I am pro Ukraine.
I favor an independent Taiwan.
But big powers demand spheres of influence.
If Americans dare look in the mirror we might open up the possibility of a negotiated and lasting peace in Ukraine and Taiwan..
James Monroe to foreign powers, 1823: Back off. Don't meddle. The Americas are ours.
[We] declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.
That has been our policy for 200 years. We can meddle; other powers cannot. In 1962 we considered Russian missiles in Cuba to be an existential threat to the U.S. Now China and Cuba are in negotiations over a joint military training facility on Cuba's north coast, sparking alarm in Washington.
Meanwhile pundits are celebrating the addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO. Finland has an 830 mile border with Russia. Our inclination is to consider this another "win."
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| Politico: "Sorry, Russia." |
Wins are dangerous. A Western "win" validates Putin's description of the situation in Europe. He says the West, led by the USA, is invading them. We are celebrating. We should be cautious.
Meanwhile, in the Western Pacific, U.S. bases surround China. One way to look at this is as a sign of our strength. We win. China loses. Sorry, China.
We should be cautious here, too. Our Navy is a mortal threat to China. In peacetime China has ample access to the world's markets. But China has some of the same problems as the U.S. if Cuba is in hostile hands. Cuba is at a choke point into and out of our Gulf Coast. There are narrow choke points both east and west out of China. China's expansion into the South China Sea is their effort to deal with that strategic weakness.
From the U.S. point of view, Taiwan is the simple story of a feisty, successful democracy attempting to be free and independent of China. For China, it is a breakaway province, whose independence is encouraged by the West as part of its grand strategy of encirclement. China not wrong. We are spending tens of billions of dollars on the strategy of encircling China.
The U.S. is doing what great powers have done for all recorded history. We advance our own strategic interests and we confound the strategic interests of rivals. That behavior has a history. Great powers are continuously involved in wars at the boundary of the empire, punctuated by total wars that re-set the grand balance. We are in the post-war era of the World Wars of 1914-45. The U.S. has been fighting those predictable wars in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Granada, Iraq, Serbia, Iraq again, and Afghanistan.
This is a dangerous game. Russia is a declining power and invasions from the west through Poland or Ukraine remain fresh in Russian memory. Russia has an interest in avoiding hostile powers at its borders, just like the U.S. does. An end to the war in Ukraine will almost certainly require that Russia get something. Putin wanted a re-unified Rus. Ukraine didn't want it. The West doesn't want it. Zelenskyy says Ukraine wants into NATO. It is something Ukraine could give up. Americans may want to open their minds to that.
China is a rising power. They are safer as a trading partner than as an enemy. I question whether it is in America's interest to surround China with an implied threat of naval blockade. We demand our sphere of influence. China does as well. Insofar as Americans perceive Taiwan as a Western outpost of our democracy and a reproachful finger in the eye of communist China, we invite the next proxy war. China feels threatened. We should avoid threatening China. Taiwan can be independent, but it must be independent-and-Chinese. It cannot be independent-and-Western, unless we want to go to war with China. And we don't. Americans should open their minds to that, too.
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5 comments:
President Eisenhower warned us against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by our immense military establishment and arms industry. But his warning went unheeded, so now we’re the self-proclaimed policemen to the world. It’s a war profiteer’s wet dream. Oh well, as they say: a man’s got to make a killing.
The thing is, the Chinese communists are evil. We should be doing everything we can short of an outright war to destroy that regime and that ideology, just like we did to the Soviets.
Why?
* the cultural genocide in Tibet
* the cultural genocide in Xinjiang
* the massacre in Tienanmin Square
* the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong
* their tyrannical high tech “social credit” system
* Their role in hiding the true th about the origin of the Covid pandemic
The Chinese Communists are out to destroy freedom anywhere they can. We should return the favor in spades.
While we're at it, we should also destroy the evil regimes in Russia, North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the list goes on. I'm all for it, as long as we keep passing the cost along to our offspring. Killing for peace - it's an American tradition.
I am not sorry we brought down the evil and tyrannical Soviet Union. Are you?
The cold war arms race obviously contributed to the demise of Soviet communism. By engaging in it, the Soviet Union brought itself down. But what actually ended it was a coup attempt against Gorbachev by hardliners in Communist Party of the Soviet Union, much like Trump's. Let’s hope Republicans don’t do for our Republic what the CPSU did for Soviet Union.
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