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America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2026/05/americas-greatest-strategic-blunder-the-imprisonment-of-qian-xuesen
40•danieltanfh95•58m ago

Comments

Nasrudith•40m ago
I don't quite get why the author thinks it would be impossible to get a big budget nose-rub in the dirt to the security apparatuses about their incredible abilability to create self-fulfilling prophecies against themselves via bigotry. It isn't like it takes pentagon cooperation for history biopics, the tech is all old.
greesil•36m ago
I doubt it's the greatest given all that's happened in the past year. But it's certainly up there, no pun intended.
magnio•34m ago
If you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...
danieltanfh95•32m ago
Unfortunately there is too much detail here for me to write more candidly.
magnio•27m ago
No worries, I don't mean to disparage your article. At least it avoids some of the most annoying LLMism I have seen, and given its length you must have put some effort into prompting, researching, or editing. Hope you will find your own voice as you write more and more.
pickleglitch•29m ago
I'm gonna let you finish, but starting a completely pointless war with Iran is one of the greatest strategic blunders of all time.
samlinnfer•27m ago
It's one of the classic blunders: never get involved in a land war in asia.
Imustaskforhelp•17m ago
unless you are Alexander the great and even then, your armies would get tired of fighting for so long for a piece of land far far away from their homeland and they would wish to get homes.
stevenwoo•24m ago
The destruction of the research and development education pipeline in the USA that took 75 years to build because “college and women and minorities bad/Israel always good” was vying for the title only a few months ago.
pickleglitch•12m ago
Oh, that blunder is so 2025. In 2026 we brought our A game.
ericmay•14m ago
Let's say the US just walks away[1]. Then what? Iran taxes oil shipments, over time gulf states reroute to avoid the Strait, and life goes on and Americans keep eating cheeseburgers and watching Netflix and talking about Meghan Merkle while the rest of the world pays much higher fuel prices, and the "Iran war" is just some footnote in a history book about Donald J. Trump's foreign policy blunders that nobody reads.

I can think of quite a few more important strategic blunders. This probably wouldn't even crack the top-100, never mind the fact that it's not yet concluded. What's the point of the hyperbole here? Is it intentional or are you a bit unfamiliar with world history particularly as it relates to military endeavors?

[1] Presuming Iran acquiring nuclear weapons doesn't result in something crazy and unforeseen.

zasz•12m ago
I buy it that this guy is incredibly important in the history of aerospace engineering and the weapons industry, but the article seems like it's making an overly strong claim that the trajectory of American and Chinese tech development was so affected by Qian Xuesen. There are, after all, many other people involved in both trajectories. Would Qian have been so successful in China if the economic and political incentives to listen to him had not been there? Had Qian stayed in America, is there a guarantee that the infrastructure necessary to support his doctrine on technological development would have been available?
xbar•8m ago
That is a good piece on a truly major technology debacle. The title is overblown.

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https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2026/05/americas-greatest-strategic-blunder-the-imprisonment-of-qian...
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