I have published an essay on the problem of Russian/Chinese military threat to America and my thoughts on what to do it about it, at www michaelpundit. com/EnemyIdeologies. htm (url is broken up because I don't have enough posts for legal url posting) . Hope people will find it interesting. Below is a fragment.

2.3.1. Defending America starts with rejecting the prevailing defeatism. The above discussion should, I hope, be persuasive, but I do not wish it to be too persuasive. I do not advocate abandoning Christianity and the Western ideals and switching to the worship of the Great Panda (or is that dragon?). I do advocate pulling the head out of the sand and carrying out effective preparations for national defense. For that we have got to reject defeatism first.

Total defeatism seems to be the normative attitude towards Chinese dominion and American and Western collapse in the English language press. People eat up countless breathless reports about China's growing might without a murmur even as American leaders are openly selling out the last vestiges of the nation's defense capacity and economic independence to the enemy. All of this is "justified" by endless appeals to free trade, anti-imperialism, fairness, ancient history, third-worldism, moralism, anti-Americanism, thinly veiled Asian supremacism and every other ideology imaginable. Serious analysis about what these developments mean for us and what to do about them is rare and generally ignored.

Did you realize that in the year 17xx China had yy% of world population and zz% of global economy? Yes, and they also invented paper in A.D. 105! Now that these factoids have dispelled our ignorance, it surely gets much easier to acquiesce to the economy falling apart around us, American technology being technology transferred to arm the enemy, and the nation being left defenseless at the mercy of the evil empire that openly boasts of its readiness for nuclear war. It is all historically inevitable, you see. And now let us all celebrate the just demise of the oppressive American hegemony and bow our heads in reverence before the miracle of globalization. Consecrate some <strike>useful idiots</strike> ambassadors for peace while you are at it.

Defense of Western freedom takes more intelligence and moral courage than the naked worship of Chinese power, much more than what the opinion makers have got to spare. All of the pontifications about fairness of X, cultural aspect of Y, and historical inevitability of Z really are just smoke screen for the underlying conclusion:
America is going to hell, we know this, and we would rather sit around and celebrate it a la Stockholm syndrome than abandon our cherished ideologies in favor of such a discredited, outdated notion as defending the nation.

Now, the first step towards surviving the battle is to stop going along with those who have already capitulated and are now zealously evangelizing others to do the same. We should regain the outdated and discredited will to defend the nation and then apply the overrated and xyz-centric rational thinking to find and implement the road to victory.

ToC|<| 2.3.2. Victory through private and community initiative, not mass mobilizations. Everybody saying "resistance is futile" does not make it so. To casual observers (all several billions of them by now) it may appear that there is no conceivable cure for what ails America. Nevertheless, continual systematic application of traditional Western rationality and inventiveness can and will yield answers more powerful than even the greatest, most globalized enemy horde.

First, we must abandon the outdated ideology that I will loosely term "mass mobilization". Whether it is the monster Ahmadinejad marshalling his puppets to the slaughter or the patriotic Ross Perot pleading in vain with his countrymen to return to rational governance, the underlying logic is the same. Let us mobilize millions of followers, the adherents say, let us take power in the government, and then we will do what should be done. Neither Perot nor other patriotic reformers got anywhere with this. When Americans actually did mobilize en masse, it was only for feats of national self-destruction.

There is a lesson to be learned here. Perot's strategy of reform through mobilization got him nowhere, even though he was right and a billionaire to boot. Consider now, what if Perot would have chosen a different path, reform through private initiative? E.g.

1. if government policy gone mad was destroying labor-intensive industries, why not invest in establishing a business empire based on capital-intensive labor-saving technology and keep it all in the homeland? Why not encourage development of such technologies for every vital industry in danger?
2.

if public schools were an abominable cesspool of incompetence, why not create your own private school system, like Catholic schools on steroids, that would have achieved stellar results at minimal costs? Why not do the same thing with higher and vocational education? If the establishment tries to squash you with laws and lawsuits, why not develop creative new ways to legally formalize your work? Or maybe set up shop offshore, outside of the hostile jurisdiction?

If full-blown school system is too expensive, why not establish a research group that will develop, empirically test in experimental schools and widely disseminate effective teaching methods for subjects you care about? Why not use the results of such research as ammunition in propaganda war against destructive ideologies?
3. if restructuring and reform were needed in the government or the justice system or whatever other place (whatever was at stake in 1992), why not mount a data gathering effort to document and widely disseminate the waste, abuses and evil that was going on? There already existed then some prototypes of modern Internet, and in any event one could always start The Daily Subversion newspaper to get the word out.

Mind you, giving advice to others is always easy. Getting things done costs a great deal, both in money and time. You do have to put your everything where your mouth is. There are cautionary examples aplenty where well-intentioned people got nowhere for lack of ability or vision (e.g. did the nation really need more graduates with second-rate liberal arts degrees, only this time with a Christian bent a la Liberty University? wouldn't graduates of a Christian engineering or vocational school have been better able to serve neighbor and nation alike?). Making a difference is hard work, but when you do it right, it will pay off.

Perhaps things would have worked out differently in modern America had such a strategy of reform been followed. I think the impact would have gone far beyond the things actually achieved. The propaganda value of works, of getting things done, is vastly greater than that of mere words, however true and earnest. All the more so when you are engaged in an ideological contest against those who fundamentally lack any creative capacity, capable only to deceive and destroy but not to accomplish anything even remotely useful.

Be that as it may, today our only hope for keeping the nation from collapsing on top of our heads is private initiative by patriotic citizens and by voluntary associations of them. We are not going to be able to take power away from the lawless government, that is hellbent on plunging America into total chaos in order to then reorganize it with total tyranny, any time soon. Laboring on attempted mass mobilizations, political games, bill X and proposition Y will not work in the long term, at best this will only delay the inevitable.

Reclaiming America from the fools and the destroyers will not succeed in top-down fashion, but it will work bottom-up. It will start not in the halls of power but locally, among citizens who will work together to do what they can with what they have available. It will be in neighborhood associations and churches, in businesses, universities and research labs. Wherever are found people who have understanding of the times and courage to go beyond "oh woe is us" chitchat and do something useful about it, that's where this will happen.

It could be neighbors planning local self-defense and disaster response preparedness that will become essential when chaos breaks out both from within and from without our borders. It could be people learning new technical skills. It could also be researchers seeking ways to maintain America's economic productive capacity and defense capability in the worst of circumstances. In case you are wondering, not all major technical breakthroughs required investment on the scale of the Manhattan Project, sometimes great things can be done by small teams on small budgets.

The work that will be accomplished, the work and not the words and the slogans, will serve to convince others to abandon their fruitless ideologies and join in. Slowly but surely we will cease to be inmates of a "think of the children" nanny state who at the slightest provocation run crying for help from the overseers, accepting real bondage in return for illusory security. America will again become a republic of free citizens willing and able to stand for themselves, locally and nationally alike.

Reform through work will not be easy, there will be no excitement typical of chatter-oriented mass movements, and both the despotic government and the deluded fellow citizens will fight back fiercely. Yet I am convinced that those who care for America will persevere, will withstand and prevail over enemies foreign and domestic, those in Beijing and in Washington DC alike.

I have a problem relating to your claim of defeatism since I've seen no evidence of this. Quite the contrary, if anything, America suffers from arrogance, often shown by people (and often by politicians) who have no exceptional qualities themselves. As for Christianity, this has to go. It's a completely unacceptable and barbaric religion that elevates hypocrisy and blatant lies over respectability and truth. What will overtake Christianity, I expect, is a thoroughly progressive and optimistic humanism. As to Russia or China posing a credible threat, no, I don't think they do. China has far too many people, most of them farmers, which its overbearing government doesn't know how to manage, and Russia pretty much destroyed itself through inept communist policies and its inferiority complex with the U.S. Are Russia and China worthy competitors for the U.S.? probably.