The True Economic Horror of USA

[DrFever]

China has the world's largest population with plentiful natural resources. It is the world's largest producer of gold, rice, wheat, rare earth metals, industrial metals and coal (with a huge lead over #2 position on most of these). Oil is one of few major commodities where China is not #1, but even there China has a respectable #5 rubbing shoulders with Iran [1] and in natural gas it is #7. In both these commodities China is quickly ramping up its production.

Water
Some of the world's largest rivers - the Yangtze, Huang He, Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong, Pearl, Amur originate there, giving China world's biggest potential for hydropower and bountiful water. This is an enormous luxury for a country located around the Tropic of Cancer. Most areas in this latitude are deserts.

History
It has a great history and during most of human history, 25% of the world's population lived in China. Humans have been living there over 100,000 years and have discovered key cereals (such as Rice) before anyone else.

For most of recorded history, China has been in the top 2 when it comes to GDP. However, in the 19th and first half of 20th century, China was hugely distracted by domestic politics. Protests against Qing dynasty and a period of anarchy in the period of warlords destroyed its economy. In the middle of the 19th century, China had the worst ever domestic conflict - Taiping Rebellion - where 20 million perished.
Having been a global superpower for most of the past 20 centuries, China's re-emergence should come as no surprise to any economic historian. With GDP growth expected to continue growing at a blistering pace, and with domestic consumption only accounting for a paltry 35% of GDP as compared to the 70% of the US, the peaceful rise of China would represent one of the greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century.

 

[DrFever]

For some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific—and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland. It's not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War, with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe but, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War II. In the coming decades China will play an asymmetric back-and-forth game with us in the Pacific, taking advantage not only of its vast coastline but also of its rear base—stretching far back into Central Asia—from which it may eventually be able to lob missiles accurately at moving ships in the Pacific.

In any naval encounter China will have distinct advantages over the United States, even if it lags in technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one thing, of sheer proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast learner. It has growing increments of "soft" power that demonstrate a particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such disparate places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal zone, and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming masters of indirect influence—by establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America's liberal imperium.

How should the United States prepare to respond to challenges in the Pacific? To understand the dynamics of this second Cold War—which will link China and the United States in a future that may stretch over several generations—it is essential to understand certain things about the first Cold War, and about the current predicament of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the institution set up to fight that conflict. This is a story about military strategy and tactics, with some counterintuitive twists and turns.

From Atlantic Unbound:

Flashbacks: "Cold War, Part II?" (February 1997)
Atlantic articles discuss the history and possible future of NATO
The first thing to understand is that the alliance system of the latter half of the twentieth century is dead. Warfare by committee, as practiced by NATO, has simply become too cumbersome in an age that requires light and lethal strikes. During the fighting in Kosovo in 1999 (a limited air campaign against a toothless enemy during a time of Euro-American harmony; a campaign, in other words, that should have been easy to prosecute) dramatic fissures appeared in the then-nineteen-member NATO alliance. The organization's end effectively came with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in the aftermath of which, despite talk of a broad-based coalition, European militaries have usually done little more than patrol and move into areas already pacified by U.S. soldiers and Marines—a job more suggestive of the United Nations. NATO today is a medium for the expansion of bilateral training missions between the United States and formerly communist countries and republics: the Marines in Bulgaria and Romania, the Navy in Albania, the Army in Poland and the Czech Republic, Special Operations Forces in Georgia—the list goes on and on. Much of NATO has become a farm system for the major-league U.S. military.

The second thing to understand is that the functional substitute for a NATO of the Pacific already exists, and is indeed up and running. It is the U.S. Pacific Command, known as PACOM. Unencumbered by a diplomatic bureaucracy, PACOM is a large but nimble construct, and its leaders understand what many in the media and the policy community do not: that the center of gravity of American strategic concern is already the Pacific, not the Middle East. PACOM will soon be a household name, as CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) has been in the current epoch of Middle Eastern conflict—an epoch that will start to wind down, as far as the U.S. military is concerned, during the second Bush administration.

The third thing to understand is that, ironically, the vitality of NATO itself, the Atlantic alliance, could be revived by the Cold War in the Pacific—and indeed the re-emergence of NATO as an indispensable war-fighting instrument should be America's unswerving aim. In its posture toward China the United States will look to Europe and NATO, whose help it will need as a strategic counterweight and, by the way, as a force to patrol seas more distant than the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. That is why NATO's current commander, Marine General James L. Jones, emphasizes that NATO's future lies in amphibious, expeditionary warfare.

Let me describe our military organization in the Pacific—an area through which I have traveled extensively during the past three years. PACOM has always been the largest, most venerable, and most interesting of the U.S. military's area commands. (Its roots go back to the U.S. Pacific Army of the Philippines War, 1899-1902.) Its domain stretches from East Africa to beyond the International Date Line and includes the entire Pacific Rim, encompassing half the world's surface and more than half of its economy. The world's six largest militaries, two of which (America's and China's) are the most rapidly modernizing, all operate within PACOM's sphere of control. PACOM has—in addition to its many warships and submarines—far more dedicated troops than CENTCOM. Even though the military's area commands do not own troops today in the way they used to, these statistics matter, because they demonstrate that the United States has chosen to locate the bulk of its forces in the Pacific, not in the Middle East. CENTCOM fights wars with troops essentially borrowed from PACOM.

Quietly in recent years, by negotiating bilateral security agreements with countries that have few such arrangements with one another, the U.S. military has formed a Pacific military alliance of sorts at PACOM headquarters, in Honolulu. This is where the truly interesting meetings are being held today, rather than in Ditchley or Davos. The attendees at those meetings, who often travel on PACOM's dime, are military officers from such places as Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines.

Otto von Bismarck, the father of the Second Reich in continental Europe, would recognize the emerging Pacific system. In 2002 the German commentator Josef Joffe appreciated this in a remarkably perceptive article in The National Interest, in which he argued that in terms of political alliances, the United States has come to resemble Bismarck's Prussia. Britain, Russia, and Austria needed Prussia more than they needed one another, Joffe wrote, thus making them "spokes" to Berlin's "hub"; the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan exposed a world in which America can forge different coalitions for different crises. The world's other powers, he said, now need the United States more than they need one another.

Unfortunately, the United States did not immediately capitalize on this new power arrangement, because President George W. Bush lacked the nuance and attendant self-restraint of Bismarck, who understood that such a system could endure only so long as one didn't overwhelm it. The Bush administration did just that, of course, in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which led France, Germany, Russia, and China, along with a host of lesser powers such as Turkey, Mexico, and Chile, to unite against us.

In the Pacific, however, a Bismarckian arrangement still prospers, helped along by the pragmatism of our Hawaii-based military officers, five time zones removed from the ideological hothouse of Washington, D.C. In fact, PACOM represents a much purer version of Bismarck's imperial superstructure than anything the Bush administration created prior to invading Iraq. As Henry Kissinger writes in Diplomacy (1994), Bismarck forged alliances in all directions from a point of seeming isolation, without the constraints of ideology. He brought peace and prosperity to Central Europe by recognizing that when power relationships are correctly calibrated, wars tend to be avoided.

Only a similarly pragmatic approach will allow us to accommodate China's inevitable re-emergence as a great power. The alternative will be to turn the earth of the twenty-first century into a battlefield. Whenever great powers have emerged or re-emerged on the scene (Germany and Japan in the early decades of the twentieth century, to cite two recent examples), they have tended to be particularly assertive—and therefore have thrown international affairs into violent turmoil. China will be no exception. Today the Chinese are investing in both diesel-powered and nuclear-powered submarines—a clear signal that they intend not only to protect their coastal shelves but also to expand their sphere of influence far out into the Pacific and beyond.

This is wholly legitimate. China's rulers may not be democrats in the literal sense, but they are seeking a liberated First World lifestyle for many of their 1.3 billion people—and doing so requires that they safeguard sea-lanes for the transport of energy resources from the Middle East and elsewhere. Naturally, they do not trust the United States and India to do this for them. Given the stakes, and given what history teaches us about the conflicts that emerge when great powers all pursue legitimate interests, the result is likely to be the defining military conflict of the twenty-first century: if not a big war with China, then a series of Cold War—style standoffs that stretch out over years and decades. And this will occur mostly within PACOM's area of responsibility.

 

[DrFever]

I sit here pondering north korea testing NUKES usa scared shitless to do anything
about it then i wonder how come usa has not invaded Syria lol again pretty simple when China, Iran Russia says don;t go there USA swallows lol

Glenn Beck warned America in the strongest of terms on Tuesday that military intervention in Syria could lead to World War III, with the United States squaring off against China, Russia and Iran.

Beck’s warning came as Secretary of State John Kerry said it is “undeniable” that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, something President Barack Obama has called a “red line” that would change our approach to the nation’s civil war.

“I learned my lesson [in Iraq], he didn’t,” Beck said. “[John Kerry is] now going to repeat exactly the same thing.”
But unlike with Iraq, when it was asserted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a clear and present threat to the United States, Beck said he hasn’t heard the second part of that case made yet. If anything, it can be argued that intervention is what poses the threat.

“Why?” Beck asked. “Because today Russia and now China have added their name to the list of, ‘Don’t do anything in Syria.’ So now we have Russia, Iran and China telling us, ‘mind your own business.’”

Unless the U.S. is willing to get into World War III against the aforementioned powers and poke “another hornet’s nest” of Islamic extremism, Beck said, you have to be “out of your mind” to intervene.

“We don’t survive that,” he said.

“You go against China, who buys all of our debt?” he asked, adding that Russia has already begun turning arms shipments from America to the Middle East.


“Don’t screw with this,” he said. “This is World War III in the making.”

 

[imnotcrazy]

SERIOUSLY....... Glen Beck


LOL

 

[Eighths-n-Aces]

 

[oldhaole]

China's navy is yet to be a true blue water force. One carrier group is all they have to project power. One. Another is under construction. The US has ten, with another under construction and two more planned. And just for grins and giggles two are in reserve.

Here is China's navy.... one aircraft carrier, three amphibious transport docks, 26 destroyers, 45 frigates 62 submarines (of which 11 are nuclear-powered), eight corvettes, 122 missile boats, 231 patrol vessels, 107 mine countermeasures vessels, five replenishment oilers and a large fleet of smaller auxiliary vessels.

The US Navy has 10 carrier groups, 32 amphibious transport docks, 22 crusers, 62 destroyers, 17 frigates and 72 nuclear submarines 285 support ships, and 3500 aircraft. The Chineese Navy has NO aircraft. Should a conventional war ever occer between the two countries, China's fleet will easily be bottled up in port. Then they would lose everything that their soft economic power has brough them.

Again if the Chineese are so powerful why have they yet to invade and retake what they consider to be the rebel held island of Taiwan? Why did they lose the 1980 war against Vietnam?

Quoting Glen Beck?

Dude...that's the problem right there. Glen Beck? That dummy couldn't tell you the time of day let alone anything that requires a brain to think through. Glen Beck pines for the good old days of GW. The US will not fight in Syria. Bush is gone and with him the idea that we can overthrow Mid Eastern governments militairly because they have oil. Why should we help Islamic radicals overthrow a dictator? All we would be doing is helping Iran expand their sphere of influence. That's not in our best interest.

Thank god Obama is not as stupid as Bush the lesser.

 

[idiit]

great thread. hope it doesn't get binned. we were discussing these subjects on other threads that got the plug pulled.

i'm with DrFever.

if you want some interesting reading on the chinese/russia alliance this place really says it better than any site imo:

http://news.goldseek.com/GoldenJackass/1377892800.php

 

[oldhaole]

Interesting artical.

I have seen many others like it....over the past twenty years. Most are trying to sell you something. In this case gold. All fortelling of the end of days for the dollar. It hasn't happened.

I doubt the rest of the world would trust China, an autharitarian government that fixes the value of it's currency, and Russia, one of Europes' more corupt governments, and the Shiite Arab nations to be the worlds central bank, because they sit on most of the worlds oil.

The paper underestimates the power of Saudi Arabia.

Russia and China may say they are allies. That relationship has warmed and cooled many times in the past. The fact is on one side of the river you have billions of people trapped, with few resources and the other has endless land with endless resources with few people.
There's a good reason why a big share of the Russian Army is on that river.

I too like this thread. If we keep it civil, maybe they'll let it slide.

 

[Neekz]

I think a U.S. economic collapse would pretty much in turn create a global one too am I right? Main point being, nobody is gonna let the U.S.'s economy collapse, as pretty much everybody relies upon us to spur their economy in the first place. Our government is just gonna keep churning out money or borrowing as needed to keep us afloat indefinetily, or at least until something revolutionary occur's (Be it political, or technological...). They (China) may be one of the largest producers and consumer's, but that is because they produce a majority of good's for export. We are also probably the highest paying nation in terms of profit on export's from China, so I doubt they will want to "control" us anytime soon. They have never succeeded in doing so in history, so I wouldn't count on them trying their luck with us. Maybe they will stir some shit in the SCS, then we will see what's going on then. I have no idea why people from the U.K. tend to feed into this propaganda stuff anyway IMO, I mean we all spanked Nazi Germany 60+ years ago, I think we could handle a similar situation way before it occur's... Whew, taking the foil cap off now ...!

 

[siftedunity]

I think a U.S. economic collapse would pretty much in turn create a global one too am I right? Main point being, nobody is gonna let the U.S.'s economy collapse, as pretty much everybody relies upon us to spur their economy in the first place. Our government is just gonna keep churning out money or borrowing as needed to keep us afloat indefinetily, or at least until something revolutionary occur's (Be it political, or technological...). They (China) may be one of the largest producers and consumer's, but that is because they produce a majority of good's for export. We are also probably the highest paying nation in terms of profit on export's from China, so I doubt they will want to "control" us anytime soon. They have never succeeded in doing so in history, so I wouldn't count on them trying their luck with us. Maybe they will stir some shit in the SCS, then we will see what's going on then. I have no idea why people from the U.K. tend to feed into this propaganda stuff anyway IMO, I mean we all spanked Nazi Germany 60+ years ago, I think we could handle a similar situation way before it occur's... Whew, taking the foil cap off now ...!

im not sure what your referring to about the uk... what propaganda are we ment to be feeding off?
we don't really have a fear here of war I don't think. we have had most of our capital bombed to the ground a generation ago.. we survived.
I think the Nazis were a far more formidable force than any other army I can think of. completely ruthless.

 

[siftedunity]

China's navy is yet to be a true blue water force. One carrier group is all they have to project power. One. Another is under construction. The US has ten, with another under construction and two more planned. And just for grins and giggles two are in reserve.

Here is China's navy.... one aircraft carrier, three amphibious transport docks, 26 destroyers, 45 frigates 62 submarines (of which 11 are nuclear-powered), eight corvettes, 122 missile boats, 231 patrol vessels, 107 mine countermeasures vessels, five replenishment oilers and a large fleet of smaller auxiliary vessels.

The US Navy has 10 carrier groups, 32 amphibious transport docks, 22 crusers, 62 destroyers, 17 frigates and 72 nuclear submarines 285 support ships, and 3500 aircraft. The Chineese Navy has NO aircraft. Should a conventional war ever occer between the two countries, China's fleet will easily be bottled up in port. Then they would lose everything that their soft economic power has brough them.

Again if the Chineese are so powerful why have they yet to invade and retake what they consider to be the rebel held island of Taiwan? Why did they lose the 1980 war against Vietnam?

Quoting Glen Beck?

Dude...that's the problem right there. Glen Beck? That dummy couldn't tell you the time of day let alone anything that requires a brain to think through. Glen Beck pines for the good old days of GW. The US will not fight in Syria. Bush is gone and with him the idea that we can overthrow Mid Eastern governments militairly because they have oil. Why should we help Islamic radicals overthrow a dictator? All we would be doing is helping Iran expand their sphere of influence. That's not in our best interest.

Thank god Obama is not as stupid as Bush the lesser.

plus the new Gerald ford.. 220 air attacks daily would be interesting.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/26977895...-and-most-expensive-carrier/?intcmp=obnetwork

 

[Fly by Night]

China has a decent buffet

 

[Neekz]

im not sure what your referring to about the uk... what propaganda are we ment to be feeding off?
we don't really have a fear here of war I don't think. we have had most of our capital bombed to the ground a generation ago.. we survived.
I think the Nazis were a far more formidable force than any other army I can think of. completely ruthless.

Point being that I am beginning to think the OP is from the U.K. (Yes I am generalizing him, like he is doing us...) , and he seem's to be taking Glenn Beck's word (See Propaganda...) for what's the real problem's in america.

I know you do not fear war (Nobody does nowadays, or at least nobody act's like they do... Nothing to worry about when Team America got your back aye ?), I simply think you guy's are quick to get hot and bothered when a "threat to the U.S." surfaces. It reminds me kind of, like someone trying to get their word in so they can say "I told you so" (By-product of losing the revolution, maybe?...), no matter the result they only talk about it in hopes of randomly finding validation.

Nazi reference can be interpreted many ways, as an analogy of what China would be doing if they wanted to flex their muscle for any of their "reasons", as an analogy for the type of "influence" OP thinks China is trying to develop over the U.S.A./World, and finally as an analogy of what the world would do if they were faced up against the "New world super-power"!

Commenting on the american towns being "bought up" by China, I would have to say this. Put yourself in their shoes. Their country is growing alarmingly fast, nothing the 1 child policy can do about it. They will reach a point soon enough where the only viable option to sustain themselves as a nation would either be mass genocide, or mass immigration/naturalization into other countries. I doubt they are gonna go the first route, so buy up as much foreign asset's it is...

 

[dddaver]

Chinese make good spicy chicken. General POW's? Makes my farts sound like pow's....opps General Po's, close enough. Sowy Chalie.

 

[Fly by Night]

More economic horror....

 

[siftedunity]

Point being that I am beginning to think the OP is from the U.K. (Yes I am generalizing him, like he is doing us...) , and he seem's to be taking Glenn Beck's word (See Propaganda...) for what's the real problem's in america.

I know you do not fear war (Nobody does nowadays, or at least nobody act's like they do... Nothing to worry about when Team America got your back aye ?), I simply think you guy's are quick to get hot and bothered when a "threat to the U.S." surfaces. It reminds me kind of, like someone trying to get their word in so they can say "I told you so" (By-product of losing the revolution, maybe?...), no matter the result they only talk about it in hopes of randomly finding validation.

Nazi reference can be interpreted many ways, as an analogy of what China would be doing if they wanted to flex their muscle for any of their "reasons", as an analogy for the type of "influence" OP thinks China is trying to develop over the U.S.A./World, and finally as an analogy of what the world would do if they were faced up against the "New world super-power"!

Commenting on the american towns being "bought up" by China, I would have to say this. Put yourself in their shoes. Their country is growing alarmingly fast, nothing the 1 child policy can do about it. They will reach a point soon enough where the only viable option to sustain themselves as a nation would either be mass genocide, or mass immigration/naturalization into other countries. I doubt they are gonna go the first route, so buy up as much foreign asset's it is...

Im pretty certain that the op is from the usa. Yeah team america got our back lol but we did fight wars for centuries without allies. However I think we make a pregood team. I agree with your post though. Most of china is rural and in poverty anyway. Not sure that its the massive superpower which people think