A trade war with China will just replace Chinese goods on US store shelves with goods made in any number of other countries that the US can continue to access. Walmart can replace their suppliers in days, if not minutes, as can any other retailer. China is a low-cost producer, not a specialty producer. It is utterly replaceable.
China is financing the US, but even when China reduced it's bond investments when the crisis ensued, other buyers of US private and government debt stepped right in and kept rates low. China is a good option for the US. The US is a critical actor for China. That's the power disparity at play. In portfolio theory terms, the US's risks are very diversified, while China's remain concentrated.
What, exactly, are the strong economic and geopolitical positions of China relative to the US that you are talking about. You seem to be mistaking mere, short-term momentum for actuality here. Fortunately for the Chinese, they seem to have a more realistic outlook on their own place in the world themselves.
the US is the only one with a navy capable of securing access to all of the foreign resources it ever needs.
And that's working really well in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, isn't it? Or how about in South America?
You seem to believe that all the US has to do is turn up with a carrier strike force and help itself to whatever it wants.
Firstly, the US has always preferred to install puppets and do less shooting. Installing puppets actually works quite well, but it's not quite as easy as it used to be, as the US is discovering in Iran and Eastern Europe.
Secondly the idea that all you need is a navy is obvious strategic nonsense. Most resources are landlocked or at least somewhat remote, and if the US wanted them it would have to capture ports and secure extraction and supply lines.
Considering that the US can't even take out the Somali pirates, this seems like a less than entirely plausible scenario.
Successful US naval actions in the last couple of decades are rarer than unicorn testicles. Iraq was a lot of shouting and shelling to no great effect, Afghanistan is a fiasco, USS Cole was another disaster, Somalia continues to be a source of fail, and the rest is - where?
Actually, yes, it is. At least as far as securing access to resources goes. Iraq and Afghanistan just prove, for the umpteenth time, that military force is a poor way to provide for economic development and nation-building, not that military power is useless for killing enemies, toppling opposing governments, or denying other nations access to critical resources while securing them for yourself.
Still, this doesn't really matter that much as the role of capital ships is power projection and keeping the sea lanes of communication open. If you want to deny them to others you use subs. Which the US Navy is shock full of. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
And exactly which resources has the US secured in Afghanistan? (Apart from heroin.)
The point is that Iraq and Afghanistan are primarily corporate welfare wars, not resource wars.
In terms of value for money and practical success, it's insane to pretend that they've bee anything other than disasters.
What they have done - and what they were likely designed to do - is put tax money into the pockets of a select few lobbyists and corporations.
Which is fine as far as it goes, but it's not a good precedent for a real resource war.
China can only buy oil from the Middle East, or any other ocean-dependent source, because it is not engaging in armed hostilities with the US. The US has no such constraint.
Apart from the fact that if you piss off the people who sell you the stuff you need to buy, they may stop doing that.
And unrestricted commerce warfare is a really good way to piss people off. Especially if it's against their biggest customer.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
But actually, I wasn't thinking so much about the oil producers as about the merchant marine. The US directly controls a fairly small share of the global merchant marine. And there's a difference between being able to blow up a ship and being able to take it over in a useful condition. Tick off enough of the rest of the world's maritime nations through unrestricted commerce warfare and you will find yourself unable to find civilian shipping for your own needs.
I guess I'm thinking that the merchant marine is basically like any other business. Ship owners, when they are not a government, have real fortunes and savings invested in them and stand to lose a lot if someone wrecks a boat, and crew members have even more to lose. (Ship insurance doesn't cover acts of war, generally, so the owners have a lot of skin exposed in such situations.) Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt many ship owners, flagging their vessels out of Liberia and Panama as the vast majority of ships are, are going to risk putting their investments in harms' way if the world's big boys came to blows, which means that the only way they could continue to pay their loans and bills is to sail them with non-Chinese cargo. To me it looks like the very market forces that allow China to benefit now, would act completely the opposite if the risk level of doing business with Chinese cargo increased. Risk gives advantages to those with the greater power, or biggest guns, all the more so when you can't afford to idle your capital (or labor) as most ship owners are.
False. What about working pipeline from Kazakhstan and under construction from Russian Far East?
Neocon crap.
We used to hear such stuff from John Bolton. Are you his deputy on ET?
No attempt to back your neocon statements?
I am happy to receive "2" marks from neocons every day.
It's possible to discuss this without name-calling, isn't it?
If you want to show what you think is of neocon inspiration in santiago's comments, that is a different matter.
So you calling santiago a neocon doesn't tell me anything about what you think is the correct view of China's motivations, nor what evidence one can get about it from outside.
You can call a spade a spade but the question of what China wants is more interesting than the question of whether santiago is a neocon. By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
Successful US naval actions in the last couple of decades are rarer than unicorn testicles.
The truth is that van Ripen did something so important that I still can't believe the mainstream press hasn't made anything of it. With nothing more than a few "small boats and aircraft," van Ripen managed to sink most of the US fleet in the Persian Gulf. What this means is as simple and plain as a skull: every US Navy battle group, every one of those big fancy aircraft carriers we love, won't last one single day in combat against a serious enemy. The Navy brass tried to bluff it out, but they were pretty lame about it. They just declared the sunken ships "refloated" so the game could go on as planned. This is the kind of word-game that makes the military look so damn dumb. Too bad Bonaparte never thought of that after Trafalgar: "My vleete, she is now reflotte!" Too bad Phillip didn't demand a refloat after the Armada went down: "Oye, vatos, dees English sink todos mi ships, chinga sus madres, so escuche: el fleet es ahora refloated, OK?"
What this means is as simple and plain as a skull: every US Navy battle group, every one of those big fancy aircraft carriers we love, won't last one single day in combat against a serious enemy.
The Navy brass tried to bluff it out, but they were pretty lame about it. They just declared the sunken ships "refloated" so the game could go on as planned. This is the kind of word-game that makes the military look so damn dumb. Too bad Bonaparte never thought of that after Trafalgar: "My vleete, she is now reflotte!" Too bad Phillip didn't demand a refloat after the Armada went down: "Oye, vatos, dees English sink todos mi ships, chinga sus madres, so escuche: el fleet es ahora refloated, OK?"
And that's working really well in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, isn't it?
Iraq is a failure precisely because they moved away from their usual modus operandi. They did not need to invade Iraq to get its oil (in fact, the opposite is true). But it doesn't disprove either the point that they can isolate any country they want whereas nobody can isolate the US from the resources of the rest of the world. Wind power
As in the turn of the last Century, places like Afghanistan and Burma are near the pivots of the great game. And China is already better positioned to cope with a massive disruption of Arabian oil exports than the US is, and pulling further ahead. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
