Traditionally, doesn't this usually result in a war to rebalance power more formally?
Even the Americans don't believe that anymore, except when they're fighting impoverished third-world backwaters that don't have an honest chance of fighting back...
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
By historical contrast, the US (and Japan t a lesser extent) grew and was able to contest space with European colonial powers through protected, domestically-oriented industrialization, not through exports and trade as China is doing. The US didn't need Europe to grow economically, so it could overtake Europe without endangering its own growth. China can't do the same because it lacks the mineral and agricultural resources it needs domestically. Lacking a global military which can secure resources by preventing others access to them, China must trade to get them. So it must abide by largely American-made rules and norms if it wants to continue its wave of prosperity.
Think of it in this extreme this way to see who's still in charge and likely will be for the forseeable future: What if hostilities were to break out between the the West and China? This could easily occur over something like Taiwan, for instance, if China simply decided it wouldn't work within American-made rules regarding Taiwan anymore and decided to contest them military.
Could the US directly defeat China in an all-out conventional war? Probably not, especially if you consider Chinese victories over US forces in Korea the last time they met.
But could China continue its economic prosperity while in a military contest with the US? No. The US Navy is bigger than the rest of the world's navies combined, most of which are close US allies. China would find itself unable function as a mercantile power because it would lose its markets for exports as well as lose the foreign mineral and food resources it now depends on for its newly wealthy urban population and industry. The US Navy would simply prevent Chinese access to its foreign assets while hostilities continued and no one could do anything about it. Furthermore, the US, EU, and the rest of the world would suffer only marginal, if any, economic loss as they find that there are lots of inexpensive substitutes, domestic as well as foreign, for Chinese labor.
That's the kind of power that a global Pentagon buys you in today's world. It compels China to act within the rules whether it wants to or not, and my reading of China's support for the Euro is that they don't have a choice, which means they are as powerless as ever.
Furthermore, the US, EU, and the rest of the world would suffer only marginal, if any, economic loss as they find that there are lots of inexpensive substitutes, domestic as well as foreign, for Chinese labor.
Except not, because the US does not have any capital plant left that's worth shit, outside the armaments industry. And most of the countries that the American capital plant has been relocated to (other than China) are in Korea, which will be a Chinese client about ten seconds after the commencement of hostilities, and Indochina, which is a region where China can stir up a whole lot of trouble even under an all-out naval blockade.
Oh, the US can build capital plant. But that will take them at least ten years, which is an eternity when a fifth of the (net) internationally traded steel and well over a third of the total global steel production just got taken off the market, and you're a net importer of both steel and finished products containing it.
That is not to say that the US couldn't make China lose more than China could make the US lose. But the US would lose.
But then again, why should China stop playing by the Americans' rules? They're beating the Americans at their own game, after all...
The US doesn't need its own capital plant to survive a conflict with anyone because it has a military capable of securing all of the resources it needs from anyone else. While China's borders are just China's borders, as far as political control over resources goes, America is effectively borderless due to its unique, global military reach. Unless a country today opts out of American empire by opting out of trade, America's military really does make all other countries mere constituencies of an American polity.
While China and other countries may be only able to politically secure economic resources within its nation-state borders, the global network of bases, ships, and aircraft that the US has allow it to secure anything it needs from anywhere just by buying it and shipping it. No one else has that capacity, and until they do, the world pretty much has to follow the leader.
Korea won't go with China, because China can't protect its trade-based economy like the US Navy can, and without US and EU markets, Korea faces famine and devastation. Korea therefore, like China, also has no choice of allies. Beating America at its own game really is the best strategy out of a very limited set of options available to would-be imperialist competitors to American power today.
an ecological disaster like we might face from unchecked global warming, for instance.
Financial collapse is not the same thing as economic collapse, though.
The thing is that the American economic collapse has already happened and should be treated in the past tense.
What's keeping the American empire going is its mental capture of the European elites and its control of the financial system. For a country whose only significant civilian economic activity is finance, financial collapse is a generalised economic collapse.
that's something that can take a thousand years to happen,
The US doesn't need its own capital plant to survive a conflict with anyone because it has a military capable of securing all of the resources it needs from anyone else.
Korea won't go with China, because China can't protect its trade-based economy like the US Navy can,
It's not about "going with China," it's about not being able to prevent China from going in there and taking it over. In a working or not so working condition...
You're right about Russia and Korea, but it's still the same catch-22 situation. If China invades Korea, but has no access to the resources it needs, then famine occurs in Korea as well as China, so Korea will always stick with America, and Chinese contesting power with America is off the table. So if China were to get cozy enough with Russia to be able to secure resources without a need for ocean transport (just as the US was able to do (and Napoleon was not) without worrying about England in the 19th century) then, yes, you have a scenario for the end of the empire.
Hence, US geopolitical strategy should be, and likely is, to keep that kind of relationship from ever occurring. That's where policy matters and mistakes can be made. Empires aren't deterministic organisms. People have to actually be smart enough to keep them working. My point is that really the only way American power can fall in our lifetimes is if American political leadership screws up. Without American mistakes, China can't overtake her, so it's America's game to lose, not China's game to win.
There is no inevitability in China's rise here, and that was even the thesis of Giovanni Arrighi in his otherwise anti-American tome about China's rise. China still has to solve the currently insurmountable problem of how to retain access to global resources without the military capability to do so. Without an American (or climatic, perhaps) calamity, China isn't likely to ever get the capacity to be independent of American power, even if it becomes a more powerful constituency for American political leadership to deal with. At the rate China is rising, however, it should be able to overtake Israel within the next decade or two, I think. /snark
And everybody else lives happily ever after.
And you don't need to defeat China to prevent China's access to resources. You just have to be able to dissuade the world's ship owners, even Chinese ones, from doing business with China, which an aircraft carrier battle group is really good at.
Only if you are prepared to interdict all shipping in the Sea of Japan. That will hit Korea and Russia as well. Now, Korea you can live without, but unless Russia actively collaborates in your embargo - and they have no particular incentive to do so - China can run their commerce under Russian cargo manifests and in Russian bottoms (the Vladivostok Global Shipping Company and the East Siberian Industrial District Consolidated Import/Export Company would suddenly become the most productive enterprises in the world...). So you'd have to be prepared to interdict Russian-flagged vessels sailing out of Vladivostok. The Russians will not be happy about that.
You're talking about a generalised confrontation with all of Asia here.
You're right about Russia and Korea, but it's still the same catch-22 situation. If China invades Korea, but has no access to the resources it needs, then famine occurs in Korea as well as China, so Korea will always stick with America, and Chinese contesting power with America is off the table.
No, it means that Korea will not be the ignition point of such a conflict. But once the conflict does escalate to the point of naval blockade
So if China were to get cozy enough with Russia to be able to secure resources without a need for ocean transport (just as the US was able to do (and Napoleon was not) without worrying about England in the 19th century) then, yes, you have a scenario for the end of the empire.
It's not a matter of being cozy - if the Americans join Israel and Somalia as state sponsors of piracy and target Russian-flagged vessels, they're going to get a lot more cozy than they are real fast. It's a matter of building the relevant infrastructure. It's a question of whether the infrastructure to transport enough crop far enough can be built fast enough for the Chinese political system to survive a blockade.
There is no inevitability in China's rise here,
I actually agree with you on that.
What is happening right now to strengthen China's hand is that American industry is being moved to China. Mechanically, what happens is that China sells industrial goods to the US at discounted prices (through a variety of means, including but not limited to maintaining currency discounts) and uses the proceeds to buy the raw materials that make up the American colonies' tribute, in order to power Chinese industry. The reason that China is trading with the US rather than buying raw materials directly from the producers is that by discounting against the Americans, they incentivise the movement of the American industrial base to China (at the cost of selling their products for less than the full value).
It is always in the US' power to stop this process by changing policy away from favouring finance and towards favouring industry.
If and when that happens (and I predict that it will happen when the US runs out of civilian industry to ship overseas, because they will be understandably reluctant to ship their armaments industry overseas), the game changes. Then China no longer has any incentive to sell stuff to the US at a discounted price, and every incentive to deal bilaterally with the American colonies.
China then faces opportunities and challenges. To take the opportunities first, they can nationalise the Chinese-based holdings of transnational companies with relative impunity, since the only reason that those transnats are currently being treated according to the American rules is the prospect of them moving more of their operations to China. In the face of determined industrial policy, that prospect radically diminishes. The Americans are going to piss and moan about that, just as the British bitched a lot when Putin renegotiated their transnats' fraudulent Yeltsin-era contracts. But like the British, they will suck it up, because the alternative - a generalised trade war with all of Asia - is more expensive.
China can also begin to demand the full price for their goods from the Americans - they won't need to be hyper-competitive anymore, because there is no serious prospect of getting more of the American industrial plant (and for the same reason, they can always erect trade barriers to avoid losing what they have).
The challenge - and where the Americans can make monkey business for China - will be diverting colonial tribute from the American colonies to China while no longer paying the Americans a cut. But they are not entirely powerless here. The Americans keep their colonies not by virtue of military superiority - they have the capacity to wreck a colony, but not really to conquer it in any useful condition. Mostly they keep their colonies in line by bribing the local strongmen and then saddling them with unpayable debts... both activities denominated in US$ (and the way the Americans have traditionally saddled their colonies with unrepayable debts has been by building infrastructure projects with revenues in local currency but financed by loans denominated in US$ - but there's no reason why the Chinese can't play that game too).
Take away the post-Bretton Woods monetary system, and you take away the American empire.
But I agree with you completely on the need for the US, and the West in general, to break its relatively recent addiction to financing wealth instead of creating it through industry if remaining powerful in the world is important to them. Long term, allowed to continue, poor industrial policy will doom an imperialist project.
That was a diary by by richard carlucci on May 11th, 2006. There was also Hot Summer for Mr Bush by FarEasterner on May 22nd, 2006; and Afghanistan neglected - and now Russia and China want US out by Jerome a Paris on July 7th, 2005. But 2006 was a different era and after the Global Clusterfuck started we haven't heard a lot about the SCO. Is it still alive? Can it be revived? Does it matter? 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
You don't have to win a war (in the conventional sense of achieving your stated objectives) in order to wreck a country and deny its resources to everyone else. 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
I fully agree with santiago's description of the asymetry of the relationship between China and the US. China has to play by the rules of the game, as set by the dominant power. The US can isolate any country form the rest of the world; no country can do that to the US. Wind power
China's government has the great advantage of being able to conduct policy without particular regard for popular sentiment, and can always play the Chinese nationalism and Han exceptionalism cards to good effect. And they have the advantage of powerful cultural traditions that, well played, bolster the government -- so long as the economy keeps working.
Something from the I Ching relevant to the US-China relation comes to mind:
The Taming Power of the Small
"The yielding obtains the decisive place, and those above and those below correspond with it: this is called THE TAMING POWER OF THE SMALL."*
Subtle and inscrutable these Chinese. The Book of Changes is thought to have taken shape in the centuries before Confucius and is basic to Chinese culture and habits of mind. China will play to its own advantages, which are considerable, when it can, while accommodating US advantages where it must.
For now probably advantage China. They have the currency reserves, a growing economy and the ability to conduct foreign policy strategically, even if they play by US rules. Meanwhile the USA is run by a cabal of pirates and is constrained to act and react according to the short term needs of that constituency. The Chinese undoubtedly think us to be barbaric fools, even if dangerous and powerful fools.
Time will tell just how valuable our military power is in this relationship. But we cannot readily use it to immediately get whatever we want. Most frustrating.
*From the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, Princeton, 1961 As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
the WestTM plays chess...
With friends like Fox And Friends and the American Petroleum Institute ... who needs external enemies?
Seriously, if war is politics by other means, then the question if whether "America can survive a conflict with anyone" is a massive non sequiter when it seems increasingly plausible that American cannot survive business as usual, with the ongoing destruction of our industrial capacity and pillaging of our natural resources as thorough as any foreign occupier ever could aspire to accomplish. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Except not, because the US does not have any capital plant left that's worth shit, outside the armaments industry.
That's not quite true. US industry is employing less and less, and has abandoned some sectors, but its output has never been higher, when measured in the value of the goods produced. I'm not sure it would be so hard to rebuild, if a war-type effort were put into it. Wind power
The US grew in the 19th century because it had a continent to colonize, not because of international trade rules. 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
If it hadn't been for the first world war, we would be having this conversation in German.
Incidentally, there's another parallel: The countries that won the first world war did so by being neutral.
please provide proof..
please proof
and every your statement deserve the same questioning.
Given: China's economic growth in the last decade has occurred mostly due to its national strategy of export promotion, aka mercantilism. (Is this false? If so, support your refutation.)
Given: China doesn't produce enough oil, soybeans, and other key minerals it needs domestically to satiate the demands of its greatly expanded economy.
Given: China currently does not have a non-oceanic transportation system or the political trust in place to be capable of supplying resources from land routes with neighboring sources such as India and Russia, which are presently relatively minor importers of Chinese production in the first place.
Given: China lacks the military capability of preventing the US from denying access to critical foreign export markets and resources if such a situation occurred.
Where will China obtain the mineral and agricultural resources it needs to maintain middle class lifestyles of its urban population as well as provide for industry, state, and military infrastructure?
Argument: If China cannot obtain sufficient income to support its current level of development and growth without international trade, then it cannot opt out of trade. (Is this not true?)
Argument: If China cannot presently obtain the mineral and agricultural resources it needs to maintain and grow its current level of industrial development, then it cannot opt out of trade.
Proof: If China cannot obtain the resources it currently needs from foreign sources if US were to choose to deny Chinese access to foreign markets and foreign sources of mineral and agricultural supplies, then China has no real alternative available other than to comply with the present world economic regimes.
China is stuck to trade, at least for the time being. It has no other option. This might change if it can become energy independent or if it develops a global military capable of contesting space with America, but that's not the situation today or, I argue, for the foreseeable future.
The difference is that China can afford to throw the US against the wall, providing it stays on good terms with the EU and also supports development in other nations which it can grow as export markets.
The US can't afford to throw China against the wall because it wants, and sometimes needs, the stuff that China makes, which now underpins a huge segment of the US corporate economy.
A trade war with China would be catastrophic for the US, because the shops would soon run out of everything - from food to clothes to toys to consumer electronics. Among others.
You're also ignoring the point that China is already supporting the US financially. If China allowed its currency to float, China would suddenly discover a significant source of wealth.
The relationship is on a knife edge. So far it's been expedient for the Chinese to continue with it, but it's immensely naive to assume that this has to continue because of some kind of implied non-specific US awesomeness that China lacks.
And China has far more options, and is in a much stronger economic and geopolitical position than the US is.
China is a low-income food-deficit country. The US is neither.
In other words, the US could literally starve China to death in the event of war.
This (the food deficit, not the war scenario) has to be one of the main reasons China is greatly expanding its hold on African agricultural production. I wonder how much of what officially counts as Chinese food imports is already "off-shore food production" on land leased by China. 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
As for food imports:
LJ Anderson: Rise in food imports heightens contamination risk - San Jose Mercury News
As computer jobs have gone offshore, so has the production and processing of food. In addition, the U.S. now imports more food than it exports -- with fresh produce, and fresh and frozen fish and shellfish among the leading imports. Mexico is the No. 1 exporter of fruit to the U.S., and China is in second place. This unprecedented growth in globalization of food sources is accompanied by concerns about health risks to consumers. Regulations governing food production in many developing countries are often negligible. For example, two-thirds of the world's production of farmed fish is grown in ponds fertilized by animal manure or human sewage.
As computer jobs have gone offshore, so has the production and processing of food. In addition, the U.S. now imports more food than it exports -- with fresh produce, and fresh and frozen fish and shellfish among the leading imports. Mexico is the No. 1 exporter of fruit to the U.S., and China is in second place.
This unprecedented growth in globalization of food sources is accompanied by concerns about health risks to consumers. Regulations governing food production in many developing countries are often negligible. For example, two-thirds of the world's production of farmed fish is grown in ponds fertilized by animal manure or human sewage.
There are a lot of vacant warehouses just south of Salinas, and many growers have shifted to growing grapes for wine production to replace lost lettuce and vegetable crops.
To be sure, the overall picture is still one of enormous agricultural productivity, but shifts are under way. And the world will live as one
Does this mean American growers would grow lettuce which would then be shipped to China and South America for packing and processing before being shipped back to the US for consumption? 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
Does this mean American growers would grow lettuce which would then be shipped to China and South America for packing and processing?
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.
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.
Where is the proof that China "must trade"? UK for example trades very little with China and Asia so we have to read often in local newspapers desperate pleas from UK ministers that their country "means business". Why can't we say that UK "must trade with Asia to survive?".
Really? How about landgrab from France, UK and genocide of native Indians as factors of American growth in 19th century?
Surely? China BTW has rare minerals which the West is in desperate need. Also China has money and able to buy all necessary raw materials from neighbours even with exclusion of Australia and New Zealand which really will be screwed if Beijing frowns.
This is false statement. China does not need "global military" to secure resources.
This neocon cry [patently false] you repeated several times on this thread, one time is enough, we have eyes to read.
After speculation on military conflict between the West and China you says:
Rhetorical statement because the same applies to US if Washington's loonies decide to have military contest with China. No way US can continue its anaemic economic recovery in case of full-blown nuclear war with China.
The fact that we're having a plausible discussion about China lending money to the US and/or EU suggests...
Could the rest of the world live without the USA. Wait and see. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
The rest of the world could live without China.
Only if we are prepared to radically downsize our economic activity. China produces well over a third of the world's steel - and exports quite a lot of it, either directly or embedded in finished and intermediate products. China also builds well over a third of the world's new shipping tonnage and a substantial fraction of world production of crude textiles. Counting energy embedded in finished goods, China is also a major coal exporter.
Removing this production overnight would not be trivial dislocations. The textile industry could probably migrate relatively easily, but steel and shipbuilding are heavy industries that do not simply spring up overnight, and coal is constrained both by the location of the resources and the willingness (or not) of the locals to die during the extraction process.
Of course how such a thing could happen is hard to see. If as a result of war the USA is highly unlikely to come out unscathed. The environmental impact of a nuclear war would likely be catastrophic. If as a result of economic and political collapse in China, the productive capacity is almost certain to remain. China could move to a model with greater domestic growth but that would be a drain on world resources of all sorts and produce an increase in pollution. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
The world is much less interdependent than we have been led to believe by business journalism. It's much more of one way street that benefits America and her allies/partners.
That job has been sent to China, not because it had to be, but because that was the most profitable decision for the elite. This elite has become destructive and parasitical. The economy that is run in their interest is sucking the wealth out of the bottom 99.3% of the US population for the benefit of the top 0.7%, give or take a few tenths of a percent. This model of military backed domination has been extended not just to the rest of the world, but to the domestic population as well. Perhaps you are o.k. with that but I am not. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
You got a couple of years ahead of yourself there... 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
This is rhetorical statement. The same applies to US to go to war with China or Russia. US would be obliterated in any nuclear holocaust.
False statement because of the word "only the US". The power of US for example in South East Asia was in mix of economic and military ties which are on the wane by all accounts, even Thailand and Indonesia are drifting away from US. After decades of lobbying US was admitted into East Asian Forum only humiliatingly together with Russia which obviously had had less interests in this region.
Then the West indeed has currently dominated international organizations but everything is changing. Take for example Moody's with atrocious rate of 80-90% of failures which were rated AAA obviously will be replaced and why not by Dagong?
Again unsubstantiated statement. China has money why it can't secure the foreign resources? What happen with Australia (and other resource-based economies like Canada) if China launch sanctions against them? China does not depend on American goodwill to get access to them.
Empty rhetorics without proof.
Again false assumption.
You're missing something very important here. China is not only a great producer, but a huge source of global aggregated demand as well. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
This provides for an effective equilibrium (that word, again). It's suicide for China to confront the US militarily, so it won't do it or even invest in military resources to do it. Instead it must content itself to try to outshine others in American-European world it has been reborn into. I really don't think we'll see another empire or such thing take America's place as long as capitalism remains the dominant way things are done in the world.
I think it would be more trivial that it might seem at first. A lot of Chinese steel production, if not most, goes to Chinese industry, not European or American. Same with shipbuilding. Without Chinese trade, the non-Chinese world doesn't really need Chinese steel or Chinese ships.
Except that if they want to buy the stuff from other people, they need ships. And if they want to make the stuff themselves, they need steel.
But the independency doesn't work the other way. Without the raw materials and food it gets from the Middle East, North America, South America, and Africa, Chinese industry won't work and neither will its army hold up long. (Same problem Japan faced.) But without Chinese stuff made from mostly imported raw materials, other places can pretty easily import the raw materials and set up shop.
Except that even with the direct support of the then-premier industrial power on the planet, it took China thirty years to transfer that industrial capacity. You are talking about taking it off-line and rebuilding it from the ground up. That is not a trivial exercise. You're talking at least ten years ramp-up time here.
Except that the US won't keep being an export market for China. At some point, it will either stop de-industrialising or become a raw materials supplier instead.
The current situation is not an equilibrium - there is a secular flow of industrial capacity from the US (and to a lesser extent from Europe) to China. You don't have secular flows in equilibrium. And you don't have a plausible story right now about how equilibrium is going to be achieved, because you don't have a plausible story about how the American body politic is going to stop cutting its hands off in order to feed China before they run out of hands.
It took China 30 years to develop its industrial capacity because it didn't have technology or, more importantly, the social institutions for capitalist industrial organization. Once they developed the social institutions of capitalism, it took only weeks or months for them to build new factories. It woouldn't take even 30 weeks for anyone who has necessary capitalist political institutions and social norms in place to replicate Chinese intermediate good manufacturing in the rest of the world. Same thing already happened in WWII when the industrial powers retooled their entire economies in matters of months to produce things multiple times the scale that had been produced before the war. The real limiting factor isn't the knowledge or industrial base; it's the resources -- the oil, and minerals and food supply, and that's what big navies provide. In the end, the guy with the biggest guns and fastest boats controls the resources, not the the guy with factories to transform resources from one thing to another. You can replicate the factory, not the resources.
Regarding equilibrium, we're not talking long duree here. We're talking about the political constraints faced by people who have responsibility for feeding billions today. It's a political equilibrium because no actor can improve their lot by doing something other than what is provided for in the rules of trade, commerce, and global governance set up by, and mostly for the benefit of, the US and its close allies.
Over the long term, yes, economic advantages can change, and the winds appear to be blowing in China's direction. But in order for China to actually overtake America, it would have to find a way of securing access to the kinds of resources that America can, either militarily, or by reorganizing the institutions by which people organize their economic lives, i.e, overthrowing capitalism. Right now, China is securing access to the resources it needs by merely depending on American goodwill and Western social contrivances for property rights and the like. China has a long way to go yet before it can do better than just depend on others for both institutions and security, but I agree that it appears to be headed that way someday.
The current system consists of a pack of sociopaths in suits with the habits of pirates seeking every opportunity to loot and pillage. They and the way they operate take no account of the need for anything but their own immediate returns, which are now only obtainable through organized fraud enabled by their capture and domination of the political process. This is unstable and will crash just as surely as the economy of ancient Rome collapsed when overrun by Goths and Vandals. The pirate elite has no interest in the boring tasks required to run a sustainable society. That is why we don't have one.
Many superior forms of organization are possible, but so are vastly inferior forms of organization. I can only hope that some of those with position and power have the vision to want to secure a livable world and a decent society for their children and grandchildren. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
in other words proof, please.
From this statement we learn that China wish to improve itself without submission to Western narrated "rules".
Proof, please.
The future fleet of conventional Chinese submarines is a deadly quiet force that could perform defensive and offensive operations. The future fleet will compose of the Kilo, Song and Yuan types, as the Romeos and Mings are phased out of service. China is reported to have the option of purchasing the more advanced Russian Amur class SSK. With the success of indigenous programmes, however, future purchases of foreign submarines look relatively unlikely.
Like the ones the Koreans and Japanese are building. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Take a capital ship that you don't like.
Then take a moderately modern spy satellite.
Then take four dozen submarines.
Launch five hundred cruise missiles over the horizon.
Watch as ten million man hours, five thousand sailors and pilots and a hundred thousand tons of high-grade steel sinks helplessly to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Dive, scatter and lose the counter-sub task force dispatched to hunt you down.
Repeat as necessary. They can get twenty of your subs for each capital ship you take out and you still come out ahead in terms of steel, man-hours and trained sailors.
Watch your capital be reduced to radioactive glass about forty-five minutes after the first capital ship gets an impromptu U-boat makeover.
Second, even if the subs win, you still don't control the SLOC's. You just deny them to the enemy.
If you don't believe me, send in your merchantmen and watch as land-based (and carrier-based) fighters, long-range bombers, missile armed fast attack crafts and enemy submarines close on them. Not pretty. You need your own ASW and AA (and ASh) bubble around your convoys of merchantmen. You only get that from capital ships, or a plentiful base network. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The Moscow Times: Tangled Triangle of Russia, China and the U.S.
... Reveling in its victory in the Cold War and its clear military, political and economic superiority, the United States set its sights on global hegemony. This antagonized and alienated both Moscow and Beijing and created an opportunity for them to join forces once again to oppose U.S. hegemony.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks marked the beginning of the end of U.S. global domination. The U.S. fall from the stars was accelerated by its unsuccessful, taxing military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and the deep economic crisis.
By 2009, it became obvious that the "Pax Americana" global empire was a pipe dream, and the United States -- now under the leadership of a more pragmatic and realistic President Barack Obama -- began looking for new alliances. One of the Obama administration's ideas was sharing the burden of responsibility for global security with China...
In February 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed creating a U.S.-Chinese superpower alliance... But the Chinese leadership flatly rejected Clinton's proposal. ...China has always insisted that it has no ambitions to become a hegemony and is opposed to any global domination by any superpower. ...This is why many U.S. policymakers view China as the country's largest threat.
How can the United States counter this threat? ... once again, Washington has courted Moscow to help the United States counterbalance China's growing global influence. But the United States doesn't realize that Russia has no interest in alienating China.
Eighteenth-century French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu said, "Small counties perish from external enemies, and large countries perish from internal ones." Russia has more than enough internal problems that it needs to solve without having to worry about conflicts with China. This is why ... the Russian-Chinese-U.S. triangle will remain as three separate centers for a long time to come.
Looking at Somali piracy, isn't it possible to mess up the world system badly enough that there are no safe shipping lanes anywhere? 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
But there is no feeling that it's needed, as so very few ships fall prey to the pirates. The real cost of this piracy is reflected in the insurance premiums shipping companies must pay when they pass through these waters. The increase of the premiums is smaller than the cost of maintaining the current naval forces down there. Heard that one before? Yeah... Privatise the profits, socialise the costs. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Put simplistically, if the Chinese went to war without a navy like America has, the Chinese wouldn't get to keep their ships -- they would have to surrender them to America
Or re-flag them with a neutral-in-their-favour country prior to the commencement of hostilities. The only historical examples of successfully blockading serious industrial powers (France during the Napoleanic Wars, Germany during the world wars) involve countries that did not have any land borders with neutral-in-their-favour countries possessing blue-water ports.
It took China 30 years to develop its industrial capacity because it didn't have technology or, more importantly, the social institutions for capitalist industrial organization.
And after thirty years of systematically dismantling their industrial plant, it is doubtful that the Americans have that capacity either at this point.
Same thing already happened in WWII when the industrial powers retooled their entire economies in matters of months to produce things multiple times the scale that had been produced before the war.
This requires there to be an industrial plant to re-tool. Re-tooling and re-building from the ground up is not the same story. And even re-tooling isn't as easy as it was in the '30s and '40s because the machinery has gotten a lot more specialised since then. You can't take a jet engine factory and convert it to a rail engine factory the way you could take an automobile factory in the '40s and convert it into an aircraft factory - you might as well scrap the whole thing and start over instead.
You would be better advised to compare the task at hand to the re-building after the War, when most of the pre-existing industrial plant had ceased to exist. That took a couple of years, not a couple of months, and they had help from the premier industrial power of the time, whereas you are talking about doing it in opposition to the premier industrial power of our time.
The real limiting factor isn't the knowledge or industrial base; it's the resources -- the oil, and minerals and food supply, and that's what big navies provide. In the end, the guy with the biggest guns and fastest boats controls the resources,
Only against countries that he can effectively blockade. Once Chinese shipping is out of the Sea of Japan, it's impossible to interdict without cutting off the Russian East as well, unless Russia is neutral in your favour. Which, at the moment, they are not. And if you send your carrier task forces into the Sea of Japan to carry out piracy against Chinese shipping, land-based cruise missiles can make them not come home again for a fraction of the cost of building a blue-water navy.
It's a political equilibrium because no actor can improve their lot by doing something other than what is provided for in the rules of trade, commerce, and global governance set up by, and mostly for the benefit of, the US and its close allies.
That is a necessary but not sufficient condition for describing it as an equilibrium situation - it could also be (and in this case is, due to the secular trends involved) - a positive feedback loop. The atmospheric concentration of water vapour is a stable equilibrium (on the macro scale). A ball balancing on top of another ball is an unstable equilibrium. A Ponzi scam is a positive feedback loop.
(Stable and meta-stable) equilibria change gradually - unconstrained positive feedback loops crash. (Unstable equilibria rarely live long enough to be observed in noisy environments.)
But in order for China to actually overtake America, it would have to find a way of securing access to the kinds of resources that America can,
You're still assuming that the Americans can simply start interdicting Chinese commerce at will. Physically, they can, but doing so would piss off every other industrial power on the planet. So economically speaking, they can't.
Germany thought they could get away with unrestricted commerce warfare against the Entente during the first world war. That is probably the single strategic decision that goes the longest way towards explaining their defeat, because that's what brought the Americans in on the side of the Entente.
Without Chinese trade, the non-Chinese world doesn't really need Chinese steel or Chinese ships. Except that if they want to buy the stuff from other people, they need ships. And if they want to make the stuff themselves, they need steel.
A year? Two years? Ten years?
Any of those answers will mean that simply embargoing China is off the table. You'd have to do something a lot more gradual. And if you do something a lot more gradual, then China has time to respond, and you start entering a regime where predictions become hard to do...
When it's not oppressing peasants in its own back yard, The US starts wars to increase its perceived mojo and to feel good about its own awesome, not for practical reasons. It also runs the world's biggest war machine as a convenient excuse for corporate welfare, not as a form of military effectiveness, the latter being incredibly limited in practical terms.
Both China and the US have nukes, and if hostilities start over - say - resource access in Afghanistan, it won't be long before they're used.
China is already in a position to crush the US financially. The Chinese leadership have chosen not to, so far, but if the US economy implodes - which is looking almost certain - the Chinese will decide that it's self defence to secure energy and other resources around the world, and the US will twitch and spasm like a moron giant, especially if the US has one of its idiot presidents in charge.
The point is that politically and militarily, the US is no longer viable. It's running on empty and hasn't realised this yet.
The best that can happen is sovereign default and economic reorganisation. But with an idiot president at the helm, conflict to save face is more likely.
When it's not oppressing peasants in its own back yard, The US starts wars to increase its perceived mojo and to feel good about its own awesome, not for practical reasons.
But it is also very careful to only start war against countries that don't have a sporting chance of fighting back.
The whole starting war against countries that actually have a military (or any economy worth speaking of) is a European thing, historically speaking at least.
Which is the real reason that China will back down over a confrontation - you don't play chicken with a psychopath. But this should not be mistaken as the psychopath having the strategic advantage in any other avenue of engagement than a game of nuclear chicken.
But with an idiot president at the helm
Such statement we used to hear from likes of John Bolton and other neocons.
Global demand rests on China. Take that away, and we'll have a real depression. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Global demand rests on China.
No it doesn't. It's narrowly true for some specific categories of raw materials, but no for global aggregate demand. Wind power
The fact that we're having a plausible discussion about China lending money to the US and/or EU suggests that unofficially, the Yuan is now the world's reserve currency and that China is the lender or last resort.
And then a physiocrat, I suppose... 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
interesting... diary? ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
So there's an interesting situation where the current hegemon's economy is imploding and the new player may be in a position to bail them out - if they choose to. At a price. Traditionally, doesn't this usually result in a war to rebalance power more formally?
The hegemon is then the term used for the leading power among the great powers, based on the prevailing power resources of the day. Under any version of power transition theory, a period of balance of power is a tumultuous period likely to have a lot of conflict, and then hegemonic wars occur after a period of balance of power when a potential new hegemon has emerged, and one or more dissatisfied challengers make a move to carve out a stronger position for themselves in the emerging international system. One of the concerns of some students of the cycles of hegemonic wars in political geography are how to establish a system were we can avoid having hegemonic wars. In terms of ability to project power beyond their own region, it would seem that the great powers of the day are the US, China and the EU, with India being the only obvious candidate medium power with the prospect for emerging as a great power.
One of the concerns of some students of the cycles of hegemonic wars in political geography are how to establish a system were we can avoid having hegemonic wars.
In terms of ability to project power beyond their own region, it would seem that the great powers of the day are the US, China and the EU, with India being the only obvious candidate medium power with the prospect for emerging as a great power.
