Miscellaneous News
- Thread starter bd popeye
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I think Tianjin may not have too much special political meaning. Lavrov's meeting with Wang Yi was in Guilin.
I think all these arrangement were due to the pandemic. Beijing is off limit for any large foreign delegation who can not be quarantined for 14+7 days due to the nature of their visit.
Isn't that exactly "capitalism vs. socialism"? In Capitalism, the state serve the owner of the capital, oligarchs. In socialism, the state serve the people who collectively own the production means.
Chyna fault
Just love this from CGTN. Trolling the western allies.
The ignominious end of the American era
Updated 12:30, 31-Aug-2021
Future students of history will remember August 30, 2021, as the end of the American era.
For 20 years, the United States of America had sent its soldiers to Afghanistan with the dream that, one day, it will root out terrorism, defeat the Taliban, establish a functional democracy in the country and have their soldiers return home in glory. And during the last weeks of the American presence in the country, the U.S.-backed government collapsed, the Taliban swept into power, a suicide bombing killed 13 American soldiers and an American drone strike took out 10 members of a family, including six children.
To U.S. President Joe Biden, this bloating mess is partially justifiable. During an interview with ABC News, he said that "if everything is equally important to you, nothing is important to you. We should be focusing on where the threat is the greatest."
Around 200 people attend a mass funeral for 10 people of a family reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike, in Kabul,
Afghanistan, August 30, 2021. /Getty
U.S. politicians have an infamous history of using big words to hide its real interests and then pack up and leave once the values are extracted – or in this case, it had become unsustainable. By the end, six out of ten Americans believed the war in Afghanistan is no longer worth fighting. And, as Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor has written, Biden's "foreign policy for the middle class" is always "tethered to a kind of nation-building populism at home." As Americans are more focused on extremist threats within America, Biden's focus turned back home.
True, every country has to have its priorities. But it is a kind of disgraceful thinking for a country that promised so much when it first dropped its soldiers on Afghan territory. According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released on August 29, 71 percent of Americans think that U.S. troops should remain in the country until all Afghans who helped the U.S. are evacuated. Yet, on the same day, the U.S.-led coalition told Afghans waiting at the Kabul airport that the airlift had ended. The U.S. Central Command announced on Monday that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan has been completed.
However, the true ignominy lies with how the U.S. is pulling out. Apparently, America learned little from 20 years of intense engagement with the fragmented country. Everything seems to have caught it by surprise: The speed of the government's collapse, the swift advancement of the Taliban, U.S. allies' private and public anger towards its intransigence regarding extension of the deadline, and the global condemnation of its irresponsibility of leaving the country in a fragmented state with no plan to deal with the potential humanitarian disaster that often comes with political instability.
Relocated Afghan families continue their lives at tents they set up at a park in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 29, 2021.
Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described the two decades of the U.S.'s governing logic of its war on terror as making the "'difficult and brave' moral decisions, and then having someone else worry about the consequences." "There is no closure and no responsibility," Malik added. It's even more ironic when contemporary America seeks to put values at the forefront of its foreign policy agenda. As the U.S. tries to convince the world that its values outshine those of its competitors, it has left millions of people to fend for themselves after tearing down the country's social fiber for 20 years.
The United States believes that it is endowed with exceptionalism that gives it the right to play God in other countries and that the political philosophy it has taken up should be proselytized across the world. It had great confidence when it went into the Middle East and Asia, hoping to create a pool of liberal democracies and transform the region. What it has got is failure after failure.
It is time for America to face the reality that it is just a country like others with a limit on its ability and can change course based on its domestic political needs and national interests. Its "sacrosanct" political position is not universal at all, but merely applicable to itself and maybe a few more countries, and that despite its effort to transform other countries, everyone has their own ways of life.
By Huang Jiyuan
For those of you living outside the U.K. please note: Dominic Rabbs is the WORSE politician I've ever known.
I think Tianjin is very significant. It was the last place to meeting with Sherman, and it was also meeting for foreigners under the Qin dynastic. A member posted this a while back. I can't remember where.
Are they for real???
A diehard team of SAS fighters have volunteered to stay behind in Afghanistan to avenge the deaths of 13 US troops murdered at Kabul airport.
Sources say up to 40 members of the Who Dares Wins regiment have asked to remain in the war-torn nation so they can take the fight to IS-K – the terrorist group behind Thursday’s suicide bombing and gun attack....
The SAS party is likely to establish a base in the lawless Afghan-Pakistan border area to conduct undercover strikes against the ultra-violent Islamic State Khorasan Province jihadists based in eastern Afghanistan.
Their base will also be used by the Royal Navy’s SBS special forces, the US Army’s Delta Force and the US Navy Seals – the unit which killed al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
The troops will be supported by drones and US and possibly British strike planes.
"Although the force will need the approval of the Taliban to operate in Afghanistan, defence sources say this is likely to be given."
A diehard team of SAS fighters have volunteered to stay behind in Afghanistan to avenge the deaths of 13 US troops murdered at Kabul airport.
Sources say up to 40 members of the Who Dares Wins regiment have asked to remain in the war-torn nation so they can take the fight to IS-K – the terrorist group behind Thursday’s suicide bombing and gun attack....
The SAS party is likely to establish a base in the lawless Afghan-Pakistan border area to conduct undercover strikes against the ultra-violent Islamic State Khorasan Province jihadists based in eastern Afghanistan.
Their base will also be used by the Royal Navy’s SBS special forces, the US Army’s Delta Force and the US Navy Seals – the unit which killed al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
The troops will be supported by drones and US and possibly British strike planes.
"Although the force will need the approval of the Taliban to operate in Afghanistan, defence sources say this is likely to be given."
If they Taliban says yes to this then they are just an other puppet regime, I think this is a good litmus test if the Taliban want to rule as a sovereign or as a puppet.. Taliban should be more then able to clean up Isis-K either with the help with Russia and China.
You meant Qing instead of Qin I believe.
During the late Qing dynasty, Tianjin was the seat of "北洋通商大臣" literally "the minister of north sea trade". The minister was responsible for trade and diplomacy in the coastal region from Shandong and above. It was usually concurrently assigned to the governor of Zhili (直隶总督) whose seat was moved to Tianjin from Baoding since 1870s. Note, 北洋通商大臣 was "正三品"/3rd rank, while governor of Zhili was "正二品"/2nd rank. So the role was not significant.
There was also a "南洋通商大臣" literally "the minister of the south sea trade". The seat of the office moved from Guangzhou to Shanghai then to Nanjing. It carried out the same responsibility of diplomacy for coastal region from Jiangsu and below. It was also concurrently assigned to one of the governors in the south.
So Tianjin was not significant in diplomatic functions in the historical context.
Considering the rank of Lavrov is higher than Sherman and Kerry, Tianjin does not seem to be more significant than Guilin in today's context either.
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Thanks. Yes I meant Qing
But you have either miss read my meaning or I've not convey meaning properly.
What I meant to say was. Tianjin was significantly chosen for being insignificant in the first place. I hope this is clear.
Now I got it.