Another lecture by a Harvard professor on the subject of an apparently inevitable clash of a rising China against the hegemonically positioned United States. To an audience of Harvard students who will likely be many of the decision-makers in decades to come, as these two nations grow increasingly toward conflict.
At the end of World War II, it was 39 members of the Council on Foreign Relations who wrote the U.N. charter, and set up a system that largely kept us from war over the last 70-plus years. Much as I distrust the U.N. and the forces of globalism seeking to crush U.S. sovereignty, the type of compromises discussed in 1945-1948 did work, and makes me wonder if globalism might be the better alternative to another far more devastating global war.
But I think the peace is as much good fortune as it was planning. One Russian ship breaking the Cuban naval blockade in 1962 could have triggered all-out thermouclear war. Likewise, a weather satellite launched over Norway in 1995, perceived as a possible first-strike magnetic pulse weapon, almost caused Russia to launch an all-out nuclear strike. With less than 30 minutes to decide, luckily Boris Yeltsin chose not to launch a first strike and to stand down. It was the U.S. that globalism seeks to replace that acted unilaterally to keep the peace in those 70 years.
A Fareed Zakaria quote comes to mind: "We might be getting a glimpse of what a world without America would look like. It would be free of American domination but perhaps also free of American leadership-- a world in which problems fester and the buck is passed endlessly until situations explode."
