John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN INVESTMENTWATCH
“US-China Rivalry Is More Than a Trade War”
http://www.investmentwatchblog.com/us-china-rivalry-is-more-than-a-trade-war/
In many respects, a good article.
However, it is more than a little too American in its perspective.
If you have an international problem, it can only be properly discussed, and dealt with, from an international perspective.
That is something too many Americans either do not understand or refuse to understand.
The article looks at China's great economic outreach programs as something vaguely threatening.
I don't see it all that way. Everything here can be understood by another perspective.
China is doing marvelous, constructive projects which will better the lives of millions, while the US spends sinful amounts of money bombing people in one part of the world and offering intimidating displays in others.
China is building infrastructure, and on a grand scale, while America lets its infrastructure rot. Bridges count for the long-term future. Bombs and bombast do not. Indeed, they work against the future by squandering resources on the most unproductive investment you can make, a giant military. Everyone needs some military, but when you go beyond a reasonable level, you are literally burning money.
For example, the South China Sea, why is the US, in high imperialist fashion, intent on sending its navy there regularly? Does China send military fleets on displays all around the Gulf of Mexico? Such actions are unmistakable in their meaning, and there is nothing positive about them. Just as the American navy has been busy recently in the Black Sea where it truly has no business beyond intimidating Russia.
There is no good reason for American military behavior. It is a fairly explicit and constant threat to other countries, like China. Not exactly the way to create a better world.
It really is a form of imperialism, of aggression, disguised as disinterested oversight of the sea lanes.
Given all America's vast economic and financial problems, it would be wise to cut the military - very, very substantially - and quit treating the world's people as subservient. Focus on improving your country and its competitiveness as China and others do.
As it is, with the Pentagon’s adopted motto of “full-spectrum dominance,” you are committed to the idea of not competing and influencing the world but of trying to dominate it militarily. That cannot be a substitute for the old-fashioned hard and productive work of building things and carrying on trade. Indeed, it implicitly carries the risk of wars in addition to all of its economic emptiness.
America is on a one-way trip to nowhere under current priorities, and loose-cannon Trump only compounds the problems.
He really thinks he can make it 1952 again for America, a time when all America's competitors were still flattened and American companies and workers had the entire planet as their market.
That is not going to happen again. It was a “one-off” set of circumstances in world history. The unique and fortunate (for Americans) opportunity created a myth in the country, complete with its own accompanying advertising slogan, “the American Dream.”
I find it remarkable how many Americans think that slogan has some kind of substance, some kind of enduring reality. It gets all jumbled up with everything from the Founding Fathers to apple pie, too, like some secular religious set of notions.
But it has no substance. It is just a happy-sounding phrase describing a brief era that is already gone. It is now a different world altogether, and this world not only includes the resurrected old competitors but many new ones coming along. It just will never be the same again as it was in the postwar era.
"Make America great again" is another empty slogan, wistfully reflecting back on the American Dream myth. Repeating it is a bit like repeating some old verse from the Bible in hopes "God" will come sweeping down out of the sky to your assistance with a chorus of angels singing “God Bless America.”
