Last week, as Chinese warships completed a coercive circumnavigation of Japan’s main islands, G-7 leaders met to forge a unified response to communist China’s ever-increasing economic and military aggression.
The result—a weak communiqué without bite or teeth—was hardly Churchillian.
Following the G-7’s kowtow, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) economic and military aggression will continue undeterred. The CCP will use its vast arsenal of mercantilist weapons to conquer world markets while it executes the most rapid military buildup of a fascist state since the Third Reich.
Nor will the CCP stop arming the Russians, nuclearizing Iran, or using its debt trap diplomacy and the Trojan Horse of a Belt and Road Initiative to acquire strategic naval ports around the world. The CCP will also maintain its vast concentration camp network and its live organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners, while the cultural genocide against Tibet and smashing of Christian churches won’t abate.
Why do G-7 leaders act as kowtowing rug merchants rather than Churchillian leaders? Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each is compromised in his own way.
China is Germany’s largest trading partner, and no chancellor would dare bite the hand that feeds the German economy. This is sadly true even if the CCP’s other hand is weaponizing a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Never mind all the dead Ukrainians or Europeans freezing in the dark for want of Russian gas.
In Italy, communist China has bought up Italian firms faster than a Ferrari at full throttle, even as it seizes stakes in key Italian ports such as Genoa and Trieste. Italy will soon reach a point where it will be impossible to say no to Beijing—and is likely already there.
With Canada and France, it’s as much a leadership problem as economic overdependence on China. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron both find it politically advantageous to play the United States off against China as a means of building their statures on the world stage and soothing their U.S.-hating liberal constituents at home.
Trudeau has played this imperious anti-U.S. card incessantly since the Trump years. Most recently, Macron threw Taiwan’s democracy under the bus, saying Europe can’t blindly follow the United States’ lead and should avoid “getting into crises ... not their own.” Never mind the irony of Europe dragging the United States into their Russia–Ukraine fiasco.
While the UK once called itself China’s “best partner in the West,” the CCP’s crushing of Hong Kong in violation of its agreement with the UK was an epiphany. At least for a period, UK leaders found enough backbone to block Huawei’s 5G network and condemn the CCP for its human rights abuses.
That said, pro-CCP prime ministers—from Tony Blair and David Cameron to Boris Johnson—have drifted in and out of 10 Downing Street. From election to election, you never know what you’re going to get.
President Joe Biden came to the summit with neither the will nor a plan to clamp down on CCP abuses and effectively abrogated U.S. leadership. This was a 180-degree appeasement turn away from former President Donald Trump’s “tough on China” policies.
Biden regularly boasts of having met frequently with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. That has simply put Biden under Xi’s guanxi spell—Biden is now far more reluctant to rock the China boat because of Xi’s phony friendship and flattery. How else do you explain Biden’s recent “silly balloon” comment?
There are also the very messy financial ties that bind the Biden family to China. Biden’s son Hunter has been implicated in influence-peddling schemes. If Joe Biden is really the “big guy” getting a cut, he’s implicated, too.
Equally problematic, Biden’s bureaucrats at the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council see no “conflict” with China. With blindfolds on, they see a “competition” to be managed.
The one outlier in the G-7’s merry band of kowtowers is Japan, which literally sits at the tip of the CCP’s economic and military spears. In a long-running dispute over the Senkaku Islands, which the CCP lays false claim to, the Chinese navy repeatedly violates Japanese waters, while Chinese military aircraft frequently blitz Japan’s air defense identification zone.
Meanwhile, on the Chinese mainland, Japanese businesses have been periodically burned and looted while, in response, the Japanese government has constructed an aggressive set of incentives to bring Japan’s factories back home. Here, it was no coincidence that, as G-7 leaders were meeting, communist China announced that it had overtaken Japan as the world’s largest exporter of automobiles. Message received—at least in Tokyo.
The entreaties of Japan’s leader for stronger action notwithstanding, all that came out of the G-7 meeting was a wishy-washy joint communiqué pledging to “build constructive and stable relations” and rejecting “decoupling.”
Where’s Churchill—or Trump—when you need them?
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