Rudyard Kipling asserted that Westerners who thought that they could outfox the orientals were—my words—clueless idiots. Orientals have been outfoxing Emperors and each other for millennia. Westerners are child’s play, to them.
>> Westerners are child’s play, to them.
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.....until GOD (and Trump!)
Except that we completely outfoxed and defeated the Asian Japanese militarists in WWII. Three examples: (1) breaking the Purple Code; (2) the use of Navajo Code Talkers, which was really a code within a code; (3) the early use of radar, and harnessing radar to gun solutions. Many other examples. We simply outfoxed and deceived them.
Kipling was British. They are no longer in Asia. We still are.
Unfortunately for China, Trump is a fine student of one of China's sons, Sun Tzu.
The west, in particular England and the US, is the only culture at this point that has been able to repeatedly demonstrate and translate aggregate social creativity into high investment military capability and then not been afraid to use it. Many others have been able to create nearly matching capabilities (in particular Axis powers) but have either been timid in its application, or unwilling to staff the upper leadership of the instruments of war to large numbers of “outside the box” thinkers.
That latter is probably due to the inherent fear of monarchist or totalitarian regimes to trust strategic power blocks of military assets to “outsiders” (serfs, commoners, workers, middle class) due to the threat to their rule.
When Mr. Trump and Chairman Kim were blustering back and forth I noted with satisfaction that we finally had a president who knew how to do the dance with the Orientals.