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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (143931)	10/18/2018 7:30:35 AM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Recommended By Haim R. Branisteanu Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220363

Re <<gold ... diamond ... agriculture land ... mind>> Believe a bit of each is better than all or nothing. In the meantime seems the world is meandering into something that can turn unpleasant ... ft.com The faultline in US politics caused by Russia and ChinaPolitical bickering over which country is most to blame undermines foreign policy As Xi Jinping, China's president, and Vladimir Putin develop closer ties, the US is turning increasingly inwards © EPAIn the early 1950s, US politics was convulsed by the question, “who lost China?” Today the question is who lost America? The days when US politics stopped at the water’s edge have gone into reverse. America’s two chief rivals, Russia and China, are gnawing at the soul of American politics. Each country is reviled by one party — China by Donald Trump’s Republicans; Russia by the Democrats. Each is driven by domestic one-upmanship. The Democrats believe Mr Trump colluded with Russia to win the presidency. Mr Trump claims China tried to hack the 2016 election in Hillary Clinton’s favour. Washington is consumed by a zero sum blame game. The upshot is that the US is losing grip on its national interest. This poses a deep problem for America’s allies — and a windfall for its rivals. For most of the cold war, the two parties stuck to a broad consensus on Soviet containment. Their differences were mostly confined to tactics. This month, Mike Pence, the vice-president, proclaimed a new cold war with China. The speech was doubly shocking: it was meant to signal a big foreign policy shift yet it was an instant domestic flop. Democrats paid it no attention. With scant evidence, Mr Pence claimed that Russia’s alleged US election interference “pales in comparison” to China’s. Moreover China wanted to eject Mr Trump from the presidency. In contrast to the original cold war, Mr Pence offered no China containment strategy. His subtext was to distract from Democratic allegations about Russia. Democrats suffer from an opposite myopia. Last week, Bernie Sanders, the 2016 candidate who is considering a 2020 run, gave a big foreign policy speech in which he mentioned China only once — and even then in a favourable light. The US and China should work together to tackle global warming, he said. Russia, on the other hand, was the chief authoritarian threat to global progressive values. The Democratic party’s silence on China is strikingly at odds with the country’s history on human rights. The two senators leading the charge on China’s alleged internment of up to 1m Uighur Muslims are Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz — both Republicans. Some of the left’s blindness stems from habit. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama placed large bets on China gradually becoming more liberal. As its economy globally integrated, the pressure on China to democratise would grow. That was a historic miscalculation. The higher China has climbed the value-added ladder, the stricter its political grip. Xi Jinping leads a country that is much more tightly controlled, yet considerably richer, than when Hu Jintao was president before him. Indeed, China is less free than in the late 1990s when its economy was one-third the size it is today. Yet Democrats have barely updated their discredited worldview. In spite of Russia’s economy being a fraction of China’s, and a technological minnow, Moscow is seen as America’s chief menace. They flatter Vladimir Putin by imagining that US politics is putty in his hands. The culture of Sinophobia and Russophobia now stretches deep into each party’s base. Conservative outlets, such as Fox News, run regular scare stories on China’s surveillance techniques and social credit scores. The left, meanwhile, is obsessed with the Kremlin’s hacking factories and its armies of bots. Recommended Can a coherent US foreign policy emerge from this mess? Any measure of America’s national interest would treat China and Russia as great power threats. America is sleep walking into a world of radical geopolitical uncertainty. It urgently needs a doctrine. Mr Trump has one thing right. China, more than Russia, poses a bigger strategic threat. But he is clueless about how to deal with it. By picking fights with allies, such as Canada and Japan, and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he has spurned the one approach that could work — multilateral pressure on China to follow global rules. He has also alienated India, which until recently was treated as America’s “natural ally”. Last week India bought $5bn worth of Russian missiles and enlisted Russia to build six nuclear reactors. India also withdrew from the Quad military exercises with the US, Japan and Australia. It is Mr Trump who is losing India. As Russia and China move closer together, and India drifts from America’s orbit, the US turns ever inwards. Instead of seeking consensus on how to navigate a multipolar world, US politics uses China and Russia as punch bags to settle domestic scores. The answer to who lost America is increasingly stark: US democracy is losing itself.