At some time “in the course of human events”, Western statesmen were replaced with politicians, politicians with nonentities, and nonentities with spivs.
Explaining why would take a book-length essay, but suffice it to say in a short article that some regression along those lines is easy to observe. The cited phrase in the first sentence comes from The Declaration of Independence, which hints at the leading role played by the US.
This isn’t an exercise in Americanophobia, but simply a recognition of the country’s role as the leader of the free world. It stands to reason that, if the US leads the West, she does so on a path not only to successes but also to failures.
Hence one doesn’t find among American politicians of today the same human calibre that was taken for granted, say, the 25 years on either side of 1800 – or even of 1900. The same goes for Europe, which makes it hard to escape the feeling that the US leads the free world on its way down, politically at any rate.
Myopia describes the unsavoury political types I mentioned earlier, whereas statesmen’s vision is hyperopic, able to see far into the future. This type of sight isn’t to be found among today’s politicians in the US or elsewhere in the West.
That’s why, ever since the world was cursed with truly satanic regimes, in countries like Russia, Italy, Germany and China, along with their allies and satellites, the West has consistently demonstrated strategic short-sightedeness, exacerbated by declining moral and intellectual standards.
Unable to see much farther than their noses, Western countries, but especially the US, busily built up those regimes to a point where they became a genuine threat to our civilisation. Then, when the threat became impossible to ignore, American and other Western governments would desperately try to snuff it out, exposing their countries to immense losses of money and, as often as not, human lives.
The late Stanford scholar, Dr Anthony C. Sutton, described that folly in a series of copiously documented studies, including the seminal trilogy Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development and also Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Without going into detail, let’s just say that the piles of documents he cites prove that without US economic and technological help, neither Bolshevism nor Nazism would have grown to its diabolical maturity.
China is another case in point. Her rise to her present status of an economic and military superpower began on 2 October, 1959, when the Sino-Soviet split kicked off with Khrushchev’s outburst and Mao’s reaction. Cold war was in full swing at the time, with America trying to contain Soviet expansion and growing influence.
The Sino-Soviet split turned China into a natural ally of America – our enemies’ enemies, and all that. Myopically, a succession of US presidents didn’t see China as a threat. The country was backward, impoverished, ravaged by communist terror, the people were starving – China was seen as a useful ally able to add her penny’s worth to the anti-Soviet cause, but not as any potential threat in her own right.
American courtship of China began, and it was eventually consummated in February 1972, when a beaming Richard Nixon shook hands with Zhou Enlai at Peking airport. From then onwards the trickle of US assistance to China has been steadily growing into a mighty stream.
Egregious folly, partly springing from an inability to plan for the future and partly from a misguided faith in the redemptive potential of commerce, made the US pump funds and technology into the sclerotic veins of China’s economy.
The picture Nixon and all subsequent presidents saw in their myopic mind’s eye was of China becoming richer and eventually democratic. How could she not? Once the Chinese people got enough rice to eat and wash down with Coca Cola, surely they’d see the democratic light shone by America?
That sort of thinking shows a profound misunderstanding of political evil, in fact an inability to think in such terms. People in general and Americans in particular like to think that deep down everyone is, or desperately wishes to be, just like them.
They know that they themselves are good people thinking of nothing but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. So the Chinese have the same aspirations, even if they are latent at the moment. All those poor souls need is a little help, and what better way of providing it than through commerce?
This hopelessly naïve and short-sighted view of the world ignored the evil nature of China’s communist regime holding total, not to say totalitarian, sway over its people. Chinese people didn’t matter: they were either brainwashed or browbeaten by the regime. And the regime realised that what was being offered to it on a platter was a chance to dominate the world, that perennial daydream of all communists.
Some US presidents, such as Clinton, meekly tried to link further assistance to some progress in the issue of human rights, but they quickly abandoned such half-hearted attempts. China was steadily built up into the workshop of the West, with more and more products manufactured there.
Westerners would then slap their labels on those products, turning them into respectable brands. But their affection for cheap labour gradually turned into an addiction: if the Chinese could make the same things for less, one would be stupid not to take advantage of that opportunity. Especially since the Chinese could only provide the muscle, not the American capacity for technological innovation.
In 2001 George W. Bush generously welcomed China into the WTO, plugging her fully into the West’s supply chain and, as a corollary, acting as Dr Frankenstein to China’s monster. The evil communist regime was well on the road to global power.
Then, what do you know, the Chinese, who are a talented and industrious people, showed that they can do so much better than just toiling in factories for coolie wages. Their perfidious communist masters wisely loosened the reins a bit, and Chinese scientists and engineers were able to go to work.
Today, 40 per cent of all patents issued in the world go to China, and suddenly she no longer needs American labels on her products. She can put her own on, while continuing to build up her manufacturing base to a point where China can match up to America economically and militarily anywhere in the world.
The communist reins might have been loosened, but the harness is still there, and China’s regime remains as evil as ever. But it’s infinitely stronger than it has ever been.
Much of the debacle visited by Trump on the world has been caused by the belated realisation setting in: as always, America first builds up her evil adversaries and, when they grow strong enough to challenge her, has a Damascene experience.
The worst words in the political lexicon, We must do something!, then thunder from all media and certainly the White House. Rather than preventing monsters from growing to maturity, the West, especially America, weans them first and then tries to slay them when they already breathe fire and threaten to incinerate the world.
Trump is economically illiterate, but some of his advisers aren’t. They must have explained to the president that wholesale sanctions make no economic sense. And if you don’t believe us, Donald, just look at what’s happening in the markets. You used to blow your own trumpet when the stock market went up during your first term, so are you going to eat crow now?
All that is fine and well, but no economic sense doesn’t necessarily mean no sense at all. Even Trump is beginning to understand that there is more to life than just a commercial transaction at the end of which he gets richer.
Progressive, century-long myopia has led to the nurturing of a succession of evil regimes, of which China just may be the most dangerous. So yes, of course it’s cheaper to outsource most manufacturing to countries like China, those that can do manufacturing for less.
But being dependent on our enemies for the supply of strategic goods, from food to steel to electronics to everything else in between, means courting disaster. So America finally perched bifocal glasses on the tip of her nose and saw that she is on the verge of losing her superpower status to a bunch of communists who have stubbornly refused to be guided by the light of democracy.
The world is pregnant with conflict and it may give birth to war at any moment. That’s why Trump is trying to repatriate the manufacturing his predecessors foolishly allowed to go elsewhere. He is doing that in a typically bullyish and heavy-handed fashion, causing more harm than good at the moment.
But at least that dread phrase, We must do something!, is clearly sounding in the back of his mind. Instead of being the John Wayne of the world, kicking doors in and shoving the nasties aside, America is now in a clearly defensive mode.
Aware that the US can no longer afford to be the leader of the free world, Trump is trying to cut his losses by withdrawing, or as near as damn, from all traditional alliances and obligations. He says he isn’t going to lift a finger in defence of a corrupt Ukraine, pathetic and freeloading Europe, and thieving Taiwan.
Let Putin have the first, along with as much of the second as he can swallow, and let China have Taiwan. America needs to buy time to become a manufacturing autarky again, but she now needs too much time.
Even assuming that this goal is achievable, it’ll take years, more likely decades, to achieve it. Rebuilding, say, the steel and aluminium production will take longer than the same 24 hours it didn’t take to end Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine. America might have waited too long, reaping the short-term harvest and leaving the really vital fields fallow.
We should all hope America gets the time she needs, and we must all follow her on the same path, one leading to strategic survival. A quick course of political ophthalmology treatment is sorely needed though.