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Grayson Reim's avatar

If I had a guess about this McFaul stuff, I’d say it seems like an attempt at reframing from criticize those who you can effect to criticize those who are the most evil, by which he means not America.

Also, I’ve been noticing a more strident tone from people in McFaul’s camp. Ben Rhode’s, on his podcast Pod Save The World, lamented about how he was tired of criticism of America and went on about how people across the world look to America as a force for good. It all consolidates around this narrative of Democracy vs Autocracy, which again slots America in as the good guy and Russia, China, etc. as the bad guys.

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Alan's avatar

Is China a threat in another way though? What if China grows more powerful economically and militarily and significantly more powerful than the US? What if it controlled the SWIFT system or enforced the use of the digital yuan for international trade? If you do something China doesn’t like you get cut off from the international system or they transfer your digital reserves out of your country with the click of a button. What if they started restricting US trade rights with Asia and reduced our wealth as a result? What if they started interfering in the politics of Canada or tried to move military forces/missiles there? These are all echoes of things the US itself does. It’s possible China won’t grow that powerful or that it won’t do what we’ve done but I don’t think we can take that risk. If we had isolated China earlier: not let them into the WTO, worked on a balancing coalition sooner, etc. we might not have to worry about it now. Clearly China has shown a willingness to throw its weight around and use whatever tools it has at its disposal to pressure other countries. Why wouldn’t that eventually become untenable to the US?

I would advocate isolating Russia too if it had a similar capability and if Europe were less capable and as important to US prosperity as Asia is. The fact is none of those things are true so we should basically shut down NATO and move on. So I don’t think we can equate the threat from Russia and China.

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