Enter the Dragon: China offers Iraq Aerial Strikes on ISIL/ Daesh

Juan Cole writes Enter the Dragon: China offers Iraq Aerial Strikes on ISIL/ Daesh.

The list of powers eager to see Daesh (what Arabs call ISIS or ISIL) defeated grew larger this weekend with a report in the Financial Times that Iraqi foreign minister Ibrahim Jaafari received a pledge from his counterpart Wang Yi that China would intervene against Daesh from the air. It was not clear whether China was offering to fly fighter jets or just programmed missile strikes.

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In short, China is beginning to behave like a classic capitalist imperial country, intervening with military force to protect investments, markets and trade routes. In short, Beijing now has an interest in Iraq that seems to make it willing to deploy air power to defeat Daesh.

Emphasis Mine

Capitalists also use military power to take investments, markets and trade routes away from other Capitalists. Capitalism needs to expands continuously, and when the market becomes saturated, competitors must be destroyed or subsumed.

Ninety-seven years ago, Lenin argued that Imperialism was the highest form of Capitalism. He defined imperialism as follows:

1. ‘the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;’
2. ‘the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’, of a financial oligarchy;’
3. ‘the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;’
4. ‘the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and’
5. ‘the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.’

Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism p.92