hm
Since you're acting like a
coward I don't know what you're trying to say. Then again, I'm not being clear either because I thought the premise of tripling America's population to increase its strength was prima facie ridiculous. Clearly though you think I'm being illiberal so I should just be explicit.
This is the premise of the book:
In geopolitical competition with China, the PRC's big advantage is that there are way more Chinese people than there are Americans so they can achieve economic parity and clout on the global stage at a much lower level of development. Easy argument.
The unstated premises are:
1) The "nation" is the correct scale when considering the global superpower conflict. We've lived in supranational arrangements since the end of World War II and for someone who talks a lot about foreign policy it seems weird to focus so much on the population of one particular country (even if it happens to be the hegemon). I already said it earlier: NATO is an almost unified free market liberal economy of many peers and accounts for a fifth of the economic activity on Earth. The reasons for American decline are peculiar to its economic and political structure... making more Americans won't solve it.
2) You can create a billion Americans mostly by moving people around. To support a tripling of the American way of life would probably require a tripling of the populations that we exploit, or it would entail keeping the immigrants wages low (probably not what Matt wants). Since a huge chunk of that is... in China... this would require a concomitant increase in China's population. You can play the supply chain shifting game if you want... I doubt that's covered in the book.
3) The immigration solution is possible. No nation has ever integrated that kind of foreign population that quickly. The reactionary backlash would be a few orders of magnitude worse than what you saw in 2016, and it would happen well before the completion of the demographic change. I'm not making a right-wing normative argument, I'm just telling you what I think about white Americans. As someone who doesn't like the new american nationalism I'm very inclined to avoid that kind of liberal project.
4) We should "beat" Chinese "imperialism". The US has been the single most predominant source of local destabilization for 70 years. There's a reason Chinese investment is vastly preferred in Africa over American investment. The percentage of American investment in extractive industries is triple that of Chinese investment, Chinese loans emphasize infrastructure development over foreign ownership of new businesses, etc. The other aspect of Chinese influence is the South China Sea which is a security risk for
China. Foreign control over those waterways could cripple China in a conflict - securing it militarily is hardly some expansionist plot that leads to world domination. What exactly is the Chinese imperialism that I'm supposed to be afraid of and why is it worse than neoliberal imperialism?
