why is it inevitable? What do trade wars get us?
As I understand it, trade wars decrease the GDP of the world, decrease the total output and productivity of markets on both sides. I mean, certainly, it's better than a war war, but it's something that has great costs for both sides, and few (no?) Benefits for either.
Also, just like trade wars, wars come at great costs to both sides, but they still happen.
but if both sides are worse off at the end than at the beginning... why do it? Are people really willing to immiserate themselves if they know the other guy is even worse off?
I always thought of wars as conflicts over resources where one side, at least, though they could gain more by fighting than what the fight would cost them. But some wars, I have a hard time putting some wars into that framework without going way out into conspiracy land, and even then, what possible profit, say, could the US have gotten out of Vietnam, or the USSR out of Afghanistan that would justify the cost of those wars? was it just an error in judgement about how much such a war would cost?
And also, yes, some consider relative wealth more important than absolute wealth; "I'd rather have $100 and my neighbor $10, than I have $150 and my neighbor $140."
I actually think that's a bad example, 'cause if I have 10x what my neighbor has, I can easily convert some of that wealth differential into real wealth for me in ways I couldn't if we were more equal. "Hey neighbor, would you like to mow my lawn for some money?" so in a real way, the neighbor example is more about how much you want local labor vs mass manufactured goods.
> So fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication.
-- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002
Oversimplified has a great couple of Youtube videos that explain it all (this was where Vietnam finally made some kind of sense to me) in an accessible and entertaining way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I79TpDe3t2g
Some fun philosophical questions...
Do you actually know that both sides are worse off at the end?
How do you personally believe this should be measured? How confident are you that that measurement approach is correct? What is the definition of "correct" in this context?
Do you conduct your measurements at two discrete snapshots in time: before and after? Are consequences 5, 10, 50 years down the road irrelevant, both in theory and in fact?
If you are measuring GDP, do you think looking at the aggregate national level is satisfactory? Might there be some unintended consequences lurking in the shadows waiting to bite you in the ass if you ignore regional GDP?
Do the very real (democratic) consequences of people's opinions matter in your measurement, or are you content with measurements limited to the the theoretical world, where people behave as they "should"?
It's interesting how easily technical people can see the complexity in their software models, but seemingly remain blind to the complexities of planet earth and human nature.
Based on the impact of the trade war on American businesses, you are able to deduce the quality of understanding of economics of those behind the policies?
The WTO was designed to encourage free trade. The problem with free trade is that countries with developed industries will crash those that don't have developed industries. Basically, there is little incentive to join if you are still developing since it will kill your local industry.
What the WTO did is a compromise. Countries that are developing get special exceptions that expire once the country reaches certain milestones. The US was one of the founding members that helped to write these rules and the rules were designed to largely help US companies.
The exceptions allow developing countries to put rules in place to help local industry. From what I can tell China looks like it will move from a "developing" country into a "developed" country sometime in the next 5 to 10 years (based on rules that the US made when it helped setup the WTO) but now it thinks that it should happen sooner.
If they started the trade war by following rules that the US helped to write then ... I don't know what I think about that ...
Could have asked what do wars get us in the 1930s - and the answer would be: with the United Kingdom? Not much ... With Nazi Germany? Quite a bit ...
Not saying china is Nazi Germany but if you ask the question in the abstract without context then it will never really have a consistent answer.
My personal view is that the Chinese regime must fall. I would be in favour of dropping most immigration restrictions for any chinese citizens. If you cannot topple the regime you can remove it's people.
I mean, I can see why the allied countries decided they needed to throw all they had into the fight... I just don't see how Germany could have actually done the math sober and thought they could win a war against... almost the rest of the world.
Not sure, though that a "bifurcation" has to happen. We live in fact in a strange situation. The world in under a "Pax Americana" where the US are at the top and effectively rule. This is not a tenable situation especially with large countries several times the US' population.
The way forward a "multipolar world" and the role of the US is to let that happen peacefully and to play a constructive part. I am not convinced that this is their current agenda.
Whereas the current unipolar system, despite its flaws, is correlated with the largest expansion of peace and prosperity in history.
I think a lot of what we are seeing in geopolitics today comes down to world leaders realizing that there could be another pole in this system if things keep going the direction they are going. And that second pole would be an authoritarian nation which is one of the greatest human rights violators on earth, has a million people in detention for practicing moderate Islam, claims sovereignty over Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong despite vigorous protest from all the aforementioned, and who shelters a neighboring hermit state that's always threatening to nuke the other pole.
Predictably you have dictators like the ones in Cambodia, Russia and Thailand who are enthusiastic about the idea. Increasingly you have resistance to it in the West and in allied stable democracies like Japan and India.
In my view it is simply 'physically' impossible for the world to remain unipolar under American so-called leadership.
It worked for a time because the only other developed pole was Europe (and Japan), which is not united with each and every country much smaller than the US.
But as the rest of the world develops then we fall back to a situation similar to the rise of the US in Victorian times: Whatever the British thought, it was 'physically' impossible for them to remain at the top.
This is not only because of China. India, the EU, maybe an African block longer term.
In today's world, war between 'superpowers' to find out who's #1 is also simply not possible because the cost would be astronomical and the result inevitably that everyone would revert to the stone age in a nuclear wasteland.
In 100 years this will all stabilise with the US being may in 3rd place, maybe just in the top 5. No direct war, but maybe a few proxy wars in the meantime.
In the op?
Isn't it "if many powerful people believe that they can use the population under their control to satisfy their megalomania"?
WWI should probably have been resolved by not stopping the murder at Archduke Ferdinand but continuing on to any Royal/controlling person who thought going to war was a good idea.
Do nations of people actually care if they're "#1"? People on the whole want local things AFAICT, sufficient freedoms to raise their family and achieve a degree of fulfillment in their lives.
Violence has a strong tendency to seem more like a good idea than it actually is.
It was pretty tongue-in-cheek, but I was saying from that point the Royals involved could have solved things without having a World war.
Edward and Wilhelm could probably just have been spanked by their nannies and sent to bed without any supper.
I'm not well versed on it but WWI always seems to me like a duel in which the factions chose 'millions of other lives' instead of swords or pistols.
1) The divide between nation/leader is not a valuable one to make in-so-far as whether it was originally their idea or not, the nations were the ones doing the warring. I think it's dangerous to think of history as caused by individuals (despite the tendency of the textbooks to tend that way). Could the world have been different if Hitler was a better person? Sure. It also could have been different if the people were better too...
2) I can think of many counterexamples to people wanting local things. You might argue that there is a way to fit things like America's current trade war with China into the deep South's degree of fulfillment, but I'm not really interested in going down that hole. I'd rather just say that, as stated, I don't think it's a predictive model of the world.
If Hitler was a better person, he probably wouldn't have gotten into the position he did, and we'd all be invoking some other German's name as the ultimate bad-guy. However, it's also possible that the NSDAP would have picked some other fool as their leader, and that person would have been less competent, and they would have been much less successful in their war campaign, or perhaps not even have gained the power they did.
But the ultimate reason Germany took the path they did is because of the way WWI turned out for them, and the horribly punitive measures they were forced to agree to by the English and French. The world would be very different now if the English and French hadn't been such assholes.
Problem being US is discarding its previous status, maybe because it is pretty expensive to sustain.
The longest/largest expansion of peace and prosperity sounds great, but the major enabler and beneficiary of such expansion is ironically, China.
I would not frame the current ongoing unsettlement of established order around the world as the war of good and evil, democracy versus totalitarianism. It could simply due to the fact of the west's diminishing lead in terms of technology and economy. On paper, we are still innovating faster than ever, however as more players on the playground, the exclusive period of ripping monetary reward from innovations is shortening, no matter it is through theft or reverse-engineering or just competitor learning faster, even open source. Knowledge is spreading faster than ever.
Such trend doesn't start with China, it started with Japan, then to SK/Taiwan, finally it had reached China. Had China reached Japan's status domination of technology like it was in the 80s and 90s, with its huge domestic market, it will wield unthinkable influence over the global economy, and it will lead to empower its military ambitions.
So where does this all lead. It is hard to predict really. With a loss of vision and confidence, this world would be much more unpredictable thus dangerous, but probably something could be done to prevent a Cold War 2.0, until the equilibrium is reached.
It was de facto independent because of the collapse of the Chinese central government during the 1911 revolution. But most of China was under the control of local warlords at that time. Both the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China viewed Tibet as just one of many provinces that were temporarily beyond the central government's control.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...
The post-WWII expansion occurred largely under a bipolar world. Calling this the "greatest expansion of peace and prosperity in history" is very questionable, though.
> has a million people in detention for practicing moderate Islam
I'm not going to claim to be an expert on what's going on in Xinjiang, but then again, 99% of the people who give their opinions on it aren't. This isn't an issue of "moderate Islam." China has a pretty significant Hui Muslim population (much larger than the Uighur population), which does not face the same issues. The issue in Xinjiang has to do with "East Turkestan" separatism, not Islam per se. The Chinese government really does not like separatism.
> claims sovereignty over Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong despite vigorous protest from all the aforementioned
Those territories are all internationally recognized as being part of China. Hong Kong was handed back to China by the UK as the result of a treaty. Tibet was never internationally recognized as an independent state. Taiwan is the most complicated issue. Most countries, including the United States, recognize only "one China," which is the PRC. The RoC (Taiwan) also officially recognizes only "one China," which it claims to represent. Funnily enough, Taiwan's territorial claims are even more expansive than those of the PRC, since Taiwan still officially considers Mongolia to be part of China. All those islands in the South China Sea? Taiwan also claims them (and it occupies more of them than the PRC does).