The United States, United Kingdom and Australia have formed an alliance called “AUKUS” to create, in the words of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, “a partnership where our technology, our scientists, our industry, our forces of Defense are all working together to provide a safer and more secure region that ultimately benefits everyone. AUKUS is primarily a military relationship, but it is said to include broad economic measures that undoubtedly seek to counter the rise of China in all spheres of development. The deal has met with some opposition in the West. New Zealand has rejected the legitimacy of the alliance while French ambassadors to the United States and Australia have been recalled after AUKUS essentially tore up a submarine deal between France and Australia.

Another point of controversy is whether AUKUS violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The first major initiative of UKUS is to develop Australia’s first fleet of nuclear submarines in the Pacific. Each side of the alliance has denied any intention to develop a “civilian” (read military) nuclear weapons capability in Australia. However, the fact remains that the United States and the United Kingdom share nuclear technology for military purposes. Nuclear submarines require the mining of uranium and the development of nuclear power plants on Australian soil, both of which are toxic to the environment and prone to accidents.

While neither US President Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, nor Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison were willing to mention China in their AKUS announcement, it’s no secret that China is the target of the alliance. This can first be deduced from the inconsistent military strategy that AUKUS seeks to deploy in the region. AUKUS was presumed as a necessary step to curb “threats” to a “free and open” Indo-Pacific. CNN Military analyst Cedric Leighton clarified that the “threat” identified for a “free” Pacific is China. Leighton added that China has yet to do anything to indicate that its economic policies are endangering UKUS ‘coveted trade routes in the Pacific.

This begs the question: if China is indeed not a “threat” to trade routes in the Pacific, then why was AUKUS formed? AUKUS surely belies economic meaning since peace is an essential component of economic development. China is Australia’s largest trading partner in terms of imports and exports. China is also one of the top five trading partners of the United States and the United Kingdom. AUKUS is a subtle admission that the particular economic interests of Western nation-states ultimately take a back seat to the long-term imperatives of militarism and hegemonism.

AUKUS is the expression of the broad agenda of the United States and its allies to demand white colonial revenge from China on military aggression. The alliance comes after more than a decade of aggressive US-led acts, which have been aptly summed up as yet another cold war against China. The US ‘hub to Asia’ has deployed hundreds of thousands of US troops and hundreds of military bases, aircraft and warships in the Pacific since 2011. The UK, as part of of its “special relationship” with the United States, has followed suit by deploying its Royal Navy to patrol what it calls “its playground” which stretches from the Indian Ocean to the West Pacific coast of the United States. United States.

Australia has also been a leading force in the West’s increasingly aggressive posture towards China. Australia is a member of the Quad Alliance (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) of the United States, India and Japan which conducted its first joint military exercise in November 2020. In the summer of 2020, the Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pledged to increase Australia’s military budget by $ 270 billion over the next ten years, as the United States deploys three aircraft carriers to the South China Sea in a blatant act of military aggression against China. In April 2021, Morrison consolidated those investments by pledging nearly $ 600 million in joint exercises and military base projects with the United States.

Australia is also a home port for the United States’ propaganda war against China, which itself has a racist and colonial character. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is one of the leading think tanks for anti-Chinese propaganda. ASPI’s work includes Orientalist “research” into alleged human rights violations in China’s Xinjiang Province and direct attacks on media such as The gray area to counter their propaganda. ASPI receives direct funding from the United States Department of State and the Australian Department of Defense. Other major funders include the three of the world’s five largest military contractors: Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

ASPI is a naked expression of the link between anti-Chinese propaganda and military aggression. Just days after the formation of UKUS, Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton announced that ASPI would open an office in Washington DC. This decision clearly demonstrates that a line in the sand is drawn by US imperialism and its allies. The outright lies about China’s so-called “aggression” in its own seas or the “human rights violations” within its own borders have ignited a racist flame within the order. white and western imperialist led by the United States. Public opinion towards China has dropped dramatically in imperialist countries in response to the relentless propaganda blitz of a “Chinese threat” led by think tanks such as ASPI.

What the United States and its Western allies are trying to hide is that the basis of their policy of colonial revenge against China rests on a state of decline. It is not that China is a threat to the well-being of mankind, but that China has rapidly advanced to the point where its economic and political model is central to global development. China’s economic and technological growth not only threatens to supplant the United States and its Western allies from a purely competitive standpoint. On the contrary, China’s development model represents a clear break with the diktats of white supremacy and colonialism that underpin the imperialist order. Over forty years of predatory neoliberal capitalism and US-led imperialist hegemony have demonstrated that the centuries-old Western colonial system has nothing more to offer humanity but austerity, climate catastrophe and endless war.

China, on the other hand, offers the world’s impoverished majority in the countries of the South hope for a better future. China is more than willing to share the lessons of its defeat against extreme poverty and rapid infrastructure development in the areas of high-speed rail and 5G technology through the Belt and Road Initiative. “, a huge China-led infrastructure cooperation agreement that has the active participation of more than 130 countries. Developing countries in the South have relied on China to provide concrete assistance in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. China also offers loans to developing countries on terms more favorable than conditionalities from Western credit institutions. In addition, countries besieged by imperialism like Syria, Cuba, DPRK and Iran have relied on China for political solidarity against barbaric US sanctions as well as for much needed economic cooperation in the face of US aggression. .

In the 20th century, the world was divided into two camps: a socialist camp led by the Soviet Union and a capitalist camp led by the United States. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States and its Western partners enjoyed almost complete freedom to dominate and exploit the planet for the benefit of private shareholders and war profiteers. Both American and Western leaders hoped that China’s integration into the world economy would spell the end of its socialist system.

AUKUS, and the new Cold War against China from which the alliance emerges, is rooted in a growing desire among the historic white colonizers of the planet to take revenge on China for refusing to give up its sovereignty and its historical global model of socialist development. The AUKUS Alliance of White Colonial States seeks the gutting of peaceful socialist development itself, especially when led by a nation of 1.4 billion non-white people who share fundamental interests with the vast majority of the world. ‘humanity.

Danny Haiphong

Black agenda report