Why can't we be more like China?

The secret of what’s wrong with his foreign policy is what’s wrong with his domestic policies. Obama’s central focus is domestic, and neither his inclinations nor his experience afford him the judgment required for serious foreign policy decisions. Accordingly, having proposed $ 8.5 trillion in deficits over the next decade, and lacking enough gall to propose the requisite taxes to fund such extraordinary spending, Obama has only the alternatives of printing money or issuing debt. Both are harmful, but the debt route is a less visible way to debase the currency. Implicitly, Obama expects China to purchase a major portion of this debt, adding to its existing enormous share of Treasury obligations. Unfortunately for the president, however, China appears unwilling to play. In particular, China worries about the potentially devastating effects these mountainous additions to the national debt will have on the U.S. economy, and thus our ability ultimately to repay all or even most of it.

Of course, this is precisely what Washington should be worried about, not Beijing. It is little wonder that Chinese leaders now question not only America’s grip on its own economy, but its grip on international politics as well. This U.S. implosion is mirrored in Obama’s fascination with the multilateral regulatory regimes favored by the Kyoto/Copenhagen global-warming negotiating process. Assuming both the seriousness of global warming, and its anthropogenic causation, however, does not dictate self-evident solutions. In fact, many Copenhagen advocates would favor the same government-imposed “solutions” even if the problem were global cooling, or if there were no earth-temperature issue at all. Ironically, China is the world’s one large economy that could easily adopt the near-authoritarian, command-and-control economics favored by the Copenhagen crowd, and yet it refuses to do so. Beijing argues, not unreasonably, that drastic limitations on carbon emissions will thwart its plans for economic growth, which it simply has no intention of doing. China must also wonder why a purportedly free-market country like America is following this decidedly statist path.