The Correlation of Armed Forces: U.S. goods and services trade with China totaled an estimated $634.8 billion in 2019. Exports were $163.0 billion; imports were $471.8 billion. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with China was $308.8 billion in 2019. Trade in services with China (exports and imports) totaled an estimated $76.7 billion in 2019. Services exports were $56.5 billion; services imports were $20.1 billion. The U.S. services trade surplus with China was $36.4 billion in 2019.

There is talk within the Washingtoniat of a possible war with China. Steve Bannon, who apparently was dropped on his head as a child, actually favors such a war. We hear the usual shoo-the-boobs alarm about how the Chinese are doing something terrible and we must gird our loins and American values and show them what for, bow wow, woof. The danger is that the current game of who-blinks-first in Asian waters might actually provoke a shooting war. You know the kind of thing: One warship refuses to get out of the way of another, a collision ensues, some retard lieutenant who signed up on waivers opens fire, and we’re off and running. It is not a good idea to let children play with matches.

The said war is discussed either in emotional terms by idiots or in purely naval terms by those familiar with such things, so we hear of the First Island Chain and the Second Island Chain and whose missiles against the other’s missiles and so on. This would be appropriate if we were fighting World War Two again. Which we aren’t. Let’s take a quick-and-dirty look at how such a war might go.

To begin the war, America would overestimate itself and underestimate China. This is doctrine in the Pentagon. There is probably a manual on it. Inside the DC Bubble, fern-bar Napoleons would assure us that it would be a short war, a cakewalk, a matter of days, not weeks. You know, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. When it turned out that the Chinese had other ideas, among which surrendering was not, and the months dragged on, various fascinating things would happen.

Rand, a thinktank wholly owned by the Pentagon, at least mentally, has wargamed both the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, concluding that the war could be both very long and a loss for America. We no longer live in 1960.

OK, the war: On day one, all the multitudinous American factories in China shut down. Example: Apple loses its factories, products from those factories, and the Chinese market of 1.4 billion consumers. Its stores close. Tim Cook’s gratitude will know no bounds. American auto manufacturers sell googolplexes of cars in China (or at least lots), mostly made in China. Overnight they will lose factories, cars, and Chinese customers. Overall, China buys many more cars than does the US. This analysis, if anything so obvious may be called analysis, can be repeated for industry after industry after industry. Goodbye, business vote.

Within weeks, Walmart’s shelves go bare. Walk down the aisles and read the “Made in” labels. We are not talking only plastic buckets and mops but chain saws, pharmaceuticals, motorcycles, and blood-pressure cuffs. So much for the blue-collar vote. The US buys 472 billion in goods annually from China, high-tech, low-tech, consumer goods, manufacturing components. No more.

China buys over $163 billion annually in American goods: petroleum, semiconductors, airline engines, soybeans, airliners, on and on. No more. It is hard to underestimate the joy this will cause in influential boardrooms. And of course the American workers who would have produced these things for China will be laid off. As electoral politics, this will prove suboptimal.

China produces a great majority of the rare earth elements crucial to the manufacture of electronics, such as semiconductors. No quick substitute is in sight. Just about everything in America uses these, to include the computers that run the electrical systems of cars. Though I haven’t checked, it is quite possible that the computers themselves are made in China. If you want a new and deeper understanding of the word “hostile,” check the influential CEOs of businesses on their second chipless day.

In a real war, it is likely that China, having thought of the foregoing, would (intelligently) destroy Taiwan’s semiconductor fabs, notably those of TSMC, as well as other factories of electronics. This would hardly be difficult since the Taiwan Strait is only a hundred or so miles wide. Losing these industries would be exceedingly painful for the US since its high-end chips come from Taiwan. It would take America years to replace this capacity domestically. Some of the necessary equipment, extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, is not made in America and in any event cannot be stamped out like beer cans.

In America it would quickly be discovered that the country is rather more dependent on China than some might think. If I may make up an example: The automotive industry finds that its sparkplugs come from China. While America could certainly make spark plugs, it turns out that a decade back the industry found that China could make them for forty percent less. In the cooperative commercial world pre-Trump, this was no problem. Not now. So much for sales of cars. And for the jobs of the workers who make them.

I will bet you all my diamond mines in South Africa and cattle lands in Argentina, that if you went through a parts list for, say, Boeing’s airliners, you would find lots of them made in China. Sure, the US could manufacture most of them, eventually. But companies need parts now, not eventually.

The effects on other countries of a large war against China would be catastrophic if not worse. Other countries also get many things, from China or Taiwan, such as semiconductors. Google on “country x largest trading partner.” A strong pattern quickly becomes clear: China is huge in trading with practically everybody. “Everybody” includes Germany, Japan, Australia, Russia, and South America as a whole. The world economy in its entirety would collapse.

How smart would this be? The United States is already in serious trouble, what with a currency rapidly being debased, a sinking middle class, businesses dying of Covid, jobs disappearing abroad, people living paycheck to paycheck, and social unhappiness resulting in continent-wide riots. Do you suppose the public will gladly support an unfathomably stupid war causing an instant, profound, and murderous economic depression? If so, you probably already have a collection of bridges.

This can be inflicted on the entire earth by a half-dozen loons in or circling around the White House unhindered by a worthless Congress. Six loons. Yes, I know, Trump is unlikely deliberately to start a Third world War, even as a publicity stunt. No, the generals in the Pentagon are not nearly stupid enough. (They might even refuse, pointing out that starting a war requires a declaration by Congress.) The problem is that for years America has been, if not actually looking for a fight, at least daring other countries to start one. For example, murdering Iranian officials, pulling out of arms-control treaties, pushing NATO ever closer to Russia, sanctioning countries far beyond anything that can be called a trade war, and playing chicken with China in the South China Sea. Under these circumstances you can get a fight without quite looking for one.

In a sort of distributed Ouija board enterprise, intellectuals these days predict the likely evolution of relations between China and America. These authorities do not wallow in consistency. China will take over the world. Alternatively, China will collapse because of a surfeit of men, because the different linguistic regions will become independent, because their debt bubble will explode, because the Chinese can’t “innovate,” and because the population is aging and there won’t be enough workers. And of course, the American military will remain regnant over the planet and nearby galactic space. The US will always stay ahead. Or it won’t. This seems to cover the bases.

Well, maybe. But if you watch what the Chinese are actually doing, you may get the impression that China is largely ignoring the American military and letting the US spend itself to death while Beijing focuses on commerce, business, R-and-D, commerce, the economy, education, technology, and more commerce. You might additionally get the idea that China is a confident, well-governed, energetic people on a roll and doing quite well in the inventive department. The snippets below may support this impression of technical and economic vitality.

The future? An asleep thought (I presume this is the opposite of “woke”): demographics is destiny. America draws its scientists and engineers from roughly 200,000,000 STEM-capable whites. Blacks and Latinos contribute, if not negligibly, then almost so. China depends on a billion STEM-capable Han Chinese. These are the people who dominate America’s elite technical high schools and universities. Thus, it can potentially put five times as many scientists and engineers to work on tech work. As America’s schools deteriorate under the assault of social-justice warriors, China expands its already-rigorous schooling. Add that psychometricians put the East Asian IQ about five points higher than that of Eurowhites. Thus, many more and somewhat smarter STEM people from demanding universities against fewer and less intelligent from inferior schools. Then add stable, focused government versus rule by chaos. Arguably, massive Chinese technological superiority might seem likely.

Increasingly America does not compete with China, but strongarms it because it cannot compete. For example, in Five G China is ahead in technology, manufacturing capacity, and turnkey systems. Unable to produce an equivalent product, Washington banned Huawei Five G in the US and has twisted arms to keep countries that it controls from using Huawei. Seeing that Huawei had very attractive smartphones that would have competed with Apple, it banned these also. What America can’t do, it seeks to keep anybody else from doing.

WSJ: “US vs. China in Five G: The Battle Isn’t Even Close

HONG KONG—By most measures, China is no longer just leading the U.S. when it comes to 5G. It is running away with the game. China has more 5G subscribers than the U.S., not just in total but per capita. It has more 5G smartphones for sale, and at lower prices, and it has more-widespread 5G coverage. Connections in China are, on average, faster than in the U.S., too…By year’s end, China will have an estimated 690,000 5G base stations—boxes that blast 5G signals to consumers—up and running across the country .”

Techies can argue C band versus millimeter waves but I will bet that the Chinese, nothing if not commercially agile, will have Five G up and running in factories and the IoT and everywhere else while American pols rattle on about how China is an Existential Threat and the Pentagon needs more money for Space Command and diversity is more important than schooling anyway.

The shifting balance may already be visible. For example, America used to make superb aircraft such as the SR-71 and the F-16. Now it has the F-35, an engineering horror. The Boeing 737 MAX, its flagship product, has been grounded internationally because of poor engineering, second-rate software, and corporate lying about both.

America invented the microcircuit, and once dominated its manufacture. Today, American companies cannot make the seven nanometer chips now used in high-end telephones, and certainly not the five nanometer chips now coming online. Neither can China. Both countries buy them from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, TSMC, Interestingly, the Taiwanese are genetically and culturally Chinese. Washington has strongarmed TSMC into ceasing to sell to Huawei—the US still can’t make high end chips. Recently it strongarmed TSMC into agreeing to build a semiconductor fab in Arizona. Because America can’t.

Then there is TikTok, a hugely popular Chinese video app that threatened to break America’s lock on social media. Unable to compete, Washington decided simply to confiscate it on grounds that it might be used to spy on Americans. (Chinese intelligence is deeply interested in your daughter’s video of her cat.)

Parenthetically, technology seems to be shifting toward East Asia, with America being less ahead in things in which it is ahead and behind in others. Did I mention demographics?

• “COMAC’s Hydrogen Fuel Test Plane Completes Ten Flights”

Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China. Airlines are looking hard at hydrogen as a replacement for petroleum with no carbon emission.

China chooses landing site for its Tianwen-1 Mars rover. Whether the lander, currently en route, will land or crash and burn remains to be seen—it is China’s first time out, so to speak. In either case, that the country, forty years ago arguably the poorest in the world and thinking that making pencils was high-tech, has built a Mars lander is, well, weird.

• “Electric planes closer to reality with China’s first flight”

“Four-seater electric aircraft makes first flight in north-eastern Chinese city of Shenyang”

Good for 180 miles, say the Chinese, expect more with improvements in batteries. Intended for short-haul flights, deliveries.

• “China to build world’s longest underwater high-speed rail tunnel”

China probably leads the world, and certainly leads the US, in civil engineering. With 20,000 miles of slow high-speed rail (180 mph) testing on fast maglev high-speed rail, (360 mph) the Three Gorges Dam, and the astonishing Daxing airport at Beijing, just opened. In America, infrastructure ages, trains look like something from a Fifties movie, transportation deteriorates as all the money goes to the military. Since the US doesn’t do much civil engineering, and hasn’t for many years, it would probably have to hire foreign firms should it decide to modernize. (See TSMC above.)

Headline “Fairfax school board eliminates admissions test at Thomas Jefferson High School” probably America’s most demanding school for science and technology.

Oh god, Oh god. Who is on the school board? Predictably education majors, the dimmest, lowest SAT-scoring dregs of the professional classes, the horror of smart students subjected to their grade-school mentalities. But not just ed majors. Probably also psychologists, sociologists, bored housewives, and liberal-artsy painfully virtuous men alight with Civic Consciousness. Oh god.

TJ, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, is a jewel in the country’s collapsing system of education, a bright light in the growing darkness. Its kids are scary smart, among the best of young minds, going on to CalTech, MIT, Harvard. This year 132 were National Merit Semi-finalists, putting them in the upper one half of one percent. Entry was, until now, by a demanding test of intelligence, though we must not so describe it as that would be racist, and manifest White Privilege, even though most of the students are Asian. Youngsters at this level need a rich academic diet to avoid boredom, to include among other things serious mathematics. Which, I will bet, not one of the earnest, uplift espousing, self-consciously good, droopy-IQed of the Board has the slightest grasp. How much is three factorial? Hint: It’s a number between five and seven. You may have five guesses.

TJ was a haven for the smart. But now Fairfax County is going to drop the intelligence test—though, remember—we must never call it an intelligence test. Why drop the test? Do you even ask? It is because not enough blacks get in. The purpose of a high-end school is to admit blacks.

TJ, I can say with confidence, would be happy with any number of black students if they passed the examination. It would be happy with box turtles if they passed the test. But they do not, as neither do blacks, so we must abandon the test and admit the unqualified. Free stuff.

Is there nothing we will not degrade, corrupt, or discard to make minorities look good? No. Silly me, even to ask.

Strange that a country once at least literate, a country for decades way and gone the world’s font of science and technology, a country that at its apogee put men on the moon and invented the modern world, should intentionally suppress the intelligence that made it what it was and reduce itself to the level of picking wild bananas and digging for roots.

Yet this is happening. From the drains of society oozes a sump of envy, of resentment, of bruised incapacity, of rabble seeking revenge against those of a higher order. Chusma, morlocks, school boards, vegetables, everywhere pulling down the bright, raging against the brighter, whom they now want to destroy.

An example of what is coming: From The Independent: “A university professor has claimed teaching maths perpetuates “unearned” white privilege…Titled “Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods”, Ms Gutierrez argues a focus on Pythagorean theorem and pi feed into the idea that math was (sic) developed by the Greeks and Europeans…Seattle is definitely on the forefront with this,” said Robert Q. Berry III, the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “What they’re doing follows the line of work we hope we can move forward as we think about the history of math and who contributes to that, and also about deepening students’ connection with identity and agency.”

The faint, agonized shrilling you hear is the English language. These people write like the recently anesthetized, but never mind. Where precisely does this gushing fount of bewilderment think math was developed? Burundi?

What were men such as Gauss, Galois, Cantor, Euler, Newton, Archimedes, Hardy, Hamilton, Laplace were—what? Ethiopians, no doubt. Or maybe bushmen. I cannot doubt it. There was Ramanujan, one of the greats, Indian. Further back, other Indians and Arabs who came up with our number system, zero, algebra. But it is not Indians and Arabs calling for the endumbment (I say it is a word) of American math.

Counting on their toes in twilit minds, such as Ms. Gutierrez want to pull down mathematics. Those seeking to do this are now called “woke,” but “stupid” would improve clarity.

We must get rid, we are told, of AP courses because the cerebrally negligible can’t understand them. Grammar is discrimination because political sensitives find it puzzling. We must ban the SATs because they make obvious what everybody knows, drop algebra requirements’ in universities because they make visible the inescapable. Math courses are are oppression in the view of education majors and other gibbering cretins. Do anything and everything to placate the malignant envy that bubbles up from septic fields of a doomed country.

Do any of these vandals and victims-studies primitives know what math is, or that only bright kids can do the work? An example of mathematics: Shannon entropy for an independent variable of two outcomes (a coin toss.) P is the probability, -log P the information content. The entropy is of importance in grasping Shannon’s coding for data compression. I am not sure just what “mathematics” means in the minds, if any, of the cognitive flat tires now trying to get rid of it, but acres and acres of such as the above, which kids at TJ probably would regard as entertaining reading, are behind everything that keeps us warm, dry, and fed. Do we really want to let nominal primates in need of remedial evolution debauch a subject of which they do not have, and cannot acquire, a tarsier’s grasp?

I should say in foresightful self-defense that I claim no particular mathematical talent, being a sort of mathematical voyeur, playing with whatever shiny baubles and colored beads I come across, and not in a league with the many real mathematicians found at the Unz Review, where this column lives. But I do not want to eliminate AP math courses for those who do have talent simply to hide the fact that I do not.

What is it that distresses the pullers-down, these incontinently dim, these education theorists, these veritable mollusks, these…forgive my language…sociologists? An easy question easily answered: They resent superiority. In a country where culture wafts from the ghetto, where expansive intellect is hated, superiority is the gravest sin. It must be dragged down. And is being dragged down.

But while students commit the individual sin of genius or a close approximation thereunto, the school as an institution essays the unpardonable. “TJ is now 71 percent Asian, 20 percent white, 2.4 percent Hispanic, and 1.6 percent black” Oops.

You can see the systemic unfairness.TJ has lots of Asians. But not a single goddam box turtle. Clearly a disparate impact. Justice for box turtles!

We are going to compete with China? Do you know how many Asians China has? But, you see, the purpose of a school is not to teach. No. It is to have the right number of blacks.

That wretched virus has spawned great gushing waves of confusion regarding what is really happening. This column, a reliable journalistic source of a high order, has therefore gathered from other reliable sources what we genuinely know about the epidemic. Henceforth you will need to read nothing more on the matter. It is all here.

Every morning I read percipient sites that, unlike the major media, are not in the pay of George Soros. The following is a compendium of purely factual findings, devoid of spin or agenda. The interested reader can search on any of them and find large amounts of corroborative content.

The virus was invented in a biowarfare laboratory in Wuhan or, alternatively, in some other kind of lab (or perhaps simultaneously in both kinds of lab) and escaped, presumably yearning for freedom. It also came about because the Chinese were eating infected bats. It was also deliberately planted in the US by Beijing to destroy the American economy, decimate the population, and make us into Communist slaves. Further, it is being used by the Deep State to destroy the economy and let the government make us into federal slaves.

Less plausibly, which is saying something, it was a bio attack on China by the United States, which sent it to China using an infected soccer team as vector. This seems odd, since the American biowarriors who would have had to grow it would have known that it would come back to the US immediately on the hundreds of monthly flights, and also that the US was defenseless against plagues. Maybe they were distracted and didn’t think of this.

None of the above matters since the virus in fact does not exist. Yes, that’s right. There is no virus, and in any event it is no worse than the seasonal flu. The plandemic, or panicdemic, is a fairy tale concocted by the Davos crowd (the familiar tone is to persuade you that I get drunk with presidents and prime ministers on Saturday nights to destroy world economies so that Bill Gates and George Soros can take away our freedoms, impose socialism, which is very bad, and make us into communist slaves. It is also intended to depopulate the world, doubtless a hard slog for a virus that doesn’t exist, but it may be a very robust nonexistent virus. Since if the number of dead reached two million, which it hasn’t, this would be four percent of the fifty million croakees attributed to the Spanish flu, and essentially zero percent of the world’s population of the earth, it would seem that the Coronavirus needs work under warranty. Anyway, the dead supposedly killed by the virus actually died of underlying causes, such as traffic accidents, diabetes, and obesity.

The alleged dead in truth died not of Covid but of underlying causes, such as motorcycle crashes, diabetes, and obesity. Also of vitamin D deficiency caused by staying inside because of the lockdowns. These made them cranky and depressed, further lowering their defenses, so that, apparently, the mere thought of a virus killed them. The alleged dead are being stored in refrigerated morgue trucks, which are fake news.

Actually, the virus is a plot to let Big Pharma make a killing, so to speak. The columnist Pepe Escobar (no relation to Pablo) (probably) says that (unimpeachable) sources in Paris revealed that the French government knows that hydroxyquinone (HCQ) is a miracle cure but that the government is suppressing this information so the Pharma companies can find a vaccine and get rich. Richer. If I were a reporter, I would ask, “The government? All of it, hundreds of thousands of people? Only some of them? Which ones? How do you know? Evidence? Phone numbers?” But I am not a reporter.

The reader unfamiliar with the dread depths of the demonic darkness lurking behind the façade of international finance capitalism may find it implausible that Paris would let tens of thousands of Frenchmen die and the economy collapse to benefit drug companies. Plausibility is an overrated virtue. Behind all of this is Microsoft. Do not underestimate the evil in the heart of Bill Gates, the Redmond Sauron, a geek of a thousand envenomed claws, who wants to make us all into Communist slaves and switch to Bing.

Now consider hydroxyquinone, Cipro, and zinc. These have been shown by numerous studies to be a miracle cure for Covid when used together. A google search will easily find these studies. The former President of the United States, than whom there can be no more sober and trustworthy source has endorsed HCQ. HCQ is a well-known, cheap, easily produce prophylaxis against malaria. Uninformed skeptics might wonder why Cipro, an anti-bacterial, and HCQ, an antiplasmodial, would work as antivirals. But it works, as many sites say, but doesn’t, according to medical authorities, probably in the pay of Bill Gates. Zinc was once widely used in making flashlight batteries. Anyway, that all the world’s governments, knowing of this proven research, do not launch massive distribution of the miracle cure can only mean that they are all working for Big Pharma.

There is evidence that those advocating the use of zinc want to make us all into Communist flashlight batteries, but even libertarians view this with skepticism. Some fear that the government may force us all to have voltage checks.

Now we come to countermeasures. A quick web search reveals that masks are ineffective, actually increase vulnerability to the virus, which in any case does not exist, and reduce the flow of oxygen to the brain, causing cognitive damage. The insistence by government that we wear them instills reflexive obedience to government, thus facilitating our conversion into Communist slaves.

Vaccines, though, are the real threat to liberty. Vaccines are known to have lethal effects, for example having been used by government to wipe out smallpox and polio. Critics point out that with minor modification they could be used to depopulate the world, presumably so that Big Pharma could do something or other. At least one site has revealed that a vaccine potentially could actually reprogram our DNA, having I’m not sure just what effects but perhaps making us into reptiles or infected bats.

Other articles, mostly by actual doctors or men who say they are, point out that we have no way of knowing what is in the vaccines. One insidious possibility is said to be nanoparticles. I don’t know just what these are, but they must be very small, and they are said to migrate to the brain and diminish free will. In many people this would not be noticeable, so you can see the deviousness. These authors urge the population under no circumstances to use masks or accept the vaccine.

Other experts say that vaccines might contain computer chips. These could be used to track us, say some, or others say to control us, making us into socialist slaves. My own theory is that if zinc made us into flashlight batteries, the resulting current could power the chips, but I don’t want to speculate irresponsibly.

Having spent my working life in journalism, I still have(unimpeachable) sources. They tell me that to their certain knowledge Bill Gates has built an underground factory to make injectable chips. The factory is about midway on his tunnel from Area 51 to Roswell. It reportedly uses the labor of undocumented aliens. Note that the mainstream media have not uttered a single word about this factory. Only tightly organized collusion of the media can explain this perfectly maintained silence

Things are worse than we think. But anyway you understand the virus now.

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Everybody and his goat has weighed in on the election, so I will too. This will make no difference to Trump’s core followers, for whom he is a cult figure, or to those who detest him. The undecided may be interested.

Note how insubstantial Trump has been, pretending to be what he isn’t and claiming to have done what he hasn’t. Does no one notice? He has heavy support from Evangelicals. Ask him to name the books of the Pentateuch, or the second book, or what church he regularly attended, or ever attended, in New York. He was going to end the wars, but what war has he ended? To reduce the trade deficit, but it has grown. To get rid of all illegal aliens withing two years, but have they gone? To bring back factories from China and Mexico, but how many have returned? He is called a law-and-order President. Yet he hid, besieged, in the White House during the greatest eruption of lawlessness the country has ever seen, with a statue being pulled down across the street from his house. His handling of the virus? America remains hardest hit in the world, and it worsens by the day.

Trump, like all Presidents, has fulfilled the two critical jobs expected of him, protecting Wall Street and the military budget. What else has he done?

Almost nothing. All in good fun. But in the crucial field of international relations, he has been a disaster. I suspect that few of his followers in Flint and Gary study things beyond the borders. They should.

Here context matters. The US, or those who control the US, are trying to maintain American hegemony, or near hegemony, over the world. America has 600-800 military bases around the globe depending on what you regard as a military base. While many tens of thousands of America sleep on the sidewalks, while infrastructure crumbles, while standards of living fall and medical care is pricey but poor, the Pentagon always gets its budget. At the level of the White House, the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel, the arms industry, the important thing is to maintain the flow of money. And dominate the world.

Trump is the embodiment of this looking-for-a-fight attitude. Not good. He has surrounded himself with over-age Cold Warriors, with generals, with the pathologically aggressive hangers-on from think-tank Washington: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Steve Bannon, and minor squibs of like outlook. He has pulled the US out of the arms-control treaties, START, INF, Open Skies. He has pushed NATO against Russian borders. In the Legion halls of Idaho, this may seem virile, the sort of thing that John Wayne would do. Back the commies down. Show them who is boss. No. It is just pointless and dangerous.

Worse, there is a new kid on the block. China is growing. It behaves no worse than other countries, does not inflict on the world nearly the destruction and horror that the United States does, but it is growing. For Washington, this makes it not a competitor but an enemy. This is very much Trump’s policy. Don’t negotiate. Threaten. “Do as I say, or I will break you.”

Those favoring the continuance of Empire might note that, even at this, Trump has been a disaster. The First Rule of Empire is Don’t let your enemies unite. Trump, having made Russia and China into enemies (why?) has forced them to unite. This is—how shall I put it?—stupid. Russia and China are not natural allies. China is a crowded country with 1.4 billion smart, industrious people, rapidly growing influence, and a very long indefensible border with Russia. Russia has barely 146 million people, a comparatively static economy, vast empty lands with rich resources. The Russians may have noticed this. The two have had territorial disputes. This is not a marriage made, as we say, in heaven. Instead of playing them against each other, allying with one against the other, or leaving them the hell alone, Trump has forced them into close alliance.

This is Trump’s policy, in the sense that if it happens during his presidency, it is his baby, though it is fairly evident that Pompeo is Trumps brains and Trump is Pompeo’s enabler.

Then there is Iran, a geopolitical linchpin, having eighty million people, a large and competent military, and lots and lots of oil. Under the JCPOA, the nuke deal, the Iranians were posed happily to integrate themselves into the Western economy—buy hundreds of airliners from Boeing and Airbus, telecommunications gear, sell oil, have western companies develop its huge hydrocarbon reserves.

Then Trump pulled out of the treaty and, led by the egregious Pompeo, tries to starve the Iranians into installing a puppet government. Iran, seeing that the West is not friendly, turns to the East, allies itself tightly with Russia and China. Tehran and Beijing are about to sign a twenty-five year, multimanymuchoslotsa billion dollar development deal.

Three enemies, united, where none was before.

Fucking brilliant, Mike. Just fucking brilliant.

Then Trump had Soleimani, an Iranian hero, murdered. This doubtless played well with his partisans in Joe’s Bar in Chicago, being manly and decisive and making America great again. It was also idiotic, making Iranians even less likely to cave to American pressure.

The same counterproductiveness appears in his “trade war” with China, in fact an attempt to wreck China commercially and technologically. This is packaged by Trump as “standing up to China,” “deterring China,” “containing China,” but it might as accurately be called “encouraging the genie to leave the bottle,” or “asking for it.”

A quick example: Huawei was contentedly using Google’s Android operating system on its smartphones. Android and iOS, both American, dominated the world market for operating systems. Huawei, with the predictability of sunrise, responded by crash-developing its own OS, Harmony. With equal predictability and suddenness it will improve it, further grow its app store (HMS, Huawei Mobile Services) and, on a guess, encourage other companies to use it. It will be said that a new OS won’t work, can’t compete, will take decades, and all the things that are customarily said of things China does. Wait.

Trump’s result: A new and, likely, serious competitor to Google. Good job, Don.

There is more to come. Precisely because of Trump’s technology-denial policy, China has launched a massive program to make itself tech-independent. It will take time, but it will happen. Every time China develops a replacement for an American product, US companies will lose the Chinese market for it—and shortly face a competitor.

The root of the matter? With Trump the country elected an attitude, not a President. Truculence, bravado, and an in-your-face aggressiveness are no substitute for competence. Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he is blankly ignorant of history, geography, technology, the military. In Hawaii, when taken to the USS Arizona memorial, he didn’t know what it was. He has opined that the Spanish flu of 1917 (his date) influenced the end of WWII. It would be instructive for a reporter to ask him what countries border Iran, where one finds the Strait of Malacca, and why it matters.

The more enthusiastic of his followers seem to be equally ignorant and, worse, have no idea why a President should know such things. Is this how we choose Presidents, and the sort of Presidents we choose?

Write Fred at [email protected] Put the letters pdq anywhere in the subject line to avoid heartless autodeletion.