "We can do it now. We can do it tomorrow, if it is necessary somewhere else," he told U.S. troops at the Skopje, Macedonia, airport. However, it soon became clear that, even though we can do it, we would like Europe to bear more of the cost. At the September NATO defense chiefs' meeting, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, with British support, pressed Europe to spend more money on defense, to close the "growing technology gap" between Europe's lagging forces and the state of the art U.S. military British Minister of Defense Lord George Robertson's pitch was blunt: "Kosovo has shown people for real that this world is going to be more dangerous and that defense is not some luxury that can be cut in times of trouble."

Despite this push for more spending by Europe, a clear objective of the Kosovo campaign has also been to add more billions to the already bloated U.S. military budget and to fill the coffers of the military-industrial corporations with super-profits. Congress, with bipartisan fervor, approved a $20 billion increase for the Pentagon, with a total of $290 billion for fiscal year 2000, with an extra $15 billion appropriated for the war against Yugoslavia. At the same time, all other domestic discretionary spending, including education, job training, housing, environment, and health, totals $245 billion, "the biggest disparity in modern times," according to the Center for Defense Information.

AN END TO NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY ?

In today's world, TNCs, and governments running interference for them, are pushing for an end to national sovereignty and democracy in order to achieve total unimpeded access for investments, cheap labor, and consumers in every nook and cranny of the globe. This is being accomplished, among other ways, through mechanisms like multilateral agreements on investment, free trade agreements like NAFTA, and the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO).

Globalization fever is running rampant. It is epitomized by the feeding frenzy taking place across the Asia-Pacific region among U.S.-based transnationals and banks as they gobble up assets at bargain basement prices-in Japan facing a prolonged recession and in other nations stricken by the Asian economic crisis. In the early weeks of that economic tsunami, the New York Times described U.S. banks and corporations as poised to "snap up some corporate bargains.... Chase Manhattan, General Electric, General Motors, and J.P Morgan are all said to be looking at ailing companies in the region."

To achieve maximum profits, these transnationals will stop at nothing. After all, they are non-human institutions that must expand through ever-greater profits, or go out of business. In so doing they have shown willingness to violate human rights-particularly workers' rights-to throw millions out of work, destroy unions, use sweatshops and slave labor, destroy the environment, destabilize governments, and install and bolster tyrants who oppress, repress, torture and kill with impunity.

Is it surprising, then, that wars and military intervention, including attacks on civilians, are waged on behalf of corporations? It has been an integral part of the history of imperialist powers. Why should we believe it is any different today?

THE COSTS, AND THE PROFITS, OF WAR

NATO nations spent an estimated $65 million daily on the war. The U.S. paid the bulk of this cost, estimated to be $1.65 billion in the first 57 days. The second largest funder was Britain, which spent an estimated $120-$180 million 2s

Tapping into this lucrative bottomless well of funds, the "Big Three" weapons makers-Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon-now receive among themselves over $30 billion per year in Pentagon contracts. Companies like Lockheed Martin are actively engaged in shaping U.S. foreign and military policies. Their efforts have yielded among other things: the "payoffs for layoffs" subsidies for defense industry mergers such as the Lockheed/Martin Marietta merger; the elimination of royalty fees that foreign arms customers had been paying to reimburse the U.S. Treasury for the cost of weapons developed at taxpayer expense (this adds up to a loss for taxpayers of roughly $500 million per year); and the creation of billions of dollars of new grants and government-guaranteed loans to support the export of U. S. weaponry Pentagon contractors, conservative think tanks and advocacy groups lobbied heavily and successfully for the "Star Wars" missile defense program.

The bombing and missile strikes are, more than ever, giant bazaars for selling the wares of the armaments manufacturers. An article in USA Today said: "The USA's defense equipment, such as the satellite-guided smart bombs, has stolen the international spotlight as NATO air forces pound Serbian forces. That could mean increased foreign interest in U.S. military equipment...." Raytheon spokesperson David Shea was quoted: "We are expecting the Kosovo conflict to result in new orders downstream." Then in early June, just after President Clinton signed the bill appropriating $12 billion in emergency military funding, officials at Raytheon announced that replacing munitions used in the Balkans could lead to about $1 billion in new contracts.

No wonder stock of the large military manufacturers shot up. Since the beginning of the war against Yugoslavia, March 24, 1999, the stock price of Rockwell International (maker of the Lancer, B-1 bomber, etc.) was up 48 percent; Boeing Aircraft (maker of the B-52 Stratofortress, etc.) up 30 percent; Raytheon Systems (maker of the Tomahawk cruise missile, HARM missile, etc.) up 37 percent; Lockheed Martin (maker of the F- 117 Nighthawk, F-16 Falcon, etc.), up 18 percent; and Northrop Grumman (maker of the B-2 bomber, etc.) up 16 percent 29 Jaynatha Dhanapala, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, said recently that "television coverage of modern warfare has effectively created an 'advertising dividend' for the manufacturers of high-tech weaponry and the countries and alliances that use such weapons... He observed that during the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf and the recent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, tiny video cameras enabled hundreds of millions of viewers to "experience vicariously" the flight paths of attacking missiles to their intended targets.

Defense and aerospace companies have either announced or completed mergers and acquisitions amounting to nearly $60 billion in just the first half of 1999. That amount is already well above the total for all of 1998.

HEIGHTENED ANTAGONISMS BETWEEN THE U.S. AND EUROPE

Another factor driving U.S. policies is economic competition with the European Union, which is surfacing increasingly in spite of cooperation and commonality of interests on other levels. This is epitomized by the recent banana trade wars in which the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled in favor of U.S. TNCs, as well as the rivalry over such prizes as the oil riches of the Caspian Sea basin and access to the markets and resources of Eastern Europe.

The U.S. has warned openly that it will not tolerate a purely European military alliance to take the place of NATO. The military might of the U.S. must prevail.

This was clearly spelled out in "The Defense Planning Guide," which said, among other things: "We must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.... We must [deter] potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.... We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO."

Nevertheless, on the very day that Yugoslavia adhered to the G-8 agreement, the leaders of 15 European countries announced the European Union would establish an independent military force.

Commerce up the Danube was completely disrupted by the bombing of bridges in Novi Sad which infuriated Europeans whose economies continue to be adversely affected. It was perceived as a manifestation of the intensifying economic rivalry between the U.S. and Europe.

Indeed, two world wars were fueled by such competition.

At the same time, rivalry is tempered increasingly by the corporate imperative to survive at all costs and to make maximum profits, including through mergers and partnerships. Lockheed Martin, maker of missiles and high-tech weaponry, has created Lockheed Martin UK Limited, based in London. Its largest U.K. operation is the Royal Navy Merlin helicopter program, among many other military programs. In fact, Lockheed Martin has more than 200 international partnerships around the world

U.S. aerospace companies are determined not to be locked out of the lucrative profits to be had from the establishment of a separate European military alliance. This pressure has led to a shift in policy by the Pentagon. Mergers between U.S. and European defense contractors are being given the go-ahead. "U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Jacques Gansler has admitted being in talks not only with European governments such as the U.K., Germany, France, and Italy but also with leading defense companies including British Aerospace, France's Aerospatiale Matra SA and Germany's Dasa."

THE NEW NATO

The giant corporations especially the military-industrial corporations-have been pushing vigorously for expanding and extending the role of NATO. Their blatant salivating over potential profits was indisputable during NATO's 50th Anniversary celebrations which became "the ultimate marketing opportunity" as described in the Washington Post. The host committee included the chief executives of Amentech, Daimler/Chrysler, Boeing, Ford Motor, General Motors, Honeywell, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Nextel, SBC Communications, TRW and United Technologies. These companies sell weapons but also other products. They have been busy lobbying for the expansion of NATO to avail themselves of the lucrative markets in Eastern European nations which have been pressed to join NATO. In order to be a part of the Alliance these nations must spend billions to upgrade their military forces.

The Ukraine, part of the NATO-sponsored Partnership for Peace, held joint naval exercises with the United States in July Perceiving this as a threat, Russian Prime Minster Sergei Stepashin was quoted by Interfax Ukraine news agency as telling the officers and men of Russia's Black Sea fleet to prepare for a naval exercise to imitate the military action in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis.

The Ukraine, along with Georgia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova, are members of GUUAM, a bloc of "western-oriented" Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) members. Moldova and Uzbekistan joined during the NATO anniversary summit in April, and a charter was established encompassing military cooperation within the group and with NATO. GUUAM members have opted out of the CIS Collective Security Treaty.

"The pendulum of Ukrainian foreign policy swung closest to the West on June 12, when Kiev briefly closed Ukrainian airspace to Russian aircraft trying to reinforce Russian troops at Slatina airbase in Kosovo.... Russia's military commanders were furious. It was bad enough that NATO convinced ostensibly neutral Romania and Bulgaria to deny their airspace to Russian aircraft, but Ukraine was a step too far. Ukraine had to clarify its relationship with NATO and with Russia."

Moreover, NATO has repeatedly deflected protest over its possession of nuclear armaments and its refusal to renounce first use of these weapons.

NATO, then, is projecting its new role as action "out of area" and intervening anywhere on the basis of "humanitarian concerns," regardless of national sovereignty and international law. The purpose is to send a message to nations of the entire world that if they do not do the U.S. bidding, they too could be a victim of the kind of devastation unleashed upon Yugoslavia and Iraq. They too could be divided up, balkanized, turned into banana republics or emirates. Especially vulnerable are those countries involved over the oil riches of the Caspian Sea basin-Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia-and where there are already related conflicts including over Chechnya, Nagoro-Karabakh, Dagestan, and Abkhazia.

U.S.-LED GLOBAL MILITARY ALLIANCES

NATO expansion pertains to what Washington calls a "new strategic concept," an expensive new program to have NATO, under U.S. Ieadership, become the key player globally This new blueprint for NATO not only sees it extending throughout Eastern and Baltic Europe, possibly taking in Russia itself, it goes considerably beyond this, as indicated by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his new book, The Grand Chessboard. He defines the alliance as part of an "integrated, comprehensive and long-term geostrategy for all of Eurasia," in which NATO would eventually reach Asia, where another U.S.-led military alliance would connect Pacific and Southeast Asian states.

The unfolding events in Indonesia and East Timor appear to be closely related to plans for establishing a U.S.-controlled NATO-type military alliance in that region to counter a purely Asian military association.

Steps are well under way for new relations with Southeast Asia in which the U.S. is acquiring access to military bases in Asian countries in exchange for financial help to buy U.S. arms. The Pentagon's East Asian Strategy Report defines this program as offering the United States "a credible power projection capability in the region and beyond."

Dr. Joseph Gerson succinctly describes the developing situation in Asia and the Pacific:

"In the Asia-Pacific region, the U.S. is enforcing its 21st century "Open Door" policy by means of the IMF, the World Bank, APEC, bases and forward deployments, the Seventh Fleet and its nuclear arsenal; as it seeks to simultaneously contain and engage China, to dominate the sea lanes and straits through which the region's trade and supplies of oil must travel (the "jugular vein" of Asia Pacific economies), and to "cap" Japanese militarism and nationalism.

Since 1951, the hub of this strategic architecture has been the Mutual Security Treaty with Japan (MST). During the Clinton years, the MST has been "redefined" to reconsolidate U.S., and to a lesser extent, Japanese power."

A "U.S.-Japan Joint Declaration on Security Alliance for the 21st Century" proclaimed at the April 1996 Summit between President Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto, cited "the alliances, new enemies and public rationales: tensions and instability on the Korean Peninsula, China's nuclear arsenal, and territorial disputes with China."

The regular gigantic war games conducted in the Korean region by the U.S. and South Korea have been stepped up substantially in the recent period.

Echoing the Gulf of Tonkin provocation used to justify U.S. intervention in Vietnam, South Korean warships sank a North Korean boat and badly damaged another allegedly over a dispute about a crab-fishing area of the Yellow Sea.

Plans for U.S. deployment of Theater Missile Defenses (TMDs) around China, sensationalized and unproven allegations of Chinese nuclear spying, claims of Chinese nuclear panty with the U.S., the blocking of China's entry to the WTO, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and recent independence moves by Taiwan encouraged by U.S. Congress members, place the world on the brink of a U.S.-orchestrated confrontation with China. Taiwan is "the most likely trigger for U.S.-Chinese nuclear confrontation and war," according to Gerson.

With the bombing of Yugoslavia barely over and with continuing and escalating air strikes against Iraq, the U.S. appears to be moving rapidly toward such a confrontation with China over Taiwan. In mid-July, Taiwan's President, Lee Teng-hui, announced the island wants "special state-to-state relations" with China, meaning a rejection of the "one China" policy that has kept the peace for many years. This led Chinese President Jiang Zemin to tell President Clinton, July 18, that China would not rule out using force regarding Taiwan.

Washington is regaining even greater access to ports and bases throughout the Philippines under the "Visiting Forces Agreement." Considerable attention is also being focused on Indonesia, to prevent the U.S. Ioss of access to its natural resources and markets, and its control of the strategically important shipping lanes. Recent events in Indonesia and East Timor will undoubtedly be used as strong leverage for the establishment of a NATO-type military alliance in that region with the U.S. in control.

Nothing could describe U.S. military goals better than the British American Security Information Council's recently published partially declassified text of the U.S. Strategic Command's 1995 "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence":

" [T]he United States should have available the full range of responses, conventional weapons, special operations, and nuclear weapons. Unlike chemical or biological weapons, the extreme destruction from a nuclear explosion is immediate, with few if any palliatives to reduce its effect. Although we are not likely to use nuclear weapons in less than matters of the greatest national importance.... Nuclear weapons always cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict in which the U.S. is engaged. Thus, deterrence through the threat of use of nuclear weapons will continue to be our top military strategy...That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries....

The Americas are not to escape this buildup of U.S.-controlled military alliances. The U.S. Army War College has urged a "NAFTA for the military," with joint command between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S."

CALL TO RESIST

Resistance to war, to the corporate globalization offensive, and to their manifestations at home, is needed today more than ever in history, as events move at astounding speed. Such a movement is bound to grow every day

Multitudes of the world's poor and working people are resisting in rapidly growing numbers. In the process they are coming to understand the commonality of interests they share with all those victimized by the corporations and the policies of the U.S. and other governments the U.S. sword and dollar marching hand in glove-in the brutal, relentless drive for ever-higher profits. Nothing is more important than to quicken the pace and strengthen the unity to resist this imperialist onslaught toward global corporate rule.

New World Order