CONSERVATIVES LOVE FOR JOE
few thousand swing-state voters away from once again walking away from our commitments and antagonizing our supposed allies. Biden can try to reclaim America’s throne... But it will take more than a few nice words at the next NATO summit. REASON NO. 2: BIDENWILL EMBRACE REALISM Donald Trump was right to recognize China as an urgent threat to the U.S. – economically, geopolitically, militarily, and technologically. And he was correct to meet the threat head-on, in contrast to the failed “let’s work with them” approach of his presidential predecessors. So Biden will need to rip a page from the first Cold War and accept that the globe is split into spheres of influence. This means that the influence of China or Russia is going to be paramount in some parts of the world – where the U.S. will have to look the other way and accept authoritarianism. One of the big reasons that the United States and the Soviet Union didn’t go to war is that both accepted that some parts of the world were off-limits to each other. Eastern Europe was the back yard of the USSR... and Western Europe was America’s domain. That was the price of peace in a nuclear world. As political scientist Graham Allison explains... American presidents faced repeated crises [during the Cold War] in which they had
to choose between sending troops into Soviet-dominated nations to support freedom fighters seeking to exercise rights that the American creed declares universal and standing by as those freedom fighters were slaughtered or suppressed. Without exception, U.S. presidents chose to watch instead of intervene. Even since the end of the Cold War, this has long been a fact of global diplomacy – (pre- Trump) rhetoric about spreading democracy notwithstanding. Russia has had its way in the country of Georgia (which it invaded in 2008) and Crimea (annexed by force from Ukraine in 2014) and with the ongoing war in Syria – all which the United States has responded to with squawks of disapproval but little else. Similarly, China erased democracy in Hong Kong last year, and the brutal Uighur “re- education camps” in northwest China have provoked outrage – which, along with a crisp $5 bill, will get you a grande cappuccino at Starbucks... and is of zero use for the people under China’s steel boot. If one day Russian President Vladimir Putin gets hungry for a piece of the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan, the response would be a lot of diplomatic huffing and puffing but not much else. If Chinese President Xi Jinping decides to cement his legacy by reclaiming Taiwan, would the U.S. move any muscle other than those that form a frown? As Allison explains, “The South China Sea is likely to become more like the Caribbean than the Mediterranean – that is, China’s
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January 2021
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