Tuesday, June 1, 2021

America’s Enemies – China, Russia, Iran

 

America’s Enemies – China, Russia, Iran

The mostly uninformed American public, conditioned by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, and the rest of the biased mainstream media, consider Russia as being our major foreign antagonist, with China and Iran secondary to Russia.  This could be further from the truth.  As I’ve often posited, rather than being a major foreign power like the old Soviet Union, Russia, these days, can be compared economically to Mexico, or even Texas, except that the Russians  have nuclear weapons left over from the cold war.

 The old image of the big, old, powerful Russian bear can be replaced by the image of a mischievous and destructive badger, nipping and ripping away at weak spots in the world fabric, (of which there are plenty, under our current very weak Biden administration).

 Of course, Russia is run by an educated and accomplished thug.  Putin’s education is as a mining engineer and lawyer, and his background is as a Soviet master spy in the old East Germany.  He speaks German and English fluently in public, and as an educated European, he probably is also fluent in French and Polish, the latter a sister Slavic language.

 Russia’s Prime Minister, or number two these days is Mikhail Mishustin, who has advanced degrees in systems engineering, and a background in government tax administration and private investment.

 s, but run by a charismatic thug, whose people love him.  When I was in Russia in 2017, Putin had an 83% approval rating.  He could do no wrong.

 Iran, similarly, is a relatively weak country, but which is a continuing danger because of their sponsorship of international terrorism.  They are a reginal threat to Israel, because Iran supplies rockets to Hamas and Hezbollah to be used against Israel.  Currently, some of these rockets are funded by payments from the U.S. to Iran.  In spite of Biden’s and Kerry’s weak and ineffective efforts based on bribes to the contrary, there is no doubt that Iran will soon emerge as a dangerous nuclear power.

 The Chinese communists are something else.  They are the greatest threat to the hegemony of the U.S. and the west in the world.  They are an oligarchic, totalitarian one-party, communist dictatorship, with Xi Jinping now as “President in Perpetuity”.  When I visited China in 2015, I was impressed by the order of their society, the rapid building expansion of their cities and infrastructure, and their foreign economic expansion, particularly their Belt and Road Initiative.

 The Chinese communists have a massive military, with similarly massive nuclear and ICBM capabilities. They are a totalitarian and monolithic country, controlling every aspect of their people’s lives, including how many children a couple can have.  Facial recognition cameras track the movements of urban people.  Minorities, like the Uighurs and Christians are segregated and many incarcerated in concentration camps.  China domestically, is a completely subjugated and controlled society.

 Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, Premier of the State Council and China’s number two leader, are both educated men, and both veterans of “rural labor” during the Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution”.  Xi’s time during the Cultural Revolution was particularly arduous, since his father was denounced and thrown into prison, and Xi was forced to fend for himself at a young age.

 Xi Jinping’s original education is as a Chemical Engineer.   Li Keqiang has a law degree, and an advanced degree in economics.  Both men worked their way up through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party to their present positions of power.  Most of the rest of the politburo are similarly educated as economists, engineers and businessmen, and have comparable communist credentials. 

 Their MBA’s and PhD’s place the Chinese leadership about as far from revolutionaries as one can get.  Their aim is to make China the dominant economic and political power in the world, and they are working strenuously toward that end.

 The Chinese like to say “We have been art this for seven or eight millennia. Some millennia have been good for China, and some have been not so good.  We are making sure that this millennium is a good one for China.”

 If this country, and particularly the Biden administration, does not acknowledge China as the real danger she is toward the western world, as the Trump administration did, we had all better start learning Mandarin, like John Cena’s apology to the CCP.

Ray Gruszecki
June 1, 2021

No comments:

Post a Comment