The Real Danger of 300,000 Chinese Students in US Colleges | Victor Davis Hanson

What sort of a challenge does China present for us then? I mean... If you let 300,000 students come over here and say 3,000, 1%, but it's more than that, steal all our technology. If you don't arm yourself, yeah, they're dangerous, but they're completely at our mercy if we don't let them do that, because we have an open capitalist, free market, constitutional, federal system. They don't. And the other thing that gets me a little upset, Qi quoted the Thucydides trap. That was a reference to Graham Allison. He's a great political scientist, but he's not a classicist. So he came up with this idea, it's an old one, that in the first and second books of Thucydides, he's talking about the rise of Athenian power, the great 50 years. And then at one point, he says that it was the fear of Athens that made Sparta preempt and invade the countryside in 431. Allison seized upon that, said this is a paradigm that's universal across time and space. When you have an ascending power, the status quo power can strike out, and we are the status quo power, and they are the ascending. Now, that was the first wrong mistake. We are the ascending power, and they are now the status quo power in decline. On fertility, they import 65% of their oil and gas. We are the greatest oil and gas producer in the history of civilization. They were self-sufficient in food, but as they got more affluent, they now import 30% of their food. So they thought they had us around the neck, boot on our neck with rare earth materials, but now the output possible from the Wyoming and the California and the Utah new mines, and some are existing, and Greenland franchise, we can produce more than we need. We're very flexible, innovative people. They're not. They're very good at taking technology and then standardizing it on scale, absolutely. So you have to be very careful. But the other thing about the Thucydides trap is it's not based on a close reading of the text of Thucydides. I taught it for 20 years in Greek, Thucydides, and I wrote a book on the Peloponnesian War. So I'm not bragging, but I will tell you that a Thucydidean scholar knows that he didn't go back and revise that text. He wrote it serially, and then at some point, whether it was 401 or 390, he died, and he left it in 411 incomplete. Okay. So there was contradictions. I'll give you one example. He said, during the five invasions of Attica, he said, the Spartans ravaged the countryside. And at one point, he said, they ravaged the entire countryside. And then when he's talking later, much later about the Decalia, and he said this was the worst attack because the prior invasions hadn't done much damage. It was a complete contradiction because he hadn't revised it. So, when Allison says that there's this line in Thucydides, he says that Spartans fear Phobos, that they were afraid of the rise of Athens. They had fought a war with, they already had something called the First Peloponnesian War. And the Spartans had even tried to invade. They had a falling out in 480. It wasn't that Athens was rising in 431. They had the biggest fleet at Solomus. Themistocles had the biggest fleet. He went down and tricked the Spartans to build the walls around Athens. So, they had parity earlier. And more importantly, they didn't fall out because Athens was strong and Sparta was paranoid. They fell out because they had completely antithetical societies. Every aspect. Athens was a sea power. Sparta was a land power. Athens was ionic by tribe. They were Doric. Athens was a commercial, big metropolis. Sparta was an out-of-the-way hamlet. Athens had a chattel slave system. Sparta had helots, endangered servants. I could go on, but the antithesis were so great that they were always going to be at each other's throats. And they were, sometimes they had alliances of convenience, but the idea that suddenly they look at Periclean Athens and they see the Acropolis and Parthenon and the Athenian Empire with 170 tribute allies all over, and then, oh, we can't defeat them. That wasn't why they invaded. They invaded because they felt that the differences that had existed for a long time had not been resolved by an earlier war. And so, we are not in decline and China's not going to attack us. We're not going to attack China before it gets to a point where we can't. If anything, they are in decline. If there is such a thing as a Thucydides trap, and there isn't, then the power to watch would be China getting desperate and say, well, the United States is getting too strong. It's got all the oil. It's got gas. It's ahead in biotech now. It's giving everyone for money and AI. All the companies are American. There are popular cultures all over the world. Their military spends three times as much as we do. We better take Taiwan now. I could see that. But that's sort of what Hitler did. He said, I can't take England. You know, it's like the first sea lord during the Napoleonic when they asked him, sir, can Napoleon invade Britain? And he said, I don't know, but I know he won't do it by sea. And that's what the British said in World War II when Chamberlain, actually it was Churchill, after he came to power in May 10th, they asked him, will Operation Sea Lion work? And he said, they won't come by sea because the British Navy was the second largest in the world. And actually it was still the largest in the world. And so there was no way in the world that was going to happen. But in any case, when he couldn't take Britain, why would he turn on Russia who was supplying him with 30% of his grain, oil, lubricants, and had no demonstrable idea that he would preempt. I know that Darrell Cooper and all these people said that Hitler attacked because Russia was about ready to attack them. That was a Nazi canard. There was no evidence that the Soviet Union was going to do that. Their idea was to fuel Germany and sit back and watch Germany and England kill each other off and then walk through Europe and take it. But they were not going to turn on Germany until they had destroyed England. So why did he attack Russia? Because he said why he did. He said, there's no way we can take England. But if we take Russia, we're going to control everything from the Pacific to the English Channel, and we'll have all the resources of the continent, and we'll have all the wheat, and we'll have everything, oil, and Britain will concede, and America then won't ever come in.