The greatest geopolitical miscalculation of our age: believing that transferring industrial know-how to a one-party state would make it a stakeholder in the free world. Jesus…
In Berlin it was called Wandel durch Handel — change through trade. I almost throw up writing it. What a world-class delusion that was. And not just Merkel’s. Does
@Siemens_Energy still try to teach the Chinese how to manufacture gas turbines?
Give Me A Break.
Decades later, that same Wandel turns on us. The supply chains we built are now instruments of pressure for the CCP. Historians will call it the betrayal of the century; realists will call it self-inflicted through greed and short-termism.
For 30 years we Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Japanese, Koreans, and Australians offshored knowledge, refining, training, and IP to the CCP, thinking integration would bring openness and fair trade.
@BillClinton and the WTO, anybody? What on rare earth were they thinking?
We — the collective West (in the political, not geographical, sense) — literally taught them everything. Now comrade Xi uses that mastery to choke our supply chains, forcing us to absorb his overcapacity and, effectively, his unemployment.
Who could have thought? As historian Stephen Kotkin likes to say: you can’t be half-communist. Exactly.
The price explosion of germanium below is just one symbol of the lesson ahead.
The blue and red lines show % appreciation for germanium delivered to Europe & the US versus the domestic Chinese price. A kilo now trades at USD 623 (¥4672) for Europe — about twice what Chinese manufacturers pay.
In Europe and the US we pay double for what we taught China to refine and scale for thirty years — the price of assuming Marxism could play by free-market rules.
Among other uses, germanium powers high-end optics such as the Leopard 2 thermal imaging system (Wärmebildgerät, WBG). Not sure if the M1 Abrams uses it too; I never liked that tank. A Ford with a turbine — silly.
Anyway, this isn’t academic. The element — Germanium — is a semiconductor, a kind of metallic chameleon used across high-tech equipment. Not easy to engineer around it. Has a cool name, too.
So China’s export leverage is strategic and real. Meanwhile, the 100 million members of the CCP are, by definition, communists. And for any communist regime, the free world is the enemy. Simple as that.
To a communist, nothing is more dangerous than a free-thinking teenager. One good Netflix series, one spark of criticism, and the streets might fill with people wanting change. Better create an enemy abroad before that happens — that’s the stage of the movie we’re in now.
Enough appeasement. FAFO.
@POTUS @vonderleyen @_FriedrichMerz @Keir_Starmer @EmmanuelMacron @GiorgiaMeloni @alexstubb @SwissGov @nfergus