U.S. Imperialist Proposal to Resuscitate a "Concert of Powers" to Further U.S. Striving for DominationRecently, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) came up with a new scheme which it hopes can unite the military, industrial and financial/civilian bureaucracy within the United States and impose its monopoly on decision-making and the use of force onto its allies. The CFR is a U.S. think tank of long-standing that brings together the vying factions within the U.S. ruling class in an attempt to devise a U.S. foreign policy which can be seen to justify whatever the U.S. is up to. At this time, CFR is proposing what they call a "Concert of Powers" for contending with international relations.
While U.S. President Biden and the likes of Canada boast about the superiority of the "shared values" of the G7 and NATO countries and the need to make everyone obey or beware of their military might, the think tank engages in much hand-wringing about what they perceive to be the decline of the U.S. and liberal democracies. The fact that the conditions which gave rise to the institutions of liberal democracy no longer exist and that the peoples of the world have rejected them is not to be discussed. All that counts is resuscitating them in the vain belief that the past of the U.S. as "indispensable nation" will project into the future and the U.S. will emerge as the last man standing, no matter what -- the sole survivor of the battles which are raging worldwide, when everybody else has fallen. It is a desperate ahistorical plea for obedience, a silly proposal which has already met its maker as far back as the period prior to World War I when the first attempt at achieving a balance of the big powers of Europe called the Concert of Europe was smashed on the rocks of the Crimean War in 1853. The CFR juxtaposes the righteous path and values of the U.S. and the other "civilized" nations to what it calls "illiberalism and populist dissension" of a "rising China" and "pugnacious Russia" which it claims are challenging the "west's authority and republican approaches to both domestic and international governance." "As Asia continues its economic ascent, two centuries of Western domination of the world, first under Pax Britannica and then under Pax Americana, are coming to an end. The West is losing not only its material dominance but also its ideological sway. Around the world, democracies are falling prey to illiberalism and populist dissension while a rising China, assisted by a pugnacious Russia, seeks to challenge the West's authority and republican approaches to both domestic and international governance. U.S. President Joe Biden is committed to refurbishing American democracy, restoring U.S. leadership in the world, and taming a pandemic that has had devastating human and economic consequences. But Biden's victory was a close call; on neither side of the Atlantic will angry populism or illiberal temptations readily abate. Moreover, even if Western democracies overcome polarization, beat back illiberalism, and pull off an economic rebound, they will not forestall the arrival of a world that is both multipolar and ideologically diverse." Striving to contend with what it sees as a U.S. in decline, the CFR is attempting to find a way for the U.S. to somehow extricate itself in order to continue being the world's "indispensable" power. The CFR is compelled to go backward for answers, in this case to an old form called the Concert of Europe. They state: "The best vehicle for promoting stability in the twenty-first century is a global concert of major powers. As the history of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe demonstrated -- its members were the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria -- a steering group of leading countries can curb the geopolitical and ideological competition that usually accompanies multipolarity." The fact that this steering group curbed nothing when it came to pursuing their national interests as they saw them counts for nothing. The CFR calls for a new grouping to include China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia and the United States. Thus the CFR is calling for the creation of yet another exclusive club while refusing to even acknowledge the striving of the peoples of the world to affirm their right to be and develop political arrangements where the people themselves govern and decide. They also ignore the lessons of history. Their Council of Europe goes back to 1814, which means it even precedes the Great Game of Lord Palmerston fame which was introduced in the 1850s and put geopolitics on a modern footing, so to speak. Those politics set in motion the imperialist scramble to control Africa and ended with World War I which smashed three empires to smithereens, the Empire of the Russian Czars, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, while Britannia never ruled the waves again. The Council of Europe did not balance the rival powers and in fact contributed to their demise under those conditions. In today's conditions war is no longer politics by other means, eventually settled through negotiations to once again establish peace in favour of the victor. War is not what happens when negotiations fail because there are no negotiations. If there are no negotiations, there can be no peace treaties which contain conditions which presumably bind the parties involved. U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan was not negotiated, nor has it ended the war of aggression and occupation of Afghanistan. At least 18,000 private contractors remain in Afghanistan, under Pentagon command. The treaty the U.S. signed with Iran is another case in point. The U.S. violates such treaties with impunity even as Iran, and sometimes the European signatories, try to uphold it. Or treaties such as those binding the members of the World Trade Organization which carry no weight because the U.S. defies them and nobody takes action to stop that. There are U.S. threats of what will happen if a country does not submit, which then means bombings, aggression, occupation, assassinations, etc. The U.S. sets the direction on the basis of such actions and threats that take many forms. These include the brutal sanction regimes -- themselves acts of war -- and the use of weapons such as depriving countries of loans or vaccines or the theft of their gold reserves and bank accounts or properties. All of it shows that negotiations no longer exist and, should the countries targeted not submit, then they are subjected to wars of destruction of human productive powers. This is what has happened since Desert Storm with disastrous consequences not only to Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Palestine, but also to the millions who are forced to migrate from Africa, or Mexico and Central America and the Caribbean, or as contract labour, visa workers, migrant labour, and so forth. The aim is to make sure it is the U.S. drive for domination which sets the course to which everyone must react. Despite this reality, according to the CFR, the "Concert of Big Powers" will function because "Democracies and non-democracies would have equal standing, and inclusion would be a function of power and influence, not values or regime type. The concert's members would collectively represent roughly 70 per cent of both global GDP and global military spending. Including these six heavyweights in the concert's ranks would give it geopolitical clout while preventing it from becoming an unwieldy talk shop." The CFR anticipates the "Concert of Powers" would bring an end to both the G7 and G20 with their public declarations and meetings. Throughout, there is no recognition that the U.S. is on a permanent war footing, wars are not politics by other means but for destruction, and negotiations have been eliminated in favour of rule by decree and use of police powers. This is the case whether the matter at hand is to end wars, or settle disputes in dysfunctional bodies like legislatures and parliaments, or settle disputes between workers and in matters related to the cartels and coalitions involving oligopolies, governments and financial interests.
As part of replacing international law with its enforceable standards, the global Concert of Powers promotes shunning "codified rules," meaning international law: "A global concert would shun codified rules, instead relying on dialogue to build consensus. Like the Concert of Europe, it would privilege the territorial status quo and a view of sovereignty that precludes, except in the case of international consensus, using military force or other coercive tools to alter existing borders or topple regimes. This relatively conservative baseline would encourage buy-in from all members. At the same time, the concert would provide an ideal venue for discussing globalization's impact on sovereignty and the potential need to deny sovereign immunity to nations that engage in certain egregious activities. Those activities might include committing genocide, harboring or sponsoring terrorists, or severely exacerbating climate change by destroying rainforests." In other words, they make the rules so they get to interpret the rules. The fraud of having an exclusive club of six powers take decisions that affect the entire world is evident. Nonetheless, the CFR says their proposal "wins by default." The arguments are so incoherent and weak, it is evident the spokespersons for U.S. imperialism are on their knees and cannot conceive of an alternative to what has got the U.S. and the G7 and other institutions established under U.S. tutelage in the aftermath of World War II mired in crisis. Proposals like the one to establish a "Concert of Powers" leave out the huge developments of human productive powers taking place independent of anyone's will and also out of anyone's control. The U.S. imperialists are reigning over anarchy and violence in an attempt to control the exploding productive powers which cannot be controlled. Their failure to do so gives rise to acts of revenge, to the destruction of anything they cannot control. What is kept hidden by covering it up is that the working class, which created these massive productive powers, can control them by directing them to serve humanity. This is what the imperialists are afraid of. It is the writing on the wall which they are using might and main to erase. The proposal to create yet another group of big powers as a solution is not even likely to get off the ground. No self-respecting country worthy of its people will ever agree with such a fraudulent attempt to usurp power in the name of high ideals. Current developments in the world today show that the authority of Old forms created out of the constitutions which originated out of conceptions given rise to avert civil war at home no longer have a material basis. New forms which recognize the right of the peoples to speak in their own name are coming into being. The Old seeks to block the agency of the working class, required at this historical juncture to open a path to progress in each country as well as internationally. The Old and its representatives such as the countries which comprise the G7 act to block the free expression of the will of the working class, and its right to lay its claims on society. To contend with U.S. fraud and proposals like the "Concert of Powers," it is necessary to keep human agency uppermost in mind and the conditions that exist, with their material system and processes. Changes to the advantage of the peoples are based on human agency finding and occupying openings, as is occurring with the battles for a global human-centred response to COVID and the battles being waged against state-organized racist attacks and for accountability and equality. Feeble attempts to block such openings and divert the movements into reliance on Old forms such as the relations the CFR is engaged in, are very weak. The peoples in their struggles are bringing forth the New, providing new forms and content that empower them. Their strivings are imbued with an effort to harmonize interests and with the internationalist spirit seen in contending with COVID, with defending immigrants and refugees, in standing with Palestine and many other battles waged as one humanity with one struggle for the rights of all.
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The Council is among those whose starting point is the claim that
this is a period of transition because U.S. power is in decline.
"History makes clear that such periods of tumultuous change come with
great peril. Indeed, great-power contests over hierarchy and ideology
regularly lead to major wars. Averting this outcome requires soberly
acknowledging that the Western-led liberal order that emerged after
World War II cannot anchor global stability in the twenty-first century.
The search is on for a viable and effective way forward," a CFR article
titled "How to Prevent Catastrophe and Promote Stability in a
Multipolar World" says.[
While failing to recognize the role of the peoples, the CFR also
ignores the fact that in today's conditions it is not nation-states but
oligopolies which strive to control everything and to politicize their
narrow private interests by seizing and controlling states which were
formerly said to be sovereign. Integration into the U.S. war machine,
such
as what the U.S. is doing with Canada, Mexico and now Central America
and the Caribbean, is part of this. The CFR's "Concert of Powers" is a
means to further undermine and eliminate international law and standards
and put in their place a so-called rules based international order. The
effort is aimed at further removing the people and their
struggles from the equation while strengthening U.S. hegemony and
dictate.