So, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but there’s this country called China. It’s filled with Chinese people, and it’s on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. It’s kind of large, has a sizable population and is looking to become the most powerful country on Earth. 

They don’t like us very much. They’re also kind of a human rights-violating dictatorship. These last three facts tend to cause some concern in people who fear that this very powerful dictatorship might rise up and supplant America as the most powerful and influential country in the world. On our own, we might not have the ability to hold off China economically and militarily. We don’t have to be alone though.

The word of the day is “allies.” Literally. That’s what my word-of-the-day calendar says as I write this, and the coincidence is hilarious. Anyway, what we really need to do to better combat the ever-reaching influence of the Chinese government is buff up our allies in the region so they can help us out – you know, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Australia, Fiji, big countries like that. We get them to help us out in combating Chinese influence, and we’ll be set.

Now, let me be clear here. I’m not saying that we should be combatting the influence of the Chinese government for any imaginary racial or nationalistic reasons you could conjure up. I’m saying we should try to stop them from becoming the premier powerhouse of politics because they are a dictatorship with no respect for individual freedoms, human life or copyright protection. If they were to become the most powerful country on earth, the world would head down a very dark path, indeed. Obviously, preventing the world from sliding down this path should be something we should very much do.

We should invest more in the countries I mentioned above, forge stronger ties with them and boost their economic and financial capacity to higher levels. We also should not be afraid of selling them military hardware – preferably still good hardware that we are nonetheless deciding to replace with something more high-tech, but any hardware is good. Guns, bullets, bombs, tanks, uniforms, MREs that have yet to completely rot away – we should be bolstering them up so that if, say, something were to go down in the future, we would have allies in the area who could actually help us out instead of relying on our military intervention. 

Do I think actual war will break out? No; our economies are too tightly linked for that. But one must always be prepared for such a possibility. We do, after all, have very different ways of looking at the world. Our country is based on individualism, theirs on submission to the group. We dislike dictators. They are dictators. Disagreements are inevitable. I see no reason to go to actual war in the near future, but that doesn’t mean we won’t. War is always impossible, right up until it is inevitable.