Mike Pence’s Dumb Ass Speech on China:
When the Cat’s Away, the Mice Will Play

by Barbara Boyd

[Print version of this article]

Oct. 9—Mike Pence’s October 4 speech on China has received widespread international press coverage as representing a new hardline approach to relationships between the United States and China. It was even characterized in some overcharged quarters as the opening of a “New Cold War,” although the speech itself hardly lives up to that inflamed billing. Analysts also should have learned by now that it is Donald Trump who runs American foreign policy, and anything that Mike Pence or his ilk proclaim is subject to very rapid change.

As Pence was delivering his speech, the President was traveling throughout the United States, addressing large rallies in an all-out effort to halt the British-inspired coup against him, which is the actual issue in the 2018 midterm elections. He was also in a life-or-death battle over a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court—a battle which could determine whether or not the nation itself descends into the sexual McCarthyite madness of the “Me-Too” movement. Many have rightly characterized the battle over the Kavanaugh nomination as a dry run for the battle over impeachment which will be launched if the Democrats win the House.

Pence, along with other old-school tools of the Washington-Wall Street-London neo-con axis, like Nikki Haley, have adopted a strategy toward the President which involves endless self-preening, unabashed flattery, and feigned loyalty. For that, both have earned the moniker “toadies in chief” from the legacy U.S. news media. Their sycophantic fawning conceals the naked ambition of their own Presidential aspirations. Pence believes that he was ordained by God to become President of the United States. Both Haley and Pence have a history of working aggressively to undermine Trump’s most significant initiatives, in this case, Trump’s relationship with China’s President Xi Jinping.

For that, both Pence and Haley have rightly earned the speculation in Washington D.C.’s gossip circuit, that either or both were the “anonymous senior official” who claimed, in a Sept. 5, 2018 Opinion piece in the New York Times, to be running a coup against the President on behalf of the “Resistance.” The two got roughly equal billing as the probable “Anonymous,” with Pence’s good friend Dan Coats, the current Director of National Intelligence.

Despite the hideous coup against him motivated by Trump’s desire for a decent relationship with Russia, and despite Trump’s being fed “Washington Consensus” gruel about how China, rather than London and Wall Street, is the source of American economic misery—nevertheless Trump has, until now, stuck to his guns concerning his desire for positive relations both with Russia and China. Now, Pence has gone for the jugular, so to speak, wildly claiming that China is intervening in the U.S. elections directly, for the purpose of removing Trump from the Presidency. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has often noted that what the British and the neo-con and neo-liberal American establishment ascribe to the Chinese, is very often nothing but their own aspirations and behavior. It is definitely true in this particular case.

The task of thinking people throughout the world should be to allow the President to see the potential for making the biggest deal of all, the deal for world economic prosperity under a revived New Bretton Woods monetary system, in which money serves the purpose of the physical economic development of the nations of the earth, rather than the imperial needs of empire. As Vladimir Putin has correctly observed, it is foolish for other nations to respond directly to the great internal battle taking place within the United States. Instead, they should be finding and elaborating the flanks which will benefit all human development. Trump really wants to build America anew. He really wants huge new infrastructure projects. He really wants sound bilateral relationships between sovereign nation states. Those concerned about human survival should do everything they can to oblige him.

Vice-Presidents as Rotten Compromises

For an international audience, it is important to put some context around these events in the United States. First regarding the Vice-President and the Vice-Presidency: For most recent American administrations, this post is a compromise involving the pragmatic arrangements necessary to win elections within partisan political parties. Think about Ronald Reagan, who desired to do some really revolutionary things, like Lyndon LaRouche’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan made a deal with that rotten Republican faction headed by George H.W. Bush, who pretty much destroyed the potential of the Reagan presidency after the Anglo-Dutch imperialists had the President shot. Reagan did the vice-presidential deal because he needed the Bush electoral machinery to win the election.

Or, take the pairing of Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Gore pretty much sabotaged every genuine Clinton effort directed toward the good of the world, personally sabotaging, for example, face-to-face meetings between President Bill Clinton and Russia’s Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov at a most propitious moment for strategic breakthroughs. As Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly emphasizes, pragmatism is what kills any ability for humankind to truly advance. All such deals involve compromises of fundamental principles, which, more likely than not, will come back to haunt the dealmaker. Such deadly mistakes are typical of partisan politics, and revulsion against them is the reason why a huge sentiment is currently sweeping the United States, seeking the end of both political parties and the birth of a politics based solely on principle.

Donald Trump ran an unprecedented campaign for the Presidency as a Republican—but, in reality, as an independent. Both the Republican and Democratic establishments opposed him with as much ferocity as they could summon. But, as Lyndon LaRouche emphasized when the returns rolled in, the American population, along with other populations internationally, was in revolt against a political establishment which repeatedly sold them out economically and sent them into genocidal wars.

In the U.S., Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had told them that they had never had it so good; that manufacturing would never come back to the United States; and that their future was in the bread and circuses of a decadent society which had produced massive poverty, an epidemic of addiction killing hundreds every day, and unprecedented suicide rates—while the very rich continued to get, well, very rich. The traditional Republican Party offered the very same poisonous recipes.

Donald Trump promised peace with Russia and China, a return of the U.S. “full-set economy” including a modern infrastructure platform, Glass-Steagall banking separation, what he called the “American system” of political economy, and a return to space exploration. The adherents of the old system in 2016 never really had a chance, despite what the pundits and prognosticators forecast from within their self-satisfied, arrogant fish-bowls.

What Is Mike Pence?

Mike Pence was facing a probable loss in his 2016 re-election effort as Governor of Indiana, and originally endorsed Ted Cruz for President. When Trump destroyed the extant Republican Party bench in the primaries, Pence endorsed Trump and avidly sought the Vice-Presidency. He almost jumped ship when the Billy Bush sexual misconduct tape emerged, flirting with forcing Trump’s withdrawal and substituting himself as Presidential candidate. Pence also ran the entire Trump transition, stacking the President’s cabinet and significant political appointments with neo-con and establishment allies, like his good friend Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence. These people not only oppose Donald Trump. They hate him—particularly his determination to end globalism and forge productive relationships with Russia and China, which is an existential threat to the swamp in which they live.

Pence is a Christian Zionist, a very significant power base within the Republican Party, which is crucial to mobilizing the evangelical vote. He also enjoyed ready access to major Republican donors, including those, like Sheldon Adelson, aligned with the Christian Zionists, and David Koch, whose networks played a major role in financing Pence’s entire career. Such donors are currently critical to winning a Presidential election in the United States. And, as with all such pragmatic compromises, Trump made it to win the election and to form a government. Although Trump is said to have characterized Pence as the Vice-President from “central casting,” he has also reportedly characterized him as slow and “dumb” behind closed doors. Pence’s October 4th performance certainly supports that assessment.

Pence gave his speech at the Hudson Institute, which was certainly not an accident. The Hudson Institute was founded by Herman Kahn, the foremost proponent of the insane belief in winnable nuclear war. The Institute has honored Pence with awards. It has gone through several transitions since Kahn and others propounded their doctrines for killing most of the human race, even moving to Pence’s state of Indiana at a certain low point in its financial trajectory.

Following the events of September 11, 2001, it became the Washington, D.C. bastion of the neo-conservatives and Straussians who populated the Bush-Cheney Administration. These are the creeps and overt Satanists who have led the United States into repeated wars in the Middle East under the banner of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Nazi slogan, “The Responsibility to Protect.” Scooter Libby, for example, is Hudson’s Senior Vice-President. President Trump has called these adventures, including the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria—which murdered hundreds of thousands—the biggest foreign policy mistakes in U.S. history. Hudson receives significant funding from CIA and Defense Department-related foundations, such as the Bradley Foundation, as well as directly from those agencies themselves. It is also funded by the government of Taiwan.

Pillsbury & Halper:
British Right and Left

In his remarks at Hudson, Pence singled out Hudson “scholar” Michael Pillsbury for praise. Pillsbury currently leads the Center for Chinese Strategy at Hudson, a constant font of hatred against everything China has done or is doing. Like Pence, Pillsbury cultivated Trump by aggressively moving to join the Administration soon after the Republican presidential primaries.

Recently, Pillsbury has been regularly appearing on television channels the President watches, such as Fox, to launch acid attacks on the Chinese while claiming that the Chinese respect and honor the President. He says that the Chinese use the Mandarin term for “big brains,” or “brainy” to describe Trump. How he knows this is not really explained, but that is true of most of Pillsbury’s alleged China scholarship. He tells endless stories on the shakiest of foundations, many of which have served as the basis for billions of dollars in Pentagon expenditures on otherwise very dubious projects. And he has been doing this for a very long time.

Pillsbury claims that he played a starring role in the late 1970s and early 1980s openings to China, earning the notice of then candidate Ronald Reagan by advocating direct military ties with China. An advocate of Kissinger’s form of geopolitics and a member of Britain’s nefarious International Institute for Strategic Studies, Pillsbury envisioned using extant tensions between the Soviet Union and China at that time, to serve as a major force in destroying the viability of the Soviet bloc.

According to his website, he played a role in providing advanced U.S. defense technologies to China in a bargain that they would pursue the U.S.-assigned use of them against the Soviets, as part of a purported covert plan by the Reagan Administration to collapse the Soviet bloc. These arms sales included new torpedoes, upgrades for jet fighters, and advanced electronics. He also claims to have played a most significant role in providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan Mujahideen. Those groupings, of course, included Osama Bin Laden. Pillsbury also claims that he played a major role in founding the National Endowment for Democracy and the United States Institute of Peace, both of which have been the font for U.S. covert regime-change operations throughout the world.

Pillsbury also cultivated a deep friendship with Mohammed Hammoud, the front man for the notorious bank of drugs, terrorism, and money laundering, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which almost sank his career. According to reports, Pillsbury met with Hammoud on numerous occasions and took funding from him, a situation which landed his boss at the time, Senator Orin Hatch, in an ethics investigation. Not to belabor the point of the rancid Michael Pillsbury being sold to Donald Trump as someone he could trust, it was Robert Mueller, then chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, who obstructed and blocked BCCI’s final and very much deserved criminal reckoning by the Justice Department.

Following the BCCI fiasco, Pillsbury went to work for Andy Marshall at the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, which was spending much of its budget concocting the idea that China represented an unrecognized mortal threat to the United States. Pillsbury joined what was called the “Blue Team” of China hawks, with people who otherwise inhabited the Committee on the Present Danger of Robert Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz and other Neanderthals and Trump-haters, who successively got the United States involved in Iraq and other endless wars in the Middle East—the same wars the President has rightly and righteously condemned.

As reported by Soyoung Ho in the Washington Monthly of July 2006, under the title “Panda Slugger: The Dubious Scholarship of Michael Pillsbury, the China Hawk with Rumsfeld’s Ear”:

The Wall Street Journal took notice of Pillsbury [in 2005] . . . in a front-page story that described him as “one of the Pentagon’s most influential advisers on China, with a direct line to many of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s top aides.” The story observed that China, too, has been “keeping tabs on Mr. Pillsbury.” For good reason: Thanks in part to Pillsbury’s influence, the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR—the blueprint for future defense strategy and spending—identifies China as the nation with “the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States.” And the Pentagon’s most recent annual report to Congress on China’s military contains passages that appear to be lifted directly out of Pillsbury’s writings, including warnings of “asymmetric programs” in the works. This can get expensive. The Wall Street Journal recently reported “the Pentagon now cites China as justification for a range of proposed procurements, most notably a new, multibillion-dollar long-range bomber program.

Ho continued,

While Pillsbury has achieved prominence within the Defense Secretary’s office, many defense experts within the military, government agencies, and universities reject his scholarship as tendentious at best, and their professional distaste is heightened by personal dislike. “Brilliant” and “charming” are words frequently used by acquaintances to describe Pillsbury, but so are “combative,” “conspiratorial,” and “ruthless.” His career has been one of numerous short-lived jobs, at least three dismissals, and a revoked security clearance.

In Pillsbury’s latest book, The Hundred-Year Marathon, he claims that the Chinese, above all, are masters of deception and that Chinese military strategy is drawn from its Warring States Period, a period of disunified strife more than 2,200 years ago. He says that, unlike most Western analysts, he has cultivated relations with nationalist factions in the Peoples’ Liberation Army who have provided him with unique access to their views and strategies.

He claims that these masters of deception have told him, a recognized China-hater of some years standing, their secret plan for becoming the world hegemon by the year 2049, the one hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution. He claims that Xi Jinping is covertly such a nationalist and deceiver. The reason he says the Chinese bequeathed their master plan upon him was to use him to enhance their status in China. As they say in the game of outright scams, if you believe that, I have a bridge I can sell you.

The other side of the China bashing inherited by this President, is the neo-liberal version. As opposed to Pillsbury, who leads the neo-con tribe, the neo-liberals have been led by one Stefan Halper. Halper’s Defense Department and British intelligence work includes a book, The Beijing Consensus: Legitimizing Authoritarianism in Our Time. It is to be noted that when he was not laying out how to geopolitically isolate and contain China, Halper worked for the British and the CIA to entrap volunteers for the Trump presidential campaign on British soil, thus fabricating the leads which led to the unprecedented FBI counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump’s campaign and the illegal Robert Mueller investigation of the Trump Administration.

The Pence Speech

In his speech, Pence gives vast lip service to Donald Trump’s friendship with Xi Jinping and the long history of U.S./China friendship, while attempting to escalate the present trade dispute between the two countries into exactly the type of geopolitical confrontation the President condemns. The President has stated emphatically that the United States is not going to tell other nations how to live. Yet, Pence takes up exactly and extensively, the hypocritical human rights and democracy-promotion themes endlessly spun as the pillars of U.S. regime change operations. In the run-up to this speech, Pence and Congressional allies arranged arms sales to Taiwan, also inflaming that very sensitive issue.

The second major theme struck by Pence is the trade dispute between the U.S. and China. There is no question but that U.S. companies exported many U.S. jobs to China and Asia, seeking the cheapest source of labor under the inhuman regime called “globalism” and “free trade.” Under the plan for the world economy crafted by the British and their U.S. satraps in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations in the early 1980s, their export of U.S. jobs and major strategic parts of the U.S. economy was part of a plan for “controlled disintegration” of the advanced sector economies.

The United States was to become a post-industrial service and consumer economy, while China and other nations were to be brought up to the fixed rates of production once enjoyed by the United States, but no further. In effect, the extant supply-chain of the world’s economy was outsourced throughout the world, to wherever the price of labor was the cheapest.

What this conspiracy of idiots failed to recognize is that any fixed mode of production or technology will ultimately fail and collapse because it disobeys the fundamental physical laws of the universe. Successful economies must enjoy high rates of technological progress and fundamental scientific breakthroughs to be sustainable over a period of generations. Otherwise they die through technological attrition.

Thus, while Pence, Pillsbury, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, and other dim-witted fools paint China as a ruthless pirate that stole America’s future and continues to do so, the reality is that the City of London and Wall Street, and their free trade and post-industrial madness, are the actual culprits. Further, continued adherence to the present monetarist regimes of Wall Street and the City of London and their globalist prescriptions is about to make the situation even worse, as the bloated debt bubble accumulated since the 2008 collapse teeters on the edge of explosion. And that presents the danger of bringing every nation down.

As Hermann Kahn’s fellows at the Rand Corporation meticulously proved, Hitler’s war machine failed because it expanded its economy only laterally and cannibalized its labor force in a genocide. In this trade dispute, some, in both China and the United States, seem to view computer technologies, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and robotics as the crown jewels of the realm. But these prized, allegedly future technologies are only linear and lateral extensions of existing technologies and known scientific principles. They have existed in the bill of materials of the United States for some years and have utterly failed to produce significant advances in productivity.

World Needs Sovereign, ‘Full-Set’ Economies

The urgent question posed in the U.S./China trade dispute is how “full set economies” can be built in both countries such that they are self-sufficient and can reproduce their populations at the highest levels of development, as specified by Lyndon LaRouche. What does it matter if the United States gets more of the worldwide supply chain back, if it is based on an old mode of production and does not result in the fundamental advances in productivity necessary to actually jumpstart the economy?

Fusion energy, space exploration, basic science at the very frontiers of human knowledge, together with massive new city-building and infrastructure, are what is required in both countries to prevent catastrophe as the speculative worldwide bubble economy collapses. And the basis for rapidly doing this across the world can only be found in a fixed exchange-rate world monetary system issuing long-term, low-interest credit for development, whose creation has now become an urgent issue of human survival.

As with Lyndon LaRouche’s and Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the United States and China should be collaborating jointly now on crash programs for breakthroughs in these advanced areas, which are now crucial for the long-term economic survival of both countries and the human race as a whole. It is extremely important now to remember that this was the Reagan offer to the Soviets—joint development for the good of humanity. It is that prospect which Pence, Pillsbury, and their British imperial friends are mobilized against. It is that prospect which Donald Trump could bring into being, but which his opponents are determined to prevent, at all costs. The joint approaches to settling the nuclear and other issues of the Korean peninsula are an initial step in that direction.

In his dumb speech, Pence made a variety of claims about China’s alleged geopolitical aggressiveness in the Western Pacific and made allusions to encircling China with an alliance involving the United States, Japan, South Korea, and India. He did this without regard for the very delicate negotiations being conducted simultaneously by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in North Korea, indicating that Pence’s faction is intent on blowing up that prospect for peace. The pipe dream about a U.S.-Japan-South Korea-India alliance is exactly that. Aside from the strategically blind United States, the other putative members of this alliance fully realize the actual potential and meaning of China’s great One Belt, One Road Initiative, and want to fully participate.

With respect to Pence’s claims about alleged Chinese aggressiveness and imperial aims in the Western Pacific, one wag commented that the claim amounts to demanding that China apologize for its geographic location in the midst of a deliberate encirclement by American bases, which is the reality of Barack Obama’s “Asia pivot” policy.

Pence Out to Undermine Trump-Xi Friendship

But, by far, the vilest part of Pence’s performance was aimed squarely at undermining the personal relationship between Xi and Trump. In that respect, Pence claimed that China is now in a “whole nation” mobilization to remove Donald Trump as President because of the trade dispute between the two nations. He cited the fact that China ill-advisedly placed ads in Iowa newspapers condemning the President’s tariffs. This reactive gaffe clearly failed to understand the present U.S. political environment, and is the sole factual basis for all of Mike Pence’s bellicose and false claims about Chinese election interference aimed at Trump.

The rest of it is based on alleged classified intelligence reports which are almost certainly as bogus as those produced by the cherry-picked intelligence analysts who claimed massive Russian interference in the U.S. elections to elect Trump. After all, Pence’s good friend, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, has not balked at public rebukes of President Trump concerning Trump’s continued belief in Putin’s good faith—and he most certainly wouldn’t balk at fabricating evidence and cooking the books to destroy Trump’s relationship to Xi Jinping.