The Western conventional wisdom was mostly to placate and coax China now; and then, soon, when rich and powerful, in gratitude, Beijing would either willingly democratize or the sheer power of its free-market opulence would transform it into a sober and judicious player on the world stage.
We have learned that Chinese espionage agents have been deeply buried within the U.S. hierarchy, from Senator Dianne Feinstein's own former limousine driver of some 20 years to Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA agent recently arrested and charged with exposing U.S. contacts and sources inside China.
Either China would enhance its efforts to the point of reaching permanent advantage with unfortunate global ramifications, or the U.S. would address the growing asymmetry.
Either an American president was going to make it evident that the U.S., while an ally and a partner, was not going down the European pathway of democratic socialism, pacifism, open borders, and multiculturalism, or it was going to transmogrify into something like the nation envisioned in the lead-from-behind Cairo speech, and in the "You didn't build that" lectures of Barack Obama's tenure.
Finally, in terms of defense, the U.S. was faced with a 1930s-like acceptance that the world was becoming a dangerous place, and that we would have to either withdraw or accept the new norms.
Again, either the U.S. was going to re-address Iran, Turkey, China, North Korea, Russia, and radical Islamic terrorism, or it would continue to find ways of granting such autocracies and nonstate threats regional hegemony, while hoping that American concessions would be seen as magnanimity to be reciprocated in kind.
Few of our experts seemed self-reflective enough to note that past approaches to overseas challenges had not always worked, that interventions had not always led to either U.S., indigenous, or international advantages, that the American interior was becoming hallowed out, and that international organizations and bodies were increasingly hostile to the very powers that had created them.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-disrupted-american-transformation-into-lead-from-behind-nation/
We have learned that Chinese espionage agents have been deeply buried within the U.S. hierarchy, from Senator Dianne Feinstein's own former limousine driver of some 20 years to Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA agent recently arrested and charged with exposing U.S. contacts and sources inside China.
Either China would enhance its efforts to the point of reaching permanent advantage with unfortunate global ramifications, or the U.S. would address the growing asymmetry.
Either an American president was going to make it evident that the U.S., while an ally and a partner, was not going down the European pathway of democratic socialism, pacifism, open borders, and multiculturalism, or it was going to transmogrify into something like the nation envisioned in the lead-from-behind Cairo speech, and in the "You didn't build that" lectures of Barack Obama's tenure.
Finally, in terms of defense, the U.S. was faced with a 1930s-like acceptance that the world was becoming a dangerous place, and that we would have to either withdraw or accept the new norms.
Again, either the U.S. was going to re-address Iran, Turkey, China, North Korea, Russia, and radical Islamic terrorism, or it would continue to find ways of granting such autocracies and nonstate threats regional hegemony, while hoping that American concessions would be seen as magnanimity to be reciprocated in kind.
Few of our experts seemed self-reflective enough to note that past approaches to overseas challenges had not always worked, that interventions had not always led to either U.S., indigenous, or international advantages, that the American interior was becoming hallowed out, and that international organizations and bodies were increasingly hostile to the very powers that had created them.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-disrupted-american-transformation-into-lead-from-behind-nation/
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