[The National Interest] The window for war between the United States and China will, in all likelihood, last for a long time. Preventing war will require tremendous skill and acumen from diplomats and policymakers. Similarly, the demands of positioning either side for victory will continue to tax diplomatic, military, and technological resources for the foreseeable future. At the moment, however, we shouldn’t forget that China and the United States constitute the heart of one of the most productive economic regions the world has ever seen.
How does the unthinkable happen? As historians continue to contemplate the various historic anniversaries around World War I through next year, the question of unexpected wars looms large. What series of events could lead to war in East Asia, and how would that war play out?
The United States and China are inextricably locked in the Pacific Rim’s system of international trade. Some argue that this makes war impossible, but then while some believed World War I inevitable, but others similarly thought it impossible.
#2
I think Trump recognises the geopolitical risk China represents, and will destabilize their economy before any conflict.
We know that when communist regimes fall they do so quickly. I don't see why China will be different. The likeliest alternate scenario is a protracted civil war with both sides holding nuclear weapons.
#3
If the current Jacksonian revolution fails, definitely. If, however, it succeeds and the current Mandarinate is replaced by leadership of pragmatic people with real world achievements - well Chinese leadership are pretty pragmatic too.
#6
They'd better get going then -- the aging of the population is already having an impact. According to an Atlantic article on the subject, in 2015 China announced it would be reducing its military manpower by 300,000. And
The frightening scope of this decline is best expressed in numbers. China today boasts roughly five workers for every retiree. By 2040, this highly desirable ratio will have collapsed to about 1.6 to 1. From the start of this century to its midway point, the median age in China will go from under 30 to about 46, making China one of the older societies in the world. At the same time, the number of Chinese older than 65 is expected to rise from roughly 100 million in 2005 to more than 329 million in 2050—more than the combined populations of Germany, Japan, France, and Britain.
A final point from the article of interest to us: the writer quotes an academic saying, "he foresees a coming “geriatric peace,” as nations around the world find themselves too burdened to challenge America’s military preeminence."
#7
I think a nuclear armed civil war in China isn't as far fetched as many will think. With the side with the fewest weapons in a use_it_or_lose_it bind.
#9
The frightening scope of this decline is best expressed in numbers. China today boasts roughly five workers for every retiree. By 2040, this highly desirable ratio will have collapsed to about 1.6 to 1.
Maybe they should take some refugees from the Middle East.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/03/2017 19:07 Comments ||
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h/t Instapundit
While the first weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency have brought plenty of chaos, some underlying themes are emerging. I think of the economic policy so far -- call it Trumponomics -- as a new approach to the redistribution of wealth, working through jobs and regions rather than income transfers. To be sure, I don’t see any single architect of Trumponomics, not even Trump himself, but even without a master plan, there are some common threads.
It’s easy to underrate Trumponomics, because so often it sounds, frankly, stupid or misinformed. In a wide variety of areas, including health-care reform and the border tax adjustment, experts struggle to describe the plans, much less evaluate them. Still, Trumponomics, though highly flawed, will probably not crash the economy, and might steal a lot of the left’s thunder. I think, the problem here is that academic research in economics took a wrong turn in 20th century and been getting further and further from reality ever since.
#1
I have yet to see anyone evaluate Trump's actions from the perspective of geopolitical security - being able to fight a war without relying on imports.
#2
Good point phil b i had not thought of that angle. I just thought it tremendous jobs are back in style, even if it does push up inflation and living standards don't shift that much, it is still better to have people participating in the economy than sidelined but with cheaper goods.
[American Thinker] The new Mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguin, made a fool of himself on Twitter both in the run up to and the aftermath of the riots that denied First Amendment rights to Milo Yiannopoulos and the many students who bought tickets to his sold-out speaking engagement at the University of California. The rookie mayor, now in a national spotlight, bears some responsibility for signaling the rioters that their attack is understandable because, as he put it in a tweet just a couple of hours before the event was scheduled to begin, "Hate speech isn’t welcome in our community."
[American Thinker] Over the last eight years, the Left has taken the offensive continually while Republicans either capitulated, cooperated, procrastinated, or employed purely defensive maneuvers that amounted to a finger in the dam.
How things have changed.
It’s been barely two weeks since Donald Trump has taken office and Democrats are facing a political blitzkrieg. They are grappling for the means to handle the assault, as the party of the Left has long thought it had total control of both the narrative and the battles.
Stunned political operatives like Nancy Pelosi don’t recognize President Trump is not interested in guerilla warfare tactics, but has put into effect a broad-based offensive against the very citadels of liberal power and bloated government.
The president is putting into play a classic military maneuver applied to politics: keep going on a total and accelerated offensive no matter what in order to keep your enemy digging foxholes and putting up barriers -- while all the while they actually are being forced to slowly retreat under the onslaught, screaming and holding up protest placards all the way to the back of the line.
Democrats are unused to a total war offensive, as they have relied on relentless guerilla warfare and the long march. They are even more unused to being on the defensive, and are ill-prepared to fight defensively. They are aghast over the Trump tactics being applied against them, are assuming the old weapons once applied so effectively against their political enemies still work.
One is reminded of the French infantry fighting in World War I. "Elan," which was a mystical sense of inevitable victory, was supposed to be enough to win the day. The result was that French soldiers were woefully unprepared for German machine guns. Guns did not take "elan" into account.
In like manner, Democrats are still hauling out old and worn out tropes from the 1960s, weapons that won victories and intimidated the opposition for two generations. But the old tactics are obsolete and increasingly prove to be virtually useless. Millions of Americans have repudiated the orthodox liturgy of the Left, wedded as it is to constant and relentless battles about race, diversity, open borders, and globalism. Millions are also sick and tired of being labeled heretics by radical Democrats who constantly dismiss decent and basically charitable Americans as haters, homophobes, misogynists, and bitter clingers to "guns and religion."
#4
There's no need to look for analogies outside Trump's experience such as making him a latter day Sun Tzu based on his stint at military school.
Just apply what he actually is - a corporate CEO with a job to do.
Think of him as a corporate raider involved in a hostile takeover of a company that was once the industrial leader but has fallen on hard times.
The problems he faces are:
- a management that is more interested in their benefits package than the stockholders
- a series of contracts with other companies that is not in the company's best interest.
- entrenched special interests that want their own area of the company to prosper at the expense of the company as a whole
- Aggressive competition from other companies who are catching up technologically.
- Built in headwinds from an industry association that exists in part to prevent the company from re-attaining primacy in the industry
Just think of how Carl Ichann would deal with these problems and you can see the next few years
#9
"Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense; benefits should be conferred gradually, and in that way they will taste better."
Niccolo Machiavelli
Posted by: james ||
02/03/2017 22:06 Comments ||
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[Daily Caller] Donald Trump is the gift that keeps giving. The week is still in its infancy, but the president has already made Chucky Schumer cry, fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates within hours of her acting up, and caused the Forgotten Man to go even harder for their president. This Trump accomplished by inadvertently exposing the Democrats as firmly in the camp of Hollywood harridans, tech execs, the immigration lawyers lobby, the global refugee industry; and in the grip of the international human rights octopus.
The Democratic constituency can no longer hide. It’s as though all these ghastly people are wearing the pussy dunce-caps adorned by the Madonna and Ashley Judd protesters.
The first moment of joy came when, flanked by swaddled Muslim women, the sanctimonious Schumer, a politician to his fingertips, choked up because of President Trump’s executive order to "temporarily halt the U.S. refugee program and ban entries from seven Muslim-majority nations for 90 days." The president campaigned on this promise, was elected based upon it, and is now fulfilling it, a novel concept to a shyster like Schumer.
Then, before Sally Yates could use her perch, as a public servant at DOJ, to crusade for a centralized value system--the POTUS fired her, promptly ending Yates’ two-hour insurrection at the Department of Justice.
Perry de Havilland at Samizdata tries to understand why the Left stumbled so badly just when it seemed about to win it all. In 2015 the Left had the media, academe, multilateral institutions firmly in the bag. The European Union seemed forever and US Federal government appeared destined to remain in progressive hands. The words "permanent progressive majority" and the end of the white race were spoken of as accomplished fact.
Then came Brexit and Trump in a single annus horribilis with a suddenness that defied explanation. The progressives went from dominance to defense in an instant. De Havilland has no comprehensive explanation of why the dramatic reversal took place but thinks the first sign of a Leftist stall was Gamergate in 2014, when the Arc of History started to mush and wing over.
#1
A preference cascade.
The people finally caught on that they were not alone.
I think Brexit really launched Trump's turn out with a kind of "Look what they did" response and they identified Hillary with the globalist elite that had just been rejected.
#2
I'd point to the rise of alternative media outlets.
The MSM has always been in the business of telling people what they should think and believe. But as their reach declined, so did their power to influence people.
Combine that with the globalist Left's over-reach especially in relation to immigration, and many people found they no longer believed what they were being told to believe.
#3
As de Havilland put it: "so certain was the Left that they had won the culture war, so confident with the established media under their effective control that ‘truth’ was theirs to declare, that they gave up on any pretence of objectivity. And so they began to maneuver with the assurance and arrogance of an army under an umbrella of complete air(wave) supremacy, a supremacy that suddenly proved to be illusory".
[Breitbart] It is Black History Month, again. This month is set aside to celebrate the many contributions made by blacks to American culture. But beyond the routine photo-ops and politically correct statements, this is a time to address the often overlooked challenges facing black communities across the country.
At the top of the list of challenges facing black Americans is the dramatic lack of economic opportunity available to black residents in major American cities.
Black unemployment rates are still sky high. In cities including Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, D.C., the unemployment rate among African Americans is 19, 23, and 18 percent, respectively, according to the most‐recently available U.S. Census Bureau data.
These dramatic unemployment rates, which are many multiples of the national average, obscure even worse carnage in specific neighborhoods. In Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill neighborhood, the black unemployment rate is 30 percent; in Chicago’s Canaryville, it’s 40 percent; and in Washington D.C.’s Congress Heights, it’s 28 percent. Nationally, the current black youth unemployment rate is more than double that of whites.
With unemployment comes crime. According to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, violent crime is up significantly in major cities nationwide. A Wall Street Journal survey finds that 16 of the 20 largest police departments reported a homicide increase in 2016. And of the four cities that decreased, three had homicide increases over 50 percent in 2015. Increased crime chases away existing business activity, further reducing job opportunities.
Judd Apatow (/ˈæpətaʊ/; born December 6, 1967) is a communist who supports violent rioting when opinions other than his own are voiced. He attempts to be a producer, writer, director, actor, and comedian, although the results are quite unfunny and not entertaining. He is the founder of Apatow Productions, through which he produced and developed the television series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and directed and produced The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Knocked Up (2007), Funny People (2009), This Is 40 (2012), and Trainwreck (2015).
Posted by: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy ||
02/03/2017 00:00 ||
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#1
How long before some people get tired/scared of these rioters and their enablers like Apatow and takes an Apatow down?
#2
You want more Trump? This is how you get more Trump. Outside of certain Democratic constituencies, most Americans are horrified to see their cities burned and looted.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
"He tried to delete the tweet, but the Internet never forgets."
