China Cuba dynamic: some friends, and other friends

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(July 06, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Sri Lanka went to China for arms, and is now going to Cuba for dengue eradication larvae.

To the total naval gazing recluse, even, that should say something. This is while the United States of America is stalling an IMF loan facility to Sri Lanka with the able guidance of ex-colonial power Britain, and we have to perhaps look to some other longstanding friends for some succour in the post war hour of need.

Now, if all this does say something about who our friends are and who they definitely are not, it also does say something about certain other global verities and emerging realities.

We are going to Cuba for dengue eradication not just because Cuba is a friend, but also because Cuba has been much smarter in the area of public health than for example her neighbour the United States of America for instance, which has for decades now been in the throes of what’s veritably a public health crisis due to rising health insurance costs.

Our going to China for arms is not due to any dearth of that commodity in the United
States —- the US being by far the largest supplier of arms to the world —— but is due to the fact that US suzerainty over world affairs as the world’s ‘sole superpower’ is diminishing so very fast that their writ no longer runs.

The recent financial crisis seems to have sealed things for the current economic arrangement that dominates world commerce, and just as this column predicted at about the time Obama was elected president, the US is now being pushed into accepting that its era of hegemony over world affairs is over, with China demanding that her currency be made the reserve currency of the world.

Power alignments right

So one thing can be said —- not just that we have defeated the LTTE —- we also most certainly got our power alignments right, notwithstanding the benefits of mosquito eradication to boot.

Therefore, it’s not the end of civilization that’s neigh, but the end of the West - - the end of the West as we know it.

That decline was hastened almost totally by the recent ramping up of the rapacious character of Western modelled capitalist economics, with neo-liberalism championed by the World Bank and the lending agencies being intensified.

Not strangely, that we have to go to Cuba for the dengue menace is not mere accident.
All we got courtesy the Western nations in terms of mosquito eradication was DDT and clean-up campaigns, and this kind of help was channelled often through multi national companies or the Monsantos of the world for which even the WHO is ever ready to give business. Rocket science is not needed to ascertain why such methods failed, whereas the Cuban method which was entirely based upon a culture of prevention, is simpler, and offers the last hope.

But also, we need to come back to the first point, made in the first paragraph of this article. It’s vital that we make the Western embassies here understand that we are old enough in these parts to see the contrasts. China and Cuba for instance, have been friendly nations, and the United States England and France etc, have been threatening nations ie; their relationship with us, particularly during the last eight months or so, has been one of obnoxious hostility veiled by the very thin veneer of routine diplomatic ties.

Now, the common narrative behind all of this is that Sri Lanka is losing, and that Sri Lanka is losing doubly by alienating the ‘world’ while courting the so called rogue nations and the black-marked club of nation states including China, a line that was plugged incessantly by the UNP’s foreign-minister-in-waiting Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, with abjectly silly lines such as these: ...our current foreign policy which has alienated our allies is so negative (or words to that effect).....it would not have made Lakshman Kadirgarmar happy.

Fantasies

That Paikiasothy fantasies that he would be the next Laksman Kadirgarmar (British educated foreign minister, and a Tamil, mollifying world opinion on behalf of Sri Lanka...) is entirely another matter, though its laughable as certainly Lakshamn Kadirgarmar he is NOT, not in terms of ability, and most certainly not in terms of his suitability for the job —— he being a Tamil who essentially supported the LTTE, an outfit that Lakshman Kadirgarmar abhorred and so famously and tirelessly worked against.

What’s far more germane is that considering how the stakes are evolving, those countries that are now said to be rejecting us, may have more to lose on the long run than we have to lose by being rejected by them.

Preposterous

Though this might sound preposterous or even laughable to the skin-deep level world affairs analyst, the more penetrative observer would soon see the merit in the argument.

It was written in a Indian news magazine for instance, that India warmed upto Sri Lanka’s effort, latterly, particularly because the Indians realized that Sri Lanka is going ahead with China’s and Pakistan’s support anyway, and were succeeding in the war, which made the Indian foreign policy Brahmins soon realize that India would lose, and China would gain in the geo-political roulette in which Sri Lanka was a key prize with harbour facilities to boot, and strategic locations at her disposal.

Now, that’s written clearly in an Indian news magazine of repute — the ‘Week’ it was I think,’ or the ‘Frontline’, I cannot remember — and that would banish all theories that the big and the powerful nations are like the Gods that always kill us for their sport. It seems India too has got to swallow some pride sometimes.

Ditto, the circumstances regarding the so called Western powers, which stand to lose on the long run by jeopardizing relations with this country under the illusion that old paradigms of carrot and stick handout-aid still operate.

It’s not just that Sri Lanka will eventually find a way to survive without western handouts, but it’s also that Sri Lanka will be part and parcel of the emerging new dynamic in the cosmology of the evolution of superpowers. We, tied to China and the brave new world, can indeed leave the West far behind with Western leaders scratching their heads in our trail to understand what happened, and why it happened so fast.....

Courtesy: Lakbima News , weekly news paper based Colombo.

-Sri Lanka Guardian