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Back in the summer of 2018, I launched my American Pravda series in earnest, deciding to finally present some of the extremely controversial material that I’d gradually uncovered during the previous five or ten years.

One of my earliest articles focused upon the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution and the resulting ideological aftershocks in America and other Western countries. This was obviously an ultra-touchy subject, including as it did a close examination of Henry Ford’s The International Jew and the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and I was naturally quite a bit skittish about my candid analysis. I therefore adopted a strategy of deflection, opening my article with a few paragraphs of important but almost totally unrelated material regarding Chinese society.

As I wrote in late July 2018:

Although I always had a great interest in history, I naively believed what I read in my textbooks, and therefore regarded American history as just too bland and boring to study.

By contrast, one land I found especially fascinating was China, the world’s most populous country and its oldest continuous civilization, with a tangled modern history of revolutionary upheaval, then suddenly reopened to the West during the Nixon Administration and under Deng’s economic reforms starting to reverse decades of Maoist economic failure.

In 1978 I took a UCLA graduate seminar on the rural Chinese political economy, and probably read thirty or forty books during that semester. E.O. Wilson’s seminal Sociobiology: The New Synthesis had just been published a couple of years earlier, reviving that field after decades of harsh ideological suppression, and with his ideas in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help noticing the obvious implications of the material I was reading. The Chinese had always seemed a very smart people, and the structure of China’s traditional rural peasant economy produced Social Darwinist selective pressure so thick that you could cut it with a knife, thus providing a very elegant explanation of how the Chinese got that way. A couple of years later in college, I wrote up my theory while studying under Wilson, and then decades afterward dug it out again, finally publishing my analysis as How Social Darwinism Made Modern China.

With the Chinese people clearly having such tremendous inherent talent and their potential already demonstrated on a much smaller scale in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, I believed there was an excellent chance that Deng’s reforms would unleash enormous economic growth, and sure enough, that was exactly what happened. In the late 1970s, China was poorer than Haiti, but I always told my friends that it might come to dominate the world economically within a couple of generations, and although most of them were initially quite skeptical of such an outrageous claim, every few years they became a little less so. For years The Economist had been my favorite magazine, and in 1986 they published an especially long letter of mine emphasizing the tremendous rising potential of China and urging them to expand their coverage with a new Asia Section; the following year, they did exactly that.

These days I feel tremendous humiliation for having spent most of my life being so totally wrong about so many things for so long, and I cling to China as a very welcome exception. I can’t think of a single development during the last forty years that I wouldn’t have generally expected back in the late 1970s, with the only surprise having been the total lack of surprises.

Although I’d closely followed the rising arc of China’s enormous economic success in the decades since my 1983 college graduation, I’d mainly been focused upon other policy issues. But then a dozen years ago in 2012, I published a major cover story in The American Conservative contrasting China’s rapid rise with America’s severe economic problems in the wake of the financial collapse and our disastrous Iraq War, and it attracted considerable favorable attention in elite political and media circles. Now rereading it again a dozen years later, there’s scarcely a single word I would take back or change.

The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon. We are living in the early years of what journalists once dubbed “The Pacific Century,” yet there are worrisome signs it may instead become known as “The Chinese Century.”

By the late 1970s, three decades of Communist central planning had managed to increase China’s production at a respectable rate, but with tremendous fits and starts, and often at a terrible cost: 35 million or more Chinese had starved to death during the disastrous 1959–1961 famine caused by Mao’s forced industrialization policy of the Great Leap Forward.

China’s population had also grown very rapidly during this period, so the typical standard of living had improved only slightly, perhaps 2 percent per year between 1958 and 1978, and this from an extremely low base. Adjusted for purchasing power, most Chinese in 1980 had an income 60–70 percent below that of the citizens in other major Third World countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Kenya, none of which were considered great economic success stories. In those days, even Haitians were far wealthier than Chinese.

All this began to change very rapidly once Deng Xiaoping initiated his free-market reforms in 1978, first throughout the countryside and eventually in the smaller industrial enterprises of the coastal provinces. By 1985, The Economist ran a cover story praising China’s 700,000,000 peasants for having doubled their agricultural production in just seven years, an achievement almost unprecedented in world history. Meanwhile, China’s newly adopted one-child policy, despite its considerable unpopularity, had sharply reduced population growth rates in a country possessing relatively little arable land.

A combination of slowing population growth and rapidly accelerating economic output has obvious implications for national prosperity. During the three decades to 2010, China achieved perhaps the most rapid sustained rate of economic development in the history of the human species, with its real economy growing almost 40-fold between 1978 and 2010. In 1978, America’s economy was 15 times larger, but according to most international estimates, China is now set to surpass America’s total economic output within just another few years.

Furthermore, the vast majority of China’s newly created economic wealth has flowed to ordinary Chinese workers, who have moved from oxen and bicycles to the verge of automobiles in just a single generation. While median American incomes have been stagnant for almost forty years, those in China have nearly doubled every decade, with the real wages of workers outside the farm-sector rising about 150 percent over the last ten years alone. The Chinese of 1980 were desperately poor compared to Pakistanis, Nigerians, or Kenyans; but today, they are several times wealthier, representing more than a tenfold shift in relative income.

A World Bank report recently highlighted the huge drop in global poverty rates from 1980 to 2008, but critics noted that over 100 percent of that decline came from China alone: the number of Chinese living in dire poverty fell by a remarkable 662 million, while the impoverished population in the rest of the world actually rose by 13 million. And although India is often paired with China in the Western media, a large fraction of Indians have actually grown poorer over time. The bottom half of India’s still rapidly growing population has seen its daily caloric intake steadily decline for the last 30 years, with half of all children under five now being malnourished.

China’s economic progress is especially impressive when matched against historical parallels. Between 1870 and 1900, America enjoyed unprecedented industrial expansion, such that even Karl Marx and his followers began to doubt that a Communist revolution would be necessary or even possible in a country whose people were achieving such widely shared prosperity through capitalistic expansion. During those 30 years America’s real per capita income grew by 100 percent. But over the last 30 years, real per capita income in China has grown by more than 1,300 percent.

Over the last decade alone, China quadrupled its industrial output, which is now comparable to that of the U.S. In the crucial sector of automobiles, China raised its production ninefold, from 2 million cars in 2000 to 18 million in 2010, a figure now greater than the combined totals for America and Japan. China accounted for fully 85 percent of the total world increase in auto manufacturing during that decade.

I emphasized that China’s economic rise had actually been very beneficial for most of the rest of the world.

Does China’s rise necessarily imply America’s decline? Not at all: human economic progress is not a zero-sum game. Under the right circumstances, the rapid development of one large country should tend to improve living standards for the rest of the world.

This is most obvious for those nations whose economic strengths directly complement those of a growing China. Massive industrial expansion clearly requires a similar increase in raw-material consumption, and China is now the world’s largest producer and user of electricity, concrete, steel, and many other basic materials, with its iron-ore imports surging by a factor of ten between 2000 and 2011. This has driven huge increases in the costs of most commodities; for example, copper’s world price rose more than eightfold during the last decade. As a direct consequence, these years have generally been very good ones for the economies of countries that heavily rely upon the export of natural resources—Australia, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Africa.

Meanwhile, as China’s growth gradually doubles total world industrial production, the resulting “China price” reduces the cost of manufactured goods, making them much more easily affordable to everyone, and thereby greatly increases the global standard of living. While this process may negatively impact those particular industries and countries directly competing with China, it provides enormous opportunities as well, not merely to the aforementioned raw-material suppliers but also to countries like Germany, whose advanced equipment and machine tools have found a huge Chinese market, thereby helping to reduce German unemployment to the lowest level in 20 years.

And as ordinary Chinese grow wealthier, they provide a larger market as well for the goods and services of leading Western companies, ranging from fast-food chains to consumer products to luxury goods. Chinese workers not only assemble Apple’s iPhones and iPads, but are also very eager to purchase them, and China has now become that company’s second largest market, with nearly all of the extravagant profit margins flowing back to its American owners and employees. In 2011 General Motors sold more cars in China than in the U.S., and that rapidly growing market became a crucial factor in the survival of an iconic American corporation. China has become the third largest market in the world for McDonald’s, and the main driver of global profits for the American parent company of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC.

Although my overall appraisal of China’s achievements was extremely favorable, I hardly airbrushed away the very serious problems that country still faced, but I argued that these had often been greatly exaggerated in the Western media.

Transforming a country in little more than a single generation from a land of nearly a billion peasants to one of nearly a billion city-dwellers is no easy task, and such a breakneck pace of industrial and economic development inevitably leads to substantial social costs. Chinese urban pollution is among the worst in the world, and traffic is rapidly heading toward that same point. China now contains the second largest number of billionaires after America, together with more than a million dollar-millionaires, and although many of these individuals came by their fortunes honestly, many others did not. Official corruption is a leading source of popular resentment against the various levels of Chinese government, ranging from local village councils to the highest officials in Beijing.

But we must maintain a proper sense of proportion. As someone who grew up in Los Angeles when it still had the most notorious smog in America, I recognize that such trends can be reversed with time and money, and indeed the Chinese government has expressed intense interest in the emerging technology of non-polluting electric cars. Rapidly growing national wealth can be deployed to solve many problems.

Similarly, plutocrats who grow rich through friends in high places or even outright corruption are easier to tolerate when a rising tide is rapidly lifting all boats. Ordinary Chinese workers have increased their real income by well over 1,000 percent in recent decades, while the corresponding figure for most American workers has been close to zero. If typical American wages were doubling every decade, there would be far less anger in our own society directed against the “One Percent.” Indeed, under the standard GINI index used to measure wealth inequality, China’s score is not particularly high, being roughly the same as that of the United States, though certainly indicating greater inequality than most of the social democracies of Western Europe.

Many American pundits and politicians still focus their attention on the tragic Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, during which hundreds of determined Chinese protesters were massacred by government troops. But although that event loomed very large at the time, in hindsight it generated merely a blip in the upward trajectory of China’s development and today seems virtually forgotten among ordinary Chinese, whose real incomes have increased several-fold in the quarter century since then.

Much of the Tiananmen protest had been driven by popular outrage at government corruption, and certainly there have been additional major scandals in recent years, often heavily splashed across the pages of America’s leading newspapers. But a closer examination paints a more nuanced picture, especially when contrasted with America’s own situation.

For example, over the last few years one of the most ambitious Chinese projects has been a plan to create the world’s largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail transport, an effort that absorbed a remarkable $200 billion of government investment. The result was the construction of over 6,000 miles of track, a total probably now greater than that of all the world’s other nations combined. Unfortunately, this project also involved considerable corruption, as was widely reported in the world media, which estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars had been misappropriated through bribery and graft. This scandal eventually led to the arrest or removal of numerous government officials, notably including China’s powerful Railways Minister.

Obviously such serious corruption would seem horrifying in a country with the pristine standards of a Sweden or a Norway. But based on the published accounts, it appears that the funds diverted amounted to perhaps as little as 0.2 percent of the total, with the remaining 99.8 percent generally spent as intended. So serious corruption notwithstanding, the project succeeded and China does indeed now possess the world’s largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail, constructed almost entirely in the last five or six years.

Meanwhile, America has no high-speed rail whatsoever, despite decades of debate and vast amounts of time and money spent on lobbying, hearings, political campaigns, planning efforts, and environmental-impact reports. China’s high-speed rail system may be far from perfect, but it actually exists, while America’s does not. Annual Chinese ridership now totals over 25 million trips per year, and although an occasional disaster—such as the 2011 crash in Weizhou, which killed 40 passengers—is tragic, it is hardly unexpected. After all, America’s aging low-speed trains are not exempt from similar calamities, as we saw in the 2008 Chatsworth crash that killed 25 in California.

All of this follows the pattern of Lee Kwan Yew’s mixed-development model, combining state socialism and free enterprise, which raised Singapore’s people from the desperate, abject poverty of 1945 to a standard of living now considerably higher than that of most Europeans or Americans, including a per capita GDP almost $12,000 above that of the United States. Obviously, implementing such a program for the world’s largest population and on a continental scale is far more challenging than doing so in a tiny city-state with a population of a few million and inherited British colonial institutions, but so far China has done very well in confounding its skeptics.

Much of my article dealt with the obvious economic and political failings of American society during the preceding decade, a record that contrasted so sharply with China’s tremendous success. I also discussed how the comparison of these two countries was sometimes seriously distorted by biased international metrics created and controlled by the West, with the disingenuous coverage in the overwhelmingly dominant Western global media often concealing these realities.

China rises while America falls, but are there major causal connections between these two concurrent trends now reshaping the future of our world? Not that I can see. American politicians and pundits are naturally fearful of taking on the fierce special interest groups that dominate their political universe, so they often seek an external scapegoat to explicate the misery of their constituents, sometimes choosing to focus on China. But this is merely political theater for the ignorant and the gullible.

Various studies have suggested that China’s currency may be substantially undervalued, but even if the frequent demands of Paul Krugman and others were met and the yuan rapidly appreciated another 15 or 20 percent, few industrial jobs would return to American shores, while working-class Americans might pay much more for their basic necessities. And if China opened wide its borders to more American movies or financial services, the multimillionaires of Hollywood and Wall Street might grow even richer, but ordinary Americans would see little benefit. It is always easier for a nation to point an accusing finger at foreigners rather than honestly admit that almost all its terrible problems are essentially self-inflicted.

When parasitic elites govern a society along “extractive” lines, a central feature is the massive upward flow of extracted wealth, regardless of any contrary laws or regulations. Certainly America has experienced an enormous growth of officially tolerated corruption as our political system has increasingly consolidated into a one-party state controlled by a unified media-plutocracy.

Some of the sources of Chinese success and American decay are not entirely mysterious. As it happens, the typical professional background of a member of China’s political elite is engineering; they were taught to build things. Meanwhile, a remarkable fraction of America’s political leadership class attended law school, where they were trained to argue effectively and to manipulate. Thus, we should not be greatly surprised that while China’s leaders tend to build, America’s leaders seem to prefer endless manipulation, whether of words, money, or people.

How corrupt is the American society fashioned by our current ruling elites? That question is perhaps more ambiguous than it might seem. According to the standard world rankings produced by Transparency International, the United States is a reasonably clean country, with corruption being considerably higher than in the nations of Northern Europe or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, but much lower than in most of the rest of the world, including China.

But I suspect that this one-dimensional metric fails to capture some of the central anomalies of America’s current social dilemma. Unlike the situation in many Third World countries, American teachers and tax inspectors very rarely solicit bribes, and there is little overlap in personnel between our local police and the criminals whom they pursue. Most ordinary Americans are generally honest. So by these basic measures of day-to-day corruption, America is quite clean, not too different from Germany or Japan.

By contrast, local village authorities in China have a notorious tendency to seize public land and sell it to real estate developers for huge personal profits. This sort of daily misbehavior has produced an annual Chinese total of up to 90,000 so-called “mass incidents”—public strikes, protests, or riots—usually directed against corrupt local officials or businessmen.

However, although American micro-corruption is rare, we seem to suffer from appalling levels of macro-corruption, situations in which our various ruling elites squander or misappropriate tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth, sometimes doing so just barely on one side of technical legality and sometimes on the other.

Sweden is among the cleanest societies in Europe, while Sicily is perhaps the most corrupt. But suppose a large clan of ruthless Sicilian Mafiosi moved to Sweden and somehow managed to gain control of its government. On a day-to-day basis, little would change, with Swedish traffic policemen and building inspectors performing their duties with the same sort of incorruptible efficiency as before, and I suspect that Sweden’s Transparency International rankings would scarcely decline. But meanwhile, a large fraction of Sweden’s accumulated national wealth might gradually be stolen and transferred to secret Cayman Islands bank accounts, or invested in Latin American drug cartels, and eventually the entire plundered economy would collapse.

Ordinary Americans who work hard and seek to earn an honest living for themselves and their families appear to be suffering the ill effects of exactly this same sort of elite-driven economic pillage. The roots of our national decline will be found at the very top of our society, among the One Percent, or more likely the 0.1 percent.

A society’s media and academic organs constitute the sensory apparatus and central nervous system of its body politic, and if the information these provide is seriously misleading, looming dangers may fester and grow. A media and academy that are highly corrupt or dishonest constitute a deadly national peril. And although the political leadership of undemocratic China might dearly wish to hide all its major mistakes, its crude propaganda machinery often fails at this self-destructive task. But America’s own societal information system is vastly more skilled and experienced in shaping reality to meet the needs of business and government leaders, and this very success does tremendous damage to our country.

Perhaps Americans really do prefer that their broadcasters provide Happy News and that their political campaigns constitute amusing reality shows. Certainly the cheering coliseum crowds of the Roman Empire favored their bread and circuses over the difficult and dangerous tasks that their ancestors had undertaken during Rome’s rise to world greatness. And so long as we can continue to trade bits of printed paper carrying presidential portraits for flat-screen TVs from Chinese factories, perhaps all is well and no one need be too concerned about the apparent course of our national trajectory, least of all our political leadership class.

But if so, then we must admit that Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.

When I published that article a dozen years ago, I certainly envisioned the possibility of growing economic and political friction between China and America. This would likely result from our envy of China’s success in contrast to our own serious problems, while our ruling elites would be eager to find an external scapegoat to deflect popular anger away from their enormous failures. However, I never considered the possibility that this might escalate into an outright global confrontation between our two countries, taking the form of a cold war let alone a possible hot one.

NATO has been in existence for three-quarters of a century, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization now seems on the verge of losing its current proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine. Yet at the 75th anniversary NATO summit a few weeks ago, American influence led the leadership of that organization to declare official support for extending its military mission to challenge China on the other side of the world, an East Asian deployment some 10,000 miles away from Brussels’ NATO HQ.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson served as the long-time chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and in that role he spent many years working at the very top of our national security establishment. I’ve always regarded him as a very level-headed individual, and in a long recent interview, he expressed his astonishment at that new NATO plan to confront China over Taiwan or the South China Sea, perhaps even deliberately provoking a war, a policy that he repeatedly characterized as “insanity.”

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Given China’s large arsenal of hypersonic carrier-killer missiles, he later suggested that a plausible outcome to any such a military clash might be the sinking of three or four of our $15 billion aircraft carriers, thereby killing tens of thousands of American servicemen and perhaps provoking our humiliated government to go nuclear in response. This is not a pleasant scenario to contemplate.

At the time I published my article, such strategic plans by the West would have been almost unimaginable. For decades, one of the foremost figures in our DC foreign policy establishment had been Polish-born political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski, a major architect of our successful strategy during the victorious later stages of the Cold War conflict against the Soviet Union. Despite the growing influence of the Neocons, in 2012 I regarded his publicly-stated views as still representing the post-Bush elite consensus and this reassured me as I discussed in an article last year.

A longtime academic scholar of the “Realist” school at both Harvard and Columbia universities, Brzezinski had been the primary organizer of the Trilateral Commission in 1973 and in 1976 was named National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration, gradually gaining ascendancy for his harder-line views against his rival, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. He strongly supported Eastern European dissident activity, notably including the powerful Solidarity movement in his own native Poland, and he also orchestrated heavy military assistance to the Muslim rebels in Soviet-controlled Afghanistan. Both those efforts probably played a significant role in fatally weakening the USSR.

Indeed, although Brzezinski was himself a Democrat of strong social democratic leanings, his foreign policy positions were so greatly admired by Republican conservatives that there were even later claims that Ronald Reagan had asked him to stay on in that same role after Carter’s 1980 defeat.

By the mid-1980s, Brzezinski had become convinced that Soviet Communism was in terminal decline and in 1989 he published The Grand Failure, bearing the prophetic subtitle “The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century.” The work appeared in print nearly a year before the Fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of an epoch.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain reunited the severed halves of Europe two generations after their separation, and this was followed two years later by the shocking collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. Moscow soon lost control over territories it had ruled for centuries, with most of the boundaries of the Russian successor state rolled back to what they had been prior to the reign of Peter the Great in 1682.

The sudden disappearance of the USSR totally transformed the geopolitical landscape, leaving America as the world’s sole superpower, having unchallenged dominance over the entire globe, a situation unique in world history.

 

Brzezinski considered the consequences of that global upheaval and in 1997 published The Grand Chessboard, a short but influential book summarizing our unprecedented international position and outlining geostrategic policies to buttress our new dominance on the Eurasian world continent, the region that constituted the “grand chessboard” of his title.

Over the years, I’ve frequently seen accusations that Brzezinski was advocating a strategy for permanent American global hegemony, but I think such critics were confusing his ideas with the crude triumphalism espoused by the Neocons, who followed an entirely different ideological path. I finally read his book several years ago and encountered a very thoughtful and moderate analysis of the dangers and opportunities America faced on the Eurasian landmass, with the author repeatedly emphasizing that our worldwide dominance was merely a temporary condition, impossible to permanently maintain.

America was his country and he certainly proposed alliances and other measures to strengthen and extend our global position, but he sought to do so in a reasonable and restrained manner, avoiding provocative or precipitous actions and properly accommodating the legitimate geopolitical interests of other major powers such as China, Russia, Japan, and the larger European states.

His book had appeared near the absolute high-water mark of American prestige and influence and in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks a few years later, Brzezinski became a strong public critic of the Bush Administration’s Neocon-influenced plans for an Iraq War, a disastrous mistake that wrecked the stability of the Middle East, squandered our national credibility, and cost us many trillions of dollars. Since the mid-1970s his closest ally and collaborator had been his former military aide Bill Odom, who as a three-star general later ran the NSA for Ronald Reagan during the mid-1980s, and the two of them subsequently urged an immediate strategic rapprochement with Iran and withdrawal from Iraq.

In that short 1997 book, Brzezinski set forth the key reasons for America’s global dominance, which he expected would persist for at least a generation and possibly longer.

In brief, America stands supreme in the four decisive domains of global power: militarily, it has an unmatched global reach; economically, it remains the main locomotive of global growth, even if challenged in some respects by Japan and Germany (neither of which enjoys the other attributes of global might); technologically, it retains the overall lead in the cutting-edge areas of innovation; and culturally, despite some crassness, it enjoys an appeal that is unrivaled, especially among the world’s youth—all of which gives the United States a political clout that no other state comes close to matching. It is the combination of all four that makes America the only comprehensive global superpower.

I don’t doubt that the Polish-born political scientist retained some deep personal hostility toward his homeland’s traditional Russian adversary and his book was written close to the nadir of Russia’s national decline. But only traces of such animosity were apparent to me, and he fully considered the possibility that a revived Russia would successfully integrate itself into an enlarged Europe, the “common European home” once espoused by Mikhail Gorbachev. He expressed some concern about instability in the Islamic world, but our disastrous post-9/11 Middle Eastern wars would have seemed acts of unimaginable recklessness and folly, and indeed he became a fierce critic of the Neocons when they unleashed those wars a few years later.

Even more importantly, I noted that his views of China were quite favorable and realistic.

The penultimate and longest chapter of his Eurasia analysis was entitled “The Far Eastern Anchor” and he described that region as experiencing “an economic success without parallel in human development.” He noted that during their takeoff stage of industrialization, Britain and America had each required roughly a half-century to double their output, while both China and South Korea had achieved that same result in merely a single decade. Brzezinski felt confident that barring unfortunate circumstances, China would surely grow into a leading global economic power, and he believed that our own country should seek to incorporate it into the world system we had constructed, while properly recognizing that “China’s history has been one of national greatness.”

But although Brzezinski’s appraisal of China’s prospects was highly favorable, his 1997 analysis was actually quite cautious in its projections. He doubted that the country’s remarkable economic growth rates would continue for another couple of decades, something that would require “an unusually felicitous combination of effective national leadership” and numerous other favorable conditions, arguing that such a “prolonged combination of all of these positive factors was problematic.”

Instead, he leaned towards a more conventional prognosis that by about 2017, China might have a total GDP considerably larger than that of Japan, thereby establishing it as “a global power, roughly on a par with the United States and Europe.” But the reality was that by that year China’s real GDP was more than four times larger than that of Japan, and its real industrial production was greater than that of America and the European Union combined.

Thus, China’s economic weight in recent years has vastly exceeded Brzezinski’s 1997 assumptions and that difference greatly magnified the importance of his cautionary advice, which our political leadership has totally disregarded. Throughout his book, he repeatedly emphasized that the greatest danger America faced would be if we needlessly antagonized the major Eurasian nations, which might then unite against us.

So instead of heeding his prophetic warnings, our national political leadership has chosen to exactly invert his suggestions, and they did so despite China having grown stronger far more rapidly than he had envisioned. 

This dramatic ideological shift in DC policy began just a couple of years after the publication of my 2012 article. One important contributing factor may have been the 2013 announcement of China’s bold Belt and Road Initiative, aimed at investing massive resources to promote trade and transport routes across the Eurasian continent, a proposal that revealed the enormous scale of Beijing’s global economic ambitions. A couple of years later, this was followed by the 2015 announcement of the Made in China 2025 strategic plan, aimed at taking China to the forefront of numerous important technologies within a decade. But although these Chinese projects were entirely peaceful economic and technological initiatives, the American response was to raise the specter of a looming military conflict.

Political scientist Graham Allison had served as the founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and in 2015 he argued that America faced an almost inevitable global clash with a rising China, a confrontation that he characterized as due to “the Thucydides Trap.” This was the title of his very influential article in The Atlantic, which he then expanded into a 2017 best-seller entitled Destined for War.

As I explained last year:

Allison’s entire academic career had been extremely sober and respectable, and this surely magnified the impact of his incendiary title and dramatic prediction. The front of the paperback edition was packed with a remarkable ten pages of glowing endorsements by a long list of the West’s most prestigious public figures and intellectuals, ranging from Joe Biden to Henry Kissinger to Gen. David Petraeus to Klaus Schwab. It seemed obvious that his message had struck a deep chord, and his national bestseller received enormous acclaim, being selected as a book of the year by the New York Times, the London Times, the Financial Times, and Amazon. So even as far back as six years ago, the serious possibility of an American war with China had become a very hot topic to our political and intellectual elites.

Allison’s reasoning was simple yet compelling. As he explained in the opening of his original 2015 article, although war between China and America might seem unlikely or even unthinkable, a broad consideration of historical analogues suggested otherwise, with the unexpected outbreak of World War I being the most obvious example.

Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago, America had emerged as the sole, unchallenged global superpower. But over the last generation, the tremendous growth rate of the Chinese economy had propelled it past America’s in real size, the first such transition since our own country had overtaken Britain near the end of the 19th century. China’s technological progress had been equally rapid, and in our modern world these constituted the raw elements of global power, while China had also begun bolstering its military, not previously a high priority…

However, when Allison and his associates sifted the last 500 years of history to locate cases in which the rapidly growing power of a rising nation had threatened to overtake that of a dominant reigning one, they discovered that in well over half the examples—12 out of 16—the result had been war…

The provocative title of Allison’s book probably should have included a question-mark—Destined for War?—but otherwise I unfortunately found his historical and geopolitical analysis all too plausible.

Allison has hardly been alone among prominent academics in thinking along those same lines. In 2001, eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago had published The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, providing a theoretical framework for his doctrine of “offensive realism,” which he claimed best explained the behavior of nations. Under his conception, all great powers aspired to become hegemons—countries far more powerful than any of their regional rivals—and for hundreds of years wars had been fought either to establish or to block such hegemony, with the Napoleonic Wars and the First and Second World Wars being obvious examples of this.

Although such hegemony was regional in scope, he argued that there was also a strong incentive for an established hegemon in one part of the world to block the rise of any potentially rival hegemon elsewhere. Thus, once the U.S. had achieved a hegemonic position in the Western hemisphere, it had naturally intervened in the two world wars to prevent Germany from gaining a similar status in Europe or Japan from doing so in East Asia.

According to Mearsheimer, typical strategies involved the creation and support of local balancing coalitions, alliances of other regional powers used to prevent the rise of a local hegemon. Thus, America had supported Britain and France in order to prevent Germany from gaining European hegemony in World War I, and did the same for those two powers along with the Soviets in World War II. Similarly, our country had blocked Japan’s drive for East Asian hegemony by allying ourselves with China, Australia, and Britain in the Far East theater of that latter conflict.

The updated 2014 edition of his book included a long last chapter focused upon China, whose large and rapidly growing power seemed likely to establish it as a potential Asian hegemon. Therefore, under Mearsheimer’s theoretical framework, a clash with America was almost inevitable, and our country would naturally foster an anti-China coalition of other local powers to forestall China’s regional dominance.

Prof. Mearsheimer had been making similar arguments at least as far back as 2005 when he sharply disputed Brzezinski’s much more sanguine appraisal of China in the pages of Foreign Policy, with those two leading figures of the “Realist” school debating whether an American military conflict with China was likely to occur.

The crucial point emphasized by both Allison and Mearsheimer was that the particular characteristics of America and China—their political systems, cultures, histories, and national leaderships—were largely irrelevant in predicting their likely military confrontation. Instead, all that mattered was America’s status as a reigning global power and China’s as a rising one, with all those other differences merely serving as convenient means of mobilizing popular support behind a conflict driven solely by considerations of power politics. This sort of framework constituted geopolitical “realism” in its purest form…

Neither Allison nor Mearsheimer made an ironclad case that war with China was inevitable, nor did they claim to do so. But the historical evidence they presented was sufficiently extensive to be quite worrisome. And as Allison sketched out, under a tense, confrontational situation, relatively minor military incidents in the South China Sea could easily escalate, perhaps even eventually reaching the threshold of nuclear war.

Mearsheimer’s updated volume had appeared in 2014 followed by Allison’s national bestseller in 2017, and the unfortunate situation they predicted has become more and more plausible every year, marked by a steady increase in the rhetoric of America’s political leadership as amplified by the mainstream media. I suspect that their books and other public presentations may have fostered this trend, transforming the notion of such a global war with China from the unthinkable to the plausibly realistic.

The importance of these works by Allison and Mearsheimer may have been greatly magnified by the political dynamics of DC. Over the previous couple of decades, the Neocons had gained overwhelming control over the foreign policy establishments of both parties as well as all the local thinktanks, with their views on such matters becoming so ubiquitous and universal that the very term Neocon had fallen into disuse.

As an example of the bipartisan Neocon stranglehold over policy, Victoria Nuland seamlessly moved from the Clinton Administration to the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration, holding steadily more senior positions at each stage. Naive American voters might have been shocked to discover that a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney was soon formulating foreign policy for President Barack Obama, including orchestrating the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected pro-Russian government, but our media never reported those strange facts. And the extremely aggressive foreign policy views of the Neocons extended to China along with most other countries not already under heavy American domination.

Neither Allison nor Mearsheimer were Neocons, with the former being a pre-Neocon traditionalist and the latter a leading Realist, most famous for his 2007 bestseller The Israel Lobby, which had actually been ferociously attacked and vilified by many of the Israel-centric Neocons. As these very high-ranking academics became the leading voices arguing for the likelihood of war with China, Neocon political apparatchiks could highlight and promote their analysis as proof that such conclusions crossed all ideological boundaries.

Thus, Neocon political muscle successfully backed an anti-China tectonic policy shift whose ideological cutting-edge had been provided by the writings of respected non-Neocon academics such as Allison and Mearsheimer. As a result, the notion of a likely war with China soon become a bipartisan article of faith within DC policy circles.

First appearing towards the end of the Obama Administration, these views were strongly reaffirmed by several senior figures in the Trump Administration such as National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and most of the Republican Party adopted fierce rhetoric along those lines. Indeed, for several years I have argued that the 2020 global Covid epidemic probably represented the blowback of a botched biowarfare attack against China (and Iran) by such hardline national security figures, aimed at crippling what they regarded as our formidable global adversary.

After the Democrats regained the White House in 2020, many had expected these trends to reverse, but instead they actually accelerated, with the Biden Administration imposing unprecedented economic sanctions on China’s crucial microchip industry as well as engaging in loud saber-rattling over Taiwan, while the Democrats and Republicans began competing over which party could be tougher on China.

Others, however, have regarded this new ideological trend as an act of colossal folly. In the year before his 2017 death, Brzezinski updated his analysis to proclaim that the era of American dominance was already drawing to a close and that we must recognize this new reality.

• Toward a Global Realignment
  As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture.
  Zbigniew Brzezinski • The American Interest • April 17, 2016 • 2,500 Words

Instead of heeding his concerns and adjusting their policies accordingly, our political elites have doubled-down on their crude strategy of attempting to maintain an impossible American global hegemony, a policy that seems likely to end in national disaster.

 

Australia has been seen as a cornerstone of America’s anti-China regional coalition, and last year I explained that Brzezinski’s huge concerns were echoed in 2022 by a top former leader of that country.

Kevin Rudd had served two terms as Prime Minister of his country (2007-2010 and 2013), and afterward relocated to America, where he later became President of the Asia Society based in New York City prior to being named Australia’s ambassador to our country a few weeks ago. In March 2022, he published The Avoidable War, bearing the grimly accurate subtitle “The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China.” Although I had only been very slightly familiar with his career, I decided to read his book for his insights on averting that looming global conflict.

Rudd seems to possess an ideal background for the important task he has set himself, having majored in Chinese studies in college and being completely fluent in Mandarin, a language he began learning at age 18. As he explained in his introduction, he has lived and traveled extensively in both China and America, has many friends in each country, and very much hoped they could avert what he considers their unnecessary conflict. I found his book excellent and it certainly merited the glowing praise it received from Allison himself, a personal friend of the author, as well as from Kissinger and other leading American military and academic figures. The work was published in English and obviously aimed primarily at an American audience, so it appropriately devoted the bulk of its pages to explicating China’s perspective, but the American side of the conflict also received considerable coverage.

Rudd seems uniquely qualified to provide this analysis. Prior to becoming Prime Minister, he had had a long career as an Australian diplomat, eventually rising to become Foreign Minister, and he had first met Xi more than 35 years ago, when both were very junior figures; over the years he has spent a total of ten hours in conversation with him on six separate occasions, including some that were quite informal. Add to this his multitude of other personal sources acquired over the decades, both Chinese and Western, and I doubt that there are many outsiders who can match his understanding of the goals of China’s top leader. Therefore, we should take the author quite seriously when on a couple of occasions he described these in dramatic terms: “Xi wants to secure a place for himself in Chinese party history that is at least equal to Mao and greater than Deng.”

Rudd presents Xi’s major goals in a series of ten chapters, representing the concentric circles of his strategic objectives, and these occupy half the book. Xi places the greatest importance upon maintaining political power and securing national unity, followed by economic development, modernizing the military, and then increasing China’s influence in its neighborhood, along its Asian periphery, and eventually worldwide. I found Rudd’s organizational approach helpful and his analysis quite plausible.

Obviously, major nations often possess conflicting interests, and the rise of Chinese power would necessarily produce a relative decline in America’s, but across all those chapters I found few deep-seated, inherent conflicts between our two continental-scale countries. Just a few weeks ago, I had reread Zbigniew Brzezinski’s influential 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. That author had similarly laid out a set of strategies and goals intended to secure America’s influence and position at the head of our global community, but his plans were hardly aimed at threatening the vital interests of our leading competitors, let alone provoking a war. I had very much taken Brzezinski’s side during his 2005 debate with Mearsheimer on China, and to the extent that Rudd has correctly analyzed Xi’s worldwide goals and plans, I would put those into much the same category. International rivalry even occasionally involving sharp elbows should not necessarily produce international conflict any more than domestic political rivalry must lead to civil war.

My own views were close to those of Brzezinski and Rudd and I regarded the widespread assumption of a likely, almost inevitable military clash between America and a rising China as totally wrong-headed, a disastrous intellectual mistake of monumental proportions that could easily wreck most of the world, certainly including our own country. Yet oddly enough, even within that erroneous geostrategic framework, the decisions made by our national security elites over the last decade have seemed utterly irrational and counter-productive.

As I explained last year:

When Mearsheimer had written his long final chapter in 2014, he had naturally envisioned Russia as a central element of the balancing coalition that America would construct against the Chinese, together with India and Japan as well as smaller powers such as South Korea and Vietnam. Any rational American geopolitical strategist seeking to contain a rising China would have taken that approach.

But the Neocons running the foreign policy of the Obama Administration were remarkably arrogant rather than rational, and that same year they orchestrated an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, followed by the loss of Crimea and ongoing fighting in the Donbas, all of which permanently poisoned Russian relations. Not long afterward, Mearsheimer gave his prophetic talk on the looming future risks of a NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine, a presentation that over the last year has been viewed some 29 million times on Youtube, perhaps more than any academic lecture in the history of the Internet.

Video Link

Thus, by the time Allison published his 2017 book, any possibility of an American-Russian alliance against China had evaporated and Russia scarcely featured in his discussion. These trends continued and a year ago Rudd’s book already characterized China and Russia as strategic partners, mentioning that Xi had described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “his best friend” and that the two countries regularly collaborated on a variety of different political, military, and economic issues. But Russia still remained a minor factor in Rudd’s analysis, with its role discussed in just a couple of pages together with scattered references elsewhere in his text.

The outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war completely changed everything, as did the unprecedented wave of resulting Western sanctions targeting Russia and the massive amount of financial and military aid provided to Ukraine, already totaling $120 billion, a sum far larger than the entire annual Russian defense budget. Over the last year, American-led NATO has been fighting a proxy-war against Russia on Russia’s own border, a war that many American political leaders have declared can only end with Russia’s defeat and the death or overthrow of Putin. The Hague in Europe has already issued an arrest-warrant against the Russian president for alleged war-crimes.

Just prior to the beginning of the Ukraine war, Xi had held this 39th personal meeting with Putin, and had declared that China’s partnership with Russia “had no limits.” The subsequent all-out Western assault on Russia has inevitably produced a tight alliance between the two huge countries.

China’s industrial strength is enormous, with its real productive economy already larger than the combined total for America, the European Union, and Japan. But add to that the huge energy supplies and other natural resources of its remarkably complementary Russian neighbor, and the two together probably outweigh the power of America and its allies.

• Did the Neocons Save the World from the Thucydides Trap?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 18, 2023 • 6,400 Words

 

In that 2023 article, I had emphasized the gigantic size of China’s real productive economy, an important fact largely concealed from the American public by our extremely biased and propagandistic mainstream media.

Since 1996 Jacques Sapir has served as director of studies at France’s prestigious EHESS institute, and last year I’d been very impressed with the economic analysis he provided in an article published in American Affairs. Sapir argued that the best measure of a country’s true economic strength was the real size of its productive economy, a calculation that excluded services, which are often non-tradeable and whose statistics are much more easily manipulated. Under that metric, he noted that as far back as 2019 China’s real productive economy was already three times larger than America’s, and indeed exceeded the combined total for America, the European Union, and Japan.

This had prompted me to produce a simple chart showing these values for the world’s largest economies, and I’ve now updated those figures to 2023 for the top two dozen of these. All my data is drawn from the CIA World Factbook, which conveniently provides estimates of the 2021 real PPP-adjusted GDP for the countries of the world, as well as the most recent figures for the nominal GDPs, the economic sector composition, and the national populations. Since some of these estimates come from slightly different years, I’ve rounded the values to emphasize that these statistics are merely approximations.

Last year when I’d produced the previous version of this chart, the latest available international economic statistics had been from the year 2021, and according to those, China’s real productive economy was already some 3% larger than the combined total for America, the European Union, and Japan.

Anyone who casually scans the daily headlines of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal must surely be convinced of China’s severe economic problems over the last several years in sharp contrast with America’s booming economy, which seems to have now successfully avoided the threat of a looming recession. So naive Americans might naturally assume that the economic balance between China and our own Western bloc has recently shifted in our direction.

However, the facts are entirely different. According to the latest 2023 economic statistics, China’s real productive economy now outweighs the combined total for America, the European Union, and Japan by nearly 12%, while continuing to grow much more rapidly.

Back in 2021, Russia’s real productive economy was already substantially larger than that of Germany and approached that of Japan. But ironically enough, two years of unprecedented Western sanctions have produced such an economic boom that Russia’s real productive economy has grown by more than 42%, now ranking that primary target of our wrath as the fifth largest economic power in the world, far exceeding Japan.

Although Allison had played a central role in shifting American policy elites towards accepting the likelihood of a future war with China, he now recognized the momentous importance of these new developments. In March 2023, he took to the pages of Foreign Policy to emphasize that the formation of a powerful Russia-China alliance had completely changed the geopolitical landscape that he had assumed in his 2017 bestseller. His closing paragraphs summarized the disastrous consequences of America’s strategic blunder and cited Brzezinski’s warnings.

An elementary proposition in international relations 101 states: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” By confronting both China and Russia simultaneously, the United States has helped create what former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called an “alliance of the aggrieved.” This has allowed Xi to reverse Washington’s successful “trilateral diplomacy” of the 1970s that widened the gap between China and the United States’ primary enemy, the Soviet Union, in ways that contributed significantly to the U.S. victory in the Cold War. Today, China and Russia are, in Xi’s words, closer than allies.

Since Xi and Putin are not just the current presidents of their two nations but leaders whose tenures effectively have no expiration dates, the United States will have to understand that it is confronting the most consequential undeclared alliance in the world.

• Xi and Putin Have the Most Consequential Undeclared Alliance in the World
  It’s become more important than Washington’s official alliances today
  Graham Allison • Foreign Policy • March 23, 2023 • 1,300 Words

Later that same year, the outbreak of the Israel/Gaza conflict caused an enormous, further deterioration in our geopolitical position.

During the last ten months, the entire world has witnessed the shameful, humiliating conquest and subjugation of the American political system and our most elite universities by the Israel Lobby. As a result, our country has become tightly bound to the albatross of that genocidal, international terrorist state, which has become a global pariah even as it still desperately seeks to involve us in an unnecessary war with Iran, intending that American lives and treasure be sacrificed to destroy Israel’s most formidable regional adversary. These events have inflicted enormous damage upon America’s international prestige and credibility, while firmly welding Iran to the China-Russia bloc.

In 1997 The Grand Chessboard had prophetically outlined exactly this sort of scenario, which Brzezinski warned might lead to the collapse of our status as a global power. However, the famed geostrategist had considered it quite unlikely that any American regime would be so foolish and incompetent as to unite all those major Eurasian nations against us.

Finally, some possible contingencies involving future political alignments should also be briefly noted…the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America’s status as a global power…Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances…Averting this contingency, however remote it may be, will require a display of U.S. geostrategic skill on the western, eastern, and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously.

However, a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.

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