Fareed Zakaria, attempting to suss out a Trump foreign policy “doctrine” other than the obvious “Don’t Fuck with US”, comes up with a reality as predictable as it is unappetizing—it’s all about the racism.
Fareed sees no point in attempting to dissect the “thought” of President Trump himself, aka “Mr. Malaprop”, passing him up in favor of John Bolton, aka “Mr. Moustache”, whose own “thought” might be best summarized by the phrase “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”
As Fareed points out, Bolton’s obvious and overweening contempt for anything and anyone “foreign” is nothing other than chauvinism, pure and simple. “This view,” he remarks, “originates in a cultural chauvinism and can easily morph into racism.”
As a case in point, he cites a recent statement by Kiron Skinner, Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, describing China as “a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.” In contrast, Kiron “explained”, “The Soviet Union and that competition, in a way it was a fight within the Western family.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard “the West” described as “Caucasian”. I don’t think we are any more “in competition” with China than we once were with Japan, a nation that, in the late 1980s, was widely predicted by any number of talking heads to surpass, if not “bury,” us in the near future. Relics of the earlier “Orientalphobia”, like the film Rising Sun, based on the novel of the same name by shameless quick-buck artist Michael Crichton, nicely capture the “The Japanese Are Coming! The Japanese Are Coming!” flavor of the times. Our “enemies” are always portrayed as more ruthless, more intelligent, and more cunning than our simple, innocent, blue-eyed selves. One can only cry, “Oy vey! Oy vey!” And a hearty “Oy, gevalt!” as well.
One thing that’s “interesting” about Skinner's statement, which Zakaria doesn’t mention—“interesting” beyond its stupidity and gross inaccuracy, I mean—is that Skinner herself is not “Caucasian”, being by her photo clearly African-American, though I can’t seem to find out anything more than that.
Fareed Zakaria was born in Mumbai, India and probably qualifies as more “Caucasian” than Skinner does,1 who has non-Caucasian proteins in each of the three trillion odd cells in her body, like close to 40% of the U.S. population (counting Americans of African, Asian, Hispanic,2 and Native American descent, along with other categories that I’ve surely missed). Moreover, implying that our “competition” with China is somehow more “fundamental” than the 50-year Cold War with the revolutionary, totalitarian Soviet state because it’s “racial” (which it entirely isn’t) is stunningly stupid. And the thought this nonsense passes for “thought” in the upper reaches of the Trump Administration, and the “respectable” Republican foreign policy apparatus in general, where Skinner has labored for decades, is stunningly depressing.
Much of the Trump Administration's domestic policy, based as it is on hatred of immigrants, is already racist. That our foreign policy could be transformed into a second edition of the "Yellow Peril"3 is not good news.
Afterwords
Skinner, a protégé of sorts to Condoleezza Rice, whose student she was at Harvard, worked in the Bush Administration beginning in 2005, and was an advisor to both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. Early in her career she helped edit collections of Ronald Reagan’s writings and letters (clever girl!), but not my favorite, I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan, with which I had a great deal of fun at the Bright Lights Film Journal, in the piece “Ronald Reagan’s Shoot from Hell! Cattle Queen of Montana”, very appropriately subtitled “Up shit creek without a Pichon Longueville ‘47”.
1. The Indians, it appears, were the original “Aryans”, though “Indo-European” is now the preferred term. Wikipedia has more, including a map showing them swarming over everywhere except the Caucasus Mountains. Too damn high, I guess.
2. “Hispanic” (“of course”) is a cultural/geographic category rather than racial, but simply describing Hispanics with non-European ancestors as being of Native American descent is too confusing to consider.
3. The "Yellow Peril" was one of many late 19th-century outbursts of racism, popularized by, among others, Donald Trump doppelganger Kaiser Wilhelm II.
