News Review 14/03/2021

 Biden is Continuing Trump’s US-China Policy

As senior officials of the administration of US President Joe Biden have their first meeting with their Chinese counterparts in Alaska in this coming week, it is unlikely that this meeting will bring a radical change in US foreign policy towards China. Those who have awareness of the reality of international politics know that American foreign policy does not change from one administration to the next; only the approach to executing it changes in accordance with the personal style of the president and his senior team, and the party to which they belong. Otherwise, US foreign policy follows established plans upon which a broad consensus exists within the American establishment, these plans being determined by America’s ideological imperatives and the contemporary reality it finds itself in. The US policy towards China is a clear example of this, following not Biden’s personal wishes but US establishment foreign policy thinking. Commenting on the upcoming Alaska meeting, US Secretary of State said, in testimony on Wednesday before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, that it was “an important opportunity for us to lay out in very frank terms the many concerns that we have with Beijing's actions”.

On Friday, Biden gave a clear signal of the continuity of American foreign policy towards China, by participating in a virtual meeting of the Indo-Pacific alliance known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or ‘Quad’) comprising the US, Japan, India and Australia. The superficial speculated about whether Biden would continue this Trump initiative but it was evidently designed not by Trump but by the American establishment to counter Chinese power in the region. The original Quad was launched in 2007 but only survived six months after the resignation of its Japanese founder Prime Minister Shinzo Abe due to ill health; at that time both India and Australia were dominated by pro-British governments. However, it was revived under President Trump in 2017 with Shinzo Abe back as Japanese Prime Minister and with pro-American governments in both India and Australia. There is a distinction between American and British policies towards China in the Indo-Pacific region. Britain has traditionally been keen to keep its former colonies at a formal distance from China, in order to be able to continue to secure their power, wealth and resources for British benefit. On the other hand, America has generally tried to push regional countries to engage with China so as to use these relationships as a means to influence Chinese policy, through either collaboration or confrontation. On 29 January 2021, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said of the Quad: "We really want to carry forward and build on that format, that mechanism, which we see as fundamental, a foundation upon which to build substantial American policy in the Indo-Pacific region."

It is the continual competition between the great powers, including between Western powers, that creates the international political space for the emergence of a new power. Nothing stands in the way of Muslims re-establishing the righteous Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the method of the Prophet (saw), which shall almost from its inception join the ranks of the great powers as a consequence of its immense size, population, resources, location and ideology.

Syria, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Afghanistan

As Syria marks the ten-year anniversary of its revolution, American policy towards Syria remains unchanged. US State Department spokesman Ned Price said of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, “He has done absolutely nothing to regain the legitimacy that he has lost through the brutal treatment of his own people. There is no question of the US normalising relations with his government anytime soon.” Such a statement superficially suggests that America is opposed to the Syrian regime but, in reality, it is America that has been supporting it as evident in another statement that Price made, saying, “There is no question that we will stand - that we will seek to support the humanitarian plight of the Syrian people as we seek a political settlement that would end their suffering.” In other words, America will be working to rehabilitate the Syrian regime internationally, despite acknowledging its tyrannical brutality towards its own people. Indeed, this brutality was carried out in the service of the US, as America was terrified of the implications of the Syrian Revolution for the entire region. Dr Henry Kissinger, for example, called attention to it in his 2014 book, World Order, as a potential trigger that could unravel the entire international order that the West had established on the model of the Westphalian settlement in Europe. But in truth America failed to crush the revolution and it still simmers within the people of Syria waiting for sincere leadership that it can rally around that will lead the people of Syria and the Muslim world in general to a new future.

The last item on the minds of the rulers of Muslim countries today is the concerns of Muslims in other countries. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan visited Sri Lanka last month but his visit appears only to have only encouraged the Sri Lankan government in their audacious treatment of Muslims, just as his multiple visits to China only serve to encourage the Chinese in their vicious oppression of the Muslims of East Turkestan in what the Chinese call the Xinjiang province. After achieving a crushingly brutal defeat of the minority Tamil community in Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese government has turned against the minority Muslim community on the island. During the Covid-19 crisis, the government announced the forced cremation of Muslim bodies in direct contravention to the well-known Shar’i requirement to bury the dead. Now, on Friday, Minister for Public Security Sarath Weerasekera, in imitation of Western countries, announced banning face coverings for Muslim women. “In our early days Muslim women and girls never wore the burqa," he said. "It is a sign of religious extremism that came about recently. We are definitely going to ban it.” Additionally, he announced banning over a thousand Islamic schools. "Nobody can open a school and teach whatever you want to the children," he said. With Allah’s permission, Muslims shall soon establish their state and appoint rulers who will stand foremost for Islam, upholding the rights of Muslims everywhere.

The US puppet regime in Kabul has said that it will attend both upcoming peace conferences on the Afghan situation, one backed by Russia this next week and the other backed by the US and expected to be held in Turkey next month. In fact, both conferences are being held at US direction, as America is desperate for a solution that will enable it to maintain dominance over Afghanistan. The mujahideen forces in the country have captured the greater part of the country, and the Kabul regime is mostly left with control over key cities and interconnecting highways. America had been unable to take the entire country despite using overwhelming force. Even the areas that America captured were not because of its own abilities but because of Pakistan, which borders directly on Afghanistan and has strong historical and current links into Afghanistan. This is not because of mismanagement on the part of America but simply because of the nature of power dynamics. America is certainly the world’s foremost military power but that military power is greatly diminished when projected across the other side of the globe from its home. Furthermore, it is well known that the disbelievers are in any case at a great disadvantage when they have to face believers on the battlefield. Their occupation of Muslim territories in recent times, Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., was only made possible by the treachery of our own leaders and rulers who were complicit in permitting, securing and defending those occupations. Pakistan, for example, is complicit is enabling America to hold Afghanistan, India to hold Kashmir, and China to hold East Turkestan, all three occupied lands bordering Pakistan on the West, East and North. For Muslims, the real solution to Afghanistan is not US-backed so-called ‘peace’ conferences but the establishment of the Khilafah (Caliphate) State over Pakistan and other countries, after which it will be impossible for the foreign disbelieving imperialists to think of encroaching on even a handspan of Muslim land.