Time's Battleland: Our silent partner everywhere we intervene - China
Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 12:44PM 
Soon to be re-joined by their Chinese comrades!
That's how I like to describe it. Whether we like it or not - much less admit it, every time we show up somewhere in tumult, the Chinese are already there or soon to show up. They will be making the big investments (like that $3-4B on a copper mine in Afghanistan) and they will be winning the big extractive contracts (like with both the Kurdish Regional Government and Baghdad in Iraq). Paraphrasing Buckaroo Banzai, "No matter where we go, there they are." You can call it free-riding and label it clever competition, but it's more complimentary than we in the West care to admit, because after the bombs stop, somebody has to rebuild and who are more incentivized than those resource-ravenous Chinese?
Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.
China, Libya, US foreign policy | in Time's Battleland | Email Article | Permalink | Print Article 
Reader Comments (1)
What I don´t understand in this "We bomb, they build"pattern, is why the West isn´t ambitious enough for post-war construction, but "only" the Chinese. Don´t we want oil from Libya, Sudan or Iraq? Are our companies too afraid to invest and the Chinese have the advantage that they have a state-sponsored resource and raw materials strategy? And what would happen if we don´t "bomb"? Would the Chinese do it--probably not.But they would ensure their interests without bombing. Could they without free-riding?Or should we charge them a "fee"?Maybe you should think about this.