Russia-China Axis? Wait for After the Olympics!
It would not be illogical to fear that Russia and China will coordinate their foreign policies and attack Ukraine and Taiwan after the Beijing Olympics are completed. Putin famously waited until after the Sochi Olympics to invade Crimea and southeastern Ukraine, to make sure there was strong international attendance along with a good public relations spike and personal adulation. The same may well be the calculation of the Chinese government.
For Russia and China, the moment seems right, with the Western democracies seemingly unprepared to counter Russian and Chinese attacks on nations that they covet for national prestige and strategic defense reasons, and possibly for furthering plans of global domination. Timing is everything.
Russian and Chinese leaderships understand that achieving global domination, the grandiose dream of all dictators, depends on defeating democracies, the natural enemies of dictatorships. That requires extensive military and propaganda preparation and careful step-by-step execution. Why would dictators want to dominate the world? In many cases, if not most, because of inferiority complexes and not having been loved properly by their parents (no joke!). That explains their cruelty, their lack of empathy and morality, their wish to subjugate others, their systematic violations of human rights, their imprisoning or murdering political opponents and journalists, even artists and novelists. Psychologically well-adjusted people never want to subjugate others, never want to violate human rights, never want to be dictators, never want to win by cheating, never want to cause injustice, never want to be abusive, never want to be unfair, never want to be boors.
One can generalize that dictators are not easily dissuaded from committing crimes against humanity or from risking the well being of their own people, because their primary goals are celebrity (to compensate for not being properly loved by their parents) and power (to feel in control, to get respect through fear, and to protect themselves from prosecution for their misdeeds). Celebrity and power is their obsession, which they rationalize with ideological or nationalistic arguments. They have no problem ditching previously held ideological convictions whenever convenient for gaining and maintaining power. Communists became fascists overnight, with no apologies or explanations for having pauperized their citizens for decades with their absurd authoritarian ideology and caused the Cold War. That ideological reversal is not so strange, since communists and fascists have a lot in common: they both want to subjugate others and implement police states to retain power. They claim to be moral, even religious, while committing atrocities and violating human rights systematically.
Unfortunately, democratic nations are so focused on producing economic prosperity, producing entertainment, and making scientific breakthroughs helping humanity, that they often choose to underplay long-term existential threats, namely the existence of dictators bent on conquering democracies. They mistakenly focus obsessively on budget deficits and underfund necessary defense spending (having flawed theories on the causes of inflation and not fully understanding the true nature of QE-financed government debt). The whole Hitler experience is instructive, to be heeded always. History should never be ignored or undervalued. Yet, that is exactly what the complacent, distracted Western democracies have done since 1992. They frittered away military and technological superiority, the only dissuasive factor against aggressive dictators, through grossly insufficient investment. A major mistake, made for short-term profit considerations, was allowing the transfer of advanced technology to China and Russia, before they had become solid democracies and defenders of human rights.
The Ukraine crisis is a wake-up call. Hopefully, it is not too late for the allied democracies to stave off Russian and Chinese imperialist aggressions and to reverse the trend of ascending dictatorships. If it is too late and the United States is defeated, that will be the end of democracies worldwide. They will be picked off one by one, through conventional military force, cyber warfare, intimidation, blackmail, and corruption. All democratic nations will then become police states, under the direction of the two major dictatorial powers. There will be no way out for generations.
Timing is everything. Instead of laughing merrily alongside a drunk Yeltsin in Moscow, President Clinton should have been somber during that humiliating moment for Russians, and realized that the KGB remained the real power in Russia and would rebuild itself, thanks to throwing off communism and embracing capitalism to finance an enormous military buildup. History shows that the time to stop Hitler was as soon as he started rearming. That lesson was forgotten or ignored by the political leaders of the United States, because they were undereducated, no matter that they had gone to college and even graduate school. Their education was narrow. They did not benefit from an enlightened high school curriculum, giving them a broad base of essential knowledge and the ability to be well-informed critical thinkers. That’s why the United States needs all its public high schools to have an enlightened curriculum, which includes the following courses: 1) The United Nations Charter and The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights complemented by the history of human rights violations; 2) economics/finance/investments, including testing mainstream theories (such as those on budget deficits) against relevant statistical history to verify correlations and to spot fallacies; 3) 20th Century world history in great detail (all students must understand the causes of World War I, the causes of the Great Depression, the causes of communism and fascism and why they failed, the causes of World War II, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, the causes of the Cold War, the causes of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the causes of Islamic terrorism); 4) history of art/architecture/design; 5) history of music; 6) logic and critical thinking; 7) ethics and empathy; 8) introductory law complemented by interpretation theory; 9) foreign languages/cultures; 10) comparative religion; 11) the major mistakes in economic, social, and foreign policy of the past 100 years and which would have been the correct policies; 12) psychology, including “group therapy” and “good parenting workshops.
Who can logically doubt that with such an enlightened public high school curriculum firmly in place over the past 50 years, the allied democracies would not be confronted with today’s existential threat or be vulnerable to disinformation, thanks to truly well-educated and psychologically well-adjusted political leaders and voters, all very knowledgeable and well trained in logic and critical thinking? Furthermore, who can logically doubt that such a public high school curriculum (along with strict school discipline, lots of homework, and individual assistance for students having academic or psychological difficulties) is an absolute requirement for the United States to no longer be plagued by widespread poverty, addiction, violence, crime, racism, rampant dishonesty, all too many psychologically disturbed citizens, a severe political divide, rising authoritarian sympathies, and high taxes?
© Edward Sonnino 2022
January 29, 2022
