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Taiwan in the age of Neo-McCarthyism

By Drago Bosnic | April 10, 2023

McCarthyism, otherwise known as the so-called (Second) “Red Scare”, is officially defined as “the repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of alleged communist and socialist influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s”. The policy was spearheaded by a Republican US Senator Joseph McCarthy, but while he was the most prominent proponent of this internal (and foreign) policy approach, he most certainly wasn’t the only one. And although the term McCarthyism is largely considered obsolete and/or outdated nowadays, as the role of one individual in such a massive nationwide policy framework is obviously overstated, it stuck and now even includes additional definitions and changes.

The McCarthyism of our age can certainly be dubbed Neo-McCarthyism, as it includes more than just the ideological rejection of non-Western ideas and is now targeting anything remotely connected to countries such as China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, etc. This is especially true when it comes to Beijing, which Neo-McCarthyists see as the “source of all evil”, turning their emotional reaction into disastrous policies that make the geopolitical situation a lot worse.

One particularly obvious example of this is Taiwan, China’s breakaway island province currently under US patronage. However, Beijing is actively pushing back against threats from the US and its numerous vassals and satellite states in the region, despite Washington DC’s constant attempts of a crawling invasion so as to undermine China’s national interests and security in seas surrounding the country.

On April 5, Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen made a stopover visit to Los Angeles after a tour to Latin America to visit Guatemala and Belize, its only remaining official allies in an attempt to stop the repeat of the recent episode when Honduras finally cut ties with Taipei and opted for Beijing instead. Tsai also met with senior security officials on Tuesday to discuss the “regional situation” ahead of her meeting with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California, which China had once again warned against.

“China is strongly opposed to the US arranging for Tsai Ing-wen to transit through its territory, and is strongly opposed to the meeting between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the third-ranking US official, and Tsai Ing-wen,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated, adding: “It seriously violates the One-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques, and seriously undermines China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

And yet, Taipei enjoys strong bipartisan support in the US, one of the very few unifying factors in Congress as Washington DC increasingly sees China as its primary adversary. McCarthy had originally even planned to visit Taiwan himself, but has opted instead to meet Tsai in the US. Some analysts saw this as sort of a “compromise” that wouldn’t be seen as escalatory as a direct visit to Taipei. However, McCarthy’s comments on a future visit to Taiwan effectively invalidated this view, while China slammed it as yet another form of US meddling in its internal affairs.

The behind-closed-doors meeting makes McCarthy the highest-ranking US official to have met a Taiwanese president on US soil since 1979 when America officially established diplomatic relations with China, effectively recognizing Beijing’s “One-China policy”. China’s strong reaction to the meeting is certainly expected, as it has repeatedly warned against such high-profile visits, stressing that they aren’t just against international law, but are also deeply destabilizing and harmful to Beijing’s national interests in the Asia-Pacific.

However, while the US officially doesn’t maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, it de facto does. Worse yet, Washington DC has been actively arming Taipei for decades and has even recently escalated this with promised deliveries of advanced weapons, including SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems and anti-ship missiles, obviously aimed against China’s potential amphibious combined arms operation to restore its full sovereignty.

For his part, Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, has been outspoken in his criticism of China. True to his last name, in December he stated that “the greatest threat to the United States is the Chinese Communist Party”. Considering the fact that he’s the third highest ranking US official and second in line for the US presidency, such statements are a borderline declaration of war, to say nothing of McCarthy’s continued support for additional arms sales to Taipei.

As previously mentioned, he also reiterated the strong possibility of visiting Taipei and stressed the need for arming China’s breakaway island province by saying: “I don’t have any current plans, but that doesn’t mean I will not go… …Based on our conversations, it’s clear that several actions are necessary. First, we must continue the arms sales to Taiwan and make sure such sales reach Taiwan on a very timely basis. Second, we must strengthen our economic cooperation, particularly with trade and technology. Third, we must continue to promote our shared values on the world stage.”

Strangely enough, while insisting on further arms deliveries, McCarthy also stated that “tensions in this world are at their highest point since the end of the Cold War, as authoritarian leaders seek to use violence and fear to provoke needless conflict”. This is an obvious reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese colleague Xi Jinping, who recently held a historic meeting in Moscow, something the US wasn’t too happy about, which somewhat explains Washington DC’s frustrations.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

April 10, 2023 - Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | ,

4 Comments »

  1. Drago Bosnic hits the nail on the head again with his analysis of the new McCarthyism. But it isn’t really new. It has been cloaked in newspeak for decades under the guise of defending democracy. When in fact the FBI’s Cointelpro Division V has been operating for decades as the “New American Gestapo”. I was a victim of it when I joined Lyndon LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees, full-time, in 1975. For almost 20 years the FBI officially kept an open file on my activities with the LaRouche organization. I say officially because unofficially the FBI spies on Americans every day as exposes have recently proven. The MICIMATT operates unofficially as in the case of Taiwan.

    Taiwan is officially recognized as China. Unofficially Taiwan is America’s next proxy under a corrupt US government that defends the rules-based unipolar world order against “autocrat” Xi Jinping. But truth has a way of demonstrating itself even in the eyes of those with closed minds. And the truth is, Xi Jinping has been behaving more like President George Washington than President George W. Bush.

    The way out of this American-made quandary is for the American people to stand up and demonstrate their support for alternative measures of the Schiller Institute and Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Wife of one of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred years. The LaRouches were responsible for presenting the alternative to Margaret Thatcher’s EU/Maastrich/Lisbon treaty stranglehold on Western Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. When the Berlin Wall fell, the LaRouche’s “PRODUCTIVE TRIANGLE” Vienna-Berlin-Paris alternative would have spurred East-West trade and exchange of capital goods from the West for raw materials from the East. It was nearly adopted but for the blackmail of Helmut Schmidt by Thatcher, Bush, and Mitterand.

    But the LaRouche’s weren’t done. After the USSR collapsed in 1991, the LaRouche’s expanded the productive triangle to include all of Eastern Europe. This became known as the EUROPEAN LAND BRIDGE, designed by Lyndon LaRouche to connect all of Eastern Europe with Western Europe with high-speed mag-lev rail systems that would include new corridors of economic development 50 miles on either side of the new rail line.

    By 1993, LaRouche’s European Landbridge was expanded to include development of every undeveloped region on the planet. The LaRouche’s WORLD LAND BRIDGE emerged as a force in the world for the benefit of all the world’s civilizations.

    Two decades later….The “Eurasian Landbridge” or New Silk Road….a vision first proposed and drafted by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche to fully develop the entirety of the Eurasian continent — is now the active, official policy of the government of China, supported by many nations globally. On September 7, 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Kazakhstan where he first announced the adoption of a policy he called the “New Silk Road Economic Belt” stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea.

    Taking from Lyndon LaRouche’s own words Xi spoke about forging closer economic ties, deepening cooperation and expanding development in the Euro-Asia region. “We should take an innovative approach and jointly build an ’economic belt’ along the Silk Road. This will be a great undertaking benefiting the people of all countries along the routes. The Belt and Road has 150 nations cooperating on developing the interiors of their respective countries by building infrastructure projects involving water, power, and high-speed mag-lev systems. These developments have already increased the agro-industrial potential of each nation exposed to the BRI and they are setting into motion a total transformation of the African and Eurasian Continents. China will continue to improve the economic conditions of life on this planet, by increasing the standard of living per capita and per sq km, quantitatively and qualitatively with scientific and technological progress for every nation that wants real freedom from want.

    Lyndon and Helga-Zepp LaRouche have stated many times that civilization is at a crossroads. Either mankind chooses peace through economic development or there will be war, famine, and disease brought on by a new dark age.
    So, anyone who cares about his fellow man should become literate on the subject herein and get excited as I am, that there is a beautiful alternative to war and Kevin’s-not so new-McCarthyism.

    Liked by 1 person

    Comment by Thomas Lee Simpson | April 10, 2023 | Reply

    • In your penultimate paragraph, I wish you had properly ended the Xi quotation beginning “We should take….” How many of those (5, I count) sentences are his and how many explicatory by you? In any event, interesting and hope-inducing thoughts!

      Like

      Comment by roberthstiver | April 10, 2023 | Reply

      • “We should take an innovative approach and jointly build an ’economic belt’ along the Silk Road. This will be a great undertaking benefiting the people of all countries along the routes”.<Xi's quote. Everything else I wrote is from past memories I have of the organizing I was involved in building support for the work LaRouche was doing. I, along with many others in the LaRouche association, was busy giving presentations to groups of supporters on the IDB, International Development Bank, proposal LaRouche made to NAM, the Non-Aligned Movement. It was adopted by the NAM in 1975 in Columbo, Sri Lanka.

        Helga Zepp-LaRouche visited China many times over the course of two decades to garner support behind her husband's World Land-Bridge/New Silk Road concept. It was finally adopted by Xi Jinping in 2013. LaRouche demonstrated the power of ideas, again and again, during his lifetime. Ideas such as those that shaped what is occurring now in terms of the development of the underdeveloped world. That vision is now driving what is occurring on the Eurasian continent, in Africa and Ibero America. The One Belt One Road New Silk Road is paramount to the future progress of more than half the world's population populating the Global South.

        The web is filled with reports on the progress the BRI is having since it began ten years ago. Even its detractors in the US and UK admit the BRI is impacting many nations (144) in the world. Especially when compared to the dismal economic stagnation in the West. With rising inflation brought on by London and Wall Street's failed 40-year strategy of disinvestment out of capital-intensive, energy-intensive, agro-industrial commodity production in favor of speculation in the derivatives market which has grown in financial turnover to 2 quadrillions annually. While the United States has become the consumer of last resort.

        A real recovery is still possible if measures along the lines of LaRouche's Four Laws are acted in the US Congress. Democrats have a better handle on the matter when it comes to dealing with Wall St. For instance Democrats took action after the 2008 banking debacle to restore Glass-Steagall regulation. Marcie Kaptur D-OH introduced Glass-Steagall legislation to restore two-tier banking that would have flushed out the derivates from the commercial banking system altogether. But it was prevented from being made law thanks to Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, two of Wall Street's most important Senators on the Senate Finance Committee. And Barney Frank in the House. Democrat legislators again introduced Glass-Steagall legislation in 2019. and recently Maria Cantwell D-WA queried Janet Yellen on the return of Glass-Steagall as a solution to the current systemic banking crash fully underway as I write this. Glass-Steagall reorganization and banking separation is the only way the US will have any chance of surviving the economic breakdown crisis that is just in front of us now. We need a Credit system to replace the crashing Monetary system. We need a new Hamiltonian National Bank for lending long term. And we need the government to provide direct credit in economic infrastructure projects on the level of the TVA. New Water systems, nuclear power systems, and mag-lev high-speed transportation systems. Together with investment in 21st century science, state of the art healthcare, and universal classical education. The fourth of LaRouche's Four Laws involves planning for the future. Thus we need a crash commercial fusion program, manned Moon-Mars space exploration and other science drivers that will continue scientific excellence in everything we do from here on out. Generations from now, people will look back on this period as a dark moment in man's history, but one in which a relatively few individuals who expressed new ideas representing a new Renaissance were able to make themselves heard in order to save civilization from impending doom.

        Liked by 1 person

        Comment by Thomas Lee Simpson | April 10, 2023 | Reply

  2. I “Like” DB immediately at my email site, knowing that any posting will confirm that “Like,” and then enjoy his superlative analyses and reporting here at AN. He gets “it” as do few others! … this posting is typically superlative.

    Effing idiotic — not to mention fraught with danger to all life forms — US foreign policy. What shall we do…? Perhaps the answer is “Go China!” I could go for that….

    Like

    Comment by roberthstiver | April 10, 2023 | Reply


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