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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Washington sincerely believes in the weakness of its opponents |
| 2023-02-25 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Dmitry Kosyrev Here is an article with a good subtitle: "How Washington Exaggerates China's Weakness." Written by professional sinologist Christopher Johnson of the highly respected Asian community in New York. He expresses his irritation with the current administration: okay, even its ideologists constantly say that the Beijing regime is on the verge of any trouble, and we (America) are the strongest. So after all, US diplomacy also constantly gets into the most stupid situations, expecting that "weak" China is ready to bend to the limit. And as a result, the Americans receive either a disruption of the most important events, or such a rebuff to them that it is inconvenient in front of people. Johnson gives several examples, here is at least a funny story with a balloon in the sky of the United States. Smart-looking people from the Pentagon say that there is a squabble between the military and civilian authorities of China, that is, the internal weakness of this power. And she is so weak that she urgently needs to agree with Washington on detente. If so, then Beijing should have rushed to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to resolve the situation. Instead, Blinken was simply not allowed into China. Johnson explains: Yes, there was no attempt by the PRC military to sabotage detente with the United States. Beijing is well aware that a hybrid American war has been waged against it for the sixth year already, and against this background, some spy balloons are a complete trifle, and Blinken’s visit is generally unknown for what. And, from the point of view of China, the Americans in this story simply disgraced the whole world, showing a complete misunderstanding of the essence of events. Here it must be said that our author is a hawk of hawks. China for him is a terrible communist dictatorship, Xi Jinping is a tough ruler who is used to playing for big stakes. But at the same time, Johnson is a professional Sinologist, and his pathos is directed against amateurs who have no idea what China is at all. And this is familiar to us. In Russia, a great number of "experts" have recently divorced, who cannot correctly decline the name of the Chinese leader, while at the same time explaining something to the respectable public. But when responsible people in Washington make decisions with such a level of competence (“China is weak”), this is somehow unpleasant for an American sinologist. Look, there's something familiar here. China is weak and about to crack, Russia has been losing the war for exactly a year now, suffers from shell hunger, and so on. Well, democracy around the world goes on the offensive. Here it is very easy for us to make the mistake of thinking that this is just propaganda. It is needed to rally its ranks, to fool the world around, and to demoralize some characters inside Russia or China - after all, such propaganda also reaches them, and many are ready to believe. And, they say, somewhere in the bowels of the Washington administration sit quiet specialists who are well aware that in fact the enemy is not at all weak. And responsible decisions are still made by this administration based on the advice of these real experts. This is a typical mistake of a smart person: to think that your opponent is also smart. Or assume this just in case, that is, prepare for the worst. And it’s very hard to believe that there really are idiots sitting there who, in all seriousness, believe that – in this case – China is weak, its leadership is full of factions gnawing at each other, its economy is about to collapse. But - moving on to Russian-American realities - smart people would not start a sanctions war against us in the sincere belief that we are so weak that we are about to collapse from this war. Smart people would have guessed that this war would arouse the hatred of most of the world and drive its organizers to a standstill. It remains to be understood which enemy is still better to deal with: competent and realistic, or the way it is. |
| Posted by:badanov |