Analysis by an insider that was there back then when Nixon and Kissinger boldly forged an alliance with China against the USSR he believes was key in the collapse of the USSR. Pompeo seems intent on reversing that with little to gain for it and lots to lose.
This analysis also explains why Henry Kissinger advised Trump on his accession to the presidency to build a strategic relationship with Russia to counter China as the most serious emering threat to US dominance. Was Russiagate designed in part to counter that, or did the US-UK foreign policy establishment just not get it?
In my view, things were actually moving in a direction that favored both the US and China, and the world as well — albeit intermentally. But Americans are impatient and the process was apparently moving too slowly for the elite, or at least a faction of it. (Tech and some other US economic factions not happy, for instance, with the current US policy that not only threatens trade, but also risks their being shot of the Chinese market.
Anyway, the Trump foreign policy team decided to "speed things up," and Pompeo seems to be getting out in front the president on this.
We'll see how this goes. Count me skeptical. I could be wrong, but I don't see it going well for the US overall, and it risks getting trapped in a lose-lose strategy, for all involved including the world geopolitically and economically will be loser in this "war," which is now economic and egopolitical, and it could easily go kinetic even though neither side seems to favor this. Looks more like Mike Pompeo betting the farm. But there is little chance of him proceeding on his own. Who else is pushing it? Sen. Tom Cotton for one. Both Pompeo and Cotton have presidential ambitions.
The wiser move would have been to let things play themselves out. But this would involve China becoming a peer of the US, which the American elite seems to have concluded is an unacceptable cost of decolonization — without Western (US) corporations and investors effectively taking control of the Chinese economy. Michael Hudson and
Henry C. Liu traced this out long ago. China's "sin" was resisting the trap of those aspects of liberalization that would lead to state capture and the demise of the CCP.
At any rate, the current policy toward China and Russia is turning up the dial on the Cold War again, with a return to the red scare and red-baiting. This benefits the US military-industrial complex that sits at the core of the US economy, as Ray McGovern observes.
Consortium News
Presumptuous Pompeo Pushes Preposterous ‘Peking’ Policy
Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and retired 27-year career CIA whose tasks included preparing and briefing The President’s Daily Brief and leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch^