Trump will likely end Biden’s belligerent stance vs China
First of Two Parts
PRESIDENT Marcos and his Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro should suspend their diatribes against the opposition senatorial candidates, that they have been silent about “Chinese aggression” in the South China Sea. They should wait to first hear what their new master, US President Trump’s stance toward China is. They might be surprised that it’s different from Joe Biden’s.
I am betting that just as Trump has practically reversed Biden’s belligerent stance against Russia by saying its invasion of Ukraine was provoked, he would soften, even jettison, his predecessor’s hostile foreign policy against China. This won’t be immediate though, as he will still have to put China among his targets to suffer higher tariffs. But Trump 2.0 is a more experienced president, who has such advisers as Elon Musk, who has deep business links with China, and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has already declared the world “is now a multi-polar world.”
Most Filipinos are so unaware that US hostility toward China was not always a pillar of American policy.
Despite Mao Zedong’s declaration that the People’s Republic of China would support revolutionary movements worldwide (which it certainly did by funding the Communist Party of the Philippines) and his backing of the communist-led North Vietnam to eventually defeat the US vassal South Vietnam, the US had not labeled the country as an enemy.
Republican President Richard Nixon in 1972 established diplomatic ties with China and, in effect, ended the US recognition of Taiwan by embracing the Chinese’s “One China policy. “
Succeeding US presidents viewed China first as a hidden partner in its campaign to dismantle the Soviet Union, which it succeeded in doing when that union imploded in 1991. Second, after Deng Xiaoping’s virtual declaration that China’s economy would be market-oriented, the American elite saw it as a vast market for US products and capital.
Tiananmen
Thus, George H.W. Bush even ignored the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, while his successor Bill Clinton focused on getting China to join the World Trade Organization, which opened up the country to the world economy, and to comply with international rules of commerce. An icon of modern American capitalism, McDonald’s, opened its first restaurant in 1990, while Apple opened its first office in 1993.
Mainly because of China’s “socialism-with-Chinese-characteristics,” its Communist Party’s skill in executing policy, and its novel financial systems by which funds could be almost instantly raised for critical infrastructure, the sleeping dragon grew at pace no one in the Western world had predicted, reducing poverty to near-zero, and becoming the world’s biggest economy, second only to the US. In 1990, China accounted for only 1.8 percent of world’s exports; by 2021, 15 percent. In contrast, US’ share of exports went down, from 11.4 percent to 7.9 percent.
Economic growth means bigger government revenues, and China fast converted its economic growth into military growth. From a defense budget of only $10 billion, China was spending $230 billion yearly in the past years. The People’s Liberation Army is now the biggest with 2 million personnel, compared with India’s 1.5 million and the US’ 1.4 million.
By the 1990s, the American elite realized that while it had demolished the USSR in 1991 to become the sole superpower in the world, China was fast rising to challenge its hegemony. Putin also had succeeded in building Russia out of the ruins of the USSR to remain among the world’s five biggest military powers. Although it ranked 11th in terms of economic size, Russia was one of the world’s biggest oil and gas exporter and a nuclear power, magnifying its influence in world affairs.
Superpower
By this time, after emerging as the world’s sole superpower that defeated Russia, the US elite had embraced an exceptionalist ideology: That it is destined to rule the world, not just because of its economic and military power, but because of its values — democracy, human rights, rule of law.
Toward the end of the last century, the new concerns of the American elite — what’s really its “Deep State” — were expressed by two scholars Zbignew Brezinski through his 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard,” and William Overholt’s 1999, “The Rise of China: How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower.”
Brezinski, who also served as President Carter’s national security adviser, argued that the US must maintain control over Europe and Asia to sustain global dominance and that a rising China would lead to its alliance with Russia that would overthrow the US as global hegemon. In a similar vein, Overholt pointed out that China’s economic reforms would turn it into a superpower that could challenge US dominance. The US needed to respond strategically to China’s rapid rise.
These views were transformed into President Obama’s so-called “Pivot to Asia” policy, disguised as a veering away from his predecessor’s overemphasis on the Middle East, to focus on the main threat to the US, China’s rise as the regional power in Asia and soon, as a world power.
Obama pointed out that the Asia-Pacific was still a major engine of global economic growth. He pushed for the so-called, unsuccessful, Trans-Pacific Partnership as a way to strengthen US economic ties with the region, set trade rules, and counterbalance China’s economic influence. To send the message to China of the US determination to be the sole superpower in Asia, he shifted more military assets to the Pacific by stationing Marines in Australia, increasing naval presence in the Pacific, and getting the Philippines to agree to host US military facilities.
Propaganda
A key element of the US’ Pivot to Asia was a massive propaganda campaign to demonize China as an aggressor out to grab features held or claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. Former Supreme Court associate justice Antonio Carpio in 2011, just two years after Obama’s Pivot to Asia declaration, delivered lectures all over the country and in Philippine embassies to claim that our country had “indisputable” sovereignty over islands in the South China Sea that China claimed through an arbitrary nine-dash line.
The state-funded National Endowment for Democracy gave tens of millions of pesos to Rappler (set up 2012), Vera Files and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism which all toed the anti-China line. President Benigno Aquino III’s foreign affairs secretary set up the Stratbase ADR Institute, apparently with financing from his former boss Manuel V. Pangilinan. Stratbase has remained the most active anti-China outfit, commissioning flawed surveys to depict Filipinos as angry at China because of its activities in the South China Sea.
Obama fast-tracked the delivery of a refurbished US Coast Guard cutter to the Philippine Navy, which Aquino III, in childish excitement, deployed to Scarborough Shoal to help arrest Chinese fishermen. That triggered a chain of events called the Scarborough Shoal standoff that eventually led our loss of the shoal to China.
Jake Sullivan, then Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton deputy chief of staff (who would become Biden’s national security adviser) in June 2012, advised her to get the Philippines to file an arbitration suit against China over the two countries’ competing claims in the South China Sea, which the Aquino III government promptly did in January 2013.
The ruling by a five-man ad hoc panel on the South China Sea arbitration would be the basis for most of the demonization of China, since it took advantage of the confusion over exclusive economic zones and sovereign territories. It ruled the Philippines’ EEZ encompassed the areas claimed by China. It did not rule though on China’s claims that these were part of its territory long ago.
Sinophobic
Still though, sinophobic jingoists like Defense Secretary Teodoro and Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela have tried to rouse Filipino anger against China with the fallacy that the “court had declared China’s claims in the South China Sea as illegal, but the Chinese refuse to accept that judgment.”
Obama’s Pivot to Asia — adopted to some extent by the succeeding US presidents — had largely succeeded in driving a deep wedge between the Philippines and China, that the latter had quietly retaliated through reduced trade and capital investment with us, making Vietnam, for instance, its biggest supplier of bananas. The arbitration suit backfired in a big way as China retaliated against it by transforming its former reefs in the Spratlys into artificial islands with all the features of military bases, thereby making the Chinese the dominant military power in the area.
Trump has an entirely different worldview than the Democratic Party’s exceptionalism and the US-must-remain-as-hegemon-forever view of his predecessor.
I’ll discuss on Wednesday other factors which likely will get Trump to drop his predecessors’ encircle-China policy — which will be the better for us.
Truth will finally out, and ironically, it will be Trump who will help us do this.
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Trump will likely end Biden’s belligerent stance vs China
Source: Breaking News PH
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