Wars, hot or cold, are quick to change concerns of what can be regarded as a clear and present danger
 One thing about wars - be they hot or cold - is that combatants do not prioritise what is unrelated to the conflict. Clear and present dangers are uppermost and those perils - however dire - with distant, uncertain outcomes fall well down on the priority list.
If getting food and supplies to our friends and allies becomes vital, one can be assured that worries over CO2 emissions from ships and planes as well as LGBTQ+ sensitivities will fall by the wayside and slip into oblivion.
It also seems clear that even in the politically divided West, split between left and right, we can agree on only a few things. Hostility towards China is shared by both sides.
With all the talk of decoupling, and high level contacts becoming chilly, it seems there is a deeply ingrained mutual antipathy towards Orwellian citizen surveillance, "social credit" monitoring of citizens, Uyghur concentration camps, the need for exit visas and one party rule headed by a president who rules for life, or as long as he likes. Even in a fiercely divided West, this is as abhorrent to a leftist New York Congresswoman like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) as it is to a rightist Texas Senator like Ted Cruz.
While it is true, postmodernist Marxists like AOC prefer the intentions of communist state policy to its deplorable results, she will still defend some of communist state features such as its single-payer health care system. But even AOC will admit that there is no national state where the communist principle is proclaimed as a working reality that she would have Western nations emulate.
No, they tend to refer to Scandinavian and Baltic states as their ideal, despite the fact that these states protest their being cast in the role of socialists, having tried it and rejected it operationally decades ago.
So while some leftists, sporting Che Guevara and Hammer and Sickle T-shirts, will shout down rightist speakers who would dare criticise high-minded communist ideals and praise the efficacy of capitalist results. Like froth on one's beer their force is more evident than real and will scatter at the first prospect of the loss of modern conveniences in the service of the greater good.
What is left is a consistent bond of unity between the West's right and left at least in regards to China. Rather in the way the 9/11 terror bombings of 20 years ago, gave President George W Bush the only peace his administration had ever known, a cold war with China would likely have a pacifying impact on the warring states of right and left in much the same way.
There is little to fear from the public at large, if reasonably well informed - which, sadly, it is not. Because of the emptiness of hyperbolic and scarifying claims of climate alarmists, LGBTQ+ lobbyists and sundry social justice warriors, these causes do not resonate with the wider public. While not insubstantial, its big support comes from the media, the academy and the bureaucracy, the latter being its biggest backer because it provides bureaucrats with a licence to spend massively,
But this has little traction with the public - chiefly men - insensitive brutes that they are. That's because environmentalists' dire predictions didn't come true. Global cooling was to be feared in the 1970s, acid rain and a hole in the ozone caused skin cancer, they said. We were also to run out of oil and live in a horse-drawn world by the year 2000, according to a Club of Rome computer model. But this was followed by several oil gluts. Now the craze is over CO2 emissions causing global warming. The exception to the rising indifference is the significant presence of newly empowered single women who can be frightened by any fashionable fear that has the blessing of officialdom.
In an extended interview with Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1990s, who gave the US its first balanced budget in more than three decades under his "Contract with America" slogan, he revealed the secret to his success in achieving what now seems to be unachievable.
The secret sauce was simply insisting on a balanced budget outcome when allocating expenditures and not allowing excess disbursements here if it did not include a compensating cost saving there.
That takes a will, and to be fair it came at a time of profligate government spending was such at the voters gave approval in principle, even though special interests among them couldn't see why an extra billion or two could not have been added to the highways appropriations bill for bike paths and rest areas for cyclists.
Mr Gingrich said that once strict adherence to the balanced budget had been accepted, every spending department - even the Pentagon, the most wasteful of them all - became more careful. This became a fashionable virtuous circle - rather like Hong Kong in the old days when each government department prided itself in being the most under budget, glorying in their efficiency.
Said Mr Gingrich: "But under the anything goes system when one cost overrun is indistinguishable from another, people are inclined to say, but can't I have my US$5 billion. So and so has his, after all. So why not me?"
Which is the case today, in which there is so much free money in the system under the rubric of "quantitative easing" that profligate state spenders are more and more careless with budgets, quite reasonably seeking to spend today's devaluing dollars before they devalue further and buy less. Under such circumstances the US Internal Revenue Service's otherwise lunatic decision to hire 700 armed tax collectors, makes perfect sense if one is to get the money while it is still worth getting.
While politics divide us, Red China unites us. And it is no frivolous matter. Both the American and European chambers of commerce in China surveys of memberships say less rather than more foreign direct investment is expected.
Apart from China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, which was first welcomed as a measure to enhance infrastructure in the developing world, it is now seen as a debt trap and a way of re-colonising poorer nations in a renewed and reinvigorated communist empire. Add to that, the concern of militarising the Spratley Islands and declaring itself the ruler of the South China Sea despite this having been ruled an illegitimate claim by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
So what we have is a re-alignment. There has been some home shoring in the West in terms of sourcing, but continued manufacturing in China is becoming increasingly unconscionable, when it can be done with tolerable loss elsewhere in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, India and Bangladesh to name a few Asian options.
Shipping must be readjusted to service these under developed areas. There will be difficulties and costs but the West will no longer be dealing with what it increasingly appears to be an Evil Empire no less so than the Soviet Union one was.
This will undoubtedly involve a reconfiguration of maritime assets. But with the combination of balanced budget enforcement, in which waste is to be much reduced if not eliminated, we shall overcome without further reliance on China. |
