Bye, Bye Miss American Pie

Last week a Chinese nuclear submarine surfaced about five miles from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, one of the Pacific Fleet’s greatest aircraft carriers.  It seems that the submarine had been stalking the carrier in the same way that Soviet and American submarines stalked the other’s fleets during the cold war. 

China is flexing its muscles and has taken the position of competing superpower, once held by the Soviets.  And this recent game of cat and mouse marks the opening salvo in a war in which America will be humbled.  A dress rehearsal is taking place for a major confrontation in which the Americans will be ill prepared.  This saddens me because a once great and mighty power whose vision of liberal democracy and system of free enterprise, under-girded by the rule of law and animated by the self-evident belief that all men and women are created equal, may be supplanted by a totalitarian regime which asserts its will over the rights of the individual. 

If I were to choose between an American and a Chinese hegemony, I would choose the former – despite its evident shortfalls.  American supremacy, although it has had mixed results, has been impelled by the stirring influences of the Enlightenment which assert the supremacy of reason and the principle that the individual is the measure of all things.  This worldview is certainly incomplete, but not as deficient as that which impels the Chinese will to power.   

While America is invested with a mission of mythological proportions, born in its formative struggle for independence; a mission which seeks to ignite the geopolitical landscape with the torch of Liberty; while it is invested with this mission, the Chinese seem to be inspired simply by the expedient of wealth creation.  In its outreach to the world it has brought investment for its own sake, and without concern for its impact on exploited people.  It is unashamedly disinterested in the plight of individuals within the nations with which it has fostered economic liaisons.  In the pursuit of resources to maintain its burgeoning power it has nothing to give but a self-absorbed scientific materialism, pragmatism and the mandate of the gut. 

China is an ancient power whose socio-political structure and view on humans is informed by an imperial design.  The last emperor did not die in the Twentieth Century; in fact, Mao Tse Tung was the greatest exponent of this imperial pattern and his successors continue to promote it beneath the camouflage of Armani suits and Mercedes Benz. 

No matter how misdirected America may have been during its dominion, at least it suffused the planet with ideas that will continue to transform societies for centuries.  If China can bring only the outdated capitalism and the desire for consumption that marked the last few centuries, it will fail as a great power and will do so more quickly and more traumatically than America, and Rome itself.