The lack of a U.S. carrier in the Pacific may be short-lived if the Navy deploys another in the next couple of months. But it shows how the open-ended operations with Iran are running some American sailors ragged, analysts say, while the Trump administration further retreats from the Asia-Pacific region and focuses on the Western Hemisphere.
“The administration says that the Pacific is supposed to be the most important behind the Western Hemisphere,” said Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Instead, the U.S. is “doing the exact opposite” of its previously expressed goal of pulling out of the Middle East.
I’ll not argue part of the reason for the portrayal of China in a lot of particularly USA media is to keep establishing that they’re an enemy we need to be ready to might. Much like the Soviets, North Vietnamese, and North Koreans. And I will not deny that the USA has a shit history of conquering people.
That said China is not wholly innocent in not doing the same. They still push for influence for soft power, so does the USA, control colonies which the USA does as well, commits genocide which the USA has done. I honestly see them more as rivals than enemies to be destroyed, and rivalries aren’t inherently bad. When they become heavily antagonistic, which I’m certain both country’s medias love to play up, is where it goes from rivalry to cold warfare.
I mean, the fact that you’ve got to caveat your caveats on this illustrates the dynamic at play. Chinese bureaucrats are focused on land and sea borders, building trans-Asiatic trade routes, and securing friendly relations with rich underdeveloped nations in the Global South. American bureaucrats are ambushing fishing boats, kidnapping presidents, starving entire islands of people, and bombing hospitals and schools.
To what end, though? Not to be That Guy, but…
One of these countries is pursuing a very explicit policy of ethnic cleansing for the purpose of resource extraction and white nationalist enrichment. The other is doing industrial development, domestic enrichment, and cultural preservation, with an explicit but ultimately benign bias towards the national leadership.
At some point, Westerners criticizing China sound like the KKK - hoods and burning crosses and all - denouncing the NYPD while reading chapters from Howard Zinn’s People’s History. Even if you do land on a salient point, it comes across as nakedly opportunistic and insincere. Even more so when you’re doing Woke Land Acknowledgement for Tibet, while orchestrating fascist regime change all over Latin America.
And then what comes of it? Now we’ve got a Canadian PM stuck banning Chinese EVs to prop up the American gas-guzzler industry in the name of… national sovereignty? Economic independence? The newest Philippian dictator is fighting a turf war over a string of Pacific Islands for the benefit of who? Six billionaire families that run the island nation like their own private fief? In the name of… freedom and justice for all? American aircraft carriers lining up to flatten wedding parties in Yemen, before a glide bomb connects with their laundry room or the crew mutinies over half-rations of dog food?
Who is this critique of China in service of, exactly? Nobody in the know seriously believes these criticisms are coming from civil libertarians or liberal democrats. Everything is just in service to the all-consuming machine of techno-feudal corporate expansion for a handful of white nationalist oligarchs.