I think the current administration is an example of being wannabe realists trying to emulate the line of Kennan, Kissinger, and Brzezinski just like Mearsheimer who spent the entire three years since the Ukraine War impotently shouting “we should be focusing on China” to the Biden government. I’ve seen some articles highlighting Rubio’s recent public statements and how that gusano, who made being anti-China his entire political career after his humiliation of being bullied by Trump calling him a “robot” off the Republican Presidential convention in 2016, is now quite firmly in the “clear-eyed realism” camp of the US “China threat” lobby.
The weird American nationalist conservative David Goldman wrote a piece framing Rubio as a “China realist” and covering some of Rubio’s recent Congressional report writings:
If this report conveys any message, let it be that the United States cannot be complacent about Communist China. Think-tank scholars and economists may bank on China’s coming collapse. Beijing is taking the other side of that wager.
[…] And Communist China will still be a more formidable adversary than any the United States has faced in living memory. At this point, the burden of proof should be on the critics who insist the CCP’s project is doomed to fail.”
B of MoonOfAlabama also recently gushed over Rubio’s “pragmatism” in the past couple weeks when he spoke about how the unipolar moment was over in a recent speech. He highlighted some of Rubio’s comments:
I think the mission of American foreign policy – and this may sound sort of obvious, but I think it’s been lost. The interest of American foreign policy is to further the national interest of the United States of America, right? […] [A]nd that’s the way the world has always worked. The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what’s in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. Where our interests align, that’s where you have partnerships and alliances; where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they’re going to further theirs. And that’s been lost.
[N]ow you can have a framework by which you analyze not just diplomacy but foreign aid and who we would line up with and the return of pragmatism. And that’s not an abandonment of our principles. I’m not a fan or a giddy supporter of some horrifying human rights violator somewhere in the world. By the same token, diplomacy has always required us and foreign policy has always required us to work in the national interest, sometimes in cooperation with people who we wouldn’t invite over for dinner or people who we wouldn’t necessarily ever want to be led by. And so that’s a balance, but it’s the sort of pragmatic and mature balance we have to have in foreign policy.
I think through this tone alone, it’s clear that Rubio is gunning to be a Kissinger/Brzezinski clone. Goldman talked about how “a credible anti-Communist like Nixon could make a deal with China without accusations of selling out, and Secretary of State Rubio could repeat the exercise, according to this line of thinking.”
Ever since 1989, America’s China policy had been hijacked by the “human rights” warriors so it is true that it has been a while since America donned up the Kissinger pragmatic realpolitik mask for its relationship with China. I personally think there would be nothing that China could gain from another hypothetical “grand bargain” with America as the fundamental contradiction of American hegemony over the world is not something that can be kicked down the road under the guise of “peaceful co-existence,” as the errors of the post-WWII Soviet leadership with their constant searching for “detente” under Khrushchev ultimately amounting to nothing but some actor freak like Reagan calling them a “evil empire.” Some parts of the Chinese government was able to recognize this back in the 2010s when China rejected Obama’s proposal for a “G2.” As the Russian term “agreement-incapable” hints at, I don’t believe even a pragmatic veneered American China policy will be able to tolerate giving any real concessions to China.
As such, I think it’s much more likely that a more geopolitically pragmatic American foreign policy will simply be a MAGA Republican flavor of the China containment objective, primarily through attempting to pull Russia away from China (as Trump had talked about many times explicitly on the campaign trail and his special advisor to Russia Kellogg recently publicly fantasized about). The pragmatism realpolitik angle will be that anything is a possible candidate to be thrown under the bus for the goal of convincing Russia to distance itself from China, as what is happening right now with the EU vassals and the Ukraine fascists. Whether the modern Sino-Russian relationship, built on economic ties this time around rather than the ideological solidarity of the Sino-Soviet era, can withstand these American overtures under Trump will be the open question of the day.
Personally, I think that rationally speaking, China has done decent material work over the past three years since the Ukraine war in making itself economically indispensable to Russia, but given that past Russian leadership dissolved the USSR because they saw the inside of a Walmart and wanted to get pats on the back from the likes of Reagan, Bush and Thatcher, I frankly put nothing past the Westanbetung Russian ruling class.
The core issue for Trump and Rubio and their ilk in the current administration is that just because you know the recipe, as they claim to do, doesn’t necessarily mean you actually have the ability to bake the cake in the end. I think that will be the defining trait of their foreign policy.
The dynamics of unorganized mass protests is that the movement will bend, in its internal contradictions, to the direction of the most well organized, motivationally driven and materially supported element.
Take the classic Tiananmen color revolution. It was originally an outcry against the runaway inflation of the 1988-9 period caused by the package reformers winning out against the gradualists. This led to an introduction of shock therapy by primarily Deng Xiaoping’s (I would indeed argue that his role played a major part) and Zhao Ziyang’s urgings, which led to historically high prices unseen in the history of the People’s Republic. Price stability was then re-introduced in late 1988 to prevent economic catastrophe but this led to backlash both from parts of the population that were outraged at this poorly conceived obsession with a “big bang” reform having taking place at all in the first place and the incipient liberal comprador-aspirants who thought the price stability initiative meant the end of the liberalizing reforms and their profit-seeking opportunities.
Both elements were present in the initial protests. The former (the Western journalistic and academic trick at the time was to dub every socialist and leftist element in socialist state politics as “conservative” to deliberately obfuscate their identity) were the socialist contingents, including Maoists and Ultraleft elements, who wanted a return to the Mao era rather than some capitalist restoration. Obviously, the color revolution elements, backed up by the West’s unfettered media penetration in China (which is how they captured those pictures they wave around nowadays), won out. They constructed that tacky Statue of Liberty clone “to Democracy” in Tiananmen Square, which appropriated and hijacked the imagery and messaging of the protests once the Western media started proliferating pictures of it, and the entire movement became a full blown color revolution aiming at capitalist restoration, even though large contingents of the participants wanted nothing of the sort.
This is how it works. Victor Bevins (a soc-dem), wrote a book called “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” that essentially dissects the systematic co-option of every single unorganized mass protest movement in the 2010s. The most infamous being the Hong Kong color revolution attempt, where public frustration over the affordability housing and the dynamics of the frozen economic and political system of Hong Kong due to China’s concession to Britain with the 50 year “1C2S” policy preventing any substantive mainland intervention or introduction of socialist governance to Hong Kong, which boiled over through an extradition case of a murderer. This was then easily was hijacked by the Trump I admin and the Western NGOs operating in Hong Kong, and co-opted as a “democracy” and “independence” protest.
As for Nepal, I incidentally made a comment three months ago back in May:
It’s not to say that things will necessarily progress in that direction, but that the external interests have been clearly demonstrated and many of the requisite pieces have likely been set in place.