Trump as a bi-product of US-China Relations and his potentially supportive role for Genocidaires & America: The Steinbeckian Lenny of International Politics

Banner: President Trump at the southern border wall in 2020. Wikipedia Commons

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Trump as a bi-product of US-China Relations and his potentially supportive role for Genocidaires & America

 
One of the difficult jobs for the US is to help a new friend to grow slowly. Japan was starving in 1945 but emerged as a strong competitor in manufacturing industries in the 1970s. Israel which pretended to be a fragile blossom surrounded by the hostile Muslim world in 1948 outstood in its belligerence in 1967. Communist China’s economy was small, but after Deng xiao-ping’s visit to the US in 1979, the US did not know when to slow down its trade and investment, until the new ally becomes a global competitor or a global partner of co-domination.

China became closer the US during the final stage of the US war in Vietnam, and the time came when the US needed China as a counterweight of the USSR. Nobody asked Kissinger and Nixon how long the new China-US alliance should last. China was alluring for the US business, and China was no threat to the US.

Besides the gross underestimation of the intelligence of China to continue double-digit annual growth for nearly 3 decades, a worldwide myth existed around that time that economic growth would democratize a nation like Taiwan and South Korea, (which meant that strong and prosperous China was desirable to the world).

China’s rise was relatively peaceful. Wise, tamed, and trained enough, ordinary Chinese became ideal workers for overseas industries coming to China in search of better labor conditions and broader market. US major industries shifted their production to China in the 1980s and thereafter China’s departure for the global center of manufacturing industries meant the rapid decline of the US working class. Global capitalism removed a large segment of American blue color workers, and the working class could not adapt themselves to the incoming IT revolution. They had to undertake lower-wage jobs. The USA as a whole constantly expanded its economy, but the new service industries created less jobs, and GINI coefficient of the US.[efn_note}図表1-3-1　OECD主要国のジニ係数の推移｜平成29年版厚生労働白書 －社会保障と経済成長－｜厚生労働省</efn_note} shows widened the gap between the working class and the leading engineers.

The American dream that survived the Depression and WWII thus ended. The Democratic Party did not come to rescue the declining class. A part of the Chinese middle class can reach the American dream more easily than a large part of the lower middle class of the US. This creates the desperate and xenophobic Americans who are distrustful of democratic values. The fad of “the end of history”, which was told as if the US had been selecting the road to victory from its inception, sounded like a propaganda. The USSR is gone but China, a non-democratic nation has become a leading major power capturing its neighbors under its umbrella of economic activities. The US working class has not done anything wrong, but they unfortunately lost competitiveness in the waves of globalization. The US has been a society with an aristocratic cleavage from before, but the prevailing unprecedented degree of inequality meant that the US is closer to the Third World. The remaining difference between the US now and the Third World is that while in many Third World countries the right of voting is not so meaningful, it can be still meaningful in the US. The discontented can produce a new government.

Criticism of Trump should be based on the commiseration for those poor Americans. The vast areas of the US are now lived by such people who jump at anything that isolate the US from the rest of the world, with the underlying assumption that being an American cannot be that bad if the US is not exposed to the outside. Expel illegal migrants and build walls. the angry Americans will be less interested in foreign miseries or injustice. And Trump fitted perfect as the driver of the bus of outrage.

We have to say that there seems to be some merit in Trump’s foreign policy.

Trump prefers peace. Israel could continue the war on Gaza only so long as the US continues its military aid to Israel. But Trump did not find particular US merit for continuing the war, and Israel had to temporarily slow down its effort of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Trump began to make Ukraine compromise with Russia. Trump’s style is to use any shameless lies to move forward. It is not Ukraine, but the US that was mainly continuing the war in Ukraine and now he blames that Ukraine is reluctant to compromise. It is good that Israel learns that Trump’s America is willing to betray its previous partner and make hypocritical excuse. But probably Trump’s America does not betray Israel, because the US workers, for whom Trump is conducting the US, include a large number of evangelical Christians.

The most obvious weakness of Trump’s foreign policy comes from the fact that while his US is looking inward, other actors are trying to expand. China’s OBOR (One Belt One Road) policy means that China wants to expand its political sphere of influence in the name of coprosperity. OBOR starts from inside Xinjiang, where the US was well aware since the mid-2010s that China started a totalitarian suppression of religion and ethnic minorities. China collected DNA and other information on the Uyghurs and other Muslim residents in the area to monitor their move, speech, and thinking. Anyone can be arrested for the funny reasons of terrorism, religious extremism, and separatism. China started to build concentration camps in the name of re-education facilities, and 1~2 million ethnic minorities were sent there, causing high death rate and population decline. But unlike in the case of Myanmar with respect to Rohingya and Israel with respect to Gaza, the Chinese genocide of the Muslims in Xinjiang is not yet condemned in international courts. China has even cooperative actors across its border. China can make Kazakhstan government to silence its human rights activists’ criticism of China. China can make Egypt to arrest and send back to China Chinese Muslim students whom China suspects of disloyalty.

China cannot go back to the old times. China needs to feed its huge population and continue its economic success, for which it needs its western part. China confident with its past success is willing to inflict Orwellian suppression on its minorities in its western part. What is necessary for China is to keep in touch with and monitor the government of its neighbors, like in central Asia or in Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar. Trump’s “America First” means the application of Monroe doctrine on the US itself exactly when policy of containment needs to be applied on China.

In sum, the US is going through the process of myopic degradation of political culture. This is not a matter of Trump as an individual but a structural problem of US domestic and global relations. This is a period when the world has lost the US. Besides, the US has wasted precious time for the past few years. The 1st period of Trump started a trade war against China, but Biden’s support for Ukraine meant US rapprochement with Russia’s potential ally, China. And this breathing period for China meant that Russia owes China political debt. As a result of this unwise war, Ukraine was devastated for no gain. The US remains conceited, with its credibility of speeches non-existent, and with its adversaries, Russia, China, and North Korea, more united than ever.

Michimi Muranushi
Gakushuin University

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America: The Steinbeckian Lenny of International Politics

First, let me address the question posed by our host Burmese human rights activist Maung Zarni: what will the Trump administration’s impact be on Asia? Having just returned from my second trip to the region in less than a year, I don’t see the U.S., particularly in Southeast Asia, to use President Trump’s own words, “holding any cards.”

Less than a year ago, our host today, Burmese human rights activist Muang Zarni, and I, sat in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal’s courtroom in Phnom Penh and listened to former Prime Minister Hun Sen. After he took a victory lap for taking his country from genocide to prosperity, the Cambodian strongman addressed the U.S. government, USAID, UN, and western NGO officials in the audience. First, he advised them not to attempt another “color revolution,” then reminded them that America had already made two mistakes in Cambodia (the 1970 Lon Nol coup and U.S. recognition of the Khmer Rouge in the UN 1979-1993), and warned them not to make a third.

A week later, American Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and CIA director William Burns made back-to-back visits to the Kingdom in an effort to regain U.S. influence in the region. However, with a Chinese naval base now in Ream and a plans for a Chinese canal that will link Phnom Penh to the Gulf of Thailand, these years late, billions short, efforts to recapture U.S. influence in Southeast Asia are futile.

America’s growing irrelevance was underscored when Muang Zarni called for a Cambodian-led “Phnom Penh Peace Plan” to end his nation’s civil war. The plan, however, came with an explicit caveat: no American or western involvement. “The West excels in destabilizing the world and inflicting immense suffering in its tracts globally,” Zarni said. “We in Southeast Asia know better.”

When I met with Huy Vannak, the former pagoda boy who is now Cambodia’s Secretary of State for the Ministry of Interior, he echoed Zarni’s wariness of the West. “We messed up with the superpowers in the past and the results turned out very bad, from colonialism to civil war, to genocide, to more civil war,” he said. “If you are involved in the conflicts of the superpowers, you will fall into the trap of war and conflict. In the future, we will try to have good relations with the superpowers, but also with our neighbor countries.”

Today, a new generation of Southeast Asians “unstained by the past” looks to a more prosperous future with optimism. A China-led, techno authoritarian future is not what I would have wished for when I first visited the region 30 years ago. However, with America suffering from deep division at home and schizophrenia abroad, who am I to judge?

Is Trump, as my esteemed Burmese colleague regularly proclaims, an American “Nazi” engaged in a “genocidal settler colonialism” motivated by “white supremacy”? Or, is Trump, as his MAGA supporters contend, the Orange Caesar who will restore America’s global hegemony? Or is Trump, as I believe, the American Gorbachev who will oversee the collapse of an overstretched empire? Only time will tell. If nothing else, Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor’s 1970 description of America as a “Steinbeckian ‘Lennie,’ gigantic and powerful, but prone to shatter what we try to save” has been more apt.

Peter Maguire is the founder and director of Fainting Robin Foundation and the author of Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia, Thai Stick, Breathe, and Comfort in Darkness. He has taught the law and theory of war at Columbia University, Bard College, and the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.