October 31, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
I penned the problem definition for this segment several weeks ago. Then on October 7th the Islamist militant group Hamas conducted a series of surprise attacks on Israel killing over 1700 Israelis primarily civilians including women and children. It is termed the deadliest war on Jews since the Holocaust. This is the latest geopolitical problem to add to the five in this segments listing. This issue too, was facilitated by bad policy decisions. Specifically, by the Biden administration significantly easing Iran sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, the Iranians increased their daily oil production from 200,000 barrels to 3,500,000 barrels, per Jack Keane, retired 4 star General, on 10/30/2023. This enabled the Iranian government to increase oil profits by a reported $80 to $100 billion/year. Most likely this cash was the funding source that enabled Hamas and Hezbollah extremists to execute their war against Israel.
This adds to the geopolitical mess facing our country and the Western World further emboldening the new evil axis of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. In my opinion, it increases the need for the U.S. to move quickly and decisively on implementing something like the America Grand Strategy that is spelled out in the follow-on excerpts.
For 2024 election reference, the attached PDF contains geopolitical perspectives of three presidential candidates per their presidential candidate website. The candidates include Nikki Haley (pages 15 – 20), Ron DeSantis (pages 20-21) and Donald Trump (page 21). I found Haley’s particularly insightful.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
I penned the problem definition for this segment several weeks ago. Then on October 7th the Islamist militant group Hamas conducted a series of surprise attacks on Israel killing over 1700 Israelis primarily civilians including women and children. It is termed the deadliest war on Jews since the Holocaust. This is the latest geopolitical problem to add to the five in this segments listing. This issue too, was facilitated by bad policy decisions. Specifically, by the Biden administration significantly easing Iran sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, the Iranians increased their daily oil production from 200,000 barrels to 3,500,000 barrels, per Jack Keane, retired 4 star General, on 10/30/2023. This enabled the Iranian government to increase oil profits by a reported $80 to $100 billion/year. Most likely this cash was the funding source that enabled Hamas and Hezbollah extremists to execute their war against Israel.
This adds to the geopolitical mess facing our country and the Western World further emboldening the new evil axis of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. In my opinion, it increases the need for the U.S. to move quickly and decisively on implementing something like the America Grand Strategy that is spelled out in the follow-on excerpts.
For 2024 election reference, the attached PDF contains geopolitical perspectives of three presidential candidates per their presidential candidate website. The candidates include Nikki Haley (pages 15 – 20), Ron DeSantis (pages 20-21) and Donald Trump (page 21). I found Haley’s particularly insightful.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING WISDOM FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 17
THE GEOPOLITICAL WAR
PROBLEM DEFINITION
As was the case in the Capital War problem definition, our geopolitical problems are and continue to be self-inflicted, meaning we have a chance to find solutions to fix them.
First Problem: (a) We outsourced most of our manufacturing to China and became a service economy. This was most evident during the pandemic when we could not manufacture preventive production products for our first responders and infected citizenry, (b) Supply chain bottlenecks became very apparent when we had scores of freighters sitting outside west coast ports and couldn’t get them unloaded and disbursed fast enough, (c) U.S. multinational corporations were quick to relocate their manufacturing processes to China in their greed to increase profits with cheap foreign labor. Now that the Chinese have reaped the benefits of our dollars and intellectual property, many of these companies are leaving China in search of other countries with cheap labor or in some cases returning their manufacturing to U.S. soil, (d) Abandoning any sort of obligation to America has resulted in the suffering of the American worker, the weakening of U.S. national security, and the transfer of significant intellectual property. Further China has gained a significant trade advantage and can hold us hostage in attaining critical supplies most particularly medicines and rare earths they uniquely control, (e) Outsourcing our energy.
Second Problem: Our political clout was weakened with the humiliating and horrific withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by the lack of attention to the successfully negotiated Abraham Accords. As a result, China filled the geopolitical void in the Middle East successfully brokering a treaty alliance between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Now China is a power player in the Middle East replacing the U.S. who has held that distinction for three quarters of a century. A similar outcome is evident in Brazil who now has an exclusive trade deal with China, with a monetary agreement to use their respective currency’s thus turning their back on the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. Our geopolitical clout will be further weakened given the recent downgrade of the country’s credit worthiness.
Third Problem: As Senator Marco Rubio points out, “Our reliance on China – financial and otherwise – is the direct result of decades of bad U.S. policy. Not only did we help and enable them to enter the World Trade Organization, but China successfully exploited American ambition – ambition to open markets, ambition to spread democracy, ambition to make obscene amounts of money – and now we are paying the price.” China now has an explicit goal of becoming the world’s only superpower by 2049. The only way that can be averted is if China implodes or the United States stops them.
Fourth Problem: We are showing extreme weakness when the only thing the Chinese People’s Party respects is solid, consistent strength. We have been very passive if not neglectful by not confronting them for the millions of deaths from the lab-leaked Covid-19 virus or the thousands of fentanyl deaths.
Fifth Problem: How could the rest of the world possibly look favorably to us to help protect them when we don’t even have the resolve to protect ourselves from the travesties of our open southern border? We have scores of people coming in unvetted, unvaccinated, uneducated with valid expectations of being housed, fed, and clothed with free medical care and schooling. The numbers are so significant that Democratic governors and mayors are screaming at the Biden administration for help and relief. The pleas are falling on deaf ears, so state and local officials are having to shave their budgets to free up funds for the illegals care, including budget cuts for already traumatized cops. This open border policy is resulting in a proliferations of fentanyl deaths, sex trafficking, embolden cartels, and terrorist entering our country.
In its entirety it is a geopolitical mess, if not a travesty.
WISDOM ON POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS -- EXCERPTS
CHINA
All foreign policy challenges must be subordinate to the goal of stopping the CCP. It presents the single greatest external threat for our republic. The CCP is not serious about any kind of accommodation—they want 100% of the pie and on their terms. We must continue to compete in every domain with China – by separating our crucial supply chains from their soil, guarding our technology and data from the CCP’s clutches, and making sure the U.S. and our allies have ample and superior weaponry to defend ourselves.
Demand Accountability: President Xi and his Communist crew denied the world access to any information about a virus that started in his country and became a global pandemic. The crime boss Xi shut out the force for good who were struggling to deal with a virus that his regime had failed to stop. We must make sure that he and the Chinese Communist Party ultimately face accountability for the grossly reckless spreading of a lethal virus. Without accountability, this will happen again.
Source: Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love by Mike Pompeo (2023)
AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY for TRIUMPH OVER CHINA
The Economic Arena
The American grand strategy must align American businesses and investment houses with our near and long-term national security, and triumph over the CCP in the global Economic Arena. How can this be done? The answer rests in a two-pronged strategy: economic containment of the People’s Republic of China together with the US and Allied economic growth. Our long-range strategy must be to maintain and increase our share of global wealth and gross domestic product (GDP) while slowing China’s economic growth. In order to achieve our goals, we must focus on two aspects of economic competition: containment and growth. China’s ascendancy depends on its access to the global economy, and above all the American and Allied economies. This access is ours to grant or deny.
The Economic Containment of China: We must transform this competition from a contest with an ascending power into a contest with a stagnant one. At its foundation, the US-China competition will be won or lost in the Economic Arena in a battle for the world economy.
De-Coupling China from Democratic Markets: Economic containment involves restricting or withdrawing China’s access to technology, capital, and market that its ascendancy depends on. By simply not helping China any further, we change the course of its economic rise. At that point, the troubles of China such as debt and demographic decline begin to take hold. This will take national will and focus, as well as a complete reevaluation of what American and Allied corporations are legally allowed to do in China.
If the democracies come together to block China’s corporate competitors then China’s tech giants will expand primarily in the China market and the emerging world. Access to China’s economy is a card that China’s rulers have played for centuries. But access to the world economy is a card that only America and our Allies can play. Business leaders must assess their risk in China and understand what they are actually dealing with in the world’s largest authoritarian country. US strategy and policy need not wait for business leaders. Economic containment of China, if implemented as a combined effort across the Alliance System, could hold enormous potential. Conversely, lack of coordination among the Allies presents China with its most desirable position: playing coalitions against each other.
Curtail China from US and Allied Capital Markets: The third plank in economic containment is to curtail China’s access to US and Allied capital markets. It may be the most important. China needs our capital – money from New York, London, and other Allied financial centers – to finance their objectives. If this were to stop, then the game changes dramatically for China.
A contained China, stagnant but large, free to live within the ideologies and practices of its own design, but not to export them nor to impose them upon the world, upon America, nor upon humanity’s future, would be a size neither too big, nor too small, but just right. We have everything we need to get there. Such a change means that we must look after ourselves, our future, and that of our Allies and partners around the world. Separation from China is crucial.
Rebuild America: A society that excels only at technology, finance, and services will always rely on other places to have a whole economy. This is untenable in a major power competition. In our case, the atrophy of our own industrial base means nothing short of dependency on our primary adversary, the People’s Republic of China. We are primed to lose this competition, whatever our advancements may be, until we rebuild our own industrial base, terminate our reliance on this adversary state, deny this state access to the advancements that we make in America and across the Allied World, and usher in a winnable systems competition.
The United States must envision global supply chains, innovation flows, and trading communities that omit the People’s Republic of China. The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a fortunate moment in world economic history for US-China competition to begin in full. It presents an opportunity for US-China competition to begin in full. It presents an opportunity for US-China bifurcations to become a path of acceleration for America and Allied democracies.
We cannot achieve this without the full participation of our business leaders and private enterprises. Industry leaders and scientists already understand the potential of the economic revolution that may be at hand in the decade ahead, but industry leaders and scientists are not yet thinking in terms of America’s existential competition with China. In order for America to prevail, we will need them to buy in.
Manufacturing dependency on an adversary state is among the most foolish outcomes and failed strategies in modern history, and certainly one of the most woeful failures of strategy since the American era began after the Second World War. The United States must make every effort to reduce and, in many cases, terminate this dependency. Doing so will require every effort to rebuild our manufacturing and industrial capabilities at home. We can use this opportunity to change the shape of the global economy and trading system, working to move manufacturing and supply chains out of China and into third-party countries, and also to focus especially on the creation of new technology that replaces labor with capital in currently labor-intensive industries.
It is the rise of America, not the rise of China, that must define our century and our world ahead. Organizing such a future will be a matter not only of economic action but of what would be among the greatest global diplomatic efforts of the modern era.
The Diplomatic Arena: The principal task of American diplomacy in the contest with China will be organizing the world’s democracies in common cause to prevail in geopolitical competition with China. The Democratic World presents the foundation for a system that preserves not only our security and prosperity, but the fundamental values for which we stand.
Our vision of world order must never be America alone or America isolated. In fact, that isolation is what our adversaries wish to achieve. Our vision must instead lead America once again to the helm of a great community of nations, one in which democracy and human rights are defended and not in retreat.
If we can succeed in unifying not only our Allies but also the world’s democracies, then the vast majority of global economic power and potential will cohere on one side of this contest against China. The primary goal of American diplomacy should be consolidating the US Alliance System and by extension much of the Democratic World into an economic community that can develop and apply the best practices toward China, Russia, or any other malefactor. In short, we must unite the Alliance System, integrate and align the world’s democracies and reconstruct the Free World.
The US Alliance System: We need a globally unified strategy, one that includes the Alliance System and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD, formed in 1960 by the United States, Canada, and a range of European nations, is now a worldwide economic organization that includes industrialized democracies and is a values-based community. In its own words, the OECD is “a like-minded community, committed to the preservation of individual liberty, the values of democracy, the rule of law and the defense of human rights. We believe in open and transparent market economy principles.”
OECD members include Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom in Europe; Israel and Turkey in the Middle East; Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and in the Indo-Pacific; and Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States in the Americas. This grouping represents the core economic community of the world’s democracies.
The United States must organize its influence and effectiveness outside of the Alliance System by working with major partners that have abundant influence and who generally lean toward America. In Latin America, for example, the direction of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico will define much of the region. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa will be essential partners. In Asia, India is already potentially our most important partner outside of our treaty Alliance System. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia is a state that may tip the balance of power for the entire region. In North Africa and the Middle East, Israel, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates will all be essential partners.
The world’s democracies must work and act together to scale back our economic engagement with China with new initiatives for growth and integration within the Democratic World. Our diplomatic strategy must succeed from the democracies of Europe to those of the Pacific.
China Rollback in the Emerging World: The continents of the Belt and Road are China’s future markets, supply chains, and, as Beijing imagines it, the CCP’s 21st century empire. It is a terrible irony that many nations from Africa to Asia, having rid themselves of European imperial powers in the 20th century, now find themselves as the coveted regions of a new imperialism from Beijing. China-funded infrastructure, including strategically located ports, railways, and other infrastructure, have wound up under Beijing’s ownership when developing countries can’t afford to make debt payments.
Even as protests abound in different countries, China continues to succeed in building infrastructure, granting loans, and exporting technology to these countries. While the Allied World must come together to push Beijing back from our markets, technology, supply chains, and capital resources, we must also push China back from the emerging world. If China succeeds at integrating and dominating the world’s emerging regions, the Communist Party would complete a new version of China’s Cold War-era strategy: “surrounding the cities with the countryside.
MAJOR POWERS: Together, the democracies form an enormous economic community, possess militaries of unparalleled technological advancement, and an innovation base far superior to our authoritarian rivals. However, in light of China’s strategies to integrate the world’s developing regions and to bring an anti-American coalition to bear against the US and the Alliance System, we lack a clear path to decisive superiority without another major power in the mix. India is that other major power. Because of India’s size, over a billion people, and because of its economic and military potential, the fate of the Free World may depend upon its choices.
CHINA CONTAINED: A contained Communist China, living inside a world of its own making, will eventually decide its own fate, but it must do so in isolation. It will be the job of our diplomats to remind China that it was America – our institutions, our capital, our technology, our markets, the world order that we built, and above all our strategy of engagement – that brought China its period of economic prosperity and the end of the poverty and dismay that it had known for much of recent history.
Source: The Decisive Decade: American Grand Strategy for Triumph Over China by Jonathan D.T. Ward (2023)
Other Perspectives: We have three tasks ahead of us. First, we need to rebalance America’s domestic economy by putting Wall Street in it place. Markets are the lifeblood of our country. They facilitate growth and innovation by connecting people who have good ideas to those with money to invest in good ideas. Wall Street has perverted this mission by funneling cash into companies either directly or indirectly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
Our second task is to bring critical industries back to America.
Finally, we have an obligation to rebuild America’s workforce. Globalization and outsourcing have destroyed the only reliable path to a stable and prosperous life available to millions of Americans. Families have broken down. Communities have crumbled, and death and despair have taken their place. We need to chart a new course by restoring the dignity of work. We must recommit ourselves to America’s founding ideals, have pride in our great nation, and be willing to throw aside the stale policies of the past.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023)
A Pentagon assessment commissioned by the Trump administration found disturbing weakness in the nation’s defense industrial base as well. Semiconductors are one weak point. So are the rare earth materials needed for advanced batteries, specialty chemicals for munitions, and scores of other small components. The United States military even has weapons that are built with elements available only in China. Moreover, the defense industrial base lacks the facilities necessary to produce ammunition, weapons, or ships rapidly. Were America threatened, these weaknesses could prove disastrous to our security.
Source: Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America by David H. McCormick (2023)
IMMIGRATION
There is no grand plan to make sure our immigration system is focused on building a stronger America. The Gang of Eight bill would have radically curtailed family-based chain migration. It would have dramatically increased border security, including $46 billion for border patrol, fencing, and more. It would have required E-Verify for employers and biometric data from immigrants. And we would have tied our immigrations system to merit – to make sure that people coming to our nation actually benefited America, just like every other nation approaches immigration.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023)
Washington should look to high-skilled immigration to accelerate America’s renewal. In 2019, the Trump administration laid out a new, merit-based immigration plan designed to prevent corporate visa abuse and raise national security vetting standards for incoming immigrants, but also to increase the number of people admitted legally due to their talents. Trump’s proposed reforms never came to fruition, but they can point us toward a menu of good policy options for a pro-worker, pro-growth strategic immigration policy.
First, simplify and accelerate visa and green-card reviews for high-skilled applicants; create a visa for well-vetted talent to support national-security-oriented innovation; and enhance protections against intellectual-property theft and technology transfer.
Second are modest reforms. These include shortening the time it takes to gain permanent residency; removing geographic quotas; and ensuring that foreign students receiving advanced degrees in high-priority disciplines can stay in the United States. Most of all, green card and visa caps should reflect our country’s labor needs, not be fixed to an arbitrary number decided by lawmakers over a decade ago.
Third, we should consider more-fundamental changes to our skilled-immigration laws. Politicians need to stop chasing comprehensive immigration reform and start fixing our immigration laws, piece by piece if necessary. They should start with stricter enforcement and border security to reset immigration. From there, start overhauling a clearly faulty system to keep the country attractive and competitive in the race for global talent. To put it plainly, our people are our greatest strategic advantage, and we need to reimagine how we educate, develop and expand America’s human capital.
Source: Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America by David H. McCormick (2023)
POTENTIAL SOLUTION
We were successful in defeating the Soviet Union without military conflict via President Ronald Reagan’s policy of “Peace Through Strength” Policy. China is a more formidable enemy, but the wisdom of history indicates “Peace Through Strength” is a winning strategy. Financial and military strength plus NATO and sanctions were the key elements to Reagan’s strategy. Unfortunately, neither our economic nor our military strength are today what they were in the 1980s, but that doesn’t mean that the strategy cannot work again – it will just be more difficult. Most importantly we must win the capital war first, by significant economic growth and reduction in spending. If successful, we can then match the military strength of China. But time is against us. So, we have to slow China’s growth.
From a geopolitical perspective we have to rebuild American manufacturing to reduce and/or eliminate our dependence on China’s. We can buy time by moving some of the dependent manufacturing to other democratic countries. We also need to decouple China from our capital markets as is suggested in the excepts to slow their growth.
Most importantly, we need help! Help from the rest of the democratic world. This effort has to be a global unified strategy by all countries who are committed to democratic principles, liberty, rule of law and human rights. There is certainly reason for them to join us, because if China becomes the only world superpower all democratic countries in the world are highly likely to lose their freedoms including us. Expanding and strengthening the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as described in the excerpts, is a must. Expanding the alliance particularly with India joining it, is highly desirable.
Our current immigration strategy of “open borders” is a strong deterrent to the development of such an alliance. When the United States can’t even prevent an invasion of illegal immigrants pouring through our southern border resulting in sex trafficking, fentanyl caused deaths, easy entry for terrorists and other enemies how can we expect other countries to follow us in such an alliance (which we must do). The border must be closed and maintained with a wall, security detection devices and more border patrol agents. Simultaneously, expanding legal immigration based on meritocracy with emphasis on STEM qualifications as proposed by the Gang of Eight would not only be a geopolitical enhancement but would be very good in helping us to reverse our overall decline.
In sum, a potential solution to the geopolitical problem definition above would be (in priority order):
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE GEOPOLITICAL WAR
PROBLEM DEFINITION
As was the case in the Capital War problem definition, our geopolitical problems are and continue to be self-inflicted, meaning we have a chance to find solutions to fix them.
First Problem: (a) We outsourced most of our manufacturing to China and became a service economy. This was most evident during the pandemic when we could not manufacture preventive production products for our first responders and infected citizenry, (b) Supply chain bottlenecks became very apparent when we had scores of freighters sitting outside west coast ports and couldn’t get them unloaded and disbursed fast enough, (c) U.S. multinational corporations were quick to relocate their manufacturing processes to China in their greed to increase profits with cheap foreign labor. Now that the Chinese have reaped the benefits of our dollars and intellectual property, many of these companies are leaving China in search of other countries with cheap labor or in some cases returning their manufacturing to U.S. soil, (d) Abandoning any sort of obligation to America has resulted in the suffering of the American worker, the weakening of U.S. national security, and the transfer of significant intellectual property. Further China has gained a significant trade advantage and can hold us hostage in attaining critical supplies most particularly medicines and rare earths they uniquely control, (e) Outsourcing our energy.
Second Problem: Our political clout was weakened with the humiliating and horrific withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by the lack of attention to the successfully negotiated Abraham Accords. As a result, China filled the geopolitical void in the Middle East successfully brokering a treaty alliance between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Now China is a power player in the Middle East replacing the U.S. who has held that distinction for three quarters of a century. A similar outcome is evident in Brazil who now has an exclusive trade deal with China, with a monetary agreement to use their respective currency’s thus turning their back on the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. Our geopolitical clout will be further weakened given the recent downgrade of the country’s credit worthiness.
Third Problem: As Senator Marco Rubio points out, “Our reliance on China – financial and otherwise – is the direct result of decades of bad U.S. policy. Not only did we help and enable them to enter the World Trade Organization, but China successfully exploited American ambition – ambition to open markets, ambition to spread democracy, ambition to make obscene amounts of money – and now we are paying the price.” China now has an explicit goal of becoming the world’s only superpower by 2049. The only way that can be averted is if China implodes or the United States stops them.
Fourth Problem: We are showing extreme weakness when the only thing the Chinese People’s Party respects is solid, consistent strength. We have been very passive if not neglectful by not confronting them for the millions of deaths from the lab-leaked Covid-19 virus or the thousands of fentanyl deaths.
Fifth Problem: How could the rest of the world possibly look favorably to us to help protect them when we don’t even have the resolve to protect ourselves from the travesties of our open southern border? We have scores of people coming in unvetted, unvaccinated, uneducated with valid expectations of being housed, fed, and clothed with free medical care and schooling. The numbers are so significant that Democratic governors and mayors are screaming at the Biden administration for help and relief. The pleas are falling on deaf ears, so state and local officials are having to shave their budgets to free up funds for the illegals care, including budget cuts for already traumatized cops. This open border policy is resulting in a proliferations of fentanyl deaths, sex trafficking, embolden cartels, and terrorist entering our country.
In its entirety it is a geopolitical mess, if not a travesty.
WISDOM ON POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS -- EXCERPTS
CHINA
All foreign policy challenges must be subordinate to the goal of stopping the CCP. It presents the single greatest external threat for our republic. The CCP is not serious about any kind of accommodation—they want 100% of the pie and on their terms. We must continue to compete in every domain with China – by separating our crucial supply chains from their soil, guarding our technology and data from the CCP’s clutches, and making sure the U.S. and our allies have ample and superior weaponry to defend ourselves.
Demand Accountability: President Xi and his Communist crew denied the world access to any information about a virus that started in his country and became a global pandemic. The crime boss Xi shut out the force for good who were struggling to deal with a virus that his regime had failed to stop. We must make sure that he and the Chinese Communist Party ultimately face accountability for the grossly reckless spreading of a lethal virus. Without accountability, this will happen again.
Source: Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love by Mike Pompeo (2023)
AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY for TRIUMPH OVER CHINA
The Economic Arena
The American grand strategy must align American businesses and investment houses with our near and long-term national security, and triumph over the CCP in the global Economic Arena. How can this be done? The answer rests in a two-pronged strategy: economic containment of the People’s Republic of China together with the US and Allied economic growth. Our long-range strategy must be to maintain and increase our share of global wealth and gross domestic product (GDP) while slowing China’s economic growth. In order to achieve our goals, we must focus on two aspects of economic competition: containment and growth. China’s ascendancy depends on its access to the global economy, and above all the American and Allied economies. This access is ours to grant or deny.
The Economic Containment of China: We must transform this competition from a contest with an ascending power into a contest with a stagnant one. At its foundation, the US-China competition will be won or lost in the Economic Arena in a battle for the world economy.
De-Coupling China from Democratic Markets: Economic containment involves restricting or withdrawing China’s access to technology, capital, and market that its ascendancy depends on. By simply not helping China any further, we change the course of its economic rise. At that point, the troubles of China such as debt and demographic decline begin to take hold. This will take national will and focus, as well as a complete reevaluation of what American and Allied corporations are legally allowed to do in China.
If the democracies come together to block China’s corporate competitors then China’s tech giants will expand primarily in the China market and the emerging world. Access to China’s economy is a card that China’s rulers have played for centuries. But access to the world economy is a card that only America and our Allies can play. Business leaders must assess their risk in China and understand what they are actually dealing with in the world’s largest authoritarian country. US strategy and policy need not wait for business leaders. Economic containment of China, if implemented as a combined effort across the Alliance System, could hold enormous potential. Conversely, lack of coordination among the Allies presents China with its most desirable position: playing coalitions against each other.
Curtail China from US and Allied Capital Markets: The third plank in economic containment is to curtail China’s access to US and Allied capital markets. It may be the most important. China needs our capital – money from New York, London, and other Allied financial centers – to finance their objectives. If this were to stop, then the game changes dramatically for China.
A contained China, stagnant but large, free to live within the ideologies and practices of its own design, but not to export them nor to impose them upon the world, upon America, nor upon humanity’s future, would be a size neither too big, nor too small, but just right. We have everything we need to get there. Such a change means that we must look after ourselves, our future, and that of our Allies and partners around the world. Separation from China is crucial.
Rebuild America: A society that excels only at technology, finance, and services will always rely on other places to have a whole economy. This is untenable in a major power competition. In our case, the atrophy of our own industrial base means nothing short of dependency on our primary adversary, the People’s Republic of China. We are primed to lose this competition, whatever our advancements may be, until we rebuild our own industrial base, terminate our reliance on this adversary state, deny this state access to the advancements that we make in America and across the Allied World, and usher in a winnable systems competition.
The United States must envision global supply chains, innovation flows, and trading communities that omit the People’s Republic of China. The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a fortunate moment in world economic history for US-China competition to begin in full. It presents an opportunity for US-China competition to begin in full. It presents an opportunity for US-China bifurcations to become a path of acceleration for America and Allied democracies.
We cannot achieve this without the full participation of our business leaders and private enterprises. Industry leaders and scientists already understand the potential of the economic revolution that may be at hand in the decade ahead, but industry leaders and scientists are not yet thinking in terms of America’s existential competition with China. In order for America to prevail, we will need them to buy in.
Manufacturing dependency on an adversary state is among the most foolish outcomes and failed strategies in modern history, and certainly one of the most woeful failures of strategy since the American era began after the Second World War. The United States must make every effort to reduce and, in many cases, terminate this dependency. Doing so will require every effort to rebuild our manufacturing and industrial capabilities at home. We can use this opportunity to change the shape of the global economy and trading system, working to move manufacturing and supply chains out of China and into third-party countries, and also to focus especially on the creation of new technology that replaces labor with capital in currently labor-intensive industries.
It is the rise of America, not the rise of China, that must define our century and our world ahead. Organizing such a future will be a matter not only of economic action but of what would be among the greatest global diplomatic efforts of the modern era.
The Diplomatic Arena: The principal task of American diplomacy in the contest with China will be organizing the world’s democracies in common cause to prevail in geopolitical competition with China. The Democratic World presents the foundation for a system that preserves not only our security and prosperity, but the fundamental values for which we stand.
Our vision of world order must never be America alone or America isolated. In fact, that isolation is what our adversaries wish to achieve. Our vision must instead lead America once again to the helm of a great community of nations, one in which democracy and human rights are defended and not in retreat.
If we can succeed in unifying not only our Allies but also the world’s democracies, then the vast majority of global economic power and potential will cohere on one side of this contest against China. The primary goal of American diplomacy should be consolidating the US Alliance System and by extension much of the Democratic World into an economic community that can develop and apply the best practices toward China, Russia, or any other malefactor. In short, we must unite the Alliance System, integrate and align the world’s democracies and reconstruct the Free World.
The US Alliance System: We need a globally unified strategy, one that includes the Alliance System and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD, formed in 1960 by the United States, Canada, and a range of European nations, is now a worldwide economic organization that includes industrialized democracies and is a values-based community. In its own words, the OECD is “a like-minded community, committed to the preservation of individual liberty, the values of democracy, the rule of law and the defense of human rights. We believe in open and transparent market economy principles.”
OECD members include Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom in Europe; Israel and Turkey in the Middle East; Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and in the Indo-Pacific; and Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States in the Americas. This grouping represents the core economic community of the world’s democracies.
The United States must organize its influence and effectiveness outside of the Alliance System by working with major partners that have abundant influence and who generally lean toward America. In Latin America, for example, the direction of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico will define much of the region. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa will be essential partners. In Asia, India is already potentially our most important partner outside of our treaty Alliance System. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia is a state that may tip the balance of power for the entire region. In North Africa and the Middle East, Israel, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates will all be essential partners.
The world’s democracies must work and act together to scale back our economic engagement with China with new initiatives for growth and integration within the Democratic World. Our diplomatic strategy must succeed from the democracies of Europe to those of the Pacific.
China Rollback in the Emerging World: The continents of the Belt and Road are China’s future markets, supply chains, and, as Beijing imagines it, the CCP’s 21st century empire. It is a terrible irony that many nations from Africa to Asia, having rid themselves of European imperial powers in the 20th century, now find themselves as the coveted regions of a new imperialism from Beijing. China-funded infrastructure, including strategically located ports, railways, and other infrastructure, have wound up under Beijing’s ownership when developing countries can’t afford to make debt payments.
Even as protests abound in different countries, China continues to succeed in building infrastructure, granting loans, and exporting technology to these countries. While the Allied World must come together to push Beijing back from our markets, technology, supply chains, and capital resources, we must also push China back from the emerging world. If China succeeds at integrating and dominating the world’s emerging regions, the Communist Party would complete a new version of China’s Cold War-era strategy: “surrounding the cities with the countryside.
MAJOR POWERS: Together, the democracies form an enormous economic community, possess militaries of unparalleled technological advancement, and an innovation base far superior to our authoritarian rivals. However, in light of China’s strategies to integrate the world’s developing regions and to bring an anti-American coalition to bear against the US and the Alliance System, we lack a clear path to decisive superiority without another major power in the mix. India is that other major power. Because of India’s size, over a billion people, and because of its economic and military potential, the fate of the Free World may depend upon its choices.
CHINA CONTAINED: A contained Communist China, living inside a world of its own making, will eventually decide its own fate, but it must do so in isolation. It will be the job of our diplomats to remind China that it was America – our institutions, our capital, our technology, our markets, the world order that we built, and above all our strategy of engagement – that brought China its period of economic prosperity and the end of the poverty and dismay that it had known for much of recent history.
Source: The Decisive Decade: American Grand Strategy for Triumph Over China by Jonathan D.T. Ward (2023)
Other Perspectives: We have three tasks ahead of us. First, we need to rebalance America’s domestic economy by putting Wall Street in it place. Markets are the lifeblood of our country. They facilitate growth and innovation by connecting people who have good ideas to those with money to invest in good ideas. Wall Street has perverted this mission by funneling cash into companies either directly or indirectly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
Our second task is to bring critical industries back to America.
Finally, we have an obligation to rebuild America’s workforce. Globalization and outsourcing have destroyed the only reliable path to a stable and prosperous life available to millions of Americans. Families have broken down. Communities have crumbled, and death and despair have taken their place. We need to chart a new course by restoring the dignity of work. We must recommit ourselves to America’s founding ideals, have pride in our great nation, and be willing to throw aside the stale policies of the past.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023)
A Pentagon assessment commissioned by the Trump administration found disturbing weakness in the nation’s defense industrial base as well. Semiconductors are one weak point. So are the rare earth materials needed for advanced batteries, specialty chemicals for munitions, and scores of other small components. The United States military even has weapons that are built with elements available only in China. Moreover, the defense industrial base lacks the facilities necessary to produce ammunition, weapons, or ships rapidly. Were America threatened, these weaknesses could prove disastrous to our security.
Source: Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America by David H. McCormick (2023)
IMMIGRATION
There is no grand plan to make sure our immigration system is focused on building a stronger America. The Gang of Eight bill would have radically curtailed family-based chain migration. It would have dramatically increased border security, including $46 billion for border patrol, fencing, and more. It would have required E-Verify for employers and biometric data from immigrants. And we would have tied our immigrations system to merit – to make sure that people coming to our nation actually benefited America, just like every other nation approaches immigration.
Source: Decades of Decadence by Marco Rubio (2023)
Washington should look to high-skilled immigration to accelerate America’s renewal. In 2019, the Trump administration laid out a new, merit-based immigration plan designed to prevent corporate visa abuse and raise national security vetting standards for incoming immigrants, but also to increase the number of people admitted legally due to their talents. Trump’s proposed reforms never came to fruition, but they can point us toward a menu of good policy options for a pro-worker, pro-growth strategic immigration policy.
First, simplify and accelerate visa and green-card reviews for high-skilled applicants; create a visa for well-vetted talent to support national-security-oriented innovation; and enhance protections against intellectual-property theft and technology transfer.
Second are modest reforms. These include shortening the time it takes to gain permanent residency; removing geographic quotas; and ensuring that foreign students receiving advanced degrees in high-priority disciplines can stay in the United States. Most of all, green card and visa caps should reflect our country’s labor needs, not be fixed to an arbitrary number decided by lawmakers over a decade ago.
Third, we should consider more-fundamental changes to our skilled-immigration laws. Politicians need to stop chasing comprehensive immigration reform and start fixing our immigration laws, piece by piece if necessary. They should start with stricter enforcement and border security to reset immigration. From there, start overhauling a clearly faulty system to keep the country attractive and competitive in the race for global talent. To put it plainly, our people are our greatest strategic advantage, and we need to reimagine how we educate, develop and expand America’s human capital.
Source: Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America by David H. McCormick (2023)
POTENTIAL SOLUTION
We were successful in defeating the Soviet Union without military conflict via President Ronald Reagan’s policy of “Peace Through Strength” Policy. China is a more formidable enemy, but the wisdom of history indicates “Peace Through Strength” is a winning strategy. Financial and military strength plus NATO and sanctions were the key elements to Reagan’s strategy. Unfortunately, neither our economic nor our military strength are today what they were in the 1980s, but that doesn’t mean that the strategy cannot work again – it will just be more difficult. Most importantly we must win the capital war first, by significant economic growth and reduction in spending. If successful, we can then match the military strength of China. But time is against us. So, we have to slow China’s growth.
From a geopolitical perspective we have to rebuild American manufacturing to reduce and/or eliminate our dependence on China’s. We can buy time by moving some of the dependent manufacturing to other democratic countries. We also need to decouple China from our capital markets as is suggested in the excepts to slow their growth.
Most importantly, we need help! Help from the rest of the democratic world. This effort has to be a global unified strategy by all countries who are committed to democratic principles, liberty, rule of law and human rights. There is certainly reason for them to join us, because if China becomes the only world superpower all democratic countries in the world are highly likely to lose their freedoms including us. Expanding and strengthening the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as described in the excerpts, is a must. Expanding the alliance particularly with India joining it, is highly desirable.
Our current immigration strategy of “open borders” is a strong deterrent to the development of such an alliance. When the United States can’t even prevent an invasion of illegal immigrants pouring through our southern border resulting in sex trafficking, fentanyl caused deaths, easy entry for terrorists and other enemies how can we expect other countries to follow us in such an alliance (which we must do). The border must be closed and maintained with a wall, security detection devices and more border patrol agents. Simultaneously, expanding legal immigration based on meritocracy with emphasis on STEM qualifications as proposed by the Gang of Eight would not only be a geopolitical enhancement but would be very good in helping us to reverse our overall decline.
In sum, a potential solution to the geopolitical problem definition above would be (in priority order):
- Develop an extensive alliance of all the democracies in the world with an objective of limiting China’s power, principally by dampening their growth.
- Achieve “Peace Through Strength” via a sound American growth economy and investment in our military to achieve equivalency or better than China.
- Rebuild America’s manufacturing capability – simultaneously decoupling from China.
- Starve China from gaining access to U.S. capital.
- Secure our Border.
- Institute a meritocracy immigration system.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| america_17l_the_geopolitical_war_--__segment_17.pdf |