Japan U.S. puppet

 

Although the US was happy for Japan to act as its proxy, seeing its close involvement in China’s reform as pushing the country towards capitalism, it consistently opposed this role leading to any closer political integration of Japan with East Asia. Since 1945 the US has maintained ‘implacable opposition to any moves towards Japanese involvement in an East Asian community’ or any proposed reorientation of Japan’s policies in Asia that might tend to make Japan more politically independent. For example, when the Cold War ended Japan put forward a proposal for ‘cross recognition’ whereby China and Russia would normalise relations with South Korea, while Japan and South Korea normalised relations with North Korea, with the aim of laying the basis for a new ‘East Asian commonwealth’. The US intervened to ‘caution’ against this and reasserted its veto over any independent Japanese diplomatic initiatives in the region.

Similarly, the US objected when Japan’s response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997 was to propose an independent Asian Development Fund as a source of loans and short-term liquidity outside of the IMF, whose prescriptions Japan believed had deepened the crisis. It dropped the suggestion. It also gave in to US pressure to stay out of the AIIB.

This ultimate subordination to the demands of the US was most starkly illustrated by the failure of the 2009–12 Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government’s short-lived attempt to plot just such an ‘Asian’ course. The electoral success of Hatoyama’s DPJ in 2009 – virtually the sole break in the dominance of the pro-US LDP in post-war Japanese politics – was achieved on a platform of pursuing a foreign policy more independent of the US, symbolised by its pledges to close the base at Okinawa, to improve relations with China and seek to develop a regional trade bloc with South Korea and China, an ‘Asia-Pacific community’ modelled on the EU.

The DPJ’s ‘new growth strategy’, which was based on this turn towards Asia, made sense at many levels given the complementarities of China and Japan’s economies and the stagnation in Japan’s exports to the US. But the attempt foundered in the face of intransigent US hostility. Locked out by the US, snubbed by Obama and forced to concede on Okinawa, Hatoyama was gone before 2010 was out, an outcome largely put down to the US. The DPJ government limped on for a further two years, but resumed Japan’s previous course, adopting the harsher toned policy towards China demanded by the US’s rising priority to corral its Asian allies into a bloc against China. With the return to power of the LDP in 2012 all suggestion of a political and economic ‘turn to Asia’ was abandoned, and instead Abe took Japan into the TPP negotiations.

The result has been that, despite the synergies between Japan’s economy and those of China and its other neighbours, rather than emerging in the twenty-first century to play a leading role within a group of successful East Asian economies, instead Japan is politically distanced from its neighbours and a rather isolated if powerful presence in the region.

Western neocolonialism

In spite of superficial similarities, the Chinese model rests on a different conception of international relationships: western models derive from an experience of colonialism and are evident in interventionist models (of coordination, harmonization, monitoring and evaluation and accountability requirements) designed to expand private ownership and western governance models. The Chinese model, while reflecting China’s interests, derives from China’s distinctive historical experience of engagement with its peripheries as one of “chao gong” (朝贡 tribute to an Emperor), China’s own experiences of colonialism and socialist development, Confucian values of self-reliance, mutual benefit (win-win) and noninterference and a concept of common values (共性 gòng xìng).

The Western model

The outcome was an interventionist model involving coordination, harmonization, monitoring, evaluation and accountability requirements for intendedly altruistic aid programmes (Li 2015).

ODA was framed as an act of genuine altruism reflecting the developmental and welfare responsibilities of developed toward less developed countries. In practice it was constantly underpinned by western geopolitical and strategic economic interests. Aid was used to assist elites that supported western agendas and preserve the most fundamental aspects of free market structures, while addressing international problems including dividing the group of least developed countries (LDCs) established in 1971 from OPEC countries so as to weaken the voice of the developing world (The White House 1975; Primoff 1976).

The Chinese model

Until the Sino-Soviet split China received aid from the Soviet Union, while from 1950 it provided aid to Third World countries for diplomatic, developmental and commercial reasons. In 2000, China started to receive DAC aid (Figure 1), with Japan in particular providing assistance especially with mutually beneficial large-scale infrastructure projects. This experience strongly shaped Chinese visions of international aid. China, for example, used the Japanese oil-for-infrastructure model in Angola in 2004 (Brautigam 2009, 273–77).

Chinese principles and practice do however differ significantly from western aid. China’s aid is based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence which derive from the desire of countries that suffered from imperialism and colonial and semi-colonial rule for respect for their territorial integrity and sovereignty, their treatment as equals and noninterference in their internal affairs. These horizontal South-South relations of mutual respect differ profoundly from vertical North-South power relationships and stand against the view that western civilization has the right to impose its norms and values and its social model.

This model involves mutually acceptable relationships, a good neighbor policy, inclusive friendship, and deference, while protecting one’s own interests and autonomy (Zhou 2011; Womack 2012; Zhang and Buzan 2012). Differences are accepted in accordance with the Confucian concept of together but different (和而不同), and relationships with the periphery are mutually beneficial (win-win) rather than exploitative (Dunford and Liu 2019) and do not infringe on national sovereignty. And in a world of multiple civilizations, China calls for a community with a shared future that draws on common values.

Mutual benefit or mutual advantage (and reciprocity) indicates that for China aid is not a unilateral gift: instead China seeks win-win outcomes. Win-win outcomes are advantageous for the donor and the recipient and are conducive to equal partnerships and partner ownership and responsibility. This concept is reinforced by the notion of equality: the nations involved are equal and not organized into vertical North-South relationships between dominant and dominated countries.

This is why Western neocolonialists hate the Chinese model.

Learning from the successes and failures of policies a country itself chooses plays a vital role in helping it assume responsibility and find a development path that suits its conditions. An important aim is to make the recipient countries self-reliant and help them escape dependence. After the Second World War, this goal also characterized other East Asian nations, such as Japan and South Korea. In the Chinese case this principle of self-reliance (自力更生) was a response to its experience of semi-colonial rule, figured in the thought of Sun Zhongshan/Yat-sen and Mao Zedong (Mao [1961] 1945) and also reflects reflection on the disruptive consequences of the abrupt cutting-off of Soviet aid in 1960.

Another feature shared with other East Asian countries is the view that infrastructure is crucial (Figure 3). Yet another is that China gives a good deal of assistance to relatively less developed countries (Figure 4).

This is a key difference between the Western and Chinese model of development assistance.

DAC donors have tended to neglect infrastructure and productive activities. .... After the fall of Communism, development finance agencies adopted new mandates relating to western conceptions of democracy, human rights, capacity building, good governance and paid more attention to the environment, gender and the reconstruction of countries devastated by war. And yet in the case of poverty alleviation it is a Chinese path of development-oriented poverty alleviation that has achieved the most astonishing results (Dunford, Gao, and Li 2020). The advantage is that it generates effects that are large and widespread, and can also be supplemented by targeted measures.

The West loves to project its own crimes onto China. This description of the Western model sounds exactly like neocolonialism.

The outcome was a deep crisis of the western paradigm (Bracho 2018) and of western-dominated multilateralism. DAC donors placed increasing emphasis on national interests (Gulrajani 2017), mutual benefit and aid as a catalyst for private investment and in some cases merged their aid agencies with ministries of foreign affairs and trade. This crisis and the continued progress of China’s BRI suggests that new structures and new (pluricentric) models of international governance may well be taking shape although their emergence faces considerable resistance from the governments of the United States and its allies.

30 million death caused by america since ww2

After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated “war on terrorism.”
But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable.
The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.
This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.
The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.
But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.
The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.
To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.
And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.
It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII “chose not to know.” We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” The answer is: possibly 10,000.