China Owns Our Foreign Policy Chiefs

At a meeting in Alaska last week Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan beclowned themselves in front of the Chinese.

The pair didn't have time to bask in their moral courage because the Chinese representatives unloaded on them with an absurd caricature of the United States straight out of Howard Zinn and Mother Jones.

George Orwell commented on it in 1941, noting how leftist and pacifist intellectuals in Britain were undermining the people's morale: "England perhaps is the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and it is a duty to snigger at every English institution." Even the "Blimps," the patriotic middle classes, were starting to lose their nerve.

The wages of that timidity and lack of faith in our own goodness were the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, the fallout from which we are still dealing with over 40 years later, and the Soviet Union's rampage of adventurism in Latin America, Afghanistan, and Africa that was checked only during the Reagan administration.

In a 2007 Foreign Affairs article, he condemned our counter-terrorism policies for failing to "Behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people." Of course, our first duty is to protect the security and interests of the American people, not virtue-signal their "Decency" or stroke their "Aspirations." But to Obama, we are just another "Exceptional" nation among many, and one that needs to use its power and wealth to benefit other peoples "Not in the spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner." But what about when our "Partners" sacrifice our interests to advance their own?

The source of "Tensions" in the region, Obama explained, were not violent jihadist attacks and the traditional doctrines that spurred them, but rather Western "Colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold war in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations."

How didn't our diplomats know that it is a major blunder to publicly criticize a touchy rival when you have no intention of following through by putting actions behind words; when you are not even prepared to respond to such falsehoods; and finally answer by trying to convince brutal realists that conceding the truth of lies is actually a sign of strength? The alleged bumbling amateur Donald Trump was much savvier than that, maybe because he came from the real world of action and accountability rather than the world of magical thinking and mantric phrases like "The rules-based order" that maintains "Global stability."
 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/china-owns-our-foreign-policy-chiefs-bruce-thornton/