|
The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-59
Recap from today’s Global Times where the argument is to continue to stay the course and counterpunch in the typical martial arts fashion, as this op/ed from today’s Global Times says:
“Chinese analysts said Sunday the key for China to handle the US offensive is to focus on its own development and insist on continued reform and opening-up to meet the increasing needs of Chinese people for better lives. In the upcoming three months, before the November US presidential election, the China-US relationship is in extreme danger as the Trump administration is likely to launch more aggressions to force China to retaliate, they said.”
Stay the course; Trump’s shit is just an election ploy. However,
“The US’ posturing is serving to distract from domestic pressure over President Trump’s failure in handling the pandemic when Trump is seeking reelection this year, Chinese observers said. However, the Trump administration’s China stance still reflects bipartisan consensus among US elites, so China should not expect significant change in US policy toward China even if there is a power transition in November, which means China should prepare itself for a long fight.”
Don’t stray from the Long Game. An international conference was held that I’ll try to get a link for. Here’s GT’s summation:
“According to the Xinhua News Agency on Saturday, international scholars said at a virtual meeting on the international campaign against a new cold war on China on Saturday that ‘aggressive statements and actions by the US government toward China poses a threat to world peace and a potential new cold war on China goes against the interests of humanity.’
“The meeting gathered experts from a number of countries including the US, China, Britain, India, Russia and Canada.
“Experts attending the meeting issued a statement calling upon the US to step back from this threat of a cold war and also from other dangerous threats to world peace it is engaged in.
“The reason why international scholars are criticizing the US rather than China is that they can see how restrained China remains and the sincerity of China to settle the tension by dialogue, even though the US is getting unreasonably aggressive, said Chinese experts.
“Washington has made a huge mistake as it has chosen the wrong target – China – to be ‘the common enemy or common fear’ to reshape its declining leadership among the West. Right now, the common enemy of humanity is COVID-19, and this is why its new cold war declaration received almost no positive responses from other major powers and even raised concern, said Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, on Sunday.”
Today’s Global Times lead editorial asked most of the questions everyone else’s asking:
“People are asking: How far will the current China-US confrontation keep going? Will a new cold war take shape? Will there be military conflicts and will the possible clashes evolve into large-scale military confrontation between the two?
“Perhaps everyone believes that China does not want a new cold war, let alone a hot war. But the above-mentioned questions have become disturbing suspense because no one knows how wild the ambitions the US ruling team has now, and whether American and international societies are capable of restraining their ambitions.”
IMO, the editor’s conclusions are quite correct:
“The world must start to act and do whatever it can to stop Washington’s hysteria in its relations with China.
“Right now, it is no longer a matter of whether China-US ties are in freefall, but whether the line of defense on world peace is being broken through by Washington. The world must not be hijacked by a group of political madmen. The tragedies in 1910s and 1930s must not be repeated again.”
Trump is elevated to the same plane as Hitler and Mussolini, and the Outlaw US Empire is now the equivalent of Nazi Germany and the Fascist drive to rule the world–a well illustrated trend that’s been ongoing since 1991 that only those blinded by propaganda aren’t capable of seeing. I think it absolutely correct for China to focus its rhetoric on the Outlaw US Empire’s utter failure to control COVID, which prompts some probing questions made from the first article:
“Shen Yi, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University, told the Global Times on Sunday that there is wide consensus among the international community that the COVID-19 pandemic is the most urgent challenge that the world should deal with. Whether on domestic epidemic control or international cooperation, the US has done almost nothing right compared to China’s efforts to assist others and its successful control measures for domestic outbreaks.
“In response to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s ‘new Iron Curtain speech’ at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on Thursday declaring a new cold war against China, Shen said, ‘We can also ask ‘is Pompeo an ally of coronavirus?’ Because he wants to confuse the world to target the wrong enemy amid the tough fight against the pandemic, so that the virus can kill more people, especially US people, since his country is in the worst situation.’
Shen said, ‘In 2018, US Vice President Mike Pence already made a speech which the media saw as a new ‘Iron Curtain speech,’ and in 2020, Pompeo made a similar speech again, which means their cold war idea is not popular and brings no positive responses from its allies, so they need to try time and again. Of course, they will fail again.'” [My Emphasis]
Wow! The suggestion that Trump, Pompeo, Pence, and company want to “kill more people, especially US people” seems to be proven via their behavior which some of us barflies recognize and have discussed. Now that notion is out in the public, internationally. You don’t need Concentration Camps and ovens when the work can be done via the dysfunctional structure of your economy and doing nothing about the situation.
Shen provides the clincher, what Gruff, myself, and others have said here:
“‘So if we want to win this competition that was forced by the US, we must focus on our own development and not get distracted. The US is not afraid of a cold war with us, it is afraid of our development.'” [My Emphasis]
My synopsis of both articles omitted some additional info, so do please click the links to read them fully.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jul 26 2020 17:41 utc | 16
Posted by: vk | Jul 27 2020 5:00 utc | 80 The USA’s foreign policy is historically consistent. There’s no reason to think domestic politics interfere with them.
Well, yes and no, in my view. Overall, across the decades, I’d agree it’s consistent: American comes first, everyone else can go to hell (and the US will help you to do so if you don’t kowtow to the US). But I can also see domestic politics getting involved under specific circumstances. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that certain specific policies might go up or down depending on who’s in charge of Congress or who’s President at any given moment.
“The enigma can be solved with a much more elegant solution: the USA can’t fight all of its enemies and win at the same time anymore, so it has to begin to choose which to fight first. In this case, Russia or China.”
I’m not even sure that’s true. The US still seems to have time for Iran. North Korea has gone on the back burner as compared to previous years, but it’s still bubbling. They’re still promoting all the Russia hate the MSM can print. The neocons have a desire to rule the world (and insure no one else, as the PNAC documents said, even gains *regional* influence), so I don’t think any of them care where the trouble starts or how.
“the American people”
It’s not the people. It’s the neocons, the elites, the corporations, the banks, etc., etc. They haven’t fought a war against anyone capable of fighting back, nor have *any* of them been subjected to any personal losses as a result, for so long that they don’t think there is any real risk of taking on people like Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. To the elites, those countries are all “Third World”, i.e., not the Five Eyes or the UK or the EU. And unless and until there is a nuclear war, none of these people stand to lose a dime or suffer any personal loss. They might see their stock go down. Big deal – they figure they can engineer it to go up again.
I quoted a guy from over at LinkedIn here some time back who pointed that the elites have some *24 trillion* in *cash*. *Cash* – not stocks, bonds, or whatever. And also not counting their houses, yachts, cars, etc. He pointed out that they could give away *12 trillion* and *still* have the same amount still in their possession. And their stocks, bonds, mansions, yachts, etc.
People like that simply don’t concern themselves over a dip in the stock market. They’ve already shorted that stock – they’ll make money in the Great Depression – which most people here have already claimed they engineered. They’ll also find a way to profit from a trade war. And short of a nuclear war, they’ll find a way to profit from any conventional war. None of these people care how many US soldiers die, or foreign civilians die, or how much the US taxpayer has to pay for those wars, or even how well or badly most US business does as a result.
As someone in a novel said once, “When you’ve got all the money, everyone else is for sale.”
Some of these people probably even think they can profit from a nuclear war. How many of them really understand the effects of a nuclear war? No one other than them knows for sure who they are or what they think.
I’m not confident any of these people really know what’s going on. They only know how to take advantage of it. But when the SHTF we’ll all go down with them. Except some of them actually *do* have a bunker with years of food stashed away. Assuming those bunkers are well hidden, they might well survive.
Will you? Will I? We can speculate here on whether some people do or do not “want” war. The prudent thing from our personal standpoint is to assume they do. You don’t want to be wrong about that.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Jul 27 2020 6:55 utc | 82
|
