Afghanistan isn't about Afghanistan. It is about Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Kamala Harris is in Singapore. She isn't being sidelined.
She is on center stage.
It is hard to notice the future when we are distracted by the present.
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| Kamala Harris in Singapore |
There is a lot of news. The Afghanistan airlift rescue is underway. Congress is working on an infrastructure bill. A House Select Committee is gathering information on January 6. There are problems at the southern border. New York has a new governor. California's governor may be recalled. One of the people who plotted to kidnap and kill the Michigan governor was sentenced.
Plus COVID, with all that means regarding schools reopening, mask requirements, vaccination requirements, governors acting and not acting, people getting sick and hospitals overcrowded.
With all this going on, Kamala Harris is in Southeast Asia, talking with the leaders of countries that border the South China Sea.
As this blog noted two days ago, our withdrawal from Afghanistan is about Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan. Our leaving frees up U.S. resources, good for us. Leaving creates a Taliban-led Muslim country on the border of China's Xinjiang Province, bad for China. It is home of the Uyghur population China is attempting, with great effort and expense, to suppress. Religion, especially militant fundamentalist religion, is a direct assault to the Chinese government, which demands that it be the unitary moral and political authority. When the Taliban were confounding the U.S., China and Russia were happy to encourage and fund them. Now the ungovernable Taliban fighters are their problem. Russia just initiated its own airlift to get their people out of Kabul. China is stuck there by geography.
China understands that Kamala Harris signifies a shift in our attention and priorities. China sees us showing common interest with countries in opposition to China's goal of expansion into the South China Sea. Harris is signaling. Her presence is part of the signal. One of China's state-run newspapers, the Global Times, published a commentary acknowledging Harris is there to “further strengthen the US’ regional presence … [to turn] Southeast Asia into a frontier against China.”A frontier against China? Who, us? Why we just want "a free and open Indo-Pacific that promotes our interest and those of our partners and allies," Harris said.
Harris is doing diplomacy. She is signaling without confronting. While denying hostile intent, she is framing the conflict as one between our team of international good-guys against a coercive bully. She said,
These unlawful claims have been rejected by the 2016 arbitral tribunal decision and Beijing’s actions continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations. We will invest our time and our energy to fortify our key partnerships including with Singapore and Vietnam. . .. We know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate, and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea.
Chinese national interest is in dominating its southern flank, and they are building islands and a navy to to project power seaward. Their control of the South China Sea resolves a vulnerability. The U.S. position that we are preserving an "international" interest is doing exactly what China accuses us of doing--and what we deny doing. We are attempting to solidify a frontier against China.
Some years from now, when the South China Sea is in the daily headlines and top of mind, Americans will wonder how whatever mess we are dealing with got started. How is it we fell into some proxy war to confound China in dominating its region the way that the U.S. insists on dominating its own region?
We didn't notice because it started small, because the U.S. denied it, and because we were distracted by other events.
5 comments:
Many Americans (not those on the front line getting their legs blown off) are in favor of making an "honorable" exit from Afghanistan, in short a "get out of jail free card" that seeks to overlook two decades of maintaining a military presence in a country where we were basically not wanted. Yes, perhaps President Biden should threaten the Taliban with a scorched earth policy for
their harassment but that's not in the cards, we won't do that. What we could do however is conduct an investigation into why we entered a region that is nothing but a graveyard for interlopers to 'save" the populace with our brand of democracy. Why would they want it?
Bob Warren
Let's leave Anonymous alone. He or she has an identity crisis along with warped opinions, and may someday receive the Congressional Medal of Dishonor.
General Petraeus’ Anbar Awakening strategy demonstrated the competent way for us to intervene in tribal societies: ally ourselves with friendly tribes instead of trying to create Denmark in the Muslim world. Sadly, when we did that in Iraq, Obama threw the whole thing away. And we never tried it in Afghanistan.
We could have done Afghanistan the right way and still have countered China’s expansionist aggression and genocide against the Uighurs.
20 years, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars ago, neo-conservatives had the brilliant idea of turning Afghanistan and Iraq into beacons of democracy. Corruption, stupidity and failure became so commonplace, it wasn’t even reported anymore. What we’re now witnessing is the inevitable result.
Anonymous comment posters have begun copying and pasting articles from the New York Post and other conservative media. I consider that copyright theft. This was a practice consistent with that of local Trump supporter and Republican candidate Curt Ankerberg. I do not know if each individual instance now appearing is by him, however.
Peter Sage
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