Chinese flee poor prospects at home for the US; war in the Middle East widens

(Originally published Dec. 4 in “What in the World“) One of every hundred working-age adults in China is broke, as China’s property bust and economic downturn worsen.

According to the Financial Times, local Chinese court records reveal that a record 8.5 million people have been blacklisted for bankruptcy. People in China who default on debts, whether business loans or mortgages, are put on an official blacklist that prevents them from buying plane tickets or using popular smartphone apps such as WeChat to pay for products and services.

Like Britain’s debtors’ prisons of old, punishing defaulters by blocking them from the economy only worsens their plight and precludes them repaying, not to mention further deprives the economy of consumer spending.

With youth joblessness high and hopes dimming that things will improve anytime soon, more Chinese are fleeing the country to join the wave of immigrants marching north to the United States from Colombia. Authorities have in the past year caught over 24,000 Chinese attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico, more than they have apprehended in the previous 10 years.

The White House, however, continues to wage economic war against China. Having already imposed sanctions meant to deny China access to cutting-edge semiconductors and the equipment to make them, the administration of President Joe Biden has now imposed rules aimed at China’s electric car and battery industry. The new rules bar federal tax credits for any car made with materials or parts supplied by a Chinese company. The aim is to reduce China’s dominance in the sector and instead incentivize the EV industry to shift production to the U.S.

A U.S. destroyer in the Red Sea shot down three drones Sunday launched by Iran-backed Houthi rebels, as the war in the Middle East seems to be spreading from Israel, Syria, and Iraq to Yemen.

The drones were aimed at the destroyer USS Carney and at several commercial vessels nearby in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, where the Red Sea narrows and Yemen and Djibouti are separated by just 20km of water. Houthi rebels said they aimed to block Israeli vessels from crossing the Red Sea as long as Israel was Gaza. The U.S. said it was considering “all appropriate responses.”

The weekend attack followed another last Wednesday, in which the Carney shot down an Iranian-made KAS-04 drone. That incident came only a day after an Iranian drone came within 1.5km of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower as the aircraft carrier steamed through the Gulf, thereby violating what the Navy said were “safety precautions.”

Incidents like these are starting to persuade national security officials in Washington that there might be a correlation between such encounters and the increasing U.S. military presence in and around the Middle East.

It seems that posting enemy forces in proximity raises, rather than decreases, the likelihood they come into conflict. And that has officials pondering the risk that a recent spate of tit-for-tat reprisal attacks between Iranian-backed militias and U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq could lead to a wider war in the Middle East.

Each side justifies its attacks as a proportionate response to the other’s, with a soupçon of deterrence added for good measure. The problem is that both sides are determined to serve the last course.

U.S. forces deployed in Syria and Iraq are there ostensibly to mop up remnants of Islamic State. They were doing such a good job of differentiating between the remnants they can’t seem to eliminate and the militias they aren’t there to eliminate that the militias seem to have their own network of weapons depots, which they share with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The militias, unhappy that Israel invaded Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, have launched more than 70 attacks against U.S. bases. The U.S has responded by attacking the militias and their weapons depots. Clearly, neither side’s recipe for deterrence is working.

As this space opined Oct. 30 and again on Nov. 13:

Washington keeps hoping (the Pentagon’s fingers crossed firmly behind its back) that air strikes will deter retaliation by the militias. Keep dreaming.”

Attacking your enemy only intensifies their determination to retaliate.

So the Pentagon and the White House are perplexed by why, after hitting them with air strikes in hopes of sending a subtle-but-sophisticated warning to Tehran, Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria have responded with more drone attacks.

Gee, go figure. American foreign policy has long been dedicated to “projecting power,” usually by meting out discrete batches of lethal punishment for perceived wrongdoing—as though what misbehaving foreigners really need is just a good old-fashioned spanking. Unfortunately, nations and peoples aren’t misbehaving toddlers. So, they never respond to these surgical strikes like a developing child. Given that corporal punishment is no longer an acceptable parenting tactic in America, one has to wonder why this paternalistic policy still has any currency in Washington.

Alas, the people around the world America aims to teach through violence its messages of democracy’s superiority don’t take away from these attacks the lessons Washington wants. On the contrary, American intervention merely reinforces their sense of injustice, proving to them that the U.S. is a bully bent on global dominion generally and their subjugation specifically. Maybe it’s partly due to the asymmetry of America’s bargain: leave us in peace, and we’ll leave you in poverty. The lessons of the Marshall Plan and “hearts and minds” have been erased from American policy. The Pentagon has instead replaced the State Dept. in directing foreign policy.

And with it, statecraft has been supplanted by a self-perpetuating cycle of military escalation, one calculated to serve the Pentagon’s interests and those of its suppliers.

National security officials in Washington needn’t worry about a wider war in the Middle East. A wider war has already broken out. It will only get worse.

But the lessons of U.S. troops in Syria and Iraq shouldn’t be lost on anyone wondering whether boosting the U.S. naval presence in international waters around China will decrease the likelihood of conflict with China.