Daniel McAdams on competition between the U.S. and China

Jeff Deist: Even among libertarian audiences there are people who say China is a real threat to the United States.  China is biding its time and hoping we suffer an economic fall here.  Those people at the Mises Institute who talk about secession would simply open the door for a weakened America to let the Chinese lion in.

Daniel McAdams: What would they do?  Take California?  I had lunch with my good friend Colonel Douglas McGregor and he said, our military is still fighting the idea of territorial warfare.  The rest of the world has given up on this idea.  You don't go and fight and take over.  Right now, we've taken over 30 percent of Syria.  What are we doing there?  Nobody knows.  We're the only country in the world that goes around looking to put in bases and get territory overseas.  What does it give us?  It seems to me the last thing that the Chinese would ever want would be to "own" most of the U.S.  You know, first of all, it's a basket case.  They've got their own basket case because of the economic problems they have.  Why would they want to inherit something worse?  It would be a disaster.  The real Chinese threat is that the Chinese do capitalism better than we do.  We go overseas and we overthrow governments, we take over media, we push people around, we push gay rights.  The Chinese go overseas and make business deals in foreign countries and they get the stuff they want.  They get the rare earths.  They build factories.  And that's the real reason that the Chinese will certaintly outpace us in the future.

~ Daniel McAdams, "All the Trouble in the World," The Austrian, November-December 2021