You knew--or should have known--that being deeply in debt to China would eventually have consequences. Not just the increased speed of movement toward a different world reserve currency than the dollar, or refusal to tolerate criticism of its human rights record, or its open analysis of Alan Greenspan's mistakes in managing the American economy.... Nope. Now Bejing is sending a clear message to President Obama regarding what it sees as the appropriate US foreign policy with respect to Afghanistan. Originally published in China Daily, this piece by Lin Qinggong is pretty clearly speaking for the old men in Bejing: The United States should first put an end to the war. The anti-terror war, which the former US administration of George W Bush launched in 2001, has turned out to be the source of ceaseless turbulence and violence in the past years. To promote much-needed reconciliation among the parties concerned, the US should end its military action. The war has neither brought the Is...

About twenty years ago, Paul Kennedy published one of those very timely/trendy but also very quickly dated books, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that looked at how dominant nation-states rise and fall on the world stage. The book was a strange combination of rare insight and horrible myopia, and the reviews were just about as bad. For example, the one cited at the link above took Kennedy to task for his misperceptions about the United States: Kennedy's problems come from the fact that completely misunderstood American exceptionalism in general and the events of the Reagan years in particular. In the first place, he failed to consider the fact that America has historically been unwilling to intervene in the affairs of other nations unless there is an actual or perceived threat to American life and has been unwilling to maintain even an adequate, never mind an enormous, military in peacetime. Second, he, like many other Liberals, considered America to be at peace during t...