MelianPretext [they/them]

That’s the rather common argument amongst many leftists that not only are the Biden regime ghoulish genocide-abetting war criminals but that they also know what they’re doing as well.

I would disagree with that assessment because I disagree with the presentivist conceit that the current crop of leadership in the West is anything more than the equivalent of benchwarmer political nobodies like the Coolidge administration exactly one century ago. Neither does making psychotic policy decisions mean ipso facto those decisions are competently made ones for the sake of US empire. The fact that we of the present are stuck confronting the fallout of their actions on a day-to-day basis should not induce people in putting them on a pedestal. Not every generation has an exceptionally competent ghoul like Roosevelt who subsumed the world financial system under the Bretton Woods arrangement or a crook like Nixon who could exploit the Sino-Soviet split through the presence of competent underlings like Kissinger.

That the present ghouls leading the Washington blob are psychologically insecure about the institutional resilience of their subordination of Europe does not mean their decision to ameliorate this anxiety by giving Europe a tighter shackle is the rational call for American empire. The material conditions of modern Europe’s entire structure and way of life are derived from the extraction and exploitation of the Global South, in the same sense that the US is. This and the fundamental character of European chauvinism and white supremacist solidarity underlying the European relationship with the US means that we in Europe would never have struck it out from under the American shadow. Until there is ever a moment where such material conditions of the European character and way of life can be made to undergo comprehensive revision and there is a reckoning for the legacy of our historical relationship with the Global South, the idea of a Europe that does not salivate at alignment with imperial aims is a pipe dream.

These are factors that would have always bound Europe to the American imperial project. That the Biden regime doesn’t want to admit the basis of the US-Europe relationship is imperialist mutual interest and white supremacy, and thus would always be on the American side when it really matters, by going out of their way to institgate the Ukraine conflict to make Europe explicitly fall in line does not mean the opportunity cost of that decision is worth the cost for US empire.

The fact is that the one cardinal rule of classical geopolitics in the Western world since the time of imperialist thinkers like Mackinder, more profound than NATO Ismay’s “Keep the Germans Down and the Russians Out” little quote that Washington seems to have living rent free in their decisions - to never allow the “heartland” of the “world island” to unite together -has been completely broken by the Biden regime’s actions.

Not only has he brought Russia and China together again, after the disastrous Sino-Soviet split destroyed the partnership before any benefit of heartland solidarity could be realized, but he has also completely convinced both Putin’s faction and Chinese “Peaceful Coexistence” Khruschevites in the Party (rightfully) that Europe in its current state could never be an independent actor. Before Ukraine, Chinese liberals and Putin were mentally masturbating to the idea of a strong EU standing up to the US alongside them. Now, they realize that the only real partners that can uphold a sincere interest in breaking down the US hegemonic structure are in the Global South, not here in Europe. This regime will go down not just for its genocidal psychopathy, but its utter incompetence as a failson of the US imperial project.

The absolute funniest thing is that whenever something like this happens, including the literal day after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in Feb 2022, there’s the current crop of “realist” Kissinger/Brzezinski wannabes like that Meerswhatever freak screaming in ghoulish rags like Foreign Affairs “not to forget about China!” and waving around RAND Corp PDFs trying to remind the Washington blob that “China is still the real long term adversary!”

They’ve been getting completely sidelined for the past two years in every subsequent geopolitical moment since Ukraine because they don’t understand that the irrational greed inherent of US hegemony can’t stand getting challenged on a single inch of its imperial sway anywhere on the planet.

The 90s were one of the blackest eras of reaction, with no exaggeration, in all of human history. The entirety of former USSR societies fell into a highly publicized humanitarian disaster of spiraling mass poverty. The fact that the DPRK suffered in this time is undeniable but it should be emphasized that the DPRK’s 1990s famine is to the anticommunist mythology of Western propaganda what the pre-WWII famines, including that infamous Stalin’s Giant Spoon-domor, were for the USSR and the Great Leap Forward coinciding famine was for China; appropriated by endless hordes of payrolled academics to outwrite any alternative accounts with their word vomit, with the intended agenda of establishing a discourse hegemony that wholly pins the disaster squarely on the man-made decisions of socialist leadership and the socialist system. This is all to say that, due to this slathering of Western propaganda and the hijacking of the narrative airwaves, so to speak, it’s difficult to ascertain the material conditions of the food scarcity circumstances of the 90s DPRK, including its extent and the particular catalysts and aggrievating factors.

I had a look at Steve Gowans’ “Patriots, Traitors and Empires,” and this is what he interpreted:

“the inevitability of a North Korean collapse, appeared, from Washington’s point of view, to be beyond question. North Korea was reeling from the dissolution of the socialist bloc and the concomitant loss of important trading partners, and had been wracked by a series of natural disasters which left it food-insecure. Its economy was shrinking and its people were hungry.”

It is true that under the allegations of an uranium enrichment program in 1994, the US put significant pressure on the DPRK right at the height of its unipolar hubris moment, which undoubtedly exacerbated conditions. The US would later, under Bush Jr., explicitly place food export licensing sanctions on the DPRK.

As for Chinese responses to this moment, here’s what the US-based so-called “Genocide Studies and Prevention International Journal” in a 2012 article alleged were the conditions of China-DPRK and Russia-DPRK relations in the 1990s:

… in the early 1990s, both Russia and China cut their food and fuel aid to North Korea. Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, had no interest in subsidizing Communist states abroad. Chinese exports of maize to North Korea declined by 80% from 1993 to 1994, in part because of a poor harvest in China itself and in part as punishment to North Korea for having opened up diplomatic relations with Taiwan (I have no clue what 90s lore this is referring to here). Both Russia and China informed North Korea that it would have to start paying market prices in hard currency for their exports.

One thing to keep in mind while miring through all this is that it’s clear that the DPRK weathered through its food-scarcity conditions of the 90s. This indicates that either 1) its systems of autarkic food self-sufficiency could be sustained and that those conditions were derived from principally natural causes, contrary to Western narratives of “inherent flaws of its system” or that 2) it was able to supply food imports despite the semi-public estranged relations with China (I agree with the cited ghouls above that it’s unlikely Yeltsin’s Russia would have stepped in). For the avenues in which foreign (i.e. Chinese) aid could have been made, as can be seen from the current circumstances of the Ukraine War, where while Chinese support is undeniable, the extent of it is still unknown and deliberately obfuscated and clandestine, I would argue that, in the midst of American 1990s triumphalism, any actions by China to support AES states, particularly the DPRK which fell under US crosshairs following the 1994 uranium enrichment allegations, would have been conducted through similar degrees of inconspicuousness and inherently contradictory to publicly stated positions.

There is some discernible evidence of this from the Jiang Zemin era China. For example, Adrian Hearn’s “Diaspora of Trust: Cuba, Mexico and the Rise of China” argues that Cuba’s painful Special Period sustained the survival of the Cuban revolution in a large degree through China’s substitution of former Soviet assistance: “China played an important but little-known role in seeing Cuba through this tumultuous period” and that with regards to Jiang’s private agenda:

According to a Chinese diplomat I interviewed in Beijing (who requested anonymity), Jiang conducted the visit to “save Cuba’s revolutionary project,” expressly against the advice of China’s increasingly pragmatic Communist Party.

That’s just the pre-New Cold War early-mid 2010s reddit r/worldnews top comment copypasta that would appear every time in a DPRK-related thread. “Oh, the only reason South Korea isn’t reincorporating the DPRK East Germany-style is because China fears the North Korean hordes (“Norks”) flooding in and uncontrollably eating all the grain in China with giant spoons after having been famined by “rocketman” Kim.”

Sino-Korean relations are actually a very fascinating study that go beyond Western propaganda’s vibes based assertions of “dependence” and “vassalage.”

It’s important to establish a macroscopic view of the Sino-Korean relationship to understand the material conditions which underpin it today. The basis of the relationship dynamics between China and the DPRK go back to the late Qing Dynasty which, to be plain, completely abandoned Korea to the predations of Japanese imperialism. The Korean Joseon government had refused to establish relations with Japan explicitly due to their loyalty to China and (misplaced) faith in its capacity to come to Korea’s rescue as the Ming once did against Japan’s invasion in the late 16th century. The Qing, having just lost their own war against Japan, were in no position to do so. The Japanese pretext for initiating its imperialist assault on Korea actually began with the pretext of “opening it up” as a direct result of this Korean diplomatic refusal. This soon forced Korea to sign its first unequal treaty with Japan and began the catastrophically traumatic Japanese invasion of Korea. The sense of Qing China having failed to live up to its obligations, and with such calamitous consequences for Korea, is the historical essence which permeates both Chinese and Korean perceptions.

This sense of past failure in historical obligations alongside socialist solidarity, a further indebtedness to Korean aid against Japan in Northeast China and, yes, pragmatic realpolitik calculus towards counter-containing the expansion of the American containment doctrine from reaching the Yalu River, were the reasons why China intervened in the Korean War. Following this, the China-DPRK relationship was actually the inverse of the big nation-small nation power dynamic for most of the 20th century, precisely because both sides were deeply historically cognizant of not making the relationship seem like such, particularly since China, following the Sino-Soviet split, had a vested interest in not making itself also appear to be the overbearing big brother when it was simultaneously accusing the USSR of being a “big nation chauvinist” within the socialist world.

To this end, the power asymmetry of the relationship under Mao actually came to skew towards the DPRK, with Mao personally offering Kim Il Sung de facto military and administrative control of Northeast China as the DPRK’s “great hinterland” and the border around Mount Paektu/Changbaishan was amended so that the DPRK would possess half of the mountain alongside its highest peak. At a time where the Sino-Soviet rupture had isolated China from fraternal nations that sided with the USSR, such as Mongolia and Vietnam, it became imperative for China to maintain its friendship with the DPRK. The DPRK under Kim Il Sung therefore not only benefitted from such asymmetry, but also could always fall back on the triangular relationship with the USSR to further cushion its position.

The Chinese perception of the Mao era relationship here is very telling, because Deng Xiaoping actually articulated it when the DPRK tried to block China’s normalization process with South Korea: “We should draw lessons from our dealings with North Korea. We should not give the North Koreans the wrong impression that whatever they ask for we will give them.”

Deng saw China’s relationship with the DPRK as not only asymmetric, but also the teleological next domino to fall over after the ruptures in similar relationships where China once gave great sacrifices to maintain: “Of course, the North Koreans are unhappy. Let it be. We should prevent them from dragging us into trouble. We have made huge efforts to aid Vietnam, Albania, and North Korea. Now Vietnam and Albania have fallen out with us. We should be prepared for the third one [North Korea] to fall out with us, though we should try our best to prevent that from happening.”

This perception, became coupled with revisionist views of the Korean War brought about through Western narratives that “if only China didn’t intervene (and humiliate America and the ‘United Nations’ coalition by fighting them to a stalemate), America might have even let China have Taiwan back,” which resonated particularly in the midst of the 3rd Taiwan Strait Crisis in the 1990s.

When China’s FM informed Kim Il Sung that it was going to normalize relations with South Korea, Kim allegedly responded "The DPRK will adhere to socialism and will overcome any difficulties on its own.” This mindset, along with the collapse of the USSR, is what led the DPRK to pursue an independent nuclear program outside of China’s nuclear umbrella. The disappearence of the USSR, its abandonment by Yeltsin’s Russia and the semi-estrangement with China following the latter’s normalization with the South at the end of the 20th century would have held undeniable parallels to the Qing failure to rescue Joseon Korea at the end of the 19th century. This justified, from the DPRK’s perspective, the idea that only with its own nuclear capabilities, could it be truly safe.

The explicit statement that the DPRK could not depend on China’s nuclear umbrella would have undoubtedly stung, which is one reason why China’s response against the nuclear missile tests in the 2000s was explicit condemnation, but I’d argue the more important reason, and the reason why Russia also joined China in supporting the American annual renewal of sanctions in the UNSC is the, in their view, disastrous precedent in terms of non-proliferation. If the DPRK could argue that the Chinese and Russian nuclear umbrellas were no longer sufficient, US-aligned lackeys like Japan and South Korea could also use it as a pretext to develop their own nuclear weapons. The nuclear proliferation of the DPRK has been the defining impediment hamstringing the last two decades which contributes to the undercurrents of tension in the Sino-Korean relationship. To be clear, the two countries are still allies and China’s treaty with the DPRK is the only explicit alliance it has in effect today, though Western propaganda and Chinese liberals have both tried to downplay its durability (the latter out of the typical Chinese liberal behavior of wanting to Gorbachev China’s interests to throw to the West in return for a pat on the back).

The New Cold War has changed the dynamics of East Asian geopolitics considerably as both Japan and South Korea (under its latest President who shifted his country’s entire foreign policy position to outright fealty to the US and Japan through his stirring democratic mandate of a 0.73% margin victory) have now openly sided with the US. This outright alignment with the US lessens China’s fear of condoning DPRK proliferation in affecting its bilateral decision making. This fear, that condonement would lead to the proliferation of the US vassals, is now less significant as there’s now a non-trivial chance they’ll do it regardless of what China’s position is or if the DPRK has nukes, since their principal target has now shifted explicitly to China itself.

Last week, actually, the biggest diplomatic shift for the DPRK occurred in that this year, when the annual March DPRK sanction supervision UNSC resolution came up for renewal, it was vetoed by Russia and abstained by China. This is a promising sign that the necessity to comply with the punitive sanctions by China (and Russia, for that matter), which has hamstrung the enhancement of Sino-Korean relations since, may now begin to be alleviated.

For further readings, I’d reccommend Shen, Z. and Xia, Y. 2018. A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949-1976. Columbia University Press. As can be guessed by the “Western University Press” publishing association, this is a fairly lib take by Chinese liberals who I surmise, through the overarching narrative in this work, wanted to make a case to sell out the DPRK to the Trump era US in hopes of this somehow improving China-US relations, so their modus operandi is to downplay the resilience of the Sino-Korean relationship and to highlight Chinese grievances. However, the fact that they’re university professors tenured in China prevents them from making any outright chud takes and so the work is useful and informative so long as this is kept in mind.