Peasants with books=WWIII

Just in case you didn’t see the link in the comments on Rob’s first Kurtz post below, the Kaplan piece in The Atlantic that (in part) inspired Kurtz’ latest bit of paranoid Huntingtonian fantasy (Am I the only one who feels like he really wants China to be a serious military threat? Does that make me paranoid, too?) is thoroughly and entertainingly demolished here by the indispensible praktike. Required reading. A taste:

Let me give you that sentence in full so it doesn’t sound like I’m making this up: “Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America’s liberal imperium.”

China’s peasants can read and write, so naturally they’re a huge component of China’s threat, because—as history so often shows—rural folk who can read and write tend to reject liberty and demand aggressive expansionistic wars at all cost. Crazy, but there you have it.

That covers the first two paragraphs of the piece, and all I can say is that America needs a better reason to go to war with China than Robert Kaplan’s obvious desire to cover that conflict from the trenches.

But this is what America—and the U.S. military—gets when we pretend that journalists are our best sources for grand strategy and national security thinking. Me, I see garbage in, garbage out.

Update: praktike isn’t the author here but rather the conduit through which I came to read it. The original is in Thomas Barnett’s newsletter, downloadable here.