Brad thinks they'll buy and control corporate securities:
So what is likely to come to pass is not the socialism feared by the Right—at least not ownership of the means of production by the U.S. government. Instead, it will be ownership of U.S. companies by foreign governments—and on a scale we’ve never before seen.
Can anything stop this progression? Yes. A collapse of world economic growth—which would create a very dangerous and angry world. Or a sudden return to thrift on the part of American consumers—so that we can finance the industrialization of the rest of the world rather than having them finance our consumption. But neither is likely.
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You forgot to include the first line of the next paragraph:
Can anything stop this progression? Yes. A collapse of world economic growth—which would create a very dangerous and angry world.
The collapse will be Peak Oil. How can China and the like have control of the U.S. if it takes them 3 months to get hear by boat? When airline tracffic and deisel ships are no longer sailing, people will be more confined to their continents. ON top of that, there'll be a ton less plastic crap to buy.
At the very worst, my fear is that China, which has very strong top-down leadership,can conserve their remaining oil supplies to launch an attack on the US in an attempt to secure it's relatively healthy (compared to China) ecosystems. How else will governments supply for their people when they start having to make the hard judgements? No leader stays in charge by telling people their limits (see Carter) and it'll soon be easy to spin a story of blame on another country when things aren't going your way (see Germany, 1933)
I tend to think this is a long shot, whether it's because I don't want it to happen or because we've learned from past global conflicts between superpowers.
As Keynses said, there's no way for humans to consistently predict the future, so maybe we'll have an Independence Day kinda thing happen.
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