China & Russia

Don’t you understand what I’m tryin’ to say.
Can’t you feel the fears I’m feelin’ today.
If a button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away.
There’ll be no one to save, with the world in a grave. 
Take a look around you boy, it’s bound to scare you boy.
And you tell me, over and over and over again my friend.
Ah you don’t believe, we’re on the eve of destruction.

Barry McGuire – Eve of Destruction

…..

The photo with this post is a photo of a book from my bookshelf. I bought this book when it was newly published in 1971. Yes, I was 16. You were probably playing sports or something. I was reading things like this. Can you say “geek”?

The book is a scholarly analysis of the conflict laden relations between Russia and China over the last 600 years. Suffice it to say that these two countries have been at odds with each other much more often than friends over that period. So historically, they are not natural allies. 

This book was written when the Soviet Union not only existed but was near the zenith of its power. Mao’s China was still struggling to pick itself up after the communist revolution a little more than 20 years earlier. Mao’s murder of an estimated 30-40 million of his own people had occurred in the late 50s and early 60s. 

Nixon famously went to China in 1972, the year after this book was published. At the time, the Soviet Union was the much greater threat to freedom and the United States. Amongst the reasons for Nixon’s outreach was to bring China closer to the west in order to keep them from forming an alliance with their fellow communist Soviet neighbors. 

It worked. Nixon was a brilliant foreign policy specialist. 

But that was a different time.

The Soviet Union no longer exists. Russia, albeit an important country, is not the power that the Soviet Union was, nor does it have the resources to be that again soon. As current foreign policy analyst George Friedman says, Putin “is playing an extraordinarily weak hand brilliantly”. 

China is the much greater threat. They have the money, military might and people to be a threat equal to or greater than the Soviet Union of the 1960s. I think we should be moving must faster to stop funding Chinese aggression through our buying of their goods and the education of their scientists, but that is a matter for another missive. 

Nixon befriended the evil Communist Chinese to separate them from the more dangerous Soviets. Thirty years earlier, FDR allied with Stalin to defeat the more dangerous Hitler. In my opinion, we should now be befriending the brutal Russian government, to keep them from an potentially very dangerous alliance with a powerful China. 

Unfortunately, the Biden Regime is doing the exact opposite. Biden’s foreign policy worldwide qualifies as foreign relational malpractice. He is screwing up our relations with friends and enemies alike in every corner of the globe. In this case, he is pushing the Russians and the Chinese together. 

I have no idea if Putin will attack Ukraine. The Russians have good historical reasons to fear who controls that area since they have suffered invasions from the Swedes, French and Germans in the last 300 years. I am writing this a few days before you will likely read it so maybe something will have already happened. But we didn’t need to be here. We should have been trying to bring the Russians closer to the west not push them away towards China. This would not be an easy task, I know. Little in international diplomacy is. I would prefer to see Russia as a part of NATO in an alliance against China, then a NATO adversary.

Sometimes I wonder if the Biden Regime’s total blunder here has been caused by a couple of things. Maybe they actually believed the Russian collusion hoax that they concocted with the support of Big Media and Big Tech? A liar is never supposed to believe their own lies. But, if they did, it would lead them to believe that the Russians were an enormous threat. And of course, the debacle in Afghanistan has made Biden to want to appear to be tough and competent somewhere. Put these two things together and you have a recipe for a much more consequential mistake.

I’m not sure the Biden Regime can fix this now. They seem to be the gang that can’t shoot straight. So, I’m not sure they have the raw ability to do much right in the arena of foreign policy. Unfortunately, we may have to count on Putin and others to save us from this moment and give time for a new administration to set things back on a better path. 

The 1971 book, “China & Russia” was written by a foreign policy expert named O Edmund Clubb. The last line of the book has an ominous warning from 5 decades ago.  “Therein lies the danger that the triangle of Sino-Russian-American confrontation in Asia will give birth, at some point, to a world holocaust.”

The consequences of getting this wrong are not trivial. 

So, that we don’t end this on a complete downer, there was a song written in response to Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” which was released in 1965. It was called “The Dawn of Correction” by the Spokesmen. It did not achieve the commercial success of the McGuire hit, but one of its verses and chorus follow.

“The western world has a common dedication.
To keep free people from Red domination.
And maybe you can’t vote, but man your battle stations.
Or there’ll be no need for votin’ in future generations.
So, over and over and over again you keep sayin’ it’s the end.
But I say you’re wrong, we’re just on the dawn of correction” 

I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive fast and live free