iTulip.com - China versus U.S.A.: "Easy to confuse the commitment of one nation to another for an act of friendship. As mid-19th century British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston once commented, nations don’t have friends; nations have interests. The mutual interests of China and the U.S. are the kind that kept the U.S. and the Soviet Union from going at each other with nukes during the Cold War.

China and the U.S. are running inter-dependent bubble economies, relying on the economic equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.) to keep one from blowing up the other’s economy. Whether by intent or accident, sooner or later market forces will assert themselves and both economies will go through tough transitions. How will the world look after that?"