00:00 Gilbert Achcar: The questions, interventions — seven minutes? No way I can answer all the questions anyhow. This discussion will continue this afternoon, and Catherine will deal with China, issues like that. So I'm not going to cover or answer every question that was put, let alone also say a few things about Greece. I would have liked to, I don't have time. But just to remind you that they had a Plan
00:30 B which was not a Grexit [?], and even that was dropped by Tsipras. And because — remember what you said yourself — Grexit is not popular in Greece, and you can't put it as a programme. I think that's one key reason for the very low score of Popular Unity, because they built it around Grexit. But this is a different debate.
00:57 So, about the key issues. The EU — I mean the common market, let's put it that way — the common
01:02 market indeed, from the beginning, is something that the United States very much encouraged and pushed for. In some way the United States is the godfather of the European Union, historically. And that was for economic reasons, because US companies needed a larger scale than a scattered European market. They needed one single unified market for their own plants, their plants in Europe, because they had invested a lot in
01:34 car industry, many other things, after that. So that was part of it. And the United States has not been looking at the EU the way that, for instance, Germany and France would have been looking at each other before the Second World War. You have some people who are still believing that the world is as described by Lenin in 1916, and that all
02:04 these imperialist powers are on the brink of war with each other. The world has changed radically. The structure of world imperialism has changed radically after 1945. It got into a structure with a dominant power, with an overlord, which is the United States of America — which has been rising from the late nineteenth century up to the peak that it reached in hegemony during the Second World War. So
02:36 you had a different structure of global imperialism: not one in which — not a multipolar imperialism where everybody, you know, the world of all against all — but one which is structured with an overlord and vassals, to use medieval terms. And so the European Union and Japan have been basically the vassals of the overlord, the United States of America. And there are no rebels here, in the sense that they are not trying to put down
03:08 this vassal relation, because it has been essential for the whole system. On the one hand the European Union, for various reasons we mentioned, is not an integrated state, far from it, and that holds as well when it comes to the military. Even if it were, it's nowhere near entering into a competition militarily with the United States
03:38 of America — at a time of austerity. To imagine that the European Union will increase tremendously, several times, its military expenditure to get rid of its dependence on the United States is just a complete illusion, a complete misreading of the world. The fact is it is the United States that keeps exerting pressure on European states to increase their military expenditure all the time.
04:09 If you know the relation between Washington and the European allies and Japan, it is the United States that is putting pressure on them to increase their military expenditure. It's not that the United States is resenting or fearing them. It's not the same with China — and that's a big difference — or Russia. The United States sees Russian and Chinese military expenditure as challenging US hegemony; it sees European and Japanese military expenditure as actually enhancing the hegemony, the strength of
04:41 the system in which the United States is the stable and unchallenged — for anything near future — overlord. Now, the decline of US hegemony, as I mentioned, is due to the reasons that I am not going to repeat, and we have seen this in the inability to intervene in recent
05:18 years in the Middle East at any scale resembling what the United States used to allow itself in the past. The point is that when the Arab uprising started in 2011, it was at the same time the low point in the history of US hegemony in the Middle East since the early 90s — since the massive intervention of the United States, seizing the opportunity of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, with a
05:51 peak in US hegemony in the region. The low point was reached in 2011, with the United States leaving Iraq without achieving any of its key goals in that country: not able to leave military bases, not controlling the country, with a government which actually is much closer linked to Tehran, which is
06:23 the arch enemy of the United States in the region. So essentially it was a total failure, a total defeat. The Libyan intervention is one in which Washington kept a low profile, with the so-called leading from behind, and it was one which actually came as a further illustration of the US decline in exerting its hegemony and power in the region — because Libya
06:54 was a defeat, unlike what people think. The goal of the United States was not to overthrow Gaddafi as such; the goal of the United States was to control the insurgency and get some kind of orderly transition at the end, which would keep the state under US or Western control. And that failed miserably — miserably, because the insurrection in Tripoli went beyond what they expected, the whole Libyan state crumbled, and what you have
07:25 now in Libya is of course a disaster for Western interests. How can anyone see that as a victory for Western interests [?]? So that's a disaster, and it added to Iraq — it added to Iraq in enhancing the syndrome, the inability to act, to intervene. And we saw it in Syria, with a US
07:56 government which hesitated very long before intervening, and only intervened against ISIS when ISIS spread last summer back to Iraq. Now, someone said: how can the US reconfigure defeat? The United States has used ISIS as a leverage to get back some
08:29 clout in Iraq, and that's what they are doing now. The United States is back in Iraq, seizing the opportunity created by ISIS. That's how they could get the prime minister replaced. They are intervening in the country and enhancing themselves. Now, as for the issue of bombing ISIS in Syria — first of all, we really should be
09:01 careful in using terms. It's not bombing Syria, it's bombing ISIS in Syria that they are doing. You speak of the Kurdish struggle: the Kurds are imploring for more bombing of this kind, and their leader is praising NATO all the time, and they would be very happy with a military intervention on the ground, which we would oppose of course. They would be very happy with that. In north Iraq, the no-fly zone, which
09:36 did not involve bombing by the way — it was just enough for the United States and Britain to tell Saddam Hussein this is the limit where your helicopters can go, and nothing was done. And the Kurds in north Iraq were extremely happy with that. So what do you make of it? It's not that easy. The issue is not solved by a Stop the War Coalition kind of position. It's more complex than that.
10:08 I'm not saying that we have to support it, I am certainly not saying that, but the issue is more complex. And actually it's not a major issue for us whether Britain carries on bombing ISIS along with the United States and France in Syrian territory or not — it is a very secondary issue. I wouldn't make of it a key issue in that regard. I don't support it, I am not going to oppose it, I
10:40 won't go into the streets for that. Because they are bombing ISIS in agreement with Assad, and in agreement with the Kurds, and in agreement with your position, the other opposition — everybody agrees on that, no one disagrees, in Syria. So what does it mean? I think you need to get this picture more clearly, also because you have to talk also to Syrians — those millions of Syrian refugees that are coming, and all that. You have to understand how they see these kinds of position. And you have
11:12 had some experience, I think, with the Syrian solidarity movement. You have to know how to talk to people and be convincing. [inaudible]
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