It’s the reality of countering an air-sea superpower as a country supplied by sea. We do a tonne of long-range logistics readiness exercises China doesn’t. Because they don’t need to.
There is no inherent virtue in stockpiling. An attritive war is all about production anyway, not starting stock. Our weakness is in low production rates of all manner of materiel, not a lack of stockpiles.
I can't read the whole article, but according to the header, they are stockpiling resources they can produce (and do so) themselve (grain, oil, gas).
They’re preparing for a siege. We’re preparing to besiege them. These are strategically different goals that result in different policies. Geographically, America is uniquely difficult to besiege. (You’d need to hold New York, Cuba and idk what on the West Coast.)
A few small and badly run ones. IIRC, the US's medical stockpile was already bare at the start of COVID, and I recall reading controversy about if it should be replenished at all when its potential worth had literally just been proven. The petroleum stockpile seems like it's mostly used for electioneering (e.g. release stockpiles in the run up to an election to lower gas prices to help incumbents). I'm not aware of any other ones, like for food and raw materials besides petroleum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...
Canada, arguably the closest US ally, is number 4 for oil output, and Mexico is 11th.
Keeping the reserves full doesn't really serve a purpose when you are capable of producing far more than you need.
Using it to stabilize prices is actually good long term thinking, because a quicker reduction in inflation will have far more long term benefits than the short term optics of liquidating a ""strategic asset"".
The only risk of a strategic petroleum shortage in the US would be as the result of an attack on US infrastructure, and I don't see how the petroleum reserves wouldn't be the first target. So there isn't any strategic risk in reducing the stockpile. When it was created, the US was a massive petroleum importer - it was a strategic asset but not anymore.
China is playing to win the future, and it’s clear in how they operate.
To power all those EVs, China's adding coal-fired electrical generation capacity at a very rapid pace. (China has plenty of coal.)
Sure. They have a strategic incentive to electrify their military. In the meantime, they need stockpiles.
Oil demand destruction, EVs, renewables, are all national economic security issues. They are stockpiling, decoupling, and becoming self sufficient internally to be prepared for an isolationist period. We can wildly speculate why, but it’s very clear that they do not want to be beholden to other nation state economic counterparties.
Days of stockpiles aren’t a strategic economic buffer. They’re tactical. You’re correct that electrification reduces one of China’s geostrategic vulnerabilities. I’m extending that to its military; stockpiles alone won’t defeat a blockade.
> The Chinese auto industry is experiencing a revolution,” said John Zeng, the director of Asia forecasting at GlobalData Automotive. “The old internal combustion capacity is dying.”
> Sales of gasoline-powered cars plummeted to 17.7 million last year from 28.3 million in 2017, the year that Hyundai opened its Chongqing complex. That drop is equivalent to the entire European Union car market last year, or all of the United States’ annual car and light truck production.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/china-auto-facto... | https://archive.today/4jCiQ
https://electrek.co/2023/04/01/ice-car-values-plummet-in-chi...
Also it kind of made sense to sell when the price was so high and fill it up later.
At full consumption. I'm pretty sure that in circumstances that would lead to the use of the reserverve, oil would be strongly rationed and directed towards hospitals/army/police/logicstics/etc.
Our strategic reserves are for low-grade emergencies. For anything minor, the status quo will do. For anything major we’ll re-route civilian supplies. In between, the strategic reserve lets the military increase consumption without raising voters’ gas prices.
Especially given that the US is an exporter of energy.
https://www.farmlinkproject.org/stories-and-features/cheese-...
Are we so sure that's true?
Aren't tax deferrals on 401ks a long term bet?
It's structured differently, power is distributed rather than concentrated.
Is power concentration a good thing?
Aren't long term bets extremely risky? Professional investors have a hard time beating the market. You think politicians can?
Arguably, the ability to tax people does offer other investment opportunities.
You misunderstand. I'm mainly talking about the policy level, not the individual level. The US let a fetish for free markets override pretty much every other national priority.
Also 401ks to a lot of things, and one of the more interesting ones they encourage laborers to internalize the interests of the capitalist class, which they are very much not served by.
Okay but what about the alternative? If 401ks didn't exist and "the capitalist class" were lobbying against it, I could plausibly imagine people like complaining about capitalists are oppressing the working class by hoarding the mechanism to which people can build wealth.
There are food lines in New York, and 2 million people there can't afford food... just a small supply-chain disruption and we'll have even more massive stability problems.
arguably that's what the stockpiles are for
You may appreciate this economics lecture on industrial policy: https://youtu.be/V6egGoCrbIo
If you think China is only subsidizing the manufacturing of stupid things like sneakers, you're sorely misinformed. They pretty much have a lock on solar panel manufacturing, due to subsidies, and I think they drove most of their Western competitors out of business. That's kind of strategic industry, with the green energy transition. IIRC, they're also getting there with batteries and EVs, but at least the West is starting to use protectionism again to protect that area.
IIRC, one of the nice things about China is they don't really care if these companies are profitable. They'll setup a situation of vicious cut-throat competition and overcapacity, instead of a few complacent but profitable oligopolies like the West seems to prefer. That means they win at the national level.
> ...is similar to the Apollo program?
The Apollo program was like 50 years ago. The US needs to stop leaning on its past glories to try to make its complacency comfortable, and instead actually deal with its problems.
Your country can do well too if you invest for the long term instead of chasing quarterly numbers and strip mining the economy.