Svetski Rat K(orona)

Јанош Винету wrote:Гурају их Амери у аутархију, али у тој бици више не могу победити.

Could Donald Trump’s War Against Huawei Trigger a Real War With China?

As relations between the United States and China worsen over the months ahead, could Beijing decide to try to make Taiwan the solution to its advanced semiconductor problem?

by Graham Allison


The centerpiece of the Trump administration’s “tech war” with China is the campaign to prevent its national champion Huawei from becoming the dominant supplier of 5G systems to the world. The Administration’s objective, as a former Trump NSC staffer described it, is to “kill Huawei.” And China has heard that message. As Huawei’s legendary CEO Ren Zhengfei told the leadership of the company in February, “the company has entered a state of war.”

After months of diplomatic efforts to dissuade other nations from buying their 5G infrastructure from Huawei, the administration delivered what one official called a “death blow.” On May 15, the Commerce Department banned all sales of advanced semiconductors from American suppliers to Huawei. It also prohibited all sales of equipment to design and produce advanced semiconductors by foreign companies that use U.S. technology or intellectual property.

In the five months between now and the election, could the U.S. attempt to enforce that ban become a twenty-first-century equivalent of the oil embargo the United States imposed on Japan in August 1941? While many people may not remember what happened, and while it was certainly not what the United States intended or anticipated, that action precipitated Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor four months later—and America’s entry into World War II.

The thought that the United States and China could find themselves in a real, hot, bloody war will strike many readers as inconceivable. But we should remember that when we say something is inconceivable, this is not a claim about what is possible in the world, but rather about what our minds can conceive. In the summer of 1941, the possibility that a nation less than one-quarter the size of the United States would launch a bolt from the blue against the most powerful nation in the world was beyond Washington’s imagination.

To punish Japan for its military aggression against its neighbors in the late 1930s, the United States had initially imposed sanctions, and later an embargo on exports of high-grade scrap iron and aviation fuel to Japan. When these failed to stop its expansion, Washington ratcheted up the pressure by including essential raw materials such as iron, brass, and copper. Finally, on August 1, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that the United States would embargo all oil shipments to Japan.

Eighty percent of Japan’s oil came from the United States, and Japan’s military forces required that oil to operate at home as well as across the Greater Co-prosperity Area in Northeast Asia. Facing what it saw as a choice between slow but sure strangulation, on the one hand, and taking an extreme chance that offered hope of survival, on the other, the government chose to take its chance with what it hoped would be a “knockout blow”—a bold preemptive attack aimed to destroy the U.S. Pacific Navy stationed at Pearl Harbor. As the designer of the attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, told the emperor: “In the first six months to a year of war against the U.S. and England, I will run wild, and I will show you an uninterrupted succession of victories.” But he went on to warn: “Should the war be prolonged for two or three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory.”

After a Black Swan spring, what else could happen in the fall of 2020?

Let us imagine that the Trump administration actually implements the ban on all sales of advanced semiconductors and equipment to manufacture semiconductors to China. Imagine further that Huawei’s Chairman really believes what he said after the ban was announced that this forces Huawei “to seek survival.” If President Xi Jinping concludes that this is a matter of life and death for his champion advanced technology company that is the poster child for his signature program promising Chinese technological leadership by 2025 and 2030, then what options does China have?

The leading producer of advanced semiconductors for Huawei is the Taiwanese company TSMC. Its factories that supply Huawei and other leading Chinese technology companies are located ninety miles off the shore of the Chinese mainland. While operationally, Taiwan is semi-autonomous with its own market economy and democracy, according to Beijing, Taiwan is a “renegade province” that China’s leaders have repeatedly affirmed will be reintegrated fully under the control of Beijing. While previous Chinese leaders had followed a strategy that envisioned the magnetic pull of its rapidly-growing economy drawing Taiwan into the motherland, Xi Jinping’s government has concluded that this approach failed. As Xi’s Party-led autocracy has tightened controls against political opposition or criticism, Taiwanese, like Hong Kong residents, have become increasingly resistant to the prospect of being ruled by Beijing. In the twists and turns of this story, observers of the recent National People’s Congress in Beijing will have noticed that Premier Li Keqiang’s speech dropped the term “peaceful” from Beijing’s standard call for the reunification of Taiwan. One of China’s senior military leaders, Gen. Li Zuocheng, gave a rousing speech to the Congress assuring them that “If the possibility for peaceful reunification is lost, then the People’s armed forces will, with the whole of the nation, including the people of Taiwan, take all necessary steps to resolutely smash any separatist plots or actions.”

As relations between the United States and China worsen over the months ahead, could Beijing decide to try to make Taiwan the solution to its advanced semiconductor problem? American defense planners have analyzed an array of scenarios that they suspect Chinese planners have considered. These begin with cutting off Taiwan’s lifeline of oil, food, and other essential supplies that arrive daily by ship—in essence, a twenty-first-century version of the coercive measures it employed in 1996 to intimidate Taiwan. A second option would be for China’s cyber warriors to shut down Taiwan’s electrical grid and the web as initial steps up a ladder that could then include covert or overt attacks on Taiwanese military bases to persuade its government to meet its demands. A third option foresees Chinese agents and sympathizers on the island, perhaps assisted by a Chinese version of Russia’s “little green men” who seized Crimea in 2014, taking over airports, ports, communication centers, and even key factories and headquarters including TSMC.

If Chinese forces seized TSMC factories and laboratories, then would this solve Huawei’s and other Chinese technologies leader’s advanced semiconductor problems? While views differ, having consulted with a number of those at leading U.S. and UK companies in this industry, my best judgment is that this could buy China critical time—one to two years— to advance its own initiatives. Of course, industry leaders like Qualcomm and ARM are continuously improving their designs and their manufacturing processes. But since Huawei and a number of other Chinese firms have been hard at work in developing indigenous capabilities, even if they should be a year behind, given their other advantages in 5G, this could still allow China to sustain its leadership in this critical new technology.

Before choosing military action against Taiwan, China would consider American reactions. In 1996, when Beijing began an analogous effort, it was forced to back down when President Bill Clinton ordered two U.S. aircraft carriers to support Taiwan. But that dramatic humiliation steeled Chinese leaders’ determination to build up their own military capabilities to ensure that this could never happen again. As has been widely reported, including in the new best-seller by Chris Brose, The Kill Chain, the local military balance of power has shifted dramatically since then. In the last eighteen Pentagon war games in which the United States and China fought a hot war over Taiwan, the score is China: eighteen, the United States: zero.

Is such a scenario likely? I think not. I’m betting that U.S. declarations about an embargo on all semiconductors are more bark than bite. That is also the way the market is assessing this standoff—the stock prices of the major suppliers of semiconductors to Huawei and to China—TSCM, Intel, Qualcomm, and Broadcom—having increased since the announced ban.

Nonetheless, the critical question is whether such a scenario is possible. And the answer to that question is most certainly yes. Those who find this too fanciful should review carefully what President Xi’s Party-led autocracy has done in the past several weeks in Hong Kong. Recognizing that a crisis would be a terrible thing to waste, Beijing has taken advantage of the distraction and disarray caused by the pandemic to tighten the noose to stop that city-state’s slide toward greater autonomy. The past two years of ineffective efforts by the local authorities to prevent disruptive weekly demonstrations demanding greater autonomy has been an embarrassment to Xi. Colleagues and critics have asked how a government that has asserted its authority so effectively on the mainland can have been thwarted by unruly kids. Beijing is thus moving step by step to impose a new national security law on Hong Kong that will outlaw four sins: session, sedition, treason, and foreign subversion. This law will allow Beijing’s state security forces to operate publicly to arrest violators. Under the cover of coronavirus limits on social gatherings and requirements for social distancing, Beijing has already arrested a number of the leaders of the protest and democracy movement and has been strengthening its surveillance system. While some Hong Kong residents have gone back to the streets in protest, even the leaders of these efforts have expressed their sense that the outcome is “inevitable.”  

As Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu warned two weeks ago: “If Hong Kong falls, we don’t know what’s going to be next. It might be Taiwan.” The U.S. government has condemned Beijing’s actions loudly, with Secretary of State Pompeo calling them a “death knell for Hong Kong’s autonomy.” It is currently preparing to respond with sanctions and even considering denial of Hong Kong’s special status for trade and finance, despite the fact that this would do more damage to Hong Kong than to Beijing. And many members of Congress are howling for more.

All this is certain to become ammunition in the most vicious war going on today—which is the war within the United States. Trump is fighting for reelection to ensure what he sees as his own personal survival and the future of his vision of America, against Joe Biden and the Democrats who are fighting for what they believe is the survival of American democracy.

In sum, as I wrote in Destined for War? (which was published on Memorial Day three years ago), we should expect things to get worse before they get worse. As the United States increasingly demonizes a rising China that is threatening to displace us from our position of leadership in every arena, and China pushes back to ensure that it can achieve its China Dream, both should be acutely aware that Thucydidean rivalries most often end in real wars. Moreover, the major risk of war in these rivalries comes not from either the rising or ruling power deciding that it wants war with the other. Instead, actions that have unintended effects, third-party provocations, or even accidents that would otherwise be inconsequential or readily managed often trigger a vicious spiral of reactions that drag the principal protagonists to what both know would be a catastrophe.

In sum: the remainder of 2020 could pose as severe a test for the United States and China as the final five months of 1941 did for the United States and Japan.


Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

EU won’t ally with US against China, foreign policy chief says before Pompeo meeting

   - The bloc will not pick a side in the escalating US-China conflict, Josep Borrell says
   - Instead, the EU would go its own way, working with both Beijing and Washington on areas of mutual interest


The European Union’s foreign policy chief has ruled out a transatlantic alliance against China and dismissed “systemic rivalry” with Beijing, just hours before he is due to talk to his US counterpart.

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell called for a “big, positive agenda for EU-China
cooperation” on Sunday, just a day before he and the 27 foreign ministers from the bloc are expected to have a videoconference with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The meeting is expected to focus on China and “disinformation”, and will be followed in a week’s time by the first EU-China summit under European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel. The two EU chiefs will meet Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, with the discussions expected to focus on market access.

In a post on his official site on Sunday, Borrell said the EU would not pick a side in the US-China conflict, adding that the European style of diplomacy focused on multilateralism and cooperation.

“Amid US-China tensions as the main axis of global politics, the pressure to ‘choose sides’ is increasing,” he said. “We as Europeans have to do it ‘My Way’, with all the challenges this brings.”

He also offered the clearest sign yet that the EU was prepared to tone down its rhetoric of treating China as a “systemic rival”, a policy reached by the last EU Commission team whose term ended late last year.

“Our relations with China are unavoidably complex and multifaceted,” Borrell said. “The words ‘systemic rival’ have drawn a lot of attention, maybe more for the ‘rival’ than the ‘systemic’ part of the expression.

“But it doesn’t mean that we are embarking [on] a systematic rivalry.”

Virginie Battu-Henriksson, Borrell’s spokeswoman, said the statement did not amount to a policy change.

“This is not at all in contradiction with the strategic outlook, which clearly said China is, simultaneously, in different policy areas, a cooperation partner with whom the EU has closely aligned objectives, a negotiating partner with whom the EU needs to find a balance of interests, an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance,” she said.

To avoid conflict beyond its trade war and geopolitical contest with the US, China has repeatedly rejected the idea of systemic rivalry with the EU, saying its relations with the bloc were based on partnership.

“With cooperation and consensus always greater than competition and differences, China and the EU are long-term, comprehensive, strategic partners,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Borrell in a meeting last week.

Borrell’s post echoed this view, promising a “big, positive agenda for EU-China cooperation”.

“China is playing an ever-growing role in global politics, and we have great interest in working together on the many issues where its role is essential, from the recovery of the pandemic to climate change and sustainable connectivity,” he said.

While there had been few results from the EU’s push for China to open up its market further, Borrell said this was an area “where good faith negotiations can produce good outcomes for both sides”.

“I hope we can conclude them as soon as possible to end the current situation of asymmetric openness,” he said, referring to the negotiations over the EU-China investment treaty that both sides hope to complete this year.

While the EU and the US share similar concerns about China’s state-controlled economy, the bloc has rejected calls to hew closer to Washington’s path.

“US-China relations are set on a path of global competition, regardless who will be in the White House next January. And this confrontation will frame the future world order,” Borrell wrote.

He said the transatlantic relationship remained vital for Europe – “the values we share form its bedrock” – but it was strained by US President Donald Trump, whose administration “has taken unilateral decisions with which we do not always agree”.

“The European Way for sure includes working with like-minded to keep the multilateral system as a space for cooperation, even if great powers use it increasingly as a battleground,” he said.

“We must uphold and defend our own interests and values. We must use as a compass not the expectations or pressures from outsiders, but what we as the EU want and need.”

But this was not always easy.

“It is no secret that the 27 member states have differing views on how to best approach this. Some push for alignment, others for equidistance,” he said.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3089014/eu-wont-ally-us-against-china-foreign-policy-chief-says-pompeo

John Bolton: The Scandal of Trump’s China Policy

The president pleaded with Chinese leader Xi Jinping for domestic political help, subordinated national-security issues to his own reelection prospects and ignored Beijing’s human-rights abuses

By John Bolton
June 17, 2020 2:46 pm ET


U.S. strategy toward the People’s Republic of China has rested for more than four decades on two basic propositions. The first is that the Chinese economy would be changed irreversibly by the rising prosperity caused by market-oriented policies, greater foreign investment, ever-deeper interconnections with global markets and broader acceptance of international economic norms. Bringing China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was the apotheosis of this assessment.

The second proposition is that, as China’s national wealth increased, so too, inevitably, would its political openness. As China became more democratic, it would avoid competition for regional or global hegemony, and the risk of international conflict—hot or cold—would recede.

Both propositions were fundamentally incorrect. After joining the WTO, China did exactly the opposite of what was predicted. China gamed the organization, pursuing a mercantilist policy in a supposedly free-trade body. China stole intellectual property, forced technology transfers from foreign businesses and continued managing its economy in authoritarian ways.

Politically, China moved away from democracy, not toward it. In Xi Jinping, China now has its most powerful leader and its most centralized government since Mao Zedong. Ethnic and religious persecution on a massive scale continues. Meanwhile, China has created a formidable offensive cyberwarfare program, built a blue-water navy for the first time in 500 years, increased its arsenal of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and more.

I saw these developments as a threat to U.S. strategic interests and to our friends and allies. The Obama administration basically sat back and watched it happen.

President Donald Trump in some respects embodies the growing U.S. concern about China. He appreciates the key truth that politico-military power rests on a strong economy. Trump frequently says that stopping China’s unfair economic growth at America’s expense is the best way to defeat China militarily, which is fundamentally correct.

But the real question is what Trump does about China’s threat. His advisers are badly fractured intellectually. The administration has “panda huggers” like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; confirmed free-traders like National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow; and China hawks like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, lead trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro.

After I became Trump’s national security adviser in April 2018, I had the most futile role of all: I wanted to fit China trade policy into a broader strategic framework. We had a good slogan, calling for a “free and open Indo-Pacific” region. But a bumper sticker is not a strategy, and we struggled to avoid being sucked into the black hole of U.S.-China trade issues.

Trade matters were handled from day one in a completely chaotic way. Trump’s favorite way to proceed was to get small armies of people together, either in the Oval Office or the Roosevelt Room, to argue out these complex, controversial issues. Over and over again, the same issues. Without resolution, or even worse, one outcome one day and a contrary outcome a few days later. The whole thing made my head hurt.

With the November 2018 midterm elections looming, there was little progress on the China trade front. Attention turned to the coming Buenos Aires G-20 summit the following month, when Xi and Trump could meet personally. Trump saw this as the meeting of his dreams, with the two big guys getting together, leaving the Europeans aside, cutting the big deal.

What could go wrong? Plenty, in Lighthizer’s view. He was very worried about how much Trump would give away once untethered.

In Buenos Aires on Dec. 1, at dinner, Xi began by telling Trump how wonderful he was, laying it on thick. Xi read steadily through note cards, doubtless all of it hashed out arduously in advance. Trump ad-libbed, with no one on the U.S. side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next.

One highlight came when Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for six more years, and Trump replied that people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Xi said the U.S. had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.

Xi finally shifted to substance, describing China’s positions: The U.S. would roll back Trump’s existing tariffs, and both parties would refrain from competitive currency manipulation and agree not to engage in cyber thievery (how thoughtful). The U.S. should eliminate Trump’s tariffs, Xi said, or at least agree to forgo new ones. “People expect this,” said Xi, and I feared at that moment that Trump would simply say yes to everything Xi had laid out.

Trump came close, unilaterally offering that U.S. tariffs would remain at 10% rather than rise to 25%, as he had previously threatened. In exchange, Trump asked merely for some increases in Chinese farm-product purchases, to help with the crucial farm-state vote. If that could be agreed, all the U.S. tariffs would be reduced. It was breathtaking.

Trump asked Lighthizer if he had left anything out, and Lighthizer did what he could to get the conversation back onto the plane of reality, focusing on the structural issues and ripping apart the Chinese proposal. Trump closed by saying Lighthizer would be in charge of the deal-making, and Jared Kushner would also be involved, at which point all the Chinese perked up and smiled.

The decisive play came in May 2019, when the Chinese reneged on several key elements of the emerging agreement, including all the structural issues. For me, this was proof that China simply wasn’t serious.

Trump spoke with Xi by phone on June 18, just over a week ahead of the year’s G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, where they would next meet. Trump began by telling Xi he missed him and then said that the most popular thing he had ever been involved with was making a trade deal with China, which would be a big plus for him politically.

In their meeting in Osaka on June 29, Xi told Trump that the U.S.-China relationship was the most important in the world. He said that some (unnamed) American political figures were making erroneous judgments by calling for a new cold war with China.

Whether Xi meant to finger the Democrats or some of us sitting on the U.S. side of the table, I don’t know, but Trump immediately assumed that Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility to China among the Democrats. Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.

Trump then raised the trade negotiations’ collapse the previous month, urging China to return to the positions it had retracted and conclude the most exciting, largest deal ever. He proposed that for the remaining $350 billion of trade imbalances (by Trump’s arithmetic), the U.S. would not impose tariffs, but he again returned to importuning Xi to buy as many American farm products as China could.

Xi agreed that we should restart the trade talks, welcoming Trump’s concession that there would be no new tariffs and agreeing that the two negotiating teams should resume discussions on farm products on a priority basis. “You’re the greatest Chinese leader in 300 years!” exulted Trump, amending that a few minutes later to “the greatest leader in Chinese history.”

Subsequent negotiations after I resigned did lead to an interim “deal” announced in December 2019, but there was less to it than met the eye.

Trump’s conversations with Xi reflected not only the incoherence in his trade policy but also the confluence in Trump’s mind of his own political interests and U.S. national interests. Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security. I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.

Take Trump’s handling of the threats posed by the Chinese telecommunications firms Huawei and ZTE. Ross and others repeatedly pushed to strictly enforce U.S. regulations and criminal laws against fraudulent conduct, including both firms’ flouting of U.S. sanctions against Iran and other rogue states. The most important goal for Chinese “companies” like Huawei and ZTE is to infiltrate telecommunications and information-technology systems, notably 5G, and subject them to Chinese control (though both companies, of course, dispute the U.S. characterization of their activities).

Trump, by contrast, saw this not as a policy issue to be resolved but as an opportunity to make personal gestures to Xi. In 2018, for example, he reversed penalties that Ross and the Commerce Department had imposed on ZTE. In 2019, he offered to reverse criminal prosecution against Huawei if it would help in the trade deal—which, of course, was primarily about getting Trump re-elected in 2020.

These and innumerable other similar conversations with Trump formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behavior that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency. Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different.

As the trade talks went on, Hong Kong’s dissatisfaction over China’s bullying had been growing. An extradition bill provided the spark, and by early June 2019, massive protests were under way in Hong Kong.

I first heard Trump react on June 12, upon hearing that some 1.5 million people had been at Sunday’s demonstrations. “That’s a big deal,” he said. But he immediately added, “I don’t want to get involved,” and, “We have human-rights problems too.”

I hoped Trump would see these Hong Kong developments as giving him leverage over China. I should have known better. That same month, on the 30th anniversary of China’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Trump refused to issue a White House statement. “That was 15 years ago,” he said, inaccurately. “Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal. I don’t want anything.” And that was that.

Beijing’s repression of its Uighur citizens also proceeded apace. Trump asked me at the 2018 White House Christmas dinner why we were considering sanctioning China over its treatment of the Uighurs, a largely Muslim people who live primarily in China’s northwest Xinjiang Province.

At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.

Trump was particularly dyspeptic about Taiwan, having listened to Wall Street financiers who had gotten rich off mainland China investments. One of Trump’s favorite comparisons was to point to the tip of one of his Sharpies and say, “This is Taiwan,” then point to the historic Resolute desk in the Oval Office and say, “This is China.” So much for American commitments and obligations to another democratic ally.

More thunder out of China came in 2020 with the coronavirus pandemic. China withheld, fabricated and distorted information about the disease; suppressed dissent from physicians and others; hindered efforts by the World Health Organization and others to get accurate information; and engaged in active disinformation campaigns, trying to argue that the new coronavirus did not originate in China.

There was plenty to criticize in Trump’s response, starting with the administration’s early, relentless assertion that the disease was “contained” and would have little or no economic effect. Trump’s reflex to try to talk his way out of anything, even a public-health crisis, only undercut his and the nation’s credibility, with his statements looking more like political damage control than responsible public-health advice.

Other criticisms of the administration, however, were frivolous. One such complaint targeted part of the general streamlining of NSC staffing I conducted in my first months at the White House. To reduce duplication and overlap and enhance coordination and efficiency, it made good management sense to shift the responsibilities of the NSC directorate dealing with global health and biodefense into the directorate dealing with biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Bioweapon attacks and pandemics can have much in common, and the medical and public-health expertise required to deal with both threats goes hand in hand. Most of the personnel working in the prior global health directorate simply moved to the combined directorate and continued doing exactly what they were doing before.

At most, the internal NSC structure was the quiver of a butterfly’s wings in the tsunami of Trump’s chaos. Despite the indifference at the top of the White House, the cognizant NSC staffers did their duty in the pandemic, raising options like shutdowns and social distancing far before Trump did so in March. The NSC biosecurity team functioned exactly as it was supposed to. It was the chair behind the Resolute desk that was empty.

In today’s pre-2020 election climate, Trump has made a sharp turn to anti-China rhetoric. Frustrated in his search for the big China trade deal, and mortally afraid of the negative political effects of the coronavirus pandemic on his re-election prospects, Trump has now decided to blame China, with ample justification. Whether his actions will match his words remains to be seen. His administration has signaled that Beijing’s suppression of dissent in Hong Kong will have consequences, but no actual consequences have yet been imposed.

Most important of all, will Trump’s current China pose last beyond election day? The Trump presidency is not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy. It is grounded in Trump. That is something to think about for those, especially China realists, who believe they know what he will do in a second term.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-bolton-the-scandal-of-trumps-china-policy-11592419564

Bolton still seems incensed at this unexpected display of caution and humanity on the part of Trump, deeming it “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do.”

— Kingston Reif (@KingstonAReif) June 17, 2020

..put up flags before delegation arrived, took pictures as if the Chinese didn't show up and took the flags away before came in.
Amb to Austria then published pic of how the room looked like during the talks and set-up was busted.
arns control official was mad

— Maxim A. Suchkov (@m_suchkov) June 22, 2020

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/chinese-communist-partys-ideology-global-ambitions/

The Chinese Communist Party’s Ideology and Global Ambitions

Remarks delivered by National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien on June 24, 2020, in Phoenix, Arizona.


...
America, under President Trump’s leadership, has finally awoken to the threat the Chinese Communist Party’s actions and the threat they pose to our very way of life. For decades, conventional wisdom in both U.S. political parties, the business community, academia, and media, has held that it was only a matter of time before China would become more liberal, first economically and, then, politically. The more we opened our markets to China, the thinking went, the more we invested capital in China, the more we trained PRC bureaucrats, scientists, engineers, and even military officers, the more China would become like us.

It was under this premise that we welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 with vast concessions and trade privileges. We downplayed China’s gross human rights abuses, including Tiananmen Square. We turned a blind eye to China’s widespread technology theft that eviscerated entire sectors of the American economy.

As China grew richer and stronger, we believed, the Chinese Communist Party would liberalize to meet the rising democratic aspirations of its people.  This was a bold, quintessentially American idea, born of our innate optimism and by the experience of our triumph over Soviet Communism.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be very naïve.

We could not have been more wrong—and this miscalculation is the greatest failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s. How did we make such a mistake? How did we fail to understand the nature of the Chinese Communist Party?

The answer is simple: because we did not pay heed to the CCP’s ideology. Instead of listening to what CCP leaders were saying and reading what they wrote in their key documents, we closed our ears and our eyes. We believed what we wanted to believe—that the Party members were communist in name only.

Let us be clear, the Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist organization. The Party General Secretary Xi Jinping sees himself as Josef Stalin’s successor. In fact, as the journalist and former Australian government official John Garnaut has noted, the Chinese Communist Party is the last “ruling communist party that never split with Stalin, with the partial exception of North Korea.” [1] Yes, Stalin – the man whose brutal dictatorship and disastrous policies killed roughly 20 million Russians and others through famine, forced collectivization, executions, and labor camps. As interpreted and practiced by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, communism is a totalitarian ideology.

Under communism, individuals are merely a means to be used toward the achievement of the ends of the collective nation state. Thus, individuals can be easily sacrificed for the nation state’s goals.  Individuals do not have inherent value under Marxism-Leninism. They exist to serve the state; the state does not exist to serve them.
...

Mór Thököly wrote:diplomatija velikog odmora

Mór Thököly wrote:

erős paprika wrote:

da li je moguce da rusi deluju kao ono meternih u svemu ovom?

Moguce je, plus Lavrov je ozbiljan lik, no takodje deluju kao Habzburška monarhija i na drugim poljima. Tako da...

Liberty Square in Baku: People are now chanting "End the quarantine, start the war"