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Notes -
US and Chinese national strategy
Here’s an article about DEI’s negative impact on the US CHIPS Act for reshoring semiconductors:
I note that this is an opinion piece. There are many other issues with the CHIPS Act, this rather dry article lays the blame on aggressive industry lobbying eating the original ‘boost US production’ idea and wearing it like a skinsuit:
Recently the Centre for Strategic Translations recently put out their take on a Chinese book “General Laws of the Rise of Great Powers”, a work designed to communicate to Chinese officials what the grand plan is, what China’s national strategy shall be and why.
Essentially, the book argues that while population size, land, resources and such are important for national strength, the most important thing is technology. Population and land get you into the game, (Iceland will never be a world power) tech lets you win it. With technology you get the military and economic power needed to rule the world.
All facets of statecraft are considered through the lens of how they can develop technology. The chapter goes through how some countries did well and did poorly: the Soviet bloc pursued imbalanced industrialization favouring heavy over light industry. The Great Leap Forward inhibited Chinese industrial development, damaging the agricultural base. Diplomacy affects how you industrialize and develop: Argentina foolishly moved towards the UK rather than the US in 1944 (I’ve never heard anyone else say this before), while West Germany and Japan had good relations with America and were able to quickly reindustrialize with their market access.
The authors regret that just when Song China was at the peak of science and industry, the Mongols showed up and wrecked their chance at early industrialization and world hegemony. Clearly technology used to be less of a key factor back in the day. But China’s time is coming! They conclude that the New China has stable foundations and has made prudent long-term investments in infrastructure and institutions. Unlike the silly Indian democrats, China has no need to pursue popular but foolish policies. Shortly they’ll achieve comprehensive scientific superiority to the US, as the huge Chinese population becomes highly educated. Replace ‘demographic dividend’ with ‘talent dividend’. That’s the plan anyway.
In another poll (scroll down to the graphs), Americans were far and away proudest about their country’s freedom. Wealth, military power, political system… all far behind freedom. What were the Chinese most proud about? Science and technology followed by economic development, then power and so on... See also the stats saying Chinese kids want to be astronauts, Americans want to be youtubers.
You can see a clear national strategy coming from the top down and widely embraced by the population, China wants to lead in all facets of science and technology. They’ve had great success in dominating whole sectors like solar panels, electric cars, 5G and drones. More electric vehicles are made in China than Europe, Japan and America combined.
In addition to science, there’s also ‘national rejuvenation’ which means annexing Taiwan and presumably becoming the world’s strongest superpower. A Chinese acquaintance told me about how the media was going on about the race to acquire ‘Zeus-shield’ (AEGIS-tier) destroyers, it reminded me a little of pre-1914 Dreadnought discourse: We want eight and we won’t wait! Those who are insufficiently nationalistic on the Chinese internet sometimes get cancelled and dogpiled by extremely online, hysterical women. They’re called ‘little pink’ and heaven help you if you besmirch the reputation of the People's Liberation Army - the censors will be knocking on your door. There’s a certain level of nationalist-jingoism in stuff like Wolf Warrior 2 and The Battle at Lake Changjin (China’s two highest grossing films) that might shame even neocons, were such a thing physically possible. I conclude that national rejuvenation is fairly popular too.
The Chinese ending caption:
I’m not saying that a focused national strategy is automatically great. The Soviets had a national strategy and failed because the strategy was based on wrong premises (that communism worked, for one). China’s system does encourage a certain amount of fraud, they accept that handing out billions to semiconductor development companies will produce a lot of waste and failures. That’s a price they pay for speed. However, it seems a much more effective national strategy than America’s.
If pressed, I’d define US national strategy as DEI, green economics and the Rules-Based International Order.
Firstly, the US’s national strategy is unpopular. A lot of people are unhappy about DEI conflicting with meritocracy, a race spoils programs has winners and losers within the country. Green economics are expensive and the rules-based order has many high-profile detractors – Trump for one. An unpopular strategy is harder to implement and it carries the risk of getting reversed. Strategic limbo is not a good place to be. What Americans actually want is freedom, yet US national strategy is going in the other direction.
Secondly, the US strategy seems much less workable. DEI saps efficiency but the rules-based order needs a powerful war machine to suppress two great powers. At the same time, green economics demands huge amounts of capital for investment. It has never been shown that a major economy can operate purely off renewable energy, green economics has a remarkable similarity to communism in its untested and transformative nature. While China invests heavily in renewables, they are also committed to coal power – China is building enormous amounts of power infrastructure generally as part of their commitment to industrialization and technology.
Charitably, there could be a synergy between DEI and the rules-based order in that privileging blacks will make them more likely to support the US in the global struggle. Even so, said synergy seems much weaker than the ‘technology -> economic/military power’ spiral that China’s committed to. African nations weren’t terribly powerful in the Cold War and they aren’t strong now. Wagner can casually coup three of them while mostly focused on Ukraine – Ukraine might be worth 50 or 100 Malis and Nigers.
Thirdly, the US strategy is unfocused and contradictory. There’s nobody at the top directing all the strands into a single, harmonious grand strategy. Thus the DEI strand can harm the Rules-Based Order and interfere with reshoring semiconductors. Greedy and unconstrained companies can consolidate or offshore their production in the first place, creating and maintaining these vulnerabilities. They can lobby so that the state won’t stop them doing share buybacks with their CHIPS funding. The American Affairs article suggests that recipient firms can even invest in Chinese manufacturing facilities under certain conditions, defeating the whole point of the operation! While the US might want to sabotage Chinese growth, they also want access to China’s huge solar industry.
There are also contradictions in China’s strategy – they admit the need to learn tech from overseas but national rejuvenation makes foreign countries anxious about China’s intentions. Nevertheless, the contradictions in US strategy seem greater to me. In the US you have many groups struggling for control, a multi-sided tug of war: hence the existence of this forum. China is not monolithic but the ruling faction enjoys incredible dominance over big tech, doves and liberals. After a significant state harassment campaign they shut down the Beijing LGBT centre.
Fourthly, US strategy seems more focused on wielding strength rather than accumulating it, spending rather than investing. Rhetorically, the strategy is justified with economic theory but those don’t seem to be the underlying reasons. For instance, globalization under the rules-based-order clearly hurt US power. American deindustrialization and offshoring of key industries was harmful and destabilizing. DEI cannot help but undermine meritocracy and efficiency. Recent research has undermined McKinsey studies on the [economic value of diversity](https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/03/new-study-shows-mckinseys-studies-promoting-dei-profitability-were-garbage/
In contrast, Chinese strategy revolves around cultivating strength. Technological power enables military strength, strength grants economic privileges. A victorious China could extract more resources from contested sea areas, Paperclip Taiwanese scientists, open up markets for their export industry.
Lest it seem that I’m slagging on the US excessively, my home country of Australia is just as bad, possibly worse. We dithered on procuring submarines for a decade, costing billions. Now we’re buying hypothetical Virginias that the US probably can’t even produce (the US submarine force is considered understrength already) after snubbing France and Japan. Our military is fundamentally unserious. Our national strategy is to prop up our economy selling iron and coal to China, even as we ally with America against China. Meanwhile we’re also playing the green/DEI game.
In my opinion, the US should follow a more defensive freedom-centric strategy. Dump DEI and green economics and reduce regulations to foster industry. Let people build things, fewer approvals and more construction. Less spying and less censorship. Lower taxes, lower spending. Defend allies without going off on overseas adventures. Instead of an expensive power-projection military, pivot towards a defensive military. More fortifications and missiles, fewer aircraft carriers. Instead of trying to penetrate defended airspace with stealth aircraft, try and defend airspace instead.
Now obviously this won’t happen. It takes a lot of luck, skill and organization to change course for a country like the US. Strategy isn’t coherently decided by a grand planner or a committee as in China, it’s a hodgepodge of vibes, class interests and traumas. Internal or external shocks are important – COVID prompted a global shift towards self-reliance.
Questions: Do you think national strategies are a good idea? Do you agree with my characterization of national strategy for either country?
My complaint with this sort of analysis is that it treats countries as if they were a monolith, like players in a grand strategy game. And they're not, they composed of many different people who all have different goals. Perhaps some of them want to expand and increase their national power, like players in a game of Risk. But most are happy to just sit back, defend what they have, and grow the economy. Iceland might not be powerful on the global stage, but they're doing a great job being happy, prosperous, and secure.
For China especially, I just don't see them wanting to expand aggressively. They're like the US and India- they already have a huge amount of land, people, and resources, there's no need for them to expand. They might attack Taiwan and other nearby islands, but that's more of a political issue. It would be difficult for them to incorporate non-Chinese people into their country- most of us wouldn't even be able to understand what the hell the government is saying, since we can't read Chinese.
I think this view of expansionist-imperialist history is colored a bit by England. They were an island nation, so they had to build a big navy to protect themselves. But once they built that big navy, it was easy to sail around the world, picking up colonies everywhere, which provided more resources, which fed a bigger navy, etc. Other small mercantile countries did a similar thing- Spain, Portugal, Holland, Japan, etc. but England was the most successful. But that's not universal, it's just the unique situation of being a small, technologically advanced, island nation.
What China needs is economic growth and the only way I see that happening is increased trade with the rest of the world. Noah Smith has a locked article arguing that China is doubling down on manufacturing to save their economy as the real estate bubble pops. Makes sense. But you can see the contradictions in this strategy- part of why Chinese manufacturing is so competitive is that their workers are so cheap. And there's a limit on just how much stuff the rest of the planet can buy...
So I guess my view is that no, national strategies are not a good idea, because there are so many different people in power who all have their own idea of what the "national strategy" should be. Perhaps the generals want to beef up the military to fight endless wars of aggression, while the politicians just want cheap toys to grow the economy and make the middle class happy, while the academicians care more about cultural goals like DEI or Communism or whatever. In the end the result is a muddle of all three.
Factories, even small ones, are pretty quickly adopting robotics and other forms of automation. I visited a factory that manufactured dental crowns and had about forty employees. CNC robots manufactured the teeth from blocks of ceramic and artists manually finished the coloring on the teeth to match the client's existing teeth.
There was a team of 3D modelers that fed models to the CNC, but the owner was looking to use AI to reduce or eliminate the amount of work needed in that area.
This is true, and ultimately a detriment to China in terms of manufacturing strategy as the advanced robotics factories have to be installed in place of the old ones, and there are multiple reasons- ranging from economic to political- to build your new manufacturing low-labor-cost factory in somewhere other than China. China could be the place... but if the cost-savings are primarily from the automation, you could just build them behind someone else's tariff wall, and not risk being caught in the geopolitical risk factors.
Currently China is trying to leverage the sunk-cost advantage, rather than a worker advantage, but the key investors on the more advanced robotics factories are external companies, and they are the ones being pressured (or lured) by other governments to be elsewhere.
China will have its own robotics factories all the same, but the normal international response to this is tariff walls to prevent dumping, and the more China leverages it's current strength to keep barries low for its own advantages, the more diplomatic costs it incurs even as it expands the dependence on others to consume.
And this would explain why China needs to expand its international influence to try to prevent tariffs.
Ayup. And why the Japanese economic strategy of farshoring (Japanese companies investing into foreign countries instead of japan), and broader American/western 'friendshoring' (investing manufactories in more local supply chains in friendly-ish countries) is the crux of the US/western divestment strategy: by putting the industry in non-chinese countries, it guides those countries to have an interest in tariffs as an anti-dumping measure in order to keep domestic industry viable and employing.
A further... issue? Contingency? Is that as the PRC investments more influence/resources into keeping trade barriers low, the dependence on the maritime flows increases. This increases the advantage of the US's blue water capabilities, as while the PRC has invested significantly in local maritime denial capabilities, it's ability to project maritime power remains limited and subject to both phsyical and economic disruption. If/when there comes a conflict, the PRC's ability to maintain the low-tariff dynamic will be militarily and not just politically challenged, and various countries will have strong incentives to assume more direct control of their PRC-paid for investments and sell to viable consumers even as the PRC is cut off.
Not a clear or clean approach by any means, but one of the key strategic questions for the US in a conflict with the PRC is how to manage/mitigate the economic fallout.
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This is a tangent, but if you want to read a work of fiction where Iceland becomes the predominant world power, read the webcomic Stand Still Stay Silent.
https://sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=1
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Sure, in the sense that planning is a good practice. However, bad planning can easily produce results worse than no planning, especially when built on bad foundations, such as understanding one's own strengths, surrounding contexts, and how others respond. For a more modern example of a failure of this, Russia indisputably has a national strategy, is led with people with very deliberate intent for national-interest maximization, and the invasion of Ukraine was well within the scope of that vision, but it has been the biggest national strategic disaster for the Russians since 1941.
The importance of contextual understanding matters to strategy just as much, and that includes acknowledging costs and benefits. DEI as a policy is unpopular with substantial parts of the US public.... but it's also popular with other substantial parts of the public, and there are a variety of strategic benefits of a DEI 'strategy' that acrue from the sort of mentality/policy considerations making that generates DEI, such as how corporate-demographic interest behind DEI is also what drives how the US relates with population inflows that will occur regardless and to structure relations with the sources sending them.
For all the political tension and contortions it brings- and there are arguments that the costs of migration outweigh the benefits, or that actively facilitating illegal migration against established laws undermines popular support- if in the Cold War the US had a strategic opportunity to take 5% of the Soviet population in a 3 year and incorporate them into the Western coalition, few would fail to see that as a meaningful strategic shift. Well, that hasn't happened with China- but that is basically what happened with Cuba in the last four years, and similarly anti-American Nicaragua since Ortega got back in power in 2007, while something like 3% of the Venezuelan population has left the Bolivarian revolution for the US alone- and the US is far less than the migration into Latin America. While DEI didn't cause that, DEI-mentality is behind the sort of policy construct of the sort of people to accept that migration flow and try to incorporate it.
So when you say DEI is a strategy, you allude terms of its more pejorative/unpopular form of discriminatory hiring policies. But when I hear DEI as a strategy, a DEI-strategy for the US entails the US's most bitter and ideological foes losing or even sending their own people to be part of the US's labor and potential military pools, the built-in cultivation of loyalist interests more interested in the DEI-archetecture than in their source country interests, while coincidentally closing one of the more significant gaps between the US and the PRC.
Is DEI worth it, on a strategic level? That could be an interesting discussion, but it's not the one that was being raised.
Similarly, just as understanding strengths is important, so is understanding weaknesses behind strengths. A common failure of armchair strategizing is to treat states like they exist in strategy games, where the populace is implicitly supportive of the controlling player and where the agent only has to get the Technologies and Industry and all the good metrics just go up and up and up. There's almost no reflection on the implications of the Tang Ping subculture growth, how that relates to the Chinese demographic trajectory, and how that (or both of those) relate to the unfolding property debt crisis, and how that is likely to rebound on both of those.
And just the property crisis alone- no matter one's politics- has significant implications for Chinese strategic strengths and vulnerabilities, as the loss of private consumer life savings at a nearly unprecedented scale is almost certain to neuter the prospects of a Chinese consumption-based economy, and thus it's dependence on a maritime-blockadable export economy, which in turn drives a number of third and fourth order effects on how the Chinese economy is structured, it's external-trade and financial dependencies the US could target, demographic pressures, and so on.
(And while the PRC certainly isn't seeing the sort of demographic outflow that, say, Latin America is, in the last two years the Chinese have become the largest extra-hemispheric source of southern border migration the US receives, with an exceptional growth rate, and the Chinese private-capital flight from the country has been leagues ahead of it. These are consequences not only of current strategic policies, but almost certain to increase as a result of the housing investment crisis.)
Will that make it a net negative? It doesn't really matter. The point is that it's a factor of consideration, and evaluation, and something someone else could benefit from.
Finally, to return to the starting question, there's always the metacontext that not having a strategy is, itself, a strategy, it just is one that is far more reactive and non-deliberate and these are rarely good things in and of themselves. A bad strategy can be worse than no strategy, but a lack of strategy is rarely as good as a competent strategy.
Not really, though this is more structural to the argument, and as a consequence most of your follow-on arguments fail.
Edit: And also, as revealed down threat, because you never actually read the national strategy for the United States.
For one, the US has a public national security strategy, which is the American strategy as far as country strategy goes, and your characterization-summary is really not really reflective of that position. Which itself is helpfully summarized in its own agenda as-
PART IV: Our (US) Strategy By Region -Promote a Free and Open Indo-Pacific -Deepen Our Alliance with Europe -Foster Democracy and Shared Prosperity in the Western Hemisphere -Support De-Escalation and Integration in the Middle East -Build 21st Century US-Africa Partnerships -Maintain a Peaceful Arctic -Protect Sea, Air, and Space
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf
Now, you could argue that the US fails to achieve that (meh), isn't consistently being followed (sure), that it's not the real strategy of the United States (it is), or that Biden has a separate strategy (possible- the Democratic Party is not the US government, and it has its own strategy which itself would have a different success criteria).
But summarizing a strategy down to a pejorative boo-word (DEI) that isn't advanced by the other party in that way* makes as much sense as saying China's strategy is a property crisis. That's a strawman to jouse against, to which the fair refutation would be- no, the property crisis isn't the strategy, it's a consequence of the strategy (industrial development driven by infrastructure investment fueled by local-area land sales). To which the defenders against the DEI-strategy can agree, and say that DEI isn't the strategy, it's a consequence of trying to manage a large number of regional relationships with migratory implications in a way that promotes buy-in to the American international system.
*And to be clear, DEI is referenced in the strategy... but in the following terms-
Note that this is on page 46- sharpening statecraft. As in, as a tool for how to influence other states.
...and now consider how that fits into the 'stealing the enemy's pops' strategy, as part of a series of policies. IF you're going to face mass-migration regardless, THEN you might as well leverage. But how do you leverage demographic dividends, get buy-in from emerging demographic interests/power centers, bolster perceptions of legitimacy from people without historic ties, and frame it in a way that boosts relations with outside powers from across the world?
Well... there's a reason that the DEI mention is in the 'how do we shape our national security workforce to meet our statecraft modernization needs', and not as one of the seven modernizable statecraft tools above it. Because DEI is not the strategy- it's a policy to support a workforce to pursue the strategy.
Which is also the point of structural disagreement two, the difference between policy and strategy.
You fail to draw a distinction between them, treating them as synonyms, but the former are a subset of the later. Strategies will encompass many policies, but a policy should not be the strategy. If it is, this is a red-flag of the weakness of the strategy, as singular policies can dominate all other considerations, or reconsiderations, as those invested in the continuation/growth of the policy have interests distinct from the achievement of the strategic objective.
More prevalent in your post is your handling of DEI, when DEI would be the archetypical policy as opposed to strategy. DEI is a principal of action to be pushed and adopted by bureaucracies, but it's not a national strategy in and of itself, any more than traffic lights are street crossings are. Those are means, a part of a larger strategy (the overarching traffic control system, with overlapping systems of public signals, enforcement, penalization, maintenance, and so on). DEI, in turn, is part of something else- and while 'what' that strategy is a part of is up for debate, if it's being framed as part of an international competititon strategy, then it should probably be framed in terms of how it fits into the overarching picture of racial-diversity organization and co-option, i.e. the idea of a strategy of stealing the enemy's pops and making them your own citizens.
The reason this matters- aside from the accuracy of the merits of a policy in and of itself- when you compare policies to strategies, it's only natural that the strategies are going to come off looking better. Of course they would- they tend to be broader and more comprehensive, because that's what they are by design. But this is as relevant to the relative merits as comparing a horse to a herd- a 1.25 horsepower horse is always going to be out-muscled by a 40 horse-herd, and it also doesn't matter. The policy of 1.25 horsepower horse-breeding can still be a winner as part of a strategy of herd-quality competition. Choosing to frame policy versus strategy is apples to fruit basket comparisons at best, or little more than argument gerry mandering at worse.
The result is not a surprise- and often not an accident per see- but it's not that useful.
Worse than Yeltsin and the 1990s? Worse than the collapse of the Soviet Union?
I spent some time talking about popularity and how well the strategy was communicated through to the population. Just lie flat gets a lot of hype in certain parts of Western media - but what results have come from it? Similarly, there are NEETs and quiet quitters in the West - they're not exactly bringing down the govt. This looks like it's part of the modern lifestyle, common to all developed countries.
Yes, that's the part I described as 'rules based order', one of the three strands of US strategy. Note that I said national strategy as opposed to national security strategy. You seem to be thinking about national strategy only in the field of security, which is a very important factor but not everything.
DEI isn't just a policy used to achieve a strategic goal, it's an end in itself. The US has tried influencing Estonia to be more multicultural. Blinken apparently brings up LGBTQI in every conversation with the Saudis. US media pushes the virtues of blacks just like Chinese media pushes nationalism, albeit in a less hamfisted way. I was watching an Avengers film the other day, the super-smart black African girl in the hidden hyper-advanced African country clowning on the white physicist was a little cringe-worthy. There's a huge affirmative action apparatus in the USA, subsidies and assistance for non-white businesses.
They didn't naively read that McKinsey paper and think 'hey diversity is really efficient and improves our other goals, let's do it'. There are true believers that the US Air Force ought to be more representative of the country's demographics, that there should be plenty of female construction workers building chip factories, that there need to be more people from marginalized communities on company boards. The people who write these papers believe in reshaping the world in a certain direction and that is happening in all kinds of different areas. China teaches national rejuvenation in schools, America teaches diversity in schools, you've got the gay-straight alliance and various other initiatives. Perhaps I could add China's 'uphold the supremacy of communist party' as a strategy with all kinds of supporting policies but that really goes without saying.
Such a large-scale and comprehensive effort isn't just a policy. A policy would be something like the semiconductor suppression against Chinese high-tech industry, it's subordinate to US national security. It's specific, discrete and focused, usually in just one sector like economics.
Ukraine has been by far the worse Russian strategic failure.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a failure of ideology, and even legitimacy- a lack of belief that the system was worth maintaining. However, recognizing that no one believed in the project, that it was ruining the nation vis-a-vis reforms, and that brutal oppression of unwilling subjects was not necessary was... an accurate and even validated strategic assessments. The Russians lost their empire, and yet the military suppression of their neighbors was proven to NOT be necessary to prevent war or an invasion of Russia. The Soviet empire was unnecessary for Russia's security needs, because Russia was not, in fact, at meaningful risk of NATO invasion despite the loss of a major conventional military, even as the Gulf War of '91 already demonstrated that they had lost military dominance.
By contrast, Ukraine was a failure of strategy because it was unforced error born of systemic incompetence at strategic evaluation. All the costs- direct and opportunity- have been unnecessary, and it was incredibly counter-productive on even its own stated goals and rationals, propagandized as many of those were.
The results are that despite how 'well' the strategy is being communicated through to the population, there is a growing subculture in China's increasingly important and undersized youth pillar, required to maintain the system as the ideological generation retires, who are increasingly don't care to maintain the ideological project, for reasons that are both compounding and beyond the the CCP's ability to stop. Reasons like the pending loss of generational savings of the retiring ideological generation due to the property crisis that is resulting from party policy, which will place more of the burden of supporting (and recovering) on the youth-generation where the passive-resistance has manifested and spread because of, and not despite, social pressure efforts.
Their existence is a counter to arguments of social mobilization behind Xi's national rejuvination narrative, and their growth is a strategic vulnerability to strategies which rely on a supportive populace, as opposed to an apathetic-indifferent one.
And this defense is what undermines the previous sentence and the implicit premise of the first post, which attempted to set up a contrast to the popular unity of the Chinese strategy versus the unpopular dissent of the American strategy. Equivalence of NEETs and cultural equivalencies isn't an advantage remaining with China, it's the undermining factor of any strategy that depends on social elan by denying it unique advantages proscribed to it.
There certainly have been strategies over history that attempted to rely on the assumption of a hyper-motivated populace on one's own side, vis-a-vis the apathetic and decadent losers on the other. They are typically poor strategies, serving more as rationalizations of those dependent on the offense rather than actually well founded, and just as often built on the rhetoric of the propaganda state being echoed by the compliant subjects, who by the nature of the state lack the outside perspective to actually make well informed conclusions of their system.
And that would an inaccurate characterization, particularly given what is behind the (multiple pages) of each of those geographic and technical areas.
And note that I predicted you might try this deflection-
-and as I said then- it is. This is how the American government- by law- articulates and communicates national strategy. It is called the National Security Strategy by the virtue of the same law- the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, because that's what they called it in 1986, and no one in the US Congress has felt a need to rename it even as the Presidents have gradually broadened it to the whole-of-government strategy.
Unless you wish to identify some other document as the the real actual national strategy document, I charge this as a No True Scotsman appeal to a semantic that the American government doesn't abide by.
You seem to be under the impression that the national security strategy is only about the field of security, which is a very important indicator that you haven't read it. And are probably confusing it with the National Defense Strategy.
The US National Security Strategy only 48 pages, including the cover and agendas. Admittedly more than some other countries, but nothing a serious commentator on national strategies should find overwhelming. Here you go. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf
By contrast, the National Defense Strategy is a wee 30 more pages, but does go into far more detail as to how the 800-lb-gorilla of the US government thinks about going about competition. https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=872444
And yet, this does not make DEI the American national strategy, and does not keep DEI from being a policy. I would certainly agree that DEI is a policy that it's advocates believe in as a good in and of itself, and even that is irrelevant to whether the spread of DEI is viewed as a advancing American strategy, but neither of those are relevant to the difference between being a strategy and being a policy advanced on the basis of strategy.
This, too, does not make DEI the American national strategy, nor does it keep DEI from being a policy. In fact, it is directly compatible with DEI being a policy- policies counter eachother.
Such a large-scale and comprehensive effort is precisely what an American WGA entails.
Whole-of-Government Approach (“WGA”) refers to the joint activities performed by diverse ministries, public administrations and public agencies in order to provide a common solution to particular problems or issues, and involve some form of cross-boundary work and restructuring.
Which is to say- a government policy.
I'll stop you right here. No, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin era was catastrophic for Russia in a way that Ukraine is not. Massive impoverishment of the population, economic collapse, social collapse, demographic collapse, military collapse. Gorbachev had a strategy to reform the Soviet Union with policies of perestroika and glasnost. He wanted socialism with a human face and to preserve the Union. It failed massively and disastrously. I'm not sure if Yeltsin had a strategy other than 'remain in power' but it certainly wasn't good for the country.
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp-per-capita-ppp
It's possible to reform a socialist country into a market economy without shock therapy, without shelling Parliament, without a decade of chaos. China did exactly that. Ideology is a part of national strategy, if people stop believing that's a problem in and of itself. With better management of the economy and internal politics, the crisis of belief would've been mitigated. They could've transitioned to other sources of legitimacy in a more graceful manner. And hey, there are people in the West today who still believe in socialism. Indeed, the Russian communist party was quite competitive electorally - it took some trickery to keep them from ejecting Yeltsin.
You don't see the kinds of hysterically aggressive Western nationalists that are found in China. There's a reason why I highlighted Little Pink and not lying flat. You don't see many novels in the West heaping xenophobia and revanchism into their story, demonizing national rivals. Furthermore, US social elan is in a pretty poor condition - January 6th is proof of that.
Above you were saying that the fall of the Soviet Union was a failure of ideology, unrelated to security issues (which is wrong, given how Chechens and Islamists immediately took advantage of Russian weakness). Anyway, you were saying strategy was about security. Now you want to say that US strategy encompasses more than security? I had a look through the document you nominate as the holy text of US national strategy and there's loads of ideological and legitimacy content in there, the need to defend democracy and human rights. Plus there's a fair bit of DEI stuff as well - they want more STEM for girls, there's anti-racism content, they affirm diversity as a national value...
They don't outright say DEI is at the core of their ideology, they say many things they don't really mean. It's a public document, not to be viewed as a window into their innermost beliefs. Only in the implementation, in the specifics of outcomes do we see what they truly desire. That's what's important and why I brought up the DEI/CHIPS article in the first place.
And yet, none of this challenges the point you are protesting, which is that of a catastrophe of strategy as opposed to a catastrophe of other forms. That the fall of the Soviet Union was catastrophic for Russia in a way that Ukraine is not a rebuttal- it is the original argument!
The distinction- and this returns to the original context of that quote you've chosen to focus on- is of the nature of choice and necessity. The commonality of Stalin being backstabbed by the Nazis after making an alliance with them, and Russia's decision to invade Ukraine on incredibly mis-informed impressions born, is that they were the results of unnecessary strategic decisions born of bad information (that the leaders themselves cultivated). Stalin disregarded numerous indicators and warnings of the attack before it occurred to the detriment of his military forces, and the choice to ally with the Nazis to partition eastern europe before that was equally unnecessary for Russian defense, making the direness of 41-42 a result of unnecessary decisions. Similarly, Putin disregarded numerous indicators and warnings that he was not going to be welcomed as liberators and warnings, including the fact that a previously astroturfed uprising failed to garner major Russophile-support a half-decade previously. The consequences of both, beyond being massively costly, were that they were the result of unforced decisions driven by bad strategic understandings, and would have been considerably better for the Russians had they had a more accurate understanding of the strategic situation.
By contrast, Gorbachev's decision to undertake reforms were taken because of accurately-identified issues, and the fact that many of the factors went on to undermine his desired result actually validates the strategic perception that went into them. Gorbachev wanted socialism with a human face not because that had never been done before, but because he recognized it was (rightfully) perceived as fraudulent by many across (and below) the system. Gorbachev identified that change would be needed to keep the system together as something other than a conquest-suppression state because that's how the system was built and enforced, as opposed to the ideological paeons that official position had been taking for decades. And Gorbachev identified a need for major economic system change, as the communist materialist rational had abjectly failed to the degree that the late-Soviet economy was taking perfectly good raw resources and turning them into inferior goods. That the 90s followed doesn't mean that the strategy of change was a wrong decision- it's reflective that any strategy taken for the 90s was starting from an incredibly bad position, and that the issues derived from those issues aren't the result of the strategy chosen, but the realities the strategy had to be chosen from.
When I referenced there is a common failure point to assume that historical states actually work like video games, with the results in control of the player's agency, this is the sort of rhetoric I'm alluding to. This demonstrates both an ignorance of the history and politics involved, as well as a conflation of the merits of the deciding on a strategy with the strategy's results.
The first point returns to the point of the original first question on the value of planning, and the importance of tying that to realistic understandings of the dynamics and actors involve. Come the late 80s/early 90s, there was no 'graceful' alternative to maintaining the Soviet Empire because from the start to the end the Soviet Union from the start was an incredibly ungraceful conquest-and-suppression state, that directly and violently both annexed its extremities, violently put down attempts to gracefully leave the imperial sphere, and systematically relies on pervasive surveillance states and systemic abuses to disrupt dissent. The result was a Union where even Crimea wanted to leave it, and when ungraceful suppression was ended, did. The constituent conquests were not looking for another source of Russian imperial legitimatization to be subjugated under, they did not want the Russian empire, and only continued ungraceful suppression would keep them in it as the Soviets were well on their way to yet another uprising come the late 80s. This is the strategic context Gorbachev was operating in, and from which any strategic decision on maintaining the broader union was being made from.
Similarly, the 90s was indeed an incredibly corrupt time and impoverished time... and was always going to be in transition, as the sort of corrupt leaders who led and looted Russia in the 90s were literally the sort of leaders the Soviet Union had on hand and was producing for decades, and their level of competence and public care was always going to be reflective of that no matter what style of reform onetook in a continuity of government effort because they were the continuity of leadership. The 90s didn't occur, and then a whole host of corrupt gangsters emerged to be corrupt and mismanage the system- the Soviet system had been run by the same sort of people for decades, and their mismanagement was what brought the situation to Gorbachev's position in the first place. The transition being run by gangsters wasn't a strategic choice, it was a limitation enforced onto the strategy by the previous generations of the Soviet Union being a suppression state led by, and selecting for, gangsters.
Which goes back to the point that strategies are chosen for addressing strategic problems, and not the implicit inverse where the strategic problems are a result of choosing the strategy. Unlike in some video games, there is no easily-identified 'corrupt politician' flag or a counterpart 'honest bueracrat' trait, and there is no magical anti-crime/encourage loyalty option. Strategies are chosen from the problems facing the chooser, and the failure of a strategy to pan out as desired is not the same as a failure of strategy, or that the strategic considerations that went into choosing it. Sometimes a bad hand of options is a bad hand of options, and the 90s were going to be a bad hand for the Russians due to many factors the Russians had stacked against themselves.
The reform of the Soviet Union was always going to be carried out by gangsters, for gangsters, after the same gangsters had looted Russia and the empire for decades.
If you mean 'see' as in that it's not covered by the media, this is because the general political tribal dynamics of the media class tend to see nationalism as uncouth and coded as their opposition parties.
If you mean 'see' as in 'it's not there,' this would be flatly incorrect, and anyone who lived through the early 2000s could probably recount more than a few American examples.
And above was a different topic, while this is on the American national strategy.
I realize it can be embarrassing to have been predicted and called out, but the sub-thread you are and were responding to was not on the fall of the Soviet Union, but the specific national policy documents the Americans use to present national strategy which you mis-characterized (your original second question), and your objection demonstrated your lack of awareness on the role of the document.
As we are back to the American national strategy, I will offer you a direct question to establish your familiarity with American national strategy, which in full forewarning I will call out if you try to evade.
Before I posted the link, and before you posted your opening thesis on American strategy, had you ever read or reviewed an American National Security Strategy?
No, not really. The Chechens are precisely the sort of release-or-suppress challenge that the Russians faced across the broader Soviet empire, validating strategies made with that consideration in mind, and the Islamists were fighting Russia even at the Soviet Strength, hence Afghanistan.
Come the late 80s, the Soviets were facing the buildup to a number of major uprisings as the Polish and Baltic independence movements gained steam, and come March 91 after the Americans cut through the Soviet-style Iraqi Army it was very apparent to the broader world that in a conventional conflict in Europe, the Russians were likely to be decisively beaten in any conflict with the Americans- including if the Americans intervened in any attempted Soviet suppression campaign in eastern Europe.
The Soviet strategic challenge of the early 90's wasn't simply that the state was decrepit and the economic system breaking and the society didn't want to be a part of it. It was also that the primary military competitor was not only ideologically inclined to intervene when the next anti-Soviet/pro-Western uprising occurred, but had demonstrated to a global audience that doing so was well within its martial capacity. The only credible model for contesting tactical defeat over non-existential imperial holdings would have been nuclear- and if you don't see the numerous ways that could have turned out worse for Russia than the 90s, you aren't trying.
Yes, and your attempt to play semantic on this demonstrates that you aren't familiar with the American strategy architecture, which undermines the credibility of your assessment of American strategy when you don't even know what it's based on or derives from. Hence the question if you'd ever read it before your opening post.
The National Security Strategy is a document whose publication is required by American law. The law specifies what the document is going to be referred to as. The National Security Strategy isn't called such because it focuses solely 'Security' in the framing you are appealing to, it is called such because in the 1980s 'National Security' was the buzzword de jure that was written into the law as what the document would be referred to.
This is classic example of (bureaucratic) semantic drift, in the same way that 'Homeland Security' refers to a framing that had a particular moment of emphasis in the Bush era US government and which Obama then diminished, and broadly refers to the same concepts that another set of words could. (Bush used Homeland Security to emphasize the implications to the north american continent, but other Presidents tend to National Security for it's broader implications for overseas interests and allies.)
And yet, 'more STEM for girls' is not the strategy, it is the identified policy to achieve a strategy. And not a particularly controversial policy objective, unless you think less STEM for girls is somehow the preferable end-state.
Come now, I know you've opened the document now. I also know which section you are pulling from, what higher-level goal that example supposed to advance, and how STEM is treated across the document.
The answer for the audience:
STEM for girls is in reference to page 15, as in
This is part of the "Investing in our People", which is a subset of "Investing in our National Power to Maintain a Competitive Edge," which itself is the first part of Part II: Investing in Our Strength.
In this context, STEM for girls is not the strategy- STEM "especially" for women and girls is one of multiple elements of the goal of developing the national workforce.
And if one values STEM over other degree fields, then the lower hanging fruit in terms of which gender could have STEM expanded more is...
Well, 'women are under-represented' is another way of framing 'the absolute and relative number of women who could be in STEM is low.' There is absolutely a reasonable policy debate to be had as to whether it's better to increase STEM by increasing the number of men doing it, or whether women in STEM is a relatively low-hanging fruit that should be encouraged, but DEI-esque systemic encouragement of "under-represented demographics" is, again, a way to frame 'the absolute and relative number of [demographic] in STEM is low' when bigger STEM number is considered better.
Given that additional references to STEM in the document are-
...and I think an accurate characterization of American STEM strategy is not 'DEI for its own sake,' or even 'STEM for girls,' but rather 'STEM from any source', with DEI-coded policies being a way to encourage an overall increase in STEM-participation not only by demographics in the United States, but demographics from outside of the US to be head-hunted into the United States.
In other words- the American National Strategy is to encourage STEM training (especially among the demographic least participating), attract more STEM talent from across the world, and improve the recruitment/retention of STEM.
This is indeed something very compatible with DEI-ideology. It's also the sort of policy you'd expect to see if you believe STEM should be increased as a matter of national strategy.
There's certainly an argument to be made on the strategic merits of quantity vs quality, but arguments that DEI fails this on a strategic level while PRC diploma-mills of STEM are uniquely successful are going to face internal contradiction. For people who believe the PRC has a STEM advantage because it's increasing the numbers of STEM graduates, and that Westoid commentary on the quality of PRC STEM education is suspect is just silly cope...
Congratulations. You officially won the argument and convinced key American elites years ago. DEI and migration policy are how the US government under a Democratic administration believe the US will long-term compete with PRC STEM diploma numbers, and it made it into policy.
Thank you for your service.
While I am always pleased to see yet more flourishing psychics able to divine the True Beliefs of people they've never met, I will again conclude that this is demonstrative of the point that you do not understand American strategy, or how the most governments think of strategy or approach it at a state-level.
While it may strain your belief, the American strategy is indeed a public document, and it is indeed intended to be a window for others both inside and outside the US to understand the objectives and directions of the US government. This is for many reasons, ranging from that coordination of the US government and its allies and aligned civil society is hard if no one knows what the strategy is (and when most don't have security clearances to view classified items), to that secret national strategies are stupid for a host of reasons and liable to be posted online within a few weeks anyway.
Contra wiki-leaks founder, the American government (and Western governments in general) do not operate as a conspiracy, where the public motives are false and the true motives are state secrets. The West generally operate as democratic administrations with relatively high turnover of national leadership, often between parties with personal and partisan animosity and no particular interest in keeping their predecessors differing secret desires a secret. There are indeed classified policy documents out there- when you review them, you will find that they are consistently about the 'how' of implementing the strategy, not secret real strategies in and of themselves. The distinction between 'how' and 'what' is part of the endurance of continuity of activities: because the public intentions are generally non-controversial, there are rarely strong motives to unearth the more secretive 'how' programs. (However, it does occasionally happen- see the European government phone-tapping schedules, where upon realizing they were spied upon while in office, new governments have outed previously secretive political espionage programs. This sort of revelation is far less common in states with far less administration turnover.)
Ultimately, national strategies aren't just a plan of how to operate, they're also a signaling and communication device. A secret strategy that no one outside a select few knows is a bad strategy at the scale of the nation-state, because the scale of governments overseeing coalitions of hundreds of millions of people is too large to be coherent. Public strategies are far superior for the purpose of coordination, as in the absence of specific direction anyone can know a more general direction, and it has also been a way for governments to signal evolutions in their postures that mitigate the risks of strategic surprises to their allies and their enemies.
Yes but the way he dealt with issues was poor. Reducing military spending would've greatly ameliorated the economic situation, it was sucking up a good 10%+ of the Soviet economy. Gorbachev didn't even have the power to control military spending but he thought he could radically alter the whole ideological and economic structure of the Soviet Union - in a controlled way! The man was dreaming.
If a strategy is launched in an inept and naive way and fails, it's a failure of strategy. A return to hardline Stalinism would be a 'strategy of change' yet that wouldn't have helped either. Change and reform is not sufficient, it needs to be the right change done in the right way. Implementation is important - gradual and controlled marketization beats chaos. Nothing about the Soviet system required handing everything over to robbers in a mad rush to privatize all assets before the communists could be elected, the Yeltsin approach was extremely counterproductive. Gorbachev's ineptitude led to the hardliner coup, he didn't manage the situation sufficiently well. Now nobody had ever done this before, it's a difficult task that he wasn't trained to do. Indeed, the Soviet failure helped inform China's success. Yet it was still a failure.
However, good management is not some made up video-game skill, it requires a sound understanding of the people and institutions that control a country, it requires certain personal characteristics that Deng clearly had. Even Putin did a decent job in cleaning up much of the mess that Yeltsin left behind - Putin is not an exceptional leader but he's not a Gorby/Yeltsin-tier blunder-addict.
That was the result of mismanagement and a certain level of naivete (itself a result of poor management) about how things would be outside the Soviet Union. As late as 2013 Ukraine regretted leaving the USSR.
Anyway, you started this diversion saying the war in Ukraine was the worst disaster for Russia since '41 - did you miss the increasingly frantic rhetoric coming from Macron and the Pentagon about how the Russians are about to roll the Ukrainians?
It's not looking good for the rules-based order.
No, American nationalism is not on the same order as Chinese nationalism today or in the 2000s. Not even after 9/11. The US ambassador in Beijing was trapped for days after the Belgrade embassy bombing as hordes of rioters threw rocks. China routinely blows up tiny maritime incidents into completely disproportionate affairs. The most popular movie in US history wasn't a patriotic war story like Saving Private Ryan toned up to 11 with 'the eternal glory of the US Army remains in our hearts forever and ever, amen' on the postscript. What are you thinking of - Islamophobia? China is way more Islamophobic than the US has ever been, as the US govt delights in telling us so often.
Firstly, the Iraqi army is not the Soviet army. Just the arsenal Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union is a whole other world to the SA-8s and Rolands Iraq was fielding. The Iraqi army was also saddled with Iraqi soldiers, who were not known for excellence under US tutelage either. We've yet to see how Airland Battle deals with S-300s or the arsenal of a proper military. Secondly, conventional inferiority was no problem for NATO in the 1970s or Russia today, they have nuclear deterrence.
This may be news to you but you do not have to read these documents to discuss national strategy. You can look at what actually happens in the real world. You can interpret govt priorities with your own eyes. This is better than trusting in the documents. Govts lie! The Chinese might say that they're interested in purely peaceful development - yet actually build up a gigantic navy and forces targeting their near abroad. The US might say it's worried about Iraqi WMDs and Saddam's links with terrorists - but have other motivations and goals for invading Iraq.
And when govts don't lie, they try to be tactful, they massage their words and adopt a certain frame. The Chinese adopt this supercilious tone where their military may be forced to take action if foreign provocateurs incite a rogue province into illegal independence activities. That's not a lie but it's not straightforward communication. Better to ignore the cheap talk and look at results.
The migration policy of having a de facto open border? I note this is contrary to what is indicated in your august strategy document. US migration policy isn't primarily about improving the quality of the STEM workforce but about demographic and political change, plus serving certain corporate interests. The vast majority of the millions of people arriving in America (many flown in at state expense) are not trained in STEM. In fact US legal immigration is a rather byzantine and complicated mess, making it difficult for the most skilled to arrive.
This is where the advantage of my 'look at what's actually going on' approach kicks in. I can observe that DEI and migration policy is not motivated by a desire to acquire STEM talent. If they wanted talent, they could adopt a points-based system like Australia and enforce the border. If they wanted talent, they'd favour meritocracy as opposed to diversity quotas and affirmative action. It's not rocket science. This policy isn't secret - its publicly observable and it does get communicated. But people massage the truth, they arrange their intentions in certain ways to make it sound more defensible. Children are taught things like 'diversity makes us stronger' in school and via the media, just like how China is taught nationalism via school and the media.
Furthermore, relying on Chinese STEM talent to counter China has a number of rather obvious flaws. This is what I was pointing out initially. The DEI and Rules-based order strands are in conflict. The US wants to skim off Chinese STEM talent but not end up training them so they take skills back to China, not have them spy for China. They want to whip up popular sentiment against China (another thing you won't find in official strategy documents but which can be observed through funding of various organizations and media slant) but do so without inciting racism or civil unrest. These are the contradictions I've been talking about the whole time.
The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says in the PR brochure.
Ah, excellent. While the abandonment of previous lines of argument to ever shifting deflections and changes of argument is as enjoyable as always (Really? You tried to use Macron warning about a Ukrainian defeat as a counter to Russia's invasion of Ukraine being a strategic disaster of choice? In the same post rejecting government strategic positions as unreliable due to lying, no less?), I think we can close this exchange by returning to one of the original points that you've been defending against all this time, which your attempt to avoid acknowledging illuminates nicely.
As was forewarned-
And your response is more than telling.
This is a rather unsubtle attempt to waive aside the relevance of having read the American strategy, when a simple affirmation would have bolstered your position considerably more in a single word. Add to that your earlier ignorance of the documents in question and attempt to cherry-pick contents of the document after introduction without awareness of how they fit into their own location, I feel reasonable concluding...
No, you did not read or review the American National Security Strategy before your commentary on American national security strategy.
And given your word choice in this non-rebuttal to as to what the Chinese 'might' say in their strategy- as opposed to what they do say in their strategic policy documents- I strongly doubt you've read Chinese equivalents either.
Which makes a fair degree of sense, given your obvious lack of familiarity with not only American strategic thinking, but how Western strategic policy systems work in general, including the distinctions between strategies and policies. And your simultaneous attempt to assert that it doesn't matter if you read national policy documents or not because of your powers of observation, but also that the American national strategy document isn't the real strategy anyway so, like, it double doesn't matter if you read it or not.
I fully expect you to continue this denial of relevance defense, of course. After all, it's far more palatable to deny that the strategy exists or that it matters if you are aware of it than to concede that you didn't read it before trying to summarize it in boo-words.
While prioritizing the personal truths of one's own interpretation is typically more associated with progressive DEI advocates than detractors, it's a common enough retort when challenged over inconvenient external objective facts that might challenge their interpretation, like the publicly available national strategy documents that anyone could check their claims against.
Which returns to the original question that led to this exchange, and the structural answer that resulted.
No. Because you never bothered to learn what their strategies are, and it shows in what you've chosen to project and focus on instead.
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The USA is already on top. There’s dumb things we do, like wind energy and preferences for woman-owned contractors, but a strategy of complacency isn’t a terrible move when you’re already there. America just needs to keep our position; China needs to grow its own.
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I think a lot of this analysis is on the money, and the US doesn't realise its vulnerability. A lot of its policies are the kind of social engineering experiments you can get away with in a time of leisure and ease, but are unaffordable luxuries in a hostile world. But it's also worth noting some major US strengths -
(1) Attracting top talent. The US is still the world's number one destination for the smartest most talented people from across the planet. China doesn't offer a very compelling cultural package to anyone who isn't Chinese. Sure, you'll get your Filipino nurses and Indian janitors, but those people would much rather be working in the US. Being a global super-attractor for high-conscientiousness, high-g, high ambition individuals is an incredible strength.
(2) Economic security. If you're a billionaire, would you rather put your money in the US or China? Sure China might have less red tape to deal with, and fewer DEI requirements, but the government can also just seize your stuff or imprison you or kill you if you piss off the wrong person. Or they might suddenly decide to make your whole industry illegal, or put massive restrictions on it for ideological reasons. This is not the kind of climate that fosters daring investment decisions; the closest thing China had to an Elon Musk or Sam Altman figure was Jack Ma, and he has been aggressively slapped down by the CCP.
(3) Facilitating creative destruction. Related to the above, the US is a hub for social and technological change. Partly due to its size and partly due to its relatively laissez-faire governance, it's a haven for disruptive new technologies like crypto and AI. By contrast, I have low expectations of the ability of Chinese society as governed by the CCP to properly harness generative AI. Part of that is because China has some of the strictest regulations on AI in the world. But more broadly, AI is likely to cause massive destabilisation in job markets, information ecosystems, and education, and it seems unlikely to me that the Chinese government will just shrug its shoulders and let that happen.
(4) Market discipline. We talk about China's incredible high-speed rail network, but it's still possible this will turn out to be a boondoggle. Generally, the economics of high-speed rail suck, and it's not just Western inefficiency that holds it back - Singapore and Malaysia recently cancelled a line between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore because the numbers just didn't add up. By contrast, the economics of air travel are pretty straightforward, and the US has roughly 25 times the number of airports as China. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the US is some kind of paragon of market efficiency, and it regularly throws taxpayers' money at stupid projects. But I think the combination of democracy and strong free-market foundations makes it harder for it to do this at the same scale and duration as China.
(5) Long-term economic trajectory. China's economics look vastly different now than they did 10 years ago. Back then, Goldman Sachs thought it likely that China would overtake the US in nominal GDP by the late 2020s. Now it's been pushed back to the late 2040s (crucially, well past the median projected date for AGI), and may indeed never happen if China's demographics don't improve. More broadly, China has yet to find an alternative solution to property development to be the second leg of its economy alongside manufacturing; it has far more property than it will ever use, and its attempt to use overseas construction projects as an alternative have had very mixed results (plus could never absorb the same amount of labour as domestic production). China's youth unemployment rate is high, and many of its young people are increasingly disaffected. Meanwhile, with the rise of "safeshoring" and "derisking", new FDI is flowing into alternative manufacturing hubs in India and Indonesia, which can increasingly compete with China on price. China seems to have fallen squarely into the middle income trap, at quite a low level, somewhere below Russia and above Egypt in GDP (PPP)/capita terms. None of this is to say that China's threat has receded - it is enormous, and even if its economy simply chugs along, it will remain a huge global producer. But it's not the all-powerful economic juggernaut it appeared a few years ago. By contrast, the US economy has performed very impressively, actually beating China in GDP/growth in Q3 last year (admittedly that one is a bit of an outlier).
(6) Friends and Allies. The US has lots of allies. Among its closest are three nuclear powers (UK, France, Israel), two permanent UN security council seats (UK, France), six of the world's largest economies (Germany, Japan, UK, France, Italy, Canada), and some of the world's largest raw mineral producers (Canada, Australia), and that's not even counting India and Indonesia, who the US is increasingly courting. It leads many of the world's most powerful international organisations like the World Bank and IMF, has a hugely outsize influence on culture, has military bases all around the world, and has no serious enemies on its own continent. By contrast, China's closest allies are Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, and Russia, who are as much liabilities as assets. It is on poor terms with several of its closest neighbours, notably Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, The Philippines, and Vietnam. It has very little cultural power and very few bases overseas.
So, I think it would be a mistake to throw up our hands in despair; the US has formidable structural advantages in any prolonged conflict with China. But none of this is a reason for complacency. Hopefully the Ukraine War has proven to be a shock to the system and will reinvigorate US ambitions.
Add in that their current plan for growth is expanding their already inflated global manufacturing marketshare through very aggressive industrial policy, in market segments where at least the rich world is practically certain to engage in things like high tariffs, at a point in time where people are already safe/friend-shoring.
It's a setup for disaster.
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All true, but I'd point out that these are the reasons why the US is currently on top. For the most part, it's where the US is coming from, not necessarily where it's headed. For many of those, the US is headed away from them. Like for (2), selective scrutiny of business dealings and of regulatory observance for being on the wrong side of politics is increasingly visible in the US; I don't know if it's more or less the case than before, but it's certainly more high profile. Musk might not be facing jail right now, but there's a large group of people, in some states a majority, who would electorally reward public officials for finding any reason to go after him. There's a large (and growing) group of people who believe Musk (or anyone) should not have been able to make that much money in the first place and that such wealth can only have come from some illegitimate or immoral acts, and while these people are not in power right now (because the elites don't believe it, they just use it for electoral purposes), it could only take one populist rising at the wrong time to ruin the idea that the US is a safe place to do business in.
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It is a major weakness. People who move are people who are willing to give up on their people, country, friends and family for personal gain. They will leave again if another country offers a better deal. By filling elites with foreigners the US has greatly increased the rift between the elites and the common people. Foreigners in San Fransisco have as much in common with people in Missouri as westerns in Singapore have with Cambodians. The US becomes nothing more than a vehicle for personal ambition among the ruling class. The result is a low trust society with a fractured political system and low social cohesion. France did not benefit by gathering the elite of Europe in Versailles. Even worse, the actual wasp elite will become less American when their colleges and workplaces are full of foreigners.
The US sanctions far more countries than China and places far greater demands on its trading partners. China has no problem selling to the taliban or various African countries. They have little interest in the inner workings of these countries. The US wants to reshape their entire societies to mirror American values. China is far less likely to sanction or even care about what happens in another country. American companies are far more likely to deplattform someone for dissenting values not directly related to the US while China really doesn't care as much about the world outside of China.
High speed trains don't have to be profitable to make sense. Roads are subsidized by taxes yet they aren't considered unprofitable. Rail way is infrastructure and sewers, railways and roads don't have to operate as a profitable business. Rail requires far less parking space in cities than roads, it produces a fraction of the air pollution, it is far less reliant on fossil fuels and it is faster. High speed rail delivers people straight to city centers and ties in well with other forms of public transit.
China is a manufacturing super power. The US is the country that is heavily reliant on property speculation. The US is running an unsustainable deficit and growing slower than China.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/ypy1oo/countries_whose_largest_trading_partner_is_china/#lightbox
China is the biggest trading partner for most of the world and most of the world has no historic grudge against China. They have never fought a war outside of Asia and have if anything been a big economic benefit to large parts of the world. The US has made a great effort to create grudges against it in the middle east and latin America.
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Well, it's certainly an AAQC for me, even if I'm going to quibble on a few key points:
I don't think involution is the right call for the US. Rules-based international order (or globalism) seems to have been a massive benefit to the States, even as it helped the rest of the world flourish through the currently disrupted Pax Americana, though this obviously helped competitors like China as well.
If the US wants to maintain its wealth, it will inevitably need to continue securing supply chains across the globe, including maintaining its deterrent capabilities, for issues like Ukraine where nobody (perhaps barring France) particularly wants things to go nuclear.
After all, China is investing so heavily in coal, both in terms of power plants, production, and land-based alternative routes to producers like Russia, because they're fundamentally afraid of what might happen if the US cut them off, for many things, but primarily oil, be it at the Strait of Malacca, near Japan and so on. Of course, they're also building naval power both in case they want to fight over Taiwan (pure nationalistic stupidity, there'll be little of value left, especially in terms of chip fabs, if the conflict goes hot. The US would likely prefer to evacuate Taiwanese researchers and workers and destroy the fabs rather than having them be captured, especially since the CHIPS act has been rather underwhelming).
An actual war with China, should it happen in the near-term before we have ASI (and once again, despite the stupidity involved in the implementation of CHIPS, the US still leads by a country mile when it comes to actual AI research, even if it's corporate), will almost certainly be global, regardless of whether it earns the moniker of WW3. So a US focused on industrialization (especially with full automation approaching), should aim to both to defend its shores and allies, while also producing enough raw military materiél to fight in less friendly shores).
Whatever takeoff we have till ASI, it's still in the slow phase, and while it's impossible to outright declare a victor, my money is on the US winning the race, be it through universal eudaimonia or getting us all paperclipped. Right now, China is only capable of picking a fight over Taiwan and that seems to me like a pure waste of time, and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future.
From a game theoretic perspective China has no incentive to pick a fight over Taiwan. The rates of change in technological and military power favor China. If they want a military victory, then the longer they wait the better their chances.
The US has the opposite incentives. The longer they wait, the worse. But they can’t be seen as too obviously instigating a war, so they make moves to keep the temperature high in hopes that eventually someone takes the bait and provides a causus belli. Think of the P3 that got clipped by an overzealous Chinese fighter pilot in the early aughts. Even then it was tense moment, and the US didn’t consider China a real adversary at that time. If something like that happened again a player could maneuver into a war.
A successful CHIPS act move actually increases the chances of war. If China senses that they’re no longer closing the gap then it becomes “now or never” for them. And they have far less need to manufacture a legitimate causus belli.
Not in terms of manpower which is about to take a nose dive.
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Between China and Taiwan, sure. Between China and the US, not necessarily. Between China and the US-alliance-network that might back Taiwan, no. Particularly since more than one of those network members could enable Taiwan to achieve something like near-breakout capability, drone swarms, or other dynamics that drastically increase the costs.
The gametheoretic perspective is that China has a relatively limited window of relative disproportionate advantage, before degrading, possibly sharply.
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Just like actual humans don't act like Homo Economicus they don't act like Homo Strategicus either. If China invades Taiwan it will be the result of internal political factions within China competing and exerting pressure, not the result of a logical decision about how best to optimize the chance of winning.
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When I said 'defend allies without going on global adventures' I meant taking a stand to defend Taiwan if it were attacked as opposed to isolationism - that wasn't clear in my post though. However, the US has lots of troops all over the world, that huge base in Africa that was recently closed for example. They should cut down on non-defensive missions - Syria for instance.
I reckon it would be hard to evacuate the key Taiwanese workers in time, would you leave your family behind as hostages? What kind of message does that send to the lowly infantryman if the elites are fleeing before the war begins? The machinery would be wrecked but a lot of the brainpower might fall into Chinese hands. Furthermore, Taiwan is useful for submarine bases (the Yellow Sea is quite shallow) and it controls the sea routes leading to South Korea and Japan.
Quite an important issue. If Chinese propaganda is to be believed, they've got factories that can produce 1000 cruise/anti-ship missiles per day. Well, they can produce 1000 electric cars per day so it seems mildly reasonable that they could - though they could also be lying and/or deceptive about what kind of missile they're making. When it comes to automation China is also quite strong - they install more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined.
The US does have an edge in ASI, maybe a decisive one. Demolishing the Nvidia/Google AI chip pipeline might be the only way China can catch up.
I think that if it possible to perform an evacuation, it'll be done. That's leaving aside unlikely scenarios like chinese commandos storming the parliament or a container ship spilling out drones like a clown car. I expect that many Taiwanese politicians certainly hope to not have to stick around when the CCP invades, and skilled fab workers are much more valuable.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be public. Tragic, the fab caught fire, and half the employees are missing in the midst of a war, who can say who's responsible? I don't expect the US to salt the earth unless they feel compelled to, as in it's obvious China will win. Either way, the fabs won't survive.
That's rather minor isn't it? After all, there's a reason they're concerned about their neighbors only a few dozen kilometers away across the Formosan Strait. Knocking out Taiwan eliminates an adversary, but if China wants to mess with SK and Japan they don't need Taiwan to do so.
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One of the reasons the US has bases all over the world is so it can quickly deploy forces in defense of allies. For example, the recently-closed based in Niger was helping the government of that country (and neighboring regions) defend against ISIS and Boko Haram. Bases in the Middle East can help defend KSA, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and UAE against Iran, Houthis, etc.. Base in Okinawa and the Philippines protect those countries from China. And so on. While I'm sympathetic to your broad view that the US has overestimated its strength and should be focused on protecting what it has, it's not clear to me that the material means of doing so are radically different. E.g., if a US ally in East Africa is attacked, the solution is sending a carrier group.
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The US is an extremely individualist country and is good at individualist projects which makes the US high in innovation. Meanwhile the US is terrible at large scale collective projects. California high speed rail, Vogtle nuclear power plants and a third of the country doing full lockdown during covid while another third are militantly refusing are examples of Americans being incapable of going with one strategy and ramming it through. Going Belarus and having no lockdowns for anyone, or going China and having lockdowns makes more sense than having half the population locked down while others are having raves.
Manufacturing chips is less about individual genius and more of a grand collective vision. The true innovation and genius is a decade ahead of what can be mass-produced. The timeline from physics genius inventing having a stroke of genius on a black board to manufacturing is long. These genius strokes of ingenuity are difficult to keep secret when they are going to be mass-produced. Taking an idea and building a 20 billion dollar plant requires a Herculean effort of tens of thousands of high skill workers pulling together for a common cause. Building high speed rail is less dependent on the next cool startup and more dependent on society as a whole coming together for a prime directive. China didn't invent the electric car, the mosfet chip, nuclear power or high speed rail, but they excel at scaling production.
Nuclear power is similar. The ideas for fourth gen nuclear power are not new, they are 60 years old. To be leading in nuclear power a country needs legislators, engineers, and technicians who can pull together to make fourth gen nuclear real. They don't need people who can invent novel exotic designs for power plants that won't be built.
As for black people they are useful for the system. A black lesbian woman with a rainbow flag is ideologically loyal. There is no risk that she will turn against the system or be disloyal, she truly believes in the liberal project. White men are a risk group. Chinese and Russian men are the most suspect. When France colonized Vietnam they promoted hmong people to positions of power. The Hmong people have been a minority in a weak position throughout history and had a grudge against the rest of society. They truly benefited from being a part of the French empire. Their loyalty made them good employees. A trustable mediocre employee is better than a disloyal genius.
Sounds pretty much like dictatorship allocating chief positions for loyalty over competency.
Blacks are not neccessarily loyal to liberal project. Blacks have highest transphobia amongst US race groups, in opposite what you could think if you just voted on them voting R vs D. There are more of such issues.
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Yeah I read a book that had the thesis "AI is switching from the era of cutting-edge innovation to scaling and iteration so China will start to pull ahead of the US". It was written back in 2021 though, so pretty obsolete.
I was tempted to say that the US should also try for the 'science->military' feedback loop. They did do it back in the 1950s with Eisenhower's post-Sputnik space effort. I reckon that's too hard now, the ship of state is too big and hard to steer. On the other hand, it's not like the freedom-centric strategy is realistic/feasible either.
I realize it's not hugely discussed, but isn't this (to some extent) still the case? The US has no shortage of scientists working on military(-ish) technology. Those National Labs all work for the Department of Energy, which, as Rick Perry found out, has surprisingly little to do with energy qua energy, and a lot more to do with nuclear power and defense research. There's also DARPA and similar programs that are more explicitly labeled "defense", and plenty of research grants from the intelligence community and the various services. Even NASA is distinctly defense-adjacent and their funding usually comes with security requirements. And "securing defense supply chains" has been a big reason for funding projects like the CHIPS Act.
It's not exactly a new example, but ARPANET was, for a long time, a defense project, and DARPA was funding a lot of the early self-driving car research. It's hard to see the current picture more clearly (I certainly don't claim to), but there's plenty of reason to hold results like this fairly quietly. I also won't claim that it's done optimally at a good scale, but the idea that science and military aren't linked currently is at least missing some of the forest for the trees.
Sure, the US does do this but not quite at the scale and commitment China's working at. How much money has the US promised on the CHIPS act? Tens of billions. Is the US willing to build nuclear plants? Not really. Other considerations come before aggressive implementation of technology. Musk has to file his environmental impact statements before launching his rockets.
China is spending in the hundreds of billions on chips. They're building the most nuclear plants in the world. They've got a huge industrial policy machine, they really put in effort when it comes to technology. When it comes to high-speed rail, they don't just talk about it, they build it. They don't care about environmental impact in China like they do in the US. Technology comes second only to communist party control.
The US still spends more on research but they're not exactly growing their research spending like China is:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS?locations=US-CN
So long as the US economy has as much or more real growth than China- and there many reasons to believe it is- that is precisely what your own link indicates is happening.
Just at an initial look, both China and the US have been increasing their % of GDP to science at about the same rate for the last decade, with the US staying between .7 and 1% of GDP ahead of PRC. Not only would the US be spending nearly an entire % of GDP more, and not only would the GDP have grown faster, but the overall economy remains much larger, meaning the same % growth actually entails larger numbers of $ being spent.
Now, you could try to change the terms by arguing effective spending should be considered in PPP terms, and the general pro-China economic framing at the moment is to make PPP rather than nominal measures, but not only would you have to significantly re-do your money argument and support the implicit claim that science-per-PPP is a consistent metric worth using, you'd have to factor in the US's extended scientific partnerships with other countries, and how their money should be factored in.
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It's not hugely discussed because it's not particularly controversial, to the point that it's like water that the fish swimming through don't recognize.
The 'issue' is that many scientific developments with military applications aren't actually all-that visible, being more about integration of capabilities than distinct form. A 'post-sputnik space effort' is visually impressive when there are no space rockets. A re-usable space-launch rocket is not visually all that distinct from a non-reusable one, and only (greatly) expands the amount of material moved into space, rather than introducing first-of-its-kind capabilities.
Another issue is that a lot of significantly advancing technology is also a lot more democratized, with periods of sole-state advantage being shorter than ever before. Thirty years ago, GPS-guided weapons and real-time tracking of forces was an unprecedented technological advantage that allowed the Gulf War US to slice through one of the largest Soviet-style armies in the world to an unprecedented degree. Now you have the same technological capability in your pocket, in some cases provided by the same companies putting satellites into orbit rather than the states that once had a monopoly on doing that. What isn't invented can still be replicated, often for a fraction of the cost.
That doesn't mean that the technology -> military loops isn't occuring, or having strategic payoffs. After being the target of proxy war for the better part of two decades, the US is arguably waging one of the most effective proxy wars in human history, in large part because of the technologies it has developed and deployed in favor of it's backed party while using lessons from the previous conflicts. The advent of drone warfare is a revolution in military affairs which will be a great weakness to all major military powers by greatly increasing the costs when operating in hostile terrain- but effect the US less due to the US's geographic and alliance contexts. This is far more relevant and impressive on a strategic level than, say, a carrier-killing ballistic missile, a weapon with only about 50 applicable targets in the world.
But drones aren't sexy a decade after the Iraq War, and a carrier-killing missile is whoosh.
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