So, we have seen these hugely important developments in South America. On the other hand, the economic center of the world has moved eastward. China is the new workshop of the world. Every cheap product you can buy all over the world is produced in China. And when the economy moves in such a big way, can politics be far behind? So the question that will haunt the twenty-first century is whether a new imperial power is emerging on a global scale to challenge the United States from the east. Will this happen? What will the United States do to block it? These are the questions now, which can only be understood by seeing the history of what has happened in the preceding two centuries. You can’t run away from history. I don’t think we will have a repeat of the First World War, because that would mean obliteration. On the other hand, the big question, which couldn’t be asked a hundred years ago but has to be asked now, is put at its simplest, does the world have the resources for every single family to live like an American middle-class family lived in the 1950s and 1960s? And I think the answer is no. The world doesn’t have the resources to do that. In which case, what is the point of this crazed, endless competition? Wouldn’t it be better to find a different way of living for people all over the world?
You’re talking about global problems, but you don’t have much respect for one of the bodies that was allegedly established to address such problems, the United Nations, for instance. Is that correct?
Yes, this is true. I don’t go for the international institutions. I think a lot can be done regionally. Here again, I return to the one example we have of a certain amount of regional cooperation in South America. I’m not one of those who thinks that what is going on in South America is a revolution, even though some of the leaders, such as Chávez, call it that. Essentially what is going on is that elected politicians are pushing through important social-democratic reforms to benefit the poor. That is very important in itself. One doesn’t have to give it a new coloration. That’s what they’re doing. And the fact that, over the last fifty years, the Cubans have created a social infrastructure that produces more doctors per person in the population than any other country in the world, and these doctors can be provided as human capital in return for other things to Latin America and Africa is an amazing development. So when Hugo Chávez is confronted by a strike of middle-class professionals and the hospitals are closing down, he rings his friend Fidel Castro and within a few days, sixteen to twenty thousand Cuban doctors with their cheap medicines are on planes, coming over to set up clinics in the poorest parts of the country. That has an impact on people, including people who disagree with you.
I’m not saying that the world is going to be just changed like this everywhere, but for countries to collaborate regionally becomes important. Why shouldn’t China, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula form a sort of a union, like the European Union? Why? Because the United States won’t let it happen.
Why is that?
Because the United States sees the Far East as the biggest threat to its global hegemony. The Japanese, unlike the Germans, have not even been allowed a foreign policy of their own since the Second World War. They more or less do what they’re told. This is dangerous, because it could give rise to dangerous forms of nationalism again, which wouldn’t be good either for Japan or anyone else. What might be better is if the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans were encouraged to work together. Within that framework you could settle the North Korean question as well.
You realize there’s a lot of antipathy between these three countries?
Of course, but there was a lot of antipathy between the Germans and the English, between the Germans and the French in Europe. Despite the bad history, there is nothing on earth now to stop these countries collaborating with each other,
Well, the Japanese were apparently so brutal in China and Korea that it’s difficult for the Chinese to accept that the Japanese will not apologize for any of this.
Well, that is true, but I think an apology doesn’t cost very much. The Germans are having to pay for what they did by reparations to Israel forever.
The Germans have apologized.
They have.
But the Japanese have not.
No, you’re right. Has the United States apologized to them for using nuclear weapons?
No, nor to Vietnam.
No, nor to the Vietnamese. What I’m suggesting is not an easy way out. And there are lots of obstacles in its path, but that’s the way things should go. I think we need to strengthen regional corporation for the world to pull out of the crisis and for something decent to happen.
You have written about Israel and Pakistan as confessional states. Pakistan is a division from India. Israel is a division from Palestine. Germany, Korea, and Vietnam were also created through separation. But these you would not say are confessional states, Korea, Germany, and Vietnam. So among the divisional states, the confessional states have turned out to be more dangerous. That’s what you are saying?
I am, though in the case of Pakistan, the country broke up in 1971, when East Pakistan split off and became Bangladesh, which reduced its effectiveness as a state and severely damaged its ideology. The Israelis, by contrast, have been slowly accumulating more and more land, occupying more and more territory. But in both cases the elites are fairly hardened, implacable people who do what they think best, whether or not they have the support of their populations. The Israelis do have the support of their population. The Pakistanis don’t. Nonetheless, in both these cases, it is not impossible to conceive that at the end of this century, Pakistan will be part of a larger union while preserving its state structures—a South Asian Union with India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal makes a lot of sense—and that, at some stage, the Israeli population will realize that enough is enough, and that the Palestinians will realize they are never going to get an independent state of any significance, and there will be a move toward a single-state solution of Palestine and Israel in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, smaller minorities, will be able to live together. I don’t think there is another way out.
You quote Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, as saying it’s not just McDonald’s but McDonnell Douglas that you need to run the empire.
Yes.
And what did he mean by that?
He meant that essentially it is US military power that is decisive in this world, and that helps to maintain McDonald’s all over the world. You know, there are now US military bases or installations in sixty or seventy countries of the world. That is a very heavy presence for the United States. And it doesn’t help them particularly, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, to have these extensions. This projection of US power not only produces anger and resentment, it has a destabilizing effect. The Russians, for instance, in Georgia, are saying, if you can intervene militarily in Kosovo, we can do it in Georgia. Who are you to tell us what to do? The Indians are saying, if terrorists from a country hate you, you occupy that country. How can you tell us not to do the same thing? So this pattern of American behavior has not created a world that is moving toward peace and stability, which they claimed was their aim.