National Identity, and the Lack Thereof, in Central Europe: Cultural Excellence Does Not Entail Political Unification

The general pattern of history reveals that the concept of the modern nation-state emerged first in western Europe. Central Europe, which produced cultural attainments both in the fine arts and in the natural sciences — to say nothing of economics and pure mathematics — lagged noticeably behind western Europe in the formation of the nation-state.

Perhaps one reason for this delay was the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire. This loose coalition of central European kingdoms arose during the 800s and 900s in an ad hoc fashion to meet a need for defensive coordination.

As the old joke explains, the Holy Roman Empire was not Holy, not Roman, and not an Empire. It was secular, organized for the purpose of defending Europe against various waves of Islamic invaders. It was Germanic, not Roman. It was not an empire, but rather a confederation whose emperor was an emperor in title only. The Holy Roman Emperor had to beg rather than dictate. He was sometimes reduced to shuttling back and forth between various kings and princes in an attempt to get them to unify around some plan.

So it was that in central Europe, in contrast to western Europe and to England, that the smaller local kingdoms and principalities retained more power, and efforts to create a centralized government over a larger territory were not fruitful.

The modern and postmodern reader should not retroject any concept of ‘Germany’ onto Europe prior to 1871. ‘German’ denoted, at most, a language and culture, but not a political or governmental unity. Indeed, the Germans were as likely to fight with each other as to ally with each other.

Even the commonalities of language and culture were tenuous. The regional differences in vocabulary and pronunciation meant that the dialects spoken in northern cities like Hamburg and Bremen were largely unintelligible to the southern cities like Salzburg and Innsbruck.

This is in sharp contrast to the degree of national unity which was reached, e.g., in England, where the residents of Manchester and the residents of London understood themselves to be part of the same nation, as historian William Hagen writes:

In 1789 the German-speaking lands were, with few exceptions, encompassed within a sprawling geopolitical entity antiquatedly named the The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. They were, strange as it may seem, divided into some three hundred and twenty-five separate principalities.

If the Germans lacked political and national unity, then they also lacked leaders to whom they could commonly pledge allegiance. The habits of the Empire meant that dozens of local dynasties had a greater impact on daily life than the one imperial dynasty. These many regional dynasties naturally worked to keep the emperor and his royal family irrelevant.

Comparing Germany with France, England, or Spain, the question arises: why did the medieval and early modern German lands not evolve, as these and many other European countries did, from the condition of a loosely strung together medical feudal kingdom into a stoutly forged centralized “national monarchy,” such as that of France’s mighty Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century “Sun King”? Premodern monarchies on the French or British model created unitary frameworks for subsequent political democratization, such as preliminarily began in England with the Puritan and Glorious revolutions of the seventeenth century and in France with the revolution of 1789.

The lack of centralized power did not seem to harm the Germans: it was during these centuries that they produced the great cultural artifacts which are universally acknowledged and admired.

Decades before there was a territory on the map called ‘Germany,’ Beethoven, whose music was chosen to represent all of Europe as the anthem of the EU, composed his works.

The long list of poets, mathematicians, composers, painters, architects, physicists, chemists, and philosophers who constitute not only Germany’s great achievements, but rather also humanity’s great achievements — many of them, if not most, lived at a time when there was no Germany.

Consider: Wolfgang Mozart, J.S. Bach, Johann Walter, Caspar David Friedrich, G.W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, G.W.F. Hegel, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lucas Cranach the Younger, Hans Cranach, Augustin Cranach, Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and many others.

Perhaps the Germans were at their best without Germany. The lack of a nation-state did not harm them, and perhaps even helped them.

But the lack of a German nation-state was a problem for the rest of the world. German culture and German political influence spread slower, and didn’t spread as far as they might otherwise have, because there was no overarching nation-state until 1871.

In Africa, in South America, and in southeast Asia, German colonization was microscopic compared to the geopolitical impact of England, France, Belgium, and other European nations.

Those regions of the world were denied advancements in culture, technology, and natural sciences. The Germans were productive and creative without a nation-state. But because the German nation-state emerged late and then was hobbled for much of the twentieth century, the rest of the world was unable to realize much of its potential.

North Korean Narrative: Decades of Deception

When global observers began to draw hope from talks between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and the United State’s President Trump, it was the first time in many years that the world saw rational diplomacy with North Korea as possible. To understand the significance of those talks in 2018 and 2019, the reader will want to review North Korea’s actions during the previous decade or two.

From 1948 to 1994, the leader of North Korea was Kim Il-sung. Upon his death in 1994, his son, Kim Jong-il became the leader. In 2011, Kim Jong-il died, and his son, Kim Jong-un, became the country’s leader.

North Korea is now suffering under its third hereditary totalitarian absolutist dictator.

Having been born in the mid-1980s, Kim Jong-un has been treated as a near-deity his entire life. This may explain why other nations have difficulty conducting any diplomacy with his government.

For the neighboring countries of Japan and South Korea, the nuclear weapons possessed by North Korea constitute an existential threat. North Korea obtained nuclear capability during the reign of Kim Jong-il. It is typical of the Kim dynasty that observers characterize its behavior by comparing it to a toddler who tosses his dinner during a temper tantrum. President George W. Bush recalls:

On the Fourth of July 2006, Kim Jong-il threw his food on the floor. He fired a barrage of missiles into the Sea of Japan. The test was a military failure, but the provocation was real. My theory was that Kim saw the world focused on Iran and was craving attention. He also wanted to test the coalition to see how much he could get away with.
I called President Hu Jintao of China, told him that Kim Jong-il had insulted China, and urged him to condemn the launch publicly. He released a statement reiterating his commitment to “peace and stability” and opposing “any actions that might intensify the situation.” His words were mild, but they were a step in the right direction.
North Korea defied the world again by carrying out its first full-fledged nuclear test. President Hu’s reaction was firmer this time. “The Chinese government strongly opposes this,” he said. “We engaged in conversations to appeal to the North Koreans for restraint. However, our neighbor turned a deaf ear to our advice.”

The world had to accept the suboptimal reality that a third-generation hereditary dictator now had nuclear weapons at his disposal. This was a nightmare scenario for South Korea and for Japan. It was horrifying for the rest of the world.

North Korea had proven that it was willing to deceive. It had agreed to stop its efforts to build an atomic bomb, and yet continued to do precisely that. North Korea proved unrepentant when, four years prior to its first successful nuclear weapon test, the U.S. intelligence community presented evidence that the weapons program was well under way. At that time, the U.S. Secretary of Defense was Donald Rumsfeld, who later wrote:

By July 2006, well over a decade of U.S. negotiations with North Korea and its erratic leadership had yielded little benefit to the United States. North Korea continued to test and launch ballistic missiles, bluster about attacking South Korea, and develop nuclear weapons, detonating what intelligence professionals believed was a low-yield bomb in October 2006. We had confronted North Korean officials in 2002 with the fact that we knew about their clandestine uranium-enrichment effort, in violation of the Clinton Administration’s “Agreed Framework.”

Ever willing to present deceptive images to the world, North Korea, after having demonstrated its capabilities both in terms of building bombs and in terms of building delivery systems, proceeded to claim that it was going to disassemble its own nuclear production facilities.

In a visible and publicized action, the North Koreans demolished a nuclear facility. This action was, however, meaningless, as Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney writes:

On June 27, 2008, the North Koreans called in the television cameras and blew up the cooling tower of the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It was 1950s technology, a device they could easily afford to give up. By that point they had produced enough plutonium for a store of weapons, and, besides, as President Obama’s director of national intelligence would later confirm, they had a robust ongoing uranium enrichment operation that could also produce material for nuclear weapons.

In yet another about-face, North Korea again wanted to boast by displaying its advanced nuclear weapons technology. Two years after claiming to have destroyed their own nuclear capability, they bragged about a multi-year effort coming to fruition.

Around this time, the world grew both wise and weary, and learned that words and statements from the North Korean government were meaningless, and that the North Korean leaders were incorrigible and could never be trusted, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reports:

In 2010, nuclear physicist Siegfried Hacker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, would be invited to North Korea and shown an industrial-scale facility capable of producing enriched uranium. According to Hecker, the state of the facility demonstrated “without a doubt” that Pyongyang had pursued uranium enrichment for many years. We’d been right about uranium enrichment but unable to use diplomacy to confirm our suspicions or do anything about it.

By 2013, North Korea was clearly and unapologetically presenting itself as a nuclear power. Missile tests were performed, not to test the technology of the rockets, but as timely signals to the international community.

By that year, also, Kim Jong-un had become the national leader, following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il. The new leader demonstrates “increasing ruthlessness” against anything except immediate enthusiastic affirmation of his own ideas, according to a 2013 article in The Telegraph.

The ambiguous, sometimes friendly, and sometimes hostile relationship between the United States and China was and is pivotal in forming a global response to North Korea’s bellicose behavior. While North Korea has good relationships with no other nation on earth, its connection with China is as close as North Korea can come to working diplomatic relationship.

The U.S. has often requested Chinese assistance in dealing with North Korea. While China certainly doesn’t like or trust the Kim regime, it also is not willing to do or be anything which might make China seem like it is in any way helpful to the U.S.

Yet China has, at times, been willing to be strict with North Korea, as Robert Wampler wrote in 2013:

One key issue is how China might convince Pyongyang to dial back its provocations lest they escalate into military conflict. Although current consultations between Washington and Beijing are taking place behind closed doors, we do have a window into how the United States assessed China’s options during a similar crisis nearly two decades ago — options that included Chinese troops crossing the Yalu to secure its borders.

Also in 2013, analyst Edward Luttwak raised this question: could South Korea be enabling North Korea? As counterintuitive as such a question might at first seem, it makes a certain amount of economic sense.

South Korea has given, at various times, substantial chunks of hard foreign currency to North Korea — sometimes as a way to buy some peace in a sort of mafioso protection racket, sometimes in response to sheer bullying. Serious currency is one thing which North Korea both desperately needs and can hardly obtain.

The North Korean economy is so weak that it’s constantly on the verge of collapse — even as a few elite members of Communist Party live in luxury. South Korea seems oddly to be throwing a lifeline to the very nation which is bent on destroying it, as Luttwak writes:

All of North Korea’s varied and extreme economic dysfunctions converge in its crippling shortage of foreign currency. Once the bulk of it is used to import military components, supplies, and subsystems from China (including the erector launcher vehicles for its ballistic missiles), very little foreign exchange is left.

While the world’s diplomats focus on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, ordinary citizens around the world are perhaps more horrified by the human rights abuses which constitute domestic policy in the country. Frank Jannuzi argues that perhaps the diplomats should take a cue from people:

The best way to resolve the ongoing nuclear crisis is to stop talking about nukes — and instead focus on advancing North Korean human rights, reorienting global attention from the North’s plutonium to its people.

The question of atomic weapons and the question of human rights in North Korea intersect when one examines the ideology and psychology of the Kim regime. The world has seen any number of communist totalitarian dictators, but the Kims are another category altogether.

The Kim family takes — and expects other people to take — its deity seriously. The Kims expect to be worshipped, praised, and given credit for every good thing. North Korean citizens are expected to thank the Kims for good weather and for any recovery after a time of illness, as Doug Bandow reports:

In North Korea, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are demigod the father and demigod son; Juche is the political gospel. Writings of the Kims are treated as scripture. Which helps explain the North’s position as the world's worst religious persecutor.

It is difficult to understand, and difficult to believe, the mindset which pervades North Korea. If one can understand this mindset, and if one can believe that it is in fact firmly rooted both in the collective North Korean psyche as well as in the North Korean diplomatic corps, then one faces the question: Is it possible to negotiate with this nation? If so, how?

For this reason, many of the world’s diplomats — from a diverse range of countries — had and have more or less given up on any attempt at serious diplomacy with this country.

And that is why so many were shocked at President Trump’s greatly increased efforts at achieving diplomatic progress with this nation.

What will be the ultimate outcome of Trump’s efforts? What will be the fruit of his administration’s diplomatic overtures to North Korea? Time alone will reveal what Trump will or will not achieve: either a great accomplishment or a disappointing fizzle.

In any case, North Korea will remain an object of world attention for some time to come.

North Korea is characterized by a determined and incorrigible drive toward building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal; by a persistent and consistent violation of many human rights; and by a culture which has absolutized and deified the Kim dynasty.

The role of the Kim family in North Korean society exceeds, e.g., the role of the Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, the role of Louis XIV in 17th-century and 18th-century France, or the role of Stalin and Mao in the 20th-century communist dictatorships.

Diplomats from nations all around the globe, who can otherwise interface with the most monstrous regimes and with the most horrific tyrants, find it difficult to interact with North Korea’s unpredictability, irrationality, and incomprehensibility.

For this reason, among others, President Trump’s attempts to reach a working relationship with North Korea are fascinating.

Kidnapping China’s Leader: Chiang Kai-shek in Xi’an

In late 1936, China was defending itself against two lethal enemies. Externally, it was being attacked by Japan. Internally, it was being attacked by Mao’s communists. The leader of China, Chiang Kai-shek, had to make difficult decisions about allocating resources.

How many soldiers and how much equipment should be sent to fight against Japan? Likewise, how many soldiers and how much equipment should be sent to defend the country from the communists?

In December 1936, Chiang was in the city of Xi’an. Suddenly, two of his own bodyguards kidnapped him.

In return for the release of Chiang, they demanded not money, but rather a change in government policy. They insisted that China’s government use more resources for the defense against Japan, and fewer resources for the defense against Mao’s communists.

The net effect of the incident was that a temporary truce or ceasefire was declared between the Chinese people and Mao’s communists. The legitimate Chinese government and the communist terrorists would temporarily work together to fight against the attacking Japanese.

The two individuals who seem to have been most directly responsible for physically keeping Chiang Kai-shek under house arrest were his bodyguards. But the leading minds behind the operation were members of Mao’s communist gang.

One of the leaders of the operation, and one of the negotiators who presented the communist demands to the government, was Zhou Enlai. During the following decades, Zhou Enlai would rise with the communists, and inside the communist hierarchy, to be second only to Mao himself.

This made Zhou Enlai responsible for millions of deaths.

During Chiang’s captivity, he got to know Zhou. Suffering perhaps from a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, Chiang developed a trust in Zhou. Years after the incident, Chiang would indicate that he felt that Zhou was a trustworthy individual, as historian Jay Taylor writes:

In 1941, Chiang would tell Owen Lattimore that he considered Zhou “personally trustworthy although he was of course under Yan’an’s control.” Years later, Chiang, obviously referring to Zhou, wrote that at Xi’an he believed that the Communists, meaning of course Zhou, had “repented and were sincere.” Although sometimes Zhou echoed Mao’s cynicism about Chiang’s belief in his own sincerity, later events would suggest that Zhou did believe and would argue within the CCP that if Chiang lived up to his commitments at Xi’an, the Communists should give priority to fighting the Japanese under the broad but real leadership of Chiang Kai-shek.

Sadly, Chiang had confided this view with Owen Lattimore, who turned out to be a Soviet asset.

Historians debate about the ambiguous aspects of Lattimore’s status: Was he a paid operative for a Soviet intelligence agency? Or was he unwittingly manipulated into acting in ways that benefitted the Soviet Socialists? Was he an actual spy? Or did the USSR simply trick him, exploiting Lattimore’s socialist sympathies?

In either case, Chiang’s admission to Lattimore was doubtless quickly transmitted to Moscow, and from there to Mao’s communist roughians. Mao would exploit Chiang’s weakness for Zhou.

In any event, Chiang was in a difficult situation: to adequately defend the nation against Japan, he would need to reduce his defenses against Mao’s communist bandits; in order to adequately defend China against Mao’s communist raiders, he would have to reduce his defenses against Japan.

China seemed doomed.

Chiang did not know that when he spoke to Owen Lattimore, he was speaking to an agent working — wittingly or unwittingly — for the Soviet Socialists.

In the final outcome, it may not have made a huge difference: the communists seemed destined to dominate China.

This much is clear: when the communists, under the leadership of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, conquered China, the result was 20,000,000 deaths within the first decade, and several million more deaths in the next decade.

A note on spelling: because these names are transliterated into the Roman alphabet, alternate spellings abound: Mao Zedong is Mao Tse-Tung; Zhou Enlai is Chou En-lai; Chiang Kai-shek is Jiang Jieshi or Chiang Chieh-shih or Chiang Chung-cheng; Xi’an is Sian. Variations in spelling have no impact on meaning.

Whither China: Can Humaneness Take Root?

Since U.S. President Richard Nixon first established diplomatic with communist China in 1972, sinologists have watched China for signs of increased respect for human rights. (‘Sinologists’ are scholars who study China.)

Observers have hoped that increased interaction with other nations would nudge China toward developing a more free society. These hopes have been dashed sometimes, and been confirmed sometimes.

China’s legacy of atrocities and genocides included the ‘Great Leap Forward’ from 1958 to 1962 and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ from 1966 to 1969.

The ‘Great Leap Forward’ culminated in a manufactured famine which caused the deaths of approximately fifteen million people (some estimates range as high as thirty million).

The ‘Cultural Revolution,’ despite officially ending in 1969, caused painful ripple effects until 1976, causing the deaths of between 500,000 and two million Chinese, and several million more Tibetans.

The question, in the wake of Nixon’s diplomacy, was whether China would become more humane. The results were at best mixed. Occasionally gestures toward civil rights alternated with the events like the Massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, in which several thousand people died, or with the bullying of religious minorities like Christians and Tibetan Buddhists.

By 2015, journalists Chen Guangcheng and Melanie Kirkpatrick could write:

China often punishes its critics by abusing their relatives; Chen’s family was no exception. Over the years, his wife was assaulted, his daughter was forbidden to go to school, and a nephew was jailed. Some family members and close friends advised him to give up his work. “I felt misery about the pain my family had suffered,” he writes. “[But] I firmly believed — as I still do — that if you bow your head before the Communist Party, it will soon make you get on your hands and knees, and next it will stomp on your crouching body until it destroys you.”

Until 2015, China also pursued its ‘one child policy,’ forcing women to undergo forced sterilization and forced abortions.

Chen never says what motivated him to be the voice of the voiceless in China. He invokes “heaven” from time to time, and he remains faithful to Chinese traditions such as praying at the graves of ancestors. He makes no mention of God or religion. What his deeds make abundantly clear, though, is his belief in the sanctity of life and his great compassion for the sick, those with disabilities, and the unborn.

Moving toward the third decade of the twentieth century, the nations of the world looked to mass protests in Hong Kong in mid-2019 to see if there were any signs of what would come next: Whither China? Oppression or freedom?

Founding Civilization in Brazil

Although Brazil was discovered in the year 1500 by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, it remained largely uncivilized and undeveloped for several centuries. Brazil’s first advancement happened when the queen of Portugal temporarily moved her capital to Brazil from 1807 to 1814.

The capital had been relocated because Napoleon threatened the safety of Lisbon, Portugal’s permanent capital city.

Around the same time, and perhaps partly for similar reasons, the first groups of German-speaking settlers brought cultural development to Brazil, as Thomas Sowell writes:

Substantial German immigration to Brazil, as to South America in general, began early in the nineteenth century and included over the years not only immigrants from what is now Germany, but also sizable numbers of Germans from Russia, Switzerland, and Austria.

The reader might be puzzled at the phrase ‘Germans from Russia,’ but from the mid-1700s forward, large numbers of Germans had emigrated to parts of Russia, hoping to make a new home there. Russia’s low literacy rates and weak economic infrastructure, however, caused many of these Germans to move on to other countries.

In 1818, a group of Germans settled in Ilheus. In 1819, another group settled in Sao Jorge. When Brazil became politically independent from Portugal in 1822, the new nation’s government worked to entice Germans to live in Brazil.

Most settled in the southern part of Brazil, concentrated in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, where the first enduring German agricultural colony was established in 1824, though earlier unsuccessful attempts to establish German colonies in Brazil go back to the late eighteenth century.

Among the first Germans to make their home in Brazil, farming was a dominant activity. Later waves of Germans settled in cities instead of in the countryside, and became entrepreneurs, merchants, technical innovators, craftsmen, and industrialists.

Settlements of Germans, in groups numbering in the hundreds or the thousands, continued to be made in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century.

By the end of the twentieth century, almost a million Brazilians used German as their primary language at home; almost three million speak German. There are villages which operate primarily as German-speaking communities.

Over the decades, the flow of Germans into Brazil enabled the development of technology and commerce. The Germans were, and are, leaders in medicine, the arts, and the economy of Brazil.

China’s New Imposing Military Bases: Artificial Islands in the South China Sea

In its expanding empire, China had begun to exert colonial control — even without formal colonization — in places like Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), and Sri Lanka. The muscle used to intimidate these and other regions into compliance is in part military and in part economic.

In a novel development, where no convenient land base for its military is present, China has begun the construction of manmade islands as bases for weapons and soldiers. Already in 2014, Robert Kaplan wrote:

Take the Spratlys, with significant oil and natural gas deposits, which are claimed in full by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and in part by Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei. China has built concrete helipads and military structures on seven reefs and shoals. On Mischief Reef, which China occupied under the nose of the Philippine navy in the 1990s, China has constructed a three-­story building and five octagonal concrete structures, all for military use. On Johnson Reef, China put up a structure armed with high-­powered machine guns.

When a superpower like China creates an island where none had previously existed, stocks that island with troops and missiles, and then makes claims on the waters in the region and on the shipping lanes through them, then nations like Vietnam and Malaysia can rightfully speak of extortion.

The nations around the South China Sea hope to offer some resistance to the Chinese, as Robert Kaplan reports:

Taiwan occupies Itu Aba Island, on which it has constructed dozens of buildings for military use, protected by hundreds of troops and twenty coastal guns. Vietnam occupies twenty-­one islands on which it has built runways, piers, barracks, storage tanks, and gun emplacements. Malaysia and the Philippines, as stated, have five and nine sites respectively, occupied by naval detachments. Anyone who speculates that with globalization, territorial boundaries and fights for territory have lost their meaning should behold the South China Sea.

While these nations are to be admired for struggling against the expanding Chinese imperialist power, they cannot stand alone against China and survive. With its large labor force and large manufacturing base, China is building missiles and battleships at a rate which these smaller nations cannot match.

The behavior of China in the South China Sea is parallel to the behavior of Athens in the Aegean Sea, as revealed in the ‘Melian Dialogue’ section of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.

When Chinese hegemony over the South China Sea is complete, it will control one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, and will be able to greatly influence the world’s economy, thereby affecting nearly every nation on earth.

Xi Jinping and His Vision of China As the Leader of a New World Order: Capabilities in Cyberwar, Space War, Conventional War, and Economic War

The current reign of Xi Jinping in China marks a high point in the consolidation of power and control. This can be seen de jure by the large number of official titles he has amassed for himself: Secretary General of the Communist Party of China, President of the People’s Republic of China, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Chairman of the National Security Commission of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission, Chairman of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, Chairman of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, and many others.

He holds all of these offices simultaneously. Like Louis XIV in France, Xi Jinping would be correct if he said, L’etat, c’est moi: ‘I am the state.’

Aside from the official titles, it is simply the case de facto that Xi is a dictator and an absolutist.

Robert Maginnis, as an insider in America’s military intelligence agencies, finds a quote from Steven Mosher accurate:

Dr. Steven Mosher, author of the 2017 book, Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order, said: “Xi Jinping is the new Chairman Mao, a thoroughly Communist dictator who has managed to seize control of the Party, the Army, and the Government. The new Red Emperor, as we should call him, is likely to be in power for decades to come. And he is not our friend. He is carrying out a new Cultural Revolution in China. Communist Party leader Xi’s China ‘Dream’ is the world’s nightmare. Xi ‘dreams’ of overturning the current U.S.-led world order and replacing it with [a new world order] … dominated by China. A world dominated by China would be less free, less democratic, and less safe, not only for Americans, but for the Chinese people themselves. Xi believes that international law and agreements are, as he has said, just ‘waste paper,’ or better put, ‘toilet paper.’”

As an uncontrolled autocrat, Xi Jinping poses a threat both to the Chinese people and to the global community of nations at large. It is clear that diplomacy is meaningless to Xi, and that negotiated treaties with him are a futile exercise, as Robert Maginnis writes:

China’s constitutional change to make Xi Jinping president for life is a harbinger of the authoritarian nation’s direction and a strategic threat to America.

To be sure, between Mao and Xi, China has had a number of leaders, all of whom demonstrated a relatively high degree of authoritarianism and absolutism. But Xi represents a zenith of those qualities, even in China.

It is easy for diplomats from other nations to misunderstand the situation in China, because the degree of autocracy and of a willingness to deceive are so extreme that the situation is non-intuitive for emissaries from other countries. Robert Maginnis quotes from a report given to Congress by Admiral Harry Harris:

“China has taken advantage of our openness,” Harris told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2018. “Our hope in the past has been that if we bring China into organizations like the World Trade Organization and include China in our military exercises and the like, and that somehow China will become like us.”

“The reality is that’s simply not true. China has taken advantage of our openness … to continue the path that they’ve always been on and we’re seeing that play out now in 2018. Certainly over the next 20 years or so that will be a concern,” Harris said.

Even while engaging in seemingly amiable talks with other governments, China is preparing for a variety of offensive scenarios. One outline goes like this: a three-pronged operation in which, simultaneously, China’s attack satellites would disable several U.S. satellites, instantly reducing communication, GPS, and logistical coordination capabilities; would hack into and disable computer networks on the ground in the United States, further handicapping transportation and communication, and crippling our economic infrastructure; and would move its armed forces into the South China Sea, an occupation which the U.S. would then be powerless to challenge or resist.

In such a scenario, China would have gained control of what is arguably the world’s single most important shipping lane, and have obtained hegemony over the nations around the South China Sea: Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, etc.

Admiral Harris explained that Beijing seeks regional hegemony and intends to oust America from Asia. It is developing the means to do that via systems such as the hypersonic glide weapons and stealth fighters. Besides, the admiral expressed concern about China’s militarization of islands in the South China Sea and its acquisition of icebreaker ships, although it has no Arctic coast.

China’s pronounced military buildup in recent years has a double motive: on the one hand, it can use massive armed forces to gain by threats and extortion what it wants, and so dominate without firing a shot; on the other hand, China is more than willing to go to war to achieve its objectives, and will use its military that way if necessary.

Beyond the South China Sea, Xi Jinping’s ambitions extend to Africa and beyond. Among smaller, less-developed “third world” nations, China’s tactic is a Mafia-like racket. It begins with China offering to help one of these nations with infrastructure project: building roads, dams, hospitals, water and sewage systems, electrical generating plants, etc. Such nations can’t afford to pay for these items, so China generously extends credit. When the nations are unable to make the payments on the loans, China offers to “forgive” the debt in return for placing permanent military bases in these nations, in return for rights to ship into, out of, and through these nations, and in return for exclusive rights which lock other nations out of what by now has become a vassal state.