Dangerous Tourism
An American politician conducting her own foreign policy is as dangerous as the "Taiwan" conflict itself.
By framersqool:
Whether you believe that China's "Taiwan" policy in recent days is right or wrong, the more crucial, constitutional, question must be: what makes Formosa any of Nancy Pelosi's (or for that matter, America's) business in the first place?
Am I the only one who recognizes how foolish, untimely, needless, unlawful, misguided, arrogant, and dangerous this recent publicity stunt by the US Speaker of the House has been?
Let's call it the Invisible Constitutional Crisis of 2022, which everyone seems to be too content to cheer over to notice the separation-of-powers issues so brazenly thrown out.
Few are willing to discuss what is on display when a Speaker of the US House presumes to conduct foreign policy unilaterally, with a globally-advertised government-funded tourism adventure to a nation which only exists in the opportunistic imagination of American industrialists ('Taiwan', the current name taken by a rogue one-party state holding power on the Chinese island of Formosa), and with strong overtones of her true interests being both personal and partisan, having to do with her family's dealings with Taiwan microchip-makers under the formidable umbrella of her position in her own party back home....
Personally, I have never shared the affected alarm over the emergence of a communist regime which united all China under a single state in 1949. Such a posture has to assume that rule by Chiang Kai-shek's fluid and deeply corrupt coalition of profiteering warlords would have somehow been better for the Chinese nation as a whole than has been that of the communists ever since. Anyone with a shred of historic honesty would have to concede that this is very much debatable. I am satisfied as an American to regard the question as a purely academic one, since any claim by the United States over the past century and a half to the right to determine the future of China has always been, at best, built on the sandy foundation of (dare I say it?) imperialism.
For many cold-war years I would hear the term 'we lost China' applied to the US military-industrial complex's spectacular failure in subsidizing the Kuomintang mafia-state's civil war against the forces of Chairman Mao. I think it originally had something to do with the absolutely justified dismissal of Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War by Harry Truman, when he presumed to demand that he re-purpose his authority as commander of UN forces in Korea to expand the war further with an unprovoked invasion of China. Instead, as we know, the one-year-old revolutionary regime in Peking sent wave upon wave of Chinese troops into North Korea, and pushed the invading forces all the way back to the 38th parallel, where the still-existing war has been frozen in place for the past seventy years.
How China was ever ours to lose, is rarely articulated.
But it is this exact same mindset which has been leveraged into one of the USA's weakest foreign policy positions around the world, regarding who retains the right to govern in Formosa ever since, as though this 'Taiwan' has some sacrosanct right to exist on Chinese soil merely because the US government and the Kuomintang Party say it does.
All it took for the US to embark on a three-and-a-half year war in the Pacific against Japan was one air raid on Hawaii.
Imagine if a foreign power had instead simply run up some new flag over those islands (which in 1941 were only a territorial possession and not even part of the USA proper) and informed the US that Hawaii was now its own republic, and would thenceforth be fully subsidized and defended by that foreign power? How would that go down in Washington?
But this is the precise position that the legitimate government of the People's Republic of China has been facing since 1949, and still Americans have no clue what the answer is to the questions,
...how is anything to do with Chinese territorial integrity any of our affair to meddle in? When was it, ever?
When I think in terms of right and wrong on how the current Beijing state obtained its territories to call them the nation we all know as China, I only need refer to the cult superstitions of Manifest Destiny and the "Monroe Doctrine", and the endless wars of conquest fought against American tribes and within sovereign Latin American nations over our entire national history, to establish those benchmarks of just how much moral high ground the United States of America has to stand on, in applying vast sums of military spending and implanting endless self-interested commercial development on a cheap-labor-rich Formosa for three quarters of a century, in order to dictate domestic policy to Beijing today.
And more of immediate concern here at home, now that the precedent is set for politicians to carry out unilateral foreign policy for their party's interests as opposed to the nation's, and quite beyond the purview of its chief executive to command, what will the next reckless adventure of this type result in?
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.