You should not only read this fine Mark Helprin piece on China in today’s Wall Street Journal, but you should file it away and pull it out in about ten years, all the while hoping that time will have proven him wrong! You don’t have to agree with every big point he makes, or alludes to, merely note the gravity and the eloquence of his case that China harbors major ambitions and is working diligently toward them; and we are doing nothing.
Mark Helprin has been prescient before in his WSJ columns. Back in May 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombings, he said:
Though it is obviously far better to attack a desert nuclear facility than to lose Chicago to a suitcase bomb or a few former Soviet tactical
warheads in a business jet piloted by a young mullah with a grudge against Sears Roebuck, what president, and especially this president,
wants to prejudice his re-election by appearing to be (in the absence of what he would successfully forestall) overly aggressive? A corollary of Churchill’s "How often I find myself called wrong, for warning of follies in time" is now the anthem of modern American politics (and journalism): “How often I look good for neglecting dangers that willstrike on someone else’s watch.”
The Wall Street Journal: Wednesday May 10, 1995
Of course it isn’t that we want him to be right.
OK we are doing nothing...perhaps you could mention what that something should be??