RealPolitik
One of the things that seems to distinguish me as a liberal rather than a leftist is my “old fashioned” realpolitik view of international affairs. I’m sure this comes both by natural inclination and my undergraduate training in that discipline. I can’t be bothered with pie in the sky hippie shit about the nations and peoples of the world all getting along. While I’m quick and clear in my criticism of immoral uses of power by the U.S. (especially as they’ve become commonplace under $hrub and the neo-cons), I refuse to take the knee jerk position that we’re always the bad guy either. I don’t believe that if the U.S. were suddenly knocked down a peg that peace and prosperity would rule the earth. There are other nations that want hegemony as badly as we do and who are willing to be at least as ruthless and brutal in achieving it as we are. The heavy hitter in this category is China. China is absolutely set on regional hegemony and, like emerging regional behemoths before it, will find that no matter how much it controls things in its sphere, things just outside its reach will require it to extend that reach even further.
For the last five years, China has outmanouvered us on the international stage as if we were complete amateurs. Arguably, our own neo-liberal orthodoxy has allowed them to do the same economically for a generation. Our desire for cheap shit amid the stagnating and declining living standards in this country created a vicious cycle that has left us unable to wield the kind of industrial might that helped us and the soviets win WWII and put us in such a strong position after it, while we’ve handed that capacity to the Chinese. The Monitor has an informative little article on another recent example of the Chinese outmanouvering us.
