Semantics?

United States Climate Envoy John Kerry has been doing some traveling, meeting with representatives of several countries as he tries to help put together multinational agreements about reducing the use of fossil fuels and thus reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The stated goal is an attempt to turn the course of what Kerry and the administration of President Joe Biden see as a global crisis, climate change.

Of course one of the main parties at the table is China -- a nation whose "carbon footprint" exceeds all others. So Envoy Kerry has been discussing emissions levels and ways to reduce them with the ruling Chinese Communist Party. And also of course China is a country with a secretive, repressive and bullying regime that doesn't give a rattus tuckus for the safety, health, freedom, flourishing, security, happiness, etc., of its people. And thirdly of course John Kerry, a man who has been as wrong on foreign policy as often as Joe Biden has, thinks we can negotiate with the CCP in good faith, as he states in this interview in Foreign Policy magazine.

Why does Kerry think this is possible? Because, shucks, those differences between our two nations are just not as major as we think they are. To wit, a quote from the interview: "We have other differences on human rights..."

A number of conservative commentators have taken Kerry to task for this kind of equivalency, for describing the two nations' approaches to human rights as just "different." But I think he is dead-bang accurate. The U.S., for example, thinks that abuses against China's minority Uygher population such as concentration camps, re-education, cultural erasure and genocide need to end. The Chinese government, in contrast, thinks that the minority Uygher population needs to end.

It's practically two sides of the same coin.