It seems that we hear everyday about the evil Russians. They are hacking our businesses, hacking our military and our allies for top secret information, still interfering in our elections, and doing everything they can to take us down. We are told that they are building up their military so that they can go “head to head” with NATO, and that their weapons R&D is so superior to ours that they are making weapons that we have no defenses for. It is said that Vlad Putin is in the process of resurrecting the old Soviet Union, and that they are back and challenging our world leadership. Nothing could be farther from the truth!
The Russian economy is roughly 1/12th of ours. Russia has 5X the people of Texas, yet the Texas economy is roughly $500 billion larger than that of Russia. Russia’s military is dwarfed by the US military. With the exception of nuclear warheads where they are roughly equal to ours, we outclass them in every other way. We spend 8X as much as they do in annual military budget, and our Navy and Air Force is larger and far superior to theirs. Our ground troops are somewhat smaller, but better equipped and able to project power worldwide, whereas they are a land based force. They have many more tanks, but ours are qualitatively better and capable of defeating theirs in large numbers. They have more artillery, but that is trumped by our Naval and Air Force air superiority. That said, they are a nuisance, but they are not the boogeyman that our media and our Leftists make them out to be.
China however is a different story. They have in the last 40 years, come from economic obscurity to prominence, and are now the 2nd largest economy in the world, at roughly 65% of the USA economy. Their military, once considered one of the most antiquated in the world, has rapidly modernized and although not nearly as well organized or effective as the US, they are rapidly reaching parity with us when close to their mainland. They have for these 40 years implemented a long-term plan to eventually overtake us both economically and militarily, and have been very successful. They have in mind to displace our world leadership with their own, and take us down hard by creating a Chinese world hegemony. They are down that path already, creating the new “Silk Road”, investing in countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Russia to build a way to get to Western Europe economically with lightening speed. They are also partnering with Russia and many countries in Africa to create economic pathways for raw materials and energy needs that they cannot satisfy at home, and in the process creating new alliances and new markets for this goal of worldwide hegemony. One should now ask a few questions: Why aren’t we more focused on this threat, and how did they become so prosperous and powerful in such a short time? The answers to both these questions will shock you, for reasons that you may not expect!
40 years ago, President Nixon, on the advice of Henry Kissinger, created detente with the Communist Chinese. There was much made out of this historic venture, and every administration from Nixon to Obama doubled down on getting closer to China. This was advice coming from Ivy League educated advisors that reasoned that being closer to China with trade was a good thing, and that the more prosperous that country became, the more likely that they would eventually embrace a capitalist themed democratic republic. These advisors, some of the same that brought us into Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other failed foreign adventures sold their bill of goods successfully to all of these administrations. Trade barriers were lifted, and in fact George W. Bush actually had his administration put on seminars for American business showing how to relocate manufacturing to China. All of this fell nicely into China’s long-term plan, and we naively assisted them with their accelerated growth that eventually created our own greatest challenge, a China that has every intention of eliminating us from the world stage.
Although not in writing, verbally the Chinese government insisted that in order for our businesses to penetrate the Chinese market, they would have to transfer their technology to their Chinese counterparts, and many businesses, including those that are deemed critical to our national defense, did do that. In addition, China systematically hacked our military contractors to acquire defense secrets that took decades of work and billions of dollars to acquire, giving them technological parity in many areas with us not only militarily but economically too. In short, China grew off the backs of the naivety of US government, businesses, and what they could not get by asking, they simply stole. All the while, our Ivy League advisors were telling us that this was OK, and that in the end a better, more accommodating China would be the eventual result. They could not have been more wrong!
The only administration that has “kicked backed” from this suicidal policy has been the Trump administration, with the initial volley through trade sanctions. This “kick back” is long overdue and has had some effect already. Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Dictator is now having issues that will be difficult for him to solve. His biggest nightmare is a restless population, and the sanctions and threat of more to come is taking its toll. His bet is that we are too weak as a society to prevail in the trade war. He believes that the short-term pain will be too much for a Democratic Republic to bear, that the weakness of our system will not allow us to win. His Communist dictatorship can use propaganda and force to insure that his people will give him time for us to fail, but that is only a theory, and it needs to be played out. Unrest in China is building, and his method to control that may just backfire.