by Roberto Iannuzzi *
In the daily succession of crises and conflicts of international current affairs, some epochal changes, less flashy but more profound, can sometimes go unnoticed.
This is the case of a historic change of course that the White House is making, signaled by two important speeches given at the end of April by the Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
The core of such speeches, passed relatively unnoticedrevolves around the US establishment’s need to blame an external actor (the Chinese in this case) for the evils afflicting the American economy, being the latter instead the result of decades of bankruptcy choices made by the various administrations that have succeeded one another in the White House.
When he states that the Beijing’s “unfair economic practices”. have resulted in the excessive concentration of the production of essential goods in China, damaging workers and companies in the US and in the world, Yellen forgets that the relocation of American industry to Chinese territory was due to the greed of the US elites, who obtained huge profits from this process.
A process that was instead opposed by workers and trade unions in the United States, but naturally to no avail. Withholding this fact, Yellen said the Biden administration is now ready to pay an economical price to “protect national security interests” from the Chinese threat. To maintain its global preeminence, Washington intends to win the competition with China and isolate Beijing, as deduced from the National Security Strategy developed by the administration last October.
To this end, for several years various US administrations have adopted measures such as: increasing investments in strategic sectors at home, prohibiting the export to China of the most technologically advanced semiconductors and the machinery to make them, banning transactions with about 600 Chinese companies ( officially due to their relations with the Chinese military, or for human rights issues), push the allies to reduce their economic ties with Beijing.
After arguing that forecasts of US decline have always proven themselves wrong, and that once again Washington will be up to the challenge, Yellen wanted to pronounce reassuring words by affirming that the measures mentioned above are not aimed at obtaining a competitive advantage over Beijing or stifling China’s modernization. She and she also added that the United States is not seeking total decoupling (decoupling) from the Chinese economy, which would be “disastrous for both countries” and would have destabilizing effects “for the rest of the world“.
Sullivan further clarified Yellen’s speech by borrowing the expression dear to the president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen according to which the West is not aiming at a decoupling with China, but at a “de-risking”, i.e. a reduction of the risks deriving from an overexposure of Western supply chains to China.
The American decision to hit the main Chinese telecommunications company (Huawei), and to ban the export to China of the entire range of the most advanced semiconductors, however, betrays the intention of waging an all-out economic war, rather than engaging a mere market competition with Beijing. In his speech, eloquently titled “Renewing America’s Economic Leadership”, However, Sullivan went even further, questioning the very foundations of the globalization promoted by the US in the last thirty years.
Once again without identifying the causes in precise US political choices, he lamented the crisis which has “left many American workers behind”, and denounced the excessive dependence on world markets which would show its negative sides during the pandemic and of the war in Ukraine.
Sullivan is the leading proponent of a “middle-class foreign policy,” a vague slogan long touted by the Biden administration, according to which American interests abroad should support strategies to revitalize the economy and society. American at home. Starting from this assumption, he argued that markets do not always distribute capital in a socially optimal waythat liberalization should not be pursued as an end in itself, that giving priority to finance over the real economy was a mistake.
Exposing theses that are in part certainly acceptable, Sullivan has dismantled the dogma neoliberal prevailing in Washington, based on the reduction of public spending, privatization, deregulation, opening up to foreign capital – the so-called “Washington Consensus”according to an expression coined in 1989. However, we should not expect a sort of “rediscovery of socialism” by the Biden administration, or the enunciation of a new universal vision, but something far more restricted: the formulation of a utilitarian strategy aimed at trying to preserve US primacy.
We are faced with the attempt to identify measures that prevent the disintegration of American society at home, and of the alliance system on which it is based the western block at the international level. Many doubts can be raised about the success of such an attempt, given that the introduction of duties and subsidies is to the detriment of the allies, and that the imbalance between capital and labor at home is not addressed.
* Author of the book “If Washington Loses Control. Crisis of American unipolarity in the Middle East and in the world” (2017).
Twitter: @riannuzziGPC
The article The USA renounces neoliberalism to compete with China: in two speeches, the epochal turning point comes from Il Fatto Quotidiano.