Even under the most hopeful scenario for November 3rd and January 20th, we can expect the outgoing kakocrats to do immense damage over the next six months. Considering it may be their last chance in a while, we should expect the harm inflicted to go very deep.A case in point of particular concern to my bicultural world is their poisoning of the already strained relationship between the U.S. and China. The Secretary of State flew all the way to the Nixon Library this week to claim it was time to declare the establishment of relations Nixon effected a failure and a mistake - as if it were an option not to have relations. This article in the Times sums up the recent onslaught:
While
the strategy has reinforced a key campaign message, some American
officials, worried Mr. Trump will lose, are also trying to engineer
irreversible changes, according to people familiar with the thinking.
... A state of broad and intense competition is the end goal of the
president’s hawkish advisers. In their view, confrontation and coercion,
aggression and antagonism should be the status quo with the Chinese
Communist Party, no matter who is leading the United States next year.
They call it “reciprocity.”
Sadly it's hard to imagine that repairing the many broken links - something which would take care and tact and commitment and time - will be a top priority of a Biden regime, tasked as it will be with picking up the pieces of demoralized domestic governance, a shattered sense of the common good and frayed relationships with friendlier countries (not to mention the economic, public health and social justice wasteland). One can't see the Chinese side, in thrall to its own reckless advocates of "confrontation and coercion, aggression and antagonism," making the effort either, at least not right away. And Trump and his henchmen's America first carnage has undermined the international mechanisms and relationships which might broker a truce. Dark times ahead.
It was perhaps naive of me to think I'd done my time living through a cold war, but this time it's personal. We're more than a little worried.
