This is a companion post to my previous post on Hogsbreath (Hegseth) statement about the Panama Canal and the news of troops being sent to Panama for ‘training’.

All this threatening talk got me to thinking and I wanted some info on just how big is the world threat from China.

I mean we hear all about their influence in Panama and their desire for Taiwan and the whole of the South China Sea and we already have heard about the punishment of tariffs of 145%….but really just how big is the China problem?

I decided that I would look beyond the MSM and its echo chamber and past the rhetoric of the politicians and especially the Donny Show and go to some academics that actually look at the world around us.

Which country is the greatest threat to the United States? The answer, according to a large proportion of Americans, is clear: China.

Half of all Americans responding to a mid-2023 survey from the Pew Research Center cited China as the biggest risk to the U.S., with Russia trailing in second with 17%. Other surveys, such as from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, show similar findings.

Senior figures in recent U.S. administrations appear to agree with this assessment. In 2020, John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence under President Donald Trump, wrote that Beijing “intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically.”

The White House’s current National Defense Strategy is not so alarmist, referring to China as the U.S.’s “pacing challenge” – a reference that, in the words of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, apparently means China has “the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the power to do so.”

As someone who has followed China for over a quarter century, I believe that many observers have overestimated the country’s apparent power. Recent challenges to China’s economy have led some people to reevaluate just how powerful China is. But hurdles to the growth of Chinese power extend far beyond the economic sector – and failing to acknowledge this reality may distort how policymakers and the public view the shift of geopolitical gravity in what was once called “the Chinese century.”

https://theconversation.com/is-the-united-states-overestimating-chinas-power-220014

Then there is this from the Foreign Policy website…..

It has become a cottage industry in Washington and in parts of Europe these days to highlight all the many ways in which China threatens U.S., Western, and Asian interests. Politicians, military officers, and pundits take turns describing the dangers posed by Beijing’s “expansionist” and “aggressive” military, “implacably hostile” ideology, “predatory” economic and tech policies, and “insidious” overseas influence operations.

Despite shunning the Trump administration’s habitual use of most of these inflammatory adjectives, U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken nonetheless depict Beijing as challenging the entire “rules-based order that maintains global stability” and as the major focal point of a global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, which is now, according to Biden, at an “inflection point.”

Such language echoes the premise of various strategy documents of the Trump administration and the speeches of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: that the United States is now locked in a strategic, great-power rivalry with China that overshadows any other foreign (or even domestic) threats or concerns facing the country.

China Doesn’t Pose an Existential Threat for America

Without depending on the opinions in a MSM site and by looking at what professionals, not a pack of overpaid amateurs that have no idea what is happening, have to report I ask again….Is China really the threat that is promoted?

What say you?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”