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Inspired by a comment from Twitter;
Everyone is talking about the US relative decline, but they are really flexing his power in a way that we have not seen from Iraq
In one year they;
Destroyed every possible reconciliation between Europe and Russia
Became a next exporter of natural resources and the ones from who a lot of allies depend
They basically sent a fuck off to Germany, and the Germans not only are not complaining, but are applauding
They strongly limited the military of power of Russia with few money.
China is slowing her growth, and they created a ring of allies in the Pacific
The cultural grip on the West is becoming stronger, and the US successfully fused Neoliberalism and Leftism in a zombie ideology who is, against all odds, successfully working
The pro-Atlantist view have never been so strong.
I doubt that these strategies will work or be healthy in the long term, but it is incredible to see how an ill and polarized country can still do whatever it wants without any reaction.
The most recent flex of US power is promising to send 18 additional HIMARS rocket launchers to Ukraine - in several years since they haven't yet been built!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-28/us-is-sending-more-artillery-to-ukraine-but-it-won-t-arrive-for-years?sref=WwMYRRLR&leadSource=uverify%20wall
The arsenal of democracy is tiring - they can't send any more 155mm howitzers without digging into weapons needed for active US forces. Instead they're sending 105 mm guns, a smaller, weaker calibre.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/28/the-us-and-europe-are-running-out-of-weapons-to-send-to-ukraine.html
I'm astonished that the US spends hundreds of billions more than anyone else on defence but they have such tiny stockpiles of weapons and munitions. Annual US production of artillery shells supplies just two weeks of Ukrainian needs. The Russians are firing considerably more shells despite having a much smaller defence budget. Obviously the US is most focused on aerospace and high-end capabilities as opposed to artillery. But it is ridiculous that NATO, despite spending about $1 trillion to Russia's $60 billion, is feeling any kind of strain.
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From PRC perspective, US sustaining RU/UKR conflict has:
Turned EU from potential spoiler that PRC was willing to expend massive resources to to court/neutralize to becoming geopolitically irrelevent short/medium term. Pro-atlantist views have become stronger, but atlantlist as a bloc as become significantly weaker, and will likely continue to. For PRC Weak EU being removed from the board (by US hand no less) is preferrable to strong EU that could lean pro US.
Forced PRC + RU coupling. Made india to be less committal to west alignment. PRC just gained reliable energy / resource partner in RU who will continue to export to eager global south who has demonstrated comforting indifference to LIO interests, and will likely increase opportunities of de-dollarization. RU sanctions was illustrative for PRC, many other lessons learned for TW scenario. Meanwhile central asia also open to PRC influence.
"Created a ring of allies in the Pacific" is (continues to be) opposite of reality. Go check out the OG first island chain PRC containment schemes proposed by US policy wonks from 5 years ago. Both Trump and Biden tried to push IRBMs, AGILE Combat Support basing and military hardware actually neccessary for PRC containment... but there's been no takers. Contrary to western narrative, PRC wolf warrior has been extremely successful in cowling region into ineffective hedging, even more so after Pelosi visit and PRC exercises in response. Apart from JP and AU whose too far away, no one in region has even virtue signalled any substantive commitment to enhancing US security architecture in the region. With strengthening dollar and where global economy is heading, it's safe to dial back JP and AU commitments as well, weak economy will likely stall JP efforts at increasing defense spending, and the chance of AUKUS delivering subs before a PRC TW invasion is miniscule. If you follow the space closely, US has basically thrown every tool in the box to "create a ring of allies" in the last 5 years and relative to what US wonks imagined, current arrangement is massive failure. Ergo heavy strategic focus on porcupining TW, which wouldn't be desperately necessary if PRC could have been deterred with viable containment framework.
PRC slow growth (largely self imposed) adjusted for inflation is still higher than US. More so adjusted by PPP. Combine with even more startling relative real decline by US partners. Sure, PRC doing not great, but almost everyone else relevant is doing much worse.
When Blinken said in May:
All this US flexing has made her sphere weaker (with more room to fall) while improving PRC's relative economic, diplomatic, and military space. Hence US going extra hard cracking down on PRC tech, but hard to say how effective it will be. PRC was suppose to be US priority while RU the sideshow, but I'd argue US efforts in Europe has largely strengthened PRC's position, especially near periphery including IndoPac. In terms of US grand strategy, that's relative decline.
Time isn't on the PRC's side. It needs to open a wide lead over the US economically and militarily to achieve its regional goals before its demographic storm hits, and limping slightly faster to the finish line doesn't help there.
Time is on PRC side, especially demographically.
There are two demographic shifts happening in PRC.
Net demographic decline which will only reduce PRC import dependancy and increase strategic flexibility.
Massive demographic boom in high skill workforce - PRC generating as much as all OECD countries combined in talent.
Even shit tier PRC demographics will producing multiple times more indigenous talent than US via births + immigration due to base effect. Incidentally this relatively new cohort (result of Academic / S&T / R&D reforms in 00s) is barely starting to be tapped, and within 10 years has saw PRC rapidly climbing up science and innovation index controlled for quality. Skilled workforce demographic is divident responsible for advanced economic development and building comprehensive national power. It's how the other Tigers with terminal demographics kept climbing up value chain. It's how PRC went from capturing $4 in assembly fees for every iphone assembeled to $100 in componenent fees. Now it's going after the other $400 left on the BoM. High tech growth still has decades of run way in PRC relative to current position, combined with massive automation (more than next 14 advanced economies combined) and is doing it's part in:
Look at regional military force balance, where PRC is rapidly and massively overtaking. And my guess is, short/medium term (next 5-10 years) PRC rockety advancement will comprehensively negate any US capital assets advantage - see how battleships reset the field. Economically, PRC GDP by PPP has led for years and relative gap has been increasing. Also consider PRC limping in technology driven growth will be coupled with disruption in western growth due to PRC eating advanced economies market share. It will start hallowing out the premium manufacturing sectors west reserved for herself. Once PRC industry starts spitting out mature high value sectors for export, every $1 PRC sells is going to take $3 from western competitors. Or PRC industrial policy will absorb selling at -$1 loss to deny $6 to west. That's the game being played, combination of growth and convergence.
TBH any appeal to demographics on hobbling PRC geostrategic aspirations is stupid for the simple reason that exquisit modern militaries don't require much labour and medium/long term move towards autonomous platforms will require even less. Sustaining military several times current size (which has already been massively downsized due to reforms) is trivial for just the sheer stupid amount of bodies PRC has (and will have). PRC is generating so much skilled talent + covid that there's record youth unemployment - talent btw the PLA has been screaming to recruit.
TLDR no country in the world is positioned to have BETTER high-skilled workforce / demographics than PRC for building economic and military power in the coming decades. And decades is about time PRC needs to properly exploit said workforce.
That doesn't mean declining demographics won't increase pressures / squeeze QoL. Competitive pressure will drive top end productivity if anything. PRC/east asia is used to being pressure cooker society. Meanwhile, unlike more developed Tigers or west, massive regional income disparity + huge home ownership + enviable house hold savings rate = significant (imo most) PRC elderly simply don't have significant expectation (or need) for comprehensive old age social support like those already at risk of collapsing in advanced economies. That's the secret. No need to worry about having an umbrella to weather the storm when *taps head* there's no expectation for an umbrella. The actual demographic storm is going to consist of stubborn savings being turned into consumption and wealth transfers from those with excess into even more consumption, resolving PRC's current economic bug of being unable to stimulate consumption beacuse said savings locked into retirement. Is it going to suck? Yes. Is it going to stop PRC from converging and surpassing US. IMO not even a little.
That's well-stated and something I'll think over.
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I don't agree. The US has burned a lot of good will internationally with the Unspecified Virus Of Unknown Origin handling and this kerfuffle with Ukraine
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Most of this is just because Russia decided to impale itself on its revanchist delusions. The US had made no serious efforts to integrate Ukraine into NATO and showed every sign of being content with the frozen conflict status quo in the Donbas, but then Russia tried to flip the table over but ended up hurting itself in the process.
Germany absolutely deserves the L here. France and Germany have always been a bit jealous of Anglo hegemony over the collective West, which is why they make periodic calls for "strategic autonomy". But instead of Germany building up its military, it instead decided to do the stupidest possible option of bankrolling an ardent enemy of the EU and becoming massively overreliant on Russian gas with barely a whisper of "what could possibly go wrong". Sensible analysts knew it could become a liability, but Germany proceeded full-speed ahead anyways, despite countless protests from a succession of US presidents and other foreign leaders.
America was arming Ukraine (hence the very different outcome to 2014).
From Putin's perspective:
He can't reach an acceptable political settlement on Eastern Ukraine.
His enemies are arming Ukraine.
Russia's demographics and stockpiles are never gonna get better, while Ukraine's can.
Ukraine is considered a matter of supreme strategic importance he couldn't walk away from.
I suppose it looked like he had to strike. The US not having any intention of attacking didn't mean it wasn't looming.
Containment isn't a friendly strategy, and you may have to try to flip the table to prevent it.
Anyone who believes that nation-states act according to their rational interest should see Germany's absolutely irrational energy policy.
Ukraine demographics are even worse.
Russians stockpiles of weapons aren't doing too badly. They've had days when they fired more artillery ammo than the US Army procures in a year. And they're still not out, somehow. Also making 5 Kalibr cruise missiles a day, that's 1800 a year. Not too shabby for a gas pump country!
For comparison, that's about the amount of Tomahawk missiles US has fired since the first Iraq war.
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Now now, give Russia some credit. Putin worked quite hard to discredit every alternative-seeking Europeans.
That one was already in effect. US has long been a food exporter, and has been edging natural gas exports for some time.
I think this reaches a bit too far. After all, one of Biden's earlier moves in office in July 21 was to drop the opposition to the Nordstream 2 pipeline as a gift/favor/trade with Merkel, in favor of the German government making promises to take national level action, including sanctions and energy cutoffs, should Russia attack Ukraine.
"Should Russia attempt to use energy as a weapon or commit further aggressive acts against Ukraine, Germany will take action at the national level and press for effective measures at the European level, including sanctions, to limit Russian export capabilities to Europe in the energy sector, including gas, and/or in other economically relevant sectors," it said.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-us-strike-nord-stream-2-compromise-deal/a-58575935
In so much that the Germans are complaining, it's complaining that the German-American deal is being upheld when the Germans were betting it wouldn't need to be. While this is consistent with the last few decades of German national strategy regarding Russia, the very German parties that committed to the agreement a year and some change ago are still the parties of government now, plus the greens.
Now, you could make a case that this is an American flex in a different way- that the US made the concession to Germany already knowing that Putin was likely to escalate the conflict with Ukraine, thus making a concession they knew they wouldn't have to leave for long in order to secure future compliance by Germany with sanctions it had already agreed in principle to on the belief that it wouldn't have to follow through- but this is a bit of a reach, and denies the Germans the agency to have been paying attention to Ukraine.
This is true, relatively.
This is also true, though not recently, since the US has been treaty allies with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia for decades.
This is not so true, because it conflates a lot of things. The cultural grip of 'the West' doesn't exist, since the Europeans aren't the cultural center and two of the main pillars that have tried to claim more cultural/soft-power independence from the US- France and Germany- were discredited in their regions of desired influence over failures in advance/response to Ukraine.
That neoliberalism 'works' to some extent isn't exactly surprising, as the discreditation of it after the financial crisis was a puncture to infalibility, not to inherent tendency to failure.
This one is true, if only because the European Atlanticists are using this conflict as an opportunity to clean house and settle political scores for their domestic political needs. It's never been easier to defang an opposition party- or coalition rival- who was ambivalent about Russia than it is now.
I think you misread it,
Ilfortewrote "grip ON the West".That isn't Ilforte? Ilforte is Daseindustriesltd
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Also , the collapse of Euro, Yen, AUD, and Pound, and the surge of US dollar. Even when things seem to be going badly here, things are worse overseas, like higher inflation, worse energy shortages , more unrest (like in Iran now).
Funnily enough I was thinking how once again Australia was passing through with a much more mild economic cold than the rest of the West (inflation has consistently been a few points lower than the US). A falling currency is also not necessarily a bad thing for a net exporter.
There's a good rule in economics: never reason from a price change. Always ask why the price is changing. An exchange rate is the price of a currency in terms of another currency.
It depends why the currency is falling. If the purchasing powers of trade partners are increasing, that's probably a good thing - more spending by people buying your products. If your currency is overvalued, that's also a good thing - exports become more profitable. If you are overstimulating your economy or your exports are falling, that's a bad thing, although it's still best for many economies to let the exchange rate (rather than the whole domestic economy) handle the adjustment to the problem, and so the change in the currency value is unpleasant but necessary.
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I was hoping one of the resident fin* people here with connections to London would have a top level on what's going on with the pound in particular. Seen some analysis that the new governments financial policies were a mismatch for ground level economic realities especially combined with energy subsidies for the coming winter. Then a much further downstream technical analysis of how a volatile bond market might have almost nuked pension funds.
At a very high level, the sterling/gilt crash is mostly driven by what finance Twitter is now calling MRP (short for Moron Risk Premium). The UK Deep State has a reputation for basic competence (Dominic Cummings thinks this is undeserved, but most investors disagree with him), whereas the clique of right-wing Brexit-supporting Tories that put Truss into power has a reputation for badly botching the technical aspects of Brexit. So when the Truss ministry publicly blows off the Deep State while simultaneously embarking on a questionable economic policy, investors worry that the British government is no longer going to display basic competence. It doesn't help that bankers can see the UK regulators visibly struggling to cope with onshoring financial regulation post-Brexit, which also creates a stench of Brexity incompetence. (This isn't actually a competence issue, it is a workload issue. The UK needs more bureaucrats as a fully sovereign state than it did as an EU member, but it is politically unacceptable to hire them).
When the government doubles down by saying the crisis is everywhere and not just the UK, blaming the remoaner IMF, attacking bond markets as woke etc. this obviously makes things worse.
At a semi-technical level, https://ukandeu.ac.uk/whos-afraid-of-fiscal-dominance/ is a good essay explaining to laymen what the scenario is that investors dumping the pound are worrying about.
I will do a separate post on the gilt market problem.
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The short version of what happened to the pension funds is:
Pension funds have future-dated liabilities. Falling interest rates raise the NPV of these liabilities, potentially causing the pension fund to become accounting-insolvent.
UK regulation makes it a bad idea to allow a pension fund to be accounting-insolvent, so pension funds want to manage this risk. The main way they do this is using long-dated interest rate swaps. Effectively this is a side bet on interest rates - if interest rates fall, you win enough on the swap to cover the increased liability.
Market interest rates rose, fast. This meant that pension funds lost money on the swaps, and faced margin calls which needed to be paid in cash in the very short term (days, not weeks). But the offsetting gain from a falling NPV of liabilities is a purely paper gain. So pension funds were in danger of becoming cash-insolvent.
In addition, rising interest rates reduce the value of long-dated government bonds, which are a popular form of collateral. The 50-year gilt was briefly trading at 40p in the £ (not because anyone was afraid of a default, just because the interest rate suddenly became below-market). If you were using this gilt as collateral, you would be facing a margin call even if you hadn't lost money.
Whatever you call it, the BoE was forced to print money to cover government (planned) deficits that the bond market couldn't bear. This is bad.
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Oh, it's getting real bad here. The £2 billion 45%->40% tax cut that the proles have gotten into a tizzy over really isn't causing much of the issue, it's more the huge additional borrowing for nat gas without enforcing a windfall tax plus the fact that the BoE is gonna start selling their QE gilts back into the market at a lower rate than it bought them at very soon (the costs are indemnified by the Exchequer, it's gonna add another £150bn plus to their outgoings, more than 2x the gas subsidies too).
The UK has fucked up big time, and you can't even say it's all the fault of Truss+Kwarteng, those gilts purchased during the pandemic were going to have to be sold at some point given how bad inflation was getting.
The big problem with the 45% tax cut is that it makes it politically impossible to cut spending (certainly, investors think it does, which is what is moving markets). If Kwarteng had announced only the corporate and middle class tax cuts while promising to find offsetting spending cuts in the next couple of months, he might have been believed.
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Didn't they also ditch their fiscal rules? I remember people 10 years ago in the UK saying that austerity was a waste of time. Turns out it wasn't: markets really do care about the management of an economy and they don't like massive debasement of its value.
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It’s been decent year.
I’d shy away from reading too much into the tea leaves. That goes for the doomsayers even more than for the optimists. It’s easy to look at something happening and not think about all the things which aren’t, or those which are quietly simmering away behind closed doors. Any attempts to distill those Happenings down into a grand unified theory of cultural/political change are walking on an awful lot of skulls.
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There certainly is a lot of screaming here. It's still somewhat subdued because we're not even used to having to scream in this way, but it feels like there's cause for it. Most working-age Germans never experienced such events, and our national character together with the media and politics are all-too-eager to pile on the hysterics for various political and psychological ends. Hard to say whether it's justified on the object level, but with enough pessimism it may well end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent.
That said, as an aside to your aside, I really want to make a top-level post about how German politicians and press knew months in advance and with great certainty that there would be terrible protests and riots this winter, and that something needed to be done about those deplorables.
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Short term you appear to be correct, to my great surprise. I honestly don't understand how we got here, except that somehow our enemies were even more grossly incompetent than ourselves. I guess that is often how war goes. it still makes me profoundly nervous. I'm also not sure how sustainable it is.
We've severely depleted our reserves of strategic resources in an effort by buy the Ukrainians time? What happens if/when China calls our bluff and finally invades Taiwan? Will we have blown our load too early?
The success of Ukraine against Russia on the field looks good for Ukraine, and great for the profound levels of financial and arms support we've given them. But what if it doesn't last with this Russian mobilization? What happens when the US is forced to partially mobilize it's economy in order to keep the aid up? It could be good for jobs and the economy. It could also be another corrupt clusterfuck that sends most of the money to our other strategic rivals overseas, China.
In order to best capitalize on Europe's great power demands, the US needs to be stepping up it's energy production. But decades of neoliberal policy treating energy companies as The Great Satan have made them too nervous. They think the football is going to be pulled away from them again, and so are content to make up for the losses they previously endured thanks to previous administrations lawfare against them. Ultimately we will fail to solidify this opportunity, and probably will allow it to slip away to the benefit of our strategic rivals.
In terms of US culture "successfully" fusing neoliberalism and leftism in a way that "works", I don't even know where to start. Whatever successes we've enjoyed on the world stage can hardly be attributed to that, and will likely be undermined by the schizophrenic priorities is forces on us. Like the above example of us squandering our opportunity to take a huge share of the world's energy market.
The deep state apparently still has enough institutional competence to fuck up the world, and leave the US as king shit of turd mountain. But our culture is too dysfunctional to actually build anything back up from there.
Just when I thought I was getting a handle on what people mean when they say "neoliberal" I get pitched this screwball.
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Basically. All of the imperial hubris without two things that made it somewhat work for the US:
A legitimately first rank military and logistics system. For all the talk of it being imperialist Ukraine made me appreciate the US more because, as bad as the War on Terror was, you can at least count on them to win the war before they lose it. Putin tried his push to Baghdad and corruption and incapacity undid him.
More importantly perhaps: the US has no comparable rival, so even a US president who fumbled as badly as Putin would simply have vastly more room to maneuver. Putin clearly miscalculated, but a US miscalculation in the same spot wouldn't be nearly as damaging cause the US isn't going to be sanctioned to hell and see a peer competitor flooding Iraq or, more comparably, Mexico with weapons.
I think the second point explains why this whole thing has been such a shock. America has been a superpower for 80 years. Uncontested for around 30. Most of the world population - and Americans specifically- have gotten desensitized to how brazen the US can be and assume it's true for other alleged rivals.
I do wonder how the U.S. would have fared in its last few invasions if Russia was providing targeting intelligence and advanced weaponry to our enemies the way we are in Ukraine. Maybe better than the Russians, but I expect much higher casualties than we actually experienced.
Syria?
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It would be much worse (Ukraine is better armed than 2003 Saddam) but:
I don't think Russia can be as generous to the hypothetical rogue Mexico/Canada as the US and NATO can be
There's a lot of criticism of Russia's performance in and of itself.
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Remember the controversy over the bogus story that the Russians were offering Taliban-aligned islamists bounties for dead American soldiers? False accusations are always projections of one's own desires; as we turn Ukrainian drone operators into twitter celebrities.
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What load? The deniable, old stuff we're sending poor Ukrainian dirt farmers to fight a trench war on the black-soil steppe is different from the material we've already sold and cross-trained the Taiwanese on. Remember a few months ago that big controversy over whether we would assist the Poles in transferring old ex-Soviet MiG and/or Sukhoi fighters to the Ukrainians? Yeah, we already sell the Taiwanese F-16s, which we most assuredly have not depleted our stocks of over the Ukrainians. Etc., etc.
That's even assuming the Chinese have the capacity to load a couple million people on boats and drop them off in Taiwan without having them starve 12 hours later, which I doubt.
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A lot of short-termism here. While we depleted some weapons they are older models. And we weren’t building more because we didn’t need more. No reason we can’t build more.
And while esg has hit oil production it’s still near record highs and in the 15 year period we went from an importer to an exporter.
And at this point there’s no evidence that Russias mobilization will work. It potentially might end Russia. And at this point there’s no evidence or even reason to expect troops with 2 weeks of military training to be able to project any force versus be easy cannon fodder. There are stories of them driving stupidly into Ukranian lines where they can be killed with cheap bullets.
Though I do agree that the fusion of leftism and neoliberalism doesn’t seem to be working that well. Neoliberalism is working reasonably well for places like Japan that get relatively free trade but internally due to language differences etc can blunt leftism.
But Russia can't.
That alone justifies throwing a lot of resources at Ukraine. This is a disaster for Russia: this was their big shot and - as of now- they've messed it up. Their demographics are not going to get better, their stockpiles will never be as large.
It's an opportunity to basically castrate Russia in the long-term.
(I would argue that this is strategically worse than integrating them as another ally against China but that ship seems to have sailed).
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A lot can happen in 12-24 months, as the last 6 months shows. And generally, it's much harder to retake territory than to defend it in the first place. Recent successes for Ukraine not withstanding. I believe taking islands, such as Taiwan, present even greater challenges.
Re. strategic resource: No, absolutely not.
Everything we have sent to Ukraine represents either outmoded equipment designed to fight an army from the 70's that is only still relevant because the Russian army IS from the 70's, or equipment the fulfils secondary capability requirements.
EG, HIMARS, manpads, and Javelin are all secondary, because what the US REALLY focuses on is air superiority; where we maintain a level of absolute crushing dominance unseen at any point in military history.
Want to destroy an ammo depot? Airstrike.
Want to blow up a tank? Airstrike.
Want to shoot down a plane? MOTHER FUKIN STRIKE FROM THE AIR BAAAAAABEEEEEEEEE
China and India are of course trying to match us here, but India is at least 10-20 years from fielding home grown engines that are competitive (not having btw, their engine program has been ongoing for a while and seems to be performaing well. I mean feiling home grown home made 4.5gen+ planes en mass), and china is likewise at the most pessimistic doomer almost definitely false estimates (from the US perspective) 10 years behind in BVR a to a shit, stealth, engines, and avionics.
Even without NGAD and the Raider, if we stood still china would take years to catch up, and we running boys!
And it turns out that Russia drank a fifth of ethanol based radar array coolant and passed out in a ditch instead of working on their gen 5 shit.
Air strikes are great, but they are not always available, especially over prolonged, low-intensity conflicts. Javelins were extremely valuable for destroying bunkers, emplacements, and other enemy positions in absence of air power in Iraq and Afghanistan. US infantry simply have no other way of fighting at standoff distances (nor any way to ward off air strikes than stingers for that matter, but in that case the scenario you suggest is a lot more likely to work out). The US having a disproportionately strong air force doesn't necessarily mean much in that kind of war. I'm not saying arming Ukraine is a bad idea, but there are very real readiness concerns that come from giving them so many ground weapons, regardless of what we have in the way of aircraft.
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Can you cite a single source to show that China is at least 10 years behind the US in these fields?
I can cite sources where US defence officials argue China is acquiring high-tech weapons faster and considerably more cost-effectively than the US:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/china-acquiring-new-weapons-five-times-faster-than-u-s-warns-top-official
The US has gotten pretty worried about Chinese BVR capabilities such as the PL-15 and PL-21, which probably outrange existing US AAMs. The US is still developing its AIM-260 to counter. This doesn't scream 'USA is >10 years ahead in BVR' to me. It indicates the US is 4-5 years behind, since these Chinese weapons are about 5 years old. Even if this is just a Mig-25 moment where the US got worked up about nothing, let's at least wait until that's confirmed before crowing for victory.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28636/meet-the-aim-260-the-air-force-and-navys-future-long-range-air-to-air-missile
I know that the Chinese and Russians are ahead in hypersonic missiles (cruise and glide vehicles) because they've actually deployed them. The article admits as such, claiming that the US is more interested in the next sprint than the last one, which they've already lost.
https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/the-groundbreaking-hypersonic-missiles-america-has-in-the-works/
And is the US not behind China in the fundamental category of shipbuilding? The US navy has been scrapping its recently completed Littoral combat ships because they're not useful and is actually shrinking. The Chinese have been and are continuing to build ships en masse. The US has only just started construction of its new class of Constellation frigates. The US is still building Arleigh Burke's, an updated design originating from the 1980s. This is because the Zumwalt was a dud.
Considering that the US has a much smaller overall shipbuilding industry than China, can it ever catch up? What good is airpower if your airbases get hammered by missiles on day 1 and you can't get carriers close to the front because there's a gigantic surface fleet supported by hundreds of shorebased aircraft and ballistic missiles in your way?
The US has certain advantages in submarines and the size of its airforce but it's not overwhelmingly superior once you account for geography, which favours China.
Nah, your gonna have to take my word for it.
Any source I post would be bullshit anyway.
It all boils down to:
Chinas missiles had sea trials, and testing was returned to land trials. We don't know why, but the most likely reason is they failed to hit a moving target. They are probably ahead of us, but that is at least partially because we are investing into the raider instead; and lockheed is working on the US hypersonic at a reasonable rate. Russia's missile is fake, it's an air launched missile that will hit mach five but it doesn't maneuver and it doesn't use scram jets or anything post 1980's. If we count that as a hypersonic missle, we've had them for 40 years.
The J-20 uses rip off russian engines from like, the su-30. No bueno. They are developing indigenous engines, but they aren't ready for service yet, apparently . Their stealth is ass, and their radars are atleast 1/2 of an ass, as seen by the fat nose on the j-20. Sexy plane though. Canarads for days. Thus, china's BVR missle: It has range on an aim (theoretically), but it doesn't mean anything if they are using avionics and stealth tech from the 80's.
Re. ship building: yeah that one is true. You can't beat having a civilian shipbuilding industry for having a military ship building capacity. We'll see their fleet get to local parity/dominance within a couple years, probably.
The new WS-10C engines are in service as of last year.
https://twitter.com/rupprechtdeino/status/1405777441252020229
The Russians have Kinzhal but also Avangard, which is a truer hypersonic missile. They're even working on that nuclear cruise missile that was irradiating parts of Northern Russia during the development process. That's pretty new stuff, even if it's an old idea.
I don't even think the US has any fielded air launched ballistic missiles, unless you count the Minuteman coming off the back of that C-5 in the 70s. They're making Prompt Conventional Strike but it's not finished yet.
The US is making the B-21 but the Chinese are also making a flying wing stealth bomber. And we know the Chinese are making their own NGAD. US NGAD isn't exactly a secret.
Furthermore, I can prove that the Chinese aren't using stealth tech from the 1980s, just from the fact that we know they were stealing stealth tech from the F-35! Claiming that China is 40 years behind the US in avionics and stealth is just ridiculous, it doesn't map to the facts. The fact that they decided they wanted less stealth and more range/payload/other features for the J-20 is reasonable. They plan to be fighting in the Pacific after all. The F-35 and F-22 seem to be designed for the Fulda Gap, for high-end air superiority over a short range. Not quite sure what they were thinking for the former case, hopefully it was Lockheed Martin bribery over a stroke of insanity.
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Joe Biden is clearly the greatest president of our era. America's enemies (and allies!) tremble before the might of Dark Brandon.
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If America really did blow up that pipeline, then the German “deep state” (if you will) is probably drafting a decade-long plan for a permanent shift away from America and toward Russia. I don’t think the German reaction will be one of a dog that obeys the master who administers punishment. This would be construed as an attack on the sovereignty of a nation, the health of the nation, and the future of the nation. 140 IQ German intelligence officers are surely going to see the event as an unforgivable attack — again, implying it was America — and not as just a short-term just punishment that they will humiliatingly endure. The economic downfall can be compared to 9/11, can it not?
Why is the assumption that Germany was taken by surprise, conditional on the US being responsible?
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The German Deep State is non existent, and if it exist, it is pro-american
Germany is more of a giant factory firm who needs to sell cars than a nation. In front of challenges their èlites will back down.
The German deep state is the entrenched commitment to progressive values by most of the German bureaucracy and political establishment and media, isn't it?
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German deep state is a phone line to Washington on hot dial. These things take generations of sovereignty to build, to grow, you need not so much 140 IQ intelligence officers but 80 year old national intelligentsia with unblemished reputation. Neither Germany nor Russia or Ukraine have anything like an American deep state. Those are shallow nations of confused linear workers.
Moreover, if Germans are all that smart, they can understand their place and the future of Russia.
America cannot prevent a German deep state, intelligence community or military intelligence community. They do not have the manpower, the boots on the ground, the ability to influence etc. especially not since the spying debacle which saw Germany revamp their intelligence communications. This is how you get things like the most prestigious special units team in Germany being filled with far right members. In that case, Germany had to change the unit because of publicity, but the fact that such a thing can happen is clear evidence that America doesn’t have such magical ability to completely control Germany’s leadership.
And if they had such control over Germany, they wouldn’t need to blow up the pipeline!
We may differ in our understanding of the term. For me, Deep State is unelected self-governed bureaucracy that steers the state policy in accordance with its own values, insular culture and long-term vision; basically a self-perpetuating fraternity entrenched in the official power structure, and it takes a whole ecology of think tanks, and decades of stability and obscurity for this fraternity to mature. You seem to believe it's some concrete institutional factor, like intelligence services. This is as queer to me as Marxist materialist analysis that explains all political processes in terms of economic relations. Spooks run Russia, maybe Israel to some extent, but in all other countries they're not the decision-making caste.
In the US, one angle of the Deep State is epitomized in Council on Foreign Relations (or rather, an informal network of people many of whom have at some point participated in the CFR). In Germany, that's structures like Konrad Adenauer Foundation, maybe? But no German structure has sovereignty comparable to the CFR; it's just a logistically convenient form to coordinate the Zeitgeist already present in the society. Likewise, the CIA is not sovereign, it's furthering ideas that the Deep State has endorsed, out of those the culture of the nation has produced. In this sense, Germans may have intelligence agencies (of course penetrated by 5eyes agents) but lack the DS; just as their culture lacks independence from the US and capacity to produce ideas.
How could they do what you're talking about? Any bureaucratic German group that attempts to move against the US and towards Russia will be ratted out as Nazis instantly, and in this fails they'll be condemned by the populace as they try to implement any policy of consequence; if they pass the policy, Americans can retaliate so catastrophically it'll deter any German with half a brain from trying in advance. In fact what you're seeing now is the cleanup of one such group, nurtured by Putin and Russian fossil industry – Gerhard Schroder and others. They're discredited and out of power now. That lobbyist club was as close to German Deep State as can be. Putin had his chance, and he blew it by attacking Ukraine.
Remind me how it ended for them.
Germans have economic elites. In matters of war, economic elites have little impact (as evidenced by success of American trade war with China, that has caught the cynical, mercantile Chinese with their pants down, uselessly begging their Wall Street partners to «do something»); but they can make noise and sow division, increasing friction in the war process. Blowing up the pipeline takes care of that.
The Deep State is a social network which has penetrated the permanent government sufficiently deeply that it can manipulate the elected government into doing what it wants. In other words, the Deep State is Georgetown and Manhattan cocktail parties and the CFR matters because it is run by people who are invited to those cocktail parties, not the other way round. Germany is run by industrialists so the German deep state prefer to speak through the IFO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ifo_Institute_for_Economic_Research).
When I worked at Deutsche Bank, there was an occasional hint of the German Deep State in action. It is real, but it is narrowly mercenary in outlook and doesn't waste time thinking about national security. FWIW, the German Deep State is more closely tied to the Gnomes of Zurich than the US Deep State, but in an age where all Rhodes (scholarships) lead to Davos, this probably doesn't matter.
The French Deep State, incidentally, is also real, and is able to act independently of the US. From a Moldbuggian perspective, this is because Harvard does not control the ENA.
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I imagine 140 IQ German intelligence officers, if they exist, will either be comfortably insulated from any financial hardships Germany encounters or offered a comfortable placement in the sprawling Beltway apparatus across the pond if the insulation fails. I'm not convinced that Germany has the sort of people who would go to metaphorical or literal war for their country and actually have the intellectual firepower to in its state apparatus (which in recent decades has been rather notorious in its inability to attract and retain any sort of talent), and anyhow patriotism is much more (the German version of red)-coded than it is in the US and most people would sooner freeze than being caught wearing the moral fashions of the outgroup.
Germany is a nation filled with Germans and German history. Globohomo can only penetrate so far. The idea that they will do what is not in their nation’s interest because they have a salary or a fictitious job offer with another Intel service is unevidenced.
Germany is a bag of money and globohomo succeeded in opening it up not only for every beggar country in Europe but also for every African, Afghan and Arab. Germany is a historical specter associated with all the sins of the 20th century and everyone with some social sense knows to reject it. Germany is not a place of honor for most of the people who inhabit it, but a place that needs to become a postnational cosmopolitan anywhere as quickly as possible. The actual hold that German identity has on most ethnic Germans is weak, and ethnic Germans are not even going to remain the majority for long anymore.
I wish you were right, but I fear that 4bpp is closer to the truth.
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All the Germans students I met voted Greens and considered racism the greatest European crisis.
Yeah, that's the usual. German youth live in one giant bubble, and the establishment plays very nice with that bubble.
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European sovereignty and self-determination were discredited as racist concepts when America won World War II. The ability to draft such plans requires a level of independence that no European nation possesses. If America wants half of Germany to freeze to death, half of Germany will freeze to death and the German government will quietly accept it.
I'm quite ready to call out our politicians as spineless grifters, with perhaps a few exceptions, but the idea that they consider themselves vassals of Washington out of a need to avoid racism is, how do you say it, cringe? Low-effort? They, like most progressives, will indeed go far to avoid accusations of racism, but this is one thing where I see no connection.
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And given that they've done exactly that with Americans ever since 1945, pray tell, what makes you think that?
If Germany took orders from the US, they wouldn't have built the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the first place.
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Do you see the end of WWII where 40 million died, for a war that Germany started, and where considerations were drafted to solve the “German question” by deindustrializing (resulting in 20 million Germans starving to death), as comparable to this event?
If America has the guts to genocide Germans for disobeying them, as they nearly considered at the end of WWII, I think you would be right. But we don’t. And we certainly wouldn’t if Germany signed agreements with Russia amounting to a defensive pact.
Genocide usually implies murder the US thus didn't commit, but ethnic cleansing of Germans was something the US supported and helped with.
As only a minute fraction (.5 million to 2.5 million) died, I rate the statement "America doesn't have the guts to genocide Germans." mostly true.
At the end of ww2 the us considered implementing the morgenthau deindustrialization plan which would have starved 20 million Germans, that is what I am referring to in order to highlight the unique case of Germany’s post-ww2 submission to the allies
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Because in 1945 the US openly threw money at the Germans, while now in 2022 they are a bad ally at best, and a polite enemy at worst.
We're a wonderful ally! Just don't expect us to, you know, participate in wars. We outgrew such barbarous practices.
No, I'm talking about the US. With Russia being the wreck it is, I don't know what the Americans really get to offer Germany.
Ah, in that case the answer is on everyone's lips lately: Gas.
Yep. Right convenient, too.
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I don't necessarily agree with all these points, but the overall conclusion - that it's been a good year geopolitically for the US - seems sound to me. I could add to your list NATO expansion, collapse of Russian influence, Western military expansion, and China deterred from Taiwan adventurism. It's also been a big boost to renewable energy, partly because Europe is investing a lot more in the wake of the Russian gas crisis, but also because the whole debacle has illustrated the dangers of relying on energy imports.
As for where I disagree, I think characterising the US's ideology as a neoliberal/leftist hybrid is pretty reductionist. The US is not an ideological monolith. It's a pluralistic society with a whole host of competing thinkers and ideas, and whatever ideologies come next, they'll probably come from the US. Moreover, actual leftism seems pretty thin on the ground in the US these days, especially compared to the 2011-2014 period when Occupy was in full swing. And social progressivism seems to have had a relatively quiet year - too soon to call it a slowing down, let alone a reverse, but at least slightly reassuring.
To the extent that the word progressivism can be pinned down, student loan forgiveness seems like a huge boost in that direction. Not to the same scale as Obamacare, but not nothing either.
Eh, feels more like milquetoast centre-leftism to me. A giveaway to the middle classes. At least when I use the term "progressivism", I mean to refer specifically to the complex of identity politics movements.
No, not the “middle classes”. The Professional Managerial Class is who benefited. The middle class paid the PMC. It was a huge route and an escalation in the race to the bottom
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What is the “pro-Atlantist view”?
A view in favor of Atlanticism clearly. Notably championed by the Atlantic Council and while technically unconnected to The Atlantic magazine, they certainly share similar views. Somewhat in cheek but it is a real philosophical force affecting foreign affairs.
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I think it’s supposed to mean “pro-cooperation-across-the-Atlantic,” aka NATO+.
I also think it’s used like Moldbug used “demotist.”
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That would be the main reason why I think the US is dying. Yeah, it's working the same way eating the seed corn works.
Though it's also true they might take all of us with them.
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