My world makes a little less sense.

Whether these ‘reluctant warriors’ want to admit it or not, but second cold war this time between these two is here.

China has come a long way since that Nixon embrace in 1972 to counter Soviet Union.

China was a pariah country, just like today’s North Korea until that Nixon visit. All the West European and East Asian countries stayed away from China following the US lead until 1972 and embraced China after Nixon’s visit. While US would not give MFN status to Soviet Union (remember Jackson-Vanik amendment?) unless Russia shed Communism, it had no problem giving it to China’s Communist dictators with a capitalist mask. Trade with China expanded by leaps and bounds during 12 years of Republican rule beginning in 1981. After campaigning against butchers of Beijing in 1992 elections, even Bill Clinton became enthusiastic supporter of trade with China once he took lessons in foreign policy from Nixon in early 1993 during a special Whitehouse-arranged meeting.

By opening up American and European markets to cheap Chinese products, Western democracies have actually strengthened the hold of Communist Party over Chinese society by allowing the Communist leaders to wear a capitalist mask and generate huge employment opportunities for China’s hungry masses and in the process allow China to accumulate vast forex reserves that China successfully uses to buy all kind of military technology and natural resources worldwide.

Had it not been for that Nixon embrace in 1972, China’s economic miracle would have been far more slower with all the US, West European and East Asian markets closed to cheap Chinese products. Had it not been for that Nixon embrace, China’s technological progress would have been far slower in the absence of West’s technology transfers. Had it not been for that Nixon embrace, China’s military progress would have been far slower in the absence of huge forex reserves that China accumulated from the massive exports of cheap Chinese products and China used those forex reserves to acquire latest military technology.

If US had a upper hand in the first cold war against Soviet Union, then China has a upper hand against US in this second cold war. China has US by its tail - US businesses are hooked to huge profits that cheap Chinese products make for them as a walk through any Walmart, Sears, Home Depot or Macy’s filled with Chinese goods proves and US government is hooked to huge investments that China makes in US treasuries.

Little could Mao or even Deng have imagined that by wearing a capitalist mask, their followers will beat capitalists at their own game. Lenin used to say that ’capitalists will sell us the ropes with which we will hang them’. With the West selling such ropes (in the form of technology transfers), China has proved that Lenin saying quite prophetic.

Nixon’s embrace of China to counter Soviet Union has come back to haunt US in the form of second cold war just as Reagan’s embrace of Islamic fundamentalists to counter Soviet Union in Afghanistan came back to haunt US in the form of 9/11 attacks.

What goes around, comes around indeed.

Multi-national corporations simply want to exchange American consumers with Chinese consumers. There are more of them. Of course, those firms wouldn't object to simply adding Chinese to American consumers, but they would then have to sacrifice the cheap labor that China provides. If there is no cheap labor in China, multi-national corporations will simply move their operations to another poor, but preferably large, country. The Chinese are smart to concentrate on producing the things their own citizens want, just as the United States did in the past.

MAYBE cooler heads will prevail. But there are few cooler heads in Washington these days, mostly there are dunderheads. There is nothing like a person that is afraid to make war to make a war happen.

It is necessary, to avoid being beat up by the bully, to punch the bully in the nose once in a while. Hard. And draw blood. Bullies are cowards by nature, but they sure make a mess of those that cower to them. In order to avoid a fight altogether, one only needs to be much stronger and more fierce than the bully. In this case, China takes the stand of the bully, although not for the same reason the schoolyard bully does.

China has little regard for human life, too many people to support, and a leadership that is unfamiliar with how a Westerner thinks. China is more than willing to kill and destroy a whole culture of people to implement their own. That makes them a potential bully. The ONLY reason that China has not been the aggressor to America so far is that we are soooo much stronger than they are. But we are loosing "o"'s. They are gaining on us.

And we have a leadership that is making us more and more vulnerable to China. Nothing like a weakling in the White House to make the nation more vulnerable to outside attack. He attacks US from within, they wait to attack from without.

If you don't believe it, then you have forgotten the lesson of December 7, 1941. The oriental mind is still oriental, and China is more aggressive than Japan.

The US exported less than 80 billion dollars to China in 2008, while importing +300 billion dollars worth of goods. The US is already in a trade war and would benefit if instead of lying on the ground the govt. actually began doing something to protect what's left of US industry.

Check out WTO Tariff Profiles 2009 -- Chinese tariffs are 3-5 times higher than US levels.

If their currency is undervalued by 40% as C. Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute has calculated, that means on average Chinese industry benefits from a tariff wall of 50-60% (China also has high tariff peaks)

Please: read up your Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman before making broad statements. Samuelson in 2004 questioned economic orthodoxy, and last time I checked Krugman was the only living economist to have won a NOBEL PRIZE FOR TRADE THEORY -- Krugman is advocating the immediate imposition of tariffs of 25% which is, if anything, too modest.