Commentary
February 2021 reprises a red-line drama, not yet as tragedy and not as farce but definitely as a threat to world peace. The repetition tests the will of President Joe Biden’s administration to defend American security and a common-sense understanding of human freedom.
On Feb. 1, communist China’s top foreign policy guru, Yang Jiechi, gave a speech to a virtual audience hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
Yang reportedly told his audience, “The United States should stop interfering in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang”—western China where Uyghurs live—“and other issues.” Yang said these three regions are Chinese “internal affairs.”
Then Yang added the most nuanced phrase: “They”—the so-called internal affairs—“constitute a red line that must not be crossed. Any trespassing would end up undermining China-U.S. relations, and the United States’ own interests.”
“Red line” meaning China’s rules.
Let’s deal with the nuanced reference. Please recall John Kerry derided former President George W. Bush as not being sufficiently nuanced, though Kerry’s slur lacked specifics.
Here’s a genocidal specific. On Aug. 21, 2013, Syria’s Assad dictatorship attacked Eastern Ghouta (a rebel-held area near Damascus) with rockets carrying sarin nerve gas warheads. The chemical weapons killed over 1,200 people.
The Assad dictatorship’s attack violated former President Barack Obama’s now-infamous August 2012 “red line” speech in which he forbade the use of chemical weapons against civilians by Assad’s forces. Obama said he would not permit a chemical weapons war crime on his watch.
Yet he did.
When the nerve gas killed, Obama dithered. He didn’t enforce his red line.
It’s 2021. Machiavellians worldwide will credit Yang for constructing a shrewd and early “red line” test of Joe Biden using “cocktail power warfare.”
Yang’s threat comes less than a week after Chinese aircraft intruded on Taiwanese air space. That was a military show of force to test the Biden administration. Yang escalated the diplomatic challenge.
Military power, diplomatic challenge? Mix them and you’ve got a cocktail of the military and diplomatic elements of power.
But information power is also in play. In the immediate background lurks Hunter Biden and his potentially billion-dollar deal with Chinese communist entities. Scrutiny and analysis and totally relevant preelection examination of the Biden family’s financial arrangements with China were suppressed by social media tech titans and anti-Trump mainstream media.
Which leads us to the real Machiavellian stroke: Yang exploits America’s greatest strategic weakness—a corrupt press.
In strategic terms—a fancy way of saying the long run—former President Donald Trump’s defeat of the corrupt mainstream media was his most important 2016 election victory. Since 1968, mainstream media bias (a wicked bias favoring leftist Democrats) has been America’s most grave strategic weakness. America is extremely powerful. Given America’s military and economic power, our enemies pursue “judo strategies” that exploit internal weaknesses. How do you defeat America? You let America defeat itself.
Here’s the weakness in two nutshells.
Nutshell One: America’s biased mainstream media won’t let Republicans fight and win wars. Nutshell Two: The biased media won’t let Republicans win an election, period.
Corrupt media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and MSNBC pushed the Russia-collusion hoax for over three years. Hoax it was—concocted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to deflect scrutiny from her utterly illegal disregard of national security rules governing classified information.
Oh, yeah. The crooked press portrayed it as an email issue. It was calculated criminal disregard of rules governing the protection of classified information. Hillary Clinton and her campaign knew this, and so did James Comey’s FBI, which chose not to indict her. Instead, Comey’s FBI and the corrupt media falsely accused the Trump campaign of “collusion” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The failure to put ex-FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith in prison for his criminal alteration of a legal document is a stain on the Department of Justice. Who is in charge of the DOJ that made the decision in February 2021?
Joe Biden.
Austin Bay is a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, author, syndicated columnist, and teacher of strategy and strategic theory at the University of Texas–Austin. His latest book is “Cocktails from Hell: Five Wars Shaping the 21st Century.”
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
