Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Playing Chinese Checkers
Two conservative voices on Hong Kong yesterday, starting with Friend of Ricochet, Annika Rothstein:
Then Josh Hammer, Editor-at-Large at The Daily Wire:
No one (to my knowledge) is suggesting boots on the ground in Hong Kong, but it really shouldn’t be too much to ask POTUS to provide meaningful rhetorical and moral support to democratic protesters (literally) standing athwart Chinese Communist Party tyranny. There are likely other substantive measures we can take, too, that are short of boots on the ground. I hope to elaborate later this week.
This leads to the inevitable question? What is “meaningful rhetoric” without the will to back it up? I believe that’s called “drawing a red line” like Mr. Obama did in Syria. We know how that turned out.
So, what are the “substantive measures?” Is the crowd that has invested almost four years into the arguments that tariffs and Orange Man bad ignorant of basic economics now going to suggest that we slap economic sanctions against China? American jobs and American prosperity is not worth economic gamesmanship but Hong Kong is? And possibly American military lives?
Published in Foreign Policy 
Yep
Which allies are in a position to matter in such a cold war with China? Which are willing? Hell, is our own country willing to use our “stick” in the same way and extent it was back then?
Besides, since Reagan our willingness and ability (and support) to use our stick has been diminishing inversely proportional to the volume of our talking. I’m for moral clarity too, but good words without resolve to use our stick is worse than saying nothing at all IMO.
Anyway, I think that President Trump is already on the way to treating China on a more antagonistic basis than we’ve been doing for the last several decades.
True. However, a nation is not a man, and a president of a nation must be prudent so as to ensure that his nation doesn’t risk death for moral clarity. Even a brave man should be prudent – living to fight another day is often the wiser course for the man and for the cause of good.
You are getting ahead of yourself. The United States Government isn’t quite yet the same as the United States. The manufacturing base owned by the people of the United States still isn’t completely the property of the United States Government, neither according to our courts, nor in practice.
Be patient, Grasshopper. You’re winning. You just haven’t won yet.
Options:
-Trump could fly to HK and stand with the residents
-Trump could talk about HK and China every day. Throw light on it every chance he gets.
-Cut China out of all E-7 to E-22 conferences.
-Ratchet up tariffs on China.
-Send China ambassador home.
-Kick all China students out of the USA. Many are spies anyway.
-Point out over and over again, to US voters, that this, the state of HK, is the face of Socialism.
Are you going to fly Air Force One in there with how many US fighter escorts violating Chinese air space?
That’s called “Thursday” at the Trump White House. Pretty sure he was going to do that anyway.
Now we’re talkin’!
What bee there is in Trump’s bonnet about China is linked to trade and tariffs more than it is to any sense of overtly working to preserve the freedoms on Hong Kong. So the only way to handle this is probably to tie the Hong Kong situation to the overall China trade policy with the U.S. and the world.
The fact that Hong Kong acts as a conduit for much business in and out of China is a cudgel the U.S. could hold over China’s head — make the already rough relations between the two counties even rougher if China opts to go the full Tiananmen Square route in Hong Kong, while selling it to Trump as a way for him to get more overall support for his trade positions with the Chinese. If China’s economy really is on a downhill slide right now, Xi and the rest of the leadership might not want to have even more onerous trade restrictions imposed by Trump and tied to human rights violations in Hong Kong. That would give the president a moral high ground he doesn’t have right now with a lot of people, when the fight is simply over economic issues (though if the leadership wanted to, they probably could simply cave to Trump on trade now, go in and silence dissent in Hong Kong and then a few months from now start going back to what they were doing in the first place that got them into the trade battle with the president. Trump’s nature of personalizing everything would likely make him do a victory lap over the deal, and let slide anything Xi did to the protestors in the immediate aftermath).
Control is a bigger deal for the CCP than the trade deal (which is pretty big). Think Tiananmen.
What a bunch of sentimentalists.
Trump has tied the trade deal to the fate of Hong Kong. <sarcasm> But of course, he’s doing nothing. </sarcasm>
The other thing he could do is to get ready for a couple of million refugees if things go sour, which they probably will. Finally we will get asylum seekers who are worth having.
Yes.
Hong Kong is not an ally. It is a Chinese coastal city with an unenforceable temporary special status. It only has kept an appearance of independence so long as it has been in the Chinese Communist Party’s interest.
How did their defense of Singapore go? The U.K. had no power to stop the PLA after WWII. That is why PM Thatcher signed a face saving agreement with the PRC.
Except it was Prime Minister Thatcher’s government that signed the merely face saving deal handing over Hong Kong to the Chinese Communists.
Did the UK own Singapore and lose a fight with the Chinese over it?
Singapore was part of the British Empire. It was occupied by the Japanese during WWII.
Singapore became a separate independent country in 1965, when the local Chinese totally took it. (They’re the majority.)
That does not seem like the same thing to me, at all.
That’s the closest it gets. Lost it to the Japanese, but then they got it back for a bit. Now I think that Singas is in China’s orbit, but no hot war type thing.
Depends on what you mean and it’s pretty questionable. US Navy uses Changi in Singapore all the time and Singapore uses US air bases.
Trying to force the Chinese Communists bad guys to “lose face in a public manner” might not be the best idea either.
Tough situation.
Trump will get blamed by the Left forces of the West no matter what he does.
Unemployment falls to lowest level in decades.
Women and minorities hit hardest.