Did America wake up just in time, or too late?

Victor Davis Hanson writes in PJ Media,

...American trade and political appeasement were never interpreted by Beijing as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but always as weakness to be exploited. It was always ludicrous to think that the more concessions on trade and human rights the United States gave, the more China would Westernize and begin to resemble America or an EU nation.

...Why did America act in such a suicidal way on China?

Cheap Chinese labor and lax American laws motivated hundreds of U.S. corporations to shut down their domestic assembly plants and relocate to China. At least at first, they were free to pay substandard wages and were mostly unregulated.

...The domestic winners in the appeasement of Communist China were the two American coasts -- the New York financial industry, the Washington political lobbying nexus, Silicon Valley's high-tech companies, and the coastal mega-research universities such Harvard, Stanford and Yale.

...Few cared about the "losers" in the now-hollowed-out Midwest and in rural America. For corporate America, domestic muscular labor could be easily and cheaply replaced by millions of Chinese workers. Outsourcing and offshoring pulled investment capital out of America and put it overseas, as Chinese-assembled products brought far greater profits.

Academics could not have cared less that the deplorables and the working classes were being wiped out, given their politically incorrect social and cultural views.

What finally woke America up were two unforeseen developments.

First, the Chinese overreached and systematically began militarizing neutral islands in the South China Sea. They derided international commercial treaties.

...In racist fashion, they treated Asian and African countries as if they were 19th-century colonies. And they unapologetically lifted technology from America's biggest and most powerful corporations to turn China into something akin to George Orwell's "1984."

Meanwhile, Beijing began rounding up dissidents, cracking down in Hong Kong and "re-educating" millions of Muslims in detention camps. All that brazenness finally drove the left to drop its multicultural blinders and accept the truth of renegade Chinese oppression.

Second, Donald Trump got elected president, all the while screaming that the Chinese emperor had no clothes. The cheerleaders finally listened and admitted that China had been buck naked after all.

Now we will learn whether America woke up just in time or too late. Either way, no one will credit the loud Trump for warning that China was threatening not just the U.S. but the world as we have known it.

Read more here.