The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Wednesday took great umbrage at the U.S. State Department for proclaiming the Western hemisphere is “OUR hemisphere,” and interference from hostile foreign powers like China would no longer be tolerated.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the “our hemisphere” kickoff on Sunday, the day after Venezuelan narco-terrorist dictator Nicolás Maduro was taken into custody by U.S. forces in an astonishing early-morning raid.
“This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live — and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States,” Rubio said in a media interview.
On Monday, the State Department turned Secretary Rubio’s sentiment into a meme:
President Donald Trump touted the Maduro takedown as the muscular return of the Monroe Doctrine — or the “Donroe Doctrine” as he rechristened it.
The Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated by President James Monroe in 1823, and it was intended to prevent European powers from developing intrusive interests within America’s “sphere of influence,” particularly in South America.
The past few administrations appeared to forget why allowing hostile governments to spend billions of dollars on developing influence in America’s backyard was a bad idea, but President Trump remembered, and in the small hours of January 3, he explained it to Nicolás Maduro in unmistakable terms.
China poured a great deal of money into Maduro’s illegitimate socialist regime and was the top customer for Venezuela’s badly-mismanaged oil industry. The Chinese were not happy to see Maduro heading for New York district court on the Donroe Express, and they are extremely concerned that Trump will begin forcing China out of other Latin American countries.
“Carving out a sphere of influence or creating geopolitical confrontation will not make a country safer, still less bring peace to the world. It’s common and cooperative security that sustains,” replied Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning on Wednesday when a reporter asked her about the State Department’s “OUR Hemisphere” meme.
Mao’s comments must have baffled Taiwan, which recently enjoyed the spectacle of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) conducting a dress rehearsal for a massive blockade of the island, precisely because the Chinese think they should be allowed to carve out spheres of influence and create geopolitical confrontations.
When Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae remarked in November that her country would view a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as a threat to its own security, China launched a petulant diplomatic and economic war against Tokyo. One of the more hotheaded nationalist Chinese officials wanted to skip diplomacy altogether and behead Takaichi — and that individual was part of China’s diplomatic mission to Japan.
Filipino fishermen long ago learned that China believes it has a sphere of influence, and that sphere encompasses reefs and fishing grounds that have been used by Filipinos for generations. When China’s expansive claims to those waters were decisively rejected by an international tribunal in 2016, Beijing began using increasingly reckless and dangerous tactics to drive the Filipinos away.
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