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November 30, 2010

From WikiChina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
While secrets from WikiLeaks were splashed all over the American newspapers, I couldn’t help
but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in
Washington was reporting about America? I suspect the cable would read like this:

Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Beijing, TOP
SECRET/Subject: America today.

Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country,
which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful
economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized
over all the wrong things.

There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in
the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and
where an airport security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report —
over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so
interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have
fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings
Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of
Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the
treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s Chinese
restaurant to praise him for his steadfastness in protecting America’s (read: our) interests.

Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman
trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be
regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other
guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix
its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling
infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.

The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from
Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the
trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador
used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls
— again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you
from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next

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door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s
embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.

But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they
are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now
fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front
page of The Washington Post on Monday there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah
Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying “American exceptionalism.” The
Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how exceptional they
still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t declare yourself “exceptional,” only
others can bestow that adjective upon you.

In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He
knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging
$190 million a day there. Therefore, America will lack the military means to challenge us
anywhere else, particularly on North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank
America’s chain every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm things
down. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the Afghans will surely hate them
so much that China’s mining companies already operating there should be able to buy up the
rest of Afghanistan’s rare minerals.

Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them
about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or
scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it.
It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is
central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar,
nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America.

Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying Chinese, which should
guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3
trillion in reserves to quietly buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in
America.

Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables.

Embassy Washington.

Maureen Dowd is off today.

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