I think the current administration is an example of being wannabe realists trying to emulate the line of Kennan, Kissinger, and Brzezinski just like Mearsheimer who spent the entire three years since the Ukraine War impotently shouting "we should be focusing on China" to the Biden government. I've seen some articles highlighting Rubio's recent public statements and how that gusano, who made being anti-China his entire political career after his humiliation of being bullied by Trump calling him a "robot" off the Republican Presidential convention in 2016, is now quite firmly in the "clear-eyed realism" camp of the US "China threat" lobby.
The weird American nationalist conservative David Goldman wrote a piece framing Rubio as a "China realist" and covering some of Rubio's recent Congressional report writings:
If this report conveys any message, let it be that the United States cannot be complacent about Communist China. Think-tank scholars and economists may bank on China’s coming collapse. Beijing is taking the other side of that wager.
[...] And Communist China will still be a more formidable adversary than any the United States has faced in living memory. At this point, the burden of proof should be on the critics who insist the CCP’s project is doomed to fail.”
B of MoonOfAlabama also recently gushed over Rubio's "pragmatism" in the past couple weeks when he spoke about how the unipolar moment was over in a recent speech. He highlighted some of Rubio's comments:
I think the mission of American foreign policy – and this may sound sort of obvious, but I think it’s been lost. The interest of American foreign policy is to further the national interest of the United States of America, right? [..] [A]nd that’s the way the world has always worked. The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what’s in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. Where our interests align, that’s where you have partnerships and alliances; where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they’re going to further theirs. And that’s been lost.
[N]ow you can have a framework by which you analyze not just diplomacy but foreign aid and who we would line up with and the return of pragmatism. And that’s not an abandonment of our principles. I’m not a fan or a giddy supporter of some horrifying human rights violator somewhere in the world. By the same token, diplomacy has always required us and foreign policy has always required us to work in the national interest, sometimes in cooperation with people who we wouldn’t invite over for dinner or people who we wouldn’t necessarily ever want to be led by. And so that’s a balance, but it’s the sort of pragmatic and mature balance we have to have in foreign policy.
I think through this tone alone, it's clear that Rubio is gunning to be a Kissinger/Brzezinski clone. Goldman talked about how "a credible anti-Communist like Nixon could make a deal with China without accusations of selling out, and Secretary of State Rubio could repeat the exercise, according to this line of thinking."
Ever since 1989, America's China policy had been hijacked by the "human rights" warriors so it is true that it has been a while since America donned up the Kissinger pragmatic realpolitik mask for its relationship with China. I personally think there would be nothing that China could gain from another hypothetical "grand bargain" with America as the fundamental contradiction of American hegemony over the world is not something that can be kicked down the road under the guise of "peaceful co-existence," as the errors of the post-WWII Soviet leadership with their constant searching for "detente" under Khrushchev ultimately amounting to nothing but some actor freak like Reagan calling them a "evil empire." Some parts of the Chinese government was able to recognize this back in the 2010s when China rejected Obama's proposal for a "G2." As the Russian term "agreement-incapable" hints at, I don't believe even a pragmatic veneered American China policy will be able to tolerate giving any real concessions to China.
As such, I think it's much more likely that a more geopolitically pragmatic American foreign policy will simply be a MAGA Republican flavor of the China containment objective, primarily through attempting to pull Russia away from China (as Trump had talked about many times explicitly on the campaign trail and his special advisor to Russia Kellogg recently publicly fantasized about). The pragmatism realpolitik angle will be that anything is a possible candidate to be thrown under the bus for the goal of convincing Russia to distance itself from China, as what is happening right now with the EU vassals and the Ukraine fascists. Whether the modern Sino-Russian relationship, built on economic ties this time around rather than the ideological solidarity of the Sino-Soviet era, can withstand these American overtures under Trump will be the open question of the day.
Personally, I think that rationally speaking, China has done decent material work over the past three years since the Ukraine war in making itself economically indispensable to Russia, but given that past Russian leadership dissolved the USSR because they saw the inside of a Walmart and wanted to get pats on the back from the likes of Reagan, Bush and Thatcher, I frankly put nothing past the Westanbetung Russian ruling class.
The core issue for Trump and Rubio and their ilk in the current administration is that just because you know the recipe, as they claim to do, doesn't necessarily mean you actually have the ability to bake the cake in the end. I think that will be the defining trait of their foreign policy.
I don't see the difference and splitting the hair seems irrelevant. The US military isn't just an imperialist fascist force, it's also a jobs program for millions of Americans. It's dialectical to acknowledge all relevant facets and the existence of those orgs as a institutional golden parachute is one of them. I don't care if someone weighs it as "just that" or "primary" or "secondary" or "whatever" it's simply a crucial element that should be highlighted.
Yes, the Reddit Democrat "analysis" or the Hasanabi interpretation of this as just "evil dumb racists" doing "evil dumb racist" things isn't necessarily wrong. There's no value in framing this under that sole paradigm, however.
The liberal explanation is that Trump is a big dumb dumb and doesn't understand the role of those orgs in US hegemony.
The fact that relatively few institutional voices from the US state apparatus are stepping out to denounce this move, collectively running out waving their arms for the bull to stop running around the china shop, if it was really done out of sheer ignorance, shows that there is likely more of an internal power struggle at play rather than some "comrade Trump" working against US empire.
There's still no real indication whether Trump will actually follow through on any of this. Regardless, however, one thing that should be noted is the reality is that those orgs are essentially the sinecure of the US institutional elite, where their spawnlings that are too incompetent even for some Wall Street board seat or STEM lord Silicon Valley company management are fobbed off to. Those like Anderson Cooper and the like. If you get a liberal arts major in the wasteland of the American job market nowadays, you're likely in for a struggle as a normal individual. If you get a liberal arts major as a failson/faildaughter of some US institutional elite, you get a job at USAID/NED and the Radio Free Whatevers. These "non-partisan" NGO careerist positions were their golden parachute and they had all largely swung in the Democratic camp over the years as they had alienated Republicans with objectives like rainbow imperialism.
There was this big news story a while back about the "Chaguan" column for the Economist (a cushy one-man job journalist position in Beijing that also funded travelling around China writing anti-China propaganda hitpieces by doing cherry-picked interviews) being shut down. Amidst all the Economist's whining about the "hostile journalism environment," it inadvertantly revealed that this "journalist" was the son of a MI6 director, John Rennie.. These are the kind of places that the failsons of Western institutional elite drift into and Trump's actions against them is essentially a form of blackmail to cow them and attempt to make them fall in line. The important thing to note is that new institutions more closely aligned with the MAGA Republican flavor of US imperialism will inevitably be created, whether wholesale or more closely under the government's leash within the State Department, and the intent of these purges is enforce a reset so that anyone who wants to regain their old spots would need to pay fealty to the new order of the day.
Honestly, the root of every struggle session that community has had recently all comes down to how much that admin team enjoys LARPing as the Western stereotype version of a Communist Party politburo: as opaque as a black box. Evidently, it's caused a birds of a feather problem, where the admins find communication challenges even among themselves and attracted the types that would withhold critical site information from each other like domain credentials, brushing the others off with disingenuous assurances that "they'll definitely renew the domain, trust." And the others apparently just went "okay" and waited all the way until the time ran out.
The best case scenario is that some rent-seeking site traffic squatter buys out the domain because it could easily be weaponized by a hostile reactionary freak aware of the site's demographic to maliciously IP grab or phish as disgusting ideological revenge. Plenty of the users take multi-month or even years-long hiatuses from the site and there would be no channels to notify them by if they return and type in "hexbear.net." There really should have been a front page permanent top banner blaring 24/7 that the domain might be lost and at least familiarizing people with the "chapo.chat" mirror from the moment they knew this could be a possibility since at least September.
The one possible upside of this is that with the site management being the way it is, I'd say that possibility of the site being some fed honeypot has definitely gone down a few notches.
Lmao. Shamelessness, thy name is America.
To be frank, I've come to the position that the primary contradiction in Soviet relations with any of its fraternal socialist states was not principally any ideological discrepancies but the anxieties of its fellow state at being a victim of "big brother chauvinism" where its own individual state interests were subordinated to the interests of the socialist bloc - as set and determined by Moscow. I would say this contradiction is a leading reason for why the CPSU was unable to resolve any ideological gulfs with the other socialist parties it came into conflict with.
This was seen first with Yugoslavia, where Tito and the CPY tried to push for some market-based reforms and, as a result, was kicked out of the Comintern by Stalin, who also attempted to depose Tito from the CPY. Tito sympathizers were ousted from Communist Parties across socialist Europe and Yugoslavia was left to fend for itself, forcing it to ask the West for aid. To be a "Titoist" thereafter became the Comintern equivalent of the McCarthyist "Reds." Churchill also accounted in his memoirs how Stalin decided with him to split Europe down the middle, leaving the Communist Party of Italy and the Greek Partisans out to dry in the Western orbit, where both were ultimately dismembered. Victor Grossman's memoirs of his time in the DDR also recounts how a large amount of people were openly relieved that Stalin was succeeded by Khrushchev because of the reparations that was deeply hampering the state's recovery and exacerbating its brain drain to West Germany.
This is not to say that the CPSU did not do a great deal for the assistance of its fellow socialist states and there are justifiable explanations for all of this conduct but nonetheless, just because something is justifiable doesn't mean it fails to incur a cost. That cost was the view that Soviet interests took precedence over any Soviet aspirations of establishing equal fraternal relationships with its fellow socialist states and parties. In material terms, the USSR had a towering disparity in all measures - military, land, economy - and when this was coupled with perceptions of the CPSU's "first among equals" attitude in the Comintern, it led to deep resentment that had catastrophic consequences for the socialist world.
It could be said that the CPSU's attempt at this "inter-state democratic centralism" can be seen charitably as a "well-intentioned" attempt to take the first step towards that internationalist dream of breaking down the divisions of the states that divide humanity, but this was an ideal ahead of its time and failed to consider the conditions of its fellow socialist states. Most (actually, every single one with the sole exception of the DDR) of the newly socialist states were countries with a long history of foreign subjugation and torturous struggles for their sovereignty and when they finally achieved this sovereignty after WWII and yet were immediately expected to subordinate themselves to the CPSU's leadership, it led to bitter feelings all around, even when Soviet side was acting with entirely good intentions, which was not universally the case.
This pattern continued all the way to the end of the USSR, with one of the most notorious cases being Honecker's writing on how Gorbachev completely went past him to sell out socialist Germany by negotiating with the US and the West Germans without him. In short, there was a view that the CPSU failed to treat any of its fraternal socialist parties as equals, which is the source of the CPC's accusation of the Soviet "big brother chauvinism" during the height of the split.
First impressions are important in all relationships and Sino-Soviet relations began distinctively on a bad note. The Comintern under Soviet direction demanded that the CPC join into the ranks of the KMT, which ended disastrously when Chiang Kai-Shek brutally purged all communists from the KMT and murdered thousands of communists and perceived communists. The understandable distrust from the CPC after the 1927 massacres led to a cooling down of inter-party relations and this lack of engagement led to a further lack of understanding which led to distrust from the CPSU when the CPC took power in 1949. It took Chinese military intervention in the Korean War for Stalin to finally trust Mao and see the CPC as a genuinely Communist Party - but the negative associations from the botched first impressions would be hard to let go of, as the later split would show.
When Deng Xiaoping met with Gorbachev in 1989, this is how he summarized his perspective on the Sino-Soviet split:
For many years there has been a question of how to understand Marxism and socialism. From the first Moscow talks in 1957 [among delegations from the Soviet Union, China and Hungary] through the first half of the 1960s, bitter disputes went on between our two parties. I was one of the persons involved and played no small role in those disputes. Now, looking back on more than 20 years of practice, we can see that there was a lot of empty talk on both sides. [...]
[...] In 1963 I led a delegation to Moscow. The negotiations broke down. I should say that starting from the mid-1960s, our relations deteriorated to the point where they were practically broken off. I don’t mean it was because of the ideological disputes; we no longer think that everything we said at that time was right. The basic problem was that the Chinese were not treated as equals and felt humiliated. However, we have never forgotten that in the period of our First Five-Year Plan the Soviet Union helped us lay an industrial foundation.
If I have talked about these questions at length, it is in order to put the past behind us. We want the Soviet comrades to understand our view of the past and to know what was on our minds then. Now that we have reviewed the history, we should forget about it. That is one thing that has already been achieved by our meeting. Now that I have said what I had to say, that’s the end of it. The past is past.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1989/196.htm
"the London Economist, the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class.” - Karl Marx
"The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires." - Vladimir Lenin
Having both Marx and Lenin speak out against a publication shows how this rag has been consistently on the wrong side of any struggle for the past two centuries. Their modern flashy r/designporn-bait cover designs and tidy site UI hides the sociopathy of their publication history.
For starters, the modern day sinophobia of the Economist is no surprise. They're the original China haters, and I mean that with zero exaggeration. They've been calling for war and imperialism against China for two centuries now. They lobbied in the UK for the Second Opium War using sociopathic mercantilist justifications:
"We may regret war … but we cannot deny that great advantages have followed in its wake"
It's an unsurprising stance when their founder literally earned his fortune from the forced opium trade imposed against China following the First Opium War.
The British capital-centric profit driven agenda they've followed puts them even on the wrong side of a "liberal" perspective of history. They've historically opposed the UK abolitionist movement, protesting that "the boycott they proposed of all goods made using slave labour would hurt British consumers and punish slaves."
They were the only British publication to support the Confederacy, arguing that:
"It is in the independence of the South, and not in her defeat, that we can alone look with confidence for the early amelioration and the ultimate extinction of the slavery we abhor."
In a mask-off moment, they said that the slavery issue was secondary compared to the lucratively low cotton tariffs the Confederacy could offer, which made Marx himself ridicule the rag when he wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, saying that the Economist was finally: ‘honest enough to confess at last that with it and its followers sympathy (for American emancipation) is a mere question of tariff’
Their chief editor at the time, the Confederacy apologist Bagehot, still has a "cutesy" little column named after him to this day.
Showing that they've learnt nothing in the centuries since, in a 2014 book review on a book about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they unironically complained without a shred of self-awareness that:
"Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy."
For more further reading, the Citations Needed podcast had an episode on "The Refined Sociopathy of The Economist." https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-98-the-refined-sociopathy-of-the-economist-4966767e1688
@ComradeEd@lemmygrad.ml @satori@hexbear.net Having gone through my own reading rabbit-hole on UN diplomacy in the past, I can clarify: The vote was on passing the "important question" scheme that the US first devised in 1961. Every time a motion in the UNGA was put forth to restore the UN seat to China, the US inserted a preliminary amendment to have the motion considered a "important question," which would require a supermajority rather than a simple majority for it to then pass. This blocked China's membership for 10 years until 1971. This is why the vote in the video has the US and its underlings voting in the affirmative and why the Assembly laughed, because by the US' turn to vote, it was already clear that the UNGA majority would reject the supermajority amendment and thus be able to restore China's membership.
The end came abruptly for the Taiwanese delegation. On October 26, 1971, the General Assembly narrowly rejected the “important question” resolution, which would have required a two-thirds majority to replace Taiwan with the Communist government. Anticipating the inevitable next step, the Taiwanese delegation walked out of the General Assembly moments before the lopsided vote that formally evicted them. In that instant, Chiang Kai-shek’s government lost all rights at the United Nations, including the coveted council seat. It was just as well that the Taiwanese had left. Many delegations broke into wild applause—and even dancing—as the results were announced. Finally, after twenty-five years of exclusion. Communist China would be in the inner sanctum.
Bosco, D. 2009. Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World. Oxford.