Tag Archives: Rule of Law

Why the Huawei CFO Arrest Is Crazy | Iran Sanctions

Today’s video skirts an interesting question. How much do the US people know about the power our government, financial and legal sectors exercise in the world? My sense is not much. I have this, perhaps naive, hope that if they did have a better sense of that power, they would want the US government to use that power more responsibility. Instead, at this point we’ve got a government and media that actively misleads the people on this topic, and often misleads itself.

A key part of Washington DC’s ability to benefit from ever increasing defense budgets is keeping people scared. Emphasizing that US financial and legal power is capable of shutting down almost any real threat would kind of sabotage that effort. So we pretend that places like Russia and China are somehow independent actors that can do us harm, rather than stakeholders than are almost as wrapped up in benefiting from the status quo as the US is. I dunno. It’s something I think about a lot.

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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Why China’s Communist Party Is America’s Best Friend

In the US we are pretty sure we hate the Chinese Communist Party. But we will miss it. What this video lays out is the service that that party provides to the rest of the world. The Party would like us to think it’s responsible for Chinese growth, and that might have been true once. But today it acts instead as a limiting factor on Chinese growth. The Chinese Communist Party gives the rest of the world the breathing room necessary to make sure that China’s rise isn’t too destabilizing.

One note to those watching from Latin America. Did it bug you that this video seemed to use “America” to refer to the United States? Well it didn’t, and that formulation was very conscious. I’ve got a lot more thinking and researching to do, but I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about geopolitics in a hemispheric sense. I’m becoming convinced that the American countries, north and south, have a lot more that unites them than divides them. But I suppose that’s a very obvious thing for a guy from the US to think. Like I said, there’s a lot more thinking to do on this topic, and what the United States would have to give up to build a true “American Community” and century, but I’d love to hear what you think…

Also, I wanted to mention it in the video, but didn’t get the chance. Like many of my better ideas, this came out of a work of Science Fiction. This video was inspired in part by the book “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War” by P. W. Singer. Singer lays out a somewhat fanciful picture of what a war between the US and China would look like. It’s interesting that his war requires a post-Communist China to be plausible in the slightest. It’s a fun read, blurbed by all manner of Defense Department muck-a-mucks, including HR McMaster, the current National Security Adviser, if I remember correctly. Well worth a read, if that’s your type of thing. I found it’s simple laying out of the weakness of the Chinese Communist Party to be one of its best observations.

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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