My Take | Why Blinken’s visit is not so important
- The US has created most of the problems, and it now asks China to cooperate and address them
Last time, it was an alleged Chinese spy balloon. This time round, it was a new spy station in Cuba. Every time US Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans a visit to China, something comes up to try to block it. At least Blinken didn’t cancel this time.
It seems either a powerful bloc within the US government is leaking left and right to try to subvert Blinken’s attempt to approach China; or Blinken himself is in on the game by playing “good cop, bad cop” to appear conciliatory and make the Chinese look rejectionist. All the while, Washington is maximising hostilities, and pushing to the brink of war.
Whether Blinken himself is sincere is not the question; the real problem is that he can’t deliver, whatever his agenda.
Practically every month, dozens of Chinese companies are added to the US sanctions list, which accuses them of having the flimsiest of connections to the Chinese military. By the same standard, the provision of “Cloud” services to the Pentagon by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle should make them targets for Chinese sanctions. The way things are going, the United States will be sanctioning half the Chinese economy soon. Perhaps that has been the intention all along.
The alleged spy balloon was a theatre of the absurd, as the Pentagon was initially tracking it and didn’t make a fuss about it – until Washington and the national press – coinciding with Blinken’s scheduled China visit, decided to go into full-scale mass hysteria.
This time, though, the “disclosure” of a plan for a spy station, coincidentally leaked to The Wall Street Journal and CNN, was met with a qualified denial from the White House. Presumably, it didn’t want to ruin Blinken’s trip this year.
But if you were Beijing, would you want to talk to someone who keeps hitting you in the head?