Category: Insights

The absurd surrealistic drama concerning a purported ‘Russian connection’ behind Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election victory unfolding in the run-up to his inauguration as the forty-fifth President of the United States of America  has a basis very different from the visible circus side show and the fake news that drives it. It reflects a struggle within the US ‘deep state’ over radically different ways to deal with China.

Ever since the secret alliance between the USA and China against the old Soviet Union, brokered in the 1970s by Henry Kissinger and the Nixon Administration, American policy toward China has been dominated by globalist “panda huggers” who believe China’s rise is inevitable and that the best the USA can do is to facilitate China’s economic development in hopes that will somehow lead to a more free, open, and democratic China.

A clear statement of that view from a self-admitted panda hugger is found in former US Secretary of the Treasury (and former Goldman Sachs CEO) Henry J. Paulson Jr.’s “Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower”. While noting China’s ambitious to become the most powerful, most dominant nation on earth, Paulson argues that the best the USA can do is to continue to help China to develop and grow, hoping somehow to integrate it into an internationalist world order.

A contrary view is presented in Michael Pillsbury’s “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”. Pillsbury is a long-time CIA operative and American diplomat who, like Paulson, characterizes himself as having been a long-time panda hugger–but one who has, within the past decade, had the scales fall from his eyes, enabling him to see that China is anything but a friendly panda toward the USA and to the West; that China is, in fact, a very dangerous (and very stealthy) dragon.

“I was told, [in China in 2011-2013]” Pillsbury writes, “by the same people who had long assured me of China’s only modest leadership within an emerging multipolar world–that the Communist Party is realizing its long-term goal of restoring China to it’s ‘proper’ place in the world. In effect, they were telling me that they had deceived me and the American government. With perhaps a hint of understated pride, they were revealing the most systematic, significant, and dangerous intelligence failure in American history. And because we have no idea the Marathon is even underway, America is losing.”

The first chapter of Pillsbury’s book is titled, “The China Dream.” That is an explicit reference both to a phrase popular with Communist China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, and to the book “The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era” by Liu Mingfu, a retired colonel of the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) and Professor at China’s National Defense University. Liu’s book explicitly states China’s intention to dominate the world by the middle of the Twentieth Century (if not sooner).

Should the USA, out of fear and weakness, continue down the road already travelled, as advocated by Paulson, a course clearly favored by Hillary Clinton’s and John Kerry’s US Department of State under the Obama Administration (and by globalist elements of the US Intelligence Community–including most of the Ivy League CIA elite) and thereby assist Communist China in making their China Dream of world dominance by end of the Hundred Year Marathon on the 100th anniversary of Mao’s takeover of China? Or should the USA, instead, respond in strength and determination with counter-measures to frustrate and prevent China’s intended rise?

Clearly, with Pillsbury (and in even stronger terms than he expresses), there is a growing faction in the US ‘deep state’ that does not see China’s ultimate world dominance as inevitable and that is willing to take on and to defeat the Communist China Challenge (which will very likely prove to be the ultimate reality TV show of the 21st Century). That faction is certainly present, though not in control of and as yet a minority in the CIA. It is strongest, however, in the US Military Intelligence Community. And, most important, the ‘curb China’ faction is very clearly strongest of all in the incoming Trump Administration.

China has long very skillfully played the US for a fool by actively supporting and boosting pro-China elements in the Bush(I), Clinton, Bush(II), and Obama Administrations. The purported ‘Russian interference’ in the US 2016 election pales to insignificance relative to the influence (interference, and hacking) exercised in the USA by China over the past half a century and more. The anti-Russian, anti-Putin fake news manipulation over the past year or two benefits China. It is in China’s interest (not in the interest of the USA) to encourage and to try to create an adversarial relation between Russia and the USA.

Why? Because the most effective way to for the USA to curb China’s plan to dominate the world is to build a broad coalition of allies with mutual interests to encircle, curb, and contain China. This must include not only Europe and Japan, but also countries like India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Myanmar. But, most of all, it must include Russia.

Regardless whether the recent anti-Trump, anti-Russian disinformation campaign is inspired, encouraged, and funded by China (it very likely is), it clearly works in the interest of China. As (ironically) even admitted panda hugger Paulson accurately chronicles, China in effect ‘blew the cover’ on its plan for world domination by 2049 by overestimating the extent to which the financial crises of 2008 signaled the accelerated (and incipient) decline of the US and of capitalism. China was like an American football defensive lineman who jumps prematurely across the line of scrimmage on a head fake from the offensive quarterback. Or, in terms of the Chinese 36 Strategies, China forgot the lesson of “disturb the snake by hitting the grass” and prematurely jumped into the open.

In her book, “The Chinese Mind Game” Chin-Ning Chu, wrote, concerning this strategy:

“To disturb the snake by hitting the grass can be, according to circumstances, either a desirable or an undesirable action. When the intention is to catch the snake by surprise, disturbing the grass would be a mistake. If, however, a direct confrontation with the snake is wanted, then hitting the grass is recommended so that the snake will make itself visible.”

The 2008 financial meltdown was not a clever exercise of this ancient Chinese strategy by the USA, but the effect was the same as if it had been. It flushed the incipient Chinese snake-wanting-to-be-a-dragon out into the open with exaggerated over-confidence that soon led to the explicit statement of Communist China’s real intentions with the “100 Year Marathon” and the “China Dream.”

China was further lulled into exposing its real aims by the feckless wimp-dom of an Obama Administration that was more concerned with global warming and LGBTQ rights than with maintaining America’s world leadership and a strong military. China clearly expected a continuation of these policies by a Hillary Clinton administration that would be as readily ‘for sale’ as her husband’s had been. China was even more disappointed to see Trump win than the Democrat Party was–and even more keen to delegitimize Trump and stir up trouble between the USA and Russia than the Democrats (and a few anti-Trump Republicans like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio) are.

The fake news circus side show over purported Russian influence on Trump is the last dying gasp of the pro-China panda huggers eager to sell out the USA to China. But they have lost. There is a new sheriff in town.

They, and China too, need to adjust to the reality of an America ready to be great again; ready to put an end to China’s plans for world domination. China can no longer count on the USA to roll over and surrender, as Obama & Co. were inclined to do. China’s leaders must adapt to this new reality, lest the China Dream turn into the Chinese Communist Party’s Nightmare.

 

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