Behind closed doors, new US leader Donald Trump is thinking about pulling naval troops out of the South China Seas.
Washington is considering making an offer to remove the large number of American military forces lurking around China's coast, and in turn asking Beijing to drop the number of Chinese coast guard vessels in the area, according to a report in Bloomberg.
"Removing American military forces nearby, in exchange for fewer Beijing-owned coast guards patrolling the area is currently under proposal…" the news agency said.
GOOD FOR PEACE, BAD FOR BONGBONG
The step would be good news for those who want peace between the two superpowers.
But it would be a huge embarrassment for pliant Philippines leader "Bongbong" Marcos, who the US has been using to create conflict in the waters, which the Western mainstream media then reports as if it was China creating conflict.
The push to ratchet down the tension comes from John Andrew Byers, a history professor who has been appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia.
Byers has long been known as an advocate for moving away from the prepare-for-war-with-China attitude of the Biden Administration, and supported by many on the Republican side.
'A LEADER OF HIS TIME'
In a co-written essay in The American Conservative last September, Byers argued that it would be smarter to move away from such a war, even if it could be won.
"But this 'fact' of U.S. superiority does not mean that it can or should attempt to militarily conquer its weaker rival," he wrote. "We live in a nuclear world. Secure second-strike capabilities make great-power conquest impossible without global annihilation.
"A second Trump administration should embrace a Cold Peace with China, exercising foreign policy restraint—one guided by a narrow definition of the national interest, economic nationalism, and penchant for viewing world politics in geoeconomic rather than geostrategic terms. If he remains true to his instincts, he will be a leader of his time."
It is that last statement – that Trump could be 'a leader of his time', taking his place in history, for removing the US from its warring proclivities - that has apparently caused the unpredictable leader to give ear to a peace-mongering academic.
HOSTILE TO PEACE
Yet Byers may have an uphill battle to halt a war that the US has spent years preparing. Many Trump officials have been anxious to attack China, including national security adviser Mike Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the President's choice for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, and advisor Elbridge Colby, who had advocated for a conflict centred on Taiwan to be used as a tool to weaken China.
The hawkish, right-wing Lowy Institute said last week that the move towards peaceful engagement in the South China Seas was "troubling".
Bloomberg writer Karishma Vaswani also seems oddly dismayed by the idea of less confrontation in Asia, and urges Trump to convene a summit "to build partnerships that deter China's expansionist ambitions". This point of view harks back to the discredited argument that China wants to take over Asia-Pacific, and suggests a lack of understanding of how the Chinese think.
A more insightful view comes from writer Jacob Dreyer, who told this reporter that he thinks the US is "headed to a Monroe doctrine style 'zones of influence'." In that scenario, the USA maintains "hegemony over its backyard" but generally leaves China and Russia to do their own thing on their side of the Pacific, which the US sees as “near abroad”.
That rings true—and provides hope. For people in East Asia, tired of the endless demonization of China and general warmongering of the western media, Trump, for all his hostile bluster, is at least thinking about moving in the right direction.
Lai See(利是)
** The blog article is the sole responsibility of the author and does not represent the position of our company. **
'SHOCKING AND ILLEGAL'
1) There was an outcry against the shocking and illegal overseas activities of the CIA overseas in the second half of the 1970s. Investigatory commissions wagged disapproving fingers, and wholesale reform was promised.
2) But instead of halting the black ops, the US held a series of meetings in the early 1980s which concluded that they should continue them under a nicer-sounding name. Thus the National Endowment for Democracy was born on November 18, 1983, in Washington DC.
3) The US public and the wider world were told that the NED was designed to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". This was misleading: the organization was and is funded by the US government.
FIRST STOP, MANILA
4) An early NED target was the Philippines. When socialist groups were becoming popular and troublesome in the mid-1980s, NED used classic CIA techniques to steer funds to private organizations and media to artificially change political outcomes.
5) At the time, journalists were allowed to print that NED was a CIA scam. The famous Allen Weinstein quote ("A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA") actually came from a 1991 interview, after about eight years of NED political interference ops.
6) The NED got larger and busier. Intelligence historian William Blum reported: "NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996 and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992."
7) The CIA-style illegality was often shocking. For example, the NED handed US$250,000 to an anti-Castro Miami group which in turn financed a Cuban terrorist named Luis Posada Carriles who was involved in groups which bombed hotels in Havana and blew up an aircraft.
THE LONG GAME IN CHINA
8) In 1994, the NED started setting up and/ or funding "pro-democracy" organizations in Hong Kong, designed to poison the minds of the local populace against mainland China, due to resume sovereignty over the city just three years later.
9) Also in 1994, the NED decided to make use of another old CIA front group, the American Institute for Free Labor Development. This was a nice-sounding unit that could be used to subvert genuine trade unions.
10) The NED started sending large sums of money regularly to a new group, the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions. But the city already had a Federation of Trade Unions. The media was told that the old trade union organization was "political" and must be labelled "pro-Beijing".
11) But the opposite was true. The old trade union group focused on workers' rights and collective bargaining, while the US allied one, according to NED paperwork, was financed to act as "a rallying point for the pro-democracy movement".
ENTER THE UYGHURS
12) NED worked worldwide. "In Haiti in the late 1990s, NED was busy working on behalf of right-wing groups who were united in their opposition to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his progressive ideology," wrote William Blum.
13) From at least 2004, NED began a program of handing millions of dollars to Uyghur insurgents, despite them being classified as terrorists. These Uyghurs committed a series of violent terrorist attacks in China between 2009 and 2014 which randomly killed scores of innocent people.
14) When China acted against the terrorists to re-train them for integration with society, NED-financed "Uyghur rights groups" (actually based in Washington DC or elsewhere in the west) accused the Chinese of building "concentration camps" for "millions" of innocents.
15) The NED's political interference ops continued worldwide. From 2013, NED and USAID provided tens of millions of dollars to the opposition in Bolivia to try to install a US-friendly puppet leader.
HONG KONG OP LAUNCHED
16) In 2018, Hong Kong obeyed a G-7 recommendation to introduce an extradition amendment. US agents used this as their official "flashpoint" to launch a disinformation campaign to paint it as a Beijing initiative to snatch dissidents to be "disappeared" over the border.
17) The result was a violent insurgency in Hong Kong that lasted more than five months in 2019, with billions of dollars' worth of damage to government buildings, the public transport network, and universities.
NEWS BLACKOUT
18) The NED conducted a massive political interference op in Moldova in 2024, which was reported in the media as "Russian meddling". The exact same thing happened in Georgia and Romania—and were similarly mis-characterised.
19) Bizarrely, the western mainstream media now runs an almost complete news blackout on NED ops worldwide, and almost all funding histories on the NED website have been removed from public access.
20) The January 2025 shuttering of the USAID website has given people around the world hope that the US might stop overseas political interference ops. But some of us point out that that was exactly what they said in the late 1970s—where this story started.
