Asymmetric, Hybrid, and by Proxy
A thought occurred to me this morning, as I was digesting news that President Biden has one-upped appointment of an eco-terrorist to lead the Bureau of Land Management by nominating a Soviet educated communist — who claims she “can’t find” her graduate thesis on Marx and Engels — to Comptroller of American Currency. I wondered, off topic and out loud, as I occasionally do on cold fall mornings in my office, if the forthcoming Beijing Olympics might be viewed by future generations as a similar moment to the Munich Olympics of 1936. In ’36 the world was just waking up to the reality of Hitler and the National Socialist party. Within two years the spectacles of the Munich Conference and Krystallnacht followed, and only four years after the games the British would be scrambling to save their Army on the battered shores of Dunkirk.
There is something in the air these days, like the smell of ozone wafting in from a distant thunderstorm, that is difficult to dismiss.
As far as Munich goes, there are some common themes worth exploring. The US policy toward Taiwan hinges on notions of “strategic ambiguity,” which is something different than Chamberlain’s outright appeasement of Hitler’s ambitions, but nevertheless one senses it isn’t quite strong enough to act as a real deterrence to a determined foe. China today is most certainly a determined and capable foe, unimpressed by the remaining vapors of American influence, and it will be interesting to see if and how American policy might change to reflect reality on the ground. It will be even more interesting to see whether or not the United States has the stomach to actually defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression when that day finally comes. If it happened tomorrow I think we would mostly do nothing — pulling the last lynchpin from-out the teetering scaffold of American credibility and reliability.
Not that reality on the ground is a high priority for American strategic or political thinking these days, as the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle should have made clear. One longs for politicians with the wisdom and foresight of Ben Franklin, the raw intelligence of Jefferson, or the sheer tenacity of John Adams. These were careful, competent, and extremely courageous men of character, who risked everything and whose calculations were underwritten by the determination to live and to defeat tyranny at any price. But a study of the modern congressional playbill doesn’t leave much room for confidence we might enjoy that kind of leadership. Instead, we are trapped somewhere between the grabasstick absurdities of Donald Trump and the bizarre perambulating cognitions of Joe Biden, which is a special kind of hell for mere citizens trying to earn a living and raise their children on something other than unbleached cynicism.
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