Tag Archives: China

For What Should We Fight Russia or China? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on April 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

Are Americans ready and willing to fight and die for Ukraine? Taiwan? From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

Last Monday, in a single six-hour period, NATO launched 10 air intercepts to shadow six separate groups of Russian bombers and fighters over the Arctic, North Atlantic, North Sea, Black Sea and Baltic Sea.

Last week also brought reports that Moscow is increasing its troop presence in Crimea and along its borders with Ukraine.

Joe Biden responded. In his first conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Biden assured him of our “unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression in the Donbass and Crimea.”

Though Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and we have no treaty obligation to fight in its defense, this comes close to a war guarantee. Biden seems to be saying that if it comes to a shooting war between Moscow and Kiev, we will be there on the side of Kiev.

Last week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov answered that if the U.S. sends troops to Ukraine, Russia will respond.

Again, is Biden saying that in the event of a military clash between Ukrainians and Russians in Crimea, Donetsk or Luhansk, the U.S. will intervene militarily on the side of Ukraine?

Such a pledge could put us at war with a nuclear-armed Russia in a region where we have never had vital interests, and without the approval of the only institution authorized to declare war — Congress.

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China and Russia Launch a ‘Global Resistance Economy’, by Alastair Crooke

Posted on April 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Belt and Road Initiative, but it is also a statement against America global hegemony. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

The U.S. will ignore the message from Anchorage. It is already testing China over Taiwan, and is preparing an escalation in Ukraine, to test Russia.

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (c. 500 BCE) advises that: “To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands; yet the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself … Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will; and does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him”. This is the essence of the Chinese resistance economy – a strategy which has been fully unveiled in the wake of the Anchorage talks; talks that silenced any lingering thoughts in Beijing that America might somehow find some modus vivendi with Beijing in its headlong pursuit of primacy over China.

Although earlier there had been tantalising glimpses of déshabillé, the full reveal to China’s tough stance and rhetoric has only been permitted now – post-Anchorage – and the talks’ confirmation that the U.S. intends to block China’s ascent.

If it is assumed that this ‘resistance’ initiative constitutes some tit-for-tat ‘jab’ at Washington – through sinking Biden’s Iran ambitions, as revenge for America loudly crying ‘war crimes’ (‘genocide’ in Xingjian) – then we miss wholly its full import. The scope of the Iran pact by far transcends trade and investment, as one commentator in the Chinese state media made plain: “As it stands, this deal (the Iran pact) will totally upend the prevailing geopolitical landscape in the West Asian region that has for so long been subject to U.S. hegemony”.

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NATO Expanding its Theater With China in its Sights, by Ann Wright

Posted on April 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

For anybody worried about potential war with China, take heart, the US will have its NATO allies, including powerhouses like Albania and Montenegro. From Ann Wright at consortiumnews.com:

Ann Wright says a new proposed roadmap reflects an alarming expansion beyond Europe and Russia, the alliance’s traditional traditional area of operations and concern.   

The U.K.’s Royal Air Force aerobatic team, the Red Arrows, performing over Kuala Lumpur during a series of flypasts in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions in 2016. (Defence Images, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

During the March 23-24 meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) council, Anthony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, encouraged NATO members to join the U.S. in viewing China as an economic and security threat to the U.S. as well as to NATO countries, thereby expanding NATO’s areas of focus to include the Pacific. This is a dangerous move that must be challenged.

To gain insight into what transpired at the March NATO meeting, we can look to a roadmap for NATO’s future, which was released last fall. The report, entitled “NATO 2030: United for a New Era,” is intended to be a guide for the military alliance in meeting the challenges it will face in the next decade. In the report, released in November, the “independent group” of five advisers from 10 NATO countries identified 13 challenges and threats to NATO in the next decade. 

This new proposed roadmap for NATO reflects an alarming expansion: It is as much about China and the Asia/Pacific region as it is about NATO’s traditional traditional area of operations and concern, Europe and Russia.

Although the group identified the No. 1 threat to NATO as Russia, China was named as threat number 2. 

The document brings the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into the Pacific and attempts to provide a justification to expand and strengthen “partnerships” in the Asia/Pacific region. NATO already has four “partners” in the Pacific through bilateral agreements with Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

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The Chinese-Russian-Iranian Alliance Ushers in a New Hope for the Middle East, by Matthew Erhet

Posted on April 4, 2021 | 1 comment

Economic development is hard when an outside power is continuously bombing you or trying to change your regime. From Matthew Ehret at strategic-culture.org:

The U.S. has little to offer a world whose underdevelopment has everything to do with America’s choice to reject its own Constitutional traditions.

As the USA continues its lunge into the abyss of obsolescence, under the new Don Quixote-modelled leadership of Joe Biden, Russia and China have accelerated the next phase of Middle East reconstruction and stabilization this week with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s March 24-30th Middle East tour resulting in the finalization of the long-awaited Five Point Initiative for Security in Southwest Asia on March 30th and $400 billion Iran deal on March 27th. These milestones were accompanied by a powerful Chinese-Iran joint declaration on Syrian reconstruction standing in total unified opposition to the regime change fanatics of the west.

The fact that Wang Yi’s Middle East tour follows hot on the heals of the March 23rd Russia-China Joint Statement on Global Governance should come as no surprise as many disposable nations across the Arab world with more than a little blood on their hands, have increasingly come to recognize that their participation in the collapsing western-run order is no longer compatible with their desire to survive. Among these nations are included Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Oman, the UAE, and Bahrain- all of whom hosted Wang Yi last week and all of whom have begun their transitions towards a new pro-Chinese paradigm.

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The Pending Collapse of the ‘Rules-based International Order’ Is an Existential Threat to the United States, by Scott Ritter

Posted on April 3, 2021 | 1 comment

“Rules-based international order” is US foreign policy blob-speak for the US calls the tune for the rest of the world. From Scott Ritter at globalresearch.ca:

For decades, America styled itself the ‘indispensable nation’ that led the world & it’s now seeking to sustain that role by emphasizing a new Cold War-style battle against ‘authoritarianism’. But it’s a dangerous fantasy.

It seems a week cannot go by without US Secretary of State Antony Blinken bringing up the specter of the ‘rules-based international order’ as an excuse for meddling in the affairs of another state or region.

The most recent crisis revolves around allegations that China has dispatched a fleet of more than 200 ships, part of a so-called ‘maritime militia’, into waters of the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines. China says that these vessels are simply fishing boats seeking shelter from a storm. The Philippines has responded by dispatching military ships and aircraft to investigate. Enter Antony Blinken, stage right:

“The United States stands with our ally, the Philippines, in the face of the PRC’s maritime militia amassing at Whitsun Reef,” Blinken tweeted. “We will always stand by our allies and stand up for the rules-based international order.”

Blinken’s message came a mere 18 hours after he tweeted about his meeting in Brussels with NATO.

“Our alliances were created to defend shared values,” he wrote. “Renewing our commitment requires reaffirming those values and the foundation of international relations we vow to protect: a free and open rules-based order.”

Our rules, our order

What this actually means, of course, is that the order is rules-based so long as it is the nation called America that sets these rules and is accepted as the world’s undisputed leader.

Blinken’s fervent embrace of the ‘rules-based international order’ puts action behind the words set forth in the recently published ‘Interim National Security Strategy Guidance’, a White House document which outlines President Joe Biden’s vision “for how America will engage with the world.” 

While the specific term ‘rules-based international order’ does not appear in the body of the document, the precepts it represents are spelled out in considerable detail, and conform with the five pillars of the “liberal international order” as set forth by the noted international relations scholars, Daniel Duedney and G. John Ikenberry, in their ground-breaking essay, ‘The nature and sources of liberal international order’, published by the Review of International Studies in 1999.

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Posted in Collapse, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, War

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From the Notebook: Archegos Bikini Atolls, by Tom Luongo

Posted on April 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

Is Archegos a Chinese financial shot across the American bow? From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

Do you remember the end of Dr. Strangelove? When the Russian ambassador reveals the existence of the Doomsday device Strangelove makes the point that such weapons only have deterrent power if everyone knows about them.

Secret weapons have no ability to deter cataclysmic violence.

The reply from the Russian ambassador is one for the ages, “It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday.”

Remember this when we consider the curious question of the demise of Archegos Capital.

Becuse sometimes I watch something unfold and I have zero opinion on it whatsoever.  The Suez blockage was one of them.  I had to will myself to care beyond the obvious, “this is bad” reaction. The more I think about it, however, the more significant it becomes (more on that in future posts).

On the other hand, the minute I read a single article about the vaporization of Archegos capital on Moday morning I smelled a rat, or least something vaguely rat-like.  And what immediately popped into my head was this thing is important, but not for the reasons anyone will admit to on CNBC or in the financial press.

In fact, they would go out of their way to demonize Bill Hwang, the head of Archegos, who ‘acted irresponsibly,’ ‘ran a scam,’ et cetera while everyone goes into cover thine own ass mode.

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The Longer Telegram: A Baby Pacifier for Infantile Washington Policymakers, by Martin Sieff

Posted on April 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

Pushing China around should be a cornerstone of US foreign policy. The geniuses who think up such policies rarely ask what happens if China pushes back. From Martin Sieff at strategic-culture.org:

The Longer Telegram reflects the intellectual, moral and emotional bankruptcy of what passes for “thought” inside the Washington Beltway, Martin Sieff writes.

The now famous – and ludicrous – Atlantic Council “Longer Telegram” on China, unintentionally has made a global laughing stock of the Atlantic Council.

But it still deserves careful consideration as an example of the pathetic  – and infantile – intellectual pretensions of Washington’s geo-political supposed “elite.” And their ever-fresh infantile wonk need to be “tougher”, “bigger” and “better” than their childhood heroes such as George Kennan and George Marshall.

Francois-Marie Arouet – Voltaire – shredded the remaining pretensions of the thousand-year-obsolete Holy Roman Empire in his day (the 18th century Enlightenment) by pointing out that it was not Holy, nor Roman nor even an Empire. Similarly, the “Longer Telegram” that purported to lay out a new US National Strategy towards China is not a telegram at all. The title of course comes from George Kennan’s now revered – as secular American Scripture – “Long Telegram” of 1946 to Secretary of State James Byrnes that was eagerly seized upon as the blue print for supposed containment of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.

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It Got Serious In A Hurry, by Robert Gore

Posted on April 1, 2021 | 38 comments

He’s a joke, but nobody’s laughing.

Trump’s five years were fun. He said things that provoked outrage among all the right people, often because they were true. You could laugh at their hypocritical idiocies, hysterical posturing, and sputtering anger. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, anyone who can watch Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow without laughing has a heart of stone. Frothing anger fueled effort after effort to depose Trump until success was realized with overblown pandemic panic, riots, and a clearly rigged election. If nothing else, Trump exposed the mendacity, arrogance, incompetence, venality, and criminality of the Corruptocracy.

Reality doesn’t invert. A corollary is that the severity of consequences from an inversion is the square of the distance between the inversion and reality. Consider the US military. It has disregarded the realities of the wars it has fought—the relative difficulty of invasion versus defense, the deadly effectiveness of guerrilla warfare and insurgency, the corruption, tyranny, and lack of domestic support for our puppets, and so on—losing every conflict since WWII, often after lengthy and in some cases ongoing engagements.

The current crop of corruptocrats have introduced yet another inversion in the military, the woke inversion. The military will now be graded on its commitment to combat-irrelevant factors: the racial, ethnic, gender, sexual preferences and political creeds of its forces, and their professed fealty to regnant political dogma. In other words, “diversity” in everything but thought.

This inversion is huge and given the distance squared corollary, it will soon render the armed forces incapable of fighting even a war for the protection of the United States proper. Given its ineptitude fighting offensive wars, the military will be completely useless. The defense budget, however, will grow ever more bloated.

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Joe Biden aspired to mediocrity in his prime and it’s been downhill ever since. As for Kamala Harris: some are born hacks, some achieve hackness, and some have hackness thrust upon them. She’s all three. They and their string-pullers have taken things from fun to serious—deadly serious—in a little over two months.

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Americans… ‘Know Your Enemy’, by Eamon McKinney

Posted on March 31, 2021 | Leave a comment

For most Americans, their biggest enemy is the American, not the Chinese, government. From Eamon McKinney at strategic-culture.org:

It wasn’t China that sold out generations of yet unborn Americans to feed the military Industrial complex to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars/year. It wasn’t China that bailed out the criminal bankers for trillions more dollars.

“Know your enemy” is one of the 36 strategies from the “Art of War” It was written by Sun Tzu 2600 years ago during the Warring States period in China. It was a treatise on dealing with war and conflict. I was almost entirely unaware of the writing during my first two years in China. That was 45 years ago when I was a foreign student at University in Beijing. I studied the language, the history and literature as a way to understand this fascinating and ancient culture. Doubtless the Art of War was not unknown in China, but I never recall it being quoted once in any modern context.

I was first acquainted with the work in earnest, not in China but in America. In 1979 after leaving China, I attended a leading business school in America in pursuit of an M.B.A. It seems that the Art of War was enjoying a rise in popularity, and was required reading at all the major American business schools. These leading business schools were grooming the next generation of American business leaders. Most of my classmates went on to be lawyers or worked on Wall Street. In many cases both. And they carried the lessons of the Art of War with them.

And what were the lessons that they extracted from this ancient work?

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U.S. Aggressiveness Will Accelerate Its Demise, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on March 31, 2021 | Leave a comment

Does the US government even know how to treat another national government as a coequal rather than either as an enemy or a subordinate? From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

The foreign policy of the current U.S. administration is exactly the same as the foreign policy of the previous one. In short: disastrous.

There are dozens of examples: The “maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran continues, the sanctions on Venezuela will be upheld or even strengthened, the bombing of Syria, no change on Yemen and so on.

The problem is that none of these ‘we are tough guys’ policies achieves any purpose.

From the outside world the behavior and tough talk of U.S. officials is seen as juvenile. It demonstrates a  lack of knowledge, wisdom and strategy.

Consider these recent headlines about China:

> The United States will take an uncompromising stance in talks with China on Thursday in Alaska, officials have said, in the first face-to-face meetings between senior officials from the two rivals since U.S. President Joe Biden took office.Beijing has called for a reset to ties, now at their lowest in decades, but Washington has said the Alaska talks will be a one-off, and any future engagement depends on China improving its behavior. <

Then, after days of badmouthing China, it finally dawned on Blinken that he needs China’s help.

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