The World Takes its Cues from Resolve—or Lack Thereof
“It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy,” predicted Joe Biden. “Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy,” Biden assured. “I don’t know what the decision is going to be, but I promise you it will occur.”
Well, obviously, it didn’t take a genius to predict that Obama would drive us off a cliff:
H/T – MeMaw
Obama Sends a Clear Message to America’s Allies: You Are On Your Own
By Mark Joseph – FoxNews
Producer/Author/Editor, Bullypulpit.com
Diehard fans of President George W. Bush make a habit of reminding the rest of us that his presidency was successful because America was never attacked on our soil after 9/11. This is a smart argument to make of course, since, absent omniscience, it’s impossible to refute. But a successful foreign policy is often difficult to analyze since it’s nearly impossible to judge what evil was prevented from happening by the way America postured itself.
President Ronald Reagan was often mocked for being “just an actor” but it is precisely the skills of an actor that are often required of an American president when conducting foreign policy successfully. Reagan the actor sent unmistakeable signals to his enemies that his tolerance for misbehavior on their part would be zero and dictators, tinhorn ones and otherwise, got the message and generally behaved themselves. How did he do it? First, there was the deep fear he instilled in the Soviet Union by turning a microphone test before a radio broadcast into a stern warning when he “joked” “I have just signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union forever; We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Reagan also understood that his invasion of the tiny island of Grenada which had fallen prey to communist Cuba would have no significance in and of itself, but could nonetheless send a powerful message to the rest of the world and make it clear to America’s enemies that they might be next on the list were they to similarly misbehave.
I have no way of proving this, but I have a strong suspicion that the Chinese government would never have cracked down on freedom-loving Chinese students at Tiananmen square had Reagan still been in office. Reagan was a wildcard, the Chinese would likely have reasoned, and it wasn’t clear how he would respond at such an affront to American values.
But with George Herbert Walker Bush, a moderate fellow who had once been ambassador to their country, they were likely to have predicted what he offered up after their brutal crackdown: a muted response that was of little help to the dissidents or any harm to those who perpetrated the crackdown on them.
In a similar way, the world has been watching President Obama carefully in the weeks leading to this current North Korean crisis and in the weak response that has followed it. Japan has been one of the U.S.’s most loyal partners in the Pacific, and they have little comfort this morning of American resolve as they watched North Korea fire a missile over their nation with seeming impunity. The message they, and other countries who depend on the U.S., like Israel and Taiwan, have received is clear: You are on your own. The U.S. lacks the resolve and iron-will to defend you and stare down your enemies.
This lack of U.S. leadership will likely have other severe consequences as Japan, unable to depend on its unsteady ally, will likely respond with a military buildup of its own and Israel will decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran, and the world will slowly but surely spiral out of control — all because a lack of resolve on the part of an American president who doesn’t seem to understand that the world takes its cues from the resolve — or lack of it — shown by America’s leadeship before and during moments of crisis.
Explore posts in the same categories: Abuse of Power, politics
6 April, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Japan would be wise to get more involved with military partnerships with countries like, South Korea, Australia, India and Singapore. It might provoke the Chinese a little but since they have been on a military build up for years it will help balance the power of China, and I don’t think China really want’s to bother to much with any too risky since they are still making good money off the rest of the world. While it’s currently unlikely right now if the rest of the world especially in the Pacific look too weak China might start getting thoughts about Taiwan, although I think most of it is a political grandstanding for domestic political power.
Remember both China and North Korea are testing the US and their allies right now, if the US looks weak or apathetic we may have bigger problems down the road, even though many people would just see this as a temporary swing in the US’s foreign policy that will eventually swing back the other way. It basically depends on if the Chinese see this a temporary and don’t want to make too many waves or see it more long term and start getting ideas. China unlike North Korea is at least not crazy, so we shouldn’t expect anything very bog out of them any time soon, they will go slow, wait and watch and if they see an opportunity they might take it but they might not.
North Korea is insane, the problem is are they really as insane as they look, or are the worse? We don’t know it could all be an act, or most of it an act, or they might really all be nuts. Remember Kim Jong-il once had a famous South Korean film director and his ex wife a very popular actress kidnaped because he wanted to make the North Korean film industry better. Even if he isn’t insane he is willing to do insane things to get things he wants.
One thing I do know is that the North Korea government needs to keep the people in a perpetual state of preparing for war to keep their power, it’s part of the propaganda to explain why the people must sacrifice themselves for the state. So even though they are probably crazy I don’t think they are going to invade South Korea tomorrow, and they want nukes so they have a better bargaining power on the world stage, this is more of a problem with diplomacy and stability rather than they idea the might us the nukes, it also is a deterrent to South Korea to make sure that the South does not ever try to invade them, since in both Korea’s there are still segments that want reunification just not always through war. Even if we can assume that North Korea would never use the nukes they should never be trusted with them, since we don’t know who they would sell them to in order to keep Kim Jong-il living in luxury with his army of underage concubines.
6 April, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Re: “North Korea is insane, the problem is are they really as insane as they look, or are the worse?”
Great Leader Kim Il Sung Is Immortal
Kim Il Sung Dies
North Korea Daily Life
US defector on life in North Korea
6 April, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Read “The Aquariums of Pyongyang” by Kang Chol-hwan and “Under The Loving Care Of The Fatherly Leader” by Bradley K. Martin, they will give you all you need to know about how screwed up North Korea and the Kim’s really are.
I have seen those videos before and some other fun ones. The Kim’s perfectly crafted a personality cult, and they are brutally evil men, the thing is it can’t all be insanity, much of it is just intentional well planned out evil. I think sometimes it’s easier to call someone insane in the face of atrocities rather than admit that some people are just evil bastards, that know exactly what they are doing.
6 April, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Yes, but in the case of Baby Kim, it’s hard to say, since he was raised in the heart of the nut-house/abbatoir. If he somehow ends up in a US court charged with war crimes, I’m sure a good ACLU lawyer could get him off on the basis of his “bad upbringing”.
I’m sure the majority of those people wailing in those videos are acting their hearts out, afraid of getting shot, or worse. But a lot must be true believers. Even if they’re just going through the motions, repeated behaviour and constant deception is bound to affect one’s psyche, leading to all sorts of delusions, dementia, schizophrenia, etc.
The leaders must be more cynical, since they get to travel around the world and see another way of life — “high class” hookers, kids in private Swiss boarding schools, and so on. Having to survive in the DPRK dog-eat-dog world, they also understand power better than an amateur like Obama, and know very well how to manipulate idiots like Albright, Rice, Richardson, Obama…
6 April, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Japan should be building up its own military, and get rid of the stupid “pacifist” clause the US put into its constitution.
Also, the Chinese dissidents were demonstrating for a return to pure communism.
The students at the beginning of the Tiananmen incident sang the Internationale and protested against the introduction of market fundamentalism in the Chinese economy. They allied with the workers and elements of the intelligentsia in demanding a return to Marxist principles.
Most of the participants were students from the north, who are traditionally regarded as more in the vanguard of revolutionary thought. Many were from the urban elite, and regarded the Party as having been overly infiltrated by peasant “country bumpkin” reactionary elements.
The demonstration also attracted trade unionists, newspaper editors, low-level apparatchiks and nomenklatura, and intellectuals.
The demonstrations began as a rally in support of the rehabilition of Hu Yaobang, the Long March veteran, who had died of a heart attack the week before. The government had declared that, “Comrade Hu Yaobang was a long-tested and staunch communist warrior, a great proletarian revolutionist and statesman, an outstanding political leader for the Chinese army”. But the demonstrator’s protested Hu’s haing been sidelined by the free market promoting clique of Deng Xiao-Ping, who had previously been “sent down” by Mao as a Capitalist Roader and Running Dog.
They wanted to preserve full government financial support for education, particularly generous socialist benefits for students, and protested against high unemployment, income inequality and widespread corruption associated with the newly developing degenerate capitalist market economy.
At first, the Communist Party was sympathetic to the students’ ideological purity, until the demonstrators were falsely portrayed in the US media (on the scene to cover the neocon Gorbachev’s visit) as what are called in China “counter-revolutionary bourgois liberals”.
The students were actually demanding more government protection from the erosion of socialist rights and privileges, but the Western media distorted the student protests as demands for free markets and bourgeois democracy.
Naive protesters were selectively featured on global television reciting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in broken English, with no understanding of US history and politics.
The Internationale:
Arise, wretched of the earth
Arise, convicts of hunger
Reason thunders in its volcano
This is the eruption of the end
Of the past let us wipe the slate clean
Masses, slaves, arise, arise
Labourers, peasants, we are
The great party of workers
etc
6 April, 2009 at 8:42 pm
There was more than one side, many of the students where trying to push for a more liberal press and economic system, with a gradual transformation into a democracy, while some wanted less government corruption and more rights. I’d read “Escape From China” by Zhang Boli, for his account as one of the leaders of the Democracy movement, and how he was on the most wanted list in China for two years until he finally escaped to Hong Kong and then to the US.
The Japanese need to get rid of Article 9 of the Constitution, I thought there might be a chance a couple years go when Shinzō Abe was Prime Minister, be he never got the chance, although it did look like he was thinking about it, or at least attempting to find some ways around it before he resigned. And both he and Junichiro Koizumi did basically go around the law and sent troops to Iraq, as well as have the JMSDF run support missions for NATO and other forces in Afghanistan.
Although I haven’t heard anything from the current Prime Minister Taro Aso about the subject, but he has taken a hard line stance towards North Korea in the past and this last little incident might end up pushing the issue forward even if just a little.
6 April, 2009 at 9:18 pm
The general mass o protesters had all sorts of demands, including general calls for “democracy” without being clear about what that meant. The DDR and the DPRK are also allegedly “democratic”.
The demonstration organizers were attacking the ruling clique’s betrayal of Marxist-Maoist principles.
Wasn’t the primary material concern of the students the 1988 reform in education, which — amongst other changes — brought an end to guaranteed job placements for graduates? The iron rice bowl is still the primary concern in China.
Paradoxically, that reform, so feared by the students, also gave them the liberty to get involved in politics without fear of reprisal in the form of being sent off to XinJiang/Turkestan upon graduation.
While many brave Students and Workers (of all political factions, including unreconstructed hardcore Communists, and apolitical people too) were killed or faced imprisonment and torture without renouncing their beliefs, certain Communist ringleaders “bravely” took advantage of their temporary fame to escape to the West and get support from gullible conservatives.
This is similar to the way Mujahadeen fundraisers would give talks to the John Birch Society in Orange County, in their suits and ties, talking about how brave Freedom Fighters like Osama bin Laden were fighting for freedom of religion and democracy and freedom of expression, and walk away with bags of schwag for the future Taliban dictatorship.
I also recall a Ronald Reagan narrated Anti-Communist documentary, introduced by Kerensky. Reagan introduced Kerensky as a champion of liberty, and Kerensky warned about the perfidiousness and treachery of Communists, which was ironic since he himself brought about the Communist revolution, overthrew the monarchy, handed them over to their Bolshevik buchers, decimated and alienated the army, and refused to counter the Bolsheviks (“No enemies to the left!”) until he had to flee for his life. Then he spent the rest of life conning American “conservatives” until he died and the NY Russian Orthodox Churches denied him a Christian burial, since he was a Communist and a Freemason. His own people (or rather victims) saw right through him, but still both the Liberals and “Conservatives” praised him.
There is a tendency in the US to view things too much in black and white.
+ + +
An interesting contemporary article:
Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, December 1989, pp.13-17, 24.
“Today the situation as it is felt by the mass of Chinese people is a bad situation, as the Chinese comrade explained, it is a situation of inflation, stagnating and receding standard of living, huge unemployment, huge imbalances, and especially corruption and bureaucratic material privileges, which are in the eyes of the broad masses of the Chinese people a tremendous scandal. Inequality in the Soviet Union is graphically expressed by the fact that in a luxury restaurant the price of one meal equals the monthly wage of a worker. In China the price of one meal equals the annual wage of a worker. Imagine what ordinary people think about such a situation.
“From the subjective point of view, the eruption of the student movement, which triggered a big mass upheaval of workers of the metropolitan area of Beijing, which we call I think correctly the Beijing Commune, has historical roots. It is the third stage of a democratic movement launched by the Chinese students and intellectuals as the historical heirs of the initial democratic movement of 1919, the beginning of the second Chinese revolution.
…
“If we look at the demands of the students and the demands of the workers, we will find an amazing parallel. The seven key demands of the students as they were published by the students’ organizational committee of Beijing University, on April 21, start with an inner-party quarrel: reevaluate the action of Hu Yaobang and approve his point of view, that which is called the reform wing of the Communist Party of China, standing for internal party democracy and more democracy in the country. Second, punish those who have started to attack the students and the masses, that is, oppose repression. Third, publish a law on the press authorizing free publication of journals, guaranteeing the freedom of the press. Fourth, force the leaders of the state to give an accounting to the country on the state of their income, their fortune and that of their families, that is to say, denounce corruption and private wealth accumulation by the bureaucracy. Fifth, ask that the leaders of the state publicly admit the errors of then- educational policy and increase the credits to education and the salaries of the teachers. You must know that the teachers in China, not to speak of students living on scholarships, are amongst the lowest paid people of that country. There is a systematic underinvestment in education, which is a real scandal from the point of view of the objective needs of development and modernization in an underdeveloped country like China. Sixth, reevaluate the campaign against “bourgeois liberalization” with total rehabilitation for those who have suffered unwarranted injustice. The last point is to ask that the press report objectively about the problems and the reality of the democratic and patriotic student movement.
“If we look at the seven demands there is not the slightest attack against socialism in them, there is not the slightest call or appeal for capitalism. These were demands for the democratization of a bureaucratized workers’ state.
“More impressive, more significant, are the central demands of the Beijing Independent Workers Association, the first independent trade union created by the Beijing workers, which was published on May 21, a month after the students started their struggle, and you see immediately the way in which there was a real capacity to help articulate the workers through the initiative of the students.
“First, the workers ask that their organization must be totally independent and must be set up as the result of a democratic process in which workers take part of their own free will. It must not be under the control of any other organization. And it must have equal status with other mass organizations. Secondly, the basic aim of this organization must be to put forward the views of the greatest number of workers on political and economic questions and never be a simple welfare organization, as is the case with the present state unions. Thirdly, this organization must have a monitoring role over the Communist Party in firms and businesses that are the property of the whole people, that are under collective ownership. This organization must have the right to use all appropriate and legal means to monitor the legal representatives and to insure that the workers are really the masters of the firms. You cannot be clearer in the expression of a revolutionary socialist purpose, which has absolutely nothing to do with the restoration of capitalism.
“They did not ask that the firms be sold to capitalist owners. No,they said that the workers must be the real masters of the collective factories. This is clearly a revolutionary socialist demand. It gives you clearly the content of this Beijing Commune as it developed.
“A huge working class solidarity developed with the student movement.
…
“When the threat of military repression of the people assembled on Tiananmen Square became visible, there occurred a degree of self-organization of the masses of Beijing as we have rarely seen in history. You have to go to the highest points of past communes, the Paris Commune, the Petrograd Commune of 1917-1919, the Barcelona Commune of 1936, the Budapest Commune of 1956, to see something similar. Practically in every neighborhood an organization was set up in order to be able to immediately mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to block the army, to block the tanks, to agitate the soldiers. This happened day after day, mobilizing a large part of the population of this metropolitan area. If you take the whole metropolitan area there are many more than ten million inhabitants, including also peasants of the suburbs and the fields around Beijing. So, you have there an extremely developed revolutionary mass movement of peasants, workers, students, intellectuals, writers, state functionaries, who not only solidarized with the students but expressed their own demands, which all run in the direction of a political, antibureaucratic revolution.
“This opinion, that we were at the beginning of such a revolution, was not something that was peculiar to revolutionary Marxists, as we are. It was shared by most of the observers who were on the spot. I have a whole series of quotes available, from newspapers and weekly papers like The Guardian, The Independent in Britain, like Die Zeit, Der Spiegel in Germany, and many other papers in France and in Italy, that said in as many words including headlines: this is the beginning of a revolution.
…
“We can ask ourselves a question: Why was that powerful commune defeated by the military intervention? There are two main reasons for this: first the uneven development of the workers’ and the students’ movement; and secondly, the uneven development between town and countryside in China.
“There was a large workers’ solidarity movement, but there was no workers’ total general strike. If there had been a workers’ total general strike, the crushing of the Beijing Commune would have been, if not impossible, at least not possible in one night. The Budapest precedent of November 1956 confirms this. There was still a gap between the general student movement and the partial workers’ movement, which involved several millions of people probably on the national scale, but not enough to make an instantaneous repression impossible.
“Secondly, the uneven development between town and countryside. Some of you know the history of the Russian Revolution and the writings of comrade Trotsky on the subject. I will remind you of the explanation Trotsky gave for the defeat of the revolution of 1905: the revolution was defeated by the peasant soldiers. We notice likewise a significant part of the army, the army stationed around Beijing, the army stationed around Shanghai, those who were the most closely linked to the working class, were not ready to crush the uprising of the students and the workers hi Beijing. Deng had to take a plane to go to look around China to find some division which would be ready to undertake the crackdown.
…
“Glory to the Martyrs of Tiananmen Square!
Shame and Disgust for Their Vile Murderers!
Long Live the Political Revolution in China!
Long Live the Fourth International!
Long Live the Worldwide Struggle for Socialism!
Long Live World Revolution!
Venceremos! We Shall Win!!”
6 April, 2009 at 9:25 pm
The former South Korean regime, with it’s criminal “Sunshine Policy” also have some share of blame, for pandering to the cannibal lunatics in Pyongyang, for the sake of “national unity”.
Even many/most “conservatives” prefer to support Kimilsungkimjongil-guk than ally themselves with Japan, which is the closest country both culturally and ideologically. Romantic delusions of fighting Japanese imperialism 64 years after Japan’s defeat will probably end up dooming the South Koreans to either nuclear oblivion or Chinese slavery.
One of the candidates in the last election (I forget his name – he was in charge of the Korean part of the Japan-Korea World Cup) who was supposed to be a hard-liner” on the North said that South Korea should remain “neutral” in any conflict between Pyongyang and the US. The definition of Bat-Shit Crazy.
7 April, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Well that is one of the problems with the mess in Korea is that both sides still have a portion of the public that views reunification as a good thing, the main problem with that is that North Korea is so far behind South Korea that the monetary cost of trying to bring North Korean any place even near South Korea would be unworkable, added along with the fact that North Koreans schools teach mostly propaganda it would take decades to deprogram them all, while the younger generation might not be hard the old generation would have severe problems adjusting. Or they could go the other way and North Korea could be in control and the South would spiral down faster than Zimbabwe.
The “Sunshine Policy” has done nothing but line Kim’s pockets and help him feed his army and is a product of this naive or overly hopeful view of reunification or the idea of a one Korea. All the Sunshine Policy really is, is Neville chamberlain’s policy on Hitler translated into Hangul.
Even in japan the Korean residents have split between the Chongryon who support North Korea and the much larger Mindan who support South Korea, and are sometimes more loyal to Japan as well. The Chongryon are currently starting to get cracked down on in Japan due to their hand in many of the kidnappings of Japanese citizens for North Korea, as well as money laundering ad other financial support for the North.
Japan itself has problems trying to better relations with South Korea because they often half ass the job, and their tendency to hide their involvement in atrocities in WWII, that helps keep the wounds open in relation to South Korea. It all ends up to be very counterproductive to both sides, and North Korea is very good at trying to keep those wounds open, along with China who has a tendency to stick their finger into Japan’s eyes now and then.