UPDATE: Richard Fernandez has has a new column that bears on this issue.
He describes a new article about what was called “The Third Way,” a political movement that was to replace the Democrats after 1988.
The Third Way, the political movement that crested at the end of the 20thcentury and the beginning of the 21st, represented the most recent effort to reimagine the centre-left in the face of massive economic and social changes.
At its apogee, when it dominated the politics of United States, the UK, and Germany, it was thought to provide a stable template for governance well into the new century. Confidence ran high that the business cycle had been tamed and that the forces of globalisation and technology could be managed for the good of average citizens as well as meritocratic elites.
You could almost call it “The Deep State” and it has lost its way.
China, in the meantime, has moved into a lead.
As events proved, the unipolar world did not remain the only game in town. “Russia regressed to autocracy; radical Islamism went to war against the West; China became far more prosperous without becoming a whit more democratic, confuting decades of modernization theories,” Galston wrote. Entrepreneurship declined, middle class incomes stagnated and a revolt against unlimited immigration began. Most of all new decentralized technological possibilities arose within the West. In a word, the power of the elites at the center was challenged as never before. All this came to an unexpected head in 2016.
Now all enemies are near enemies, as the supply chain problem and the “collusion” allegations in every Western country illustrate. We are engulfed in a civil war because in a globalized world that’s the only kind there is. Yet in retrospect Brexit and the election of Donald Trump should not have been the shocks they were. They were only surprises because the media refused to see the growing storm.
There has been quite a bit lately about the China trade deficit. Trump has proposed tariffs on Chinese imports until China treats US products fairly. The recent trade talks with Mexico and Canada are based on the knowledge that much of this NAFTA trade is really with China that send products like steel to Mexico and Canada, which is then incorporated into products imported by the US as north American manufactures.
Now we have evidence that China is more than a trade rival.
But that’s just what U.S. investigators found: The chips had been inserted during the manufacturing process, two officials say, by operatives from a unit of the People’s Liberation Army. In Supermicro, China’s spies appear to have found a perfect conduit for what U.S. officials now describe as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.
One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards.
This was an espionage act that infiltrated US Defense computer systems.
I have been convinced for some time that Russia is a stalking horse form Democrat politicians, like the Clintons, who have been bought and paid for by China.
One government official says China’s goal was long-term access to high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks. No consumer data is known to have been stolen.
The ramifications of the attack continue to play out. The Trump administration has made computer and networking hardware, including motherboards, a focus of its latest round of trade sanctions against China, and White House officials have made it clear they think companies will begin shifting their supply chains to other countries as a result. Such a shift might assuage officials who have been warning for years about the security of the supply chain—even though they’ve never disclosed a major reason for their concerns.
I do sometimes wonder at the violent opposition to the Trump China initiatives.
America’s leading business lobbies, which represent every sector of our economy, have declared all out war against President Trump’s trade tariffs.
Manufacturers, corporations of every size and shape, retail businesses, agricultural industries, and consumer groups — 45 associations in all — have joined forces to defeat the president’s plans to impose higher trade taxes on our long-standing trading partners and most loyal allies.
The largest of these organizations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 3 million businesses nationwide, is launching an unprecedented campaign against the tariffs.
Is this ignorance or what ?