I disagree with quite a bit in Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column which focuses on Secretary of State Blinken’s trip to China. For example:
Meantime, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing was a solid though limited success.
Unless you consider the very fact of Blinken’s visit and the fact that he actually met with President Xi a solid success, I don’t see how you can look at the body language and expressions of the various parties in the published photographs and arrive at that conclusion. They look like nine year olds being told they must clean up their rooms. Few smiles, not much eye contact, stiff posture.
But I had the most problem with a single word:
American military spending remains woefully inadequate, and the Biden administration has no serious trade strategy.
which I have emphasized above. What would be adequate? I don’t know how you can separate adequate military spending from objectives. If our objective in the Indo-Pacific is hegemony, will any amount of spending be adequate? I don’t see how when you consider that China’s GDP approximates our own.
And the war games about which I posted several months ago arrived at a somewhat different conclusion. What they revealed was that Taiwanese, Japanese, South Korean, and Philippine military capability was inadequate at present in the event of actual warfare there. The U. S. can’t bear the burden alone. Is that the objective?
