Official
Washington regards China as Enemy Numero Uno, and war fever has addled
our rulers’ brains. You doubt our pentagon contains nitwits who believe
we can bomb Chinese cities with impunity? Well look no farther than a
New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins back in November, citing military
sources. That was when president Joe Biden tamped down war hysteria by
meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20
summit in Bali and openly reconfirming U.S. support of the One China
policy.
That’s
the policy that has, to the annoyance of first-class dingbat warmongers
everywhere, kept the peace since the 1970s, one that Biden had
previously undermined with his four pronouncements that the U.S. would
support Taiwan militarily, should its possible declaration of
independence cause a hullaballoo with Beijing. Fortunately, back then
while at the G20, Biden appeared not to have been reading the New
Yorker, for if he had, he would have encountered Filkins’ long takeout
on Taiwan, of the sort that could encourage the president’s worst
instincts, a summary in which military sources were quoted, discussing
possible U.S. bombings of Chinese cities.
Such
assaults would quickly involve nuclear weapons, but the article omitted
that. Indeed, the report reflected the delusion of military planners
that they could perpetrate such a monstrosity with impunity. Nowhere did
Filkins mention that war with China over Taiwan entails tens of
millions of dead Americans and the same number of dead Chinese. The
article did not even discuss a nuclear contretemps, reflecting the
wishful belief of its official U.S. sources that they could contain a
fight with Beijing, and any resort to nuclear war would be limited.
This, in turn, reflects the hallucination that limited nuclear wars are
possible and winnable and that low-yield nuclear devices would not lead
AT ONCE to the high-yield variety. Thus readers ingested a deadly
concoction of mendacious omissions and outright untruths and could have
come away thinking, yes, maybe we could beat China – when in reality
there would be nothing but losers on both sides.
Happily,
the U.S. president didn’t appear to have read that issue of the New
Yorker, but things have only slid downhill since November. The
ridiculous spy balloon hubbub derailed U.S. diplomacy, while idiotic
grandstanding by American politicos profoundly offended Beijing.
Despite minor breakthroughs here and there since, we’re still in a deep,
dark morass, where the Chinese defense chief, Li Shangfu won’t answer
U.S. defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s phone calls. Given how crowded the
China Sea is with American and Chinese battleships and the good chance
of hostile encounters, this is a recipe for disaster.
Adding to this cloud of gloom, came the horrific news in March from former Trump national security advisor Robert O’Brien,
that the U.S. might bomb Taiwan’s semi-conductor factories rather than
let them fall into Beijing’s hands. O’Brien’s hints at such an attack,
bolstered by a Massachusetts Dem House member Seth Moulton also
hypothesizing it in May and by Trump defense official Elbridge Colby
mentioning it to Filkins, thus verified Henry Kissinger’s alleged quip,
“To be an enemy of the U.S. is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”
Needless to say, Taiwan expressed unhappiness about this threat to wipe
out its vital industry, but still didn’t nix the Biden regime’s plan in
May to send it $500 million-worth of weapons.
Throughout
all of this, pentagon generals and congressional China hawks beat the
drums for war. As Kentucky GOP senator Rand Paul lamented in June at an
American Conservative conference, much of the GOP wants war with the
5000-year-old Asian civilization. If this article seems to put
Republicans under a microscope that’s because, where China’s concerned,
the GOP is most outlandish. Democratic Sinophobia generally pales by
comparison, but don’t think they lack gusto for war. It’s just Ukraine
where they want a no-fly zone, not Taiwan – yet. And there is one
glaring exception, but we’ll get to her later.
As
for military jingoism, many high-ranking officers have taken to the
media of late to rattle their sabers at China. We had admiral John
Aquilino in The Hill June 6 saying regarding China that “For the United
States it’s the synchronization integrated efforts of the entire joint
force under sea, on the sea, above the sea in space and cyberspace. So
if anyone were to choose to take on the United States, they’re going to
get the full Monty.” If China attacked Taiwan, it would be “taking on
the United States,” and get “the full Monty.” We also had a four-star,
Mike Minihan, writing his subordinates on January 27, “My gut tells me
we will fight in 2025.”
On the civilian side, we had the GOP’s creation of the House Select Committee on China, majority leader Kevin “Free Taiwan” McCarthy’s
baby and a forum for spreading delusions about the communist menace –
from phony alarms about being spied on via weather balloons and Cuban
command centers, to Beijing sending vast numbers of its citizens across
the border, fifth columnists, along with fentanyl, no doubt to dope up
unsuspecting Amuricans. Then, rubbing more salt in the gaping U.S.-China
wounds, McCarthy met April 5 with Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen in Simi
Valley, California. Beijing protested, to no avail.
But
McCarthy is by no means the worst of the China hawks. Back in March,
the chairman of the House Select Committee on China, Wisconsin
Republican Mike “Sinophobic Fever” Gallagher, described U.S.-China relations as “an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century.”
Existential? Well, if we go to war, then yes, it sure will be
existential, but barring that, China remains our chief trading partner,
well ahead of the second and third ranked ones, Canada and Mexico, no
matter how much hogwash the dimwits on the select committee parrot about
fentanyl, human rights abuses (this from a country with over two
million people incarcerated and that made torture its explicit policy
during the Bush years), trade theft and whatever else their fertile
though meager brains can come up with.
Beijing
is also Washington’s second biggest creditor, holding over $800 billion
in U.S. Treasuries – though China moved swiftly to remedy that once
U.S. insults heated up in 2022, by dumping them as fast as possible and
buying gold. China’s holding of U.S. Treasuries shrank last year by
$175.85 billion. That’s a lot of Treasuries to ditch. “Demand for
dollar-denominated bonds is slowly but surely collapsing,” wrote Pepe
Escobar in the Cradle April 27. “Trillions of U.S. dollars will
inevitably start to go back home – shattering the dollar’s purchasing
power and its exchange rate.” In other words, we Americans could wind up
in boiling hot, hyper-inflationary water.
Part
of this threat to the American standard of living (ho, ho! That’s the
standard that ignores the two in three Americans who could not cough up
$400 for an emergency), is China’s de-dollarization. But it’s not just
China. Everybody’s doing it, because the imbeciles in the white house,
going back to the Clinton years, weaponized the dollar by sanctioning 29
percent of the global economy. China, Russia and the Global South are
desperate to shed dollars and have begun trading in their own
currencies. Indeed, the reason Beijing currently snubs defense secretary
Austin is U.S. sanctions on China’s defense secretary, Li Shangfu.
Beijing says no meeting between the two will happen until those
sanctions go away. How do the great minds in the Biden white house
respond to this life-and-death dilemma? With stubborn, macho stupidity.
Sanctions are sacred. They will never be lifted! You think “never”
sounds unconvincingly long? Ask a Cuban.
The Top Ten
So
who are the top ten China hawks most likely to get us into a war with
Beijing? (Actually, there are lots more than ten, but space is limited.)
Well, clearly Gallagher is one. Beijing has already expressed its
intense displeasure with his committee’s Sinophobic antics. GOP senator Ted “Pop the Spy Balloon” Cruz is
another. On Face the Nation, “Cruz suggested that swifter and more
decisive action [on the so-called spy balloon] would have sent a
stronger message to Chinese president Xi Jinping and the People's
Republic of China,” CBS reported February 5. What could have been more
decisive than shooting that menacing balloon down off the coast of South
Carolina was left unclear. Maybe Cruz meant the air force should have
scrambled fighter jets when this wayward weather balloon first floated
over Montana. Or maybe Cruz thought we should have launched a fleet of
our own balloons to assault Chinese airspace. Never-mind that both
Washington and Beijing have all the space spy satellites they need to
see everything each other does, or that the U.S. first launched spy
balloons back under Eisenhower. “More broadly,” Cruz pontificated, “I
think this entire episode telegraphed weakness to Xi and the Chinese
government.” Well, if Cruz ever makes it into the white house, God help
us, because this trigger-happy senator won’t be telegraphing anything
like reasonableness, considering that could be taken for weakness. If
any spy balloons menace Amuricans on his watch, a Cruz white house will
likely launch something and it won’t be peaceful.
Another menace is Florida GOP senator Marco “Capitalism Didn’t Change China” Rubio.
I guess if you ignore the nearly 850 million people China lifted out of
poverty in 25 years, the biggest such eradication of misery in human
history, you could say that Chinese use of capitalistic tools (in tandem
with communist ones) didn’t change it. But nearly 850 million people is
kinda a lot. Especially considering that here in the U.S., the opposite
has been going on, with $50 trillion transferred from ordinary people
to the top one percent in recent decades. As our middle-class standard
of living collapsed, China was busy eradicating poverty.
On
March 2, Rubio spoke on the senate floor on the weighty theme of the
continuing communist apostasy of China, droning on at length, accusing
China of becoming a superpower at U.S. expense. This charge, beloved by
China hawks, of course ignores the simple truth that decades ago U.S.
corporations salivated at the prospect of cheap Chinese labor and
couldn’t wait to shift production out of the U.S. with its more
expensive workers. Nary a peep from Rubio about that inconvenient fact,
because mentioning it would, by Rubio’s logic, entail accusing corporate
America of treason – something no self-preserving, donor-dependent
politico wants to do.
Instead,
Rubio bloviated that China is “far more dangerous than the Soviet Union
ever was,” because of its influence in American society. “They have an
army of unpaid lobbyists,” he said. Well, those lobbyists better get off
their behinds and do some work, ‘cause last I checked, China’s getting
bashed on the regular in the U.S. media and by self-promoting U.S.
politicians. The anti-China atmosphere has become so poisonous that
ethnic Chinese scientists are abandoning their American citizenship and
moving to China in surprising numbers. We can thank the mighty
intellects in congress for this brain-drain.
Missouri GOP senator Josh “Fist-Bump” Hawley puts
up stiff competition for Rubio in the rage-against-Beijing escapades.
On June 2, ahead of the senate vote on his amendment to the debt deal,
to raise tariffs on Chinese imports, he ranted about the jobs lost to
China. So it’s logical that this senator, who did not see fit to lay
blame where it was due – on corporate America – which can only be called
the mission of a nincompoop, had introduced a bill in March called
“Ending Normal Trade Relations with China.” Just what we don’t need here
in America, an end to the few things resembling normalcy – though what
would you expect from an ambitious, far-right senator who gave a
fist-bump to the January 6 rioters at the capitol? Normal is not
something people like Hawley appreciate or aspire to. Higher office is
what they aspire to and if they can get there by stirring up hysteria
over the yellow peril, they will do so.
Then there’s Arkansas GOP senator Tom “Invade Mexico!” Cotton,
given to speeches about sending drones into Russian airspace and waging
war on Mexico or its drug cartels, whichever, I suppose, we can bomb
first. Back on March 30, Cotton introduced the “Not One More Inch or
Acre Act,” a bill aiming to prevent any Chinese citizen or company from
owning American land. This odd focus on Chinese land purchases is
something of a GOP fixation. It’s quite the bugaboo. Radical right-wing
Florida governor Ron DeSantis maunders on about it too, and how the
Chinese Communist Party is not welcome in the Sunshine State. But Cotton
puts up stiff competition regarding who can froth most insanely about
this hooey.
“For
decades the Chinese Communist Party has been gobbling up American
farmland and real-estate,” Cotton hyperventilated in March, not too
subtly stoking cow country terror of devious Reds. “These purchases
serve as outposts for Chinese espionage campaigns against American
businesses and military bases…everything they [the CCP] do is as our
adversary.” Did you get the message? Those commies have bought up half
the country, are snooping around our bases, have installed espionage
tech in our horse barns and if you don’t stand up to them now, like
Cotton is doing, in a few months they could have all of us singing the
Internationale.
And don’t forget Florida GOP senator Rick “Ditch Social Security!” Scott.
Back in June 2020 he jumped on the bash-China bandwagon with quite a
thud, claiming China tried to sabotage a covid vaccine. When Beijing
demanded proof, Scott, quite uncomfortably, had nothing to say. Fast
forward to March 16, 2023, and we have Scott introducing a package of
five bills “to hold Communist China accountable.” On April 27, Scott,
rolling out his package aimed at China, thumped his chest and squawked
“We know Communist China will stop at nothing to exploit American
markets…its top targets are our investors, markets, supply chains and
jobs. I continue to strongly advocate…to cut ties with Communist China.”
If that doesn’t convince Beijing its dealing with hostile half-wits and
that it better take its business elsewhere, nothing will. Incidentally
this same press release brags – without a single word about American
corporate culpability for sending millions of jobs to China – that Scott
has been verbally assaulting China since 2018. Although total
decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies would sink both nations,
somehow this realization has not penetrated the very scanty gray matter
in Scott’s skull.
So
that’s a small, representative gang of Sinophobes from the senate.
Don’t worry, there are many more. But it’s time to move on to the House,
where we got lotsa GOP members riding the “Attack China” hobby-horse.
Indeed, Indiana’s Jim “Super Tweeter” Banks boasted
back in March that he has tweeted about China 585 times. And no, for
this article I did not go back and read them all. That is a level of
masochism to which no journalist should be asked to stoop. Just reading
his press releases was enough.
Naturally,
Banks is on the China select committee, pontificating on March 31 that
“Democrats are afraid to stand up to China on twitter…Their fake China
bill doesn’t just fail to counter China…when Chairman Xi read the bill,
he breathed a sigh of relief.” Banks’ familiarity with Xi’s breathing
may strike some as peculiar, but never-mind, you get the picture. Those
limp, Democratic chickens aren’t pulling the wool over Banks’ eyes when
it comes to the wily, nefarious Chinese and their sighs of relief. Nor
would they have to; those eyes are firmly shut, the better to make stuff
up about what Chairman Xi is doing.
Proving yet again that female representatives can emit as much rubbish as their male counterparts, there was New York’s Elise “From Moderate to MAGA” Stefanik on
Hannity radio last fall, intoning that containing China is our
generation’s greatest geopolitical challenge. “$28 million of funds we
know of went through NIH, CDC and DoD to Chinese Communist entities for
research and development,” the GOP representative hyperventilated. Well
duh. This should come as no surprise to anyone with even a
nine-year-old’s familiarity with history over the past three decades.
After all, the U.S. and China are trading partners and as such have
engaged in many fraternal exchanges, which now, these GOP congressional
opportunists paint in alarming, sinister colors. “China is not a
partner,” Stefanik instructed us. “They are not an ally. They are not a
friend. This is an adversary.” Well, if Beijing wasn’t before reading
this list of insults, it sure would be afterward. The GOP’s policy of
constant threats and affronts directed at China may or may not get them
votes. That is debatable. But it most certainly is a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
Then
on April 26, Stefanik and Gallagher introduced the Countering CCP
Drones Act, which prohibits Da-Jiang Innovations from operating on U.S.
communications infrastructure. “DJI drones pose the national security
threat of TikTok, but with wings,” Stefanik informed us. For those who
were skeptical of the TikTok fulminations to begin with, this is not the
most convincing argument, but it shows, yet again, that these congress
critters never stop and that if the next president is a Republican, it
will be a miracle if we avoid nuclear war with China. (We’re not doing
too well with the current white house resident either, but that’s
another story. Let’s just leave him for now, coping with a supposed,
secret Chinese spy base in Cuba, a fiction reported by the Wall Street
Journal June 8, but denied by Havana’s vice minister of foreign affairs,
Carlos F. de Cossio and indeed even by the pentagon and white house.)
Another GOP member of the House select committee to maul China is Andy “Shoot that Commie Balloon” Barr from
Kentucky. On March 23, he took secretary of state Antony Blinken and by
extension the entire Biden administration to task over the terrifying
mission of a Chinese weather balloon. “Talk is cheap. Deterrence
requires force,” Barr railed. Shortly after this, Blinken cancelled his
trip to China, so one could argue that the absurd balloon fracas took
U.S.-Chinese diplomacy hostage at the precise moment when we, and the
world, need it more than ever. As aforementioned, currently defense
secretary Austin can’t even get his Chinese counterpart on the phone.
That’s also related to the precipitous decline in diplomacy, since the
Biden gang no doubt fears that dropping sanctions on Li Shangfu would
make it look weak. The GOP would go ape if a Dem president rescinded
sanctions on a Chinese bigwig. But being scared to end sanctions is a
lot weaker than failing to what diplomacy requires. So sanctions are a
big stumbling block, but they occur in a diplomatic ecosystem rendered
toxic by the ravings of congressmen like Barr.
Lastly, let us not forget Washington Republican Dan “Stop Socialism” Newhouse,
also on the select committee, who back in February announced that he
“led his House colleagues in the introductions of the Prohibition of
Agricultural Land for the People’s Republic of China Act.” In his press
release, Newhouse cited the Chinese “threat to American democracy” and
our “great power struggle with the CCP.” Numerous other legislators were
quoted, all backing Newhouse that the CCP’s sneaky, previously cited
plot to buy Amurican land is the first step in threatening the U.S. food
supply. Can’t get much more malicious than that, can you? But Newhouse
is on the case: he’s yammered about protecting the American food supply
from Chinese influence literally for years.
But
what is this so-called “great power struggle?” The U.S. has roughly 800
foreign military bases. China has one. In recent decades the U.S. has
started numerous wars. China has not started any. In its history, the
U.S. has conquered territory and countries from Cuba to Hawaii to the
Philippines. China has not done so. Washington conducts much of its
foreign policy at gunpoint. Beijing does not. In other words, the U.S.
is warlike and China is peaceful. But this, as Chinese leaders have
noted, does not mean Beijing won’t defend itself – which is precisely
what the American weapons manufacturing oligarchs who own the congress
and white house want to compel China to do, thus provoking a war. And
who are the useful idiots in this particular provocation? GOP lawmakers
and white house neoconservatives.
Ror how we got into this mess, you can thank the…
China Hawks Emeritus (Still Able to Inflict Much Damage)
Of course, any bash-Beijing list must include former House speaker and China Hawk Emerita Nancy “My Husband’s Stocks Are His Business” Pelosi,
whose ground-breaking work preparing the world for terminal nuclear war
over Taiwan we must never forget. Back in August, Pelosi made her
Freedom Flight to Taiwan, a shameless stunt that poisoned the already
toxic relations between Beijing and Washington. It may have bamboozled
credulous ignoramuses back in the so-called homeland, but originally the
pentagon didn’t want her to go. The biggest backers for this idiotic
adventure were – you guessed it – congressional Republicans. Pelosi
amped up her supposedly heroic defiance by speculating that military
chieftains didn’t want her to go because the People’s Liberation Army
might shoot down her plane. More likely, sane pentagon officials foresaw
nothing but headaches as a result of this unseemly performance, though
just to be cautious, Pelosi arrived in Taipei in the dead of night –
slipping in and out of the country in a surreptitious manner befitting
one well aware of doing something wildly inflammatory, and, to
understate it massively, irresponsible.
Pelosi’s
rabid hostility to China has deep roots. She called the quite bloody,
brutal and violent Hong Kong riots of 2020 “beautiful.” But long before
that, she supported the failed Tiananmen square color revolution very
aggressively. In 1991, she visited the square and, in an act of brazen
provocation and hypocrisy, unfurled a banner that read: “To those who
died for democracy in China.” I say hypocrisy because, while some died
at Beijing’s hands when suppressing the protest, that’s a minute portion
of the multitudes killed by Washington across the globe, explicitly to
stifle democracy – as it did with coups and slaughters in Chile in 1973,
Indonesia in 1965-66, Iran in 1953 and other nations too numerous to
list here.
If
a Chinese-American war does break out, its few, desperate, irradiated,
cave-dwelling survivors across the globe can take solace from the
thought that a U.S. congresswoman thought it was worth risking starving
five billion people to death via nuclear winter, just to make a point
about her so-called democracy.
Any list of China Hawks Emeritus must also include former Trump secretary of state Mike “Sinophobic Rampage” Pompeo.
The former CIA director and non-presidential candidate (phew!)
pontificated some months back that the Biden regime’s hesitation to
shoot down the so-called spy balloon showed weakness and “encouraged bad
guys.” That would be balloons from Russia and Iran, I guess. In any
event, Pompeo is no slouch in the provoke-China department. Just look at
his March 2022 visit to Taiwan. Pompeo jetted into the island
presumably to show solidarity with separatists, thus dousing the
U.S.-Chinese diplomatic dumpster fire with gasoline. He followed up this
little tourist stop with another in September 2022 – where provoking
China’s concerned, I guess Pompeo just couldn’t get enough of it and its
headlines – in which he hectored listeners about how “China’s
aggressive conduct, diplomatically, militarily, economically…brought
those who prefer peace and commerce even more closely together.” Who
prefer peace? Ho, ho. Pompeo may preen that he’s a peacemaker, but then
you, reading this, may also be the king of England.
Lastly,
let us not forget two deceptively minor figures who did so much to get
us into the current mess and who could return to power, should an
indicted Trump win the white house in 2024: Former Trump national
security advisor Matt Pottinger, now at the Hoover Institution and former Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro.
Pottinger, a little-known former Wall Street Journal reporter was
intimidated as a journalist, according to the Washington Post in April
2020, by the Chinese police – arguably one of the worst mistakes they
ever made. It could easily have contributed to his rabid hatred of the
5000-year-old civilization. Indeed, Trump’s national security advisor,
H.R. McMasters said of Pottinger that he is “central to the biggest
shift in U.S. foreign policy since the cold war, which is the
competitive approach to China.” In short, Pottinger bequeathed us
policies that envenomed relations with China, whose leaders “Pottinger
believed, were engaging in a massive cover-up and a ‘psychological
warfare’ operation to obscure the origins of the virus and deflect
blame.” Covid, according to Pottinger, was likely a Chinese creation.
Navarro concurred, claiming that it was an “open question” whether China
had deliberately created Covid-19 and that the “virus was a product of
the Chinese Communist Party.”
+++
So
there you have it – a mere sampling of the politicians loony enough to
get us into a war with China. In fact, such a terminal war is GOP
policy, which has Republicans marching in lockstep toward nuclear
Armageddon. You think this is hyperbole? Hello? Hostile rhetoric leads
to hostile action, action leads to attacks, attacks lead to
counter-attacks – and then we’re all sunk. Just like our great big
aircraft carriers will be, in the Pacific, if someone doesn’t put the
brakes on Washington’s misbegotten approach to Beijing.