China has done some really terrible things like sell me cheap products and buy my countries debt at subsidized rates. The horror!
If we don’t watch out they might start selling me cheap electric vehicles!
Look, if we didn’t have nukes then maybe I would be all worried about them taking over the world. But we do have nukes. An invasion of Taiwan would end 5 minutes after it started. And they don’t even have a good reason to try.
There are some issues with the Soviet military spending numbers here
- They're cited as coming from Holzman (https://doi.org/10.2307/2538679), but they're actually CIA estimates he's quoting. Holzman explicitly states that he thinks they're 1-2% too high
- They are contemporary estimates of spending in the 1982 budget - deep into the cold war, and well past its hottest point. CIA estimates from 1973 are 6-8% of GNP.
- CIA estimates at the time were based on direct costing - which is extremely sensitive to how you do dollar-ruble comparisons, when you get your index prices from, etc. And is questionably meaningful, in a Soviet-style planned economy. Realistically, we don't actually know what the Soviet military cost them, and neither did the Soviet government.
Yeah as I finished writing this I realized I could probably stand to revise it because there arguably didn’t have to be a first Cold War either. But I haven’t published in a while and didn’t want to take the time
Currently, the Chinese economy is 21x bigger than the Taiwanese economy. If what you're saying about defensive capacities being 50x cheaper than offensive capacities is true, then it seems that Taiwan should be able to independently defend itself from China.
My worry would be that a successful Chinese takeover of Taiwan would grant China the naval bases that it needs to successfully challenge America in the Pacific. My recommendation is that TPP is combined with NATO into a Pacific-Atlantic free trade, mutual defense pact, and Schengen zone. That seems fantastical since TPP was defeated under Obama, and Trump is ratcheting up the tariffs on Canada.
Peter Zeihan would like a word--he tends to argue that America's relative success will rise in the coming decades, and predicts the collapse of China and Russia based pretty much on the demographic math.
I think Peter is a bit too confident, but he's right that demographics do not look good for China.
I broadly agree with your two main paints, that (1) China probably does not intend to start a second Cold War with the US, and (2) our own blinders are the biggest threat to our hegemony, not the designs of our enemies.
I do however think you're being overly sanguine about China's militarization. It seems fairly obvious that China is seriously considering an invasion of Taiwan, which should be a cause or concern. Furthermore, comparing US to Chinese military spending is fraught because (1) cost disease and (2) the far greater number of military commitments that the US has compared to China
Interesting post! (Honored to be the source of a new byline...)
I think I've got (very close to) the same take here. ‘New Cold War’ rhetoric *in the context of just China* probably is exaggerated—it very much takes two to tango—even though their rising star is sort of inherently destabilizing in the old-fashioned realist way.
But I still think your analysis is missing consideration (or just too dismissive) of who China’s bedding up with—Russia and North Korea and Iran don’t respect sovereignty or international institutions even a bit. So long as the Chinese menace legitimize and prop up those regimes (even if only tacitly!), America and her allies will have plenty of conflict and strife to deal with.
I guess, imagine a very chill Soviet Union that vaguely supports a bunch of nuclear-armed, expansionist, revisionist Cubas. That’s a pretty chilly Cold War! And it means a world where our foreign policy will have to get more adversarial.
To put it in the post’s framework: China supplies the economic power of the New Axis, and the Russians, Iranians, and North Koreans provide its military and ideological muscle (and easily-invadable land neighbors). Add it all up and compare it to the Soviets (plus their satellites & the East Germans & the actual Cubans, to make it fair) and I think you'll get a fairly menacing picture. (I haven't actually done the math, this is kinda speculative...)
I think the only problem here is Russia, and even then I have to wonder how much of it is because the US parroted the idiotic "democracy vs. autocracy" line and pushed them together. As for Iran and North Korea, the alternative to China trading with them is that the US completely destroys the Iranian economy and makes a lot of people's lives more miserable, and North Korea becomes a failed state with a humanitarian crisis and loose nukes. So I'm frankly glad China is bailing them out. Before the first Trump admin went psycho and tried maximum pressure, the JCPOA was working (supported by China) and China enforced UNSC sanctions (which it still does today, actually).
No one currently in the US government seems invested in confronting China like the Soviet Union. Democrats have shifted into treating Russia as the primary threat that would weaken China by proxy. Trump's new policies are more interested in dealing with domestic issues, and it seems he would rather arrange a sort of detente between the world powers while that happens.
Such a balance would probably be good for the world. But such balances don't usually last forever. Someone's power will wane, someone else will keep building up, and a big war or collapse will upset things. And then historians might say, 'Why didn't the USA deal with China 50 years before that point?' Since domestic policies are so important, the answer is, as always, 'It was complicated...'
China was a Senatorial increasingly bourgoise regime in 2010, and as such there was not real problem with the USA. First China Senate fell under a Caesar, then perhaps América is in the same track. Kings sooner or later go to war.
China has done some really terrible things like sell me cheap products and buy my countries debt at subsidized rates. The horror!
If we don’t watch out they might start selling me cheap electric vehicles!
Look, if we didn’t have nukes then maybe I would be all worried about them taking over the world. But we do have nukes. An invasion of Taiwan would end 5 minutes after it started. And they don’t even have a good reason to try.
Are you saying that our nuclear umbrella extends over Taiwan? I don't think that's true.
They have very good reasons to try. The only reason they don't is American and to some extent European threats.
There are some issues with the Soviet military spending numbers here
- They're cited as coming from Holzman (https://doi.org/10.2307/2538679), but they're actually CIA estimates he's quoting. Holzman explicitly states that he thinks they're 1-2% too high
- They are contemporary estimates of spending in the 1982 budget - deep into the cold war, and well past its hottest point. CIA estimates from 1973 are 6-8% of GNP.
- CIA estimates at the time were based on direct costing - which is extremely sensitive to how you do dollar-ruble comparisons, when you get your index prices from, etc. And is questionably meaningful, in a Soviet-style planned economy. Realistically, we don't actually know what the Soviet military cost them, and neither did the Soviet government.
Yeah as I finished writing this I realized I could probably stand to revise it because there arguably didn’t have to be a first Cold War either. But I haven’t published in a while and didn’t want to take the time
Currently, the Chinese economy is 21x bigger than the Taiwanese economy. If what you're saying about defensive capacities being 50x cheaper than offensive capacities is true, then it seems that Taiwan should be able to independently defend itself from China.
My worry would be that a successful Chinese takeover of Taiwan would grant China the naval bases that it needs to successfully challenge America in the Pacific. My recommendation is that TPP is combined with NATO into a Pacific-Atlantic free trade, mutual defense pact, and Schengen zone. That seems fantastical since TPP was defeated under Obama, and Trump is ratcheting up the tariffs on Canada.
Peter Zeihan would like a word--he tends to argue that America's relative success will rise in the coming decades, and predicts the collapse of China and Russia based pretty much on the demographic math.
I think Peter is a bit too confident, but he's right that demographics do not look good for China.
Who in the world do demographics look good for?
Well, relatively speaking, some much more than others. China, Korea, Russia have it really bad according to Zeihan.
Charts say no one has it as bad as South Korea. I don't think Zeihan has predicted the Norkies will take over the peninsula from that.
I broadly agree with your two main paints, that (1) China probably does not intend to start a second Cold War with the US, and (2) our own blinders are the biggest threat to our hegemony, not the designs of our enemies.
I do however think you're being overly sanguine about China's militarization. It seems fairly obvious that China is seriously considering an invasion of Taiwan, which should be a cause or concern. Furthermore, comparing US to Chinese military spending is fraught because (1) cost disease and (2) the far greater number of military commitments that the US has compared to China
Interesting post! (Honored to be the source of a new byline...)
I think I've got (very close to) the same take here. ‘New Cold War’ rhetoric *in the context of just China* probably is exaggerated—it very much takes two to tango—even though their rising star is sort of inherently destabilizing in the old-fashioned realist way.
But I still think your analysis is missing consideration (or just too dismissive) of who China’s bedding up with—Russia and North Korea and Iran don’t respect sovereignty or international institutions even a bit. So long as the Chinese menace legitimize and prop up those regimes (even if only tacitly!), America and her allies will have plenty of conflict and strife to deal with.
I guess, imagine a very chill Soviet Union that vaguely supports a bunch of nuclear-armed, expansionist, revisionist Cubas. That’s a pretty chilly Cold War! And it means a world where our foreign policy will have to get more adversarial.
To put it in the post’s framework: China supplies the economic power of the New Axis, and the Russians, Iranians, and North Koreans provide its military and ideological muscle (and easily-invadable land neighbors). Add it all up and compare it to the Soviets (plus their satellites & the East Germans & the actual Cubans, to make it fair) and I think you'll get a fairly menacing picture. (I haven't actually done the math, this is kinda speculative...)
I think the only problem here is Russia, and even then I have to wonder how much of it is because the US parroted the idiotic "democracy vs. autocracy" line and pushed them together. As for Iran and North Korea, the alternative to China trading with them is that the US completely destroys the Iranian economy and makes a lot of people's lives more miserable, and North Korea becomes a failed state with a humanitarian crisis and loose nukes. So I'm frankly glad China is bailing them out. Before the first Trump admin went psycho and tried maximum pressure, the JCPOA was working (supported by China) and China enforced UNSC sanctions (which it still does today, actually).
No one currently in the US government seems invested in confronting China like the Soviet Union. Democrats have shifted into treating Russia as the primary threat that would weaken China by proxy. Trump's new policies are more interested in dealing with domestic issues, and it seems he would rather arrange a sort of detente between the world powers while that happens.
Such a balance would probably be good for the world. But such balances don't usually last forever. Someone's power will wane, someone else will keep building up, and a big war or collapse will upset things. And then historians might say, 'Why didn't the USA deal with China 50 years before that point?' Since domestic policies are so important, the answer is, as always, 'It was complicated...'
China was a Senatorial increasingly bourgoise regime in 2010, and as such there was not real problem with the USA. First China Senate fell under a Caesar, then perhaps América is in the same track. Kings sooner or later go to war.