CHINA AND TRUMP: BOTH BACKING THE WRONG HORSE, AGAIN
Cozying up to the ruthless Putin in his terror campaign to dominate, if not destroy, Ukraine, China has put itself on the wrong side of history along with other agents of fascism such as Donald Trump.
Dear readers: I am still on the road in Asia and taking a break from regular reports, but I continue to follow news developments with interest. Below a think piece about the uncanny way Trump plays into the hands of America’s rivals and foes.
Philip J Cunningham
Nearly all nations and powerful stake-holders would agree that terror is not to be sided with, but the devil lies in the details. What is terror? What is legitimate in the name of self-defense? Who started it? Where is it going? Is state-sponsored violence not a form of terror? On whose moral authority is a horrific action deemed not to be terror but self-defense or even a step to liberation?
In general terms, nation states get away with terrible actions, if not outright terror, because their killing machines are be cloaked in state prestige that can posit a violent course of action in legal terms, however odious an offense it might be morally.
Non-state actors, religious zealots, and separatists fare less well in the court of legality, but they, too, often enjoy a measure of public opinion and media support.
And there are indeed some terrible conflicts where a sudden flip in the power equation redefines history, where a bad cause becomes a good cause, and not just by winning, but because it represents values deemed in some manner superior to the system it replaces.
George Washington’s “irregulars” defeated the prestigious British army and Mao’s unkempt bandits defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s well-oiled military machine to the applause of history.
On the other hand, the rise of the fascism and the temporal triumph of the likes of Adolf Hitler, no matter how you dice it, is not moral cause. The defeat of outright evil is a win; one up for mankind.
The crux of the problem is that it is not always easy to see in advance which way the long arc of history is bending, but certain patterns are evident with hindsight.
Suffice to say there is now enough information about Russia’s unwarranted invasion of Ukraine to suggest not just a cruel violation of borders and a humanitarian disaster, but ultimately a losing cause, but something akin to Hitler’s gamble on Poland.
It is unlikely that Putin’s remorseless, relentless war against Ukraine will ever go down in the history books as the masterwork of a latter-day George Washington or even a Mao Zedong. More likely it will be seen as self-destructive, the hateful belligerence of a psychopath akin to Adolf Hitler who must be defeated for the sake of the common good.
Inasmuch as the front-line in Ukraine is an existential fight to preserve the sanctity of national borders in the Westphalian tradition, Russia must withdraw. The stakes of this unnecessary battle are high enough to threaten enveloping the entire world in war. Even short of world war, it is forcing the world into two diametrically opposed camps.
When it comes to defeating the Hitlers of the world, it is not so much “are you with us or against us?” as “are you against fascist terror?”
Thus oft-ridiculed, and deservedly ridiculed refrain of George W. Bush has gained a new life with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Russia annexation of Crimea in 2014, while serving some of the same irredentist aims and cloaked in some of the same unilateral claims of sovereignty, was disturbing, and posed a foreign policy conundrum, but it did not polarize the world into two camps.
For the Russian takeover of Crimea was achieved mostly by stealth, at a time of inattention. It was done almost before it was over. More importantly, it did not involve outright violence, even if it was predicated on threats and bullying.
It was one of those topics upon which reasonable people could argue and disagree.
But Moscow’s success in Crimea bolstered Putin’s ego and sense of infallible destiny. When he took aim at Kiev and the heartland of Ukraine, hoping to execute a three-day blitzkrieg to decapitate the Zelensky government. The plan was to do it fast, and Chinese authorities in Ukraine, with at least partial knowledge of Putin’s plans, did not evacuate but told citizens to stay in place, distributing Chinese flags for ready identification under the expected new regime.
Diplomats would protest, and the shock of a Kiev takeover would be considerable, but had it been successful, the very success of the operation would be parried to promote the false narrative that what Ukrainians really want is to be part of Russia, and that’s why resistance is futile.
But the resistance was stronger than expected and not at all futile. As explained by Yale historian Timothy Snyder:
“When Russia began its full-scale invasion that month, the American consensus was the Ukraine would crack within days and that Zelens'kyi would (and should) flee. Instead, he stayed in Kyiv despite the approach of Russian assassins and the Russian army, rallied his people, and oversaw the successful defense of his country.”
World opinion, not state actors, was up in arms about Putin’s war. World opinion, not state actors, led the call to sanction Russia.
Everywhere in the democratic world, but most especially Europe, untrammeled public opinion was predictably outraged at the sight of tanks crossing borders. The specter of a massive land war in Europe, with its notoriously porous flat lands, and troubled twentieth century history, came as a great shock. A capital city of a sovereign state was under siege.
Russia’s surprise attack, massive invasion and occupation evoked memories of Hitler and Stalin trampling over their neighbors, and spin though the Kremlin might spin it, it could not be construed in a positive light.
Fear of offending Russia continued to hem in state-led outrage, especially in Europe, and most especially in Germany, which prided itself on a special relationship with Russia, but even the US had its share of Russia-leaning observers, including Donald Trump, whose attitude was, “so what?”
For a man bereft of any meaningful ideology, there was no point in letting the suffering of others destroy his beautiful relationship with Russia.
The continued public outrage around the world at the sight of a big country invading a smaller one, launched in the form a surprise attack after month’s of denial, posed a challenge for China’s pro-Russian media coverage from day one.
CCTV News had little to say, and what little it said was less than convincing, because its editorial stance put it woefully out of tune with more seasoned observers of European history.
Not just out of tune with the usual suspects in the US and NATO, Japan, Australia and so on, but out of tune with the universal outrage with which so many ordinary justice-loving people viewed this disturbing turn of events.
The persistence of Russia’s heavy-handed military incursion, combined with documented reports of massacres in Bucha and other destroyed communities in Ukraine, continues to pose a PR problem for Beijing. Not so much because sustaining the pro-Russian view was problematic and out of tune in Washington and Brussels, but because it clearly flew in the face of China’s proud view of itself as a nation that respected national sovereignty.
The Chinese media has consistently presented a pro-Russian view of events, frequently censoring any indication of Russian wrongdoing. Implicit and tacit support Putin’s bloody incursion has thus become an albatross around the neck of Beijing’s image to the world.
The optics of the much-vaunted Sino-Russian “no-limits friendship” are a nagging problem, even though China, especially before February 2022 had a reasonable, if not entirely justifiable, desire to balance US hegemonic power with a strategic lean to Moscow.
Beijing’s natural desire for a trouble-free border with Russia is also understandable, especially given the acrimony of the 1950’s Sino-Soviet split, Russia’s well-known historic territorial grabs of Qing Dynasty dominion and, more troublingly, the nuclear-tipped tensions that arose in the face of Soviet “revisionism” in the 60’s and 70’s.
China’s need to protect itself from the Russian threat that was the major impetus driving US-China relations from 1972 onward, not the much-vaunted diplomacy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
In today’s topsy-turvy political world, the inflammatory rhetoric of Trump bears strange parallels with China on the topic of Ukraine.
Again, according to historian Timothy Snyder, an academic who rarely minces words,
“Trump never speaks about the Russian invasion itself. He never recalls Russian war crimes. He never mentions that Ukrainians are defending themselves or their basic ideas of what is right. He certainly never admits that Zelens'kyi is the democratically-elected president of a country under vicious attack and who has comported himself with courage. The war, for Trump, is just a scam -- a Jewish scam.”
When backing the wrong horse, sometimes the impulse is to double down rather than admit a mistake. Those in China who continue to support Beijing’s diplomatic hard lean to Russia can take heart that they are not alone. No less a personage than Donald Trump is doubling down on the same misguided approach.