The Dangers of Asymmetry, by Victor Davis Hanson.
It is strange how suddenly a skeptical Wall Street, CEOs, and even university and think-tank policy analysts are now jumping on the once-taboo Trump bandwagon on China: that if something is not done to stop China’s planned trajectory to global hegemony, based on its repudiation of the entire post-war trade and commercial order, then it will soon be too late.
In a wider sense, at some point on a variety of fronts, Americans got fed up with perceived lopsidedness, and their ensuing exasperation started to change status-quo thinking and policy — whether China’s flagrant cheating, the recent illustration, via the “caravan,” of rampant hypocrisies about illegal immigration, or weariness with the asymmetries with the Islamic world.
Exactly. The globalist worldview of fantasies is crumbling. Some tidbits from the article:
The Chinese misjudge Western patience, especially as its surpluses grow, its violations of copyright and patents become more flagrant, and espionage and technological appropriation are seen as a Chinese birthright.
China assumes that many of the third of a million Chinese students and green-card holders in America have an obligation to engage in espionage for the mother country; and they further expect that U.S. visitors to China not only do not share such rigid loyalty to the United States, but if they did, they would be sorely punished by Beijing.
If we think Chinese students at Stanford or Cal Tech or in Silicon Valley are won over by our diversity, prosperity, consumerism, free-wheeling popular culture, and unfettered free speech, and that they will take back such an ethos to China, leading eventually to a democratic spring, the Chinese government thinks that we are sorely mistaken. It believes instead that returning Chinese students and green-card holders will be chock-full of invaluable technological, military, and commercial information but nonetheless turned off by American license — perhaps in the same way that Japanese visitors and residents in the United States during the 1920s, a future Admiral Yamamoto and foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka among them, eventually became strong advocates for war against the U.S. …
In terms of culture, we also live in an asymmetrical world with Islam itself: Mosques sprout all over the West; Christian churches are banned in many kingdoms of the Gulf and more and more are disappearing, from Syria to Turkey. This is said to be normal, and we are to get over it.
Inside a Western country, if one blasphemes Jesus, the mockery is seen as the stuff of comedy, art, popular culture, and entertainment. Try the same in Paris or New York with the prophet of Islam, and the consequences can become violent and relentless. Try it in a Muslim country, and the consequences are death. That asymmetry, again, becomes normative. To Islamic extremists, this is not a token of magnanimity to be reciprocated but rather proof of timidity and impotence to be justifiably exploited.
Mass and illegal immigration to the West from Arab and Muslim nations is assumed, along with the idea that even illegal aliens from the Middle East and North Africa immediately on entrance to Europe or the U.S. have the right and indeed the eagerness to demand from the West the freedoms and prosperity lacking in most Islamic countries — including the liberty to ridicule the hospitality of their newfound hosts.
