Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan
“We got China wrong. Now what?” ran the headline over the column in The Washington Post.
“Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?” asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence.
America’s elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would cause the People’s Republic to coexist benignly with its neighbors and the West.
We deluded ourselves. It did not happen.
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Xi Jinping just changed China’s constitution to allow him to be dictator for life. He continues to thieve intellectual property from U.S. companies and to occupy and fortify islets in the South China Sea, which Beijing now claims as entirely its own.
Meanwhile, China sustains North Korea as Chinese warplanes and warships circumnavigate Taiwan threatening its independence.
We today confront a Chinese Communist dictatorship and superpower that seeks to displace America as first power on earth, and to drive the U.S. military back across the Pacific.
Who is responsible for this epochal blunder?
The elites of both parties. Bush Republicans from the 1990s granted China most-favored-nation status and threw open America’s market.
Result: China has run up $4 trillion in trade surpluses with the United States. Her $375 billion trade surplus with us in 2017 far exceeded the entire Chinese defense budget.
We fed the tiger, and created a monster.
Why? What is in the mind of Western man that our leaders continue to adopt policies rooted in hopes unjustified by reality?
Recall. Stalin was a murderous tyrant unrivaled in history whose victims in 1939 were 1,000 times those of Adolf Hitler, with whom he eagerly partnered in return for the freedom to rape the Baltic States and bite off half of Poland.
When Hitler turned on Stalin, the Bolshevik butcher rushed to the West for aid. Churchill and FDR hailed him in encomiums that would have made Pericles blush. At Yalta, Churchill rose to toast the butcher:
“I walk through this world with greater courage and hope when I find myself in a relation of friendship and intimacy with this great man, whose fame has gone out not only over all Russia, but the world. … We regard Marshal Stalin’s life as most precious to the hopes and hearts of all of us.”
Returning home, Churchill assured a skeptical Parliament, “I know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”
George W. Bush, with the U.S. establishment united behind him, invaded Iraq with the goal of creating a Vermont in the Middle East that would be a beacon of democracy to the Arab and Islamic world.
Ex-Director of the NSA Gen. William Odom correctly called the U.S. invasion the greatest strategic blunder in American history. But Bush, un-chastened, went on to preach a crusade for democracy with the goal of “ending tyranny in our world.”
What is the root of these astounding beliefs — that Stalin would be a partner for peace, that if we built up Mao’s China she would become benign and benevolent, that we could reshape Islamic nations into replicas of Western democracies, that we could eradicate tyranny?
Today, we are replicating these historic follies.
After our victory in the Cold War, we not only plunged into the Middle East to remake it in our image, we issued war guarantees to every ex-member state of the Warsaw Pact, and threatened Russia with war if she ever intervened again in the Baltic Republics.
No Cold War president would have dreamed of issuing such an in-your-face challenge to a great nuclear power like Russia.
If Putin’s Russia does not become the pacifist nation it has never been, these guarantees will one day be called. And America will either back down — or face a nuclear confrontation.
Why would we risk something like this?
Consider this crazed ideology of free trade globalism with its roots in the scribblings of 19th-century idiot savants, not one of whom ever built a great nation.
Adhering religiously to free trade dogma, we have run up $12 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Our cities have been gutted by the loss of plants and factories. Workers’ wages have stagnated. The economic independence Hamilton sought and Republican presidents from Lincoln to McKinley achieved is history.
But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants, many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million, composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth.
Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation and one people?
LOL! So it’s we who decided to send 10s of millions of jobs to China and allow it to rise in power! More revisionist history!!!
It was the $$$men like Bain Capital and their bought-puppet-politicians that saw big $$ to be made Carpet-bombing the heartland’s manufacturing jobs which has led to the opioid crisis and record suicides and the destruction of millions of families!
I believe it would be Pride , Greed and then the utter stupidity of our so called elites who now deserve to be put in front of firing squads.
And all those common people who supported it out of their own greed for cheaper goods, the ones without which it would not have worked, the majority of the people, what should become of them?
Would you be among those who have refused to buy imported goods all these years to support American jobs and workers? I’ve heard there are several of them.
“warships circumnavigate Taiwan threatening its independence”. The offical US policy is Taiwan is not Independent.
“In the Joint Communique, the United States recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, acknowledging the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.”. https://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35855.htm
In addition to lobbying to become President-For-Life, that Chink bastard last week also outlawed a list of words that are now banned … punishable by long prison terms.
Words like; Orwell, Animal Farm, lifelong control, board a plane, and even Winnie The Pooh. Not kidding.
The slant eyed dictator even banned the letter “n”. Not kidding. See below.
https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/03/01/asia/china-letter-ban-trnd/index.html?rm=1
China is an enemy.
Banned the letter “n”? So now there are iggers?
*icely do*e !
Funny, but it needs a tweak.
*icery do*e!
That’s how you write the joke.
Culture is an artifact of a people.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
Nothing will ever change those facts.
@HSF
I have to look the second sentence up. I have no idea what those words mean, and I’m a reasonably intelligent guy. I’m about to get a little smarter, but I’m the meantime, can you put the cookie jar down on a lower shelf ?
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Because things appear similar does not, as they become what they are intended to be, make them the same. This holds true for everything.
I first heard that phrase 56 years ago in a Comparative Anatomy class.
A wise person once wrote: the future proves the past.
Mr. Che*- Ancient Chi*ese secret say, *othi*g *ew u*der the su*. And, just say *o to drugs.
Ecktually, it’s Mr. Lee. Chen is my first name, lound eyes.
Mr. Lee-So solly, please to excuse mistake.
Charlie Cha*
I understand your sentiments, Tim, but, that request is taking the easy way.
Like you, I will figuratively need to slide over a chair, climb up on the counter, and reach for
the cookie jar to literally expand our toolbox of vocabulary, and humbly realize that those with greater knowledge periodically give us nudges toward growth and further learning. Stretch!
Now, where’s that dictionary, thesaurus, or the Wikipidia link?
Hopefully, the head of the farmhouse or one of his other offspring got up early
and tickled some of the udders out in the barn.
Cookies without milk are like Corn Flakes with water.
It may be that bankers, politicians, corporate moguls, and elitists of every stripe have shoved globalist agendas, free trade and uncontrolled immigration down our throats for decades. However, the majority of the American public has, apparently, been generally ok with that so long as life remained comfortable and they could get their fat fingers on endless streams of cheap Chinese crap, cheap Mexican labor, and cheap Middle East oil.
I am old enough to remember when the rubes of flyover country were ridiculed every time they fought to keep the next Walmart outpost from being built in their territory, or bitched about the real dangers of agreements like NAFTA, or balked at the idea of normalizing dependency, indebtedness, and deviancy.
Shouted down at every turn, those who saw the future were, and continue to be, derided as luddites, racists, and backward-ass rednecks. Well, the future is now.
The juggernaut of fiscal lunacy, cultural decay, political stupidity, and endless war has rolled across this country virtually unimpeded as Americans on the right have “U.S.A.-U.S.A.-U.S.A.’ed” their way toward the abyss and Americans on the left have “F**k the U.S.A.’ed” their way right along with them.
Meanwhile, the shrinking middle holds on by their fingertips, wondering where their country went.
What Pat Buchanan does not say is that the Republic was wounded badly by Lincoln’s illegal, in fact criminal, war against the South and finished off with the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, which is owned by a international cabal of Jewish bankers, and the IRS to suck wealth from the American people to service the growing debt and fund endless wars. In the process, the US has been turned into a corrupt oligarchy with only the trappings of a democracy remaining. Russia is a natural ally to the US and Canada and wants peace and open trade, but instead it has been surrounded by US/NATO bases, threatened with a first-strike nuclear attack, and turned into an adversary. The endless attacks on Russia have been led by AIPAC and other Israeli/Jewish lobby groups, the Jewish MSM and the Jewish-occupied US government. wdg
Which Jewish bankers own the Federal Reserve? Name names. I have seen this said many times, but never gotten the lowdown.
Finally I am about to find out.
Rdawg
Are you serious? If so, perhaps I could help.
Please help.
And don’t say Rothschilds; it’s so cliché.
Seriously though. I have tried to find out which rotten Jews own the Fed but can’t. Do you know?
Dawg- You may not like this answer. The Fed is a private corp. with stockholders, the majority of stock is owned by banks such as JP Morgan/Chase, CitiCorp etc. These banks are Rothschild owned so therefore (((they))) own the Fed.
There are individual shareholders of the royal kind but they are proxies for guess who?
There’s a program called “My 600 Pound Life” that shows morbidly obese people struggling with their condition. The driver is, of course, the very natural human condition of appetite. The problem is not that they desire sustenance, but that they cannot control it and are in every single case enabled, supported and facilitated by other human beings who appear incapable of realizing the error of their actions.
The same could be said of any of the other myriad problems of our current culture, from drug addiction to self mutilation, rampant degeneracy and carnality completely unmoored from purpose.
Power is no different. It is a human hunger, usually satisfied by healthy pursuits like command over one’s environment, the control of one’s offspring or land, the husbandry of livestock and acquisition of provender from the environment, the mastery of skills and abilities derived from the pursuit of self-reliance.
In an era of specialization, where no man or woman need look out for their own nourishment, offspring, spouse of living space but can sub-contract and delegate these primal human desires and obligations to strangers, how easy is it to divorce oneself from purpose and a healthy relationship with reality?
These power hungry monsters that seek to impose their dominion and will over unseen masses do so as a result of their thwarted hunger, their misguided and perverted drives. The instincts that once allowed us to survive and now lead us towards collapse and extinction and it is enabled and promoted by the same kinds of misguided drones that shovel tens of thousands of empty calories down the pie-holes of those quarter ton beings trapped in their beds.
These are the elites if their hunger for power was visible-
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I don’t know whether to give that a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
Is the observation valid? Have I overlooked something?
I just want to understand the truth- as much as it possible for us to comprehend- than to rage against the machine. I can’t change the man in the picture, but I can make certain that I do not become like him. That will have to be enough.
I took Iska’s funny comment as approving of the explanation, Sir, but the photo probably unnerved him, as me, in our quest to hang on to our breakfast, instead of releasing it unwillingly and into a waste bin.
It is, though, and effective visual example of excess and its perils, as compared with power and greed.
Detached observation is all that can be done a great percentage of the time. Some of us truly understand that control is an illusion, but that still doesn’t stop us from desiring it–it is very basic desire of human nature.
Like most, I imagine, I feel some pity (at the useless waste and hopelessness of a man that far gone) and a great deal of revulsion. At some point, the addiction takes control and overtakes all aspects of the man. The mechanism of that is fascinating and more than a little terrifying. Do we have a new being with the very face and likeness of this abstract notion of addiction?
Your caption is perfect. I think we tend to envy or admire those with power, but should we? Not for a second in my mind. They are miserable, irredeemable creatures behind the facades and niceties their great wealth affords, without any semblance of true friendship or love. Pity them (always stopping short of mercy) or ignore them. I prefer the latter.
A few pushups and cut back on the carbs and that guy would be right as rain.
Yes, but does that mean that losing a few minor wars would cure a megalomaniac of his hunger for power? As all alcoholics know, one drop of alcohol is too much and a millions drops is not enough.
Lee Chen
The “disease theory” of alcoholism is a fairy tale.
I heard it was habituation, the body adapts to it and needs alcohol after that. But you wanted to make some sort of point. I missed it. You whiffed, Ouija.
“Recall. Stalin was a murderous tyrant unrivaled in history whose victims in 1939 were 1,000 times those of Adolf Hitler”.
What? Hitler had no “victims” by 1939. Stalin was proud instigator of the Holodomor. Later on, of course, Stalin and his (((regime))) were responsible for the Holocaust fakery.
This is a nonsense article. I stopped reading there. Buchanan beating the drums of war, I’m truly disappointed. So now we’re going to fight the Chinese as well, the Russians aren’t enough.
Buchanan has always been one of our more reasonable commentators. What hope is there?
Hitler had no “victims” by 1939.
I guess you mean that because he had the authority, they were not victims; merely justice being carried out. By extension, Stalin had no victims either.
Lee Chen
I guess you didn’t hear that was a hoax.
Try to keep up.
“America’s elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would cause the People’s Republic to coexist benignly with its neighbors and the West.
We deluded ourselves. It did not happen.”
They were repeatedly warned. They didn’t delude themselves, they knew full well what they were doing, and did it anyway – because their goal was (and is) the destruction of America.
I remember listening on the radio to the news of Nixon’s visit to China. My father told me that just watch the jobs go to China and industries get shuttered. And it came to pass. My brother and sister lost their jobs to China when Advanced Energy sent the fabrication over there. My brother had to go to China and train the locals how to do his job. He knew he was on the way out and was picking up receipts off the ground to get the maximum per diem he could get from his company.