Global Shift in Favor of China, East Asia to Intensify: US Author

“The global shift in favor of China and East Asia clearly will intensify unless Western leaders take the kinds of extreme actions I described in my previous answer. And even in that case, the West’s reckless and panicky efforts to contain China will likely fail,” Dr. Kevin Barrett from Madison, Wisconsin, told Tasnim.

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009). His website is www.truthjihad.com.

Following is the full text of the interview:

Tasnim: The post-COVID19 race could determine whether the US rebounds in a manner that allows it to retain what itself calls the mantle of global leadership. There are reports that Beijing could leverage its first-mover advantage – alongside a faster economic recovery across Asian markets – accelerating the trend toward a Chinese-centric globalization. What do you think?

Barrett: The coronavirus crisis represents an intensification of the accelerating US-China conflict. As I have written elsewhere (here) I think COVID-19 was most likely created in a lab and released deliberately as part of an effort by the ruling Western banking elite to disrupt the prevailing historical trajectory, whose most salient feature is China’s inexorable rise toward #1 world power status. If this is the case, and if the Western planners intentionally provoked the global crisis (rather than expecting COVID-19 to be contained in the target countries as with SARS, bird flu, pig flu, and other presumed US biological attacks on China), then we can expect the West to emerge from the crisis on a hypermilitarized footing targeting China. The US Administration will demand trillions of dollars of reparations from China, and likely seize China’s treasuries and other investments in the US. It will engage in reckless provocations in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and perhaps Taiwan. It will lock down its own people permanently in an Orwellian gulag state whose excuse will be the crisis and wartime or near-wartime state of emergency. It may launch more biological attacks, possibly including far more lethal pathogens than COVID-19.  (Bill Gates is already calling COVID-19 “Pandemic 1” and predicting that Pandemic 2 will be much worse.) Essentially the US-led West will try to fight World War III while it still has an advantage in military hardware.

So China’s first-mover advantage in terms of its and the East Asian region’s economic recovery is likely to occur in an increasingly hostile environment. This will be the case no matter who wins the US presidential election in November, and indeed whether or not the election even takes place.

Tasnim: The IMF has projected a US economic decline of about 6% in 2020 and a contraction of the eurozone of 7.5%. That compares to projected Chinese economic growth for 2020 of 1.2% after a first-quarter real decline of 6.7% – far less than the 10%-plus dip many experts had expected. The only group of countries in the world projected to be in positive territory are East Asian, at roughly 1%. This has raised concerns within the US and Europe. Recently, French President Emanuel Macron argued that the coming months could determine whether the European Union collapses as a political and economic project. Do you believe that their steeper economic decline and slower recovery could lay the seeds for a long-lasting shift of global tectonic plates to East Asian nations’ advantage?

Barrett: The global shift in favor of China and East Asia clearly will intensify unless Western leaders take the kinds of extreme actions I described in my previous answer. And even in that case, the West’s reckless and panicky efforts to contain China will likely fail. So I do think it’s likely that future historians will look back on the COVID-19 crisis as the moment the West lost its grip on the world.

Tasnim: There is a potential scenario raised by Deloitte and Salesforce referred to as “Sunrise in the East.” They write, “The global center of power shifts decisively east as China and other East Asian nations take the reigns as primary powers on the world stage and lead global coordination of the health system and other multilateral institutions.” What factors do you think could contribute to this shift of power?

Barrett: Several factors are driving China’s increasing role in global institutions. The first, of course, is China’s economic success, which in my view is largely due to its 80% publicly owned and operated banking system. Western-style private usury banking has created a parasitical financial sector that contributes nothing to the real economy while draining roughly one-third of value from actual producers and consumers. Another factor is China’s preference for economic cooperation over military confrontation. This contrasts starkly with American arrogance and belligerence. The neoconservatives have been ruling the US since their September 11, 2001, coup d’etat, and their Machiavellian motto is “it is better to be feared than loved.” But in fact, the US is widely resented and despised due to its ongoing mass murders in Middle Eastern wars, and is discovering that being hated by the world is not a recipe for long-term success—a lesson the Israelis will also eventually learn the hard way. Alongside Western belligerence versus Chinese reasonableness, there is also the issue of relative competence. Many of the West’s international ventures, most notably its military campaigns, have been carried out with extreme incompetence. The Western and especially the US response to COVID-19, as opposed to the more effective Chinese response, has highlighted this perceived difference incompetence in favor of China.