maybe in hindsight it's always easy to spot the problem. but the tragedy here is that we're feeling the effects of lost opportunities and mistakes that were made already 15-20 years ago. We had a window of opportunity when China was still coming up to give them a carrot/stick treatment and force them to either reform in exchange for export opportunities or remain isolated. The same mistakes were made with Russia (that window closed around 2002-2004). The US has been just one foreign policy blunder after another unfortunately.