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Thom Hartmann: And welcome back to The Big Picture. I'm speaking with legendary filmmaker and journalist John Pilger about his brilliant new documentary, "The Coming War On China," which will play exclusively in the United States here on RT America starting Saturday night at nine p.m. Eastern time.
And John, in your film, social scientist and businessman Eric Li had this to say about the relationship between the United States and China.
"There never have been two countries more interdependent on each other than China and the US in history. And China is the largest trading nation in the world and in history. So China's economy and their society, their lives, are are linked to the entire world including America and the West and all the other countries. So I think interdependence between these two countries and among all the nations of the world speak to peace."
Thom Hartmann: John Pilger, given that, why are we threatening China with this naval Asian pivot and I guess it goes beyond just the Navy, and why has the US surrounded China with military bases given that?
John Pilger: There's a long answer to that, Thom, and it doesn't have to do with Donald Trump or really any other president. It's about a rapacious foreign policy that's run pretty well in a straight line since the Korean War. And it's about dominance. Listen to Ashton Carter, the present defense secretary, and he's made it very clear. He's a very verbose provocateur. He likes speaking in public -- speaking his mind, as he says. And he says those who confront us, wishing to deny our dominance -- my paraphrasing -- then they will have to deal with us. And he was referring to China and Russia, but mainly China.
Now, that's an attitude, that's a policy that has become almost vivid since 9/11. It existed before that. It's existed actually since 1950. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, which cost probably a million lives and dispossessed about four million people, all of it based on deception. That was part of that policy. So there's a long answer to your question, but the short answer is that China has become the second biggest economic power in the world. It may well be the biggest economic power now. There's never been a rise like it. It's happened in a very, very short time and the US knows that its dominance across, for instance, trade deals, goodbye to all those US-dominated trade arrangements and banking arrangements.
The Chinese have set up a parallel banking system that challenges the whole Bretton Woods architecture of banking. And China has become the developer, the builder, not only the workshop but the builder, leaving the United States with one well-defined power: that of its military. That's why the sabers are being rattled, because that is the power of the United States. This is not to say that anyone wants to have a nuclear war, but it doesn't work like that.
There was a panel in the US, I think last year, in which general James Cartwright made some very interesting remarks about the the interval of decision-making when a country knows that it's possibly going to be attacked with nuclear weapons. It's about 12 or 15 minutes. China until recently, according to the literature, used to keep its, kept its nuclear weapons on low alert. That means they separated the missiles and the warheads.
They're now on high alert. Why?
In China there are many like Eric Li. He was educated in the United States. They admire so much about the US. One strategist said to me, "look, we're not your enemy, but if you want us to be your enemy we have to prepare." And that's, I think that is certainly the reluctant view in Chinese ruling circles.
Thom Hartmann: So, China has, you know, the Great Wall. In fact, one of the points made in your documentary is that the Great Wall was defensive, that China has always been more inward-looking than outward-looking. They have, at least to the best of my knowledge, and I'm not a China scholar, you've done the research on this, but they have never done the Great British Empire kind of thing, you know, that was done back in the 18th century. So what is, (a), is that still the case, that they're not expansionist, and if they're not, then why the Spratly Islands? And (b) what is an appropriate American response to the Chinese economic growth that you were just talking about.
I was in China, in fact, I lived in China for a month back in 1986 and it was just a, you know, it was dirt lanes kind of thing. And now it's this, you know, it's exploded. How should the United States respond? Two questions there.
John Pilger: Well, the United States should stop threatening the world, in my opinion, and stop threatening nuclear powers. There's a very good interview, I think, in my film with Professor Ted Postol who was a former adviser to the head of US Naval Operations, now at MIT, and he said, why is this happening? Why don't we sit down with people? Why don't we connect, have a world in which we connect? The reason to that is that the US still operates a kind of nineteenth-century foreign policy. It's a gunboat foreign policy. It's so out of date that no one wants it, because everybody knows where it could lead.
Is China expansionist? Yes, China has secured its borders, as the example of Tibet, taking over Tibet and its sphere. But beyond that, apart from one small installation I think in Djibouti, there are no Chinese bases, military bases. There is a lot of economic and infrastructure activity around the world, especially in Africa. Africa is very interesting, where the Chinese have gone in, instead of the old western routine of really saying countries can only develop on our terms on World Bank terms, IMF, the Chinese have gone in and said let's have your raw materials and we'll build roads and bridges and ports for you. And that's what's happened.
The US response to that has been entirely military. So you have right through Africa, Africom, which is the newest US military command with headquarters now in Addis Ababa, has a military presence in almost all the major countries, all the major countries in Africa. A military presence, in which military hardware is given to often unstable governments and that old, that's a colonial, it's a 19th century imperial way of dealing. The Chinese, on the other head, yes, they're expanding, they're there, but they're expanding in business terms. It's not in military terms.
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