Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
Originally posted by: Arcada
Originally posted by: sandorski
China's Military Investments may not make them equals with the US, but they certainly make them a less attractive Target(not that the US has them in their sights). Even if all China wants is Asian Domination(Politically speaking) they still need to discourage the US from "meddling", so they need a Military that can at least Defend against a US attack.
they are biding their time till all our manufacturing is gone.
then they'll finally crush us economically by calling up our loans, and taking over all american owned factories in china and placing them under chinese gov't control.
the USA is done, that easy.
and lose their largest customer?
We give them IOU's they give us goods. They don't need IOU's to feed their people and they don't need IOU's to build weapon systems.
What does it matter to them if in an instant, all their US paper became worthless? It wouldn't hurt them nearly as much as us.
I nearly p1ssed myself when some naive conservative on some board said we could, if it got too big, just default on what we owe China. That would be America's "Rome is Burning" moment. Just imagine going to Walmart and finding empty shelves. Finding people fighting over the last toothbrush on the rack. Plus whatever civil unrest an economic calamity might introduce in China, it can easily be handled by a military of their size, especially when they don't mind getting their hands dirty. Think you could say the same about the US? An economic catastrophe on that scale would endanger the republic. By the way - a bunch of other western and European economies would follow ours right downt the old sh1tter.
So what I'm really getting at is this - We need China, much more than they need us. At some point in the future, we will need their financing so much, that we won't be able to stop them from taking back Taiwan if they really want to.
Our trade imbalance is a huge structural problem and no one really seems to care. The trade deficit is a much bigger threat to America's long term security than Saddam Hussein ever was.