It wasn’t a very good movie but I enjoyed watching two very sexy people running around and talking very fast like they were under intense stress to save New York from being levelled in a nuclear terrorist plot.

To paraphrase Clooney, what Campbell obviously meant this week was that the US trained half of China’s most advanced science and tech students who are now helping the communist regime to take on America.

“I would like to see more Chinese students coming to the United States to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics,” Campbell told the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank which also publishes the influential Foreign Affairs journal.

“I believe that the largest increase that we need to see going forward would be much larger numbers of Indian students that come to study in American universities on a range of technology and other fields.”

Personally, I wouldn’t be so trusting of the Indians. What if India becomes as big and challenging as China today? What is the US going to do then?

Campbell also tried to justify the constant harassment of Chinese visa students in advanced sciences and engineering by US customs and Homeland Security officers, and of ethnic Chinese researchers at the country’s universities and research institutes by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI.

“I do think it is possible to curtail and to limit certain kinds of access, and we have seen that generally, particularly in technological programmes across the United States,” he added.

In the US, there has long been a shortfall of domestic students pursuing STEM degrees. Those spaces have largely been filled by Chinese and Indian foreign students, among others.

Campbell could just have said that Chinese foreign students should be made to pay ridiculous sums of hard-earned money saved by mums and dads back in China to pursue useless humanities degrees from American universities that offer no real employable skills and career prospects.

Perhaps like their American cohorts, they will also end up living from the Bank of Mum and Dad, in the same bedrooms they were in since they were children, or else move into a larger family room or the basement if they get married and have children. We Chinese love extended families after all.

(Apologies to my two adult children; I don’t mean you guys, of course! You will always be welcome to my meagre retirement fund.)

Chinese leaders and parents aren’t so stupid, though. If their kids can’t study STEM in the US, they will just have to pursue them at home. And please, send back all those Chinese scientists and engineers you suspect of stealing America’s hi-tech secrets. It won’t be just one Qian Xuesen you are repatriating, but a thousand.

I read somewhere that Campbell studied music in college. I don’t know if he has seen The Peacemaker. The nuclear terrorist was just a hired gun who was in it for the money. The real terrorist mastermind was a highly cultured piano teacher and music professor, played by the great Romanian actor Marcel Iureș. To show his intense soulful anguish and personal loss, the movie had him play Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp Minor and another Nocturne piece.

I have been listening to Chopin ever since the movie.

Remember, the most dangerous and damaged minds are often those who are overly educated in the arts and humanities rather than in the hard sciences. Just look at Campbell and the neocons who are trying to start another cold, or even hot war. The philosopher Karl Marx, after all, was more threatening than a thousand Soviet engineers.