TRUMP, XI AND THE THUCYDIDES TRAP: Few Americans these days have read “The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides, so the significance of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s two references to the “trap” associated with the great Greek writer is undoubtedly lost on most, including especially the journalists covering President Donald Trump’s Beijing visit.
That said, Rod Martin lays out the amazing changes in the U.S./China relationship on the world stage in the two years since the Biden administration closed and the second Trump term commenced. Read it and you will quickly forget what the talking heads of the MSM are saying about Trump’s alleged Beijing failures:
“Xi is very aware of his own problems. Two years ago, he was on the verge of controlling the approaches to North America. Today, America has flipped that script. So isn’t it at least possible that Xi is recognizing how we’ve kicked his butt out of the Caribbean, humiliated his armaments industry in Venezuela and Iran, and locked down Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok with our new Indonesian defense pact(s)?
“And that’s not even mentioning Japan’s reassertion as both a major power and arsenal to our allies, South Korea’s and Australia’s nuclear submarine deals with the U.S., the defensive implications of the Taiwan arms deals, the growing forest of missiles in Luzon, and the recently announced $1.5 trillion Trump defense budget, up from under $1 trillion. If we obsess about China’s strengths, do we really think they don’t obsess about ours?”
