We also sided with tons of authoritarian governments during the cold war, and the more authoritarian USSR had a lot of allies around the world. So I could be wrong. But it seems a nation which is a liberal democracy like South Korea or Australia would have more in common with the US than China.
If it’s not a new technology, it’s going to be drone/UAV-based cruisers. You heard it here first.
Looking at it dispassionately, with populations of over a billion each, both countries could lose a hundred million people and not even blink.
That’s a common argument but France and Germany were huge trading partners before WWI. Their economic ties didn’t stop them doing anything stupid.
It’s like Poland, Iraq, and Georgia were just begging to be invaded. Walking the dark alleys of Embassy Row by themselves late at night, flaunting their strategic geographical advantages, leading superpowers on with that “come hither, I spend less than $100 billion on defense” sort of look.
All I’m saying is that when a lonely country chooses to go out and get drunk, and troops from a stronger, more powerful country end up finding their way into the first country, it isn’t right to call it an invasion. Sometimes these things are consensual, you know.
Actually there is a problem. We were the arsenal of Democracy during WW2. We had a huge industrial base that could move to building war machines. Detroit auto plants were cranking out airplanes and tanks.
With all the outsourcing, we would have to buy them from China. Being capitalists, they would probably sell them to us. We allowed our industrial base to shrink so the top 1 percent could make even more money than they already had.
There is a danger to the safety of America because of that. We don’t have the industrial capacity to make war materiel in a short time. China does.
As has been pointed out to you dozens of times, our industrial base hasn’t shrunk. Our manufacturing sector is larger than it ever was. It’s only smaller as a PERCENTAGE of our economy, and that’s only because other sectors have grown much faster than manufacturing.
So, if you come up with a cite like you usually do that manufacturing used to be 25% of our economy, and is now 10% of the economy, that doesn’t mean manufacturing has shrunk.
China has a much smaller manufacturing sector than America does. That’s a simple fact. Say it with me. America manufactures more than China. The American economy is 3 times larger than the Chinese economy, China’s population is 4 times larger than America’s, so China’s per capita GDP is 1/12th of America’s. These are facts. You could look it up.
That made me laugh. China is regarded with a great deal of suspicion in India. This is quite understandable of course, we’ve lost a war at their hands, have active border disputes, and they’re fairly keen on helping Pakistan as a counterweight to India. All that said, I don’t think anyone really knows how China is going to play it over the next few(10-20) years. They’re very unscrupulous though(give the impression of being positively machiavellian in their foreign policy), and that hardly inspires any confidence. IMO only.
You’d think two countries whose border is the world’s most forbidding and undesirable mountain range could avoid border disputes.
What would happen, seriously, if the U.S. ever embargoed China?
Pretty ridiculous isn’t it? The ONE time India initiates a land grab, it does so to take over the most expensive, inhospitable and otherwise generally inconsequential battlefield in the world. It was taken from Pakistani occupation though, not Chinese.
Also, the border disputes with China are largely in the North East of India, parts of which China claims were historically ‘South Tibet’. There’re massive infrastructure buildups on the Chinese side(roads and such like, which hawks immediately interpret to mean troop deployment). Which in turn is leading to similar infrastructure being built on the Indian side too. Who knows, all that sabre rattling may do some good yet.
I’d argue that this has already happened, and carriers are just big floating targets. One example: Millennium Challenge 2002 - Wikipedia. Another example, by way of an anti-ship missile: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/moskit.htm. That missile is the basis of the Chinese version that is being designed the overwhelm carrier defensive screens. Although that doesn’t have to be that sophisticated, and you only have to have a few missiles actually strike their target. There is still the issue of getting within range to launch these missiles. A few diesel-electric subs would take care of that.
Very possible. That’s the trouble with paradigm shifts in military history, no one goes round with a big stamp saying “obsolete”. You don’t actually find out until you go into battle and the obsolete equipment you’ve blown your military budget on is reduced to so much scrap metal (at happened to HMS Prince of Wales in 1941).
China would cave. I’m mostly basing that on the ability of the individual chinese person to be able to buy food. While they do export a lot of stuff to the rest of the world, closing American ports to Chinese goods would not adversely affect Americans, there is probably enough goods stockpiled in the port of long beach and others to supply costco and walmart would probably stall large sections of the chinese work force,
Couple that with controlling the sea lanes and forcing them to re route oil supplies over their land borders, would take time. The time line that they need for going through their strategic food stockpiles is not known, but even at ten percent of the population facing borderline starvation, would be 100 million people.
They could hit back, but they are still for the most part, a regional power. I’d need to hear a reason why we would want to embargo China, before making any more guesses.
Declan
I dunno . . . Why do we want to embargo Cuba?
They probably have a cuban summer/spring scheduled, or penned in, lots of atrocities against cubans wanting a new government, possibilities are endless.
Declan
So? Drop the embargo, maybe it’ll give things a push.
Absolute fantasy land.
10% of China would be facing starvation in the couple of weeks before Walmart’s back orders ran dry?
Chinese imports of agricultural products are booming, but look at the big ticket items. It’s not Big Macs and Ben & Jerry’s, not even corn, soya and wheat (primarily to feed to their pigs), it’s fibres.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aib775/aib775e.pdf
They own your arse, because you sold it to them.
You’re lucky they were buyers, 'cause nobody else had the necessary cash.
To pay it all back, or at least service the loan, requires increased taxation (which the US hasn’t the stomach for) or selling them things they want to buy, which has the happy advantage of being win-win. In that regard a US trade embargo would be as inane and counterproductive as the debt default that was recently on the radar as some quick fix.