My long labor of love, A Grand Strategy: Countering China, Taming Technology, and Restoring the Media, is now available on Amazon here.
I started the book by writing down the many stories of my fabled career but then realized I had a burning messages directly relevant to today’s debates about China and technology. Having been based in China and following its emergence over 40 years and also having covered technology for decades, I felt I could see patterns that other traditional foreign policy analysts have missed. And I came to believe that we in the media have not done a good enough job of maintaining the trust of the American people and offering them some measure of guidance on how to deal with the big issues.
So I cut out 15,000 words of personal detail, retaining just enough to hook the reader. I retained stories about going to South Africa, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Germany and Russia. I use those stories to set the stage to discuss the very serious global challenge that Xi Jinping represents. He is a digital dictator, far more powerful than Mao Tse-tung ever was. It is primarily a technological battle. The Chinese have surged in technological sophistication, as evidenced by their exploits in space.
The $250 billion technology package moving through Congress is a great step, but it is going to be a challenge to manage the money well. And it’s also going to be difficult to prevent the Chinese from stealing new technologies we develop. There is much work to be done. I hope A Grand Strategy helps light the path.
