On Point: China's Alaska Ambush of the Biden Administration, in Context
http://www.strategypage.com/on_point/20210323223518.aspx
(From within the article - entire article is at the link.)
March 23, 2021
March 2021 exposed a serious rub: the well-calculated diplomatic and personal disdain senior Chinese officials displayed for President Biden's administration.
The theatrics occurred at last week's high-level U.S.-China talks. The talks -- "face-losing debacle" describes the U.S. experience -- took place on U.S. soil, in Anchorage, Alaska. So dub it the Alaska Ambush, a Chinese diplomatic and information warfare cocktail.
Ambush -- isn't that a tactic? A high-ranking Chinese Communist Party foreign policy official surprising a U.S. secretary of state indicates China seeks strategic advantages from the bashfest
Blumenthal's insight helps contextualize the incident. Opening remarks were supposed to be limited to two minutes. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken observed the agreement. Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Director Yang Jiechi launched a 17-minute tirade damning America. The tirade included these choice examples. Yang said, "it is important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world." Right -- freedom is predatory. He reprised Cold War communist themes by asserting China opposes using force "to topple other regimes" and accused the U.S. of using violence to "massacre the people of other countries." Remember, China is currently being accused of murdering Turkic Uighurs in western China (yes, a genocide). At one point, Yang mentioned Black Lives Matter and alleged that "many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States."
The fact that Yang's harangue occurred on American soil with no American interruption may have added to the perceived "loss of American face" in some Asian audiences.
Yang's rhetorical jabs certainly mocked the Biden administration's fatuous slogan "America Is Back."
"Back to what?" is a fair question. The Alaska Ambush nixes any Washington Post tout of a moral high ground, "soft power" Democratic diplomacy that deserves broad bipartisan support. The correct answer: The incident reveals a simultaneously naive and just-plain-dangerous return to Beltway foreign policy conventionalism.
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Zim.
Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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