https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/10/lib...more-free/
<note-same is true with Iran>
"A section of foreign policy realists has written a lot about why a U.S. rivalry with China is inevitable. In the liberal idealist heydays of the 1990s, when the Clinton administration was paving the way for “normalizing” China through the World Trade Organization, the conventional wisdom was that once the U.S. market was open to China, everything would fall into place, and the power of the market and capitalism would lead to the spread of human rights, democracy, and rule of law.
This liberal idealism, which is enormously common and often comes up in strategic talks, is needless to mention naïve and utopian. Nevertheless, it was the conventional wisdom that China, due to the burden of its global responsibilities, would become a responsible stakeholder and global citizen through greater market access.
A few conservatives and a section of the foreign policy realists warned that would never happen because the history of great powers suggests otherwise....
Even though China is nominally Marxist, it also has a Confucian cultural backbone, and “within that system, Confucianism still lends a respect for hierarchy and authority among individual Chinese, whereas American culture is increasingly about the dismantling of authority in favor of devotion to the individual,” said Kaplan. “Confucian societies worship old people; Western societies worship young people...."
Consider this. If the Soviets were not autarkic and could enjoy the benefits of free trade with the West, do you think America or the West would have enjoyed the technological advantage it had during the 1980s? The answer is no.
American businesses would have outsourced all the jobs to cheap Soviet labor, and the USSR would have simply ripped off the technical knowhow and intellectual property, while maintaining the advantage of the iron core discipline of the Soviet state. This is exactly what China is doing: benefiting from Western trade and hollowing out Western manufacturing, while maintaining a hawk’s devotion to the pursuit of great power and glory.
China is a threat, but far bigger threats are the woke corporatists who would sell their mother for the market. Footballers and female soccer players can take a knee against the American flag, but they’re silent and self-censorious about any atrocity in Hong Kong.
Apple can silently delete the Taiwan flag emoji to appease its overlords in Beijing. Google can refuse to work with the Pentagon, while helping Beijing implement the strongest secretive surveillance state. Hollywood actors can stop working in the Southern states because local abortion laws hurt their feelings, but they have no problem prostituting themselves for the vast Chinese market despite actual concentration camps in Xinjiang. This is the logical extreme of the free-market dogma, which is a dogma because it has forgotten that sometimes the market should be subservient to national interest...."