I guess, we might as well start walking now.
(Grading papers so a short one tonight)
Read list week’s Message
You do not want nervous allies and you do not want frightened citizens. If you keep doing things that provoke those responses you get one thing: alienation.
Alienation brings down empires. It makes the people you depend on to keep the system running decide that there is no point in working or sacrificing to maintain it. They look for alternatives, and better deals because you basically told them they were suckers for being loyal to you and your past relationships. But the days the unipolar world when American could just do as it pleased and ignore the world are over and never coming back. Yet the US government acts like it is 2004.
We do not want a Qing America that is woefully unaware of developments around the world and that insulates itself from reality by holding on to out-of-date ideas of superiority.
The early nineteenth-century Great Qing court of China learned that the hard way. For two centuries the ethnic Manchus had ruled over the Chinese empire, populated by the majority Han people, the group we often refer to as the ethnic Chinese. The Manchus were a people from what is now northwestern China, and they now sat at the center of one of the greatest empires on earth. But by the late 18th century they refused to see that the world around them had flipped. Earlier Tsarist Russian probes on the steppe of East Asia were treated as a nuisance in an old game of barbarian management, and not seen as evidence of a new kind of power projection. The Qing successfully checked Russian expansion in Central Asia in the 1690s but drew the wrong lessons. Russia’s limited but effective eastward push showed that European powers were gaining a decisive edge in logistics and long-range power projection. There were European ships in the South China Sea but no Chinese ships in the Channel or the Baltic. Yet after defeating the Russians in the steppe, the Qing made no effort to study Russia itself or to rethink their own military and strategic posture.
At sea, they similarly misread the encroaching presence of European empires across maritime Asia. Spanish, British, Portuguese, and Dutch footholds from the Philippines to Burma and Macao were not seen as a new strategic environment; instead the Qing court dismissed naval and maritime issues as secondary. Han merchants understood the significance of oceanic trade far better than Manchu officials in Beijing, but the state neither valued nor organized that knowledge into something actionable. As a result, Europeans steadily gathered information on China through trade, missions, and regional contacts, while Qing forces went into the nineteenth century with little understanding of their opponents’ technology or methods.
Internally, the dynasty depended on Han resources and manpower while systematically privileging Manchus and preventing the emergence of an integrated, expert officer corps. Officers were rotated to block the development of independent power bases, but this also blocked the accumulation of local and functional expertise. During the First Opium War of 1839–42 the sad state of affairs was exposed. As a special imperial commissioner in Canton in 1839, Lin Zexu took several actions against the opium trade. He arrested Chinese smugglers, compelled British merchants to surrender their opium, and destroyed approximately 1,400 tons of the narcotic. The British started the war to stop the suppression of the trade because it was their way of getting silver out of China.
The opening clash of the First Opium War came in late 1839, when two British warships punched through the Qing blockade of the Pearl River delta and destroyed twenty-nine Chinese vessels. In a single action the Royal Navy made plain its technological and tactical superiority at sea and set the pace for the rest of the war. British forces attacked and occupied Canton in May 1841, and subsequent British campaigns were overwhelmingly successful, and China gave in in 1842. For the first time a European country had defeated a major East Asian power.
Manchu favoritism and the willingness to scapegoat Han officials, such as Commissioner Lin, eroded Han loyalty. In southern China, many Han merchants and even soldiers saw more advantage in cooperating with British opium traders than in supporting a distant court that did not fully trust them. This created a perverse situation in which the British benefited from Han intelligence and from the reluctance of Han troops to fight decisively for Manchu rulers. The combination of pride in “China” and ignorance of the “barbarians” led to the Qing state both ignoring the technological advances of the West, but also downplaying the allure the West might have on the Han subjects in the South. In the end, Britain prevailed not over the latent strength of the Chinese world, but over a self-crippled Qing state that had chosen to alienate those it needed to survive.
America is already in Qing territory. American citizens are losing faith and rethinking careers of government service. Nervous allies are decoupling, redirecting trade, and building new security structures that treat Washington as a problem to be managed not a leader owed deference. Canada is pivoting to Europe and looking to build a competitor defense industry. The US cannot afford to lose Canada to Europe.
Would-be opponents of American decline, like the Democratic Party, must start speaking directly to the crisis in foreign relations and the destruction of the civil peace. Especially Canada. There is no excuse for the silence regarding the treatment of Canada. It is an open wound that threatens to turn into a permanent infection in North American relations. The road back will require a humble country that does not dismiss the grievances we have caused. Pride did not save the Qing and it will not save us. To reverse the decline we will have to smarten up and be humble or get humbled by our opponents. We need our allies, more than they need us because they have each other and we are increasingly isolated. Not a smart choice.