It was going a little long (and too expensive) for the Korean War, and Dwight D. The new US administration of Eisenhower was in clear doubt, unable to decide whether it should move forward (i.e. intensifying the war with the option of using nuclear weapons against China in the foreground) or backward (i.e. opting for the negotiating table). In this context it is necessary to understand the message of Mao that appears in the video: let the United States do what it wants; we will fight to the end. Was it a forceful pretence or deliberation? It wasn't tested, and it was better.

It is said that this mockery of swimmers between Eisenhower and those around him was decisive for the victory of the Korean armistice election. Because it was true that the main argument of the supporters of the intensification of the war (say, the Dulles brothers) was that if the meni were agreed in Korea, then the Chinese “reds” could attack Taiwan. But it was an apostate of the adversaries: “Yes, with a million swimmers!”

Because it was absolutely true that Mao’s China at the time did not have any naval fleet. So even if they wanted to, it would be impossible for them to take Taiwan. It’s not 70 years later. Swimming is usually done every year in a festive atmosphere to mock the thunder, or to cross the strait between Kinmen Island, which is now manupera in Taiwan, and the Tzar city of Xiamen on the mainland, five or six kilometers there.

The anecdote should serve us, however, at least by analogy, to ask ourselves a more serious question: is it credible that the main argument that the Trump administration is using right now to ignite the tariff chaos is that the manufacturing industries that have gone into exile in recent decades must and want to be attracted back to the United States?

Those of us who have been able to read Emmanuel Todd’s latest work, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), will hardly hesitate to answer no. And not because it is more than clear that Todd himself would respond as well (the book has been published before Trump’s second term, but his diagnosis about the United States cannot be more obscure), but because of the data he explains about the performance of the educational systems in different countries. Especially the one that shows the evolution of the “engineer creation” of the United States and Russia (and India, etc.; apart from China), and what this suggests for the economy, under consideration.

As the Chinese swimmer’s mockery said, Trump should reindustrialize with millions of lawyers.