Until recently, as President Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon was relegated to a low profile role, hamstrung by Trump’s need to work with the establishment.
Now freed from his shackles, Bannon is pressing his brand of nationalism on center stage. On Tuesday, outsider Senate candidate Roy Moore pulled off a huge upset Republican primary victory, with Bannon’s backing. Moore was opposed by big spending by the Republican establishment, who had also convinced Trump to publicly voice opposition.
Joshua Green writes for Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday that the Breitbart news executive chairman is renewing his focus on China, the target of many Trump attacks during the presidential campaign that Bannon ran:
He’s also taking his cultural revolution overseas. Bannon, who’s been consulting with Henry Kissinger and other foreign policy veterans, is preparing a project to sound an alarm about what he views as the primary economic threat to America: China. “If we don’t get our situation sorted with China, we’ll be destroyed economically,” Bannon says, sitting in the Capitol Hill town house that serves as Washington headquarters of Breitbart News, where he returned as executive chairman after leaving the White House. “The forced technology transfer of American innovation to China is the single biggest economic and business issue of our time. Until we sort that out, they will continue to appropriate our innovation to their own system and leave us as a colony—our Jamestown to their Great Britain, a tributary state.”
And we know Beijing will be watching Bannon’s calls for economic war with China very closely. The Communist Party’s second most powerful leader, anti-corruption tsar Wang Qishan met with Bannon recently to discuss the very topic.
Military spending helps America police the world and I wouldn’t want to imagine a world without American supervision.
The article doesn’t say that Americas budget is failing but that it needs to keep a competitive edge with China.
This seems to me to be common sense.