Conrad Black - Trump’s Military Moves Reinforce US Preeminence Over China

American strategic policy under President Trump has been so imaginative and so professionally executed by the U.S. Armed Forces that the punditocracy, none too blessed with piercing insight the best of times, has generally failed to recognize the proportions of its success. In the 13 months of this second Trump administration, a technique has been devised that has demonstrated it can almost immunize the United States against the depredations of its enemies, who have been subsidizing terrorism and guerrilla warfare to harass and enervate America.

Pundits have also generally failed to see that these decisive moves against Venezuela, Iran, and indirectly Cuba—all effectively agents of China and its junior partner in the Kremlin—are altering the global balance of power in favor of the democracies and are lengthening the military and economic preeminence of the United States over China. In the course of this still relatively new year, the United States has moved to increase Venezuelan oil production and use it to displace Russia as a provider of oil to Western Europe, persuaded India to cease to be an energy customer of Russia, and effectively ended Iranian oil supplies to China.

The scandalous hypocrisy of Western Europe beseeching American assistance in repulsing Russia from Ukraine while financing the Russian war in Ukraine by buying Russian oil is about to end. Presumably, Russia will shift its oil exports to China, replacing Venezuela and Iran as a supplier, while China replaces Western Europe and India as a Russian customer. But China buys oil at cut-rate prices, unlike the Russian customers it will be replacing, and China’s oil supply will become more tenuous as Russia’s oil revenue declines.

This will put considerable pressure on the ability of Russia to continue to finance its war in Ukraine—a war that has already cost it approximately a million casualties and 500,000 deserters or draft evaders. And though it has gone on longer than the epic Russo-German war of 1941–1945, Russia has barely increased the amount of Ukrainian territory it has managed to occupy in the last three years.

China has already suspended its formerly regular outrageous violations of Taiwanese airspace and its preposterous claims of international waterways such as the Formosa Straits as territorial waters of the People’s Republic. The Chinese regime can’t have been delighted about the almost effortless destruction of their sophisticated air defenses in Iran by the Americans and Israelis.

No country has dared to attack the United States directly since the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and President Roosevelt promised the next day that “we will … make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” Thereafter, the United States was not directly attacked, only lured into assisting anti-communist forces in Greece, Korea, a ludicrous micro-charade in Guatemala, the embarrassing fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, and much more dangerously, Vietnam. President Eisenhower welcomed South Vietnam into the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, which ensured it assistance against invasion from the North Vietnamese communists.

The specific point of difference was that the Geneva Accords (1954), which ended the war in Indochina and formalized the departure of the French, called for a vote on the unification of North and South Vietnam, and the communists purported to believe this meant a single vote in both countries which they were bound to win by delivering 100 percent of the voters in the North. The South Vietnamese government, with the support of the United States, held that it required separate votes in North and South Vietnam and a majority in each, which the communists would not have won in the South, whose population was swollen by a large number of fugitives from Ho Chi Minh’s totalitarian regime in the North.

The Americans had no idea how to deal with such a war. Their two leading military commanders, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, who led the allies to the unconditional surrender of our enemies in the Pacific and Western Europe in 1945, warned Presidents Kennedy and Johnson not to commit ground forces to continental Asia, but that if they did intervene in Indochina, to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail (the North Vietnamese invasion route through Laos). However, it was not until after Johnson had been driven from office by domestic anti-war sentiment that President Nixon produced the winning policy of handing the war to the South Vietnamese while assisting them with overwhelming air support. This included up to 1,200 air strikes a day on North Vietnam after the North invaded the South in April 1972, between Nixon’s historic visits to China and the Soviet Union.

The South Vietnamese were victorious, and it was assumed that this formula could be repeated when North Vietnam violated the 1973 peace agreement. Only the nonsense of Watergate, which caused the evaporation every day of the administration’s executive authority, prevented President Ford from assisting the South Vietnamese with the level of air support that had been foreseen, with the result that the government of the South was overrun.

With the end of the Cold War in 1991, the enemies of the West were a rag-tag of regional malcontents and fanatics that eventually gained the patronage of the Putin regime in the Kremlin attempting to reestablish the Empire of Peter the Great and Stalin, and the post-Deng Xiaoping Chinese cranking up to challenge the United States for the leadership of the world (stepping into the shoes of Nazi Germany and the USSR that had been cut off at the ankles). George H.W. Bush admirably expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 but left him in power in Baghdad. George W. Bush determined to remedy that for no good reason, and in response to the terrorist outrages against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, produced the tragic non sequiturs of the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By tightening the war on drugs, effecting regime change in Venezuela in a few hours with no American fatalities, and assisting a pan-American movement to the sensible right led by Argentina, the United States has effectively expelled China from the Americas. By eliminating the totalitarian, rabidly belligerent, pseudo-theocracy in Iran and replacing it with an innocuous regime, Trump will create the necessary conditions for the gradual development of durable peace in the Middle East based on the uncontested recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

It will apparently take some time for the American commentariat, so biased against Trump, to recognize any of this.

https://www.newenglishreview.org/trumps-military-moves-reinforce-us-preeminence-over-china/