Fred Reed on the U.S. cold war with China

In pondering Washington’s new toy, a cold war against China, one sees a pattern.  China’s approach to influence and prosperity is commercial and longsighted.  This does not mean that the Chinese are warm and fuzzy, only intelligent.  They advance their interests while turning a profit, which wars don’t.  China invests heavily in the infrastructure, both physical and educational, that makes for current and future competitiveness.  They are fast, agile, innovative, and imperfectly scrupulous...  Washington’s approach is military, coercive, shortsighted, and commercially dimwitted.

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China’s major capital expenditures, as gleaned as best I can from pubs covering these: highways, dams, bridges, very-high-voltage power lines, airports, rail, new high-tech 360 mph rail, five-g implementation, reactors, and semiconductor catchup.  America’s major capital expenditures: the B-21, F-35, Virginia-class subs, Ford-class aircraft carriers, SSN (x) attack submarine.

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What is a Ford-class carrier good for?  The Fords are versatile ships, having a three-fold purpose: Funneling lots of money into military industry, killing defenseless peasants, and sticking the Pentagon’s tongue out at China. Killing peasants and soldiers in third-rate armies of bedraggled third-world countries is what the American military does.  Think Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Somalia. Getting into big wars with real countries is no longer practical despite the opportunities for profits because big countries depend on each other too much commercially.  Even killing peasants begins to lose cache, as witness the comic opera defeat in Afghanistan..

~ Fred Reed, "A Military Solution to a Commercial Problem: It Probably Ain't Gonna Work Much Longer," The Unz Review, September 13, 2021