A World At War
With a debt ceiling deal now "doable" (Kevin McCarthy's word), Joe Biden was cleared for takeoff. He arrived in Japan Thursday for three days of meetings with his G7 counterparts.
The setting, Hiroshima, is apt. The city is a reminder "of what happens when a brutal war escalates into a nuclear one," as The New York Times put it. Olaf Scholz on Thursday described Hiroshima as emblematic of peace's necessity.
Russia is at the top of the agenda. So is China. Neither were invited to Hiroshima an
China could be a constructive third party in Ukraine, but they’re too focused on their self-interest, insecurity, and weaknesses.
The preponderance of CCP power is the country’s weakness. It’s still the party of the 1950s, serving its own narrow perspective of power, not differing much from Russia in regard to how it measures itself.
The insertion of Chinese manufacturing into the production cycle of American products in the 30 years after 1980 did wonders for US manufacturing margins and was an extraordinary play by the US. But today I own stock in a company that chose to make batteries in Malaysia, and I’m very glad they’re not in China. Makers of US products need to leave China because it’s only a matter of time before Xi Jinping tries to leverage its role in US production and managing margins.
To quote my mother when I was a young boy, “It’s not a ride you want to take at the carnival – it’ll make you sick.”
How much money do you suppose we’ll have to spend to try to be totally independent from China (not actually possible as three of our top meat suppliers are Chinese companies. A whole bunch of Tesla’s profits depend on Shanghai. The “we hate them” ship has pretty much sailed.
Growing independence from China is realistic. It will take a decade at least. Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia are some alternatives.
And India…
Who could possibly want data from Montana? There are more cows there than people. Cows don’t know very many useful secrets.
Guessing that you don’t know about Malmstrom Air Force Base near the city of Great Falls Montana. It is the home of the 341st Missile Wing of the Air Force Global Strike Command and one of only three military bases run by the Air Force that can operate the Minuteman III missiles for intercontinental use according to publicly available data. Based on our military’s love of secrecy and deception it might be in China’s interest to confirm or disprove the publicly available data.
What we have here is a stark situation where backward looking nationalism and religious hatred are trumping the desire to have a better life. The cold war never ended. Kissinger said even Mao was more nationalist than marxist…Russia wants to go back to 1860. China wants to be the Middle kingdom. Turkey want the Ottoman empire back. Iran wants it to be the 9th century. India has told 14% of their citizens that they aren’t legit because they are Muslim. North Korea- I don’t know what they want, etc. We need to grow up. All those people hate us. Some of the hatred is legitimate, but mostly it is a desire to blame their troubles on others. We need to govern as if governing matters. I have believed for a long time that our economic problems are political and that our political problems are mostly psychiatric….
Good point Ethan. This is a quandary enabled by, and/or caused by, our democratic freedoms. We have the power as individuals to indulge our freedom to be stupid. We can even be psychotic up to a point.
Psychology in the setting of our democracy and social and political evolution has always been a curiosity for me. It’s reality. We’re figuring it out as we go. But fundamentally, not unlike markets, we have an idea that we know what we’re doing. But we don’t know anything really until we get there, wherever that may be.
Real truths you share in your comments about different peoples fondly looking back in time. We can’t control that impulse in them. But in our country there has always in my life been a group of people, so-called republicans, who fondly look backward in time, rather than address the present realities.
This is today the party of Trump, not Lincoln. They do a disservice to the name of the party and its history. Today there’s a real reason to fear that Kevin McCarthy will give up the financial stability of his country to earn the love of Matt Gates. McCarthy somehow has reason to place greater value on the affections of his party colleagues than his country. That’s some very serious and unfortunate reality.