Writing for the Claremont Institute's The American Mind publication, David Goldman says we get five things wrong about China and our policy toward the Middle Kingdom. Here are those five, minus the explanation he gives for each.
Myth #1: America is making China rich, and can weaken it by reducing imports, investment, and so forth.
Myth #2: China depends on stolen American technology.
Myth #3: China faces demographic collapse.
Myth #4: China wants to take over Taiwan because it is led by an expansionist Marxist-Leninist party that hates and fears democracy.
Myth #5: We can deter China by shifting military forces to Asia and adding to conventional capabilities.
And Goldman lists five things we need to do to win the competition with China.
I see much here with which I agree. Particularly the importance of on-shoring mission-critical industries like pharmaceuticals and computer chips. He shares my concern that aircraft carriers are huge billion dollar targets, impossible to protect against a determined peer adversary.We need to fund federal R&D at the Reagan level, that is, an additional 1% of GDP, or roughly $2 trillion over ten years. We need a radical revision of tax and regulatory policy to favor capital-intensive manufacturing. We need selective subsidies for mission-critical industries. We need to shift in educational priorities toward engineering and hard science. We need to shift defense priorities away from legacy systems toward innovation, including space-based missile defense, directed-energy weapons, cyber war, and drone swarms.
It will be difficult culturally and politically to "shift educational priorities toward engineering and hard science" as those tend to be fields in which Asians and whites excel and BIPOCs don't.
