Cary Fraser is a Guyanese historian of international relations who teaches in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Penn State University, USA. He has written extensively on international relations and US foreign policy, as well as the politics of race in the US and the Caribbean. He is the former President of the University of Belize.
By Cary Fraser
The recent joint announcement at the end of the 2014 summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Community (APEC) leaders that the USA and the People’s Republic of China had reached an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to increase use of ‘clean’ energy sources has become a platform for collaboration and increasing interdependence between the two largest economies in the world. It is a major accomplishment that opens the door for wider international efforts to deal with the increasing challenges of climate change for the planet. This development signals a decisive effort to restructure the global economy within the context of a new ‘energy’ regime in which reliance upon the fossil fuels that powered the spread of industrial civilizations over the past two centuries, and the threat of irreversible climate change arising from the use of those fuels, will be diminished.
For both Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, the summit has cemented the growing perception that they are leaders focused upon the future who demonstrate a pragmatic approach to managing the tensions inherent in the ongoing transition from a North Atlantic-bipolar international order to a Pacific-centred multi-polar system.
The APEC summit agreement on reducing carbon emissions also serves as a reminder of the partnership forged by the two powers as the Nixon administration sought a way out of the quagmire in Vietnam and as a strategy for containing the expansion of Soviet influence in the international system in subsequent decades. In effect, US-PRC collaboration is a signal of a major geo-political shift in the international system and it will be interesting to see the ways in which the joint announcement on greenhouse gas reduction targets will lay the basis for longer-term collaboration on other major international issues.
One immediate area of concern for both countries is the recognition that the interminable violent conflicts in the Middle East that have flowered since the oil crises of the 1970s have become a threat to the stability of global energy supplies and markets – upon which China and the US are dependent. During the Cold War, the Soviet-American competition in the region had fuelled the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian and intra-Arab conflicts. Later, the Iranian Revolution and the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Sunni militants – both occurring in 1979 – triggered increasing levels of sectarian violence across the region and imposed more complex layers of tension upon the fragile states of a region which had become – as energy suppliers – pivotal to the stability of the international economy.
These developments were exacerbated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 and the Carter administration’s success in sponsoring the negotiations that led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord, also in that year, which led to the marginalization of Egypt within the Arab world and the subsequent assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat who signed the peace accord with Israel . In effect, 1979 proved to be a turning point in the Middle East and Persian Gulf as the rise of Islamic militancy – in Shia Iran as well as among Sunni populations in the Arab states – redefined the domestic and international dimensions of the region’s engagement with the wider world.
The realignments within the Middle East and the Persian Gulf after 1979 created the space for China’s increasing role as a major customer for energy resources from, and as a supplier of advanced military technology to, regional states. At another level, China’s engagement with the region was also shaped by the need to address the issue of its own Muslim population within China to pre-empt either religious militancy or the rise of ethnic separatism within these communities. China’s status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council also carries weight as a source of influence for regional states in international debates and as a brake upon the policies of other major powers in the region. In sum, China’s pragmatic foreign policy in the region has proven to be a critical component of its ability to avoid being trapped by the sectarian tensions and Cold War legacies that continue to shape the role of other external powers in the region.
It is precisely that pragmatic approach which will be required by China to manage the process of reducing its reliance upon fossil fuel technologies to power its economic growth and to provide credible leadership – in collaboration with the United States and the other major industrial powers – in dealing with the challenges of climate change. While several of the major European states seem to be prepared to move relatively quickly to reshape their energy use policies, a major source of resistance to the idea of ‘climate change’ and the proposed shift away from an excessive reliance upon fossil fuels has been the Republican Party in the USA. Immediately following the joint announcement by the American and Chinese Presidents, the Republican Party’s leadership made clear their discomfiture in issuing statements critical of the proposals in that document.
While the Republican leadership comments could be attributed to the foetid political atmosphere that accompanied the mid-term elections of early November 2014, the political climate in the US has been roiled by the highly-charged debates over the proposed construction of the Keystone pipeline that would move fuel extracted from Canadian tar stands to ports in the United States for export.
The Republican leadership in Congress has been pressing very hard to have the pipeline approved by the Obama administration, while President Obama has been particularly measured in approach to a final decision, emphasizing that a review of the project to determine whether it will accelerate climate change should be completed before a decision is made. The joint US-China announcement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has undoubtedly made the Republican leadership even more anxious to push for a quick approval of the pipeline.
Further, it was notable that in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 mid-term election, the former President, George W Bush, was on a promotion tour for a book about his father, George HW Bush, who had served as a single-term President from 1988 to 1992. During that tour George W Bush was open to discussion about the possibility of his younger brother Jeb seeking the presidency in 2016. Both former Presidents had been assiduous in their deference to the fossil fuel industry in their pre-presidential careers and each had the distinction of launching a war against Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the effort to assert American military pre-eminence in the Persian Gulf. The Obama-Xi joint announcement may become a thorny issue for plans to replace Obama in 2016 with a Republican President who may wish to continue with policies that are excessively deferential to the American fossil fuel industry and which reflect a nostalgic commitment to the continuation of a military strategy centred upon control over fossil fuel resources outside of the United States – particularly in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
The American obsession with control over the energy resources of that region had been clearly articulated in the 1980 Carter Doctrine: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” In seeking to enforce that doctrine the United States, over the course of every administration since Carter, has found itself embroiled in destructive religious and military conflicts that have failed to secure a Pax Americana in the region.
In addition, American policies both supported the military adventurism of Saddam Hussein and, after his removal, created the conditions for the collapse of the secular Iraqi state amid a vicious religious war that has yet to run its course. Iraq had been an important buffer state within the Middle East and the Persian Gulf and its disintegration has eerie parallels with the Balkan wars that were unleashed through the disintegration of Yugoslavia as the end of the Cold War unleashed an extraordinary return of ghosts of Europe’s past – religious war, ethnic cleansing and unbridled nationalism.
The joint announcement by the Chinese and American Presidents in 2014 – however symbolic – may yet offer an opening to escape the short- and long-term destructive consequences of an international political economy based primarily upon fossil-fuel and the assumed primacy of any single country.
