by EVE OTTENBERG, Novelist and Journalist
First published in COUNTERPUNCH - 18 November 2022
War with Beijing, the GOP project, is not a partisan effort. It is bipartisan. The military and the security state will push ferociously for the assault on China that they have long lusted for. There is real danger afoot. Those Dems who really want to avert World War III with Beijing will have to go about it in a relentless, low-profile manner, because anyone perceived as standing up to the bash-China juggernaut will be crushed.
At the top of the GOP foreign affairs agenda is economic war with China and no matter what price we pay, and it will be high, you can’t slap economic sanctions on your biggest trading partner with impunity, nor on any major economy, like Russia’s, without them backfiring badly, as Biden and birdbrain Eurocrats found out when their sanctions on Moscow started destroying western economies. Regardless, an economic fight to the death with Beijing is the first item on the GOP to-do list. The second item is actual, all-out, military hot war with China, if it makes any hostile move on Taiwan.
GOP congressmen are all keyed up about confronting Beijing militarily, and they have been since the Trump administration, with its Sinophobic fanatics like his trade advisor Peter Navarro and foaming-at-the-mouth China-basher, Matt Pottinger egged Trump on to heights of folly that could have culminated in a planet-killing nuclear war. Navarro and Pottinger hyped the insane hysteria that China deliberately created Covid in a lab and unleashed it on its own population. Expect to see such China-hating maniacs back in government in the unlikely event that Trump regains the White House. Don’t forget Trump secretary of state Mike Pompeo, no slouch in the anti-China psychosis department, jetting into Taiwan last year to inflame the separatist movement by lauding the Chinese territory as a great “nation,” and hectoring Europeans, as he did in 2020, to sever economic ties with Beijing.
The Exceptional Empire carped and groused about Nord Stream 1 and 2 for years. Then came the imperial news from Biden that if Russia invaded Ukraine, Washington would stop Nord Stream 2. When asked how this would happen, he said, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” No one speculated back then that this pronouncement might mean Washington was ready to go full-on Don Corleone. Biden didn’t specify how. But barely a year later – voila! Some mysterious somebody blew up both pipelines. Whoever could it be?
It’s time for imbecile Eurocrats to wake up. The gangsters who exploded their gas pipelines now eye their trade with China. The Empire is nothing if not creative when it comes to destroying what it perceives as a threat - assassinations, riots, and coups.
Knowing all this, powerful Dems like Biden and Nancy Pelosi went out of their way prior to the mid-term elections to prove that they, too, are tough on China; Pelosi with her idiotic and inflammatory jaunt to Taiwan last summer and Biden, with his many pronouncements that Washington backs Taipei to the hilt and will go to war to prove it. But there are people in Biden’s administration who walk back his bellicose yowls. They know what a global nuclear catastrophe such a war would be, even if they appear oblivious to the same thing in Ukraine. They aim to drag the Ukraine war out as long as possible.
Biden risks global conflagration in Europe, while whoever the GOP vomits up to replace him will simply refocus the nukes onto East Asia. The GOP believes this work would largely be bipartisan. Biden’s war whoops directed at Beijing may box the white house into a policy that could leave tens of millions of Americans and an equal number of Chinese radioactive.
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy has long wanted a China select committee and tried to work with Democrats to create one in 2020. But Pelosi pulled the Dems out of this potential quagmire – quite surprisingly, considering her characterisation of the very violent and brutal Hong Kong riots as “beautiful” and her later incitement of Taiwan’s independence, that is, incitement of war.
Hard at work to avert the coming debacle between the U.S. and China has been Code Pink. This organisation runs campaigns:
to oppose the Taiwan Policy Act, which would arm Taiwan to the teeth and end the One China policy – a huge blow to peace prospects;
to tell congress to stand for peace with China; and
to condemn the escalating U.S. militarisation of Guam and the wider Asia-Pacific region.
The GOP wants war with China. The Dems want – and have got – war with Russia, one which they intend to drag out for years. Either way, ordinary people all over the globe lose badly.