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Cambodia Doesn’t Owe Washington an Explanation Over China Ties, China-Russia Summit 8000 word Full Statement, New Realities Shape the Eurasian Economic and Strategic Space

May 19, 2024

Cambodia Doesn’t Owe Washington an Explanation Over China Ties

By Brian Berletic (New Eastern Outlook)

“We have been clear that Cambodia is not allowing any foreign forces to be deployed on its territory,” he said. “That won’t happen; that point is in our Constitution, and we are fully following it.”

An Associated Press (AP) article dated May 8, 2024 article titled, “Chinese warships have been docked in Cambodia for 5 months, but government says it’s not permanent,” attempts to depict the Southeast Asian country of Cambodia as covering up growing Chinese-Cambodian military cooperation.

Satellite images of Chinese warships docked at Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base for several months have prompted “questions” and “worries” over the possibility of a “new outpost for the Chinese navy on the Gulf of Thailand.”

No actual evidence has been presented by Western governments or its various think tanks, including the US government and arms industry-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) whose report documented the presence of Chinese warships at Ream Naval Base, to suggest a permanent Chinese military presence has been established in Cambodia.

The AP article notes:

Defense Ministry spokesperson Gen. Chhum Socheat told the AP [the Chinese warships] were due to take part in a joint Cambodian-Chinese military exercise later this month, and that they were also involved in training Cambodian sailors.

Even the most basic of military training can span a period of several months, and more advanced training can take up to a year or more.

AP cited Cambodian officials who claimed:

“We have been clear that Cambodia is not allowing any foreign forces to be deployed on its territory,” he said. “That won’t happen; that point is in our Constitution, and we are fully following it.”

To explain the root of US “worries,” AP would explain:

Controversy over Ream Naval Base initially arose in 2019 when The Wall Street Journal reported that an early draft of a reputed agreement seen by U.S. officials would allow China 30-year use of the base, where it would be able to post military personnel, store weapons and berth warships.
The base sits adjacent to the South China Sea, where China has aggressively asserted its claim to virtually the entire strategic waterway, and also provides easy access to the Malacca Straits, a critical shipping route leading from it to the Indian Ocean.
The U.S. has refused to recognize China’s sweeping claim and routinely conducts military maneuvers there to reinforce that they are international waters.

Ironically, it was CSIS who also published data regarding maritime shipping moving through the South China Sea Washington accuses China of threatening. The shipping is overwhelmingly moving to and from China itself. It is clear that China has no interest in disrupting its own maritime trade, Washington obviously does.

No explanation was provided by AP as to why the US believed it had any authority, jurisdiction, or say regarding what takes place within the sovereign borders of Cambodia regardless of whether the Chinese military presence is permanent or not, or across the rest of theAsia-Pacific region.

It should be repeated that the Asia-Pacific region is located on the opposite side of the planet from Washington, D.C.

AP does make one important admission as it concluded its article, pointing out that:

China only operates one acknowledged foreign military base, in the impoverished but strategically important Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti, but many believe that its military is busy establishing an overseas network.
The U.S. has more foreign military bases than any other country, including multiple facilities in the Asia-Pacific region.

This admission is key to both understanding the true nature of US “worries,” and the actual source of security threats in the Asia-Pacific region.

Among the many “foreign military bases” the United States maintains around the globe, a large number of them, home to tens of thousands of US forces, are located in the Asia-Pacific region and more specifically in South Korea, Japan, and increasingly the Philippines. These forces are admittedly part of a long-standing US foreign policy objective of encircling and containing China itself.

The US State Department through its Office of the Historian has archived a 1965 memorandum titled, “Courses of Action in Vietnam,” in which it admits:

The February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China.

The same memorandum admits:

There are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front.

The US has maintained efforts to encircle and contain China along these three fronts up to and including today.

The very Chinese activities cited as a justification for US military expansion thousands of miles from American shores in the Asia-Pacific region are in fact a response to this long-standing and continuous US policy of containment.

If the prospect of Chinese warships permanently stationed at a naval base in Cambodia is a “worry” for Washington, certainly tens of thousands of US forces scattered across a network of military bases along China’s periphery, closer to Chinese territory than America’s own shores, is a legitimate concern for Beijing.

The belligerent hypocrisy of US foreign policy runs deeper still.

AP, along with the Western experts it cited in its report, present a narrative in which Cambodia appears to somehow owe the collective West an explanation for supposed military cooperation taking place within its internationally recognized borders. Yet, the West itself has repeatedly asserted “the right to choose its own path” for any nation seeking to join NATO and not only cooperate militarily with the West, but be integrated into an active military alliance conducting wars of aggression around the globe.

Upon NATO’s official website under a post titled, “Setting the record straight: de-bunking Russian disinformation on NATO,” it claims:

The wording “NATO expansion” is already part of the myth. NATO did not hunt for new members or want to “expand eastward.” NATO respects every nation’s right to choose its own path. NATO membership is a decision for NATO Allies and those countries who wish to join alone.

If this were so, why wouldn’t this also apply to nations and any desired military cooperation with Russia and China? It appears that Washington, London, and Brussels insist on a nation’s “right to choose,” as long as it chooses NATO.

The “right to choose” NATO membership is itself a myth. Many nations have openly chosen neutrality instead, including pre-2014 Ukraine. Through what were admittedly US organized protests, governments supporting neutrality were removed from power, and client regimes eager to “choose” NATO installed in their place.

The Guardian in a 2004 article titled, “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” would admit just how extensive this type of political intervention was across a number of potential NATO members, and how the US repeatedly interfered in the internal political affairs of targeted nations to remove governments who were choosing “wrong.”

The article explains in regard to the Ukrainian protests in 2004 which would be repeated again in 2014:

…the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.
Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.
Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

What is revealed is instead of nations having a “right to choose,” the United States and its NATO allies choose for targeted nations. Governments opting for neutrality are admittedly overthrown and replaced by those who will pursue NATO membership. The resulting decision is not a reflection of a nation’s sovereign foreign policy, but the undermining and usurpation of that sovereignty – the very sovereignty NATO claims it exists to uphold.

The resulting security crisis this process of coerced NATO expansion poses to the Russian Federation has prompted the resulting tensions and conflict that now consumes Ukraine, wider Europe, and is continuing to spread along Russia’s periphery into Central Asia.

In this context, regarding Cambodian-Chinese relations and the nature of military cooperation between the two nations, according to NATO and the nations that constitute it, Cambodia not only has the right to choose its alliances, any attempt to reverse these choices represents a threat to regional and even global security.

In reality, the United States is not opposed to Chinese-Cambodian military cooperation – whatever its true nature – because it believes it is a threat to stability or represents Chinese expansionism and growing “primacy,” but instead opposes such developments because they serve as an obstacle for Washington’s own military expansionism in the Asia-Pacific region, its own primacy over the region, and its desire to influence and undermine peace and stability with impunity.

Whatever the true nature is of Chinese-Cambodian military cooperation, US “worries” only further highlight the belligerent hypocrisy of Washington’s own foreign policy.

Washington and the rest of NATO insist that Ukraine’s ability to “choose” NATO membership must be respected, but Cambodia’s desire to choose China as a military partner is presented as unacceptable. The only commonality between these otherwise contradictory positions is that they both serve Washington’s interests rather than any of the other parties involved.

By 2024, China has become Cambodia’s largest trade partner, according to Khmer Times. Better relations with China also serve as Cambodia’s greatest chance of developing modern infrastructure in a nation destroyed by and struggling to rebuild after decades of US proxy wars and interference. It is clear that Cambodia’s decision to work closely with China serves its own best interests, but because this doesn’t serve Washington’s best interests, Cambodia has “chosen” wrong.

For Cambodia, it is clear that if it does not build both the internal capabilities and foreign alliances required to neutralize the same sort of US interference resulting in Ukraine’s political capture in 2014, Cambodia will likewise find important “choices” about its future decided for it. Just as in Europe following Ukraine’s political capture in 2014, Cambodia will find both its own national security and economic prosperity and that of the region within which it resides, upended.

Washington suggests Chinese-Cambodian military cooperation represents a threat to the wider region. In reality, Washington opposes it because it serves as an obstacle for Washington’s own desire to interfere in and threaten the Asia-Pacific with impunity.

New Realities Shape the Eurasian Economic and Strategic Space

By Hussein Askary (Vice-President of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden)

While the world has been rocked by a series of financial, economic, strategic and security crises in the past ten years, other processes of a constructive nature have been progressing unhindered. The rise of China as the world’s largest industrial economy, and with it the rise of many Asian nations, has continued and accelerated despite major impediments like the trade war with the U.S., COVID 19 pandemic, and the global inflation crisis following the launching of the war in Ukraine by Russia in February 2022.

Another such process was the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative to include 152 nations in 2023 by the time of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of its launching in 2013. The Expansion of both the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation westward to include Iran as a full member, and Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar as observes, and more importantly, the expansion of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Ethiopia as full members, all have contributed to the creation of a new Eurasian reality which is more determined by geo-economics rather than geopolitics. The withdrawal of the U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, symbolically marked the end of more than 200 years of the geopolitical Great Game. The fact that China rushed to establish formal relations with the Taliban-controlled government in Kabul was more than a symbolic gesture.

China as the industrial superpower

A number of indicators published in the 2023 OECD Trade in Value Added (TiVA) and analysed by Professor Richard Baldwin should send shivers down the spines of geopolitically-minded Western leaders who wish to see China’s economy slowing down or grinding to a halt.

First, China continues to be the world’s largest manufacturing economy, holding 35% of the world manufacturing. All G-7 countries combined cannot reach this level, with the U.S. keeping 12%. China is also the absolute leader in creation of added value in manufacturing, holding 29% of the world’s total, with the U.S. lagging behind with 16% and the rest of the G-7 with 17%. Another extremely important indicator is the exposure to foreign supply chains, and how dependent the Western industrial nations are on China even in their own industrial production as their imports of intermediate goods from China has increased dramatically since 2002. China by now have built an astounding industrial supply chain at home. It has also achieved an absolute monopoly of certain sensitive sectors like the refining and supply of rare-earth metals with a 95% control of the global supply. This means that the U.S., for example, became by 2022 three times more reliant on China than China is on the U.S. as the source of industrial inputs.

On telling example of this process was revealed in December 2023 in South Korean media which reported that “Korea has suffered a trade deficit with its biggest market China this year for the first time in 31 years”. According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, Korea’s exports to China totalled $114 billion in the first 11 months of 2023, while imports amounted to $132 billion, resulting in an $18 billion deficit. One of the explanations given for the deficit against the Chinese market is that China no longer needs to import a large number of industrial and technological components from South Korea, because these can be produced now domestically in China. What this factor means is that decoupling by the West and other industrial powers from China has become impossible.

By 2030, China is intending to become the dominant manufacturer in such areas as aerospace equipment, aircraft, high-end CNC machines and basic manufacturing equipment, robots, engineering machinery and biomedicine industries. China is already the world leader in construction sectors like high-speed and standard-gauge rail and associated infrastructure such as tunnelling and bridge building. China is also the world leader in hydropower construction. It is making major advances in commercialization of its domestically-developed third generation nuclear power plants (with two plants in Karachi, Pakistan) and also the new fourth generation High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor-Pebble-bed Module (HTR-PM) . .

New markets and partners

Another indicator of significance that these statistics reveal is that China’s reliance on the American market for selling its products is decreasing. It is a matter of fact that some of the new emerging major trade partners of China are its own neighbours in the ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations), the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) which includes ASEAN plus Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia. The Arab countries are another emerging trade and economic partner that has the potential to surpass the EU in its importance for China in the coming years. The fact that China has replaced the EU as Russia’s main trade partner and helped it survive the sanctions and isolation imposed on it should ring alarm bells in the power corridors of the West.

What these factors imply for the nations of the Global South and to be a partner of the world’s largest manufacturing power is that the tools of economic progress, i.e. machinery and technologies of all kinds are now available from China. China has shown willingness to share these tools with other nations, for example through the Belt and Road Initiative, but always staying ahead of the wave technologically. Here, the issue is not the much-hyped Chinese export of solar panels and electric vehicles, which are of interest mostly in Europe and the U.S. and not in developing countries. Developing countries in Asia and Africa need construction machinery, infrastructure engineering, telecommunications, power generation capacity, healthcare and skill capacity development. Nations in Africa and Latin America are realizing that they have been robbed through the process of being mere suppliers of cheap raw materials to an industrial world which would resell finished products to them with a much higher added value. Nations in Africa are demanding that they become part of the industrial supply chain. For example, Zimbabwe banned the export of raw lithium in 2023 and declared that it would only cooperate with nations that help build a domestic lithium battery industry in Zimbabwe. China was readily willing to comply, because it would be a winner no matter how the coin falls, as it has the technology and capacity to provide the industrial equipment for those countries to industrialize. China is assisting Ethiopia in its plans to build industrial parks where textiles, leatherware, and even car assembly lines for production of affordable Chinese cars for the national and Africa markets are being built.

New Go West Strategy

China is developing a new strategy of “going west” pivoting on making Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region a launching pad and centre for this policy. I explain this policy in a detailed report I wrote recently after touring the region. The policy focuses on making Xinjiang both as an industrial and logistics hub focussing on trade with Central Asia, West Asia, and Europe. The Chinese government is pouring unfathomable amounts of money in investments in new infrastructure and industrial and logistics zones in Xinjiang, reaching the equivalent of US$ 70 billion only in 2023.

In May 2023, a historic summit held in Xi’an brough together China’s President Xi Jinping with the leaders of the five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan). This summit and the subsequent March 2024 establishment of the joint secretariat and other mechanisms of free trade and communication brough the role of Xinjiang and the Central Asian nations into a new light. Several new transport infrastructure projects are under way, the most important of which is the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Highway and the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan highway and phase two of the China-Tajikistan Highway. Trade between China and the Central Asian nations reached US$ 90 billion in 2023, an increase of 27% year on year, and is poised to increase even more. Xinjiang takes the lion’s share of this trade.

China and Kazakhstan have many plans to enhance the China-EU Express Rail (CEER) capacity and add new routes to it, such as the Middle Corridor (also known as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Corridor) that would link China to the Black Sea from Kazakhstan’s Caspian Sea port of Aktau to Azerbaijan, Georgia, and also with a branch to Turkey.

The Central Asian nations, especially Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, are becoming more than a land-bridge between China and Europe. Their economies are booming with foreign direct investments from both East and West pouring into their emerging economies. With the New Silk Road, the disadvantage of being landlocked nations is disappearing. Their natural resources are coming into play in the international economy. The growth of their economies will be boosted by machinery and technology provided by the new industrial zones of Xinjiang. The case of Afghanistan and Pakistan, although less shiny examples than the Central Asian nations, are on a much better path towards development than the past 40 years of geopolitical proxy wars.

Further to the West, Iran and the Arab countries in the Gulf and Egypt are emerging as new economic centres. If you draw a circle that encompasses Iran, Arab Gulf states, Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Iraq, what you get is one of the most interesting regions in the world in terms of economic potential. However, this region has been a geopolitical playground of global politics, with the Arab-Israeli conflict at its core. While the war in Gaza has brough the whole region to the brink of a regional war, it is still unable to diminish this region’s importance of the global economy. It is home to about two-thirds of the world’s known reserves of oil and gas. It has a unique geographical location between world continents and seas. It has a very large, very young, and relatively well-educated population of more than 500 million people and rapidly growing, surpassing the stagnating total population of the EU (448 million). Add to all this the fact that the sovereign wealth funds of the region contain more than US$ trillion generated largely by export of oil and gas. This wealth was previously mostly invested in Western financial and economic institutions and assets, in addition to real-estate projects. Currently, a certain portion of this money is repatriated to be invested in infrastructure and industrial projects at home and in productive economic investments in Asia and even Africa. The Asian Infrastructure Development Bank and the BRICS New Development Bank are in dire need for such fresh inputs. The severe oil shocks of 2014-2016, and 2020-202, when the oil price dipped to below 30 $ / barrel and caused real economic and financial crises for the oil exporting countries, represented very harsh lessons. Diversifying the economic activity and sources of income have become the battle cry of the governments of the region, with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 as a good example of the shift taking place.

This area has slowly but certainly become a focus of China’s economic and foreign policy since President Xi presented his “1+2+3” policy in the China-Arab Summit of 2014. The December 2022 summit between President Xi and the leaders of the Arab World in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, highlighted the enormous potential that exists for cooperation, industrialization, and trade. “China is now the largest trading partner of the Arab states, with last year’s trade volume almost doubling from the 2012 level to 431.4 billion U.S. dollars,” said President Xi Jinping in his speech to the Arab leaders.

In his speech to the GCC leaders in Riyadh on December 10, 2022, President Xi outlined the concrete economic and financial measures China was offering to work with the GCC immediately. The “five points” Xi presented should be of interest to study for any serious analyst. They include long-term trade in oil and gas in local currencies, infrastructure projects extending to nuclear power, space exploration and space technology, telecommunications and AI, industrial projects, and transport infrastructure projects. One day before the China-GCC Summit President Xi and Saudi King Salman ben Abdul-Aziz reached a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement. This partnership is symbiotic with Saudi Vision 2030. Immediately, 30 memoranda of understanding (MoUs) were signed between Chinese and Saudi entities. These were concretized as contracts worth US$ 10 billion during the China-Arab Business Forum in Saudi Arabia in June 2023.

The Irony is that when U.S. President Joe Biden visited Saudi Arabia in July 2022, he made it clear that “the bottom line is: This trip is about once again positioning America in this region for the future. We are not going to leave a vacuum in the Middle East for Russia or China to fill. And we’re getting results.” It seems that the complete opposite happened a few months later. Not only China was filling a huge vacuum left by U.S. lack of interest in building stronger economic partnerships, but the Gulf countries and OPEC continued coordinating oil export policies with Russia within the framework of OPEC Plus. The vacuum seems to come not from actions of Russia or China, but instead from the fact that the U.S. is solely focused on security and military matters in the region with no interest in trade and economic cooperation with the nations there.

In February 2023. Iran (a non-Arab country) finalised a 2021 25-year comprehensive strategic cooperation agreement with China, during the state visit by President Ibrahim Raisi to Beijing. Surprisingly. A month later, in March 2023, China brokered the Iran-Saudi Arabia restoration of diplomatic relations. By the end of the year 2023, Iran, Saudi Arabian, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Ethiopia were all admitted into the BRICS (Brazil, India, Russia, China, and South Africa) creating the BRIX Plus. These nations are also either full members or observers in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) which is increasingly moving from being a mere security cooperation organisation into an economic cooperation mechanism. Xinjiang plays a major role in all these architectures.

Securing the energy flows

China’s energy security in the coming decades will depend on securing, through cooperation and diplomacy, this whole region to the shores of the Red Sea. Central Asia and the Persian Gulf countries are the main suppliers of China’s oil and gas needs. Russia has also emerged as the complementary major energy exporter to China. China’s economic stability depends largely on the safe and continuous flow of oil and gas from these regions to its ports. Geopolitical tension can make strategic chokepoints like the Hormuz Strait and the Malacca Strait a major source of insecurity for China and its partners. Therefore, land-based energy corridors along the Economic Belt of the New Silk Road and Xinjiang will assume increasing importance and attention in the coming decades. Currently, four major pipelines carry around 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to China through Xinjiang. This is exactly as much gas as the ill-fated Baltic-Sea based Nord Stream 1 was carrying from Russia to Germany before it was sabotaged in September 2022.

Conclusion

The withdrawal of the U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 was a major watershed, probably marking the end of the Great Game that lasted for almost three centuries. Using Afghanistan and other Khanates and stans as a security buffer zone and a destabilization source for both Russia and China have ended. With China managing successfully to end the threat of terrorism and separatism in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and consolidating its relations with the Central Asian nations, and now through diplomatic relations with the Taliban-steered Kabul, it is moving towards securing the realm around it. Russia’s role remains strong in the region, and its intervention in January 2022 in Kazakhstan to prevent a colour revolution was decisive. Although a certain level of tensions between these countries and Russia still exists and attempts by the EU and the U.S. to persuade them to reduce their reliance on Russia and China continue, realities of geography and history cannot be changed.

With the Arab countries, Iran, and the central Asian countries emerging as key economic partners of China, geoeconomics is emerging as the key element of foreign policy rather than geopolitics. Economy will have a final saying in many of the issues that have determined the policies of the nations of the “heartland” of the Eurasian continent.

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