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Unintended Consequences: Strategic Naïvety, China and the End of the US Empire

30 points by mellosouls 3y ago

andrewstuart 3y ago
This hit the mark 24 months ago but China is in a major decline since then and its strategic ambitions surely must be reviewed by the CCP in that light. 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.
- WentFullRetard 3y ago
  [dead]
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Arresting local people bravely trying to reconcile with the west, like Naomi Wu also didn't help. But I agree the US is tearing itself apart in the two party war.
  - addicted 3y ago
    > 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.
    - tdba 3y ago
      What are your thoughts on the politics of California?
    - filoleg 3y ago
      > 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).
      - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        So your big complaint about the other party is that media companies they are "affiliated" with covered someone running for President who was saying shocking things? Yes, both sides are truly the same. Why bother even voting?
        standing_user 3y ago
        Quite a big theme tbh I'm not smart enough to make a comprehensive reply to your question that encompasses all the socialogical, economical and so on thing. 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
  - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
    Sibling post by "addicted" takes aim at your "two party war" throwaway line. He/she seems offended by the implied "false equivalency". Let me take this in a different direction -- 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.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      I didn't mean for it to be a throwaway comment. I just didn't feel like going to deeply into it, thinking it was obvious to everyone. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37860952
      - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
        Yeah, I wouldn't fundamentally disagree with your point, either. While there is this other layer I describe, the polarization is of course a major problem. 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.
- addicted 3y ago
  The US’s biggest problem right now appears to be an inability to build. 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.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    You're probably aware but for anyone not familiar, the economic term you're describing is called "purchasing power parity" (PPP) and I seem to remember that China had more or less matched the US in PPP terms some time ago. 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.
    - pylua 3y ago
      People probably would move if the jobs paid well and the housing cost was affordable. The reality is that the United States has priced its people out.
0dayz 3y ago
Sorry but I can't buy into using history to compare if an empire is collapsing or not especially in this case where the USA is apparently doing every fuck up almost all other empires did. Each empire they bring up was torn apart with an entirely different world and multiple factors that the author didn't include.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  Your point kind of illustrates the article: 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> ?
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    China and the west are in a MAD situation with their economies still. Maybe in 20 years they’ve disentangled but if there were sanctions / blockade on China that would mean the global economy taking a fall similar to the Great Depression
prepend 3y ago
I for one welcome our new multi-polar world overlords. 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?
2devnull 3y ago
“Second, there is the conviction that cooperating with any competitor will result in the rival being assimilated into existing power balances, thus acting to preserve—rather than destabilise—an empire's existing regional or global order.” This same mistake “Wandel durch Handel” seems inherent to “techno optimism” no?
ddggdd 3y ago
Historian like this one is more like fashion columnist, they choose from huge volumes of history records and fit a story that tailor to current popular mass hysteria, if lucky and good at story telling, they will come into public awareness and get popular themselves, like ‘history is ending ‘ 20 some years ago, they should really be honest about history, respect the unpredictability and stop curve fitting.

30 points by mellosouls 3y ago

This hit the mark 24 months ago but China is in a major decline since then and its strategic ambitions surely must be reviewed by the CCP in that light. 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.

WentFullRetard 3y ago
[dead]
wkat4242 3y ago
Arresting local people bravely trying to reconcile with the west, like Naomi Wu also didn't help. But I agree the US is tearing itself apart in the two party war.
- addicted 3y ago
  > 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.
  - tdba 3y ago
    What are your thoughts on the politics of California?
  - filoleg 3y ago
    > 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).
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      So your big complaint about the other party is that media companies they are "affiliated" with covered someone running for President who was saying shocking things? Yes, both sides are truly the same. Why bother even voting?
      - standing_user 3y ago
        Quite a big theme tbh I'm not smart enough to make a comprehensive reply to your question that encompasses all the socialogical, economical and so on thing. 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
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  Sibling post by "addicted" takes aim at your "two party war" throwaway line. He/she seems offended by the implied "false equivalency". Let me take this in a different direction -- 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.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    I didn't mean for it to be a throwaway comment. I just didn't feel like going to deeply into it, thinking it was obvious to everyone. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37860952
    - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
      Yeah, I wouldn't fundamentally disagree with your point, either. While there is this other layer I describe, the polarization is of course a major problem. 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.
addicted 3y ago
The US’s biggest problem right now appears to be an inability to build. 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.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  You're probably aware but for anyone not familiar, the economic term you're describing is called "purchasing power parity" (PPP) and I seem to remember that China had more or less matched the US in PPP terms some time ago. 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.
  - pylua 3y ago
    People probably would move if the jobs paid well and the housing cost was affordable. The reality is that the United States has priced its people out.

0dayz 3y ago

Sorry but I can't buy into using history to compare if an empire is collapsing or not especially in this case where the USA is apparently doing every fuck up almost all other empires did. Each empire they bring up was torn apart with an entirely different world and multiple factors that the author didn't include.

RetroTechie 3y ago
Your point kind of illustrates the article: 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> ?
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  China and the west are in a MAD situation with their economies still. Maybe in 20 years they’ve disentangled but if there were sanctions / blockade on China that would mean the global economy taking a fall similar to the Great Depression

prepend 3y ago

I for one welcome our new multi-polar world overlords. 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?

2devnull 3y ago

“Second, there is the conviction that cooperating with any competitor will result in the rival being assimilated into existing power balances, thus acting to preserve—rather than destabilise—an empire's existing regional or global order.” This same mistake “Wandel durch Handel” seems inherent to “techno optimism” no?

ddggdd 3y ago

Historian like this one is more like fashion columnist, they choose from huge volumes of history records and fit a story that tailor to current popular mass hysteria, if lucky and good at story telling, they will come into public awareness and get popular themselves, like ‘history is ending ‘ 20 some years ago, they should really be honest about history, respect the unpredictability and stop curve fitting.