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On Balance | On Cuba, South China Sea or Taiwan Strait, Beijing has failed to rally support against US positions
- The question isn’t so much why Beijing and Havana might be conspiring to spy on the US. Rather, it’s why China would not have something of this nature on the go already
- Moreover, Beijing should reflect on why it hasn’t been able to convince others in the region to join it in challenging US narratives in the South China Sea
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In the flurry of US-China diplomacy in recent weeks, it’s understandable that tensions between the two countries over the South China Sea and Cuba have been in the background.
Despite all the initial clamouring to confirm reports that Beijing is paying Cuba billions of dollars to set up a surveillance base on the island, the story never developed into the kind of crisis that a Chinese balloon over the American heartland caused a few months ago.
The most China-triggered lawmakers in Congress tried to keep the China-Cuba connection at the top of the agenda, but the American debt ceiling stand-off and the possibility of a violent response to the second indictment of former president Donald Trump exhausted our anxiety receptors. A theoretical listening station around 160km south of Florida doesn’t have the visual urgency of Chinese machinery just above Kansas.
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There are other reasons that alleged Chinese and Cuban cooperation on spying cycled out of the headlines more quickly than the balloon incident.
Older Americans have as their reference the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the possibility of Soviet nuclear missiles on the island left many wondering whether they would be spending years in a nuclear winter eating cockroaches in a bunker.
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The cultural impact of that crisis stretched from the baby boomers well into Generation X, and makes reports of a listening station in Cuba seem to many in these age brackets about as threatening as a jaywalking fine in Manhattan. Meanwhile, social-media obsessed younger Americans largely aren’t concerned about something that doesn’t play well in a five-second video loop with special effects.
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