Xi Jinping Is Right About the U.S. Empire

In Mr. Xi's telling, China sought to rise peacefully, but Western powers would not accept the idea that a Communist-led China was catching up and could someday overtake them in global primacy. The Times writes that Xi's speeches "Voiced an almost fatalistic conviction that China's rise would prompt a backlash from Western rivals seeking to maintain their dominance." Xi told Chinese Air Force officers in 2014, "The faster we develop, the bigger the external shock will be, and the greater the strategic blowback." According to the Times,. The problem, one that all too many Americans are loathe to confront, is that Xi Jinping is right about the U.S. Empire. Rather than using its tax revenues to kill large numbers of people, as the U.S. Empire was doing, China was using them to expand its influence around the world by helping countries with big, grandiose socialist projects. Thus, in the eyes of the U.S. national-security establishment, China's rise posed a grave threat to its post-Cold War role as the world's sole remaining empire. By suppressing China's economic prosperity, the empire aimed to diminish the amount of tax revenues flowing into the Chinese government's coffers, thereby limiting its ability to expand its military and its influence around the world. Questions naturally arises though for the American people: Is it right for the U.S. government to be wreaking economic damage on the people of another country? Indeed, is it right for the U.S. government to even be an empire?