USA & China -- The Road Less Travelled

[pete richardson]

Mao went mad in the mid and late 1960s and fomented the disastrous
Cultural Revolution. Then after the US left Vietnam, China invaded it.
It moved about 40 miles in-country. The troops killed every living thing and razed the entire area, hooches, farmland, bridges. They even took
the time to burn phone poles to the ground. Ho and Gen. Giap got the
message (even though they had no obvious expansion plans).

When, in 1979, China decided to pay its bills and join the real world, the
US welcomed it. There was extensive debate about supporting the economic development of China, but in the end, we decided better to have It in the tent than not.

Geopolitical buffs have a field day with China and India as eventual great
economic behemoths who will challenge US "hegemony". All this hoopla does the three nations a profound disservice in my view. I am much
more interested in the ways the US and China, political differences notwithstanding, can work together for mutual benefit. So too the
US and India.

Cooperation and mutual benefit will be where the money gets made.
I'll take this less traveled road, thank you.

PR

[nodoodahs]

Of course, none of this "geopolitical buffing" stops me from trying to make a profit at the markets!

Shameless "geopolitical buffing" follows - may the squeamish avert their eyes, lest they be transmogrified into pillars of salt!

I calls 'em like I sees 'em. People work together - countries don't. You and I desire peace, prosperity, mutually beneficial exchange. But here in the real world ... they have a power-mad government, and so do we. So does India, the U.K., France, Somalia, etc. Countries are not co-operators, they are competitors, each out for their own in what they see as a zero-sum game, with us (and less powerful countries) as pawns. Whilst you and I, as capitalists, can see that free, voluntary exchange is a positive-sum game and the only way to create wealth, those in power do not see that ... all their rhetoric to the contrary.

I'm not saying the above is as it should be ... I'm saying the above is as it is. And we should invest accordingly ...

U.S. hegemony is real, forged over more than a hundred years of imperial war, starting with Teddy and western hemisphere gunboat diplomacy, continuing with Wilsonian dreams of one world government and our government lying about the sinking of the Lusitania, through the U.S. deliberately baiting the Japanese into an attack at Pearl Harbor, through the now-proven-to-be-false Potemkin incident, and that time we told Saddam that we don't care about Kuwait (six months before the First Oil War). This is not to mention various assassinations and assassination attempts of foreign leaders, the guns-for-hostages Iran-Contra scandal that gave Ollie North and Fawn Hall their 15 minutes of fame, the military-bases-in-return-for-OPEC-oil-in-dollars deal of the early 1970's, the fact that Saddam was our friend immediately after the fall of the Shah, etc.

I will provide links to any of the above, if anyone wishes to email me.

I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night, and I am not naive enough to think that our government cares one hoot about working with other governments - as long as it gets its way. Did anyone listen to the congresscritters' questioning of "Easy Al" yesterday? All the casual conversation about "forcing" China to revalue ... could you go get that, and read it online, and tell me that they (our government) want to work together with China for mutual benefit?

Other governments, if they are ambitious and successful enough, dream of dethroning the U.S. as the hegemonic power, much like Wilson dreamed of defanging the British empire. Each wants to be "King Rat" (the excellent first novel by James Clavell BTW, who actually did spend time in a Javanese prison camp).

Pete, you've been around a long time. Isn't the U.S. the biggest "currency meddler" in the world? And yet the pot saith, "kettle, thou art black!" to the Chinese?

The U.K. had very similar wars to the First and Second Oil Wars that the imperial U.S. now finds itself in. They were the Boer Wars, both fought in South Africa. They played out remarkably similarly. Fascinating in that the U.K. government tried to paint their motivation for the second Boer War as "democracy" i.e. allowing British citizens of the Transvaal the majority, when in actuality the commencement of the festivities closely followed the discovery of huge gold deposits there. Hmm ... you see, back then they didn't have an oil-based economy, so think of gold as "yellow oil." It remains to be seen if Iraq will mark the zenith of our empire in the way that South Africa marked the zenith of the British one ...
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I haven’t seen a beatin’ like that since somebody stuck a banana in my pants and turned a monkey loose.