Thursday, September 10, 2015

America: Its Own Worst Enemy In Asia?

Like a hapless soccer team persistently kicking the ball into its own goal, Washington has shown a perverse knack for responding with policies that do more to weaken than strengthen the U.S. position.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

America is its own worst enemy everywhere, Home and Abroad...Its people LET CORRUPTION take over...What did/do you expect to happen? You can't seriously ask that question with a straight face unless you are completely clueless to how bad the corruption is...I hope Mike that you are asking that as a rhetorical question....Sign me, Neal Jensen

Anonymous said...

Mistake #1 yet repeated over and over ad nauseam is to deal with people of other lands as if they were Americans with a funny accent.

Chiu ChunLing said...

China is America's worst enemy in Asia. The narrative that Beijing is a reactive nation that is guided by circumstances rather than long-term plans is unspeakably naive and dangerous. America is the reactive nation with a short attention span (linked to the electoral cycle), even when compared with allies like Japan and Korea (who still consider themselves strategic competitors with each other in the context of their security relationship with America). But the myth persists more because Beijing is clever at manipulating the narrative than because American leaders are total idiots.

What China is doing now is what Beijing has been planning for decades (I don't know how long exactly, I've only been seriously observing their plans for the last two decades, and there is no reliable documentation). Beijing does react to emergent circumstances, of course, but the way they react is largely determined by how they view developments as possibly serving or hindering their long term plan, which is to force a catastrophic dollar collapse at a moment when the U.S. appears too weak to enforce the dollar's reserve currency status through 'gunboat diplomacy'. Under Xi, this plan has taken an aggressive turn as it became apparent that the U.S. military was resisting all the political and economic pressures which were supposed to hollow out it's credibility as a credible superpower military (it also has been expanded to involve a global currency collapse by destroying the Euro and Yen as well, though I think Beijing probably always needed to take Japan's money off the table to really hit the dollar, but there would have been ways to do that without the opportunity Abenomics has exposed).

Beijing is intentionally betting trillions on a major U.S. embarrassment before the end of the year. I don't believe Xi intends to passively await developments, the response to Putin's half-naked aggression has been disappointing (the lack of a credible ability to respond effectively disappoints me, but given that the U.S. can't really respond, I'm just as happy to have it appear that Obama simply doesn't care).