America and China should kiss and make up

This article is unbelievably naive. In this telling any friction is down to America’s ‘hawkish rhetoric’. David Cameron is seen not as a dumb appeaser on the wrong side of history but as some sort of bridge-builder. Utterly ludicrous.
Xi is preparing for war, this is clear in all his statements, in the record stockpiling of food and energy resources his country has been engaging in, in his extreme belligerence over Taiwan and latterly overy some rocks near the Philippines that China claims based on some dodgy old maps it dug up from centuries ago.
We should continue to disengage and not be fooled. Xi’s economy is collapsing, let it happen, it’s a direct consequence of the country’s authoritarianism system. It should be a warning to all (including deluded CCP members in China) that the successful ‘China Model’ was all smoke and mirrors enabled by Western finance and know-how.
Meanwhile let’s move to safer countries for our manufacturing – it’s the only thing China was ever good for anyway but we don’t need it any more. Let Communism collapse (again) but afterwards let’s be a bit smarter about how we deal with the fallout.

How are we to take these writers seriously when they cite Gavin Newsom as a successor to the current puppet occasionally turning up here and there to babble incoherently? The guy who ruined San Francisco and went on to destroy the rest of the California?! That Gavin Newsom?
Given the disasters of the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush administrations, I suggest you stick to manufacturing your award-winning drones and stay the h*ll away from advising anyone on anything.

Not being an economist I can’t comment on the numbers but this article seems to be suggesting that the last 8 or 10 years have been some sort of geo-political nightmare – a dream sequence in a TV show – but the hero wakes up at the end much to our relief and life will go back to normal.
Is that even possible? China may have economic issues but they have used Belt and Road to plant their flag in parts of the world where Western economic hegemony was once the natural way of things. As it stands China is positioning itself to lead the world in manufacturing Green tech and control the supply of resources necessary to do that. They are also on good terms (or at least not on bad terms) with Russia, whose Ukrainian folly, we were told by experts, made its economic collapse all but a certainty.
More importantly, can the West go back to the days prior to what David Starkey called the Tyranny of the Know Betters? Can we rid ourselves of top-down governance – the so-called “elites”? These are the people that caused Brexit and Trump and then in true anti-democratic fashion claimed the deplorables had got it wrong but not to worry: “We can fix this”.
China’s Covid policies may have been a disaster but the West didn’t survive unscathed either. Here in Canada, the government couldn’t print money fast enough. The economic hangover has been brutal yet the Liberals declared that this was an opportunity. The New Green Deal. The Great Reset. Net Zero. The combination has been a disaster. Young adults can’t afford a place to live and the food banks are overwhelmed yet the WEF-inspired Liberals present themselves as best-positioned to guide Canada through these “challenges”.
The UK is looking worse if that’s possible yet the Conservatives bring back Cameron? The Democrats and Republicans are equally beset by internecine hair-pulling and eye-gouging yet Trump is the frontrunning GOP nominee and the authors of this piece suggest Newsome – lead architect of the California disaster – as a suitable DNC candidate?
How can Kiss and Make Up be a solution when it doesn’t even acknowledge the problem(s)?

This is just categorically wrong on a number of levels. This author is unbelievably ignorant of American politics, particularly how our political rhetoric reflects public opinion. The reason we have politicians loudly rattling their sabers in the direction of China is that it’s politically beneficial to do so, and one summit in San Francisco isn’t going to change a decade of political momentum swinging in the opposite direction. The one thing that both parties and the American public largely agree on is the threat posed by China in military, economic, and geopolitical terms. China has been openly blamed for conspiring with Wall Street to replace unionized, well paid American workers with cheap Chinese labor, and this was well before COVID. Public opinion on China was already souring on China long before the pandemic. This is part of the reason Trump won in 2016 and Sanders almost knocked off Clinton in the primaries that same year, and China’s behavior since then has hardened this into a new political reality.
Further, 2024 is a presidential election year, so anything Biden does now is going to have a huge impact on the race, and ‘soft on China’ promises to hurt the Democrats everywhere except the coastal areas that they were never going to lose anyway. In America, geography matters as much as if not more than raw popularity so it would hurt the Democrats far more than even a public opinion poll might suggest and China is deeply unpopular in middle America. When both parties run ads accusing the other of being ‘soft on China’, the writing is on the wall.
Also, where has this author been the past eight years? He mentions the popularity of Trump and RFK Jr. as reasons for detente with China, but that makes no sense. Trump started the trade war and the tech sanctions that the Biden administration has doubled down on. Both parties and the military industrial complex have already hitched their wagon to this train. The CHIPS act was passed with overwhelming support from everybody including most voters engaged enough to know what it was. RFK Jr.’s foreign policy toward China is not well-defined, though he did accuse both China, and the US, of developing race based biological warfare weapons. Based on my limited understanding of genetics and how difficult it is to map genetics to our concept of ‘race’, I doubt this is remotely possible, but if it is possible, I wouldn’t be shocked if either government was pursuing it. I also wouldn’t be shocked if neither government believed a race based bio-weapon was possible but both sides were spending money studying the possibility simply because they believed the other side was. Such things happened regularly during the first cold war. Broadly speaking, he’s a populist who favors working class voters and largely draws from Sanders/Trump voters. Whatever remains of American support for free trade with China comes from big business and finance, and RFK Jr. is no friend of theirs. He has also been unequivocal in his support for Israel and harshly condemned antisemitism. He’s focused on domestic policy, and probably wouldn’t do much to change the status quo except as part of a broader economic plan.
Economic nationalism is going to be a thing and neither Biden nor this author can do anything to stop it. I’m sure it will cost a great deal and I’m sure free trade purists and ivory tower economists will remind us of it at every possible opportunity, but things aren’t going back to the way they were in 2015. It’s far too late for that. It’s no accident that this summit is happening in California, the one state where the old attitudes toward China still prevail. It’s where a lot of the big tech firms that benefited from past policy are located and where all those Chinese ships dropped off their goods. It’s no coincidence that Gavin Newsom is making direct appeals to Chairman Xi. Still, anybody running against him in a primary or a general election is sure to remind the voters of that at every possible opportunity.
I would presume this author is basically a globalist and things have been going quite badly for them recently. It’s natural in the jaws of defeat to look for any glimmer of hope, but it’s fantasy. Nothing will come of this meeting but the usual empty rhetoric because none of the conditions upon which current hostilities are based is going to change because of this meeting. China isn’t going to stop manipulating its currency, stealing technology, or relinquish their claims on Taiwan. They are going to continue to pursue the economic nationalism that finally forced the US to retaliate. They will continually play the poverty/colonialism card to justify unequal emissions standards in the climate change discussions. The US public isn’t going to suddenly change their minds about China because a doddering old man had brunch with a tyrant. The Pentagon isn’t going to stop worrying about maintaining technological and military superiority. The CHIPS act is not going to be repealed. The conditions are what they are, and they all point to a deepening economic and political conflict. We can and should all hope to avoid outright war, but such things are sometimes inevitable, as we have seen. Hoping against hope that Biden emerges triumphantly hand in hand with Xi Jinping and announces the end of Cold War 2.0 is wishful thinking of the highest order.

China steals Intellectual Property. They call it ‘sharing technology’. Being faithful Communists, they believe that your stuff belongs to them. Like the man said, “All your data are belong to us!”

Sure, it’s always a good idea to kiss and make up with a country that will happily destroy your own. Should Biden also whisper in Xi’s ear (while they kiss) “No worries! Of course you can invade Taiwan; why would we care just because it’s a bastion of freedom and democracy?”

“It is now almost impossible for Biden to justify further funds for Ukraine, especially with President Zelenskyy refusing to hold elections, a move which killed any idea that he was fighting for democracy.”
A bit of a cheap jibe there. Were we not similarly fighting for democracy and indeed the very existence of our country from 1939-1945? A general election was due in 1940 but was postponed until after the war had ended.

East is more productive and less narrative to obtain power; hence why non-western often have civil wars or unrest events – behaviour is more important than just pure narrative. In the west, narrative in the form of psychological weapon is the preferred method to control and influence. Both systems are powerful in their own ways but when there is a conflict, the one with the body behaviour always win – words lose meaning when there is misunderstanding. Think of a couple fighting about the future compared to couple fighting about infidelity. US wants to regulate, impose laws and threats to get what they want. China prefers to give a real tangible infrastructure and then payment to maintain relationships. These types of mentality will not meet in the middle. One must lose the war. With the advancement of AI taking over language much faster than the bodies for now, US and the west are losing the narrative wars and do not have a body (tangible real connection to any country) to depend on their loyalty and their rhetoric is showing its doublespeak due to technology! It is over. Show me your support not say it – this is the new mantra! and China excels at that in their own country to control and influence their middle class and now they are taking same thing on the road. US is like you are with me because I say so or we destroy you! that cannot last forever.

What’s a few Uighurs between friends?

The first note of hope I’ve imbibed in a while. That was nice. If China would get back to business and the US back to its global responsibilities that would make all the difference. A true piece of historical magic would be if all the Arab countries still pressed ahead with the Abraham Accords. Wouldn’t that be something.

The issue is China’s instability makes regimes more willing to take risks. Ex – Falkands War