Chavez finalized a $1 billion deal to purchase five diesel submarines to defend Venezuela's oil-rich undersea shelf and thwart any possible economic embargo imposed by Washington. By then, Venezuela had become the second-largest buyer of Russian weaponry. (Algeria topped the list, another indication of a growing multipolarity in world affairs.) Venezuela acquired the distinction of being the first country to receive a license from Russia to manufacture the famed AK-47 assault rifle.
By channeling some of his country's oil money to needy Venezuelans, Chavez broadened his base of support. Much to the chagrin of the Bush White House, he trounced his sole political rival, Manuel Rosales, in a December 2006 presidential contest with 61 percent of the vote. Equally humiliating to the Bush administration, Venezuela was, by then, giving more foreign aid to needy Latin American states than it was.
Following his reelection, Chavez vigorously pursued the concept of forming an anti-imperialist alliance in Latin America as well as globally. He strengthened Venezuela's ties not only with such Latin countries as Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and debt-ridden Argentina, but also with Iran and Belarus.
By the time he arrived in Tehran from Moscow (via Minsk) in June 2007, the 180 economic and political accords the Chavez government had signed with Tehran were already yielding tangible results. Iranian-designed cars and tractors were coming off assembly lines in Venezuela. "[The] cooperation of independent countries like Iran and Venezuela has an effective role in defeating the policies of imperialism and saving nations," Chavez declared in Tehran.
Stuck in the quagmire of Iraq and lashed by the gusty winds of rocketing oil prices, the Bush administration finds its maneuverability woefully limited when dealing with a rising hydrocarbon power. To the insults that Chavez keeps hurling at Bush, the American response has been vapid. The reason is the crippling dependence of the United States on imported petroleum, which accounts for 60 percent of its total consumed. Venezuela is the fourth-largest source of U.S. imported oil after Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia; and some refineries in the United States are designed specifically to refine heavy Venezuelan oil.
In Chavez's scheme to undermine the "sole superpower," China has an important role. During an August 2006 visit to Beijing, his fourth in seven years, Chavez announced that Venezuela would triple its oil exports to China to 500,000 barrels per day in three years, a jump that suited both sides. Chavez wants to diversify Venezuela's buyer base to reduce its reliance on exports to the United States, and China's leaders are keen to diversify their hydrocarbon imports away from the Middle East, where American influence remains strong.
"The support of China is very important [to us] from the political and moral point of view," Chavez declared. Along with a joint refinery project, China agreed to build 13 oil-drilling platforms, supply 18 oil tankers, and collaborate with the state-owned company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., in exploring a new oilfield in the Orinoco Basin.
So dramatic has been the growth of the state-run company PetroChina that, in mid-2007, it was second only to Exxon Mobil in its market value among energy corporations. Indeed, that year three Chinese companies made it onto the list of the world's 10 most highly valued corporations. Only the United States, with five, had more. China's foreign reserves of over $1 trillion have now surpassed Japan's. With its gross domestic product soaring past Germany's, China ranks No. 3 in the world economy.
In the diplomatic arena, Chinese leaders broke new ground in 1996 by sponsoring the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, consisting of four adjoining countries: Russia and the three former Soviet Socialist republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The SCO started as a cooperative organization with a focus on countering drug-smuggling and terrorism. Later, the SCO invited Uzbekistan to join, even though it does not abut China. In 2003, the SCO broadened its scope by including regional economic cooperation in its charter. That, in turn, led it to grant observer status to Pakistan, India and Mongolia -- all adjoining China -- and Iran, which does not. When the United States applied for observer status, it was rejected, an embarrassing setback for Washington, which enjoyed such status at the Association of South-East Asian Nations.
In early August 2007, on the eve of an SCO summit in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, the group conducted its first joint military exercises, code-named Peace Mission 2007, in the Russian Ural region of Chelyabinsk. "The SCO is destined to play a vital role in ensuring international security," said Ednan Karabayev, foreign minister of Kyrgyzstan.
In late 2006, as the host of a China-Africa Forum in Beijing attended by leaders of 48 of 53 African nations, China left the United States woefully behind in the diplomatic race for that continent (and its hydrocarbon and other resources). In return for Africa's oil, iron ore, copper and cotton, China sold low-priced goods to Africans and assisted African counties in building or improving roads, railways, ports, hydroelectric dams, telecommunications systems and schools. "The Western approach of imposing its values and political system on other countries is not acceptable to China," said Africa specialist Wang Hongyi of the China Institute of International Studies. "We focus on mutual development."
To reduce the cost of transporting petroleum from Africa and the Middle East, China began constructing a trans-Burma oil pipeline from the Bay of Bengal to its southern province of Yunan, thereby shortening the delivery route now traveled by tankers. This undermined Washington's campaign to isolate Myanmar. (Earlier, Sudan, boycotted by Washington, had emerged as a leading supplier of African oil to China.) In addition, Chinese oil companies were competing fiercely with their Western counterparts in getting access to hydrocarbon reserves in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
"China's oil diplomacy is putting the country on a collision course with the U.S. and Western Europe, which have imposed sanctions on some of the countries where China is doing business," comments William Mellor of Bloomberg News. The sentiment is echoed by the other side. "I see China and the U.S. coming into conflict over energy in the years ahead," says Jin Riguang, an oil-and-gas advisor to the Chinese government and a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Council.
China's industrialization and modernization has spurred the modernization of its military as well. The test firing of the country's first anti-satellite missile, which successfully destroyed a defunct Chinese weather satellite in January 2007, dramatically demonstrated its growing technological prowess. An alarmed Washington had already noted an 18 percent increase in China's 2007 defense budget. Attributing the rise to extra spending on missiles, electronic warfare and other high-tech items, Liao Xilong, commander of the People's Liberation Army's general logistics department, said: "The present-day world is no longer peaceful, and to protect national security, stability and territorial integrity, we must suitably increase spending on military modernization."
China's declared budget of $45 billion was a tiny fraction of the Pentagon's $459 billion budget. Yet, in May 2007, a Pentagon report noted China's "rapid rise as a regional and economic power with global aspirations" and claimed that China was planning to project military farther afield from the Formosa Strait into the Asia-Pacific region in preparation for possible conflicts over territory or resources.
This disparate challenge to American global primacy stems as much from sharpening conflicts over natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas, as from ideological differences over democracy American-style or human rights as conceived and promoted by Western policy makers. Perceptions about national (and imperial) identity and history are at stake as well.
It is noteworthy that Russian officials applauding the swift rise of post-Soviet Russia refer fondly to the pre-Bolshevik Revolution era when, according to them, Czarist Russia was a great power. Equally, Chinese leaders remain proud of their country's long imperial past as unique among nations.
When viewed globally and in the great stretch of history, the notion of American exceptionalism that drove the neoconservatives to proclaim the Project for the New American Century in the late 20th century -- adopted so wholeheartedly by the Bush administration in this one -- is nothing new. Other superpowers have been there, and they, too, have witnessed the loss of their prime position to rising powers.
No superpower in modern times has maintained its supremacy for more than several generations. And, however exceptional its leaders may have thought themselves, the United States, already clearly past its zenith, has no chance of becoming an exception to this age-old pattern of history.
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.
About the writer
Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, both published by Nation Books.
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