Our Real Competition

Our Real Competition

We Americans are really not fighting any major wars.  We have pretty much defeated and contained the organized terrorists against us.  We have relative peace and freedom from external threats, yet we are as divided in our politics as we have ever been.



What do we do?  We fight each other.  Our national energy is sapped by an absurd, political impeachment effort.  Our cultural energy is diminished by identity politics, political correctness and an uninformed rush toward socialism bordering on communism.  And we popularly and publicly blame Russia, a second to third rate economic power, as being our main international enemy, as if they were still the aggregated Soviet Union of the 1980’s.



In the meantime, Xi Jinping’s China, with 1.4 plus billion people, continues their goal of becoming the pre-eminent economic, military and space powers in the world.  By “terra-forming” islands, they are transforming the international South China Sea into a Chinese lake.  China’s, (little reported in the USA), “Belt and Road Initiative” is their massive effort to insert China economically and culturally into the infrastructure and fabric of a major portion of Asian, European, African and South American countries.  Not restricted by the niceties of western “social justice” norms, Chinese scientists have used CRIPSR techniques to create “designer babies”.



While we have been arguing about the number of genders and which bathroom to use, the Chinese have launched numerous earth-orbital satellites, have been exploring the dark side of the moon and are gearing up for exploration of Mars in 2020.



China’s efforts pay only lip service to environmental concerns.  While many of our global warming activists would have the wealthy western powers restrict our carbon producing activities, they ignore the vast amounts of high sulfur, “brown coal” being burned in the north of China to produce electrical power, that the Chinese use in big cities to run battery-powered bikes.  The Chinese then say “see, we use batteries with zero carbon footprint” (while multiple tons of pollution spew from North China into the atmosphere).



It seems that the popular media in the U. S. is ignorant, or plays down these Chinese accomplishments (and abuses), which are threatening American hegemony in economics, science and space.  We blame Russia, or Ukraine, or each other, while Xi Jinping’s monolithic dragon with 1.4 billion people behind it hover above us all, and laugh up their collective sleeve.



Donald Trump, from the business and media world, and not being cut from the same political cloth as his predecessors, is at least trying to redress the inequities imposed on our trade and technology by past arrangements with the Chinese.  Trump seems aware that China is our predominant foreign threat.  However, as with most things that Trump highlights, the popular media is in opposition or “resistance” to his ideas.  Let’s hope that reason and common sense prevail, and that China’s threat is met with appropriate economic and political vigor.



Ray Gruszecki

November 26, 2019