In 2017, Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan gave a speech to a town hall meeting of his ministry’s staff, in which he discussed the 5 core principles of Singapore’s foreign policy. Though these principles had been in place since the founding of the Republic, the minister gave a new twist to the 2nd core principle, which deals with the need for a “credible and deterrent military defense”. Whereas the traditional purpose of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) had been deterrence against foreign military invasion, Mr. Balakrishnan instead framed the rationale for the SAF with the statement: “We must not become a vassal state. What this means is that we cannot be bought, nor can we be bullied.”
The following discussion aims to examine what it means to be a vassal state, and whether the maintenance of a “credible and deterrent military defense” is the best way to avoid behaving like a vassal. I apologize for the length of the writing. To avoid weariness, please read it in sections at your leisure.
Principles of Vassalage
The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a vassal state as one “with varying degrees of independence in its internal affairs, but dominated by another state in its foreign affairs and potentially wholly subject to the dominating state.”
The last formally recorded vassal state was that of Manchukuo in northeastern China. Manchukuo’s dominant state was Imperial Japan, which had conquered it by force in 1932. But in the post-World War II era, states are bound by the United Nations (UN) “principle of the sovereign equality of all its members”, and they no longer engage in “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence” of another state. Hence, the prospect of obtaining vassal states by force no longer exists.
And yet, the term “vassal state” and its equivalent “client state” are fixtures of contemporary geopolitical commentary, and they are still used in the Merriam Webster sense of a state with compromised sovereignty in both its internal and external affairs, but especially in the latter. Since military conquest is off the table, dominant states must now rely on a package of soft and hard power to elicit vassal-like behavior. There are two broad components of soft power. First there is the attraction of the dominant state’s “values” and institutions, which we may call ideological soft power, and then there is the potential for the dominant state to facilitate material prosperity for its clients, which can be called technological and economic soft power. Hard power refers to the ability to project overwhelming military power, but also to withhold technological progress or cause economic harm. We note that ideological power is always soft, military power is always hard, and technological/economic power can be both soft and hard. When Mr. Balakrishnan talks about being “bullied” he is talking about hard power. When he says “bought”, this implies corruption, which is a gray area, but tending to the hard side of things.
The Great Powers
The only states that can lay claim to vassals are the great powers (superpowers), because only great powers wield both soft and hard power in relation to the majority of the world’s states.
There are 3 great powers today, but their hard and soft powers are not equal. The US, China and Russia are the world’s 3 military superpowers, while the US and China are the only 2 economic superpowers. The US’ ideological soft power stems from its image as the home of human rights, liberty and democracy, and the political philosophy undergirded by these values has traditionally been known as “liberal democracy”, though its current iteration is the more controversial “neo-liberalism”. China’s attractiveness lies in its avoidance of preachiness, its treatment of all states as equals, and its eschewal of war as an extension of politics. Russia possesses unique soft power in Africa owing to its status as the only European power to have been absent from the ignominious 19th century “Scramble for Africa”, as well as for the Soviet Union’s support for national liberation movements after World War II. For unlike in Asia, colonialism did not end quietly in Africa, and the struggle against “neo-colonial” domination continues apace in the countries of the Sahel – Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger etc. Hence, Russia’s “standing up” to the “Empire” in Ukraine has earned it admiration amongst African leaders and populaces alike. However, no one would claim that Russia seeks vassals in Africa. And however much Anglo-American policy specialists may impugn the strategic independence of the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, these nations are also clearly not vassals. Some might claim that Russia is seeking to make a vassal state out of Ukraine. There is some truth to this idea, but Russia seeks to control the politics of Ukraine not because of imperial ambition, but out of its own security concerns, and also to protect the Russian population in eastern Ukraine from oppression by the central government in Kiev. So now we may establish a defining characteristic of dominant states – they are driven by expansionist aims rather by considerations of national security.
The Political East and the Global South
With Russia out of the running, the question is whether both China and the US are dominant states or would-be dominants. To answer this question, we may note that our 3 superpowers fall into 2 broad geopolitical camps. On one side is the US camp, aka “the West”, comprising Europe, the 4 British settler-colonialist states of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the self-styled “Jewish State” of Israel, plus Japan, South Korea and that entity of ambiguous status, Taiwan. On the other side is the China-Russia camp, aka “the Political East”, consisting of a small group of countries which the US has designated as its adversaries. It is important to note that the members of the Political East have not taken the initiative to oppose the West, and their endogenous inclination is to have good relations with all while preserving their political autonomy, but the West has chosen to deny them courteous and cooperative relations.
However, most countries of the world do not belong either to the West or the Political East, but to the Global South (aka the Global Majority), a grouping of over 6 billion humans and consisting of all the former European colonies plus the Political East. Its opposite number, the Global North, is in fact coterminous with “the West”. Economically speaking, Global South countries are “developing countries”, while those of the Global North are said to be “developed”. There is a high degree of geopolitical homogeneity among the Global North nations, in that all are “liberal democracies” and treaty allies of the US. Again, Taiwan is the odd man out, being officially recognized as part of China by the US, and thus barred from technical treaty alliance with the US, but in every other respect fully aligned with the developed West.
By contrast, the countries of the Global South are politically heterogeneous and tend to adhere to a non-aligned or ambiguous foreign policy. But we note that the Political East is included in the Global South. Hence there is an organic overlapping between the Global South and the Political East. In contrast to the Western post-colonial powers, Russia and China do not present themselves to the less developed nations of the Global South as leaders, role models, benefactors or “civilizers”, but as “brothers”.
The countries of the Political East have bilateral strategic partnerships with each other, such as those between China and Iran, China and Venezuela, Russia and Iran, Russia and Syria, Iran and Venezuela, Iran and Syria, China and Russia etc. These partnerships are built upon a live-and-let-live principle which the Chinese articulate through phrases such as win-win cooperation, equality, mutual respect and non-interference in each other’s affairs. Because each state has different needs and each bilateral partnership has its distinct goals, the Political East does not have supranational unions like the European Union (EU) which make common policy decisions for member states. Similarly, there are no alliance treaties or “defense partnerships” with their contractual obligations which can compromise sovereignty and autonomy. However, the countries of the Political East respect the authority of global institutions like the UN and WTO.
There are emerging Global South groupings such as the investment-focused BRICS and the culturally oriented SCO, whose combined growth has taken the West by surprise. Important to note is that these are “cooperation organizations” which emphasize mutual equality and non-interference. They do not regulate what member states must do or may not do.
With their emphasis on sovereignty and the equality of all states, vassalage is not feasible among the nations of the Political East. The smooth overlapping between the Political East and the non-aligned Global South means that one does not have to conform to any rules or commit to any ideology to be part of either grouping. Countries here are rather bound by feelings of fraternity and respect, but also, it must be said, by a common aversion to being lectured and talked down to by the West.
Team USA
That leaves the US as the sole vassal-seeking expansionist state in the world, and it is a status which leads to endless disquiet in America’s corridors of power. For where the mood in the Political East is characterized by optimism and tolerance, the US camp is riddled with tension and anxiety. There are the endless ginned-up perturbations about “Chinese malign activity”, “Russian disinformation” and “Iranian-backed terror”. There is America’s pervasive insecurity over the loyalty of its allies, where the loosening of tensions or warming of relations between any of them and China is seen as an existential threat.
US policy makers also worry about a few “pivotal” nations around the world that are the geopolitical equivalent of “swing states” in a US presidential election. As the US feverishly woos Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords with a number of controversial commitments, the Saudis are naturally expected to normalize relations with Israel, but most analysts understand that the deal is really about wresting the Saudis out of the embrace of China. The US relentlessly pressures Türkiye to abandon its engagement with Russia, but this merely causes the Turks to relish the leverage they wield. And whenever Indian Prime Minister Modi and Vladimir Putin advertise their friendship to the world, the US suffers “frustration” even as it continues treating its “most strategic and consequential” partner with kid gloves, grateful for the small mercy that tensions between India and China seem certain to remain elevated into the near future.
The 3 countries above are “friends” of the US. Even as they savor being courted with excessive eagerness, they preserve their value by never jumping with both feet into the arms of the US. With Europe, the situation is different. The European Union (EU) states are in an existential client/patron relationship with the US, whose legacy dates to the US’ oversight of western Europe’s post-World War II reconstruction. Where the Marshall Plan established western Europe’s status as the US’ economic protectorate, Europe’s security dependence upon the US was sealed by its induction into the NATO alliance system and placement under the American “nuclear umbrella”. Today, the EU and NATO pursue identical geopolitical goals laid out by Washington, with the EU specializing in the design of punitive economic sanctions, while NATO concerns itself with military deployments and gray zone operations, including the “training” of Russia’s adversaries. With both organizations expanded to include the greater part of central and eastern Europe, the main job of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is to browbeat EU members into aligning their economic policies towards the Political East with those of the US, while NATO Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg is primarily a spokesman for the US’ military posture in Europe and increasingly in East Asia as well.
The EU states act like genuine vassals, and none more spectacularly so than Germany. In 2022, under intense pressure from the US, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reversed decades of German energy policy and voluntarily cut his country off from affordable Russian gas. Nevertheless, the possibility of a future German-Russian rapprochement was so abhorrent to Joe Biden that he saw no choice but to “bring an end” to the natural gas pipelines linking Germany to Russia, ensuring there would be no turning back from the Chancellor’s decision. The destruction of the crown jewel of Germany’s industrial infrastructure, the Nord Stream pipelines, has been billed as the “most consequential act of sabotage in modern times”. The Russians have a simpler name for it – state terrorism. Despite the gravity of the crime, prosecutors in Sweden and Denmark, in whose economic zones the attack took place, have closed their investigations without revealing their results. The US and its allies have rejected a call by China for a UN-led investigation into the sabotage. The primary aggrieved party, Germany, has shown no interest in pursuing the case or seeking compensation. As for Russia, it should be grateful it is no longer a suspect and shut up.
Cutting Germany off from Russian natural gas was a US project long in the making. In 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, former US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had said:
“The Russian economy is vulnerable. 80% of Russian exports are in oil, gas and minerals. People say, well, the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy. And I understand that it's uncomfortable to have an effect on business ties in this way. But this is one of the few instruments that we have. Over the long run, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence. You want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we're finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don't go through Ukraine and Russia. For years, we've tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes. It's time to do that.”
But in 2014, then German Chancellor Merkel was a statesman who still valued balancing East and West. It took another 8 years and a much more pliant German administration to realize Condoleezza’s dream. The problem is that Germany’s “change” of “energy dependence” was every bit as “uncomfortable” as she had predicted. Substitution of Russian pipeline gas with much more expensive US liquefied natural gas (LNG) led to an unprecedented decline in Germany’s industrial output from which the country is still reeling, though you will be hard pressed to find any voices in this democratic country complaining about their government’s surrender of economic sovereignty. In a cruelly ironic twist, Germany is today still importing Russian gas, shipped into various European countries as LNG and then re-gasified and piped into Germany, again at a much higher cost than that of its direct pipeline gas from Russia.
While Germany’s act of self-harm is striking, the nation is by no means uniquely vassal-like. The UK’s compliance to US dictates is so unquestioning that the British have described themselves as lapdogs of America. Then there are the noisy ones. France is famous for its protests against American overlordship dating back to the fiery Charles de Gaulle. And so when Australia ditched a $90 billion French submarine deal in favor of the US/UK-sponsored AUKUS nuclear powered submarine technology acquisition pact a mere two weeks after the Australian and French leaders had declared their “firm commitment” to the French deal, it was natural for the French to complain bitterly about being “stabbed in the back”. But the Americans are indulgent of Gallic tantrums and they allowed the French to stir up a tempest, secure in the knowledge that when the dust settled, France would sensibly subsume its self-interest to the greater good of the US’ ability to sail stealth submarines right up to China’s doorstep.
The Rules-Based World Order
In 1941, 4 years before the end of World War II, American and British élites were already preparing for the coming “postwar” world order, the so-called Pax Americana or epoch of American Peace. They drafted the Atlantic Charter, a document whose principles became the foundation of the UN Charter. The UN Charter in turn became recognized as the codification of “international law”, while over the years a panoply of UN-affiliated specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) emerged “to solve economic, social, cultural and humanitarian issues through international cooperation”. The protocols formulated by these intergovernmental organizations and the UN Charter have traditionally been seen as constituent of the “rules-based world order”.
But today we are faced with a paradox, in that the US and its allies accuse China and Russia of undermining the “rules-based order”, while China and Russia clamor for the restoration of a world order based upon the UN Charter which the US was responsible for creating, but which they claim Team USA no longer respects. Who is right?
The truth is that there has always been an essential discrepancy between international law, which can only be amended by constitutional procedure, and the “rules”, which can be changed ad hoc by the world’s dominant power. When the US and Britain designed the postwar world order, they were driven by two distinct motives. On the one hand, they set up the UN to provide the legal and institutional framework under which the community of nations could rebuild itself and promote collective prosperity through trade and political cooperation in a world forever freed from the scourge of war. On the other hand, they wanted to underscore the principle that the Anglo-American powers had the sole authority to establish the institutions of international law, and this authority was bequeathed to them by the “rules” that they themselves had set. Following the UK’s abrupt descent into geopolitical irrelevance after 1945, the “rules” further provided that the US should become the world’s sole permanent military superpower.
All of the US’ major acts on the world stage at the time served the dual purpose of benefiting the world while reinforcing America’s “primacy” and control over all the world’s nations. The twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ostensibly hastened the end of World War II and the beginning of mankind’s prosperity in a new age. But they were also a message delivered to the Soviet Union that America not only had the capacity for overwhelming devastation, but had no qualms about exercising it .
On the economic side, the Bretton Woods Conference aimed to create an international monetary system that was flexible enough to facilitate global reconstruction and economic growth, to provide credit where needed while avoiding inflation, and to constrain governments from pursuing competitive currency devaluations that could lead to economic depressions. This was all for the benefit of mankind. But the Conference also provided that international trade would be settled in US dollars, and that the US would control the international flow of dollars. The US dollar then became the world’s reserve currency, conferring to America the “exorbitant privilege” of financial hegemony that has become so problematic today. The Conference also gave birth to the US-controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund, both of which provide the US with meticulous oversight of the economic destinies of developing nations.
Outside of those who believed in socialism, the apparent fusion of humanity’s interests with the US’ self-interest was either not noticed, or it was a welcome feature. Most of the world became ever more enamored of their champion of human rights, freedom and democracy, of its education system, business culture, industrial goods and movie stars. To modernize, to have good governance, to get a good education, to drive a nice car and entertain oneself, all of it meant becoming more American.
In startling contrast to the Americans’ benign status as the beacon of universal human values, however, stands the fact that America is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world”. It has been out of war for a mere 17 out of its 246 years of existence. Since it launched the Global War on Terror in 2001, the US has been fighting wars of choice without interruption, which as of August 2023 had cost around 4.6 million lives and left a legacy of human devastation that included 7.6 million acutely malnourished children. The vast majority of the US’ military adventures have been conducted outside the mandate of a UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR), i.e. outside of “international law”.
US state violence takes many forms. It includes engineering coups, instigating color revolutions, launching military invasions, unilaterally redrawing a country’s borders, occupying parts of a country against the wishes of its government, arming guerillas to topple a government, applying packages of sanctions, embargos and asset freezes designed to “grind” a country’s “economy into dust”, imposing sanctions so draconian as to bring about the death of half a million children, and even arming and providing cover for rebels to publicly sodomize a leader by bayonet prior to finishing him off with a bullet to the head. Only the last of these martial escapades was sanctioned by the UN Security Council, to the enduring anguish of the Chinese and Russian delegates who merely abstained, and did not veto the resolution to launch NATO’s ignominious military operation against Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Since the US creates the “rules”, its prosecution of state violence is always by definition “rules-based”. This means that the US can also change its mind and replace its previous rules with new ones at any time. It was “rules-based” for a US president to spearhead the Iran Nuclear Deal to bring Iran back into the “family of nations”, and when a new US president came along and “ripped up” the deal, he was simply changing the “rules”.
Another peculiarity of the “rules” is that there is one set for the US, and another for its adversaries. Thus it was “rules-based” for the US to provide weapons, ammunition, aerial refueling and intelligence for Saudi jets to bomb markets, weddings and school buses in Yemen, but it was against the “rules” for Iran to provide the Yemenis with the means to defend against the Saudis. And when the US finally decided to suspend its support for the Saudis, they did so based upon a new set of “rules”. Saddam Hussein’s 8 year-long war of catastrophic aggression against Iran was “rules-based” simply because it was in America’s interest to weaken Iran. Towards the end of the war, it became “rules-based” for the US to arm both sides because it seemed like a good idea to let them destroy each other.
How do America’s aficionados come to terms with its double standards, its arbitrary demands and prohibitions, its systemic brutality and lawlessness? Quite simply through a cult of idolization. America’s supra-legal behavior is justified by its exceptionalism and “indispensability”. As the grande dame of American extraterritorial violence, Madeline Albright put it, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”
We note 3 salient characteristics of America’s facile use of violence.
First, the US is intolerant of differences, implying a totalitarianism which is out of kilter with the egalitarian values it purports to protect.
Secondly, since America’s military adventures typically lack the support of international law, it must strenuously propagate narratives that explain why the US knows better than the law, and ultimately why it is above the law. The US’ allies (vassals) are those which help to promote its supralegal privilege, while its adversaries are those who call out the US’ “hypocrisy” and “double standards”. And herein lies the root of America’s deepening angst. It is not the fear of losing militarily to Russia and China, it is the fear of losing soft power to them. The catalyst of this sea change is Gaza, home of the most mistreated people on earth who have succeeded in defeating the monolithic algorithms of the Western media ecosystem by broadcasting their own extermination in real time to billions of smartphones all over the world. The US’ unconditional military, financial and political support for Israel’s genocide is a watershed moment, stripping the Emperor of his clothes and making a mockery of his “rules-based order”.
Thirdly, the US likes to play God, protecting those that glorify it, punishing those that displease it, and making commandments for all to follow. It is “a consuming fire, a jealous God”, which does not suffer the worshipping of false idols, and will cast into Hell those who do. Hence, a US-led world order cannot be a peaceful, harmonious one, and Gaza is a feature of it, not a bug.
The Pitfalls of American “Friendship”
There is a reason beyond crass racism for EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell’s designation of Europe as a “garden”, and the world outside it as a “jungle”. It is the spiritual homogeneity of Europe, which facilitates not only intra-European cohesion, but a pan-European affinity for America’s “primacy”. It is natural for Europeans to view America as the outstanding offspring whose arrogance occasionally irritates, but whose supremacy is ultimately a source of pride and cohesion. American soft power is so sticky in Europe because it is affixed to the bedrock of kinship. By contrast, the world outside Europe is diverse, unruly and incapable of true affection for the hegemon simply because it lacks this kinship.
That is not to say that the US cannot form alliances inside of the “jungle”. In Asia, the US’ allies fall into two broad groupings. There are the Arab nations - Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and Qatar – who have traditionally been drawn to the US’ financial and military might. They are primarily interested in “transacting” with the US’ hard power, and there is little in the way of infatuation with the US’ “values”. Then there are the East Asian allies - Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, and the two Anglosphere states of Australia and New Zealand. From the US’ point of view, these allies have but one raison d'être, which is to support the US in “containing” China. Among the East Asian allies, the relatively small nation of Thailand has surprisingly become the least loyal towards the US, while Pakistan is in the curious position of having a military that preserves magnificently transactional tight connections with its US counterpart, even as the nation enjoys an all-weather strategic cooperative partnership and "ironclad" friendship with China.
The US’ remaining East Asian allies present themselves as willing protectorates, displaying vassal-like behavior similar to that of the Europeans, and participating enthusiastically in novel overlapping institutions and “informal alliances” that seek to mimic NATO. In addition to their respect for America’s hard power, they are also to varying degrees infatuated by America’s soft power and imagine themselves as belonging in the “garden”.
However, most Asian countries are not US allies, and the US doesn’t actually want to expand an alliance system that even it recognizes as burdensome. At the same time, in the words of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the need for the US to “shape” the world is more pressing than ever in the face of “a rising China”. Hence, the US must seek to induce compliant behavior outside of its alliance framework, and it sets about this end by maintaining a network of “friendly” nations and establishing its own “strategic partnerships”.
The partnerships formed by the US bear little resemblance to those of the Political East, which are predicated upon principles of equality, tolerance and mutual respect. As in the case with its alliances, the US’ partnerships have a hierarchical structure which the US justifies through its status as the guarantor of regional peace and more generally the “leader of the free world”. Conformity is expected of the potential US partner, who before anything else is discussed, will be expected to perform an initiation rite of condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and declaring China a security threat. In return, the US will offer “defense cooperation” against Chinese “aggression” in concert with a mouth-watering array of prospective economic and technological benefits, including co-operative ventures in AI, public-private financing for green energy transition projects, increased US multinational FDI, access of processed minerals to the US market, being treated as a “friendshoring” destination for US companies forced to move their supply chains away from China, receiving state-of-the art civil nuclear technology, and finally that be-all and end all, partnering with the US in “defense innovation”.
A cursory glance at the benefits of US sponsorship shows us that the US often creates problems for which it presents itself as the solution. Veiled threats and arm-twisting are usual. As a country that is used to settling disputes by war, and where war is a mechanism inconducive to compromise, it is natural that soft power can quickly turn hard, and the flipside of prospective benefits is the threat of their denial. The US has merely to declare you an unfriendly nation and cut you off from its tech value chain, or put sanctions on you and cut you off from the dollar trade settlement system. You will be treated as a leper by the global business community and that will be the end of your GDP growth. The US does not hesitate to threaten its own allies. Under US pressure, the Dutch company ASML, South Korea’s Samsung and Japan’s many lithography companies are all prohibited by their respective governments from selling high-end semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to China. If they defy the US-imposed bans.. well, none of them have done so, and so the consequences are yet to be determined.
If you really succeed in angering the Americans, you run the risk of having your country invaded, your government toppled, and your people bombed. Ever since it launched its 2001 Global War on Terror, the US has increasingly resorted to violence and the threat of violence to achieve its political goals, in diametric opposition to the UN’s core founding principle. Diplomacy is a curio of American folklore. Statesmen of yore such as Cyrus Vance, Henry Kissinger and James Baker III were revered for their scholarship and chasm-bridging skills. Today’s Secretary of State plays “Rockin’ in the Free World” on the electric guitar in a bunker-nightclub in Kiev while pledging more weapons and rejecting diplomacy, oblivious to the fact that he is singing an anti-war song. He travels to China to issue threats, accusations and warnings. He lies, saying that Hamas is the sole obstacle to peace when talking about a US-sponsored UNSC ceasefire resolution which Hamas formally accepted, but which the Israeli prime minister responded to with a tent massacre and a dismissal of any possibility of negotiating with Hamas.
When the US takes the step of attacking another country, its insistence on your taking sides becomes an unvarnished threat, as when George W. Bush uttered his infamous warning: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”. This stark call to vassalage was necessary because the war Bush was about to unleash on Iraq was an illegal one, a textbook case of the “rules-based order” trumping international law, and a grim reminder that you could be a target of shock and awe if you did not stand with the US. Such is the “benign” power, the “soft touch” that Singapore’s thought leaders so appreciate over what they superciliously describe as the “heavy handed” approach of China.
Today, no matter how American politicians may veil their ultimatums with their polished barbs, unctuous solicitudes or downhome bonhomie affectations, the basic precondition of the US-“shaped” world has not changed since the days of Dubya. You are either with the US, or you are its enemy. The zero-sum discourse emanates in overwhelming combined-arms formation from every department of the Executive Branch, the Houses of Congress, the Washington think tanks, Wall Street, Hollywood, as well as from the Schools of Government, the alumni networks, the Asia-Pacific Research Centers and Asia Society-type “education organizations” of every élite US university, all synchronously and tirelessly applying their superficial nuances and articulations to the overarching doctrine of American “primacy”.
After spewing forth from these mighty institutional echelons, the zero-sum message flows further downstream through 2 major distribution branches. The 1st is the ubiquitous digital encyclopedia known as Google. The beauty of the American indoctrination ecosystem is that, whereas Soviet citizens of yesterday knew propaganda when they saw it, as do the people of China today, the Western internet consumer has no sense either of the subtle workings of Google’s censorship algorithms or of the search engine’s deep ties to the US intelligence agencies.
The 2nd branch of American propaganda dissemination flows through a coterie of international news agencies (Reuters, AP, AFP and Bloomberg) which use selective reporting and one-sided interpretations of global events to hammer home the message that the West represents the norms and the good of humanity, while China and its friends are deviant and malign. The news agency articles are then either re-printed verbatim or re-processed by pro-Western journalists in the local media outlets, which can be broken down into two broad categories of appeal. The erudite version of US propaganda is delivered through the “Times” of the world – the New York Times, the Times (UK), the Japan Times and the Singapore Straits Times, while messaging for the masses is assigned to the tabloids – the New York Posts, the Suns, Bilds and Herald Suns of the world. The differences between the Times’ and the tabloids are purely stylistic, while the substance they share is strictly totalitarian.
In East Asia, the zero-sum ontology is embraced by clusters of western-educated and Americanophile metropolitan élites, but it doesn’t gain much purchase with the common folk. Asian politicians tend to be wary of American expansionism and they don’t see much glory in being put into service for maintaining US primacy, but they will pay lip service to US indispensability to keep the hegemon “nearby” as a “counterweight” to China”.
Truth be told, most Asian leaders manage to play some version of the Indian chess game. They form strategic partnerships with the US, and then deepen their ties with Russia. They criticize China, but make it clear that the dispute is between themselves and China and does not require outside help, thank you. They say ok, they won’t join the China-centric AIIB, but they also won’t recognize sanctions that lack a UN mandate. They manoeuver around the pitfalls of the US-“shaped” world, defending their sovereignty while preserving the benefits of American “friendship”. Because the US is so insecure about “losing” these countries to China, one would be forgiven the impression that it is these junior partners who are calling the shots in their relationship with the US.
Alone among the nations of East Asia that are not outright US protectorates, Singapore either doesn’t want to or doesn’t know how to finesse the US’ insatiable need for “friendship”.
Japan
In using the concepts of soft and hard power, I have remained faithful to the meanings intended by the person who coined them, Joseph Nye, such that hard power is coercive and soft power is attractive. Carrots offered to US partner countries such as increased exports, inward investment, technology transfer and military support are neither coercions nor attractions, but inducements, or in Mr. Balakrishnan’s terminology, methods of “buying” a country. When a nation complies with US dictates on the basis of inducements, it may stave off the stigma of being “bought” by seeing itself as acting “transactionally”. When a Southeast Asian country draws closer to the US in order to “balance” China’s influence, it is also acting transactionally. Such states are not truly attracted by America’s soft power. It is almost as if they are feigning love for America in order to obtain benefits from it.
We can now begin to refine our answer to the question of how vassalage is acquired in the modern era. With the rising geopolitical influence of the Political East, the growing power of Global South institutions such as the BRICS and SCO, and the emergence of very large non-Western multilateral platforms such as the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF), the BRI Forum and FOCAC, it is no longer feasible for the US to secure vassalage through hard power. Militarily, the US has neither the unquestioned supremacy nor the moral authority it enjoyed in Dubya’s era, and the world will no longer tolerate another illegal US invasion of a developing country. On the economic side, the more strenuously the US applies its sanctions against its adversaries, the more ingenious and ubiquitous become the means to evade them, and the more likely the sanctions will backfire. As for nations whom the US views as “friendly” but who are in fact acting transactionally, every time the US tries to put the heat on them, they can simply “deepen” their ties with Russia and China.
Hence in the modern era, vassalage can only be secured by pure soft power. The true vassal head of state acts without calculation, and is instead impelled by duty and affection to serve America. Such a leader is entranced by the post-World War II logos where what is good for America is good for his own country and the world. Such a leader will feel revulsion towards states which show disrespect to America, and will spare no effort to help “contain” them. In Asia this sentiment manifests itself in eager support for a network of overlapping “blocs” - the QUAD, QUAD+, SQUAD, AUKUS, AUKUS Pillar Two and Camp David - all operating under the aegis of the US Indo-pacific Command (PACOM) and tasked with the overarching purpose of countering China’s threat to American “primacy”.
The Philippines, without any doubt, is the nation where the China threat narrative has gained the most traction. Wariness and fear of China is widespread and built upon a foundation of latent Sinophobia. However, the recent explosion of Filipino ill will towards China is attributable to the latter’s physical encroachments into the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the Spratly Islands. Filipinos view China as a threat to themselves, rather than to the US, and hence their enlistment of US military and cognitive support is a transactional, self-defensive move, and not a display of vassalage. By contrast, a true vassal does not distinguish between its own self-interest and the interests of its protector, and will rush to protect its protector as a matter of course. Such a state will tend to have a strong culture of honor, duty and self-sacrifice.
The most iconic book about Japan-US relations since the end of World War II carries the unabashed title: “Client State: Japan in the American Embrace”. The book describes Japan as “ the most durable, generous, and unquestioning ally of the US, attaching priority to its Washington ties over all else”. Ah how sweet it is to have a servant who is ashamed even to think of questioning you. The concept of a “generous ally” harkens to Professor Yuen Foong Khong’s characterization of the US’ world order as a “tributary system”. And “American Embrace” points to a yearning for oneness unique to Japan, as was crystallized in former president Shinzo Abe’s brainchild Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy (FOIPS). Abe’s grand vision of a US sphere of political influence and military command stretching from the Gulf of Aden to the California coast went on to become the inspiration for the US’ induction of India into a 4th Island Chain, and the re-imagining of the U.S. Pacific Command into the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Abe had already conceived this historic expansion of US power projection under Obama’s administration, but he waited for the supposedly isolationist Donald Trump to assume office in 2017 before unfurling it. Alone among his peers, Abe found honor in being put in the service of making America great again.
Abe’s successor, Fumio Kishida, was a proud inheritor of Abe’s devotional worldview and proactive spirit. He has on repeated occasions “strongly condemned” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and expanded multiple rounds of “tough” sanctions against Russia while pledging unending support for the heroic Ukrainian government. Under his watch, Japan’s National Defense Strategy White Paper of December 2022 was über-hawkish towards China, accusing it of continuing “to advance its unilateral changes to the status quo by force in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.”
To underscore his “unquestioning” allegiance to his masters, President Kishida paid a state visit to the US on April 11th 2024 which “resulted in one of the most ambitious boosts to the United States-Japan alliance. This alliance is now at the core of American strategy to strengthen a regional coalition to counter China’s geopolitical rise.” Plans have been made to deepen interoperability between the US and Japanese armed forces, and for a “networked missile defense system” spanning Japan, the Philippines and Australia. A joint council has been formed to study co-investment in and co-production of defense systems.
The pièce de résistance of Kishida’s trip was the speech he gave to the Joint Houses of the US Congress, in which he said that China's actions in the South China Sea presented “an unprecedented, and the greatest, security challenge… not only to the peace and security of Japan but to the peace and stability of the international community at large.” He urged US lawmakers to “overcome any “self-doubt” about the US’ “leadership role”, and emphasized that American global leadership was “indispensable”.
Kishida’s words cannot adequately be described as vassal-like. They are more like a liturgical recitation of praise and glorification of his Master. He even gives rein to a pseudo-mystical conceit whereby the Lord depends upon his adoring servant to reveal to Him his own glory and majesty.
Japanese prostration before America is unique and traceable to the nation’s vanquishment by the US in the 2nd World War. It was America that claimed 100,000 Japanese civilian lives and made another 1 million homeless in the fire-bombing of Tokyo, followed by the twin atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed another 200,000 and injured innumerable others, with malignant health sequelae lingering into the present. In the Hiroshima bombing, 90 per cent of physicians and nurses were killed or injured; 42 of 45 hospitals were rendered non-functional, and 70% of the 70,000 wounded had combined injuries including severe burns which could not be treated. Was this the inspiration for Gaza? The triple mass atrocities of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only brought about Japan’s unconditional surrender, but ensured that Japan’s fate lay at the pleasure of America. It fell to America at its sole discretion to oversee the subjugation, demilitarization, punishment, reform and rebuilding of Japan. To Japan, America was indeed the creator of worlds and destroyer of worlds, the hand that giveth, and the hand that taketh away. There has never been another nation in such a posture of rapturous self-effacement towards its master and annihilator. At the commemoration ceremony for the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombings, President Kishida did not simply avoid the blasphemy of mentioning the United States as the perpetrator of the bombings, but took the opportunity to lash out at his master’s enemy one more time, accusing Russia of being a “nuclear threat”.
Abe and Kishida both made it their mission to rewrite Japan’s pacifist constitution and remilitarize Japan. They have largely succeeded, as Japan now has the 3rd largest military budget in the world. Abe had ties to suspected war criminals on both sides of his family and regularly visited the Yasukuni Shrine which honors convicted war criminals, while Kishida is the 1st Japanese prime minister who has never mentioned “regret” or “remorse” for Japan’s wartime aggression. At the same time both men have dedicated their country’s renewed military power to a crusade in honor of the one nation ruthless enough to have made their people a live experiment for weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps this is the quintessence of vassalage.
Russia
The physical dismantling of the Berlin Wall on November 9th 1989 symbolized the fall of the “Iron Curtain” and the demise of the Russocentric Soviet Bloc. The dissolution of the Soviet Union itself occurred 2 years later on December 25th 1991. The US president who presided over these historic developments was the last US president endowed with diplomatic instinct, George H.W. Bush (Bush Senior), of whom it was said that “historians credit his steady, low-key, cautious approach to Soviet relations with helping to ensure that when communism collapsed, it fell as softly as possible.” The internal political situation in Russia between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union was precarious, and Bush did not seek to exploit Russian instability for the US’ benefit.
Acting in concert with Bush Senior’s policy of conciliatory engagement, Secretary of State James Baker III in 1990 promised Russian premier Gorbachev as “part of a cascade of assurances” that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” (from Germany) if and when the Soviets retreated from eastern Europe.
When the Soviet Union eventually dissolved into the post-Soviet states, that should have been the end of the Cold War, but what it instead ended was the last vestige of America’s propensity for engagement, détente and de-escalation, all those hallmarks of a foreign policy that is benign for the world. Although the transition from the Soviet Union to the post-Soviet states was a peaceful internal affair, the Americans saw it as their victory, and they viewed the most important post-Soviet state, Russia, as a vanquished nation owing submission to its victor. The Americans even convinced themselves that they had brought about the “end of history”, “that is the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.
Brimming with triumphalism, the US enshrined its status of the world’s sole superpower into national security doctrine and no longer saw the need to “give ground” to Russia on any of its security concerns. In May 1999, President Bill Clinton bombed Russia’s ally Serbia, unilaterally redrawing the country’s borders and carving out a new nation of Kosovo for the establishment of a permanent NATO outpost. Later that month he reneged on the guarantees provided by James Baker and oversaw the 1st post-Cold War expansion of NATO, bringing Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the alliance. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia followed in 2004.
In 2007, Vladimir Putin gave his famous Münich Security Conference speech where he denounced the “unipolar world model”. Putin’s speech was remarkable for its length, its amalgam of philosophy and fact, and its landmark polemicism. It was the first time anyone had dared to heap an uninterrupted half hour of criticism on an audience of incredulous Western leaders. The speech was also memorable for its smirking dismissal by the US, as triumphalism had evolved into disdain not only for Russia, but for the Russian President himself. Senator John McCain, who sat with bemused irritation before Putin’s speech, later derided Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country”, and his cowboy contempt became the paradigm for the torrential Russophobic messaging that has run amok ever since from the endless self-indoctrinating “policy papers” of the Washington think tanks to the tabloid vituperations of the strangely pompous Piers Morgan, all the way to the self-conscious Putin putdowns employed by Singapore’s own aspirationally western-lensed Channel News Asia show presenters.
The view that Russia’s concerns are not worthy of consideration is the driver of the US’ relentless push to encircle Russia’s borders with NATO member countries, of its casual support of neo-Nazi forces which toppled the democratically elected government of Ukraine in the 2014 Euromaidan Coup, of its cynical disregard of the UN-sponsored Minsk II Accords designed to resolve the civil conflicts that erupted out of Euromaidan, and of its unilateral withdrawal from the ABM and INF arms-control treaties signed by earlier administrations which had enough respect for their adversary to seek de-escalation.
Contempt underpinned Joe Biden’s dismissal out of hand of Putin’s draft treaty on security guarantees in December 2021, as it did Boris Johnson’s intervention in the 2022 talks between Ukraine and Russia, where the two sides had hammered out basic peace terms barely 2 months after the start of the war, but then the US and UK vetoed peace and pledged in return to arm Ukraine to the last Ukrainian. The premise that what Russia wants doesn’t count underlies the repeated “peace summits” from which Russia is excluded, and whose aim is simply to garner solidarity with Ukrainian demands for Russia’s capitulation. Disdain for Russia has prompted the US to install intermediate range ballistic missiles in Germany that can reach Moscow, and to erect 15 military bases in Finland next to Russia’s northwestern border, all because Russia “has no red lines” and Putin’s threats of retaliation are all “empty rhetoric”.
It is America’s contempt not just for Russia, but for the eminently “dispensable” Ukraine, that has cost this sorry nation the lives of over half a million of the flower of its youth. The same contempt infects Ukraine’s corrupt leaders and the gangs of Ukrainian conscription enforcers who ambush young men on the streets of Kiev, ramming them to the ground and handcuffing them behind the back before sending them off to the front to die with a rifle in their hands they barely know how to use.
Singapore
After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th 2022, Singapore along with 140 other countries, comprising 73% of UN member states, voted in favor of UN General Assembly Resolution (UNGAR) A/RES/ES-11/1, condemning Russia’s “special military operation”, demanding that Russia withdraw its troops from Ukraine, and rejecting Russia’s inclusion of the Donbass region of Ukraine into the Russian Federation etc.
But Singapore went much further than the world majority when it joined a select club of 29 countries, i.e. the West, in imposing financial sanctions on Russia, thus earning itself the distinction of being included onto Russia’s Unfriendly Countries List.
Singapore’s jumping on the sanctions bandwagon was all the more extraordinary because they were not mandated by a UN Security Council resolution (UNSCR), and yet Singaporean law provides for imposing financial sanctions on another country only “in order to.. facilitate the discharge of any obligation binding on Singapore by virtue of a decision of the Security Council of the United Nations.”
When Singapore follows its own laws by imposing sanctions based upon UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR), it is simply abiding by international law, as UNSCRs are binding on all UN member states. Conversely, when Singapore applies sanctions outside of a UN mandate, it is violating its own laws as well as international law. The vast majority of nations do not recognize sanctions outside of a UN mandate because such sanctions are illegal under international law, and also because sanctions are a violation of another state’s sovereignty, a denial of that state’s legal rights and even its human rights, widely regarded as acts of war that can lead to hardship and deaths surpassing those caused by military warfare. Hence it is obvious to most nations why the bar for legitimate sanctions is extremely high and beyond the purview of a small club of Western élites.
Singapore’s sanctions on Russia fall into two categories – export controls and financial sanctions. The export controls ban the export and transshipment of a wide range of strategic goods and so-called “dual use” goods to Russia. Such export restrictions are somewhat understandable and less legally problematic. A state may reasonably wish to ensure that it is not arming one side of a conflict or otherwise facilitating warfare.
The financial sanctions consist of 2 discrete actions. First, Singapore’s financial institutions are prohibited from doing new business with the Russian Central Bank, the Russian Government and targeted Russian banks. This is a hostile move that delegitimizes the targeted banks, but it still lies within certain norms of sovereign behavior. Secondly however, Singapore’s financial institutions have also been ordered to freeze the existing assets of the targeted Russian banks. This is where the problem lies.
The way the asset freeze works is that any financial institution operating in Singapore that is the custodian of assets belonging to the targeted Russian banks must refuse to honor its contractual obligation to return those assets to the Russian banks. This move does not comply with international and local law, and it also undermines the “full faith and credit” of Singapore’s financial system.
When you step into a hail-down taxi, the driver expects you to pay his fare when you reach your destination. If I deposit money in a bank, I expect the bank to give me my money back when I ask for it. The monetary transactions that underpin the functioning of society are all based upon trust, regardless of the amount of money involved or the complexity of the transaction. The legal basis for this trust is contract law, and we inherited it from the British. Legally speaking, the principle of contract is fundamental to all monetary dealings and as in the case of the taxi ride, it doesn’t even need to be documented. If ordinary citizens are trusted to honor their contractual obligations in their daily affairs, why does a country that has once again attained the No. 1 spot in the “World Competitiveness Rankings” think it can pick and choose whose trust it should honor?
But the problem runs deeper than a simple default. The Russian asset freeze unleashed by the West was but one component of the most comprehensive set of sanctions ever imposed on a nation, and which keeps expanding with no end in sight. They were designed to turn the Russian Ruble into “rubble”, to “destroy” Russia’s economy, “isolate” Russia from the world, irreparably damage the Russian president’s standing at home and ultimately make life so miserable for ordinary Russians that they would remove him.
The justification given for the effort to crush the Russian economy and overthrow its government was Russia’s supposedly “unprovoked and completely unjustified attack on the democratic state of Ukraine”. a “serious violation of international law and a grave breach of the United Nations Charter..”
Clearly, most world leaders understood that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked, and they were doubtless put off by the American pot calling the kettle black. Cultural modesty would also have played a part in their restraint. It takes a special mindset to pile in on a collective project to punish a sovereign state and topple its leader, and the keynote of that mindset is contempt. In partaking of that mindset, Singapore has gone from being a “friend to all” to a country that chooses to grandstand, cloaking its gratuitous hostility to a nation that has done it no ill under the mantle of American exceptionalism.
From a pragmatic point of view, the sequelae of the anti-Russia sanctions at the 2-year mark have further attested to the wisdom of those states that refrained from partaking in the feast of self-righteous punishment. Sanctions do not weaken a country, especially if they have ample back doors such as China and India. Post-sanctions, Russia’s GDP by PPP has become the world’s 6th highest, and Russia has risen from being a middle income to a high income country, all while the major economies of Europe are stagnating or in recession thanks to German style self-harm. In Russia, there is a generalized sentiment among the citizenry that the West is trying to harm their country. As a result, domestic discontent is at an all-time low and Putin’s popularity is higher than before the war. Meanwhile the US is mired in “civic crisis”, popular support for the leaders of France and Germany have fallen to 26% and 28%, and the UK administration just suffered its “worst ever” election defeat. As for Ukraine, its economy has become completely dependent upon foreign aid since July 2022, a fact that does not bode well in light of the West’s increasingly stretched resources, widespread Ukraine War fatigue and the prospect of a Trump presidency in 2025. To add salt to these wounds, Russia’s army is now more powerful, efficient and competent at defeating all of the West’s advanced non-nuclear weaponry than before the war. Russia has not only immunized itself against every economic and military weapon the West can hurl at it, but its cachet with China, India and the rest of the Global South has enjoyed a significant boost, because in the end everyone likes to stick with a winner.
It gets worse. The “rules-based order” unraveled after Russia invaded Ukraine, not at the hands of the enemies of the “rules”, but thanks to America’s own exorbitant privilege, and it happened the moment the US exercised its nuclear option of freezing the foreign reserves of the Russian Central Bank (RCB). Just after the freeze was announced, Crédit Suisse analyst Zoltan Poszar said: “Bretton Woods II was built on inside money, and its foundations crumbled a week ago when the G7 seized Russia’s FX reserves.” Note: “Bretton Woods II” refers to the backing of the Dollar’s world reserve currency status by the US’ hard and soft power rather than by gold. “Inside money” means that the nations of the “jungle” don’t own their own foreign reserves, but are merely permitted to act as if they own them so long as they behave themselves.
Sovereign central banks and diplomatic missions have always been sacrosanct in peace and in war. The countries that sanctioned the RCB were signaling that they did not dignify the Russian Federation with the status of a nation, that they were branding it as a pariah state to whom diplomatic norms no longer applied. The message they delivered was a logical extension of America’s longstanding contempt for Russia. But it was also a light bulb moment for most world leaders, who instead of savoring the US’ display of financial shock and awe instead thought to themselves, “Wait a minute, these reserves we thought we had in our central bank, turns out they don’t belong to us.”
De-dollarization, which would more accurately be called “inside money de-risking”, is not the sole purview of the 10 country-strong BRICS, which 36 countries including Thailand and Malaysia have applied to join this year, and whose membership rules include rejection of all US-led sanctions and the development of a BRICS currency for inter-member trade settlement. Friends of the US such as Saudi Arabia and Türkiye are also signing onto non-dollar trade settlements, cutting their holdings of Western government bonds and even repatriating their gold from the vaults of those bastions of the Anglo-American financial order, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England. The conversations in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the East Africa Community (EAC) and even ASEAN are all increasingly including the Double-D word. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which some call the Central Bank of Central Banks, has in cooperation with the Central Banks of China, the UAE and Thailand reached an advanced development stage in the mBridge, a distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based, instant peer-to-peer cross border payment and settlement platform using local Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), bypassing inside money together with its SWIFT messaging ecosystem.
On the military battle front, having insisted from day one that Russia must suffer a “strategic defeat’, and that it would “move heaven and earth” to secure a Ukrainian victory, the West can no longer hide the twin realities that Russia is winning its gruesome war of attrition in Ukraine, and neither America’s weapons systems nor its military doctrine works against a peer adversary. The G7, supposedly an economic forum of the “most developed nations”, has gotten into the business of war and decided to double down on failure by 1) pledging another 43 billion euros and 60 billion dollars on top of the more than 178 billion dollars already committed to Ukraine’s destruction, all amidst a backdrop of spiraling national debt burdens and domestic populaces struggling against the twin hardships of inflation and “welfare reform”, 2) making plans not only to freeze the RCB’s assets but to “seize” them and use them as collateral for loans to Ukraine, thus setting the dystopian precedent of commandeering Russian money to kill Russians, 3) threatening direct military involvement in the war, 4) expanding sanctions that have not worked and 5) offering Ukraine an “irreversible path” to NATO membership, which in the words of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico is a “guarantee of World War 3”.
All these moves are not just reinforcing of failure but dangerously escalatory, and there is one simple reason for them. Western commentators like to point condescendingly to the Asian preoccupation with saving face. This is sheer projection. It is a peculiarity of the US neo-liberal élites that they must always have the last word, and they abhor losing any argument not because they are wedded to every outcome, but because losing is unbecoming for the exceptional people of the indispensable nation.
After all the promises, the vainglory, the sunk costs and Putin- demonization, any accommodation with Russia would entail an irreparable loss of face. Diplomacy is a dirty word and the appetite for war so insatiable that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s peace initiatives caused “outrage among EU leaders and heads of government”, with the EU Commission President von der Leyen chiming in with the mindless maxim: “Appeasement will not stop Putin”, and the US President adding his obligatory John Wayne touch: “We know Putin won’t stop at Ukraine, but make no mistake. Ukraine can and will stop Putin.”
As for the Ukrainian people, they simply don’t count, and their yearning for peace is as taboo as Orbán’s efforts at diplomacy. Censorship in Ukraine is so draconian that an opinion poll on seeking terms with Russia is impossible, and one individual was sentenced to 10 years in prison for writing in a private Telegram chat that he favored giving up territory to end the war.
America’s cartoonish view of the world, birthed in scorn and contaminated by the precipitous cognitive decline of a president who in his clearer days thought insulting foreign leaders was a good way to get his point across, is a toxin that infests all its allies, luring them onward in an unwinnable confrontation against a nation they assumed would collapse like a house of cards before Western military and financial might. But the US has committed the most basic mistake of warfare. It underestimated its enemy while overestimating itself. It is obsessed with crushing a great power competitor while being too proud to acknowledge its adversary’s strength.
The Global South countries look on the just deserts of American hubris with outward detachment and inward satisfaction. Deep down they are fed up with Western hypocrisy and double standards. They don’t buy into the West’s indignation at an “unthinkable” military war in the “garden” of Europe, which implies that the countless “postwar” Western-orchestrated devastations of countries in the “jungles” of Asia, Africa and South don’t count. They have long seen that Pax Americana delivered peace and prosperity for the few at the expense of the many. And most states value equal justice over fairness, so they are outraged when the people who browbeat them into condemning the “war criminal” Putin are the same ones who invite Binyamin Netanyahu to deliver a solemn address to the Joint Houses of Congress, where they reward him with 58 standing ovations and give him a thumbs up to continue his genocide in Gaza and expand the fires of war all over the Levant and further to Iran.
By tossing Russia’s trust into the wastebasket and staking its claim to the “inside money” club, Singapore has signaled its exclusion from the Global Majority, and it is also distinguishing itself from the ethos of its post-colonial neighbors by proclaiming that Singapore identifies with the colonizers rather than the colonized, unaware somehow that no matter how earnestly our leaders may pledge their “commitment to the rules-based order”, Singapore will never possess the pedigree of the colonizer, and we are simply signing up to remain the colony of an Empire that has shifted its capital 5,894 km east from London.
Channel News Asia
If you find yourself in a waiting room in Singapore, be it at a medical office, bank or airport, you will likely see a large screen playing the English language news network CNA, which focuses on “global developments with Asian perspectives”. The western-educated élites of Singapore and the region look upon it as a go-to source for understanding international developments. More than just a TV station, CNA is a “transmedia” company that pops up on people’s phones and laptops through multiple platforms. Because it is so ubiquitous and coterminous with daily middle-class life, and because the network positions itself as an alternative to Western media, you would be forgiven for finding comfort in the belief that you were getting objective news, far from the clutches of Western propaganda. But is it merely incidental that the programming format, production design, production values and even the accents of the show hosts are strongly Anglo-American? Or do these ubiquitous cues of Westernness in the CNA sensory experience serve to implant the subliminal message that there is no distinction between Singapore’s perspective and the Western perspective on global events?
On July 9th, 2024, a missile struck the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv, damaging the building and causing 27 deaths and 165 injuries. The West blamed Russia. Russia denied targeting the hospital and insisted that the hospital was struck by an errant Ukrainian air-defense missile. Russia admitted targeting the Artyom missile plant which is located a mere 1.5 km from the hospital. Kiev claimed that the Russians deliberately targeted the hospital with a KH-101 1,000-pound bomb, offering images of unidentified missiles in mid-flight as proof. But they have declined to carry out a forensic investigation under proper chain-of-custody procedure, relying instead on the insistences of the Western media to buttress their claim.
The BBC, CNN and Financial Times naturally did not give high credence to the Russian version of the tragedy, but they were still circumspect in their language, reporting for instance that a UN mission found a “high likelihood” that the culprit was a Russian missile, but without outright accusing Russia of targeting the hospital. CNA, however, chose to dispense even with this veneer of restraint. 2 days after the missile strike, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid a state visit to Moscow on his 1st foreign trip after his re-election. A day later, on the 75th anniversary of its founding, a key NATO summit was about to be held in Washington (the one where Biden called Zelensky “Putin” and Kamala Harris “Trump”). CNA ran a show covering all 3 topics. The presenters begin the show by asking their guest pundit from the neo-liberal Lowy Institute what kind of “message” Putin was trying to convey by bombing a children’s hospital. The expert echoes the “question” by saying that the strikes were a “clear message” of retribution for a string of Ukrainian attacks on civilians in Crimea and other places, as well as an effort to “deter NATO by demonstrating that he has enough in his arsenal to continue with his assault on Ukraine”. No mention is made of the missile plant in the hospital’s vicinity which raised the likelihood that the tragic strike was accidental.
The CNA presenter used a “leading question (why did Russia target the hospital?), which implied the premise that Russia did target the hospital, even though the premise was unproven. It is a conjuring trick that leads an uncritical audience to believe that Russia must have targeted the hospital, otherwise the question would not make sense. The leading question is an overused perception management technique that is taught to Western interviewers, though falling out of favor because it is so overtly manipulative and likely to backfire against the sophistication of younger audiences brought up on peer-to-peer social media.
As for the guest’s answer, is dropping a single missile on a children’s hospital really a good way of demonstrating what an irresistible artillery arsenal you have? And would such a move serve to deter NATO, or would it rather fire up the NATO members with indignation and renewed determination to deter a “killer” who bombs hospitals? Common sense tells us that the hospital was struck accidentally, but if the act was indeed deliberate, the party with a motive would not be Russia, but one who was feeling increasingly betrayed by NATO and abandoned by the world, and for whom the NATO summit was a “make-or-break” moment to turn the tide of the war. But CNA chose to override reason, posit the Ukrainian narrative as fact and endorse Joe Biden’s melodramatic depictions of Putin as a “murderous madman on the march” who “must be stopped”.
Having dispensed its daily dose of Putin-shaming, the program turns to the subject of Modi’s visit to Russia. “What sort of strategic gains or risks does his ambiguity on the Ukraine conflict entail for India?” the female presenter asks in the silkiest of California Korean monotones. This is another question for which the answer is incidental, since the purpose of the question is to reinforce the dogma that the universe centers around America, that the pleasure or displeasure incurred from America is the yardstick for judging every act of international relations, that Prime Minister Modi is some sort of mistress or prisoner on parole who must always be weighing the consequences of straying too far from his prescribed path. CNA show presenters use the word “risk” a lot. It is a code word for America’s ineluctable authority, an oblique method of denying agency to Global South nations and assigning primacy to the “rules” they must follow.
Previous shows had spun Putin’s visits to China and North Korea as as awkward efforts to squeeze out of his “isolation” on the world stage, the current show once again ignores its audience’s intelligence by focusing on how much Modi is straying, rather than pointing out that this self-styled “voice of the Global South” is delivering the clear message that Russia’s isolation is a fiction of the imagination. The network might somewhat live up to its self-advertisement as a deliverer of news “from an Asian perspective” if it acknowledged Modi’s skill at immunizing his country from American “threats” and “warnings”, his ability to keep the Americans just where he wants them without ever having to pledge his allegiance to the “rules”, and the fact that he is laying down a benchmark of Asian strategic autonomy which gives credence to the Indian concept of an alternate “polycentric” order.
CNA delivers Western propaganda, not news from an Asian perspective, when it imputes an atrocity to Russia by the crude technique of a leading question, while consistently failing to report on Russia’s complaints of Ukraine’s use of chemical weapons on the battlefield and cluster munitions in Crimea, of Ukrainian attacks on Russian civilians in Belgorod and Donetsk with no military targets in the vicinity, and of Ukraine’s complicity in a Moscow terror attack which killed 145 and injured 550, among others.
CNA is not so much a news network as a thought shaping instrument with one overarching message, which is that Singapore is part of the “garden”. But it is a garden whose flowers are wilting even as its walls grow ever higher, the space within gets tighter, and its inhabitants suffocate under their leaders’ tired delusions of supremacy.
Sovereignty
Unlike the US, the EU, Japan and South Korea, Singapore is apparently not arming Ukraine, and it doesn’t have skin in the game of killing Russians. But war is not just fought on the military front. And Singapore is all in on the information war against Russia. Hence it is no less wedded to Russia’s “strategic defeat” than those allies of the US who decry any talk of peace. Having a “credible defense force” has not prevented Singapore from burning its bridges with an adversary of the US in the service of US “primacy”.
At the end of this long rambling discussion let us finally identify 3 types of vassals. There are the European vassals of kinship, the Japanese vassals of adoration, and then there is the sunbathing vassal. Singapore sees itself basking in the aura of American exceptionalism and imagines itself to be likewise exceptional, failing to understand that there can only be one exceptional nation. By the same token, indispensability is something that makes all nations dispensable except for one, and that one would not be Singapore.
Most nations understand that it is unwise to align oneself with a senile, bombastic US president’s Russophobic obsession. If Trump wins the election and stops the war “within 24 hours” as he boasts, it will only be on the back of huge concessions to Russia. While Trump can distance himself from defeat by passing on the Ukraine misadventure as “Biden’s war”, Singapore does not have that luxury. We have made the war our own, and we will end up on the losing side, regardless of who wins the presidency. If Harris becomes commander-in-chief, the US will simply lose the war at the cost of greater death and suffering. What do we do about the sanctions then? Lift them and admit they were ill-conceived? Or maintain them and keep Russia as an enemy even when the war is over? Neither act will make us look good, but perhaps we will finally learn what the Global South already knows, that there are ways to finesse “friendship” with the US without bowing to “the rules”, that discretion is the better part of valor, and that the key to sovereignty is not a “credible and deterrent military defense”, but genuine non-alignment. We may even conclude that enabling Western impunity makes us neither Western nor independent, and that the “postwar world order” and the cachet of being Western are both past their prime.
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