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Grenville Cross says America's bully-boy tactics are an affront to the comity of nations, and must be called out
After the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taiwan on Aug 2, 2022, her compatriots continued to stoke regional tensions. They have sought to provoke China at every opportunity, hoping to trigger a response. Whereas their rhetoric has been inflammatory, their hypocrisy has been blatant.
On Sept 28, for example, when the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, visited Japan for the funeral of its former leader Shinzo Abe, she could not resist stirring things up. Instead of concentrating on the obsequies, she chose instead to needle China, accusing it of undermining the "international rules-based order". This, of course, is code for American hegemony, and she even claimed, notwithstanding the US having done the same thing for years, that Beijing was flexing "its military and economic might to coerce and intimidate its neighbors".
Shortly thereafter, the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, was also tasked to stir the pot. On Oct 2, while welcoming his Australian and Japanese counterparts to the US military headquarters in Hawaii, he said he was "deeply concerned by China's increasingly aggressive and bullying behavior on the Taiwan Straits and elsewhere in the region". He presumably imagined his guests were ignorant of America's own record of interference, although the likelihood is that they knew but could not care less.
Anybody listening to Harris and Austin could be forgiven for marveling at their hypocrisy, not least because neither was seemingly aware of America's "Monroe Doctrine", let alone the harm it has caused. The doctrine was announced by then-US president James Monroe to the US Congress in 1823, and it warned the European powers that the Western Hemisphere was now America's own sphere of interest, and that anybody failing to respect this did so at their peril. Over the past 199 years, the doctrine has become central to US foreign policy, and has been repeatedly used to justify its interventionist policies.
Indeed, in 2004, the American philosopher Noam Chomsky pointed out that the Monroe Doctrine had been used by US governments as both a declaration of hegemony and a right of unilateral intervention in the Americas, and he can hopefully find the time...