Wake Up America! You're Falling Behind

I've mentioned before that my former boss toured China last year and was astounded at all the signs extolling Chinese workers to work hard and to strive to make their company the best in the world (not the country, the world). Their business leaders are actively expanding globally with the goal being to dominate the markets. It may be full of poor, rural people, have a ton of pollution and environmental mismanagement to contend with, and spend quite a bit of its wealth on energy production, but it will be a force to be reckoned with (especially as they hold a ton of our debt now).

Rep Mike Coffman even mentioned China briefly at the Tea Party meeting last week - how they are holding exports of rare earth metals "hostage" to wrangle for whatever they want, and he was almost indignant saying he was going to fight for fair trade. I thought it sounded like good old fashioned capitalism to me! It just sucks that we're on the short end of the stick for a change...

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com ... ng-behind/
Post by: Kishore Mahbubani - Special to CNN
April 25th, 2011
Editor’s Note: The following is an edited portion of an interview with Kishore Mahbubani, the Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Mahbubani previously served for 33 years in Singapore’s diplomatic service and is the author of The New Asian Hemisphere, Can Asians Think? and Beyond the Age of Innocence.

Every time the United States or the West steps into an Islamic country it presents a major geopolitical gift to China. (When the U.S. decided to intervene in Libya) China was saying, “Great, go ahead! Go into more Islamic countries. Make my day.”

If you’re a logical, long-term, hard-headed geopolitical realist thinker from America it is very, very clear that the only country that can overtake the United States in absolute power - militarily, economically, in every sense - is China.

The Islamic world will not overtake America– not in my lifetime and not in your lifetime. So America should be devoting 90% of its resources on managing China and 10% of its resources on managing the Islamic world.

A lot of my writings are intended to serve as a wake-up call to the West. I’m not anti-West nor am I anti-American - even though many people think I am. I’m actually just telling the West that you are acting against your own long-term geopolitical and economic interests in your policies towards the rest of the world.