Tricontinental | The Global North Defined

Tratto da Tricontinental, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage, gennaio 2024. Un’analisi molto interessante di quello che gli stessi autori di Tricontinental definiscono l'”impero” a guida Stati Uniti e che oggi possiamo pensare come il nemico principale dell’umanità. I commenti di Antiper sono evidenziati con sfondo [arancione]. [Antiper]

The Global North is an integrated military, political, and economic bloc at present composed of 49 countries, as pictured in Figure 17. These include the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, and secondary Western and Eastern European countries. This US-led bloc is the imperialist camp in today’s world. [Si tratta di un’affermazione molto interessante perché dichiara che esiste un solo campo imperialista e che è guidato dagli USA].

As pictured in Figure 18, the Global North is fundamentally a North Atlantic project, with two outlying countries – Australia and Japan. [Questa affermazione sembra a prima vista sorprendente in quanto esclude la Corea del Sud che viene invece collocata nell’ambito del Sud Globale e al tempo stesso in quello della cosiddetta “NATO+” ovvero dei paesi militarmente guidati dagli USA, anzi dei paesi pesantemente militarizzati dagli USA (“Heavily US Militarised”), visto che la Corea del Sud presenta ben 62 basi americane].

Inspired by Samir Amin’s concept of the Triad [Stati Uniti, Europa e Giappone] but expanding and modifying it to suit the realities of the present, the organisation of the Global North bloc can be best understood as layers of four concentric rings. [73]

The position of each country within each ring depends on its rapport with the United States and how close its intelligence services are to those of the US, which is explained below.

GN Ring 1: Six Core US-Led Anglo-American Imperialist Countries

Ring 1 (listed in Figure 19) represents the inner core of imperialism. The white English-speaking victors of  WWII, the Five Eyes (US, UK in 1946, Canada in 1948, Australia and New Zealand in 1956) established themselves as the Praetorian Guard of what can be called the Anglo-American Project. It is composed of the UK and the white settler states it spawned. Israel, treated by the US as the sixth eye, is unofficially part of the inner core. The cohesion of countries in this ring remains; an example is the trilateral security alliance AUKUS, created in September 2021.

A fundamental key to understanding the Global North is the special relationship between the United States and Israel. They are white settler states, founded on and justified by white supremacy and religious zealotry, and are the core of Ring 1 of the Global North. The US was established by white, religious extremists who, in 1690, conceived and established their colonial settlements as ‘plantations of religion’. [74]

They believed that only they, the white Puritans, could realise God’s plan in the ‘American wilderness’. Their genocide against the native Americans and enslavement of Africans were viewed as the inevitable and obvious outcome of their racial and religious superiority.

Israel was the creation of British and US imperialism and was organised by the leaders of the Zionist movement. It was described by the military expert for The Guardian, Herbert Sidebotham, during WWI as follows: ‘The only possible colonists of Palestine are the Jews… at once a protection against the alien East and a mediator between it and us, a civilisation distinct from ours yet imbued with our political ideas’. [75]

For the imperialists, ‘freedom from discrimination’ was only the pretext for the formation of the Judaic and white supremacist state of Israel.

As indicated earlier, between 1776, the year of independence from the British, and 2019, the US has spent 228 of 245 years in war/conflict, and only 17 years in ‘peace’.

During its history, the United Kingdom’s forces (or forces with a British mandate) have invaded, had some control over, or fought conflicts in 171 of the world’s 193 countries that are currently UN member states, or nine out of ten of all countries. [76]

In its 72 years of existence, Israel has ‘officially’ started 16 military conflicts with the Palestinians and other Arab nations. One-fourth of them were under the rule of Benjamin Netanyahu (1996–1999; 2009–2023). Of course, not included in these ‘official’ statistics are the multiple incursions by Zionist settlers and their army brethren against Palestinians.

Israeli white racialism and religious demagogy have morphed from ideological justifications into material forces that have contributed to the qualitative change in imperialism today. This is exemplified by, among other things, the per capita military spend of the US, which is 12.6 times that of the world’s average, with Israel’s 7.2 times, the two largest in the Global North. In the first month following 7 October 2023, Israel killed more civilians than all the civilian deaths in the Ukraine since 2022 and detonated more tons of explosives than the combined weight of the two nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [77]

The US Congressional Research Service reported that: ‘Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II… Israel is the first international operator of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Department of Defence’s fifth-generation stealth aircraft, considered to be the most technologically advanced fighter jet ever made’. [78]

Adjusting for inflation, US aid to Israel from 1951 to 2022 totalled US$ 317.9 billion. [79]

Nonetheless, it is the US — not Israel — who is driving the agenda in the region following 7 October 2023. Blinken’s ‘shuttle diplomacy’ sets the rules and tones for Israel’s military operations and the ‘proportionate’ actions against the Palestinian resistance and regional powers. The US provides the necessary political and military support for Israel to eliminate the Palestinian resistance ‘permanently’, deter Iran and its allies, and push forward normalisation with Arab neighbouring countries. All these US interventions seek to lay the ground for building the planned India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which is not only an economic corridor but essentially an ideological and political plan to block China’s increasing integration and influence in the region. Therefore, Israel constitutes a ‘central junction’ for the US-programmed IMEC, which is outlined within the framework of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment (PGI), a Global North world plan, aiming essentially at countering China’s BRI and any form of Global South long-lasting cooperation.

GN Ring 2: Nine Core European Imperialist Powers

As listed in Figure 20, the countries in Ring 2 are the closest to the US-led inner core, namely Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Ring 2 is defined by each country’s proximity and affinity, and the trustworthiness of their intelligence functions to those of the United States.

‘Politics is a concentrated expression of economics’, Lenin explained. [81]

The military function is the essential expression of this political concentration. Post-WWII, and with the advent of the Internet and social media, the control of communications and all its related functions has become a qualitatively new strategic intelligence asset of the state and has further advanced the US’s dominant hegemonic control of vast portions of the world.

Thanks to the work of Wikileaks and the bravery of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, the world was given its first public view into the secret world of intelligence relations among the imperialist forces.⁸¹

Instructively, the US prioritised its level of trust beyond the Five Eyes and the hidden special relationship with Israel. Subsequently, secretly but formally, the US created the Nine Eyes, which added Denmark, Norway, France, and the Netherlands. The Europeans were unwilling to have it be known, even privately, that Israel was a formal member. In addition, Israel did not fully trust many European powers with intelligence, so all parties allowed the US to continue having its special relationship with Israel.

Fifty years after WWII, the United States continued to exclude the former fascist powers of Germany, Italy, and Spain from the Five and Nine Eyes. Following the end of WWII, the US built an international system that was premised on the subordination and integration of the former fascist powers and the rest of Europe. This process of subordination and integration was evident in the military apparatus constructed by the United States, with NATO as one of the lynchpins. Establishing a system of US military bases in the defeated powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – allowed Washington to set aside any talk of a sovereign military or diplomatic project for the defeated.

In 2001, five other countries (Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden) were added to the Nine Eyes to become the Fourteen Eyes. [82]

Between 2005–2009, the US became increasingly alarmed about Russia and China. The unofficial ‘Pivot to Asia’ had begun; the official launch was delayed until Barak Obama took office in 2012. [83]

GN Ring 3: Japan and Fourteen Lesser European Imperialist Powers

Ring 3 (listed in Figure 21), though made up of 15 countries, has a special focus on Japan, which has become a decisive front-line asset in the effort to curtail and suppress China and Russia. However, we have added here other secondary Western European powers, who, although loyal to the United States, are less strategic than others. A few of them, like Portugal, Finland, and Iceland, are part of NATO. Portugal is the only former fascist colonial power not in Ring 2 due to its small importance to US military intelligence (they are not in the Fourteen Eyes) and its smaller GDP.

Therefore, the third ring of the imperialist camp includes Japan and another 14 European countries (Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Finland, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta, Iceland, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, and Monaco).

In the past several centuries, countries in the first three rings of the imperialist camp, other than Ireland, have caused massive human disasters. The United Kingdom, the US, and the Netherlands appropriated wealth through the African slave trade. Europeans implemented colonialism worldwide; the entirety of the Americas, nearly all of Africa, and more than half of Asia were dominated by colonisers. Anglo-Saxon white immigrants forcibly expelled or murdered Indigenous people in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. There were several imperialist attempts to break up China, including the First Opium War, when Hong Kong was ceded in 1842, and then Taiwan at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. In 1884–1885, European colonisers arbitrarily partitioned Africa at the Berlin Conference. This violent methodology of the partitioning has continued unabated until today, as evidenced by the 2011 partition of Sudan and by the ongoing destruction of the country and its people. In 1919, they dismantled the Austro-Hungarian and German empires through the Treaty of Versailles, transferred rights of some areas of China (Shandong) to Japan, handed German colonies in Africa to victorious European powers, and re-established a world order led by Anglo-American forces. As a result of internal crises and imperialist rivalries, fascist states arose within this camp, triggering WWII and leading to the death of at least 50 million Soviet and Chinese people. In the final stages of WWII, the US used atomic bombs on civilians. To this day, the US still refuses to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons and has unilaterally withdrawn from key nuclear and missile treaties.

Since the end of WWII, Japan has become a strategic US ally. With the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1951, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida accepted the dominance of the US military over his country. During the Cold War, Japan played a significant role in containing the Soviet Union and China on the Eastern front, and this role continues today. Japan is the second country with the most US military bases as of July 2023 (98), only after Germany (171). To date, none of the German bases are in the former German Democratic Republic.

Although not officially a NATO member, since 2014, Japan has cooperated with NATO on an individual basis – most recently agreeing to the Individually Tailored Partnership Program in July 2023 – and has participated in the past two NATO summits. Japan also regularly participates in meetings held at NATO Headquarters in Brussels between NATO Allies and the four partners in the Indo-Pacific region at the level of ambassadors. This practical incorporation can be explained by the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept, which states that ‘cooperation with partners in this region is key to addressing the increasingly complex global security environment, including Russia’s war on Ukraine, the shift in the global balance of power and the rise of China, and the security situation on the Korean Peninsula’.

In addition, Japan is the only G7 member not part of NATO. In 2022, China was labelled by the Japanese government as ‘the greatest strategic challenge ever to securing the peace and stability of Japan’ and announced plans to double official military spending to 2% of the GDP (on par with NATO countries) by 2027, overturning Japan’s post-WWII cap, which had official limited military spending to 1% of GDP. [84]

GN Ring 4: Nineteen European Former Eastern Bloc Integrated into NATO

Ring 4 is composed of the European members of the former Eastern Bloc and the Eastern European members of the former Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon, which lasted from 1949 to 1991). They are a new category within imperialist camp and thus not included by Samir Amin in his seminal work on the Triad.

Ring 4 (listed in Figure 22) of the imperialist camp includes Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Albania, North Macedonia, Moldova, and Montenegro (except Belarus). Five countries were formal republics of the Soviet Union.

These countries were not previously part of the imperialist camp. To expand its hegemony, the US has targeted this region militarily, politically, and culturally. Serbia, part of the former Yugoslavia, was subjected to a 78-day NATO bombing in 1999. Despite not being a NATO member to this day, Serbia was compelled to participate in joint military exercises with NATO countries in June 2023.

Romania’s entrance to NATO did not involve a referendum. Instead, the ruling government modified the constitution, allowing senators to make the decision without consultation from the Romanian people.

US and western European expansion were done mainly through economic subordination and NATO’s eastern expansion. Fourteen are NATO members, whilst four (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) attended the NATO Vilnius meeting in June 2023. Some of these countries are governed by pro-NATO right-wing regimes (examples include Poland, Ukraine, and Estonia), and actively playing the role of frontline troops against Russia.