Seats At The Table

(Seats At The Table)

It's President's Day. Naming a day after Donald Trump is just the thing to encourage his ego. The ancient Chinese had legions of civil servants to run the Imperial bureaucracy. To attain such a positing one took an examination that had to be thorough. The exam, however, did not innovate. The bureaucracy did not learn and kept Chinese affairs stagnant and as threats from the West expanded to the point of foreign occupation of the Middle Kingdom became a reality, the Qing Dynasty, China's last, internal control was not maintained.


The Chinese example is relevant in several respects. One can day that the ancient Chinese bureaucracy as antiquated and archaic as it proved to be, in many respects that is the current situation in the American government, the type that President Trump and DOGE, the very situations that Democrats are intent on defending. Like the Chinese ? Knowing how that came out in the end ?


When the Chinese lost Hong Kong and other "colonies" that foreign powers established on the Empire's periphery, the Qing court was not consulted, Useless gestures like the Boxer Rebellion were attempted only to be brutally suppressed. In the end, Imperial China was over-thrown and replaced with a "republic" of China under Dr. Sun Yat Sen. Over time, the nation evolved into the Peoples' Republic that the country is today. It has a seat at the table. It is using that seat with some influence.


How much of that influence is being applied to Ukraine ? A security conference has just concluded in Munich, site of the 1938 infamy. One of the infamies was that Prague was not consulted only in the desperate attempts by Britain and France to avoid another war with Hitler, and told the Czechoslovakians to cede the Sudetenland to greater Germany.


In negotiations to end the war in the Ukraine, a new European leadership conference convened in Paris but the Vice President and the Secretary of State had their own comments to make, demanding that NATO submit to negotiated defense expenditures for the Alliance, 2% of GDP. But Ukraine will not be a formal member.


That being said, Ukrainian President Zelenski is insisting on his participation in whatever discussions will take place. Ukraine will not be another Czechoslovakia and will not submit to Russia and the U.S. with no input from Kiev. In short, Zelenski wants a seat at the table.


  

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