On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:53:26 -0700, PaPaPeng wrote:



This long thread is evidence that the Chinese are already messing up
your minds from across the Pacific and in your own front yard (1.2%.)
Do the South Asians (Indians), Russians, Europeans, Arabs, anyone else
out there?, pose the same amount of concern about your place in the
global scene? Nope. China has displaced the USSR as your enemy #1.

It doesn't help that China has decided that we're their primary enemy
too, and I can recall one speech by Chi Haotian that makes me rather
nervous when I think of it. If you look at Chinese foreign policy for the
last twenty five years or so, it strongly resembles a Weiqi game on a
board designed by Halford MacKinder and Karl Hausehoffer.

I've got to give them a great deal of credit though. We build weapons and
hope that we can come up with the logistics to deploy and support them.
The Chinese built the logistical structure first and deferred weapons
acquisition until they could support it. We could learn something from
that,...

It's one of the big reasons that I hope that we don't attack Iran,
(another SCO member) and that we get out of the Middle East. If you ask
que bono, the only winner regardless of what we do or how well, will be
Beijing.

In the end, I hope we stay out of a direct armed conflict in any case.
We're a post industrial technological power with a rapidly declining
industrial base while China is a rising industrial power and the
preeminent industrial power on the planet-- what we were in WW-II. Given
our lack of convertable industrial base and our tendency to buy boutique
weapons systems that are too precious to hazard and impossible to replace
in wartime, all China has to do in order to win is simply not lose.

I'd just as soon avoid two things. First a modern equivalent of the
Russo-Japanese War with us playing the Czar's part, and a situation where
we both work to exhaust each other like the Persians and the Byzantines,
since in the end, your Islamic proxies would come to devour us both.
(Which may be their intention. They study history too.)
--
"Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral
Elmo Zumwalt, USN.