I have respected your intellectual prowess before, and I found your previous writings intellectually stimulating, and creative and arousing, but what you have just written now is, I’m sorry to say, complete bunkum.

(1) For some reason you think that in order to defend American democracy, you have to smear China. 

(2) And your little syllogism is such claptrap you should be ashamed to even tell other people that you have a Ph.D. in math. And to even write “Q.E.D.” at the end … it’s almost as if you are insulting your own intelligence.

Please allow me to explain myself.

So, dear Dr. Suzuki, even though you are not a philosopher by training, you like to dabble in philosophy; so, I assume, you must have heard of Jacques Derrida. The trap you have fallen in your argument is the exact trap that Derrida had jumped out of. You still think in this old Hegelian duality, of thesis vs the antithesis, democracy vs autocracy, east vs west, established power vs rising power, liberal democracy vs conservative authoritarianism. It’s so ingrained in your thinking that, precisely, you don’t even think. Perhaps you are a student of the late Francis Fukuyama, the doddering neoconservative who still believes in the final triumph of democracy, since you went to Johns Hopkins University, where he was teaching? Perhaps his erroneous thinking has affected you because you were a student of his? Am I right?

That is not important. What is important, my dear friend, is for you to understand that this whole USA vs. China political theater is just that, it’s all political theater, Kabuki theater. In some instances one character will put on a black mask and imitates the devil, then the other character will put on a white mask and imitates the angel, and they do this just to extract resources and loyalty from the lesser powers.

In fact, let me tell you, do you know why Donald Trump seems to be so cozy to Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping? Because—even though they may appear to be rivals militarily—they are allies in the cultural war against Europe. Europe may be allied with USA militarily, but the conservative right within the American cultural movement views Europeans with utter disdain, contempt, and vile hatred that even surpass what they hold against other adversaries. That’s why you never hear Elon Musk criticize China and Russia on twitter while on a daily basis he berates Europe and Great Britain.

In the cultural sense, the conservative right in America is allied with Russia and China and the enemy that the conservative right sees are liberals in America and Europe. And because of this worldview is so strong, it’s starting to affect their decisions on military strategies so much so it’s not entirely impossible that America might wage a military conflict against its own European allies.

As for your syllogism … really? Really? China is 100 times worse? Did the Chinese president send an open letter to every head of state in Europe openly saying that if you don’t give me the Nobel peace prize, I’m going to bomb your country?

Even Kim Jong Un is not this crazy.

I assume you are Japanese American, because you mentioned that you voted for Trump. Well let me tell you as an outsider looking at America: your country, the United States of America, is a pariah state. We look at America like how we look at North Korea now. The only reason we are not doing regime change in your country is, at least at this moment, you are still the most powerful military in the world and you have nuclear warheads. But keep it up and soon you will find all your allies running toward China and the American empire is going to collapse just like the Ming empire under Wanli Emperor (萬曆帝) or what Emperor Song Huizong (宋徽宗) did to the Song empire.

The Chinese century is here. Oswald Spengler predicted it 100 years ago.