Russia a competing superpower? No, but China is a different story!

Spengler writes at PJ Media,

…When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, Russia and its satellites had a population of 375 million, vs. 225 million for the United States. Although Russia’s economy was rotten–as Reagan and his team insisted against the prevailing consensus–its military power threatened to make Western Europe a Soviet economic colony. Reagan beat Russia in the Cold War and broke up the Soviet empire. Russia now has 146 million people, less than half of America’s 300 million. Game over. The problem at present is managing a rancorous spoiler rather than a competing superpower.

…China is entirely different. Its per capita GDP has risen 45 times (that’s 4,500%) since Deng Xiaoping began China’s economic reforms in 1979. Although its growth rate has cooled from double digits to between 6% and 7% a year, China’s economy still doubles roughly every ten years. China now graduates four times as many STEM bachelor’s degrees and twice as many STEM doctorates as the U.S. During the past two years, moreover, Chinese applications to U.S. graduate schools (where foreign students comprise about 4/5 of all students) have dropped by about half during the past couple of years, because Chinese universities are roughly on par with America’s in math, physics and computer science. One out of 3 Chinese university students majors in engineering. The number in the U.S. is one out of 14 (and that counts Chinese foreign students at U.S. universities).

…China’s exports to Asia are three times larger than its exports to the U.S., and have grown three times as much as exports to the U.S. during the past 10 years. China has a $1 trillion program to assert economic dominance over Asia called “One Belt, One Road,” and its Asian business is booming.

We won the Cold War because the innovations of the 1960s and 1970s became the weapons of the 1980s. That was the result of Eisenhower’s response to Sputnik, including a crash program for tech education, the Kennedy moonshot, the tech investments at Harold Brown’s Defense Department, and Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.

America remade the world. Wages and salaries rose in real terms by 20% between 1981 and 1998 as a result. But we have been coasting on these innovations, making incremental but not fundamental changes, and real wages haven’t budged since 1998.

America has done it before, and we can do it again. We need a grand national strategy for technological supremacy. I’ve spelled it out in any number of publications, including this essay for the Journal of American Affairs. China has a grand strategy for technological supremacy. We’re better at it this kind of thing than China. But China is the diligent tortoise and we’re the sleeping hare.

Read more here.