Rumors Of War Between China And The U.S.

Washington’s Campaign Against China Could Lead to War

Brian Cloughley

When prominent U.S. personalities such as Secretary of State Pompeo speak critically and scornfully about leaders and other prominent figures of countries with whose policies they disagree, they ignore or even welcome the fact that such attacks are heard not only by the persons at whom they are aimed. The citizens of the country concerned are unlikely to disregard such criticism, and even if they may agree with some of it — perhaps all of it — on a purely practical or individual basis, they do not accept the premise that their countries are in the wrong because some foreign representative sounds off against their leaders.

There is a campaign of denigration being waged by Washington against Beijing, and Secretary Pompeo is brandishing the sharpest sword. His speech of July 23 at the Richard Nixon Library and Museum was a definitive indication of how the United States stands in regard to the People’s Republic of China, and its very title made it clear that Washington has no intention of engaging in reasoned dialogue that could lead to rapprochement with the Chinese government. Pompeo’s discourse on ‘Communist China and the Free World’s Future’ was a venomous diatribe aimed at persuading the world community to combine against the PRC.

Pompeo is nostalgic for the good old days of the Cold War, and warned that “If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world. General Secretary Xi is not destined to tyrannise inside and outside of China forever, unless we allow it. Now, this isn’t about containment. Don’t buy that. It’s about a complex new challenge that we’ve never faced before.”

He has probably done more to bond and unify the people of China than has been achieved by any other foreign politician in recent years.

The purpose of psychological operations (psyops), which is what Pompeo and many others are conducting against China, is to “induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behaviour favourable to the originator’s objectives.” But one of the principles of psyops is to refrain from insulting national figures on the opposing side. By all means make gentle fun of them, because few things succeed more than laughter when you are attempting to sway people’s opinions against an individual — but rudeness and abuse directed against a country’s leader are more likely to have the effect of binding citizens together in a nationalistic fashion than uniting them in opposition to the leader whom the foreigners want them to overthrow.

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