An Aussie Warns U.S. That Asia Won’t Accept Its Manichean Vision of the World

Aug. 30, 2020 (EIRNS)—Michael Pembroke, a former New South Wales Supreme Court judge and the author of America in Retreat—The Decline of U.S. Leadership from Hiroshima to Covid-19 (March 2021), writing in South China Morning Post today warns the U.S. that Asia—even Australia and New Zealand—will not accept Pompeo’s demonization of China.

“The ascendant American view is binary—dividing the world between good and evil and advocating that the U.S. and its allies engage in a great Manichean struggle with China that will define the next century. Pompeo described the conflict as one ‘between tyranny and freedom,’ even proposing regime change in Beijing. There are no takers for this approach among the countries of East Asia. They have their disputes and differences with China ... but every one of them wants an accommodation with China that will permit them to coexist in relative peace, despite those differences. None desires military confrontation with China.”

He points to some obvious facts to back that up: China

“is responsible for approximately one-third of global growth; its trade with the ASEAN nations now exceeds its trade with any other bloc, including the EU and the U.S.; and intra-Asian trade is greater than Asian trade with the rest of the world. One of the defining truths of our times is that the Western share of the global economy is shrinking and will continue to do so. In this ‘plague’ year, while the rest of the world reels from an unwanted pandemic, China’s trade figures for June 2020 exceeded figures from June 2019—seven months before the pandemic.”