Beating Up on Russia Is Easy and Fun

precisely because Russia is so weak today. The problem is that its new status as the Sick Man of Eurasia is similar to that of the old Ottoman Empire's role as the Sick Man of Europe in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, which caused so much trouble. The U.S. needs a Russia that's not falling apart to keep the Chinese from thinking about the many uses of a strong military and instead keep the Chinese focused on playing well with others.

In "Don't let Russian bear take US eyes off Chinese dragon," John Hughes writes in the Christian Science Monitor:

... the most significant change in China is that the government has eliminated funding for the majority of newspapers and media outlets. They must be self-supporting. Hence the executives in a modern, 50-story building in southern China which produces a bunch of newspapers with state-of-the-art technology are hungry, in their new profit-oriented orientation, to learn foreign management techniques.

In the 1890s, new printing technology lowered the cost of newspapers to a penny apiece, creating a paying mass audience for news for the first time. New York press barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer responded to less sophisticated new readers by hyping Spanish atrocities in Cuba (which, by the way, were pretty awful). This played a major role in bringing about America's war with Spain. Will the new Chinese mass market for capitalist news be too different?

Hughes continues:

What this and other evidence suggests is that the world's concern should be not so much with the eroding communist ideology in China that has failed almost everywhere else in the world, but the vigorous Chinese nationalism that seems gradually to be supplanting it.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer