China? A Rising Imperial Power?

I wonder if our ever stranger, more Trumpian country would look any better were I to trade in the kind of glasses I’ve worn since I was a nearsighted kid in fourth grade for what have become known as Meta’s “Pervert glasses,” complete with camera and audio. In some way, though, this old guy may just want to turn in any kind of glasses whatsoever. Not only do I feel a lack of desire to record our new (but also unbearably old) world, moment by moment, day by day, week by week, but this is increasingly a world I might prefer not even to see.

After all, it does seem as if, in some strange but essential way, we humans — if, of course, Donald Trump even is a human being and not a Martian masquerading (not particularly effectively) as one of us — may be all too prepared to end this world of ours, at least as we’ve known it. Of course, such an ending would be exactly what we’ve feared for so long: that humanity was the ultimate in destruction. The only genuinely unexpected thing about such a reality, I suspect, is that it might not happen as we once imagined (via nuclear weapons) in a distinctly short space of time, but in a slow-motion version of the apocalypse that fits all too well with the slow-motion arrival of what we’ve come to know as climate change.

Keep in mind that, in these years, Americans elected a president (twice, with a brief, aged intermission) who has given the very idea of end times new meaning.

It’s also true that we’re in a world where (leaving aside Vladimir Putin’s flailing war in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s pathetic all-American war in Iran) the latest version of a great imperial power no longer seems intent on seizing foreign territory the way such powers have done throughout our history.

Amid this chaotic world of ours, in fact, give China full credit. No, not for its political system, of course, but for the fact that, unlike any other great power in human memory, aside from its month-long war with Vietnam in 1979 and its border skirmishes with India as this decade began, it’s extended its power and influence globally without trying to seize a single country or going to war in any way whatsoever. The only thing it’s seized, in fact, is significant control over the future production of green power, which, given our planet and where it’s headed right now, simply couldn’t have been a smarter “imperial” way to go.

And as an imperial approach to global power, it also couldn’t be both more historically out of the ordinary and, on this strangely embattled planet of ours, more intelligent. After all, we humans are already functionally at war, day and night, week after week, month after month, year after year, with our world as a livable place for us, not to speak of everything else from mountain lions and elephants to eels and cockroaches.

Honestly, it’s more stunning than you ever see described in our mainstream media. I’m thinking, of course, of how we’re literally heating this planet toward the boiling point. This summer, after all, was the hottest in both Europe and the United States in all of recorded history. Imagine that! And imagine this as well: in such a context, in 2024, the citizens of the still most powerful country on the planet reelected a man who can’t even imagine that the world is getting hotter (and hotter and hotter) by the year. Think of him, given what he’s had to say about climate change, as the “con job“ president or perhaps even President Heat.

In his bizarre ignorance of the subject, think of him, in fact, as quite literally turning this planet’s future over to Earth’s rising power, China, and believe me, that’s no small thing to do. No wonder the normally unsmiling Chinese leader Xi Jinping had such a grin on his face during his recent meeting with President Trump at the White House. He knows that, while his country is investing ever more in producing (and selling) a greener planet, the American president — from Venezuela (“the biggest oil deal in world history”) to Iran — should be considered the fossil-fuel king par excellence and so, not our future, but our past writ all too large.

A New Definition of Imperial Decline

So here we are in — well, what century could it be when two of the greatest powers on Earth are still fighting wars with two lesser countries (Ukraine and Iran), while the third is intent on turning both Donald Trump’s America and Vladimir Putin’s Russia into ancient history? Those two old-fashioned imperial powers are now flailing, if not simply failing, while the rising imperial power, China, seems all too ready to conquer in a distinctly imperial fashion.

In the case of China, however, we’re not talking about territory, but a very different kind of conquest on this planet. After all, with its proliferating green energy industries, its near monopoly of the new field of electric vehicles, and its sale of green everything to the rest of the planet, China is giving the very word “imperial” a radically new meaning, even as it, too, rises (financially and otherwise) on — quite honestly — the backs of a future humanity, including its own people, and does so on an unnervingly different planet. And of all people, I really shouldn’t be shocked by any of this since, in my early teens, I was already drawing a fantasy map of the Chinese conquest of the world (which, believe it or not, I still possess).

And keep in mind that, after all these centuries, thanks to the way we humans are heating up this globe of ours, we’re already in a very different kind of imperial world, even if “our” president hasn’t the slightest idea that that’s so. Honestly, at this very moment in history, there simply couldn’t be a better definition of imperial decline than Donald J. Trump as president (twice!) of the United States. If anything, he’s giving the very concept of decline new meaning.

Imagine this, after all: an American president on a planet growing ever hotter whose key goal is to foster the energy that’s already broiling this world of — well, honestly, I don’t really think you can say “ours” anymore, can you? Though our mainstream media (which generally underplays the significance of climate change) never suggests it, Donald J. Trump should be considered the definition of a globally suicidal president.

And if there are history books in our future to record it, even a theoretically rising imperial power like China is undoubtedly going to find itself in an historically different situation on a planet that’s going down, down, down (at least when it comes to human comfort and habitability).

Honestly, I suspect that these days we’re all wearing “Pervert glasses,” with our vision of this world twisted increasingly upside down. Honestly (to be repetitive), I’m already sweating!