Saturday, December 3, 2016

Sometimes you want to be unpredictable and mix it up.


Gordon Chang is a writer with a special interest in the far east. I would listen to him all the time on WABC on the John Batchelor show every night while I was cooking. He seemed pretty level headed in his analysis. Writing in the Magazine "The National Interest" he had this to say about Trump's phone call and his relationship with China:

What Trump has done is not “reset” Washington’s relations with China but put them on an entirely new footing. Up to now, Beijing has kept the initiative, and American presidents, especially George W. Bush and Obama, have merely reacted, trying to build friendly relations in spite of increasingly bold Chinese moves. The concept was that Washington had to maintain cooperative ties, increasingly considered an end in itself.
Trump, by seemingly not caring about Beijing’s reaction, has cut China down to size, telling its autocrats he does not fear them.

Just about everyone assumed the Chinese would create a crisis for Trump in his first months in office, just as they created crises for both George W. Bush—in April 2001 with the detention of the crew of the U.S. Navy EP-3—and his successor—the harassment of the Navy’s unarmed reconnaissance vessels, the Impeccable and Victorious, in March and May 2009.
Instead, Trump took the initiative and created a crisis for China’s leaders, and he did that more than a month before taking the oath of office.
Therefore, Beijing is bound to find the next months unfamiliar and unsettling.
There is, if you need a metaphor, a rather large bull in the china shop. And, yes, that could be a good thing.
(I think you are going to find that Trump is going to do a lot of this stuff. The diplomats and the elitists and media and the pundits are going to piss their pants but the power players like Putin and these Chinks know what he is doing and have a healthy respect for his unpredictably.
Also as Evi said check out what Scott Adams had to say about it. He has been pretty on the money so far.)

13 comments:

edutcher said...

Trump hates the Red Chinese (good American that he is) and I'll bet he's been just waiting for the opening.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

We should have Taiwan and Japan nuke up.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

Trump as a bull?

Synova said...

My feeling was pretty much wondering why we've been letting China say who we're allowed to talk to. I suppose that for a long time we didn't talk to China, until Nixon repaired those diplomatic ties, and maybe not talking to Taiwan was part of that but I had no idea that we weren't talking to Taiwan. What is this? Middle school?

China has been doing some odd things... because building whole islands in order to extend your national waters is a really odd thing. I don't see any reason why we should worry that relations would go badly South, but certainly tip-toeing around the issues doesn't prevent anything from going badly South and never has.

edutcher said...

The Reds have been telling the world for at least 20 years they're going to have a war with us for the heavyweight champeenship of the Pacific.

Nice to see Trump's been paying attention.

Presumably, it's why he picked Mattis.

rcocean said...

The whole "one China" policy is just an illusion we up keep because we want the Chinese to like us.

I've never been able to understand why we continually Kow-tow to the Chinese communists (yeah that's what they are, incredibly) while constantly attacking and provoking the Russians.

We're not going to sit back and let the chinese take over taiwan, which they haven't really controlled since 1895.

rcocean said...

BTW, I have a Chinese-American co-worker who talking about her relatives in china. And i asked her if they belonged to the Communist Party. And she said "No, they aren't rich enough".

I then made a face. And she laughed.

And then she said. "I now it sounds funny, but its true".

chickelit said...

Hillary was a big sinophile: Just look at her wardrobe and her one child policy.

chickelit said...

Did her pantsuits not just whisper "Mao"?

Leland said...

Oh now, look what you've done, Troop. Evi's getting excited about Trump!

Leland said...

Trump taking a phone call from Taiwan is tantamount to Nuclear war.

China building military bases on islands in the fishing territories of Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines is just a prudent measure towards peace in the region.

Trooper York said...

The thing is that everything that Trump does makes the media, the elites and the Democrats beclown themselves. People will start to notice. Not just Trumpers. But regular people.

Look at the Carrier factory deal. The media, democrats, #nevertrumpers and conservatives are all saying you can't do that. That if violate some sacred rule. That Presidents should be above caring about the jobs of a 1,000 factory workers in Indiana. I mean he should be playing golf or something.

Regular Americans see that. They see themselves as the factory workers who are going to have a Merry Christmas this year. What do you suppose they think about the media and the President and the elites who say it is no big deal and nothing to get excited about?

Trump has the common touch. You know who else had it? Reagan. The Carrier deal and others like it will be his firing of the air traffic controllers.

The media will lose it's mind.

Leland said...

Technically, Trump couldn't do the Carrier deal as President. It's Pence as governor making the deal. $7 million is cheaper than Solyndra, and those 1000 employees will pay taxes, rather than live off the dole. A truly free market deal? Not exactly, but I'll leave ideological purity to the #NeverTrumpers and SJWs to clutch pearls over.

I agree Troop, this is the deal that Regular Americans see, and they like it.

BTW, I saw a clickbait item in one of the news aggregates at the bottom of some page (some other site). Its bait? Celebrities that live like average Joe's. The teaser was Carrie Underwood, that perhaps she does, because her roots are in Oklahoma. Of course, the multipage clickbait doesn't have her. But it did include a bunch of BS, such as Leonardo DiCaprio; who is about as Average Joe living as Joe Kennedy. I don't know any regular American's making regular trips to Switzerland every year to ski (and complain about the CO2 emitted to get there, in order to write off the trip on taxes).