Wishing you a better new year!
China was in a civil war between the Nationalists, supported by the U.S., and the Communists, supported by the Soviet Union. The U.S., with the fervent push from many powerful segments of American society, particularly the religious groups, sent billions of dollars to the Nationalists. Sometime before 1949, the U.S. had decided to abandon the Nationalist China.
In 1975, the U.S., again, left South Viet Nam in the lurk leading to the spectacular evacuation of the American forces and the Vietnamese who chose to leave Viet Nam. The South Vietnamese were bitter. The former Minister of Economic Development and Planning of the last South Vietnamese Government and a close advisor of the late Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, Professor Nguyen Tien Hung wrote a series of books about the experience.
After reading “Khi Đồng Minh Tháo Chạy” (When An Ally Ran Away) his most critical book on the American withdrawal from Việt Nam, I wrote an article pointing out that, besides the fact that there was not a formal alliance treaty between the two countries, the Vietnamese leadership had misunderstood the concept of Alliance. Even a formal treaty such as the France-Czechoslovakia Treaty of Alliance and Friendship was broken by France just before WWII.
Alliance does not mean a suicide pack, we fall you fall with us, and if we die, we expect you to die too. Such fictional Kungfu romantic thinking damaged the Vietnamese American Alliance. The Americans had reached a point where they realized that the war effort of such an alliance was one-sided, that the Vietnamese did not try or did not try hard enough, and for their own national security, they had to get out.
The Ukrainians have fought valiantly against a strange nation, which has continued living in its medieval dream of taking the earth for itself. If the Ukrainians lost, the party that should be blamed would be the European Union.
Since the end of WWII, Europe and now EU has not conducted itself as an ally of the U.S. but a vassal pledging unwavering support to the U.S. in exchange for its protection, which they are now discovering is optional. It has lived next to Russia, a country with a long history of aggressiveness and land-grabbing insatiability. While the world has used the computer’s power to improve the lives of its citizens, Putin’s Russia uses it to hack everybody. Other countries of the world have tried to improve the lives of their citizens by making use of the land within their national borders, Russia has sent its people to die in the hundreds of thousands so that it can take a few square miles of land from ANOTHER country while it has 6.6 MILLION square miles of undeveloped land inside its borders that could have provided immense opportunity for the deceased young Russians to produce wealth for themselves and for others.
The Europeans was probably infected with the South Vietnamese’s “alliance” virus that lures them into the state of mind of a pacifist: Let the American cowboys deal with the ugly Russians. With the American nuclear umbrella over Europe, they have focused resources on making thousands of Birkin bags selling for a million dollars apiece. Voila! Our GDP is catching up with yours, America. In fact, the European Union’s GDP has roughly been in parity with the U.S.’s GDP, especially its Purchase Power Parity adjusted for cost of living. But it has no military power strong enough to put the perennial aggressor on its east border on notice.
A cowboy does not fight for free. America knew that but was so polite as to say it out loud. Until Donald J. Trump and MAGA, who are the real cowboys, came into power. They did not know why America could not say it out loud and why America kept sacrificing its young people and spending its coffer to provide security and safety for others so that they could pursue the folly of spending billions of dollars making little bags and little bottles of perfume instead of manufacturing weapons.
EU members should provide security for themselves including other nations, which if under threat would affect its own security such as Ukraine. The U.S.A. is no longer an America of yesteryears. Then, it would send an airplane abroad to pick up a patient ravaged by kidney disease, transported them to the U.S. for treatment – for free, or send military personnel out to locate the children who were separated from their parents. The present-day America would pick up a seriously ill patient from an American hospital whom they deem not a legal American and send them abroad. Present-day America would not mind separating children from their parents.
Time has changed, but Russian nature has not. Today Ukraine could cede 25% of its land to buy off Russian aggression. Then, there would be little doubt that Russia would look to its other former satellite countries such as Poland, to invade five or ten years from now. The Domino Doctrine is as valid in Europe as in the Western Hemisphere or the Pacific Basin.
The U.S. has made it very clear: It won’t defend Ukraine. It seems the European Union has only two choices: Live on borrowed time long enough to learn how to speak and write Russian or stand up and fight to preserve its integrity, culture, tradition, and way of life. Its GDP is 10 times that of Russia and its population is three times as big. If it let Ukraine fail to protect its territory, it wouldn’t just be a mistake but a sin.
The U.S. has decided to leave Europe because it has enough worry in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Basin. The drug trade collects hundreds of billions of dollars a year that translates into huge energy, and huge damages if the bad guys start getting ideas and use their financial resources to cause troubles.
In the Pacific theater, with time, if nothing done, Taiwan would inexorably drift toward mainland China. If that were the case, don’t expect Japan, Korea, and many other countries on the Pacific Rim to remain allies of the U.S.
JOHN P. LE PHONG (This article appears on thelephongjournal.com, Facebook, and X).
