According to U.S. President Joe Biden’s 48-page national security strategy document, there is no moral ground for cooperation in today's or tomorrow’s world between China and the United States. Even mentioning “cooperation” and ‘’Russia’’ in the same sentence is totally out of the question, if not high treason, and the Biden administration is putting its money where its mouth is.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce published new export regulations that will make U.S. tech company employees sending Christmas cards to Chinese tech friends and acquaintances a punishable offense. This is not an exaggeration. Reviving former U.S. President Donald Trump's sanctions, the Biden team put into effect what they call the “foreign direct product rule.” Under this rule, if you send a Barbie doll or toy fire engine embedded with a chip that has “hardware or software with a supply chain that contains American technology,” you may go to jail. Trump implemented a similar ban to prevent the Chinese technology group Huawei from becoming what it is today. Did it work? Ask the millions of users enjoying Huawei servers, routers, switches, data center facilities, GSM centers and optical transmission solutions. Of course, you could also speak to the many Huawei cellphone users. No, it did not work. Quite the contrary, Trump’s sanctions pushed the Chinese technicians and CTOs to create their own technologies. They are also very good at what is called reverse engineering! (Did you see their foldable Flip P50 Pocket? But let’s stay on the topic of Biden’s national strategy document!)
Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan says China is technologically far behind in areas like advanced logic and memory chips, and the U.S. wants to keep it that way. On nearly every page of that national security strategy document, the author (probably Sullivan himself) mentions China as the primary competitor of the U.S. When it comes to each issue, the Biden administration wants us to be prepared for a major “competition.” But the way they describe this upcoming competition across many areas should really be called a "war." First of all, the document says that China is not a democratic country, and non-democratic countries always put new technologies to military use in order to suppress people's democratic rights, invade their neighbors and redraw borders by force. The U.S. believes the risk of conflict between major powers is increasing which, in turn, renders global cooperation on the shared interests of the U.S. allies and partners “existentially important.” When you finish reading the document, you stop wondering why the U.S. and its European allies did not skillfully manage the growing risk of the invasion they claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin was preparing, and instead, they simply egged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on. And they still continue to do so. No one, not even French President Emmanuel Macron, the author of the Minsk agreements between Russia and Ukraine, tells Zelenskyy that the only way to save Ukrainians from being killed on their way to school by Putin’s ruthless cruise missiles is to meet Putin at a negotiation table.
This strategy document aims to make us believe that only the U.S. can strengthen international institutions and make the "foundational principles of self-determination, territorial integrity and political independence respected." Yet not only in the recent referenda in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, but also the voting in 2014 under European Union observation, the ethnic Russians in those areas tried to determine their future. Instead of provoking Putin into launching this savage occupation and bombardment of civilians, the U.S. and its partners in Europe could use the Minsk agreements – which sought to end the Donbass war fought between armed Russian separatist groups and the Armed Forces of Ukraine – to lead the way to a successful mediation by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format.
But no! Instead of pushing the Ukrainian leadership back to the Minsk Protocol, the whole Western world (or in the language of the strategy document, the U.S. and those who believe in a rules-based international system) tried to convince Zelenskyy and his colleagues that Russia's "brutal war of aggression against Ukraine” could be defeated by a handful of donated missiles and bags full of U.S. dollars and EU euros. Russia's mighty diplomacy, on the other hand, was unable to manage the situation as expected when faced with a country vying for a place in world leadership. Perhaps those generals who believed that a Ukrainian invasion of Russia was imminent were successful in putting Russian diplomacy on the back foot.
But after reading the strategy document, you know why the U.S. side was so ready to exhaust any diplomatic efforts that France and Germany were willing to exercise. The document is based on the spirit of the words former President George W. Bush said at the joint session of U.S. Congress in 2001: “Every nation now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” But, to be fair, we have to remind ourselves that Biden doesn’t believe that “all governments and societies must be remade in America’s image.” How generous he is!
Yet, the document says, “The United States will not allow Russia, or any power, to achieve its objectives through using or threatening to use nuclear weapons.” The document doesn’t say anything about how that “not allowing” is going to work.
Since 1986 when the Goldwater-Nichols Act made it mandatory, the U.S. national security strategy has always been a perfunctory document detailing national security concerns and how the president is going to deal with them. Bush used it as justification for the invasion of Iraq. For Obama, it was used to call to eliminate nuclear weapons.
It was Trump’s national security strategy that mentioned China and Russia as competitors and removed all the offhand remarks of “community of nations” and “international community” featured in previous documents. Trump had used the Bush strategy paper as a boilerplate for his, which, despite all the rhetoric Biden uses against Trump, now serves Biden!
So, long live the Bush doctrine; down with cooperation!
