Gasbags

 So I'm kind of intrigued by this whole "eeeeeevil tricksy Chinese spy balloon" thing.

Apparently the Chinese are having a hoot with it, too:

I mean...I guess it seems deeply weird. The oldest "reconnaissance overflight" thing in the world seems to be "when you see the enemy hide under a bush".

How hard would it be to hide from this party favor?

The PRC obviously knows that the U.S., a hugely militarized nation bristling with surveillance gadgets would track this. Was it some sort of way of drawing aerial surveillance fire? Getting the U.S. to give away it's ability to track, umm...a big fat slow moving object?

And the PRC obviously has reconnaissance satellites, too - possibly not as sexy as the USAF/Spaceies have - and those are perfectly capable of looking down at the continental U.S.

Like I say...the whole thing just seems truly, deeply weird. I'd love to know what the fuck this goofy thing is and what it's supposed to do. Is it just stupid? Or, as my old drill sergeant used to say, if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

And speaking of deeply weird and stupid, this is the Republican U.S. Senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance...

...apparently guarding his woodpile from a Chinese balloon that is floating at something like 9 or 10 kilometers of altitude with an AR-15 knockoff that has a maximum effective (horizontal!) range of about 400 meters.

Don't look at me. I sure as hell didn't vote for this nimrod.

Update 2/4/22: Andy (in the comments) suggests this gasbag was basically a SIGINT thing...which sounds as reasonable as anything else. Kinda hard to go completely radio silence for the whole time this birthday party favor floats by, but who knows? 

Apparently this is a sort of thing; several more of these rascals over flew over the Trumpies' heads, too, but (I suspect) the biznay was kept on the downlow so Donnie didn't look like he was being cucked by his pal Xi.

Anyway...just kind of funny and kinda cool that here we are - flying faster and higher than anyone in the 18th Century could have imagined - but the Montgolfier Bros tech still works.

Update 2/16: Wins the Internet for today:

New York for Kyiv? Boston for Taipei?

Now that the United States doesn't have bodies coming home from the lesser paved parts of the world (the bodies we're generating tend to be locals and remain where we drop them...) the U.S. public can go back to sleep regarding it's foreign policy doin's around the world whilst the foreign policy nabobs can go back to the sort of stuff they enjoy; pondering Great Power rivalries.

And current events have had a way of bringing those rivalries up in the nightly news. 

First back in October we had worries that the People's Republic of China was - at least - thinking about forcibly re-uniting the island of Taiwan with the Motherland.

Now the focus has shifted to eastern Europe, where Russian military moves appear to be directed against Ukraine.

The larger questions that arise from these potential conflicts are the same ones that have been in place since the end of WW2, namely that 1) as the Western hyperpower the United States is, effectively, the Western "big stick" in Great Power confrontation, but 2) there is always the question of the degree to which a United States would be and will be willing to risk escalation with the other big nuclear powers - Russia and China - over threats to the U.S.'s non-nuclear allies.

Some "allies" don't believe the U.S. is willing to do this at all; one of the prime drivers of the Israeli nuclear program was the desire to be independent of U.S. political will. France much the same (with a heaping helping of post-1940-defeat-shame). 

My understanding is that the U.K. was the only Western nuclear power who hung on to the "special relationship", developing their nukes purely as a way to avoid sitting at the geopolitical kid's table.

There's also the issue of diplomatic linkage.

The European nations are militarily bound up with the U.S. in NATO. You nuke Berlin, it's going to cost you. Israel, too, has always had a (in my personal opinion an unhealthily) close relationship with the U.S. 

In theory those polities can depend on U.S. military power to back their integrity if threatened. They can act as if they had a portion of that power, which gives them a certain degree of geopolitical freedom and international influence beyond their inherent military strength.

(At least that was the c.w. until Trump; now the GOP is full-on ethno-nationalist and "America First" and, frankly, if I was Berlin or London I'd be hesitant to make plans based on the notion that Uncle Sammy had my back 24/7/365. President Trump 47 (or Tom Cotton or Marjorie Taylor Greene) may very well be most unwilling to go to the mat for latte-sipping socialist Eurotrash.) 

Smaller states with relations short of full alliance like Ukraine and Taiwan don't have those options. They pretty much have to design their relationships with their larger neighbors based on their assessment of the willingness - or, particularly, potential unwillingness - of the Land of the Big PX to risk a bigger fight rather than give their rivals the win.

And that means that the U.S. itself has to - or, at least, should - think hard about the degree to which it's willing to risk that fight for those polities. 

After twenty years of lies, damned lies, and delusion the current U.S. administration finally admitted that there was nothing in Afghanistan worth the bones of a West Virginia grenadier. 

Will a non-America-First administration be willing to risk that, and more, to ensure that Taipei remains free of PRC occupation? To keep the Donbass as part of the Ukraine?

What frustrates me about this, and the only reason that I'm writing this post, is because of the combination of indifference, stupidity, and hubris that seems to characterize the U.S. public and most political discussion about these topics.

The U.S. press spends about five or six more times the amount of talking nonsense about "critical race theory" than it does these potential collisions. The degree of public literacy about the risk-versus-rewards of an aggressive Taiwan policy in the linked article above is appalling; if damn near 70% of the U.S. public want their government to recognize Taiwan as an independent nation? 

They've been face-down in the edible weed far too long.

There's discussion to be had - and, potentially, arguments to be made - for resisting Chinese and Russian aggression in places like the West Pacific and eastern Europe. 

Those discussions are difficult and complex...and are not going on. 

Instead the public and, it appears, most media and political talking heads, are trying to reduce the issues to simple us-versus-them jingoism.

Yes. I realize that's how a lot of "geopolitics" gets done here in the Land of the Freedumb.

But, frankly, after the twenty-year-long disaster that has been the Phony War on Terror?

It's really time that We the People grew up and started putting away these childish things.

A collision with China or Russia may, indeed, be inevitable (or, as Andy will remind you in the case of China, is already happening...)

But I'd like to think that if it happens it will happen for sound geopolitical reasons. For U.S. national interests. 

I'd like to think that the systems of supposed self-government - the "free press", the representatives of the People in Congress, the foreign specialists in the Departments of State and Defense - would have conducted a thorough discussion and analysis of the potential gains and risks before it happens.

But.

That would mean thinking geopolitical strategy and, as former friend of the blog Seydlitz would tell you, the United States don't do "strategy".

We do the shit out of "critical race theory", though, so there's that.

Jesus wept.

Over the Hegemon

I get that there is a fairly large subset of the U.S. public (and the pundits that natter to it) that refuses to use the word "empire" for the United States.

Imperial is as imperial does, but, fine, whatever.

But I can't think that there would be any disagreement that the U.S. has been the global hegemon for quite some time.

My question for the readership would be, then, is this worth going to Cold War with the PRC over?

I won't even argue with Rubio's contention that the PRC wants to replace the U.S. as the global hegemon.

Would that, however, present "as great a threat as any in history"?

Threat of what?

Would it harm the U.S. public in a material way if the U.S. was no longer the premiere Great Power but, instead, the second behind the PRC?

Keeping in mind that mainland China has a fairly horrible human rights record, would that translate into a worse world in general if the PRC had the ability to conduct whatever they'd call the "Ledeen Doctrine" on regional powers? A worse United States?

I have some ideas, but at this point I'm curious to hear yours; is this an actual thing (or is it just scaremongering)? If it IS a thing, is it really the MOST scary thing ever? And if it IS...is it worth hatting up for a new Cold War (with the attendant sorts of small Hot Wars between proxy states and non-state actors of the sort fought between the US and the USSR between 1945 and the 1990s)?

Let's discuss in the comments.
 

Passing through

Busy day today, but thought I'd throw out a couple of nutty clusters to chew on for the gang here.

SecState Pompeo delivered a real tubthumper of an address at the Nixon Library last Thursday about those tricksy Chinese. They're devious heathen devils, and apparently all the Western efforts to civilize them since "Nixon went to China" in the Seventies have gone for naught, so now it's time to muscle up and beef them around:

(Pompeo said that)..."the U.S. will organize the free world, while alienating and undermining the free world; he extols democracy, while aiding and abetting its destruction at home; and he praises the Chinese people, while generalizing about the ill intent of Chinese students who want to come to America.

Pompeo is also ultra-loyal to a president who cares not one whit for democracy, dissidents, freedom, or transparency overseas. Trump’s long track record on this is well documented, and it has defined his personal approach to China."

As we discussed here a while back, I'm all in favor of treating the PRC with cautious skepticism. But the problem here is that, having made it clear that if you're a Trumpkin, you're "America First" all the way, this administration has little diplomatic throw-weight to actually mobilize any sort of large-scale pushback against Chinese geopolitical ambitions. And then there's the whole "you are, too!" problem:

"The Chinese Communist Party wants a tributary international system where smaller countries are deferential to larger powers, instead of a rules-based international order where small countries enjoy equal rights. The CCP also sees no place for universal rights or global liberal norms, and wants to ignore the principles of open markets to pursue a predatory mercantilist economic policy.

So does Trump."

All this will undoubtedly rachet up tensions in the East Asian littoral. What that means in practice? I'm not sure; right now the U.S. is too busy being devoured by the Plague to make anything as distant as the South China Sea fairly low on the priority list...

Meanwhile, half a world away the same U.S. administration has directed the USDOD to move about 12,000 military bodies out of the Federal Republic of Germany.

This does not, in case you're keeping score, count as a "Donald the Dove" peace proposal. These people aren't going to become VISTA volunteers. Many are going to other parts of Europe, including Poland(?), Belgium, and Italy. But some of this may tie into the aggressive rhetoric against the PRC:

“Several thousand troops currently assigned to Germany may be reassigned to other countries in Europe,” Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said in an op-ed published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal. “Thousands may expect to redeploy to the Indo-Pacific, where the U.S. maintains a military presence in Guam, Hawaii, Alaska and Japan, as well as deployments in locations like Australia.”

It's difficult not to be cynical about seeing this as a Trumpian revenge against the German government and his bete noir, PM Merkel, for being insufficiently fawning.

Anyway...interesting times.

کمربند و جاده, or "How do you say "Belt and Road" in Farsi?"

So much for "maximum pressure":

"Iran and China have quietly drafted a sweeping economic and security partnership that would clear the way for billions of dollars of Chinese investments in energy and other sectors, undercutting the Trump administration’s efforts to isolate the Iranian government because of its nuclear and military ambitions.

The partnership, detailed in an 18-page proposed agreement obtained by The New York Times, would vastly expand Chinese presence in banking, telecommunications, ports, railways and dozens of other projects. In exchange, China would receive a regular — and, according to an Iranian official and an oil trader, heavily discounted — supply of Iranian oil over the next 25 years.

The document also describes deepening military cooperation, potentially giving China a foothold in a region that has been a strategic preoccupation of the United States for decades. It calls for joint training and exercises, joint research and weapons development and intelligence sharing — all to fight “the lopsided battle with terrorism, drug and human trafficking and cross-border crimes.”

The partnership — first proposed by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, during a visit to Iran in 2016 — was approved by President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet in June, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said last week."

This is an obvious move for Iran, given that it is unavoidably clear that any Republican administration - and 2016 makes clear that the US electorate cannot be counted on not to elect a Republican government, no matter how ridiculous - will treat Iran to whatever they can manage of the Ledeen Doctrine.

This is also obviously a very deep tarpit for Iran. Other "Belt and Road" nations have found that the PRC gives nothing that it cannot take, and have found themselves in hock up to their national ears.

Still...a worthwhile reminder that when your only tool is a hammer, and the tool using that tool is an utter tool, you end up with a "foreign policy" stupider than a bagful of hammers.

Oh, well. We're too busy catching the Plague to worry about any of this stuff anymore.

Breaking the Belt? Leaving the Road?

Andy is one of the few regulars here that keeps reminding us of this, but the current pandemic has brought the problematic relationship between the United States (and much of the "developed world", I should note...) and the People's Republic of China into a harsh light. Fred Kaplan at Slate posted a worthwhile conversation starter here:

"David Livingston, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, notes in an email that while China is not a rich source of raw materials or finished products, it is “a behemoth in the middle of supply chains.” It is in fact the world’s largest exporter of intermediary goods, providing one-third of the “intermediate goods” that help turn raw materials into finished products.

According to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, China supplies the critical components in 70 to 85 percent of the world’s solar panels, 75 to 90 percent of high-speed rail systems, 60 to 80 percent of agricultural machinery, and 40 to 50 percent of cargo ships.

COVID-19 has drawn attention to this grip on the middle of supply chains for health and medical products—a grip that’s tighter than commonly realized. As Bradley Thayer and Lianchao Han note in the National Interest, China produces “key ingredients to medicines in almost every area,” including drugs for Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, antidepressants, HIV/AIDS, and cancer treatments, as well as statins, birth-control pills, antacids, and vitamins. If China stopped exporting these ingredients, they write, “America’s—and the world’s—hospitals would be in free fall.”

It's very obviously not in the national interests of a supposedly-developed, supposed-republic like the United States to be at the mercy of a one-party dictatorship. Especially a dictatorship that sees itself as a global rival. Especially a dictatorship that is moving aggressively to gain influence beyond its borders in a way that no previous Chinese governments have ever attempted since the days of the Yuan Dynasty.

The difficulty - as the piece points out - is finding some less fraught middle ground without pushing either nation closer to an open Cold War.

It's tempting to read the problem as an artifact of the sort of bog-standard-fatheaded-Trumpian-"diplomacy" that has produced idiocy like the ridiculous "Love Letters from Pyongyang" Kim-Trump bromance. I think that's heaping too much of the problems on the current Administration; this is a tangle produced by generations-long economic and political miscalculations from the West in general and the US in particular, as well as a false hope that the fall of the Soviet Union (once described to me as "because nobody wanted to wear East German jeans and listen to Bulgarian disco music") could be duplicated by showing the PRC the attraction of Western goodies. Far too long the US has been coasting on the Nixonian engagement policies begun back in the Seventies. The PR has been more than willing to open the doors. It's just not going to let anything in it dislikes - like the idea of a China not run by the current dictatorship.

It's also tempting to look at it as purely a governmental and diplomatic issue without considering the massive role played by domestic US financial and tax policies that encouraged private US corporations to move much of their production to the low-wage nations of East Asia. If corporations are people those people are sociopaths; they typically have no interest in anything other their bottom line. Making the West hostage to Chinese mercantilism? Hey, not my problem! Gotta make the price point on those inhalers and the cheap plastic Walmart crap!

The duplicity - and let's not kid ourselves, regardless of whatever else the PRC did in this pandemic, their initial reaction was horrifyingly similar to that forecast in Max Brooks' World War Z PRC's response to the zombie apocalypse; they tried to hide the outbreak and downplay the severity because that's overwhelmingly often what dictatorships do - of the PRC's government simply points out that as currently constituted the government of mainland China is not anything similar to the sort of state presumed to be a part of the "Western group" of nations.

The fact that the United States is increasingly neither one of those states is neither here nor there in affecting how the rest of the developed world decides to deal with the PRC.

But I think the problem at the heart of the Kaplan piece remains; how? His conclusion is that "...we need to diversify our supply chains, we need a more clever, alliance-driven style of diplomacy, and we need a new president."

Which is all well and good, but...those supply chains are largely in private hands, which will move them only as far as the fattest profit.

And the diplomacy is largely in the hands of that president, who was recently quoted recommending that Americans threatened by a pathogen inject themselves with bleach and swallow UV lights and yet remains the god of nearly 4/10ths of the American public. There is at least an even chance that there will be no "new President" for another four years and change.

So...what?

Update 4/26: Dan Drezner at Reason has a thoughtful piece that goes into the US-PRC relationship in more detail. In particular it does good work examining the starry-eyed narrative that too many US officials believed would link economic growth and political freedom, as well as the clumsy mess that the Tariff Man has got the relationship into.

However, when he comes to his proposals for solving the mess, Drezner doesn't seem to have all that much more than Kaplan:

"There are areas in which the prospect of weaponized interdependence means that some negotiated decoupling will be necessary. In those arenas, however, the United States will need the cooperation of its allies—because otherwise, China is likely to be the one setting global standards in 5G and other technical areas. The U.S.-China Trade Policy Working Group, a collection of economists and lawyers from both sides of the Pacific, has put forward a framework for managing the relationship. As for coping with predatory liberalism, Adam Silver's change of tune in the face of a media firestorm shows that negative press attention is the best way to get U.S. firms to stop kowtowing to Chinese authorities."

The notion that the Trumpkins will sudden drop their "America First" mania and begin cooperating with allies is risible, while "negative press" seems a weak reed for a world that has gotten used to reading the press equivocating on whether drinking bleach is a bad idea.

So I think we're still very much in the same place. We know there are some things that need to be done about the US-PRC relationship. But what things, and whether the US in its existing condition can or will do them?

That seems very much not so much undecided as largely unexplored.

Update 4/29: It's worth noting that this really is a transnational problem; the Trumpkins' "America First" xenophobia isn't the only source of trouble here. There's much to ponder in this essay (An Old Anxiety in a New Era 1900 & 2020 庚子年的優思 by Zi Zhongyun) regarding the turn to aggressive nationalism on the PRC. It appears that the Xi regime has largely abandoned the pretense of socialist internationalism inherited from the original revolutionaries. In its place - at least, per Zi - is a sort of purblind xenophobia and nationalist rage that would make any MAGA rally look like a kid's playdate.

(The banner above the restaurant door reads "Enthusiastically Celebrate the Coronavirus in America; Wishing the Virus a Long and Successful Journey in Japan". Yike.)

"This deplorable situation is only getting worse and, given the kind of unwarranted self-congratulation encouraged by the recent Amazing-China-boosterism [inspired by a swaggering and sensationally popular 2018 propaganda-documentary, ‘Amazing China, My Country’ 厲害了, 我的國], it is hardly surprising that we are now subjected to fabricated stories about how neighbouring countries are supposedly pleading with Beijing to be allowed to merge with the ‘Chinese Motherlands’. [Note: in mid April 2020, articles appeared on the Chinese Internet claiming that Kazakhstan was applying to become part of China. In response, the Kazakh foreign ministry summoned the Chinese ambassador in Almaty to issue a formal protest]. On the global stage stories like this feed an existing anxiety that China is secretly harbouring plans to invade and absorb other nations."

I've heard it said that a diplomatic catastrophe often requires the hard work of the parties on both sides. It would seem that we have just such a situation at hand.

Update 4/30: This...

...on the other hand, is NOT good.

President Bone-Spurs Wet Dream

The Mother of All Parades!    

People's Republic of China celebrated the 70^th anniversary of its founding with both a gigantic military parade and a people’s parade.  Despite the rioting and the shooting(s?) in Hong Kong.  Was Donny's dream about the parade?  Or about the violent crackdown on protestors wishing he could do the same to Nancy and the WH press?

The South China Morning Post claims 15,000 troops paraded, with overflights by 160 aircraft, and there were 580 pieces of weaponry and equipment.  Advanced weaponry shown including the new hypersonic DF-17 glide vehicle and the longer range DF-100 (is it a missile, a drone or a nuke tipped reentry vehicle?).  I personally like the tiny two-man, open-cockpit helicopter, or is it an autogyro?  It’d be great for a commute to beat Seattle traffic and could land in my daughter’s tiny back lot.  Two links below, the short version at just over three minutes, and the full version at almost three hours.

Three minute version:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayi8ddu_eZg 

Full version:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGdF_ajRZYg 

Baby copter/autogyro is at 1:12:03

And oh I forgot, for FDChief they had two battalions of women-at-arms parading in boots and miniskirts.  The ladies are at 1:00:45 and again at 1:03:15.  Here is a preview teaser:

And a precedent, they allowed foreign troop contingents to march at National Day for the first time ever.  Mostly the usual suspects, but also Mexico, Afghanistan, and the Republic of Fiji.  No GIs of course, but  China Central TV was kind enough to call out the contribution of Chennault's Flying Tigers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hAg8MsG30M

The civilian portion of the parade had several million pompoms and flower bouquets,  angel-voiced pre-teens, high school glee clubs, 21 open-top sightseeing buses full of Civil War and Sino-Japanese War veterans too old to march, parade floats that put the Rose Parade to shame, cheek tats, ethnic minorities in traditional dress (including the much maligned Uighurs).  Lots of stone-faced suits in the reviewing stand with iron bladders.  This civilian version can be seen startin at 1:40:00 of the three-hour video above.

 Festivities are continuing through the 7th.

Somebody's been smoking Hemp For Victory...

THIS stuff is what drives me nuts about the current American pash for tongue-bathing soldiers.

When speaking of the Americans who are going to take it in the shorts because of the trade wars with the PRC that are fun and easy to win Senator Tom Cotton (R - Arkansas) consoled them that:

"There will be some sacrifices on the part of Americans, I grant you that, but I also would say that sacrifice is pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas that are fallen heroes that are laid to rest in Arlington make."

Except those farmers and manufacturers and Sears customers getting hit with these costs didn't ask to be dragged into a pissing contest with the PRC over Fitbit parts any more than those GIs asked to be walking the streets of Kabul trying to remake Afghanistan into Belgium.

To equate these trade wars with the "blood of heroes"?

It's despicable on it's face, but, worse, it makes taking issue with the trade wars to a level of Dolchstoß comparable to betraying the Noble Soldiers. It's a version of Godwin's Law, a rhetorical trick designed to put a stop to debate.

Worse, it's deeply dishonest, if for no other reason than those "fallen heroes" didn't "fall" as "sacrifices" in a war declared by the People in Congress, or to any sort of existential threat to the United States, or, for that matter, for any sort overarching national interest, but in a bog-standard squalid little imperial expedition in the global hustings that has been ginned up largely by lies, misdirection, fear, and pants-pissing panic.

I love my Army brothers, but the guys holding down a slot in Asia or Africa today aren't holding back global fascism, or facing the might of a hostile superpower. They're doing the dirty business of empire. If my country wants them to do that business that's one thing. But if Tom Cotton - or my country - wants to drag me and every other American into a trade war in Asia and justify it by comparing it to that service?

He and it need to come to me first and make a case for that trade war and that service, not simply assume that they're worth blood and/or treasure and demand I respect that because some poor bastards are getting hosed wasting a year-and-a-half in fucking Helmand Province playing whack-a-muj.

Because if you gave me the choice between:

1) "Sacrificing" in a boneheaded trade war with China because I "support the troops", or
2) Skipping the trade war AND ending the expeditionary wars in Asia and Africa and bringing those troopers home?

I'd go with Door #2.

It'd be bad enough if We the People really were Army-mad, but in a nation where barely anyone bothers to give up a couple of years to the tree suit it REALLY drives me nuts when I run across this faux-militarism stuff.

Arresting development, or arrested development..?

Apparently the PLAN is in the process of laying down a second large fleet carrier before the first has even fully entered operational service.

What I find kind of interesting about this is it seems to confirm Andy's observation when we talked about the subject back in February that the PRC and the PLAN have bigger ambitions than simply dominating the near abroad/South China Sea. One carrier can be dismissed as curiousity; two seems more like a plan.

What I find kind of fascinating about this is how it seems like if you're a highly-placed naval officer with big ambitions for power projection - or a naval bureaucrat responsible for force design and ship orders - it doesn't matter if you work for the USN or the PLAN...it seems like you just want to build carriers, regardless of whether those carriers can help you do what you want to do.

Our frequent commentor Sven spent a ton of time dissecting the notions of 21st Century naval power back in 2018 and - while his whole series is worth a read, I'll quote from his conclusion:

"Navy bureaucracies have zero incentive to become storage administrators running inventory and function checks on thousands of containers. They want ship hulls to play with. They want to go cruise at sea. That's what a navy is all about in their opinion - regardless of whether this is a means to a reasonable end.

We need military bureaucracies that offer the most cost-efficient approach to satisfy deterrence and defence needs, not clubs of men who want to play with ships or boats at the taxpayer's expense. The outcome of European naval bureaucracies pursuing their self-interest is a combination of very high expenses and a de facto absent ability to secure maritime trade. We need the civilian masters of the naval bureaucracies to rein in and bring them on course to pursue the national interest over their bureaucratic self-interest, for the navies would never be able to do so or even only admit that they don't serve the national interest first and foremost. Without such an intervention we will simply keep wasting money for next to no benefits in return."

When we talked about this earlier Sven also made the observation that since 1945 carriers have been used exclusively as a land-attack platform. Does the PLAN's enthusiasm for carriers mean not that they see them as a way of securing their maritime supply lines - which, if you read Sven's series makes a good case for big warships as a very inefficient and cost-ineffective way to do that - but, rather, that they see themselves as doing the sort of imperial diddling around in the hustings that the USN has been doing with their carriers?

You'd think, given the history of the results of many U.S. "interventions" outside the western hemisphere (and not a few of them INside...) that a sensible polity would take that not as an example but as a warning.

So...Chinese carriers? Hubris? Great Power affectation? Part of a cunning geopolitical strategy? Just following the fad? Geopolitical mistake?

"Will you govern it any better?"

This post got me thinking.

I know it's difficult to look past the grandiose follies of the TrumpenEra.

But Klare has a point; there seems to be a widespread consensus in the United States' geopolitical thinking, not just within the GOP but throughout the mainstream U.S. geopolitical thought, that "China is the enemy". As Klare points out:

"In eastern Ukraine, the Balkans, Syria, cyberspace, and in the area of nuclear weaponry, Russia does indeed pose a variety of threats to Washington’s goals and desires. Still, as an economically hobbled petro-state, it lacks the kind of might that would allow it to truly challenge this country’s status as the world’s dominant power. China is another story altogether. With its vast economy, growing technological prowess, intercontinental “Belt and Road” infrastructure project, and rapidly modernizing military, an emboldened China could someday match or even exceed U.S. power on a global scale..."

The recent tsuris over the INF treaty and both the US and Russia seeming more concerned about China that each other seems a part of that. There seems to be a LOT of U.S. conturbation over the perceived threat of a powerful China.

Is it just me, or does this seem unpleasantly reminiscent of the setting of the Irano-Byzantine Wars of the 3rd through the 7th Centuries, wherein the two empires were obsessed with defeating the other, to the point where both succeeded only in thrashing themselves into debilitation that was ideal for the rising power of Arabic Islam to dismember and devour?

Is the ascent of the PRC inevitable? It would seem that to be so the flaws in the economic and political systems that brought down the USSR would have to be avoided. But, if they could be, does a conflict between the PRC and the USA have to occur? And, if so, what form(s) would it take? And would it be possible for one polity or the other to succeed, or is a mutual exhaustion of the Sassanid-East Roman sort seem more likely?

Discuss.

(Oh, and the title? Its from the supposed exchange between the newly crowned emperor Heraclius and his deposed predecessor Phocas:

"Is it thus", asked Heraclius, "that you have governed the Empire?"
"Will you," replied Phocas, with unexpected spirit, "govern it any better?"

Ruling the waves..?

Rob Farley has a post up at the National Interest discussing the current expansion of the PRC's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), comparing that to the Great Power navies of the past century.

He asks whether the PLAN can succeed in advancing the PRC's geopolitical ends compared to the Imperial German, Russian (and Soviet), Imperial Japanese, and United States navies.

It's not a bad little article, but I think it asks the wrong question.

I'd start, rather, with the question "Does (fill in the blank nation) need a blue-water navy?"

Two of the four examples Farley picks - Germany and Russia/the Soviet Union - were primarily continental powers and as such the answer seems obviously "No".

As such their fleets were superfluous at best and, for Germany, disastrous at worst; dragging Wilhelmine Germany into a naval arms race with Great Britain that diverted resources that the Reich could have put to better use.

The "good cases" would seem to be the maritime empires, Japan and the U.S.; both depend on overseas trade, both are isolated by oceans, at least partially in the case of the U.S., both had, or have, imperial ambitions.

Oddly, Farley chooses to ignore two other great maritime empires.

The "success" is, obviously, the British. Britain obviously needed a blue-water navy, and, in general, did pretty well with it. Unsurprisingly that naval power disappeared with the Empire, but it had a hell of a good 400-odd-year run.

Spain, on the other hand, needed a fleet but always seemed to find its ambitions were greater than its capabilities.

Someday I should really find a good Spanish naval history to understand why the Dons never managed to figure out what the British seemed to manage so effortlessly. Whatever the reason, lacking a fleet capable of long-range power projection surely helped doom the Spanish colonial empire, whether from foreign enemies like the U.S. or from colonial revolt.

So.

Looking at the historical examples, and the current geopolitical needs of China, I can't really see how putting time, money, and effort into a big fleet helps them.

Anyone willing to take the counterpoint?

Let's discuss.

Taking our nukes and going home

I'm a bit baffled at the tactics in play here.

"For far too long, Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with impunity, covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad. Tomorrow, the United States will suspend its obligations under the INF Treaty and begin the process of withdrawing from the INF Treaty, which will be completed in 6 months unless Russia comes back into compliance by destroying all of its violating missiles, launchers, and associated equipment."

There's no question that the Russian Federation has been playing fast-and-loose; the 9M729 GLCM violates the 1987 INF Treaty's definition of banned weapons; "...all land-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers..."

My understanding is that one thing that worries the Russians is China, which isn't bound by the INF and has some intermediate-range missiles that the Russians would like to counter. The USN has similar concerns about the tricksy Chinese, too, and may have been pushing for this. Our old pal Bolton hates arms control treaties - ALL arms control treaties - with a hate as huge as his mustache.

So there's no shortage of players who wanted this to happen.

But, as Kaplan points out, there's a huge difference between "...Bolton go(ing) to Moscow, formally declare the Russians in breach of the treaty, and give them a certain span of time to rectify matters, warning of consequences if they don’t." and reneging on the treaty ourselves.

For one thing, how does this "punish" the Russians? I mean, unless it means that the US is going to begin a GLCM arms race in Europe, which, I'm sure, will thrill the living shit out of the EU.

If China's the US's problem, as Kaplan points out:

"...we have plenty of other weapons, nuclear and conventional, that would deter a sensible Chinese leader from aggression against vital U.S. interests. (If the Chinese leader isn’t sensible, then all principles of deterrence are null and void anyway.)"

The other point is that this treaty bans LAND-based intermediate range missiles. Ships and aircraft? Not limited.

And the biggest thing about this is that it gives away the game to the Kremlin, largely because of Trump's preceding treaty fucktardry. The guy who spiked the Iran deal, the Paris accords, NAFTA can't realistically whine about other people breaking treaties.

This simply give the Russians a free hand to do what they were doing sneakily anyway.

That doesn't sound much like the Art of a Very Smart Deal to me.

Neocolonialism

It has been over sixty years since Sartre first termed the word 'neocolonialism'.   I read or tried reading his opus Colonialism and Neocolonialism years ago.  But Jean-Paul was too deep for my military mind, or maybe it was the fault of the translator.   Or maybe it was because years before that I had read Larteguy, and had a bias towards Bigeard's paras taking names and kicking butts.   Plus I never liked Sartre's portrayal of DeGaulle, whom I had always admired despite his antipathy towards my own country.  Sartre and many others since have put the blame squarely on the West for a later brand of colonialism.  Mostly in Africa.  But also in Asia, especially for the US in the Philippines, and Vietnam, and Laos, and Lebanon, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Syria, and others.  Maybe so.

But there is also an even newer cutting-edge neocolonialism going on in Africa in the 21st Century.  China's Xi Jinping AKA the Marquis of Belt & Road and co-prince of Africa is using a modern twist

of a much older colonial notion.   Xi does not stoop to conquering a country to exploit its population as labor and its natural resources.  He now uses debt bondage and/or bribery on an international scale for the mercantilist exploitation of resources.   They probably got the idea from the West.   Although they are doing it to an extent that dwarfs anything the World Bank tried to do in the past.  They are also buying influence by interfering in elections a la Trump-Russian collusion.  They probably got that idea from the West also.

But the colonized are now fighting back.  Not just in Africa but also in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific.

https://www.newzimbabwe.com/chamisa-i-will-kick-out-chinese-investors/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/01/08/violent-protests-against-chinese-colony-in-hambantota-sri-lanka-rage-on/2/#

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-22/book-reveals-extent-of-chinese-influence-in-australia/9464692

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/china-s-cobalt-conundrum-congo

https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/if-china-bugged-the-au-headquarters-what-african-countries-should-be-worried/
 
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/16/on-chinas-new-silk-road-democracy-pays-a-toll/

Within my grandchildren's lifetime they will be doing the same to us.   What goes around, comes around.