A speech by David Lampton from earlier this year, "A Tipping Point in U.S.-China Relations is Upon Us," is worth reading ... he tries to take a balanced approach.
“Confidence that a growing middle class, exposure to the world, and integration with it would produce growing value and/or interest convergence over time is challenged by the PRC’s perceived domestic political tightening and muscularity abroad ... the hope that economic interdependence would produce tolerable security cooperation increasingly is questioned.”
The China Fantasy is over, right?
I liked this line:
“In the United States, elections put a premium on finding security issues that exert a powerful influence over voter behavior and justify larger military budgets in a constrained fiscal environment. ”
In other words, politicians have to find a new bogeyman that scares the booboisie enough to justify continued support for the military-industrial complex. China a much better hobgoblin than a ragtag bunch of fanatical Islamists.
