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How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan
- deepVoid 7y agoIt is long overdue. China has 1.3B people and the second largest economy in the world. It is righteous for them to be Asia's military titan.
- DavidHm 7y agoI am not sure whether anyone being a military titan can be defined as "righteous", but its definitely been something that was going to happen sooner rather than later.
- Hillsborough 7y agox
- devoply 7y agoYes just as it was righteous for Japan to assert itself over all of Asia. No it's isn't. And this will not be good for the world. The reason being that being a sleeping friendly giant is much better for your long term survival than being an asshole looking to assert themselves. Especially in a world in which other people exist to challenge you, and you are challenging them. Because then they will conspire against you and try to wear you down. The only reason the US has been able to get away with being the world's asshole since WWII is that it has not really had any real competition in that field. It's just been going around fucking over countries that could not defend themselves. We don't need leaders like these in the world. We need leaders that focus on commerce and leave everything else to individuals and smaller groups to decide. Also the Communist Party of China is in no way representative of the people of China. You need democracy for that. These are basically fascist totalitarians that have succeeded. And sure the Chinese may be behind them right now, but these sort of regimes sooner or later start causing misery of their own people. Let's see how it is before that happens.
- terryschiavo22 7y agoLet's be clear. Being the world's military titan is not a desirable job. Someone has to fend off the Somali pirates, but it's not glamorous and everyone benefits equally from it (as in not just the US).
- devoply 7y agoYeah you're right the protection racket is not a glamorous job but someone's gotta do it.
- terryschiavo22 7y agoI'm not saying America doesn't do any racketeering. I am saying that they get the job done though, and the job sucks.
- landryraccoon 7y agoI don’t get it. Why is any of this true? If this is true, why doesn’t the US also take in refugees from all over the world, and take over building schools or doing more humanitarian aid as well? What exactly is the moral principle that “someone” has to do these things, and why does that “someone” have to be the US?
- panzagl 7y agoThe US does all of those things.
- terryschiavo22 7y agoIf no one fights off the Somali pirates, then no one can sail their shipping boats through those passages, and the US turns a net profit by fending off the Somali pirates because no one else can/will do it. That said, it still sucks that we're the ones that have to do it.
- landryraccoon 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Hillsborough 7y agoI wonder if you meant 'right' like 'appropriate'? Clearly you could not have meant 'righteous' since it does mean something else in English.
- mrb 7y ago> > It is long overdue. China has 1.3B people and the second largest economy in the world. It is righteous for them to be Asia's military titan. > I wonder if you meant 'right' like 'appropriate'? Clearly you could not have meant 'righteous' since it does mean something else in English. I think "righteous" is still appropriate. The word means "characterized by or proceeding from accepted standards of morality or justice". I would argue that aiming for countries to have equality (same GPD per capita, same military spending and power per capita, etc) is not only morally acceptable, but also just.
- Radzell 7y agoGoing to be a very dark decade.
- noobermin 7y agoWe should match our military spending with China's, that should do it. EDIT: I hope everyone realizes this is sarcastic. We already spend more than China and then some.
- jayd16 7y agoTo be fair, this is projecting power in Asia but the US projects power globally. That said, I'm no fan of this military budget.
- JimboOmega 7y agoIt kind of worked with the Soviet Union. They tried to keep up, but just didn't have the economic power to do it. It won't with China, because China isn't playing the force projecting world superpower game like the SU was.
- luckylion 7y agoThe SU was also much smaller than NATO wrt to population, it's reversed with China.
- Areading314 7y agoNATO countries have a comparable population to China, 938 million, according to this: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/nato-countries/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/nato-countries/
- luckylion 7y agoYeah, it's not a 2:1 thing, but 40% more is still significant. NATO countries are much more industrialized than China (the same applied when the SU was the opponent), so that certainly helps.
- jeffbax 7y agoI can't say for sure, but I have a hard time believing a lot of our spend is less efficient than other nations (just like our spend on most sectors of the economy that are heavily government-involved, like healthcare and education where we get less bang for the buck)
- Dravidian 7y agoUS should have recovered from Henry Kissinger's fu*k up much earlier & aligned with India. US saw Pakistan as an ally to fight 'communists' in Afghanistan & benefitted from India-Pakistan stand offs to keep Pakistan under pay check. Guess who else benefitted? China. China gained more from India-Pakistan enemity, while they were facing off; China gained foothold in Srilanka (by aiding them in their genocide of Tamils), built military base in Myanmar. Current Indian PM is an imbecille bigot, his vote bank politics involves destroying Pakistan & Muslims; exactly what China wants & has gain strategic superiority while India focuses on Pakistan. US had a chance of making India, a democratic country with similar values a regional super power; it chose not to. Now let the world prepare for 1984.
- dkjshfajskdfa 7y agoIndia was far too friendly with the USSR from the US point of view for that to ever happen.
- duxup 7y agoI don't think you can predict what the outcome would have been from any of those decisions with any amount of certainty.
- olivermarks 7y agoIn fiscal year 2015, US military spending was projected to account for 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending, a total of $598.5 billion. Translation: they need even more money.
- onepointsixC 7y agoAka 16% of the total budget.
- rayiner 7y agoBoth "federal" and "discretionary" are weasel qualifiers that attempt to make military spending look artificially large. For one thing, defense is one of the relatively few things the federal government is supposed to be doing--you would expect defense to account for a disproportionately large fraction of "federal" expenditures. (And it makes for misleading comparisons to countries with unified governments, where military spending is reported as a percentage of all government spending.) For another thing, many expenditures are mandatory rather than discretionary, for good reason. Peoples' social security checks shouldn't vary from year-to-year based on government finances. That doesn't mean that social security spending should be ignored when you're looking at the percentage of government spending that goes to the military. Total government expenditures in the U.S. is $7.65 trillion. The military budget is less than 8% of that. We're on the higher side, but that's less than for example India or Singapore. As a percentage of GDP we're at 3.1%, which is again on the high side but not crazy out of line. France is at 2.3%, and the NATO target for Europe is 2%. In the early 1990s, France and UK were spending the same percentage of GDP as the U.S. is spending now (over 3%). I remember people talking about Seinfeld and Friends back then, but not about how the U.K. and France were crazy out-of-control with their military spending.
- vkou 7y ago> Both "federal" and "discretionary" are weasel qualifiers that attempt to make military spending look artificially large. > For one thing, defense is one of the relatively few things the federal government is supposed to be doing And "Defense" is a weasel qualifier that attempts to make military spending look artificially necessary. Most military expenditures are not for defensive purposes.
- NTDF9 7y agoI can't be the only one noticing so much noise about China in American media. Is America really so scared of being number 2?
- jayd16 7y agoOf course. Our entire national psyche has been centered around American exceptionalism for at least 70 years. Scared isn't exactly right. We're very rival focused, I would say. It's China now but there was a time when it felt like Japan would control the electronics industry, for example.
- NTDF9 7y agoBut is there an acceptance that the exceptionalism cannot be had by massive global bullying, wars, lack of investment in people vs corporations? I mean, its literally impossible to be number 1, if the competition is investing in their people and aren't going to insane wars. America is still number 2 and that's not a bad place.
- luckylion 7y agoNumber 2 doesn't get to control what the numbers 3 - X do, number 1 does. US wealth depends on being the primary global power.
- jayd16 7y agoYou say that but quality of life is still considered considerably higher in the US than China. Even if the trajectory looks good, as more of China moves to a middle class lifestyle, the growth that's fueled by cheap labor will slow.
- NTDF9 7y agoSure. But I don't know what's better. A life of $10/day with dirt cheap healthcare or a life of $60/day with the constant fear of losing healthcare. This is why PPP comparison matters.
- mc32 7y agoIdeally the US, EU and CN would work cooperatively rather than adversarially with regards to leading the world into a brighter future. The US and EU share s lot in terms of philosophy and economic goals. Japan and the “Asian tigers” also fit in. I think India to a great degree shares the same, but China currently is not in synchronicity with the EU-US-JP and to a lesser extent India’s goals on the world stage. We can quibble about climate change or tariffs, but we’ll agree on basic frameworks around trade, security, cooperation, and many other policies. We need a way to weave China into this (Russia too, but that’s another story) MFN status and WTO could have been leveraged, but that ship sailed a long time ago...
- AtlasLion 7y agoyour priorities seem way off to me, I don't care if these countries disagree about trade but climate change needs everyone on board. Also, we don't need China following the US regime change war machine.
- beasteurope 7y agoCount Europe out as well. With Italy officially joining the Belt and Road and Hungary expressing interest we should align ourselves with the future not a dying America.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoSure, China has the best interests of europe in mind. /s Or could they be trying to split Italy off with their populist govt not have much experience and wanting to show they are 'independent'.
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- JamesBarney 7y agoI think any type of global war would far worse for human lives than climate change and also be terrible for the global climate. And if we are tightly coupled through trade that aligns our interests and helps reduce the risk of war as well makes it easier to cooperate on things like climate change.
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- mrb 7y agoHalf the comments in HN are flagged or downvoted. Is it a sign that the HN crowd feels uneasy and divided about China's rising power? Meta comment: wonder if my comment will get downvoted too when it's just asking a question meant to start an intelligent discussion.
- duxup 7y agoI suspect it has to do with the comment(s). Also there are all of a handful of comments right now, if you're drawing conclusions already I'd say that is flawed from the start. It's all too easy to declare votes are for whatever reason you want to think they are.
- gervase 7y agoHN intentionally flags and removes controversial comments and posts, with the intention to prevent trolling, flame wars, and other detrimental behavior patterns. This is considered a feature, not a bug [0]. This ensures that HN provides a semi-curated discussion weighted towards technical and scientific issues, and against geopolitical or socioeconomic topics, for example. That isn't a statement that these topics shouldn't be discussed, just that they aren't necessarily appropriate for discussion here. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rexpop 7y ago> HN intentionally flags and removes You mean, the forum software itself? Who wrote the algorithm?
- jlarocco 7y agoHonestly I don't see a problem with it. We already waste too much money in the United States trying to be the world police, and there's no good reason for it any more. We have too many of our own problems to deal with to waste so much money on that crap.
- crowdpleaser 7y ago+1. We should make sure that our allies get access to our best technology and weapons platforms and obviously we can commit to defend them if they can commit to defending themselves (places like Germany need to step up to the plate) but America doesn't need to be the world's police man and can't afford to be the world's police man.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 7y agoThe entire "world police" concept is ridiculous and used to mask the true colonialist ambitions the US operates under. The reason this is a "problem" is that it might make China richer rather than the US. The notion that the US military has been a force of good for the world needs to be abandoned. It serves only to encourage the US to attack more countries, as killing millions more Asians would be viewed as the more moral option than allowing Chinese influence to spread.
- ethbro 7y agoAbsolute power corrupts absolutely. America, every European colonial power, Britian, the Soviet Union, and Imperial Japan have each had their share of atrocities where they were unchallenged superpowers. There's a lot to be said for multipolarity. Additionally, I'd point out the US funds ~1/4 of the UN (China next at ~1/10). Which seems pretty generous to maintaining internal order in a broad way.
- thucydidesofusa 7y ago>The entire "world police" concept is ridiculous and used to mask the true colonialist ambitions the US operates under. Can you provide proof or is this just something you want to be true? If the United States has used the military to colonize, we should get a refund. The US military didn't deliver Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Also, if the US uses its military to colonize, why does the military do so many humanitarian missions? Sending food to starving people seems like a bad way to colonize, you'd expect the military to at least bomb people.
- thatfrenchguy 7y agos/America/United States. Seriously this bad naming needs to stop.
- Leary 7y agoWith anti access area denial weapons like ballistic missiles and submarines, it is increasingly difficult to offensively project naval forces into a region. While this means America will have trouble navigating within China's vicinity, it also means that even relatively small countries like Vietnam and Taiwan can buy equipment to deter China.
- sremani 7y ago>> His push to project power abroad was accompanied by a power play at home. Xi has purged more than 100 generals accused of corruption or disloyalty, according to the official state-controlled media. >> For me this is a resounding signal the PLA is predominantly a domestic force. American Presidents do not sack Admirals that easily, because the American admirals are more powerful on the seas than domestic policy or DC. I am not discounting the improvements in Chinese firepower, esp. their missiles targeting carriers. This article does not have anything substantial to say, China is a military Titan. China may escalate certain issues to divert the attention of people especially if their economy has a hard landing. Its a risk, but we all know it.