Storm Clouds on the Distant Horizon

       Two interesting news articles serve as data points for the increasingly diverging paths and trajectories of the United States and China. While the United States suffers from economic fatigue, domestic political polarization, and war weariness (and its accompanying military exhaustion and lack of innovation,) China marks achievement after achievement in the economic, political, military, and diplomatic spheres. Once more, China’s increasing assertiveness in international politics—particularly regarding East and Southeast Asian issues—bodes ill for the protection and advancement of American national interests.
       In an article from yesterday’s New York Times (“Amid Tension, China Blocks Vital Exports to Japan,”) we are treated to the most recent example of China’s adherence to the tried-and-true principles of power politics. As a result of an impasse with Japan regarding the detainment of a Chinese fishing captain (which, arguably, acts as a foil for larger Sino-Japanese maritime disputes,) China is leveraging its near-monopolization of rare earth elements to pressure Japan. Rare earths are vital to many high-tech products and absolutely essential to advanced weaponry. China’s near-monopoly of the world’s current rare earth supplies, combined with its de facto embargo of the elements’ export to Japan, serves to not only pressure Japan, but—indirectly and deliberately—the United States.
       While Chinese assertiveness and dynamism grow, the United States gets fatter and weaker. Contrasting the NYT’s article is one by the National Journal highlighting American youths’ inabilities to meet the basic standards of military service. While the Chinese increasingly throw their economic, diplomatic, and military weight around to consolidate the country’s position as East Asia’s dominant player, American teens and twentysomethings can’t seem to get their weight off the couch and from behind the Xbox, in order to meet what would have been once considered laughable standards of physical fitness. Army officials frantically search for innovative ways to make hardy soldiers out of increasingly flabby and brittle young Americans.
       Make no mistake—power in terms of political stability, material wealth, economic vitality, favorable geographic position, global access, and military power is still the coin of the realm in international politics. Power gains and maintains influence through persuasion and, if necessary, coercion. Regardless of recent missteps over the last decade, the United States is looked to not only because of the desirability (by some) of its political and cultural characteristics, but because it is the most powerful actor in the global arena. (No offense to our Kiwi brethren or northern neighbors, but few people in the world have the same expectations of New Zealand or Canada, countries with very similar political and social systems to the United States, but exponentially different measures of power.) As we continue to forfeit individual elements of our nation’s power, and as actors like China maintain a near-opposite track, we should be contemplating the ramifications.