Bastion of Democracy

By Atreya Misra

Ever, since the Cold War, even before that, the United States has supported its policy of containment and enforcing democracies. Or has it? The US continually to support partners like China while its ignoring policies that it’s obligated to acknowledge.
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In fact, according to the Congressional Research Service on June 24th, 2011, we, “despite apparently consistent statements in four decades, the U.S. “One China” policy concerning Taiwan remains somewhat ambiguous and subject to different interpretations” (Kan 2). The issue over whether we support Taiwan or not has been highly scrutinized. First, President Obama declares that we our neutral on the issue but then later states that Washington acknowledges China’s position that Taiwan is part of its territory.

However, the fact of the matter is, by supporting China as one country; we are directly stating that we support the partially communist government of China. On the contrary, Washington still states that it is in strong support of its containment policy. So the question remains, if we put down democratic Taiwan and support communist China, are we containing anything? The question still plagues the minds of politicians.

Nonetheless, let’s look at what action the US has taken to support. Of course, during the Cold War, we tried to support our policy as much as possible in Europe, now; we are taking steps to aid countries in a sea of monarchy, communism, and conflict, such as Israel. However, similar to our policy with Taiwan, our main concern has changed since the mid-20th Century. Rather than containing communism, we are more concerned with containing stable trade. In just the last century, we’ve sent billions of dollars in aid to Middle Eastern countries like the UAE (a monarchy). Also, we’ve been supporting countries which only claim to be republics or democracies, but are actually regimes that still contain fascism. We send aid to Venezuela even though its president has been assuming overarching power. Further, we supported Hosni Mubarak even though he has been in office for decades. In addition, we aid corrupted republics which are not working properly like the government of Pakistan. The list goes on and on. Why? To protect our oil.

Although people say we need to protect the Earth. It’s not only the Earth we will be protecting a long with reducing our oil consumption, but also our diplomatic relations. And in recent years, that has become a main concern. The US has ill relations with Iran, just because of oil. It’s time the US shifts to come to its senses, we mustn’t be concerned with oil, but rather with democracy worldwide.

So when it comes down to it, it’s not only Taiwan, our policy has been reflected everywhere for all reasons. Although we are in no Cold War, we have to keep ourselves to the standards that we had during the Cold War. Although it’s not an economic superpower like Germany in today’s case, the collection of corrupt regimes worldwide supersede Germany’s power. And with proper enforcement, we can shift our focus from oil to democracy.