U.S. and Allies Ramp Up Reckless Provocations Towards China

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at the West Side Conservative Club, Friday, March 26, 2021, in Urbandale, Iowa. As a vile neocon, Pompeo did his best to cause trouble with China, although that policy had already begun under Obama.

This week saw Washington announcing a $750 million weapons sale to Taiwan, the island territory which is recognized internationally as an integral part of the People’s Republic of China since the victory of the 1949 civil war. As Beijing angrily remarked in reaction, the proposed arms deal blatantly undermines China’s sovereignty and national security. It also seems a calculated move to destabilize the region. The supply of American weaponry to Taiwan – the first such deal under the Biden administration – will likely embolden separatist factions on the island to declare independence from China. In that event, Beijing has warned that it will militarily invade the territory and reclaim authority. That would inevitably throw China and the United States into direct conflict since the latter has made controversial declarations to “defend Taiwan”.

The proposed U.S. arms sale to Taiwan follows a pattern of previous Washington administrations. Under Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, the number of weapons deals with China’s renegade territory hit a record high. These military transactions are a violation of Washington’s own avowed One China Policy which purports to acknowledge Beijing’s territorial sovereignty over Taiwan. That policy was formulated in the 1970s as a way to align China with the U.S. in opposition to the former Soviet Union. Over the decades, Washington has shifted its geopolitical calculus to designate Beijing as the main threat to American hegemonic ambitions. Cynically, and unscrupulously, the One China Policy has become redundant for pursuing U.S. interests.

Selling arms to Taiwan is only one of many facets in the systematic effort by the United States and its allies to provoke China. Last week saw the seventh American warship to transit between Taiwan and mainland China since Biden took office in January.

The Taiwan Strait is only about 130 kilometers at its narrowest. It has been the locus of numerous dangerous military crises between the U.S. and China over the decades when at times the use of nuclear weapons was considered by the American side, according to veteran whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Washington calls its naval exercises “freedom of navigation operations”. The operations are thinly veiled challenges to Beijing’s territorial claims. They are part of a general build-up of military forces in the region by the United States and its allies.

This week sees the U.S. navy engaging in huge military drills in the South China Sea along with Australia, Japan and India. The U.S.-led group known as “The Quad” has adopted a strident stance of challenging China and hemming it in.

A British-led carrier strike group comprising American and Dutch warships has also entered the South China Sea on a regional display of power. France recently sent a nuclear submarine to “patrol” the sea which is a vital commercial shipping route for China and which also possesses abundant subterranean oil and gas reserves. Germany announced this week that it was deploying a warship to the South China Sea – the first such mission to the region for Berlin in two decades.

Meanwhile, Jens Stoltenberg, head of the U.S.-led military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has the brass neck, or stupidity, to repeatedly claim that “China is coming closer to us”.

So the so-called transatlantic alliance is moving to the Pacific and Asia to presumably defend Western democracy and security from the threat of China. Only a thoroughly brainwashed subject could possibly believe such nonsensical double-think.

The overt militarism towards China is part of the “hybrid warfare” that Washington and its imperialist surrogates (NATO, Five Eyes, corporate news media, etc.,) accuse Beijing (and Moscow) of waging. The other aspect of this hybrid aggression is informational warfare.

China is constantly vilified and demonized by Washington and its allies with groundless allegations of genocide against the Uyghur ethnic minority in Xinjiang western province and of human rights abuses in its other renegade island territory of Hong Kong. China points out that its Uyghur population has grown significantly and prosperously in recent years.

Beijing has also been accused of conducting global cyberattacks and more recently of expanding its nuclear arsenal. All of these accusations can be more substantially and accurately leveled at the United States and its allies.

A further twist in information warfare is the politicization of the Covid-19 pandemic.

U.S. politicians and media are shoring up tenuous claims that the deadly novel coronavirus originated from a medical research laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan. This week, U.S. intelligence agencies claim to have surreptitiously obtained genetic data from the Wuhan Institute of Virology which could allegedly demonstrate that the virus escaped from its laboratories.

This is setting up a “smoking gun” scenario which can then be used by Washington to incriminate China over the global pandemic. It is not dissimilar to how in the past the same intelligence agencies falsely cooked up “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction that justified the U.S. launching a genocidal war on Iraq.

For its part, Beijing has vehemently dismissed all of these allegations as part of Washington’s aim to create a new Cold War. On the origins of the pandemic, in particular, China points to evidence that implicates the U.S. biowarfare laboratory, Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The American objective here is to divide the world into adversarial camps so that it can dictate the terms of engagement. European allies are being manipulated and forced to damage their own burgeoning economic relations with China.

Washington’s global ambitions are predicated totally on an adversarial agenda. The unique and dubious privilege of the U.S. dollar as a universal exchange currency is fundamental to maintaining this global power. The economic rise of China and the emergence of a multipolar world is anathema to – indeed the nemesis of – the U.S. empire. This explains the madcap efforts by Washington to whip up antagonism at every opportunity. But this criminal madness is stoking all-out war.