"Given China's rise, its wise long-term to keep a presence in the region."
Why?
China will surpass the United States in soft and hard power eventually. This is demographically and economically inevitable. Even sooner, if not already, China will become an unshakable hegemon over all of Asia. So why fight it in the most expensive and futile ways possible, i.e., by maintaining the fiction that we will be able to exercise any sort of long-term military power in Asia?
It's time we focused on our economic power, and not our military power. The former is a necessary precondition of the latter, and we're acting as though it's not.
"This is demographically and economically inevitable."
Oh, no it's not. First China has to hold together over that time frame. This is feasible... this is not inevitable. There's a lot of tensions over there. Then even if they pass that test, there's other things they're going to have to deal with.
Right now, there isn't a single world power that's looking to be "inevitably powerful" in the next 50 years, it's really "anybody's game".
First China has to hold together over that time frame. This is feasible... this is not inevitable. There's a lot of tensions over there. Then even if they pass that test, there's other things they're going to have to deal with.
Right. It's entirely possible that China can hold together as a sovereign nation, but will develop or hold onto pathologies which will cripple it as a major power. Then again, the same could also be said for other potential powerhouses like Brazil, Russia, and India. The same could even be said for the EU and the US.
China doesn't need to hold together for that to happen. China has a far stronger ability than most other countries to collapse, reform, and remain "China."
> China will surpass the United States in soft and hard power eventually. This is demographically and economically inevitable.
As far as I can tell, this conclusion can only be reached via naive interpolation of current trends. I can't come up with one plausible scenario in which this actually happens. Most of China, population-wise, lives in a state of abject poverty, about which the government has done very little. The Chinese gov't itself indicates that nearly 10% of the population are migrant workers. The migration of peasants from the countryside to the city is already considered the largest migration in human history, and it's expected to grow drastically over the next decade or so.
No country can smoothly handle the kind of stresses that come with having most of the country living in abject poverty, and seeking migration to already-overpopulated cities. At some point, /something/ will snap - the magic bubble that is China's economy will pop, and we'll all realize that being gigantic is an impairment, not an advantage.
Put another way: at some point, China's ridiculously poor standards of education and health care will catch up to its economy - and the western companies that have been moving (partly) there, helping to fuel the growth, will stop doing so.
Your point about economic vs. military power is, of course, valid, and largely irrefutable. I would add that, as China does seem to be a relatively stable country - with a competent and, most importantly, sane government - they stand little to gain by way of aggressive military action. We may do well to let them police their part of the world (read: keep North Korea in line), trusting their own rational self-interest, and save ourselves the effort.
I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that in 40 years China will have per capita GDP half of the US (The Shanghai and Beijing areas are already close on a PPP basis) - indeed some GS research paper argues this. At that point its economy will be about double the size of the US...
It's definitely a two-way street. Employees bear some degree of responsibility for self-esteem and upholding of limits. At the same time, managers bear a big degree of responsibility for the productivity and wellbeing of their employees. And when they cross lines and reject reasonable limits, that shouldn't be seen by default as the employee's failing.
I've worked for a big corporation in the past that bore a particularly onerous, victim-blaming animus toward its employees. Anytime anyone, anywhere, had an issue with his boss, he was told to "learn to manage upward." "Managing upward" became a catch-all excuse for allowing a boss's failures to be re-characterized as your own. As it so happened, our division had a few downright abusive bosses. I mean, abusive in the legally actionable sense of the word. And their direct reports would invariably try to "manage upward," then get firmly reprimanded for doing so. To top it off, they'd be labeled internally as malcontents, politically isolated, and subjected to further abuses. Not surprisingly, very few people below the upper-middle-management tier of this company stuck around for longer than a year.
Why?
China will surpass the United States in soft and hard power eventually. This is demographically and economically inevitable. Even sooner, if not already, China will become an unshakable hegemon over all of Asia. So why fight it in the most expensive and futile ways possible, i.e., by maintaining the fiction that we will be able to exercise any sort of long-term military power in Asia?
It's time we focused on our economic power, and not our military power. The former is a necessary precondition of the latter, and we're acting as though it's not.