The world is watching the Middle East in a state of high tension. Will the conflict escalate and expand? The prospect is nightmarish enough. But just imagine if this crisis were happening not now, but at the beginning of 2023. Why would that have made a difference? In the region itself, the configuration of forces was broadly similar. The struggle in Ukraine was raging, then as now. The decisive difference, as Edward Luce points out in a typically insightful
Unmentioned is China’s habit of stealing technology and continually using espionage for economic gain. That, together with the way it treats minorities and others who disagree with the state ideology, make it an illegitimate economic competitor. The U.S. is correct to treat it as an adversary which would stop at nothing to replace it as the world’s
That doesn't actually matter for this discussion. Whether China is a good regime or not (it's not) doesn't change the material fact of their existence. Whether that money was gotten legitimately (and of course America is hardly innocent of exploitation) doesn't matter, that money spends just the same. China is an economic competitor, regardless of whether or not you believe they should have what they have. If they were a flawless democracy, it wouldn't change the fact that the People's Republic of China and the United States of America have divergent interests. Morality isn't what's at stake here. The reason why deescalation is important is because war isn't about who is right, it's about who is left. And in a world with nuclear weapons, there is no way to "defeat" the Chinese regime or force it to stop existing, only the ability to deal with the reality in which it exists, and to minimize the risks it poses. China wants to be world leader, US wants to be world leader, but it is in the interest of everybody involved that they don't destroy each other over the question. And "legitimacy" has nothing to do with that interest.
Very good points. I was replying to the comments suggesting that actions taken by the U.S. toward China were inappropriate. I was making the point that an unethical and/or cheating world power may call for a different type of response to serve notice that the U.S. is not blind or naive. Otherwise the two may well “ destroy each other.”
Among the mysteries of life for which I don’t find any explanation is what role all the commercial entwining since the 1980s — outsourcing, offshoring — plays in reducing the likelihood of war. The reverse to that is that the Pacific front in WWII was triggered (no pun) by creating an existential economic crisis for Japan. Desperation, of course, also motivated Hamas’ attack of October 7.) Are the economic relationships a deterrent to a significant degree?
Another: outsourcing and offshoring had a deflationary effect over the years. So if outsourcing and/or offshoring was reduced, how bad would the resulting inflation be? Maybe bad enough to, again, pressure our leaders to hold back on the sabre-rattling.
Two more factoids: a nation always has to have enemies to protect the people from; “1984” provides the classic, simplified model. While the US has a bunch of domestic enemies (at least as perceived by conservatives) the military-industrial complex needs foreign threats to boost sales of munitions.
The longtime conundrum has been that Dems screw up foreign policy in order to look tougher than maybe warranted so as to look tough in the face of GOP claims of the Dems being weak or mushy in response to whatever overblown threat — which then gets echoed in the mass media. And now that the GOP is essentially a party of the insane, unhinged, delusional, whatever… well, conservatives’ support of Putin in his fully unjustified invasion of Ukraine is at least an omen.
China and immigrants from the south are keeping down inflation with China’s relatively cheap manufactured products and immigrant labor especially in food related industries. Maybe a good PR firm could figure how to get this small fact ( inflation) out into the conversation
claimed sovereignty over, and built permanent fortifications in, the South China Sea, and pushed the Philippines out of its economic zone there violently, all in defiance of a World Court ruling that the SCS is international waters;
suppressed the civil rights of Hong Kong residents and suborned their democratically elected government;
dammed the headwaters of the Mekong river inflicting suffering on the already poor people of its valley;
continued its program of destroying Tibetan culture;
used slave labor and concentration camps to destroy the Uighur people and their culture;
sent fishing factory ships all over the world to exploit and destroy fisheries of poor countries;
stolen billions of dollars of trade secret information from American businesses;
threatened the people of Taiwan with military conquest and destruction of their democratically elected government; and,
spread the COVID plague over the world, and, ...
I just listed those off the top of my head.
The United States has been torpid in reacting to Chinese aggression, partly because of American fantasies that if China became prosperous it would act like other countries that were formerly hostile like Japan and Germany, and partly because moneyed interests were too heavily invested in China and too enmeshed in their own fantasies of deriving incalculable wealth from that enormous market (Hello, Adam Silver).
Anyone who thinks that China is not an enemy of the liberal international order that has grown more dangerous, more hostile, and more aggressive as it as grown more prosperous is either misinformed, deluded, or suborned.
Any American who is not impressed by the urgent need to disentangle our economy from China, to get our vital supply lines under control (e.g. medicines), rebuild our industrial capacity for defense, and restock our arsenals and those of our allies, is either ignorant, foolish, or rooting for the other side (a common affliction at in the Ivy League).
Tooze; I am done with you. After I heard a couple of podcasts and read The Deluge, I thought your were a smart guy with a lot of insightful things to say. I even bought a copy of The Deluge for a friend. But after this display, and after your regurgitation of Hamas talking points, I understand that you only a fountain of European Leftist conventional wisdom. I see no reason to waste my time reading it or arguing with you about it. I understand that you are a foreigner and you have no obligation to to like the United States or promote its well being. I also understand that your employer Columbia University regards your output as a feature, not a bug. (Why American Taxpayers are required to subsidize it is a separate issue.) But, I don't have to. So, au revoir, drive safely, and don't forget to floss.
So, what is this shooting the messenger? To the question of who and what will be left after a war, you think the US has a chance? How did the US rise to power? Your list of Chinese vices could easily be translated to what happened in the US, and again prove Chinese to be copycats!
Russia is a democracy, elections, strong executive, and in fact allows for more viable parties than the US and US is still at its throat as much as possible.
Also, the sanctions imposed on Iran are not, as implied here, internationally sanctioned, it is jst the US here. Nobody cares that much. Same way nobody care about the price cap on the Russian oil...
Lovely to see Max Boot warn (others) about 'blundering into war'. He's an expert there.
A US - China war initiated by the US is not very likely if the military bureaucracy would call the shots - but we have to content for gentlemen like rep Gallagher (he's in the below Politico story).
But even with massive extra funding the results of decades of free trade, international wage competition (both theoretically covered by democratic peace theory), applying defense contracting to secure jobs in politicians home states, and US defense market concentration (a CN defense dollar is applied 25 x more effectively than a US def. dollar) will bite the US in the ass:
Former McCain aide and now weapons seller Christian Brose (Anduril Industries): “We could throw a trillion dollars a year at the defense budget now, and we’re not going to get a meaningful increase in traditional military capabilities in the next five years.”
While war games result in:
'And as a protracted siege ensued, the U.S. was much slower to rebuild, taking years to replace ships as it reckoned with how shriveled its industrial base had become compared to China’s.
But a swift response may not be possible, in large part because of how shrunken the U.S. manufacturing base has become since the Cold War. All of a sudden, Washington is reckoning with the fact that so many parts and pieces of munitions, planes, and ships it needs are being manufactured overseas, including in China.
Among the deficiencies: components of solid rocket motors, shell casings, machine tools, fuses and precursor elements to propellants and explosives, many of which are made in China and India. Beyond that, skilled labor is sorely lacking, and the learning curve is steep.
The U.S. has slashed defense workers to a third of what they were in 1985 — a number that has remained flat — and seen some 17,000 companies leave the industry, said David Norquist, president of the National Defense Industrial Association. And commercial companies are leery of the Pentagon’s tangle of rules and restrictions.
Under Secretary of Defense William LaPlante said the Biden administration and its allies in Europe and Asia were moving quickly to fill the gaps'.
Now you understand what the IRA and similar fiscal largesse really is supposed to achieve. And now a wartime US deficit makes a lot more sense. But the under secretary forgets about the impact (climate worriors love that word) of ESG (also known as 'impact investing') on EU arms manufacturers: since pension funds and asset managers have divested and banks refuse loans, the European weapons sector can't find the private investments it needs to scale up to increase deliveries to UA. While no one is scaling up to counter CN.
Current military thinking on a US - CN conflict is that the US army is way too small to do anything significant inside CN. While expanding it is so hard currently some are thinking about conscription. Plus, US aircraft carriers are so vulnerable to CN land- air- and sea missiles that it is likely that they would be destroyed.
Military academies and magazines like War on the Rocks c.s. have been writing on the need to have (much) smaller carriers. Altough small carriers are (even) more vulnerable militarily the reasoning is that the loss of a huge, prestigious carrier with its thousands of personnel, would propell the US to (having to) retaliate grimly. And since it has few if any conventional ways to do that convincingly the US would choose the nuclear option. (Similar to what D Ellsberg revealed about the 58' standoff: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/politics/nuclear-war-risk-1958-us-china.html )
Too Big to Sink - The aircraft carrier has become so central to the U.S. Navy that its defeat would be catastrophic.
'Loss of a carrier could be the U.S. Navy's Black Swan...But carriers are crucial to so many of the fleet’s missions that if the enemy can defeat them, the results would be catastrophic for both the Navy and the nation. The loss of a $12 billion capital ship, more than 5,000 American lives, and a powerful symbol of U.S. military superiority would send shock waves around the world'.
Just like economics, climate, nudging humans, etc the military rely on models. And on hapless opponents:
'Evidence for the carrier’s invincibility, however, is seriously flawed. War games, exercises, models, and expert opinions are not nearly as robust as actual combat experience.
Argentinian commanders failed inexplicably to realize that if they had hit [the carrier] Hermes, the British would have been finished. They never really came after the one target that would surely have given them victory. As it was, we fought our way along a knife-edge, I realizing perhaps more than most . . . that one major mishap, a mine, an explosion, a fire, whatever, in either of our two aircraft carriers, would almost certainly have proved fatal to the whole operation'
Unfortunately US cancel culture is rather pervasive and includes those whose honour is hurt by studies that do not provide the correct outcomes:
'last month the incoming U.S. Navy secretary called a halt to a study on the future of the country’s fleet of 11 aircraft carriers. The “Future Carrier 2030 Task Force” was asked to test how large, nuclear-powered carriers might stack up against the new generation of long-range precision weapons being fielded by China and Russia'
'There is a natural tendency to avoid thinking about how America might lose by imagining how U.S. forces might win instead'. (US proxies included i guess. Until they don't.)
'In 2019, analyst David Ochmanek of the RAND Corporation remarked that “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it.” In November 2018, the National Defense Strategy Commission found that “If the United States had to fight Russia in a Baltic contingency or China in a war over Taiwan … Americans could face a decisive military defeat … Put bluntly, the U.S. military could lose the next state-versus-state war it fights.”
Thinking about defeat is not merely taboo in U.S. strategic culture. It is illegal in some cases. In August 1958, Sen. Richard Russell expressed outrage that he had heard on the radio “that some person or persons holding office in the Department of Defense have entered into contracts with various institutions to conduct studies to determine when and how, and in what circumstances, the United States would surrender to its enemies in the event of war.”
Russell proposed an amendment to the supplemental appropriations bill then under consideration that “no part of the funds appropriated in this or any other act shall be used to pay” for studies of this kind. While the Eisenhower administration (which protested that Russell misrepresented the studies he was condemning) and some senators pushed back against the amendment, it ultimately passed with 88 votes for and only two against'.
as admirable as the effort of confronting the real possibility of multilateral war, the prospect isn't one of narrow conflicts suddenly--irrationally-- spinning out of control.
to see these catastrophes clearly means to acknowledge the scope of ruling class interests of each nation that ultimately engulfs rank & file soldiers **and** civilians as the sacrifice upon the altar of corporate profit.
what grudge or enmity could i possibly have against a citizen of gaza, tehran or moscow that should prompt my desire for their respective or collective harm? this is the very question i wish all americans would self-address and answer with paint-stripping honestly.
In the final analysis, Clausewitz’s statement that war is politics by other means is ever present. However, a corollary to that is choosing war comes at much higher costs than the alternative, but countries and their leaders let their egos cloud their judgement.
What I believe Adam is pointing out is that because both the US and China know they have much to lose, the reopening of dialogue to gain understanding and prevent a major miscommunication now can help prevent events from getting out of control. And absent this, hence the counter factual exercise of going back a few months, shows how important this communication is today.
Unmentioned is China’s habit of stealing technology and continually using espionage for economic gain. That, together with the way it treats minorities and others who disagree with the state ideology, make it an illegitimate economic competitor. The U.S. is correct to treat it as an adversary which would stop at nothing to replace it as the world’s
leader.
That doesn't actually matter for this discussion. Whether China is a good regime or not (it's not) doesn't change the material fact of their existence. Whether that money was gotten legitimately (and of course America is hardly innocent of exploitation) doesn't matter, that money spends just the same. China is an economic competitor, regardless of whether or not you believe they should have what they have. If they were a flawless democracy, it wouldn't change the fact that the People's Republic of China and the United States of America have divergent interests. Morality isn't what's at stake here. The reason why deescalation is important is because war isn't about who is right, it's about who is left. And in a world with nuclear weapons, there is no way to "defeat" the Chinese regime or force it to stop existing, only the ability to deal with the reality in which it exists, and to minimize the risks it poses. China wants to be world leader, US wants to be world leader, but it is in the interest of everybody involved that they don't destroy each other over the question. And "legitimacy" has nothing to do with that interest.
Very good points. I was replying to the comments suggesting that actions taken by the U.S. toward China were inappropriate. I was making the point that an unethical and/or cheating world power may call for a different type of response to serve notice that the U.S. is not blind or naive. Otherwise the two may well “ destroy each other.”
Oh, you mean like the US did to the British in the late 1800s?
Or how Japan and S Korea did when they started their modernization/industrialization? With the US never saying anything about that.
Among the mysteries of life for which I don’t find any explanation is what role all the commercial entwining since the 1980s — outsourcing, offshoring — plays in reducing the likelihood of war. The reverse to that is that the Pacific front in WWII was triggered (no pun) by creating an existential economic crisis for Japan. Desperation, of course, also motivated Hamas’ attack of October 7.) Are the economic relationships a deterrent to a significant degree?
Another: outsourcing and offshoring had a deflationary effect over the years. So if outsourcing and/or offshoring was reduced, how bad would the resulting inflation be? Maybe bad enough to, again, pressure our leaders to hold back on the sabre-rattling.
Two more factoids: a nation always has to have enemies to protect the people from; “1984” provides the classic, simplified model. While the US has a bunch of domestic enemies (at least as perceived by conservatives) the military-industrial complex needs foreign threats to boost sales of munitions.
The longtime conundrum has been that Dems screw up foreign policy in order to look tougher than maybe warranted so as to look tough in the face of GOP claims of the Dems being weak or mushy in response to whatever overblown threat — which then gets echoed in the mass media. And now that the GOP is essentially a party of the insane, unhinged, delusional, whatever… well, conservatives’ support of Putin in his fully unjustified invasion of Ukraine is at least an omen.
China and immigrants from the south are keeping down inflation with China’s relatively cheap manufactured products and immigrant labor especially in food related industries. Maybe a good PR firm could figure how to get this small fact ( inflation) out into the conversation
In the past decade, China has:
claimed sovereignty over, and built permanent fortifications in, the South China Sea, and pushed the Philippines out of its economic zone there violently, all in defiance of a World Court ruling that the SCS is international waters;
suppressed the civil rights of Hong Kong residents and suborned their democratically elected government;
dammed the headwaters of the Mekong river inflicting suffering on the already poor people of its valley;
continued its program of destroying Tibetan culture;
used slave labor and concentration camps to destroy the Uighur people and their culture;
sent fishing factory ships all over the world to exploit and destroy fisheries of poor countries;
stolen billions of dollars of trade secret information from American businesses;
threatened the people of Taiwan with military conquest and destruction of their democratically elected government; and,
spread the COVID plague over the world, and, ...
I just listed those off the top of my head.
The United States has been torpid in reacting to Chinese aggression, partly because of American fantasies that if China became prosperous it would act like other countries that were formerly hostile like Japan and Germany, and partly because moneyed interests were too heavily invested in China and too enmeshed in their own fantasies of deriving incalculable wealth from that enormous market (Hello, Adam Silver).
Anyone who thinks that China is not an enemy of the liberal international order that has grown more dangerous, more hostile, and more aggressive as it as grown more prosperous is either misinformed, deluded, or suborned.
Any American who is not impressed by the urgent need to disentangle our economy from China, to get our vital supply lines under control (e.g. medicines), rebuild our industrial capacity for defense, and restock our arsenals and those of our allies, is either ignorant, foolish, or rooting for the other side (a common affliction at in the Ivy League).
Tooze; I am done with you. After I heard a couple of podcasts and read The Deluge, I thought your were a smart guy with a lot of insightful things to say. I even bought a copy of The Deluge for a friend. But after this display, and after your regurgitation of Hamas talking points, I understand that you only a fountain of European Leftist conventional wisdom. I see no reason to waste my time reading it or arguing with you about it. I understand that you are a foreigner and you have no obligation to to like the United States or promote its well being. I also understand that your employer Columbia University regards your output as a feature, not a bug. (Why American Taxpayers are required to subsidize it is a separate issue.) But, I don't have to. So, au revoir, drive safely, and don't forget to floss.
So, what is this shooting the messenger? To the question of who and what will be left after a war, you think the US has a chance? How did the US rise to power? Your list of Chinese vices could easily be translated to what happened in the US, and again prove Chinese to be copycats!
I see considerable evidence for a Gresham's Law of comments.
This is not even to mention that we are doomed without co-ordination on climate. Frankly, I think we are doomed.
Russia is a democracy, elections, strong executive, and in fact allows for more viable parties than the US and US is still at its throat as much as possible.
Also, the sanctions imposed on Iran are not, as implied here, internationally sanctioned, it is jst the US here. Nobody cares that much. Same way nobody care about the price cap on the Russian oil...
Lovely to see Max Boot warn (others) about 'blundering into war'. He's an expert there.
A US - China war initiated by the US is not very likely if the military bureaucracy would call the shots - but we have to content for gentlemen like rep Gallagher (he's in the below Politico story).
But even with massive extra funding the results of decades of free trade, international wage competition (both theoretically covered by democratic peace theory), applying defense contracting to secure jobs in politicians home states, and US defense market concentration (a CN defense dollar is applied 25 x more effectively than a US def. dollar) will bite the US in the ass:
Former McCain aide and now weapons seller Christian Brose (Anduril Industries): “We could throw a trillion dollars a year at the defense budget now, and we’re not going to get a meaningful increase in traditional military capabilities in the next five years.”
While war games result in:
'And as a protracted siege ensued, the U.S. was much slower to rebuild, taking years to replace ships as it reckoned with how shriveled its industrial base had become compared to China’s.
But a swift response may not be possible, in large part because of how shrunken the U.S. manufacturing base has become since the Cold War. All of a sudden, Washington is reckoning with the fact that so many parts and pieces of munitions, planes, and ships it needs are being manufactured overseas, including in China.
Among the deficiencies: components of solid rocket motors, shell casings, machine tools, fuses and precursor elements to propellants and explosives, many of which are made in China and India. Beyond that, skilled labor is sorely lacking, and the learning curve is steep.
The U.S. has slashed defense workers to a third of what they were in 1985 — a number that has remained flat — and seen some 17,000 companies leave the industry, said David Norquist, president of the National Defense Industrial Association. And commercial companies are leery of the Pentagon’s tangle of rules and restrictions.
Under Secretary of Defense William LaPlante said the Biden administration and its allies in Europe and Asia were moving quickly to fill the gaps'.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-weapons-china-00100373
Now you understand what the IRA and similar fiscal largesse really is supposed to achieve. And now a wartime US deficit makes a lot more sense. But the under secretary forgets about the impact (climate worriors love that word) of ESG (also known as 'impact investing') on EU arms manufacturers: since pension funds and asset managers have divested and banks refuse loans, the European weapons sector can't find the private investments it needs to scale up to increase deliveries to UA. While no one is scaling up to counter CN.
Current military thinking on a US - CN conflict is that the US army is way too small to do anything significant inside CN. While expanding it is so hard currently some are thinking about conscription. Plus, US aircraft carriers are so vulnerable to CN land- air- and sea missiles that it is likely that they would be destroyed.
Military academies and magazines like War on the Rocks c.s. have been writing on the need to have (much) smaller carriers. Altough small carriers are (even) more vulnerable militarily the reasoning is that the loss of a huge, prestigious carrier with its thousands of personnel, would propell the US to (having to) retaliate grimly. And since it has few if any conventional ways to do that convincingly the US would choose the nuclear option. (Similar to what D Ellsberg revealed about the 58' standoff: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/politics/nuclear-war-risk-1958-us-china.html )
Too Big to Sink - The aircraft carrier has become so central to the U.S. Navy that its defeat would be catastrophic.
'Loss of a carrier could be the U.S. Navy's Black Swan...But carriers are crucial to so many of the fleet’s missions that if the enemy can defeat them, the results would be catastrophic for both the Navy and the nation. The loss of a $12 billion capital ship, more than 5,000 American lives, and a powerful symbol of U.S. military superiority would send shock waves around the world'.
Just like economics, climate, nudging humans, etc the military rely on models. And on hapless opponents:
'Evidence for the carrier’s invincibility, however, is seriously flawed. War games, exercises, models, and expert opinions are not nearly as robust as actual combat experience.
Argentinian commanders failed inexplicably to realize that if they had hit [the carrier] Hermes, the British would have been finished. They never really came after the one target that would surely have given them victory. As it was, we fought our way along a knife-edge, I realizing perhaps more than most . . . that one major mishap, a mine, an explosion, a fire, whatever, in either of our two aircraft carriers, would almost certainly have proved fatal to the whole operation'
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/may/too-big-sink
Unfortunately US cancel culture is rather pervasive and includes those whose honour is hurt by studies that do not provide the correct outcomes:
'last month the incoming U.S. Navy secretary called a halt to a study on the future of the country’s fleet of 11 aircraft carriers. The “Future Carrier 2030 Task Force” was asked to test how large, nuclear-powered carriers might stack up against the new generation of long-range precision weapons being fielded by China and Russia'
https://bit.ly/3uPGKxo
And that seems a good old US tradition:
'There is a natural tendency to avoid thinking about how America might lose by imagining how U.S. forces might win instead'. (US proxies included i guess. Until they don't.)
'In 2019, analyst David Ochmanek of the RAND Corporation remarked that “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it.” In November 2018, the National Defense Strategy Commission found that “If the United States had to fight Russia in a Baltic contingency or China in a war over Taiwan … Americans could face a decisive military defeat … Put bluntly, the U.S. military could lose the next state-versus-state war it fights.”
Thinking about defeat is not merely taboo in U.S. strategic culture. It is illegal in some cases. In August 1958, Sen. Richard Russell expressed outrage that he had heard on the radio “that some person or persons holding office in the Department of Defense have entered into contracts with various institutions to conduct studies to determine when and how, and in what circumstances, the United States would surrender to its enemies in the event of war.”
Russell proposed an amendment to the supplemental appropriations bill then under consideration that “no part of the funds appropriated in this or any other act shall be used to pay” for studies of this kind. While the Eisenhower administration (which protested that Russell misrepresented the studies he was condemning) and some senators pushed back against the amendment, it ultimately passed with 88 votes for and only two against'.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/06/defeat-is-possible/
Problem solved.
as admirable as the effort of confronting the real possibility of multilateral war, the prospect isn't one of narrow conflicts suddenly--irrationally-- spinning out of control.
to see these catastrophes clearly means to acknowledge the scope of ruling class interests of each nation that ultimately engulfs rank & file soldiers **and** civilians as the sacrifice upon the altar of corporate profit.
what grudge or enmity could i possibly have against a citizen of gaza, tehran or moscow that should prompt my desire for their respective or collective harm? this is the very question i wish all americans would self-address and answer with paint-stripping honestly.
In the final analysis, Clausewitz’s statement that war is politics by other means is ever present. However, a corollary to that is choosing war comes at much higher costs than the alternative, but countries and their leaders let their egos cloud their judgement.
What I believe Adam is pointing out is that because both the US and China know they have much to lose, the reopening of dialogue to gain understanding and prevent a major miscommunication now can help prevent events from getting out of control. And absent this, hence the counter factual exercise of going back a few months, shows how important this communication is today.