“If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership? What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president? Once this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat who is the vice-chair of the Senate select committee on intelligence, complained.
“What will we say now if Xi Jinping wants to capture Lai of Taiwan or Putin tries to capture Zelensky in Ukraine?” Rep. Ro Khanna whined.
Because the only thing restraining Putin or Xi are our high standards for doing nothing. If we do something, Xi and Putin will then decide that they can do something. Our inaction is the only thing keeping China and Russia from invading places.
And when we do nothing, then when Russia and China invade other countries, we will at least have the moral authority to issue a sternly worded letter condemning them. But if we do things, we will lose the ‘moral high ground’ from which our foreign policy elites issue worthless press releases while Xi and Putin laugh at them.
Here’s the reality.
China made multiple trips and statements in support of Maduro and now he’s in our custody. China tried to prop up Iran to now avail. Ditto for Russia. The message that Trump sent is that China is a paper tiger whose support isn’t worth much.
Developing good relations with America is important not just because of the soft power for which past administrations lavished billions on the rest of the world, but because we’re a whole lot more dangerous than Russia or China.
Russia and China aren’t restrained by impotent inaction, but by our actions.
The only thing restraining China or Russia from doing things is fear of what we might do. That’s why Putin invaded Ukraine twice under Democrat rule and zero times when Trump was in office. Putin knew Obama and Biden were worthless. And he was right.
What stops dictatorships from doing horrible things isn’t our shining noble example as non-interventionists, it’s the fear that we might do something to them.
In short, fear of the kind of thing Trump just did.
Rep. Khanna and Sen. Warner whining “what will we say now” is the essence of the completely failed politics of the Obama era.
They’re not concerned with what Russia and China will do, they’re concerned with their virtue signaling when they do it. Trump isn’t concerned with the same hollow liberal virtue signaling, but with a realpolitik that actually changes the world.
Having China and Russia afraid of us counts far more than some hollow liberal platitudes and posturing. Those aren’t expressions of moral superiority, but moral failure.
