Xi Jinping Could Save America With One Simple Announcement
In fact, it's an announcement that could put the entire free world back on track...
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When Pope Leo XIV ascended to the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica two weeks ago, he was bathed in the shadow of a long-gone empire. The throne of St. Peter is in Rome because that was the center of the world in the time of Jesus; the Church speaks the language of a civilization that peaked two millennia ago.
Echoes of the ancient Romans still whisper to all of us. Our laws are filled with Roman ideas. Our calendars were designed by Romans, the days and months named after their gods and emperors. Our architecture, measurements, and government are Roman-infused hand-me-downs. If you want an idea to sound more sophisticated, you talk about it in Latin—that's what our doctors, lawyers, and scientists do.
All of which serves as a reminder that a mighty fallen civilization can have a long afterglow. And that should be some comfort to America as we slouch into our age of decline.
Alaric may not be at the gates, but the signs of decay are hard to ignore. Americans have become substantially less educated and pay much less attention to the world. We elect parasitic leaders who feed us facile "member berries" about restoring our former "greatness" while actually wrecking our credit, undermining the scientific research that forms the foundation of our prosperity, and dragging down our democratic freedoms.
They send the world's investment fleeing pell-mell away from us, and are sapping our very brains. We've become anti-social, unhappy, and cantankerous, and like anyone struggling through a depression, we’ve fallen too far down to seemingly do much about it.
So there's a little consolation in the prospect that the afterglow of American economic, intellectual, and military power from the last century could keep our descendants relatively well off for generations to come, the way the eastern Roman empire persisted for 1,000 years after the sputtering decline that culminated in the sack of Rome.
But what if we don't want our grandkids merely to coast on the dynamism of our grandparents, aimless scions of an old fortune? History suggests that there may be a way to spur us to start creating new fortunes again: face an existential threat.
Of course, that didn't work for the Romans, whose internal rot had progressed too far. But it did work for the ancient Greek city states that preceded them. The threat posed by the Persian empire forced them into rapid growth and evolution.
In the case of Athens, this threat led to the invention of democracy, flourishing commerce, and a flowering of literature, philosophy, and science—innovations that passed to the Romans, and thence to us. Facing a deadly enemy can really work; in this case, creating a powerful enough impetus to continue shaping societies 2,500 years later.
Still, while threats can be great motivators, we don't exactly want to get into an actual shooting war. What about a proxy, then? In the same way that you can substitute a vaccine for a living, deadly virus in order to kick your immune system into gear, could we provoke a robust national response by getting challenged to a different kind of world competition?
What if we could get into another space race?
From the Soviet Union's 1957 Sputnik launch through America's 1969 moon landing, the space race was an unmitigated boon for the United States. This gladiatorial competition generated literally incalculable economic growth and improvements in our well-being.
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It gave us basically the entire computing and information technology sector, plus all kinds of products that we buy, sell, and use to this day, such as—and this is just a short list of examples—sneakers, LED lights, home insulation, camera phones, smoke detectors, and artificial limbs. It gave us national purpose. It renewed our pride.
Of course, even if such a competition is just what America needs, we can't launch a race without a competitor. And let's face it—we're unlikely to do it under President Donald Trump's reckless scientific destruction. We need a foil, a real rival to jolt us into action.
That's where Xi Jinping could solve our problems in a stroke. What would happen if he announced that China would be the first nation to land a human on Mars, and would do so in the next ten years?
Would Trump respond? You better believe it. Nothing riles him up like losing to China and looking like a chump, especially since he's already publicly committed to being the first to get to Mars.
And once a few tech titans explain to him the mind-boggling fortunes theoretically available in space mining, that the race to Mars is really a race to develop the capabilities to start exploiting asteroid wealth, and that a single asteroid (Psyche) has an estimated value of $100 quintillion—orders of magnitude more than the entire global economy—do you think this highly transactional, avaricious president might start to get interested?
Would American industry respond? See above. Not to mention the lure of the hundreds of billions in federal contracts that would become available once the U.S. government got into it.
Would the American public respond? Very likely. Two-thirds of Americans, including 80 percent of Republicans, already support maintaining America's lead over China in artificial intelligence. Imagine how they would feel about losing the biggest technical competition in history.
And would it work? Would America get a new infusion of innovation, focus, and economic vitality? Considering the research that would be required for the myriad of next-generation telecommunications and computing equipment, materials science, botany, electricity generation and storage that would all be supercharged by a second space race, it's hard to see how it wouldn't pay off in very visible ways, and pay off very quickly.
And by the way, it's also hard to see how China wouldn't gain just as much, especially given its growing economic challenges and desire to, according to the Congressional Research Service, "boost growth and productivity by investing in innovation, education, digital infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and emerging technologies." Sound like a prescription for a space race?
In the brilliant streaming series For All Mankind, Hollywood made a compelling case that the entire world would have been better off if the Soviets had beaten the U.S. to the moon in 1969 and given us the motivation to keep the space rivalry going.
We can never know. But we can be pretty confident that in 2025, that kind of kick is exactly what we need, what China needs, and what the world needs. Your move, President Xi.
This is a guest post from Blue Amp contributor Matt Robison--former Democratic Congressional chief of staff, campaign manager, and Newsweek columnist. Subscribe to Matt's Substack, Worth Knowing, to support and amplify indy media and a Blue Amp contributor!
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Two big problems with this view:
1) The United States in 1957 was in the midst of a boom that grew out of the Depression and World War II. That boom included 91% marginal tax rates on the wealthiest, substantial corporate tax rates, and an American public that was well educated, motivated, confident, and proud of the fact that our nation was the only one in the world in which a middle class populace could claim at least 50% of the total. The superwealthy were marginalized to make room for upward mobility, and even the working poor faced some opportunities to grow out of poverty and into some level of comfort, if not prosperity.
We had a true war hero as president, an unpretentious, modest, yet deeply principled man who had become a war hero by rising through the ranks of a meritocracy. We had Congressional leaders and even a Supreme Court that actually believed in the United States Constitution. And we had a foe that was, in fact, our enemy in the truest sense of the word.
But most of all, we had the self-confidence of a nation that had, in conjunction with our allies, defeated the most concentrated collection of evil that the world had seen.
2) We now have as president a cowardly bully who has no interest in the welfare of the nation, only the well-being of his personal fortune. He is surrounded by a group of fascists who imagine themselves to be the politburo for a new, permanent governing regime, and who, like their putative "boss," are interested only in their power and wealth.
Their supporters -- 1/3 of Americans -- are not proud, happy warriors or successful, upwardly mobile citizens. They are not citizens, but subjects, capable only of destructive acts: uneducated, ignorant, bitter, self-obsessed, resentful, and utterly unpatriotic. These MAGA men and women fantasize about two things only: joining the ranks of the wealthy who despise and use them, and wreaking revenge on the remains of the successful, moderate, progressive, patriotic middle class who want only to live in a normal nation under normal leadership.
Thus, if President Xi decided to announce his intention of being first to land a human on Mars, the response would be bluster from the White House followed by a contract with the drug-addicted illegal immigrant Elon Musk to take on the challenge. And we all know what the outcome of that would be: promises made, trillions of dollars from our treasury making their way from our pockets to his, while rockets exploded, competent scientists are drummed out for lack of loyalty, and the Chinese -- joined by decent nations around the globe -- laugh at the poor, pathetic Americans imagining that they can be on the cutting edge of this race.
We have reached a point, under this regime, that the Soviet world reached long ago: a laughingstock with no future but a corrupt, end-of-the-republic collapse into tyranny. We are Rome: we're just waiting to see whether we get an emperor in name only, or in fact.
I shall assume you are kidding... a very silly idea. Why would China/Xi do that!? Don't think they are interested in Mars. That is a Musk level misconception. China attempting to take over Taiwan would be a much more reliable, probable, and definitive motivating factor. Think how the US and Allies responded to WW2. But then we had the industrial power, materials, and capability to create our economic engine. The incompetence of Trump as President and Hegseth as Secretary of Defense is manifest. China could read the war strategy and planning hacking Hegseth's What app posts (or his wife's). Much more probable, plausible, and likely. And much more to gain.
A race to Mars with China would save America???? Let's get serious and do something that helps this Earth and its inhabitants to survive rather than conceptualizing a "space race" to monetize asteroids.