Anybody keeping an eye on what happened in Anchorage, Alaska? Someone better.
For those wrapped around the axle about tax hikes, the opening of US borders, the destruction of our hard-won energy independence and the general run of craziness that is the vogue in Woke Washington these days, it might have escaped attention. But that would be a mistake.
Dateline Vienna, Austria, June 3, 1961. Nearly sixty years ago, newly-elected US President John F. Kennedy met Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to “have an exchange of views.” It was a disaster. Kennedy was appalled by the Premier, and Khrushchev was unimpressed by the President who he described as having “…much to learn and not much to offer.” Although Kennedy boosted the defense budget and increased the draft on return to Washington, in August the Soviets built the Berlin Wall dividing the city in violation of agreements at the 1945 Potsdam Conference. Although US and allied armed forces were made ready to intervene, President Kennedy recognized that the Warsaw Pact had an overwhelming superiority of men and materiel, and in the end, acquiesced to the Wall – which stood until 1989. Kennedy’s tepid response further emboldened the USSR and 26 months later the world stood perilously close to the brink of a nuclear war over Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba.
We were very, very lucky on those three days in late October, 1963. We shouldn’t look to roll those dice again.
Which brings us to Anchorage, Alaska just following the Ides of March, 2021. Apparently the idea was that the Biden Administration, after a quick round of consults with its principal Asian associates Japan, Australia and India, would call in the Chinese and give them what for over their bad habits of cheating on trade, stealing intellectual property, jailing Chinese who dared to think differently and say so, tossing national minorities in concentration camps and other associated naughtiness. Said Chinese, properly chastised, would scuttle back to Beijing and Joe Biden’s Tough Guys could do their touchdown dance, to the fawning accolades of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and other members of the Biden Cheer Squad. Then we could go back to business as usual.
Unfortunately, the Chinese hadn’t been shown the script, and didn’t care to play their part. Instead, they came back at SecState Anthony Blinken with a two-minute riposte that took seventeen minutes to translate. The upshot was, “Don’t lecture us, round boy. Shut up and deal.” And it didn’t get much better after that.
At one point, SecState Blinken admitted the Chinese had a point, sort of: “… one more hallmark of our leadership here at home, and that’s a constant quest to, as we say, form a more perfect union. And that quest, by definition, acknowledges our imperfections, acknowledges that we’re not perfect, we make mistakes, we have reversals, we take steps back,” he said.
Under their masks I’m certain our Chinese guests smiled with predatory satisfaction. The man who had come to chide them had just admitted his country was in no position to do so. They won, and make no mistake: in China, the conference will be ballyhooed as another Chinese “Wolf Warrior” victory over the barbarians. Blinken should have known, and done, better.
China has been violating international norms, agreements and treaties for a good while now, and the only party who has ever attempted to push back was President Donald Trump. The Clinton and Bush administrations paid little attention; the Obama Administration was accommodationist, evidently believing that China would eventually see the error of its ways and settle down. And now, after the unpredictability and confrontation of Trump, they are across the table from Joe Biden, who they think they own. They’ve said so, when they think no one’s listening. Watch a video of Di Dongsheng, vice dean of international relations at Renmin University’s School of International Studies explain the graft behind that confidence – if you can find it. Widely distributed inside China, it was snatched down as soon as the Politburo got wind of the fact that it was being circulated outside the country. It’s that damning.
The Politburo has also been winding ordinary Chinese up over “Western interference” in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Translation: we’ve said we’re unhappy about massive Chinese violations of the Hong Kong accords and of the human rights of non-Han Chinese. They’ve also announced that within five years, “border issues” will be resolved with their neighbors and Taiwan will be reincorporated back into China – by force if necessary.
All this, plus China’s debt-trap diplomacy, overt pressure on Australia over rare-earth mining in competition with Beijing, increasingly heavy-handed relations with its near neighbors and violations of international agreements in the South China Sea virtually guarantee that a confrontation will occur with Joe Biden’s America, probably sooner rather than later. When it does, Joe is going to learn that those allies he praised, telling them they were once again important because he isn’t like the Bad Orange Man, aren’t going to be eager to follow him into any sort of confrontation with China. They like things the way they are, and until the world situation gets very serious they’re going to talk a lot and do a little, maybe some of it helpful.
He’s also going to learn that Beijing doesn’t care what he says. They care what he does, and they will pay attention to him only if what he does hurts the Politburo and threatens its grip on power. There are ways to do this, but they might be beyond the reach of a weak old man who sees his country as deeply flawed and who is daily being pushed by those around him to create in the United States the sort of state he feels somehow compelled to oppose in China. It’s a recipe for failure, and in that failure, the foundation for a far more dangerous confrontation to come.
To refer to an example better-known than Khrushchev at Vienna, there was the case of Franco-British cravenness between 1934 and 1939. By September of the latter year, the leaders of Europe’s totalitarian states were convinced by experience that the remaining democracies would knuckle under to the carving-up of Poland. It was an entirely understandable miscalculation, but it led to butchery on a scale mankind could not have imagined previously.
Although we can hope that lesson of history was well-enough learned, it seems at the moment the question is in doubt. Nothing out of Anchorage would indicate that it prevailed there, so we must now wait on the next occasion, to hope that our leadership is not as feckless, as easily distracted or as uninterested in America’s vital national interests as it seems.
Fingers crossed.
