Hillary's Watergate?

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted: 10/31/2016

http://buchanan.org/blog/hillarys-watergate-125935

After posting Friday’s column, “A Presidency from Hell,” about the investigations a President Hillary Clinton would face, by afternoon it was clear I had understated the gravity of the situation.

Networks exploded with news that FBI Director James Comey had informed Congress he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email scandal, which he had said in July had been concluded.

“Bombshell” declared Carl Bernstein. The stock market tumbled. “October surprise!” came the cry.

The only explanation, it seemed, was that the FBI had uncovered new information that could lead to a possible indictment of the former secretary of state, who by then could be the president of the United States.

By Sunday, we knew the source of the eruption.

Huma Abedin, Clinton’s top aide, sent thousands of emails to the private laptop she shared with husband Anthony Weiner, a.k.a. Carlos Danger, who is under FBI investigation for allegedly sexting with a 15-year-old girl.

The Weiner-Abedin laptop contains 650,000 emails.

The FBI has not yet reviewed Abedin’s emails, and they could turn out to be duplicates of those the FBI has already seen, benign, or not relevant to the investigation of Clinton.

But it does appear that Abedin misled the FBI when she told them all communications devices containing State Department work product were turned over to State when she departed in 2013.

Clinton, understandably, was stunned and outraged by Comey’s letter. For it casts a cloud of suspicion over her candidacy by raising the possibility that the FBI director could reverse his decision of July, and recommend her prosecution.

By Monday, Oct. 31, new problems had arisen, some potentially crippling or possibly lethal to a Clinton presidency.

Reporters have unearthed a near-mutiny inside the FBI over the decision to shut down the investigation of the Clinton email scandal and Comey’s recommendation of no prosecution.

Andrew McCabe, No. 2 at the FBI, has come under anonymous fire from inside the bureau as one of those most reluctant to pursue aggressively any investigations of the Clintons.

McCabe’s wife, in a 2015 state senate race in Virginia, received $475,000 in PAC contributions from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend and major fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

After the Senate race that McCabe’s wife lost, he was promoted from No. 3 at the FBI to No. 2, where he has far more influence over decisions to investigate and recommend prosecution.

Justice Department higher-ups under Attorney General Loretta Lynch apparently disagreed with Comey notifying Congress, and the nation, to new developments in the email scandal. Yet Comey had given his word to Congress that he would do so.

In the Southern District of New York, which has jurisdiction over the Weiner sexting investigation, FBI agents have reportedly been blocked from opening an investigation into charges of corruption in the Clinton Foundation.

This follows revelations that corporate chiefs and foreign rulers and regimes, hit up for contributions to the Clinton Foundation, were then urged by an ex-Clinton aide to provide six-figure speaking fees for Bill Clinton.

This follows reports the Clinton Foundation took contributions for victims of natural disasters, and awarded multimillion-dollar contracts to contributors to do the work.

Still unanswered is what Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lynch discussed during that 30-minute meeting on the Phoenix tarmac, prior to the FBI and Justice Department decision not to indict Hillary Clinton.

The stench of corruption is reaching Bhopal dimensions.

What appears about to happen seems inevitable and predictable.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, the email scandal, the pay-for-play scandal involving the Clinton Foundation, “Bill Clinton, Inc.,” the truthfulness of her testimony, and reports of Clinton-paid dirty tricksters engaging in brownshirt tactics at Trump rallies, are all going to be investigated more thoroughly by the FBI.

And if Clinton is president, there is no way her Justice Department can investigate the Clinton scandals, any more than this city in the early 1970s would entrust an investigation into Watergate to the Nixon Justice Department.

Clinton, understandably, was stunned and outraged by Comey’s letter. For it casts a cloud of suspicion over her candidacy by raising the possibility that the FBI director could reverse his decision of July, and recommend her prosecution.

By Monday, Oct. 31, new problems had arisen, some potentially crippling or possibly lethal to a Clinton presidency.

Reporters have unearthed a near-mutiny inside the FBI over the decision to shut down the investigation of the Clinton email scandal and Comey’s recommendation of no prosecution.

Andrew McCabe, No. 2 at the FBI, has come under anonymous fire from inside the bureau as one of those most reluctant to pursue aggressively any investigations of the Clintons.

McCabe’s wife, in a 2015 state senate race in Virginia, received $475,000 in PAC contributions from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend and major fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

After the Senate race that McCabe’s wife lost, he was promoted from No. 3 at the FBI to No. 2, where he has far more influence over decisions to investigate and recommend prosecution.

Justice Department higher-ups under Attorney General Loretta Lynch apparently disagreed with Comey notifying Congress, and the nation, to new developments in the email scandal. Yet Comey had given his word to Congress that he would do so.

In the Southern District of New York, which has jurisdiction over the Weiner sexting investigation, FBI agents have reportedly been blocked from opening an investigation into charges of corruption in the Clinton Foundation.

This follows revelations that corporate chiefs and foreign rulers and regimes, hit up for contributions to the Clinton Foundation, were then urged by an ex-Clinton aide to provide six-figure speaking fees for Bill Clinton.

This follows reports the Clinton Foundation took contributions for victims of natural disasters, and awarded multimillion-dollar contracts to contributors to do the work.

Still unanswered is what Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lynch discussed during that 30-minute meeting on the Phoenix tarmac, prior to the FBI and Justice Department decision not to indict Hillary Clinton.

The stench of corruption is reaching Bhopal dimensions.

What appears about to happen seems inevitable and predictable.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, the email scandal, the pay-for-play scandal involving the Clinton Foundation, “Bill Clinton, Inc.,” the truthfulness of her testimony, and reports of Clinton-paid dirty tricksters engaging in brownshirt tactics at Trump rallies, are all going to be investigated more thoroughly by the FBI.

And if Clinton is president, there is no way her Justice Department can investigate the Clinton scandals, any more than this city in the early 1970s would entrust an investigation into Watergate to the Nixon Justice Department.

If Clinton wins this election, and Republicans hold onto one or both houses of Congress, investigations of the Clinton scandals will start soon after her inaugural and will go on for years. And the clamor for a special prosecutor, who will, as Archibald Cox did with Nixon, build a huge staff and spend years investigating, will become irresistible.

Realizing that this is the near-certain fate and future of any Hillary Clinton presidency, and would be disastrous for the country, Sunday night, Doug Schoen, who worked for President Clinton for six years, said he has changed his mind and will not be voting for Hillary.

Donald Trump says this is worse than Watergate. As of now, it is only potentially so.

But if Hillary Clinton, this distrusted and disbelieved woman, does take the oath of office on Jan. 20, there is a real possibility that, like Nixon, down the road a year or two, she could be forced from office.

Do we really want to go through this again?

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http://buchanan.org/blog/hath-trump-wrought-125976

What Hath Trump Wrought

Patrick J. Buchanan

“If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump.

Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics.

Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation’s ruling class from which it may not soon recover.

Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee.

Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country.

Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate.

Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now.

How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected?

How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees?

Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs.

The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility.

Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank.

But it is the national establishment that has suffered most.

The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak.

Consider the litany of horrors it has charged Trump with.

He said John McCain was no hero, that some Mexican illegals are “rapists.” He mocked a handicapped reporter. He called some women “pigs.” He wants a temporary ban to Muslim immigration. He fought with a Gold Star mother and father. He once engaged in “fat-shaming” a Miss Universe, calling her “Miss Piggy,” and telling her to stay out of Burger King. He allegedly made crude advances on a dozen women and starred in the “Access Hollywood” tape with Billy Bush.

While such “gaffes” are normally fatal for candidates, Trump’s followers stood by him through them all.

Why? asks an alarmed establishment. Why, in spite of all this, did Trump’s support endure? Why did the American people not react as they once would have? Why do these accusations not have the bite they once did?

Answer. We are another country now, an us-or-them country.

Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power.

Trump’s followers see an American Spring as crucial, and they are not going to let past boorish behavior cause them to abandon the last best chance to preserve the country they grew up in.

These are the Middle American Radicals, the MARs of whom my late friend Sam Francis wrote.

They recoil from the future the elites have mapped out for them and, realizing the stakes, will overlook the faults and failings of a candidate who holds out the real promise of avoiding that future.

They believe Trump alone will secure the borders and rid us of a trade regime that has led to the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. They believe Trump is the best hope for keeping us out of the wars the Beltway think tanks are already planning for the sons of the “deplorables” to fight.

Moreover, they see the establishment as the quintessence of hypocrisy. Trump is instructed to stop using such toxic phrases as “America First” and “Make America Great Again” by elites who think 55 million abortions since Roe is a milestone of moral progress.

And what do they have in common with a woman who thinks partial-birth abortion, which her predecessor in the Senate, Pat Moynihan, called “infanticide,” is among the cherished “reproductive rights” of women?

While a Trump victory would create the possibility of a coalition of conservatives, populists, patriots and nationalists governing America, should he lose, America’s future appears disunited and grim.

But, would the followers of Donald Trump, whom Hillary Clinton has called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots,” to the cheers of her media retainers, unite behind her should she win?

No. Win or lose, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said at the Democratic Convention of 1980, “The work goes on, the cause endures.”

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http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-doctrine-america-first-126011

A Trump Doctrine 'America First'

11-14-16

Patrick J. Buchanan

However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border.

Yet those views are hemlock to the GOP foreign policy elite and the liberal Democratic interventionists of the Acela Corridor.

Trump promised an “America First” foreign policy rooted in the national interest, not in nostalgia. The neocons insist that every Cold War and post-Cold War commitment be maintained, in perpetuity.

On Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Trump said: “You know, we’ve been fighting this war for 15 years. … We’ve spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, $6 trillion — we could have rebuilt our country twice. And you look at our roads and our bridges and our tunnels … and our airports are … obsolete.”

Yet the War Party has not had enough of war, not nearly.

They want to confront Vladimir Putin, somewhere, anywhere. They want to send U.S. troops to the eastern Baltic. They want to send weapons to Kiev to fight Russia in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.

They want to establish a no-fly zone and shoot down Syrian and Russian planes that violate it, acts of war Congress never authorized.

They want to trash the Iran nuclear deal, though all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies told us, with high confidence, in 2007 and 2011, Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.

Other hardliners want to face down Beijing over its claims to the reefs and rocks of the South China Sea, though our Manila ally is talking of tightening ties to China and kicking us out of Subic Bay.

In none of these places is there a U.S. vital interest so imperiled as to justify the kind of war the War Party would risk.

Trump has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.

After World War II, we awoke to find our wartime ally, Stalin, had emerged as a greater enemy than Germany or Japan. Stalin’s empire stretched from the Elbe to the Pacific.

In 1949, suddenly, he had the atom bomb, and China, the most populous nation on earth, had fallen to the armies of Mao Zedong.

As our situation was new, Truman acted anew. He adopted a George Kennan policy of containment of the world Communist empire, the Truman Doctrine, and sent an army to prevent South Korea from being overrun.

At the end of the Cold War, however, with the Soviet Empire history and the Soviet Union having disintegrated, George H.W. Bush launched his nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr. His son, George W., invaded Iraq and preached a global crusade for democracy “to end tyranny in our world."

A policy born of hubris.

Result: the Mideast disaster Trump described to Lesley Stahl, and constant confrontations with Russia caused by pushing our NATO alliance right up to and inside what had been Putin’s country.

How did we expect Russian patriots to react?

The opportunity is at hand for Trump to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit, and to the vital interests of the United States.

What should Trump say?

“As our Cold War presidents from Truman to Reagan avoided World War III, I intend to avert Cold War II. We do not regard Russia or the Russian people as enemies of the United States, and we will work with President Putin to ease the tensions that have arisen between us.

“For our part, NATO expansion is over, and U.S. forces will not be deployed in any former republic of the Soviet Union.

“While Article 5 of NATO imposes an obligation to regard an attack upon any one of 28 nations as an attack on us all, in our Constitution, Congress, not some treaty dating back to before most Americans were even born, decides whether we go to war.

“The compulsive interventionism of recent decades is history. How nations govern themselves is their own business. While, as JFK said, we prefer democracies and republics to autocrats and dictators, we will base our attitude toward other nations upon their attitude toward us.

“No other nation’s internal affairs are a vital interest of ours.

“Europeans have to be awakened to reality. We are not going to be forever committed to fighting their wars. They are going to have to defend themselves, and that transition begins now.

“In Syria and Iraq, our enemies are al-Qaida and ISIS. We have no intention of bringing down the Assad regime, as that would open the door to Islamic terrorists. We have learned from Iraq and Libya.”

Then Trump should move expeditiously to lay out and fix the broad outlines of his foreign policy, which entails rebuilding our military while beginning the cancellation of war guarantees that have no connection to U.S. vital interests. We cannot continue to bankrupt ourselves to fight other countries’ wars or pay other countries’ bills.

The ideal time for such a declaration, a Trump Doctrine, is when the president-elect presents his secretaries of state and defense.

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http://buchanan.org/blog/obamas-world-utopian-myth-126048

Is Obama's World A Utopian Myth?

Patrick J. Buchanan

Speaking in Greece on his valedictory trip to Europe as president, Barack Obama struck a familiar theme: “(W)e are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude form of nationalism, or ethnic identity, or tribalism that is built around an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ …

“(T)he future of humanity and the future of the world is going to be defined by what we have in common, as opposed to those things that separate us and ultimately lead us into conflict.”

That the world’s great celebrant of “diversity” envisions an even more multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial America and Europe is not news. This dream has animated his presidency.

But in this day of Brexit and president-elect Donald Trump new questions arise. Is Obama’s vision a utopian myth? Have leaders like him and Angela Merkel lost touch with reality? Are not they the ones who belong to yesterday, not tomorrow?

“Crude nationalism,” as Obama said, did mark that “bloodiest” of centuries, the 20th. But nationalism has also proven to be among mankind’s most powerful, beneficial and enduring forces.

You cannot wish it away. To do that is to deny history, human nature and the transparent evidence of one’s own eyes.

A sense of nationhood — “I am not a Virginian, but an American,” said Patrick Henry — ignited our revolution.

Nationalism tore apart the “evil empire” of Ronald Reagan’s depiction, liberating Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians, and breaking apart the Soviet Union into 15 nations.

Was that so terrible for mankind?

Nationalism brought down the Berlin Wall and led to reunification of the German people after 45 years of separation and Cold War.

President George H.W. Bush may have railed against “suicidal nationalism” in Kiev in 1991. But Ukrainians ignored him and voted to secede. Now the Russified minorities of the southeast and the Crimea wish to secede from Ukraine and rejoin the Mother Country.

This is the way of the world.

Out of the carcass of Yugoslavia came Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo. As nationalism called into existence Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, it impelled South Ossetians and Abkhazians to secede from Georgia.

Was it not a sense of peoplehood, of nationhood, that drove the Jєωs to create Israel in 1948, which today insists that it be recognized as “a Jєωιѕн State”?

All over the world, regimes are marshaling the mighty force of ethnonationalism to strengthen and sustain themselves.

With economic troubles looming, Xi Jinping is stirring up Chinese nationalism by territorial disputes with neighbors — to hold together a people who have ceased to believe in the secularist faith of Marxism-Leninism.

With Communism dead, Vladimir Putin invokes the greatness and glory of the Russian past and seeks to revive the Orthodox faith.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invokes nationalism, Attaturk, the Ottoman Empire, and the Islamic faith of his people, against the Kurds, who dream of a new nation carved out of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

“So my vision … may not always win the day in the short run,” Obama said in Greece, “but I am confident it will win the day in the long run. Because societies which are able to unify ourselves around values and ideals and character and how we treat each other, and cooperation and innovation, ultimately are going to be more successful than societies that don’t.”

What is wrong with this statement?

It is a utilitarian argument that does not touch the heart. It sounds like a commune, a cooperative, a corporation, as much as it does a country. Moreover, not only most of the world, but even the American people seem to be moving the other way.

Indeed, what values and ideals do we Americans hold in common when Obama spoke in Germany of “darker forces” opposing his trade policies, and Hillary Clinton calls Trump supporters “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic … bigots.”

Did not the Democrats just run “an us and a them” campaign?

Less and less do we Americans seem to be one country and one people. More and more do we seem to be separating along religious, racial, cultural, political, ideological, social and economic lines.

If a more multicultural, multi-ethnic America produces greater unity and comity, why have American politics become so poisonous?

Trump’s victory is due in part to his stand for securing the U.S. border against foreigners walking in. Merkel is in trouble in Germany because she brought in almost a million Muslim refugees from Syria.

The nationalist parties that have arisen across Europe are propelled by hostility to more immigration from the Third World.

Outside the cosmopolitan elites of Europe and North America, where in the West is the enthusiasm Obama detects for a greater diversity of races, tribes, religions, cultures and beliefs?

“Who owns the future?” is ever the question.

In 2008, Obama talked of Middle Pennsylvanians as poor losers clinging to their bibles, bigotries and guns as they passed from the scene.

Yet, now, it’s looking like it may be Obama’s world headed for the proverbial ash heap of history.

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http://buchanan.org/blog/populist-nationalist-tide-rolls-126086

Populist-Nationalist Tide Rolls on

11-29-16

Patrick J. Buchanan

Now that the British have voted to secede from the European Union and America has chosen a president who has never before held public office, the French appear to be following suit.

In Sunday’s runoff to choose a candidate to face Marine Le Pen of the National Front in next spring’s presidential election, the center-right Republicans chose Francois Fillon in a landslide.

While Fillon sees Margaret Thatcher as a role model in fiscal policy, he is a socially conservative Catholic who supports family values, wants to confront Islamist extremism, control immigration, restore France’s historic identity and end sanctions on Russia.

“Russia poses no threat to the West,” says Fillon. But if not, the question arises, why NATO? Why are U.S. troops in Europe?

As Le Pen is favored to win the first round of the presidential election and Fillon the second in May, closer Paris-Putin ties seem certain. Europeans themselves are pulling Russia back into Europe, and separating from the Americans.

Next Sunday, Italy holds a referendum on constitutional reforms backed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. If the referendum, trailing in the polls, fails, says Renzi, he will resign.

Opposing Renzi is the secessionist Northern League, the Five Star Movement of former comedian Beppe Grillo, and the Forza Italia of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a pal of Putin’s.

“Up to eight of Italy’s troubled banks risk failure,” if Renzi’s government falls, says the Financial Times. One week from today, the front pages of the Western press could be splashing the newest crisis of the EU.

In Holland, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders, on trial for hate speech for urging fewer Moroccan immigrants, is running first or close to it in polls for the national election next March.

Meanwhile, the door to the EU appears to be closing for Muslim Turkey, as the European Parliament voted to end accession talks with Ankara and its autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In welcoming Muslim immigrants, Germany’s Angela Merkel no longer speaks for Europe, even as she is about to lose her greatest ally, Barack Obama.

Not only Europe but the whole world President-elect Trump is about to inherit seems in turmoil, with old regimes and parties losing their hold, and nationalist, populist and rightist forces rising.

Early this year, Brazil’s Senate voted to remove leftist President Dilma Rousseff. In September, her predecessor, popular ex-President Lula da Silva, was indicted in a corruption investigation. President Michel Temer, who, as vice president, succeeded Rousseff, is now under investigation for corruption. There is talk of impeaching him.

Venezuela, endowed with more oil than almost any country on earth, is now, thanks to the Castroism of Hugo Chavez and successor Nicolas Maduro, close to collapse and anarchy.

NATO’s Turkey and our Arab ally, Egypt, both ruled by repressive regimes, are less responsive to U.S. leadership.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye, her approval rating in single digits, is facing impeachment and prosecution for corruption.

Meanwhile, North Korea, under Kim Jong Un, continues to test nuclear warheads and missiles that can hit all of South Korea and Japan and reach all U.S. bases in East Asia and the Western Pacific.

The U.S. is obligated by treaty to defend South Korea, where we still have 28,500 troops, and Japan, as well as the Philippines, where new populist President Rodrigo Duterte, cursing the West, is pivoting toward Beijing. Malaysia and Australia are also moving closer to China, as they become ever more dependent on the China trade.

Responding to our moving NATO troops into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Putin has begun a buildup of nuclear-capable offensive and defensive missiles in Kaliningrad, its enclave between Poland and Lithuania.

Should we get into a confrontation with the Russians in the Eastern Baltic, how many of our NATO allies, some now openly pro-Putin, would stand beside us?

The point: Not only is the Cold War over, the post-Cold War is over. We are living in a changed and changing world. Regimes are falling. Old parties are dying, new parties rising. Old allegiances are fraying, and old allies drifting away.

The forces of nationalism and populism have been unleashed all over the West and all over the world. There is no going back.

Yet U.S. policy seems set in concrete by war guarantees and treaty commitments dating back to the time of Truman and Stalin and Ike and John Foster Dulles.

America emerged from the Cold War, a quarter century ago, as the sole superpower. Yet, it seems clear that we are not today so dominant a nation as we were in 1989 and 1991.

We have great rivals and adversaries. We are deeper in debt. We are more divided. We’ve fought wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen that availed us nothing. What we had, we kicked away.

America is at a plastic moment in history.

And America needs nothing so much as reflective thought about a quarter century of failures — and fresh thinking about her future.

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“painful” Trump’s birtherism has been to African-Americans. And Democrats and the media are pledging not to let it go, but to exploit Trump’s attempt to “delegitimize” Obama’s presidency.

I think that is one of the absolute DUMBEST things about the liberals, when they accuse someone of racism over such a non-racial issue. Are they just trying to distract us from the fact that.. HELLO! We have a right to know whether our president is ELIGIBLE to be president?

you know, those liberals, they really think most of us are a bunch of morons.

the ironic thing is that they are the ones who are operating without all oars in the water, which is why we see them sinking to the bottom

 :cheers:

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-calling-xi-jinping-126107

Is Trump Calling Out Xi Jinping?

Patrick J Buchanan

12-6-16

Like a bolt of lightning, that call of congratulations from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to President-elect Donald Trump illuminated the Asian landscape.

We can see clearly now the profit and loss statement from more than three decades of accommodating and appeasing China, since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their historic journey in 1972.

What are the gains and losses?

Soon after Nixon announced the trip in July 1971, our World War II ally, the Republic of China on Taiwan, was expelled from the UN, its permanent seat on the Security Council given to the People’s Republic of China’s Chairman Mao, a rival of Stalin’s in mass murder.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter recognized the regime in Beijing, cut ties to Taipei and terminated the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty of 1954. All over the world countries followed our lead, shut down Taiwan’s embassies, and expelled her diplomats. Our former allies have since been treated as global pariahs.

During the 1990s and into the new century, Republicans, acting on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, voted annually to grant Most Favored Nation trade status for China. They then voted to make it permanent and escort China into the WTO.

What did China get out of the new U.S. policy? Vast investment and $4 trillion in trade surpluses at America’s expense over 25 years.

From the backward country mired in the madness of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1972, China grew by double-digits yearly to become the foremost manufacturing nation on earth, and has used its immense earnings from trade to make itself a military power to rival the United States.

China now claims all the islands of the South China Sea, has begun converting reefs into military bases, targeted hundreds of missiles on Taiwan, claimed the Senkakus held by Japan, ordered U.S. warships out of the Taiwan Strait, brought down a U.S. EP-3 on Hainan island in 2001, and then demanded and got from Secretary of State Colin Powell an apology for violating Chinese airspace.

Beijing has manipulated her currency, demanded transfers of U.S. technology, and stolen much of what of U.S. did not cover.

For decades, China has declared a goal of driving the United States out beyond the second chain of islands off Asia, i.e., out of the Western Pacific and back to Guam, Hawaii and the West Coast.

During these same decades, some of us were asking insistently what we were getting in return.

Thus Trump’s phone call seemed the right signal to Beijing — while we recognize one China, we have millions of friends on Taiwan in whose future as a free people we retain an interest.

China bristled at Trump’s first communication between U.S. and Taiwanese leaders since 1979, with Beijing indicating that Trump’s failure to understand the Asian situation may explain the American’s gaffe.

Sunday, Vice President-elect Mike Pence assured us that nothing of significance should be read into the 15-minute phone call of congratulations.

Trump, however, was less polite and reassuring, giving Beijing the wet mitten across the face for its impertinence:

“Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea?”

Trump then answered his own question, “I don’t think so.”

According to The Washington Post, the phone call from Taiwan to Trump was no chance happening. It had been planned for weeks. And people in Trump’s inner circle are looking to closer ties to Taiwan and a tougher policy toward Beijing.

This suggests that Trump was aware there might be a sharp retort from Beijing, and that his tweets dismissing Chinese protests and doubling down on the Taiwan issue were both considered and deliberate.

Well, the fat is in the fire now.

Across Asia, every capital is waiting to see how Xi Jinping responds, for a matter of face would seem to be involved.

On the trade front, China is deeply vulnerable. U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods would cause a sudden massive loss of income to factories in China and a stampede out of the country to elsewhere in Asia by companies now producing in the Middle Kingdom.

On the other hand, without China using its economic leverage over North Korea, it is unlikely any sanctions the U.S. and its allies can impose will persuade Kim Jong Un to halt his nuclear weapons program.

China can choke North Korea to death. But China can also step back and let Pyongyang become a nuclear weapons state, though that could mean Seoul and Tokyo following suit, which would be intolerable to Beijing.

Before we go down this road, President-elect Trump and his foreign policy team ought to think through just where it leads — and where it might end.

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