This second cold war, conducted on a teeming planet whose anxiety is intensified by the passions and rages of social media, is only in its beginning stages. The aim, like in the first Cold War, is negative victory: not defeating the Chinese, but waiting them out, just as we waited the Soviets out.Kaplan makes much of the Chinese abuse of the Muslim Uighur minority in western China, and our failure to capitalize thereupon. He chooses not to notice that Americans couldn’t care less about their fate. The man in the street’s attitude echoes Henry Kissinger about the Iran-Iraq war, “It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.”
As COTTonLINE noted earlier, given time the Chinese economy is likely to implode much as the Japanese did in the 1990s, and for similar reasons.
