Trump’s America has become an unstoppable, out-of-control bully

The current regime running the US risks plunging the world into war with its hegemonistic belligerence in general and escalating provocation of China in particular

By Yonden Lhatoo

"Information Clearing House"

Listen to the screams of panic-stricken passengers, children’s voices among them, crying in terror and calling out prayers, as an Iranian airliner is intercepted and harassed by US warplanes over Syrian air space just the other day.

Passengers were left bruised and bloodied after the pilot of the civilian aircraft suddenly changed altitude to avoid a collision with one of the F-15 jets, although the US claimed it kept a safe distance and was only protecting its military base below.

There’s nothing that Iran – already debilitated by US-led sanctions and ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic – can do about it, except complain to a United Nations that is powerless to confront the world’s biggest bully as it gets more belligerent.

This is the new world order as US President Donald Trump, facing the growing prospect of a drubbing in an election he is desperate to win at all costs, seeks to distract voters from blaming him for the social and economic carnage wrought by the pandemic and his own abject failure to contain it.

On the home front, his administration has sparked a potential constitutional crisis by sending federal forces to crack down on anti-racism protests in cities that don’t want that kind of interference upending the separation of powers between state and national governments.

To those who would argue that protest violence justifies federal intervention and media reports have misrepresented demonstrations as being entirely peaceful, that’s exactly what happened in Hong Kong, remember, and yet the same US government painted every attempt by authorities here to restore order as “repression”. How do you like them apples?

And now, in addition to cutting off Hong Kong’s nose to spite Beijing with punitive acts that only serve to hurt the city, China’s weakest link, the Trump administration has gone into overdrive to ostracise and stigmatise Beijing as the ultimate bogeyman.

Washington’s escalating and reckless provocation seriously risks triggering a military confrontation that could prove catastrophic for the whole world, but there is no power on the planet to counter its hegemony and aggression.

While openly coercing America’s cronies and lobbying other nations to gang up against China, Trump’s thuggish top diplomat Mike Pompeo made an unhinged rant of a speech this week that was beyond appalling in its ignorance and Sinophobia.

“The truth is that our policies, and those of other free nations, resurrected China’s failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that fed it,” he said. “We must also engage and empower the Chinese people – a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.” Really.

The most eloquent and fitting response to this nonsense came from former diplomat and veteran China hand Robert Daly, who told US News & World Report magazine: “China is not a land of innocent captives and evil master trolls. US-China relations are not a children’s story. In China, the United States faces something far more formidable than Secretary Pompeo suggests: China is a vast, complex, wealthy, ambitious, aggrieved nation …

“In confronting China, we’re not dealing with a wholly good people who have been ‘imprisoned’ or ‘enslaved’ by a purely malign party. Chinese are often frustrated by a government [that] ignores their wishes, moves too slowly or moves in the wrong direction, but the available evidence is that, as citizens of the PRC, most Chinese people feel proud and enabled, not constrained.”

All that’s left to say to Pompeo and his master is what Boston lawyer Joseph Welch once famously told anti-Communist witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy during one of his Salem trials-style hearings: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Yonden Lhatoo is the chief news editor at the Post