I make it a rule to accept invitations to appear on televised interviews or panel discussions only when I believe that I am sufficiently informed on the main subject of the given program and have a unique contribution to make based on my core expertise, which is in Russian affairs.
I accepted the invitation from Press TV, Iran’s “Spotlight” to talk about China, because the questions submitted in advance indicated that comparisons and contrasts between the issues of China-Taiwan and Russia-Ukraine in American foreign policy would be foremost in the discussion. And it is very important to get straight how these very different regional conflicts seem to be commingled in the minds of the Neoconservatives who are running the U.S. State Department and the national security agencies of the USA so as to form a single master plan: namely to provoke first Russia and now China into precipitate military action to subdue Ukraine and Taiwan respectively, ending in both cases in a bloody quagmire that weakens the given challenger to U.S. global hegemony.
To my thinking, this overarching idea of current American foreign policy is deeply flawed. The two regional conflicts only have superficial similarity. The relationships between Russia-Ukraine and China-Taiwan are very different. This begins with the degree of agency of the Ukrainian versus Taiwanese governments. It also relates to the relative power of the parties in all dimensions, starting with population: Russia to Ukraine is 3:1 whereas China to Taiwan is 30:1
Ukraine is run by an insane junta first put in place by the United States in the coup d’etat of February 2014 that it stage managed. Zelensky himself may have been democratically elected but the pro-peace platform that brought him victory was turned around under U.S. marching orders and he has allowed his country to be used as a battering ram against Russia without regard to the physical destruction of his cities, implosion of his economy and loss of hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
No one will say that the Taiwanese are led by fools of that caliber. Nor has the Taiwanese population been brainwashed and cowed by its present leaders in the way we see in Zelensky’s Ukraine. The issue of independence has been raised repeatedly by candidates in the periodic national elections and each time it has been defeated by Taiwanese voters. They obviously do not share the suicidal tendencies of Ukrainians.
In my opening remarks on this video, I am saying that the Chinese leadership views reunification with Taiwan as foreordained given a sufficient time horizon, and Xi’s speech a day ago calling for a ‘great wall of steel’ indicates that the Chinese military effort is directed against the United States presence in its region, not for the specific purposes of taking Taiwan by force. The Chinese intent is to push back the American naval presence to the first chain of islands in the South China Sea and eventually to send the U.S. Navy back to Honolulu if not to the bottom of the sea.
Of course, in a 25-minute program the discussion also moved on to other highly topical issues of international relations, of which the Chinese brokered restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is the most important.
I once again extend a bouquet to the production team at Press TV and to moderator Marzieh Hashemi, in particular, for not only preparing an interesting show in advance but for reacting at once to what the panelists are saying so as to put forward probing follow-on questions.
©Gilbert Doctorow