When President Obama wanted to push through the Iran nuclear deal and rally support for it, he used the time-honored technique of constructing a straw man. We were told we had two choices. We could support the deal, or we could go to war with Iran. Those were our only options.
It was a lie of course. We were not in any sense on the brink of war with Iran. There were an endless array of other options available to us. Still, politically, the tactic worked.
No one wanted war. The deal faced no serious challenge domestically. We capitulated to Iran and handed them $155 billion to set the Middle East on fire.
The straw man is back. This time he is headed for Anchorage, where he will make his appearance at the upcoming high-level meetings between U.S. and Chinese officials.
Once again, we the American people will be told that we face two choices, this time concerning Taiwan. Either we can accept that we will be forced to go to war with Communist China over Taiwan or we can agree to an as-yet-unspecified series of concessions and accommodations concerning Beijing. Once again, most reasonable people will agree that avoiding war should be the priority. Only later will they begin to understand that they have been lied to and deceived.
The stage for this maneuver has already been set. Speaking recently before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Admiral Philip Davidson, Commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, stated that he believed it likely that China would take direct military action against Taiwan within the next six years.
Anonymous defense officials have stressed the need for caution and restraint. Said one official, “If we interject ourselves, we are the reagent catalyst that will make this problem hotter. Militarily we know that if we do too much, push too hard, China will use that optic and they will do more against Taiwan.”
The imminent nature of the threat has been underlined. “War over Taiwan would be unthinkable,” said Eric Sayers, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “A major challenge Washington faces is that Taiwan has been viewed by many as a 2035 planning problem. … The [Chinese army’s] capabilities have now matured to such a degree that this is no longer a dilemma we can afford to push off.”
And, of course, Politico has made clear that this is all due to Trump’s overly bellicose behavior.
“Top U.S. military officials are warning with increasing urgency that China could in the next few years invade Taiwan, the island nation whose disputed political status has long been a fraught subject of U.S.-China relations. It’s a timeline they say has been accelerated by the Trump administration’s repeated provocation of Beijing…”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/15/china-growing-threat-taiwan-476170
The team that will fly to Anchorage and ‘begin the process of surrender‘ will be headed by Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor. For a President who is himself a lackey of Xi Jinping, there could be no two better men to handle this assignment.
Blinken served in the past two Democratic administrations, including as a deputy national security adviser from 2013 to 2015 and as deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017. Blinken also has a long history with Joe Biden and was his national security advisor when Biden was Vice-President. More recently, Blinken has been acting as Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement that Joe Biden established in 2018 at the University of Pennsylvania.
As Director of the Penn Biden Center, Blinken presided over an entity that was funded in large measure by the Chinese and which seems to have been dedicated primarily to pushing Chinese propaganda inside the United States. Since its founding, the Penn Biden Center has received in excess of $70 million from Chinese donors. Until questioned about it, the Center reported none of those donations even though it was required to by law. In excess of $20 million is still categorized as having come from anonymous Chinese sources.
The Penn Biden Center focuses most of its attention on subjects and themes that dovetail nicely with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda worldwide. The Center does not concern itself with forced labor camps in China, live organ harvesting from Uyghur captives, the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, or China’s role in the ongoing worldwide pandemic.
In 2020 the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), an organization that monitors ethics in public life, filed a 12-page complaint with the Department of Education demanding an investigation of the Penn Biden Center, to determine whether it was in compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for engaging in political activities on behalf of Chinese interests. The NLPC also demanded that Blinken identify the Chinese donors who remain anonymous and requested that the Department of Education order the Biden Center to comply with this request.
Jake Sullivan is cut from the same cloth. He also spent time in the Obama administration and was for a time also national security advisor to then Vice-President Biden. Sullivan was part of the team which conducted secret meetings in Oman with the Iranians which set the stage for the disastrous Iran nuclear deal.
Sullivan served as a fellow at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center, another pro-Beijing institute that has taken huge amounts of money from China and promotes Chinese Communist Party interests in the United States. The center was created in 2016 following a donation of $30,000,000 from Joseph Tsai, son of the co-founder of Alibaba. Tsai is also a patron of the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a Chinese Communist Party-backed group that is part of China’s United Front activities. The United Front seeks to co-opt foreign elites and encourage them to adopt policies favorable to the Chinese Communist Party.
As with the Biden Center, the finances of the Paul Tsai China Center have also attracted attention. The Department of Education has demanded to see the financial records of the center as part of an effort to determine the origins of an estimated $375 million in money Yale has taken from foreign governments.
The exact outlines of the surrender document that will be crafted in Anchorage remain unclear. Likely the Biden administration, conscious of the fact that it is transparently in the pocket of the CCP, will begin slowly. We will “review” weapons sales to Taiwan. We will limit deployments of ships and aircraft into the Taiwan Strait. Visits to Taiwan by U.S. officials will be curtailed. In the face of Beijing’s increasingly bellicose attitude toward Taipei, we will remain largely silent.
All this will be enveloped in the usual doublespeak. We will not be caving in. We will be de-escalating. We will be building ‘trust and confidence.’ We will be nurturing ‘mutual respect.’ We will be avoiding war.
And the result, as with the Iran deal will be a disaster. An emboldened China will push aggressively not only against Taiwan but throughout the region. Whatever the risk of war today, it will only be increased by what is about to come.
We have seen this movie before. It ends badly.
