| >> Do you have a source on that? Xi himself, as recently as just last week, centering reunification in his New Year's speech [0] Delaying China is absolutely critical for democracies to remain globally viable. The fundamental principle is that any person or country who wants to remain self-determining must be better armed, prepared, and able to fight than the local bully or global authoritarian; if not, they'll take your lunch and democracy every time. With Russia, supported by China [1], we are already far past a new Cold War and into a Hot War with the autocracies. The better defense capabilities of the democracies rely on the concept of "Defense Offset", which is basically maintaining a technological advantage so that a numerically much smaller military can prevail against a numerically superior military (e.g., US mil 2019 total size 1.388MM [2], vs China 2.535MM [3]). This military advantage, since at least the late 1960s, has relied on advantage in microchip technology. When the first Cold War ended after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Grand Experiment was tried. The idea was that free flow of economic benefits and information would inevitably lead to open and democratic societies. Sadly the generous experiment failed miserably — all it did was further empower the dictators. Now, Russia is attempting to regain all it's territory back to 1917, and China is continuing it's expansionist ways. This is because they now have significantly closed the technology gap to the point where even Iran is contributing significantly to Russia's war on Europe with the Shaheed drones, using a lot of off-the-shelf technology, and Ukraine is significantly bolstering it's defense with FPV drones. So, even if China does eventually manage to catch up (which is unlikely considering how many insanely complex and globally-non-China-sourced technologies go into one $450MM ASML chip lithography machine), the key is to delay CCP sufficiently that we can extricate them from the democracies' supply chains and maintain a sufficient military offset to defend democracy around the world. We are starting very late, so this is truly critical, unless we are OK with us and our descendants living under a regime like CCP or Putin. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-67855477 [1] https://www.voiceofeurope.com/chinas-advanced-machine-tool-e... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili... [3] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/military-arm... |