Crouching Tiger, Tumbling US Economy

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized"
Sun Tzu, Chinese author and military strategist, c. 544-496 BC

The Iraqi cabinet has just approved a draft of an oil law granting foreign companies unprecedented access to the country's oil fields. Meanwhile, Chinese oil company officials arrived in Baghdad to revive Hussein-era contracts for developing Iraq's oil, specifically, the Ahdab oil field in south-central Iraq. Hundreds of millions of dollars and a reduction in Iraq's Chinese debt are already on the table.

China also recently announced plans to strategically refocus its one trillion dollar foreign-currency war chest. Rather than continuing to rely on US Treasury bonds, which yield relatively small returns and risk dollar depreciation, Beijing is expected to increasingly snap up natural resources and energy assets across the world. As the U.S. economy sinks, China and India, the two countries with the largest populations, are expected to fill what traditionally has been the role of the United States in the global market. As they lay claim to natural resources across the globe, they are distancing themselves from the U.S. economy. The never-ending war on terror can only have one consequence.

As the famed military strategist Sun Tzu once noted, "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare." Instead, he advised waiting quietly as an enemy self-destructs, then sweeping in to reap the profits, an effective plan for Beijing during the Bush years.