The U.S. Is Ceding the Pacific to China While Washington’s focus is elsewhere, Beijing plays the long game—that means preparing for war.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-is-ceding-the-pacific-to-china-11551649516
The way to deal with China, and thus North Korea, its naughty but wholly dependent vassal, is not by a failing and provocative attempt to weaken it, but by attending to America’s diminishing strengths. Unlike the short-focused U.S., China plays the long game, in which the chief objective is a favorable correlation of forces over time and the most important measure is military capacity.
As a dictatorship, it can continue military development and expansion despite economic downturns. With big data and big decrees, Xi Jinping has severely tightened party control in expectation of inevitable variations of fortune. The hatches are battened for a trade war that would adversely effect China and the world should the U.S. not blink first or fail to reject false or delaying assurances.
China looks past this and all short-term maneuvering to see the U.S. ill-attending to its fundamental strengths, and marks us down as a declining country that cannot come to terms with necessities. It knows that in the 1970s and ’80s, when America led the world in computers, electronics, research, and capital, we failed to automate. Taking the easy way out by offshoring for the sake of cheaper wages, we allowed our manufacturing base to atrophy. And now China sees a weakling that, rather than venture competition, seeks safe spaces behind tariff walls.
Perhaps had the U.S. refrained from needlessly antagonizing every one of its important allies and instead assembled them in a coalition of common interests and grievances, China, thus isolated, would have made real accommodations. But given broken, uncoordinated, squabbling opposition, and the high level of Chinese-American economic interdependence, it need not do so. It will almost certainly delay, prevaricate, and work around its commitments in all too familiar fashion. And a country the leader of which in living memory sacrificed 40 million of his people to crackpot economic theory presents an entirely different kettle of fish than bullying Canada or outfoxing a real estate minimogul over lunch at the Four Seasons. CONTINUE AT SITE
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