RE: MTP: Russia Redux
All this Russia, Russia, Russia talk is distracting us from the real problem--China. Russia can probably barely defend itself from Western Europe, as weak as they are, and in the next decade they start to run out of 20-somethings to man the Russian Army.
We are in Cold War II, like it or not, and the enemy is China. And while we are still trying--unsuccessfully--to impose our will militarily on the Mideast, China is building power economically--Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Africa, and now entering South America. Ross Perot said something in 1992 that I believed long before he said it, "In the post-Cold-War world, economic power will be more important than military power." China has figured that out. We haven't.
China is running out of 20-somethings too, as a result of the one child policy. But having a shortage of 20-somethings in a population of 1.5 billion is very different from doing it in a population of 150 million. And they have some real weaknesses. They are a collection of folks who don't like each other--the warlike north doesn't get along well with the commercial Yangtze Valley, and neither get along with the Cantonese south, not to mention Tibet and the Uighurs in the west. Their solution has been to export cheap consumer goods and use the cash to finance make work projects with no economic value (like the empty cities) in order to keep people too busy to have time to revolt. That falls apart very quickly if they can't import oil from the Mideast, and until somebody figures out how to build a pipeline across the Himalayas, that requires a sea route through the Straits of Hormuz, around India, through the Straits of Malacca or otherwise through Indonesia, and across the South China Sea. They are developing a relationship with Iran and building "islands" in the SCS to cover the ends, but if we build alliances with India and Indonesia, they can't protect the middle.
We won Cold War I because Truman bribed up an alliance to stop the Soviets in Western Europe, and Reagan put pressure on their economy to crash it. We can do the same thing with China, but we need to get busy.
(This post was last modified: 09-13-2020 11:45 AM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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