China's Chess

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again.

It should be recognized that Sudan, the head of the bloc of the 135 "developing countries" is a Chinese puppet. So, when China needed the developing countries' quote to reinforce their spin, there it was.

And, we should probably look back at the Chinese efforts to block all non-Chinese press from the US-China meeting, subverted only by Robert Gibbs getting involved.

Historically, the Chinese try to go after each new US President in his first year. Because of 9-11, no one seems to remember the way they pulled the Bush administration around on a string after grounding the US electronic spy plane there, holding the crew, and then holding the plane to try and reverse engineer it.