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.
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.”
ping
“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.
>>“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.
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.
Buchanan bump for later....
All the way back to the Opium War era there has never been a single time that the West has gotten anything right on China.
On top of that if you were Chinese pretty much your history with the West wouldn’t be very good. So they aren’t particularly inclined to be subservient or even very friendly.
Same argument was if we brought blacks up into middle and upper classes they’d be more like the traditional white American culture
Wrong again