China’s state-run Global Times published a gloomy roundtable on Tuesday about the danger of a “new Cold War” beginning under former Vice President Joe Biden.
The article labored mightily to avoid obvious celebrations of the much more China-friendly Biden potentially taking over from President Donald Trump, and took pains to note that America is still a xenophobic capitalist empire spoiling for a fight with noble and innocent Communist China.
The most entertaining pessimism came from Margaret Kimberly of the Black Agenda Report website, who did her best to rain on Communist parades by noting America will still be an imperialist, capitalist predator with a “bipartisan pro-war orientation” under the kinder and gentler Biden:
Imperialism is bipartisan and it also has a revolving door of people who were Obama administration officials who are now advising Biden and will no doubt accompany him back to the White House, State Department, and Pentagon. They pen essays in Foreign Affairs magazine[s] calling for China to change in some way that America would like.
Biden will surely bring Obama holdovers from their holding places at think tanks and universities. They will probably be more polished than Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who thinks that “maximum pressure” and boorish insults will win the day. But style is not what counts.
The hedge fund chieftains who invest in the military and in the presidency are calling the shots. They don’t give money without anticipating that they will also have influence. They don’t build planes, helicopters, and battleships for show. Ultimately, they build them to be used and that is never good news.
Academics from Renmin University of China said both U.S. candidates unsuccessfully tried to play the “China card” during their campaigns, especially Trump, who “tried hard to divert voters’ attention from his failures to fight Covid-19 [Chinese coronavirus] by smearing China.” They predicted American anxiety about China’s rising superpower status would continue to complicate relations between the two countries for years to come.
Political studies professor Radhika Desai of the University of Manitoba in Canada told the Global Times that the “protracted agony” of the 2020 election is “merely another milestone in the decades-long unraveling of the US’ neoliberal, financialized capitalism and in the consequent decline of its world influence.”
Desai said the new Cold War is pretty much upon us, as the “most roguish regimes” like India and Brazil line up behind the United States against wise, reasonable, and “stably rising” China.
Renmin University senior fellow and Tricontinental Institute for Social Research executive director Vijay Prashad threw cold water on the notion of Biden as a more “internationalist” or “multilateral” president than Trump, arguing that even the most celebrated globalist achievements of Biden’s vice presidency under former President Barack Obama were actually disguised U.S. bids to shore up the NATO alliance, secure supplies of oil, and whip Europe into shape for the new Cold War with China. It turns out that Obama and Biden were just enacting sneakier versions of Trump’s foreign policy all along, he argued.
Claudia de la Cruz of the People’s Forum in NYC concluded the Global Times roundtable by lamenting that the “class struggle” in America remains dead in the water because Biden probably will not embrace the socialist superpowers of Venezuela, Cuba, China, and Iran.
“Some of the key questions in this context are, how will we coordinate our efforts, and organize ourselves so that we are not the end tail of the Democrats’ anti-Trump coalition? And how will we accumulate the people power to respond to this moment as social movements and advance the class struggle in this critical stage?” she asked.