Subject: Re: Trade deal with China reached
Which is better than if they were firing shots.

Sure. Of course, if we continue down the path of being reliant on them for so much, when they start flexing their muscle to force everyone to pay more and more for those things and continue to give them concessions, is that awesome? Not really.

They're Confucians at heart. They understand that you don't train to fight and build capability to fight to go out and...fight. The best part of having muscle is the option to never use it. Anyone who's taken any form of martial arts understands the concept of it being better to not fight at all.

China is building a global Navy and a global support network for it that's sited along all the major trade choke points of the world. They're happy to sow chaos as long as they remain unaffected.

If the rest of the world is totally dependent on a Chinese monopoly...why *would* they need to fire a shot?

We don't get to tell China that they have to stay forever weak and poor. Just like America First allows the U.S. to struggle and strive and compete to enrich and empower our country, so too can the Chinese do that as well. It is far better for us if they direct those efforts into non-combat competitions in economic and diplomatic arenas than if they are firing shots.

Oh, they get a vote. And they're exercising it. Unless you want to live in a world with their thumb weighing heavily on it then we need to spool up certain things here in the US.

Because the energy independence didn't result from a government choice to become energy independent. It happened because of technological developments in fracking that allowed it to become ridiculously economical to extract oil and gas domestically from shale. We tried to become energy independent for some four decades prior to that, with the federal government (and some state governments) using regulatory and financial carrots and sticks to try to force an outcome that was different than the market outcome.

That's right. And in the case of energy independence, Obama fought it tooth and nail before deciding producing energy was a good thing. The government actively tried to slow down the energy production expansion by denying leases on public lands and spiking things like the Keystone Pipeline (which would have ironically really benefited Canada).

(BTW, like semiconductors, we don't really import much medicine from China.)

We buy some ~$24 billion in medicines from them, most generics.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.or...

We do seem somewhat dependent on them for cardiovascular meds for some reason.

They also supply starter compounds
https://thehill.com/policy/int...

In 2018, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission noted that the country was “heavily dependent” on drugs and API originating from China. A 2023 analysis from the Atlantic Council found that the value of Chinese-imported APIs has continued to grow in recent years.

According to Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the U.S. isn’t unique in its dependence on China for drugs, noting that the European Union is similarly reliant.

Not conflating - just pointing out that merely "providing incentives" isn't going be effective unless they're so massive that we're in Sanders territory.

Depends on what "massive" means. Currently Trump believes that unfettered access to the US market is enough of one. YMMV.