Herland Report: The United States Could Easily Lose: Since the United States seems serious about confronting China in an extended contest for global supremacy, it had better start getting its own house in order.
Other countries will not want to ally themselves with a power that rests on increasingly uncertain economic, social, and political foundations.
In seeking the world’s favor, the US will have to make up a lot of lost ground. Its long history of exploiting other countries does not help, and nor does its deeply embedded racism.
The United States appears to have entered a new cold war with both China and Russia. And US leaders’ portrayal of the confrontation as one between democracy and authoritarianism fails the smell test, especially at a time when the same leaders are actively courting a systematic human-rights abuser like Saudi Arabia.
Such hypocrisy suggests that it is at least partly global hegemony, not values, that is really at stake, writes at Project Syndicate.
For two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the US was clearly number one.
But then came disastrously misguided wars in the Middle East, the 2008 financial crash, rising inequality, the opioid epidemic, and other crises that seemed to cast doubt on the superiority of America’s economic model.
The United States Could Easily Lose: Of course, America does not want to be dethroned. But it is simply inevitable that China will outstrip the US economically, regardless of what official indicator one uses.
Not only is its population four times larger than America’s; its economy also has been growing three times faster for many years (indeed, it already surpassed the US in purchasing-power-parity terms back in 2015).
While China has not done anything to declare itself as a strategic threat to America, the writing is on the wall.
In Washington, there is a bipartisan consensus that China could pose a strategic threat, and that the least the US should do to mitigate the risk is to stop helping the Chinese economy grow.
According to this view, preemptive action is warranted, even if it means violating the World Trade Organization rules that the US itself did so much to write and promote. Read the full article here.
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Led by Scandinavian bestselling author, Hanne Nabintu Herland, The Herland Report news and opinion website provides independent analysis from leading Western intellectuals and ground breaking YouTube interviews, cutting through the mainstream media rhetoric. It is a great place to watch interviews and read the articles of leading intellectuals, thought leaders, authors and activists from across the political spectrum. The Herland Report believes in freedom of speech and its editorial policy resides above the traditional Left vs Right paradigm which we believe has lost its relevance and ability to describe the current driving forces in Western politics.
