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Americans are always innocent. They never provoke. They never antagonize. Their only concern is the preservation of democracy and human rights around the world. So, they say.
During her recent visit to Taiwan, the raven-eyed Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, pledged her support for democracy on the Chinese island. At a press conference following her meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen, she stated, “Again, our delegation came here to send an unequivocal message: “America stands with Taiwan,” no doubt in the same manner it stands with Ukraine.
The message, of course, was sent to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who, speaking with his American counterpart, Joe Biden, prior to the Pelosi visit, warned that, “Those who play with fire will perish by it.”
On the advice of the military, President Biden, who initially cautioned against the visit, tried to play down the controversial trip by asking, in essence, what’s the problem? America’s One China policy has not changed. So, what’s the fuss?
Democratic and Republican lawmakers, normally at each other’s throats, agreed that Pelosi should follow through with her visit. After all, they reasoned, the Chinese Communist Party should not be able to dictate the travel plans of the Speaker of the House, illustrating once again the bipartisan nature of the politics of empire.
Pelosi, however, did not visit Taiwan on an American Airlines flight or one sponsored by any other commercial airline, chartered airline, or private jet. No. She flew to the island on a U.S. Navy military transport plane, protected in the South China Sea by the aptly named USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and a flotilla of warships. There was no provocation, according to U.S. government spokespersons, pretending innocence.
This is the same Nancy Pelosi who, as a Congresswoman, carried a banner in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square honoring pro-democracy demonstrators while decrying the lack of political freedom in Communist China in 1991. The public relations stunt was repeated by Vitoria Nuland and John McCain in Kiev’s Maidan Square in support of pro-democracy protesters in Ukraine; the difference being, the United States was able to topple the Ukrainian government by using fascist shock troops in 2014, but failed to organize a color revolution by co-opting students and workers in China, whose military crushed dissidents in 1989.
The People’s Liberation Army could have shot Pelosi’s plane out of midair and ended, once and for all, the career of a venal imperialist politician who spouted anti-Chinese rhetoric for decades. They did not do so, considering the act too brazen, unlike the United States government that routinely uses its military or its surrogates to take out enemies with the ruthlessness of Mafia hitmen. Witness the recent killing of Al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Or the hanging of Saddam Hussain. Or the torture, sodomy, and shooting of Muammar Kaddafi, captured on a cellphone video, and viewed with relish by Hillary Clinton, who commented, “We came, we saw, he died.”
In his comments extoling the extra-judicial killing of Zawahiri, Biden stated, “We make it clear again tonight that no matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out,” a right reserved by the American empire but forbidden to its enemies.
What China has done is commence “targeted military operations” surrounding the island of Taiwan. These operations involve the entire Chinese military, including naval drills, long-range shooting drills, and ballistic missile launches by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). By so doing, China has closed Taiwan’s water lanes and airspace. It has done so before.
There have been three Taiwan Strait crises, one in 1952, another in 1954, and a third in 1995. On all three occasions, the PLA launched military operations only to face deterrent forces deployed by the United States. In the second crisis, PLA troops massed in the coastal province of Fujian, prompting the Americans to send warships into the Strait. China is currently massing troops in Fujian as part of its targeted military operations in response to the Pelosi provocation.
Two questions emerge: Is the military operation a show of force or a prelude to war? If China launches a war of reunification, what will the United States, having pledged to defend Taiwan, do?
Unlike the United States, whose leaders have their itchy fingers poised on launch codes for Hellfire, cruise, and nuclear missiles, the Chinese, whose civilization is 5,000 years old, have demonstrated a great deal of patience when it comes to Taiwan. They can take the long view and simply wait for conditions to ripen for reunification after demonstrating their military power to crush any move toward independence by Taipei and Washington.
President Xi, who values stability, is very cautious and undoubtedly understands the consequences that a proxy-war like the one being fought by the United States against Russia in Ukraine would have on China. The consequences of a direct war would be infinitely more profound and destructive.
But the highly emotional issue of Taiwan’s reunification should not be underestimated given China’s history of subjugation prior to the Maoist revolution in 1949, especially if U.S. provocations continue, as they most certainly will. The revolution pulled China from the clutches of imperialism and bestowed independence and dignity upon the Middle Kingdom, enabling the country to emerge as a global economic and military power, one that should not be trifled with today.
Yet, it is precisely because of China’s emergence as a world power that Pelosi stuck her finger in the eye of the Chinese Dragon in the name of defending “democracy” from “autocracy,” holding fast to the Biden doctrine of foreign interventionism.
The truth is that the United States only loves democracy when the state serves capital, particularly American capital, as it does in Taiwan and every other democratic vassal state in the empire. These are fake democracies that serve the elites, not the people. Autocratic governments, including monarchies such as Saudi Arabia’s, are acceptable to the United States as long as they adopt vassal status to U.S. capital. The only type of government, democratic or autocratic, hated by the American empire is one that adopts policies of economic nationalism and does not throw its doors open to unregulated foreign (i.e., U.S. corporate and financial) penetration.
In the United States, politics is controlled by capital. In China, capital is controlled by politics. That is what allowed the Chinese Communist Party to lift 800,000 of its people out of extreme poverty. The United States, despite its “War on Poverty” during the 1960s, never approached such a monumental social achievement and, worse, has abandoned the Keynesian economic model that supported Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in favor of a neoliberal economics of deregulated capital accumulation.
Internationally, the Chinese practice fair trade, not free trade, a euphemism for U.S. corporate globalization and profit accumulation. In 2013, President Xi Jinping undertook the Belt and Road Initiative, an economic and infrastructural development program that connects China to Central Asia, Europe, and Africa modeled on the ancient Silk Road trade route. In 2017, President Xi extended the initiative to Latin America. The idea is to set up a global corridor by land and sea for financial integration, development, and trade, supported by institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which does not involve itself in predatory lending and debt enslavement as do the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, American accusations of a “Chinese debt trap” notwithstanding.
On July 22, 2022, China and Russia announced the development of a new global reserve currency to replace the dollar, thereby undercutting financial dependence on the United States and its Treasury Department’s profligate use of sanctions to punish adversaries. The announcement was made at a meeting of BRICS countries that included Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, who intend to develop a basket of currencies to replace the dollar reserve.
Herein lies the threat to U.S. global hegemony that explains why the United States sees itself as being involved in agreat-power competition, the latest neoconservative justification for military interventionism and confrontational behavior.
Pelosi’s visit must be analyzed within the context of Obama’s pivot to Asia. The foreign policy initiative was announced by the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2011. It is the brainchild of his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, that was also adopted by Trump and Biden.
Here is where the truth radically differs from propaganda. The United States’ empire is being threatened by an economic competitor that is, in the words of its own president, “eating our lunch.” The American response, as usual, is to apply force. The pivot to Asia is nothing other than the hegemon, under Obama, Trump, and Biden, turning away from its destructive frenzy in the Middle East to vent its anger in the Far East, in the same way a mass murderer pivots from one victim to another to take aim during a shooting spree.
The pivot involves the United States surrounding China with an archipelago of 400 military bases that extend from Australia, to the South Pacific, to Japan, especially Okinawa, and to South Korea. The purpose is to counter Chinese naval expansion in the South China Sea and potentially cut off maritime trade routes. The bases also provide a launching pad for an attack on China. Who, it must be asked, is threatening whom?
The pretext of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is not only to protect democracy from autocracy but to protect human rights. Presidents of the United States, State Department officials, Congressional representatives, including Pelosi, and corporate journalists have been particularly vocal in confronting China’s human rights abuses, especially regarding its treatment of Uyghur and Tibetan people.
Concerning the Uyghurs, China is accused of committing human rights violations against the largely Muslim ethnic minority living in Xinjiang province, including the detention of over one million people, the imprisonment of thousands, and the imposition of a mass sterilization program on Uyghur women. China has denied persecuting the Uyghurs by mass internment. The Chinese government has also categorically denied charges of imposing mass sterilization in the province. Not coincidentally, the United States has been recruiting Uyghur jihadists, who were battle-hardened in its proxy-war in Syria and its occupation in Afghanistan, to fight for independence in Xinjiang, thus disrupting the Belt and Road Initiative. China has launched a genuine anti-terror campaign to put an end to the Uyghur separatist rebellion.
Even if the charges against China are taken at face value, which they should not be given the American track record of imperial lies, who is the United States government to lecture China on the treatment of Muslims in the wake of its fraudulent “War on Terror?” The U.S. war of terror led to attacks on seven Muslim countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Iran; CIA ghost flights, extraordinary rendition, and torture programs aimed at Muslims; the kidnapping and imprisonment of insurgents, many of whom are Muslim, on a military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; FBI raids on Muslim charities and violations of the civil liberties of Muslim Americans and immigrants in the wake of 9/11; a ban on immigration from seven Muslim countries; and U.S. support for Israel’s repression of Palestinians, particularly its recent attacks on Muslim worshipers at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
Prior to the Chinese entry into Tibet, the country was ruled by a Buddhist theocracy that based itself on a ruthless feudal order, the foundation of which was serfdom, with all of its attendant atrocities. The Chinese communists permitted limited self-rule in Tibet when they entered the country in 1951. The CIA immediately began financing a Tibetan independence movement, including support for the Dalli Lama, leading to an armed uprising that was suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army in 1956/57. The fraudulent Dalli Lama, who lived in opulence while in Tibet, has been hailed as a paragon of spiritual virtue by clueless liberals in the West, despite his history as a tool of the CIA and one of its front organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy.
The empire never rests when it comes to subverting independent states by fomenting religious, ethnic, and tribal hatred to induce separatist movements. And yet, the Chinese people and their government are subjected to the appallingly hypocritical rhetoric uttered by Nancy Pelosi as she presumes to lecture China on the issue of human rights.
It is peculiar how Pelosi, the freedom fighter, is not concerned about the human rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, 14,000 of whom were killed by the fascist puppet government in Kiev installed by a U.S. sponsored coup in 2014.
Pelosi has no regard for the human rights of Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Yemeni, or Somali people who have suffered from U.S. invasions, occupations, bombings, drone strikes, and other forms of hideous imperial violence in the Middle East and North Africa.
Pelosi, being a regular attendee at annual AIPAC conferences, recipient of large Zionist campaign donations, and hack for the Zionist Lobby, cares not a whit about Palestinian human rights, being as she is, a rabid supporter of Israel and its violent repression in the Occupied Territories.
She does not care about the people of Cuba, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, or any other country subjected to economic boycotts, sanctions,
coup d’états, proxy-wars, death squads, and other forms of political violence and oppression imposed by the United States in Latin America.
Closer to home, despite rhetorical support for the Black Lives Matter movement, Pelosi is unconcerned about the human rights of Black Americans, who are routinely shot down in the streets of freedom’s land by police forces deployed in mass by her political ally in the White House, Joe Biden, author of Bill Clinton’s notorious crime bill.
Above all, she does not care about the people of China or Taiwan. What she cares about is imperial domination. Pelosi and Biden have fractured the One China policy that recognizes the People’s Republic as the legitimate government of China and acknowledges the view that Taiwan is part of China, in favor of intimidation and the not-so-veiled threat of military intervention should China try to reunify Taiwan. The U.S. posture of “strategic ambiguity” with regard to Taiwan is no longer ambiguous following Pelosi’s visit and recent statements by Biden that are designed to encourage Taiwanese independence from Beijing.
When Biden was asked during a recent news conference in Tokyo whether the United States would use military force to defend Taiwan if it were attacked, he answered, “Yes, it’s a commitment we made.” Spokespersons at the White House and State Department tried to “walk back’’ the comment, reiterating the One China policy, but the proverbial cat was out of the bag.
Mad-dog imperialists are desperate and can only provoke war to save their declining empire, but war with China or Russia, or both, is a conflict they cannot win as it will destroy life on the planet. Herein lies the existential danger facing humanity.
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Donald Monaco is a writer and political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War. He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective. His most recent book is titled, The Politics of Empire, and is available at amazon.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
