By Fighting Words Staff
Let’s be perfectly clear! Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s trip marks a huge step towards the Pentagon reestablishing nuclear armed U.S. military bases in Taiwan, an island just 100 miles off the mainland coast of China.
Yet the corporate media here is blasting the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for its strong reaction to this huge provocation, including China suspending meetings with the U.S. military and sanctioning Pelosi.
Just as the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine is meant to place NATO military bases there, including replacing the Russian Federation naval base in Sevastopol in Crimea with a U.S. base, so it is with Taiwan.
The arch-militarist website, “GlobalSecurity.org”, provides a history of U.S. military presence in Taiwan:
In the 1950s, after the Korean War and before Vietnam, Taiwan was an important naval and air base for the United States. In 1958 President Eisenhower deployed 20 Matador TM-61 nuclear cruise missiles to Tainan Airbase as tensions in the Formosa Strait smoldered. The 17th TMS on Taiwan (Formosa) was the first TM-61A missile unit deployed in Asia. Numbers deployed, operating locations, and operational history for this unit are unknown. The Matador, a winged guided missile that travels a distance of 600 miles at a speed of 650 miles an hour, was capable of sending an atomic warhead to the key Communist coastal air bases opposite Formosa. Only in 1960 did the United States first base nuclear warheads on Taiwan; by 1970, about 200 nuclear weapons under US sovereign control were in place on Taiwan.
Taiwan was also a major center for gathering intelligence on Communist China. Pilots of the Nationalist Air Force flew U-2 missions out of Taiwan and the information gained from agents and other sources on events in mainland China was turned over to American intelligence units on the island. The first two U-2Fs were delivered to the ROCAF in July 1960, another two in December 1962. During 15-years of reconnaissance operations code-named Project Razor, ROC pilots flew 102 missions that penetrated the bamboo curtain, including overflights over North Korea and Northern Indochina. Surface-to-air missiles shot down five U-2s over Mainland China.
The number of United States Taiwan Defense Command troops stationed on the island of Taiwan gradually rose to 30,000 from 1968 to 1969. Americans provided support and communications facilities for forces in Vietnam and the western Pacific. By 1971, there were about 9,000 Americans in Taiwan. The majority of these serve several squadrons of transport aircraft at two American bases. Other units include staffs at the Taiwan Defense Command, United States Air Forces Taiwan, and an Army Communications unit. There was a small naval contingent on the island.
Taiwan is the same distance from the mainland as Socialist Cuba is from the U.S.. In 1962, Kennedy set up a naval blockade around Cuba when the Soviet Union established a nuclear deterrent there to prevent the invasion of that country, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. What gives Biden the right to do that now in Taiwan, which historically has always been part of China?
In the early 1970s, the PRC became embroiled in conflicts with both the Soviet Union and Socialist Vietnam. Sensing an opening for sharpening this conflict, Nixon and his main henchman Kissinger began to draw down the U.S. military presence in Taiwan. The U.S. stopped blocking China’s entry into the United Nations.
By 1979, under the Carter administration, all large U.S. military bases in Taiwan had been removed. The U.S. accepted the “One China” policy, meaning that Taiwan was recognized as part of China. U.S. corporations flooded into China to extract riches from its huge labor force. There were imperialist dreams that China would turn away from socialism altogether and adopt capitalism like Russia did, with the U.S. holding supreme hegemony.
But that never happened. So, the Obama-Biden administration adopted a policy of resuming “containment” of China, sending the Seventh fleet in the area and creating anti-China trade alliances in the region.
The Trump regime stepped up the anti-China strategy, with massive tariffs on Chinese goods (which are paid for by the workers and oppressed here and aggravate the rate of inflation that we are now confronting). Trump’s advisor Sterve Bannon announced that the U.S. and the PRC would be in open war in a few years, during the second Trump term.
When Biden took over, instead of rolling back these anti-China policies, he has escalated them. The tariffs continue despite this new wave of inflation. Chinese scientists and researchers continue to be harassed and arrested on false charges for supposedly stealing secrets. Technical advances from not only the U.S. but other countries are arrogantly forbidden to China by the U.S.
Biden “let it slip” that if the Taiwan regime declared independence, the U.S. would offer direct military support, ending the 40-year policy of “deliberate ambiguity”.
China’s “Silk Road” trade and development policy has caught favor by developing countries around the world, and very few continue to recognize the Taiwan regime, much to the chagrin of the U.S. State department.
The U.S. ruling class is united on this anti-China policy, even though they are still amassing huge profits from Chinese labor. They fear the PRC’s ability to control inflation, to not fall into the Great Recession, to enhance the growing prosperity of the Chinese working class. They fear this successful example of socialism by the second most powerful economy in the world.
It is time for the anti-war and entire progressive movement to recognize this danger, and to mobilize our forces to take the streets.
No U.S. military in Taiwan!
Remove the U.S. fleet from China’s coast!
Remove the tariffs on Chinese goods!
Stop the sanctions against the PRC!
Stop the racist attacks on Chinese and other Asian people!
No war with China!
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