What I don’t understand is how we got into this situation in the first place.
We know how powerful the US intelligence agencies are. The fact that the CIA has been able to install leaders in previously hostile governments shows their competence. Aside from Iran, most of their operations were successful. Even in their missteps, they were able to limit its influence in the region.
So how did it come to this? Why does it feel like the CIA dropped the ball on China?
How do you fall from being able to change the course of world history with shadow governments, to failing to even install operatives in the country?
> Last year, an F.B.I. employee pleaded guilty to acting as a Chinese agent for years, passing sensitive technology information to Beijing in exchange for cash, lavish hotel rooms during foreign travel and prostitutes.
Falun Gong is basically the only resistance left here, and you can see the line between CCP Chinese and non-CCP Chinese by walking down a major street: you can see where the Shen Yun posters end, and the Mandarin-only prints begin.
Simply put, defense isn't sexy. It's always easy to find people who want to discover a way to, for example, make foreign centrifuges blow themselves up. It's less easy to find people who want to spend eight hours a day preventing, say, ignorant government employees from clicking every link that shows up in their e-mail. Infiltrating a foreign telecom provider to use its smartphone OS update mechanism to hijack the phone of its head of state's wife and record secret conversations is sexy. Monitoring the behavior of apps installed on your own personnel's phones for potential hostile behavior is not sexy. Building a 1.5 trillion dollar fighter jet is sexy. Stopping China from repeatedly stealing all the project files is not.
> So how did it come to this? Why does it feel like the CIA dropped the ball on China?
1) I don't think the CIA has ever has been that powerful and 2) the US political establishment got arrogant and lazy after the fall of the Soviet Union.
> What I don’t understand is how we got into this situation in the first place.
Some Americans love to watch America suffer, because it makes them feel better about themselves; a similar thing to the British intellectuals who celebrated every British loss and defeat of the second world war, though they would not enjoy a total defeat.
We know how powerful the US intelligence agencies are. The fact that the CIA has been able to install leaders in previously hostile governments shows their competence. Aside from Iran, most of their operations were successful. Even in their missteps, they were able to limit its influence in the region.
So how did it come to this? Why does it feel like the CIA dropped the ball on China?