China is weaker than we thought. Will we change our policies accordingly? reads the head for Fareed Zakaria’s latest column, which I found cogent in the extreme, Fareed noting that, way back in 1992, when he was, well, managing editor of Foreign Affairs—“my first full-time job,” he notes—so humble!—“everyone” thought that Japan was going to take over the world, more or less, despite the collapse of the Japanese stock market in 1989, a setback that marked the beginning of Japan’s now permanent also-ran status.
Flash-forward to 2022 and, Fareed asks, isn’t China starting to look awfully “Japanese”? Fareed gives us a nice overview of all the setbacks and fumbles that the Middle Kingdom has experienced ever since Xi Jinping decided that that “King of the World” shit looked like a lot of fun.
I totally agree with just about everything Zakaria says in this column, including his takedown of China’s once-celebrated “Belt and Road Initiative”, but I have to ask myself, “Wouldn’t it have been ‘nice’ if some wise person had foreseen all of this, and had spared us—Fareed Zakaria in particular, of course—all the heartburn and sleepless nights we endured thanks to the spectre of China rising? But who could have been so prescient? Who? Who?”
Well, Alan Vanneman, that’s who, as I wrote in a post way back in 2015, in which I accused Fareed of “mixing marmalade with applesauce,” although the relevance of that metaphor now eludes me. However, the point was, however obliquely I made it, that Fareed’s cry of “The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!” contained more emotion than thought. So it’s good to see that Fareed is coming around, although, since he had seen this same movie 30 years ago, with the Japanese “menace” in the starring role, he might have gotten the picture a few years earlier.
Anyway, the main point is, Xi Jinping’s China, like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, suffer from sadly corrupt and repulsive leaders. Both should be handled with care, with restraint, and, yes, even respect, as “great” powers though not admirable cultures. But they are not “adversaries”. Unlike the Soviet Union, they are not cultures who derive their ultimate sanction for being the leaders of a pre-destined world revolution. They are greedy and selfish, but they are not “driven” as the USSR was, with all its sclerotic bureaucratic corruption, which ultimately made it a shambling laughing stock, unable to bear the weight of its own incompetence.
Neither Russia nor China are likely to collapse soon, in significant part because they do not bear the weight of the USSR’s global pretensions, something I briefly discussed a few years ago in this post complimenting Kevin Williamson for also talking sense when it came to the Chinese “menace”. If only the world doesn’t make sense to America’s military intellectual complex without an “Adversary”!
