"I would caution readers to dismiss Stephen Leeb's warnings only at their peril."
-Thomas Kaplan, chairman, Tigris Financial Group
The American Dream is close to being replaced by a living nightmare:
- Key commodities that are essential to our daily lives and that are widely believed to be abundant are running critically short. Even worse, the Chinese are doing what they can to monopolize the world's dwindling resources.
- The U.S. is now largely dependent on our greatest economic rival for rare earth elements as well as a host of other minerals-all of which are absolutely essential to the development of alternative energies and are critically important for our defense industry, computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices.
- While America has been fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, China has focused its substantial muscle on securing vital commodities from these and other lands to upgrade its infrastructure and industrial strength to meet the resource challenge head-on.
- China has wrapped itself in the green flag of combating climate change while systematically discouraging other nations from adopting similar policies in a bid to gain time to achieve its plans.
RED ALERT is a provocative and frightening look at the growing political, economic, and social power of China and the threat that nation poses to the Western world. It lays out how the Chinese are strategizing to overtake the United States as the world's premier economic...
I’d suggest this:
1) The authors’ characterization of “aggressive” actions in Africa is a thorough misreading of reality. Yes, China is buying mines of coal and rare minerals. Aggressively? Hardly. They’re cutting deals, which we have done ourselves. After all, we cornered the market in bananas not so long ago. More tragically, we attempted to secure a docile client state in the mid-east through an aggressive war that would be paid for by our new client state’s oil and which turned out to nearly bankrupt us. (So we can't buy up those African resources ourselves.)
2) The usual scare and doom predictions about America’s coming failure because of (you name it) loss of moral fiber, all those minorities who vote, Big Macs, undisciplined use of resources, Barak Obama, rap music , smarter countries than we are, and the ineptitude of the West are scare tactics. These people can’t seem to write without hyperbole. There are serious issues facing America…and they need to be discussed seriously. Just maybe Jesus isn’t arriving next week to wreak havoc on nonbelievers, which one 90-year-old preacher finally admitted to.
3) As usual, we learn of dire predictions based on half-baked “facts” which are posed so that we can target an “enemy.” In this case, China. This is the toxic residue of the Cold War.
I’d further suggest than any realistic reading of the tea leaves makes a good case that China and the U.S. have far more in common than what we differ on. We are not natural adversaries. Our future and China’s are not tied together in some simplistic zero-sum struggle. Each of us wants our zones of influence. Each of us needs to understand each other much better than we do (witness the differences between us on contractual law). Each of us will continue to compete, but we have more to gain by trade and finding mutual areas of cooperation through negotiation. This is a lot harder to do than ringing the book-selling doom chimes.
To paraphrase what one British prime minister said about the UK quite a while ago, “The U.S. has permanent interests. It does not have permanent friends.” The same is true of China. The key question is what are our mutual interests? Books like this tend to smother the child who asks this question as soon as it’s born.
So, Mr. Leeb and Mr. Dorsey, let's not give up on our country quite so soon. The Great Pumpkin isn't really that scary.