I think it was the Economist that used to say "no two countries with a McDonald's have gone to war", until the bombing of Serbia by NATO in the 90s.
It's a strong argument. Integrating supply chains across borders means that there's a big section of the business community ready to lobby against war that might threaten that investment. Not to mention that modern industry is much less "capturable"; you can capture farmland and mineral resources (especially oil!) in war, but fixed plant and creative businesses are just obliterated, not captured.
Often suggested as one of the reasons Europe has experienced its most peaceful period in a thousand years. The EU means we can't afford to go to war with each other. Although some are intent on dismantling that progress, sadly.
My favorite factoid: the Baby Boomers are the first generation to go from birth to retirement (and I might hope: to death) without witnessing a war along the Rhine. The first, that is, since the death of Charlemagne.
The EU has its issues, but its core accomplishment is a singularity.
Why is everybody so certain that the EU is the reason for this?
Many other things changed in the same time England, France, Germany were no longer the powers they were before. The US and Russia dominated. There were nuclear weapons. The internal politics of many of these nations changed quite a bit as well. Idiotically changes of the people and even the political elites changed.
Also the EU has not always been the EU it has now. There were many iterations and those that are against the EU might not be against the general idea of a more united EU but rather against a specific iteration of these contracts.
These other visions of the EU might also have prevented war (and they might have in the time they were active).
EU was built on the ECSC which has been created with preventing war as one of its primary goals:
> The ECSC was first proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950 as a way to prevent further war between France and Germany. He declared his aim was to "make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible" which was to be achieved by regional integration, of which the ECSC was the first step. The Treaty would create a common market for coal and steel among its member states which served to neutralise competition between European nations over natural resources, particularly in the Ruhr.
Because one thing the EU established and maintained is the principle that countries should compete for resources and economic position in the market place and not the battlefield.
It's the one constant about the EU from 1957 to today.
There are indeed other visions of the EU that might also have worked, and we might need to switch to one of them in the future. But they would still have that one central element.
It depends. The questions is about institutional reform and how possible it is. I do not think the current EU will evolve in a good direction. I prefer countries to leave and establish new bilateral treaties along the same lines.
Maybe after the EU has failed we can have a new attempted that people will actually get on board with.
While I think that the EU should not (and if they try they won't be able to) try and become a "super country" and the bureaucracy can be excessive (but some of it is needed) it's a good idea in principle
> I prefer countries to leave and establish new bilateral treaties along the same lines
So that they have all the obligations of a member but no say on the discussions?
Bilateral treaties between n countries would mean a total of n*(n-1)/2 deals
If you have more than 3 countries, it's useful to have a common set of rules instead of just bilateralizing all deals
(Which doesn't mean all rules really need to be centralized, not all EU countries adopt the Euro, for example
However, when you sign a BT with the EU, your power on the decisions is diminished, but you still have to pay to be an "associated member" (that's what I meant above)
It's not an accomplishment of EU, it's because of the reduced significance of European powers.
When England and France and Germany etc fought, they were huge colonial powers (or wannabe powers), controlling large parts of the world. So they were in competition, and there were great stakes from the outcomes of such battles.
After the 50s or so such a war would have been insignificant as they don't have much to split. And of course Germany was in diapers and closely parented, split into Eastern and Western Germany.
So the US and USSR took their place on the global arena, as major powers that competed with one another at a global scale (and thus justified a Cold and several warmer proxy wars).
For the periphery of Europe (e.g. Balkans and Eastern Europe) there was another reason for the early 20th century wars: there were many nation states formed quite late and still fighting to define their borders and control. After they have solidified into a more or less homogeneous population and solid borders, there was less reason that war (and if there was one, it would be civil war).
But unlike the global ingignificance of the old colonial powers (which doesn't seem to reverse course), the above balkanization might re-appear again, in the form of a split between the "native" population and a large, not-really-assimilated immigrant population in some countries -- which, in 2030 or 2050 or so, can turn into wars between those parts of the population.
> When England and France and Germany etc fought, they were huge colonial powers (or wannabe powers), controlling large parts of the world. So they were in competition, and there were great stakes from the outcomes of such battles.
More importantly, Germany and Italy both came late to the colonial acquisition game, and both were trying to industrialize at a time when their access for raw materials like natural rubber could only be obtained by gaining colonies at the expense of other powers.
In 1945, the US imposed on France and Britain a new regime: they had to start letting go of their colonies, but in return, the US imposed peace would allow any country to complete for raw materials by price rather than by power.
>In 1945, the US imposed on France and Britain a new regime: they had to start letting go of their colonies, but in return, the US imposed peace would allow any country to complete for raw materials by price rather than by power.
I've never heard this before... Can you share reading materials?
In that article, the United Kingdom agreed that in return for U.S. lend-lease assistance, it would cooperate with the United States in devising measures to expand “production, employment, and the exchange and consumption of goods,” to eliminate “all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce,” to reduce barriers to trade, and generally to achieve the goals laid out in the Atlantic Charter.
[...] That describes the Lend Lease Act, which was expanded in effect into Bretton Woods
England, France and Germany (or HRE) fought before being colonial powers. They fought a lot of times even when they were just regional (the region being Europe) powers.
>They fought a lot of times even when they were just regional (the region being Europe) powers.
Which is part of my argument: they fought on their way up, to secure dominance in Europe, and then went on to divide the world between then (or failed to, like Germany).
I also mention something similar later, when writing about Eastern Europe, that nation there's also fought as they developed to define their borders and reach, until those "solidified".
But your argument ignores the fact that they were fighting amongst themselves long before the "up" part started. England and France fought each other for hundreds of years before they even knew the parts of the world they would eventually colonize even existed. Germans were fighting in France and Poland long before a state called Germany existed. The gold rushes of colonization intensified these conflicts, but they didn't create them.
And even if they had, why should we assume they wouldn't happen again if Europe was heading "down" instead of "up"? It's depressingly common in history for peoples in decline to fall into warring amongst themselves over who gets to keep the largest part of what's left. What makes Europeans exempt from that tendency, other than the fragile agreement the EU represents that warring amongst themselves just isn't something Europeans do anymore?
The general European peace is one of the great accomplishments of modernity. We shouldn't take it for granted, or assume that it will hold without the willingness of today's Europe to work at maintaining it the way yesterday's did.
>But your argument ignores the fact that they were fighting amongst themselves long before the "up" part started.
That's because it's not the "up" itself that matters, it's the upwards trend -- which they did have since the 10th century or so.
In my other example, the balkan/eastern european nations fighting were even less "up" by any definition of wealth, power, etc. But they were going upwards from peripheral parts of empires or serfdoms under foreign rule (e.g. under the Ottomans) to building their own nation states.
>And even if they had, why should we assume they wouldn't happen again if Europe was heading "down" instead of "up"?
Who said we shouldn't assume that?
What I said is that the peaceful period was because of an end to the power and big stakes that resulted from the upward trend. Those powers entered a stasis, so to speak, and didn't have much to win over one another anymore.
If a forceful downward trend emerges, we can certainly see wars again.
The problem is that the EU is far more then that. I support both movement of goods and people, I even support standardization efforts and things like that.
However many people want the EU to be far more then that. The EU as a strong central state for Europe. That I do not want, and that's why I am against the EU in its current form, and Im against growth of the EU.
Unspecific question. There are many reasons. We have seen many of the weaknesses of in the last financial crisis. The EU is just horrible set up economically. The Euro as a EU project is the crown achievement of bad economics has been a total and absolut disaster, the biggest since the Inter-War gold standard. There are many other problems, with debt, enforcement of debt collection and so on. The bad EU setup was totally unclear about how debt management worked and all these problem had to be (and jet have to be) solved on a running system, instead of using a good design in the first place.
The EU was used often to push bad laws on countries that they had internally rejected, but the people against it could not stop in on European level (Germany Vorratsdatenspeicherung for example). The EU is not democratic enough, both internally and the way it was created.
One can of course argue that many of these problems can be solved with more centralization, but that 'solution' has lots of problems by itself also.
I would image a EU should be a club that agrees on trade and the movements of goods. There is no reason to handle every single issue under the EU umbrella, I would rather see independent organisation that deal with certain issues. The EU is like a hammer, and every single problem looks like a nail to it.
>> The EU was used often to push bad laws on countries that they had internally rejected, but the people against it could not stop in on European level (Germany Vorratsdatenspeicherung for example). The EU is not democratic enough, both internally and the way it was created.
By the same token you can't stop laws that affect you on the regional level by voting on the national level, or laws that affect you on the community level by voting on the regional level.
So what's the solution? Dissolve any union above the community level, so that we can all have our small-town democracies, who can then have a jolly good fight over who shall pick up the garbage? Kind of ... parochial, innit.
In any case all that about the EU being undemocratic is just hogwash. MEPs are much more likely to be people from outside the political establishment of their country, which means voting fot he European parliament gives you a much better chance that your vote will represent you rather than give power to established interests that don't give half a bit about you.
Plus: Nigel bloody Farage is an MEP. If you call an organisation that allows you to elect people who campaign against it "undemocratic" then I have no idea what you'd call democratic.
> In any case all that about the EU being undemocratic is just hogwash.
Sorry, People who say 'look, the parliament is elected, therefore the system is democratic' are focusing on the machinations, rather than the demos; it is the demos (the first person plural 'we') which acts as the one thing that permits a group of people to be governed. It cannot be found in the EU parliament, and it cannot be manufactured by tweaking the system.
>> People who say 'look, the parliament is elected, therefore the system is democratic'
Well, those people are not me. I noted that MEPs come from outside the traditional political establishment and that MEPs like Farage, and others, represent views that are also traditionally left out of governance. That's not the "mechanism" in the abstract. It's the actual nitty-gritty of how it all works out in the end.
And that's your demos right there- the people, not the elites, or the corporations or whomever. The EU is democratic because it gives people an opportunity to choose its direction. The UK for instance, it chose to get out.
The Soviets? There you go- they couldn't vote themselves out of being Soviet. EU citizens can.
Just because a citizen has a representative doesn't mean the whole apparatus becomes accountable in his eyes any more legitimate than an occupying power.
Look at it this way; how many EU citizens do you think are willing to die in a ditch somewhere in Lithuania for the European project ?
These are important aspect of the philosophy of government. I suggest reading the books of Sir Roger Scruton if you really want to understand why.
It is true that we have the same problems on other levels. Finding the right boundary for choices is a difficult problem.
Its my believe that in my country we have a far better more democratic institutional setup that I feel much better about then the institutional setup at the EU.
Even so even then I feel that pushing down choices to lower levels is preventable. Pluralität of system allows for more experimentation and generally better represent local views.
I don't know why people outside 'the political establishment' should be better for me. The can be better or far worse, I see no clear reason for a bias in either direction.
Regional? National? By that thoughts someday we will get to Global Level. Guess who will win the vote if it is all down to population and Economic Power once US and China steps in.
And yes, by the token is exactly the reason why there is a movement for California to try and break out from US, there is Catalan independence, and similar movement in place in many parts of the world.
I am not saying EU is a bad in every sense. But it mustn't try to dictate everything, and even starting an military operation.
One has to wonder how well that works if one of the governments turns totalitarian and starts seizing private businesses, as has been happening for the past few months in Turkey. (Turkey makes a large proportion of the lower-end TVs sold in Europe, amongst many other things.)
That was Thomas Friedman's McDonalds Theory of Conflict Prevention, espoused in the book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree." Interestingly enough, he still tried to defend the theory even after the Yugoslav breakup wars (namely, that the war ended very quickly because of fears of long global isolation), but he dropped the theory altogether after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Interestingly enough, he has an updated theory that more specifically ties it to integrated supply chains. However, that theory is probably still equally fallacious. Prior to WWI, it was thought that a major war wouldn't break out due to the impact it would have on trade (particularly the fact that Britain and France relied on German industrial production for key military components).
Yes, we shouldn't forget that this one is the second globalization, not the first, as you say, the first was before the First World War.
I'm reading now "Global Capitalism: It's Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century" by Jeffry A. Frieden, and it's fascinating to see how history really rhymes.
Prior to world war I, the economy was pretty globalized and numerous e.g. german companies had a big US presence, and vice versa. Trade did not prevent a war then...
> "In May 1930, Canada, the country's most loyal trading partner, retaliated by imposing new tariffs on 16 products that accounted altogether for around 30% of US exports to Canada.[15] Canada later also forged closer economic links with the British Empire via the British Empire Economic Conference of 1932. France and Britain protested and developed new trade partners. Germany developed a system of autarky."
Autarky doesn't help trade for sure.
> "US imports decreased 66% from $4.4 billion (1929) to $1.5 billion (1933), and exports decreased 61% from $5.4 billion to $2.1 billion. GNP fell from $103.1 billion in 1929 to $75.8 billion in 1931 and bottomed out at $55.6 billion in 1933.[18] Imports from Europe decreased from a 1929 high of $1.3 billion to just $390 million during 1932, while US exports to Europe decreased from $2.3 billion in 1929 to $784 million in 1932. Overall, world trade decreased by some 66% between 1929 and 1934.[19]"
Historical experiments are hard to make but looking at what happened back then there is a chance that peoples not talking to each other make them less friendly and more prone to go at war.
the germans attacked the serbs because they were so integrated into the empire that a few of them were very rich. war meant leaving bank accounts and those business spots open for the taking.
and later on, Japan attacked the US because it was afraid its only source of oil would block them out.
For any purpose, including civilian purposes after the war is over.
(One of the overlooked bits of the end of WW1 is the looting of German intellectual property by the US: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Pkl7HNzhXgoC&pg=PA56&lpg... ; at the end of WW2 it was the rocket programme's men and materiel which got looted. So it's not entirely impossible to loot an advanced industry, but it does help if the men involved are keener to surrender to you than the Soviets.)
He wasn't the first. It's the whole "Capitalist Peace" theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_peace proposed by Professor Erik Gartzke, that economically developed countries (capitalist - but in this case even something like China can qualify) don't fight with one another.
I think the word "capitalist" might have been better than "economically developed".
One could argue that Capitalism was the reason Japan went to war against the US. Japan was worried that the US would cut off all oil exports to Japan, so they attempted to gain control of the pacific in order to solidify access to oil. They needed to keep their machine going.
Idk if I would call (pre-wwII, post rise of Hitler) Germany truly "Capitalist" though.
> Japan was worried that the US would cut off all oil exports to Japan, so they attempted to gain control of the pacific in order to solidify access to oil.
Errr, the US did cut off all oil exports to Japan in August 1941. As you say, though, they needed to keep their machine going; the obvious prospect of a US declaration of war in response to their planned (and executed) seizure of oil-producing regions in the South Pacific was the key motivation for the "pre-emptive strike" on Pearl Harbor.
That seems strange to me. Its not like the west cut of oil from Japan for no reason. Japan was fighting a war with China. They were not willing to give that up and escalated the war.
Capitalists (as in profit seeking companies and people) seem to have very little to do with it. That is a political decision on the highest level.
I guess they did it to protect their market and war machine. The question is where did the pressure to do so come from, was it from the political class or the business community.
I think the pure Capitalist peace theory is wrong, but with some exertions if fits.
German both in WW1/WW2 had governmental elites in control that were not beholden to the broad capitalist (market). The capitalist (and Im not just talking big industry people) who were standing to lose from war, had no (or not enough) political power.
The question is how reliant are the political elites on the broad bushiness community.
P.S: Yes, Hitler was helped to power by many large Capitalist but after he solidified control he and the political elite were no longer reliant on them.
That's pretty interesting. That also reminds me of what people have called "Pax Americana"[0] which is probably due to America's large influence on modern Capitalism.
> On a cold and rainy February afternoon in 1947, one year before the Games Center was established, First Secretary H. M. Sichel of the British Embassy in Washington telephoned Loy Henderson, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and African Affairs. He had two messages from the Foreign Office which were "rather important." They were of a sort that normally should be delivered by the British Ambassador direct to the Secretary of State, George Marshall, but since General Marshall had already left the office for the weekend perhaps, Sichel suggested he could drop off the notes, have a "brief" chat about them, and allow Mr. Henderson a weekend of reflection on them before briefing the Secretary prior to meeting the British Ambassador on Monday morning.
> Sichel arrived as State Department employees, after a comparatively dull week, were donning their raincoats and galoshes to take off for an indoor weekend. Loy Henderson, who habitually worked until eight or nine o'clock even on Fridays, had sent off all his secretaries and was alone in the office. The scene was the one of utter calm that skillful dramatists often establish to provide the psychological setting for a shattering announcement. The announcement, which Mr. Sichel delivered in the course of his "brief chat," was certainly shattering.
> The two messages were official notification that the Pax Britannica, which had kept order in much of the world for over a century, was at an end. Specifically, His Majesty's Government could no longer afford the $50,000,000 or so that was required to support the resistance of the Greek and Turkish Governments to Communist aggression either, as in the first case, by guerrilla warfare or, in the second, by direct military action of the Soviet Union. Either the United States Government would fill the gap, or it would go unfilled - or it would be left to the Russians.
[...]
> With the British announcement, delivered so calmly by Mr. Sichel, the United States was given the choice of becoming an active world power - an "on-the-ground" world power, as a lecturer at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute was later to put it - or seeing the Soviets become a more menacing feature of world politics than Nazi Germany could ever have been. Mr. Sichel said, "I hope I haven't spoiled your weekend."
I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time. - JFK
And neither was Gartzke. It's important to note that the "Capitalist Peace" is considered a modern explanation for the "Democratic Peace" theory, an idea that goes back as far as Kant. The democratic people theory is also harder to pick holes in than the capitalist peace - particularly if you restrict it to mature democracies.
true, but one should also ask how much trade is necessary to serve as an effective deterrent to war? Must we put everyone factory worker in the midwest on the public dole to avoid war with China, or just some fraction of them?
Even if you start erecting trade barriers, you are not going to get back the jobs lost to automation. Whoever is telling that is lying. A large fraction of the low-skill, well-paying factory jobs of the past are permanently gone. This is not an easy problem to solve, and any easy solution proffered is likely to fail.
UBI won't solve anything. In fact, it will mostly just lead to inflation for basic goods and services with ultimate effect on the poor and working poor being a wash.
I liken UBI to easing credit for home mortgages. Easy credit doesn't make houses more affordable, it just makes it easier to borrow more money for a more expensive product.
Sam Altman does not understand or appreciate the above point.
> Sam Altman does not understand or appreciate the above point.
Maybe because the above point is dubious at best?
In a complex domain like an economics, it is very hard to make proclamations such as yours with anything resembling your certainty. Depending on how UBI is implemented (and how close to full employment the economy is, how much other government spending there is, how it is financed,...) there might be an effect on inflation. But it would probably be nowhere near enough to 'be a wash'.
The debate on UBI isn't settled yet by economists. More experiments are needed and will shed more light on it.
Your comparison with easing credit is nonsensical.
China stands absolutely no chance in a direct war with US and her allies.
Not only do we absolutely decimate them in nuclear and naval capabilities, our combined allied forces would decimate them technologically, on the ground, and through strategic embargoing, attrition, psychological warfare, etc.
We and our allies literally surround them. Not only that, look into geopolitics, Trump getting a call from Taiwan pisses China off more than giving them weapons. Why? Acknowledging and reaffirming our commitment to protect them, angers them more than physical capability of defense for Taiwan.
China enslaves a portion of its citizens, jails activists, kidnaps Taiwanese, support DPRK, among other things.
Trump is remapping Asian relations, because China isn't strong, nor are they suicidal. Rewriting our trade relations will help us, and if they continue being friends with us, good for them as well.
A restructuring is likely, and a war will only happen if our Asian allies or China forces our hand. If so, we win, based on any strategic viewpoint of might.
The Philippines already crossed over to China;s side.
Vietnam, which just 2 years ago invited the US Navy to use the ports at Da Nang, has been miffed by the loss of TPP.
Obama worked hard to build a coalition confronting China to prevent the war from ever happening. Trump's incompetence is destroying it.
And free trade has kept China peaceful by establishing that any resource the Chinese want, from any other country, they can compete for by bidding for it, rather than having to fight for it. Now Trump is threatening that.
This loudmouth moron is goading China into war and making it more likely they will win.
The TPP was a significant issue in the election, and helped get Trump elected. It even divided the Democratic party, and Hillary finally switched sides and was against it. The TPP had way too much input from Obama's corporate masters, particularly in the entertainment industry. It was a good idea at first, I think, but it was ruined by the details. It wasn't a good deal for regular Americans, only the corporations.
So it's not just Trump's incompetence at work here, it's Obama's incompetence too. He could have made a much more limited TPP that didn't give so much power to Hollywood and the copyright cartels.
>So it's not just Trump's incompetence at work here, it's Obama's incompetence too. He could have made a much more limited TPP that didn't give so much power to Hollywood and the copyright cartels.
If you feel a need to make a sinister choice between a war between nations and a war on the working class, you've done something very, very wrong.
I don't get it. Trump isn't the only one nixing the TPP. Sanders was going to nix it too, and so was Hillary (unless she was lying). Have you forgotten that Hillary came out against the TPP too?
There was no choice for a candidate who was pro-TPP in this election, except earlier on during the GOP primaries. If you're pro-TPP, the best you could have gotten was Hillary who, considering what she said about it, might have tried to amend it instead of nixing it altogether.
You're not going to convince average voters that they need a trade agreement which makes things worse for them just to "check China". This is a big part of why Trump won.
OP Here, my whole point was America's power would get them a better trade deal. My whole point was China would not want war, and neither do we, so a restructuring makes sense.
Yet I get downvoted by idiots who hate opinions they don't have. And I replied to you to agree with you - Trump one because giving lopsided deals makes NO SENSE - Unless you're a billionaire wanting cheaper labour in the 70s...
> ... we don't get to dictate terms to other countries.
Of course not; it's a negotiation. And power plays are a very legitimate tactic to use during a negotiation. And the US happens to have a large amount of both economic and militaristic power.
And using it in this particular fashion is poor form if your intent is to secure another nation's commitment to send their soldiers and sailors to die alongside yours.
This sort of statement is useless without context.
What would be the objective of such a war? Regime change? Iraq and Afghanistan are both much smaller, yet the US wasn't too good with that.
Sure, the US could probably protect itself from any nation's military. But there's no universe where a successful incursion into China leads to anything apart from massive pain for everyone involved
If we could deal with Japan and Germany, why not China? What makes China more comparable to Iraq and Afghanistan?
Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted there's obviously some issue with the question which I'd love to hear. What makes the situation more comparable to our recent quagmires and not more "traditional" and, in my mind comparable, situations with Germany and Japan?
If we could deal with Japan and Germany, why not China?
America "dealt with" Japan and Germany by being a few months ahead in the nuclear arms race. That specific asymmetry was what ended WWII. America doesn't have anything like that advantage over China.
To be fair, we dealt with Germany through conventional warfare, but that "we" included the Soviet Union, and required millions of deaths on both sides.
America dealt with Germany in a conventional manner, and could have done so to Japan in a conventional manner. At the time America decided it would be expedient to use a brand new destructive device that the world has more or less collectively decided not to use in a first-strike capacity.
The intent in asking the question is why does the preceding commenter feel a war with China would look like an Afghanistan as opposed to a Germany?
Nuclear weapons and ICBMs to deliver them are the most obvious difference. The world in general is just so different than it was 70 years ago that it doesn't make sense to take the stance of "assume things are the same unless given an explicit reason not to" anymore.
My point is that a war with China would resemble a more traditional war as opposed to an insurgent conflict as in Iraq or Afghanistan. Why would we assume fighting a proper nation state would resemble fighting random lots of terrorists with varying agendas?
Your point falls through either way. A traditional full-out war is an improbability, because of any number reasons (balance of power between Russia/China/US, destructive capability of respective nuclear arsenals for MAD). With a proxy war more like recent conflicts (korean war, vietnam), a pyrrhic victory or an uncertain resolution is the most likely outcome. There's no point arguing who wins a global war in the 21st century because WW3 ends in irradiated hell on earth for all involved and would usher in the rise of whichever country was insignificant/uninvolved enough to avoid the ICBMs
I would say the biggest effect is that modern media makes America much more sensitive to casualties, in contrast to the past where broadcast-style media like TV and newspapers were essentially hijacked for uncontested government propaganda. I'm sure if an expert thought about it for a while he/she would come up with more stuff around homemade explosives/IEDs, small arms, and the like, but I think media is the main one.
So your theory is that lack of political buy-in from the populace, exacerbated by our access to technology and thus free information?
If that is the case, again, I contest that the real issue was fighting an unwinnable war for no real reason. Having a true, blue enemy to fight is an important difference. A war with China would be a Nazi Germany situation, whereas Iraq / Afghanistan were clearly a Vietnam.
And what would the US do without daily imports of thousands of cargo containers of goods? How would the US engage in sustained war when a significant percentage of goods used to propagate the war come from China? How would the US "technological superiority" deal with supply lines thousands of miles long (e.g. invasion). How would the US "technological superiority" deal with being outnumbered 2 to 1?
If the US' continuing presence in the Middle East and other areas demonstrates anything, it's that maintaining supply lines is not an issue for US military logistics.
And technological superiority is exactly how you fight and win a war with a 1:2 manpower disadvantage... So I'm not quite sure what you're trying to get at there.
How exactly can you "decimate" someone in nuclear capability? The earth can only be destroyed (for purposes of supporting human life) once. US being able to destroy it five times over and China once doesn't really help in real life. It is not like you can trade one US nuke 1:1 to stop one China nuke.
Pedantic, perhaps. Wrong? Definitely not. Look it up. "Decimation" was a term invented by the Romans, and was a method of punishing Army units who failed in battle. All the men would line up, and every 10th man would be executed. That's why it's called "decimation": "deci" is Latin for 10.
Modern uses of the word are simply wrong and nonsensical if you understand that "deci" means 10, which should be obvious to any competent English speaker who knows of the word "decimal" and understands our numbering system.
I like how buddy proves to you he's right, and you have the gall to act like you're right.
Besides, this argument is over pedantics. My original comment stands. China is weak compared to US. No war necessary, restructuring in favour of US WILL TAKE PLACE.
Dude, this is not another DEFCON game. All your confidence is based on fact that nobody will touch north American area. Good luck with this 'strategy'.
All of my "confidence" is based on stockpiles of nuclear arnaments, nuclear submarine capabilities, missile shields, nuclear destination sites for both parties, potential first strike responses, allied coalitions, global trade, and internal strife.
China loses. Plain and simple. So, given that China obviously knows what I know, a trade restructuring is the best way for both sides to Win.
Lopsided deals from the 70s, when Kissinger gave our millionaires cheap labour from China - Doesn't work anymore.
I get discouraged talking strategy with people who have no clue about modern capabilities.
Russia VS US would be game over. Pakistan VS India would decimate 50-70% of World Population - but not game over.
China has a very small stockpile of missiles. Also, All of them would get shot down, while Nuclear Subs of the coast of China would destroy every population center.
Not to mention, first strike with this capability by the US could mean no war... Just absolute and total victory.
So again, per my original point. Trade will be restructured. China KNOWS this!
Well, we better get pretty good at shooting down missiles because North Korea has a bit of the crazy and nuclear weapons. I get the feeling that someone has looked at the Aegis combined with XR standard missiles.
I'm not worried about China. I'm worried about the last days of a dictator.
Shooting down one missile is a lot easier than shooting down a hundred. The US has had the ability to defend against an attack from North Korea since the W Bush administration. That capability would barely dent a Chinese attack.
I wasn't talking about China, just the "any" nuclear power is hopefully becomes a false statement given NK's instability.
Do you have a source on the "The US has had the ability to defend against an attack from North Korea since the W Bush administration." for ballistic missiles?
Ok, but why do you keep mentioning China, I said I wasn't worried about China. I'm worried about the crazy folks (e.g. NK) with limited launch capability. China is pretty stable.
Because the overall context here is China, the potential for war with China, and the devastation that would result. I want to be clear that our defenses would not prevent that.
Really, you think "In any all-out war between two nuclear nations there will be no winner, just two losers" in a discussion about war with China wasn't talking about China?
I provided a counter-example that is much more likely and frankly a lot more worrisome. Plus, I specifically mention what I was worried about. Comments on HN expand out from the topic all the time, and I was pretty specific in my response.
Not necessarily. It depends on defensive capabilities. It's very possible that two countries get into a conflict thinking it is a mutual assured destruction scenario, only to find out one country is better at neutralizing attacks in-transit.
A direct war between the US and China would be over in a matter of hours.
And the only "winners" would be any nations in the southern hemisphere who had the good sense to sit the war out. My money would be on Indonesia and Brazil in the short term. Longer term, South Africa would be the big winner. That'd be my guess.
I agree we would clearly win, but it would still be a worse outcome by far, even in winning, than the status quo, or virtually any othe non-war situation (even a trade war or Cold War).
Yes; I'm worried about those in power on the American side. The fact that China would lose a war against the United States doesn't mean it would be a good thing for the US; the best we could do is lose less.
A war between the US and China is most likely to result in a stalemate. China may not have the capabilities to threaten continental US possessions to any degree, but it does have the ability to deny amphibious invasion. The coast of China would be an active war zone, with neither side able to move with impunity.
Beyond that, it's hard to say what would happen without knowing who would be involved in the way, which depends a lot on how the war was started. The main land routes into China are either via Russia (unlikely to permit staging of US troops), Kazakhstan (ditto), Kyrgyzstan via Tajikistan and Uzbekistan (aka the Silk Road, and dubious due to enough tensions between those countries), Burma (again dubious permission), Vietnam (which might prefer to try to remain neutral), and North Korea (which would only happen in the context of a North-South Korea war). The passes over the Himalayas from Pakistan, India, and Nepal are insufficient quality to maintain an armed front. Recall the difficulties of supplying Chinese forces in WWII.
I find it baffling that you can speak about open conflict between two nuclear superpowers so confidently.
Nuclear exchange would mean, best case, collapse of civilization with a possible extreme worst case of human extinction. Why in God's name would you even tamper with the possibility? Or do you think that nukes would never be used, no matter how desperate either side got?
It's dangerous to assume the contrapositive of this claim is actually true (war doesn't start if trade doesn't stop). The best example of this is World War 1 Europe. It was held as common knowledge then that a world war could never possibly break out because of how interdependent the European economies were becoming. Nobody was going to kill the golden goose over some silly land dispute. We all know how that turned out, and it had nothing to do with whether jobs were being created or destroyed.
If the contrapositive isn't true, then the original claim may not hold any actual weight.
Dan Carlin talks about this in his Hardcore History podcast and does a great job telling the story of WWI, definitely would recommend.
Jack Ma says the darnest things. What is happening now is the (almost) same thing that happened as a prelude to Opium War(s). China want people to buy their stuff, but the other way around only through tight control from China. That's not how trade works. Of course, opium war had such a perverse blowback from the English via India that it's not possible in this day and age, but who knows. One thing is sure, something is going to happen. My bet is on (slight) collapse of economy from within China and then opening up their economy a bit more towards everyone else. This will happen after the currency war. I don't see any actual combat conflict happening. But, who knows.
Ma notwithstanding, history shows that trade does not prevent war (and that the idea that it does springs from unbridled optimism about the nature of man). This has been much discussed:
It is a bizarre twist to claim Jack Ma is somehow threatening US with war over trade frictions. After all the highlight of his trip was to donate $20 million to an Australian university (Newcastle), in return for generous help and friendship he received as a young man over 30 years ago from an Australian family (the Morleys).
"I am very thankful for Australia and the time I spent there in my youth. The culture, the landscape and most importantly its people had a profound impact on my view of the world at that time," Mr Ma said in a statement on Friday.
Does it feel like Jack Ma went to Australia to deliver a threat to the US? He went there to unveil headquarters for Alibaba and to make a donation to an Australian university. He talked about how grateful he was to Australia (as a Western country). To read war threat into a cliche comment is too much.
What exactly is old mate Jack proposing will happen here? Apple moves some of it's manufacturing out of Shenzen death camps and into California, so China attacks mainland USA?
China would be very silly to initiate a conflict with America in the next 20 years - they simply don't have the capacity, experience or training to fight a very large and very sophisticated adversary. I know we all like to rag on America, but the fact the US military is staggeringly big, well funded, experienced, and well organised.
>“Trade is about trade of values. Trade of culture,”
Not sure what Mr. Ma means here, considering the barriers the Chinese have erected against foreign culture, e.g. The Great Firewall.
The increasing intrusiveness and paranoia of major US institutions - e.g. NSA and Google -- suggests the US is also running a value trade deficit with China.
Ma seems to be saying to the United States: Continue running trade deficits with China, subsidizing China's ill-conceived domestic social and economic policies, or war. If this is what Ma is saying (it essentially is) then war with China is inevitable and better engaged in now, while the US still enjoys a qualitative advantage.
Anyone doubting this interpretation of Ma's comments needs to read Michael Pettis' commentary on Chinese economic policy:
UPDATE: Comments claiming Ma only says, "keep trading"... don't understand how trade works between US-China (read Pettis links above), and are not paying attention to coincidental news from China about new DF-16 ICBM's pointed at the United States. Its almost as if China plans to negotiate trade with a gun pointed at the Trump administration's head.
And that's where it stops. Ma made a general observation and that's it. Historically countries who trade less tend to be hostile toward each others, while countries who trade in bigger volumes are friendly.
Also Ma isn't saying or implying "keep the trade deficit". He says "keep trading. period" (a surplus or a deficit, doesn't matter in the context of his argument.) By the way it's weird that people seem to think it's China's problem that the US have a trade deficit with them. The deficit can be solved by the US selling products and services to China. It's the US' problem to find what to sell. And only the US can solve it.
>It's the US' problem to find what to sell. And only the US can solve it.
This is completely wrong.
China has huge barriers in place to dissuade the importation of products that compete with their own. 30% tariffs on certain items, selective application of VAT and currency manipulation all make it near impossible for the US to sell goods in China.
Yes, they CAN sell in China, they're just at a huge disadvantage. Is your argument that because SOME products still sell, the barriers aren't significant, or that US firms aren't adversely affected by them, to the benefit of Chinese ones?
My argument is that when companies can't compete on technology as they may be used to, too frequently, they throw their hands up in the air and conclude that this means they can't compete period. However, we can see that Western companies are successful today competing along different axes.
I would even extend that further by saying that if things dry up in the future and we have to keep innovating to stay ahead as China continues to copy and catch up, good. Let's do that. Everyone will be better off.
Not to mention heavy restrictions on money transfers in and out of the country and a huge amount of red tape. Ian of Dangerous Prototypes set up a business in China a year or so back and wrote about what was involved, and it's astonishing: http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/2016/02/04/how-to-china-...
> Historically countries who trade less tend to be hostile toward each others, while countries who trade in bigger volumes are friendly
I can think of one big counterexample off the top of my head: trade between France and Germany in the years leading up to 1914. Strong economic ties didn't prevent Europe from going completely off the rails. Which historical trading partners did you have in mind?
> It's the US' problem to find what to sell. And only the US can solve it.
Well there's the problem of China not respecting copyright or any type of intellectual property. And that's not just a problem for the Facebooks of the world, they are stealing our agricultural and industrial knowledge as well. And while it's not officially sanctioned by the CCP, it's unofficially encouraged.
This implies that the American way of looking at these things is the ONLY right way of looking at things and that Chinese need to accept western companies on western terms.
If they are going to be part of the global economy then they need to accept the terms of the global economy. Yea their practices are mainly harming western countries at this point, but in the future maybe it's India or Singapore that has the lead in these areas. Would you think it's alright for China to do it then?
Like it or not the global capitalist economy has to be built with some form of protection for content and IP producers. I fail to see how China's model is the 'right way of looking at things'. In fact if we all acted like China I'm guessing the global economy would collapse.
Sure there are theoretically better ways of doing things. If there are theoretically better ways of distributing food does that mean I get to go rob a grocery store?
You can't flaunt the rules and regulations of world trade because you disagree with them or want to change them. Besides that's not what China wants. China wants to eat its cake and have it too.
Edit: Wow looks like it's ok to lie, cheat, and steal because "the other guy does it and I think the system is unjust on top of that." Really spectacular arguments from the anti-establishment crowd.
And so does USA, EU and others. Isn't that how foreign diplomacy and trade works? Steal, murder, take what you can, behave well only when someone forces you to?
Because from current perspective I can't seem to find a reason why China would back down and let their own economy be taken over by western companies, when protectionism works well for them and their manufacturing is holding the world world by the proverbial balls. It's the tactic USA employed mercilessly (and still does) to get the best position - forcing everyone else to drop their rules to trade with them. Of course, now when China does it it's suddenly a problem, because Facebook, Google and others can't monopolize their market and transfer money to their offshore accounts? :)
>Steal, murder, take what you can, behave well only when someone forces you to?
And the US is forcing China to. I'm not trying to hold one side up as some kind of moral victor. Yea China's doing the same thing the US would in their position. This isn't some kind of moral equivalency contest.
Your post is the equivalent of Trump excusing Putins behavior because the US has done some pretty bad stuff too.
No one's talking about robbing physical goods or food. Copyright & IP matter to wildly different beasts: ideas.
And there are way more practical better ways of dealing with those than strict locked down control over it. It's not black & white.
Now, we're drifting. My point was: it's normal, acceptable and even desirable to contest and discuss the way cough "everyone" do things, especially when two parties trade. That's how they may all progress.
Going to force, or to war, as too many here seem to suggest (and I just can't believe I read this), solves nothing: it destroys the problem with a long-lived lie (that violence can solve anything) and creates new, larger ones.
Are you even having the same conversation as me? You are so into your anti-IP/DRM mindset its blinding you to the basic principle I'm getting at.
I don't give a shit what you think about the current Copyright or IP laws we have in international trade. In fact I think the current system is stupid.
BUT that doesn't mean China gets to unilaterally ignore them because it's beneficial for them. The same way I can't unilaterally ignore our laws on theft just because I think the system of distributing food is wrong. IF China wants to change the rules then they need to do that through the WTO. They decided to join in order to gain access to the global market. If they can't follow those rules then they need to be stopped or kicked out because it's causing serious issues within the global economy, issues that are leading some people to talk about war.
That's fine... but they joined the WIPO and promised to uphold certain Intellectual property laws internally that are internationally the norm... except it looks like they aren't.
It's almost like Imaginary Property laws don't correspond to how the universe actually works, and perhaps China only "agreed" to them the way one "agrees" to unenforceable terms in a unilateral clickwrap "contract".
I don't know if you were around in the 80's but, if you were and have some memory, this song that we are listening now, should be familiar to you.
And it seems to me that, yes, there is a standard for developing a country's economy: you build and industrial base. For that you need importing technology and knowledge. For that you need foreign currency. So, you sell the job of your people. By the way, what you don't do, if you are clever, is follow the IMF advice.
gph says:>"... the problem of China not respecting copyright or any type of intellectual property. "
And, after thirty years' trying, mainland Chinese still make very low-quality hand tools and have severely damaged Western suppliers of the same.
"Give me a good screwdriver and a place to stand - I will move the Earth." - Archimedes322
P.S. Why the downvote? Compare the quality of USA-, European- and Chinese-made (except Taiwanese, which are often exquisite) hand tools. The mainland Chinese don't measure up to a 1920's standards of manufacture in the West.
This is an awfully US-centered way of interpreting the comment, which completely misses the real play. The comment was made while visiting Australia, and this article is in Australian media. Furthermore, China isn't looking to get into outright war with the US, for all the reasons listed in sibling comments.
What Ma (/China) is really doing is capitalizing on the fear in US allies that the US will now hold back military support. This is a negotiation happening with Australia, to gain trade terms favorable to China. China is reminding Australia that they are within China's sphere of influence, and that it is Australia who must work to stay on good terms with China.
For context, I'm a USian and think Trump is duplicitous and incompetent, but sympathize with why he was elected. The problem with the TPP was the same problem with our entire political landscape - it mostly consisted of prudent trade terms, but packaged with a bunch of corporate-pushed corruption. It's designed to be against our own interest to defect (game theoretically), but people are getting quite fed up with the scam.
>Ma seems to be saying to the United States: Continue running trade deficits with China, subsidizing China's ill-conceived domestic social and economic policies, or war
Subsidizing? The US (and others) spends X in China, and Chinese workers and factories sweat their ass off and give back products that the US companies then sell for 2X to 100X.
That's the exact opposite of subsidizing. It's the US that can't produce anymore, or can't produce cheaply enough and with enough tolerances, that found a solution to its issues.
And if you count for the trade deficit, it's China that holds US debt and thus "subsidies" the US.
No. This is NOT how it works. China exports its domestic demand to the US, the US absorbs Chinese overcapacity. This initially began as China importing inefficient US industrial production in the 70s-90s, in exchange for US expectation of access to an enormous Chinese market. That trade never really occurred as the short terms incentives weren't present, resulting in Chinese inefficiencies and massive imbalances for both sides.
This is exactly the policy the US seeks to now reverse (absorbing over-capacity) and which planned reversal China meets with threats of war. It wasn't charity as you well understand. The US exported its inefficient industries initially for the unfulfilled expectation of access to much greater markets for its efficient industries.
Do you think that the next generations, surviving in a post-apocalyptic irradiated world, will care about the reasons that took us to war?
Is there anything that is worth the death of hundreds of millions of people? Because that's what you're advocating by saying we should go to war, throwing this word lightly like if there would be a future after war between major powers in the nuclear age.
Post-apocalyptic irradiated countries, maybe. World? Not completely. I am skeptical of China's capability of successfully nuking US, aside from perhaps the west coast.
Your usage of the word subsidize is strange. I might as easily say that I subsidize my local grocery store. Except that a much more natural way to say the same thing is that I buy food there.
We have a trade deficit with China because they make so many affordable products that Americans want to buy.
Of course much of that wealth ends up in the hands of the Chinese government, just as the US taxes corporations here. I would probably describe our government's use of most of those funds as "ill-conceived." We certainly wage more wars than China.
Now that you bring it up I realize that I am also running a massive trade deficit with my local grocery store. This does not seem fair, I should impose a 30% tariff on all food imported from the grocery, that will show them for subsidizing their supply chain and manipulating the prices of food
In fact, I think the grocery store has been manipulating their prices down, giving them an unfair advantage. Obviously you should insist that they stop selling such cheap food.
You're not in the grocery business. Your grocery store doesn't manipulate its prices giving it an unfair advantage against your store. Spirited disagreement != belligerence.
>He's not making a threat of any kind, he's making an empirical observation that countries that trade with each other tend to go to war less.
That's more wishful thinking though. Many touted the same thing in early 20th century: that the increased trade between European powers, economic interdependence, etc. will mean the end of war.
Then WWI and WWII came along.
Trade is itself a kind of soft war (for resources, for markets, etc) and can easily be extended to full war when those are not ample enough.
Yet there is evidence that larger trade agreements that bind economies together and create some sort of codependence have a function in reducing the likelihood of going to war.
Ma is maybe guilty of conflating individual agreements between nation states and these kind of larger partnerships like Nafta, EU, Euratom etc (or not being sufficiently nuanced for effect).
Of course, these large supranational agreements (rather than trading agreements per se) seem to be what Trump is opposing.
Seems like we've somehow forgotten that before Trump came to power to denounce those agreements, every leftie and liberal, that is, all non corporatists, were also against NAFTA, TPPA, etc (and rightly so).
In the US, maybe. The Eu enjoys broad support on the 'metropolitan' centre-left across Europe - only being opposed really by the extreme left and the centre to far right.
Also, maybe the US should be careful what it wishes for. The UN, for instance, was set up post WWII to project US / Wilsonian values around the world. While trade deals / supranational agreements are inconvenient sometimes, the US may end up missing them when they're gone and the US has to deal with a truly multipolar world again.
>In the US, maybe. The Eu enjoys broad support on the 'metropolitan' centre-left across Europe - only being opposed really by the extreme left and the centre to far right.
Same in the US I think. I wasn't talking about democrats (the US "centre-left", but about the actual left.
>Also, maybe the US should be careful what it wishes for. The UN, for instance, was set up post WWII to project US / Wilsonian values around the world. While trade deals / supranational agreements are inconvenient sometimes, the US may end up missing them when they're gone and the US has to deal with a truly multipolar world again
Incorrect. His comments are coincidental with Chinese military announcements that smell like a campaign to manufacture a crisis that gives Chinese negotiators an upper hand in trade talks and US legislation to come.
I've felt for a while that more happened behind the scenes in this election than we know, and that part of what occurred is a collapse in the de-facto unwritten alliance between the USA and China that has existed for some time now. Clinton was working to preserve that alliance, and failed.
That's dangerous. I do agree that the USA has subsidized China too much to its own detriment, but the alternative could be significantly worse for both countries. A collapse of trade would crash both economies, and given the fragility of the Chinese economy a crash there could be a humanitarian and political disaster. It could also lead to the ascent of crazy hard liners.
Honestly I don't see either -- continuing to subsidize China or collapsing trade -- to be a good outcome. It seems we've painted ourselves into a corner.
How is the US subsidizing China's policies? US consumers buy lots of Chinese products because they offer cheap prices. Is a trading deficit really that hard to understand?
Trade deficits aren't subsidies. All it means is that there's a greater volume of home-currency-denominated investment in the "deficit" country than there are home-currency-denominated exports. So, in the case of the US, there's a net positive capital inflow - dollar-denominated investment. Dollar payments balance, as they must: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ahpWrFO8WFM/TZkyZmhwGLI/AAAAAAAAP...
Trade deficits are a meaningless thing to worry about. They're not actual deficits of any kind, and they don't even accurately measure trade, since they generally don't include services or the chains of value-adding.
> Trade deficits are a meaningless thing to worry about.
Manifestly wrong. Large trade deficits are unsustainable for three reasons. They cause private and public debt bubbles in the defect nation. They cause unemployment and underemployment in the defect nation. And, they can cause systemic inefficiencies in the surplus nations that lead to economic and social problems at home, and deflation abroad.
Private and public debt bubbles? There's no actual debt or deficit being incurred - it's just using money to pay for goods. We might as well worry that we have a trade deficit with the corner store, or our employer might worry that they have a trade deficit with us. "Trade deficits" are orthogonal to actual debt.
And they don't cause unemployment, they just change the composition of employment. Now, if a country resolutely insists on hampering its own economy with cartels and bizarre regulation, then yes, "trade deficits" can reveal some of those weaknesses more prominently, but they were already there.
Trade deficits are just a mercantilist phantom, conjured up by counting physical goods crossing a border, carefully not counting services and capital investment, and then claiming that wealth is being "drained". It's like measuring evaporation from a lake (exports), ignoring any and all precipitation (payment for exports), and then claiming that the lake is running dry, without actually measuring the water level (per capita income).
"Trade deficits" pretty much always comes down to "foreigners sell us things at a low price, therefore we need to fight them/restrict investment in our economy/make things more expensive for our own consumers". It's never been an actual problem.
I've read it, and it seems to be the same kind of mercantilist thinking that I'm criticizing. It's more of this "take an accounting identity, ignore the effects of one-half of it, bemoan the 'imbalance' of the other half."
I mean, you could solve the US 'trade imbalance' by making it extremely hard for foreigners to invest capital in the US. But of course this would have knock-on effects that make it harder for companies and workers in the US to access investment capital. Or you could shut out foreign goods - and ignore the costs of more expensive domestic goods for US consumers. None of this actually benefits people.
I see nothing in this article to distinguish it from the historically-always-wrong mercantilism that just kept drawing boundaries around areas and then yelled and shouted whenever more of one particular class of good went in than came out.
You are missing a step. How does "Keep trading" mean that war is inevitable?
It almost certainly means that devaluation of the dollar is inevitable (the ultimate fate of any currency that runs an account deficit for long enough), but to say "war is inevitable, therefore declare war today" is ridiculous.
This chart (1/2 through article): https://www.ft.com/content/acd3f2fc-084a-11e6-876d-b823056b2... suggests a disorderly adjustment for China if its economy is not rebalanced soon. With this adjustment will come much social unrest and with that always comes scapegoats and calls for war. So, its no the United States that concerns me.
>> then war with China is inevitable and better engaged in now, while the US still enjoys a qualitative advantage
Are you saying that, or are you saying the Mr. Ma is saying that? Because if you are saying that then I'm pretty sure you haven't been following the news since August 6th ... of 1945. What the hell kind of war with China do you think is going to happen, one fought with bubble-gum? War with China means the doomsday clock goes to midnight and we all develop a nice healthy green glow.
If the British Empire is fated to pass from life into history, we must hope it will not be by the slow process of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right and for truth.
What's with the war propaganda level rhetoric? How do you even compare world powers jostling for trade advantage with moral dichotomies of "right/truth" and "evil?" Any cursory examination of the practices of American businesses in international trade should immediately dispel any delusion that the US has clean hands in the matter. You're implying here (not very subtly either) that mutually assured nuclear destruction and loss of life in the billions is somehow a reasonable response to an asymmetry in economic advantage between world powers?
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the use of that quote in this context is then advocating nuclear holocaust. If that is what you are trying to say, the next question is then: Are you insane?
I'm not an economist, but from what I've read, running a trade deficit isn't necessarily a bad thing. The US ran trade deficits through the 80's and 90's while the economy was booming.
And there is never a good time for war between two nuclear powers.
I took a quick look and didn't see that, other than "Your comparison with easing credit is nonsensical", which I agree is somewhat uncivil and provocative. But what you did was worse, and if you're going to keep commenting here you (i.e. all of us) need the discipline to resist provocation.
If trade stops (read, if the US trade policy starts giving a shit about its working class, trade is never going to 'stop'), it's certainly bad for Jack Ma.
So I would take what he says with a grain of salt.
As the second richest person in China, he's in a position to know the minds and influence the opinions of party leadership. I absolutely do not take his statement with a grain of salt. I take it as a threat.
Lol, did you even read the article? He used it during your typical anodyne corporate speech at some event in Australia. This sentiment is as old as trade itself - "If goods don't cross borders, armies do." Ma was speaking to the unifying power of globalization and trade, not some ultimatum he was giving the Trump administration.
My careful reading of the situation tells me that Jack Ma was speaking a message of peace because it is in his current economic interest. The other side of the quote is that war is also an economic interest. I find it troubling that the Chinese power-elite are thinking and talking in these terms.[1]
Yet somehow we have unprecedented relative peace since the rise of global capitalism that can only be explained via the long tail of trade policies being a disincentive to conflict and an incentive to working things out peacefully.
Worse, Trump supporters have followed nothing but a narrative of appeasement for Russia. Its amusing to see their hypocrisy with China. The bias here is obvious.
> giving a shit about its working class
The idea that the Trump administration is fighting for the middle class is asinine. From repealing Frank-Dodd, to putting in Goldman Sachs employees into cabinet positions, putting in billionaires into cabinet positions, removing regulations that protect workers, raising mortgages on FHA loans, etc its obvious that the middle class worker can only lose under Trump.
>via the long tail of trade policies being a disincentive to conflict and an incentive to work things out peacefully.
Can you explain what you mean by long tail in these circumstances? I started taking a course on stats and understand generally what a long tail is, but I can't parse what or how you're applying the concept here.
> unprecedented relative peace since the rise of global capitalism
This is not as it appears. The 'peace' has come at a tremendous economic and social cost to the United States, and to the people of China. That Ma frames the alternative as war demonstrates how dire the situation must be in China, that stimulating domestic demand and rebalancing their economy is no longer a viable option. The long tail was a fog hiding a crisis.
It's a strong argument. Integrating supply chains across borders means that there's a big section of the business community ready to lobby against war that might threaten that investment. Not to mention that modern industry is much less "capturable"; you can capture farmland and mineral resources (especially oil!) in war, but fixed plant and creative businesses are just obliterated, not captured.