Salient to Investors:
Fareed Zakaria said China is not the world’s other superpower and we should not treat it as such. Zakaria said China has always played a weak hand brilliantly, and will one day become the largest economy, but by most political, military, strategic and cultural measures it is not a global power.
David Shambaugh said China is a very narrow-minded, self-interested, realist state, seeking only to maximize its own national interests and power, and cares little for global governance and enforcing global standards of behavior, except noninterference in the internal affairs of countries. Shambaugh said China’s economic policies are mercantilist and its diplomacy is passive, has no allies, and has distrust and strained relationships with much of the world.
Henry Kissinger said Xi Jinping knows that he has to define a new direction for China, no matter how successful their previous efforts have been. Kissinger said China is stoking nationalism but wants a relationship with the US that avoids confrontation, but permits each side to put through its own national objectives.
Noah Feldman at the Harvard Law School said:
- Relations between China and the US are almost destined to get cooler, perhaps worse because it is not in China’s interest for the long-term for the U.S. to remain the sole global superpower – China wants, at least within Asia, to be the regional superpower.
- There will be no Cold War because we need China to buy our debt and they need the US to buy their goods.
- South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Australia, and Japan, if it doesn’t arm itself in a more serious way, have little choice but to rely on the US to stand up to China because they do not have the military capacity, which puts us on a potentially confrontational footing. Those countries’ close economic ties to China are, in many ways, are getting closer than they are to the US, so are tied to us for security, but increasingly tied to China for their economies.
- The cyber attacks have shown that you can close the military technology gap much faster today than you could have 25 or 50 years ago.
Joseph Nye at Harvard said the interdependence between China and the US will prevent an adversarial military relationship – there are areas of competition and areas of cooperation. Nye said cooperation with China will be necessary to manage the global financial system without a crisis, get serious about climate change, and manage pandemics.
Fareed Zakaria said since 2000, there has been a large net migration from southern California to Oklahoma City, which has the lowest unemployment rate of the 49 metropolitan areas with more than a million people, and has grown 3 times faster than San Francisco in the past decade. The reason is not all about oil and natural gas but about new global markets for agriculture, and investments in good education.
Joel Kotkin said the Great Plains have outperformed the US average on population increase, on income growth, and in job growth.
Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz say cities and counties across the US are overcoming political divides, partnering with the private sector, and revitalizing America.
Watch the video at http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/category/gps-episodes/ or read the full transcript at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1306/09/fzgps.01.html