I would like to add here this: Ukraine gave up its nukes with the understanding that if big Red ever tried any shit, their backs would be protected. Ukraine, rich in minerals and oil and whatnot, became a favored piggybank of the west.
That said, they gave up their nukes. They don’t rate a NATO membership due to their vast corruption. But, if we cut the tether, who will trust us ever again?
It’s a good thread to mention things like why North Korea will never give up its Nukes. Not after Libya and not after Ukraine. I don’t know how to say “Fuck that,” in Korean, but I bet Little Kim does.
So, Italy should get a mention. They’re building up their army and recently sent their Navy to the South Pacific, cut back ties with China and vociferously back Ukraine.
In an unprecedented move in the spring of 2023, Italy sent the aircraft carrier Cavour and its accompanying flotilla into the South Pacific, an unmistakable show of closer alignment with the U.S. stance on Chinese claim to hegemony in the region. The carrier headed to Japan to brandish strong ties (including joint production of the F-35 fighter) with an alarmed—and rearming—Japan. In 2023, Italy upgraded its relations with Japan to the “strategic” level during a visit of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to Rome. It did the same with India during an exchange of high-level visits. In October, a second representative office of the Taiwan government opened in Milan in a ceremony attended by the Taiwanese Foreign Minister.
After signaling for months that it would not renew its agreement to be part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, Rome officially withdrew in December 2023. Expected gains in trade and investment within this framework had not materialized. As the only G-7 country to have joined, Italy’s position was discordant with both the United States and the EU. Instead, the Meloni government has indicated that it will work to “revitalize” its longstanding strategic partnership with China.
The U.S. and China were on the brink of nuclear war throughout the 50’s-60’s. The U.S. was facing Mao Zedong, a man willing sacrifice hundreds of millions of his own people in order to win. The U.S. agreed a better path would be to evolve the policy into “engagement”. In this way, by the U.S. establishing official relations with Beijing, trade status, and eventually bringing China into the World Trade Organization, the U.S. had hoped that the codependency of the U.S. and China on this underlying structure would be enough to deter both countries from going to war.
Unfortunately China continued to use proxies to wage total war on the U.S.
Now the U.S. policy is “Containment”. The underlying economic and trade structures we spent decades putting in place to prevent confrontation now have little leverage over China.
So my point is, the U.S. still funneled millions into China, knowing the risks, but calculating it is a better path forward than the alternative. It’s not that the U.S. made some huge mistake - it was calculated.
Now this is an excellent point. The U.S. stagnated in many areas, including infrastructure. Now most infrastructure is aged and needs to be replaced - monumental backlog of work that needs to be done.
I’m fine with that part. Although when it became clear that China is not going to allow free speech despite growing significantly in economic power and gaining a middle class, the US should have checked Beijing and force them to back off. The first time they should have done that was after the Tiananmen, and the second time was after China built the great firewall of China, and starts forcing US companies to give up user data. Instead the US continues to deepen the codependency, to the point that any economic containment would be hurting the US equally as bad.
Total bull.
China did not lock down the west or shaft the economies.
Most deaths were from something else, with ‘covid’ added to the death certificates.
700 million casualties - not from something that had a 99.6% survival rate.
Watch as Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee forecast the China relationship at a key date in 1997, and analyze the different approaches we can take — “engagement” vs “containment”. Winston Lord and others give a chilling and informative testimony which is still relevant today.
“This is going to be our most important and most complex foreign policy challenge…not only in Asia…but in the World, for the next few decades” -Winston Lord
I reckon it’s likely to stay strong for twenty years (at least), unless the American left manages finally to murder the domestic gas and oil industry and strangle nuclear in its crib. No doubt they’ll give it their best shot.
This assumes that an emerging American supply-chain foreign policy remains paramount in the medium- to long-term. Rebuilding an Americas-dominated supply chain should keep employment rates strong for the next ~10 years.
China will struggle to procure carbon energy in the near term (no way a Russia-China alliance can build out a pipeline within the next fifteen years), and be forced to adjust. Their goal should probably be to become a net exporter of energy by 2035 if they want to catch up by 2040.
From Q4 2023 to Q1 2024, most high tech companies in the US have or are in the midst of laying off 20% of their employees. If the economy looks good, it looks good on paper only.
I just read something in WSJ last week that many, if not most, laid-off tech workers are finding jobs in-house within companies trying to build out their own software systems, basically in-house enterprise resource systems. I’ll see if I can’t find the article later today.
If a few companies in different fields are laying off 20% of people when the situation calls for it in a spread out fashion, there’s nothing significant going on. If a vast majority of companies in the same sector are all doing this within 6 months, I think it’s pretty unusual.
