How can we portray China as the most imminent threat facing the United States, something that has become a political imperative for both political parties in America in recent years, at a time when Russia is integrating its own economy with China’s while attacking and grinding its neighbors to submission?
To understand this, it’s important to be clear about the Republican Party’s new ideological foundations: The liberal international order that earlier incarnations of the Republican Party spent decades building – an order in which free markets and civil society initiatives expanded the political base of Western countries – is seen by Republicans today as more dangerous than anything Moscow and Beijing have done to undermine it.
In other words, it’s better to throttle independent media and the judiciary that might question attempts to disrupt elections and the everyday use of Nazi rhetoric than to allow transgender people to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity..
Trump has been able to get away with making these remarks because they are just part of his usual meandering swirl of extreme rhetoric that reflects a backlash against white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
But now others around Trump, many of them powerful foreign policy figures, are laying the groundwork for a new position that the entire party needs to adopt as part of an effort to undo what happened globally in the late 20th century.
He doesn’t deny that relations between Beijing and Moscow are now much closer, but Pillsbury argues that Biden is not only responsible for the hell Putin has unleashed on Ukraine, but also for not supporting negotiations between Moscow and Kiev.
Putin has no intention of giving up an inch of Ukrainian territory occupied by his troops and will use any means necessary to keep it. So what’s the point of negotiations unless the parties involved are prepared to accept these conditions?
Aside from asserting that Biden is the real villain, Pillsbury made a statement that sounds like it came straight out of a Moscow propaganda machine: “We need some kind of negotiation on Ukraine.”
Anyone at his level knows that putting the article “the” before Ukraine was how the Soviets referred to the region. When Ukraine became independent, the article was dropped.
This is not an inconsequential verbal gaffe: it is part of a restructuring that will set the stage for the eventual shift the Republican Party needs to achieve its new geopolitical goals.
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Mainland China strongly condemns Taiwan leader’s ‘blatant’ demand for independence
Mainland China strongly condemns Taiwan leader’s ‘blatant’ demand for independence
Over time, the new Republican Party will no longer side with democratic Taiwan against the alliance between Beijing and Moscow, which has become a military industrial giant pushing a nationalist populist agenda. When it comes to international power projection, it will be much easier for Republicans to negotiate with like-minded figures like Putin and Xi Jinping than to cater to the policies of the world’s democracies.
The question isn’t whether the Republican Party will side with the world’s dictators — which it already does — but whether they will distort the truth enough to align themselves with American voters.
Robert Delaney is The Post’s North American bureau chief.
