Spheres Of Influence, Donald Trump, Taiwan, And Latin America - Machiavelli And Regional Hegemony

'This is my sphere of influence', Harper Flynn said to his wife who was once again rearranging things on his desk after dusting, 'which means hands off. 

'But dear', his wife said. 'It wanted dusting and it is a part of the household after all'; and so it was that a discussion of Taiwan, the President's trip to China, and the question of regional hegemony turned into a marital squabble. 

That always seemed to be the case.  Women simply couldn't keep to themselves, couldn't keep out of it despite themselves. As a young child whose room was a ruckus of boy things - toy dump trucks, soldiers, dinosaurs, comic books, and baseball stirrups, he couldn't understand why his mother was always in their picking up.  'Because I know it's there', she said to her son when he asked why he couldn't keep his room the way he wanted. 

In the Ondaatje book, The English Patient, Count Almasy insists on a world without maps, a world without ownership and belonging, a simple world as God made it with no national boundaries, no claims, no deeds, and no definition.  The desert was never one place, said Almasy, but always shifting.  What was here today will be gone tomorrow, the desert's own and no one else's. 

Of course this idea as noble and elegantly simple as it was, was untenable, and before long Almasy was claiming Katherine as his, and to save her life he gives away secrets to the Germans. 

There is nothing new or particularly unusual about staking a claim.  This is what the first settlers of the American West did - simply marked off the perimeter of their land, fenced it and kept off interlopers and intruders with a shotgun. 

The Lewis and Clark expedition was the first step to land titling, legal ownership, and capital.  One's land had value when titled and could be mortgaged, sold, or rented; and that alone was the key to westward expansion and Jefferson's Manifest Destiny. 

The territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific was America's, Jefferson said, European America's and over the course of the next hundred years ago European Americans tamed and settled that land and crisscrossed it with railroads.  The Indians - Native Americans - were in the way, and by the early Twentieth Century were either eliminated or in reservations. 

There was nothing new or special about this territorialism. Genghis Khan and his Mongol-Turkic armies burst out of the steppes with his ten thousand horsemen, and conquered territory from Europe to Japan. He was known for his savagery, and the roads between conquered villages were lined with severed heads on spikes as a warning to all in his path. 

 

The Crusades were organized by Pope Urban II to rid Jerusalem of the infidel, but they were no different than the armies of Genghis Khan, territorial in intent, and bloody in execution.  Jerusalem is ours! said Urban, western, Christian, civilized and European. 

The history of territorial expansion is long, consistent, and predictable; so the desires of Russia for Ukraine, China for Taiwan, and the United States for Venezuela and Cuba fit a pattern.  American with military force ousted the Communist dictator in Venezuela, Russia will eventually regain the Donbass region of Ukraine, and Taiwan will become part of greater China.  It is the law of hegemony or spheres of influence. 

The United States has always been territorial.  Manifest Destiny was an expression of territorial right.  Texas belonged to the United States, not Mexico; Chile and is copper mines were well within America's sphere of influence so President Allende had to go.  The United States supported the military regimes of Brazil and Argentina because they were always to remain America's allies; or put another way, America's foreign properties. 

 

While not in America's immediate geographical sphere of influence, it intervened militarily in the Philippines and took it over as colonial ruler for years. The US fought a long, bloody, and ultimately losing battle to keep Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia within its sphere of political influence. Its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, similarly failed enterprises, were to keep those parts of the world under American control. 

Ronald Reagan intervened militarily in Nicaragua,  the Dominican Republic, Haiti,  and El Salvador for the same reasons.  They belong to us, said the President, if not by Constitution and title, then by right. 

So those in America who find Donald Trump's warning to Taiwan to keep its missiles in their silos, and to make no public pronouncements of independence from China, do not understand history.  The assimilation of Taiwan into China is a foregone conclusion just as Hong Kong and Macau were; and there is no way that the United States will engage in a bloody no-win war with China to defy it. 

Trump is a true Machiavellian and his foreign policy is based on national self interest. What would America gain by confronting the Chinese over Taiwan?  Nothing.  By the same measure what does America gain by perpetuating the war in Ukraine at a cost of tens of thousands of lives, the destruction of the country's infrastructure, and billions of US treasury dollars when a Ukrainian victory, as impossible as that might be, would gain the US nothing.

The Biden Administration insisted that democracy was at stake in Ukraine, an extension of American exceptionalism; but as Machiavelli pointed out centuries before, it is folly to get involved where there is no tangible, observable, quantifiable reason to do so. 

American liberals are howling, beating their chests in righteous indignation.  How could he? they sputter? How could he give away a sovereign country? Toss it into China's hamper with nary a second thought.  The answer is easy, they say - billions of dollars of trade with China that will benefit his cronies and American oligarchs.  Another example of the crude insensitivities of this rube, this barroom brawler, this fool. 

Of course billions are at stake in the US-China negotiations, and that is the whole point of the new Machiavellian foreign policy of the United States.  And Trump, the ultimate deal maker, knows that China holds all the cards.  It owns our debt, is a country of a billion and a half Confucian-inspired patriots, has progressively and deliberately rounded up the world's rare earths, and is in a geopolitical position of supremacy. Throw it all away out of some exceptionalist principle.  Read Machiavelli's The Prince. 

Harper Flynn got the geopolitical picture easily - life was a series of territorial disputes, ownership was not only the basis of capitalism but a feature of human nature and his office was his.  

His wife not surprisingly also took the office dispute as a metaphor.  There were principles involved here, contracts of marital communalism, the right way to behaves within larger contexts.  Machiavellian territorialism was just a convenient academic cover for taking and holding what is mine regardless of the larger world.  

The world if filled with One Worlders, Neville Chamberlain capitulating idealists, peace at any price accommodators who put a fictious value over reality.  Anyone in their right minds should have seen Hitler's intentions; and it should not have taken an outspoken Churchill to call out Stalin's hegemonic ambitions. 

Taiwan for the time being will remain quiescent, unobtrusive, and no obstacle to profitable deals to be concluded by the world's two greatest adversaries.  As it should be.  Foregone conclusions should never be challenged, and above all, a la Machiavelli,  moral principle should never get in the way of geopolitical self interest.