The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself
noahpinion.blog
noahpinion.blog
It is all about dependency trees. The US decides to divert imports from China to other countries, which in turn may import from China.
This reminds me of my day-to-day work so much; especially w.r.t. transitive dependency management. So:
If service A is 100% dependent upon service B which is 100% dependent upon service C, then service A is 100% dependent on service C.
At some point you need redundancy to protect against disruptions, outages, supply chain issues, policy changes, wars (either physical or economic), etc.
My (probably silly) question is: Does anyone know of "building block" or "core" services (such as authentication, authorization, BLOB storage, data storage, queuing) which are multi-cloud by design? Meaning service X offers SLAs for service endpoints hosted in AWS, GCP and Azure? If/when any of these "go down", consumers can (automatically?) flip a switch to route to another cloud service implementation?
I'll read this later: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/multi-cloud-deployment/
This is already happening with more than ~80% of products that are "Made in Vietnam" and at least ~40% of products that are "Made in Korea." Not only do the raw materials come from China, but most of the work is done in China. The product is shipped overland from a Chinese factory to Vietnam or Korea, then some screws are tightened, some paint is slapped on, or a label is applied, and the product is re-exported.
Among other things, this is effective for tariff evasion.
And it's usually at least somewhat legitimate. It doesn't take much to make a product that's assembled in China "Made in Vietnam," even in a legal sense. Consider: https://casetext.com/case/ferrostaal-metals-corp-v-us
Basically, there was a tariff on Japanese steel. US-based plaintiffs -- steel distributors -- sent that steel to New Zealand, had it galvanized, and re-exported it to the USA as a "Made in New Zealand" product. A Judge holds that the galvanization process (which is laughably cheap) is enough to render the steel "Made in New Zealand."
When all's said and done, Chinese factories haven't slowed down and Chinese GDP is still rising (by more than American GDP) which tells you that the "decoupling" has to be in some respect illusory.
But, you appear correct, the decoupling does appear to be an illusion.
Can we really know that anymore? China has stopped publishing a majority of economic indicators.
Honestly, I'm tired of this "oh they're totalitarian, so we cannot believe their statistics when it's good" stance. It looks so much like a comfortable self-deceit.
I’m tired of it too, but I think it’s better than “not use any data points” or “trust the super subjective data points put out by a totalitarian regime so they aren’t comparable to other countries.”
I don’t think the US is perfect, but economic indicators that they put out are probably as good as they get, all things considered.
But I think the complaint was more to say why they weren’t looking at other data they would like, and other countries provide reliably, and instead must limit to what the US and other countries report.
I understand this sentiment when it's applied to shithole countries where statistics cannot be verified in meaningful ways. But China is too big and too integrated into the world economics to fake or dismiss Chinese data. You can independently prove a lot of Chinese data by comparing it with their western trade counterparts.
Chinese statistics are notoriously biased. There is a cottage industry of hedge funds using satellite imagery to correct their figures and trade on it.
That is the national government's approach, for the most part: tweak the basket of goods you use for inflation here, pick the best looking among several measures there, and so on. The overt manipulation occurs at the subnational level: Chinese statistical work is heavily decentralized and officials are promoted (or not) partially on the basis of meeting growth targets. The national government corrects for this to some degree - but estimating just how manipulated the data is is hard, and provides another lever you can pull to push it one way or another.
Federal statistical agencies in the US conduct more and better direct research and report through fewer (though not zero) layers of politically motivated actors.
Source?
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-july-exports-impo...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/reality-of-ocean-container...
https://www.mahindrafarmequipment.com/services/tractors#:~:t....
The Philippines are famous for this too.
https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/201...
https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/201...
https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Vol_48_No_...
The whole point of this article is to rebute the point you've made. From the article:
> The Economist’s basic argument is that because many of the goods exported to the U.S. from countries like Vietnam contain a lot of parts and components made in China, “decoupling is phoney”.
Here's one of the arguments the article makes against this:
> But there are reasons to think that at least part of the drop in U.S. dependence on Chinese imports is real — at least, the recent drop in the last couple of years. First, Chinese exports overall are down substantially from 2021.
[...]
> To the extent that falling investment in China is due to corporate de-risking, it’s probably eventually going to spread all the way up the supply chain. If you’re a U.S. company that moves production from China to Vietnam because of the risk of war, and your Vietnamese factory is importing most of its parts from China, you’ll know it. And you’ll know that you’re still exposed to China risk, and you’ll look around for alternative places for your Vietnamese factory to get its parts and components. That might take time — years even, given China’s dominance of manufacturing. But as long as the risk of conflict stays high for years, companies will keep looking for ways to build entire supply chains that never run through China. And they will succeed.
The risk for companies to build supply chains that completely avoid China is that they will be outcompeted by competitors who won't and who will make use of these loopholes.
2021 was a great year for Chinese exports especially due to COVID. It's one of the countries that suffered the least economic damage, and it's exports actually grew immensely compared to previous years.
PRC export value went from 2.5T in 2019 to 3.4T in 2021, to 3.6T in 2022. It increased more during 3-4 years of covid than previous 10 years combined (1.4T in 2009). Primarily because 0covid left most of PRC undisrupted, most of the time, which setup PRC to export to most of world, especially global south. Currently everyone's exports down due to global slow down, but PRC exports down from stupid high peak. It's more surprising how much of exports PRC is holding onto due to artificial conditions caused by covid. Reverting back to 2021 (3.4T) would be a 5 steps forward 1 step back situation vs, reverting back to 2020 (2.6T) which would be status quo.
What degree of economic damage would fundamentally destabilize China politically such that Xi is deposed?
If stupid me is thinking about such vulnerabilities/risks, would foreign businessmen bet on Chinese factories, or move them to the newer/cheaper labor markets I've been hearing about for the last 10 years like Vietnam and Malaysia?
And Jinping is 70, do you think he's lasting to 80? When he croaks, due to his elimination of what semblance of political power handover / elections that used to exist in China, it will be a bloodbath.
> In 2022, both U.S. exports to China and imports from China continued to grow for a third year in a row. U.S. exports totaled $153.8 billion, an increase of 1.6% ($2.4 billion) from 2021; U.S. imports from China totaled $536.8 billion, an increase of 6.3% ($31.8 billion); and the trade deficit with China was $382.9 billion, an increase of 8.3% of ($29.4 billion).
- dept. of commerce.
Truth is when they ask a random dude on TV if he's ok with drinking Japanese radioactive water (the trendy distraction these days), he replies that he didn't intend to make children so he doesn't care if he loses fertility due to contaminated water...
Nobody gives a fuck about shit, we all pretend to work while they pretend to pay us, we get jailed for months in our own homes when there's a stupid sneeze in the city and get all released under the "it's just a fever, wait a few days" admonitions of the same doctors who captured us when we all get it at the same time, we're either completely ignoring the communist bullshit and doing nothing they expect us to do, or totally believing in it and doing only the BS they expect us to do, which produces nothing.
Kids are unemployed, elderlies are fascists, politicians are spineless and factories impotent. The GDP growth is as real as the president's official salary.
our leased (up to 70 years) homes
You buy a house, there are expectations it's yours. Each time it's been tested the government had a choice between murdering desperate owners or accepting to just renew on the same terms. They chose to renew.
Freehold offer no more security: I come from a civil law, freehold country, well, the government can seize houses it wants at low cost any time anyway. Sometimes to build a highway, sometimes to rent to immigrants.
This line is so wrong. You can't have 22% (at least) youth unemployment rate, and 19th straight month collapsing land sales revenue https://www.reuters.com/article/china-economy-landsales/chin... (which is how local government get most of its money), and your biggest and second biggest real estate developer going bankrupt, and still support a 5% GDP growth as mentioned by the Chinese government. just doesn't happen in a real world.
And there are so many reports of factories closing down, especially in the Shenzhen and Dongguan districts, either online videos or news reports https://thediplomat.com/2023/04/dongguans-industrial-woes-ch..., that I don't know why you're attempting to lie outright.
Increasing youth unemployment last few years also has little NET growth impact because PRC is graduating MORE every year, 12m this year vs 8m from ~5 years AGO. What's happening is is MORE youth in absolute numbers are entering work force, even if relative youth unemployment is higher. And net unemployment is 5%, meanning youth get work eventually. They just have flexbility of chilling at home to find job they want, or fuck around and realize they have to do something - side affect of PRC having high youth live at home + high house hold savings rate + low student debt.
Industry has been closing in coastal due to land price for years. Low value/light has been moving abroad due to labour price. New (high value) industries are being shifted to interior industrial clusters. PRC export value grew by 1T in the last 4 years, more than the previous 10 combined. West might be trying to decouple, but PRC has been coupling more than ever, especially with global south.
Truth of the matter is PRC has just undergone the most intensive phase in globalization in human history, and exports down only due to weak global economy, but it's still a 5 steps forward, 1 step back situation. The lie is motivated useful idiots who pick a few indicators to rationalize dampening growth to 4-5%, aka nearly HALF, is still not enough, and real growth must be near 0 because PRC is collapsing due to exogenous crisis when in reality PRC proactively triggered 3RL and other policies in a MANAGED unwinding because they could do so and still have room to hit 4-5% growth.
I wonder how long they are willing to do that. Those countries aren’t on the best terms with China either. Doubt they want a dependency on China if they can help it.
Wouldn’t they want to take over the manufacturing (along with it the profit) too instead of just re-exporting for a profit? They are in prime position to do so given they are the gateway for China’s goods - and can cut China’s goods out and substitute their own.
I feel like that position is similar to being a middleman - in which case its clear the skillset to be the producer is not the same.
For countries like Vietnam, that might be due to lack of investment.
For the last few decades, everyone was concentrating on China. This I believe has began to change - foreign investment in China is down if Im right.
On the other hand relationships between Vietnam and the West has been thawing the last decade or so - especially with the US.
Countries like Mexico are also looking to take on some of China’s manufacturing load - their proximity to the US is an advantage.
Tariffs on China effectively gives all their competitors a competitive advantage which will only help develop said competitors.
The 7% number is from 2018 data (!) -- yet Noah is talking about "since 2019." And, looking at the graph again, the major shift occurs in 2019.
So Noah's "7%" (again, from 2018, largely before the "decoupling") is totally irrelevant, and he handwaves away the possibility that China has since done an increasing amount of exporting to SE Asia for re-export to the USA.
They also do this so that they know nobody is using slave labor.
Maybe things have changed; I'd certainly be glad to hear it. But we all know of Wall Street's long history of hatred towards physical inventory.
Accounting and taxes on physical inventory are pretty stupid and cause a lot of Wall Street's hate for inventory. The more costs there are to storing inventory the less desirable or even viable it is to store inventory.
Automakers (and everybody else) reacted very quickly and shut down/decreased staff almost immediately.
Where they got caught out was in assuming that the semiconductor industry would return to normal quickly. That was a huge mistake.
Everything in business is so hyper-optimized to hold no inventory that nobody can absorb demand increase shocks of any amount, anymore. In addition, the fact the companies actively downsized during Covid meant that things couldn't even go back to pre-Covid levels quickly.
Two examples from the top of my head:
Confluent Kafka: https://developer.confluent.io/courses/hybrid-cloud/intro/ MongoDB Atlas: https://www.mongodb.com/docs/atlas/cluster-config/multi-clou...
For higher level services, I can't think of an example. For the examples above, you're still thinking at VM level, whereas you typically don't do that if you purchase a higher level service.
Isn't that cost prohibitive?
It’s very hard to convince the money people that we should double our cloud storage bills in case all of AWS goes down.
In order to really replace A, you'll need to hire, train and form software developers specializing in A. This is both time consuming and expensive.
This falls in the same line of some people (economists) who think that printing money will generate wealth. Sounds familiar?
In the 90s the U.S., EU and Japan were the champions of free trade for industrial products and services.
However, when it would come to agricultural goods they were the champions of tariffs and protectionism. Why? Easy: because 3rd world countries were very competitive on agriculture. Egypt had better cotton, Argentina had beef, Brazil had orange juice, Cuba had sugar, etc, etc.
3rd world countries would complain about the hypocrisy and the rich would reply that they should just shut up and give up on protectionism.
Now the whole Southeast Asia is competing with rich countries in industrial goods and protectionism is not protectionism anymore, is "decoupling".
US mandates on removing protectionism were never for them; they are for others. Their recommendations on how to run our economies are always like this; they are never for them, it's always for us.
They sometimes use fancy speak like "decoupling" in hopes we won't be able to tell.
I have the impression that the China today is the result of the planning made in the 90s, implemented in the 00s. What planning the west did last 20 years? I think the west already lost and this is the tantrum. :(
I think it's quite telling that the "workshop of the world" does not export high precision CNC equipment made by domestic companies in any meaningful amounts. Similarly, even before any export controls and sanctions really kicked in, their domestic chip makers had huge problems with yield and quality even though they bought tried and tested machines (and sometimes whole departments) from established chipmakers.
I'm also unsure about your comment about Southeast Asia competing with rich countries on industrial goods. It seems to me it's more specifically about China and not so much other countries in Southeast Asia.
I wouldn't disagree with your offhand comment about the 90s and such and the US, EU, and Japan. But I'm not really sure what the point of it is given that countries such as China (not the only one) have maintained protectionist policies. Since many didn't go along with the idea of free trade and the theory that free trade would open up global markets and raise everyone's living standard (which was probably just marketing from those who stood to profit) you can't then blame the US, EU, Japan, or others for reverting back to more protectionist policies to be in line with how most other countries tend to operate.
Hey we should all do this thing that stands to benefit everyone, but we all have to do it
Starts doing it
Hey we all have to do it or it won't work
No change
Ok fine we're not going to do it then
Repercussions/results/etc.
Just like bribery in 3rd world is corruption but here, it's called lobbying ( cost of doing business ).
America exported its manufacturing know how for decades, and now it is taking it back as the trade is no longer as favorable. Seems rational to me. SE Asia came out a huge winner in the process, and now the time has come to stand up their tech and manufacturing in their own.
Much ado about nothing imho.
And maybe we stop using these cheap things anyway since they're garbage anyway. Perhaps it's time to re-start building things to last, or at least that's my wish...
It really is what it says on the tin. It's a risk for the U.S. to be economically dependent on a state whose government does not share American values, and that is threatening its neighbors with invasion.
Mexico is the USA's second largest trading partner worldwide. Exports of goods and services to Mexico support an estimated 1.1 million jobs (Department of Commerce). Mexico is also the second largest source of foreign crude oil to the USA, and the top export destination for US petroleum & natural gas. The US-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) entered force in 2020, replacing NAFTA. The countries have a variety of complex ties. There are other treaties and areas of cooperation too, such as the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC). A security cooperation agreement called the Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities went into effect in 2021.
As for Vietnam, the US and Vietnam established a bilateral trade agreement in 2001. The US provides maritime security assistance to the country through the Maritime Security Initiative, Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, and through foreign military financing. US transferred Coast Guard cutters to Vietnam in 2017 and 2020 to bolster its law enforcement capabilities.
Those sound like alliances to me, but I'm interested to hear what other definition you're using.
Therefore psychologically and in terms of US foreign policy, those countries are more allied to the US then China.
It's not black and white. It lives on a gradient.
The entire point of formal alliances is that they are sworn, binding guarantees that can be relied on, not wishy-washy resolutions.
Think about it. It's the other way around. Reality is not defined by the word alliance, clearly there exists a gradient of countries who are more friendly than others.
Stick with the intention of the word by the person using it not the absolutist pedantic definition.
If you want to redefine ally to mean something closer to "partner", then Vietnam is also a "China ally" because it has a good partnership with China. Mexico could also be called a China ally by this loose definition.
But if you follow Vietnamese IR, you would know they take geopolitical neutrality very seriously, due to drama of 20th century. Both US and China separately invaded Vietnam because they thought it a Soviet proxy. No chance of Vietnam becoming an actual ally of either in the short term.
Similar for Mexico. US-Mexico relationship is extremely complicated right now. Right-wing US calling for invasion of Mexico on "drug war" grounds. Mexico purchasing and nationalizing Texas oil company, etc.
Vietnam: 84% have a favorable opinion of the U.S., 11% have a favorable opinion of China https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2023/07/19/vietna...
Mexico: 60% favorable of U.S., 30% unfavorable. For China, 57% favorable, 33% unfavorable https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinio... https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/07/27/views-of-china...
The government of Vietnam has emphasized that it will not "choose" between US or China. ASEAN nations in general feel this way. They oppose war itself, and can't be tricked into taking sides in one instigated by Washington (or Beijing).
> Vietnam: 84% have a favorable opinion of the U.S., 11% have a favorable opinion of China
Please actually read the articles you link. This is for Vietnamese American citizens, not citizens of Vietnam. It is utterly unsurprising that immigrants have a overwhelmingly favorable opinion of their new home country, and reveals next to nothing about the PRC-SRV relations .
The numbers for Vietnamese citizens are similar. Vietnam one of the most pro-American, anti-Chinese countries in the world. 76% favorable for the U.S., 78% unfavorable for China, though the dataset is older. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/07/14/chapter-1-the-... https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/07/14/chapter-2-chin...
We've gotten a bit far from the original point - for the purposes of the U.S. supply chain, Vietnamese government neutrality and strong public support is plenty to negate the risk that the country suddenly cuts off the supply chain. My original point is that de-coupling from China is a national security decision, not protectionism, and production is moving to Vietnam because it's a friendlier country than
Informally, I do think Vietnam can be considered a U.S. ally. China is signaling a desire to expand, and most of its neighbors consider it the biggest threat to their security. There's a reason that Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all among the countries that have the highest opinion of the U.S. It's not a trick - they are acting in their own security interests.
Vietnamese neutrality makes perfect sense, and I don't think they'd get involved in a war that didn't involve them. But the country is certainly friendly enough to rely on for the U.S. supply chain.
Trade issues with Japan dominated relationships, especially the threat that American automobile and high tech industries would be overwhelmed. Japan's economic miracle emerged from a systematic program of subsidized investment in strategic industries—steel, machinery, electronics, chemicals, autos, shipbuilding, and aircraft.[118][119] During Reagan's first term Japanese government and private investors held a third of the debt sold by the US Treasury, providing Americans with hard currency used to buy Japanese goods.[120] In March 1985 the Senate voted 92–0 in favor of a Republican resolution that condemned Japan's trade practices as "unfair" and called on President Reagan curb Japanese imports.[121]
The Japanese real estate bubble was directly caused by the former and the latter put the nail in the coffin by massively tightening the Japanese economy, bursting the huge debt bubble and robbing the BOJ of any and all tools to try contain the explosion.
US architected Japan's downfall and there was nothing Japan could do because they weren't allowed to have their own guns anymore so couldn't stand up for themselves and refuse to sign/implement aforementioned accords.
> Startlingly, however, The Economist provides no actual data to support this claim.
Ha! This was a reason I unsubscribed from the economist. A lot of times it makes broad claims and then leaves out the details to support said claim. Almost like it expects the reader to treat the economist like a first hand source and therefore no citation needed.
Good on the author for calling this out and then rebutting with details of their own (not necessarily supporting author’s claims though since I haven’t had time to really think about it just yet).
This is kind of the point of The Economist; its intended audience is busy executives who are on board with its ideological bias and don’t care much about footnotes and citations. Sounds like it wasn’t the publication for you.
But as an American, when it comes to anything relevant to my country, I've noticed that in the past few years any remaining social liberal edges have been sanded off and they've become predictably center-right.
Basically we are back to where we were in the 1980s in many ways.
When confronted with slightly more competent weak opponents (e.g. Taliban), the US military performs far more poorly. This poor performance worsens sharply as enemy competence scales.
Full-scale war with near-peer or peer adversaries? USA is SOL.
But aside from the loud-mouthed war hawks or perma-doomers on YouTube, I don't think anyone in the US or China (or Russia, for that matter) with decision-making power really has the appetite for direct open conflict, since it means the end of all things.
Expect more proxy wars like Ukraine...
Russia and America have fought albeit slightly indirectly.
US soldiers engaged Wagner in Syria in the Battle of Khasham.
Rough outcome of this battle.
US / SDF side - 1 wounded
Wagner / Syrian government side - 50 - 100 dead. upto 200 wounded.
My point is that the following paragraph doesn't exactly hold up if you consider Wagner to be "slight more competent weak opponents" which I would.
> When confronted with slightly more competent weak opponents (e.g. Taliban), the US military performs far more poorly. This poor performance worsens sharply as enemy competence scales.
And sure, the US has successfully 'fought' similar 'battles' against groups of Taliban troops before, but eventually lost the war.
Iraq and Afghanistan may very well be more detrimental than useful. They made the US military focus on aspects of warfare that aren't relevant to a near peer conflict, and unlearning that is a difficult task that's currently consuming a lot of resources.
The US didn't invite china to anything. The US begged, threatened and cajoled china to open their immense and cheap labor force. China had what the US wanted. It was nixon that went to china, not mao that came to the US.
> The thinking was they would move away from communism and Russia and towards an open Democracy.
That's as stupid as saying we helped saudi arabia, kuwait, qatar, etc develop their oil and gas field so that they will become christian. If your assertion was true, we'd be trading with cuba and north korea today. If your assertion was true, we would have been top trading partners with the soviet union. Instead we isolated the soviet union and sanctioned them. Did we only want china to be a democracy? Not the north koreans, cubans and soviets?
> Such as the Democracy movements in the 80s that were ultimately crushed in Tiananmen square.
'Democracy' movement. Right. And look where china is today? I think china made the right decision to crush the 'democracy' movement. Don't you?
It's the same debunked propaganda I've been hearing from the likes of gordon chang since the early 2000s. Morons actually believed we invaded iraq to bring freedom and democracy. So it shouldn't be surprising that morons believe we exploited their cheap labor to bring democracy to china. It's cringe level propaganda.
This term is functionally meaningless. Authority is not a coherent ideology (an -ism), it's just the natural outcome of the state maintaining a monopoly on violence.
The real question is: whose authority, and for whom?
History has shown it to be right. All you have to do is look at the soviet union/russia.
> It doesn’t flow that their economic success was tied exclusively to authoritarianism.
No. But it is tied to the crushing of the 'democracy' rebellion.
> One might argue they would have a stronger domestic consumer economy if they hadn’t.
You can argue anything but you can't deny reality. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
In the last few decades, the overall Chinese population has seen dramatic upticks on all sorts of quality-of-life measurements. It doesn't look like an obvious kleptocracy. The surveys we have, regardless of how much it can be claimed they're cooked, indicate the public is broadly happy with the government. Maybe a single-party system works for them, at least at this point in time. I'd argue if you have multiple diverse functioning government types, that's worth preserving. Ecosystem diversity is valuable, just from a perspective of "when we get the next big crisis, maybe one has better tools available to solve it."
There's nothing wrong with dangling Western style democracy as an option to the Chinese-- "if and when you want to try it, here's a body of experience and we can consult", but treating it as an end-all-be-all for an audience that broadly isn't begging for it is asking for friction.
This, of course, assumes a level of good faith which I suspect is delusional. The real narrative was always less about democracy and human rights and more about property rights. Saudi Arabia has a terrible human rights record, but the West feels safe enough that they're not going to nationalize their investments, so it all gets swept under the rug, alongside bits of Jamal Khashoggi's corpse.
In my opinion, yes.
Any other system of government means that you're being governed without consent and without a means to remove those in power without violence.
In short, any regime without a democratic mandate is an illegitimate dictatorship. No mater how enlightened it claims to be.
It requires either a lot of good faith by participants (most participants actually striving for the public good, and voters being able to disagree with an opponent, but still respectfully accept defeat) or systemic guardrails to effectively enforce good-faith style behaviour.
Even with those guidelines in place, some countries are going to have a hard time with the nuts and bolts (How do you safely deliver ballots and count votes with an active insurgency? How do you campaign when only 10% of voters can read? How do you avoid a major ethnic/religious schism just being re-processed through the electoral system?)
It's an aspirational goal, to be sure, but we can also respect that other systems are working reasonably well for some audiences, and in some cases might work better than a "more legitimate" democracy.
The “state” does not know best.
The reason that dictators withhold the vote is the same reason they refuse to allow a free press. They are scared of criticism.
If they really knew what was best for everyone it would be obvious and people would vote for them.
…but it ain’t obvious, so the hang on to power by repressing anyone that points that up is up and down is down.
4211
I'm not sure most-- or even any-- people really know what's best for everyone. It gets even more complex when it turns into what's best for one group versus another, or what's best for today comes at a cost to be paid in 5-10-20 years.
It's easy to catapult yourself into office by promising people ice cream instead of broccoli. The leader you want has to be persuasive enough to convince voters they want broccoli. An autocrat can just mandate broccoli.
What if he just built a vanity project trans-fat factory and doesn’t want to loose face, so insists everyone must eat cheap trans-fats?
What if the autocrat decides to block access to a free-press and to jail anyone that dares to say ice cream makes you fat?
We can play what if scenarios all day but end result is always the same.
In an dictatorship you can’t remove a bad actor from power or even laugh at them.
In a democracy you can.
Imagine if Joe Biden went on TV tomorrow and said "we're taxing gasoline to USD100 per gallon to force private cars off the road. It's gonna be tough for a while, but you'll thank me in 2050 when the public transit is fully fleshed out and we hit a 1.5c climate goal." He'd be driven out of office in favour of someone who ran on a campaign of "let's roast the next generation so you can save a dime at the pump today." OTOH, Xi Jinping could probably get away with it.
Xi isn't enacting enlightened laws to protect the environment. Quite the opposite. He's opening more and more coal fired power stations. He doesn't care if the rivers overflow.
You're saying "but he could do good", he won't. Dictators never do.
Except we've allowed ourselves to loose our industrial base.
China does have serious issues with its real estate economy and fertility. But the US also got through the grave issues of 2008, and China still has 1.4b people who take rigorous education a lot more seriously than many in America. And they will have far more people than us in the foreseeable future too.
Do not count China out, they are a “hurricane,” are dangerously aimed at Taiwan, but with better understanding we can hopefully all defuse the situation amicably.
China misses GDP targets by 1% for a single quarter, every news outlet reports on it, and in five years everyone is going to wonder how China has gotten to the place it has. That's basically happened repeatedly over the past 15-20 years.
Either way I doubt it will be that much of an economic catastrophe, even if it is a humanitarian one.
I agree, and the other way, in many BRICS and other countries, there is a broad consensus that global economies need to become less dependent on US Dollars.
Both efforts at decentralization and lessening concentration of power are probably going to lead to new good results, as hegemons are forced to compete rather than enjoy a near-monopoly worldwide.
And I think that's generally true in everything, everywhere. The reason you can walk down the street safely in most places is not because of an implicit agreement of cooperation, but simply because we're all working in our best interest. You don't even consider messing with other people, because you'd just end up in prison for negligible gains. And indeed as soon as that threat and imminence of harsh consequence disappears, it suddenly becomes much less safe to walk down those streets.
BRICS is not united in some ideological conformity, but instead in self interest. They don't want to be dominated by a single hegemon. And I think this form of cooperation based solely on self interest - is far more likely to persist and yield fruitful results. I also expect this is why agreements will, and should, take much longer. Instead of just bum-rushing some virtue filled "Treaty of Whatever" that'll get scrapped by any participating government when it becomes inconvenient, they want to ensure there are implicit self-interest motivated systems driving cooperation through any foreseeable circumstance.
Their primary complaint is that they wish they were hegemons, except to them hegemony means being far more of an asshole to those you dominate than the US's terms. Thus their need to try to force the issue rather than naturally ending up in that position. This is also an issue India and China would conflict on, as being neighbors, they seek to be hegemons over the same region.
They're talking about moving past the USD, but none of them have the trust and general guarantees it has had and none of them are going to risk putting their trade in a currency that would be dependent on the whims of their direct competitors.
I also disagree with your premise that this is comparable to nuclear deterrence. While nukes have been a deterrent to conflict between the US and USSR, Europe and USSR and perhaps also between India and China, they haven't really been a large factor at all in Europe and in Africa.
I think they've been comparatively peaceful not because of nukes, but because European countries were forced to come to terms with the futility of trying to be hegemons over each other over both world wars, with the second one having finally been brutal enough to make them give that up. Now as WW2 fades from living memory, they remain peaceful due to deep integration between cultures that makes it difficult for them to "other" another enough to justify war.
The world order as you know it today is not even remotely "natural." And this is a fundamental component to try to appreciate the geopolitical relations between countries, as well as how other nations are going to perceive the various threats of the world.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[2] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/how-many-...
In Yemen, the US-led airstrikes have bombed hospitals, markets, etc. as recently as a couple years ago, leading to the largest humanitarian disaster in the world: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
In multiple countries across Africa, US-trained officers have led numerous coups: https://theintercept.com/2022/03/09/intercepted-podcast-afri...
Yes, it's true that USA seems to have stopped overthrowing governments in South America (if you don't count the coup in Honduras, or our upcoming invasion of Haiti). But countries across south America remember the decades of overthrowing governments and installing our puppets there. And countries across Africa are seeing it today.
Collectively, the "global south" and the "middle east" doesn't have a great view of the USA. So it's not surprising that many of them are joining BRICS as a way to have some allies against US aggression and hegemony, or at least counter its financial dominance with the dollar, world bank and IMF. It's not unlike the governments of countries that experienced USSR's aggression and hegemony seeking to join NATO, in order to have some allies against USSR, and now against Russia. It's not necessary for all their interests to align, in order for some of them to align. "The enemy of their enemy is their friend", is very much in play here.
But you can go further, beyond governments and politicians (as I like to do) and look at polls of regular people around the world. It's not very favorable to USA. Not just "years ago", but let's just look at the last 20 years. The public in our allied countries in Europe named USA as the greatest threat to world peace:
2002: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2003/12/10/anti-america...
2007: https://www.ft.com/content/70046760-27f0-11dc-80da-000b5df10...
Across the rest of the world:
2014: https://nypost.com/2014/01/05/us-is-the-greatest-threat-to-w...
2021: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/05/us-threat-demo...
2022: https://thewire.in/world/more-indians-hold-us-nato-responsib...
2007: https://www.ft.com/content/70046760-27f0-11dc-80da-000b5df10...
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of US interventionist foreign policy, but that is largely irrelevant to the global trading system. Money talks, and most of the countries with money (or goods worth trading) are at zero risk of a US invasion.
As for Niger, it's not a member of that bloc nor has it even been invited to join. Regardless of how much uranium they export, they will never have any influence over the international financial and trade settlement system. So, I don't know why you would even bring that up.
BRICS is not about cooperation, but rather about allowing each independent country to fully pursue their own self interest. Right now that's not really possible when relying on economic systems controlled by the US. So we're seeing a gradual shift on the currencies countries hold, US debt holdings, the development of e.g. SWIFT alternatives like SPFS, and so on. The development of a common currency will be the next logical step.
Because we all know if a company needs to spend 100mill and a year to bring up a new supply source, their stock price will plummet due to analysts negative ratings.
It is not a "very far cry". It's almost a direct link. Industries don't just "spun out" of nothingness. These countries are not re-industrializing as much as they are re-labeling. Which is cheaper and has much better margins.
> But there are reasons to think that at least part of the drop in U.S. dependence on Chinese imports is real — at least, the recent drop in the last couple of years. First, Chinese exports overall are down substantially from 2021:
This is a really weird timeline to pick given that the pandemic year saw a very high increase in Chinese exports: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports If you look at it from that angle, it looks more like stabilizing to previous growth.
I find it interesting that both articles (The Economist) have the same prognosis, yet the came at two different conclusions: The restrictions did affect China, but only marginally. Some Chinese producers found ways around it by funneling their capacities through other countries. One is calling it a success and just a start. The other is calling it a failure.
Maybe it's too early?
Huh? The Economist is as liberal-centrist as it gets. Whatever the rift forming here is (and I agree there is one), it's happening within the neoliberal bloc.
"There are poorer countries yet to be exploit" exploit is it. The contortions involved in being anti capitalism
What's CRAZY to me is why this hasn't always been the case. Who thought it was a good idea to depend on unfriendly countries like China? Right, I know who thought that. Those who also claimed "if we trade with them enough, they'll like us" did.
Fuck depending on China, or Russia, for that matter. The West should have all its critical dependencies within it. At most we could get non-critical niceties from the outside, no more than that.
Change my mind.
Policymakers in the late 90s couldn't necessarily predict swings in American opinion 20 years later.
For example: being invited to rimpac and then sending uninvited ships (2014)
Why should they have to be "in the fold"?
Taiwan is a sovereign, independent, democratic nation. The Chinese Communist Party has never had political control over Taiwan. It just claims the right to overrule the right to self-determination of 23 million people because it feels like it.
The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is an unincorporated U.S. territory, but it could leave at any time. The commonwealth has held four referendums, none of which have found a strong majority for either statehood or independence, so the island kinda keeps muddling along with the status quo. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, and though they don't have representation in the U.S. federal government, they also don't pay federal taxes and have an elected local government.
The ethics of the situation are not complicated. The CCP can't just decide to subjugate an independent, democratic people.
Even _without_ the historical context it is completely justifiable from a national security perspective to push out the military presence of the most aggressive nation in the past century.
Lastly - the gall for an American to invoke "self-determination" after its track record.. simply incredible. We are what, one week removed from the leaks re: Imran Khan?
> where it has no right to be
Would you like to tell us your version of history according to which Taiwan has no right to be? Because in the one I'm familiar with, one of the factions fighting the civil war won almost everywhere but failed to invade that island.
The fact that they've resisted and survived certainly gives them the right to be, by definition.
Delegates vote in committee. It ain't nothing. "Committees is where the real action happens"
Cuba is a much better one, it's not even hypothetical.
America doesn't claim Cuba as its territory.
If China requested parity with Taiwan in respect of America's relations with Cuba (recognition of sovereignty, trade restrictions and no American military presence there), it would be a good deal for everyone.
Where do you think the Guantanamo Bay torture facility is located?
Not even sure how you can equate a lease of one bay to claiming the whole island. Besides, If china stopped claiming Taiwan was it's territory and insisted on leasing one small base, I think we could all go to sleep better at night.
A 'lease' at gunpoint is an occupation.
And the US pays a fixed $4,000/mo, which Cuba doesn't even accept.
We've punished Cuba continually for 70 years for having a government that we didn't approve.
https://news.usni.org/2014/07/18/china-sends-uninvited-spy-s...
Happy to be corrected, show me.
Which are more often than not US dictated.
>If a country invites you to their joint military exercise, you don't spy on them during the exercise
This is nonsense. No-one does this more than the US.
https://news.usni.org/2014/07/18/china-sends-uninvited-spy-s...
Very cringey.
Then add up the population who weren't consulted.
Also, I take issue with the idea that we "made" them unfriendly. I'm pretty sure China and Russia can take responsibility for their own foreign policy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/world/middleeast/saudi-ki...
Are you trying to make a point? Make a point.
1. over fifty years ago or more at this point
2. Unpopular with the public
so it doesn’t seem like a good faith stance to pretend that’s current Us doctrine. It’s an ignorant whataboutism used by defenders of brutal regimes.
Heck they even did a coup not too long ago because a country rich with lithium elected a socialist government.
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-i...
The individual executives serving Capital are interchangeable.
It also wasn't a dictatorship. China under Xi is stupider, more short-term oriented and weaker than it was when it had internal competition for power.
The US <cough>Obama</cough> was too optimistic about the effects of trade engagement with China (and Russia) and now we get some whiplash making up for lost time.
Furthermore, until 2008 and our financial meltdown, China was a willing student of the US. After 2008, China saw how we allowed our financial systems spiral out of control, they turned away and started looking for their own path.
That said, in thing in general, the world should diversify its supply lines. It's just good policy in general -- be it for political reasons, wars, natural disasters, or pandemics.
Many of the countries in EU have quite the war history with each other.
It's easy to forget that countries like Denmark and Sweden, France and Germany, etc etc used to be bitter enemies with so many conflicts and wars between them that it's difficult to keep track.
So in your opinion why is it that it worked the countries in Europe, but not for West vs China/Russia?
It would've absolutely worked for Russia, if the EU was offering it path to EU membership together with Ukraine instead of forcing Ukraine to choose between tighter economic/political integration between its two neighbors. Time for that was early 2000s, but Europe and USA chose otherwise.
Ok so why didn't it work for China then? What's your explanation for that?
Well, Europe is not entitled to anything either. With that attitude we ended up where we are.
Then of course, as for China VS West, AFAIK there hasn't been any wars for almost a 100 years?
I also think expectations are set too high. Let's not perfect be the enemy of great - some tension is probably inevitable (Greece VS Germany, UK VS rest of the EU). But the trade war between China and the US (as media likes to put it, or at least did for a few years) is a lot (like, infinitely?) better than a real war.
This was a complaint from the beginning and it was brushed aside as xenophobia and not understanding modern economics. Its been a legitimate complaint from the beginning that has been completely ignored, even now whike we are trying to move away from China.
A determined user can easily get around this wall, while it's JUST annoying enough to make a casual user (such as myself) close the tab after the second paragraph once the modal appears.
Or just tap "continue reading" to dismiss it like a normal person.
Seriously though thanks for pointing it out because my eyes skipped right over the continue reading and went right up to the close my tab X.
Looks like its just substack with a custom domain. Those can be annoying though, for sure.
I clearly see the "continue reading" now, but I definitely recall the first time I saw this popup not seeing it and closing out of the window because I thought substack was demanding signup.
I have no doubt they've a/b tested the hell out of this UX and patted themselves on the back when first time readers started subscribing at record rates... never bother to ask what this meant for the actual UX.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/m... https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter...
Can't imagine browsing web with all the crapware, adds, nags, and trackers.