Chatham House

Construction on Myanmar’s Coco Island Raises Concerns Over India’s Security: Report

The island is located just 55 kilometres north of India’s strategic Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The report by Chatham House noted that “India may soon have to contend with Tatmadaw eyes watching the movements of its warships”.

New Delhi: Satellite images have captured a spurt in construction activity on Myanmar’s Coco Island which could become a hub to mount surveillance of India’s military activities on the nearby Andamans, an article published by a UK think-tank warned.

A report in the monthly magazine of London-based Chatham House said that the latest images indicate that Myanmar “may soon be intending to conduct maritime surveillance operations from Great Coco Island, the largest in an isolated archipelago that lies just 55 kilometres north of India’s strategic Andaman and Nicobar Islands”.

It was also observed that although Great Coco Island had been a subject of conspiracy theories for many years, it now has the potential to be a legitimate cause for concern.

While India has good relations with Myanmar, the article titled “Is Myanmar building a spy base in the Great coco island” rang alarm bells that Beijing’s close ties with Nyay PYi Taw could give it access to sensitive information.

“Given China’s well-established intelligence practices, local intelligence from Great Coco could find its way, either through espionage or consent, to Shanghai,” said the article, authored by the Open Source intelligence expert Damien Symon and Chatham House’s John Pollock.

The article is based on satellite photos dated January 2023 by Maxar Technologies. According to the authors, the images show two new hangars, a new causeway, and a probable accommodation block, all near the runway and radar station at Great Coco island, the largest island in the archipelago.

Further, new images dating back to late March show evidence of land-clearing efforts on the southern tip of the island, which indicate the likelihood of more construction work. An “expanded airbase on Great Coco opens the possibility that India may soon have to contend with Tatmadaw eyes watching the movements of its warships”.

Hosting the only tri-service command of the Indian military, the Andaman and Nicobar islands are a highly strategic piece of real estate, located on important sea lanes in the Indian ocean. As the article also noted, the Andaman and Nicobar islands provide “India’s Eastern Fleet strategic depth in the Bay of Bengal and command approaches to the Strait of Malacca”

There have been media reports of regular sojourns by Chinese submarines in the region for monitoring purposes. The furore of the Chinese surveillance balloon over the United States led to resurfacing of old photos of a similar balloon over Port Blair in January 2022.

With Great Coco island lying just 55 kilometres north of Andaman and Nicobar island, it had always been perceived to be an ideal base to spy on Indian military activity.

Earlier, the Coco Islands were perceived as a direct listening post of China, but as the authors said, there is little evidence for that.

However, the increased construction activity on the island could mean that a rather “non-existent Chinese intelligence post, the Bay of Bengal may soon have to contend with an airbase hosting Myanmar’s air force”.

While Myanmar is not a strategic threat to India, the authors argue that the Junta’s diplomatic isolation and dependence on China for its economic survival could mean that it was vulnerable to any arm-twisting from Beijing.

“If China were to further apply pressure to the Tatmadaw, leveraging naval intelligence acquired from surveillance flights from Great Coco for desperately needed economic investment, it would give Beijing a key regional advantage over New Delhi,” said the report.

India’s close cooperation with the Quad countries would also tempt Beijing to increase its intelligence network in the Indian ocean.

“Were Myanmar to get the base fully established, surveillance flights could track movements to and from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Given China’s well-established intelligence practices, local intelligence from Great Coco could find its way, either through espionage or consent, to Shanghai,” said the article.

Book Review: The Foundations of White Anglo-American World Power

Maribel Morey’s book ‘White Philanthropy’ lays bare how a global network of Anglo-American elites shored up White power and supremacy in the 1940s, when the latter were on the global defensive.

In most circles today, beyond selected academics, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), remains a landmark achievement, a key moment of blinding clarity about White Americans’ obvious racial prejudices and injustice, starkly contrasting with an otherwise moral American creed of equality, causing moral angst and national guilt, and requiring ameliorative action. In contrasting Americans’ guilt over their racism with the Nazis’ proudly dogmatic ideological racism, Myrdal is seen to renew the notion of American moral virtue, founded on a culture that feels guilty about the gap between its ideals and behaviours. Such people, Myrdal argued, could be trusted to lead the White world after 1945 and maintain White world domination.

Maribel Morey
White Philanthropy
The University of North Carolina Press (November 2021)

Maribel Morey’s book White Philanthropy takes a scalpel to the body of beliefs and myths about the Myrdal thesis, clinically dissects them, and lays bare the starkest truth: that Myrdal’s book was part of an entire hegemonic programme led by a global network of Anglo-American elites that spanned decades whose principal aim was to shore up White power and supremacy in an era when the latter were on the global defensive against rising anti-colonial and freedom movements. The book was about White racial prejudice and practices, for White people with agency, who allegedly felt guilty about their behaviour, and who would rectify the matter at their own pace and in their own way. The victims of centuries-long racist-colonial exploitation and domination would just have to passively await the fruits of Whites’ introspection and reform.

I certainly have not read any book-length study that provides such compelling detail and in so persuasive a manner as to ensure that other scholars do not make the mistake of misunderstanding Myrdal’s study again. Yet, I am also aware that the gate-keepers of knowledge in the major foundations and their extensive scholarly and other networks remain powerful. And important landmark studies, which is what Morey’s book truly is, will make an impact but its full impact is unlikely to be of the proportions it ought to attain. The “free market of ideas” is rigged.

Anglo-Saxonism at the heart of the Myrdal project

Morey’s study critically and in great historical detail deconstructs the underlying racialised Anglo-Saxonist interests and motives behind the funding, researching and writing of An American Dilemma. It argues that the principal overtly stated aim of Myrdal’s study, in conjunction with previous studies (of South Africa, and in Africa more broadly) funded by the Carnegie Corporation under Frederick Keppel’s presidency, was to produce national and international policies to manage America’s national as well as the broader Anglo-Saxon-dominated global colour line – to maintain White supremacy and Black subordination, albeit with superficial reform or elimination of the most brutal aspects of racism and colonialism.

In that regard, the book backs the arguments of contemporary leftist and Black nationalist critics of An American Dilemma, whose voices had largely been censored, suppressed/marginalised until decades after the latter’s publication and rapturous reception by White elites (and, importantly, by the more conservative Black organisations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

Carnegie philanthropy and White supremacy

The ground-breaking character of Morey’s monograph – based on research in several countries’ archives – is especially valuable given the challenge of over-turning dominant understandings of Myrdal’s study as a major anti-racist document when in fact it was designed to shore up White power, even during the Second World War, which was significantly driven by Nazi theories of racial superiority, and its genocidal consequences. Any scholar entering this field of investigation will now have to take into account Morey’s study and sources. In fact, even more, the book brings into question the entire world-view of the Carnegie Corporation including whenever they may claim nowadays (and probably since the revolts against the African Studies Association that the Carnegie Corporation largely established, shaped and funded from the 1950s to the 1970s) to have repudiated such racism and elitism.

The book makes a major, original contribution to an understanding of the racialised basis of elite US institutions, networked into the American establishment; their huge impact on US life especially in this case on ‘race relations’ and understanding of racial power structures. Its greatest contribution is in imperialising and globalising Myrdal’s book as well as the thinking on racial power of US elites as organised on a national and international-imperial basis, with a mentality that was literally a ‘world-view’. In that regard, the material on Britain’s Chatham House and other pro-imperial bodies in the empire, and the roots of Andrew Carnegie’s own thinking, as well as in Myrdal’s European-oriented Mathusianism, is very interesting and impressive. The racialised world views of elite think tanks – the US Council on Foreign Relations, and Chatham House – to which Carnegie donated large sums over decades, help flesh out such elite networks.

Morey’s fascinating book also adds to our knowledge of the philosophy and political manoeuvring of Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel, who is not normally viewed as a decisive figure in the broader (mainstream/conventional) literature on US philanthropy.

Frederick Keppel. Photo: By Unknown author/United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division, Public Domain

Morey’s book adds to and deepens and broadens in regard to the Carnegie Corporation and its racialised and colonial Anglo-American elite networks the picture sketched in Frank Furedi’s The Silent War (1998). Furedi shows how race was understood in Anglo-American polities from WWI onwards as the major problem of international politics. To cut a long story short, Furedi shows how a ‘race relations industry’ developed in Anglo-America viewed race relations in specific ways in a period of rising anti-colonialism. In their topsy-turvy world, anti-colonialism was seen as anti-White ‘reverse racism’ and, therefore, likely to cause a global race war.

Morey’s work is further buttressed by Robert Vitalis’s study White World Order, Black Power Politics (2015) which uncovered and exposed in great detail the origins of the academic field of International Relations (IR) as “race relations”, not to mention the field’s active marginalisation and exclusion of anti-colonial scholars at the historically-black Howard University in Washington, DC.

White philanthropy speaks to our current crisis

While there is no doubt that Morey’s study is at heart a work of brilliant historical scholarship, it screams with relevance to current discussions of race and inequality, and White supremacy. The book informs current discussions of the roots of White supremacy and the necessity of its eradication via direct action. It is clearly not the main point of the book but the current era with all its symptoms of crisis and legitimacy of elite institutions, the rise of Trumpism, of White nationalism and open White supremacy, and the fascistic coup attempt and insurrection of January 6, 2021, suggests that those historical forces that Morey uncovers remained just beneath the surface of establishment politics, police forces, and immigration law enforcers. The progressive and radical revolts and uprisings of the 1960s weakened but did not destroy racism nor its deep roots in American capitalism and its racialised class system. In such ways, Maribel Morey’s book rises above the specifically historical. The racist heartbeat of American capitalism is alive and well.

Maribel Morey. Photo: Twitter/@MaribelMorey1

My own study of Carnegie and other such major philanthropic foundations [Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (2012)] suggests that those forces continued in such racialised and elitist manner well after the 1960s and I would recommend scholars use Morey as a springboard to continue investigating Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations’ roles in the post-civil rights and women’s liberation eras. The power of the major foundations to incorporate and domesticate powerful radical dissent should not be underestimated.

Morey’s scholarship is impeccable, thorough, detailed, painstaking, and extensive. The use of multiple archives across several international collections is remarkable and impressive. This book is a labour of love, deeply-felt, inspired scholarship, but whose interpretation and conclusions are clinically-advanced and stated. It is a book that had to be written – and we should be thankful that Morey took up the task. A truly amazing study.

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, and visiting professor at LSE IDEAS (the LSE’s foreign policy think tank). He is a columnist at The Wire. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire.

100 Years of Chatham House: A Century in the Service of Empire

The authority of the liberal international order that grew out of imperial-internationalism, and further embedded Western power in world affairs, is unravelling at home and challenged by rising powers abroad.

Chatham House, the erstwhile Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), one of the world’s oldest and most influential think tanks, is 100 years old this year. Located near Westminster and Whitehall, it is a key institution in the discussion of British foreign affairs and world politics. Its flagship journal, International Affairs, is a sprightly 98 years old.

It leads in the University of Pennsylvania’s global rankings of think tanks. Despite such long-lived influence, however, the very liberal-imperial order founded on Anglo-American power that it championed, is unravelling. It has its work cut out to take on the forces of populism, nationalism, opposition to Western interventionism, and the ‘rise of the rest’, in its second century.

Made in war and revolution

Chatham House was formed in the wake of the First World War and the rise of an increasingly assertive, democratic and socialistic public opinion, especially among the working class and women. Claiming to be objective, non-political and even scientific, it promised to democratise the making of foreign policy, and to end the Foreign Office’s jealously-guarded monopoly over foreign and imperial policy. Steeped in its own elitism, and patronised by the monarch, it aimed at educating public opinion, the very embodiment of what American political commentator Walter Lippmann called a ‘secular priesthood’ to manage the masses in the age of popular discontent and revolution.

Also read: Washington’s Newest Thinktank Is Fomenting a Revolution in US Foreign Affairs

It never really achieved its stated goals, remaining wedded to imperial-internationalism, elitist in character in ‘educating’ newly-awakened ‘public opinion’, and supportive of a racialised world view wedded to Anglo-Saxonism. At the core of the Chatham House project lay the aim of an alliance with the United States as Britain’s imperial power declined. Such attitudes were on full display at the Paris Peace Conferences in 1919-20, where Chatham House was conceived as the British branch of an Anglo-American institute of international affairs.

Saturated with a haughty attitude to inferior colonials considered incapable of self-government, Chatham House elites looked down on an increasingly assertive organised working class, galvanised by the experience of bloody trench warfare, and inspired by the dramatic effects of the Russian revolution, and Lenin’s calls for workers to get out of the war and overthrow ‘their’ governments.

Made by Empire

Chatham House was a descendant of the Round Table, an openly imperialist group whose goal was the preservation of the British empire. Its main achievement was probably the making of the South African constitution under Sir Alfred Milner – which is instructive. It highlighted the group’s imperial and racist attitudes as that constitution embedded and codified racial inequality, laying the initial foundations of apartheid.

But increasing dominions’ nationalism, World War I, the virtual collapse of the moral authority of empire, and the rise of anti-colonial nationalist revolts, not to mention the Bolshevik revolution, forced a major rethink in elite circles. The post-1918 world was one of the crisis of colonial hegemony as the United States emerged as a dominant world power with a new, modern, scientific, concept of global governance, liberal internationalism.

In particular, a group of discontented colonial and other officials, and their allies, were largely ignored in the Paris Peace Conference deliberations and decided to form an institute of international affairs that would make the making of foreign policy more democratic and scientific. Chatham House was born as the weaker twin of its US counterpart, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR publishes the influential review, Foreign Affairs, that reflects the mindsets and preoccupations of the US foreign policy establishment.

But its imperial credentials and elitist mentalities, with their embedded Anglo-Saxonist notions of racial superiority, meant that Chatham House was destined to broaden the basis of oligarchy rather than democratise foreign policy. It meant that Chatham House became ever more integrated into the mentalities and machinery of the official foreign policy making process, even receiving direct funding from the state to supplement its corporate donations and US foundation grants. It was, moreover, part of a set of transatlantic, especially Anglo-American, elite networks that cemented politics, government, finance and cultures.

Leaders of Chatham House supported the appeasement of fascism in the 1930s, endorsing the official policies of the British government towards Nazi Germany. In the Second World War, the Institute was virtually nationalised by the Foreign Office to engage in conceptualising and planning for the post-war new world order, in which its Anglo-American origins and connections permitted it to leverage influence in regard to the making of policy but also conducting semi-official information campaigns, and diplomacy via the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). In the latter, Chatham House was the IPR’s UK national council, using the transnational forum to defend the ‘achievements’ of British colonialism against challenges from its US, Canadian, and Asian counterparts. Chatham House left its institutional imprint in the Foreign Office through the formation of its Research Department, which exists today as FCO Research Analysts. WWII was probably the height of Chatham House’s influence and prestige though it remained close to government, media, academia and embassies in London, not to mention West End clubland.

Committee of Post-War Reconstruction meeting in the Institute’s Common Room, 1943. Photo: Chatham House/CC BY 2.0

The liberal international order of the post-1945 period – the Bretton Woods system of UN, IMF, World Bank – and even the later Marshall Plan, and the concept and practice of ‘foreign aid’ for Third World ‘development, were debated and conceived in elite networks at the centre of which sat Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and their states’ respective foreign ministries.

By the1950s Chatham House had also become a model for think tanks across the empire and dominions. Versions of Chatham House appeared from the 1920s and 1930s in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India, and even across Europe. The Anglo-Saxonist core of the organisation, and its relations with the US and the rest of the English-speaking world, remained significant well into the postwar period.

Yet the winds of change forced a formal shift against overt racism in world politics. In the 1960s, Chatham House was accused of showing obvious bias against South Africa in the invitation to dialogues with a succession of sufficiently moderate black representatives. The aim was a negotiated revolution to ensure the smooth transfer of power to responsible black elites suitably attached in mind and interests to western capital.

Moreover, although the institute had no affiliation to any political party, it actually operated within and was greatly influenced by a particular ideological consensus or framework that reflected the mainstream of parliamentary politics – especially in its attachment to US global strategies, while ignoring alternatives. Yet in the chilly atmosphere of Thatcherism and Reaganomics of the 1980s, Chatham House suffered serious attacks when it showed its willingness to start dialogues with an unreformed Soviet Union.

As Chatham House enters its second century in 2020, much as its US counterpart the CFR, it faces a crisis of authority of the liberal international order that it helped conceptualise, foster, and engineer in and after the Second World War. As Antonio Gramsci noted, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Indeed, Chatham House is one of the key elements of a complex international elite knowledge network that is waging a battle for hearts and minds in the wake of Trumpism, Brexit, growing popular opposition to military interventionism in the Middle East, and the dissolution of the United Kingdom itself. The authority of the liberal international order that grew out of ‘liberal-empire’ – imperial-internationalism – and further embedded Western power in world affairs, is unravelling at home and challenged by rising powers abroad.

Shihui Yin is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, and an alumnae of City, University of London.