'Washington and its allies need to start playing a smarter game when it comes to China and its ambitions over Taiwan,' you said in The Spectator.
I think it's too late for 'smarter' and even 'stronger'.
China is so far ahead of us in smarts and strengths that we're little more than rowdy spectators.
As President Trump, himself a genius, observed, “People say you don’t like China. No, I love them. But their leaders are much smarter than our leaders. And we can’t sustain ourselves with that. It’s like, take the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and have them play your high school football team.”
One need only glance at the history of pliable observers of the USSR between 1925 and 1980 to satisfy one's worries there.
As is a recurring theme of your podcast, much CCP policy which gets mistaken for "long-termism" or "strategy" by oblivious Western commentators is actually blind panic about employment stability, which in turn strangles the rational allocation of capital and talent needed to sustain rapid growth.
My baseline is that China will now have to be lucky just to claw back from the Xi Era (obviously after the man himself dies) without fighting a civil war. It will end the century with the average Chinese-in-the-street enjoying the relative standard of living (compared to the developed world) of Romania or perhaps Hungary today.
Even achieving the relative economic status of Poland would be a damned impressive achievement.
Which is a profound shame, because so, so much more was possible, once upon a time.
Just a minor correction: "blockade of Taiwan [h]as started." We've all done it before :).
Congrats on another Spectator article however. I am a regular reader of that magazine.
Thanks Dale
'Washington and its allies need to start playing a smarter game when it comes to China and its ambitions over Taiwan,' you said in The Spectator.
I think it's too late for 'smarter' and even 'stronger'.
China is so far ahead of us in smarts and strengths that we're little more than rowdy spectators.
As President Trump, himself a genius, observed, “People say you don’t like China. No, I love them. But their leaders are much smarter than our leaders. And we can’t sustain ourselves with that. It’s like, take the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and have them play your high school football team.”
Hi Godfree - I hope you're wrong (for the nicest possible reasons).
One need only glance at the history of pliable observers of the USSR between 1925 and 1980 to satisfy one's worries there.
As is a recurring theme of your podcast, much CCP policy which gets mistaken for "long-termism" or "strategy" by oblivious Western commentators is actually blind panic about employment stability, which in turn strangles the rational allocation of capital and talent needed to sustain rapid growth.
My baseline is that China will now have to be lucky just to claw back from the Xi Era (obviously after the man himself dies) without fighting a civil war. It will end the century with the average Chinese-in-the-street enjoying the relative standard of living (compared to the developed world) of Romania or perhaps Hungary today.
Even achieving the relative economic status of Poland would be a damned impressive achievement.
Which is a profound shame, because so, so much more was possible, once upon a time.