“China’s leaders believe that America is in decline ... the Chinese see an America that is losing ground in technology, infrastructure, and education, ... a country unable to coordinate government policies ... in a coherent way to accomplish national goals.... Unfortunately, recently, there is a lot of truth to this.” So wrote Jamie Dimon in his annual letter to JPMorgan Chase shareholders. How would he propose that the Biden Administration respond?
Although Trump had tried to hobble Huawei, by banning its use in, or purchase of, various US products, that company achieved in 2020 the highest world market share for smartphones, as it invests several billion dollars into research every year.
China came out of the 2007-2008 financial crisis with an acceleration of its bonanza of infrastructure building. Over the decade 2008-2018, China brought the number of cities served by metro systems from 10 to 34; expanded by 52,000 km its high-speed rail network, bringing it to account for two-thirds of the world’s total; and built over a million kilometers of highways. In contrast, Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 succeeded in improving under 70,000 kilometers of roads.
China’s role in crucial infrastructure and materials has increased. The chairwoman of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission told the Congress in 2019 that two-thirds of the world’s top 50 maritime container ports were either owned by China, or supported by Chinese investments. (The figure had been 20% only a decade earlier.) The majority of the world’s production of rare earth minerals occurs in China.
So what is Jamie Dimon (or Joe Biden) to do? Rather than taking a good look in the mirror and adopting its own program for growth, the Great Reset and military confrontation are the oligarchy’s answer to the threatened loss of trans-Atlantic world pre-eminence.
Without a cultural and political transformation in the United States, the trajectory of history leads to nuclear war.
Will you go about life as normal, as though the grave threat of nuclear attack — brought about by design or through error in a launch-on-warning situation — does not exist?
(China figures from https://tomdispatch.com/bidens-anti-china-ambitions/)
