The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. And China Headed for War? | Hacker News Reader

The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. And China Headed for War?

theatlantic.com

51 pointsbambax64 comments

One thing I think might be interesting is how the history of economic thought affects the war/peace calculus.

For much of history, people thought of wealth as a sort of zero-sum (or near) game. If one country gets richer, another will get poorer. If Athens get rich, Sparta gets poor. If Britain has colonies, France and Germany need colonies. Everyone wants to be an exporter and hoard gold.

The economic thought about this started to change around the time of David Ricardo (comparative advantage overturning mercantilism), but I would not be surprised if mainstream politicians took some time to understand this idea.

These days it's pretty clear the US and China benefit from mutual trade, and anything upsetting that would require quite some compensation.

Aside from economics, there's also the fact that we've seen massive global wars already, and we have weapons that could make the world unliveable for generations. Particularly if you look at Chinese history, there's an enormous amount of bloodshed. The party leadership will understand this.

> These days it's pretty clear the US and China benefit from mutual trade

Yes, that is probably the current perception even with most people never hearing of competitive advantage. I wonder how climate change in the next couple of decades will change this war/peace calculus. I fear we may realize that benefits that the U.S. and China receive from trade partnerships is from extracting natural capital and replacing it with negative externalities. When that natural capital runs out and negative externalities come back to bite us in the form of climate change, what will the U.S. and China think of each other then? Will we still believe in competitive advantage then?

China has made a huge about-face in the last 2 years on energy. Their policy is currently to invest heavily in green energy for domestic use, and to become the global green energy technology leader. I think they will be successful - advances in energy tech take superpower-level resources, but they also tend to sustain those superpowers for a long time.

China will build their dominance on 'clean' energy. No doubt about it.

I think that you're right -- the Chinese administration is ruthless, but also pragmatic. I think when they look at the USA, they see a country at war with itself. There's no need to destroy us since we do such a good job of it ourselves.

Also, the USA has a pretty huge advantage geographically over every other country in the world: our borders consist of oceans we can easily defend with our navy and allied countries who are strong both militarily and economically. We also have access to all of the factors of production of an army (steel, oil, etc.) domestically and the industry necessary to process them. Geographically, we're very protected as well: attack from the north and you have 2000 miles of Canadian tundra too extreme to march an army across that can be littered with radar and anti-aircraft stations. Attack from the south and you have to cross rugged, mountainous terrain in Mexico. Even against a weakened USA, victory would be very difficult.

War against the US is therefore pointless from the Chinese perspective: a war of the scale a US-China war would likely just rekindle the machinery of American industry while inflicting heavy losses on China. The Chinese government (and people) have a long-term mindset: war would be an impatient choice because China's dominance is all but assured anyway.

I don't think American politicians are as pragmatic; and I expect our war hawks to turn their attention to China (likely when China eventually tries to retake Taiwan). From a realpolitik point of view, I actually think that a major war with China is probably the best chance the US has to maintain global dominance over the next 50 years. But that war would need to happen soon, while the US still has a clear technological advantage over China -- in 10 years that advantage will be all but gone.

It's looking like the US plans to use Japan as its proxy for fighting China. Japan recently authorized its military to operate in defense of its allies; a first step into removing the post-WWII restrictions placed on the Japanese military. They plan to continue that process; with US support. China sees this as unacceptable -- and is ramping up its military as a result. I think we'll see a China-Japan war in the South China Sea before we see a China-US war. But I think we'll also see China engage in the type of limited incursions / occupations like the Russians did in Georgia and Ukraine, and they won't stop until someone starts fighting back.

China's development is already beginning to slow. It is not headed towards global dominance, it was merely catching up with the rest of the developed world. China will likely continue to enjoy a modernizing economy and growing middle class, but in terms of growth it looks to be headed the same way as Japan.

I would agree with you except for the fact that the Chinese economy will be large enough to support a military equalling or surpassing that of the US. That's basically what the article is saying: economic ascendancy often results in a military build-up, and when it does, conflict often follows. China is spending heavily on their military to exert their will, and given current trends will be able to overtake the US on military spending in the next decade or two. Whether that results in conflict is largely up to the US, in my mind.

Also, post-WWII Japan was more or less a vassal state of the US, so we kept their military ambitions in check. We don't have any US military bases in China, so we can't do that there.

Again, it remains to be seen whether the Chinese economy meets the expectations of earlier forecasts. I think a more realistic view is that the Chinese economy assumes a role in the region comparable to Germany's in Europe.

Military ascendency is not just a simple product of economic ascendency however. Geography plays a large role, as well as military history and institutional knowledge. For example, one does not simply build a blue water navy. China is practically starting from scratch when it comes to naval tradition, and when combined with geography will likely never pose a serious challenge to US naval primacy in the Pacific - regardless of comparative economic might. Even at the height of its power the USSR never posed a serious threat to that primacy. Bounded to its own regional theatre, the Chinese military will likely continue to be structured around anti-area access denial strategies.

However, increasing economic co-dependence is likely to make this entire topic moot. Call me an optimist but I predict the extent of US-China naval engagement 20 years from now to consist of joint security exercises and disaster relief missions.

> But I think we'll also see China engage in the type of limited incursions / occupations like the Russians did in Georgia and Ukraine, and they won't stop until someone starts fighting back.

They've already started, with their claims in the South China Sea, and occupying and building up islands.

True, there hasn't been any shooting, which is better than Russia. But the process looks the same.

While China gets all the flak for this in the US media, they were actually kind of late to the game on the Spratly Islands. Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Japan have all been reclaiming islands in the same area on a smaller scale. China is just staking its claim alongside the rest, and while China is by far the biggest user of dredging to reclaim islands, they weren't the first.

Russia invaded the undisputed, occupied territory of a sovereign nation (twice!) on trumped up reasons of "protecting ethnic Russians" -- as if "ethnic Russian" was a real thing. The Spratly Islands are the very definition of disputed territory; they're claimed by half a dozen countries and have no meaningful settlements on them. I'm not saying that China has a claim to them, but their claim is no less valid than Japan's or Vietnam's.

Now, when they invade Taiwan, we can say they're like Russia. But they have not flexed their military might because they're not yet a modern military. That will change over the next 10-20 years; and when you have a strong military, you tend to come up with ways to make use of it to achieve your strategic goals (again, this was a central theme of the original article).

Source for Spratly info: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/30/world/asia/wha...

Which came first: China's huge territorial claim in the South China Sea, or Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Japan reclaiming islands in the area?

China never would have resorted to dredging if they had been able to occupy an island big enough to put an airport on. But all of the islands of that size were already occupied by one of the other countries, so China decided to build one rather than take one by force. The alternative is to abandon their claim on the islands entirely, which would be stupid because nobody else really has a better claim on a bunch of barren, uninhabited islands.

Honestly, this is one of those types of disputes where nobody has a clearly better claim than anyone else, so the nation with the biggest navy wins (the US did this all over the South Pacific, so we can't act all high and mighty). But there's nothing inherently important about those islands other than they grant territorial waters, so whoever has the biggest navy in the region will control them. Very different than what happened in Georgia or Ukraine (or Iraq, or Afghanistan...)

The US media usually portrays this as 100% Chinese aggression, when the truth is that every country that claims the islands is doing the exact same thing (albeit on a smaller scale).

OK, and I agree with most of this, but that doesn't answer my question. Which came first, China's territorial claim, or other nations building up their islands?

I know that sequence doesn't necessarily imply causation, but if there is causation, which one is the original cause?

If you want the original cause, you have to go back to WWII. Or the Boxer Rebellion. Or the colonial era before that. With territorial claims, if you go back far enough in history, you can find some justification.

Territorial claims on uninhabited islands are even less cut and dry. China has claimed the islands since, well, ever - but until the last 10-20 years they lacked the resources/need/desire to exercise that claim. China claims that Japan's aggression in the area forced them to build up a military presence to defend their claim, but it's hard to know whether that's just anti-Japan propaganda or not because it's entirely plausible.

What I'm saying is that a lot of countries have claimed these islands for a long time before the recent militarization/occupation of the area by all parties. No country has a truly better claim than the other, so it's a case where possession is 9/10ths of the law. China was late to the island base building game, so they had to take an island that was too small to build a base on and expand it. Does that make them the aggressors? Or are Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam aggressors because they built a military base there before China?

The US media doesn't give you that nuanced view, because this is a case where morality is grey and there are no heroes or villains. Just a bunch of nations claiming some islands and then trying to justify their claim by building on said islands.

The gas pipeline through Ukraine is a good example of this: it's economically critical to both ends, which is why it's not been blown up in the civil war.

It's telling that of the four cases they studied that didn't result in war, three were the most recent three and the fourth was also in the past century.

I think nuclear weapons are the wildcard here. They make it difficult to extrapolate from wars in the last 500 years to wars in the future.

In 1914-18, although the outcome was quite a lot more terrible than what everyone expected going in, it wasn't as if Europe ended up as a radioactive wasteland for hundreds of years.

I don't know if "wildcard" is the right word. Nuclear weapons were developed with the explicit purpose of preventing wars as terrible as the World Wars. With the help of economic sanctions, they've succeeded so far.

This is revisionist thinking, applying current knowledge to the motivations of those 75 years ago.

Nuclear weapons were developed because they could be. More specifically, it was feared that Germany was already researching them.

During the Manhattan Project and for the next several years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they were thought of as just another weapon of war, different perhaps in scale but not in essential character (certainly by the US Army brass, anyway). It wasn't until later in the Cold War that the deterrent value of nuclear weapons was emphasised.

It did take quite some time for the full power and destructiveness of atomic weapons, let alone the later fusion bombs, to be appreciated. At one point, it was a serious idea to fire atomic shells from the standard 155mm field howitzers. Or, for even greater insanity, from over-sized crew-served bazookas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

This wasn't because the power of nukes was unappreciated, it was because Soviet conventional superiority in the European theater was seen as an existential threat to Western Europe for which the cost of using that kind of nukes was acceptable in order to mitigate.

This is a message similar to the promotion of World War I involvement using the "war to end all wars" argument.

In the end though, it's just a way to either expand one power's reach at the cost of another, or a way to halt the ascension of a young world power (Germany) into a dominant position.

Nuclear weapons were certainly NOT developed to "create and keep the peace in the world". Nuclear weapons were developed with the intention of using them. The US intended to use them on Germany, but Germany capitulated before "the gadget" was ready. The US intended to keep using nuclear weapons on Japan after the first two strikes[1]. The US maximized the civilian and economic damage of their nuclear bombings, intentionally maximizing the firestorms and incapacitating civilian fire fighting efforts [2].

Of course, it is argued (and to some extent, documents back this up) that the lasting radiation damage was not well known or understood at the time. People, including the scientists and engineers working on the bombs, considered them to be the super-sized equivalent of conventional bombs.

Nuclear weapons were developed as an ace card, which would grant its sole wielder (at that time, the US) a serious advantage at any international negotiation table.

[1]: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/25/weekly-document-th... [2]: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/08/the-height-of-the-...

They did pretty well creating a wasteland without atomic weaponry. 460 square miles of France in 1918 were declared "Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge). Hundreds of tonnes of unexploded munitions are still unearthed in the soil of Belgium and France every year; hundreds of people have been killed or injured by them.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest).

A nuclear weapon can do that in seconds, at a tiny fraction of the monetary cost.

That's not really the point. We accomplished the same effect (albeit over a smaller area) already, and it clearly didn't stop WWII from happening.

No nuclear weapon has ever been built that can do that to 460 square miles.

> No nuclear weapon has ever been built that can do that to 460 square miles.

460mi ^2 = 1192km^2

sqrt(1192km^2 / pi) = 19.5km

Tsar Bomba (largest one), from Wikipedia: 'total destruction _radius_ 35km.'

So, yes, such a single weapon surpassing that several times has been built. And it can as well be argued that a MIRVed ICBM is in a way a single weapon.

The biggest takeaway from their chart is that culture clash leads to war and bigger, more powerful countries have more noticeable wars. In addition, their chart of things that didn't result in war is mostly inaccurate.

Japan vs USSR was never actually a real idea because Japan didn't have an army. USSR knew the actual battle would be against the USA.

USA vs UK never existed because there wasn't a culture clash (and their focus of power was a bit different).

UK, Germany, and France don't clash today because their cultures are closer than they've ever been and because they perceive a shared foreign threat in Asia.

Thus we're left with the only war that never happened being USA vs USSR -- a war that didn't happen due to self-preservation.

It seems most probable that USA vs China fits into the same category as USA vs USSR where self-preservation will keep war from actually happening. I don't think any reasonable person trusts a losing government to NOT use weapons of mass destruction -- especially when the first one to use them wins. It's easier to get forgiveness than permission (that happens when you're the last superpower standing).

There certainly was USA/UK friction in the aftermath of WWI. The Washington Naval Treaty was written to stop an incipient naval arms race, in which the USA and UK were two of the major competitors.

Wasn't there battle plans for invasion of Canada and vice versa around the same time? I thought it was something that could have easily occurred if Germany didn't spark WW2.

There are generally battle plans developed for any conceivable conflict. I would not be terribly surprised if the Pentagon has war plans on file for an invasion of Canada today.

That was also in the heyday of the Prussian General Staff school, which emphasized the whole concept of war plans, with things like mobilization timetables, logistics and troop movements choreographed like chess openings.

Can we deal with the war with Russia first? You know, the one with the Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine and the other one in Syria with the US proxy forces attacking a Russian ally?

The future is probably more of this sort of deniable medium-intensity conflict.

This isn't a new phenomenon; the Cold War was full of similar things.

I agree this is much more prudent, and China excels at playing a role more confined to the shadows. For now at least.

In some sense, the US and EU has already accepted China's new found dominance - and place - in the international community. Russia has a much bigger problem accepting their current role, and are almost defiantly demanding respect; putting their forces into situations that could (or probably will) escalate into a full scale war. Personal opinion and all, but Russian foreign politics is reminiscent of Lebensraum, and all that it entailed.

Well, as always it depends on "who started it".

There are people who say that the current regime in the Ukraine is a US puppet installed via a coup. And up to today several unknowns persist (MH370, the Maidan shootings, the Odessa fire..). Same holds for Syria.

In reality, IMO, there is never only one guilty, neither in politics, nor in marriage, nor in war.

So I will refrain from blaming someone for all of it and I tend to disbelieve people who "know that it's the other one's fault".

I wasn't blaming anyone. Merely observations.

(Although, are you seriously insinuating that MH370 were caused by the US?)

Well, you were judging Putin's foreign politics which is your absolute right and I have no right whatsoever to tell you that you are wrong and in fact, I can't. I just wanted to point out a flaw in your logic (which is, again, only my opinion and not a fact per se).

Regarding MH370, I just checked an it was MH 17 ;)

Apart from that, there are many actors who could have done it. What I find surprising is that obviously noone is interested in providing supporting material for his side's theory. No satellite images, no radio tower comm, weird versions of the Dutch report on the black boxes (one with a sentence blaming Russia, the other one without that very sentence), it just appears so much politics that it doesn't pass the smell test.

Actions speak loader than words.

Also, take a little time to analyze how the Russian media vs. the world reacted to the incident.

There were so many proxy wars between the USA and the Soviets I would not class that as a bloodless "no war" conflict.

I don't think there will be a war for the same reason Europe did not go to war with in the past few decades ... it would be like shooting themselves in the foot. there is little incentive for war when economies are so reliant on each other.

Niall Ferguson's The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred, which looks at the 20th century, starts by pointing out how comfortable and settled everything looked at the start of the 20th century and as Keynes put it that this state appeared "normal, certain and permanent".

For all we know the historians of the 21st century may look back at our time in similar ways.

Let's hope not. For the first time ever we have something we need to protect - our technological civilization, on its way to reshape the fundamentals of human life. Ending aging and death, colonizing other worlds, really learning something about ourselves and the universe - those things are now actually reasonable concepts. It would be a real shame if we lose it over some stupid issue like political bickering leading to a world war. Because if we halt now, if we roll back to before the industrial revolution, we won't likely achieve this level for several more millennia, as we've pretty much used up all easily accessible, low-tech energy sources and materials. I really wish our leaders would realize that for the first time in the whole history, humanity is greater than the sum of its parts. However important your local issues seem to you, they're not worth endangering the future.

"For the first time ever we have something we need to protect"

Humanity has always been worth protecting.

Yes. I didn't mean to devaluate human life. My point is, for most of the history, societies have been replaceable, fungible. A tribe would die off to be replaced by another one, with different language and maybe culture, but otherwise the same. A civilization would fall, and next one would took the place, replacing the lost works of art with something superficially different, but generally the same. The world didn't change much with the centuries, people had the same illnesses, same problems. Same capabilities and the same perspectives. We were as far from the stars in 2000 BC as we were in 2000 AC. You could restart a civilization any time, and it wouldn't be significantly different.

Not so now. The last three centuries gave us the means and capacity to significantly improve the human condition. We started to ride on a self-amplifying feedback loop and we can't give up or fall off until we stabilize it, or we may never get on it again.

Humanity has always been worth protecting. Human lives has always been worth protecting. But for the first time ever, we now have a civilization worth protecting. All the problems it has, we have to fix. We can't afford to try and start over.

You significantly underestimate the last 20 000 years of progress. It's easy, because progress was very slow, but it was still nessesary for the later stages, and there's no reason to think it will take less time the next time around.

Domestication and farming alone took tousands of years, if you restarted the culture in year 0 - we wouldn't have to wait 1600 years for industrial revolution, but more like 10 000 years.

It's true that what we have today was built directly on the last 20 000 years of progress, but there is still a significant difference - those previous 20 000 years will live in the memories of survivors of the next great war, as well as in any books that will last. Domestication, farming, basic health care, etc. are things that can fit in one's mind. In the entire known history, we've never really restarted from scratch.

Even from our times, a some of knowledge would probably survive - from the ideas behind industrial revolution or modern medicine that can fit in one's head, to knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology that is stored in books. No matter how hard we try, we won't nuke every single book out of existence.

But then again, not that much knowledge will live, given our increased dependence on volatile storage media. Even if a hard drive would survive a century, we won't have anything to read it with.

The reason last 300 years were special is because our progress started to depend on enormous and ever increasing amounts of power. We've used up most of the sources that could be mined, and most renewables are not viable without high-precision manufacturing. Solar power is out of the question; we could start rebuilding hydro and wind power capacity but it will be a slow and very painful process, without easy coal and petroleum to help build the infrastructure. We simply may not have enough easy fuel left to restart the technological civilization.

"Norman Angell, a famous author and Nobel Prize winner in the 1930s, published a brilliant book in 1909. In 'The Great Illusion', Angell argued that war in Europe had become impossible due to the intense level of interdependence between European countries in investment and trade. He postulated that a war would devestate Europe simply because of the economic disruption it would cause. Therefore, war was impossible." George Friedman, Flashpoints.

Perhaps it will be a different kind of war. With the economies so reliant on each other, one side can tweak their economy to cause negative effects in the other side's economy. There are politicians in the US who consider China to be engaging in economic warfare for artificially lowering the value of their currency. There is also the possibility of cyber warfare. Steal some secrets here, bring the stock market down for a few hours there. Actual shots don't need to be fired, just enough disruption to reach agreements that one side wants.

So what was QE then if not artificially reducing the value of the dollar?

'As Xi Jinping himself said during a visit to Seattle on Tuesday, “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.”'

That's scary. What do you think he means by that, specifically? It seems like a threat to me.

It's beautifully layered. In one sense he's saying that war is not inevitable if we make the effort to get along. In another sense he's saying don't prod the panda.

I think he's saying that we should be wary of seeing everything China does as a threat since that kind of one dimensional thinking puts us on a trajectory toward the trap. Instead we should aim to rise both our boats.

Perhaps it's irrelevant, but I wonder what effects the single child policy will have in the next few decades to Chinas ascendancy. The ratio of adult males to females is going to be very lopsided. Will the excess males join the military to make up for the family life they cannot have? Will there be vast emigration to search for wives?

It's impossible to say in my opinion, but it's interesting to think about.

Asked a Chinese friend of mine about this once, she said the Chinese males with means will either find Chinese wives, or will exploit a (comparatively) strong yuan and "raid" neighboring Asian countries (Vietnam, Thailand, Phillipines, etc) for wives.

Not sure if I agree with the article, but I'm always fascinated with how the classics can relate to modern times.

I'm also old enough to remember 30 or so years ago when Japan was the rising power that terrified everyone (watch the film Rising Sun). We all know how that played out. I'm a Brit, but in matters like this I would never bet against America.

But. If we look at the recent history (the last three wars), then the probability drops (suddenly) to 0% for a new war to happen.

If we look at the last 7 wars, it is 42%. Not 0, but certainly not as high as 75% (12/16).

So maybe things are changing (and I guess they are). War now involves nuclear weapons, which I think they are a great detractor from getting the countries directly involved.

It might be the reason why they are resolving instead to proxy wars on "innocent" countries.

Wars are largely for profit and supported by propaganda. To be safe we must fight propaganda and unethical bankers.

Anyone advocating for mass murder forfeits their authority.

Oil and resources in general are still a big issue that could cause conflict. We should conserve and recycle much better. Mandate 1- or 2- passenger lightweight vehicles for individuals. Mandate telecommuting to some degree. Need a massive development push to replace oil-based industrial processes with bio-renewable-based processes.

Also can improve land and energy use. https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage

Sounds like someone's read Ghost Fleet http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2015/07/15/ghost...

So, why do people want to fight in the first place? Is any natural inclination all bad? If we level up in perspective from that of personal tragedy, is war an important force of evolution and largely responsible for the place we are at now?

I realize technology changes the equation. And human suffering and destruction are never pleasant. So hopefully we are wise enough to find other ways and I think we will eventually. But I think in order to do this, we have to honestly admit that war has had an important role in human relations and development and the some of the outcomes of war have been for the betterment of humanity.

It is interesting to me that 3 of the 4 non-war outcomes were all within the last 50 years.

War? Not while we depend on China for rare earth elements. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dih30mUexrA )

edit: So I guess the people voting this down believe our failure to maintain a local source of rare earths makes war with China more likely? Our military (and GDP) depends on these elements, and China likes the profit they make selling them. These both make war much less likely.

One reason is that "rare" earths aren't really that rare, what's rare is First World countries that are willing to tolerate the mess of refining them, which roughly entails boiling the ore in acid a thousand times. What was even rarer was a willingness to sell them at a loss when the PRC was selling them cheaply, before they established export quotas and the world market prices for them reversed.

See e.g. this article from 2011 which looks accurate to me: http://fortune.com/2011/11/18/molycorps-1-billion-rare-earth...

As far as I know, the PRC doesn't have a long term monopoly on anything but the largest concentration of Han Chinese in the world, which is of course rather worthwhile.

/sigh/ - I suppose I shouldn't have assumed that I could skip over the details of China's rare earth strategy.

Of course they aren't "rare"; I'm obviously referring to China's cornered market on refinement. I also didn't claim anything about the future trends of the rare earth market. We could (and should) rebuild domestic sources, but that takes time and requires fighting regulation.

I'm simply saying that I find it extremely unlikely that we would go to war with China when they are de facto a necessary part of military and industry supply chains. China wants the profit, and it would be stupid for us to start a war when reopening domestic mining and refinement industries would be cheaper.

Except they didn't corner the market, aside from when they're willing to sell them cheaper than anyone else. E.g. the company that Fortune article focused on, Molycorp, stumbled in various ways and for various reasons, including lower prices because the PRC's initial restrictive actions were of course followed by counteractions, including recycling.

On the company's web site, they say they're putting their US facility in maintenance mode, ready to resume if market conditions warrant it, and are fulfilling customer demand from the PRC and Estonia.

So, no, in terms of rare earths they aren't a necessary part of our military and industrial supply chains. A trade embargo between us would hurt us both, and it would be devastating if they could interdict shipments from Taiwan, Japan and South Korea (one of the reasons we maintain an expensive military, although fab lines have to be exquisitely vulnerable), but otherwise at 0th approximation it's hard to distinguish your argument from those made just prior to The Great War AKA WWI.

I'd also note that if we even had a complete trade embargo between the US and USSR I don't remember/remember reading of it. In 1980 Reagan campaigned on lifting Carter's grotesque grain embargo to the USSR, one of many pinpricks he made after they invaded Afghanistan and mightily embarrassed him.

China isn't the only place with rare earth elements. Molycorp mine in Mountain Pass California for instance. The mine has been plagued with legal/financial problems, but the existence of rare earth elements that the US doesn't have are not the reason we don't go to war with China. To be cynical, if the US vitally needed those elements and China did indeed have all of them and was choking the supply off... at that point terrorists might suddenly appear in China requiring the US to send military troops to liberate the poor Chinese (and their rare earth elements).

"If" the US vitally needs those elements? How much modern tech (or military hardware) can you name that doesn't require rare earths?

> Molycorp

Last I heard, they filed for bankruptcy, probably because of China cornering the refinement market.

> The mine has been plagued with legal/financial problems

Yes. The video I linked to was an attempt to work around those problems. It failed, but that doesn't mean a domestic source cannot happen in the future.

for the rest, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10310969

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