President Obama could undertake to strengthen our economic security. Here is one: He should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United States-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015.
Let's see, 23 million Taiwanese at $1.14 trillion? Surely we can do better than $50,000 per person. Come on, the per capita GDP is over $35,000. We're to settle for a year and a half of production?
Come on! I mean, Taiwan has the women and China doesn't. That's leverage, baby! Do we not have the best business schools in the world? Negotiate, sir. Don't give away the cow.
I mean, once we've established what we are, aren't we just haggling over the price?
UPDATE: The morality of abandoning friends is surely obvious. The strategic loss of abandoning an ally should make even the most realistic realist shudder at the implications when we are proclaiming a Pacific focus:
"The 21st century will be America's Pacific century, a period of unprecedented outreach and partnership in this dynamic, complex, and consequential region," she said.
Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, Clinton said Washington wants to build a "trans-Pacific system" for Asia that is modeled on the United States' trans-Atlantic relationship with Europe.
In what way does abandoning an ally just because China is getting more powerful help with our diplomacy?
Just simplifying China's military problems in an age of defense cutbacks here should give us reason to ignore the advice.
Oh, and China could not use their foreign cash holdings because they aren't just sitting in a Chinese lock box:
The critical point is, the $3.2 trillion FX reserves held by the PBOC (in the form of Treasuries, etc.) represent money that is already in the Chinese economy, in the form of yuan. There are already domestic claims on those assets; they cannot be “given away” or spent by the PBOC without receiving other assets of equivalent value in return, or incurring a loss that would have to be plugged by Chinese government’s own fiscal resources (taxes or government borrowing).
So other than being morally, strategically, militarily, diplomatically, and economically bad or impractical, this is a fine idea.
UPDATE: The author claims satire and I offer my comments on that.
