Friday, May 29, 2020

Trump's and Republican Party's anti China pre presidential election campaign


Asia Times:

Behind Trump’s push to blame China

Trump administration mounts global campaign against China that harks to false WMD claims made before US invasion of Iraq




A Trump supporter holds a sign during a rally Saturday in Salem, Oregon

Photo: AFP / John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency


The rhetorical clash between China and the United States over the Covid-19 pandemic escalated to new heights this past week. Harsh language and taunts are now a daily event, feeding growing concern that the war of words could lead to more serious tensions over Taiwan or the South China Sea.

Calls for “decoupling” from dependence on supply chains for vital medical equipment and technology produced in China took concrete form in new steps to block China’s Huawei telecom giant from using American-designed technology.

Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump face challenges to their legitimacy and political future from the pandemic and the two are equally eager to deflect responsibility for the crisis.

The Chinese regime has mounted an aggressive campaign to promote the superiority of its system and assert global leadership, despite widely held doubts about the veracity of its claims. It has hawked xenophobic propaganda blaming foreigners, even the US military, for the spread of the virus.

In Trump’s case, the urgency is even greater thanks to the presidential election campaign. The campaign now places central responsibility on China, labeling his Democratic Party opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, “Beijing Biden.”

Beijing Biden

This strategy was laid out in a confidential Republican strategy memo on April 17th that instructed candidates to accuse Democrats of being “soft on China” and to claim the virus is “a Chinese hit-and-run followed by a cover-up that cost thousands of lives.”

“This election is going to be a referendum on China,” Trump advisor Peter Navarro predicted in a television interview this past week.

When Trump signed a trade pact with China on January 15, things were quite different. The trade deal was a centerpiece of a re-election strategy touting a booming economy and having put “America First.” And for the next two months, Trump issued a string of praises for China and Xi, lauding the handling of the virus.

Then came a stunning collapse of the stock market, a looming recession and rising infection rates. “Trump completely panicked after Covid and the economic collapse hit his campaign,” Jeffrey Bader, former Obama administration national security advisor on Asia, told me.

“He had to find a new villain. He had to come up with all these conspiracy theories about how the Chinese handled the virus. There is a whole disinformation campaign these guys are orchestrating.”

Trump's two adversaries: Biden and Beijing | Gravitas - YouTube

Trump is pushing for the US intelligence community to provide evidence to support this effort, according to reports in the New York Times and other publications, and confirmed to me by a senior intelligence official.

“Regarding Trump’s next steps, he has tasked the entire US intelligence community, including CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NSA [National Security Agency], and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], to search all of their files – intercepts, humint [human intelligence], whatever – to find out if China is responsible for COVID-19,” the senior official told me.

“When this kind of tasking takes place, it is almost certain there will be some type of ‘intelligence’ that can be overstated, manipulated, overblown, to make the case – any case.”

The official compared this to the pressure brought by former Vice President Dick Cheney on the CIA to provide evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda-9/11 link to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Going to War: How Misinformation, Disinformation, and Arrogance ...

“While there is no denying the importance of determining how this came about,” he said, “it is equally hard to escape the conclusion that Trump will politicize the intelligence as a means of distraction from his own abysmal management and leadership in dealing with the pandemic. Of course, all of this is intended to serve one purpose: his re-election.”

In an unusual joint article in Foreign Policy, three former senior CIA officials warned against the politicization of intelligence by the Trump administration. They wrote:

“This pattern of politicization is particularly concerning now, as the country confronts the coronavirus pandemic. The answers to key intelligence questions – Did the coronavirus emerge from nature or escape from a Chinese lab? To what extent did the Chinese government misrepresent the scope and scale of the epidemic? – will have profound implications for the future of U.S. national security policy, especially concerning China. 
We know Trump’s preferred answers to those questions. What we don’t know is whether the career analysts in US intelligence agencies will be allowed to speak the truth when they uncover it.”

Charge of deliberate spread


With Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leading the charge, the Trump administration is mounting a global campaign against China, including a four-page letter sent to the World Health Organization accusing it of doing the handiwork of the Beijing regime.

In recent days, Trump and his close advisors have moved beyond their earlier attempts to pin Chinese responsibility on their suppression of information on the infection, or the lab-origin theory, to a bolder charge that the Chinese government deliberately spread the disease out into the world.

In a tweet this past week, Trump accused China of “trying desperately to deflect the pain and carnage that their country spread throughout the world.” Trump advisor Navarro, a key figure in the anti-China policy, told ABC News this past week that “China sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed” the virus.

This theory was first laid out in a little-noted commentary by Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former senior aide to Dick Cheney and now senior vice president at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank that has become the most important influencer of the administration’s China policy.

User Clip: Lewis "Scooter" Libby | C-SPAN.org

In the essay, published on April 29 in the conservative National Review, Libby argued that Xi and the Communist Party leadership were under increasing threat from multiple challenges – the protests in Hong Kong, the re-election of the pro-independence Taiwanese government, exposure of the suppression of Chinese Muslims and, most of all, the stumbling of the Chinese economy due to the Trump administration’s tough trade policy. With Trump heading for re-election, party dissent against Xi was mounting, he wrote.

Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government ...

From Wikipedia:

Valerie Elise Plame Wilson (née Plame, August 13, 1963), is an American writer, spy novelist, and former officer who worked at the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer was leaked to and subsequently published by Robert Novak of the Washington Post.

In the aftermath of the scandal, Richard Armitage in the U.S. Department of State was identified as one source of the information, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of lying to investigators. After a failed appeal, President George W. Bush commuted Libby's sentence and in 2018, President Donald Trump pardoned him. No one was formally charged with leaking the information. 


The Covid-19 outbreak in China posed a new challenge for Xi. “As long as the virus raged primarily inside China – derailing only her economy, stigmatizing only her government – his troubles would soar. All the while, the world predictably would have leapt ahead, taking Chinese customers, stealing China’s long-sought glory.”

But the pandemic had a potential upside, Libby argued. Its spread diverted attention from the Chinese regime’s internal woes and “rendered disease-weakened nations more susceptible to China’s goods,” he wrote. Trump’s re-election was no longer certain and a weakened economy would impact US defense spending.


In Libby’s account, Xi went beyond simply taking advantage of an opportunity. The Chinese regime deliberately “let tens of thousands of travelers, infected among them, leave China and enter an unwary world.” All of this, he concludes, is part of the quest for world domination by Xi’s inner circle. “A fever for Chinese primacy burns among them.”

Libby is no stranger to the construction of this kind of narrative. He was Cheney’s point man in pressuring the CIA to support the false claims that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction and had links to the September 11 attacks. He was convicted in 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice for his attempts to discredit a diplomat who disputed those claims.

Surprisingly, Libby was pardoned in April 2018 by Trump, even though former President George W. Bush had refused to give a pardon, despite pleas from Cheney.

“Libby’s presentation has the feel and smell of yet another problem in the making,” said the senior intelligence official, comparing this to the Libby role in the Iraq war buildup.

“This is Scooter’s ‘wag the dog’ fantasy,” agreed another former senior intelligence official with long experience in Asia. He dismissed Libby’s belief that the Chinese leadership would have an interest in spreading the pandemic around the world.


“Party legitimacy, Xi’s position and China’s future depend on sustained growth, even if the rate of growth is much slower,” the former intelligence official told me. “Spreading CV19 could only further depress Chinese growth and accelerate realignment of supply chains in ways that disadvantage China. Chinese leaders understand that.”
Hudson Institute connection

The alarm over China’s assertiveness is widespread in U.S. policy circles. But Hudson is home to a group of policy makers who articulate a much darker view of China as both a totalitarian state and one with long-term plans for global domination.

Writers like Michael Pillsbury, who enjoys access to the President, as well as Libby and others are based at the think tank. Vice President Mike Pence delivered a major hardline China policy speech in late 2018 at Hudson, as did Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in October 2019.

Hudson has also become the favored channel for Japan’s Abe administration to reach the White House. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has delivered several major addresses at Hudson, where Libby, a personal friend, introduced him. Hudson President Kenneth Weinstein, another Abe friend, has been nominated to be US Ambassador to Tokyo.

Memo reveals anti-China strategy for Republican candidates

GOP (Grand Old Party) is the Republican Party

The term originated in 1875 in the Congressional Record, referring to the party associated with the successful military defense of the Union as "this gallant old party"


While Trump’s views of China seem mostly to reflect his obsession with trade imbalances and his neo-isolationist impulses, men like Pompeo, Navarro and Libby have deeply held views on the China threat.

“For the ideologues, this was their magic moment to overcome resistance,” Bader argues. “Trump went along with it because he needs an election plank. The true believers don’t know if Trump is going to win or not but they are putting as much in place as they can before November.”

Republican memo reveals anti-China scheme over COVID-19 ...

Republican memo unveils anti-China strategy for GOP candidates ...

Republican memo reveals anti-China scheme over COVID-19 ...

Daniel Sneider is lecturer, international policy, at Stanford University and a former Christian Science Monitor foreign correspondent. This article originally appeared Monday in Tokyo Business Today and is reprinted with permission



9 comments:

  1. You mean like the CCP's alleged million-strong army of terrorists in Xinjiang ?

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    1. Running out of new story to twist?

      Thus, has to recycled urban legend that has passed its shelf life!

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    2. TrumpAss Kisser is chasing his own tail in this Western-churned echo chamber. Firstly, who plucked from the air that magical 1 million figure ? It turned out that an American under the Trump administration was the culprit. Did they personally go into Xinjiang to do a body count ? CNN even at one point put the figure at 3 million, then a few weeks later, without explanation, scaled back to 1 million, hehehe

      Now this parroting gang of sheeple latched on this figure and keep on chanting 1 million, 1 million, 1 million....

      But 'the fact known throughout the world' is, hehe, there are hardcore Uighurs who came back from ME fighting side by side with the ISIS, and started their recruitment exercise in Xinjiang among those Uigher youths who lacked education and mostly jobless wondering aimlessly around. These hardened terrorists have been agitating and recruiting for their separatist movement back home, with the CIA agents as usual providing that critical subversive support. Trust these meddling hands of the US to create unrest and chaos in foreign land. "This is a known fact throughout the world" Ha ha ha.

      The Chinese government had ferreted out these spies, kicked them out and, instead of going the Guantanamo route which involves water-boarding and all sorts of heinous tortures, decided that a better method is a re-education, just like that done in Malaysia, but better organized.

      We don't have the actual numbers but an estimate of 20K to 25K is not too far fetched, given the size of the buildings housing them found spread out in 3 locations. Reports mentioned that the hardcore were completely separated from the new 'terrorist recruits', the latter being given jobs-skill training to enable them to stand on their own feet when they graduate from these centres. These youths were required to be trained for at least 2 years, with breaks in between for 2-weeks home visits. All these reports are publicly available.

      The Western corporate media are working in cahoots with their masters to smear China but the wind is taken out of their sail when they failed utterly to destabilize the country, as the training was successful and there are now zero terrorist killings in Xinjiang and the surrounding area.

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    3. Now these Western cohorts turned their attention to Hong Kong and for almost one year, they appear to almost succeed in their efforts to undermine the Hong Kong government, financing and training a gang of students in the fine arts of terrorism and rioting. But their ultimate goal is to provoke China to send in the PLA, to see blood gushing down the streets...which is a signal for the West to  have the right to call for sanction on China, to stop their rise, to stop their Made-in-China 2025.

      Well, President Xi refused to bite the bait. He just stay cool, and at one point, even teased them by plying a platoon of army just outside the border of Hong Kong, hehehe.

      My own suspicion is that he 'allows' the mayhem to continue, with absolutely no interference at all. When there's a lull in the rioting, he will come out with statement that China will crush bones if....etc etc. Then we see the rioting started again, hehehe. But that's only my own suspicion, wa ka ka ka. I think his game plan is for Hong Kong community at large to start screaming on their own - 'Enough is Enough'. The business community couldn't take it anymore...no tourists, no retail uptakes, no customers in restaurants, no guests in hotels. And then, WHAM...national security law. ha ha ha ha. He had done the maths...there's not much the US can do to China with the implementation of this much needed law. In fact, the pros out weigh any cons...for one, the 1200 embedded spies there will be ferreted out and sent scattering back to their nesting holes in the US and UK..and the bias foreign judges will voluntarily resign in droves. The rioting cockroaches will soon melt away, and Jimmy fuckery Lai and his cohorts like Martin Lee, Anson Chan, Albert Ho etc can fly out to their homes in UK and Canada. And this legislature will finally close that legal loophole to prevent any future act of subversion.

      Once this whole episode has calmed down, I think the next on the SAR of Hong Kong to-do list is to tackle the Education mess. No more liberal classes with Christian priests and Pro-Dem teachers giving BTN courses and poisonous Apple Daily will just fold up with their fuckery boss running off to his home in Canada. Funny thing is his children who were having the time of their lives in Canada drinking champagne driving Maserati and Porsche were never brought back to Hong Kong to join these 'freedom fighters' cockroaches...ditto for the rest of the Anson Chan gang. WTF...their children are supposedly too good to join these'rebels' running riot on the streets...they first brainwashed these kids and then mercilessly let them be fodder for their own ends. These  adults gangsters are worst of the worst...si kitol opening the gate for the barbarian hordes from the West and using children to face the wrath of the police, a justifiable wrath I must admit

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  2. i think its the other way round, ccp exported virus kill too many americans, so trump is now intimidated by americans to seek justice to punish the culprit ccp, i sympathize trump now forced by his countryman to do what is right, even to the extent to turn against his best friend xi. pity la trump.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. U aint no Libby!

      With a petrified skull full of dead neurons, all u can do is recycling 台毒 farts!

      How boring!

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    2. KT is so right ! Bodoh macam batu la.

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  3. AmeriKKKa - land of DEMONcrazy.

    With ghouls like Peter Navarro and Scooter Libby churning out deadly evil schemes and with FatArse Pompeo running around as secretary of state to arm twist other heads of states to fall in line with their horrendous devilish plans and instructions, although good olde Britain don't need much persuasion.

    The UK is sneaky in that way, hiding behind full of malice and toxic angst. Instigation and fanning the coals are the Brits' favoured methods. They still have the imperialist mentality but since their decline after WW2, they passed the torch to the USA to continue on this bully-of-the- world role. In this way, they at least have a shadow role to play. They are nothing more than a bunch of 'yes-men' to obey Trump and try to rip off the EU.

    Abe, after the two nukes from Papa Murica and the forced signing of the Plaza Accord, is now totally under the thumb of the Satan, hehehe. See how Shorty Abe humbly trailed behind Trump...watch his body language..gone completely lapdog.

    Who the hell would buy this latest shit narrative from those vampires !
    Chinese in planeloads seeding the virus around the world, LOL
    These vile devils who invented this latest scheme have gone ape-shit crazy. Even Hollywood, or even Bollywood won't buy this sort of script.

    Orange Buffoon might be stupid, petty-minded and desperate, but if he falls for their incredulous scheme this time again, he deserves the full condemnation for surrounding himself with these warmongering murderous bunch.

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  4. "Trump's two adversaries: Biden and Beijing | Gravitas - YouTube"

    Gravitas ! Who or What is Gravitas ?

    Recently there were quite a few videos coming out from an Indian Internet TV channel going by the program name of *"Gravitas"*.

    This channel is similar to the TV channel *NTD ("New Tang Dynasty") TV* and the *Epoch Times* (newspaper) which are both owned and operated by the *Falun Gong* from their HQ in New York and known far right US/Trump supporters and financiers.

    Gravitas is always posting right wing anti-Chinese propaganda videos.

    *Gravitas* is operated by an Internet TV network called World In One Network... *"WION"*.

    It's owned by the *Essel Group* from Mumbai under one Subash Chandra. Sometime last year it got into very serious financial problems and was bailed out in late November 2019 by the Invesco Group of Atlanta USA which also took a large block of their share. (Prior to this takeover there was almost no anti-Chinese rhetoric from them)

    The right question to ask is... "why would a US fund management company shelling out more than USD 1 trillion in assets to bail out a bankrupt Mumbai Internet TV company?... and also take a large block of its shares, especially when it is not their business as fund managers to do so and go bailing out bankrupt Indian businesses.

    Invesco is a very large Fund management group managed by a team of hard core right wingers ... now can you see why this TV channel is putting out such matters.

    Their anchors in their news report continue to call the virus "Wuhan virus" and refer this pandemic as a "disease from China", even when the virus name has already been officially known as SARS-CoV-2, and the disease Covid-19.




    ReplyDelete