Political and Military Analysis on China

Can someone confirm for me whether or not the Penalty of stealing from the Party is Death?

If you are talking about small items that might be the case in North Korea. :P

Stealing firearms is quite serious I believe. And heavy corruption can get you death sentence.

From jamestown
http://www.jamestown.org/uploads/media/cb_08_17.pdf

* Hu Jintao’s Doubtful Future on the Central Military Commission
* Army Day Coverage Stresses PLA’s Contributions and Party Control
* Sansha: New City in the South China Sea
* Taiwan Rebalances in the Near Seas
* Beijing Doubles Down on Kim Dynasty

From jamestown
http://www.jamestown.org/uploads/media/cb_09_01.pdf

* Angola Operation Shows China Testing Overseas Security Role; Cambodian Visit to China Rubs Salt in ASEAN Wounds
* China's Shades of Grey
* Diaoyu-Senkaku Crisis Tests Resilience of Beijing’s Japan Diplomacy
* Sino-Japanese Relations: Citizens Taking Charge Despite Government Efforts
* China’s Search for a “New Type of Great Power Relationship”

The Next Arms Race
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute...oad.cfm?q=1113

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (New START) agreement was reached in 2011, and both Russia and the United States are bringing nuclear strategic warhead deployments down to roughly 1,500 on each side. In the next round of strategic arms reduction talks, though, U.S. officials hope to cut far deeper; perhaps as low as several hundred warheads on each side—numbers that approach what other nuclear weapons states, such as France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan either have or will soon possess. This, then, raises the question of how compatible such reductions might be with the nuclear activities of other states. How might Russia view the nuclear and military modernization activities of China? How might the continuing nuclear and military competition between Pakistan and India play out? What might the nuclear dynamics be between North and South Korea, Japan, and China? What might other states interested in developing a nuclear weapons option of their own make of the way the superpowers have so far dealt with the nuclear programs in India, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea? Are "peaceful" nuclear competitions in the Middle and Far East where states build up civilian nuclear programs to help them develop nuclear weapons options inevitable? What, beyond current nuclear control efforts, might help to reduce such nuclear threats? Each of these questions and more are examined with precision in The Next Arms Race.

Much Ado About The Sansha Garrison

Don't believe the hype: Beijing's Sansha military garrison is more of an administrative move than an arms buildup in the South China Sea.

In June, Beijing raised the “administrative status of the Xisha, Zhongsha and Nansha islands” from a county-level administrative office to prefectural-level city named Sansha based on Woody (Yongxing) Island in the Paracels (Xisha) archipelago in the South China Sea. In July, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) established a division-level garrison in the newly created city also based on Woody Island.

Analysts and pundits have viewed the announcement of the new garrison with alarm. One analyst viewed the decision as “a sign of [China’s] growing reliance on hard power” in the South China Sea. Another commentator equated the announcement with a decision to create “a permanent forward-deployed military force within striking distance of such contested waters,” a view echoed by the New York Times. Still others suggested that a division of at least 6,000 soldiers would be deployed to the region and that the garrison might command units from the PLA Air Force and Navy.

Such conclusions, however, are misplaced...

More about the Air-sea Battle concept

U.S. model for a future war fans tensions with China and inside Pentagon

When President Obama called on the U.S. military to shift its focus to Asia earlier this year, Andrew Marshall, a 91-year-old futurist, had a vision of what to do.

Marshall’s small office in the Pentagon has spent the past two decades planning for a war against an angry, aggressive and heavily armed China. No one had any idea how the war would start. But the American response, laid out in a concept that one of Marshall’s longtime proteges dubbed “Air-Sea Battle,” was clear.

Stealthy American bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country. The initial “blinding campaign” would be followed by a larger air and naval assault.

The concept, the details of which are classified, has angered the Chinese...

Originally Posted by escobar

More about the Air-sea Battle concept

U.S. model for a future war fans tensions with China and inside Pentagon

It's stuff like this that I've always said why Chinese need forces equivalent in strength to the Soviets at their peak, particularly since the US knew that trying the same stuff on the Russian heartland would result in the US being destroyed. This is also where cost-effective force improvements is critical for PRC forces to ensure MAD in any attempted US preemptive strike.

Uphill Challenges: China’s Military Modernization and Asian Security
http://www.nbr.org/publications/stra...2_Overview.pdf

The military advantages that previously allowed the U.S. to deny its great-power rivals hegemony over Asia also enabled Washington to dampen regional security competition and create a liberal economic order. This order was grounded in U.S. military superiority, economic power, and willingness to bear the costs of global leadership, as well as the inability of any Asian power to prevent the U.S. from operating along the Asian littorals in defense of its allies. China’s current military modernization, however, challenges the U.S. military’s ability to operate in proximity to the Asian land mass, thereby threatening the larger structure of regional stability built on American hegemony...

Strategic Asia by the Numbers: pdf

China’s Navy and Air Force: Advancing Capabilities and Missions: pdf

The Revenge of Geography and the Asia-Pacific: pdf

Chinese Leadership and Elite Responses to the U.S. Pacific Pivot
http://media.hoover.org/documents/CLM38MS.pdf

Over the past several years, the most significant overall U.S. foreign policy action of relevance to China has been the announcement and initial follow-through of the so-called Pacific pivot or “Rebalancing” of U.S. attention and resources to the Asia-Pacific. Many observers and officials in the United States, China, Asia, and elsewhere view this policy move as an important response not only to the growing overall significance of the region to American interests, but in particular to the challenges and opportunities presented by an increasingly powerful China. The Pacific Pivot has thus drawn considerable attention and levels of controversy in many quarters, and nowhere more so than in Beijing. This article takes a close look at Beijing’s reactions to Washington’s increased stress on Asia, including its assessments of the perceived implications of this policy shift for the region and for China in particular...

Chinese Views of the Syrian Conflict: pdf

Say Hello to the New Guys: pdf

Cross-Strait Relations: pdf

The text of a talk by Martin Jacques on BBC Radio 4, the first of four:
BBC News - A Point Of View: Making sense of China

A Point Of View: Making sense of China


China's growing importance on the world stage means that the West needs to start speaking its language, says economist Martin Jacques.

My son has been learning Mandarin Chinese since he was five; he is now just 14.

It has not been easy. Learning Chinese has required a deep pocket and the determination of an Olympic athlete.

For nine years, he fed on the scraps of a veritable army of part-time tutors, each one lasting a year or so if we were lucky. The reason? Until 12 months ago it wasn't possible for him to learn it at school - French, Spanish German, Latin, even Ancient Greek, no problem. But not Chinese.

Even now, alas, it is very much a second-class subject. His lessons take place during the school lunch break.

The reluctance of the educational system - public and private - to grasp the Chinese nettle is a metaphor for a much wider problem: our ignorance about China and our failure to appreciate just how much it will change the world and transform our lives.

With unerring regularity, our predictions about China have proved mistaken. Take its economy. In 1980 it was one-20th of the size of the US, today it is half the size and closing rapidly. Throughout that period, the doubting Thomases were always in a large majority. It would not last, sooner or later it would all end in tears.

Why have we managed to get China so wrong? The reason is hardly rocket science. We insist on viewing it through a western prism. For the best part of two centuries, Western societies have seen themselves as the model for all others. But China isn't like us. It never has been and never will be.

The great task facing the West over the next century will be to make sense of China - not in our terms but in theirs. We have to understand China as it is and as it has been, not project our own history, culture, institutions and values onto it. It will always fail that test. In truth such a mentality tells us more about our own arrogance and lack of curiosity than anything about China.

Let's take one example. We assume that the nation-state, that long-standing and remarkably influential European invention, is more or less universal. True, China has called itself a nation-state for about a century. But 100 years is a mere pin-prick for a country that dates back over two millennia. Modern China emerged in 221 BC. By the time of the Han dynasty - still more than 2,000 years ago - China's borders already closely resembled those of eastern and central China today. China is very old, the longest continuously-existing polity in the world. And for more than 2,000 years, it was not a nation-state but a civilisation-state. In essence it still is.

Our own sense of who we are, and what we are, is overwhelmingly shaped by our sense of nation, as it is for every Western country.

China is different. The things that define for the Chinese who they are and what China is are a product not of the past 100 years of calling itself a nation-state but 2,000 years of being a civilisation-state.

China is changing faster than any other society in human history. Yet at the same time it continues to enjoy a unique and extraordinary intimacy with its own history. On my countless visits to China I am always fascinated and intrigued by this paradox. Don't be surprised if a Beijing taxi driver quotes an old sage or two from 3,000 years ago in a conversation about the present. History, even far distant history, is right there in the rear-view mirror. The values associated with Confucius, who lived 2,500 years ago, continue to shape and mould social attitudes such as harmony, stability, order, or the state as a microcosm of the family.

It is no accident that the Chinese write the family name first followed by the given name. It reflects the overriding importance of the family in Chinese history. Then there's the ancient roots of Chinese food and indeed Chinese medicine. Civilisation is what defines China.

The country has another remarkable characteristic in this context. It is huge, a continent in its own right as well being home to 1.3bn people, one-fifth of the human race. Although we tend to see China as highly centralised, it would be impossible to run a country of such size and immense diversity from Beijing. Its provincial governments have enjoyed great power, with the largest having far more authority than the great majority of the world's nation-states.

But what in practice does it mean to be a civilisation-state?

The implications are far-reaching.

Here's an example.

You may remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997. Under the new constitution, known as the Basic Law, China proposed that Hong Kong would be run on the principle of "one country, two systems". The vast majority of us, I suspect, hadn't got a clue what it meant. I am sure that we overwhelmingly believed that, soon after the handover, Hong Kong would become more or less indistinguishable from the rest of China.

Over 15 years later, it is abundantly clear we were wrong. Hong Kong is at least as different - politically and legally - from the rest of China as it was in 1997. The Chinese really did mean one country, two systems.

Why didn't we believe them? Because we are a nation-state and think like a nation-state.

Take the reunification of Germany in 1990. What happened? The old East Germany disappeared. The new united Germany was the old West Germany writ large. It was the natural solution for a nation-state - one country, one system. But it is impossible to rule a civilization-state of China's scale on that principle. For 2,000 years, China has operated in varying degrees according to the principle one country, many systems. The country could not be held together on any other basis.

In this light, it was entirely logical for China to embrace Hong Kong on the basis of one country, two systems. If Taiwan should decide at some point that its future lies with China and that it should accept Chinese sovereignty, I think the Chinese will offer the Taiwanese the same deal - one country, two systems. But they will likely go further and give an undertaking that Taiwan can retain universal suffrage and its present multi-party system. Because what really matters to the Chinese is not the system but the principle of their sovereignty.

So, let's now imagine a world in which the dominant power is no longer a nation-state, like the United States and before that Britain, but a civilisation-state. I suggest that over time - and I mean many decades - the world will come to look very different. The European-inspired nation-state system will progressively give way to a more pluralistic world. The rise of China will encourage other countries to think of themselves differently. India is not a civilisation-state in the manner of China, but it too is the product of a great civilisation. Turkey too, and likewise Iran. The decline of the West will undermine the strait jacket of the nation-state.

The study of Chinese can take twice as long to learn as a European languages
The idea of China as a civilisation-state is the key to many other aspects of China. We cannot understand why - quite remarkably - over 90% of Chinese think of themselves as of the same race without reference to it. Or why the state enjoys such authority and reverence amongst the Chinese even though it lacks a Western-style democracy.

If we persist with our present mindset, then don't be surprised if we continue getting China hopelessly wrong. Worse, with the relentless rise of China and the long-term decline of the West, we will find ourselves increasingly unfamiliar with a China-centric world and feel more and more like outsiders. That's exactly what happened to China, to its huge cost, after 1800 with the rise of the West.

Despite all the obstacles, my son's Mandarin Chinese is coming along nicely.

The task is formidable: you have to learn thousands of characters and a host of entirely unfamiliar sounds. It is estimated that it takes at least twice as long to learn as a European language. The language is a metaphor for China. Understanding the unfamiliar requires a different mentality: rather than superiority, hubris and presumption, which have I think been the dominant Western attitudes towards China, we'll need respect, humility and modesty. Will we respond to the challenge? The stakes could not be higher.

Strangely enough he is called an economist on this page.

Interview with Thomas PM Barnett American Style Globalization and a bit on China.

Thomas Barnett: American-Style Globalization Will Win the Day - Casey Research

Interviewed by Alex Daley

Alex: Hello, I'm Alex Daley. Welcome to another edition of Conversations with Casey. Today our guest is Dr. Thomas Barnett, a famed author and chief analyst at Wikistrat, a massively multiplayer online consulting firm that specializes in bringing war games to public and private clients alike. Thank you, Tom. Can you tell us a little more about your work?

Thomas: Well, Wikistrat is a startup out of Australia by way of Israel. The fact that it comes through Israel is indicative of its focus on taking a product – a service line – and globalizing it rather quickly, early in the process. If you know anything about the startup culture in Israel, it immediately embraces that sort of globalizing ambition.

It's an attempt to create a global community of strategists from around the world and give clients the opportunity – the option – to crowdsource their strategy, rather than have that really tiny group within the organization – and you see this throughout the national security establishment in the United States. If you're in a globalized world, do you want to have two or three white guys sitting in a room, trying to think through China's perspective, India's perspective, Iran's perspective?

[Think of] All the complexity, all the iatrogenic unintended consequences that come from decisions you make in national security or as the head of a corporation. Would you rather have some of your ideas, your strategies, vetted through a much broader lens, a much wider global perspective?

We find that this is a huge cost saver. In many ways, we put together in the Hollywood model temporary teams of analysts from around the world. We war-game in two or three weeks online, 24/7: global community, or whatever strategic concept you want to look at. So we can do it cheaply compared to the classic "butts in seats" model of the consulting firms – the big ones like Booz Allen Hamilton and whatnot – but we can do it fairly rapidly.

If you have an idea, we can put it out, jury-rig it on top of the Wiki; and then we have analysts creating dozens, hundreds, thousands of scenarios if you let it run long enough and have a big enough crowd. You'll get ideas that you just hadn't thought about or considered. So it's fast, it's cheap, and it gets beyond the notion of relying on two or three great minds within your organization to somehow figure out all the complexity on the planet.

Alex: With a network like that, you must get a really interesting perspective on global politics and power and the problems the world is concerned with today. Will you give us some of the examples, some of the insights that you guys have gleaned through your work?

Thomas: Well, we did a war game – or a planning exercise, if you will – on Israel attacking Iran this summer. We came up with a lot of counterintuitive concepts. The further the war goes, for example, the more likely it is that you're really looking at a strategic pivot from that whole dynamic which has dominated American foreign policy the last five, six years, to Turkey sort of running the show in the Middle East. That's because you see an Arab Spring empowering Sunnis throughout the region. You see Iran being threatened by that, acting out more and more, using the whipping boy of Israel to justify its reach for the bomb, when it's really concerned about American regime-change ambitions, rightly or wrongly.

Well, that dynamic can play itself out. We can pitch it all in terms of nuclear proliferation and Shia versus Sunni, or Iran versus Saudi Arabia, or Iran versus Israel and Israel's right to exist, the Palestinian question and all that. That whole thing can blow out in a fairly substantial war. You [end up] looking at, to the surprise of many people, a Middle East once again dominated by an Islamist but yet secular democracy in Turkey. You have Iraq turning in that direction, very possibly Syria falling under Turkey's purview and influence... same with the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt.

We are looking at a very tectonic shift amidst all these things. Our fascination now is on "Is Iran going to get the bomb or not?" We are probably looking at something that's going to take that dynamic, and its centrality in American foreign policy, and just push it off the table. You'll be looking at a Middle East really led by an Islamist Turkey, and that will be a huge shift in the way we view things. That wasn't what we were looking for going into the war game. We weren't naturally assuming we were looking at a strategic shift of players and key influences in the region from what we were used to in terms of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, to Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Syria. That was something that came out because we didn't structure the war game in such a way that we only had one or two outcomes planned. We really threw it out to a global community of several hundred analysts. As you often find with crowdsourcing, people surprise you with the ideas and the creativity and the ingenuity they display.

Alex: It sounds like it's a Middle East based less on religious fundamentals and more on economic power, if Turkey's going to lead. Does that have any implications on American foreign policy? Are we making the wrong decisions out there? Should the Pentagon be changing its direction, or is the Pentagon well ahead of us and your work?

Thomas: Well, I like my private sector smarter than my public sector. In the public sector I like my politicians smarter than my military. In the national-security community, I like my military smarter than my intelligence. So counterintuitively, I like my intelligence – my spies – kind of dumber compared to everybody else, because if the spies are smarter than the military, it looks like Pakistan. If the military is smarter than the politicians, it looks like the Soviet Union, 1985. If politicians are smarter than the private sector, God help you. It looks more like Europe in terms of its creativity. The situation that they've got there now with the fight over the federal project, as opposed to an America that's led by its private sector…

So, I would say, if I'm looking at the planet, I'm looking at globalization. I'm much more comfortable with the view from America's private sector, for example, on how they view China. I would cite GM's relationship with Shanghai Automotive Industrial Group, SAIC, as probably the model that the US government should be following in its relationship with China. They partnered up with SAIC fifteen years ago. They're trying to grow it in such a way that it becomes a shared partnership. As a result, GM is the biggest seller of cars in Asia. But lo and behold, SAIC wants to grow kind of bigger and out of that partnership. That's a great analogy for the United States and China at this point in history.

Are we getting that from the Pentagon? Absolutely not. We're getting a search for a budgetary floor for the big war force, maybe, and air force, in this new "air-sea battle concept." That's basically taking an old Cold War construct: the Fulda Gap (in Germany) air-land battle. We were going to take on Russian tanks in Germany, and now they have us taking on Chinese submarines and missiles in the South China Sea. Underlying all that is really a seabed contest. If you talk to businessmen, they'll tell you they're going to have to split the difference – they're all going to have to invest. It's going to be massively capital intensive. If you want Shell or anybody to go in there and actually get the hydrocarbons at the bottom of the ocean, even CNOOC or Sinopec (Chinese companies), you can't have people shooting off missiles at each other, arresting fishermen, and having spy trawlers bumping into submarines, and stuff like that.

I think we're at a point in history where the complexity and the spread of American-style globalization – which I think is very much modeled on these United States… We went from a sectional to a continental economy in the late 19th century. I think we are seeing a repeat of a lot of that history, right down to the populism, the angry populism we see around the world today, [which was] very much evident in the United States of the 1880s and 1890s. I think business has a more comfortable, comprehensive, systematic take on what's going on in all that complexity than the politicians or the military types do.

Alex: Is this driven by the fact that businesses really don't care about national borders – they're going to go wherever they can find growth, wherever they can find revenue?

Thomas: It is a function of that, because businesses are more interested in getting transactions, customers, getting the investment in. They like security. They're more willing to split the difference. You layer that spreading reality of all the economic activity and financial flows with what happens to traditional societies when globalization comes in. This is a major theme in my books and in my work throughout my career.

You know, we're seeing traditional societies [facing a] very liberating construct. Basically: "Hey, women should go to school, women should go to the workplace. Maybe you should expect more divorces and less control over women in society if you want to develop and rise as an emerging power." We've seen that time and time again; it's all about liberating women, educating them, putting them into the workforce, delaying sex and pregnancy and marriage, getting a "demographic dividend." There's your economic miracle, repeated time and time again. China's just the latest to do it.

When that comes in, it creates social tumult. When men no longer control women in society, man, you get blowback. You get insurgencies, you get fundamentalists of all stripes rejecting that. That's what’s going on. That's what the politicians see, that's what the military sees and that's what we saw with 9/11. But underlying all that is the transaction growth and the network growth being propagated by the business types. When they come to the South China Sea, they look at it and say, "You know what? This is not a fight about where we draw the line. This is: 'Who's got the money? Can we get enough security? Can we get the investment? Can we access the resources? Will you get a proper profit-sharing model here?'" Well, if it's China rising, Japan's sort of fearful of that. All sorts of social and economic tumult going on. The politicians – it becomes very Manichean in their worldview.

So we have a disjuncture between a business network connectivity that is vast – that really defines globalization – and a time lag in understanding between that universe and what's happening in the political and military realm. There, we're still talking in 20th-century nationalism, "this is my border" kind of stuff. We're still seeing a lot of, I would say, earlier than 20th-century responses in the form of Al Qaeda and other types of fundamentalists who fear the essential liberating mode that is globalization, when it comes to traditional societies.

Alex: So the tumult we're seeing across the Middle East and Asia these days is really just a symptom of these countries following America down the path to prosperity and a growing middle class?

Thomas: It's a symptom of globalization coming to parts of the world that have been off-grid for a long time. Our transactional relationship with the Middle East for the last thirty years has been really pretty bare bones. We give you cash, you give us oil, and we really don't interact a whole lot beyond that.

[Think of it as being like] an American south, pre-Civil War, that dominates cotton markets like the Persian gulf dominates oil markets. The more you come in and allow that connectivity – and it comes in all sorts of networking forums, Facebook, the Internet and all that stuff that we've seen drive a lot of the Arab Spring dynamics to a stunning degree. I mean, no one's in charge – who's making these things happen? We're not quite sure. It's just unfolding. We're seeing a lot of young people move into a kind of strongly oppositional mode against what has been the traditional hierarchies in that part of the world. But at the same time it's frightening to us, because those traditional hierarchies have been maintained largely by suppressing religion and identity. And the conundrum for us is realizing as globalization comes into a traditional place like the Middle East, you're going to see more religion, more nationalism, people are going to want to hold on to identity. Why? Because Facebook and the Internet and social networks and globalization and foreign direct investment and all these things are coming in and transforming societies that have been pretty stable in their social structures for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Alex: Big implications for the world. How can America stay on top in a world like this? Do you think it's realistic that we can continue to maintain our position in the global economy with huge populations now coming into these sort of American-style markets?

Thomas: I think you've got to remember that even though we are a young country, we are the world's oldest and most successful and thus most experienced multinational union. What's going on, on a global scale, we practiced and pioneered on a continental scale in the United States in the latter half of nineteenth century. We went from a Civil War package to an America that dominated the whole continent and had 48 states, roughly, or 45 by the end of the century. That process, all the things that went in to it – the railroad building, the insurgencies, the private security firms, doing stuff on the frontier, the religious revivals – that whole package that we see in America in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, we're watching that experiment writ large on the globe. [That's] primarily because we spent the last seven decades trying to make that economic international liberal trade order come about, defending it and encouraging it. But what that does to us now – in Thomas Friedman's language – is create a level playing field. That means our privileged position [is going to be challenged.] The notion of the American dream in the 1950s came off the weird situation where America was still strong and powerful, and the rest of the world was either underdeveloped or decimated by World War II. We got into this mindset that said, "high school degree, blue-collar, middle-class existence."

Well, that dream started disappearing within twenty years of its formation in our minds. It is really gone now, to the point where we've experienced an economic boom over the last ten to fifteen years that really didn't, for the first time in history, include income growth for the middle class. If you look at American history, we are democratic, open, and tolerant whenever middle-class incomes are rising. We are intolerant, nondemocratic, and pretty nasty to ourselves and others whenever middle-class incomes stagnate.

India is rising despite a massive Maoist insurgency across the interior. China is booming on the coast, but stagnating in many ways, not developing, still kind of holding to a collectivist mindset in the interior. What's going on between red states, blue states, Tea Party, all that kind of populist anger in America. We're seeing a lot of these same dynamics that we saw in the late 19th century in America. The rise of the global middle class, much like the rise of the American middle class at that time frame – it's a tumultuous process. It's a democratizing process. But anybody who expects that the spread of globalization to bring immediate peace, stability, tranquility – everybody's getting along in a Kumbaya kind of fashion… I mean, that's why I called my first book The Pentagon's New Map. There's going to be tumult and violence, most of it subnational, transnational. Globalization, American-style globalization, is pure social economic revolution.

Alex: That's an incredible change for the world. Does that mean that the next few years are probably going to look a lot more like the last few years then they are the earlier days of American history where we were the one growing economy around the world?

Thomas: Well, we were the China of the late 19th century. And we scared people like China scares people now, and we were kind of a rough, rowdy, corrupt, jingoistic democracy, pretty warlike. And we still have that warlike image in a lot of people's minds, because we've played leviathan to the global system for quite some time. We've been very successful in that. We haven't seen any great power in war across the system for close to 70 years. Part of that's nukes, part of that's America basically saying, "I'm not going to allow that." Well, that role that we've played in the last six, seven decades has given us kind of a privileged sense that we run the world. The problem is, our strategy – our open-door strategy, if you will, of encouraging trade and investment to lead to connectivity, to hopefully, over time, lead to democracy – our success in doing that has created so many rising great powers out there that we're no longer able to boss people around. That creates a certain crisis of confidence in our ability to manipulate the world around us. It forces us to kind of look inward and recognize that there are some big parts of our society and economy that don't work particularly well: health care, education that's still structured in an industrial-era model – that really needs to be revamped if we are going to compete with not just the other players out there in the West but a global middle class that is ravenous in its demands. I mean, changing the resource-utilization models across the planet, but giving us a chance to sell to massively larger numbers of consumers than we've ever had in this world.

It's a great time for us to reinvent ourselves. I look to a future that's in my mind logically, say, 2030 and beyond, dominated by a China, India, and America. I call it my "CIA model of the future," kind of three great superpowers. We are more likely to get to 2030 in great shape, compared to a China that has to democratize and create an environmental movement to really deal with the way it's raping its own ecosystem and using up its water tables. Same for an India that has to deal with all sorts of tumult and a caste system that still residually exists throughout.

We've processed populist anger in America three or four times throughout our history. As much as we like to demean our own democracy, we're actually pretty good at dealing with this kind of change. I give us much better odds than India or China, especially when you realize that compared to them we are chock full of cheap energy.

The fracking revolution reminds us and gives us that possibility again. And then we are, frankly, the OPEC of food, which is an unknown in most people's minds here in America. We are the source – North America writ large – of 70% of the world's moveable feast in terms of poultry, pork, the major grains, beef as well. We are an immense player in that realm; and when you layer on climate change, which is mostly going to be an equatorially centric phenomenon – massive droughts, much more difficulty with water shortages – we have a fairly long-term bright future. We're going to be able to grow food. We're going to have cheap energy. We've got an innovative economy. We've just a couple small things to fix, relative to India and China: health care and education.

We get some serious political leaders willing to do that – which to me probably involves the boomers retiring from politics, because they've proven to be just about the worst political generation we've had in a century – and I think most of these things are quite fixable. We're looking at a major industrial renaissance in America. We're looking at a rebound that will put us back up on top, to the point where I think you can legitimately argue a second American century, very likely. Not the same package we had in the second half of the twentieth century. We won't get to rule by default, but I think there are attributes to this system that put us in a great leadership potential situation for the next five or six decades, easy.

Alex: That's a fascinating insight on the way the world is working, and quite an interesting picture for America, which I think is different than many people paint today. I want to thank you for giving us your unique perspective on the world.

Thomas: Thank you.

Here's the video of the interview