Great news! With the UN clearly failing to take strong or any action in many war-torn parts of the world, it's good to see the world's most powerful democracy step in to try and bring some stability and peace to the world's most failed continent.

Bernie, your sense of irony does you credit.

Stevenimeyer There are two quite important areas of democratic activity. One political, the other economic. I'm hard pressed to settle on one good example to recommend that the countries of the world might follow. On a scale of 1 to roughly 250 the top 50 places would not be filled.
Cheers
Den71

DEN71,

I am not passing moral judgments. I am not saying USA Good, China Bad.

I am taking a purely pragmatic view. The Chinese system of government seems to me to be excessively brittle. It has performed brilliantly in taking a country that was a basket case in the 1970s* and turning it into a contender for world power in the 21st Century. It is fair to say that we all live in the world Deng Xiaoping created.

But from here on it gets harder. If it is to supplant the US as the global hegemon, which seem to be the ambition of the Chinese leadership, it will have to do it by climbing up the value / technology chain with a declining and aging population. I'm not saying they can't do it. But I am saying that the Chinese Communist Party is going to have to let go some of its power, allow more flexibility, if that is to happen. Will they be able to do it?

In South Korea and Taiwan, once a certain level of economic development had been attained, authoritarian regimes transformed themselves into fairly decent democracies without any revolution being necessary though there was some unrest. Can that happen in China?

I don’t know. But if it doesn't I think Chinese growth will stall.

The fact that China is suffering such capital flight that even middle-class people want to build up an offshore nest egg says to me that maybe they know something we don't.

It is also becoming increasingly apparent that China's neighbours want the US, warts and all, to remain involved in the Asia Pacific. They recognise that only the US can serve as a counterweight to China.

The danger for China is the middle-income trap. Many countries grow till they reach a sort of middle-income level and then seem unable to take the next step.

Of course China is so massive that even at a middle-income level it would have by far the world's largest economy.

*Of course the Communist Party helped turn it into a basket case.

Communism (egalitarianism) turns every country it touches into a basket case, it's particularly relevant to any discussion of Africa's "woes".
Pilger, like all good Leftists promotes the idea of African hypoagency and the narrative of non White suffering, and what's his solution,his "big idea"?
Global Marxist Socialism, the millstone around the neck of the Third World is his proposed solution.

Steven,
If I'm right you're a Jewish person of South African birth, correct?
What's your opinion of the program of genocide which since 1994 has been directed at South African Jewry by the racist Black Marxists of the ANC?
I'm just curious why the supporters of the narrative of Jewish suffering are still flogging the dead horse of the "Holocaust", events which will soon be beyond human memory as opposed to the very real and persistent problems diaspora Jews face on a daily basis?
What about the looming Genocide of Jews in the low countries at the hands of racist African and Arab thugs?
The definition of genocide under international law is very broad and the examples I've listed certainly fit within the parameters set out in the relevant international conventions.