Each time Joe Biden spoke about the China threat, he reminded me of my late father-in-law.
My father-in-law was a through and through Peranakan – a local born Penangite, totally English educated and worked his entire life for the Penang Port Commission. Besides English, he spoke only Penang Hokkien, and did not know how to read or write a word of Mandarin.
After his retirement, he and my mother-in-law came down to Kuala Lumpur to live with us. They helped bring up our two children. He loved to read papers. I used to subscribe both The Star and The New Straits Times; he read almost everything in them, including the classified advertisements. I also subscribed magazines those days – Newsweek, Fortune and The Economist – which he would also read if they hanged around. He also kept to his “office” hours – religiously at one of the stockbroking houses in town. He brought back many stories and gossips from there.
However, as he grew older, I noticed that he tended to repeat things with a strange frequency. On a piece of misinformation about a politician which I had taken pain to explain to him that was not true, he would still say the same old thing when the politician’s name came up each time. Other than that, his mind was as sharp as ever. As he aged into his 80s, another phenomenon surfaced. He would many a time insist that my eldest brother-in-law was going after his life. But this brother-in-law of mine, a retired engineer, must be the mildest, most harmless person in this whole universe. No matter how hard my wife tried to correct him, my father-in-law would repeat this fear from time to time! Of course, by then we knew he was in his early stage of dementia. He lived to a ripe old age of 95.
Doesn’t Biden sound like my father-in-law when the talked about China? No matter how much the world or his intelligence community told him about the falsehood about the genocide and force labour situation in China, and about the need to leave it to science on the origin of Covid-19, he would point his finger at China regardless. China is your enemy which you must destroy at all costs, Donald Trump seems to be whispering into his ear all the time, even though Trump is his enemy No 1.
When a person is entering into a pre-dementia stage, I suppose the neurons in his or her brain will rearrange themselves to give him outlandish conclusions and fears. Isn’t Biden going into this phase now?
I was most perplexed when he hailed America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as a great success. What success? And what sort of twisted logic is that?
We all have heard that amid chaos at the Kabul airport, CIA Director William Burns had to fly all the way to meet Taliban leaders ahead of the August 31st deadline. If not for the courtesy extended by the Taliban, the evacuation would surely have been a disaster. Yes, some 6,000 Americans and 120,000 others were flown out. But could it be said to be a great success? It was an operational feat given the way he shot himself in the foot with the timing of his withdrawal announcement, thanks to the resources that they had had in their command. Nothing more than that. Yet Biden could go on TV to crow “success” to the world. This speaks volumes of the state of his mind and the competence of his “world-class” team like Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Llyod Austin. To us in the orient, aren’t these a bunch of “fun-shis” or sweet potatoes?
By any standard, the US’s capitulation from Afghanistan will surely go down in world history as one of the most glaring defeats of American exceptionalism. On America’s response, I only watched CNN and read the bits and pieces from its papers. I seemed to sense that the burden of humiliation has yet to be felt by the American masses. Of course, no sooner after the Afghan debacle, they were hit by hurricane Ida and now floods in New York and New Jersey. As if these are not enough, they also have their Supreme Court’s decision on Texas abortion law to debate.
On Afghanistan Blinken had also telephoned Wang Yi. The State Department’s readout on the matter apparently was a one-sentence statement to say there was a need to rein in the Taliban in view of the development there, hence the exchange. However, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s readout was a tongue-lashing record of what Wang Yi had reiterated to Blinken. It bluntly said to the effect that “the call was requested by you Blinken, you came to us when you needed our help, and if you were sincere and genuine, you should first and foremost do what we had requested you to do in the list which we had given to your Sherman. Period. I have not really read the two readouts; but the fact has been disclosed by a credible source. Anyway, they should be on the relevant websites for anyone who cares to check.
And we are now reading that John Kerry has flown to China to talk about Climate Change. Obviously, these Americans don’t even understand body languages let alone rebukes. After flying all the way, he could only meet with Wang Yi on zoom. The Chinese must have felt a little bad, since Kerry has always been thought of as a decent man. He was subsequently arranged to see the redoubtable Yang Jiechi and later Vice Premier Hang Zheng. However, the message was the same: Don’t waste our time unless you do what is expected of you first. We know what we are doing. He left for home emptied handed. How embarrassing!
If their reaction to world opinions on the recent Afghan capitulation debacle is reflective of their ability, or the lack of it, to form good conclusions, let alone learn anything, then I suppose to these top guns in the Biden administration the meaning of humiliation is definitely not in their vocabulary. Or thick skin-ness is actually a part of their collective DNA. Remember the lecture given by Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi to Blinken and Sullivan in Alaska, and the protocol that was accorded to Sherman in Tianjin? Luckily, Llyod Austin’s request to visit his Chinese counterpart has gone unanswered, lest he gives us another case in point to cite.
Nonetheless, a wounded lion is always a dangerous animal. A humiliated Biden can also be one. The only consolation I take is that judging from those incidents that I have enumerated above, I suspect he might not possess that sense in his faculty.
Dear America, stick to what you can do best for the world, that is, continue to help the world with your universities’ fundamental and cutting-edge research. This also means you must welcome the best and the brightest to your soil. And trying to teach the world what democracy is all about will surely bring you nowhere. It takes a mere spokesperson at China Foreign Ministry to explain this: Coca-Cola indeed tastes the same everywhere. But democracy is NOT Coca-Cola. It has to be different for different country. The world will certainly be safer without America going around preaching and upholding Democracy.
Look into your backyard first; there is much to be cleaned there in the first place.
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