Category: Policy

Barry Briggs

Every educated American should visit China.

Why?

Because much of you’ve heard on the news is wrong. It’s fragmentary, sensationalized, often biased, and doesn’t paint the full picture.

Not that I can based on just my first trip to mainland China, lasting just less than a month, but here are a few (warning: opinionated) perspectives.

Our Trip and a Few Caveats

We visited the Middle Kingdom in April and May of 2026, touring many of the major tourist attractions and sites: the Great Wall, Forbidden City, the terra-cotta warriors in Xi’an, the extraordinary Avatar Mountains in Zhangjiajie, the marvelous Bund in Shanghai, and, of course, the pandas – among others.

To be clear, ours was a carefully curated itinerary. We stayed at the best hotels, enjoyed private guides and drivers, and in general traveled in comfort. (We very highly recommend WildChina as a tour operator, if you’re interested.)

What We Loved in China

There’s lots to like about China. Despite all the negative reporting we see here in the US, we found it modern, cosmopolitan, and the people unflaggingly friendly. Here are a few things that surprised us:

Infrastructure is Amazing

We were all over the country. Everywhere the highways and main roads were smooth, well-paved and up to date – not a pothole to be found anywhere. Many were lined with mile after mile of flowers: one guide told us that they close the highways in the middle of the night to water and fertilize them! In the countryside highways were usually bordered with trees and shrubs; and very few (there were some, to be clear) billboards littered them. None for personal-injury attorneys.

5G connectivity was available literally everywhere with excellent response times. Even on the tops of the mountains we climbed (or ascended in comfortable cable cars) I had no trouble. (I was testing a web application I wrote which runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud back in the US – and got as good if not better response time up on the peaks than at home.)

I’ll talk about the Great Firewall in a moment, however.

China is Very Safe

Yes, China is a surveillance society. There are cameras everywhere.

But as a result street crimes are virtually nonexistent. No pickpockets (as in Europe, or for that matter, New York). None. With all the cameras they wouldn’t dare. You can hold your wallet up and no one will take it.

In Xi’an we visited the crowded terra-cotta warrior museum (amazing). We were jostled everywhere. I never feared for my expensive camera or phone.

I have to admit, I liked it.

Bullet Trains: Wow

China is in the midst of a building spree for high-speed trains; we here in the US are at least a decade behind. From Beijing to Xi’an, from Xi’an to Chengdu, and other routes, we thoroughly enjoyed the trains, travelling upwards of 340km/hour (over 200mph).

WildChina reserved “Business Class” seats for us, which on the trains is more luxurious than first class. The seats are larger and more comfortable than first-class on airlines; well-dressed attendants serve snacks and drinks; you can get up and walk around anytime (no seat belts! – hey, it’s the little things); you don’t have to go through invasive security as at airports; and, above all, they are consistently on time to the minute. The train stations – which are huge – sport pleasant lounges for business-class travelers.

We loved the trains and will miss them.

Why can’t we have them here? I have some thoughts at the end of this essay.

The Quiet City Streets

In 2025, over half the cars sold in China were EVs. Let that sink in for a moment.

You can tell an EV in China as they possess green license plates where gas-powered cars have blue ones. From what I could tell, overall the number of EVs on the road easily matched the gas-powered ones (there are tax incentives as there used to be here).

Why are there so many EVs? One reason is that, unlike the US, in China there is a nationwide network of charging stations. And charging is much cheaper than filling up with gas. We were supposed to be building such a network after the Infrastructure Act — but it didn’t happen. Why?

Now, there are traffic jams in the Chinese cities just as there are here. And some bad ones: we were there during the 5-day May Day (they call it Labor Day) holidays: whew! But many Chinese get around the cities on scooters (think Vespas) except nearly all are electric, which means they’re dead silent – and clean.

They do, however, tend to sneak up on you when you’re walking.

Speaking of Cars…

Nearly all the cars we saw on the crowded streets were relatively new; not a clunker to be found anywhere! (I suspect the reason has to do with the sudden inflow of money from the West within the last decade or so — all that cheap stuff from Amazon and Wal-Mart!).

I like cars. And I lusted after several. Xiaomi makes a lovely little sports car somewhat reminiscent (but way cheaper) of a Porsche, for example.

We visited the Huawei (yes, that Huawei) flagship store in Shanghai and there was a full-size SUV there I’d give my eye teeth for. Wraparound video on the dash, electronic seats, gorgeous interior, fully electric of course – all for around $60K US.

Of course you can’t get them here and I have some thoughts on that at the end.

Electrification

Much has been made in the West about the human cost of the massive investments China has made in hydroelectric power, that is, dams: in particular, the Three Gorges Dam, the largest in the world, which displaced over million people during construction. And to their credit, China makes no secret of the fact.

That said, however, the enormous amount of renewable energy the dams create powers the vast network of trains mentioned above, as well as the explosive expansion of the southeastern cities of Chongqing (population almost 4x that of NYC), Chengdu (2.5x), and of course the bright lights of Shanghai (3x).

Electricity is the great enabler.

Alipay

The internet giant Alibaba owns a payment service called Alipay. It’s like Apple Pay or Google Pay but more convenient and far more ubiquitous. To pay for anything – and I mean anything, from high-end meals to souvenirs on the street to (we did this) a drone video on the top of a mountain to street beggars – you whip out your phone, load up your personal Alipay barcode, the vendor scans, and boom. You’re done. I loved the convenience and simplicity.

Communist, Shmommunist

Yes, China is a Communist country with an authoritarian government and central economic planning.

But private enterprise thrives, from small shops to giant companies like Huawei, Alibaba, and DeepSeek (the AI company challenging US firms). And walking along South Nanjing Street in Shanghai, you’d could swear you were strolling a modern version of Fifth Avenue in New York – if not for all the Chinese characters. (At the three-story Nike flagship store I had my feet electronically measured and purchased customized sneakers: most comfortable footwear I’ve ever owned.) All the major Western luxury brands – Louis Vuitton (who built a Titanic-themed store with a museum), Rolex, and so on, are well represented, as are a number of Chinese luxury stores.

Now it’s true: the central government helps, cooperates with, partners with, and in many cases outright owns large Chinese firms: major banks, airlines, construction firms, telecoms.

Then again, the US government recently took a 10% stake in Intel, numerous investments in lithium and rare earth firms, steel, and semiconductors (e.g., Nvidia and AMD). These aren’t ownership like the Chinese SOEs (state-owned enterprises), to be clear; but to some it might all just be a matter of degree.

You be the judge.

Things in China We Weren’t Crazy About

China isn’t perfect: far from it.

The Great Firewall

China blocks many Western websites, especially news and social media sites including the Washington Post, New York Times, and Facebook – all of which I use. It is beyond annoying.

You can usually get around it. If you’re a Westerner with a Western cell service like Verizon and international roaming, you can (usually) get to any site. I also had an eSim which also bypassed the firewall and the combination (I was never exactly sure which route the phone took, but it didn’t matter). I emphasize “usually.”

My laptop was a different story. On it I’d loaded a VPN: results varied. Sometimes it worked great on the hotel wi-fi. In other hotels it didn’t work at all or was sporadic. Sometimes it would work for a few minutes and then something would kick in – perhaps somewhere the VPN was detected – and it would stop working.

I don’t understand what China is afraid of.

Free Speech

While the Chinese I met were, on the whole, voluble, politics was an area that drew reticence or even silence. One person mentioned a friend who had posted something critical about the government recently only to have the police show up as a warning.

But all were cautiously curious about how we felt about the state of the United States. Only one Chinese we met explicitly asked how we felt about Trump; and he opened up when we said, well, in a nutshell, we don’t like him.

“I approve of my government,” he said. Another mentioned her ninety-odd-year-old grandmother, who enjoyed a great government pension, ample food, excellent healthcare: “she loves her government,” she said. I’m certain she meant it.

I countered with “I don’t care for the people running our government now. But I have confidence in our system of government.”

However, they’re not entirely without snark. There’s a joke that CCTV (China Central Television) news is “10 minutes of busy Chinese leaders, 10 minutes of happy Chinese people, and 10 minutes of crime and chaos in the US.”

Cookie-Cutter Apartment Buildings

The “Chinese dream,” if there is one, does not include a house. Instead, city-dwellers live in row after row of high-rise apartment buildings, huge groves of them, all roughly twenty stories high and thin, so that all occupants have a window on one side or the other. These massive forests of apartments go on and on, sometimes from the train window reaching the horizon.

I jokingly asked a guide “how does anyone find their home?” in row after row of identically constructed buildings? He didn’t find it funny.

There’s plenty of evidence that these were overbuilt; we saw several “ghost towns” of unoccupied buildings. Although one guide did try to downplay the effects, many prominent real estate developers have gone bust in recent years and the crisis continues.

The Food

Wasn’t crazy about it. Bland for the most part: if you like spicy, you have to ask for hot sauce (they call it chili sauce). The exception was in Chengdu (in Szechuan province) where they serve “hot pots” which are, well, beyond spicy: the Szechuan peppercorn actually numbs your tongue (we thought it was an allergic reaction at first).

And if you’re vegetarian like my wife you’re kind of out of luck: everything is pork, pork, pork, with some chicken and some beef.

Closing Thoughts

We learned a lot on this trip: as they say, travel provides you with perspective.

China is a Fearsome Competitor

For the first time in America’s history, we face a nation that truly presents long-term, existential competition. They have made the core investments (with lots of our money, as mentioned above, that Amazon and Wal-Mart send for cheap goods) that set them up for success over decades if not centuries.

We in the US made such investments in the 1950s and 1960s – think for example the interstate highway system – but China has equaled or surpassed us.

And they continue to build: we witnessed many high-speed train tracks and bridges under construction. By contrast we are hobbled by litigation, by short-sighted regulation, and by billionaires’ self-interest. Above all, the trillions we could have invested on infrastructure we have chosen instead to use on useless, valueless military adventures.

We must learn to build again.

Protectionism Hurts Consumers

I really want one of those inexpensive electric Huawei SUVs. But I can’t buy one here.

This is partly because of the “Connected Vehicles Final Rule,” released by the US Department of Commerce, which explicitly prohibits the import or sale of connected vehicle systems designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by Chinese or Russian-related – the key word being “connected.” Since every modern car is somehow connected to the internet, that means essentially every car from China (or Russia, but who cares).

The law is, in theory, aimed at protecting US industry and workers: a laudable goal. But it fails in the far more important aim of protecting the US consumer, who is forced to pay artificially inflated, anticompetitive prices. Let’s also remember that the history of protectionism – the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, which raised tariffs, catastrophically backfired, worsening the Great Depression, comes to mind – is not a good one. (Read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s terrific history 1929 for more detail.)

Now, the US government has demonized companies like Huawei for their alleged connections to the Chinese intelligence community and military. This is an important concern – but it could be addressed. Just as Microsoft provides the source code to Windows to China (as it does to every government), so too could Huawei provide its code to the US for auditing.

But I don’t think the US government wants to address it. I suspect that the car companies – and Elon Musk in particular – heavily lobby against the import of inexpensive Chinese cars (in fact, Ford CEO Jim Farley recently said that Chinese car brands like BYD are the “best in the business”). It’s no wonder they’re afraid.

The Chinese, on the other hand, have allowed Tesla to build a large factory south of Shanghai; Model 3s and Model Ys are popular – as is, inexplicably to me, Buick.

I think we should let the Chinese cars in just as they have let American cars into China. Let the buyers decide. That’s what free-market capitalism is…isn’t it?

Bullet Trains

It’s ridiculous. The high-speed rail project in California, connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, has been underway since 2015 and has no confirmed completion date.

Are the airlines quietly lobbying against bullet trains? Maybe, but I doubt it. More likely it’s just bureaucratic bullshit.

As we’ve seen with our own eyes, the benefits of high-speed rail are obvious and amazing.

We should be ashamed. There’s no excuse for this.

And Finally

Before our trip I read Dan Wang’s excellent Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, in which he argues that the key difference between the US and China is this: China’s leaders (the Central Committee) are largely engineers by trade; ours (the Congress) are nearly all lawyers.

Which means China knows how to build stuff, perhaps trampling civil liberties in the process. When it comes to infrastructure and construction, they are unequaled, perhaps only matching the US of half a century ago.

As he points out, however, China’s attempts at social engineering, such as the one-child policy of the 80s and 90s, have often been failures or even disasters.

The US, by contrast, places a high premium on civil rights, and we should be proud of that. We have a much more diverse country than China, in which some 90% are ethnic Han, and – on the whole – we have made great progress equalizing opportunity for all.

Still: we have got to learn to build again. The simple fact is, like it or not, the Great Competition in our children’s generation and for generations to come will be between the American and Chinese ways of life. Not Japan nor South Korea nor the EU can threaten us – but China can.

Right now, while both countries have enormous strengths and huge problems, I would say this: while all the construction in China has come at a cost, there is also undeniable, near-universal civic pride in their progress that is honestly felt. Here in the US, we’ve become so cynical about government and Big Anything that it’s nearly impossible to get anything done.

We have to undo this knot. It’s killing us.

by Barry Briggs

The world has changed over the past decade. Not long ago, international politics was dominated by the United States and supported by smaller, but wealthy countries with Western democratic values. Now the power and influence wielded by the US and its allies is in decline – a decline, I argue, is accelerating.

Power hates even the hint of a vacuum. Two countries – Russia and China – whose interests and values are inimical to those of the West are assuming their place in a new tripartite world. In different ways they seek to extend their power across the globe while suppressing, violently in many cases, the rights and freedoms of individuals and whole minority groups.

Russia

In 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin famously told an audience that the fall of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” It’s an obvious conclusion that the attempted invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of the Crimea in 2014, and the current, disastrous war in Ukraine are all part of a larger plan to restore the USSR.

However, it’s my view that Putin – an extremely intelligent, cunning leader – seeks rather to emulate the 17^th century Tsar Peter the Great, whom he frequently mentions in speeches. Peter, who ruled as an absolute monarch for 43 years, was a brilliant polymath credited with modernizing backwards Russia – and expanded its borders both east and west. Peter is Putin’s role model.

But Putin is not mired in the past. He is a modern man well versed in current technologies, as this remarkable dialog with PhDs and postdocs in St. Petersburg a few years ago demonstrates. And his five-hour end-of-year press conferences (most recently, here) much of which are ad lib interactions with journalists demonstrate clear, perhaps unmatched among leaders, intellectual agility.

However, Putin, a former KGB agent, is – frankly – hamstrung by his abject hatred of the West and in particular of the United States. He, and most Russians, hold the US responsible for the collapse of the USSR, and while most Americans believe the Cold War over, Putin and Russia see the USSR’s downfall only as a setback. The war continues. That then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted, in Putin’s view, to interfere with the 2014 Russian elections was for him unforgivable, and continued evidence of America’s desire to weaken Russia – and Putin.

Putin’s strategy toward world and Russian affairs, then, can be summed up as follows:

• Expand Russia’s borders either directly or with client states to buffer against the US-dominated NATO alliance. Hence the war in Ukraine; and all sorts of mischief in Eastern European countries.
  
  
• Expand trade with friendly non-Western nations such as China, India, Turkey, North Korea and Iran. Russia’s massive oil and gas reserves, once supplying the bulk of energy to Europe, are now being redirected. Russia needs this infusion of cash to both support its war in Ukraine and to reduce the crushing inflation (central bank rates are 21%!) at home.
  
  
• Crush all opposition internally – as did Peter the Great, all the other Tsars after, and for that matter the Communist rulers. Putin – and many Russians – believe that Gorbachev, a reforming Westernizer, caused the USSR to fall while Stalin, a brutal dictator, made the USSR “strong.”
  
  
• Use any and all methods short of war to weaken and disrupt the United States. In this I believe Putin has been remarkably successful by using such means as social media to divide Americans and to manipulate the election of the US president of his choice. To be clear, Putin’s goal is less a Republican consensus, but rather a weakened, divided, polarized – and paralyzed – America. More on that later, but suffice it say, as I did in this blog post, it’s not that hard, sadly.
  

Militarily, it is notable that the Ukraine war has depleted the Red Army and other branches – significantly, perhaps up to one million casualties. But Russia’s losses have been China’s and North Korea’s gains as both have supplied Moscow.

Finally, in any calculus involving Russia, its huge stocks of nuclear weapons must be taken into account. Several thousand Russian nuclear warheads on a hair trigger target the United States. Let’s not forget that history could end in the space of just a few minutes.

China

Two or three decades ago we hardly considered China a threat. Now, both militarily and economically, it presents the biggest challenge to the United States and to our way of life perhaps in our history.

I remember in the 1970s, shortly after Nixon “opened” China, a conversation I had with a fellow who planned to get rich by selling to China. What goods was he planning to sell? Nails. And screws. The most basic construction materials.

Fast forward to the present: Shanghai is perhaps the most modern city on Earth; BYD sells more electric cars than any other company; the Chinese navy boasts more ships than that of the US. It is a truly stunning transformation driven by an economic philosophy completely antithetical to ours: centrally managed development, a planned economy, that – unlike the failed “5-year plans” in the USSR – succeeded beyond expectations. After the chaos and repression of the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, China actually has leapt forward, and quite far.

Just check out the explosive growth of Chinese high-speed railroads in just 12 years, far surpassing rail progress in the US — or anywhere in the world:

Xi Jinping’s ambition, simply put, is global domination through nonviolent means. For all its investment in the People’s Liberation Army (over two million active serving personnel in ground, naval, air, and rocket forces), China has not engaged in armed conflict since the end of the Korean War in 1953 – whereas the US and Russia, for better or worse, both have experienced, battle-hardened militaries.

Instead, China views economics as its principal weapon. Its so-called “Belt and Road Initiative,” announced in 2013 and now reputedly the largest foreign aid project since the post-WWII Marshall Plan, has invested in well over 140 countries. Over 75% of the world’s population has been affected by BRI in one form or another. Either through loans or outright grants China has helped countries build bridges, modernize ports, and constructed railroads: these multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects extend China’s influence in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Italy, and Greece – not to mention large-scale projects in the Americas, in Peru (deep-water port), Ecuador, and Brazil, to name a few. The influence China gains from these foreign investments cannot be understated.

Internally China’s technology innovation thrives, not least because of significant IP theft which helped it leapfrog early mistakes (as my friend Evan Anderson has documented extensively). Countless examples of copycat technology from computers to missiles and jet aircraft exist. Taking advantage of cheap labor – at least until recently – China has flooded the West and especially the US with inexpensive goods: it is estimated between 70% and 80% of goods in Wal-Mart and Amazon are Chinese-built.

Nevertheless, there are problems: China massively overbuilt housing through the 2010s; over 20% of its workforce is still agricultural, far above other developed countries; and its surveillance-happy, repressive government keeps close tabs on its citizens. However, unlike Russia and the US, inflation remains at near zero, if we are to believe its economic reports.

United States of America

Turning inward, the US appears to be abandoning its global leadership role. While its foreign policy seemed to stabilize somewhat during the Biden administration, it is, at this writing, in flux to put it kindly; “chaotic” might be a better word. Harsh words and tariffs on its allies, kowtowing to its enemies, specifically Russia: it’s difficult to understand what America’s global vision, if any, is.

The ”America First” slogan, eerily reminiscent of the exact same words used in the 1930s as the US turned a blind eye to events in Europe and Asia – which of course led to World War II (the photo shows Charles Lindbergh addressing an America First rally) – has turned Americans against one another. As Germans were encouraged to report Jews in the early days of the Holocaust so too are Americans asked to report illegal immigrants, and to not help them by informing them of their rights. Whole government agencies are being disbanded and regulations – protections by any other name – are struck from the Federal Register.

By cutting foreign aid funding, the Trump administration has essentially opened the door to further Chinese investment worldwide. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean will become, economically, Chinese lakes.

By abandoning Ukraine, the Trump administration emboldens Putin’s imperialistic actions, risking the invasion of a host of former Soviet republics: Georgia, Moldova, perhaps even Poland. And what is after that? Germany? France? Moreover, should Russia win a victory in Ukraine, then every country in the world would recognize that American security commitments are worthless – thus driving them to other guarantors, namely China or Russia.

All that having been said, for the moment at least the American economy remains the strongest in the world. All other currencies measure themselves against the dollar. America leads the world in technological innovation, even as China and others copy it as quickly as we create it. Referring to their own stagnant economies, European investors talk about “American exceptionalism” and recommend the US stock market over their own bourses.

Both Russia and China believe the US freedoms will be its downfall – and are committed to it. Thus, both have engaged in massive covert disinformation campaigns – largely successful – to divide Americans, to stir distrust of the American government, and to elect leaders who promise to dismantle it. This is precisely what Putin and Xi desire.

The aggressive, authoritarian, even dictatorial philosophies of Russia and China are absolutely opposed to the American way of life – and are committed to its downfall. To ignore this plain-as-day truth is to accelerate our defeat.

The Tripartite World

This is now the world we live in, in which the primary competition – economically, intellectually, militarily – is between the US, Russia, and China.

Other countries and regions, bluntly, do not matter as much. They are chess pieces manipulated in the grand three-way battle.

India refused to back Ukraine and instead began purchasing oil from Russia, incurring the wrath of the West. Trump’s generally more transactional approach and in particular recent entreaties to Russia may however signal a change.

India’s foreign policy remains one of studied nonalignment (Prime Minister Modi calls it “multialignment,” which is essentially the same thing), focusing more on the more pressing regional issue of its nuclear-armed rival Pakistan – with whom armed conflict always seems imminent.

Internally, India’s internal policies remain concerning. The Indian government has ramped up repressive actions against its Muslim minority. Violence is common and increasingly the authorities turn a blind eye.

Nevertheless India remains economically tied to the US. The two countries have formed an interdependence: US industries – in particular, IT – heavily rely on the likes of Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, HCL, and others.

Europe, long stagnant, may be awakening as a consequence of America’s new isolationism. Several, recognizing the threat from Russia (and the obvious parallels with 1939), have announced increased military support for Ukraine. A wave of European rearmament appears to be on the horizon.

However, the far right continues to expand across Europe, partially in reaction to wave of Syrian immigration in the mid 2010s (nearly a fifth of Syria’s pre-civil war population found their way to Europe). In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) enjoyed unprecedented gains in recent elections. Marie le Pen’s far-right National Rally won a clear majority in the first round of last summer’s elections in France only to fall short in the second. Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party, won on a populist and anti-immigrant platform.

Growth remains slow. GDP rises for the UK, France, and Germany are all projected at less than 1% in 2025 (compared to 5% for China).

The Middle East continues to roil with no end in sight. The damage to both Israel and Palestine from the vicious October 7^th attacks and the brutal, if deserved, retaliation will linger for generations. For the US, Israel represents an outpost of Western democratic and individualistic values in a troubled region; while it continues to be in American interests to support Israel, the Jewish state has demonstrated – time and again – it is well capable of taking care of itself.

Iran remains an existential threat to both Israel and secondarily the US. By abrogating the agreement limiting Iran’s production of enriched uranium, Trump in his first term effectively allowed that country to proceed apace with nuclear weapons development. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani, effectively Iran’s number-two leader, by a US drone in 2020 (also on Trump’s order) likely eliminated any possibility of renegotiation.

Africa, South and Central America remain strategically important to the US, especially as both China (with the Belt and Road Initiative) and Russia (with the brutal Wagner Group) are making inroads.  Central Africa in particular poses a challenge to global stability: impoverished, dispossessed – and unhappy – males in their 20s comprise the majority of its population, leading to the possibility of multiple failed states in the region. The West African nation of Niger, which after a coup strengthened ties with Russia, recently expelled a US anti-terrorism military force stationed there.

Trump, under the Rasputin-like influence of South African immigrant billionaire Elon Musk, alienated that otherwise neutral country by offering its Afrikaner (white) residents asylum in the US for no particular reason. The State Department then subsequently expelled Pretoria’s ambassador for a speech in which he claimed the US was pursuing white supremacist policies – arguably correct.

Meanwhile, South Africa was the first to sign a Belt and Road partnership with China, which to date has invested some $25 billion there.

China has also invested in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama in Central America. Nicaragua, in a clear sign of Chinese influence, severed relations with Taiwan. Numerous countries in South America have benefited from the Belt and Road Initiative, including Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru.

Whether or not these countries ever pay China back is irrelevant. China now owns these chess pieces.

Who Will Win?

The rise of Russian and Chinese influence across the globe with the coincident decline of America on the world stage is troubling, to say the least. Americans’ polarization and self-absorption, their obsession with silly cultural issues, their distrust of their own government, and the fact that they take their freedoms for granted are all leaving the world open to other more sinister powers.

As I’ve stated, China and Russia want nothing less than the utter destruction of the American way of life. It is a top-level strategic objective for both countries.

How can we survive?

First, we must resume our leadership position in the world. Soft power is important. This means resuming generous foreign aid, investing in other countries, providing medical services around the world (in particular, Africa, to stem the tide of HIV and malaria) and assuming, again, moral leadership by calling out dictators and repressive regimes. This is a core vision that every US president from Carter to Reagan to Bush to Clinton shared.

Second, the US must invest in education at home. The confrontation between three powers will not be decided on the battlefield but by smart, clever people – on the diplomatic front, on the financial front, and on the technological front.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Whenever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government.” Yet, appallingly, a large percentage of the American populace cannot name the three branches of government. The federal government should assume authority over the curriculum of our public schools, not for any ideological reason, but so that our kids can compete in the world.

Third, the American budget must be reprioritized. I do not dispute the importance of hard military power — but we have overinvested. We prioritize some 66 nuclear attack submarines (at a cost approaching a half a trillion dollars) over feeding hungry children and ensuring their – and everyone’s – health and well-being. Could we get by with (say) 40 attack subs and feed and educate our kids?

A New World Order

This new world order is characterized by white-hot competition among the three superpowers. China seeks economic dominion; Russia wants to re-establish the USSR; all while the complacent United States declines and withdraws. Even worse, the US appears to be in a state of intellectual collapse, not recognizing or even wanting to recognize, the dangerous world around it.

History does not repeat itself. Yet one cannot help but compare our time to previous ones: what will be the Sudetenland or the Poland that trips the world into another cataclysm?

According to the Federation of Nuclear Scientists, Russia possesses some 5,580 nuclear warheads, most of which are aimed at us.

I believe we have forgotten the terror that these end-of-the-world weapons should inspire. No nuclear war has ever happened, so no need to worry. Except that we’ve come very, very close, and more than once.

Imagine: it’s a sunny day. You look up and see a streak of light heading down. Then: a blinding flash.

If you’re close to the blast, you are instantly vaporized, with no warning. One moment you’re there, the next moment every single bit of you is gone, vanished from the face of the earth; no physical trace of you exists, will ever exist again.

If you’re a little further away a horrifying phenomenon occurs: the heat of the blast carbonizes your body. When Japanese and American investigators came to Hiroshima shortly after the war’s end, they found thousands of blackened human forms. You’re turned, in effect, to charcoal.

Fire storms ignite everywhere. Touch your face and your skin peels off. The burns are unimaginable. After the Hiroshima blast, thousands jumped into the river in the center of the city to get relief from the pain. Thousands of others lost their sight and wander, aimlessly, in agony through the streets.

They have become ghosts.

Tens of thousands more will contract radiation sickness and cancer of all forms over the coming months and years.

At least three times in the nuclear age we have come close to Armageddon. Once, in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a brave Soviet officer named Vasilii Arkhipov disobeyed orders and prevented the firing of nuclear torpedoes near Florida. In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, overrode a computer warning of an American attack (the malfunction was later traced to sunlight reflecting off clouds). Arkhipov and Petrov quite literally saved the world.

Later that same year, after hardline comments by President Ronald Reagan, NATO forces conducted military exercises, codenamed Able Archer, which were so realistic that the Soviets believed a pre-emptive attack was imminent. Only at the last minute when it became apparent that the Soviets were mobilizing (including loading their bombers with nuclear weapons) the exercise was called off.

That’s how close we’ve come. And who knows if there have been other such incidents?

The comparatively tiny Hiroshima blast killed 70,000 people.

Imagine if it were New York.

(some of this paraphrased from Stuxnet: A Worm’s Tale, a Microsoft Think Week paper, by Barry Briggs.)

The state and local jurisdictions have clearly and without question done a horrible job educating our children. Nowhere is that clearer than in the South where Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana rank at the bottom.

What we need is not to dismantle the Department of Education but rather to strengthen it, by giving it the authority to institute a national, STEAM-focused (Science, Tech, Engineering, Arts, and Math) curriculum with standardized tests to measure progress. There’s no reason that kids in Alabama, or elsewhere, should be held back because their idiot legislators refused to fund schools or to teach evolution or fund programming classes.

Listen: I’ve worked in Big Tech for half a century. I have rarely seen kids from the Deep South in my industry (and having lived there I know there are a lot of smart kids); I can only conclude that it’s because their schools did not adequately prepare them for the tech job market.

This is not an issue of federal encroachment or wokeness or social engineering. This is about national competitiveness: while chaos rules our government India and China are quietly churning out hundreds of thousands of qualified engineering graduates every year.

We may indeed invest $500b in AI data centers (apparently, only in red states). But the only ones who will understand how to use them, at this rate, will be graduates of Tsinghua and Beijing Universities, and the Indian Institutes of Technology, while we sink into a morass of stupidity, idiot debates over meaningless issues, and mediocrity.