This newsletter began its life elsewhere as a series of notes about contemporary imperialism. It then became something more eclectic, and now feels a bit random and lacking in purpose. So we’re going back to the original conception, but with a focus on the region that has become the central geopolitical concept of our era: the “Indo-Pacific”. It’s orientation will be anti-imperialist, rejecting both Washington’s and Beijing’s designs on the region and its workers.
Most attention will be placed on the countries with which I am more familiar, and which form the frontier of the power struggle between the US and China, namely those surrounding the Bay of Bengal, the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. The broader regional economic transformation here has been substantial. Thirty years ago, Europe and North America accounted for 56 percent of world economic output (in purchasing power parity terms), more than double the share of Asia. Today, the north Atlantic economies are less than 40 percent of global output, while Asia has increased to 42 percent and is projected to continue taking ground in the coming years.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, comprising ten states (eleven when Timor-Leste joins at the bloc’s summit this month) and 700 million people, appears to be a constant minnow in economic terms. But looks can be deceiving. In 1995, the Western European economies collectively were more than thirteen times the size of Southeast Asia. Today, they are just six times the size. While Singapore is the only truly “advanced” economy in this bloc, traversing through metropolises such as Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City (or Chennai across the Bay of Bengal), or smaller cities such as Medan, George Town, Da Nang and even Phnom Penh, one quickly gets a feel for the concept of “combined and uneven development” before ever consulting a statistical database. Much of this has been driven by the spectacular growth of China and the way that the region has been drawn into its industrial orbit.
Those who hear “Southeast Asia” and picture in their mind’s eye only rice paddies with smiling farmers, or who harbour some romantic notion of guerrilla struggle from jungle bases, have missed the rapid, gargantuan metamorphosis here, including the epic growth of urban middle classes and state apparatuses.
Moreover, the area to Australia’s north is a key site of imperialist confrontation. Domestic and regional political-economies increasingly are becoming framed by geopolitical tensions. Military spending is rising almost everywhere, and there are resulting trade-offs. Spending on health care, pensions, housing, and other social welfare is under pressure as governments up their outlays on weaponry. Two dynamics—expansive militaries and more challenging conditions of working-class life; imperialist war and class war—are becoming indelibly linked. All this makes South and Southeast Asia more interesting and important components of global political calculations.
Australia in the US order
Australia’s peculiar role in world affairs will also be a focus. While the Australian ruling class has always exploited workers and defended the property of capitalists, its orientation has been tied by a thousand threads to the broader imperialist project of protecting Western assets and the Western economic and political order, all the better to protect its own privileges.
Throughout its modern history, this continent has been an outpost of the British Empire and then a distant moon of sorts in the US imperial galaxy. It has mostly been an outlier state attempting to increase its influence by aggressively allying with a more powerful state. Thus, governments for more than a century have pledged resources to, and sacrificed workers for, almost every significant British and American conflict while offering territory for weapons testing and foreign bases.
Today, Washington has around 80,000 troops stationed in nearly 200 installations in Japan and South Korea, less than 1,000 kilometres from some of China’s biggest cities. But the increasing power of the People’s Liberation Army Navy is forcing the US to alter its force posture and spread its military footprint. The last US administration gained access to four additional military facilities in the Philippines and opened a new Marine base in Guam. And Australia has become far more important to US military planning, a situation the security establishment here has long dreamt for. Andrew Shearer, a senior research fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, wrote more than a decade ago:
Successive Australian governments from both parties have made sustained efforts to reinvigorate the alliance with the United States since the end of the Cold War. This was a key factor in Australia’s military contributions to coalition operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, in major Australian defence acquisitions (such as M1 tanks, Aegis-equipped air warfare destroyers, and F-35 aircraft), and in steps to institutionalise much closer defence, intelligence, counterterrorism, and other security links. As a result, only the United Kingdom is as broadly and deeply integrated with the United States as Australia is in security matters.
That integration has only deepened. The federal Labor government’s 2023 Defence Strategic Review came after more than a decade of US force posture initiatives in the Northern Territory and after the 2021 announcement of the AUKUS strategic partnership. Billions have been spent on joint military infrastructure upgrades in the north and west of the country, allowing for the permanent rotation of 2,500 US marines, the hosting of long-range US nuclear bombers, an increase in the size and frequency of joint military training exercises and greater resources for the forward deployment of a range of US military assets. At least $20 billion has been pledged for HMAS Stirling in Perth and the adjacent Henderson industrial precinct to host and maintain US and UK nuclear submarines.
“In a narrow sense, AUKUS is a trilateral partnership meant to enhance the defense capabilities of the nations involved”, Charles Edel, a former US State Department official, told Damien Cave and Edward Wong from the New York Times a couple of years ago. “But its broader significance lies in its intention to … deepen strategic coordination between the US, Australia and the UK. Ultimately, strategic convergence, and not submarines, is the big story behind AUKUS.”
Jake Sullivan, former US national security adviser in the Biden administration, was more straightforward in January this year when talking to Demetri Sevastopulo, the Financial Times’ US-China correspondent: “It’s a strategic marriage between the United States and Australia for half a century”.
This has not thrown into question Australia’s sovereignty—forever a point of contention for sections of the nationalist left and social democratic right. Australian capitalism cannot be understood, at any point of its history, without reference to its status as a component of empire. From being a far-flung colonial garrison, the country now sits on the edge of the most dynamic region of the world economy. Cognisant of this, the ruling class here is dragging us from the margins of world politics to the centre of imperialist conflict. And it is doing so on the basis of a longstanding calculation that Australian capitalism is strengthened, not weakened, by its close association with US imperialism.
Not since General MacArthur set up the Allied South West Pacific Area Command in Brisbane after being driven out of the Philippines by the Japanese offensive in 1941 has this country been so relevant as a component of the Western alliance as it is today. But this time, Australia is no temporary beach head for an Allied counteroffensive—it is looking more like a permanent installation. Perhaps it will become something akin to the Israel of the southern Indo-Pacific.
Those following these developments will no doubt note that this perspective is at odds with the thesis put forward by Hugh White, Australia’s most prominent strategist, which is basically that America is retreating from Asia and is destined to become a hemispheric, rather than a global power. That case is certainly plausible, but, either way, the issue demands more attention.
What now?
So what will this newsletter become? Probably a bit of history, some backgrounders, interviews with people who know what they are talking about, analysis of sorts, journalistic jottings from the region, and guest posts.
Narrowing the newsletter’s scope will no doubt make it appear more niche. Certainly, Europe and the United States will remain for the foreseeable future more important and influential politically due to the West’s ideological export machinery. Modern Asia is an economic behemoth, but it remains culturally and politically derivative of the West in so many ways—similar to Australia in relation to the United States.
Unlike regions where geographical designations often coincide with shared political and cultural sensibilities forged out of common histories, struggles, intellectual movements, etc.—think Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, Western Europe—“Asia” exists primarily in the cartographer’s imagination. This is arguably changing due to the forces of economic integration, though significant linguistic and nationalist barriers place limits on any influential “pan-Asian” political culture developing.
At any rate, the global economy’s industrial centre of gravity has shifted decisively to this region; the geopolitical weight of the states here have increased as well, though arguably not commensurately. With these developments, much else will follow. The aim of this newsletter will be to bring an anti-imperialist perspective to it all.
On a technical note, in the coming month or so, Red Flag will move to a new website. This newsletter will shift from Substack to the new platform, on which we plan to host a couple of other socialist newsletters as well.
