Detente: The Vital Word Missing From Discourse
On Russia And China
By Caitlin Johnstone
May 06, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - - "
On a recent
60 Minutes interview with Norah
O’Donnell which focused on the
Biden administration’s China policy, US
Secretary of State Tony Blinken talked about the
United States as a defender of the rules-based
international order and the importance of bringing
Beijing into compliance with it.
“Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it
back, to keep it down: it is to uphold this
rules-based order that China is posing a challenge
to,” Blinken said. “Anyone who poses a challenge to
that order, we’re going to stand up and defend it.”
Now, had Blinken been speaking to an actual
journalist, he would have been asked in what
specific ways defending “the rules-based order”
against China would differ from trying to contain
China and keep it down. He would have also been
asked what business a nation that has
killed millions and
displaced tens of millions in illegal wars just
since the turn of this century while deliberately
starving civilians to death with
sanctions and
blockades has proclaiming itself the defender of
any “rules-based order”.
But Blinken was not talking to a journalist.
Blinken was talking to Norah O’Donnell.
O’Donnell’s interview with Blinken was a perfect
illustration of the fact that modern mainstream
reporters are only allowed to ask confrontational
foreign policy questions of US officials when
demanding to know why they aren’t being more hawkish
and aggressive. Here are some of
the questions Blinken was asked during the
interview:
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“I know you say the goal is not to
contain China, but have you ever seen China be so
assertive or aggressive militarily?”
“Do you think we’re heading toward some
sort of military confrontation with China?”
“Let’s talk about human rights. Describe
what you see is happening in Xinjiang that maybe the
rest of the world doesn’t.”
“If Xinjiang isn’t a red line with China,
then what is?”
“The Chinese have stolen hundreds of
billions, if not trillions, of dollars of trade
secrets and intellectual property from the United
States. That sounds like the actions of an enemy.”
“And so did President Biden tell
President Xi to cut it out?”
“China thinks long term, strategically,
decades in advance. Is America just caught up on
the latest fires here and there, and we’re not
thinking long term, strategically, and as a result,
China will surpass us?”
“What is the administration going to do
about Hong Kong?”
“Then why not boycott the 2022 Olympics
in Beijing?”
At no point is Blinken ever confronted about the
many glaring plot holes in the US government’s
Xinjiang “genocide” narrative, or the
many indications we are seeing that there is an
immense propaganda campaign manufacturing that
narrative to
advance western geostrategic agendas. At no
point is Blinken ever asked if China acting “so
assertive or aggressive militarily” might have
something to do with the fact that the US has been
aggressively
surrounding it with military forces for years.
And at no point is Blinken ever asked by O’Donnell
what measures can be taken to move away from this
dangerous trajectory in pursuit of detente.
In fact, as the US-centralized empire hurdles
headlong into increasingly hostile cold wars with
both Russia and China, the word “detente”, which
means the easing of hostilities between nations, has
been curiously absent from mainstream discourse.
During the last cold war it was
a
mainstream point of discussion embraced by
prominent Democrats and Republicans alike, but in
this dangerous new multifront cold war it’s gone
missing.
You’ll see the word appear occasionally, but
almost never with regard to the two powerful
nuclear-armed nations where it matters the most. A
recent Guardian article talks of
potential detente between Syria and Saudi Arabia, a
Reuters piece three weeks ago referred
to detente between the US and Iran, and a
Wall Street Journal article last month
spoke of detente between the US and North Korea, but
recent use of that word in widely circulated western
news media is hard to find or missing entirely.
It’s like the concept doesn’t even exist. Like
it’s not even considered an option. Like people are
being kept ignorant that it’s an option.
And I see this play out in the online
conversations and debates I engage in from day to
day: people who defend the reckless cold war
escalations by the United States against Moscow
and/or Beijing generally speak as though they
haven’t even considered the possibility that detente
could occur. Many don’t even know the word exists.
They simply assume that the only option on the table
is increasingly confrontational cold war
escalations, and don’t even have a conceptual
framework in place for considering any alternative.
That’s how extensively the possibility of peace with
Russia and China has been hidden from their
attention.
And one gets the sense that this is entirely by
design.
The late Stephen Cohen, renowned scholar and
expert on US-Russia relations,
used the word “detente” constantly until his
death last year, but in the preceding years as
things began heating up with Russia he’d been
finding his analysis less and less welcome on
mainstream channels. For the same reason Norah
O’Donnell only asked Blinken how he was going to
escalate aggressions against China and never how he
was going to de-escalate them, the mainstream media
are keeping the general public ignorant of the
possibility of, and dire necessity for, detente.
We are meant to take it as a given that the only
option available is to continue increasing
aggressions with these two nuclear powers. This is a
lie, and it is insane. Detente absolutely is
an option. We do not need to keep
risking all life on earth with this psychotic
game of nuclear Russian roulette every day just
because a few powerful sociopaths have decided the
US empire must retain supremacy at all cost.
There is no valid reason why we cannot all get
along and spend our energy collaborating toward
human thriving. The
incredible shrinking Overton window of the
mainstream discourse manufacturers not even
permitting this as a topic of discussion tells you
they are deliberately hiding it from our awareness
in the interests of the powerful. It is being hidden
because the only alternative to attacking and
undermining the interests of China and Russia is for
the US empire to relinquish its unipolar domination
of the planet and allow other nations to thrive
beyond its control.
I am often accused of having sinister loyalties
to the Kremlin or to the Communist Party of
China–which one depends on the day and what I happen
to be writing about at the time. The reality though
is that I simply do not consent to having my life,
the life of everyone I love, and the life of
everyone I share this planet with gambled on some
idiotic American supremacist value that serves
nobody but the powerful. There is no good reason we
can’t lay down our arms and collaborate with other
nations in friendship, and anyone who says otherwise
is lying.
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