And that's working really well in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, isn't it? Or how about in South America?
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
