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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Russia and China: The Bodyguards of Kim Jong-Un |
| 2017-09-09 |
| [Free Beacon] "Why did we lose this war?" asked James Burnham of Vietnam in 1972. One reason, he wrote, was that "We failed‐that is, our leadership failed‐to comprehend this Indochina struggle as one campaign or sub-war in a global conflict. Since we did not set it within its global frame of reference, our leaders could neither develop a comprehensive strategy to win it nor make it comprehensible to the American people." That is a fair description of the geopolitical situation more than four decades later. America faces diplomatic and security crises along the Rimland of the Eurasian supercontinent, from Lebanon and Syria and Yemen and Iran, to a recalcitrant Pakistan, a militarized South China Sea, and nuclear brinkmanship in North Korea. We bomb ISIS, threaten to unwind the Iranian nuclear agreement, demand that Pakistan assist us in our war against the Afghan Taliban, and remind Kim Jong Un that U.S. forces are "locked and loaded" if he crosses an ill-defined red line. We treat these dilemmas as if they are isolated from one another. We prefer to think the Shiite Corridor that Iran is establishing from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean has nothing to do with a North Korean hydrogen bomb. We focus on Omar al-Baghdadi and Kim Jong-Un and Bashar al-Assad rather than the more powerful players who lurk behind them. We apply local solutions to a global problem. The result is not only strategic incoherence. It's a diminished United States. We know what the problem is. The post-Cold War, American-led world order of democratic capitalist nation-states tied to one another by free-flowing capital, trade, labor, technology, and media is falling apart. And this fragmentation is happening not only because of internal division, feelings of historical guilt, and spiritual exhaustion, but also because two external challengers are actively subverting American prestige and influence around the globe. I doubt Burnham would be surprised to learn that these challengers are exactly the same powers that thwarted the United States in Vietnam: Russia and China. None of the subsidiary national security issues of war in Ukraine, chaos in the Middle East, or nukes on the Korean peninsula can be resolved without confronting Russian and Chinese malfeasance. As we are consumed with White House intrigue, dopey clichés, and blistering Twitter threads, Russia and China consolidate their positions by establishing facts on the ground. Consider the following headlines: |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #2 More Russophobia. Ridiculous. "What we have, then, is the steady erosion of the American position, with Russia acting in the western flank of the great continent" Russia is surrounded on all sides, hemmed in by US bases. China is behind three lines of defense. They have shitty positions and we hold all the cards. And this guy is pretending that we're somehow losing and the world will go to hell. "What he needs now is to align his words with his actions and resist fully the Russian and Chinese attempt to remove America from the global power equation. That is the way to solve our North Korean problem, our Syrian problem, and many of our problems besides." Ah, a globalist. What a fucking surprise. Globalism doesn't solve problems, it creates them. How else can it justify its existence? |
| Posted by: Herb McCoy7309 2017-09-09 06:39 |
| #1 I'm beginning to wonder if North Korea is Russia-China answer to the Nevada Test Site. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2017-09-09 02:04 |