The president of Iran Hassan Rouhani is stepping down soon. Rouhani is generally considered a moderate. I read somewhere that an ex-president of Iran is making a comeback. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an anti-American and anti-Israel hawk. Obviously, he must have received the blessings of Iran’s present supreme leader Ali Khamenei to return to the political scene.
This development again demonstrates the short-term nature and short-sightedness of the American foreign policies. Barrack Obama succeeded in reining in the nuclear ambition of Iran to sign the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). His effort was only destroyed by Donald Trump with a stroke of a pen. Trump has let the genie out. Joe Biden knows that was a bad mistake, but he is not bold enough to repeal all the silly sanctions for Iran to halt its uranium-enrichment activities. The Iranians are a very smart race, they can easily produce nuclear weapons if there are no external constraints.
The situation is prompting Israel to do the pre-emptive stuff – attacking the Hamas. Soon it might train its guns on Iran and its allies in the region. If left unchecked, the war will spill over and the whole Middle East will be in turmoil again. Silly America!
America is indeed delusional. Couple of months before the outbreak of Covid-19, my wife and I took a month-long coach tour of America, from New York to San Francisco. The country has stood still for a long time, many parts have actually deteriorated to become unimaginable for a superpower to have. People looked laid-back; many are outright obese. New York is no longer vibrant; homelessness is third world like in San Francisco. But instead of gathering resolve to do something to rejuvenate America, politicians there are fighting head over heel to gang up with sycophants to make use of every opportunity to retard the rise of China, to threaten Moscow and to coerce lesser leaders in many countries not to work with China.
American hegemony began after the US emerged at the end of World War II as the undisputed superpower of the world. USSR tried to challenge it, but its brand of Communism simply could not make it happen. And Boris Yeltsin shot his own foot by dismembering the union. Russia is a shade of its former self in terms of influence now. There was no challenger to the US, for many many years.
Deng Xiaoping unleashed the dragon. Unlike `Mikhail Gorbachev, he did not blindly copy the West. He freed up the entrepreneurial spirts of Chinese. China continued to take pride in saying it is a Communist country. But its Communism is very different from that of the USSR’s or that the world has all along understood and associated – totalitarian, lack of human rights, so on and so forth. They did not (and still do not) know what was deeply embedded in China’s political system is “Confucianism” – rulers must do good for its people, people must respect for law and order, and public good must take precedence over individual rights – and the innate appetite of Chinese to learn, especially in STEM. Its millennia’s cultural philosophy became the bastion against superficial democratic beliefs and practices. China began to leap-frog.
However, it was not until the inauguration of Xi Jinping that China became a formidable challenger to the American hegemony. He fights corruption head-on, expedites the country’s infrastructure development, goes all out to alleviate poverty, and, in the eyes of America, the most “sinful” of all, advances the Road & Belt programmes to change the world order!
Xi has succeeded most of these and this has led America and the West to fear that if they do not do anything now, their lordship over the world will soon be over. This is delusionary. China will rise regardless, but it will be a nation that is happy to coexist with the world. It will not try to change the world in anyway, for it understands no single race, culture, religion, ideology, or system can claim supremacy; each is unique to its own needs and future.
However, China still has some distance to cover. Much of the country is already “intellectual”, again thanks to its Confucian heritage. The nouveau riche, on one end of the social yardstick, to the more rural simpletons on the end, are already conscious what constitutes proper etiquette, thanks to the “education” that its TV channels are introducing. Now you often see campaigns to ask people to exercise good “chopstick” practices, road courtesies, public space behaviours, etc. All these measures may look mundane, but they are transformational in essence.
Pro-independence Taiwanese should wake up. By running China now, you are only giving the West the opportunity to make you subservient to them in the long run. Only with a strong China, will all the yellow and brown skin people be safe in every part of the world. I do not mean to be a racist; but that appears to be the reality in front of us.
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