Donald Trump is now the Republicans’ official candidate. His pick as running mate is J D Vance, a young lawyer who is well-known for his anti-China stances. Tyranny of status quo has allowed a semi-demented Joe Biden to walk to Democrats’ finished line only to be stopped from crossing it. (At times Biden is surprisingly loud and lucid on stage, thanks probably to the neurological "Viagra" that has been administered just before he is made to appear.) They might come up with a new nominee, but no matter who he or she is, it is a little too late. It looks like Trump will win the election in November. And the momentum he has built up will also allow the Republicans to carry both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Democrats only have themselves to blame. He is going to be the Sun-Emperor of the United States of America!
Trump, erratic as he may be, is likely to retain these traces in his behaviour and actions:
1. I am the emperor. No one stands equal to me. Narendran
Modi, please know your place. (He does not like fake saints!)
2. UN, WHO, WTO, ICJ and other international organisations
are totally irrelevant to him.
3. You want me to help, you MUST pay. No buddy-buddy
favours. NATO, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, please take note.
The single person whom he will least tolerate is President Xi Jinping of China, who he sees is his greatest challenge to his sense of majesty. Regardless of consequences and practicality, he will impose tall tariffs to deny Chinese goods entry into America. He is a Qianlong in reverse.
Be that as it may, China probably knows all this and must brace itself for the new geopolitical realities.
A massive global IT outage started on Thursday. Cyber-security firm CrowdStrike’s Falcon software update paralysed its Microsoft Windows platform system. At this point of writing, it is still not out of the woods yet. It affects airlines, banking, healthcare, and other services. China does not use it and therefore is not affected.
China should have used this window to bring Taiwan back to its fold!
What a waste!
Why do I advocate this?
If Taiwan is back to the fold of China, China can very much do without America. Yes, its economy will suffer for a couple of years. And yes, America is a big market for its products, but Trump is going to choke it anyway.
Trump is a proud man. Unlike Biden who rallies all his hoodlums to deny China of technologies and encourages even companies like TSMC to invest in America or simply relocate anywhere as long as they are not in China, Trump is unlikely going to do that. Americans must produce the products themselves and not anywhere but in the soils of America, not even in Mexico. (He looks down on Hispanics!)
Why do I describe him as a Qianlong in reverse?
George Macartney led a British mission to the Qing court in 1793. He wanted principally to persuade China to open new ports for British trade in China and to allow the establishment of a permanent embassy in Beijing. They met the Qianlong Emperor, who thought China had nothing to learn or gain from the West. He turned down the British requests. The rest is history. China suffered more than a hundred years of humiliation later on.
America is already in decline. The strengths of America used to lie in their ability to attract the best brains from all over the world, significantly those of Chinese immigrants and students. Save for the Civil War (1861-65) no wars were fought on American soil.
If a hot war were to be fought, America should not think their country will be spared. Russia and China are capable of returning America a favour if it acts the way it talks.
China, hold your head high and Trump will back off, like what Kim Jong Un has done it to Trump during his first term.
Maybe there is another opportunity come November?
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US cant produce its essential goods as cheap and good as China. Its people would pay the cost hike in Trump' ways
ReplyDelete1/n
ReplyDeleteOne should dust off on the origin of chaos theory on how the flutter of a butterfly's wings ends up causing a tornado elsewhere, both in our small planet spinning around in a universe of billions of galaxies separated by unimaginable distances.
Conspiracy theory aside on a second shooter in the mode of the Dallas assassination, Trump getting an ear-pierce has diminished Biden's chances of winning the forthcoming elections (unless he too gets one at the nearest tattoo shop).
One wonders if Trump had instead got his nose or lips pierced what would be the outcome today. Such be the twists and turns of modern-day political dramas that put korean tv drama's to shame.
In any case, Trump lost no time to get Vance onboard as his veep. Although people say the VP position is more window-dressing than executive, one must note Trump won't likely get a third term so it will be Vance at half his age who will be the next US president after the orange-haired one ends his term leaving a policy trail of destruction across the globe.
All this assumes Biden will resign and Harris will take on the leadership of the Democrats. Time is too short and the transfer of campaign funds from Biden to Harris requires some legal handiwork. Meanwhile, Trump has gained momentum, additional campaign funds and sentiment support in the mid-region swing-states and from tech moguls.
Barring the wing flutters of not just a butterfly but a pterodactylus, Trump will roll into the US white house like a tyrannosaurus rex come January 2025, buoyed by the bewilderingly insensate and recrudescent support of the US masses and media whose psychological makeup is to reactionally rah-rah anyone remotely anti-establishment.
They will find that making America great again will take a heavy beating as a cause because their US makers won't find unionized American manufacturing cost-effective which means if made in the US, prices will be so high that inflation will be the result which will exactly hit the very voters supporting the Trump-Vance thrust to re-isolate their US and abruptly destroy its mantra of free markets while in pursuit of an isolationist industrial policy made of tariffs and sanctions, however in a world that has long become interconnected in terms of dependencies for lowest-cost, best-fit, widest-market, competitive advantages - while dedollarizing.
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ReplyDeleteNext, to the Trump-Vance pair will be added US pine coffin-nailers Lighthizer, Navarro and other anti-China hawks such as O'Brien, Brands, Colby and Schmidt - for the storm that is coming together is US focus on containing China which however can make anything these days besides being supreme on green technologies including EVs.
The only challenges that China currently has and is vigorously solving are: lack of cutting-edge tech, aging demographic, property market overhang, and weak consumer sentiment counterpoised by increased export-activity in the Global South including SEAsia, even India inasmuch Russia.
Depending on what the US Republicans will be doing in terms of tariffing everyone, the US allies in Europe and partners in Asia may see China as a positive counterbalancing power, in terms of being a more stable geopolitical alternative inasmuch a recovering market, default subparts supplier of the first rank, global controller of critical and strategic natural resources, co-partner in STEM-based research and development besides being the world's premier builder with a base of local infrastructure for end-to-end logistics tools that presents her as the most modern and relevant supply-chain ecosystem.
One also notes that nothing has yet been said how Russia's languishing brainpower STEM pool can collaborate with China's same to usher a new generation of high-tech products and applications.
It is noted that the stealth technology of the US' F-117 bat-wing jetfighter had first come about because its Skunk Works Lockheed engineers had chanced upon a theoretical paper on anti-radar stealth that was first published by a Russian academic. What for this more with China next.
The global geostrategic calculus will be interesting to future historiographers of what will happen next on Trump's return.
What exactly are the strengths of the US today? Biden ran against China and failed.
Trump will soon realize his US can only sell big ticket items - airplanes (a falling Boeing against a rising Airbus plus China's emerging C919), chemicals (China makes them abundantly too), pharmaceuticals (costly research drugs against emerging countries' generics), food (China and others are planting more to gain food security) and microchips (China has legacy chip supremacy while making progress on latest-chip equipment).
US, European and Japan/Korean bankers and industrialists know this so it will be interesting ahead to see how they can still maintain their respective global footprints - unless they collaborate more with China even in the face of the on-coming Trump onslaught.
As for Taiwan, Trump has already rattled Taipei to pay more and for its own defense, noting the distance of his US from the island. Besides, if it comes to blows between the island and the Mainland, how are his US forces to know who is who since both fighters look alike.
As for Macartney and Qianlong, there is a tragic twist to how a butterfly flutter has changed history. It was understood London had sent in advance to the Emperor a draft letter of introduction for relations. This was translated by a Chinese missionary in London who used Latin. The translation mentioned gift-bearing which implied equal-status. It was received in Beijing by a foreign translator also schooled in Latin who moderated it to say tribute instead of the original gift-bearing. Duly warmed, Qianlong welcomed Macartney. On arrival with the official same letter, Macartney presented it however without knowing his translator being a Christian had added some missionary statement. Qianlong's translator read the missive which the Emperor thus found dismissible.
China might have invented gunpowder but it was the brits who used it on their cannons to step onto her soil despite having a smaller fleet than Zhenghe.
Hence today hypersonic missiles, submarines locator and the world's largest blue-water navy. That's besides how the balance of power will change in an instant if Moscow moves half of its nuclear packs on its hypersonic long-range launchers across the border into China.
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ReplyDeleteOn the IT outage:
https://tinyurl.com/3y2rjtcz
It's just like covid. The virus intrudes and triggers a protective cytokin storm by the human body's defensive immune system which tragically overwhelms what it tries to protect.
The crowdstrike update patch was to kernelize a more intelligent reading of potential intrusions; it went into blue-screen overkill and shut down the operating system instead. A few lines of logic codes were wrong, it seems.
Sometimes one wonders if those cybersecurity firms weren't the ones to malware in order to egg the affected to buy their products.
Just like some theory that the Republicans remain deepstate architects of political scandalizations, eg CIA on mob while brainshaping Oswald, Lewinsky planted as honeytrap on Clinton, the Nixon tapes and Washpost. Why hold back the SService for a full three minutes before their shooters neutralized Cross?