Even during the Cold War, the USA didn't seek to invade and occupy China or Russia. They are too big, and they are too well armed. America only attacks smaller, less well armed countries, like Iraq, and even then only after degrading the country's defense through a long, painful international economic blockade. The empire's main weapons are economic sanctions, covert actions, "democracy assistance," media propaganda, and so on, and when it comes to wars, it usually prefers proxy wars, like using Ethiopian troops in Somalia.
In this day and age, the empire cannot hope to invade a country bigger than Panama or Grenada and occupy it easily.
The empire's strongest asset, however, is cultural assimilation (assimilating the top 20-40% of each nation of the global South into the capitalist consensus of the multinational empire). When the top 20-40% of each nation "spontaneously" consent to US hegemony and run their country in accordance with it, the empire's power elites benefit the most, much more than even when they win wars against so-called "rogue states" and "terrorist sponsors." Business as usual of capitalism itself, much more so than ideological apparatuses directly controlled by the empire's power elite, helps create this "spontaneous" consent, in the quintessential Gramscian fashion.
China and Japan's economies are moreover deeply intertwined with each other and they are in turn integrated into US economy through trade and finance; Russia and Europe also need each other, albeit their economic integration is less than China, Japan, and the USA's. Such economic facts make war among them unlikely, and they also limit the extent of Moscow's and Beijing's resistance to Washington's foreign policy: neither has fully complied with it, but neither has flatly vetoed it.
On 9/14/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 13, 2007, at 8:11 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >> You'll like how Ervand Abrahamian says that Ahmadinejad has a lot in
> >> common with Cheney. What we call neocons in the U.S. are "principled
> >> conservatives" or "principalists" in Iran, says he.
> >
> > If there is one thing that Cheney and Ahmadinejad have in common, it's
> > that they both know what they want, which we can't say about leftists.
> > Other than that, their social bases are not the same, and neither are
> > their goals. If they were, there would be no conflict.
>
> Gosh, better tell Abrahamian! Maybe he's been busy writing a book and
> hasn't been keeping up.
>
> It's amazing, reading and talking to people like Ervand Abrahamian
> and Hamid Dabashi. While they strongly reject the caricatures of Iran
> that circulate in the West, they have no problem with criticizing the
> regime (a word Abrahamian uses, by the way - better brief him on why
> it's bad) as petit bourgeois and repressive.
Are Cheney's social base and ideological goals "petit-bourgeois"? I think not. And I doubt that Ervand Abrahamian makes such a claim. Abrahamian wrote that the Islamic Republic has social foundations "unlike its predecessor": "especially among the traditional middle class, the bazaar lower class, and the shanty-town poor" (Ervand Abrahamian, The Iranian Mojahedin, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 259), and it's mainly the shanty-town poor in urban areas as well as the provincial poor who preferred Ahmadinejad to Rafsanjani in 2005, and upper classes have scorned the former Revolutionary Guard. In the USA, the shanty-town poor, when they vote at all, tend to vote Democrat, not Republican, and it is upper classes who have supported Bush and Cheney more than lower classes. So, if Abrahamian sees commonality between Cheney and Ahmadinejad, it has to be something other than their respective social bases and political goals.
The American presidential candidate in recent years whose ideology is most authentically petit-bourgeois is Ralph Nader, and someone like Nader gets excluded from ballots here to begin with and can hardly hope to actually get elected, unlike Ahmadinejad.
In any case, class compositions and power structures of Iran and the USA are very different. The presidency of Iran is not the same office as the presidency of the USA -- the latter is a far more powerful office than the former, which does not have armed forces at its command. And the petit-bourgeoisie most certainly do NOT rule America or any other country of the multinational empire for that matter.
> Abrahamian says that most of the Iranian elite would like to
> make peace with the U.S. and court foreign investment -
> which is rather at odds with your view of Iran as on some
> kind of anti-imperialist mission.
What do you think anti-imperialism today is? Make war on the USA and reject foreign investment altogether? I don't think so. Even Cuba courts foreign investment and wants to make peace with the USA, and it is the US power elite that have tried to isolate it and deprive it of access to markets, investments, scientific advances, and even chances for cultural exchanges. Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval write in "The Venezuelan Economy in the Chávez Years": "Venezuela is one of the only major oil-producing states in the developing world that allows foreign investment in oil production -- even US allies such as Mexico and Saudi Arabia, for example, do not" (July 2007, <http://cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela_2007_07.pdf>, p. 20). Does that mean Venezuela is less anti-imperialist than Mexico and Saudi Arabia?
On 9/14/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 14, 2007, at 11:43 AM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
>
> > Because when Islam and democracy are "re-conciliated" in Muslim OPEC
> > countries it will be harder for the US to bomb away the whole Middle
> > East.
>
> Iran is more democratic than Saudi Arabia or Egypt - and which is the
> U.S. more likely to bomb? Venezuela is highly democratic and the U.S.
> would love nothing more than to shoot Chavez and reverse his
> policies. Etc.
Washington prefers less democracy to more democracy in the global South, for more democracy means more shares of wealth going to populations in the South, making less of it available for the multinational capitalist class, and if Iran and Venezuela were like Egypt or Mexico or Saudi Arabia, the empire would be very happy indeed.
Reconciliation of Islam and democracy is nevertheless desirable for the benefit of working people who live in the predominantly Islamic countries. There are some among Muslims and secular liberals who think that Islam and democracy are fundamentally at odds with each other, but that is because they both conflate democracy with political liberalism and economic liberalization. The way to go is to make Islam like the Bolivarian ideology, which is very much compatible with democracy though at odds with political liberalism and economic liberalization. -- Yoshie