RE: The Xi Jinpooh Chronicles: Communism's Last Stand
One of my old history profs used to say that countries don't generally have long-term allies, but they do have common enemies. We've never been good friends with Russia, but we've never fought a war against them. France and Russia have historically allied against Germany.
Russia may not be our friend, but they are't going to be much of a player much longer. Their demographics mean they run out of 20-somethings in about a decade, and you can't man an Army, Navy, and Air Force without 20-somethings. This is actually a lot of what brought down the Soviet Union. The low Slav birth rate (you don't make a lot of babies when you drink vodka until you pass out) meant that the USSR was going to become majority Muslim by around 2050, and the Red Army age group was going to get there around now. So they got rid of the Muslims, and now they are just stuck with the low Slav birth rate.
China is also running out of 20-somethings, thanks to the one child policy. But a shortage of 20-somethings in a population of 1.5 billion is a different proposition from a shortage of 20-somethings in a population of 150 million. They have other problems. They are a bunch of folks who don't like each other. Warlike north doesn't get along with business-like Yangtze Valley, and neither of them get along with the Cantonese south. Plus they have Tibet and the Uighurs in the west. Their solution has been to export cheap consumer goods and used the cash flow to finance make-work projects with little economic usefulness (the empty cities for one) to keep the people too busy to revolt. If that comes apart, they have economic ruin and they starve to death. And it is all dependent on imported oil. They consume about 13 MMBbl/day, going up, and they produce domestically about 4 MMBbl/day, so they are importing 9 MMBbl/day. About 2 MMBbl/day come from Siberia, and with a new pipeline that could go up to 4 MMBl/day. But that leaves 5 MMBbl/day to come from somewhere else, almost all Mideast. And until somebody figures out how to run a pipeline over the Himalayas, that has to come by sea--through the Straits of Hormuz, around India, through the Straits of Malacca or otherwise through Indonesia, and across the South China Sea. They are trying to ally with Iran to address the start of that trip, and they have built "islands" in the SCS to protect the last part, but they are badly exposed in between. If we can ally with India and Indonesia, we can pretty much cut their oil off any time we want to, and they can't really stop us. If they have to convoy oil tankers from the Mideast to China, that pretty much uses up every ship they have in PLAN, and more.
We won Cold War I because Truman bribed up an alliance to contain Soviet expansion in Europe, and Regan put pressure on their economy and collapsed them. We can do the same with China. Bribe up an alliance with Japan, Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Thailand, and then we can strangle their oil if they provoke us. We can do it the same way we did Western Europe, economics (give them access to our markets on preferred basis, and move a lot of the manufacturing that we formerly had in China) and defense (keep a carrier battle group and an amphibious ready group in the SCS on an ongoing basis).
(This post was last modified: 09-13-2020 02:56 PM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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