Tag Archives: Taiwan

Political Rants

Riding Grievance all the way to armageddon

Biden recently announced another $1.1 billion in arms sales to Taiwan, this on the heels of Nancy Pelosi’s bizarre-ass junket to the island / breakaway province. This, I think, is called tripling down, based mostly on a calculation common to most U.S. politicians that provoking China is a political winner, regardless of context. That may be true, but only if you’re cravenly pursuing popularity with no thought of human consequence. While that may sound particularly like Donald Trump, it also sounds like pretty much every other modern president.

We live in a time, once again, when criticism of American foreign policy is characterized as either foolishly alarmist or callously dismissive towards the victims of our official adversaries. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called out for not being sufficiently critical of either China or Russia. It’s not enough to say that the leadership of both states is arbitrary and rapacious. You need to cheer on the weapons as they roll off the assembly line and into the waiting hands of our Ukrainian or Taiwanese allies.

The actual grievance narrative

What gets glossed over in this toxic discourse is a fuller understanding of history and motive. What is the power behind Putin? He presents himself as the protector of his people – the strong dude who’s going to rescue them from the ravages imposed by the west. This narrative resonates with many Russians because they lived through a catastrophe in the 1990s – an economic implosion born of the “shock therapy” doctrine pushed by the United States and Europe. Many, many Russians lost their livelihoods, their security, even their lives. They also lost any lingering sense that Russia was a great nation. Into that breach walked Putin.

There’s a similar dynamic with China. Xi Jinping and his cohort seek to present a strong, non compliant nation. While China is far from being a democracy, it’s likely that the Chinese people want to think of their country as consequential. That is probably founded in China’s history over the last 100+ years, which started with decades of humiliation at the hands of Europeans (the British especially), followed by civil war and a long, bitter occupation by imperial Japan. No question but that Xi is a tremendous dick, like Putin, but their grievance narrative is based on something real, unlike that of the Republicans.

Revisionist history 2.0

It’s kind of amazing how little understood this dynamic is. The public radio show On The Media did a story about competing historical narratives regarding Hong Kong and China (thanks to Best of the Left for clipping this). What fascinated me about this was that these narratives, which were presented as mythical, all had varying elements of truth embedded in them. There was this “King of Kowloon” graffiti artist who became notorious for claiming that his family owned the Kowloon Peninsula before the British claimed it. Well, maybe. It was something like a feudal society. Then, of course, there is the tabla rasa myth of British Imperialism – the place was empty when we got here.

But then this NPR reporter talked about how China was rewriting history books again to, in effect, erase British imperialism:

Now they’re claiming that Hong Kong never was a British colony. They’re saying that when the British took over Hong Kong, there were these series of treaties, which the Chinese call unequal treaties. They say they were forced upon them by gunboat diplomacy, by violence, and they never actually agreed to any of these treaties. So sovereignty was never ceded. It’s a crazy argument when you think of all those governors and the British administration of Hong Kong to claim that it was never a colony, but it also shows you the sort of mutability of history.

Is it crazy to say that China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong was taken from them by force? Really? It was a forfeit as a result of one of Britain’s opium wars. What do you call that?

No more gunboats.

We seem to be leaning into our imperial posture. And while it’s natural to empathize with the victims of Russia and China, let’s not forget that there are people directly in the cross-hairs of our policy as well. We need to spare them some concern and intervention as well. We also need to bear in mind that major power conflict in the modern age carries with it an insupportable risk of nuclear war.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

An unhealthy dose of imperial fetishism

As I’ve mentioned more times than I should have, I have had very low expectations for the Biden foreign policy since the beginning. By “the beginning”, I mean well before his election, when you couldn’t find foreign policy positions on his campaign web site for love or money. Biden’s fifty-year track record on foreign affairs is not a particularly good one. I remember him saying he was “ashamed” of Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy towards apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s. Um …. that’s about it.

These past two weeks have done little to change my mind on this. The drone assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al Qaeda leader, prompted a lot of fist-pumping on the part of mainstream Democrats and some never-Trump Republicans. A similar amount of jingoism accompanied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, as well. I’m not certain what the expected takeaway is for either of these decisions, but it the point was to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current Democratic leadership is well vested into America’s imperial enterprise, they certainly succeeded.

A child of bad policy

Ayman al-Zawahiri was a terrible person, there’s no question. I think, though, as we are the one global super-power, it’s probably a good idea to consider how our policy may have contributed to his no-goodness. Al-Zawahiri started down the road to al Qaeda when he was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime, where he and his fellow prisoners from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood were tortured, killed, and otherwise abused. Egypt, I will remind you, has long been a major recipient of U.S. aid, far beyond what nearly every other nation has received from us. If Egypt’s notoriously brutal prison system contributed to al-Zawahiri’s radicalism (which it most certainly did), we bear considerable responsibility for that.

Secondly, there likely wouldn’t have been an al-Qaeda for him to join up with if it hadn’t been for (1) the Afghan CIA operation during the 1980s, and (2) the first gulf war in 1990-91, when U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia for the first time, remaining there long after Iraq was driven from Kuwait. Again, these were policy choices, not forces of nature. Without multiple interventions in the middle east and southwest Asia, America might not have been such a big, attractive target for these people. Can’t be sure, but …. might have been worth a try.

Worst of the worst?

Then there’s the question of how many lives were lost at the hands of al-Zawahiri. I would argue far too many. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show last week, he had a long history of planning terrorist actions, including being one of the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and so on. So, thousands of live lost. Not a nice person, right?

Now, there should be some reckoning as to how that record stacks up to the record of his pursuers. All killing is intrinsically bad, so I’m not suggesting that the rapacious policies of the United States somehow lessen the severity and the cravenness of al-Zawahiri’s attacks. But if it’s bad when he does it, then it’s bad when others do it as well, right? And if others do a lot more killing than he did, well … that makes them particularly bad, right?

Let’s just stick to the wars that followed 9/11. How many people died as a result of our actions? Was it less or more than the number of al-Zawahiri’s victims? In all honesty, America’s victims through this period run in the high six-figures to perhaps seven figures. Several countries were destroyed essentially beyond recovery. Fist pump, anyone?

Unfair comparisons

Okay, I know …. it’s really not fair to compare nation states like the U.S. to non-state actors like al Qaeda or individuals like al-Zawahiri. Nation states have international obligations, responsibilities, and should at least formally be accountable to their populations. Terror networks are kind of a law unto themselves, though international law does bear on them. But honestly …. shouldn’t we expect more out of our own government then that they should be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of times the number of deaths caused by our most ruthless enemies?

Seems like kind of a low bar.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

About casting lead upon the waters

You have heard this from me before, but I’ll say it again – in broad strokes, Biden’s foreign policy is kind of awful. We knew this was coming back during the 2020 presidential campaign, when Biden’s web site had near-zero entries for foreign affairs. What I should have included in my ad-hoc assessment is his tendency to create policy off-the-cuff. This may be the only trait he shares with Trump – leading with his mouth.

Sure, I’m deeply concerned about Biden’s foot-dragging on reestablishing the Iran nuclear deal, his disinclination to revisit Obama’s Cuba policy, and his refusal to bury the hatchet with Afghanistan in some respect. But Biden’s tendency to speak personally about public policy is bringing us close to the brink of global war, and that’s not a good place to be. No, he’s not as nuts as Trump was. I think, though, that the world takes what Biden says a bit more seriously.

Pivot to aggression

You probably heard about Biden’s comments regarding Taiwan. I have to think that he raised this issue intentionally, as many both inside and outside the administration have elevated the China/Taiwan issue since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Roughly speaking, the feeling early on was that Russian success might encourage Beijing to move against the island. Most of what I heard on this score was a lot of hand waving, but the fact that that story has been out there says something about our Asia policy.

The Democratic party foreign policy establishment has been anxious to make their “pivot to Asia” since the mid Obama years. That characterization always struck me as odd and belligerent, summoning the image of a corpsman turning on his heel to point his weapon eastward (once again). I have to think that Asians were about as excited over this as Africans were over Bush’s announcement of the “Africa Command” back in the 2000s (or as Martians were over Trump’s announcement of the “Space Force”). But the focus, as always, is ascending China, and not so much the self-determination of Taiwan.

Countering what, exactly?

There’s plenty that China does that should be criticized, but is it a budding military hegemon? Not likely. The press’s hair was on fire over the story that China has more military vessels than we do. Numerically true, but (a) they are predominately smaller ships than the U.S. has, and (b) the calculation doesn’t take into account forces allied to the U.S. military. (See this article in The Diplomat.) The United States has an enormous presence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, maintaining hundreds of bases and fleets of vessels many thousands of miles from its national territory. Can China make that claim?

Last year Biden announced a joint plan with the British to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. Again, this is more about China than Australia. The United States is trying to head off regional consolidation in the Asia Pacific region under the leadership of China. Obama tried to pull China’s neighbors into the Trans Pacific Partnership, another neoliberal multilateral investment agreement along the lines of NAFTA, the MAI, and others. Now Biden is trying an opt-in, a la carte type of pact that is explicitly not neoliberal (this is what his administration claims). Their hope is to get more people behind the pact, of course. (TPP went down in flames.)

Block v. block

The core of this dispute is not democracy; it’s economics. Washington’s nightmare scenario has long been the rise of China as an economic power to the point of displacing us as the center of the global economy. That they are willing to flirt with military conflict is obvious, and it speaks volumes about our leaders’ priorities.

World War II rose from a world divided into competing trading blocks – the dollar block, the sterling block, etc. We should learn from that bitter experience.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.