Although it is now 20 years since the English edition of my Japan: The Toothless Tiger best seller first appeared, everything that has since happened has confirmed its thesis that East Asia is a powder keg that Japan cannot contain.

Although China’s Belt and Road Initiative is inexorably falling into place, so too is the South China Sea. Although a British convoy, supported by German and American cruisers, recently sailed through the area, they, like the Australians, who are being butt hurt by Chinese sanctions, are not serious players.

South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are the region’s heavy hitters. Though Taiwan would give an excellent account of itself in any future encounter, there is little they could do when faced with overwhelming Chinese firepower. Taiwan could be East Asia’s Arch Duke Ferdinand moment.

South Korea, however, remains the real dagger to Japan’s heart. There are more than five million men under arms on the Korean peninsula – far more armed soldiers than either the United States or Russia maintains. Vladivostock, Russia’s military headquarters in the Far East, is only fifty miles away from North Korea! The resulting geostrategic rivalries make Korea the most militarized piece of real estate on the planet and it is the only place the United States has (repeatedly) declared it has locked and loaded nuclear weapons. As there is no way Seoul can be defended from a determined attack, the USMC is heavily embedded in Okinawa to where they hastily retreated at the height of the Korean War and to where they most likely will have to retreat again. Though Japan needs South Korea as a buffer state against North Korea and its historical Russian and Chinese sponsors, the Belt and Road Initiative would marginalize Japan and make her almost irrelevant to this Chinese minted version of The Great Game.

China views its own naval expansion as vital to protecting her sea routes and, just like Washington, Beijing is deploying her navy to ensure that the black gold continues to arrive to her shores. The fact that this policy poses a threat to Japan is not Beijing’s primary concern. They have the much more daunting task of keeping their vast nation afloat. For that overriding purpose, they need a strong navy to guarantee their oil supplies and a steely determination to defend and promote their national objectives.

Japan’s looming quandary is that, with Taiwan and South Korea, it has been a vassal of America’s East Asian policy, trading economic advancement for American political and military hegemony in contrast to China’s unfettered development. That bill is now due.

China is involved in a great strategic game that she cannot afford to lose. Kazakhstan is China’s natural bridge to the lucrative Iranian and Iraqi fields. Such a link-up would advance China’s standing as a world power. It would also cripple United States’ efforts to secure the Caspian Sea’s oil for the West. China also wants to secure central Asia’s economic cooperation to help mollify Xinjiang, which Erdoğan’s Muslim Uighur fifth columnists are charged with subverting. About 200,000 Uighurs live in Kazakhstan and opposition Islamic terrorist groups have their bases in Almata, its largest city. China hopes to neutralize this U.S. sponsored internal ISIS threat by its oil diplomacy in Kazakhstan, and its arms diplomacy in Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.

NATO’s ongoing belligerence in Eastern Europe has transformed the pipeline poker China has been playing with Russia and the other regional powers, forcing Russia and oil rich Kazakhstan to fully throw their lot in with China. Siberian oil will flow southwards to China and, if Korea and Japan wish it, onwards to them as well.

Iran meanwhile, is helping China wrest the vast oil reserves of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf from Uncle Sam . If Iran and China control the flow of oil from the region, the United States will lose control not only of the Caspian Sea but also of the Persian Gulf’s vast and vital oil supplies. Japan best urgently take stock.

China’s missiles nullify America’s capacity to militarily dominate Asia’s vast geography with its small, dispersed pockets of marine forces, whose forward deployment policy bases are much too vulnerable. Without forward bases in Asia, there can be no concentration of American military power: weapons cannot even be stored, let alone massed for use.

This vulnerability of their bases to Chinese missiles is America’s singular military weakness in Asia. America’s powerful Seventh Fleet cannot make up for the loss of Asian land bases. The Seventh Fleet cannot generate anything like the military power or psychological effect of fixed bases.

The most important of these forward bases are those in Japan. Guam, like mainland America, is simply too far away to fill this role. Okinawa is the pivotal, preferred spot. And China’s missiles are gradually making those bases redundant to America’s strategic thinkers.

China is devoting vast resources to her missile program. This is a war of nerves where time and, ultimately, technology, is on the side of Mainland China. This psychological aspect explains China’s widespread use of ballistic missiles, which are, in essence, really psychological weapons – paper tigers if you will. Although Taiwan might protect itself from an amphibious assault, protecting Taipei from surgical missile strikes – or the threat of surgical strikes – by Beijing’s ballistic missile units is a more daunting task. Beijing knows this and will continue to tighten and loosen the screws, as she deems appropriate.

Japan has a glass jaw, one that China could easily break if Japan does not act responsibly over the next few years. Japan is the only major nation in the world that has explicitly renounced war as a tool of policy. Article 9.1 of the Japanese constitution renounces war “as a sovereign right of the nation”. Article 9.2 asserts that “land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained”.

That said, Japan maintains very substantial “land, sea and air forces”. Japan’s military expenditures are, in fact, the third highest in the world. Tokyo has stockpiled over 100 tons of plutonium that would be relatively simple to transform into weapons’ grade material. Japan’s fast-breeder reactors (FBRs) have the capacity to squeeze over 60 times more energy from uranium fuel than can the light-water reactors of most other countries. Japan will, in other words, have the capacity to make more nuclear weapons than the combined arsenals of the United States and Russia hold. If nothing else, this arsenal makes an impressive bundle of bargaining chips.

Because its major challenges will come from the air, Japan has developed formidable anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missile defense systems. Japan’s radar and its accurate Tomahawk missile technology far excel their American prototypes. Other Japanese strengths in miniaturization, automation, telecommunications and the development of durable, lightweight advanced materials further enhance their military capabilities.

Japan’s plutonium purchases have allowed it develop the necessary nuclear submarine technology to counter China’s blue water navy. Though impressive, a handful of nuclear submarines and a couple of batteries of missile defenses do not make Japan impregnable.

Bizarre as it seems, Japan’s expertise in these niche areas is a cause for concern in Washington. America fears lost market share if Japan exports its expertise – and, to develop the required expertise, Japan would have to copy the examples of Israel, Sweden, South Africa and other small countries and aggressively export. The United States fears that Japan would win export orders at its expense.

Japanese dual-use technological capabilities in commercial fields related to military use threatens the preeminent position American producers currently enjoy in the world’s arms’ markets. This is ironic as, historically, the United States encouraged Japan in its development of dual use capabilities. Spin-offs from the radio industry, for example, helped kick-start the Japanese commercial television industry, which eventually obliterated their American competitors.

Japan’s defense industry is, however, an inconsequential part of Japan’s overall industrial output. It accounts for less than 1 percent of Japanese gross domestic product (GDP) and even those firms, such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI), which are most heavily involved in it, are there mostly because of the spin-off technological benefits it has given them.

Whereas Japan has some particularly strong trees of knowledge, the forest overwhelmingly belongs to America. Japan just does not have the logistical depth of America or the European Union to be a major league player. While Japanese industry has established a global position in a wide range of critical modern technologies, Japan’s defense industry has lagged behind. At the systems level, military technology has simply moved faster than Japan’s ability to catch up.

Japan, in other words, does not have an autonomous arms industry. Today, the defense industry accounts for less than 0.6 percent of total industrial production, an almost insignificant amount in Japan’s overall context. Though Japan produces about 90 percent of its own military requirements, much of that is built under license from American firms and a considerable amount of the technology is black-boxed – sealed so that Japanese engineers cannot study and copy them.

In summary then, East Asia is in a state of chassis. Although Japan has neither the heart nor the materiel for what lies ahead, she, together with South Korea and Taiwan, must develop not only their autonomous defense systems but their own autonomous diplomatic voices as well. Japan’s future, whether she likes it or not, will be with its East Asian neighbors’ Belt and Road Initiative when the U.S. 7^th Fleet, however belatedly, scuttles back to Pearl Harbor.

The key to China’s security riposte to the U.S. is linked to two words that go unstated in U.S. formal policy documents, but whose silent presence nevertheless suffuses and colour-washes the text of the 2022 National Defence Authorisation Act.

The term ‘containment’ never appears, neither does the word ‘encirclement’. Yet, as Professor Michael Klare writes, the Act “provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of U.S. bases, military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states. The goal is to enable Washington to barricade that country’s military inside its own territory; and potentially to cripple its economy in any future crisis”.

What the earlier patchwork of U.S. China measures lacked, until now, has been an overarching plan for curbing China’s rise, and so ensuring America’s permanent supremacy in the Indo-Pacific region: “The authors of this year’s NDAA” however, “were remarkably focused on this deficiency, and several provisions of the bill are designed to provide just such a master plan”.

These include a series of measures intended to incorporate Taiwan into the U.S. defence system surrounding China. And a requirement for the drafting of a comprehensive “grand strategy” for containing China “on every front”.

A ‘sense of Congress’ measure in the Act provides overarching guidance on these disparate initiatives, stipulating an unbroken chain of U.S.-armed ‘sentinel states’ — stretching from Japan and South Korea in the northern Pacific to Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore in the south, and India on China’s eastern flank — meant to encircle and contain the People’s Republic. Ominously enough, Taiwan, too, is included in the projected anti-China network.

Accordingly, the measure advocates closer military coordination between the ‘two countries’, and the sale of increasingly sophisticated weapons systems to Taiwan, along with the technology to manufacture some of them.

“And here’s the new reality of the Biden years”, writes Klare: “[Taiwan] is now being converted into a de facto military ally of the United States. There could hardly be a more direct assault on China’s bottom line: that, sooner or later, the island must agree to peacefully reunite with the mainland; or face military action”.

This is not new. The China containment notion reaches back to Obama’s pivot to Asia (and back even further), but it was the during the Trump Administration that the Taiwan pretext began seriously to be ramped. Pompeo upped the ante by approving visits to Taipei by senior officials.

What is different now is that the Biden Administration has not only not reversed the Trump-Pompeo policies, but rather has embraced the Pompeo encirclement agenda, with a vengeance. This is underlined through a provision in the Act insisting that the U.S.’ 1982 agreement to reduce the quality and quantity of its arms transfers to Taiwan, is no longer valid due to China’s “increasingly coercive and aggressive behaviour” toward the island.

The point here is that ‘encirclement’ and ‘containment’ effectively have become Biden’s default foreign policy. The attempt to cement-in this meta-doctrine currently is being enacted out via Russia (as the initial step). The essential buy-in by Europe is the ‘party-piece’ to Russia’sphysical containment and encirclement.

The EU is coming under intense pressure from Washington to commit to sanctions – the financial ‘mode’ to encirclement – as EU officials negotiate what would be considered their ‘red line’. Jake Sullivan however, made the new doctrine and what he expects from Europe very clear last November, when he said: “we want the terms of the [international] system to be favourable to American interests and values: It is rather, a favourable disposition in which the U.S. and its allies can shape the international rules of the road on the sorts of issues that are fundamentally going to matter to the people of [America] …”.

Biden’s threat of unprecedented, harsh sanctions however, has brought forth a warning of a completely unexpected source – as both the U.S. Treasury and the State Department have warned Blinken that the envisaged sanctions would hurt U.S. allies (i.e. Europeans) more than they would hurt Russia, and that their imposition could even trigger a counter-productive global economic crisis that would touch both the U.S. and European consumer, via increased energy prices – thus giving a sharp kick to already record U.S. inflation rates.

In short, Europe might also face a U.S.-led insurgency war fought from its territory, spilling over and across other states; giving birth to a new breed of radical ‘jihadis’, and dilating around Europe. And to yet a new wave of sophisticated weaponry (as happened in the wake of the Afghan war) circulating amongst opposition groups, as Stinger missiles were sold on to who knows whom (and then had later to be bought back from them).

In a likely planted piece, the NY Times reports that:

For years, U.S. officials have tiptoed around the question of how much military support to provide to Ukraine, for fear of provoking Russia.

Now, in what would be a major turnaround, senior Biden administration officials are warning that the United States could throw its weight behind a Ukrainian insurgency should Putin invade Ukraine.

How the United States, which just exited two decades of war in Afghanistan, might pivot to funding and supporting an insurgency from just finishing one – is still being worked out: “Biden has not determined how the United States might arm insurgents in Ukraine; or, who would conduct the guerrilla war against Russian military occupation. Nor is it clear what Russia’s next move might be … But Biden Administration officials have begun signalling to Russia [that eventually it] would find the costs of an invasion … prohibitively expensive in terms of military losses.

“If Putin invades Ukraine with a major military force … And if it turned into a Ukrainian insurgency, Putin should realize that after fighting insurgencies ourselves for two decades, we know how to arm, train and energize them”, said James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral, who was the supreme allied commander at NATO.

This talk in the U.S. of an insurgency mounted via Ukraine has acquired a frenetic quality. Discussion has slipped into neurosis as the U.S. mainstream melts-down at any suggestion of selling out the cause of democracy and liberal values. See here the reaction when the Tucker Carlson’s guest said, “the world is perched on the edge of an abyss. We may soon see the worst combat in Europe since WW2 – killing thousands of people and raising the likelihood of nuclear war. It didn’t have to be this way”.

It’s as if all the many failures of the Biden Administration are being channelled and vented through the narrow atonement of ‘saving Ukraine’.

Naturally, that is not the end to the U.S. project: With ‘containment’ and ‘our democracy’ so much at the forefront of Washington liberal thinking, once Russia has been Gulliverised, and China put on notice, the subsequent containment and encirclement of Iran would seem a foregone conclusion.

Especially, as the encirclement project for China is already underway. And it is not confined to the Indo-Pacific. It is playing out, even today, in the Middle East as an attempted double containment both of Iran and China. The recent drone attack on UAE (claimed by the Houthis) is not unconnected with those targeted states’ bigger struggle to break U.S. encirclement.

One key component to global commerce in upcoming years will be China’s Maritime Silk Road – a shipping route which inevitably pivots around the Horn of Africa, and its choke-point of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, off Yemen’s coast. Yemen therefore becomes a key hub for the U.S.’ ability to ‘contain’ and deny China its’ Maritime Silk Road.

In this context, the UAE plays the Mid-East strategic counterpart to ‘Taiwan’ in the Pacific, becoming the geographical anchor to the ‘sentinel’ ports and islands overlooking the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, and the Bab al-Mandab strait – all presently controlled by UAE.

The enhanced strategic significance of the UAE to Israel and the U.S. almost wholly derives from its having blatantly used the Yemen war as an opportunity to establish an oversized role for itself – through seizing the ‘guardianship’ of the strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Ibrahim Al-Amine has outlined in the pro-resistance Lebanese daily, Al-Akhbar (of which he is editor), “the [recent] American decision to force the UAE to reconsider its war “exit strategy”” in Yemen:

“The new development consisted of a major modification in the American-British decisions represented by a strategic decision to prevent the fall of Ma’rib. The Americans thus directly intervened in the battle. Anyone who looks back at the details … will realize that it is deeper and more dangerous in terms of the Israeli fingerprints … The nature of the intelligence work doesn’t resemble at all the work of the assaulting forces in the past years … In the present war situation, the battle needs men on the ground, hence the American decision to force the UAE to reconsider its war “exit strategy”…”.

Thus, the port of Aden, the Bab al-Mandab Strait and Socotra Island fall neatly into a vital component of the Cold War build-up between China and the U.S.: The Arab ally that can control this essential strait will give the U.S. leverage with which to jeopardize China’s Maritime Silk Road – hence, America’s support for the ongoing conflict in Yemen.

And hence the Houthi drone attack on UAE, signalling that the Houthis have no intention of conceding such a vital key point. The Houthis are giving the UAE a bitter choice: Strikes on its cities or yield up the strategic asset of Bab al-Mandab and its surrounds. Iran and China will be watching closely this ‘breakout’ initiative.

Recognizing that the policies spelled out in the 2022 NDAA represent a fundamental threat to China’s security and its desire for a greater international role, Congress also directed the President to come up with a ‘grand strategy’ on U.S.-China relations in the next nine months, and to prepare an inventory of the economic, diplomatic, and military capabilities the U.S. will require to blunt its rise.

Andrew Bacevich, the U.S. military historian, writes that among foreign policy mandarins in present-day Washington, “spheres of influence” have become anathema. As interpreted today, however, the very phrase smacks of appeasement: It carries for the Beltway foreign policy class, a whiff of selling-out the cause of freedom and democracy, a sin which senior U.S. officials abhor. This is all too evident in today’s heated U.S. mainstream discourse.

A decade ago, Hillary Clinton declared categorically that “The United States does not recognize spheres of influence”. More recently, Secretary Blinken affirmed that statement. “We don’t accept the principle of spheres of influence … the very concept of spheres of influence “should have been retired after World War II”.

Of course! Isn’t it obvious? You can’t barricade a country inside its own territory to enjoy the latitude at a later date to be able to suffocate its economy in any future crisis, and at the same time, accept that Russia and China can set their own red lines – red lines that are formulated precisely to counter their containment, and to counter intimidation through military encirclement.

What the NDAA does, (perhaps inadvertently), is to underline precisely how the Russian and Chinese situation are inter-leafed reflections of each other’s predicament. The ‘war’ to break containment and encirclement is already underway. 

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Before you read another story claiming war among China, Taiwan and the U.S. is getting closer, or relations are entering dangerous territory, or long-standing issues may soon be settled by any means necessary, ask yourself these three questions.

Why Would China Attack Taiwan?

Over the last decade Taiwan invested $188.5 billion in China, more than China’s investment in the United States. In 2019, the value of cross-strait trade was $149.2 billion. Pre-Covid, travelers from China made 2.68 million visits to Taiwan. China applied in September to join the new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. A week later, with no opposition voiced by Beijing, Taiwan applied to join as well. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner. “One country, two systems” has not only kept the peace for decades, it has proven damn profitable. Why bomb one of your best customers?

Apart from the potential the nuclear destruction of the Chinese state (the U.S. has 10 nukes for every Chinese one) why would China consider a war that would provoke the U.S.? Total Chinese investment in the U.S. is $145 billion. U.S. investment in China passed $1 trillion. The Chinese are literally betting the house on America’s success.

A failed invasion of Taiwan would topple Xi if not the whole power structure. An invasion is impractical. Chinese amphibious forces would be under fire from Taiwan’s F-16s armed with Harpoon anti-ship missiles practically as they left harbor. Taiwan will soon field a land-based anti-ship missile with 200 mile range. Estimates are China would need to land a million soldiers on day one (on D-Day the Allies put ashore 156,000) against Taiwan’s fortified rocky west coast, navigating among tiny islets themselves laden with anti-ship weapons. China’s primary amphibious assault ship, the Type 075, carries about only 1,000 men, and China currently has only three such ships. Its conscript troops are unblooded in combat. Meanwhile American and British forces patrol the waters. Aircraft from Guam, Okinawa, and Korea could shut down the skies, and decimate Chinese aircraft on the ground. This is not Normandy. It is also not another of the counterinsurgency struggles which defeated America. It is the Big Power conflict played out in the Strait instead of the Fulda Gap, the war U.S. has been preparing to fight against someone since the 1960s.

No risk vs. gain calculation would end up concluding the best option was war. And discard the irrational actor scenario; Chinese leaders have always believed in historical cycles. They waited close to 300 years to end the foreign Qing dynasty. They waited out Britain for hundreds of years for the peaceful return of Hong Kong, same with Portugal and Macau. Chinese diplomacy is patient, not reactive. There is no fierce urgency to reunification. One waits to win.

Why now?

In fiction one of the important tools is the Change Event, the thing that answers the question of why now? Why did the mild-mannered accountant suddenly become a vigilante? Oh, his daughter was kidnapped. So where is the “why now” part of China-Taiwan?

One of the most compelling arguments China plans no war is they haven’t yet fought any wars. No shots have been fired over the disputed islands, which have disputed for decades. Taiwan broke away in 1949 and the last shot fired was in the 1950s. Chinese troops entered Vietnam only after the U.S. began its own campaign of regime change there, and briefly in 1979 during a border scuffle. China joined the Korean War only after the U.S. threatened to cross into Chinese territory. Xi’s reunification rhetoric is essentially the same as Mao’s.

China is an autocracy (unchanged since 1949), and has not promoted things like free speech in Hong Kong or Tibet, never mind in Beijing or Shanghai. We don’t have to like that, but it is nothing new and has nothing to do with invading Taiwan. China did little when some of the leaders of the Tienanmen protests turned up in Taiwan, another worried over “why now” event.

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Under U.S. guidance, the regime of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek was installed in Taiwan beginning in 1945: He had already been supported by the USA in the 1920s, then also by Hitler’s Germany. Taiwan is being instrumentalized against the People’s Republic of China, again intensified since U.S. Presidents Obama and Trump. The current U.S. President Biden is even toying with a possible war with the help of Taiwan.

At the end of the 19th century, China was simultaneously subjugated and exploited by all colonial powers of the time — especially by Great Britain with the help of the annexed territory of Hong Kong (crown colony since 1843), but also by Russia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and finally also by the colonial newcomers USA, Japan and Germany. In a joint war campaign, they bombed the capital Beijing, then set up embassies there and took command of the formally continuing Chinese government.

The colonial powers raided enormous wealth with their trading companies, banks, mines and corporations, crushed uprisings (most famously the “Boxer Rebellion”), destroyed the rule of law, civil society, order, government and the environment. Partial modernization and industrialization along Western lines simultaneously benefited a tiny Chinese elite. The country was plunged into deep poverty, disorganization and depression (mass sale of opium by British companies from Hong Kong). Local warlords, collaborating with the colonialists, exploited the ungovernability. Millions of people starved, vegetated, were killed for resisting and rebelling.

Bourgeois Revolution: Sun Yatsen 1912

The bourgeois-radical revolutionaries under Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomintang Party ousted the Chinese collaborationist government in 1912 and declared the Republic of China. Sun Yat-sen was supported also by the Soviet Union, the Comintern, and the Chinese Communist Party, which was founded in 1921.

In contrast, the colonialist victorious powers of World War 1 in the Treaty of Versailles under the leadership of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (1919) allowed Japan’s rule over the Chinese island of Taiwan, annexed in 1895, to continue and even transferred rule over the previous German colony of Quingdao to the further rising imperial power of Japan. England’s annexation of Hong Kong remained in place, as did Portugal’s annexation of Macao.

The United States, in particular, continued to treat China as one of its spheres of influence: Standard Oil took over the oil and gasoline business, the Rockefeller Foundation financed the medical department of Peking University, and the lavishly funded missionary organizations Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) established schools and boarding schools in many cities. Sun Yatsen’s government could not withstand these influences.

USA and Hitler support dictator Chiang Kai-Shek

After SunYat-sen’s death in 1925, the old feudal and U.S.-British oriented elites prevailed in China. They relied on General Chiang Kai-shek as the new dictatorial leader of the Republic of China. He was simultaneously head of the military and the government. He was supported by the United States with a lot of money for his army, also for his personal lifestyle, which included an extensive court.

Nazi Germany also recognized a kindred spirit in Chiang: Hitler Youth organized tent camps in China. Hitler sent Wehrmacht generals Hans von Seeckt and Alexander von Falkenhausen as military and industrial advisors. The German corporations IG Farben, Junkers, Heinkel, Rheinmetall, Messerschmitt, Krupp, Otto Wolff equipped Tschiangs army. However, German support ran out from 1938 after Japan invaded China and Hitler allied with the Japanese Empire as the incomparably larger and more important power.

U.S.: “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

But the U.S. continued its support of Chiang. During the World War, there were about one thousand U.S. military advisors in Chiang’s army: it was supposed to fight the Japanese occupation army, but increasingly fought the strengthening People’s Liberation Army under Mao Tse Tung. The Catholic Church also joined in the fight, because the U.S. favorite, like Hitler, proved to be a militant fighter against the “communist danger.” In 1942, Chiang’s dictatorship received diplomatic recognition from the Vatican (it continues uninterrupted to this day). In 1943, Chiang was invited to Cairo by U.S. President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill.

The Vatican and the national Catholic churches, like the U.S. — especially the arms, oil and car companies and Wall Street banks — supported anti-communist Catholic dictators and putschists everywhere at the time, such as Mussolini in Italy, General Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal. Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Vatican had already concluded the Concordat with him. Chiang did not even have to be a Catholic; he had converted to Methodism as a favor to the United States, but that did not bother the Vatican.

Chiang Kai-Shek had workers’ and peasants’ uprisings shot up. U.S. military advisers coined for him, with understanding, the consecration “Cash My Check” in allusion to his name. U.S. President Roosevelt supported the corruption system, following the time-tested motto of U.S. foreign policy, “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

1945: The USA smuggles the Chiang regime into Taiwan

After the war, the U.S. took over the island of Taiwan, which had been annexed by Japan until then, and handed it over to Chiang as head of the Republic of China, which was declared to continue to exist. The U.S. military smuggled some 600,000 soldiers and officers from the Generalissimo’s demoralized army, which was losing more and more rapidly to Mao Tse Tung’s army of millions, to the island.

Chiang formally continued the Republic of China with the Kuomintang Party on the island. He had taken the gold treasure of the rump state with him, as well as the administrative elite. Together with the United States, they hoped for the rapid overthrow of the People’s Republic, which had been founded under the leadership of Mao Tse Tung in 1949.

Massacre of locals

The U.S. Army trained Chiang soldiers in the United States as terrorists: They were then parachuted into mainland China from the island and from Hong Kong to organize uprisings.

The good dozen indigenous peoples and the majority of the locals were kept in check, as under the Japanese colonial regime, and were allowed to take up only subordinate positions. Local uprisings were bloodily put down by Chiang’s deputy, justified by the “communist danger” staged by the USA in Europe and Asia at the time. On Feb. 28, 1947, the regime massacred a popular uprising — at least 28,000 locals were murdered.

The counterrevolution exported to the mainland did not work. The population on the island had to be kept down. Therefore, in 1948, with the approval of the United States, the “Temporary Regulations for the Period of National Mobilization to Suppress the Communist Insurrection” were issued: This emergency decree, with the sole authority of the president and the prohibition of new media, associations and parties, then applied “temporarily,” namely for four decades, until 1988.

Taiwan: Unsinkable aircraft carrier of the USA

The U.S. practiced what it later called nation building: It enforced that the separated territory of Taiwan represented all of China in the UN. And the island was promoted industrially: While the “CoCom list” (Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Control) drawn up by the U.S. In 1949 excluded the People’s Republic of China from the supply of technologically important goods — Taiwan was showered with them. All members of NATO including also Japan, Australia and even “neutral” Switzerland had to abide by this. (CoCom only in 1994 was dissolved)

As in the Federal Republic of Germany, which was occupied by the USA at the same time, production in Taiwan in the 1950s was for the U.S. war in Korea. The U.S. Army as well as the military of the West German Federal Republic trained Taiwanese officers.

The island with the small islands Quemoy and Matsu offshore to the mainland was developed into an unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier. In the following decades, subcontracting orders, initially for U.S. corporations, led to the creation of Foxconn, the world’s largest organizer of casernized low-wage labor (today’s main customers are Hewlett Packard, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo), and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC), one of the world’s largest chip manufacturers.

In contrast, the USA prevented the People’s Republic of China from joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) until 2001 (1).

1971: The People’s Republic replaces Taiwan in the UN

It was not until 1971 that the People’s Republic, supported by several dozen developing countries and the Non-Aligned Movement, achieved recognition as China’s representative in the UN (UN Resolution 2758 of October 25, 1971). The United States therefore also transferred diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China.

Taiwan, with its 23 million inhabitants, continued to receive special support from the United States. However, this was scaled back on the military level, at least until the early 2000s. The reason: The largest U.S. corporations were able to shift as much supplier production as possible to the People’s Republic, which was extremely profitable, because the People’s Republic was an absolute low-wage state at the beginning of industrialization. The low-wage economy was often organized with the help of Foxconn: The profits of U.S. corporations and then other Western corporations skyrocketed.

Low-wage organizer Foxconn flees to the USA and the EU

That changed slowly, but permanently. The practices associated with importing Western companies and contracts were transformed in the People’s Republic, unlike other Western-dominated developing countries such as India: labor incomes in the People’s Republic were gradually increased several times decades, and the number of socially insured people is increasing. Chinese minimum wages now exceed the minimum wages of several EU countries (the U.S. anyway), especially when purchasing power is included (2).

The largest previous organizer of low-wage labor in China, the Taiwanese corporation Foxconn, is therefore gradually saying goodbye to the People’s Republic. Foxconn migrated to the Czech Republic, member state of the European Union, in 2016 with two plants and is taking advantage of the low EU standards and weak trade unions there, also to develop further low-wage sites in the Middle East and Africa from there. At the beginning of 2019, Foxconn set up its first subsidiary in the USA with the support of U.S. President Trump: the state of Wisconsin had declared itself a right-to-work state in 2015. It means: there, trade unions are additionally discriminated against compared to the already weak U.S. federal laws, wages are low in a sparsely populated region, and company start-ups are highly subsidized by central and individual states. Foxconn is now building operations also in Thailand for e-car delivery. The decades-long super-profit source in the People’s Republic of China is drying up.

Obama, Trump, Biden: Tightening up Taiwan’s arms buildup

Taiwan’s one-party dictatorship lifted the emergency constitution in 1988, after four decades, and allowed parliamentary elections, gave itself a democratic appearance, continued to receive economic and media support from the U.S., but had to and was able to buy high-quality armaments elsewhere. This was not a problem: For example, Armament company Dassault of France supplied the Mirage fighter jet.

With the unexpected economic and technological upswing of the People’s Republic — both internally and globally as the largest trading partner and through the New Silk Road — and with the decline in super-profits for U.S. corporations, U.S. President Obama in particular then changed policy: “Pivot to Asia” was the new guideline — turn to Asia! The U.S. animates their allies Australia and Japan to provoke conflicts with the People’s Republic. Also the USA concluded in 2021 an additional military alliance (AUKUS) to act more precisely against the new secular enemy.

With Abrams tanks, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, guided missile-equipped warships and F-16 fighter jets, produced by the U.S. companies General Dynamics, Raytheon and Lockheed, tiny Taiwan is fifth on the U.S. arms export list since 2020, after Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Australia.

Also the European Union takes part

The Biden administration accompanies military buildup with diplomatic campaigns. State Department’s Antony Blinken wants to “upgrade” Taiwan at UN. The most subservient U.S. vassal in the EU, the impoverished and at the same time highly digitalized small state of Lithuania with three million inhabitants, was the first to answer the call and inaugurated the “representation of Taiwan” in the capital Vilnius on Nov. 18, 2021 — the first of its kind. Until now, due to the diplomatic non-recognition of Taiwan, its representations abroad are called “Taipei Representation” (Taipei = capital of Taiwan).

The European Commission and the European Parliament did not prevent this breach of international law by the EU member Lithuania and did not even reprimand it. On the contrary, the Parliament decided by a large majority that a first bilateral investment agreement of the EU with Taiwan will be concluded and that the office of the EU in Taiwan will be strengthened. A parliamentary delegation in early November 2021 emphasized the EU’s solidarity with Taiwan against the threat from the People’s Republic of China and praised the Taiwanese government’s exemplary cooperation with Facebook in combating disinformation campaigns (3).

U.S.: Nuclear first strike is possible, but strengthen intelligence first

Since Obama, the United States has again officially been preparing for the possibility of a nuclear first strike. The “only world power” maintains by far the largest global military apparatus, on land, at sea, in the air, in space and on several hundred territories around the globe — many of them illegally annexed, as in Guantanamo, Guam, Kosovo — in order to maintain its special role, which it has assumed and continues to assume in violation of international law.

Already against the already defeated Japan, the USA used the two atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II in violation of human rights and international law, without any remorse and compensation until today. How incomparably closer would be in this logic today the nuclear first use against China. But this is highly dangerous for the USA itself, in view of the superior second-strike capability of the People’s Republic.

Therefore, the U.S. is intensifying its political and media destabilization campaigns. They are instrumentalizing colonial and pre-democratic remnants such as in Hong Kong, Tibet (religious feudalism), Xinijang (Muslim separatist movement), and Taiwan is now being increasingly added as a point of ignition.

But that’s not enough for the crazed hotheads: in October 2021, the CIA intelligence agency announced the creation of a new independent large-scale unit — China Mission Center. It is to counter “the greatest geostrategic threat to the United States in the 21st century,” the People’s Republic of China. Espionage and counterespionage, terrorism and counterterrorism are part of it. But all important new global conflict areas are also to be instrumentalized: Climate change, technology, and global health, including health policy and pandemics (4).

It has never been more necessary than now that the EU, the whole of Europe and the “rest of the world” finally break away from this highly dangerous policy of the “only world power” USA, which feels threatened and which is contrary to human rights and international law.

Notes

(1) For the geostrategic context see: Werner Rügemer: The Capitalists of the 21st Century. An Easy-to-Understand Outline on the Rise of the New Financial Players, tredition 2020, p. 206 following
(2) For labor injustice organized within the European Union see: Werner Rügemer: Imperium EU – Labor injustice, crisis, new resistances. tredition 2021
(3) European Parliament ends visit to Taiwan, press release 5th of november, 2021
(4) CIA Reorganization to Place New Focus on China, New York Times 7th of October, 2021; CIA Zeros In on Beijing by Creating China-Focused Mission Center, Bloomberg 7th of October, 2021

If you thought western mass media have been brazenly pushy with their anti-China propaganda, wait til you see The Hill’s appalling new opinion piece titled “America must prepare for war with China over Taiwan”.

“China’s massive investment in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may show China is preparing to fundamentally change the status quo and preparing for possible war with the United States over Taiwan,” the piece begins. “To deter China, the United States must rapidly build up its forces in the Pacific, continue to strengthen military alliances in the region to ensure access to bases in time of conflict, and accelerate deliveries of purchased military equipment to Taiwan.”

The article goes on to narrate about Taiwan’s importance on the global chessboard and why we should all expect a full-scale invasion by Beijing quite soon, casually discusses a direct military conflict between two nuclear-armed nations like it’s no big deal, and calls on the Biden administration to “articulate to the American people why Taiwan’s defense is critical to the United States.”

“America must prepare for war with China over Taiwan” (@TheHillOpinion) https://t.co/oOvTwqle05 pic.twitter.com/EM0iAuDQMf

— The Hill (@thehill) November 25, 2021

Then at the very bottom of the article you get to the part that really matters: the information about the author.

“David Sauer is a retired senior CIA officer who served as chief of station and deputy chief of station in multiple overseas command positions in East Asia and South Asia.”

Ahh, okay.

The CIA used to have to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media.

Apparently this “retired” senior CIA officer has been spending his “retirement” churning out war propaganda articles for The Hill with titles like “The US cannot allow China to think it will abandon Taiwan” and “The next US president has a tall order: Keeping China in check”, as well as acting as an expert source for virulent anti-China propaganda rag The Epoch Times.

Would you like to know what this big brave warrior looks like? Would you like to see a picture of this mighty hero who has no fear of leading us all into a third world war?

Here he is:

Now that’s the face of a man who’d be first to volunteer for duty on the front lines in defense of what he believes in. You look at that man and can’t help but imagine him charging into Taipei bleeding red white and blue firing an M4 carbine for freedom and democracy. He’s not just talking about sending our sons and daughters into this war, no siree.

Why is it that all the worst warmongering narrative managers are always weird-looking little nerds who plainly wouldn’t know how to hold their own dicks, much less a gun? Were they bullied so bad in school that they just have to act out their pent-up aggression by helping to incinerate families in the global south over crude oil or something? What the hell is wrong with these freaks?

Anyone who supports the idea of the US and its allies entering into a third world war against a nuclear-armed nation to determine who governs an island off the Chinese mainland is an enemy of humanity. Such a war could easily kill tens of millions of people if engaged with full commitment, which could turn into billions at any time if it went nuclear. I hope Beijing never launches an unprovoked attack on Taiwan (unlikely), and I hope the US doesn’t provoke it into doing so (far more likely), but if all this brinkmanship spins out of control and that does indeed happen then entering into such a war to stop it would benefit nobody but a few sociopaths in Washington, Langley and Arlington. And quite possibly not even them.

Contrary to what propagandists like Sauer keep implying, the US is not even treaty-bound to defend Taiwan militarily and hasn’t been since 1979 when the only such treaty was annulled during Washington’s campaign to coax Beijing away from the Soviet Union. Yet because of their steadily escalating propaganda campaign, for the first time ever a majority of Americans surveyed on whether they’d support going to war with China over Taiwan now reportedly say yes.

Citing US Threats, #Russia and #China Agree to Expand Military Cooperation
US pressure has pushed the two countries closer together
by Dave DeCamp @DecampDave https://t.co/gmhn52PgKh pic.twitter.com/lfSssnID2Z

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) November 24, 2021

At best all these manipulations are geared toward manufacturing consent for pouring vastly increased military resources into the US empire’s ongoing pivot to Asia, which just by itself will necessarily include myriad provocations against the Chinese government which can easily escalate into war at any time. These people are playing games with the lives of every living organism on this planet, and they are suffering no consequences for doing so.

And now Moscow and Beijing are moving further into a military partnership that seems to be getting closer by the year in response to aggressions from the US and its client states, which, I dunno, I’m no historian but maybe might be cause for alarm when you’ve got world powers splitting into two increasingly hostile global alliances. Could that lead to something bad? It seems like maybe that could lead to something bad.

Cornered animals are dangerous, especially ones with fangs and claws. Dying empires are dangerous, especially ones with nuclear weapons. We’re being aggressively propagandized into consenting to insanely dangerous agendas geared toward maintaining US unipolar hegemony in defiance of the natural movement we are seeing toward a multipolar world. We are seeing signs everywhere that the drivers of empire are preparing to do some very, very crazy things in order to stop that movement and maintain their dominance. The fact that they are still ramping up their propaganda campaign is concerning, to say the least.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

United States President Joe Biden held his first direct dialogue with China’s President Xi Jinping amid spiraling tensions between the world’s two biggest economies. Professor Francis Boyle gives his take on the “big event” in a brief interview below.

First though, some background. It seems oddly complacent that it has taken nearly 10 months since Biden entered the White House for these leaders to finally get around to engaging in substantive talks given the urgent context of fraught relations.

Some observers will see the conference held online on November 15 as a welcome move to put the brakes on a dangerous dynamic that is potentially leading towards military confrontation. But a closer look beneath the optics of the meeting reveal that there was no removal of the fundamental source of tensions, which is US hegemonic ambitions, according to Boyle.

The online summit was initiated by Biden and lasted for more than three hours. The American side gave the event high-profile TV coverage. Chinese media tended to welcome the meeting as signaling a possible turning point for improved relations. However, while both leaders appeared to be cordial there was little sign that Washington has changed its fundamental position of antagonizing China, a policy that is leading to armed conflict in particular over Taiwan.

Professor Francis A. Boyle comments in the following interview that both sides remain entrenched in opposing positions. He notes that President Xi warned the Americans that China would not tolerate any interference promoting Taiwan’s independence. For his part, Biden said the US maintains its so-called One China Policy recognizing Beijing’s sovereignty over Taiwan. But at the same time, Washington retains “strategic ambiguity” which gives itself license to supply Taiwan with military weapons, a policy that is emboldening Taiwanese declared independence from the mainland.

From the White House readout of Biden’s comments, the US side also arrogates a presumptive right to lecture China over alleged human rights abuses. Objectively speaking, this US position is cynical and provocative given its blatant hypocrisy over its own record of gross human rights abuses, past and present, as Boyle has extensively documented in his scholarly and legal work over several decades. For Biden to keep pushing this arrogant charade as with previous administrations is proof that Washington is not capable of conducting relations based on mutual respect, which Xi called for.

Boyle points out that the disastrous retreat by the US from its failed war in Afghanistan is largely motivated by Washington’s geopolitical need to confront what it views as the primary challenge to its global power stemming from an ascendant China and an emerging multipolar world. Afghanistan does not represent “an end to American wars”, as Biden claimed. It is more a conservation and redirection of imperial power. In that regard, the online summit with Xi initiated by Biden is merely more deception and duplicity by the US side, which does little to mitigate dangerous tensions.

Francis Anthony Boyle is Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He is an alumni cum laude of Harvard School of Law. Boyle has served as counsel for Bosnia-Herzegovina and an advisor to the Palestinian Authority. He is a long-standing critic of US policy supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories which he has condemned as genocide. Boyle has denounced US governments over foreign policy that systematically promotes war and the oppression of indigenous peoples. He is author of numerous books, including The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence; Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade US Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution; World Politics and International Law; Destroying World Order: US Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11; and Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations.

Interview

Question: After the online summit this week between US President Joe Biden and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, do you see any grounds for optimism for US-China relations improving and “veering away from conflict” as President Biden put it?

Francis Boyle: No. President Xi read the riot act to Biden on Taiwan. So far, I have seen no evidence that Biden is backing down on his support for the Taiwan independence movement.

Question: Was it significant that the summit was requested by Biden in the first place?

Francis Boyle: Yes. This was basically a public relations gesture by Biden to convince the American people and the world that he was really doing something to calm the situation down when in fact on the ground in Taiwan and in the seas of the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea he is doing the exact opposite. I am sure President Xi is paying attention to what Biden is doing, not what he is talking about in a virtual summit that Biden broadcasted in the media for propaganda purposes. As Machiavelli said in The Prince, the Prince must learn to be a fine liar and hypocrite. That’s Joe Biden!

Question: Biden told Xi that the US still supports the One China Policy. Do you see this statement lowering tensions over Taiwan?

Francis Boyle: Of course not. Indeed, right after the meeting the Biden administration announced there is going to be a high-level meeting between US defense experts and Taiwan defense experts. Biden basically slapped Xi in the face right after their “summit”.

Question: Biden mentioned various human rights concerns in China. Xi did not mention human rights concerns in the US Does that indicate US policy is still hampered by arrogance and presumption of superiority?

Francis Boyle: Of course. Like all US administrations going back to Jimmy Carter, they have all used “human rights” as a propaganda weapon against their designated adversaries. Meanwhile, look at what successive recent US governments have done to the Palestinians, or the Libyans, or the Iraqis, or the Syrians, or the Somalis, or the Yemenis, or the Afghans, etc. Massive death and destruction all over the Middle East and Central Asia.

Question: China’s President Xi often talks about how China is no longer the weak giant of former times when the US and European imperial powers dominated it as for example during the 19th Century Opium Wars. Would you agree that there is a new historic reality of US imperial decline in a multipolar world where China is more than capable of determining relations?

Francis Boyle: Yes. The United States government just suffered the most catastrophic defeat since Vietnam in Afghanistan. They have learned nothing from it. Indeed, Biden said that they are leaving Afghanistan in order to better confront China. QED.

The contradictions multiply: On the one hand, U.S. Administration ‘China hawks’ accelerate the eating away, piece by piece, of the ‘One China’ commitment and egg-on Taipei to think that the U.S. ‘has its back’, were China to attempt any reunification of the Island using military force. Yet Taiwan will eventually be integrated into China, as the latter would be bound to prevail militarily, should ‘push come to shove’. Perhaps though, Washington sees this tactical harassment of Beijing as a political ‘capillary action’ success – even if Taiwan’s end-destiny is ‘writ’ in stone.

Then there are reports that Israel is engaged in what are described as ‘intense’ drills to simulate an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Blinken has made clear that the U.S. Administration knows what Israel is planning, and approves. He met with Israeli Foreign Minister Lapid on 13 October, and said that should diplomacy with Iran fail, the U.S. will turn to “other options.” Lapid later confirmed that one U.S. option precisely is military action.

Yet, even Israeli military experts admit that there is no realistic Plan ‘B’ to halt Iran’s enrichment programme. One leading Israeli Military Commentator recently noted that: ‘Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear know-how. In a ‘best-case scenario’ military Israeli action would delay the program by “two years maximum”’. Should the Vienna talks fail, either Israel will come to live with a ‘threshold power’ Iran. Or, it must prepare itself for a multi-front regional war – which it is doing.

Thirdly, we observe the most blatant (apparent) contradiction: The West contrives to use Ukraine as the peg to threaten Russia with NATO action, even to the extent of NATO recently lowering the threshold for using its nuclear weapons – and yet … there is no way that Donbass can be seized back by Kiev. Moscow will never allow it, and NATO knows it cannot prevail over Russia in Ukraine, short of an unthinkable nuclear exchange.

Either way, the U.S. – apparently – courts failure: Either Ukraine remains territorially status quo, and disintegrates from the weight its own dysfunctionality, economic collapse and endemic corruption. Or, in a futile gesture, it goes for broke versus the Donbass forces and ends dismembered, as Russia – very reluctantly – is forced to intervene.

What then is the logic to this? For Ukraine, it is either the Scylla or Charybdis. Nonetheless, signs point to the U.S. and its allies providing Kiev with new weapons. Macron is due shortly in Kiev to sell it the weapons with which to threaten Donbass. The re-arming process seems already to be underway. But even with new weapons, Kiev cannot prevail.

Perhaps the Ukrainian public will believe it might – but not the Kiev authorities: Their hope is that any resulting Russian military intervention would force full-blooded European support for Kiev. The EU would, of course, back Kiev – if only to stem a potential millions of refugees heading to the European Union. Yes, the country would have been Balkanised, but the corrupt Russophobic oligarchs would still be intact, and politically ‘on top’.

Thus, it would seem that the American ‘end-game’ is to give a reluctant Russia no choice but to have to intervene. The goal here clearly is not to defeat Russia militarily, but politically (as the Russia commentator, the Saker, has noted). He also rightly points out that Moscow well understands that America and EU leaders are setting it a trap. Nonetheless, Russia would have little option to stand aloof, were their kith and kin in Donbass being slaughtered. (It is possible that the Donbass forces could manage alone, though the domestic pressures on President Putin to intervene would be huge.)

Why should the U.S. in its present politically debilitated state want to risk igniting three unpredictable firestorms? Professor Mearsheimer tells us that China is compelled to build itself as “the ‘Godzilla of Asia’, since that’s the way for it to survive!” It cannot trust the U.S., since it can never be certain about U.S. intentions. Fear becomes dominant in this anarchic jungle of a world. “This is the tragic essence of international politics: the unpredictability of intentions”, Mearsheimer concludes.

There is much in this point: The American Establishment plainly fears, and is angered by, any prospect of losing supremacy. The Democrats, in particular, historically fear to be perceived as weak in preserving hegemony. But one old hand perhaps offers a different insight: Jonathan Clarke, writing in 1996 for the Cato Institute, calls it the flaw of America’s Instinct for the Capillary. That was 1996. This is the proliferate flaw that contains the potential to upend America’s hegemony.

He was referring to the Clinton Administration’s desire to rack up a string of miscellaneous, shallow achievements that would be boasted as successes to the electorate, so that the latter would conclude that foreign policy was in reasonably good shape. Yet they would be in error: The quest for racking-up these hollow achievements “ignored the alarming void, in precisely the area of greatest importance: the question of whether policy was making it more or less likely that America would have to fight a major war in the near future”. The U.S. is addicted to ephemeral success, whilst ignoring its strategic erosion, he wrote.

It was ‘Instinct for the Capillary’, in the sense that water (i.e. these minor successes) can progress along a tube – but only if the tube is sufficiently constrained and narrow:

“The unnuanced support for Taiwanese independence, irrespective of Chinese reactions and the public advocacy of covert action against Iran are the most prominent examples” Clarke wrote then. “Such actions are not signs of a coherent, much less a prudent, approach … One [that] has failed to promote the evolution of stable, non-volatile relationships with … Russia and China. To the contrary, the United States is almost on the point of turning those two powerful nations into strategic adversaries, possibly even in alliance with each other. That disturbing possibility is being covered up by the rhetorical abandon with which administration leaders celebrate their ‘success’ on secondary issues. That may be effective politics [domestically], [but] is exactly the opposite of what is required. The successes … tend to be fragile or unfinished, puzzlingly remote from the nation’s true interests – or founded on ill-conceived diplomacy”.

“A brief look at U.S. policy on China illustrates the point. The array of contentious and mutually conflicting issues is intimidating: Taiwan, commercial opportunities, Beijing’s sales of advanced (including nuclear) technology, China’s increasing defence spending, territorial expansionism in the South China Sea, and human rights. In many of those areas, a classic American dilemma between realism and idealism exists. But the administration has done little to resolve that dilemma; or to consider what level of risk the United States should be willing to incur in pursuit of specific objectives”.

“In November 1995 Joseph Nye, at the time assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs, answered Chinese questions about the potential U.S. reaction to a Chinese move against Taiwan with the vague statement that “it would depend on the circumstances”. That formulation might be forgiven as a justifiable public circumlocution on an extremely delicate matter if there was any sense of confidence that the administration in private knew how it wished to proceed and was making dispositions on that basis. But U.S. officials do not even seem clear in their own minds whether American democratic values are sufficiently on the line in Taiwan, to risk a military confrontation with Beijing”.

That was written two decades ago! Since then, the U.S.’ successive pursuit of hollow ‘tub-thumping’ has, as Clarke forewarned, duly turned both Russia and China into adversaries, and brought them into strategic military partnership. Just to be clear: Clarke was saying that the weight of these strategically-incoherent ‘victories’ constituted a contradiction that, one way or another, ultimately would implode American power.

Biden may not want all-out war with China, but nonetheless he desires to virtue signal American belligerence towards this rising power. And U.S. mainstream media presently are feasting on the Taiwan issue. What is the objective then? Conceivably the ‘success’ would be Taiwan’s ‘meaningful participation’ in the UN and other international bodies (magnified by western allies’ loud and repeated support). In a word, to ‘Kosovo’ Taiwan out of China’s orbit, just as Kosovo was separated, and pumped out from Serbia’s orbit.

These U.S. tactics will ensure the ultimate military defeat of the Taipei administration (and hence its ‘Kosovisation’ turns wholly ephemeral). Yet nonetheless, it will be presented as somehow a U.S. political success (‘standing up for democratic values’). This would be doubly so were the modus operandi to be extended to the majority-Muslim province of Jinjiang (where U.S. policy could be portrayed as both supporting human rights and diversity, too). And yes, the strategic cost would be there: Whatever trust for Washington there may be still lingering on in Beijing would have been shredded. China is now not only an adversary – It is set on winning.

In Ukraine, provoking even a limited Russian military intervention into eastern Ukraine would be hailed as a political achievement. Never mind the damage, the deaths; Europe would fall under full Washington control, and NATO would re-discover its raison d’être. But Europe and America would be weaker – and yet more of America’s traditional clients will assert themselves, through diversifying their relations, and projecting power through broader alliances. And the more they look eastward, the more deeply they engage with China.

For Iran, the ‘Capillary Action’ has begun: Iranian petrol stations have been subject to cyber attack; new U.S. sanctions have been imposed on IRGC figures; and ‘muscular’ virtue-demonstrations – on a par with the Freedom of the Seas naval sails-through of the Taiwan Strait – have begun. Over the last weekend, the U.S. flew a B-1B strategic long-range bomber over the Middle East, and specifically over the Strait of Hormuz near Iran, in what the U.S. Air Force called a ‘presence patrol’ to send a message to Tehran (the point being that the B-1B nuclear-capable bomber is capable of carrying America’s large bunker-busting bombs). Symbolically, at various points along the route – which went from the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Yemen and then through Israel and Jordan and then over the Persian Gulf – Israeli fighter jets escorted the bomber, periodically with others from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, too.

Another secondary success, notwithstanding America’s strategic risk in pursuing this path of ephemeral achievements? Israel’s intentions are wholly unpredictable, even should Blinken and Sullivan imagine that Tel Aviv would warn them first. “So”, the Israeli military commentator summed-up: “I believe that we’ll see the continuation of this low intensity conflict – though it not turning into a direct one – unless Israel decides to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities”.

Has the U.S. considered – per Clarke’s analysis – what level of risk it is willing to incur for ‘pulling in’ these secondary achievements (naval sail-throughs, and B-1B fly-bys)? Or is “rhetorical abandon” again the order of the day?

Success stories are needed in the wake of the Kabul withdrawal débacle, and this Administration is in a tearing hurry to give Biden the semblance of foreign policy success. Yet, the combined weight of such fragile, unfinished and strategically disconnected ‘successes’ will at some point badly rebound, in ways exceeding what a dysfunctional U.S. system can bear.

Under Trump’s escalating anti-China stance, Taiwan enjoyed enhanced recognition and support – with regular high-level visits from U.S. officials, as well as increased arms sales. This led some Beltway pundits, at the time, to express concern that ‘strategic ambiguity’ regarding the possibility of a U.S. military response – were Taiwan to be militarily reunited with China – was being deliberately eroded. They warned in Foreign Affairs to not rock the boat with China.

Nonetheless, Taipei feared that this salami-slice push by Washington’s China hawks nurturing Taiwan autonomy, could be watered down by an incoming Biden administration. They feared that U.S. foreign policy under Biden would chart a softer approach, based more on managing its pivot to ‘intense competition’ with China.

Much the same expectations of a Bidenesque ‘softer’ approach – albeit in the context of multilateral co-operation – was shared by Brussels in the wake of Biden’s arrival in the White House. Biden’s ‘America is Back’ mantra received a gushing welcome from the Brussels ruling class. It was expected to overturn Trump’s scepticism and hesitancy on NATO and the EU, and to usher in a new golden era of multilateralism. It hasn’t.

Biden’s ‘laser-like pivot’ to China as its primordial security interest – rather – has resulted in the North Atlantic, the EU and NATO becoming much less important to Washington, as the U.S. security crux compacts down to ‘blocking’ China in the Pacific.

Biden may ‘speak’ multilateralism; he may speak more ‘softly’; but it is the Military Industrial, War College and Think-Tank conceptualisations ultimately that count, and to whom one should pay attention. Why? because … continuity.

Incumbents of the White House come and go, but U.S. security objectives do not alter course so readily. A touch on the tiller by an incoming Administration often is insufficient to change a massive vessel’s course. Academic military think-tank perspectives evolve to a different rhythm, and to a longer ‘beat’. When Trump was in the White House, his views on NATO and Europe’s defence efforts were not so very different to those just manifested by Blinken, when he disparages the EU as a significant actor in Global terms – as the U.S. plunges into its ‘China First’ metamorphosis.

The key difference is in style: the new Secretary of State says it in excellent French, whereas Trump just didn’t ‘do European finesse’. The continuity however, was ever present.

On 3 October, the Department of State’s spokesman, Ned Price, made a statement that the U.S. was most concerned by China’s air activity near Taiwan, calling such actions ‘provocative’. Price also described Taiwan as ‘democratic’, an ‘ally of the U.S.’, and one who ‘shares our values’. “We will continue to stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity, security, and values and deepen our ties with democratic Taiwan”, he said.

Not surprisingly, Beijing responded furiously with a strong counter-statement criticising Price’s words as a plain inference that the U.S. regards ‘democratic’ Taiwan as a ‘nation’, separate to China. Beijing views any breach of America’s 1972 ‘One China’ commitment as trespassing across China’s reddest of red lines. Beijing underlined its extreme anger by deploying a record breaking 52 aircraft near Taiwan, in a single day. And a thunderous editorial in the Global Times insisted that it was ‘Time to warn Taiwan secessionists and their fomenters: War is real’.

Biden may be sincere when he says that his Administration does not seek war with China, but nonetheless, from some one, or other, wedge inside the Establishment, there has been this continuous chip-chipping away at the One China policy with a series of small, seemingly innocuous moves – proposing to change the Taipei Cultural and Economic office in the U.S. into a quasi-diplomatic Taiwan Representational Office; through more military sales; USAF touchdowns, and senior official visits – culminating last week with Australia’s former prime minister Tony Abbott visiting Taipei, where he provocatively insisted that “any attempt at coercion would have incalculable consequences” for China, and strongly suggested that both the United States and Australia would come to Taiwan’s aid militarily. “I don’t believe America could stand by and watch [Taiwan] swallowed up”.

Was this speech ‘green-lighted’ ahead of delivery from some cubby-hole in Washington? Almost certainly ‘yes’.

Then again, back in August, in the Washington Examiner, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Michael Rubin contended that Taiwan must “go nuclear” in the wake of the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan. To survive Taiwan should obey the most primal, bare knuckles law of world politics: Self-help.

The Island authorities plainly have long been inching towards full independence from China. This week, President Tsai, marking the 110th anniversary of the declaration of a Republic, inflamed tensions with Beijing by suggesting that Taiwan stood as the first line of defence of democracy against authoritarianism. Her speech was riddled with language implying there are two countries on each side: i.e. in effect, that there are two distinct nations. Was Tsai egged on to use such language?

Rubin’s contention that Taiwan should go nuclear is not without history. In 1975, the CIA reported “Taipei conducts its small nuclear program with a weapon option clearly in mind.” However, Taiwan was not allowed to develop a weapon, and the CIA put a stop to it in 1987, when a defector arrived in the U.S. with proof of the programme.

President Xi however, by contrast, is fully committed to reunifying Taiwan with China. He repeated it forcefully again this week. Beijing suspects Team Biden of pursuing a stealth policy of encouraging Taiwan’s independence by such weasel-worded statements, such as the one by Price, that give the impression of an America that, in the last resort, would back a unilateral act of independence by Taiwan. China’s response is unequivocal: That would mean war.

Yet there is more to it than that. Taiwan is the principal piece on the chessboard, but not the only one. Again, continuity is the key. Incumbents and their programmes wax and wane, but the dynamic pull of continuity can prove nigh impossible to resist .

At the beginning of February – just four weeks after Biden was inaugurated – a Republican senator Dan Sullivan, a member of the Armed Services Committee, took to the floor of the U.S. Senate, in response to the Atlantic Council’s publication of “The Longer Telegram,” a paper by an anonymous former senior government official proposing a new American China strategy. The Senator said of this paper: this is “a great, important development” that the Biden administration “needs to take a hard look at”. He noted that the U.S. has arrived at a historic moment similar to the period after World War II in which it devised its containment strategy toward the Soviet Union.

Senator Sullivan’s reference to that historic Soviet containment strategy, was intended to draw comparison with George Kennan’s historic 1946 “Long Telegram” on a grand U.S. strategy for the Soviet Union. As the anonymous author of January’s Longer Telegram explains:

“Kennan’s famous 1946 “long telegram” from Moscow was primarily an analysis of the inherent structural weaknesses within the Soviet model itself, anchored by its analytical conclusion that the USSR would ultimately collapse under the weight of its own contradictions … The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, has been much more dexterous in survival than its Soviet counterpart, aided by the fact that China has studied carefully, over more than a decade, ‘what went wrong’ in the Soviet Union. It would therefore be extremely hazardous … to assume that the Chinese system is destined to inevitably collapse from within — much less to make the overthrow of the Communist Party the U.S. declared objective …T he present challenge will require a qualitatively different and more granular policy response to China than the blunt instrument of ‘containment with Chinese characteristics’ and a dream of CCP collapse”.

Here is a case of continuity hijacked. Yes, Kennan’s analysis was a profound appraisal of how the Soviet Union functioned internally, and from that had flowed a U.S. strategy. And the same needs to be done with China, the author insists. Yet there is in the new Telegram no comparable empathetic understanding of President Xi’s modernisation project, nor the part played by China’s experience of its’ ‘Century of Humiliation’ in the Kanaan mode. Rather, the Longer Telegram stands as a narrative supporting mainstream U.S. interventionism, albeit cloaked in the Kanaan mantle.

The playbook is very familiar (from the Iranian experience): “The political reality is that the CCP is significantly divided on Xi’s leadership and his vast ambitions …”, the author asserts. The author’s key policy take-aways are: to drive a wedge into the CCP leadership; to divide it against itself; to mount a menu of pressure-point issues in order to impose costs on Xi and his allies (Taiwan features prominently at the top of the list); and specifies as the single greatest factor that could contribute to Xi’s fall: Economic failure.

All these identical policies that failed dismally in Iran – they never learn.

What is the point here? It is that following Beijing’s broadside at Ned Price’ statement, Biden’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, urgently flew to Zurich to meet with Yang Jiechi, a Politburo Member and Director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission. Yang and Sullivan talked for nearly six hours, apparently. It seems they disagreed on all issues. Sullivan reportedly framed the talks as listing several issues of contention (Human Rights, Uyghurs, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the disputed Islands, etc.), which America wishes to pursue with Beijing. Yang, however, flatly refused to discuss any of them, saying they were all domestic issues.

Sullivan then insisted that Climate Change should be compartmentalised from these other points of contention – and treated as a separate area of co-operation. Sullivan also called for open channels of communication by which America’s intense ‘competition’ with China could be ‘managed’ and contained. Still, it seems they disagreed on all issues. The only ‘positive’ to emerge from the meeting was agreement – but only in principle – for there to be a virtual meeting between Biden and Xi before the end of the year.

The point here is that Sullivan’s script seems drawn straight from the Longer Telegramplaybook, whose flaws are very manifest: Firstly, it is rooted in the pure ideology of preserving U.S. supremacy “for the century ahead”; and secondly, it is rooted in fantasy to imagine that the U.S. can successfully change the decision-making of top Chinese officials of whose political culture they have no inkling. This strategy most likely will end in disaster, or even in catastrophic war.

It would be a mistake however to underestimate the Longer Telegram’s appeal. Part of the reason, as Ethan Paul notes, is that “the sharpest minds in Washington have been singularly focused on finding the best ways of maintaining American dominance, assuming it to be synonymous with American interests, and as the only way of organizing the world. Many authors of these arguments—Ely Ratner, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Kelly Magsamen, Melanie Hart, Tarun Chhabra and Lindsey Ford —have secured top jobs in the Biden administration. Together (and with their key theorist, Rush Doshi), they represent a new, rising generation of policymakers who seek to reorient American foreign policy – around competition with China … They will now get their chance to put their ideas to the test”.