"This was always a hybrid proxy war, starting before 2014.
The US put it on, and now they're taking it off bc the Russians won and the Sino-Russian alliance is too formidable."
If you look carefully you can see Obama warning dumb neocons like Hillary not to do this. When he said "the Russians have escalation dominance in Ukraine" what he MEANT was that this is how it would end - tragically.
Both Obama and Trump understand the lessons of Vietnam.
On Iraq:
TRUMP: “In Iraq — so they spent — President Bush went in. I strongly disagreed with it, even though it wasn’t my expertise at the time, but I had a very good instinct about things. They went in and I said, ‘That’s a tremendous mistake.’ And there were no weapons of mass destruction. It turned out I was right.”
20th century opponents of Japanese and Chinese immigration argued that they would out-compete US workers and drive down wages. They also predicted that East Asians would eventually threaten "white domination" of the world. The same sentiments are just below the surface in the minds of many China hawks today.
Excerpts below from Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Yes, this is a real book, influential in 20th century America and beyond. Stoddard met with Hitler and Himmler in Germany in 1939.
The book was positively reviewed by the NYTimes in 1920. NYT: ""Lothrop Stoddard evokes a new peril, that of an eventual submersion beneath vast waves of yellow men..."
"Does any one doubt, that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world's markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany."
"Experience proves that the Chinese as all-round laborers can easily outdistance all competitors. They are industrious, intelligent, and orderly. They can work under conditions that would kill a man of less hardy race; in heat that would kill a salamander, or in cold that would please a polar bear, sustaining their energies, through long hours of unremitting toil with only a few bowls of rice."
"Flexible as Jews, they can thrive on the mountain plateaux of Thibet and under the sun of Singapore; more versatile even than Jews, they are excellent laborers, and not without merit as soldiers and sailors; while they have a capacity for trade which no other nation of the East possesses. They do not need even the accident of a man of genius to develop their magnificent future."
"This economic superiority of the Chinaman shows not only with other races, but with his yellow kindred as well. As regards the Japanese, John Chinaman has proved it to the hilt. Wherever the two have met in economic competition, John has won hands down. Even in Japanese colonies like Korea and Formosa, the Japanese, with all the backing of their government behind them, have been worsted."
Edward Ross (1866 - 1951) was a professor of economics at Stanford and later Wisconsin.
Ross traveled to China and wrote The Changing Chinese, a 1911 work of sociology and economics. Here is an excerpt:
"For all his native capacity, the coolie will need a long course of schooling, industrial training, and factory atmosphere before he inches up abreast of the German or American working man. In the technical and directing staffs there is the same absence of the modern industrial spirit, resulting in chronic mismanagement, ... These failings are not peculiar to China; they hamper the industrial development of other Asiatic countries, notably India. Still, the way in which Japanese industry, with all its faults, is perfecting both its technic and its methods shows that these failings will be gradually overcome ..."
Ross predicted that Asian economic development will take considerable time - that his grandchildren's generation would be the one that loses control of the world.
N~300k Finns, avg incomes age 35-45, age 18 test scores from mandatory military service. Non-cognitive test covers “self-confidence” and “leadership motivation”