Now that the relationship with China has soured and the People’s Republic of China has become the greatest adversarial threat to the U.S. and Western security, policymakers should revisit thi…
Exactly. It’s a mutual beneficial arrangement that’s made. If the US didn’t want this to happen, we shouldn’t have continued to utilize Chinese manufacturing after literally building them up.
We helped make China who they are today because of capitalism.
"We" didn't do anything. The shift to China for manufacturing was performed by private companies, not the state, and for economic reasons, not political ones.
Private companies moved to China because of capitalism. That’s exactly what I said. Cheaper means of production and whatnot. This could have been avoided with some forward thinking in the 70s, 80s, and 90s about the future of America. Investing and subsidizing industries so that they stay in the states, encouragement to move away from the unlimited growth mindset, etc.
We don’t like to think that far in the future though because we like to have quarterly returns so instead of building up our infrastructure and industries state-side, we built them up in China because of the lax regulation and cheap labor.
Yes but the US isn't in default on that debt. Interest is being paid. And China will keep buying US Treasuries to manage the price of the Yuan vs Dollar.
You know, it hadn’t occured to me before now, but Trump did an unexpected piece of damage when he started his trade war.
The initial steps of a war footing with the west would involve the cutting of financial ties in a strategic way to cause hassles in western markets without drawing too much suspicion.
Before those would have looked out-of-place and very noteworthy. Now they blend in. Are they actually … considering attacking Taiwan soon? That strikes me as sheer suicide, the west hasn’t been this up-in-arms for decades. That makes intervention about a million times more likely.
They do know that while Taiwan has no direct military guarantees from the US, they do have some from our immediate allies, right? And we are not the types to sit out a fight anymore, getting smacked with that error twice in the last century taught us our own valuable lesson, sending us into an overcorrection in the other direction. We do the whole intervention thing now, often.
I hope I’m reading too much into this. I’ve always been in the war-is-actually-unlikely minority, but these moves seem strangely timed to me.
Trump did an unexpected piece of damage when he started his trade war.
And that’s why economists all agree that trade wars are bad.
And we are not the types to sit out a fight anymore, getting smacked with that error twice in the last century taught us our own valuable lesson, sending us into an overcorrection in the other direction. We do the whole intervention thing now, often.
Well… I would argue that the US has been pretty good at avoiding confrontation. Obama should have done more to stop North Korea. Obama, Trump and Biden collectively aren’t doing much about the militarisation of the South China Sea.
IMO the problem really got rolling with President Bill Clinton gave China most favored nation trading status, eliminating a lot of barriers for US business to ship jobs and production to China. The hope at the time was that a country that became Capitalist would always become a Liberal Democracy. That prediction was very, very wrong.
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