My current thinking on China

+ Rumsfeld warns China on lack of democracy Do what? Turns out Rumsfeld didn't actually warn China. That's not his job. This is a little bit of a case of headlines gone wild. He commented about China. In some ways, it's his job to be cautious about China (especially when he's the civillian boss of so many career military personnel who feel that a SinoThreat is the butter on their bread).

+ President Bush is stuck between a rock and a hard place on China. As a conservative Republican, he is typically a friend to both big business and the military. But you can't have it all on China. Big business (barring defense contractors) wants closer ties with China and a good wroking relationship. Some of the military want us to see China as a near-peer (which is a joke in itself) so we can build our military over against a trumped up version of theirs. Here's hoping big business wins out over the military SinoHawks...

+ Tom says one of the reasons some don't want peace with China is so we can keep a big, bad military funded over against China as spectral near-peer.