Pentagon released its report on the PLA's military expenditures and buildup and strategic designs - and it's definitely an eye catcher for anyone still harboring the delusion of a peaceful rise for China - but I was struck by charge by some analysts that pictures of the weapons systems central to the hardware build-up and of confrontations with an increasingly aggressive and assertive China like the Cowpens incident have been suppressed because the Obama administration doesn't want to feed notions of a cold war with Big Dragon - which seems a bit silly since we clearly are in a proto cold war with China - it's different from the USSR version, what with our deep economic ties to Big Dragon and the fact that they have yet to really develop a system of client states that serve their interests [although that's coming I think] - still, this is a cold war and I'm not sure about the reasoning behind trying to pretend it isn't - unless of course it's your goal to shrink the US military and the threat of a cold war with China doesn't fit such an agenda.
Maybe this is why Obama often seems to approach foreign policy problems as if they're conceptually malleable things that can be controlled better through language than actions - possibly he's naively liberal enough to believe that by not for instance calling Islamic extremism Islamic extremism and instead deploying smart strategic phrasing like 'workplace violence' a real problem is solved - without sitting down and talking to him I can't know if he's that misguided, although the Bergdahl bullshit seems to suggest the man is indeed laboring under the delusions of a worldview in desperate need of adult supervision - but I do know that if you've convinced yourself that a less powerful America would be a good thing then hiding real threats behind fake language would be an excellent way to go about it.
Maybe this is why Obama often seems to approach foreign policy problems as if they're conceptually malleable things that can be controlled better through language than actions - possibly he's naively liberal enough to believe that by not for instance calling Islamic extremism Islamic extremism and instead deploying smart strategic phrasing like 'workplace violence' a real problem is solved - without sitting down and talking to him I can't know if he's that misguided, although the Bergdahl bullshit seems to suggest the man is indeed laboring under the delusions of a worldview in desperate need of adult supervision - but I do know that if you've convinced yourself that a less powerful America would be a good thing then hiding real threats behind fake language would be an excellent way to go about it.