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Vivek Ramaswamy has written an article on his foreign policy doctrine, focusing on China.
He is squarely taking aim at the "neocons and liberal internationalists", in other words the two main constituents of what Obama referred to as "the Blob" dominating foreign policy in D.C. He is predictably being called an isolationist and WaPo columnists are freaking out.
WaPo columnists themselves are not relevant but they are often mouthpieces for more powerful interests. Trump was hated for many things but one underappreciated aspect of why the Blob hated him was his instinct not to start new wars. In fact, he is one of the few presidents in recent memory who did not start a new war and he tried to get out of Syria - twice - but was undermined by his own bureaucracy.
Vivek is a much smarter guy than Trump, so I wonder if the Blob would be able to run circles around him the way they did around Trump. I doubt it and I suspect they doubt it too, which is why I think a campaign to destroy Vivek is likely to ramp up before too long. Trump couldn't be controlled outright but at least he could be misled.
You don’t have to be a professor of international relations to see why this idea is retarded. So you accept Russian control of Eastern Ukraine and lift all sanctions on Russia, and then Russia has to ‘exit’ (ambiguous) its ‘military alliance’ (something that only partially exists on paper anyway) with China….or else…what? Vivek restores sanctions on Russia for not sufficiently breaking ties with China (pointless, even a temporary break in sanctions will allow for large scale repatriation or transfer of Russian capital in anticipation of future sanctions)? Are you going to trust Putin? How will that be measured? Why wouldn’t cooperation continue in an underhanded way? Once you force a Ukrainian defeat and unilaterally lift sanctions you’re not in a position of strength toward Russia, you’re in one of total weakness. And Vivek can’t threaten Putin with Ukrainian NATO membership because, as Putin knows, there are other member states that would be amenable to vetoing it regardless of what the US says.
And most importantly, Russia can never be a ‘strategic check’ on China’s designs in East Asia. What does Vivek think he can do, get Putin to invade Manchuria in case Gyna threatens to bomb Taiwan? Send Russia’s three remaining seaworthy warships to the South China Sea? And Vivek is an isolationist who only cares about Taiwan until 2028 or whatever anyway (when he believes TSMC will no longer be critical) so why care about a long-term ‘check on China’ at all?
Still, Vivek is a high verbal IQ arch-grifter who has never created a substantial, profitable business, bilked investors out of $400m to buy a $5m failed drug from GSK (and burned through that entire capital in a doomed pivot) and then himself pivoted into politics when the cheap money dried up. He has never accomplished anything that is both impressive and good for society in his entire life. Even Trump is a better businessman, so perhaps this is what America deserves.
One of the biggest limitations China has is a dependence on imports of oil and natural gas; if those are cut off sufficiently, any invasion of Taiwan is stillborn (and Xi runs the risk of his head ending up on a pike). Russia (and areas in Central Asia in which it has a lot of influence) is a very important backstop; with Malacca closed off, land-based imports of oil would still allow China to wage a war on the scale of a couple years instead of months. Russia offering a credible promise not to export fossil fuels to China would be worth a lot, if it were possible.
Oil and gas only matter if a war is fought on the years scale, not the weeks or months scale. This is virtually guaranteed not to be the case. Any Taiwanese conflict is going to be a months-long affair at best. And if it's longer, there are larger macroeconomic considerations more important than oil. I think you dramatically overestimate how much oil a country goes through mid-conflict. No one is going to boycott selling China oil in peacetime, either. In short, this entire line of reasoning is irrelevant and severing the so-called Russia-China military alliance (which mostly only exists on paper, it's not like the Russian fleet would ever, under any circumstances, fight alongside China against the US, which is the only thing of real value Russia even has in that theater.).
How would US even figure out whose submarines are attacking them?
They don't even need to surface. Even if you sank one, odds are that finding whose sub was it would require a deep diving ROVm
As any Clancy reader could tell you, from their distinctive audio signature.
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The war will last for only a couple months if one side or another gets a decisive victory. If it's more evenly matched, it will extend for years. Though I agree that if China does get that decisive victory, Russian oil will have been irrelevant and the world will quickly adapt to the new norm and eagerly sell fossil fuels to the new hegemon in the Western Pacific.
China obviously wants a 6-week campaign of victory after victory to happen, but that's not guaranteed. And if it gets stuck in long attritional warfare, it'll end up losing, but only after years of rationing and hopeful delusions being dashed. Without Russia enabling China to continue a war, all those delusions would be crushed much sooner, which is best for everyone involved.
There's pretty much zero chance that a conventional conflict over Taiwan lasts years. Maybe either a blockade or an insurgency could lass that long, but even those are unlikely. Taiwan is less than 6% of the size of Ukraine, while also being an island. Either a Chinese invasion gets stopped on the beaches, or it's pretty much game over. Taiwan's rugged terrain could plausibly let it fight for a few months, but little beyond that.
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I really cannot understand how you can believe that China, a nation with 1.4 billion people, would lose a war of attrition with Taiwan, a small island with a population of 23 million. Could you please explain or elaborate how China loses the war of attrition with Taiwan?
A war of attrition with the US, Japan, and every country which doesn't want China to be hegemon in the Western Pacific. Which is to say, all of China's neighbors. Vietnam and other regional players would maintain neutrality to not get too much on China's bad side, but they'd be rooting for US victory.
Here, Chinese victory would mean gaining control of Taiwan; US victory is not-Chinese victory.
So why would attrition mean China losing? If China can't get victory over ~3 months, its existing capabilities can't win it Taiwan. Over time, its warmaking capabilities will face increasing degradation relative to the US and its allies due to its sea lane imports being cut off. That's the core dynamic.
There are wildcards: China will be doing terribly economically, but so will US allies and the US itself. But less so than China. (Taiwan will be doing worst of all, but its military capabilities are irrelevant compared even to Japan's). That could cause domestic issues in those countries that would undermine warmaking efforts.
This is the bit that I can't understand. The US is currently unable to fully extricate Chinese gear from military supply lines and has frequent issues with counterfeit Chinese equipment showing up in military procurement. At the same time, the US navy agrees that China has approximately 232 times the amount of shipbuilding capacity that the USA does. Ukraine has proved that drones are now an increasingly important element to modern wars, and China's manufacturing capacity in that arena so dwarfs the US that there's barely even any comparison possible. At the same time, China's manufacturing base has made it a far more crucial trading partner to a lot of the world than the US. I just don't see how the US is going to interdict trade to and from China without causing the entire global economy to disintegrate overnight and make dedollarisation take place overnight rather than over a longer timespan.
In short, it comes down to oil. You need oil to make an economy run, which includes making jet fuel but also civilian purposes. China consumes around 15M barrels/day and produces only around 5M barrels/day domestically, with a strategic supply of around 1B barrels. There are workarounds--rationing, increasing imports from accessible sources--but the deficit after the strategic reserves are exhausted within 3-6 months will be crippling and destabilizing. You can run a pretty effective war machine on 5M barrels/day, but you can't sustain civil society on an 80% cut on civilian oil consumption.
The USA, for all its issues (both military and civilian), is not gonna be starved for oil. When China sinks its ships, the USA can rebuild them: it's true that China accounts for 48 per cent of global shipyard output, but South Korea (less likely) accounts for 25 per cent and Japan (more likely) does 15 per cent. Purely legal regulations prevent the US from taking advantage of those capacities, regulations that will be promptly discarded in the case of a real war.
It will happen, it will be brutal, and it will restructure the world economy. But I'm counting an obliterated world economy where China has failed to take Taiwan as a loss for China and a "win" for the US.
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What would you offer Putin? Other than "nothing, the trap is shut and it's not coming open until you die and whoever replaces you crawls back to grovel".
The PLA is small for a country the size of China, because China, like the USSR before it, is afraid of its own army even with commissars and the CMC.
If Russia ends up in the American sphere of influence, China will have a 4000 km long border it will have to adequately man, drawing both funds and manpower away from its other military endeavors. It will also end up locked out of Central Asia. Outbidding Russian interests is one thing, outbidding Russian interests backed by American interests is another.
Direct, immediate, quid pro quo total sanctions relief (codified, in a treaty) in exchange for a withdrawal from all occupied territory (except Crimea), with the withdrawal happening first. Once a withdrawal occurs, sanctions are lifted and the US helps build a fortified defensive line in Eastern Ukraine, the risk of future invasion is minimal.
This might work with his replacement, but I doubt Putin cares about sanctions this much. He wanted to be "the Great", so he'll either succeed (and it's the definition of success that is negotiable) or die trying.
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Putin's not going to go for that. It's defeat.
It's a better deal than the one the West is offering him now. If he doesn't want to take it, the flow of arms to Ukraine can continue indefinitely at only a tiny percentage of US/Western European GDP.
Europe doesn't even have the weapons production capacity of 1935.
It could after three more years barely provide artillery shells Ukraine needs at their modest expenditure rates.
As I understand, anti-aircraft missile situation is very bad, ditto for tanks (Leo-1 now supposed to be mainstay lol).
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GDP is irrelevant, production is everything. US officials are openly declaring that they can't sustain the flow of supplies that's going to Ukraine. It will take at least 5 years just to have a chance of refilling reserves of key munitions like Javelins and Stingers.
The US might have a high GDP, based on financial trickery and service sector shenanigans but its actual military production capacity is pathetic. It's a bare shadow of what it was in 1994. 100 Stingers per year!
https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/230109_Military_Inventories_Graphic.jpg?V07Bh5IFz5cOgg9qXyu.wrwD7BYakT7C
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Actually, it is a substantially worse deal. He's currently winning in Ukraine - why does he want to withdraw? If he accepts the deal he ends up in a worse situation than he is now. Russia and China have both been working on a replacement to the USD as global reserve currency for some time, and the sanctions have directly contributed to the growth of their alternative to western financial systems. They no longer trust the dollar or western financial bodies because they understand that the sanctions can just get turned on and their assets stolen. They'd obviously enjoy being able to get back all the wealth that just got confiscated and stolen, but there's no level of compromise that would get them to stop building and using their alternative systems. What does he have to gain from giving up territory in this deal? The trust relationship between the BRICS and the Western Financial system has been completely broken, and de-dollarisation is picking up pace around the globe because everyone else is correctly realising that the dollar is now a weapon.
Furthermore, what sort of assurances would the US be able to provide that he could actually trust? I don't think there's any deal which both the US and Russia would accept. Do you remember the Minsk accords? Because Russia sure does, and they also remember the following prank call to Francois Hollande.
https://tass.com/world/1600325 (I know this is a Russian news source, but you can just go listen to the phonecall if you want)
For core structural reasons related to the underlying nature of China’s economy, this is impossible. To become a true reserve currency, they’d have to reverse the balance of trade, which is the one thing they’re desperate not to do.
My understanding was that they wouldn't be using the Yuan as a reserve currency but creating something new (or bringing back an old barbarous relic). I totally agree that the Yuan is deeply unsuitable for use as a reserve currency, but that doesn't mean the BRICS nations can't work on a replacement to the USD.
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I’ve heard a lot about the dangers of a non-western reserve currency but you’re saying it’s not viable? For China at least.
Would you mind explaining in a bit more detail? I don’t have a good grounding in macro finance.
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You think the Russians are a credible threat to the Chinese short of nuking them? Hell no, if Ukraine wasn't sufficient evidence already.
I don't think the level of US support, both financial, military and logistical, needed to get Russia to be a credible threat to China is anywhere near the Overton Window, then I have a bridge crossing the Strait of Malacca to sell to you.
I just want to remind everyone that China might be a bit less corrupt than Russia, but it has the same problems with a top-down army at well below paper strength- and almost no recent combat experience, to boot.
Counterpoint: Russia didn't fully unleash its cyberpower against Ukraine because it expected to occupy Ukraine afterward and didn't feel the need to. However, in a hypothetical US-China conflict, China has a high chance of going pretty high-stakes to win (shooting down GPS and other satellites, unleashing their tried-and-tested cyberpower troops who might even be more experienced than US ones, etc). Their primary opponents would be the US Navy (which while relatively battle-tested has also shown signs of rot and corruption) and the Taiwanese military (which is even more dysfunctional and abandoned than China's). I think Western theorists strongly underestimate the threat China poses in such a conflict. They also have a ridiculous supply-line advantage (literally their entire coast right there), so they don't need to project air or naval power very far at all.
I agree that ‘China is militarily irrelevant’ is not true, but ‘Russia’s army is too dysfunctional for China to have to worry about under any circumstances’ is also not true, because China’s army has many of the same structural issues. Russia probably has lower force quality generally, sure, but it’s a difference in degree, not in kind.
Is that even true? Russia was actually deploying armed troops/PMCs to theatres such as Syria and parts of Africa before Ukraine and there they engaged in combat operations. The PLA combat experience of the last several decades has been non-firearms close combat with India along the border and ADIZ missions while Chinese PMC/PSCs supporting Belt and Road efforts has been entirely unarmed non-combat support, focusing instead on equipment delivery, training and unarmed advisor roles. The error bars around the PLA seems much larger than the ones around Russian forces.
That’s exactly my point. China seems less corrupt and to have better maintenance standards, but 1) Russia doesn’t have a 3rd world military and 2) China has some of the same systems that limit Russia’s military capabilities at maneuver warfare.
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Alone? No. With Ukraine-style lend-lease? Definitely. The Ukrainian army is not the only one that is gaining valuable combat experience first-hand.
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Many in Russia also, rightly or wrongly*, blame the US for the last round of "development" that led to a ton of corruption and cronyism.
* Wrongly imo
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Why is this such a bad thing? As-is, that seems to be what the Americans are doing, and it's going just fine for them
For purely humanitarian reasons and in case Trump wins and screws something up.
Bad how? What deal should people offer, would it be better than the status quo, and would it actually be feasible?
Bad as in several hundred thousand more deaths.
The Ukrainian nation seems pretty resolved to keep fighting. Who are you to tell them they shouldn't?
Much like dealing with a drug addict in the family -- you can support them and help them to survive, but you need to do so without enabling the addiction that is destroying them.
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Nothing, you don't reward people for doing things to which you are opposed, especially when you don't have to.
"Do not call this a grave, it is the future you chose". Putin has been given off-ramp after off-ramp, chance after chance and he has refused every single one. He is not interested in any resolution of this conflict other than near-total victory and is apparently willing to stake everything on a war he lost months ago.
Firstly, Putin would rather burn Russia to the ground than even consider thinking about imagining the possibility of "Russia in the American sphere of influence". Secondly, Russia is a spent force for at least a generation, having burned through more men and materiel than the modern Russian state can credibly replace. Thirdly, the war in Ukraine has revealed that the armed forces of Russia are incompetent, hollowed out by an institutional culture of lying. Of course, China is probably in a similar state, but they also have substantial advantages in both manpower and materiel. Additionally, the forces that would be used to fight a war with Russia (a land campaign) are not the same as the forces that would be used to fight the US (air and naval) and China already has both.
Chinese ships don't accidentally crash into civilian shipping, nor do their light carriers burn down in port, nor is their fleet actually shrinking year-on-year. When it comes to quality and naval professionalism, China seems to be well ahead of the US navy.
As for an institutional culture of lying... the Afghanistan War? The defeat against the Taliban with about 1/100th the funding of the US/NATO force, supported by no foreign power at all? Staying on ten years despite it being clear that the US was not going to achieve its objectives, while the Taliban was? Constantly lying to the public and saying things were going fine? Junior officers being ignored when they pointed out the entire thing was a massive farce with zero chance of success, that the 'allies' they were trying to train were drug addicts and pedophiles?
/images/1693360022033126.webp
No, the ports themselves burn.
Or, maybe yes
Case in point:
https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/chinas-first-type-075-amphibious-assault-ship-begins-sea-trials/
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It's such a shame that, because Trump has the GOP in his pocket, this line will never be used on Vivek.
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I get similar thoughts reading him on geopolitics. He’s either grifting or just dumb and I’m not sure which.
Russia won’t accept that deal. Personally sure maybe they should accept a pot of gold and become good Russia for the US. But Russia still wants more land and not the pot of gold.
Geopolitically the best day for Russia to leave Ukraine was yesterday. It hasn’t made any sense for them since the fail of the 3 day war. The best case scenerio for not is Ukraine is rubble but I don’t see that as a win in the modern world.
But for Vivek (and his people overall) they need to be realist and not claimed realist. Which to me understanding what your opponent is trying to do.
Roivant is like a $10 billion company now which Trump never created. Though admittedly I can’t understand why the company went up as their study on the drug that appears to the cause of the stock up doesn’t seem to impress me in a first quick look.
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You are correct. The die was cast Vivek wants to put the paste back into the bottle. He can’t. It is one thing to criticize the outcome of the support given to Ukraine based on the outcome but this proposal is just dumb.
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Excellent summary. I’d only add that I think a lot of these nonsensical foreign policies come from a “strategy-game understanding” of geopolitics. You can’t just offer Russia a big pot of gold to get +100 relations. Russia and China currently have deeply aligned interests. Both are non-status quo powers. Russia has already paid a significant cost in involuntary decoupling from the West and is now rebuilding those value chains with China. The Russian public is as anti-American as they’ve been for decades. Given the above, even if you could extract a promise from Putin to play nice, there’s no reason to expect it to hold.
The whole vulgar geopolitical mindset that believes that we just have to achieve "multipolarity" and then whatever desired outcome (generally something like the advancement of socialist economics or socially conservative culture) happens also often comes off like the person advocating it has this huge complex game board inside their head where this piece moves here and that piece moves here and good things happen and everything just seems to be based on so much wishful thinking.
I understand why Russians and other peripheral countries would advocate for multi polarity. What I haven’t really grokked is why an American would expect that to improve our situation.
Because maintaining the Empire is really expensive, to the point that the US government cares more about it than actually doing the job it is supposed to back home. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but huge swathes of the US are in absolutely terrible shape - drug addiction, economic malaise, continual border crises, unsustainable birthrates, infrastructure falling into malign neglect... the portion of the US population that directly benefits from the empire is shrinking day after day, and the portion for whom it is an unbearable burden is growing. One of the reasons for Trump's enduring popularity among his base is that he has directly advocated for pulling American funding out of a variety of overseas shitholes and focusing on America - that's a large part of what America First actually means.
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Everyone except them (the master strategist) is a robot NPC whose actions can be predicted by economics 101 game theory.
IME this sort or thinking is rampant within the US state department and I believe that it is largely responsible for the situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya turning out the way they did.
Yeah, well, why do you think George Kennan believed US, after dealing with USSR, should be isolationist ? Because he didn't think the people produced by the US system of government are capable of not fucking up everything given half the chance.
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Especially as we've already seen that Putin is the sort of person who'll renege on a deal the moment he sees it as advantageous to do so. Is this guy at all familiar with the last century or so of European politics/culture? All that's missing from this proposal is a line about "securing peace in our time".
And of course you can’t have any discussion about appeasement without someone invoking WWII. As if that was the sole appeasement in the history of military affairs.
Appeasement works when you can buy time to improve defenses. When Russia invaded Ukraine, we should’ve strengthened our NATO allies (a core goal for the US); not a corrupt state that was outside our sphere of influence.
As I've argued on previous occasions, every Russian tank, plane and helicopter destroyed in Ukraine is one that wont be able to threaten Poland, Latvia, Finland, Et Al.
Clearing out old stock to significantly weaken the largest regional threat is strengthening our allies, and as others have pointed out, likely at a far lower price point than trying to fortify the Russian border.
Is Poland under threat? If the Russians can't even reach Kiev, it seems unlikely that they're poised to sweep into Warsaw.
Not as much of a threat as it was before the Russian army was revealed to be a paper tiger, but yes it is absolutely under threat.
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Well that sacrifices the Baltics too who have been good since they would be militarily indefensible without Ukraine.
And every post communist country does the “corruption” game until they improve institutions and do the Poland game (tracking do be one of the wealthiest Euro countries in a decade). Country’s don’t pop out of Russian sphere and become good Euro countries day 1 but they all seem to get to that point with time.
Why is it sacrificing the balkans? You could while Ukraine was being invaded move a bunch of military installations into the Balkans so that if Russia expanded (questionable whether they would) they wouldn’t be facing a group trying to get it together but a group that is already together.
The Baltics, not the Balkans. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are small and flat. The original defense plans for a Russia-NATO war called for abandoning them first and counterattacking from Poland.
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You would need trenches and permenent troops like S Korea to even have a chance at protecting it. It’s just an area Russia has better access too and shorter supply lines. Ukraine for NATO is likely cheaper than keeping 150k troops combat ready for the next 50 years.
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Indeed. Not to mention that the last guy dumb enough to trust a deal with Putin famously just got murdered.
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Yeah, this foreign policy just seems straight up retarded. Actually the more I read about Vivek the less I seem to like him in terms of whether he will be good for the world. I still prefer him over most of the Republican field for symbolic status reasons of putting white racists in the "uncomfortable" position of having to vote either for a Democrat or a non white person in the general election. Same reason why I wouldn't mind Nikki Haley either, but it's a lot more on the nose with Vivek.
Nearly all white racists would hold their nose and vote for Ramaswarthy without having to think twice about it. Anti-Hindu sentiment exists in the red tribe, but anti-democrats is a much bigger deal even for the people who hold it.
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So to stick it to the racists, you want a candidate to succeed based on the color of his…skin?
Do you think Republicans dislike Clarence Thomas? Do you think they dislike Tim Scott (a man who really hasn’t done anything but is considered a super star for…reasons)?
Nah, not really. I've changedy mind on Vivek over the last few days when I actually got to read more about him and now I'm negative on him. Were I to have a real vote at this point I would not use it on him.
My post was just a bit of wishful thinking, an innocent daydreaming fantasy of seeing white racists go red in the face as they overload deciding whether they are going to vote for the brown man or vote for the white man who's policies they hate, and the despair they will feel when they realise that those two are the only real options available to them. I thought of it as a small microcosm, completely insulated from its impacts on the rest of the world (as all good fantasies are).
It's nothing important, we all have our fantasies, probably a good thing they don't come true.
"an Indian Republican? That will really make their heads explode"
Nothing happens
"Well, nevertheless"
The capacity of WNs to endure despair is probably far beyond what you can imagine, and the notion that they retain any kind of hope in the two party system is totally laughable.
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How many white racists even are there who would identify Nikki Haley as non-white?
Her parents are named Ajit Singh and Raj Kaur. I don't think you get more Sikh than that.
She looks white. I don't think most Americans even know what a Sikh is.
To be fair, the (vanishingly few) hardcore wignats probably do. Same reasons they can provide a laundry list of which Hollywood stars have some drop of Jewish blood.
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Her bigger problem is she has big ex wife energy
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I think you doth project too much.
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