On abortion (“personally pro choice”), civil unions for same sex couples, illegal immigration, or gun control. He is essentially a Rudy Guiliani conservative, and I’m surprised that all those “true conservatives” out there haven’t turned on him yet.

I say this not in defense of Christie but because I know of precious few pols who are humble. (For that matter, how many successful attorneys do you know who are humble?) The ones who seem to be tend not to be very popular among “the base” (see Mitch Daniels). At any rate, I don’t see the importance of it, given that public imaging makes it impossible to be sure just what the true content of a public figure’s character really is, beyond quantitative stuff.

I don’t think that Christie will run, though: and so much the better. My hope is that Palin will stay out, as well, and that she’ll put her support behind a credible candidate who has done a decent job running his/her state, like Pawlenty, Johnson, Barbour, or Daniels. That would be the optimal solution for me.

For that matter, Rudy’s far to the right (for lack of better terminology) of where I would be on the civil liberties vs law enforcement/long-term military conflict dichotomy. And of course, both are to the far left of where I’m at as far as gun control and abortion go. However, I can’t for the life of me see where a Democrat would be better on any of those issues; all of the laws prohibiting the video recording of police officers as they go about their duties are to be found in true-blue states across the East Corridor and the Midwest, and leftists are in bed with virtually every group dedicated to expanding the state. I know it is the same for conservatives, and I just don’t see how the inevitable turning against Christie on the part of “true conservatives” furthers our goals as a movement or a party.

in that they have, IMO, been over-inflated into a world power by sensationalist journalism and their own actions trading off long-term prospects for short-term benefits. They’ve also been propped up rhetorically by a fair number of leftists and third-world regimes seeking to “prove” an alternative to liberal democracy as far as improving outcomes. China’s “authoritarian capitalism” seems to fit this bill, and those types will seize on any opportunity to justify their own authoritarianism. They are, no doubt, a strong regional power that is somewhat antagonistic to our interests. However, we have plenty of regional powers that serve as appropriate balancers, such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Taiwan (other, formerly neutral countries in the region like Vietnam and Laos are now more on the anti-China side): if we ever pushed Japan to untether itself from its constitutionally-mandated pacifism, that alone would be enough to make our regional allies without us more than the match of China militarily.

Many commenters also tend to forget the many missteps and internal problems that China has: as an example, its one-family, one-child family will be absolutely disastrous in the future, as young males find themselves in a society with very few marriageable prospects, and dissident minority groups that have been a thorn in China’s side who ignore the rule find themselves a larger part of the population. My prediction: there will be a regional war at some point in the medium term.

Agreed on the unrealistic standard that we’ve set vis a vis Afghanistan.

If anything, the Chinese government is capricious and arbitrary, while having learned from the Asian Tigers that they have to keep some basic stability so that they can attract business. Case in point: China’s pro-urbanization policy (designed to make it easier to rule over their subjects) recently led to the Chinese adopting policies very similar to those that we pursued in the housing crisis, but to a much greater extent. Now that the bubble has popped, China has been even more adversely affected than we have been by the housing crisis, which is one reason that they have been relatively silent in this recession. China’s saving grace is not that they are patient, it is that they have about 900 million Han Chinese who are generally hard-working and industrious who have no alternative but to hope that the Chinese government doesn’t screw up too badly. They aren’t even close to being able to play in the big leagues, and medium- and long- term prospects aren’t favorable.

As to their holding of our securities, outsourced jobs, etc, an old adage puts the mind at ease: if you owe $100,000 to the bank, the bank owns you. If you owe $100,000,000 to the bank, you own the bank. Just like any business, China needs to please its largest customer, not the other way around: if the worst comes to pass, we can always outsource our production to other third-world countries in Latin America and Africa. Will it hurt us? Yes, but not nearly as much as it would hurt China. There are a number of actions that China has been forced to take precisely because of this dynamic, and politically, it would be far less politically unpopular for us to unilaterally stop trade than for them to do so. We’re holding them by their short hairs, not the other way around: problem is, our biggest opinion-makers, pundits, etc either don’t know it, or are too desperate for hard copy to report it in any truthful manner. China is a regional concern, but in no way is it a rising or current world power in anything but the fevered minds of various newspaper editors.

Never forget that China’s best-laid plans were laid to waste by something as insignificant as opium.

during the Great Depression. Tariffs and protectionism were all the rage at the time.

Without dramatic changes on the foreign and domestic front, the idea that China will ever be our equal, much less our better, on the international stage is one that is laughable. The US is on the decline, but so are virtually all of the other countries in the world, due to the recession. Certainly, China can be bothersome (i.e, selling weapons to hostile regimes, using soft power to get other countries to oppose us, etc.) but that is all that they can aspire to without starting a war in their part of the world (which would undoubtedly hurt them more than us). There will, IMO, be a significant conflict in SE Asia in the future, due to bad decisions on the part of Chinese leadership, but China is not a threat to the extent that the punditocracy is making it out to be.

To which training, logistics, and coordination between services plays a role, the extent to which we’re currently ahead of China, and the massive amount of resources, allies, etc we could bring to bear if we were threatened by China (or even the dreaded China+Russia+Iran+Norks combo). They are behind in their tech, but they’re even more behind in those things I just mentioned. They won’t even give the Norks any tech, much less train with them (and who could blame them?). Iran is not in a place where it can project force credibly. So it’s basically China against the world in that scenario. Does that mean we just sit tight behind our Maginot Wall? Far from it: it simply means that acquiring intel is both more cost-effective and savvy, given that we are looking for long term directional trends to counter, not short-term threats. It also helps wrt knowing what their short term regional interests are.