>Why is North Korea on our radar, but not China?
This one is kind of obvious. America and N. Korea aren't business partners also N. Korea acts like a unpredictable child with nuclear weapons, China does not.
If by business you mean "imposing onerous terms on other people, up to and including literal slavery," I'd agree. The unfairness of the terms is what makes the superpower. Without the unfairness, then balance can be maintained. Superpowers do business on their terms, not anyone else's.
It takes national pride to consistently do the work to maintain a competitive advantage. You see the same thing in business with trying to maintain an edge. It's not something you can do using your normal effort. You have to work smart and hard.
> America and N. Korea aren't business partners
America and N. Korea could be business partners. The only thing that keeps this from happening is American obstinacy. North Korea would happily do business with the US. In fact, the whole reason for North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship is precisely because we have slapped onerous sanctions on them and refuse to allow anyone else but China to trade with them. There are dozens of nuclear-capable nations out there, more popping up by the decade. We don't treat Pakistan like we do N. Korea. Opening up the spigots of American and global trade will turn North Korea into South Korea in just a few decades. But we're instead applying containment strategies to them like they killed our dog or something. North Korea doesn't really need to be contained. They're just not powerful enough.
China does. This is what we should be doing with China, perhaps in addition to North Korea, but not in spite of. We should be pushing back much more rigorously in the South China Sea, keeping our relations with small nations in China's periphery open instead of stagnating, pushing hard for our trade agenda instead of allowing China's to take lead.
But we're not even doing those basic steps.
Look I'm not even offering a moral argument here. I've been using 'should' in the "balls should roll downhill." We should be doing it, not we ought to be. What I'm saying is that this is how foreign policy is done. Has been done, for a thousand years. I'm not saying we ought to be starting an arms race with China. I'm saying that by all rights, by all historical analyses, China looks like a rival, not like a partner. But we're not treating her like one, and just allowing her to accede to the world stage completely unchallenged.
Good thing? Bad thing? That's up to history to decide. What's not is the fact that this is completely unprecedented.
>America and N. Korea could be business partners.
Nuclear weapons testing is the entire reason why they are banned as business partners. It needs to be contained because it's a trump card that a relatively backwards country can use to level the playing field of war.
Additionally, even before the trade sanctions were enabled (2006) the weak North Korean economy would make the country a pitiful and basically non-relevant business partner to the US. China, as N. Koreas' lone trade partner, has the GDP to lift N. Korea up to a relatively prosperous nation but that hasn't happened due to the internal issues with the N. Korean economy itself.
>Look I'm not even offering a moral argument here. I've been using 'should' in the "balls should roll downhill." We should be doing it, not we ought to be. What I'm saying is that this is how foreign policy is done. Has been done, for a thousand years. I'm not saying we ought to be starting an arms race with China. I'm saying that by all rights, by all historical analyses, China looks like a rival, not like a partner. But we're not treating her like one, and just allowing her to accede to the world stage completely unchallenged.
China is a rival politically. But globalization today has made that rivalry all but a front to the true nature of the US and China relationship. US and China are economic partners and rivals in the olympic games and comparing GDP numbers.
The most powerful entities in the united states are not politically elected leaders. The most powerful entities are for profit corporations. Essentially just massive conglomerates of individuals grouped together into a massive entity to work together in business. When you group people together in such a way, an interesting thing happens, the individual morals and desires and "National Pride" of a person get lost in the aggregation of people and what you get is an entity that acts like a psychopathic person on an insane quest to do anything for profit.
Big businesses or aka corporations are the driving forces and most powerful individuals in the world today. It is the desires of these corporations that largely drive economic policies and foreign affairs.
When you look at motive, when you examine the rationale behind why a country does one thing instead of another thing, you have to incorporate Big business into the psychology of your analysis. It looks like your analysis doesn't include this as a factor. If you did, it'd be obvious why the US isn't challenging china.
How do you define the good of the country? Only against the interests of other countries. What's in the best interests of the US is against the interests of China. That's what this stuff means. And it's a strong enough model to have prevailed for over a thousand years. Foreign policy experts are all over themselves right now wondering what the hell is going on and nobody really has a good answer.
The United States has historically been the global hegemony that dictates how much other nations can get away with. That's something that usually sinks into the minds of the entire population and infuses them with the willingness and desire to fight, not just to safeguard that status, but also to punish insults to that status, even if they're just perceived.
The EU is not an insult to American status. Neither is Russia, Africa, or South America. China is. They're creating global status for themselves that the US has historically held to be within it's purview. It's creating alternatives for countless small nations other than acceding to American dominance.
American politicians are more than capable of setting the economic agenda. They've done this in the past. Why are they not doing this now, in response to geopolitical imperative that's held for every single other nation in the same position has for as long as we can study dominant nations for? China should have expected the American inquisition. The inquisition never came. So they get bolder and bolder. This is far beyond business. This is pride.
America got to rise because the powers in Europe were too busy infighting to recognize the growing nation. Once the world wars concluded, they got their act together and are acting as a bloc to balance the US. The world learned to not ignore rising powers just because they're thousands of miles away.
Look, the US is willing to check North Korea, which serves no real threat to anything but perceived American interests. Yet we're willing to make national news every little thing Kim Jong-Un does, and seriously rattle our sabers against him. Why is North Korea on our radar, but not China?
It's got nothing to do with business. This is pure politics. The only entity capable of drumming up the resources to check China is us, and we're not doing it. By all analyses that have served us well for a thousand years, we're not doing it. Are we just waking up, just now getting ready to perceive the threat? Or is there something else going on? Does America just not care about the position in the world that previous generations spent their entire lives building?