When you make a nice table everyone wants to sit at it.
This will only go on so long and then we’ll knee cap their basing operation around the world with our former partners kicking them out and depending on us for support.
Hopefully there will still be an America to blunt their efforts at completing their little string of pearls.
Just as in WWII when Japan lost their sources for Steel and Oil, China will act with aggression to assert their desire for global domination and unfortunately the world will have to call their hand.
Result? Probably not good.
Might be time to get a place in Idaho to escape the onslaught as the seas no longer protect us.
Western Europe was superior because did not form an empire after the Roman one. Geography had something to do with that, but not as this professor says.
What made Western Europe so innovative was extreme competition among a new kind of political “shape”: the nations. And the formation of nations had many causes, some of them geographic, such as Europe being constitued of a series of peninsulae (it was easier to build nations on borders stabilized by geography), but also religion (Benedictine monks preserved knowledge during the Dark Ages and the Church a sense of union beyond feudal kingdoms).
When nations were constituted, during the 15 and 16 centuries, Europe was already superior than China. It might not have the same military strength or technical development, but Europe knew how to use what it had in much better way than China. And it wasn’t China the one to sail to Europe, they were Europeans the ones to reach China, coming from opposite directions!
What has made weak Europe during the 20th has been that the concept of nation has been developed to its limit and surpassed. Only “surrounded” by a belt of colonies could nations have survived, and there were not enough colonies for everyone, hence the struggle for Lebensraum. In this case, geography and demography had a lot to do, since Germany could dream of building a colonial empire (in the east) fighting rapid wars from his central position in Europe.
The West is what it is thanks to a political system that allowed innovation and competition in a extreme way. Empires that search for uniformity cannot match that. IMHO China has a deep contradiction on its political system, and each second this contradiction grows bigger and bigger (and more dangerous for everyone). Furthermore, I think that articles like this what really aim is to justify the wrong decissions of powerful people.
Europe had the same location for the 18 centuries when it had a smaller economy. The difference was economic freedom. We dominated the world when we were capitalist Republics, and we’ve begun to fall now that we are socialist democracies.
What a strained case of fitting facts to a story. China was within 3000 sailing miles of all kinds of natural resources and material wealth. Look at Australia, for example, or India as a great trading nation for exploiting comparative advantages. But because this guy’s at Stamford and his explanation is tidily PC, this is getting trumpeted worldwide.
Dr. Sowell (also incidentally, a professor at Stanford) talks some about the effects of geography in his “trilogy” on international history. Of course, unlike this professor, Sowell doesn’t overstate his hand. For example, he points out how the lack of navigable rivers in sub-saharan Africa historically impeded the development of large scale trade networks, with their attendant cross cultural interactions. At the same time he refrains from the conjecture that geography is the sole, or even the main, determinant of cultural development. Instead it seems that Prof. Morris is milking his pet theory for all it’s worth.