All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Joseph Solis Mullen, who recently wrote this really great piece for the Mises Institute, Mises Wire over there at mises.org.
It's called China Won't Be Taking Over the World.
What a relief, huh?
Welcome to the show, Joseph.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, happy to have you here.
So first of all, I'm curious how you know so much about China.
It seems like you know a lot.
Well, I'm a political scientist, and I tend to read most of what comes out, read the whole spectrum really, and I started to get a little bit irritated recently, because it seemed like every publication I looked at, whether it was the typical hawkish establishment publications like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, is just this obsession with China.
I read most of the books that come out, a lot of good sinologists and specialists who have been writing books on China, especially since it joined the WTO and especially since Xi Jinping took power in 2012.
And it's just it's a fascinating country with a fascinating history.
And as sort of the rising power, it just seemed prudent to know as much as I could about it, especially since so much of the American political establishment seems focused so intensely on it.
Yeah, well, I guess the question is just how high is it rising and how terrified we're all supposed to be about that, right?
Yeah, and in my opinion, not terrified at all, but I suppose we can get into that.
But yeah.
All right, well, I think it's a massive overreaction, pretty, pretty typical.
OK, so now, first of all, I guess let's start with what's true about the worst accusations against them, if we could, for example.
Sure, there's there's some kind of possibility, if not likelihood, that they're going to invade and conquer Taiwan sometime in the next 20 years.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Probably, probably.
You know, I most of I tend to view virtually everything the CCP does in terms of domestic political incentives, and so if the CCP thinks that it behooves them to attempt that, then they will.
They think time is on their side, though, and.
So I don't know that they're going to push too hard and talk about it in the article, but they're so dependent on global supply chains and it's hard to know exactly what the international community's reaction to that would be because of the U.N.'s position on Taiwan.
So and the fact that China is so deeply involved in trade with all countries, it's not a country that you could isolate.
That's one of the things that I think is maybe needing to be parsed a little bit more closely.
It seems like they're almost, you know, people who write in like foreign affairs, foreign policy, seem to be advocating kind of a new containment strategy, and that's just not going to work.
So Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Obama, not Obama, although Blinken was in Obama's cabinet, Biden's top people have been making a tour of the region, stopping in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, India, you know, trying to make a nice cordon around China to make sure that they have control over the sea lanes there.
So invading Taiwan, you know, maybe it will happen.
Certainly the military establishment thinks so.
They've said so in congressional testimonies.
The Biden administration has approved a massive new weapons sale to Taiwan.
So that certainly doesn't calm things down at all.
But maybe, maybe they will.
Yeah, well, so Gareth Porter had a piece about how they had this dual deterrence policy where they're always, you know, reminding the Chinese that we respect one China, but reunification should be peaceful someday in the long term future, kind of thing, while at the same time telling the Taiwanese, you guys cool it and not, you know, get too radical in your separatist statements and cause trouble and that how now they're abandoning that policy and how I guess the current president or prime minister is from a radical party and is almost out of time.
And her natural apparent successor is even more radical than her, Gareth says.
And you could have a real problem just right there.
Yes.
It doesn't it reminds you of the dynamic in the Cold War, you know, the Soviet Union, the United States didn't really want to confront one another in these other countries, but you had local political actors who were invested in a certain outcome by acting in a certain way, they could draw one or the other superpowers in on their side.
So very dangerous, I think, because Blinken has been very forthright about defending Taiwan's integrity.
But at the same time, the UN has made its ruling, you know, a U.S. president.
And his secretary was an NSA national security adviser, but, you know, they acknowledge that, you know, it's part of China should go back to China 40, 50 years, they said, well, we're 40, 50 years later, the Chinese want it back because Taiwan is home to the finest semiconductor manufacturing in the world.
Real difficulty manufacturing high end semiconductors, so that would be really helpful for them.
All right.
So and now what about Hong Kong, too?
Because, you know, the deal was that they were going to maintain, you know, one country, two systems there.
And then I guess, you know, the not the West because I don't know what real stake they have in it, but the people of Hong Kong's bluff is being called and the Chinese are asserting more control there.
Right.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
That's crucial for the CCP.
They really have to be careful with managing really distant commercial hubs.
That's been a historic problem.
Xi Jinping is one of the most historically aware leaders I've ever encountered.
He's very ideological and he understands the dynamics of power.
He understands what he needs to do in his position.
The things about watching China, reading about China is just how aware their leaders are of these problems.
There's nothing I wrote in this article that their leadership isn't already very, very aware of and trying to take steps to fix.
And the problem is that some of these are just not things you can solve.
So, yeah, Hong Kong is another difficult situation.
And again, I just I don't know.
I don't know what there is for the United States to do or anyone in the West.
You know, they've said they're going to honor the.
But then Trump under Trump, Trump revoked the special status, which the Chinese objected to because they know Hong Kong is where they can get access to Western technology and Western money means they can funnel that back into the internal credit system.
So, you know, well, you know, I mean, not to be too accusatory to the hawks here, but I've actually heard it expressed quite a few times that, you know, we never should have really sent Milton Friedman over there to teach him about capitalism, because, you know, in other words, they kind of regret that it's not still a Maoist state where people are starving by the tens of millions, because at least that kept them down and out and away from us.
And then ever since they've become this mixed economy, as we call it here in America, the pseudo capitalist sort of, you know, red brown kind of fascist state there, then essentially now they're just as evil only now with all this money.
And so now they're coming, I guess, not just for the Mongolians and the, you know, Taiwan and Hong Kong and Uzbekistan or whatever, they're they're coming to Seattle and to L.A.
Well, I mean, the power of capitalism, I think ultimately resides in the ability of free actors to make profitable decisions based on calculations about economic efficiency.
Fortunately for the Chinese, the CCP have really backed away from the reforms that started under Deng, with Min and then Hu Jintao, really hit the accent on liberalizing the economy.
And that was when China was having its peak growth.
Since Xi Jinping, there's actually been a reversion to the means, to the historical means, much more state control, much worse capital allocation.
There's a lot of bad debt being built up because a lot of these calculations are being made on the basis of political evaluations.
You can say all you want about technocrats and how they mess everything up with all their tinkering and microeconomic management and stuff.
I would far rather have technocrats than political appointees, which is what they've increasingly moved to.
So there was a circular that very briefly appeared, but there was some panic because over the summer, just a month ago, the CCP was directing the central bank to shut off credit to local lenders.
China's system is actually really interesting, the way the credit market works.
Actually, a lot of it's done at the local levels.
They get targets from the central government, from the CCP.
But then it's up to them to just fill those targets.
And so that's why you wind up with things like ghost cities, trains to nowhere.
So the real estate boom is incredible.
More home purchases in China now are second or third properties than first time home buyers now.
And this ties into the demographics struggle that they have and the housing boom that they have, the bubble that they're in and the credit bubble.
So, yeah, capitalism is very powerful.
A lot of it deals with finance, moving money around to make it profitable.
And that only works in a society where there's accountability.
And, you know, obviously.
The West can't talk too much about that after 2008 with its own bailouts.
But there's a much more capital discipline in free market societies like our own, whatever its flaws, than there is in the CCP's case.
You know, I'm interested if you ever read David Stockman, you know, he calls it he kind of refers, I think, to the entire nation state over there as the Chinese Ponzi or the China Ponzi, he calls it.
Yeah.
Where it's not even a government.
It's this massive pyramid scheme makes our Federal Reserve look like the gold standard as they just print money all day.
And the crash is coming someday.
And the longer they put it off, the worse it's going to be.
But, you know, he portrays the entire China society like bouncing on a razor's edge of bad monetary policy kind of, you know, it is.
Oh, it is.
I mean, it's it's remarkable that it's lasted as long as it is.
And the reason that it lasted as long as it was is because the U.S. was concerned with other things.
Really, it was obsessed with the war on terror while China was dumping and manipulating its currency and gobbling up manufacturing jobs during the 2000s.
That's really after the after the dotcom bubble and the recession that happened, U.S. manufacturing actually took just an absolute beating.
We tend to think of the industrialization happening in like the 70s, 80s.
That was huge.
And most of those jobs didn't come back.
No, I mean, it was just for some perspective in terms of non-performing loans.
So like bad loans.
When the subprime crisis hit, we had about a trillion dollars worth of non-performing loans in our financial system.
Conservative estimates put China's at about seven trillion.
Seven, so seven times that, so they've because of their unique position in the global marketplace, they've been able to put off reckoning with.
Probably 25, 30 years worth of financial crises, it looks like Japan on steroids.
In the late 80s.
So.
And again, in the late 80s, if we had been having this conversation, I would have written the article about how Japan wasn't going to take over the world, right?
Right.
Which is what they were saying, though.
Oh, no, the Soviet Union is falling.
Japan and Germany are going to re-rise and take over the planet again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like in 100 years, no, probably no one's even going to speak German like Germany suffering just terrible demographic decline.
And it's just Europe's a mess.
So that's another question.
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So now here, you know, in your piece about China, essentially it sounds like what you're saying is that China is already an overextended empire on its way down rather than, you know, something that's on the cusp of just breaking loose.
I mean, because anything compared to Maoism is a huge plus.
Right.
I mean, Maoism just means burning your country to the ground.
But that doesn't mean that they're prepared to seize Uzbekistan and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan and then next stop Berlin.
You know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
No, not at all.
And even things like the Belt and Road Initiative.
You know, I look at that as just a sign of how bad things are getting.
Like, they are so desperate to offload their overproduction and export the credit cycle, keep the merry-go-round going, that they're just lending money to countries where it's like for projects that just make no sense.
And Covid has made things a lot worse.
There have been projects getting canceled.
There have been fights over who's going to pay what.
We're not going to pay this.
So and the Chinese can't really project military strength because of their geographical situation, nor do they want to, especially not in Central Asia and the Middle East, especially with the way they treat their own Muslim population.
That's one of the things that strikes me as really weak about China is it has terrible access to sea lanes.
You know, moving goods over land is 10 times as expensive as moving things over water.
And so you're talking about, OK, they're moving into Afghanistan, just throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at them.
Like, what do you get for all that money?
Like some influence in what, Afghanistan?
Yeah, that makes no sense at all.
I mean, that Belt and Road is going to go north of Afghanistan if it goes through there at all.
Yeah.
And, you know, I just I look at like overland transport, especially with sort of high tech, low cost weaponry like drones.
There was the drone attack probably carried out by the Iranians in the Gulf two weeks ago.
They just slammed, you know, a couple thousand dollar drone full of explosives into a tanker ship, you know, hardly cost any money at all.
You don't really risk much.
You know, if you have all these overland transport routes, let's say the rail, let's say it's like a rail system that moves all Afghanistan's copper or something, you know, like that's vulnerable for thousands of miles.
I mean, it's a terrible, terrible idea.
Yeah.
And now you make a big deal about the Gobi Desert.
I got to tell you, that's pretty far from here.
And I don't know how much of China is desert.
How much of China is desert?
I mean, I mean, China's huge, China's huge.
So like most of the northern half, well, not northern half, like the northern northwest third is mostly desert.
And then you've got mountains.
And then on the west mountains to the south and once you hit the south, you're in the tropics.
So just imagine Vietnam like conditions down there, you know, so I just imagine like running infrastructure.
Like this is just a terrible idea.
And then, you know.
The northern provinces, this is I think I pointed out in the article, China has less arable farmland per capita than Saudi Arabia.
It's northern four provinces also have less water per capita than Saudi Arabia.
A lot of it is in the south.
A lot of it's contaminated due to, you know, growth at all costs, industrialization.
I mean, China has a ludicrous pollution problem and it's actually becoming a political liability.
There are lots of protests about environmental degradation among local communities.
So China's put itself in the CCP.
I should say the CCP.
The CCP has put itself in just a heck of a spot here.
And I do not understand the obsession with China.
It's on the rise.
It's going to get us.
It's going to take take over, you know, it's going to be the new purveyor of globalization.
You have to really strain reality, I think, to reach that point.
Well, for a number of reasons.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, a great number of them, as you delineate here.
One of them is something that you mentioned.
I think you alluded to this earlier.
It's something that Grover Norquist brought up, who is moderating a panel discussion that I was a part of at Freedom Fest recently.
And it was about how without America there at all, you have China essentially surrounded by not necessarily enemies, but certainly very jealous rivals who want nothing to do with being dominated by them.
And you go down the list, too.
We're like starting with Mongolia and then you can go all the way around the clock.
Both Korea's, Japan, Vietnam and Afghanistan for that matter.
I guess they're friends with the Pakistanis.
For now, but we've seen what kind of friends the Pakistanis are.
Yeah.
And the Pakistanis aren't happy either because they got used to the U.S. who just give you billions of dollars.
Yeah.
The Chinese want to loan it to them.
Oh, yeah, no, that won't do.
Yeah, no, they'd rather just pick my pocket instead.
Oh, exactly.
But, you know, the Indians, they sold a dam project.
Yeah, well, they had to say that in a second, but they had a big border dispute with India in the Himalayas and they had a big fistfight over it and then went home.
So that was pretty good.
A friend of mine pointed that out, that I met there at Freedom Fest, that they don't seem too hell bent on expansion right now if they ordered all their soldiers to drop their firearms and go over there and kick those guys ass, you know?
Yeah, no, I I absolutely agree.
I'm sorry, the dam project, you were saying China's bankrolling a Pakistani dam.
There have been a lot of disputes between countries who have gotten used to dealing with the United States, who just, you know, they hand you money.
You know, foreign aid gets criticized a lot as part of the U.S. budget.
You know, we can debate the pros and cons of foreign aid, whether we should be doing it at all.
But one thing about it is, I mean.
It's free, like these countries just take it and, you know, there's a lot of graft and, you know, very little of it does much good.
There's been plenty of literature written about the inadequacies of foreign aid and the myth of foreign aid.
But yet China's coming in and saying, well, we'll lend you the money, but we want it back.
And, you know, if you don't pay us, then we get, you know, your your primary port in these countries.
I think so.
Yeah.
And a great example of this is the Philippines.
You know, there's a lot, as I said, I view most of China's activities through because the number one goal of the CCP and Xi Jinping is to maintain CCP control over the state.
And so, you know, you look at the Philippines, Duterte got elected and he was all about sending the Americans home.
And, you know, where are we still in the Philippines?
Right.
He's got no real interest in the United States leaving the Philippines because then he'll have to deal with China on his own.
He doesn't want that.
Yeah, politically popular to be anti-American for a lot of good reasons historically in the Philippines.
But in just terms of evaluating your real geopolitical position, probably not great for the Philippines to be standing up to China by itself.
So, yeah.
And now, so you mentioned here about the one child policy and population collapse and all of that.
But what does population collapse look like in a society that is a billion people in the first place that still have a lot of people?
Right.
You know, yeah, I get this argument a lot that, well, by 2040, they'll still have 200 million people who are under the age of 25.
That's great.
How many retirees are they support?
That's the real question.
Like maybe robotics and stuff will increase productivity.
Their TFP, their total factor productivity is completely flatlined because they don't really contribute.
I know their patents have gotten better and things like that.
And they are starting to generate some of their own technology.
But like most of it was theft and, you know, getting good agreements and special economic zones with like GM and other companies to like get technology from the West.
You know, I just look at China and say, you know, by 2030, you're going to have four retirees for every one worker and it's only getting worse.
How are you going to maintain this?
The Hukou system is their welfare system and it has tons of problems.
And that's one of the areas that I pointed to in the article as Xi Jinping, it's not that he wanted to move away from the liberalizing reforms.
It's that even before he took power, Hu Jintao in 2007 said that publicly said that the Chinese economy was becoming very off balance, was, you know, out of out of sync, off balance, destabilized.
And so if you look at really closely at what Xi Jinping tried to do in the first few years was he tried to continue that path of liberalization and ultimately abandoned it because he just not totally abandoned it.
Some of it has continued piecemeal.
But, you know, the Hukou system, this is their social welfare system.
If you leave your home province, you lose access to your state benefits.
And population mobility is so crucial because most of China's tech and good jobs and higher incomes are on the East and are on the East Coast.
And so you have these people who want to move to the East Coast to better their situation.
But by doing that, they're sacrificing all of their state benefits, which means they have to save more.
They can't spend as much.
It's.
But the local governments are in charge of Hukou benefits and they don't want to be responsible for paying for additional workers, migrant workers who come.
So it's a whole mess there.
And, you know, Xi basically kind of backed off.
You know, he's not all powerful.
He kind of gets depicted that way, but he's not all powerful.
He has to make deals within the bureaucracy, within the military, within the party, you know.
So I saw you mentioned in here something that the Hawks mentioned a lot, too, which is one of the results of the one child policy is all those abortions of baby girls and this massive imbalance.
And then the Hawks say, well, they're just going to have to put them all in the army.
All these womanless young men are going to have to all go into the army and march west or north or to across the sea to Japan or somewhere or else.
What are you going to do with them?
It's a real concern.
Yeah, I mean, it is a real concern.
I think it's probably the best argument the Hawks have, which is that the Chinese just need to get rid of some of this population or it's going to be a problem.
You know, when when when the financial crash finally comes and unemployment skyrockets and you have all these, you know, tens of millions of young men with, you know, no job and no no girl.
I mean, it's it's not going to be good.
So, you know, they argue, well, China will want to throw them into a meat grinder, you know, either with India or in Taiwan or in some other contest.
So that's a lot of people to grind up.
But yeah, it's just I mean, but the CCP has a history of doing I mean, sure.
Yeah.
Going off large numbers of its own people.
So, I mean, it's it's horrifying, but it can't be ruled out.
Although I mean, more likely, they'll just reinflate the bubble and give them all a hammer and put them to work building houses again.
Right.
Yeah.
You just like the Americans, you know, reinflate the housing bubble.
We definitely have our share of problems in terms of finance, but you said it earlier, like their central bank makes the Federal Reserve look like the gold standard.
It's it's incredible how out of hand they have allowed this to get.
And that's why she has had to.
Go towards exporting, you know, trying to create more demand for you on creating like a little yuan zone, because they can't stop the credit mobile, but they can't really lose.
You know, there's kind of a debate about how much consumers spending goes on in China.
Is it too low?
Is it too high?
You know, it's about 40 percent in Western countries.
It tends to be about 50, closer to 60.
But it's been rapidly growing.
It's not like the Chinese aren't buying things.
It's not like the Chinese don't have an internal market they can sell to.
The problem is that they're just producing too much stuff.
And unfortunately, a lot of it is just not very productive stuff.
They need to get it out of there.
They can't slow down employment like that is their number one concern is keeping people employed.
And, you know, the credit boom is going to stop at some point.
Like it just can't go on forever.
I know that, you know, for 10, 15 years now, we've been hearing, oh, the China bubble is going to pop.
China bubble is going to pop.
Well, it is going to pop just because it hasn't popped.
It doesn't mean that they defy the laws of economics and the CCP are actually, you know, some kind of other world galaxy brain geniuses or something.
You know, they've been in a very nice situation.
They've had a lot of catch up growth that they could do.
You know, they've been picking a lot of the low hanging fruits of industrialization, right?
They've lifted, you know, hundreds of millions of people out of the absolute worst poverty they were starting.
Mao left them with backyard smelters and no food.
I mean, they were starting from like the lowest level.
And so catch up growth has been great, but, you know, it gets intoxicating.
And the CCP's legitimacy has come to rely on delivering this just outrageous growth.
It's been revising its growth estimates down.
And this is the reason that I conclude the article by arguing that the US needs to make sure that it does not play into the Chinese Communist Party's narrative about a malevolent West trying to keep China down, because the CCP is just ruining things on its own.
They've, you know, they've had a lot of great accomplishments in terms of bringing people out of poverty, modernizing the state.
But.
They can't trust their own people.
They can't trust their own people.
Well, it's such an important point, and we see this over and over again in whatever state our government designates as enemy from Iraq to Cuba, to Iran, to North Korea, to whoever, that all their dissidents get labeled CIA stooges, which just helps to consolidate the power of the power and to marginalize anyone who might stick their head up, whether they're really CIA stooges or not.
Right.
We had those recent protests in Cuba, and we don't really know if they're CIA stooges or not, but they probably are.
Even if they're saying things that libertarians want to hear and agree with, they're still kind of suspicious of who put them up to it.
And so that means it's the same thing in the eyes of the average Cuban, too, which certainly undermines their cause, presuming that they're not just carrying water for the US, you know?
And that's the problem, is you can point to innumerable instances, just the ones that we know about, of the US government interfering in other countries, and that's why the Russians don't pay any attention to the United States when they talk about interfering in other people's elections.
I mean, one of the things I always point to is the US complains that China isn't listening to the World International Court and not listening to...
And it's like, the United States doesn't acknowledge that court's jurisdiction over itself.
Right.
Like, you can't have it both ways, you know, because then to the other countries, it just looks like, well, these aren't actual rules.
These are just tools to maintain the status quo.
Yeah.
You know, and like you talked about, you know, we have a history of covert interventions in other countries.
And so Iran, Iran's a great example.
When the pro-democracy protests broke out, you know, they immediately painted them as like agents of the West, you know?
Maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but it's certainly a narrative that will play.
Yeah.
Oh, you're talking about the Green Revolution in 2009?
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was NED money there, you know, predictably.
And then, yeah, there was, yeah, there was at least some of that.
So see, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And you know, I wouldn't be surprised if there was money going to Hong Kong, right, the Hong Kong, right?
Like, so, yep, totally.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming on the show to talk about this.
I think it's such a great article and I highly recommend it.
And, you know, I think if you go back to kind of the beginning, what you were talking about, I think at one point you sort of said, I don't understand why they're doing this, but I think, yeah, you do.
Everybody does.
Right.
Is they ran out of enemies and after Russia and China quit being our enemy previously, then they kind of had to settle for cocaine dealers in South America for a little while as a kind of fill in until they could get the terror war going and now people are sick of that.
And so now they're going back to great power competition, but then, you know, as much as they demonize them, Putin really doesn't seem like he's coming.
Does he, you know, like he's going to march West and conquer all of our friends in Europe?
Nah.
He sure as hell isn't going to come here and mess with us.
And so then we're out of countries and continents.
What are you going to do?
Pick on Australia?
I guess we could go to India, but that's not a very convincing enemy.
You know, they have nukes, but they certainly don't have the ability to project, to project power and they don't try to.
And so, but somebody's got to have, you know, some salesman needs a pitch to sell these battleships and these long range bombers and, and, and to keep these CIA and, uh, and Pentagon employees from having to get jobs.
Not to lay into Lloyd Austin too much, but like he worked at Raytheon before becoming secretary of defense, you know?
And you can take it the other way too, that this guy coming to work for this company, he just finished being the head of central command.
That's a huge conflict of interest too.
And then back and forth it goes, you know?
And I think you've put your finger on a real good question here because we, we need to decide like what our core us interest, you know, oh, it's core us interest, Ukraine is Ukraine, a core us interest or Taiwan on a map, please.
Seriously, you know, like core interest.
Really?
I just feel like a lot of the dialogue around, you know, grand strategy and core interests and all these things like are really just meant to, you know, elide the fact that we have a very powerful military industrial complex, uh, which has kind of a logic of its own and it needs enemies.
And, you know, I definitely think there are relationships worth having with other countries.
But I think we really need to, as a nation have a, have a realistic conversation about sort of the new balance of power in the world.
Like this is not 1945.
Right.
I mean, U S power is still very large, but in relative terms, it's been declining every single minute since 1945.
It's certainly since the end of the cold war.
Yeah.
You know, I like beating everybody over the head with this repeatedly, that even Krauthammer called it the unipolar moment where moment where we can kind of push everyone around and form up the world order in the order that we say.
But then even the point was to break all these countries away from communism and toward doing it our way.
Well, what do we know about markets?
They work for improving people's standard of living and gross domestic product and therefore potential military power and the rest of it.
And so, I mean, that's really the thing, right?
Is there's this illusion among the right that, Oh, the rise of China and all this.
It's just America declining, China kind of rising a little bit.
And it's the world.
It's not China taking over the world.
It's just the unit, the world ceasing to be a unipolar world and becoming more multipolar, which is an entirely different kind of scenario than China's going to paint Eurasia red and then us.
Yeah, exactly.
And what, what kills me is these are intelligent people.
They're aware of the history.
And like, we've had countless instances of like the Kindle burger trap where like wars wind up happening because of a power that had had a moment, a moment of hegemony, and then got really overreactive about the fact that its power was declining and another power was rising.
And, you know, Biden in an, in an address a couple of weeks ago said that, you know, Chinese cyber activities could lead to a hot war.
What?
Yeah.
My God.
I certainly hope not.
I mean, just no sense of proportion at all.
Like the, the U S has, has definitely tended to wildly overreact to, to any perceived threat to its, uh, you know, like Cuba going communist, like is Cuba going communist, like really a threat to the United States?
Like, I mean, the fact that it's sitting there being communist, like I would obviously prefer it to not be communist for the benefit of the Cuban people there.
You know, Nicaragua having a Sandinista government, like, was that a threat to core us interests?
Like it was just too much, too much overreaction to events that really, I don't think have really much to do with well-being in America.
And I think a lot of our policies, everything from interventions in Central America, Middle East, now in Southeast Asia, they make us less safe.
You know, it really is.
It really is like a agent Smith's speech in the matrix where you just can't stand to not have an enemy to fight and a struggle to be, and kind of wouldn't it suck in fact, imagine it right now, right?
Like if bewitched came and just got rid of all of the warfare States and.
Essentially every country on the planet adopted market capitalism and more or less was just kind of getting along and spinning around the sun here, trying to get by and take care of our families and, and do our best thing then how boring and horrible that would be and how much everyone would hate it and pull all their hair out and start fistfights with each other.
And then, you know, shoot up the local school, which they already do.
Right.
Like people couldn't stand it to not have a China out there, man.
Yeah.
The elites can't stand it.
Yeah.
One of the things that stands out to me about the device of like, yeah, the polarized politics in our country, like if you go back and trace them, like it really didn't take hold until after the cold war had ended because there was a necessity among the elites, there was enough of them in the core, you know, the Washington consensus group that like, this is what we're doing.
Like there were always, you know, fringe elements who were detractors about the cold war strategy and this and that.
But there was enough there to like glue something together.
And as soon as the Soviet union went away, the politics got very devised in the 1990s, the war on terror kind of pulled them together again.
But then, you know, they got kind of bored with the war on terror.
So, you know, now we need China.
And so they're going to, they're going to try and use China.
And, uh, you know, you look at the bills that have passed under Trump and Biden, unanimous votes in the Senate and house, what, what year is this?
Unanimous votes, you know, anything targeted at China on unreal.
Yep.
So yeah, it's just like the, the entire, you know, uh, detente kind of arrangement back from the early 1970s, back 50 years ago, like it never happened.
Or, or again, like we wish it hadn't, oh, it's too bad Mao died.
And the people of China ended up making some money and now they can afford to buy and recycle and refurbish an old diesel powered Russian aircraft carrier or whatever, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what it is.
Yeah.
It was sitting in like a Ukrainian shipyard for like 10 years.
All right.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, the U S is building, you know, more super carrier battle groups that cost, you know, $10 billion, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, they could cut what two thirds or three quarters or, or maybe nine tenths of the U S Navy.
And they would still rule all seven seas and the entire planet and everybody knows it.
And nobody would even try to challenge their dominance either.
And China doesn't really want to either.
It loves the fact that the United States takes care of all that stuff in the Gulf and it doesn't want to provide public goods.
It doesn't want to provide a world current, a world reserve currency, because that would involve opening up its capital accounts.
And it absolutely cannot do that.
It already tried.
Can't do it.
The money runs right out of China.
I would too.
Yeah.
Um, well, there you go.
So yeah, we'll have to figure out, you know, some branch Davidians to be afraid of or something instead.
Something else.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show here, man.
It's great talking with you, Joseph.
Oh, and I'm late.
Oh man, I blew my deadline.
I better go.
All right.
Yep.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Bye.
All right, you guys, that is Joseph Solis Mullen.
Writing at the Mises Institute, China won't be taking over the world.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
