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Foreign policy

Posted

To the editor:

Since I'm not suicidal, I'm hoping Norman Solomon's fear, "Nancy Pelosi Could Get Us All Killed," (in “CounterPunch,” Aug. 2), does not prove true. But he describes the U.S. policy that has kept the peace between us, Taiwan and China.

It's basically that we quietly support Taiwan's democracy militarily while officially recognizing the mainland as the one China.

President Joe Biden has openly said that the military thinks House Speaker Pelosi's trip to Taiwan was not a good idea. But he did nothing to stop it, making him the typical politician who lives by the words of Lou Christie, "Two Faces Have I."

The Financial Times reported that Biden's "National security advisor Jake Sullivan and other senior National Security Council officials oppose the trip because of the risk of escalating tension across the Taiwan Strait."

Michael J. Gorman (letters, Aug. 5) describes the "Chinese bully." But Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi sees this as "The exposure of America's bullying face again shows it as the world's biggest saboteur of peace,” as a recent piece from The Associated Press put it.

This is certainly true in Ukraine, though the mainstream media ignores U.S. provocations going back to its support of the 2014 coup. 

There's a long U.S. history of replacing democracies with dictatorships who cater to the interests of our corporations and those of our allies. President Dwight Eisenhower supported the overthrow of Iran's democracy  and installation of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1953 and the replacement of Guatemala's democracy with a dictatorship in 1954. His vice president, Richard Nixon, would in 1973 be responsible for the replacement of Chile's democracy with a brutal dictator. Those are just three examples of brutal U.S. bullying. Our governments only have problems with dictators who don't take orders from them.

But it does not surprise me that Gorman, who advocated the establishment of a no-fly zone in Ukraine, now has no problem with a redundant provocation toward another nuclear power.

With Democrats like Gorman, I can see how that old Goldwater Girl, Hillary Clinton, was able to get the Democratic nomination in 2016.

Richard Warren

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