Rumble link Bitchute link
Watch above Saturday after 7 a.m. Eastern (six hours earlier than usual).
Australian conspiracy researcher Peter Myers joins a special edition of FFWN. We’ll plan to do roughly half an hour covering the week’s news, then the final half hour debating the “Greater China” issue as raised in Peter’s latest newsletter.
PSA
1) Help Produce Greater FFWN Shows! https://fundrazr.com/greater-israel-v-greater-china
Piracy
2) Venezuela accuses US of ‘piracy’ after oil tanker seized off coast https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cy07yk63x80t Kevin rants about it on Press TV https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/zionist-owned-trump-seizes-venezuelan-oil-tanker-pathetic/
Undead Epstein
3) Judge OKs public release of Ghislaine Maxwell documents https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/09/ghislaine-maxwell-epstein-files-grand-jury-00682668
4) Unearthed photo of Trump cozying up to Ghislaine Maxwell at Heidi Klum’s bash reignites questions about his links to Epstein and favoritism toward the jailed madam https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15353597/resurfaced-photo-donald-trump-ghislane-maxwell-cozy-party-heidi-klum.html
War on Freedom
5) US to snoop on tourists’ social media https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/dec/11/australia-us-tourism-new-visa-rules-social-media-history
6) How Genocidal Jewish Terrorists Got a Neurologist Fired for a Tweet https://substack.com/home/post/p-181196058https://themiamihurricane.com/2025/11/20/neurologist-who-resigned-from-ums-miller-center-due-to-controversial-instagram-repost-breaks-silence/
7) Why Isn’t the BBC Covering the Palestine Hunger Strikers? https://novaramedia.com/2025/12/10/why-isnt-the-bbc-covering-the-palestine-hunger-strikers/
Greater Israel
8) Israeli Leaders and Settlers Aim to Create a Fully Colonized “Greater Israel” https://truthout.org/articles/israeli-leaders-and-settlers-aim-to-create-a-fully-colonized-greater-israel/
War on Russia
9) Putin’s already won (Foreign Policy) https://archive.ph/5As2z
10) The Demand for Silence: Essay documents widespread Ukrainian resistance to unbelievably Orwellian conscription of men age 18-60 https://www.equator.org/articles/the-demand-for-silence
Greater China?
11) This is the Future of War (NYT) https://archive.ph/lvs3E
12) New York Times Wants The US Military Built Up For War With China https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/new-york-times-wants-the-us-military
13) China Teaches Japan’s New Leader a Lesson https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/12/china-teaches-japans-new-leader-a-lesson/
14) What Happens if Japan Joins the War in Taiwan https://www.unz.com/bhua/what-happens-if-japan-joins-the-war-in-taiwan/
15) Peter Myers: China claims both Taiwan and Tibet as part of Greater China…Maybe Even Korea? https://mailstar.net/China-Taiwan-Japan.html
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Bonus: Transcript of Chas Freeman’s talk at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs
It may be imperfect. Blame ChatGPT and Grok
Let’s get started. I’m Lyall Goldstein, Director of the China Initiative here at the Watson Institute. I want to give a warm welcome to everyone. This is really our last event of the season. I’m pleased to start on time, and we’ll try to end on time as well.
It’s my great pleasure to welcome my friend and senior mentor, Ambassador Chas Freeman. He has had a major impact on this institution—on the Watson School—and we are extremely thankful for that. He has served in numerous roles in government: as ambassador, assistant secretary of defense, and assistant secretary of state, among others. I could go on and on. He has also played a major role in the search for peace around the globe: in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe—even more. It is truly extraordinary.
But in the China field, as you know, he has legendary status. I’m going to say he has done more than anyone to promote positive, peaceful, pragmatic relations and friendship between the U.S. and China. He has played many roles, including Director for Chinese Affairs at the State Department, and—my personal favorite—not least, as principal interpreter for the pathbreaking Nixon visit.
So please join me in welcoming Chas Freeman.
Chas Freeman:
Thank you very much. I wish I could live up to that introduction.
It’s human to imagine that change lays bare the ambitions of those who benefit from it. China has successfully returned to wealth and power, but there is little evidence that the Chinese have sought anything other than their own enrichment, international respect, national unity, and reassurance against renewed subjugation by foreigners.
We Americans nonetheless fear our eclipse by China. Our fears are aggravated by a lapse into xenophobia and authoritarianism. As Hannah Arendt so presciently explained, authoritarians arise when economic, social, political, or religious changes make members of formerly powerful groups feel left behind. Their frustration makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them “dominant” or “great” again. A strongman downplays the real causes of their problems and tells them the only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power.
Americans attribute to China an aggressive desire to replace us as global hegemon. This conjecture may have no basis other than our own neurosis—born of fears of lost supremacy. It hardly matters. We Americans once insisted, as the Chinese now do, that we would never emulate Great Britain’s dominance of world affairs—until we did.
At present, the Chinese shrink from replacing us as leaders of the causes and institutions we have ceased to lead or abandoned entirely: climate change, development assistance, the rules for international trade and investment, countering nuclear proliferation. But like us, they will eventually have leadership thrust upon them. We cannot know whether they will follow us into our current experimentation with global despotism.
China’s new global prominence reflects its national rejuvenation and the reality that China once again accounts for more than one-third of global production. In purchasing-power terms, China’s economy is now much larger than ours; in nominal terms, it is the greatest driver of global growth. China has become the largest source of support for economic development in poorer nations. It is the world’s largest trading nation and is destined to become the largest market for imported goods, supplanting the United States.
China is a civilizational state with what is likely the most entrepreneurial population on the planet, and the world’s largest community of scientists and engineers. American efforts to stifle Chinese innovation have instead galvanized it. China now leads the world in the production of intellectual property and in innovation across nearly every field of STEM. Its dominance of key consumer, industrial, and energy technologies enables it to set global standards.
While the United States is severing or weakening ties to international institutions, China is strengthening them. It now has the world’s largest and most widespread diplomatic presence abroad. It plays a prominent role in new institutions that complement and expand the purposes of those the United States sponsored after World War II. By contrast, we oppose reform in legacy institutions and exclude ourselves from new ones.
China tries hard to be inoffensive. Beijing practices what I call “strategic neutrality.” It keeps its commitments limited, its ideology idiosyncratic and vague, and its ambitions restrained. It makes itself available as a conciliator but avoids entangling itself in foreign quarrels. It does not seek to impose its political system or ideas on others. As the United States gains a reputation for bullying behavior, double standards, and indifference to claims of crimes against humanity, China is—somewhat improbably—emerging as a global moral leader.
The United States has chosen to treat China’s rise as a national security threat rather than an opportunity to benefit from global economic and technological advance. We have launched economic warfare against China and invested heavily in its military containment. This posture is intended to sustain American military primacy in Pacific Asia by preventing the People’s Liberation Army from conquering Taiwan and completing its victory in the unfinished Chinese civil war.
Empathy for Taiwan as a robust Chinese democracy reinforces this stance. But the principal result of our policies has been to stimulate Beijing to modernize the PLA and expand its nuclear arsenal so it can prevail in a war with us—should we again intervene to perpetuate Taiwan’s separation from the rest of China.
We have declared China our “pacing threat.” Yet what we are doing to compete with China and other rising powers is more self-debilitating than invigorating, and more rhetorical than real. We are in the midst of a great leap backward—a cultural-revolution-style assault on the domestic institutions that made America great: the rule of law, freedom of speech, academic freedom, scientific excellence, partnerships with research universities, openness to foreign ideas, evidence-based policy, and the prioritization of objectivity over political correctness.
We have abandoned diplomacy as a means of threat reduction or as an alternative to economic and military warfare. Our “pivot” to Asia never took place. Our armed forces remain bogged down elsewhere. Our alliance relationships have barely adjusted, even as we alienate former partners. Meanwhile, the balance of naval and air power on China’s periphery has turned against us.
Huge increases in our war budget cannot persuade China not to do what it believes it must do in its own region. Rather than increasing our political and economic involvement in Pacific Asia, we have absented ourselves from its councils. We skip or make cameo appearances at most of its gatherings. Our visa policies discourage Asians from studying, working, or investing here.
Strategic abdication and self-isolation are not effective responses to shifting power balances.
The Biden administration’s effort to replace the UN Charter and international law with a “rules-based order” dictated by the U.S. and the G7 failed to gain traction. Instead of buttressing Western leadership, we discredited our claim to exemplify a civilization entitled to impose its values on others. Consider our abandonment of the rule of law, endorsement of indefinite detention without charge, participation in kidnapping, torture, and regime-change operations, egregious double standards in foreign wars, complicity in Israel’s mass atrocities, and suppression of dissenting opinions.
At home, we are adopting a novel form of state capitalism with American characteristics: a grifter-directed economic order based on political patronage, protection of vested interests, subsidies to offset the harm of misguided policies, and private profit extracted from government by a privileged class. We subsidize uncompetitive sectors, disinvest in research and education, curtail investment in new technologies, and rely on credit rollovers to finance unprecedented debt.
The world economy no longer revolves around the volatile and increasingly inaccessible American market. It is fragmenting into regional systems whose common features are exclusion of the United States and the restoration of open trading regimes once embodied in the WTO. Smaller economies now rely on larger ones that can guarantee trade and investment—and sadly, the U.S. is no longer dependable.
America no longer leads most fields of science and technology. Surveys suggest that as many as three in four scientists in our country—native and foreign-born—have considered leaving. This resembles the ultra-xenophobia of 1930s Germany, which forfeited global leadership in STEM. We are now driving our own talent overseas, increasingly to China.
In the late 20th century, Americans were the primary guarantors of international law and global security. We should take pride in that. But today, others see us as the most powerful threat to both. Nations once secure within the Pax Americana now feel obliged to protect themselves from an America they see as belligerent, selfish, cruel, inhospitable, and adversarial.
We are withdrawing from the world order we championed. Our country plays a shrinking role in global decision-making, trade, supply chains, and investment. We prioritize the gratification of our political elite over strategic calculation, pushing nations—including in our own hemisphere—toward China and other powers able to fill the void we are leaving behind.
China’s increasing influence must be seen in this context. Its prominence is not a measure of threatening ambition but the inevitable consequence of our retreat. Yet China is not moving to fully occupy the leadership vacuum either.
We cannot know whether they will eventually follow us into our current experimentation with global desperatism. China’s new global prominence reflects its ongoing national rejuvenation and the reality that China once again accounts for more than one-third of everything humanity produces. In purchasing-power terms, China’s economy is now much larger than ours. In nominal terms, it is the greatest driver of global growth.
China has become the largest source of financial and material support for the economic development of poorer nations. It is the world’s largest trading nation. It is destined to become the world’s largest market for imported goods, supplanting the United States in that role.
China is a civilizational state with what is possibly the most entrepreneurial population on the planet and the world’s largest community of scientists and engineers. American efforts to stifle Chinese innovation have instead galvanized it. China now leads the world in the production of intellectual property and in innovation across almost every field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Its increasing dominance of key consumer, industrial, and energy technologies enables it to set global standards for them.
The United States is severing or weakening ties to international institutions and other countries, while China is strengthening them. China now has the world’s largest and most widespread diplomatic presence abroad. It is also the most prominent member of new institutions that complement and expand the purposes and programs of those the United States sponsored after World War II. By contrast, we Americans have chosen to oppose reform in legacy institutions and to exclude ourselves from the new ones.
China tries hard to be inoffensive. Beijing practices what I call “strategic neutrality.” It keeps its commitments limited, its ideology idiosyncratic and vague, and its ambitions restrained. It makes itself available as a conciliator but avoids entangling itself in foreign quarrels. It does not seek to impose its political system or ideas on others. As the United States gains a reputation for bullying behavior, double standards, and indifference to claims of crimes against humanity, China is—somewhat improbably—emerging as a global moral leader.
The United States has chosen to treat China’s rise as a national security threat rather than an opportunity to benefit from global economic and technological advance. So we have launched economic warfare against China and invested heavily in its military containment. This stance is meant to sustain American military primacy in Pacific Asia by preventing the People’s Liberation Army, the PLA, from conquering Taiwan, thereby completing its victory in the unfinished Chinese civil war. Empathy for Taiwan as a robust and newly vigorous Chinese democracy—ironically now considerably more devoted to the rule of law than we Americans are—reinforces this stance.
But the principal result of our policies has been to stimulate Beijing to modernize the PLA and expand its nuclear arsenal so that it can prevail in a war with us if we again intervene to perpetuate Taiwan’s separation from the rest of China. We have declared China to be our “pacing threat.” Nonetheless, what we are doing to compete with China and other rising or resurgent powers is more self-debilitating than invigorating, and more rhetorical than real.
We are in the midst of a great leap backward—a cultural-revolution-style assault on the domestic institutions that once made America great: the rule of law, freedom of speech, academic freedom and scientific excellence, federal partnerships with research universities, openness to foreigners and their ideas, policies based on evidence and expertise rather than fake news and unsubstantiated prejudice, and the prioritization of objectivity over political correctness.
We have abandoned diplomacy as a means of reducing threats or as an alternative to economic and military warfare that could adjust our relations with other nations or groups of nations. More compelling interests overwhelmed our much-vaunted “pivot” or “rebalance” to Pacific Asia, and it never took place. Our armed forces remain pinned down in other regions. We have made only minor adjustments to our alliances even as we alienate former partners and friends. Meanwhile, the balance of naval and air power on China’s periphery has turned against us.
In the absence of a strategy implemented and backed by diplomacy, huge increases in our War Department’s budget will not persuade China not to do what it feels it must do in its region. Rather than increasing our political and economic involvement in Pacific Asia, we have absented ourselves from its councils. We skip, or make only cameo appearances at, most of its gatherings. We have adopted visa and other policies that discourage Asians from studying, working, or investing in our country.
Strategic abdication and self-isolation are not effective responses to shifting balances of regional and global power.
The Biden administration’s effort to replace the United Nations Charter and international law with a so-called “rules-based order” dictated by the United States and other members of the G7 utterly failed to gain traction. Instead of buttressing the global leadership of the West, we Americans discredited our pretensions to exemplify a civilization entitled to impose its allegedly superior values on others.
Consider our abandonment of the rule of law and endorsement of indefinite detention without charge, both at home and abroad; our participation in kidnapping, torture, and regime-change operations; our egregious double standards in foreign conflicts; our turn from enablement to active participation in Israel’s mass killing, starvation, denial of medical care, assassination of journalists, and other war crimes; our indifference to cruel and unusual punishment, including torture, sodomy, and rape; our politically vindictive suppression of dissenting opinions; and our abandonment of constitutional democracy in favor of what Latin Americans call caudillismo—authoritarianism characterized by a personality cult.
We no longer offer others access to our market, provide foreign assistance, or build institutions to meet challenges to regional and global interests. The legacy institutions we originally created lack the capacity to address the challenges we now face. We have withdrawn from, or are sabotaging, the institutions we created to promote and regulate global commerce and cooperation—substituting for them unilateral American attempts at coercive dominance through economic warfare, punitive tariffs and sanctions, extortion, protection rackets involving the expropriation of foreign property and resources, and the lawless use of force.
We are now seen as cruel and profiteering rather than caring.
At home, the United States is adopting a novel form of state capitalism with American characteristics. This grifter-directed economic order is a parody of our distorted understanding of the Chinese system. It is based on political payola, the protection of vested industrial interests, subsidies to offset the damage done by deleterious policies, and the siphoning of private profit from government activities by a privileged class of bureaucrats.
Among other things, our version of state capitalism entails disregarding conflicts of interest to enable private enrichment at government expense; subsidizing uncompetitive economic sectors and protecting them from foreign competition; disinvesting in education, scientific research, and government services; and curtailing investment in new technologies such as electric vehicles and renewable energy in order to preserve the coal, oil, gas, and internal-combustion sectors.
It includes partial government takeovers of key industries by extorting equity shares in return for policy favors, and reliance on credit rollovers rather than tax revenue to finance unprecedented levels of government debt.
The world economy no longer revolves around the volatile, contracting, and increasingly inaccessible American market. It is fragmenting into multiple regional trade and investment regimes whose only common features are, first, their exclusion of the United States, and second, their commitment to restoring the open trading system once embodied in the World Trade Organization.
Smaller economies are shifting toward reliance on larger ones that can guarantee trade and investment. Sadly, the United States is no longer a dependable source of either.
America also no longer leads most fields of science and technology. Recent polls suggest that as many as three out of four scientists in our country—both native- and foreign-born—have considered or are considering emigration. We are making the United States an ever smaller yard with an ever higher fence. Exporting scientific talent is a damaging blow to our ability to compete with China or other rising powers. This is political self-mutilation, resembling what happened when ultra-nationalist xenophobia took hold in Germany in the 1930s. As Germans forfeited their global leadership in STEM fields, the United States absorbed that role. We are now following Germany’s example by driving our most inventive STEM workers to greener pastures— increasingly in China.
In the last half of the 20th century, Americans were the primary guarantors of international law and other nations’ security. We should take pride in that. But in the third decade of the 21st century, others see us as the most powerful threat to both international law and their security. Nations that once felt safe under the Pax Americana now feel obliged to protect themselves against an America they view as bellicose, not benign; selfish, not generous; cruel, not compassionate; inhospitable, not welcoming; and inimical, not companionable.
In short, we Americans are well along in our withdrawal from the world order we once championed and helped establish. Our country is becoming an ever smaller participant in global decision-making, supply chains, trade, value-added investment, and a world economy no longer dominated by the West. We prioritize the gratification of our political elite over strategic calculation, driving other nations—including those in our own hemisphere—toward China and other great powers capable of filling the void created by our retreat from globalization and our retirement from constructive participation in world affairs.
China’s increasing influence must be seen in this context. Its new prominence is not a measure of threatening Chinese ambition but an inevitable consequence of our retreat from leadership and our alienation of other nations. But to the regret of much of the world, China is not moving to occupy the leadership void we are creating. An authoritarian, caprice-based order is no substitute for one grounded in the predictable foundation of international law. Ego-driven petulance is no substitute for strategy. Protection rackets and cronyism are no substitute for diplomacy. Intemperate insults do not provoke partnership. Disregard for the sovereignty of others enrages them and discourages their cooperation.
It is generally considered wise to divide, not unite, one’s adversaries. We have done the opposite.
China and other rising powers are well aware that they owe their prosperity to their embrace of the international system created by the consensus of the United States and other capitalist economies. The BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization do not want to discard that system. To the contrary, they seek its reinstatement—free from American dominance—and its empowerment to address neglected global challenges through consensus-driven, incremental change.
They are groping for ways to restore or reinvent the beneficial consensus-based rules that America once led the world in creating and has since undermined. If the World Trade Organization cannot be rescued from U.S. sabotage, its market and dispute-resolution functions must be recreated in sub-global form. The challenge is to create substitutes for the growing number of institutions the United States now shuns or blocks.
Doing so will require ad hoc conferences and gatherings to address planet-wide issues that the United States denies exist and prevents international organizations from addressing. It requires developing trade-settlement mechanisms that bypass the increasingly weaponized U.S. dollar. It suggests seeking ways to preserve value that reduce reliance on the dollar as a reserve currency. It means forming new defensive coalitions and alliances to compensate for the loss of international law’s protections and for the transformation of the United States from military protector to uninhibited predator.
Meet the proposed new world order: same as the old one, but under new pluralistic management, and regulated by new institutions.
America has turned its back on globalization, but the world beyond the transatlantic community continues to globalize. American strategy has always aimed to prevent the rise of a Eurasian hegemon that might threaten our global primacy. But our confrontations with China and Russia have pushed them into a close embrace, to which our other policies have now added Iran and North Korea. This unnatural grouping—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—has nothing in common except shared hostility to U.S. dictates. Current U.S. policy statements and actions are bringing into being the very Eurasian counterweight to our power that we have traditionally sought to prevent.
Three months ago at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tenzin, the leaders of three of the four major power centers on the Eurasian landmass—China, India, and Russia—joined in a defiant response to American unilateralism. The gathering was attended by Iran, all Central Asian states, and almost all Southeast Asian countries. Only Arab states other than Egypt, and Europe, were absent.
Once the home of the world’s colonial overlords, Europe is now the sick man of Eurasia. The European Union lacks the institutional capabilities, unified resolve, and steadfastness needed to pursue either strategic or tactical objectives effectively. It possesses many of the attributes of a geo-economic superpower but seems determined to remain less than the sum of its parts, and thus politically impotent.
Having invented modern statecraft, Europe has forgotten how to practice it. Europe’s malaise and declining competitiveness will not be reversed by the strange combination of austerity, rearmament, and embargoes on Russian natural resources that most of its governments have adopted. No European government has produced a coherent response to deteriorating transatlantic relations, Russian advances in Ukraine, energy insecurity, China’s increasing technological prowess, or the emergence of a world order no longer centered on the West. In short, Europe is adrift. No one can confidently predict Europe’s future geo-economic role or geopolitical orientation.
The other major absentee at the Tenzin gathering was Japan, whose defeat in World War II was commemorated two days later in a grand military parade in Beijing. For its own reasons, India did not attend that parade. But Japan’s efforts to persuade other Asians not to attend failed. The military might on display demonstrated China’s convincing ability to defend itself against the United States if Americans contrive a bloody rendezvous with Chinese nationalism—something we increasingly risk, as does Japan.
The United States is 7,000 miles from the East and South China Seas. Distance attenuates power; great distance attenuates it greatly. Together, the SCO meeting at Tenzin and the Beijing parade raise unwelcome questions.
How long should Americans expect to retain the political-military dominance we have enjoyed in Pacific Asia since the defeat of Japan 80 years ago? Beyond that increasingly ripe conundrum, what is our strategic view and focus? To what extent does our view of Japan’s role in Pacific Asia or the Indo-Pacific coincide with Japanese aspirations? Must we follow Japan’s recent threat to extend its defense perimeter to include Taiwan? How do we manage that we can move India, a resolutely independent player on the geopolitical chessboard? If so, where and how? What if Pakistan and its apparent extension of nuclear deterrence to Saudi Arabia against our nuclear-armed Israeli client state? Can we extricate ourselves from the moral turpitude and alienation of the global majority that complicity with Israel in genocide has entailed? Will Latin America accept a return to lawless US overlordship of the sort that we seem to be pursuing? How do we propose to deal with the countries of Africa as they rise in demographic and economic weight in association with China, Arab states, Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, and other resurgent powers? Are we capable of minding our own affairs? Is building pariah barriers to cooperation with other countries a feasible way to do that?
All these issues impinge on our relationship with China for the simple reason that, for the first time in its long history, China is a world power. That is a nation whose economic, political, and other interests and policies must be considered everywhere on the planet as ours must. Anywhere we appear to push other countries around, they will seek to enlist China in opposition to us. China will not necessarily accept such invitations, as its cautious policies in West Asia and the Western Hemisphere suggest. But we cannot rule this out. After all, we are currently engaged in a strange version of self-containment, retreating politically and economically while uniting allies, friends, and foes against us. Our media curate reality rather than reporting it. Our government is systematically stripping itself of expertise and competence. While other governments are willing to talk to us, they no longer follow our lead or replicate our policies in their relations with other countries. We may inadvertently be creating a world divided between the United States and a few vassal states and a global coalition or sphere of influence animated by aversion to our selfishness and bullying behavior and aligning against us with China.
At the Sino-American summit in Busan, our president acted as though he understood that we can neither outcompete China nor win a war with it. China has learned how to use export controls, sanctions, boycotts, and embargoes from us to put pressure on countries that challenge it. Will it wield its growing strength as unilaterally as we have done as our power diminishes? Will it emulate our new disdain for international comity? Is the West up to countering a China behaving like we do? Western international prestige and privilege have been overtaken by events. And the West, as we’ve known it since the 1940s, is moribund. It still has three permanent members to cast vetoes in the UN Security Council, but it lacks both the cohesion and the authority to control the direction of world events.
No, China has many problems, but most of them do not conform to those that career anti-China publicists have predicted. China shows no sign of collapse. It is not growing old before it grows rich. It is instead growing rich through automation and offshoring those labor-intensive industries that cannot be manned by robots. Negative population growth plus steady economic growth and gains in productivity foretell considerably higher per capita incomes for the Chinese people. Most Chinese do not share our distaste for their political system. Unlike us, China is not at war with other countries. It may yet be able to conclude its civil war through shows of force, assimilating Taiwan by making the island an offer it cannot refuse rather than through outright warfare. We better hope so. Our current mindless drive toward war with China over Taiwan can only end in tragedy for all concerned, including Taiwan.
It is, of course, not inevitable that China’s progress toward greater affluence and global leadership will continue without interruption. Many things have gone wrong for China in the past. Much could go wrong for it again. But hoping that China will suffer unanticipated setbacks is not a strategy. The fact is that the United States does not have a plan for dealing with the most probable scenario before us: a world in which China has returned to the preeminence of past millennia. We need to conceptualize one. This means we must nurture a realistic understanding of China and the Chinese, not engage in spurious reasoning by analogy. China does not seek to conquer or abridge the sovereignty of its neighbors. It is not engaged in a search for Lebensraum or foreign colonies. It has no theory of manifest destiny. Its Warring States period in which it resembled Europe or India in the viciousness of its internal rivalries is long past. It is unlikely to follow either our path or that of other civilizations.
Tragically, whatever the source of our current approach to managing China may be, it is not expertise. We are now led by China hawks who’ve never been to China or studied it, but who are convinced they know everything they need to know about it. Our president’s first and only visit to China was as president in the security cocoon and perceptual bubble that presidential visits entail. Neither our secretary of state, who was in fact sanctioned by China, denied entry to China for his vituperative comments about it, nor our so-called secretary of war, have ever been to China. The architect of the administration’s trade and investment war on China, Peter Navarro, sometimes known as Ron Vara, with whom he conducted an active dialogue, made his career with decades of China bashing, but had his first and only visit to China in 2018. He’s not been back. The small army of China hands that used to populate our diplomatic and intelligence services has been decimated. Those who remain have no real input into China policy anyway. In any event, there is no coherent policy process in today’s Washington in which their expertise might play a part.
The last quarter century, I hate to remind us, has seen an unbroken series of defeats, disappointments, and political and economic crises for our country. Most recently, the scuttle from Afghanistan, the failure of our proxy war in Ukraine, our engagement in the genocide in Palestine, a forever war on behalf of Israel with Iran, dysfunctional policies that have made North Korea a nuclear threat to our cities, an escalating confrontation with Venezuela and its neighbors. We are engaged in combat with so-called terrorist forces in at least 82 countries. But instead of learning from this sorry record, the United States has adopted an approach to international relations that combines the belief that the right combination of pressures can always bring foreign nations to heel. Personal chemistry can overcome conflicting national interests and military action should precede diplomacy rather than back it. Our leaders habitually avoid the hard political choices that statecraft demands while throwing money, sanctions, weapons, and soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines at problems. They like flashy signing ceremonies, pseudo-events that celebrate their resolution of problems they have not in any way resolved.
We cannot afford to apply this self-indulgent methodology to China, which is destined to play a role at least equal to ours in world affairs. We must be realistic. We had better come up with a way to coexist with the Chinese, leverage their rising prosperity and technological competence to our own and reduce the point danger of pointless confrontation with them. Such confrontation promises to be catastrophic for us as well as for them. To conclude, our current China policy is as ruinous as our repudiation of the world order we played the major role in creating is. It cannot and must not be sustained. We need to rethink this. Thank you.
