[conspire] (OT) geopolitics

[Rick Moen]

I'm being _totally_ unfair, of course, in sending just my 
side of a conversation.

I periodically try to fix Ruben's far-right-GOP-typical China-fixation
through dousing it in reality.  It continues to not work.



Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2023 18:14:03 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com>
Subject: Myth of multipolarity (was: enjoy)

[snip]

Here's an article for you about geopolitics that I consider sane and
clear-eyed:
https://ecumenico.org/the-myth-of-multipolarity-american-powers-staying-power-stephen-g-brooks-april-2023-foreign-affairs
(That is a third-party-site link, as the main copy at the _Foreign
Affairs_ Web site is paywalled.)

It starts out as a debunking of the usual "We're now in a multipolar
political/military world" position we hear so often.  No, there is not
any other nation that is in a position to challenge the USA for
influence and global reach.  And that includes China.

Author Stephen G. Brooks touches lightly on one of Peter Zeihan's points
about China: that if Beijing ever gets too troublesome including without
limitation Xi losing his mind and attempting seaborne conquest of
Taiwan, the US Navy could cause China to collapse as a coherent state by
just instituting a long-range naval blockade, and waiting.

Zeihan says that more pointedly, that all the USN would need do is
position two destroyers in the middle of the Indian Ocean and cut off
their oil shipments from the Persian Gulf, and China would cease to have
an economy and would start to starve, soon after that.

Brooks puts China's much-vaunted naval power into the same perspective
that Zeihan does, that their military reach only barely extends to the
"first-island" chain" (Japan, Philippines, Taiwan), and no further.
And their total dependence on imports means they can be kneecapped by
enemies pretty easily.

(Zeihan does warn, based on compelling data, that Xi has made himself so
isolated, to a historically unique degree, relative to all heads of
government previously known, from domestic influence and reliable domestic
information sources, that China's state behaviour, both internally and
towards the rest of the world, has lately been difficult to predict and
often erratic.)

Brooks's recommendations for US international policy make sense to me.
You might be surprised to hear that I fully agreed with part of Trump's 
foreign policy, the bit about getting us the hell out of overseas
occupations -- and Brooks also stresses that.




Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2023 22:52:58 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com>
Subject: Re: Myth of multipolarity (was: enjoy)
 
[snip]

> Reading the Foreign policy link.

If you mean the name of the magazine, it was _Foreign Affairs_ (but yes,
it's about foreign policy).

> It is very long and needs a serious editing.  The first 4 paragraphs
> can be just axed, IMO and the analysis of bipolarity and multipolarity
> is flawed in a fundamental way without annotation... at least not that
> I've seen yet and I read about half of it so far.

It addresses a conventional wisdom that should need no annotation.  
The intended audience is greatly aware of that narrative, even if you
aren't.

> Here is a POV, for example, that is badly flawed:
> 
> Quote:
> 
> Many who proclaim multipolarity seem to think of power as influence—that
> is, the ability to get others to do what you want. Since the United
> States could not pacify Afghanistan or Iraq and cannot solve many other
> global problems, the argument runs, the world must be multipolar. But
> polarity centers on a different meaning of power, one that is
> measurable: power as resources, especially military might and economic heft.
> 
> UNQUOTE
> 
> This has too fundamental errors.  The US did just fine at pacifying both
> Afghanistan and Iraq, largely with one hand tied behind its back and with
> minimal economic consequences.

Yeah, _great_ job at that.

Afghanistan went straight back to the Taliban, as anyone could have 
predicted, just after costing us billions of dollars, countless deaths
not even including Afghan ones, and international credibility.

Iraq is now bordering on a failed state and physically ruined, and 2/3 of 
it is a vassal of Tehran.  The other 1/3 is the relatively good news,
the de-facto Kurdistan that we're too gutless to help, and which is 
doing somewhat well, if perilously, in spite of us rather than because
of us.

God spare us from such "successful" nation-building.  And, especially,
spare us from the needless financial ruin and distraction from real
problems.

> Secondly, it just expects too much.  There are real limits to how much
> one country can assert influence on another country, and real success
> takes DECADES, not years.  

No, it doesn't even _imply_ that we should have doubled-down.  It just 
says that it was an obvious double failure, which it most assuredly was
no matter how delusional you are on that subject, and that thankfully 
we seem to have learned the correct lesson and aren't doing that any
more.

> Unless you want to be China or Russia, there are real limits to what
> military power and economic power can do, and you have to have the
> stomach for it.

You didn't actually read what he said, did you?

> The entire thumbnail history lesson misstates much.  It fails to account
> for the devastation of modern warfare compared to the 18th century.
> They had endless cycles of war because, frankly, with important
> exceptions, their wars were limited on total destruction and involved
> mostly combatants, unlike... say in ancient Mesopotamia when total
> warfare was the means of success.

You're really not getting it, and not bothering to understand either the
author's historical referents or his point.

What he said was that that previous multipolar world of the great-power
rivalry until 1945 simply worked differently from putative multipower
arrangements today.  Back then, it was a vying among approximately
equally powerful states.  Today, instead we have one great power, one
much weaker aspiring power, and a lot of weak also-rans.

You seem to have completely disregarded what he said.


> There is a lot of theoretical point they make, some which are valid,
> some are boring and some are just wrong.  What I am interested in is not
> that China is misreporting its GDP.

Well, no shit.  To you, this is news?

> I DON'T TRUST THESE NUMBERS not even in the US.

Orders of magnitude less problematic.  Administrations lie, of course,
but there are excellent econometrics available both from government and 
private-industry sources, which by the way agree, and neither of them 
is able to be ordered to systematically lie (or, as they often have
been doing lately, just deliberately not collect data at all), as is the
case in China.

> What I measure and watch is how much we depend on China for goods,
> which is just TOO MUCH.

The US doesn't actually depend very much for value-add of goods passed
through China on the way to being manufactured -- by which I mean a very
specific thing, which you should actually bother to understand before
mouthing off:  China's manufacturing buildout, the one that made it a 
major force in trade, has been based on:  

1.  Import all raw materials, usually by ship.
2.  Leverage massive cheap labour to assemble things.
3.  Ship the finished goods back out.

What they have _never_ done is either skilled work or most of the
value-add of the goods they deal in.  Or, to put it another way, 
_all_ they really brought to the table was cheap low-end labour.

And that is now a problem for them, because step #2 has stopped working, 
because their labour force has aged out, they are actually having
massive labour _shortages_, and manufacturing labour in China is now 
3x as expensive as is manufacturing labour in Mexico.  The only reason
manufacturing hasn't _yet_ massively moved out of China to much
cheaper places like Mexico, Colombia, Vietnam, etc. is sunk-cost of 
manufacturing build-out -- but that will increasingly be corrected 
by the huge amount of reshoring and near-shoring that has already
started.

China is basically toast, in that area along with half a dozen other 
simultaneous crises.  They screwed themselves by demography, and are
also screwed by natural resources and location.  Your fixating on China
is a result of you not bothering to follow what's going on.  They are
dead men walking, facing multiple country-ending calamities in less than
a decade.

> Can we make US weapon systems without Chinese manufactoring?  That is
> what concerns me.

We do not rely on Chinese manufacturing for US weapon systems.
Do your homework.

> Does Chinese diplomatic and economic investment in Venezuela, Brazil,
> and Central America cause a greater influx of migrants to the US and
> destabilize those nations more than they are?

No correlation.  You have a wacky notion of what they're doing.

China tries all over the world to try to nail down natural resources 
such as vital minerals, because it is with extreme justification 
paranoid about getting cut off.  Also, their hyper-financialized
economy generates such wildly excessive amounts of fake money that 
their moguls struggle to find places to put it, preferably somewhere
offshore so the moguls could hope to flee China's probable collapse
within a decade with more than the shirts on their backs.

China doesn't give a tinker's damn about influxes of migrants to the US,
and, even if it did, has little muscle to do anything in our backyard to
that degree.

Venezuela collapsed just fine out of native incompetence, without help 
from the Chinese.  The Northern Triangle of Central America, where 
you and the US Army used to hang out, is still being screwed by
cocaine and the narco-gangs being stronger than the weak and ineffective
governments, such that being a regular-citizen Honduran is about as safe
as being a Somali.

Brazil is fixated on its internal problems that proximately result from
it being totally screwed by land topology and by the type of extremely
infertile soil that predominates.  Look up "Cerrado", the regions I'm
talking about, that comprise most of Brazil's claim to being a 
major food producer:  It's wet savannah that must be _constantly_
re-fertilised, in exactly the way Iowa and Manitoba do not.  And 
what is required for the massive annual applications of fertiliser?
Imported oil.  And what is becoming a rarer, hoarded resource,
with almost all of Russian production going away?  Imported oil.

Brazil's agriculture-based economy is headed for deep problems and
long-term failures, starting as soon as the next southern-hemisphere
planting season (our fall/winter).  Watch for that.  And China has
nothing at all to do with that.


> The ruthless suppression of Hong Kong with nary a response by the West.
> The threats to Taiwan... these are real troubles that are deadly.

Deadly to Taiwan _if_ Xi is delusional enough to not learn the lessons
of the Ukraine War.  Until a year ago, Xi and the PLA intended to 
use the Soviet playbook and Soviet-grade weaponry to stage an amphibious 
and air-supported takeover.  Then, the failed attack in Kyiv happened,
and the saner people in the PLA thought "Holy shit, that was what we
were going to do, except with the need to move 200,000 troops across 
a very vulnerable 100 mile ocean crossing."

So, the PLA people have, we are reliably told by our spooks, been
quietly trying to pour cold water on walking right into an expensive and
embarrassing bloodbath.  We cannot tell whether Xi is listening, because
he literally consults with nobody and attempts to be the sole deciding
power for the entire country.

The ruthless suppression of Hong Kong was a foregone conclusion the
moment Beijing broke the 1997 treaty and started applying mainland laws
to Hong Kong SAR, and "nary a response by the West" occurred for the
same reason there was no response to the seizure of Crimea in 2014:
The powers that be saw no percentage in it, and didn't need Hong Kong.

(I'd rather live in a world where the powers care about Hong Kong,
because it's my home town, but that's not the world we have.)

> A long dissertation on political and military theory doesn't erase these
> real problems.

If you expected Brooks to natter about "those real problems", then you
didn't pay any attention to what he said.

> I'm watching and China is not the only place that concerns me.  There
> are bushfires everywhere right now that can ignite into consequences
> that can kill my children.  And none of them have simple solutions.

If you want simple solutions, geopolitics is not for you.

> The Chinese diplomatic and military build up across the globe, and
> particularly in Iran, Central America and the Ukraine.

Bullshit.  The Chinese have negligible military power beyond 500 miles
from its shores.  (Paying for some commercial ports abroad that will be
re-nationalised in 5 minutes in the event of conflict is not military
power.)  They don't have "diplomatic power", just a modest amount of
bribery.  Whose benefits are doomed to fritter away as their
artificially overheated economy goes bust from terminal demographics
and the regionalising of world trade now that the USA is starting to 
finally disengage from Bretton Woods promises to make worldwide
sea-lane commerce safe and cheap forever.  Everything they have
is _extremely_ vulnerable to coercion from Washington.

> The Saudi/Iranian diplomatic warming (which was brokered by China), is
> a direct threat to Israel and US interests.  

One royal state visit will in no way erase the Kingdom's long-term aim
of destroying Iran for fundamental ideological reasons and to eliminate 
their only regional enemy.  And the Kingdom will in due course pay 
big sums of money to make that happen, which they can afford.  That
is also exactly why the Kingdom already spent a fortune building a
high-capacity oil pipeline right across the Arabian Peninsula to 
carry as much as half the entire national oil production _west_ to its
Red Sea ports, and additional refining and port facilities to handle
all of that.

Why?  Because the Kingdom can then laugh when Iran next closes the
Strait of Hormuz to oil transport and say "OK, great.  You're now going
to starve, which is exactly what we want, and meantime we'll be doing
fine."

And why do I say the Kingdom absolutely is set on destroying Iran?
Because Iran is not only _the_ regional enemy but is perceived as
embodying Shi'a Islam, just as the Kingdom acts as if it embodies Sunni
Islam.  And that is a grudge that goes all the way back to October 10,
680 and the murder of Hussein ib Ali by the Ummayad regime army -- 
the Hatfield/McCoy central drama of the Islamic religion, the vendetta 
that never goes away and is always thought of in both Riyadh and Tehran
as if it just happened yesterday.

"Warming" my ass.  That vendetta is real, and is not going to be
hand-waved away by a parade.

> Western public opinion is turning against the Jews and a larger
> segment of the West has no problem following a foreign policy that
> will result in another genocide of the Jews.

Maybe your being politically in bed with white nationalism and
Dominionist Christians was actually a bad idea?


> Egypt is a powder keg held together with by military junta which is
> facing food shortages.

Egypt is indeed a powder keg, and is likely to be destroyed by the 
same fertiliser problem that is poised to devastate Brazil, _plus_
plain and simple unavailability, starting this autumn, of imported
wheat.  The smartest thing Egypt could do is immediately cease growing
citrus as a cash crop for Europe, and cotton for international trade, 
and instead go plant 100% wheat -- but they would still be short of food
starting this autumn, and basically the man in the street who lacks 
privileged access to army food resources is screwed, and many, many
of them are going to be dying.

A lot of the rest of Africa is in some version of the same boat; Egypt
is merely the worst-off of all of them.

> Juan Guaidó had to flee Venezuela and then flee Colombia to go to the US
> which largely ends the Democracy movement there.

There is no functional democracy movement or even functional government
in Venezuela, and even their oil industry would take about ten years 
of intensive foreign-based work to rebuild -- which in any event is 
not going to happen because one of Hugo Chávez's last and most
significant initiatives before he died was to acquire and hand out
100,000 Russian Kalashnikov AK-47s to pretty much anyone and everyone.

So, that alone has rendered Venezuela the New World's little Somalia 
for the foreseeable future.  It's _possible_ that, as the world oil
market becomes tighter and more regionalised, some oil-starved European
power might call up Washington and say "Hey, would you be willing to
look the other way if we re-colonise Venezuela and rebuild it as an
oil-exporting country?"  And we might say "Sure, be our guest."  But 
_we_ are going to simply steer clear of there, as there's nothing for
us worth the trouble.  It would be at least as stupid as trying to 
run Afghanistan and Iraq.

> I'm still reading.  

You should stop, because reading isn't working for you.  Seriously.

> But it has never been a world of single powers or dual powers.  It has
> always been complex and multifaceted.

See, the fact you you think Brooks said otherwise is sufficient to show 
that you did not read with any comprehension at all.



Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2023 22:59:07 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com>
Subject: Re: Myth of multipolarity (was: enjoy)

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> FWIW - I don't believe that.  When we blockaded and sanctioned Iran and
> Iraq the sanctions were wearing thin and the smuggling undermined the
> sanctions.

A naval blockade would have teeth that "sanctions" can only dream of.

China is utterly dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf.  No amount of
"smuggling" or other chicanery would have a prayer of defeating a
determined and well-funded naval blockade.  We have satellite
and other surveillance that tells us exactly where Persian Gulf oil 
goes, and if we ever decide no significant fraction of it is going to
sail to China, then that's what'll happen.

There's a lot of brave talk about pipelines, that turn out to either 
have small capacity, or don't reach anywhere useful, or are never built
(such as the one that was supposed to reach down to one of Iran's Indian
Ocean ports but has never been built).

Believe what you want.  As the late Sen. Moynihan said, everyone's
entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.



Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2023 23:17:55 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com>
Subject: Re: Myth of multipolarity (was: enjoy)

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> Moynihan - whom I disliked, once told me that welfare work programs
> couldn't be afforded and wouldn't help minorities.  He told me that in
> Central Park.

Saying someone said something true, once, does not equate to endorsing
anything else that person ever said or did.

This is something adults learn, isn't it?



Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:05:29 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com>
Subject: Re: Myth of multipolarity (was: enjoy)

I just wanted to compare and contrast the West's collective shrug over 
China's squashing of Hong Kong vs. threats against Taiwan and Ukraine
ending up being treated differently.  There is _of course_ ideological
inconsistency about this.  This is international politics, not a
debating society.

Hong Kong being squashed is tragic for the Hong Kongers, but has
basically no blowback for anyone else.  Margaret Thatcher would have
been upset, except for the fact of being dead.  The world at large 
shrugs because they have no material interests at stake, there.

Now, you could say "Taiwan is a domestic Chinese issue almost exactly
the way Hong Kong is, so the West is being hypocritical in opposing one
takeover but not the other."  Yes, the West is being hypocritical.  If
you say that, you get a cookie.  But then, we have to talk about
something that is real, which is money and politics.

Taiwan is, for the time being, important because of Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Company, Limited ("TMSC"), which is where a large fraction
of the world's _high-complexity_ semiconductors are made, in its
foundries on the island.  TMSC, Taipei, and Washington are well aware 
that TMSC made a strategic error in not, until recently, hedging its
bets by having world-class facilities elsewhere.  Starting 2020, TMSC
started building those on a high-priority basis, first in Germany and
Japan, and soon thereafter near Phoenix.

Everyone's favourite Tom Clancy-esque conspiracy scenario involves
Beijing doing a lightning-fast Red Dawn takeover of Taiwan and instantly
becoming master of the world's high-complexity chips.

Haha, no.  In the event of national disaster, it's a high priority to
exfiltrate TMSC people and to destroy everything that matters on the
island.

Ukraine's a different and more-extreme kettle of fish, because, despite
noises from Putin's mouthpieces, recognition of Ukraine sovereignty and
entitlement to every bit of soil including the Donbass and Crimea, is
solid.  More to the pragmatic point, the West knows that, unlike Taiwan
and Hong Kong, Ukraine is on the _way_ to somewhere, in its case to
Putin's key objective of putting under Russian military control the
Bessarabian Gap (in eastern Romania) and the Polish corridor (all of
Poland west to Warsaw and the Vistula River), as protection against 
invasion of the Russian heartland after Russia's near-term enfeeblement
because of demographic collapse (that is already baked into its future).

Putin and his circle of advisors know that, unless they re-conquer and
occupy all 11 of the external corridors used in the past to invade
Russia before the Federation's remaining competent officers and soldiers
age out, which will happen (again!) within this decade, Russia will 
be hideously vulnerable (again) to foreign domination.

The awkward bit about that is that both Romania and Poland are NATO
members, entitled to Article 5 mutual defence, which would quickly
go nuclear on the Russian side.  Therefore, NATO (and by extension, the
EU) have, currently, as a high priority bottling up Russia in Ukraine
so there isn't a nuclear war.