I'll Show You Mine

Nice analysis from Austin Bay on StrategyPage, on the vulnerabilities of the US power grid, contrasted with the weaknesses of China’s leadership. A sample:

Which leads to China’s cyber-struggles. Beijing complains that the U.S. has extraordinary cyber-warfare capabilities, and it does. China’s worries, however, go well beyond protecting military secrets and electrical grids: FREE information, disseminated by unfettered digital media on the Internet, threatens political control by communist elites.

China may have weathered the global recession, but if it has, Beijing regards its success as tentative, for even slow economic growth threatens the communist elites’ deal with the Chinese people: We will let you get wealthy, just don’t question the political structure. Beijing knows this.

And that’s why most days I’m pretty sure the US and China will remain as competitors and not enemies. If China were to attack our grid, we’d be hurting — but we’d untangle the damage and go on. But Beijing is, as authoritarian systems usually are, just one misstep away from regime change.