This article, Biden Travels East in Clouds of Mistrust, appeared today in Covert Action Magazine.
(An earlier version appeared last week in LA Progressive.)
I was very excited to see the leaders of Vietnam and China shaking hands in friendship – I’ve been waiting decades for that! It was also nice to show the leaders of France and Germany meeting Xi Jinping at a time when the US and NATO are trying to keep them apart.
The article also mentions joint US-South Korean combined war games involving 240 warplanes in about 1,600 sorties – the first joint exercise involving a US aircraft carrier since 2017. And there are “flashbacks” to the attempted assassination of then-Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai in 1955 when he was enroute to the first Non-Aligned conference in Indonesia… and the Indonesia genocide of 1965, lest we forget!
On the way to Indonesia Biden touched down in Egypt for the UN COP27 climate change conference, where he got some boos for hedging on “loss and damage” funds for countries in the Global South. And in Cambodia he heard that all the SEATO countries are solid for One China and against a new cold war.
