The Grand Impediment

Certain nations, notably Venezuela and China, pretend to be responsible members of the family of nations by rushing aid to disaster-plagued countries such as Haiti. This is of course not a demonstration of compassion but a public relations show. How could tyrannies that have no humanitarian impulse for their own people possibly be concerned with the welfare of foreigners? Venezuela is subjected to rolling blackouts and those who oppose the Chavez regime do so at their peril, taking their lives into their own hands. As for the great menace China, vast swathes of the country outside of the cities are still on a subsistence level similar to pre-quake Haiti. China is a buttress to the fanatical ruler of North Korea and that benighted place's only friend and sponsor state as the North slowly starves her own people to death. China brutally suppresses dissent and has even used hackers to entrap online domestic critics of the government. China engages in widespread spying including industrial espionage and considers the world's democracies as markets for goods produced by slave or near-slave labor, competitors to be dumped on and overwhelmed, and targets for even countenancing a free Taiwan, but not and never friends. Any outreach to Haiti or Africa has a purely self-interested motive. If China was anything but a threat to world peace and stability, the Red Chinese government would take its boot off the throats of the Uyghurs and Tibet and would not block the sanctions that might spare World War III starting over China's client state Iran developing nuclear weapons.