Trump, China, and Foreign Policy as Theater
A new op-ed by Mike Pompeo and Marshall Billingslea vividly demonstrates everything that has been wrong with Trump’s China policy.
January 06, 2021
President Donald J. Trump joins Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, at the start of their bilateral meeting Saturday, June 29, 2019, at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, Japan.
Credit: Flickr/The White House
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I would have normally prefaced a piece on muscular foreign policy pronouncements from a lame duck administration days away from stepping down with the famous Dylan Thomas lines – “Do not go gentle into the good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light” – had said administration not been U.S. President Donald Trump’s. Even as Trump himself bends every known political norm known in the United States to the breaking point to hold on to power, despite unambiguous defeat in the November elections, his policy
December 18, 2020
NEZAVISIMAYA GAZETA: I’m going to be brief in my questions, to give you some time to you to respond. And I will start with the news of the last days: cyber attacks allegedly conducted by Russians on major infrastructure, objects, and networks in America. And I read and saw a lot of comments of professionals who elaborated on the type of response: political, geopolitical, military even, [as] an attack on infrastructure is considered to be, and of course my heart is not feeling easy when I hear such things.
The first question is, how to be sure that Russians are behind these attacks, because they say it might be Russians, might be the Iranians, might be the Chinese. Because of the consequences of the response to the attackers, I think it is so important to be more than 100% sure that this party is specifically responsible for these attacks. And I want to hear your comments on this new bad news in Russian-American relations.
In USA’s economic and health crisis – nuclear weapons spending is booming
Roughly 50,000 Americans are now involved in making nuclear warheads at eight principal sites stretching from California to South Carolina. And the three principal U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories located in Los Alamos and Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif. have said they are adding thousands of new workers at a time when the overall federal workforce is shrinking. “the insane idea that after a pandemic and dealing with climate change and in an economic crisis in which people are struggling with massive inequality that we are going to spend this much money modernizing every last piece of our nuclear infrastructure that would be a failure, a failure of policy and a failure of imagination.”
While the country has been preoccupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, economic decline and the election, President Trump’s administration quietly and steadily steered America’s nuclear weapons industry to its largest expansion since the end of the Cold War, increasing spending on such arms
Roughly 50,000 Americans are now involved in making nuclear warheads at eight principal sites stretching from California to South Carolina. And the three principal U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories located in Los Alamos and Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif. have said they are adding thousands of new workers at a time when the overall…