So What Will We Do About China?

 I went to the most depressing foreign policy talk I expect to ever go to in my lifetime last night. It was depressing not because of the far-sightedness of the speaker, but the short-sightedness. This was a Trump Undersecretary who said that the most pressing issue of our time is the potential for war with China and the existential importance of shoring up our alliances with all the major East Asian countries who surround China.

Meanwhile, he was advocating for everything that would ensure there would be no such alliance. He advocated for the strongest possible alliance with Japan, and simultaneously said we had to finally start making Japan pay for its own military defense. To suddenly pay for your military defense is such an enormous change to a national economy that if China offered to pay Japan's military bills instead, they might sooner change their loyalties completely to China than accept a disturbance to their economy that enormous.

This guy believes that China and the US will be at war in the next three or four years. He believed not only that China had designs on being the unquestioned dominant power in East Asia (which it obviously already is), but has military designs as well, and that we will be forced into a war with China to protect our allies in East Asia.

And here's the worst part of what he believes.... he believes that if China and the US go to war, it can be a limited conflict that won't destroy both sides: If there's one thing in history that ensures total war, it's the idea that world powers can declare war on each other on a limited scale. If this is the level of mind we have dictating foreign policy when a 'Republican' is running the show, we're all gonna die...

There was another enormous elephant in the room because through all of that talk, he did not bring up the Trans-Pacific Partnership even once. Why? Because he was partially in part responsible for the withdrawal, which is a large part of the reason the world's relationship to China is as dangerous as it now is. I asked him the question, and after after an hour of bracing us for being hard-headed about foreign policy compromises, he retreated to the fact that 'trade now has an odor' and 'we can't let China dictate the terms of trade' (preventing that was literally the whole point of creating the TPP....) 'elites have contempt for working class Americans who want better jobs.' Well, whatever it's worth, I can assure this guy that my contempt for working class Americans has nothing to do with their desire for better lives, it has to do with their belief that their humiliation is more important than the survival of the country they claim they love.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership was a masterly coup of international diplomacy that created an economic network between America and all the nations surrounding China worth five TRILLION dollars. Whatever the environmental cost, the TPP was an unbreakable economic firewall that might have insured the world against World War breaking out in East Asia for another century. So of course, everybody in America on both the right and the left protested it to high heaven. It should have been Obama's crowning achievement, but this one wasn't just stolen from him by Trump, it was stolen by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and every Democrat in their various camps who believe that liberalism and progressivism are basically synonyms. Hillary Clinton opposed the TPP too in 2016, but nobody in America believed her, and nobody who supported the TPP believed her either. In the meantime, China has created an economic agreement with the same countries that renders the whole point of the 'TPP 'useless, even if Biden went back into it.

The withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords was a cataclysm, but no more for America than it was for the world, but it's becoming ever clearer that withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership is the largest cataclysm for all of us Americans that there will ever be in our lifetime. There's a direct line of correlation between America's withdrawal and Xi Jinping's ability to install a lifetime cult of personality around himself to make his 1.4 billion subjects worship him in quasi-Kim-Jong Un like terms.

Is Xi really that crazy? Is he really trying to set himself up as a god? Of course he's not, but like Mao and Stalin, he finds this cult of personality incredibly useful to consolidate his power and force every part of the country to do exactly what he wants.

Xi's government has installed what's called a 'social credit system' which monitors literally aspect of a Chinese citizen's behavior to determine who is obedient enough to reliably be offered the best life opportunities without compromising the stability of the dictatorship. At the moment, the Chinese government has literally 415 million cameras operating in every public place, and the New York Times reported a while back that the goal is to have something like 2 billion cameras monitoring their citizen's behavior. It's almost literally the surveillance techniques of Oceania in Orwell's 1984.

This may not be a country that aims to conquer the world or even East Asia, but you do not fuck around with a country like this. They mean business, they will protect their interests, and with a government like this you do not make a single move without anticipating every possible outcome ten steps ahead.

So the question is, is China really that dangerous? Is China really that evil? Is China really that stupid?

Obviously not. Why would China want to conquer the world when they now have a gargantuan pig troth of rainy day money to invest all over the world. The Chinese government is using their saved money to raise their standard of living, but they're not raising the country's standard of living because they want to help the average Chinese person so much. They're raising the standard of living because a certain buttress of median income provides political stability. China does not want to be Nazi Germany, it does not want to conquer the world or show that the Chinese are the master race or that Chinese communism is the model the whole world should adopt...

What China wants is to be everything the world currently thinks the US is, but isn't really. China wants to to covertly coerce every world government to act in the interests of China, without having the visual appearance of doing anything at all.

The problem is, that was never what actually happened with the United States. It was what happened to a large extent under Imperial Britain, but rarely ever here. If the United States wanted world governments to act according to our national interests, our government failed so spectacularly that we must be the most incompetent superpower in world history. We've had moments when we acted in that way, most particularly under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, but those moments when we acted with traditional imperial arm-twisting is somewhat rarer than you might think. Not absent obviously, but it was never the main weapon in America's arsenal.

The United States's main weapon is that, even to this day, how the country operates is a complete mystery to everyone, even Americans. No presidential administration has ever lasted long enough to effect any policy change for more than a few years, and until very recently, no chief executive has ever been powerful enough to make his entire political party operate by dictation. This is exactly how the country was always supposed to function since the drafting of the Constitution in 1786, and this sort of enforced absence of decisive leadership has proven so effective that countries around the world have been desperate to implement the same chaotic system, and now, there's are a good 3 dozen countries who probably do it better than we do.

This is, obviously, the exact opposite of how China works. Every political decision is made from the top down by leaders who, by definition, have to be much, much more competent than ours.

The Chinese Central Committee is fundamentally based on the Republic of Venice during the Renaissance. Like the Venitian Councilors, every member of the Central Committee has to go through a rigorous process where they accumulate executive experience in every sector of government before they advance to the Central Committee. To reach the top echelons of power, you need to demonstrate hyper intelligence, hyper competence, and the sort of hyper caution that would never willingly do anything to create circumstances where revolutionary change is possible.

What this means in practical terms is that there is no conceivable reality in which the Chinese government would ever be stupid or reckless enough to start a war with the USA.

The US, on the other hand, would most certainly be stupid and reckless enough to start a war with China. The current Republican Party is the most monolithically dictated to voting block in the entire history of this country, and for the first time in American history, they act with as much uniformity of purpose as a Chinese government. The only difference is that to rise up in the Chinese government, you have to be really smart and really cautious. To rise up in the Republican party, it often helps to be both reckless and stupid.

With every Republican presidency, we get more disastrous decisions. The biggest consequence of the Bush years was not Iraq, it was the 2008 recession that almost brought the whole economy crashing down to a valley lower than the Great Depression. Nobody can swear that it was Bush's fault, but the massive upper class tax cuts didn't help, the massive increase in national debt didn't help, the refusal to do anything to raise median income didn't help, and what helped least of all was his constant rewarding of administrative incompetence in both the public and private sectors.

The biggest consequence of the Trump years is not the decay of democracy, it's COVID, pure and simple. And of course, nobody can blame Trump for a virus (and let's face it, you just might be able to blame China...), but Trump didn't help. We don't need to go through the litany of everything Trump did, but in this one case, there is no way COVID would have been as bad as it was if Trump had tried to trace it and been in any sense honest about what COVID was when he first knew about it.

So if we have gone this far out of our way to honor a party that so rewards incompetence and recklessness, how much further will we go to reward them? What fresh hells will they not help us to minimize? And how bad will their incompetence make our national crises get before blaming Democrats is just not enough to convince the American people to trust them again, and they will require an enemy who is truly as monolithic as they are, and appear far more dangerous because, when provoked, they really are that deadly?

So no, the problem is not China, the problem is us. China would probably be the aggrieved party, and they may rightly get the world's sympathy and support, even as they tear our country to shreds.