New Left Review Gets It Half Right on Israel and China
Over at the New Left Review, Tariq Ali interviewed Jean-Luc Mélenchon (the de facto leader of the left in France). They covered pretty wide-ranging topics, but the whole thing was framed as addressing what the world’s nation-states—especially the United States—think they’re doing.
The urgent puzzle: No state has made a meaningful attempt at arresting Israel’s bloodletting in Gaza, and the US has been its main backer. The more general puzzle: The world is awash in militarism and all of our states are acting as if more militarism (even at the expense of economic democracy) is the answer, which is madness.
Mélenchon says that, from the perspective of the US national security state:
The plan is, first, to reorganize the entire Middle East to secure access to oil for the countries of the Global North; and, second, to create the conditions for war with China.
This statement contains true elements but they’re not framed correctly. Materialist explanations of world politics are quite powerful, but to be effective accounts of our world, they don’t need to describe the motivations of the actors involved.
Israeli Primacy, Not Oil
The plan of US elites, largely unchanged for 50 years, is to ensure Israeli primacy in the Middle East. Through Israeli primacy, Middle East oil can become our oil, but that’s just one among many value propositions for Israeli primacy. Oil is not driving US decision-making and Israeli primacy is not necessary to secure oil.
To be clear, oil is always a factor when you want to justify something in geopolitical terms and the location you’re talking about is abundant with oil. But the chaos of endless war is not great for the stability of oil supply and there are many other considerations that are more important, even to the national security state.
For example, MAGA adjacent uber-hawk Nadia Schadlow said recently that the US should be backing Israeli aggression (as well as Taiwan and Ukraine) because frontline allies absorb a lot of the costs of war on behalf of the US.1 That’s pretty mask-off—I mean, totally demented, right? But it’s the reasoning of so many national security bros, even the lady bros.
There’s also a longstanding view among geopoliticians that Israeli primacy preserves regional stability (the opposite is obviously true but it’s what they believe). In this way of thinking, a “stable balance of power” (by this they mean primacy, though that’s an unstable power configuration) requires local proxies in key regions to maintain primacy on America’s behalf. This is the logic of the sub-imperial power; the local sheriff. Again, this has nothing to do with oil.
And I don’t need to say much about the ideological role that Zionism plays in making American white Christian nationalist politicians mistakenly equate Israel’s power with their own. Again, a motivation that’s not reducible to oil.
In short, oil can be secured without Israeli primacy, which has many other rationalizations beyond something so crude as oil (forgive the pun).
Making the Conditions for War With China
The interview gets many things right on China, more perhaps than on the Middle East. Mélenchon concludes that:
The conflict between the US and China is over trade and resource networks, and in some respects the Chinese have already won, because they produce almost everything the world consumes.
They [China] have no interest in fighting a war because they are already satisfied with their global influence…many other powers in the region, are now strengthening ties with China…throughout much of Asia, capitalism is still defined by dynamic forces of trade and production, whereas in the US it has assumed a predatory and tributary character.
This is a bit flip. Generally speaking, I don’t think China is treating its trade and resource networks as zero sum; that’s a US posture. But the quote more or less tracks with what I first argued at length in Pacific Power Paradox and then in The Rivalry Peril with Mike Brenes: this is a contest that America shouldn’t be pursuing, in part because it can’t win it and trying will come at great cost. It’s the wrong battle to fight.
And of course this statement from Mélenchon is practically ripped straight from The Rivalry Peril:
when it comes to the US and China what we have is a competition between two different forms of capitalist accumulation – even if it is reductive to describe the Chinese economic model as simply capitalist…about the military balance of forces…China was in a favourable situation, because, as [Mélenchon’s Chinese counterpart once] put it, “our front is the China Sea. America’s front is the whole world.”
Where Mélenchon errs a bit is in his claim that the national security state aims to create the conditions for war with China. This is not quite right. Washington accepts creating the conditions for war with China as the price of war-prepping.
Strangely, Mélenchon says this provocative thing about the US wanting to cause war with China up front and then doesn’t really follow up on the point. The closest he gets is this comment, which is not the same as saying the US wants to cause a war:
some in the West would prefer a cold war to a hot war, encirclement and containment rather than direct conflict. But these are nuances, and in reality it is easy to move from one to the other.
I’ve heard Mélenchon’s claim—that the US wants a hot war with China—from leftists before.
A few months ago, a prominent publication actually asked me to write a version of that argument—the US wants to create the conditions that cause war with China—but I couldn’t do it. I tried and I concluded it’s the wrong way to think about war with China.
I’ve personally known a couple people who do want to actively cause war with China—though they dance around it in public—but only a couple. There are passages in Bridge Colby’s book that are forthright about the desire to induce China to do something dramatic and violent so that the US can then galvanize China’s neighbors to rally with the US and form a coherent anti-China bloc.
But that is not a widely held view. It’s so niche of a perspective, in fact, that it’s a major reason that even many national security bros think of Bridge as an uber-hawk.
What I think is true is that many within the national security state see war with China as inevitable, and if you believe that then you believe either that the US needs to divest of Taiwan now or optimize to win an unwinnable war at any cost now.
Many other natsec people do not think war is inevitable, but nevertheless have “cult of the offensive” brain and believe that retooling damn near everything about American life and the economy in order to win the unwinnable war is worthwhile because it will “deter” the outcome of war itself.
At this point I’ve made a career of disagreeing with that.
Anyway, the Mélenchon interview is worth a read. I don’t agree with everything in it, but he says a lot of polemical things that are either correct or that will sharpen your thinking by being wrong in a peculiar way; opinions that Americans in particular need to expose themselves to.
Her exact quote was “Frontline states—such as Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel—should be supported to divert the resources of adversaries. That gives us breathing room and operational flexibility. With U.S. backing, Israel has already severely degraded Iran’s military capabilities and destroyed Hamas and Hezbollah.”