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To: tradermike_1999 who wrote (2978)	4/9/2001 1:30:18 AM
From: tradermike_1999	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

believe drudge is wrong - I have sources who tell me that the Chinese have made a breakthrough in submarine technology. Supposedly they have converted a Russian kilo submarina and developed a cruise missile that it can launch underwater. This would give it the capability to strike at US aircraft carriers which are the mainstay of our navy. Supposedly the spy flight was taking pictures of a Chinese naval drill in order to catch a glimpse of the submarine and the hatches on it. My father was a Colonel in the US Army and served on the Army Staff as chief of preventive medicine. He retired in 1989 and passed away a few years ago. To me Asian politics is like watching two whales do battle beneath the ocean. Occasionaly they surface and spout a bit which is your only evidence of the trouble the is brewing beneath the surface. American politics is no different. To understand what is going on you need to read newspapers carefully and read in between the lines. Watch for the rise and fall of key figures and look for power struggles. Most Americans have difficulty thinking like that because it requires a lot of digging up and with our built in ahistoricity that is a foreign way of thinking. There is a book called The Logic of World Power written by Franz Schurmann in 1974. It is the best work on American foreign policy ever written. Deals with the period after the cold war and 1/3 of it is devoted to China and the Soviet Union. The book is still valid today if you want to know how US foreign policy is really made. One way of thinking about things is that the government creates interest groups - not the other way around. Each military branch has its own private interest groups which jockey around to influence policy on way or the other. In military budget procurements some individuals stand to benefit when one weapon system is canceled and another is funded. At the same time - like the two great whales under the ocean - there have basically been two strands of competing economic blocks and viewpoints in the US. The Civil War brought the rise of new financial banking interests in the United States which are cosmopalitian in outlook, felt themsleves akin to the British, and supported global free trade, internationalism, and multilateral institutions from the League of Nations, the UN, the World Bank etc. Represented by Henry Cabot Lodge and Nelson Rockefeller in the Republican Party and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. When Nixon won his second term as President he sat down with his advisors and made a list of goals that he wanted to accomplish. First was to end the Vietnam War. Second was to "destroy the eastern establishment." That is the term most commonly used for this group. The second group makes most of its money from natural resources - oil and ming - and the defense industry. Its headquarters is in Dallas Texas and Orange County California. It is more nationalist in orientation and seeks to aggressively expand US military power through control rather than international cooperation. Military bases instead of international alliances. The containment policy of the cold war was Truman's way of building a compromise policy between these two positions. However, some of the more unseemly events in American history were outbreaks between these two blocks - the McCarthy hearings and much of the political turmoil of the 1960s(not talking about civil rights or student protests - behind the scenes battles which resulted in ghastly public spectacles - murders, bugging, robbery etc). Anyway the point of this is that the spy plane incident going on now between Bush and China is not just a conflict between the two. It is a conflict among Chinese leaders on how to take advantage of this and among constituencies inside the US. The China lobby(not red China, but Tiawan) for instance will lobby for Bush to take a hard stand. So will unions and religious leaders. While the free traders will want to see an accodomation as soon as possible. Bush will have to confront these interest groups and ultimately go against some of them on this issue. What he does in this crisis will be influenced by this.