Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: End of American Empire Page 6 of 12

China Seizes The Master’s Weapon As It Makes Itself The New Hegemon

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On October 17, 2025

29 Comments

John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes believed that ideas, hospitality, travel, knowledge and science should move freely between nations.  if a country could reasonably produce something physical it needed, it should. Trade should exist, but be kept to a minimum.

I’d like to highlight something Matt Stoller (the anti-trust guy) recently wrote:

In May of 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared its economic strategy, using the phrase “dual circulation.” Dual circulation meant fostering a domestic productive apparatus that is independent of foreign technology and finance, while making sure the rest of the world is dependent on Chinese control of key supply chains, whether it’s shipping, railroad construction, electric batteries, or solar panels. Chinese ‘grand economic strategy,’ in other words, is to operate as a giant monopoly on which the rest of the world must rely.

Matt says this isn’t about Trump, but notice it’s from 2020. It is about Trump: Trump in the first term, with his anti-Huawei sanctions. The Chinese realized they were vulnerable and the national effort became making sure they controlled all their own critical supply chains. Having seen how the US used financial sanctions and supplier boycotts, they regrettably decided to reverse the situation.

Now what one needs to understand is that after WWII American controlled most of the key supply chains outside of the Russian bloc. They had over 50% of the world’s industry. If you wanted something, you have to get it from them. Over time, this franchise expanded, first back to the Euros, as they re-built their industry, then to the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans. All of these nations were firmly American vassals. Not allies, vassals with military bases in their countries.

The West, led by America and the USSR had all the advanced tech. In the 70s the USSR fell behind, they couldn’t manage the digital revolution happening, and then the USSR collapsed and the West, really America, ruled unchecked.

If you wanted any advanced tech: planes, cars, computers, weapons, etc… it had to come from America or one its vassals. The US effectively had “dual circulation”, especially since it also had full control of the international finance system and could lock anyone out at will.

This wasn’t theoretical, US sanctions on Iraq in the 90s under Billy Clinton killed at least hundreds of thousands of people. I once talked to an Iraqi oncological pediatrician from the 90s and her incandescent rage over all the children who died of cancer she couldn’t save because of American sanctions was so hot it blotted out the sun.

Once such sanctions had been rare (though there are cases back in the 50s.) The most notable is the multi-generation trade blockade of Cuba.

But from Clinton on use of these sanctions became routine, “Treasury’s Wars.” Millions died, many more were impoverished.

So, China has learned from the evil master. And it has decided that if there is such a weapon, it will have it and  use it and no one else can have it.

Everyone who rages against this is correct. No country should have this power. Not America. Not China. No one.

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What should be the case is a trade regime where everyone makes most of what they need. Need medicine? Make it in your country. (Shut up about prices, if the supply chain is domestic then almost all that crap that MMTers go on about becomes true. Prices are irrelevant, it’s all in money you print.) To the largest degree possible, everyone makes what they need. Smaller countries will have a harder time, and trade-states like Singapore obviously can’t, but this is what a good world looks like.

This maximizes political autonomy, too. You can’t be blackmailed by other countries. Spread nukes around, and much military force goes off the table too. (And they are going to spread. The US has taught everyone that if you have nukes you’re safe, and if you don’t, you’re dinner.)

So. China is teaching the Western world the same lesson America taught China and Africa and Iraq, and Iran and Cuba. We: Europe, the Anglo countries, South Korean, Taiwan and Japan, were inside the bubble during the period when the US allowed its vassals decent lives. (Oh, they destroyed Japan’s tech and industrial lead, they gutted Britain after WWII, they forced Canada to destroy its world leading aviation industry), but overall, if you were on the inside of the “Golden billion” or, early, “the golden 500 million”, life was pretty damn good.

America used the whip, its vassals jumped to obey and everyone else was poor.

Then Americans got stupid and thought that China was like Japan, they could ship their industry there, makes lots of money and if necessary bring China to heel if it got out of hand.

Wrong. Morons. I and others warned about this for decades, how stupid it was, but no one in power listened. Probably a good thing, since it led to a billion people getting out of poverty, but it’s not going to be fun for those us living in the West.

So: the weapon is being wrested from the old hegemon’s palsied hands, and being wielded by the apprentice, the new master, the new hegemon.

Bow, insects, the new lord is here. And no, America isn’t going to get its hegemon status back, nor should anyone who isn’t American want it to.

The actual solution is Keynes solution. No one should have the weapon—the power—because every country should make, grow and dig as much of they need as possible, using trade only for what they genuinely can’t make or for luxuries they can do without in a pinch.

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EU Leaders Determined To Win “Most Supine Slave Award”: Nexperia Edition

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On October 15, 2025

17 Comments

A couple days ago I discussed the Dutch taking over Nexperia, a Chinese owned but Dutch domiciled company making commodity semiconductors. The company became Chinese owned because it was almost bankrupt, the Chinese bought it, fixed it and kept many jobs in Europe, including the headquarters.

What I didn’t know about the story on Monday is that the Dutch were between a rock and a hard place. The Americans threatened to put Nexperia on the entity list, and thus kill it with sanctions, if it remained Chinese owned. So if the Dutch didn’t kick the Chinese out, it was doomed.

But the Chinese have put a ban on any exports to or from Nexperia (it has facilities in China.) Which means it won’t be able to manufacture anything. So it’s doomed.

Now the important part here is that Nexperia mostly sold semiconductors in Europe. And American sanctions could stop a Dutch domiciled company from selling to other European countries.

That is how supine the EU is. They haven’t put in place a way to resist American sanctions on intra-European trade. That’s hilarious pathetic and servile.

Other Chinese companies will simply produce the chips Nexperia used to, and none of the money for that will go to Europe. This is a loss for the Dutch.

It should also be noted that the Dutch have more companies in China than vice versa. So if China really wants to retaliate, well, they can.

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Europe is being ground between America and China, and ground to dust. The only way to avoid winding up third world nations (I am not being hyperbolic about this) is to get out from in between. All the GDP numbers are fake, they mean NOTHING of importance. All that matters is what you grow, dig up, refine and make. Everything else is nice to have, but ultimately if you can’t produce what you need, you are at the mercy of those who can. Germany, the industrial heart of Europe, is de-industrializing furiously. Everyone else’s industry was already gutted by Germany’s use of the Euro to inflate their costs and move production to Germany.

China has no reason to love Europe, but they’re happy to do business. They offer a better deal than America does right now. Statesmen (of whom Europe has zero) would re-orient and tell America to go take a long leap off a short pier.

And yeah, that means accepting that Russia is going to win the Ukraine war, but, y’know what? It is anyway. And yes some of the Eastern Euros will scream, but who cares, they’re all welfare recipients who couldn’t make a budget without Germany and France subsidizing them. If they want to prioritize hating Russia over saving Europe, kick them out of the EU. Most of them should never have been let in in the first place. Start with the Baltics and Poland.

This is the great power shift, a historic switch of hegemonic powers which only happens every hundred to hundred and fifty years. You can align with the new hegemon and have a chance at prosperity, or you can choose to remain with the old order and suffer serious decline. This is especially true with America, whose current policy amounts to “loot the vassals while we still have them.”

European leaders need to stop being a bunch of supine wimps, and if they won’t, the European population needs to replace them, by whatever means necessary.

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The West Cannot Win A Trade War Against China

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On October 13, 2025

5 Comments

So, the Dutch seized a Chinese owned semiconductor company:

Mistake. Big mistake. And the Dutch will pay for it.

This is a clear escalation in the US/China trade war (the EU are on a leash, they have no independent trade policy.)

Here’s what I want everyone to understand. The Chinese make everything that matters. Not the end products, but the parts. They make the parts required for almost every industry to operate. For decades I inveigled against international trade logistics and the idea that “it doesn’t matter where something is made.”

China spent the last 9 years, since Trump kicked off the trade war era in 2016 with his absolutely moronic Huawei and chip bans, making sure that their supply chains are domestic or in completely trusted allies. (Vietnam is not going to start a trade war with China.) They make everything they need for most of their industries, with only a few exceptions, like commercial jet engines. (They’re working on that, but two or three years out.)

It used to be, for example, that they bought almost all their helium from America. They fixed that, and now make it domestically. This has been systematic. The Chinese looked at their weaknesses in a trade war and fixed almost all of them.

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America did little of significance, though Biden did start a small amount of rare earth and magnet industry. US industries almost all need parts or materials they can only get from China.

If China decides to seriously go to trade war, Western economies will collapse. They will have to shutter most factories, you won’t be able to get parts for household appliances, cars, planes, air conditioners, drying machines. Practically anything. And the West has given away so much basic industry that we’d be rebuilding almost from zero, in many cases. Even the expertise is gone in many industries, or those who have it are in their sixties or older.

If we fight a trade war with China we will be horrifically hurt.

China doesn’t want a trade war, because it will hurt them too. They still sell a lot to the West. But they will survive it far better than we will.

Stop being morons, and make trade-peace.

China Is Going To Leave The US What America Left Britain: Nothing

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On October 10, 2025

27 Comments

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Chinese and American flags

So, China has slapped draconian export controls not just on rare earths, but on all technology related to rare earths. If you want rare earths you have to beg for permission and certify it won’t be used for anything military or anything technologically related. If you want the rare earths or tech to catch up, you can’t have them. (Like when the US banned advanced lithography machines.)

As an extra fillip, China has also announced that all American ships must pay port fees. (This is symbolic, few ships are flagged American.)

The writing was on the wall for this when China, just recently, told all domestic firms to not buy Western chips. That mean that they had enough of the chip technology stack that they felt they were immune to counter-sanctions.

And now the whoop-ass.

You can thank Trump for this. His chip and Huawei sanctions taught the Chinese they had to control their entire own tech stack. Before that they preferred American, Korean and Taiwanese chips. No big Chinese company would buy Chinese crap chips. If the US hadn’t decided on its moronic trade war, China would have allowed it to gracefully age out of its Empire, letting it keep some areas of technological superiority.

As usual, the Chinese played this ice cold. They took their lumps, they devalued the yuan, they made concessions. When Biden came in, he doubled down so they realized it wasn’t just a democratic hiccup, but core policy agreed to by both parties. Then Trump came in and went on his insane tariff blitz. Worked against his vassals, but China doesn’t have to take America’s crap any more and it isn’t.

Now, as the kids like to say, having fucked around, America and the West are about to “find out.” Revenge served ice fucking cold.

I want to be really clear on a couple things here.

First, China is not going to leave the US or the West anything meaningful in terms of tech lead. They are going to take the tech lead, with the industry to back it up, in essentially everything (they’re already in the lead in at least 80% of areas, so don’t kid yourself about the rest.) And they are going to break the US’s hold on the Americas too. By the time China is done with America, they’ll be lucky to still have have Mexico and Canada as vassals (which is why they might invade and is why the US is threatening Venezuela before it gets a full suite of Chinese and Russian weapons.)

Second: if you are in charge of any country in the world that is an American vassal and you have an IQ above 90 and the smallest amount of interest in the future of your country, your job right now is to transfer your allegiance to China and get the best deal you can in exchange. The longer you wait, the worse the deal will be.

I do mean everyone: Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea.

Everyone.

Get out, now. The US has already lost the war, and while there may be a lot of screaming and even a shooting war (without rare earths, the US needs to fight a war in the next two years, or wait tent years as it rebuilds its military stack) it’s over. Just like Japan had already lost even before Pearl Harbor (and that sort of attack is the danger now.)

China is going to run the world for the next forty to sixty years, minimum, barring ecological collapse. It has zero love for the old hegemons. The US, the Anglo countries and the Euros will not be treated kindly out of some feeling of kinship or because they are needed, neither is true. Only Australia and Canada have something to offer the Chinese might want. Everyone else is just wasting assets.

Besides, the Americans are bastards. Right now they aren’t offering anything but “stay our vassal and let us loot you.” Pull out your knife and your pen. Sign an agreement with the Chinese, and drive a knife right between America’s shoulder blades.

I’d say “they do it to you” but they’re natural born bullies and you’re already on your knees begging them not to hurt you more. (EU, I am especially looking at you. To say you have the dignity of slaves would be to malign slaves, who at least have no choice.)

America’s done. All statesmanship for the next fifteen years will be about handling the fallout. If the West had any statesmen, even one, that might be good news.

London & New York Are Toast

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On September 24, 2025

14 Comments

Stumbled across this recently: 

  • China aims to become custodian of foreign sovereign gold reserves to strengthen its standing in the global bullion market, according to people familiar with the matter.
  • The People’s Bank of China is using the Shanghai Gold Exchange to court central banks in friendly countries to buy bullion and store it within the country’s borders.
  • The move would enhance Beijing’s role in the global financial system, furthering its goal of establishing a world that’s less dependent on the dollar and Western centers.

Remember when the US stole Venezuela’s gold? Remember when the West “froze” Russia’s reserves, including gold?

Actions have consequences. Since most countries do more trade with China than with the US, let alone the laughable UK, and since China appears a lot less likely to steal one’s reserves, this rather makes sense.

China does almost half of its trade now in Yuan, and the the remaining is often in local currencies. (The Russians pay in rubles, for example.)

When  you add in the trade flows, and bear in mind this is 5 years old and today China has overtaken in more countries…

Well, why exactly would you use US dollars for trade, or use New York or London as your primary foreign banking center? You’d be a fool if you did so, if you’re outside of the West+allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan.)’

The US stock market is also VASTLY over-valued. There hasn’t been a proper market correction which was allowed to stick in generations. The idea that US public companies are worth more than China’s public companies is ludicrous. As the actual world economy is now centered on China, not America, this will become unsustainable, because the US dollar is going to copy what happened to the UK pound over the 20th century, and the US will no longer have currency seignorage: if other countries don’t want it, the US can’t just print it without massive and crippling inflation.

This means the eternal rising market created by Greenspan and treated as sacred by every President and Federal Reserve Chairman is in its last gasp. No matter how much they will wish to prop it up, they won’t be able to without crippling side-effects beyond what can be papered over by printing more money and giving it to rich people. (All of this before the fact the stock market is currently an AI circle jerk, with companies buying NVidia chips for AI and NVidia then investing in those companies. When AI turns out to be an ordinary tech, useful for some things but not revolutionary, BOOM.)

Meanwhile:

This is a big deal. This is what GE and Siemens sell. Now there are Japanese and Korean and Chinese suppliers, but this a key technology. And Iran can make it now. GE has the largest installed base, followed by Siemens (German), but why court sanctions risk and repair parts being cut off?

When the Ukraine war started, Siemens withdrew from Russia, and refused to maintain already sold turbines.

Woops.

Again, core tech that used to be controlled by the “North” is spreading across the world. Hell, the Houthis are making their own farm combines!

And it’s China where the future is happening, including the Jetsons future:


The US isn’t even on this technology, let alone moving to scale. Let me remind you of the rule of Industrial dominance:

When there is a dominant industrial power (Britain to 1860, America from 1920 to 1965) you have to be ahead in tech to compete, because the dominant power can always scale cheaper than you.

This is an industry where the US and Europe aren’t even on the playfield. Worse (or better), it’s the sort of industry that, in wartime, can easily be converted to military production.

We’ll end with one more chart:

It’s over. It’s all over. The West is sinking into industrial and technological second place and it’s a second place that is long way behind first place. Further, massive US research cuts and a monomaniacal obsession with one tech (so called “AI”) indicate that the US isn’t serious about catching up, but has accepted its decline, whatever the political rhetoric may be.

This leads to the end of the American Empire, to vassals pulling away, and to a massive and sustained loss of standard of living, just as it did in the UK. Combined with ecological issues, I expect the American experiences of decline to be faster and worse.

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American Billionaires Are Competing To Be King Shit of Turd Island

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On September 17, 2025

11 Comments

You may have heard that Tesla’s board has proposed giving Elon Musk a one trillion dollar payday. Tesla is falling apart, and the ostensible theory is that only Musk can save it, as if he’s not the guy who ran it into the ground with his bad decision making.

Elon, of course, is currently “the world’s richest man” but his fortune is probably under 500 billion. So he wants to triple it.

This, as you may have figured out already, is not about saving Tesla, but looting it before it crashes out completely, which is what’s going to happen. Only 100% anti-china EV tariffs are keeping Tesla alive right now, but the problem is that non-Chinese companies are now producing cheaper, better cars and no, Tesla isn’t going to regain its lead.

Elon is just a rat trying to leave a sinking ship with a huge wheel of gold embossed brie, and the board (his cronies) are helping him.

Meanwhile:

(Every person who told you that the end of dollar hegemony was impossible was either an idiot or lying to you.)

Oh, and meanwhile China has banned all its tech companies from buying NVidia AI chips. Seems they figure their homegrown chips are now as good as the lobotomized versions NVidia is allowed to sell to Chinese companies.

In about three years, China’s chips will be as good as NVidia’s. In about six years they’ll be as good and a lot cheaper. Then every country outside the West will switch.

Meanwhile, as I’ve discussed before, every non-Western country will use Chinese Open Source AI, because using American or European AI is way too risky (if you don’t understand why, you’ve been a coma for the past 40 years.)

NVidia is driving something like 40% of American stock valuations and AI is the huge bet America is making. America can’t even make magnets.

So what happens when China can produce essentially everything the West can, at equal or better quality, and it costs less? Passenger jets, military tech, chips, AI, robots, drones, cars, consumer goods. Everything. (or a reasonable facsimile, well north of 90% within five to ten years, and it’s already north of 80%.)

Well, the oligarchs who have been competing to be the richest guy in America are going to find they have a whole bunch of US dollars that the most important economy in the world, China, won’t accept for anything meaningful. You won’t be able to buy Chinese companies with it. You won’t be able to buy Chinese tech secrets with it. Chinese scientists won’t want to work in the shithole that the US is turning into, especially given all the racism against Chinese.

American oligarchs will, as my father put it, find out that they were competing to be “King Shit of Turd Island.” Like being the world’s richest Indian in 1950. You’ll live a nice life, but you don’t matter.

Serious elites have three jobs, in order of importance.

  1. Keep their country powerful and advanced and important;
  2. Keep control of their country
  3. Compete among themselves.

American elites reversed the order of these tasks for generations. They’ll be lucky to avoid a civil war, is how badly they’ve fucked up. And the tech-bro “masters of the universe” are about to watch China roar past them and gain the tech lead in everything that matters. They can own America’s Tik-tok, but who cares, because America is a has-been nation, coasting on legacy fumes, and it’s only going to fall further and further behind.

Thiel and Musk and so on are just crabs in a bucket, competing for power in country going to Hell. May the best most ruthless crab be crowed King Shit of Turd Island.

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Follow Up and And Reply On My “How to Lose Allies” Post

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On September 10, 2025

23 Comments

First, I want to follow up on this: “I am due to have a conversation with a friend that lives in Denmark tomorrow and I’m going to ask him about energy prices.”

His reply, and I paraphrase as I did not record it or take notes: “if we still had to make our house payment, we would be totally screwed. The amount of money that we pay for energy now is about equal to what our house payment used to be. It’s about five times higher than it normally is, but what’s even worse is the high cost of energy filters out into everything in the Danish economy. A simple item like bread is three times higher than it used to be. Specialty items are three or four times higher than they used to be. Fish from fisherman that we go to the docks to buy from because we live on an island is four times more expensive because they’re paying four times more for the energy they’re using to go out and fish. It’s brutal and it’s all because the United States or somebody allied with it blew up the Nord stream pipeline. I try to keep my mouth shut about this because most people have drank the Kool-Aid, but I really hope Russia wins because I’m sick of all this global elite bullshit.”

These words were spoken by a well educated American married to a Dane with two teen-aged Danish children. If the Danish economy is suffering like this Germany must be fucked.

Where does Europe get its energy now? From the US, now exporting LNG (liquid natural gas) to Europe for 4x the price of Russian and Turkmen natural gas. Here is my question as a Texan: why haven’t natural gas prices risen in tandem with the export of the commodity? People I have asked who recieve natural gas royalties are pissed because there is no price increase pass through. So, owners of the wells are getting screwed and so are the buyers of the product. Welcome to Oligarchical America.

Next I want to address a handful of commenters in my post, best reprersented by Mark Level. He writes, in a very gracious and polite comment that he takes issue with my outline of American Grand Strategy. He notes, “This insane hobby-horse (or idee fixe, choose your metaphor) dates back far more than 120 years, probably 3x that long, and originates in British Colonial phobias about Russia and “the East” generally. Halford John Mackinder developed this lunacy & published it almost exactly 120 years ago, but it had a long pre-natal development among arrogant Imperial gits in Asia. (Gits and twits, upper-class British twits, like the Monty Python sketch.) See here, and the delightful childish fantasy of being Alexander Magnus from this Mackinder thought bubble . . . .”

Please note, first and foremost, I used the word hostile power or hostile coalition. Hostile being the primary variable.

I’ve read Mackinder’s works. Anyone who has traveled across the Silk Road pretty much has to read them. His idea is not necessarily original. It’s more a fusion of ideas that came out of the late 18th century and 19th century Western European dominance of the world that began, as I previously mentioned, with the defeat of Venice in 1509,  Portugal’s conquest of a Spice Empire, and its desrtuction of the Ottoman Navy in the Indian Ocean, thus having no rivals, and of course Spain’s rapacious theft of New World gold and silver.

During the 17th and 18th century, a new idea developed with the growth of the British Navy, who outstripped the Dutch and pretty much took over their empire. New York City was, after all, New Amsterdam. What these developments presaged was an idea that centered around the ascendancy of the Littoral powers over the Continental Empires that had ruled Eurasia for millenia. Gunpowder, boats, better firearms, better steel and in the New World, devastating disease leading to genocide in many cases up and down North and South America. The Littoral is defined by strategists “as those land areas (and their adjacent areas and associated air space) that are susceptible to engagement and influence from the sea.” Thus the emphasis on a strong navy by Alfred Thayer Mahan who proved just how dominant Littoral Powers could be. For a time, that is, only for a time, as I see it.

Add to this ascendancy the wars of the Western European powers of the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire primarily fought during the 18th century for two strategic reasons, primarily by two very different nations with very different vital national interests at stake.

One, was the United Kingdom’s insistence that no power could dominate the Low Lands of the Netherlands and later Belgium because if they could, it would threaten an invasion of the British Isles, plus their massive exports of wool textiles, fueling the nascent industrial revolution. Smart, if ruthless policy.

Second, we must understand France‘s main goal during the wars of this time (and for several centruies prior) was to ensure a divided Germany. So long as the German states were littered into 100 different little principalities France had nothing to worry about. Thus France could go on dominating the continent. The first seismic change to this was the War of the Sixth Coalition which saw for the first time Russia flex its true potential when Russian troops occupied Paris. France’s cataclysm occured not in 1941 but in 1870 with her defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The result of which was Prussia unifying all of Germany into one empire, adding insult to injury by having the Kaiser crowned in Versailles and taking Alsace Lorraine away as its prize.

Fuse those two strategies together and it is not too far an intellectual leap, considering the Great Game going on at the time between the UK and the Russian Empire, for Mackinder to conjure up his ideas. Were his ideas taken up by the United Kingdom? You bet, but by 1917 when it was clear that the United Kingdom could no longer maintain the balance of power in Europe and the United States had to intervene, (everyone should read AJP Taylor’s magnum opus, The Struggle For Mastery in Europe, to understand the balance of power and its collapse in 1917) US foreign policy intellectuals adopted it. And rightly so.

I think it’s the correct idea. But my reasons for thinking it’s the correct idea are not gonna make many of you happy. You might have to face some hard truths. Oh yeah, I did tell you I was a Realist in the old school manner of the word? In fact there have been a few times when Ian has chastened me pretty seriously for my realism. With that admisssion I will make another one: I don’t mind the criticism from Ian or from others. Ian is probably the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life and I listen to what he has to say. And when I say listen to him, I mean, I consider his words deeply. A man who cannot change his mind will never change anything. Nevertheless, I digress.

Here are my reasons for why I believe the prevention of a single hostile power or coalition of hostile powers from dominating the Eurasian landmass is smart policy. Please, if you take anything away from this sentence, take the meaning hostile. 

Number one: the Monroe Doctrine. Oh, I hear you screaming already. But the fact is that if this were not “our” hemisphere, not a one of us would have the standard of living we do today. Our hegemony of the Western Hemisphere is the primary foundation of our wealth and our power. You might not like it. I grimace frequently at the crimes we comitt to protect it. But, the Westphalian System is not built on justice. It is built on the acceptance of international anarchy. Each nation to its own. There is no single sovereign power governing planet Earth. Thus, violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. Is this a grim Hobbesian outlook? Yes. I don’t like it and I’m pretty sure you don’t either. But as a realist, I take the world as it is, not as I desire it to be. A hostile power or coalition of hostile powers that dominate Eurasia can take that hegemony away. You might not like it but trust me when I say you don’t want that to happen.

Second, a hostile power or coalition of hostile powers that dominate Eurasia can take more than our hegemony away, it/they can invade us. We don’t want that either. Thus we have a powerful navy that projects power to keep Eurasia divided–for the time being, because I think if we get into a war with China, their indirect way of war–read your Sun Tzu–will probably outwit us on the high seas. I’ve spent a great deal of time in China and have a healthy fear of their capabilities. However, my greatest fear is that in our arrogance we will engender the very hostility we must prevent and by our own devices bring about the doom we should seek to avoid. We have lost our edge, our generosity of spirit and our understanding of power. We have become a mean spirited, two-bit, cheap and vulgar people. And sadly, because so many of us are beaten down economically by rich elites who are delusional, we’re going to lose a big war in a painful way. A war that could be avoided, but probably won’t be. I hope I’m wrong, but don’t think I am.

That said, these very wise words, written by Robert D. Kaplan recently, convey the gravity of our present predicament, “There is no prediction. It is only through coming to terms with the past and vividly, realizing the present that we can have premonitions about the future.” Moreover, as a wise woman wrote about history, “the more I study history, the more I learn the art of prophecy.” Deeply contradictory statements, yet both true in their essence.

Are we any more perceptive now about what awaits our planet than were the Russians of 1917, or all of Europe in 1914, and, for that matter, the Germans of the 1920s and the early 30s?

Do we honestly think we know better than they did? With all of our gadgets and our technological triumphalism I bet you there are a handful of you out there that think we do know better than they did. I hate to disappoint you, but we don’t. History is the story of contingency and human agency, not inevtiablity.

So, there it is. Rip me to shreds if you wish. I’ve suffered enough Shakespearean arrows of outrageous fortune in my 54 years to handle it. In fact, I welcome your ideas and if you got this far I’m grateful for your time.

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If You Understand Only One Thing About Chinese Government

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On September 2, 2025

4 Comments

It should be that almost always they do what they promise, and they meet their goals. An American-Chinese silicon valley type spent some time in China recently (I don’t agree wit the whole article, but you should read it), and among the bits that stood out to me was this:

In the US, when politicians make campaign promises, I never actually expect them to follow through. But Chinese leaders do—for better and for worse. The 2025 plans to build 1,350 Shenzhen parks or reduce China’s energy dependence aren’t mere propaganda. (Neither, tragically, was the one-child policy.) Accountability is built into China’s bureaucratic system through KPIs, and you can see the results firsthand.

This echoes what Naomi Wu noted: that the Communist party attains their goals, and that many of them are the smartest most capable people she knows. (I think the one child policy wasn’t a mistake, as it happens, though it probably continued too long.)

This chart is of average rent as a percentage of income.

As a westerner this is mind boggling. My entire life rent prices have just increased and increased and increased. So have housing prices. One of my big criticisms of China for years was that they had overly-relied on housing bubbles to fund their growth and that it was causing significant discontent. Every young Chinese person mentioned it as a problem.

So then they just… went and fixed it? And yes, it’s been painful, and led to some softness in the economy, but when it’s done, the economy will be much stronger. (See, “China is Transitioning, and So far successfully“).

China faced a challenge during Trump’s first term: he slapped export controls on chips. They didn’t have a significant domestic industry. So they built one. They knew that if America had done this with one industry, they could do it with all, so they set a national goal to become self sufficient industrially: to be able to make everything they needed. As this was happening, they realized housing was too expensive, so they made that part of the solution, they rotated investment out of real estate into industry.

To a Westerner who has lived their entire adult life under neo-liberalism, this is mind-boggling. Wait, the government can “just do things?” And when it decides to do things, it succeeds? It isn’t just bullshit?

I mean do things other than de-regulate and say “well there isn’t anything we can really do, this is just how the world is.” Do things other than just make the rich even richer? Do things other than constantly de-funding science and engineering and the humanities? Do things other than making medicine fantastically expensive? Do something other than blowing another asset bubble?

I’m 57, and I remember the world before neoliberalism, but I remember it as a child. In my entire adult life I have not seen a Western government capable of doing what China does: set an important goal which benefits the population as a whole and crush it.

China is winning because China deserves to win, because it is better run. I’m not going to whitewash it: there are a lot of things I don’t like about how China is run. But bottom line, it’s run more for the benefit of ordinary citizens than most Western countries, and those countries which seem to be run for the benefit of the population as a whole are running on legacy systems: the entire EU it seems, is considering gutting their social welfare systems to spend more money on American weapons. For my entire life things have been getting slowly worse in France and Germany, and quickly worse in the UK. In China, on the other hand, life keeps getting better for the majority of the population.

Are you worried about Democracy? You should be. But one simple threat is this: China isn’t a democracy and its actions clearly benefit the majority of its people more than the actions of American or British or EU governments benefit their people.

Democracy isn’t just a something word you wave around. If it doesn’t produce better results, people will stop believing in it.

China’s winning because the CCP gets results and the results it chooses to get are, much more often than in the West, good for the majority of its people. That means it deserves to win, and we deserve to lose.

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