Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

China and the U.S

Obama has a tricky hand to play. He must show his domestic audience that he is tough on human rights whilst depending on loans from China to stop America going bust.Some years back, approaching thirty, I wrote that China was the power of the future. People smirked, knowing they had read the ramblings of a fool.

Though a much older civilisation than our Western model with a quite different culture to our Hollywood inspired celebrity-worship, it is less advanced in modern technology and social structures. But it is catching up fast, as it is in military hardware. When its economic power and its military might reach a certain point, if America tries to throw its weight, China will challenge. Unlike the now defunct Soviet Union which was always an economic house of cards, China will be the world’s economic mega power.

The United States will then have this simple choice. Either accept gracefully its hour has passed and set to work sorting out its own consumption gluttony, debt and social issues and plan for the fact that when next Yosemite erupts it will wipe out half its population in a single bang, or opt for confrontation. This it will lose.

Brown’s Plans for Exit

Maybe a conference is a good idea. Unfortunately conferences have a bad record for solving problems, but in the end, short of conquest, people have to talk to get a solution.

Afghanistan, with its epic history and its unique poppy based economy requires all who meddle there to recognise one simple fact of life, whether they like it or not. The Taliban is built around Afghan tribal culture and the warlord tradition and no settlement is possible with out its stamp of approval. They now have the initiative and they will not let go. NATO is utterly unable to raise the million plus troops necessary to impose a settlement by force and keep it in place. If we exit snubbing the Taliban thay will hang Karzai and his corrupt henchmen and take over as soon as we are gone. They did it to Najibullah. Their predecessors the Mujahidin brought the Russians to exactly the position we are in now, before they set off home.

Money is the key. If we can help them set up an economy which can bring prosperity with a crop other than poppies, that and that alone will gradually ease the Afghans out of a medieval mindset into modern times. An intersting footnote is that the Columbian drug barons and the Taliban depend, like Al Capone before them with liquour,on thier product being illegal and subject to criminal black  marketing and distribution. Making all drugs legal but controlled, would do more to sort this out than anything else. Unfortunatley the  failure to see the lack of connection between illegality and reducing consumption is intellectually a gap too wide for the legislators to bridge.

I remember my father telling me how when he visited New York on business during Prohibiton, that friends had fixed him membership of an illegal bar so that he would not be thisty. He always felt safe there because it was mostly full of New York cops.