|
How We Lose against China
[National Review] The Cold War ended not on the battlefield but inside the Soviet Union. There were no tank maneuvers through the Fulda Gap in Germany, nor was there a nuclear armageddon. Instead, one of the two superpowers faced an internal crisis that shattered its society and its European empire. The Cold War was a global struggle, but its end was a matter of domestic politics.This history has profound implications for our new struggle with China, which has been likened to the Cold War. Experts including me have written many books and essays about Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula, not to mention cyber and space warfare and, as China advances its Belt and Road initiative across Eurasia, the struggle over trade and trade routes. As with the Cold War, we see the struggle with China as unending. We simply can’t imagine a world beyond it. But what if this new struggle were to end as the Cold War did in 1989: with a domestic evolution in either China or the United States that renders one of the two parties unwilling or unable to continue the competition? If we consider this scenario — a domestic conclusion to a global struggle — we of course assume the fatally weakened party will be China. After all, China is a society of increasing totalitarian dimensions, with a growing and increasingly restive middle class sitting atop a mountain of debt that carries the potential of igniting a domestic crisis. With its blend of communism and capitalism, China may not be truly Marxist anymore, yet it is more and more Leninist as its dictatorship suffocates the public space, leaving only the personal sphere for people to express themselves in. And regimes like that don’t end well, as we know from the examples of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. But what if we’re wrong? What if the society that undermines itself first is our own? Why would this come about? Consider that the United States thrived as a modern mass democracy only in the print-and-typewriter era, which lasted roughly through the end of the 20th century. In communications, that age was defined by major newspapers, which published professionally written and researched articles based on a commonly perceived historical experience. Among major media, objectivity and neutral politics were taken for granted, as public schooling and a military draft enforced a common destiny that pushed people toward the political center and away from extremes. Such centrism was seen on early television as well, with the three network anchors differing in style rather than in politics. Moreover, much of the 20th century was a time when travel overseas was largely the domain of the wealthy and immigrants substantially cut ties with their places of origin: Thus they had no choice but to become, in effect, as the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington put it, honorary Protestants like the rest of us. Despite all our troubles, flaws, and inconsistencies, we were a nation. And this also had much to do with a particular level of technological development that spawned a solid middle-class system, encompassing more than just technology, from one coast to the other. It was this nation that waged the Cold War and did not so much defeat the Soviet Union as outlast it and out-compete it. That nation exists less and less, and principally because the technological context is no longer the same. Posted by: Besoeker 2021-01-31 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=593026 |