The US has spent the past 3 decades working on the assumption that trade engagement with China would guide China toward a more cooperative and democratic future, but that has been shown not to be the case. The US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were unjustifiable and terrible mistakes, but WRT to the current Chinese policy toward Taiwan bringing up US foreign misadventures is pure whataboutism. China's threats toward Taiwan are completely unacceptable - the future of Taiwan is the choice of the people of Taiwan, and not the CCP.
'Democratic future'. Ha.
Such a statement sounds good coming from the likes of the State Department press team, but the US has never cared about fostering democracy. Not at all especially when the peoples in those democracies want something which might be opposed to US economic interests. There are so many examples of this and the world is still reeling from the ramifications of these humanitarian disasters.
There's the 1953 Iranian coup d'état of the democratically elected PM Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had worked to liberalize Iranian society, by the US and UK simply because the UK was concerned about their oil interests in the country. Classified documents pertaining to the overthrow were released a few years back by the US government so there is no doubt what happened. This directly led to all the subsequent problems in Iran and certainly it hasn't fostered a liberalized, democratic society. It's the complete opposite.
Not long after that was the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état of a democratic government because in large part US business interests, United Fruit/Chiquita opposed labor reforms which hindered the use of lowly-paid laborers. That led to a nearly 40 year civil war which the country is still recovering from and this remains a source of humanitarian disasters as people try flee the are. Guatemala may not be quite the neighbor that Ukraine is to Russia, but the US and Guatemala are neighbors and Guatemala's plight has become the US's problem.
Just to name one more example (there are many more), and perhaps the most famous one, there is the 1973 Chilean coup d'état led by the US and UK to overthrow the democratically elected President Allende for economic and resource purposes. Again, the region has never fully recovered from these humanitarian disasters.
It's not about democracy. The US is friendly with a several international non-democratically leaders...many of whom have their own humanitarian disasters. Rather, the US was hoping China would completely liberalize their economy along neoliberal principles ala Chile. That has not happened as China, which has a rather liberalized economy, does still maintain some state control of their economy and they have exerted that in recent years. It's certainly within their right to do so. If the US doesn't like it, well, tough. They're welcomed to implement trade barriers with China, but to try to force change via militarization is disastrous. Even the infamous anti-communists who ran the 1950s coups knew China was more or less untouchable. What makes modern US leaders think that China is Afghanistan or something...which wasn't exactly a smashing success for the US either.
This is a bit of red herring. are you saying that they shouldn't co-operate with China on green energy (China is pursuing it anyway, especially in Africa) on the grounds that they disagree with certain facets of Chinese policy? So that on the same grounds maybe everyone should never cooperate with the U.S. based upon its malevolent foreign policy (for the last 60-70 years)? If we want to count human rights abuses people in the west can quickly be embarrassed.
China's human rights abuses seem quaint to what the US/west have sponsored/are sponsoring at the current time. Nobody has brought it up, but there is the genocide against the Uyghurs. This is terrible. However, the amount of human rights violations, if not outright genocide, against Muslims in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa is outrageous. The US gives unquestioning support to the modern day Andrew Jacksons in Israel's far right-wing government. Much was made about Trump's Israeli policies, but Biden has only continued them without much of the same scrutiny. And, of course, these policies are supported by far right-wing Christian Zionist groups here in the US. So much for the Democrats combating right-wing Christian extremism.
This is not just a matter of whataboutism either. Other countries around the world know what's going on including China. If the US was a shining example of human rights, then maybe the US would have some leverage in convincing other countries to change their broken ways. However, when the US is the perpetrator of massive human rights violations year and year, other countries are not going to take the US seriously and Klassik doubts there is even much diplomatic push on the humanitarian front anyway.
The US wants countries such as India and so forth to condemn Russia's actions against Ukraine. It's not that these countries like what Russia has done because they don't, but they know the US has done the same thing many times over and they've had to live with the consequences with that.
Moreover, countries involved in militarization generally aren't in position to improve their human rights. Generally, human rights get worse under that condition, not better. If the US was really interested in improving human rights, what's with the militarization?
If you had to choose where to live out of the three countries, and all other factors important to you being equal, which would you choose?
This is usually said by people who've never been to China. There's this idea that it's devoid of civil liberties and everyone walks about afraid. It's not true. At base level alone you're not likely to end up shot dead while sitting in a restaurant there.
I think we've all seen over the last few years that civil liberties can be curtailed anywhere, but that some states have better PR.
Klassik Sr. lived in Eastern Bloc countries in the 1960s such as the DDR and Czechoslovakia. While things weren't perfect, Klassik Sr. quite enjoyed his extended time there and reported that conditions are nothing like what was being reported by the US/western media at the time (Klassik Sr. also lived in Western Europe as well). Conversely, if one looks at what life was like in the US at the same time, minorities couldn't even drink from 'white' drinking fountains or eat at the same lunch counters here in the south.
Klassik has never been to China, but Klassik has been to the biggest cities of India and has seen what a problem pollution is there. China surely has similar problems. The US could and should be working on those issues. After all, a large amount of that pollution is from US companies and if China and the US alone made significant environmental progress, outcomes would be so much better for the rest of the world.
Also, Le Baron's point about crime, violence, and other maladies caused by poverty in the US are exactly right. On a street in Klassik's area this week, which is not a rough part of town, there have been two shootings. One yesterday was a shopping center Klassik used to frequently visit because it had an awesome new/used media store that had excellent classical music CDs before it closed a couple of months ago. It's not all gun crime, but things are pretty ugly here and things are getting worse. This is in an area which does have major employers and at least a moderate cost of living. Klassik can only imagine what things are like in places with worse employment problems. The Chinese probably don't have to deal with all these shootings and violent incidents in their towns.
It didn't 'raise' them, it likely stopped some falling into poverty. Clearly the infrastructure was always too small, and was continuously throttled to meet the usual panics of 'default' etc. This is the same story for the climate/energy transformation plan.
Did you read that 'new trickle-down' plan for 'build back better' from Janet Yellen on the government's policy announcements posted by LaughingBoy? The numbers look big, they are big, but nowhere near what is required. Yet in the popular mind it's hard to stand there and say so without people being stunned into incredulity as to why that would be said.
Sí señor. Even the Republicans were willing to spend to keep the US from turning into something from the Hoover era during Covid, but this does not remotely solve any sort of greater poverty issues. Prominent monetarist figures such as Lawrence Summers still have large voices in Democratic Party policy which is downright scary. Even the Republicans know that complete austerity won't work because the government has to subsidize all those working McJobs. In some ways, those McJobs might be even better than 'gig' jobs.
McJobs and gig jobs, along with high unemployment, is not a good mix when the US very easily could implement full employment policies. Does anyone think voters in critical EC locations such as Michigan (where there is a report that Ford, for example, is getting ready to make ~8000 mostly white-collar engineers and such redundant) and Ohio are going to throw tomatoes at Democratic Party politicians for promoting full employment? Sure, they might have to explain it to overcome years of economic ignorance pushed in part by the Democratic Party themselves, but it's an idea which people will want to support even if they need assistance seeing how it'll happen.
For all the talk about Biden saving us from the Republicans, what's going to happen when citizens in places such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and so forth look at their communities in 2024 and realize that improvement has not happened, poverty and byproducts of it have increased, and so forth? Are they going to be running to vote for Biden or will they vote for someone like DeSantis...or what should be the Democrats' biggest fear that these voters will just stay home and not vote?
