Unintended Consequences: Strategic Naïvety, China and the End of the US Empire
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
In the past few years China had ripped apart its own economy and made most of the world into its enemy, as a result vast numbers of foreign companies have pulled out of China and there is mass unemployment. The real estate market has been shown to be a bubble and is crashing.
China has ripped up its tech sector and let any billionaires know they exist only at the pleasure of the CCP as witnessed by Jack Ma.
The good days are over for China. If there’s a war it’s because China is failing, not because it is succeeding.
The USA has more to fear from itself than China in terms of its world dominance.
But I agree the US is tearing itself apart in the two party war.
It’s remarkable that people continue to frame the US’s problems in this way.
There is only 1 party that has taken the U.S. to the brink every time the debt ceiling has been a factor.
The same party is currently unable to select a speaker within its own caucus.
The same party took the U.S. to decade long wars in the Middle East.
The same party is the only major political party in the world that denies the reality of climate change.
The same party has overseen massive increases in deficits and debts while somehow pretending they will lower both.
There is nothing redeemable about the Republican Party while the worst thing you can probably say about the Democratic Party is that they might spend a little too much, and yet their spending has caused lower increases in deficits than the tax cuts implemented by the Republican Party.
The U.S. has a 1 party problem. The other party is a big standard average Western centrist party at worst.
The other party has a problem too, just a very different kind that is ultimately synergizing well with the badness of the Republican party - utter incompetence at a lot of points.
The 2016 election was a great example of that. Dem-affiliated media giving Trump all the screen time in the world and free promotion they could, because the profits are too nice to ignore and “haha who would vote for him anyway, amirite”? Check. Running a heavily disliked candidate that previously failed (in 2008), with a heavy twinge of “it is her turn”? Check. That candidate almost entirely ignoring important battleground states during the campaign, all while Trump was campaigning very aggressively in those states (and then subsequently winning them)? Check. I absolutely hate the fact that I called it out (as soon as the primaries started) that Trump was very likely to win. Which got me clowned at the time.
This is just the most surface level easiest points to make, and only about the 2016 election. If one wanted to, they could dive into this much deeper.
I will say this though, Dems seem to have gotten their shit together a bit more recently, so that’s a nice development. However, let’s not pretend that just because the Republican party is tearing things up using their methods, Dems aren’t doing the same as well (just in very different ways that help the Reps do their job more efficiently).
Yes, both sides are truly the same. Why bother even voting?
But my 2 cent on this topic as common dude is that nowadays it pretty useless to vote since both parties have scandals or some grade of corruption.
On the other hand if you don't vote you are just idle and you can't complain if things don't change if you don't act
I'm talking about almost every first world country rn not just the US
And I’ve never said anything even close to resembling “both sides are the same.” They are not. But they are both contributing to the whole tearing things apart issue, just in very different ways.
> Why bother even voting?
Because I believe that voter participation is vital to preserving any semblance of a democracy.
> The U.S. has a 1 party problem. The other party is a big standard average Western centrist party at worst.
Their entire point was about the false balance BS that enables this almost incredible level of dysfunction.
And your reply is about how the Democrats really do have problems and your list is, in a word, weak. All of it, not just the "news media covering news" item I singled out.
So you're doing exactly what the person you replied to was complaining about, and contributing to the problem.
That would be the military junta that really runs the country, masquerading as a republic through the smoke and mirrors of the revolving door between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CFR.
However my point of view is, when there is a war there are two parties fighting. One side started it more than the other, yes. One side did worse things than the other, yes. The other side did have to respond, well maybe.
But as long as this continues it's on both parties in my point of view. The democrats are not perfect. In particular, they are just as beholden to campaign contributor interests as the republicans are.
But both are fighting now and considering a loss of the other a win for their camp (zero-sum thinking). Until this is prevalent, this will not end and the country will continue to suffer. Someone will have to be the responsible one and stop it.
PS: I'm not in favour of the republicans personally, I'm socialist. I'm a lot more left-wing than even the democrats in the US. Where I don't live. And glad not to, to be honest, I have been offered a job in Silicon Valley in the past and have declined. Now, I have to say this was during the Trump reign and with the whole Corona thing going on. Not the best of times.
But I blame both for this continuing battle that puts the position of the US as a geopolitical force at risk, because the enemies don't have this particular infighting issue (easy, being mostly dictatorships) and they take full advantage of this weakness. With the world with China and Russia as major powers we are all a lot worse off.
What's keeping the US from having a Speaker of the House? Infighting within the Republican party.
Or, what have the fiercest political fights been around the Bay Area? Who "cancels" whom? It's all infighting among Democrats.
So while there's polarization, there's also infighting. This concept of "realignment" captures some of it, but not completely. (Also, Democrats have been fighting recently, with success, to hang onto labor, and Republicans have been noticeably absent from recent strikes, which calls the whole "realignment" into question.) I do see a "hidden" political axis that is split between the two parties and neutered, though.
While I'm personally more aligned with the democracts in the US (I'm a socialist in Europe), I do see the same kind of zero-sum thinking from both parties. "The loss of the other side is a win for our side". This is not sustainable as it leads to ever more polarisation.
I wrote about this in a little more detail recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37860952
I'd also agree with your characterization, in your other post, of how the proportional, Parliamentary systems in Europe make the issue a little less bad there. When that comes up I always cite Duverger's Law.
The U.S. is the world’s biggest arms seller in terms of revenue and yet it seems it’s incapable of ramping up ammunition production to meet the needs of the Ukrainian military, which would be a fraction of the needs of what a war that involved the U.S. fighting a symmetric power like China or Russia, as opposed to cave dwellers from the 19th century would require.
Add to that the general inability for the U.S. across both private and public sectors to do anything cheaply which means even a poorer nation might still have greater resource capacity than the U.S. So even though China's economy, contrary to expectations even a year ago, might now never grow as large as the US’s economy in dollar terms, it would still have greater capacity because it’s able to wrangle out a lot more output for every dollar than the U.S. is.
Finally, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine thoroughly discredited the Russian military, it’s also exposed the US’s lack of preparedness for the next version of war which will be heavily driven by drones and the like. Unfortunately the U.S. is relying on heavy expensive weaponry and doesn’t seem to have a great counter for inexpensive weaponry deployed in mass. So, Russia can fire large number of cheap Iranian drones at Ukraine, but Ukraine has to spend a million dollars worth of defensive weaponry to take down 100k worth of those drones, an economic difference which would not be sustainable in a larger war.
I can say this - as much issue as I might have working in software development, I'm definitely not interested in moving to some other state to work on ammunition presses or whatever it would be to contribute to some foreign war. Even if I believed (which I do) that we are more or less on the righteous side.
this is usually heavily weighted by consumer basket, meaning China has cheap rice, clothes and basic services, but PPP for oil, cars, aircrafts, ships, industrial machinery will be equal.
Also, growing up in the 70s and 80s, I’m a bit cynical to the “end of the us empire” stories. As theoretically Japan was going to surpass the US. Then EU. Then BRIC. Etc etc.
Remember that Rome peaked in like 200 and it took another 100-300 years to really fall apart.
Hell, Novell didn’t cease to exist until 2014 and no one smart was using it after, what, 1995? 2000?
Each empire they bring up was torn apart with an entirely different world and multiple factors that the author didn't include.
Past empires didn't learn from the history of earlier ones. Or failed to adapt to changing circumstances. And were then caught by surprise.
True, knowing what happened to past empires may not help to see where a current great power is heading. But it does help to avoid past empires' mistakes.
China appears better at avoiding such mistakes than the US, imho. That said:
"This integration into Western-dominated and US-constructed international institutions and organisations would not only help China to become a ‘responsible actor’. It would also serve to constrain Beijing's threat to the wider liberal international order, neuter China's threat as a great power competitor and leave the US's primacy unquestioned."
Western policy may have failed at the 2nd half of this quote.
But maybe it did succeed at the 1st part? At least to some degree? China's economy is highly connected with the rest of the world. Any large-scale conflict would cause China huge economic pain, regardless of the capability to develop its own tech / military, manufacture its own goods, grow its own food, etc.
Had China been (more) excluded from integration with Western economies & Western-led institutions, but developed on its own anyway, then today it could 'flex its muscle' with impunity. In the current situation, not as much.
One should alway keep such alternative scenarios in mind, before claiming the current situation is worse in any way.
Every nation that's welcomed into the international community, once in has something to lose. And as someone wrote:
"Germany after WW1 had little to lose, and dived 'happily' into WW2. But 40y later, not so much: they'd be scared to get a scratch on their Mercedes".
Today's China is much in that 40y's-on situation I think. The average Chinese isn't doing too bad. Why risk that by starting a conflict with <insert military/economic power here> ?
If they stopped doing the things that get them sanctioned they could 10x their economy but then the leadership or establishment would lose a lot of their power and ability to do as they please and follow their own version of self determination.
The point isn’t that history is the perfect tool for predicting collapse — it’s not. The point is it’s seemingly the best tool we have at this time.
What would you suggest as an alternative? Gut feeling? Intuition? “Logic”?
The last I deliberately put in scare quotes because there’s no from-first-principles mathematical / logical model of this that accounts for all of these things (and I kind of doubt there can be). And even if it was possible to create one, there isn’t one now and one has to navigate the world in its absence.
I'm not saying history is useless mind you. But the author is putting the cart before the horse, in that they don't form a strong foundation that is based on observable data or events that we suspect is contributing to the collapse.
Instead they define a probable cause "Strategic naïvety", okay fine how do we know this is the cause? From The author we don't instead they just jump straight to historic similarities and is only focused on proving the link between present and the past.
Instead to demonstrate a more proper way of analyzing plausible collapse, look at China.
When we look for China there are various observable data and signs that it isn't doing to great for this demonstration I'll focus on the social aspect, because it's harming the backbone of Chinese might, it's demographic.
We can observe various data here like the amount of young people, the amount of babies, immigrants, the welfare of the people, homelessness, social services etc.
We can also look at social dynamics such as how many people get together, what about the social hierarchy, how much trust do people have in society, how does socialization generally work? What about it's antisocial cultural norms how severe are they? Etc.
Now we can start forming a more proper picture of what the social issue are that are harming demographics, and the inability of the government to even want to consider the issue.
Now we can look into history for inspiration or as a alternative timeline into what happen, but not to how things will play out.
This same mistake “Wandel durch Handel” seems inherent to “techno optimism” no?