Tag Archives: foreign policy

Rewriting History

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Here is an example of the level of integrity of the men reigning over the People’s Republic of China.

Thirty years ago, a man stood in front of a column of tanks, halting their hulking passage from Tiananmen Square a day after the bloodshed of June 4.
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“Tank man” images are ruthlessly excised from Chinese social media, according to monitoring services.
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Now the Chinese government is seeking to exert the same sort of control over how China’s history is seen in the rest of the world.

President Xi Jinping and his henchmen are increasingly restricting access by foreigners to PRC—even academic—databases of the nation’s history (such as it’s allowed to exist) along with actively purging them to control domestic consumption.

Nor is just this relatively passive censorship.  Here’s Glenn Tiffert, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution:

The way to think about the PRC on the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen is that it isn’t just trying to bury a set of inconvenient truths and facts, but is trying to construct a new narrative.

Xi and his men aren’t lying about their nation in a fit of self-delusion, nor is this an attempt simply to keep such knowledge from circling back to the citizenry from outside; Xi and his men are lying in a conscious effort to delude us.

Such men cannot be trusted in any venue.

Trump Commentary

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There is much commentary, generally negative, over President Donald Trump’s statements, among others, that he likes the idea of Boris Johnson succeeding outgoing British Prime Minister Theresa May.  It’s unbecoming. It’s unpresidential. Mostly, though, it’s simply not supposed to be done for one foreign dignitary to comment on the doings of another nation’s political debate.

I’ll ignore the foolishness of “unbecoming” and “unpresidential;” those objecting on these grounds routinely shy away from saying what they mean by “unbecoming” or “unpresidential.”  We’re simply supposed to accept their august pronouncements without question.

There’re a couple of larger issues in play here, though.

Why shouldn’t Trump weigh in on this or that British political debate?  After all, the Brits, including Sadiq Khan and Jeremy Corbin among several, routinely weigh in on American political debates.

More important than the triviality of such tit-for-tat, though, objecting to his speaking up—or to Khan’s/Corbin’s speaking up—insults the citizens of both countries: those objecting are saying that the citizens are so droolingly stupid that they’ll actually be swayed by what a foreign leader says about their own leadership or what that foreign leader says about any other domestic matter.

Venezuela is not Grenada

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That, there, is a true fact. The University of Georgia’s Emeritus Professor (of Agricultural and Applied Economics) Glenn Ames used that as an argument for why the US ought not invade Venezuela in his Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal.  After all, he wrote,

Venezuela is a large, complex country politically, not a tiny island in the Caribbean.

Also a true fact.  But then he went astray, here and on a couple of other points.  For one, our military is not the disjointed, uncoordinated collection of disparate forces that went into Grenada; it’s much better integrated, and it has demonstrated that improvement many times since.

The Venezuelan military is indebted to President Nicolás Maduro for their perks and subsidies. They are not going to give them up easily.

This badly overstates the case. The Venezuelan military leadership is indebted to Maduro.  The field-grade officers and especially the junior officers and soldiers have no such “loyalty;” they are not going to fight seriously in support of that “leadership”—which steals from their paychecks as much as they do from the civilian citizens of Venezuela.

Cubans and others are embedded in Venezuela’s security apparatus.

As Cubans were in Grenada, and they folded rapidly in the face even of that confused operation.

That Venezuela is not Grenada also is an irrelevant fact.

“Normalize Relations”

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Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif travelled to the People’s Republic of China in an effort to get its help in saving the nuclear weapons deal with Iran that the US walked away from and that Great Britain, Germany, and France, along with Russia and the PRC, remain in.  Zarif insisted that

the world must normalize economic relations with Tehran and take “practical steps” to save the nuclear accord….

No, we don’t.  There’s nothing to save: all the accord did and does is create a brief delay in Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons so it can use them against Israel and, through its proxies and affiliates, others.

Aside from that, though, again: no, we don’t.  Not until Iran normalizes relations with the other nations in the Middle East and then with the nations of the world at large.

Full stop.

A Shift May Be Beginning

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As the tariff volleys in the People’s Republic of China’s years-old economic war (of which trade is just one component) against us begin to grow, some potential changes in international trade and production for trade are becoming visible.  If these apparent changes represent the beginning of a solid trend, the changes and the trend will not be to the PRC’s benefit.

It’s true that consumer prices might start to rise in both our nation and in the PRC, but as a population—and as a people—we’re better able to absorb those increases than is the population of the PRC.  Our per capita GDP is $62,500, more than three times the PRC’s $19,520.

It might get worse from there.

  • Sweden-based telecom gear-maker Ericsson AB is preparing to shift some manufacturing from the PRC to the US, Estonia, Brazil, and Mexico
  • Republic of China-based AsusTek Computer Inc has been moving some production bases domestic facilities and Vietnam from the PRC
  • Foxconn, which assembles a huge share of iPhones, has been considering producing the devices in India and Vietnam
  • The 25% tariff on PRC-made lithium batteries means PRC producers will have difficulties competing with Korea’s LG Chem and Japan’s Panasonic Inc, both of which already have lithium battery production facilities in the US

If that sort of thing spreads and grows, and if US exporters find other markets (as US farmers are doing for next year’s crops, while others change the crops they grow for export), it won’t be good for the PRC’s economy—or for PRC President Xi Jinping’s political standing in his Party.