Skip to main content

The Fog of War between the Powers in Asia

Fog of war is a military expression referring to the difficulty, during the course of battle, of knowing and calculating all factors at play as they unfold and interact. This image can be extended to the military-strategic and also to the political dimension of power relations: today a rearmaments race, regular parades of war devices, new alliances, political warnings and mutual ambiguities in Asia signal the agitated beginning of a long crescendo of tensions. A number of questions can help us understand the new characteristics of this contention.

Should NATO extend its strategic aim to the confrontation with China? Jens Stoltenberg, the Alliance’s secretary general and a Norwegian — a fact which expresses an Atlanticism closely aligned with American positions — thinks so. He tells the Financial Times that China, even though it cannot be defined exclusively as an adversary, is having an impact on European security via its capacity in cyberspace (the integrated field of electronic communications and the manipulation of data), new technologies and long-range missiles. NATO’s new doctrine for the coming decade will be how to defend itself from these threats: Nato is an alliance of North America and Europe, but this region faces global challenges. Terrorism, cyber, but also the rise of China. So, when it comes to strengthening our collective defence that’s also about how to address the rise of China. Stoltenberg answers the East European countries, which fear a new strategic concept less concentrated on defence against Russia, that Russia and China should not be seen as separate threats: China and Russia work closely together, and when NATO strengthens itself by investing more in technology that’s about both of them.

The question is full of implications which regard the ultimate nature of the relationship between Europe and the United States. The Dutch debate, which, after Brexit, has become the litmus test of the transformation in Atlantic relations, captures some of them. Tim Sweijs and Joris Teer of the HCSS (The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies) ask themselves in NRC Handelsblad what Europe would do if China attacked Taiwan and the United States reacted by asking its allies for help. Europe would have to choose whether to back the USA or to keep its distance, and it has to do this now, before a crisis breaks out. The answer must also define what a collective European defence would be without the USA, now that the United States is no longer able to uphold its two-front war strategy at one and the same time.

This observation sends us back to the controversial question of a division of tasks between America and Europe, which even becomes the agreed-upon defence of the two fronts of a potential single conflict, in Eastern Europe and East Asia. According to Caroline de Gruyter, also in NRC Handelsblad, the message coming from Washington is that the United States wants to concentrate on China, and Europe must do more for the security of its near abroad, i.e., the threats from Russia in the Mediterranean, the Arctic and the Sahel. The German weekly Der Spiegel is of the same opinion; it writes that, in spite of the AUKUS pact between Washington, London and Canberra, the United States is not clear about the role its European partners, including the British, could play in the Indo-Pacific. The American Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin has raised doubts about the mission of the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier in the South China Sea: there are areas in which the UK can be more helpful. According to Der Spiegel, Austin seems to be proposing a kind of division of tasks: the United States will take care of China and the Indo-Pacific, and the Europeans of Russia and the Atlantic.

Is there consensus in Europe about a global NATO and the division of tasks between the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific? The two questions are connected, and are a concentrate of the unresolved ambiguities and mental reservations which characterise the Atlantic relationship. It goes without saying that the division of tasks hypothesises a purely regional role for Europe and a global role reserved for the United States: this does not correspond to the financial, industrial and commercial interests the Europeans have in Asia. In the same way, a NATO extended in its strategic focus to China and the Indo-Pacific presumes that American and European interests are the same in that area. This may not be true, or it may be that there is an agreement on these interests, although there is no sign that this is being explored in the exhaustive strategic debate.

As was to be expected, at a political level, the biggest reservations are being expressed by France. Le Monde is sceptical about a NATO role in the Indo-Pacific: it is not clear what advantage it would bring. Also in Le Monde, Sylvie Kauffmann wonders: Should we die for Taiwan? Taiwan is a long way off, and nothing had been signed about this in NATO. However, can Europe stay prudently out of this confrontaton which is structuring all of the glob al dynamic? According to Mathieu Duchâtel, of the Institut Montaigne, China will try to test the determination of America and Taiwan to resist, continuing in the meantime to prepare for the great offensive; it cannot arrive at this without creating critical situations.

Bruno Le Maire has tried to explain Europe’s reservations to The New York Times, with very Merkel-like tones: The United States wants to confront China. The European Union wants to engage China. Kauffmann sums up: according to the French Finance Minister, what is at stake for the Americans is to remain the leading superpower in the face of an authoritarian China which is trying to wrest its position from it; Europe does not have this ambition: what is at stake, for it, is not to depend on either of them.

Some American comments are harsh. According to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSS), the EU must be more realistic about its strategic dependence on the United States and recognise there is no credible European alternative to NATO. Emmanuel Macron is promoting a ‘third way’ in the Pacific that emphasizes trade and coopcration with China, but this is decoupled from the realities of dealing with an emerging authoritarian Chinese superpower. In the The Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead highlights the fact that the AUKUS pact has cut out Paris: Washington’s willingness to alienate an important European partner in order to advance its Indo-Pacific strategy is an important signal to allies and adversaris, because it demonstrates that the pivot is real.

We observe that the considerable convergence between Paris and Berlin over the Chinese question does not seem to be taken into consideration here, in spite of the many versions that would like to see France critical of the mercantilism which apparently antmates Germany’s policy. Commenting on the virtual leave-taking summit between Angela Merkel and Xi Jinping, the Global Times argues that Berlin’s line on China is structural and not contingent; the German companies which are strongly integrated into the Chinese market will also push the new government to continue with Angela Merkel’s pragmatism. If anything, we observe again, Paris adds a reflection at a political-strategic level which is most congenial to it: the so-called third way wants to avoid both the EU being dragged into the confrontation with China and being sidelined by an agreement between the United States and China.

What can a European card be worth for New Delhi? Raja Mohan writes in The Indian Express that the conjunction with the AUKUS pact has overshadowed the publication of the EU’s Indo-Pacific doctrine, although it will probably have a greater impact in the region. For the first time after the withdrawal of the European powers from Asia in the decades following the Second World War, Europe is again a geopolitical protagonist in the region, seen by many not with strategic suspicion but as a precious partner. In Mohan’s opinion, the EU is the most trustworthy partner for the ASEAN powers after Japan, ahead of the United States but also well ahead of China and India itself. With the confrontation between the United States and China beginning to hold Southeast Asia in a vicelike grip, the EU is seen as a force capable of widening the strategic options for the region. A similar prospect holds true for New Delhi, which sees the EU today as a crucial element in stabilising a multipolar world: this is the Jaishankar doctrine, in which India’s strategy is to engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, [and] bring Japan into play. From this standpoint, even if the EU is not comparable to America’s military stature in the Indo-Pacific, it can help to strengthen the regional military balance and contribute in many other ways to the security of the area, also as a a valid complement to the Quad coalition.

We observe that the question of power proportions in the comparison between Europe and the United States does not elude Mohan; from the European point of view, the Indian suggestion also highlights the limits of the political centralisation of the EU, which, because of its delays, has difficulty in exploiting its political and strategic opportunities. From the Indian point of view, the hypothesis of a European card seems above all to want to signal the reluctance for, if not the rejection of, an unconditional alignment with American strategy.

Does Japanese rearmament mark a watershed in the Asian strategic scenario? In the new Liberal Democratic Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s election campaign programme, it is proposed, for the first time, to raise military spending also above 2% of GDP, abandoning the 1% ceiling agreed upon almost half a century ago. In other circumstances, the announcement that Japan intends to double its military expenditure, raising it from $50 to $100 billion, would have captured the attention of all the front pages of the world press; the fact that the news went almost unnoticed is a sign of the times, in the sense that by now the tension growing daily in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait almost takes the rearmament race in Asia for granted. We analyse in other pages of our newspaper transformations and Permanent features of Japanese politics in relation to Chinese question and the alliance with the United States: it is a fact that the ambivalence of the two hands towards Beijing now has to be played at a higher level than military preparation.

The considerations of a number of American analysts reported by the Japan Times contextualise the announcement of the new 2% spending level: it is a question of adopting the criterion/target in force among the NATO countries, with the political aim of strengthening the commitment to rearmament which was already in the Shinzo Abe line. We can add that the prospect of the plans to increase military expenditure will probably be for a five-year or ten-year period. This is not a strategic break, but it suggests the direction the next decade will take with its unprecedented tensions and the fog that is thickening over the Asian seas. Here, miscalculatons and unintended consequences increase the risk of collision.

— La Barbera, Guido. La nebbia della guerra tra le potenze in Asia. Lotta Comunista, , p. 23

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

The British Link in the Imperialist Chain

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 8 Lenin often used the metaphor of a chain that binds the world to describe imperialism. The October Revolution of 1917 broke a first link in that chain and hoped to pull the whole thing loose. The metaphor was adopted in those years by all the Bolshevik leaders and the leaders of the newly formed Third International. Within a decade, Stalin's well-known formula of socialism in one country signified the overturning of that strategic cornerstone and the defeat of the revolution in Russia, in Europe, and in the world. Dates that have come to symbolise historical change act as the synthesis of previously accumulated contradictions, and, while such a sudden change does not exhaust the possibility of future contradictions, the concentration of events in 1926 nonetheless marked a watershed that revealed the true extent that the counter-revolution had reached. The great general strike in the United Kingdom that year, wh...
Read more

German Socialism in 1917

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the worker’s movement  According to Arrigo Cervetto [ Opere , Vol. 7], “paracentrism” is “the biggest obstacle to the formation of the worldwide Bolshevik party”. The Spartacists at Zimmerwald and Kiental Cervetto was analysing Lenin’s battle against centrism for the creation of the Third International, a battle which saw him isolated at Zimmerwald. He wrote down one of Zinoviev’s quotations from Histoire du parti communiste russe . “We were in the minority at Zimmerwald [1915]. […] In the years 1915 and 1916, we were nothing but an insignificant minority”. “But what is more serious?” – observed Cervetto – “is that the Zimmerwald Spartacists also said they were opposed to us”. In the strategic perspective of the “two separate halves” of socialism – the political conditions in Russia and the economic, productive, and social conditions in Germany – “for ...
Read more

The Theoretical and Political Battles of Arrigo Cervetto II

From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”), soon to be published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. II “Neither Washington nor Moscow”, “Neither Truman nor Stalin”. These were slogans sufficient to rally the internationalist cause, not only against the influence of the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI) on one front, but also, on the opposite side, against the pro-American, “Westernist” leanings present in certain political currents of anarchist individualism. There was a unitary imperialism to be fought, of which the US and the USSR were both expressions. 1951, Genoa Pontedecimo In the ideological climate of the Cold War, heightened by the Korean War, a third world conflict was considered imminent; La guerra che viene (“The coming war”) was the title of a Trotskyist-inspired pamphlet that ultimately leaned in favour of the USSR, but reflected a widespread perception. The internation alist principle alone proved insufficient. To maintain...
Read more

Militarised Scientists

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 13 From the series Atom and industrialisation of science “ The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers ” [Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto ). The Manhattan Project scientists In Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists , Robert Jungk [1913-1994] writes that the Manhattan Project was a labyrinth of winding paths and dead ends. Commenting on Jungk’s romanticised account of the first phase of the history of the atomic bomb, Edward Teller [1908-2003], often called the “father” of the H-bomb, wrote: “There is no mention of the futile efforts of the scientists in 1939 to awaken the interest of the military authorities in the atomic bomb. The reader does not learn about the dismay of scientists f...
Read more

Battle Over Times for European Rearmament

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Pages 1 and 2 In current Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, appeasement stands for cowardly and illusory pacification, as exemplified by the Munich Agreement of 1938, which conceded to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia without stopping the march towards world war. Were Shigeru Ishiba, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz really, as has been said, the Neville Chamberlains of the tariff war, accepting appeasement on the 15% tariff in an ignominious surrender to Donald Trump's blackmail? And has Trump really revealed himself in Anchorage, Alaska, to be an appeaser towards Vladimir Putin? Was it, finally, only the firmness of the Europeans at the Washington summit which convinced Trump to remain as one of the guarantors of Ukraine's security? The plague of television and social media diplomacy feeds on simplistic and propagandistic images, but also consumes and contradicts them at the pace of...
Read more

Class Consciousness and Crisis in the World Order

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Pages 1 and 2 The consciousness of the proletariat “cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population”. If it concentrates exclusively “or even mainly” upon itself alone, the proletariat cannot be revolutionary, “for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding — of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society”. For this reason, the worker “must have a clear picture in ...
Read more

The Drone War

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 13 From the series War industry and European defence The Economist provides an illustration of how the use of unmanned and remotely piloted systems in warfare is expanding. In Africa, 30 governments are equipped with UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), or drones. In 2024, they were deployed 484 times in local wars in thirteen different countries, twice as frequently as the previous year, causing 1,200 deaths. The most widely used drone on the continent is the TB2, produced by the Turkish company Baykar, which has seen a decade of extensive use in conflicts across Syria, Azerbaijan-Armenia, and Ukraine. LBA Systems and MALE drones At the Paris Air Show in mid-June, an agreement was signed to establish LBA Systems, a joint venture between Baykar and Leonardo. The aim is to produce the Akinci and TB3 drones, the latter of which will be capable of taking off from helicopter carrier decks. The aircraft wil...
Read more

The Chinese Dragon Does Not Wait for American Rearmament

From the series News from the Silk Road According to The Washington Post , through the federal budget the White House has opened negotiations with the Senate that include long-term competition with China. The figures — $6 trillion, including infrastructure and family welfare plans — will vary in the negotiations, and will be centred on three directives. One demand is common to various proposals of expenditure: they must have a positive impact on the American productivity vis-à-vis China on the open fronts of industrial, energy and technological restructuring, or on the efficiency of welfare systems. In the case of welfare, the competition is also vis-à-vis Europe. Another calculation, attributed to Biden’s administration and the Democrats, is the enlargement of the electoral coalition in view of the next mid-term elections. Finally, there is a need to direct military expenditure, within the framework of a greater increase in the other items of discretionary expenditure, not absorb...
Read more

Science Against Time

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 14 From the series Industry and pharmaceuticals The surge in China’s biopharmaceutical industry over the last decade is part of its broader scientific and technological ascent and therefore deserves our attention. Such growth presents a challenge to other imperialist powers. The Biosecure Act’s intention, to reduce the ties between American and Chinese biotech firms, has been branded by The Economist as “old-fashioned protectionism”. The British weekly recognises, however, that the clash goes well beyond a trade war. The stakes are higher. In a lengthy cover story [“The rise of Chinese science”], it writes that “China is now a leading scientific power”. Just five years ago, this was still considered only a possibility. The current question is whether this is “welcome or worrying” [June 15th, 2024]. Unity and scission The viewpoint of that publication, an authoritative voice of one of the power-houses of imperia...
Read more

“Polish Moment” at Risk

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 3 From the series European news In July, the strategic triangle of London-Paris-Berlin was strengthened with the Northwood Declaration, in which the United Kingdom and France signalled the possibility of coordinating the use of their nuclear weapons through the creation of a “Nuclear Steering Group”, and with the Kensington Treaty, an Anglo-German defence pact. These agreements complement the Franco-British agreements of Lancaster House and the Franco-German Treaty of Aachen. Although Poland signed the Treaty of Nancy with France in May 2025, it was excluded from the recent “E3” consultations, in which only the United Kingdom, France, and Germany participated. Nevertheless, the establishment of the new government led by Donald Tusk, the Civic Platform (PO) leader, in the October 2023 elections, after eight years of antagonism with Brussels under the Law and Justice Party (PiS)-dominated government, ha...
Read more