超能结晶怎么换封印石:China is not what US was in 1945! - Focus dis...

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China is not what US was in 1945!

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By Tom Engelhardt

Back before 9/11, China was, of course, the favored future uber-enemy of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and all those neocons who signed onto the Project for the New American Century and later staffed George W. Bush’s administration.  After all, if you wanted to build a military beyond compare to enforce a long-term Pax Americana on the planet, you needed a nightmare enemy large enough to justify all the advanced weapons systems in which you planned to invest.

Finding itself hopelessly bogged down in two ground wars with rag-tag insurgency movements on either end of the Greater Middle Eastern “mainland,” it let China-as-Monster-Enemy slip beneath the waves.  In the process, the Navy and, to some extent, the Air Force became adjunct services to the Army (and the Marines).  In Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, U.S. Navy personnel far from any body of water found themselves driving trucks and staffing prisons.

There’s no reason to be surprised then that, as the war in Iraq began to wind down in 2009-2010, the “Chinese naval threat” began to quietly reemerge.  China was, after all, immensely economically successful and beginning to flex its muscles in local territorial waters.

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Behind the overheated warnings lay a deeper (if often unstated) calculation, shared by far more than budget-anxious military types and those who wrote about them: that the U.S. was heading toward the status of late, great superpower and that, one of these years not so far down the line, China would challenge us for the number one spot on the seas -- and on the planet.

You know the background here: the victor in the Cold War, the self-proclaimed “sole superpower” ready to accept no other nation or bloc of nations that might challenge it (ever), the towering land that was to be the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Vulcans rolled into one. Well, those dreams are already in history’s dustbin. These days, the U.S. appears capable of doing little with its still staggering military might but fight Pashtun guerillas to a draw in distant Afghanistan and throw its air power and missile-armed drones at another fifth-rate power in a “humanitarian” gesture with the usual destruction and predictable non-results.

Toss in the obvious -- rotting infrastructure, fiscal gridlock in Washington, high unemployment, cutbacks in crucial local services, and a general mood of paralysis, depression, and confusion -- and even if the Chinese are only refurbishing a mothballed 1992 Ukrainian aircraft carrier as their first move into the imperial big time, is it really so illogical to imagine them as the next “sole superpower” on planet Earth?

Still, for all those naval and air power types who would like to remove American power from a quicksand planet and put it offshore, for those who would like to return to an age of superpower enmity, in fact, for all those pundits and analysts of whatever stripe picking China as the globe's next superstar or super evildoer, I have a small suggestion: take a deep breath.

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As a start, let’s take a stroll down memory lane.  Back in 1979, Ezra Vogel, Harvard professor and Asian specialist, put out a book that was distinctly ahead of its time in capturing the rise to wealth and glory of a new global power.  He entitled it Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, and in praising the ways Japanese industry operated and the resulting “Japanese miracle,” the title lacked only an exclamation point.  Vogel certainly caught the temper of the times, and his scholarly analysis was followed, in the 1980s, by a flood of ever more shrill articles and books predicting (in fascination or horror) that this would indeed someday be a Japanese world.

As you think about that, keep something else in mind.  China’s story over the last century-plus already represents one of the great discontinuous bursts of energy of our modern moment.

No one at the time could have imagined that the giant, independent but impoverished communist land would become the expansive number two capitalist economy of today.  In fact, from the turn of the previous century when China was the basket case of Asia and a combined Japanese/Western force marched on Beijing, when various great powers took parts of the country as their own property or “concessions,” followed by ensuing waves of warlordism, nationalism, revolutionary ferment, war with Japan, civil war, and finally the triumph of a communist regime that united the country, the essence of China’s story has been unpredictability.

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The minute China’s economy falters, the minute some bubble bursts, whether through an overheating economy or for other reasons, the country’s leaders face a lot of problems. What many here call its growing “middle class” remains anything but -- and there are literally hundreds of millions of forgotten peasants and migrant workers who have found the Chinese success story less than a joy.

It’s almost inconceivable that, in the future, China could or would ever play the role the U.S. played in 1945 as the British Empire went down. It’s hard even to imagine China as another Soviet Union in a great global struggle with the United States.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).

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