Saving Amerca’s future from the Blob

Never believe what bipartisan foreign policy establishment hacks say about China and Russia. They don’t believe what they say, either. The Blob (as Obama aide Ben Rhodes called it) learned through generations of strategic blunders that if everyone closes ranks and sticks to the same story, its members will survive a strategic disaster of any magnitude with their careers intact.

The same principle explains why not a single American banker went to jail after the subprime collapse of 2008, the biggest fraud in all financial history. The Blob’s logic is simple: If you go after one of us, then you have to go after all of us, and who will be left to put things back together?

Whether or not it was right for America to go abroad seeking monsters to destroy in Moscow and Beijing, the way we went about it was abominably stupid.

“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared,” Machiavelli advised.

Washington has wounded Russia and China but not disabled them, setting in motion a tragic sequence of responses that in the worst case will lead to war, but more likely will leave the United States with vastly diminished strategic standing.

The rise of China and the resilience of Russia have persisted through serried waves of tech restrictions, $125 billion of NATO support for Ukraine and an unprecedented sanctions regime against Russia, including the seizure of $300 billion in reserves, among other measures.

The Black Legend propounded by the Blob states that China is on the verge of invading Taiwan because its Communist leaders hate democracy, and because it wants to distract its citizens from their economic misery. It claims that Vladimir Putin wants to revive the Russian Empire and