Success Quote by Steve Forbes

Forbes is doing something shrewdly corporate with a century of blood-soaked history: turning geopolitics into a cautionary case study about “early intervention” and the price of delay. The line reads like a boardroom postmortem - identify the missed inflection point, quantify the downstream cost, prevent recurrence - except the “cost” here is world war. That managerial framing is the point. It makes an aggressive foreign-policy posture sound like sober risk management rather than a choice that creates its own risks.

The historical analogy is the lever. Germany and Japan function as moral shorthand in American memory: regimes the world “should have stopped sooner.” By invoking them, Forbes borrows the clarity of hindsight and transfers it onto China, a far more entangled, nuclear-era rival that doesn’t map neatly onto 1930s villains. “Properly deal with” is deliberately elastic - it can mean tariffs, tech containment, military buildup, alliance-making, or covert pressure - while “early” implies a narrowing window that demands action before debate catches up.

The subtext is aimed at an American audience that oscillates between complacency about commerce and anxiety about decline. As a businessman, Forbes is also signaling that engagement-through-trade was naive, that markets don’t inevitably liberalize authoritarian powers, and that economic interdependence can become strategic dependency. The rhetorical move is to make confrontation feel like responsibility: if we hesitate, we’re repeating history; if we act, we’re learning from it. It’s a tidy story - and that tidiness is precisely what makes it persuasive, and dangerous.