Local Hegemon

Last week, Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio, already sanctioned and banned from entering China, hǎo zì wéi zhī, warning him, as a subordinate, to behave responsibly. Secretary Rubio, who had already signaled the end of unipolarity, took the warning to heart:

It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War. But eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.

Heeding Wang’s warning, the Department of State replaced its former Taiwan page, signaling that it would no longer oppose reunification:

Quid pro quo?

In return, the US will receive TSMC and its negligible IP because, without ASML technology, TSMC is worthless to China but signals a great victory for President Trump.

Trade sanctions?

Sixty-percent of China’s exports to the USA are made in American-owned factories in China1 and, apart from the jobs they provide, China does not need them. Besides, since Trump was elected in 2016, America's share of Chinese exports has fallen from twenty-two to fifteen percent–much of that being goods that only China can provide.

Imperial moments

Despite three thousand years of failures, the lure of global hegemony still entices wealthy nations to impoverish themselves, as Britain did: