Patience Is More Than A Virtue--It's A Weapon

Dr. Henry Kissinger, the gentleman that was President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State back in the 1970’s, made a comment in his book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?," which changed the way that I think about world politics forever when I read it several years ago. Paraphrasing Dr. Kissinger, he stated “the Chinese government made political decisions based on the perspective of a civilization that is 3000 years old.”

Further, he pointed out that as a result of this millennia long history, the Chinese government and, by extension, their people think nothing of patiently waiting and watching geopolitical events that might take one hundred years or more to transpire. A time period such as this, from their political perspective, only represents the longevity of a few (three or at most four) generations of their despotic communist leaders. With their inherent strict control over education, religion, and the media, very little can and will change in China over what we here in the US consider to be a VERY long period of time. (Remember, the US is only 228 years old this year.)

In the US, one hundred years represents 25 election cycles for president. At the very least, 13 different men could be elected, assuming each was to serve the maximum of two four-year terms. Further, our presidents are elected from not one but from two or possibly three political parties representing in theory very different ideologies. The direction of the nation vacillates along in an ever-declining (some call it a spiral downward) direction away from the government envisioned by Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson.

Dr. Kissinger didn’t say it outright, but I believe that the Chinese think that they can defeat us without firing a single shot or launching a single nuclear warhead. They will instead just wait for us to implode politically. If they keep waiting, instead of “beating them,” our un(der)educated population and our liberal (read that socialistic or communistic) politicians will just keep on hammering away at the rest of us until they make our country “join them.”

In my earlier posting The Devils in the Details—Part II, I referenced the fact that China’s population is about 1,300,000,00, while the US population stands at 293,000,000. Over four Chinese for every one American. I suspect that if the truth were known, they are hungry for the freedoms that we take for granted. The average 18 year old Chinese man would die for the opportunity to move to the US, get a student loan, enroll in college, get a part time job, rent an apartment, buy a used car, and drink an imported beer or two every Friday night. He would also kick most of his fellow students asses when it comes to test scores and wouldn’t think of watching (or believing) what that unshaven sloth Michael Moore spews out in the media--telling us that the US is an evil, unfair place in which to live. “Sell that crappola somewhere else,” he would say.

As I also referenced in that post, if the Chinese government ever managed to allow the Chinese population to consume petroleum products at the same rate as all of us “Ugly Americans” manage to burn it in our SUV’s and water heaters, the Chinese could consume more than 80,000,000 barrels per day. That means that China could in theory use more oil each and every day than the quantity that is currently pumped out of the ground by every oil producer on the entire planet.

Forget about Iraq , Iran, Syria, North Korea, al Queda, al Quackka, al "whatever," and AIDS, for that matter—in another one hundred years the Chinese will still be waiting patently for us to screw up…if the US is even still on the world map by then.

What are you going to help me do about it?