FINAL WORD
And it’s going to keep President Joe Biden’s hands full on the foreign-policy front. From what we have seen so far, Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”) Chief Xi Jinping is preparing to put on a clinic of realpolitik for this new White House. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s foreign policy (no new wars was certainly great), he was fundamentally correct about China. The CCP was getting away with all kinds of illicit and unfair trade practices at the expense of American workers and businesses. Despite the conventional wisdom about the need for “free trade” with China, Trump was right when he said that wasn’t what was actually occurring. It’s China that we will really have to worry about... And this has been true for decades. China is by far our biggest competitor economically and militarily. country with a GDP under $2 trillion and about 140 million inhabitants who struggle to pay its bills when the price of oil drops. It’s China that we will really have to worry about... And this has been true for decades. China is by far our biggest competitor economically and militarily. With a GDP of almost $15 trillion, and boasting more than 1 billion people, China is the only real challenge to U.S. hegemony. Geopolitics in the 21st century will be dominated by a struggle between the American eagle and the Chinese dragon. We can all see this coming.
It was really a one-way trade war, and Trump decided to fight fire with fire. Then there’s the ongoing cyber war... The Chinese are among the most aggressive and sophisticated hackers on the planet. The Russians have had more success going after top-tier American targets of late, but whatever China lacks in quality, it more than makes up for in volume. There’s simply no way to accurately assess how much intellectual property and other sensitive or proprietary information has been taken from U.S. computers in recent decades. In the long run, we may discover that this massive and ongoing theft at the hands of the CCP was a civilization shifting transfer of knowledge and wealth. This could manifest itself in advantages China has over the U.S. in quantum computing, 5G communications, and other essential technologies. It’s already starting to pull away from us in those areas. China also has the advantage of clear purpose. While America in the first months of the Biden administration seems determined to tear down its own history and go on a cancellation spree of Dr. Seuss books, China is expanding its influence in many of our most powerful institutions. The proliferation of Confucius Institutes and other nodes of CCP influence on U.S. soil have been growing for years, but it’s the power that China wields over America’s entertainment industry that has gotten the attention of everyday people. When a remake of the movie Top Gun is forced to remove the Taiwan and Japan patches from the pilot Maverick’s jacket, even
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March 2021
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