American foreign policy and China

St Augustine Sacrificing to a Manichaean Idol

Biden's Two-Front War by Richard Fernandez is mostly about American foreign policy and China. I mostly like what Richard writes. Occasionally he will strike a false note, but he's usually very good.

There were a couple of new-to-me terms in his story.

• Curleyism - from James Michael Curley (1874 – 1958), four-time mayor of Boston, who "used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor." Quote is from the introduction to a lengthy academic PDF. I didn't read the whole thing.
• Manichaeism was a major religion founded in the 3rd century AD by the Persian or Parthian prophet Mani in the Sasanian Empire. Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness.