Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
Bill,

I ran across and read that yesterday. Very important indeed. The quote that came to mind for me is "I drank your milkshake."

In the movie "There will be Blood" (note, this is my recollection, I saw this movie once, years ago) the Daniel Day Lewis character is developing oil fields in Southern California, but one farmer refuses to negotiate on matters of principle. Finally, the farmer breaks down and goes to Lewis and says "OK, I am ready to negotiate." At which point he is told he is too late, as he had drilled all around his property and no oil was left to sell, he had "drank his milkshake."

The US is like that principled farmer. We think we are holding onto something, where in fact activities all around us are taking away the very thing we think we are preserving. At some point, we too will come to the point where we will say to China, "Ok, lets sit down and talk about how we share responsibilities and work together." To which, China will likely reply that we are too late, that they "drank our milkshake..."
Classic movie, I hated capitalism for an entire day after watching it, but then I saw a Michael Moore documentary, and became a capitalist again.

At some point, we too will come to the point where we will say to China, "Ok, lets sit down and talk about how we share responsibilities and work together."
We have been at this point for well over a decade, it isn't due to a lack of effort on our part. I don't think today's leaders in China really want to share, they want to monopolize and dictate. They increasingly believe they have the means to do this. I can't recall what renown world politician said it (he wasn't a U.S. politician), but he argued that East Asia is the future of the world economic engine, and if the U.S. gets marginalized in this region they will no longer be an economic superpower (and everything that comes with that). Terrorism in the Middle East and Africa is important, but it doesn't come close to the level of importance of other strategic interests. We're capable of dealing with both, but we tend to act as though we can only have one priority. If we can't move past transactional national security actions to focusing on longer term strategic interests we are setting ourselves up for failure, failure will manifest self as a crisis, then we'll shift effort with no underlying strategy and start flailing at threats again.

Sharing is a nice concept that mature actors can agree to, but when decision makers (from all concerned countries) rather embrace nationalism, pride, and greed rather than compromise, then a confrontation is perhaps inevitable?