With a debt ceiling deal now “doable” (Kevin McCarthy’s word), Joe Biden was cleared for takeoff. He arrived in Japan Thursday for three days of meetings with his G7 counterparts.
The setting, Hiroshima, is apt. The city is a reminder “of what happens when a brutal war escalates into a nuclear one,” as The New York Times put it. Olaf Scholz on Thursday described Hiroshima as emblematic of peace’s necessity.
Russia is at the top of the agenda. So is China. Neither were invited to Hiroshima and neither would’ve made the trip if they were. Xi was busy in Xi’an, where he’s presiding over the China-Central Asia Summit, a gathering of geopolitical powerhouses like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Putin, meanwhile, is busy in Ukraine, were he’s presiding over a systematic campaign of atrocities in pursuit of blood-soaked imperial glory.
Russia lobbed at least 30 missiles at Kyiv Thursday in the ninth major bombardment this month. 29 were apparently intercepted. There were no casualties in the capital, but a five-year-old died in Kherson, Volodymyr Zelensky told the nation. One of Ukraine’s donated Patriots was damaged earlier this week in an “indirect hit,” according to a Western official who spoke to the media.
China’s Special Representative of Eurasian Affairs, Li Hui — not to be confused with China’s point man during Donald Trump’s trade war, Liu He — was in Ukraine on Tuesday and Wednesday, when he met with various officials including, allegedly, Zelensky. Li promoted China’s “peace plan” a nebulous document released by Beijing just hours after Xi’s top diplomat left Moscow in February.
China’s position, Li told Ukrainian officials, is based on the “four shoulds”, “four commons” and “three points of thinking” put forward by Xi. Those are “the fundamental principles for China’s political solution to the Ukrainian crisis,” according to an official statement from China’s foreign ministry, which repeatedly referred to Ukraine as Uzbekistan. Ukraine reiterated that Zelensky “does not accept any proposals that would involve the loss of territories.”
I’m not sure why Kyiv bothers. It’s plain that Xi isn’t interested in a settlement that doesn’t favor Moscow. China wants a peace that legitimizes wars of conquest — a peace with the ironic potential to preemptively excuse a war in the Taiwan Strait. In spirit, China is no more “neutral” in the Ukraine conflict than the West, something G7 leaders will lament both publicly in Hiroshima and behind closed doors.
Back at the ranch, Montana governor Greg Gianforte banned TikTok from operating inside the state. Gianforte slammed (get it?) TikTok as a Trojan horse with the potential to transfer “Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information [to] the Chinese Communist Party.”
The ban will surely be challenged in court, and comes amid deliberations in Washington about a national ban on the app. A spokeswoman for TikTok said Gianforte is “infring[ing] on the First Amendment rights of the people of Montana,” and claimed the social media app “empowers hundreds of thousands of people across the state.”
The Biden administration is, of course, in the process of restricting US investment in certain sectors of the Chinese economy. According to VC Patrick Zhong, US investors have already pulled back. LPs and CEOs have “kind of put it on hold because of geopolitical concerns. They used to travel to China once a quarter, but they haven’t been back since COVID,” he told Bloomberg, which noted that “there are a maximum of just two dozen flights weekly between the nations, down from an average of 340 per week in 2019.”
China could be a constructive third party in Ukraine, but they’re too focused on their self-interest, insecurity, and weaknesses.
The preponderance of CCP power is the country’s weakness. It’s still the party of the 1950s, serving its own narrow perspective of power, not differing much from Russia in regard to how it measures itself.
The insertion of Chinese manufacturing into the production cycle of American products in the 30 years after 1980 did wonders for US manufacturing margins and was an extraordinary play by the US. But today I own stock in a company that chose to make batteries in Malaysia, and I’m very glad they’re not in China. Makers of US products need to leave China because it’s only a matter of time before Xi Jinping tries to leverage its role in US production and managing margins.
To quote my mother when I was a young boy, “It’s not a ride you want to take at the carnival – it’ll make you sick.”
How much money do you suppose we’ll have to spend to try to be totally independent from China (not actually possible as three of our top meat suppliers are Chinese companies. A whole bunch of Tesla’s profits depend on Shanghai. The “we hate them” ship has pretty much sailed.
Growing independence from China is realistic. It will take a decade at least. Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia are some alternatives.
And India…
Who could possibly want data from Montana? There are more cows there than people. Cows don’t know very many useful secrets.
Guessing that you don’t know about Malmstrom Air Force Base near the city of Great Falls Montana. It is the home of the 341st Missile Wing of the Air Force Global Strike Command and one of only three military bases run by the Air Force that can operate the Minuteman III missiles for intercontinental use according to publicly available data. Based on our military’s love of secrecy and deception it might be in China’s interest to confirm or disprove the publicly available data.
What we have here is a stark situation where backward looking nationalism and religious hatred are trumping the desire to have a better life. The cold war never ended. Kissinger said even Mao was more nationalist than marxist…Russia wants to go back to 1860. China wants to be the Middle kingdom. Turkey want the Ottoman empire back. Iran wants it to be the 9th century. India has told 14% of their citizens that they aren’t legit because they are Muslim. North Korea- I don’t know what they want, etc. We need to grow up. All those people hate us. Some of the hatred is legitimate, but mostly it is a desire to blame their troubles on others. We need to govern as if governing matters. I have believed for a long time that our economic problems are political and that our political problems are mostly psychiatric….
Good point Ethan. This is a quandary enabled by, and/or caused by, our democratic freedoms. We have the power as individuals to indulge our freedom to be stupid. We can even be psychotic up to a point.
Psychology in the setting of our democracy and social and political evolution has always been a curiosity for me. It’s reality. We’re figuring it out as we go. But fundamentally, not unlike markets, we have an idea that we know what we’re doing. But we don’t know anything really until we get there, wherever that may be.
Real truths you share in your comments about different peoples fondly looking back in time. We can’t control that impulse in them. But in our country there has always in my life been a group of people, so-called republicans, who fondly look backward in time, rather than address the present realities.
This is today the party of Trump, not Lincoln. They do a disservice to the name of the party and its history. Today there’s a real reason to fear that Kevin McCarthy will give up the financial stability of his country to earn the love of Matt Gates. McCarthy somehow has reason to place greater value on the affections of his party colleagues than his country. That’s some very serious and unfortunate reality.