China, Iran and Reality - the undiscovered countries

An excellent article by John Feffer in Foreign Policy in Focus may be found here.  It is indeed quite worth reading, particularly given that it offers a coolly realistic counterweight to the idealistic and borderline-arrogant rhetoric of American and European news outlets such as the Economist, the New York Times, CNN and Auntie Beeb. (Though, just in case some idiot accuses me of being a wu mao dang yuan, it’s very much worth noting that we don’t do this just for China at all. It’s quite a longstanding pastime in Eastern Europe as well.) Here is the money quote:

This latter point, that China has its own national interests, invariably eludes Western observers no matter how often Chinese leaders repeat it. Sure, a Chinese leader might like American basketball or admire American business. But the essential fact is that he leads a political, economic, and military apparatus dedicated to preserving itself and the country’s territorial integrity. The same can be said for the leaders of most countries, including the United States. Certainly no one in Beijing expects the 2012 U.S. elections to produce an American president who embraces state capitalism, a global trade order that disproportionately favors Chinese economic growth, or a ceding of U.S. military position in the Pacific to the up-and-coming superpower. And yet for some bizarre reason, U.S. observers expect the latest Chinese leader to suddenly tear off his clothes and reveal a Captain America suit underneath.

Mr Feffer also very calmly and very objectively speaks of Iran’s military capacity, as well as its willingness to come to the table and negotiate. Given that the only regimes in the region that they truly trust are Syria and Turkey (cultivating much closer relations with the Christian world power in Russia and the secular-agnostic world power in China than with any states in the Sunni Muslim world), it is really not difficult to see that their behaviour in all this mess has been quite rational (at least from a foreign-policy perspective). Perhaps it is time that we demand from our leaders that our foreign policy reflect a similar grounding in reality; though that would almost certainly mean throwing away all of the exceptionalist and jingo rhetoric which has been a sad, dull and predictable staple of American political oratory for every president (Democratic or Republican) since Reagan.