U.S. Foreign Policy and the China Problem
On August 11, we came to within a hair’s breadth of war with China. On that day, in the South China Sea, Chinese forces, which have been bullying and harassing Philippine ships almost ceaselessly for the past several years, unleashed another risky tactic against a Philippine Coast Guard vessel. On that day, two Chinese vessels — a Coast Guard cutter and a guided missile destroyer, the Guilin — attempted to sandwich a Philippine military boat between them, an action that, if successful, would have probably destroyed the ship and led to a loss of Philippine lives. Instead, the Chinese mis-timed the maneuver, and the two Chinese ships collided, crushing the bow of the Coast Guard cutter and doing damage to the Guilin as well (incident shown above). While the reporting on this event focused on the incompetence of the Chinese navy, the larger story is the enormous risk of war from such mishaps. The Philippines is a treaty-bound ally of the United States, and has been since 1951.
The willingness of China to confront the Philippines on an almost weekly basis jumped significantly during Biden’s feckless presidency, when the Chinese (and most of the world’s other bad actors) correctly perceived that the American government was on autopilot, fronted by a dithering husk of a president barely able to climb a flight of stairs, much less formulate intelligent policy.
But little has changed on the foreign-affairs front with the inauguration of President Donald Trump. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East grind on; Iran is bloodied but unbowed; and Communist China is as bent as ever on the conquest of Taiwan, control of the South and East China Seas and the western Pacific, and global hegemony to eventually surpass America’s. This is no doubt because of Trump’s inconsistency on foreign affairs. Is he, as he has been so loudly proclaiming for many years, truly America First? Or is he yet another guarantor of the globalist status quo, reluctant, perhaps, but no less committed in the end, to ensuring the continuity of the global Pax Americana? Certainly, it is starting to look more and more like the latter. While he criticizes the likes of NATO and the UN, he shows no sign of withdrawing from either organization. While he fancies himself a skilled and impartial negotiator, he is showing a remarkable partiality to China in the trade war, granting extension after extension even while levying heavy tariffs on the likes of Canada and Mexico. As much as the rehabilitation of tariffs as a viable source of federal revenue is a welcome development, the spectacle of Trump imposing levies on friends and neighbors while doing little more than bluster about China is not a good look.
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