[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
World News See other World News Articles Title: The Western Gaze: Look Toward the East As the leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth meet in a city that was once the center of resistance to Western dominance of the region, it is being pointedly ignored in Washington, DC, to the extent such an extraordinary event can be ignored. Instead, the petty complaints of partisan hacks and wide-eyed conspiracy theorists have taken center stage. A discredited lawyer whose lies no one takes seriously, and yet whose every word is pored over as if it were a revelation from on high, is treated as a credible source, while the ruler of a desperately poor country furiously signaling he wants to chart a new course is ignored, ridiculed, and threatened. The President is withdrawing from Afghanistan and getting the heck out of Syria, having defeated ISIS and saved the last bastion of Christianity from being enslaved by the Islamic “Caliphate.” And so what is the media focusing on? The fake regime change operation in Venezuela, which is – like so much of what the President says and does – lots of smoke and mirrors and very little action. What difference does it make to the people of the United States who rules that wreck of a country? How does it advance our interests by one iota if some guy named Juan declares himself “President,” or if the office goes to some socialist hack with a fat Swiss Bank account and a penchant for jailing his opponents? What is happening on the other side of the world will determine the fate of nations well beyond the next news cycle: indeed, what we are witnessing in Korea is the collapse of the Cold War apparatus designed to catapult us into war at the slightest provocation. In its place we are seeing the rise of a tripartite system of relatively free trade, cultural exchange, and certainly a new day for North Korea. When Trump took office, missiles were flying, nukes were being tested, and the rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang was hot and heavy. Halfway through his first term, the Koreans are singing his praises and he’s holding hands with Kim Jong-un, the fearsome despot, as they stroll along the pathway to peace. Stuck in the ritualized belligerence of the Cold War era, this kind of progress was unthinkable during the Bush and Obama administrations for the simple reason that both were ruled by dogmatism; that is, by an unthinking routinism. Why, you can’t do that! And why not? Well, it’s never been done, and furthermore no one with the right credentials has ever proposed or endorsed it. Our President doesn’t give a hoot about credentials: he just wants results. The high court of the credentialed has been pursuing the same policy of cold confrontation, empty threats, and starvation tactics for decades. That policy has brought us to the brink of war on several occasions. It has cost us many millions to keep up the containment, maintained and driven by a momentum all its own. The media and the politicians are the threat inflators, and the resulting hysteria leads to a permanently expanding war machine, the biggest and most expensive in the world. The Western gaze has been fixed on the Middle East and Europe for so long that policy makers are jolted by this turn toward Asia and don’t know quite how to deal with it. Yet if you think about it it’s clear where we need to direct our attention: China has a population of nearly one and a half billion. Japan has the industrial power of a nation ten times its size. South Korea went from being a blood-soaked ruin to an economic powerhouse – a potential inherent in its neighbor to the north, if only the West will get out of the way. There is money to be made, and Trump, with his entrepreneurial instinct, smells it and is pursuing it with all the alacrity of one of his bigtime real estate deals. Kim Jong-un, too, sees opportunity here, and is eager to close the deal. And the deal is this: North Korea gives up its nuclear program, forges more links, both physical and personal, to the South. In return, the sanctions are dropped, the state of war that still exists between the US and the North is abolished, and all US soldiers are withdrawn from the peninsula. The question of reunification is bound to come up: a referendum should settle the matter. That the summit is being held in Vietnam – another post-Communist country seeking rapprochement with the United States – underscores how Eastasia is changing, presenting the US with both challenges and opportunity. The future lies in the East: our President, with his great foresight and entrepreneurial insight, recognizes this. May the Hanoi Summit bring both leaders closer to their goal. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
|
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
|
||