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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1637 thread views

Transnational Thursday for February 22, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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I found the latest Douthat piece on Ukraine to be quite interesting: https://archive.is/xVlg2 Basically he argues that there is a real tradeoff between helping to defend Ukraine and Taiwan. It's not a question of money, so much as physical equipment. China is doing an intensive modernization of its military, aimed to be done in 2027. That might not mean anything, but it could also be a prelude to invading Taiwan. Which, Douthat argues, would be a much bigger loss for world order than Ukraine.

It's a tough tradeoff. Lots of angles to consider:

  • a real, here-and-now war, vs a potential future war
  • an "emerging" democracy vs a much more stable democracy
  • vague promises to both countries, but no formal treaties
  • the role of Europe and Asian allies in both respective theaters (again, lots of vague promises but no formal treaties)
  • would depleting the US arsenal by sending everything to Ukraine make China more likely to invade?
  • or, would not supporting Ukraine make China more likely to invade?

For what it's worth, Manifold has the odds at 21% now. Not super high but much higher than I would like.

... on the other hand, in my darker moments, I can't say that I'd really hate to see the end of the US-led world cathedral of global liberal capitalism.

According to Wikipedia, US-led alliances have a total GDP (PPP) of 80 trillion USD. The China-Russia-Iran one has a GDP (PPP) of 43 trillion. Even if I generously add every -stan to it (and I'm being really generous, I really doubt Pakistan would join, since it's trying to avoid anything that would cause India to align itself with the US), it's still just 55. The US could easily outproduce China if it really wanted to.

This Russia-Ukraine war should really be a wakeup call for simply assuming that GDP (or PPP) is the same as military production. Russia, by itself, is producing more artillery shells than all of NATO. China is massively outproducing the US in warships right now. Perhaps the US could change that "if it really wanted to," but that's not something you turn on overnight. It doesn't really have a lot of shipyards or heavy manufacturing left at this point.

There's also the small detail that most of the US-allied countries are in Europe, about as far from the Pacific as its possible to get. I don't see most of them helping out in this scenario.

Yes, this has been the case for quite awhile. For all the hand-wringing about the U.S. spending more on defense than the "entire world combined", a simple PPP adjustment already gets us to the point where China is spending as much as the U.S.

America's nominal GDP is 15x that of Russia. We should be able to easily overwhelm their military production. But we can't. Because our military spending is fake and mostly wasted on salaries for useless mouths.

To be fair large chunks of spending by Russia and China is also fake. Mainly because of corruption. China particularly has huge amounts of their spending just vanish. Which is they are always going on anti-corruption drives, appointing a new anti-corruption czar..and then discovering said tzar is themselves corrupt, firing and replacing them.

If you've never been in China for any length of time it is difficult to understand just how corrupt it is. The only place I have spent any amount of time that was worse was Pakistan. Though the Chinese version is slightly better hidden.

How many of those Chinese ships and missiles and electronics are built with sub-standard parts so someone could skim? How many missiles do they think they have vs how many they actually have that are functional?

"We now have new revelations of corruption in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army resulting in, among other things, “missiles filled with water instead of fuel” and missile silos “with lids that don’t function.” According to U.S. officials, this latest bout of corruption “led to an erosion of confidence in the [PLA’s] overall capabilities” and made President Xi Jinping “less likely to contemplate major military action.” Xi responded by purging at least a dozen PLA leaders implicated in the scandal."

This is a very good point and I think we'll just have to wait until there is a kinetic conflict to see what happens.

Russia is clearly getting more bang for their buck than the U.S. is. They just don't have a lot of bucks.

When it comes to China, they will soon have quite a large material and spending (PPP adjusted) advantage over the U.S. On the other hand, nobody has any idea what will happen if China ever tries to actually do anything. I have a feeling it won't go well for them. They have no actual war-fighting experience. If they truly want to invade Taiwan, they should start fighting some minor conflicts to gain experience. The logistical difficulty of taking Taiwan with a hostile U.S. fleet against them is off the charts.

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