De-Americanize the World? It's Just a Matter of Time

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

30 October 13

.S. fiscal failure warrants a de-Americanized world," warned the headline on a recent English-language op-ed from Xinhua, China's official news agency. Sadly, the warning received widespread notice, but evoked almost no serious soul-searching.

Blaming "the intensifying political turmoil in Washington" for putting other nations' "tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy," the op-ed called for "a new world order" in which all nations, big or small, rich or poor, hew to the basic principles of international law, respect national sovereignty, and "have their key interests respected and protected on an equal footing."

High on Xinhua's list of reforms is the creation of an international reserve currency to replace the U.S. dollar in international transactions, which would stop America from paying its debts simply by printing money. China currently holds some $1.28 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, while Japan holds some $1.14 trillion.

Such de-Americanization is the face of the future, brought nearer by Washington's cackhanded response to revelations of massive spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) in Brazil, Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain - and by the awkward lies of our highly embarrassed European allies and victims. The truth is that most of them have gone along with the surveillance since the early Cold War, when the U.S. joined with its predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Christian allies - Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - to create a world-wide electronic surveillance network called Echelon. Originally created to monitor the Soviet Bloc and never officially acknowledged, Echelon and its spin-offs have increasingly become a tool for commercial and industrial espionage.

The Chinese op-ed goes far beyond surveillance. The author Liu Chang, a staff writer for Xinhua, made no claim to represent an official view, but he appears to reflect the direction in which Beijing is moving. He faults "a self-serving Washington" for abusing its superpower status and introducing even more chaos into the world "by shifting financial risks overseas, instigating regional tensions and territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies." He blames the global "economic disaster" of recent years on "voracious Wall Street elites." He accuses the U.S. of declaring "vital national interests to protect in nearly every corner of the globe," and becoming "habituated to meddling in the business of other countries and regions." And, no surprise, he indicts America for "torturing prisoners of war, slaying civilians in drone attacks, and spying on world leaders."

Dismiss all this as Chinese propaganda, if you will. But what does Liu Chang include in his list of particulars that is not for the most part true? Much of the world shares his view, while most Americans simply do not get it. They believe, as Obama told the U.N. General Assembly, that whatever our blemishes, we remain exceptional, indispensable, and primarily a force for good. Or they think, as does Dick Cheney, that the U.S. should do whatever its leaders want, relying on money and military muscle to remain king of the hill. Call it America Über Alles.

Warmly self-righteous or coldly self-serving, the difference might move U.S. presidential elections and matter to dependent allies. But, if Liu Chang's op-ed has anything to tell us, it's that the chickens are coming home to roost. The Chinese and even close allies are losing patience with U.S. hegemony, largely because it leaves them vulnerable to America's growing dysfunction and ineptitude, both economic and political. The question for China is not whether to curb our global dominance, but when and how to do it. The question for American leaders is more existential: Do they act like adults and learn to make the best of a changing world? Or do they waste millions of lives and trillions of dollars more to remain global cop and de facto decider, at least until China and whoever else make it impossible for them to continue.

My bet, to quote my sainted father, is that - like dunderheads - America's leaders will continue shoveling shit against the tide.

Just listen to how ineptly U.S. officials and their pet pundits lie about their global spookery. We're just doing what everybody else does. We're doing it to prevent terrorist attacks, especially in Europe. We're doing it to fight drug gangs in Mexico. We're not listening in on Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel, at least not now. And, take our word for it, some of the charges are false.

The excuses contain elements of truth, I'm sure, but none explain why the NSA, CIA, and other U.S. agencies have spied on at least 35 heads of state, the European Union, the G20 summits, the United Nations, diplomatic missions, business competitors like Brazil's Petrobras, and millions of private citizens. The answers go deeper. The U.S. spies on everyone because it can. It spies because that's one of the ways U.S.-based multinational corporations compete in a global economy. And it spies because that's how Washington and Wall Street run a global empire that is slipping from their grasp.

Nor will America's allies stop the surveillance with U.N. resolutions and agreements not to spy on each other, as the French and Germans have proposed. The U.S. has long had a no-spying agreement with Britain, where I used to live and work. One day in late 1976, a well-known reporter at the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times - Derek Humphrey - rang to ask me about a story he was working on. The American Embassy had told him that I was spreading a forged document about U.S. intelligence activities in Britain. I quickly convinced him, and the U.S. Embassy later confirmed, that the document I had was authentic. It contained 69 Key Intelligence Questions (KIQs) that the CIA wanted its people and other American officials to answer about Britain, including economic, financial, and commercial information. This was the official need-to-know list about a country that was supposedly off-limits to American spies. An anonymous "admirer" had sent the KIQs to former CIA officer Philip Agee, and he had passed them on to me.

At the time, I had just published the identity of the new CIA Station Chief in London, Dr. Edward Proctor, and I called the embassy to ask for an interview with him, in part about the KIQs. Someone at the embassy then called Derek, showed him the authentic document and a ham-fisted forgery that was circulating in Europe, all in an effort to discredit Agee and me. When Derek saw that I had the real thing, he invited me to co-author an article with him on the KIQs, and the whole business left the CIA and NSA looking like the spies they are. In fact, I had never seen the forgery, but the document Agee gave me showed clearly that America's no-spy agreement with Britain made little difference in practice. It's a lesson that overly Americanized leaders like Angela Merkel understand, but do not want their voters to know.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."

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