The Duran Podcast - U.S. foreign policy isolates the U.S.

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

U.S. foreign policy isolates the U.S.

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the Blinken trip to China. And maybe we can start at Blinkin's sendoff from China, his final day in China, a video that went viral of Xi Jinping waiting for Blinken. It seems that Blinken got delayed, and Xi Jinping had to wait for him. And Xi Jinping is looking at his watch, pacing back and forth, then he asks one of his aides off camera, when is this guy leaving, something like that. And then we had reports that Blinken was not escorted by any Chinese officials to the airport.

Though I have read reports claiming that China did indeed send a foreign ministry official with Blinken to the airport. So there are some reports that claim only the U.S. ambassador accompanied Blinkin to the airport, but I have seen reports which claim that China did have a foreign ministry official escort blinking along with the U.S. ambassador to the airport. Anyway, I don't think that's very important. The tone of the Chinese, especially on the final day towards blinking, I believe, says a lot. And it probably says a lot with regards to just the general feeling from countries outside of the collective west towards the U.S. is foreign policy department or team the way they conduct diplomacy. I think it has a lot of countries very put off by it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And now we've discussed what happened over Blinken's visit to China, the fact that he gave this ultimatumating to the Chinese to stop supporting the Russian war economy. And the Chinese said, no. They're not going to, you know, structure their economic relations with third countries according to what the United States wants and that they're going to go on trading in a normal way

with Russia as they have been doing. I think that's going to change, by the way. We've also seen Lincoln bringing up the so-called overcapacity issue, which is when you actually read American comments carefully, basically saying that China's economy is too big. That's what they're now basically saying when you feel it down, that China has too big an economy, it must arrange somehow to make its economy smaller in order to make it easier for the US and others to forge ahead.

I mean, absurd things. The Chinese are furious about it. They were furious also by Blinken's statement, public statement, as he was leaving China. which looked very much in places, I have to say, like an election address. It was like, you know, talking about jobs for American workers and that kind, protecting jobs of American workers and basically accusing China of causing unemployment and the US and shutting down businesses there.

And the Chinese will not have liked that either. So the Chinese have responded. And putting aside, whether or not. a Chinese foreign ministry official did accompany Blinken to the airport. The fact remains that the video that's been published of Blinken boarding the plane only shows the U.S. ambassador there. But that's totally overshadowed by the fact that the Chinese have published this extraordinary film of Xi Jinping pacing around impatiently, waiting for Blinken, glancing, glancing, glancing, at his watch and asking people, when does this man leave?

In other words, giving the impression that the Chinese don't want Blinken in their country. Or at least Xi Jinping doesn't. So, I mean, it's, the Chinese didn't need to publish that film. The fact is they have done so. And it's a sign of how angry Blinkin's visit to the United States has made them. but this is just part of how angry people generally feel now about the United States. Erdogan has just postponed a trip that he was going to make to the United States. First one-on-one meeting in the United States since Biden was elected, by the way,

but the US invited Erdogan to come to Washington and to meet with Biden on the 9th of May. Erdogan has now announced that he's not going and he's postponed the visit and nobody knows when he's intending to go. But apparently he doesn't want to go to the US at this time. He feels unhappy apparently about US policies in Syria and about the Kurds and all the usual things that we've been hearing about. But anyway, he really doesn't want to meet Biden. He doesn't feel obviously that meeting with Biden is going to advance or sort of advice. answer any of his agenda or sort out any of the problems that are accumulating. And I understand that in India, the government there is becoming increasingly angry also

about the endless sniping that is now going on against Modi, who is in the middle of a massive election, Indian elections go on for weeks because the country is so enormous. But if you follow the American media, lots of articles now starting to have. appear sniping at Modi, talking about his authoritarian turn, talking about the way in which Modi is supposedly sending assassins around the world to murder his opponents, specifically seek separatists, including in the United States itself, indications that even the relationship with India, which the United States had wanted to develop is now deteriorating because the Biden administration is unhappy with the fact that Modi, as Prime Minister of India, is taking an

independent line. So we are seeing a major deterioration of US policy in every region, with every important country. Well, maybe they win back a few. They won back the Philippines when Marcus Jr. was elected president a short time ago. They won back Argentina when Millicester. They won back Argentina when Millet was elected. They're hoping, I think, to achieve something in South Africa where the ANC is facing a difficult election. But in more and more places around the world, in all the big places in Brazil, in India, in China, they are across the Middle East. They are losing friends. And they're losing friends at an accelerating rate. Even Colombia is now talking by the way of joining the Briggs. And Colombia is and has

been the U.S.'s most loyal ally in Latin America for decades. Yeah, what would you say about the argument that where it matters, the U.S. is picking up friends. For example, Philippines is an argument that you get off in, or at least the Asia Pacific, where the U.S. needs to contain, according to the argument, they need to contain China. So they're putting an emphasis on winning over the Asia Pacific. I think the telegraph actually had an article talking about this where they said China is the most hated country in the world. And the U.S. is picking up allies in the Asia Pacific with their stellar diplomacy. This is, this is, this actually goes to the heart of the problem.

because the Biden administration doesn't see diplomacy as trying to, you know, achieve stable relations with countries, powerful countries, that you need to have stable relations with. It sees diplomacy as simply part of a giant chess game that it plays out against people that it considers are its adversaries. So we've had the election of President Marcos Jr.

The son, by the way, of the notorious Marcos senior. They've persuaded him to realign more closely with the United States because they see China as an adversary. And the result is that the far more important relationship with China, the biggest economy in the world now, the biggest manufacturing power by far, that's getting worse. And that's really a bigger problem

than the fact that you're able to get a few more bases in the Philippines, which are not going to change the overall military balance in the Indo-Pacific region against an adversary like China. They might have won, as they see it in the Philippines, but by the way they're losing in other places in Vietnam, the Vietnamese are now clearly saying, we don't want to have anything to do with this.

They're starting to tilt more towards the Chinese, apparently they're now coming in for criticism as well. Indonesia, also bigger economy, much more powerful country than for the Philippines, is also starting to distance itself from the United States. Elsewhere in the world, Yeah, they won back Argentina. It looks like Venezuela is stabilising and is becoming, again, more hostile,

and Colombia is cooling, and of course, Brazil is part of the bricks. So, I mean, it's an infantile, a childish way of approaching diplomacy. You treat the world as a chessboard. You treat countries as pieces on that chessboard. You think to yourself, well, we won a major win because we've got the Philippines on side. And in fact, in reality, what you're doing is losing, and you're losing friends and partners when in the end you might need them. Yeah, I agree with you. But if you look at the way the neo-libs and the neocons go about foreign policy and geopolitics,

For them, they may see it as getting countries, even one country. If you can get one country on side to act as a block to progress and development of a region or of something like bricks, then you may see it as a good move on the chess board. Oh, yeah, of course you do. Or on the checkers board in this instance. You know, if we could get Argentina to block the development of bricks in South America, That's a win. If we can get Philippines, if we can just pick off one country in Asia, in Asia Pacific, okay, Philippines to block the progress of the entire region, that's a win. And the same carries

for the Middle East. It carries for the efforts being placed in Eurasia as well, and so on and so forth. Maybe that's how they're looking at it. Of course, they do. That is exactly how they look at it. But as I said, this is not the right way to look at global relations. It is to misunderstand them entirely. In the end, it won't make you friends. It will make you enemies. And you end up, by the way, making partners of people who might not be ultimately very helpful to you, people like Millet in Argentina, who's becoming increasingly erratic, by the way, and he's losing support there, and Marcos Jr., potentially in the Philippines as well. And, of course, ultimately, it will cause you more problems.

It is not going to stop China's economic development that the United States has now got some kind of a relationship going with the Philippines. All that it is going to do is provoke China. And that really doesn't make any real kind of sense. True diplomacy is not conducted in this way. creating blocks is not going to help you. All it's going to do is it's going to involve you in more commitments that you can't fulfill in more places where you really want to have peace rather than find yourself in an adversary situation.

But you're absolutely right. If you're a near-com, you don't think in these terms. You do think that the whole world is a chessboard, you play your thesis, you won the Philippines, you congratulate yourself that you've got the Philippines on side, and then you try and make your next move as you see it, thinking that you can create trouble in that way. Let me give an example. If you follow media outlets like Business Insider, for example,

there's a big discussion about the fact that the United States has bought 81 fighter jets from Kazakhstan. And this is clearly an attempt, by the way, to create trouble between Russia and Kazakhstan because the suggestion is that the fighter jets have been bought from Kazakhstan, which are all the Soviet models, are going to end up in Ukraine. It's not going to make any difference in relations between Russia and Kazakhstan. These are absolute broken down relics from the late period. 19,000 a plea.

A $19,000 a plane. I mean, the Kazakhs have gone out of their way to say these aircraft are completely inoperable. They're unsalvageable. All of the electronics in them have been gutted, even as spare parts. What you would be doing is you'd be getting aircraft, which, frankly, are now so old and so rusted and so broken down that whatever spare parts you could extract from them would probably be dangerous.

in any new plane that you install them in. So why does the United States buy these aircraft? Because they did it. You know, why do they do it? You know, aircraft that are useless to them, the reason they've done it, as I said, is to create trouble between Kazakhstan and Russia, which is not going to do.

But this is how the neocons always think. They always say to themselves, we're going to play, you know, everything's a chessboard, we make our move, How are we going to create trouble between the Chinese, so between the Russians and the Kazakhs where we buy all these fighter jets and we think we're going to annoy the Russians and cause them to have issues with the Kazakhs? And how are we going to annoy and infuriate the

Chinese? Well, we're going to play games with the Philippines, as if that's going to scare the Russians at all or change anything in the Indo-Pacific region. You lose China completely. I mean, We have a furious Xi Jinping. You create problems with yourself in India. Where, by the way, Modi used to be the pro-American leader. So now you, you know, you antagonize him. You upset Lula in Brazil, whose project to build up the bricks in, and to build up relations in Latin America have been wrecked by what has happened in Argentina.

You do all of this. Are you winning? No, you're losing. But of course, you fool yourself and say that you're winning and you're playing all these clever, complicated moves. Yeah, the foreign policy of the U.S. right now seems to be just how do you stop the progress, of the multipolar world. That seems to be the policy right now. And that's not a policy. That's a losing policy. How do we stop progress? And I think Xi Jinping even hinted at this when he was speaking to Blinken at this fact that we don't need to stop the progression of the multipolar world. We can create a

win-win situation. And he went out of his way to try and convince Blinken that they can create a win-win partnership. And it doesn't have to be about one country blocking the problem. of another. But then Blinken, the next day, he turned around and he made the statement that he made. But that seems to be the policy right now of the U.S. How do we block the world from progressing? And no one, even in life, in personal relationships, no one wants to hang out with that dude that is constantly sabotaging and trying to block the progress of you and your friends or your family or whatever. No one wants that person around them. And I think a lot of countries and are saying, you know, this is getting very annoying.

Absolutely. The collective West end and the U.S. trying to block every little move that we make, which may better our economy, our people, our standing. People are getting annoyed. The leaders of world powers are getting very annoyed with this. Absolutely. But you're absolutely right. That is the policy.

By the way, if you go to neocom publications, they don't conceal it. That's the other extent. thing. I mean, it is about freezing the world in a position where American hegemony is indefinitely preserved, which is an anti-historical thing. It is an absurd idea. You can't stop history. You can't stop human development. And as you rightly said, trying to do so, all that is going to do, is it's going to create for you. It's going to convert your rivals into enemies and your friends into adversaries also.

It's an absurd idea. But this president, this secretary of state, this national security advisor, the team around them, they think in no other way. All right. We will end it there, the derad. We are on Rumble, Odyssey, Butchew, Telegraph, Rock Finn, and Twitter X, and go to the Duran shop,

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