 Welcome to NewsClick. Today we're very pleased to have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmed, well-known Marxist commentator, scholar, author of the very great classic book in theory and the book which I particularly like, the imperialism of our times. We're going to talk today about the world in the middle of COVID-19. Ajaz Ahmed, welcome to NewsClick. Thank you very much. Well, it's a very curious time. We have this global pandemic, as we speak, 5.2 million people infected by the disease. And yet it seems in the middle of all this, despite the UN Secretary General asking for a ceasefire, the United States seems to be ramping up its belligerence against Iran, against Venezuela and against China. How should one start to understand the behavior of the United States government in the middle of something where we should, it seems, be focusing on the health issue and not on war? First of all, as you well know, the US administration, Trump himself and people close to him, were extremely reluctant to start with, to recognize the magnitude of what was coming. And it is really because of their negligence and belligerence on the front of introducing the restrictions that very important studies are showing that had they taken it more seriously, they would have saved many, many more lives. Maybe 30,000, maybe 50,000, whatever, perhaps half the people have died. So what is the sort of refusal to see what they are up against? Similarly, a refusal to see what can happen if they do not continue to be careful and concentrating on the issue of what this pandemic means for their own people. In a broader perspective, first week of April, when pandemic is full blown, Trump is used in executive order, which says the United States has the right, the people and citizens and companies of the United States have the right to use, to go to the moon and use the minerals and other resources of the moon. The executive order says that the space is not a common space for humanity, it is for the United States and life-minded states to do that and so on. So belligerence is of this order, it is on the level of the cosmos. And they have announced that they are going to initiate this program in which by 20,024 they are going to establish a credible human presence on the moon and they are going to start this whole exploitation. Now you see what interests me, the reason I brought it up is that this gives you some sense of what lies behind their belligerence towards individual countries. There is a question of the mind of the early colonial period of we can establish a preemptive right to the resources of the world and now of the cosmos and any challenger who comes will be beaten back. This is the early colonial era, extended now to space. Venezuela, largest deposit of oil and oil and so on. So oil, gas, Iran, Venezuela and so on. Second preemptive right, third unique American power, which is the very idea at the heart of all of this, Venezuela, Iran, China. I have written this earlier that third world nationalism has been for the United States since the Second World War, since the decolonization movements began, as dangerous as communism. And these are the states which refuse to follow the American dominance. Now, I think what Trump is doing, one is to share human callousness. Exactly the question that you asked that in the midst of this pandemic, you are escalating and being more and more belligerent on this when 35 million people in your country have lost jobs. You can't take care of them, but you want to. So there's that kind of callousness that is specific to this administration. But the policies of belligerence towards Venezuela, Iran, China are older. The whole anti-China strategy of what these days is called hybrid warfare or whatever. Full spectrum dominance and all that. That has been in place since about 2010. As soon as China made the kind of breakthrough across the front of technology, non-production, industrial development, etc. So that the so-called pivot to Asia was actually above. Now you are at a different point. And we can also talk about that. What is specific, I think, about this particular administration is, is sharing competence. The kind of invasion that they mounted against Venezuela is simply laughable. They couldn't even carry that. Earlier American administrations, the way they fought against Nicaragua, for example, compared that to what they tried to do to Venezuela. And the shared level of incompetence, a country that is suffering so very much. Cuba was different. At that time the Soviet Union was there to support. So any kind of American sanctions in Balco and so on, Cuba could bear. Venezuela cannot because there is no such power outside. Venezuela is bleeding, bleeding, bleeding badly. And yet all you can muster is this kind of... So one is sharing competence, inability to figure out their own stuff. The other thing is that there's a kind of a thing about Trump that he's playing. His main concern is to get elected and to sort of strut it out on the world stage. Where his voters base, the far-right voters base, which is solidly behind him, so much of it is because of that. Much of this belligerence is also highly rhetorical. Particularly about China, a lot of it is really rhetorical and they're creating this new kind of atmosphere of far beyond just the Second Cold War. The Committee of Present Danger China has now been activated. It's the fourth time this Committee of Present Danger has come into being. This time it is China. A lot of it is rhetorical. A lot of it is that they really are caught because China's strengths, they cannot match. Literally, we're China is strong. They cannot match. The only language they know is military villages. I think that's very interesting because you're saying that at least for this administration, there's callousness, there's incompetence, and then there's a kind of rhetorical overreach. But I think that you've said something I think which needs a little more for people who are listening, which is when you say that there are these strengths of China, which might be a barrier to this kind of imperialism, what are some of those strengths and how should one understand them? A very obvious one which everyone talks about, which is the sheer, it is the only truly productive country in the world. It is what America some 78 years ago used to be. That's where China is now. That is where Britain was in the early parts of the 19th century. It is the only truly manufacturing industrial country in the world where everybody, you know, and so on. And there is no stopping that. That can only. Secondly, China has now developed a very interesting combination of dominating, increasingly dominating the world market and at the same time expanding the home market at a very rapid rate. So that in some areas of production in China now, wages are higher in some parts of Europe. So that, you know, the fact that they have to take a home market and they're constantly expanding that home market because of, you know, rising incomes and wages and so on. There is that. But there are certain things people don't talk about all that much. Cutting edge technologies. China is bypassing the United States increasingly very much. The great scientific technological base that they are creating. China has now a larger scientific intelligence here than any other country in the world and not just larger. China now has, you know, one of the measures it would be that within the last 10 years, China from being a, you know, 10th or 12th is now that leading power in the world in the number of patents they got last year. Four times as much as the United States. So, you know, in the cutting edge technologies, China is forging far ahead. Now, this is not something small. Technological monopoly is one of the absolutely central monopolies that the Western powers have had against the rest of the world. You can break through that and go to the other side and start dominating the whole range of technological fields. The kind of public education that they have, any number of actual tests that have been done on a multi country level about two years ago there was a study done where students from all the advanced countries including China, you know, 15-year-old kids they were given the same exams and so on and so on. Shanghai-based kids were much ahead of any of the American kids. You know, so you have a very different, so that shows you the trajectory of their Chinese, you know, this is their strength towards the future. These very kids, 10 years from now, 15 years now, will be the middle ranking scientists and financials and so on and so on. So, these are the strengths and at the same time, what they have is a very different kind of coherent policy, which is above board and based on mutual advantage. Americans know how to dictate and military is that and the other. What the Chinese are doing is, you know, because they have surplus capital, because they have immense amount of technological know-how, they can go to multiple countries, dozens of countries, and say, we can give you finance, we can give you technology and in lieu of that, these resources and so on. Therefore, China, whose main problem is, really the main problem is its vulnerability on the front of all kinds of resources, including energy resources. That's where the weakness is for China. And other kind of resources, China is trying to guarantee in all kinds of ways, but when it comes to something like petroleum, gas and so on, that vulnerability is very great. And I would think that China's main vulnerability to the United States is that. That is something the U.S. And again, that is a military threat, but that's all they have. In the military field, as a matter of fact, from what I have read, China is first of all a defensive part. It's not an aggressive part. Now, does it need to be? It has enough finance, enough technological resource, enough to offer countries to cooperate with it. But it is a defensive part and now it has broken the barrier where its defensive structure is too strong for the Americans to take on in any sort of way. So in a peculiar sense, I think some Americans are understanding that the time may have passed or that this may be the time when you can stop China from, you know, etc. But in America, that nervousness about China is very, very important, is very great. So this administration turns it into this very worker kind of belligerence, which plays to the height supremacist electoral base inside. So how much of it is bluster and how much of it is real is very hard. You're right. As you said, there is a rhetorical overreach in Mr. Trump in general. On the other hand, the Indo-Pacific command, which is the US government's military arm in that part of the world, had published a new article called Regained the Advantage, which is a concession that there's some drain of power and that somehow the United States needs to regain the advantage. If you were a rational government in New Delhi, and I'm not saying that this government is not rational in its own way, it has its own rationality. If you were a rational government in Delhi, why would you tow the line of this Indo-Pacific strategy that the United States is pushing to regain its advantage? You know, who's lining up behind the US Indo-Pacific strategy? It's Japan, which is basically a client state of the United States even now, Australia and India. What is India doing? You see, two or three things I would say. One is that this again is nothing new. This quad was formed some ten years ago, or a little more perhaps. At that time, China was supposed to be compared to today. It was already on its way, but compared to today, China every two years, the scale of power changes in China. Now it is becoming increasingly more crazy to be in that. So they're caught, on the one hand, these are far right guys, you know, Bolsonaro and Modi and these guys. This kind of, you know, essentially the axis of evil in the world today is really the United States is right in India. So far the states are concerned, the governments are concerned. But again, they're caught, there's a logic of capital. This is also the government that is very keen to become a full member of the Shanghai process. This is a government that, again, India just doesn't know what to do with China. And again, the only thing they know is to work up the boundary dispute. That is not the game China is going to play with you. You do something irresponsible, then punish you right there on the spot. But there will be no rhetorical escalation. So the Indian government, as it is constituted, its entire mentality takes it into this Indo-Pacific command and so forth. It's a very dangerous game that they're playing. At the same time, there must be sitting, there must be sections of the Indian bourgeoisie and the foreign service, which want to have a normal relationship. You know, people like Ambani and so on want Chinese to come and build their factories. So India has got any contradiction in this. And it doesn't know how to live in its own neighborhood. It has never known it. This government is the worst in that regard. India has never known how to live like a decent member of that community of South Asian states in which it is very bad. Great phrase. India doesn't know how to live in its neighborhood. I think we'll come back another day and pursue that, make that the centerpiece of the conversation, India and its neighborhood, very illuminating on the United States, particularly on Trump's incompetence, belligerence and callousness, but also rhetorical overreach. And of course on the nature of the Chinese experiment and where it's going. Professor Ajah Zayamat, thanks very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.