It seems that there are now so many politico-economically 'fattened up' Asian regimes, China now being apparently the fatter, that they each can't get enough 'food' for their large economic girths, over there. A quite understandable situation for all concerned.
This editorial, with its frankly militarist implication of 'retreat', also gives the lie to all the Cobdenist free trade pacifism which Americans have been fed, and still are being fed by their Executive Branch, about the peaceful consequences of economic development for all comers. This is so even though China is Japan's largest export market now.
What does that imply re power, and trade as a peace loving pastime?
New or recently developed economies are as unlikely to be peace loving, going forward, toward their erstwhile economic benefactors, or their neighbors, as wasteland countries and regions, shunned by any development, were and are.
See prior post re Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919, quote from a British diplomat there, 'vicious from the moment of their birth'.
The big bad difference, the terrible, seldom voiced, implication for longstanding American foreign and economic policies, is that developed and developing economies are much more formidable economic and military adversaries, in the global struggle for resources and power, than undeveloped wastelands.
It is not a good direction to have blithely gone, all these decades, really, since the 19th Century, Republicans since 1930 or so. The Democrats were free traders since before the Civil War, for reasons hardly identified with Cobdenism.
See prior posts re Nixon Shock, 1972, Fattening Things Up, Trading Poker, Trading Places, Trading American Interests, Prestowitz, Eckes, cartoons, Maverick Executive, etc., etc., etc., on this site.
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