Republicans Want Two Wars With China

The boom-boom kind, and the let’s-take-away-rights-from-Americans kind

Part IV of our mini-series on Kurt Campbell’s Washington and the primacy pathology is coming. Just lots of stuff popping up in between (plus I’m sick!).

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The second Republican presidential debate this cycle was held last night—it was f*cking nuts. Luke Savage pretty much summed up the elite delusion these candidates are living in and promoting:

The debate was unremarkable, unearthed nothing new, and is unworthy of coverage in any serious way, so I’ll say nothing more about the debate itself.

What I want to pull out though was one little nugget from señor Ronald DeSantis, which I’ll quote at length:

we’re in this mess because elites in DC for far too long have chosen surrender over strength when it comes to the CCP. Some people in our country got rich, our industrial base got hollowed out, and they [China] have been able to build the second most powerful military in the entire world. We need a totally new approach to China. We are going to have real hard power in the Indo-Pacific, like Reagan, to deter their ambitions. We’re going to have economic independence from China where we're decoupling our economy, and we are going to go after the cultural power they have in this country. As governor of Florida, I banned the CCP from buying land in our state. We should do that all across these United States. We shouldn't have them in our universities, we shouldn't have Confucious institutes. So what you see a country in decline…China’s going to surpass us this decade and if they do that that's going to affect every single American household. As your president, I am not going to let that happen. I'm going to reverse this country's decline. We are going to choose strength not surrender when it comes to the CCP.

Like, I mean, what? Ok, three things here.