Dumb Don Trump can’t read a map so he doesn’t understand from this one how Xi jinping has been slapped silly by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Don keeps raving about how Xi has done nothing to put Kim’s nuclear weapons and ICBMs into check. To anyone with a brain, a glance at this map shows why: Kim targeted The Center of Everything (China in Chinese) with the Taepodong-1 in 1998, two decades ago, and the Center knows it better than anyone.
Xi has no choice. (See Publius on Xi jinping Drives China Down.) To save himself and stay at the center of the Center he has to pay off Kim. Make a mistake and say goodbye to Shanghai …
To Publius, this simple map should tell our Dumb Dude everything he needs to know about the Xi-Kim relationship and the limits on just how central the Center really is. That the Dumb Guy doesn’t get this at the same glance that we do is yet another demonstration of his massive intellectual deficiency.
The map also says that Putin too must do whatever Kim tells him to do. And he is doing it, cap in hand. (See Publius on Managing Russia's Implosion.)
Dumb Don, as Publius has demonstrated time and again, can, by contrast, only make decisions based on what he doesn’t know and cannot figure out.
To understand just how desperate Xi is, take the Chinese characters for China, Center + Nation, or Central Nation. This says that the country is the center, or focal point, of all nations. Whence, “Center of Everything” in English.
Mao’s goal was to ensure that The Center was restored to its rightful, historic role as the center of everything on the planet. Our role, he believed, is to follow The Center and obey like feudal lieges. Especially those upstart Americans. Mao died long before he could fulfil his mission. But the Party, the center of The Center, carries on.
Until the Kims.
Parked right on The Center’s border, the Kims built a nuclear arsenal and throw weight that put The Center on notice: “You are the center of precisely nothing.” (See Publius on What North Korea is REALLY Worried About.)
In effect, the Kims took the first of the two characters in Center + Nation and threw it away. All Xi has left is, according to Kim Jong Un, "Nation." Pretty humiliating. To say that the people of The Center are upset about being pushed from the center is putting it mildly.
But, the map shows, Xi has no choice. All he can do is keep his mouth shut and pay Kim Fatty III, as he is known, whatever Kim wants.
Otherwise, he has to admit to his people the unacceptable, which is that, as Kim's missiles show, The Center of Everything is no such thing. The Party has no Mandate of Heaven. It is just a money machine using a fiction to feed on the people.
There is absolutely nothing stable about this situation. Indeed, looking at our map, Xi must be so angry that it would not take more than a small miscalculation by Kim Fatty III to start a Center-North Korea nuclear war. One that we would have no control over but that would soon engulf much of Asia and all of Russia.
The idea that Dumb Don gets any of this is laughable. We have long ago seen that his education stopped well before the eighth grade. He cannot read Publius. So he could never apply what Publius is teaching him to the security of our country.
Love the guy.
Update July 30, 2017
Xi's failure is now screaming at us. Only four days after Publius published this, Kim Jong Un fired a missile capable of hitting as far into the U.S. as Denver. Xi clearly didn't know about this missile, telling us that his intelligence in North Korea is non existent. Kim has made it absolutely clear to everyone, especially President Zero, that Xi has no leverage whatever in North Korea.
Kim's message to Dumb Don: You are weaker than Xi next door and in the words of your new top advisor, Anthony Scaramucci, I am going to use an unnatural sex act to "block" both of you.
Xi's next miscalculation is that President Zero knows that the ONLY thing that can save his presidency now is another Korean War. Dumb Don Trump is desperate for something, anything, that tells him how great he is. A total failure at home, all out war with North Korea is it. Xi seems completely unaware of this. Kim too. Which makes them both pretty stupid.
To avert this war, and the appalling outcome it will mean for the Center, Xi must take control. But, the last time his military did anything at all was a disastrous border conflict with Vietnam in 1979, nearly forty years ago. This war lasted only 27 days yet the Center lost more soldiers than the U.S. in the entire 20-year Vietnam War. And won nothing. Ineptitude on a spectacular scale. Before that, you have to go back to the first Korean War (1950-53), before most in the People's Liberation Army were born.
No one in the People's Liberation Army has any experience of combat let alone of invasion, occupation and regime transition and management.
So the panic in the PLA--an organization devoted to mainly civilian functions today--must be amazing to see.
Nonetheless, Xi moved his ill-prepared PLA forces to the border with the North in an effort to induce some restraint. Kim's response to this empty gesture was yet another, more powerful missile.
For some months now we have been only days from the Second Korean War. As Don Trump's stupefying list of failures grows here at home, he will do what everyone else before him has done, look abroad for something to polish up what he sees in the mirror.
Forget health care or tax reform. We are talking blood and a lot of it. Maybe nuclear war. Time for everyone to get serious. Especially the U.S. media which has been asleep for years.