America's Real Competition

America seems to have lost its mind. Its rational faculties have gone to seed and it is running around headless exclaiming that the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.

It was all collusion. If it wasn’t collusion, it was treason. It was worse than Pearl Harbor, worse than the attack on the World Trade Center. We would call it Armageddon, but we need to reserve that one for the Trump tax reform bill.

Anyway, the intellectual elites are out there trying to overturn the result of a fair election in the name of defending democracy. Why do we think that these people are so smart?

Anyway, if you worship at the Church of the Liberal Pieties you must believe that the Russians colluded with the Trump campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton. How else could Hillary have lost?

Roger Kimball explains:

All of a sudden it was Russia, morning, noon, and night. Donald Trump must have ‘colluded’ with the Ruskies. It was the only answer to the otherwise imponderable question: how could Hillary Clinton lose? Every-one knew that she was a shoo-in, just as everyone knew that Donald Trump was a vulgar buffoon whose candidacy was a bad joke.

The only fly in this ointment was that no one could find any evidence that Trump had colluded with the Russians. This was not for lack of looking. The Democrats managed to saddle the Trump administration with a special counsel to investigate the charge.

A few sensible souls, possessing integrity, have offered that this is nonsense. One of the best, Stephen Cohen at The Nation has been saying that the current hysteria about Russia is making it far more difficult for the two nations to address any international issues together. A sensible point, well worth noting.

Kimball adds another salient point, namely that America’s real competitor on the world stage is not Russia, but China:

The second irony is that even as the media are running around skirling about the Russians, China is methodically extending its web of influence and power. We have all read about its encroachments in the South China Sea. This vast and weaponised manmade archipelago is a brazen attempt to extend China’s territorial claims and secure its hegemony in that part of the world.

Hardly a day goes by without another news story about China’s military and technological advances. As I write, a prominent tech website warns that the US is no longer guaranteed military technology dominance. ‘China is rapidly growing its fighter plane and stealth fighter capabilities,’ it warns. ‘China has developed competitive air-to-air missile capabilities.’

China has also become expert at projecting soft power. Consider the Confucius Institutes, Chinese government-sponsored cultural centres, that have sprung up at universities across the US. Not only are they potential havens for spies, they are mouthpieces for the Chinese government to disseminate the party line. As Peter Mattis, a former US intelligence analyst, noted, the institutes ‘are an instrument of the party’s power, not a support for independent scholarship’. Senator Rubio made the same point. ‘It’s a long-term, patient approach,’ he said. But then the Chinese are known for patience. Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, was once asked whether the French Revolution was a success. ‘It is too soon to say,’ he replied.

Politically correct elites in America are screaming about Russian interference. Meanwhile, a grave, multifaceted threat is coalescing just beyond the horizon of their consciousness. When will they wake up?

Now, you might see China as a threat. Or you might consider it a competitor. You might note that China’s expanding military presence in the South China Sea happened during the Obama administration. At the time, no one paid it much attention.

But, you will also note, as we have reported on this blog, that China wants very much to compete against the United States in the worlds of business, technology and commerce. It is building up its military technology at a rapid pace, too. 

And you will also note, that the American left does not want to engage in that kind of competition, in the marketplace, the playing field, the battlefield or the arena.

It is fighting supposed Russian election collusion because it wants to fight about minds and ideas. The American left had thought that it had fully and completely occupied the American mind… to the point where it was in complete control. After all, what with its monopoly control over the media and the educational establishment it had submitted American children and adults to constant indoctrination for decades now. How could Americans fail to vote the way their philosopher kings wanted them to vote?

The struggle against imaginary Russian collusion bespeaks another monumental failure. The struggle over democracy is a fight over an idea. The idealist faction of the American intelligentsia believes, as an article of faith, that the nation's success or failure will depend on whether it lives up to its ideals. Democracy is one; social justice is another.

Our Asian competitors are more pragmatic and more empirically minded. They are competing in industry, commerce, technology and the military. They care whether it works, not how it feels. They do not care, as Deng Xiaoping famously said, whether the cat is white or black. They care about whether it catches mice. 

We are masking our fear of competition with China with a hue and cry over our precious, sacred democracy— one that only succeeds when the people do what their overlords tell them to do.