Steve Sailer writes: The rude welcome Obama received in China suggests that a long-term great power rivalry between the United States and China is inevitable. This doesn’t have to be disastrous, but it does need to be treated seriously.
It would therefore be useful for Washington to avoid needlessly alienating Beijing’s natural rivals, such as Moscow. (China and Russia share a 4,200 km border).
But Washington instead seems to go looking for an odd set of issues over which to stoke Russian hostility, such as promoting Georgian irredentism in 2008 and Pussy Riot, driving Russia and China closer together.
COMMENTS:
* Tucker Carlson was on the Fox All-Stars panel on Special Report a few nights ago. Carlson is as close as it gets to alt-right on Fox News, and he was saying that China represents a far more dangerous adversary to the US than Russia. How that annoyed Charles Krauthammer and some other neo-con on the panel. No, no, no, Russia is Enemy Numero Uno! Putin is the new Saddam Hussein! It has been decided.
* Carlson has “evolved” quite a bit in his thinking, and not in the way that beltway journalists usually do.
* For historical reasons the neocons care a lot more about Russia than about China. Actually, they even care more about the Ukraine than about China. Plus they have an ongoing conflict with Islam.
One of the causes of China’s meteroric rise is that America’s foreign policy makers are busy fighting other, less important nations for their own private reasons. The Chinese are smart and hardworking, but they’ve obviously been helped by this phenomenon. A US-nationalistic regime in Washington would have not only allied with Russia against China, it would have also pursued a protectionist trade policy.
* The continued bear-baiting of Russia by neocons in the State Department like Clinton, Nuland, and Kerry, and their congressional allies like McCain betrays the utter stupidity, arrogance, and idiocy of the ruling elites.
Why does Russia pose a threat to the U.S. 25 years after the end of the Cold War? It doesn’t. We have no land disputes or common borders with Russia. Russia no longer advocates global communist domination. Russia no longer occupies Eastern Europe. (Why do we even have NATO a quarter century after its mission ended?)
The answer is that the arrogant, feminized, homosexualized Yale-Harvard elite ruling class dislikes Russia because it is led by a virile, heterosexual white man and unapologetic nationalist. The ruling elite has made the advancement of gay rights an actual foreign policy goal (it’s also written into the DoD’s strategic posture goals) — so naturally, they hate Putin.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
As for “rivalry” with China… China practically owns us. We have an obscene trade deficit with China. The employment base of Michigan, New York, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin has been outsourced to China. How in hell are we going to have a “rivalry” with them? We can’t. They’ll dictate the terms to us, and we’ll crawl up to them with our tail between our legs and lick their hands like a beaten dog.
* Only a fool wouldn’t be able to see China as our biggest competitor and rival in the 21st Century, with any squabble with Russia being a sideshow at best. That doesn’t mean we will get into a shooting war with China, but it does mean extreme vigilance and careful management of China’s rise.
The main problem I see is the pervasive and now well-entrenched China Lobby in the United States. The alt-right often goes full foaming at the mouth mode with the Israeli Lobby (granted, it IS a powerful and sometimes detrimental lobby), but few raise a similar ruckus over the China Lobby. Chinese and American business interests are now so strongly enmeshed that the corporatist class in this country is completely and totally in the tank for the China Lobby.
Not only do the Chinese exercise an enormous influence over our foreign and economic policy via the business class of this country, it also spreads around A LOT of money among the think tanks and foundations that often provide policy blue prints for those in power.
And this powerful lobby makes it increasingly impossible to pursue any rational policy toward China.
* The only reason why China has such a huge GDP is because it has close to 1.4 billion people. When it comes to sheer GDP size, population size does matter. China’s GDP is of extremely low quality. It mostly the manufacture of sneakers, electronic consumer goods and such. Even mid-tech industry, like automobiles, seldom come from China unless they are made by Japanese and Korean companies. China is an economic paper tiger. The only true power of China, economically, is that they hold trillions of U.S Dollars in reserves. China can literally crash the Dollar overnight if they want to by just flooding the marker with Dollars. This is China’s “weapon of mass destruction”. Crashing the Dollar would mean a much, much, much more serious crisis than 2008 as it would essentially mean the end of the U.S Dollar as the World’s fiat currency. Most people don’t remember this, but once upon a time it was not the American Dollar but the British Sterling that functioned as the World’s reserve currency. Even after WW2 when American’s econonomy was literally 10 X larger than Britain’s, the Sterling was still the prefered Global Currency. It was only when the British Socialists decided to devalue the Pound to artificially raise Britain’s PPP per capita overnight that the Dollar truly became the fiat currency. The result was a protracted depression with hyperinflation that lasted until Tatcher came into power.
The bottom line is this: ultimately, power boils down to military power. That is the ONLY true power: the ability to kill and destroy. And military power is heavily dependend not so much on GDP size, but on the level of scientific sophistication of a Society or nation. for instance, Germany could, in a very short amount of time, become a much bigger threat to the U.S than China. Why? Because the German GDP is not the rsult of exporting sneakers and t-shirts. They still produce enormous amounts of elite physicists, PhD engineers in pretty much every field of engineering and high-level scientific work. Even though Western European countries have an intellectual production nowadays that is only a quarter of what it used to be before WW2, they stll win a LOT of Nobel Prizes and produce a lot at the highest end of science. They could translate that into formidable military hardware. China cannot do that. The Chinese do not have a high number of elite scientists. The Chinese excel only at basic engineering and not high-end engineering. For instnace, they had to import all the technology for mag-lev trains from France, because they don’t have it on their own. Even their(few) nuclear-armed ICBMs are mostly Russian technology. Xiaoping himself admitted that China would never have developed nukes without Soviet assistance – which proves my next point.
Russia can defeat the American Military RIGHT NOW. Not only do they have enough nukes armed with ICBMs to glass America ten tomes over, but a very large fraction of the huge amounts of money Russia has made over the past 15 years has gone to revamping it’s military. After the fall of the Soviet Union Russia was broke and could not compete militarilly with the West. But in the late 1990′s, some of the World’s largest oil reserves were found there, and the Russians suddenly became rich – at least the Russian government and plutocrats, that is, not necessarily the Russian people. With this wealth, Putin has vastly upgraded the Russian military.
The fundamental difference between Russia and China is QUALITY. The Russian GDP is much smaller, but that doesen’t matter nearly as much when it comes to military capabilities as scientific capabilities. Russia has signifcantly superior technical abilities to China. That might change in the next few decades as more and more Chinese scientists and engineers earn PhDs from the best Western univrsities, but for the time being Russia has significantly greater ability to produce high-end military weaponry.
Putin has focused all of Russia’s military upogrades on countering the American Military. He accurately assessed that neoconservative America is the single biggest threat to Russia. The Russian Military now is heavily focused on killing American Airpower by the use of GTA missiles, interceptors and such. Russia can literally shoot down half of America’s airforce by lunch time. Putin knows that the American military is heavily dependend on the superiority of range and killing vital targets that comes from having massive air superiority. Without this, the American Military becomes very beatable when having to fight on enemy terrain where guerrila tactics, at which the Russians are the supreme masters (just ask Hitler) are king. And Russia has the best artillary, both light and heavy, of any nation. What would really tip the scales in their favor is their light artillary, which is extremely verstile, light and packs and amazing weight-to-destructive-ability ratio. Millions of Russian soldiers with bazookas, mortars, land-air missles, having the advantage of being close to the industry where they are made, and without the American Air Froce having the ability to bomb such factories, would result in an unbelievably tough war for America. I mean, a war between America and Russia in eastern Europe. It would make the Spanish Ulcer that decimated Npoleon’s army seem like a mild affair. I am talking here a war that would last for 10-15 years and would result in up to 3 ,million American boys returning home in body bags.
China “might” become a threat 50+ years. Alienating Russia is a threat now.
