Who’s Afraid of Big Bad China?

We are.

This section expands on the principles in my monograph on power, Narcisso-Fascism, examining how they apply in real life.

(I’m in the process of starting a new project which I’ve been putting off for several years because it seemed too big. Turns out it is. As a result, over the next few weeks, these posts will be a bit shorter and more focussed on current events. Unfortunately, there are plenty to choose from).

*****

The “law of unintended consequences” is a wondrous thing. A week ago, the Musk Amateur Show decided they needed to do a pruning job on the US Department of Energy. With much fanfare, they sacked a lot of people and sat back to congratulate themselves on a great job of cutting the bloat out of the bureaucracy. It wasn’t long before the panicky calls started coming in: “Just what do you clowns think you’re doing? Do you know who you’ve sacked?” “Yep,” they replied with the glowing smugness that partners with true ignorance, “all them lazy good-for-nothin’ office workers is out.”

“You fools,” the phones shrieked, “are you a bunch of communist agents? You just got rid of our nuclear deterrent.”

Oh dear. In their haste to do their erratic master’s bidding, they hadn’t bothered to learn about a branch of the Dept of Energy called the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), whose 2,000 staff handle the contracts for developing, building, distributing and maintaining the country’s nuclear weapons. Panic ensued, especially when they realised that they couldn’t actually find all the essential people they’d dumped on the roadside. After a few days of panic, it blew over, as the completely unbiased people at Fox News reassured the country, and only 50 probationers were actually “let go.”

This illustrates two important points about human behaviour. First, the idea of unintended consequences, pithily summarised by every parent’s startled cry “Look before you leap.” I can’t find a definition of this principle but it would be something like “In any complex system, the likelihood of an unexpected result from a change increases exponentially with the complexity of the system.” The US Government is indeed a very complex system. No part is isolated from the rest. Fiddling with one bit is definitely going to send consequences rippling through the system.

The second is the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which says that people with low competence in a particular domain over-estimate their abilities in that field. There are different reasons for this. First is the common misperception that this only applies to people of low intellect: they don’t know what they don’t know, and blunder in. However, it also applies to people of normal or even high intellect who have no experience. They see other people getting through a task and think it looks easy, not realising how much effort has gone into training for just that job. Finally and mostly overlooked, it is part of the grandiosity seen in personality disorder. We have some truly amazing examples of this on the hoof at present: e.g. a certain Herr Trump, who declared himself a “very stable genius” who knew more about treating Covid infections (“drink bleach”) than people who had studied viruses for a lifetime.

We can joke about this but it’s dangerous. Exceedingly dangerous. Most of the people charged with running the world today have no concept of their limited abilities, or of how their actions will trigger unexpected consequences in distant places and distant times. Now with one notable exception, they’re not lacking intelligence so they can’t (and wouldn’t) say they’re not smart enough for the job, that it’s actually too much for them. Trump, I believe, didn’t have the intellectual ability or education first time round but now he’s dementing. The trouble is, the bizarre collection of sycophants and opportunists who surround him have every reason to keep this quiet while they get on with rearranging the world to suit their ideology, perchance to get exceedingly rich in the process. The rest of the world’s politicians are mostly bright enough to work in a team to get the job done, but therein lies the problem: most of them can’t. They have no idea how to work in a team. They can issue orders but they can’t work cooperatively, they can’t put their ambitions aside for the common good for reasons of personality.

It has to be remembered that “working cooperatively” doesn’t mean working with people who already agree or who will do as they’re told, it means working with people who don’t agree and can’t be told what to do. It means sitting down and reaching a compromise that gives most of the people most of what they want and doesn’t leave any group thinking they need to overturn the agreement to get any sort of satisfaction. The classic example of this was the “victors’ peace” imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. French Marshall Ferdinand Foch allegedly believed the Treaty was too lenient, that it imposed merely “an armistice for 20 years.” The renowned British economist, JM Keynes, believed it was excessively punitive and would not produce peace, but the Allies were determined to pin all the blame for the War on Germany and make it suffer. Which it did. Why wasn’t this seen at the time? Because the Allied leaders were drunk on victory and didn’t want anybody to think they were weak by treating the defeated Germans graciously. They needed not just to be the winners but to be seen by all as the winners, including the miserable Germans.

The prime personality factor that stops people working cooperatively is the need to be get to the top of the hierarchy and repel all challenges. This is a major part of the biocognitive model for psychiatry, which says that all humans feel better by going up the hierarchy and worse for going down. This dominates life to an extent not realised by mainstream personality theorists, by sociologists, or by politicians. There is a strong biological basis to this common to all humans but what counts is how individuals handle it, how they put it into practice or keep it under control. Politics, for better or for worse, is all about domination, so politicians who keep their urge to dominate under polite control aren’t going to last long. They will very quickly find themselves at the back of the queue for influential jobs, if not pushed out of the party altogether.

The social structure of political processes (in all countries) separates the polite and passive sheep from the aggressive billy goats, and sends the former to the abattoir. The people who survive this weeding process are not nice people. Most of them are, in fact, complete pricks, in it for themselves only. The fate of the world rests in their greedy, vengeful hands. There is no clearer demonstration of this than the present “negotiations” between the US and Ukraine, where the US is demanding the lions share of Ukraine’s mineral assets and its infrastructure as “payment” for military aid received to date. Bizarrely, the Zelensky regime seems likely to agree but that’s what’s meant by “make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

This, however, is a sideshow on the international stage. The real competition is between the US and China, as outlined in an interview of author and analyst, Ben Norton, by the very capable journalist Danny Haiphong. Norton, who is now based in Beijing and keeps close contact with influential figures, is crystal clear: the driving force in US international policy today is “containment and suppression” of China (times in brackets):

(1.45): The central tenet of Trump’s - and Biden’s - policy is to try to contain and weaken China. Unfortunately, we're in a new cold war… (Trump’s team) want to soften tensions with Russia in order to isolate China …

In an interview with Tucker Carlson in October last year, Norton reports Trump as saying: “Russia and China should not be united. I am going to un-unite them. I think I can do it.” In order to do this, Trump and his cabinet are prepared to sacrifice Ukraine which, he says, confirms Kissinger’s view, that to be an enemy of the US is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

The entirety of US policy now is shifting, away from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to Asia, for the explicit purpose of fencing in China and preventing its rise to dominance. In the Western Hemisphere, as Trump said at a rally on January 25th, “very soon, we’re going to vastly expand the territory of the US.” By this he meant taking control of the Panama Canal and of Greenland, and emasculating Canada and Mexico (“invade Mexico, make Canada the 51^st state”). Along the way, Venezuela is to be crushed, Nicaragua brought into line, Brazil to get rid of its lefty president, and so on, the Pax Americana triumphant from Arctic to Antarctic. Norton quoted Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, as saying: “China is the greatest threat the US has ever faced, much greater than the Soviet Union was …” Having lived through half a lifetime of the Red Menace from Moscow, that comes as quite a surprise. Norton continued:

(21.50): They need to improve relations with Russia in order to isolate China. This is not about peace, the US has never been about peace, this is about imperialism. Trump is the true face of the American empire … he is explicitly colonial, he doesn’t hide it … he invoked ‘manifest destiny,’ which is a colonialist mindset… That’s why he thinks McKinley was a great president.

Writing in National Defence, the defence lobby’s newspaper a few days after Christmas, Dr Daniel Green said the US “must prepare for Great Power War with China.” He didn’t say why, he just accepted that this is the way of the world: great powers struggle until only one is left standing. What happens to everybody else is of no concern. Similarly, military writer David Hookstead said:

The United States government has to take the Chinese threat seriously. It's the biggest foreign threat the USA faces, and not taking it seriously could lead to major problems down the road. Hopefully, we will continue to adapt and improve our military. It's what's needed.

While he didn’t say what sort of threat China represents, he saw a real problem for the US: that in the event of the coming war with China (note that), US forces in the Western Pacific would run out of missiles in just eight days and Chinese forces would be ideally situated to prevent reinforcements coming by air or by ship. His solution? Sit down with the Chinese government and come to an agreement on how the zones of influence should be allocated peacefully? Come to amicable arrangements regarding trade and international finance? Just kidding. His solution: build more missile factories in the US and preposition heaps more of them closer to China.

The US believes its “destiny” is to dominate the world and fight off any potential threats. The USSR was a military threat but all the hysteria about Soviet hordes invading Western Europe has somehow been forgotten now that it’s clear Russia has spent three years advancing a few hundred kilometres into just one of its immediate neighbours, including 40km in the past year. At their present rate, it would take them about 200 years to reach the Atlantic so there’s not much to worry about. Clearly, Russia is not a threat to US supremacy, Europe can’t get its act into gear so they’re not a threat, and that leaves only China. The US now intends to complete its vaunted “pivot to Asia” that Obama announced 13 years ago except events got in the way.

Why pivot to Asia? Contain and suppress China. Why contain and suppress China? So the US can be unchallenged Numero Uno in the world, can strut around kicking sand in everybody’s faces, even if they have to push us to the brink of nuclear war. But, like over-confident teenagers, they underestimate the risks in doing so, and over-estimate their capabilities. I mean, this is the country that has engaged in continuous wars since 1945, without winning a single one of them. They couldn’t defeat the ragtag Vietcong or the Taliban, so they’re going to try China? What’s the sudden panic? Ah, that’s where it gets interesting.

Under the influence of the Wall St titans of finance, the US exported its manufacturing industries to the cheapest and most skilful workforce in the world, which just happened to be China. Now, and as they did NOT predict (that damned law of consequences again), they have deindustrialised even faster than China has industrialised. Suddenly, to their horror, they see this behemoth of a country actually controls the supply chains for three quarters of the essential electronic products the US military needs to maintain dominance. Oh shit. Get those industries back asap, bring the tech bros into the White House and boot those Wall St titans to the shithouse (which suits Trump as he hates them for looking down on him as the petty gangster from Queens that he is), make peace with the Russians, screw the Ukrainians for their rare earths, the same ones China is now blockading, forget the Frogs and the Krauts, they’re not going anywhere, it’s China, China, all the way.

As far as threats go, China is not a military threat. It threatens the US national self-esteem, and nothing else. Our reality is that America is prepared to risk nuclear war in order to avoid the humiliation of being Number Two in the world. It’s all so a bunch of grandiose, personality-disordered politicians can get a regular blast of testosterone to make them feel they count. The real problem is that they’ve convinced us that they’re the ones who know what’s what while we dumb civilians should just sit quietly and wait for them to make all the decisions.

Dunning and Kruger, we’re sorry we doubted you.

*****

The whole of this material is copyright but can be quoted or retransmitted on condition the author is acknowledged.