Clinton's Chief of Staff, Obama's CIA director Leon Panetta: We made a big mistake

In the newly released BBC documentary 'China: A New World Order', Panetta says:

Quote:
While we were concerned about Russia, Al Qaida, North Korea, China was operating below the radar and coming at us at a number of directions.

The bottom line that I learned in dealing with China is: Don't trust them. Don't trust them.
And always suspect they are making efforts to undermine your stability. If you do that, then I think you can ultimately find a way to deal with China. If you don't do that, then you are gonna be overwhelmed.
EndQuote.

Now whoever says China is not an enemy or threat is so obviously in their pocket and treasonous.

 

Anyone who's been paying attention knows that China is the main competition against the US and that they do not share the western ideals of individual freedom and human rights.
The situation could be traced back to Nixon, who went to China in 72 and gave them a leg up. Maybe he should have left them alone and backward a bit longer, but the real issue is what to do about them now.
We can do two things- stop using China as our cheap sweatshop and go back to making our own stuff, and reach out to the developing world and invest in our collective future the way the Chinese are doing with their belt and road initiative.

We can also stop obsessing about irrelevant pimples like terrorists. They have managed to drag us down to their level and we are wasting time and energy that could be put to much better use developing a smart strategy to protect our vital national interests.
Then again, some of our vital national interests may be based on unsustainable mechanisms that have passed their time, such as the world's reserve currency.
We are no longer the world's only financial and military superpower, and who are we to lecture others about building foreign bases when we have them all over the world?
Thinking that we have to rigidly maintain the status quo in a changing world just because it benefits us is not a smart strategy.

 

Yeah. Nixon was Progressive to the core. If there was ever a RINO, it was Nixon ,,, the reason he only had 20% support in the Senate. Wrong party for Democrats. Wrong policies for Republicans.

The only difference between Nixon and Woodrow Wilson was that Nixon wasn't a racist.

Having addressed the Nixon issue, it was Carter who gave China Most Favored Nation stature, and Clinton with the influence of Lehman Bros, Goldman Sachs, etc. who gave away the farm to the ChiComs.

 

Well dumb as a box of rocks a la hands on Joe is another possibility.

 

First if we are going to fight an enemy we need first to understand him. The current Chinese leadership are not communist in any way shape or form, they are old school, 19th century autocrats. They are the people Mao started the cultural revolution to preempt. Obviously in spite of killing millions of people he failed. So now the problem is how do we leverage 21st century technology to preempt China's own grandiose ideas of imperialism.