“Goodbye, America”
I thank Charles Edel for those things he got right in my essay. “An obsolete understanding of regional dynamics and a nostalgic desire to promote American primacy”: a more succinct description of America’s problem as it looks across the Pacific I cannot think of. “Wishful thinking born out of ‘longing for the once-was, anxiety in the face of change, and an appallingly poor grasp of China’s aspirations and intentions’”: I cannot be but grateful to Dr Edel for singling out these phrases and ascribing them to wishful thinking. It is precisely the stuff of said nostalgia.
