Posted on 03/02/2018 11:39:12 AM PST by Mariner
“We got China wrong. Now what?” ran the headline over the column in the Washington Post.
“Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that Communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?” asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence.
America’s elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would cause the People’s Republic to coexist benignly with its neighbors and the West.
We deluded ourselves. It did not happen.
Xi Jinping just changed China’s constitution to allow him to be dictator for life. He continues to thieve intellectual property from U.S. companies and to occupy and fortify islets in the South China Sea, which Beijing now claims as entirely its own.
Meanwhile, China sustains North Korea as Chinese warplanes and warships circumnavigate Taiwan threatening its independence.
We today confront a Chinese Communist dictatorship and superpower that seeks to displace America as first power on earth and to drive the U.S. military back across the Pacific.
Who is responsible for this epochal blunder?
The elites of both parties. Bush Republicans from the 1990s granted China most-favored-nation status and threw open America’s market.
Result: China has run up $4 trillion in trade surpluses with the United States. Her $375 billion trade surplus with us in 2017 far exceeded the entire Chinese defense budget.
We fed the tiger, and created a monster.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Look at the result. It's the result which measures any theory.
Even the theory was wrong. Materialism doesn’t make an enlightened Westernized country.
“America’s elites believed...We deluded ourselves”
“We fed the tiger, and created a monster.”
Buchanan seems to rightly include himself as one of the elites while blaming the elites for the problem.
What Pat might not get is “the elites” are not Western man.
So the larger theme of this seems to be that the swamp really, really needs draining.
Not only is China an ideological mess, but it is a ecological mess. Communism did exactly what it always does: trashes things for the common man by way of benefit to the elite who oversee the scam.
From the article:
“Consider this crazed ideology of free-trade globalism with its roots in the scribblings of 19th-century idiot savants, not one of whom ever built a great nation.”
And the swamp is worldwide.
ping
You are so right:
08/25/98, Balint Vazsonyi
American attitudes and policies in relation to developments in the Eastern regions of Europe and of Asia rest on the assumption that a switch to “capitalistic” practices will ring in the bells of freedom.
Both the word “capitalism” and the thesis that economics determine the political structure come from Marx and have no foundation in reality. Nonetheless, we have adopted these views with the fervor of a gospel and even the least Marxist among us uses them as the basis for rational argument. As a result, we are bound to make costly mistakes on a grand scale. (snip)
http://www.balintvazsonyi.org/washtimes/wt082598.html
Yeah... China and the USA have just taught the world that Communism comes in a rich man’s model as well. Money rich, that is. Poor in everything else.
The chicom guvmint is evil
Their people are very smart and hard working
Education is a premium there
I’m short. Thank G-d for nuclear weapons
That will make their huge standing army mostly irrelevant
“We today confront a Chinese Communist dictatorship and superpower that seeks to displace America as first power on earth and to drive the U.S. military back across the Pacific.”
From a chinese perspective, why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they want to put China first, like we want to put America first. It’s called competition.
“Result: China has run up $4 trillion in trade surpluses with the United States.”
So what? This trade imbalance talk is such malarky! I have a huge trade imbalance with my grocery store and it keeps on growing everytime I shop there. There is no trade imbalance. Don’t they get paid every time we buy something from them? We got tangible goods from them and they got pieces of papers from us. If anything that’s a better deal for us.
I’m not sure who wants to escalate a nuke conflict over a ground war.
Most of the money your grocery gets is spent in your country. The analogy breaks down when you consider the world to be your supermarket.
>>“Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that Communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?” asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence.
LOL. That was the story for mass consumption. The Globalist Truth was that engagement with China was supposed to turn America into a Communist backwater...except for a privileged few, of course...so the poor, but well educated, work force could compete with Third Worlders who live in a shed like the one we keep the lawn mower in now.
China has only gotten where it is by (and I’m being generous about it) a system of soft slavery and stark spoliation.
Rewarding that reaps before God what it always does. We didn’t learn from getting kicked in the rear by the consequences of chattel slavery, apparently.
Where did they get this "WE" stuff?
I've been bitching about our Chinese trade since the early 1990s.
In what world did it make sense to reward a regime that both gunned down and drove tanks over it's own unarmed citizens? (unfortunately, ours)
It was a given that capitalism would work, make China quite wealthy, and create another massive headache to replace the Soviet Union.
I've said for several decades now, anyone associated with this policy should be lined up and shot.
I've also said our young kids will die in large numbers because of this, and we may have many more die on our home soil before this is over.
” I have a huge trade imbalance with my grocery store and it keeps on growing everytime I shop there. “
The analogy, while catchy is specious.
There is no common element to compare a local transaction to the macroeconomics of international trade.
How reasonable would your transactions be if the store owner put all other stores out of business, and then would only give you 75 cents for every dollar you spend there?
Now imagine you were an employee of that store and your hours or rate were reduced because a 17yr old kid was willing to do your job for less.
Those would be more accurate analogies than yours.
In the grossest sense of collectively, not that there were not dissenters. But it seemed like they were feeble breaths in a maelstrom.
And this etiolated (OK, I love long words) the economy, pushing the USA into less and less soft socialism.
It would have been a lot easier to teach China the virtues of Christian faith when it was still trying to get off the ground. Instead, the USA spent off what it had accumulated on the virtues of its own earlier Christian faith.
Trump is partly right. We could just walk on China. However what’s going to erect the replacement infrastructure? It used to be that faith in God to prosper would get people to part with fortunes for the sake of this. Now I fear it will be all like “no, YOU first.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.