Comment Re:This is insane (Score 1) 105
War doesn't always start with a clear-headed, cold-blooded weighing of national interests. In fact I'd say that's the more the exception than the rule. Historically it's quite common for a country to start a war that in retrospect looks stupid from the standpoint of national interests.
Of course peaceful initiatives can be just as badly thought ought. We quite *deliberately* chose to tie our economy to China; I remember this quite distinctly. Although nobody anticipated the speed or completeness of the interdependency that would folow, everybody understood that we were choosing to head that way. The argument was a purely ideological one, whether interdependency per se was a *good* thing. And, as far as it goes, the argument was sound. If you don't nitpick too much, it worked out just as planned.
The thing that we really didn't put much thought into was *who it was we were choosing to become interdependent with*. China is, not to put too fine a point on it, an unstable and very dangerous powder keg. There is no rule of law; laws are enforced selectively by officials tied to an unaccountable and unrestrainable political party. There is no freedom of information, which means among other things you don't get economic data you can trust. The system is prone to sudden, opaque power shifts and the emergence of strong men who are legally, and sometimes politically unrestrained with respect to policy and military affairs.
And now we'd really like a little more distance from that powder keg, but our interdependence is the main thing that's stabilizing the situation. At least in the short term, until somebody does something that, in restrospect, will look really stupid. Which is inevitable, eventually.