I’m not as confident. China has a capitalist economy but they don’t have a capitalist government. Capitalism is not a fundamental principle in China the way it is in the western world. The Chinese government basically sees their capitalist economy as a tool; it’s useful for producing wealth and resources. It’s a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Nationalism, on the other hand, is a fundamental principle for the Chinese government. Bigger even than communism. The current government has based its legitimacy on its ability to protect Chinese borders. And there’s no border issue that’s bigger than Taiwan. Having to admit Taiwan is no longer part of China would be a huge blow to the Chinese government. It would undermine the government and could literally cause the government to collapse.
I do wonder how China and the US will try to compete for influence in Africa. I don’t know if there will be proxy wars, but I’m sure both will be competing for influence in the continent.
I expect the Ukraine to be invaded completely by Russia shortly after Trump takes office.
Merkel would probably need to lead the charge to go in and fight them off, and I doubt that she will do that.
I’m less worried about the China/Taiwan thing. I think that Trump is going to use his willingness to make China look like idiots as a bargaining chip to make them back down. I don’t think that he’ll go so far as to try and trade blows with them, except financially. (Of course, I also expect that the Chinese will get the better of him in whatever deals he ends up trying to arrange with them. Probably he’ll get concessions from them that are minimally valuable to the US, while giving them total access to plunder the rest of Asia, and lose us a lot of growing markets to the Chinese.)
China is already way ahead on that. Further, while America generally ignores or vilifies South America, China has been making all sorts of connections for resource extraction there as well.
I meant politically more than militarily, but yeah, the EU in general isn’t a military powerhouse. They’ve relied on the US. Hence, if the US isn’t concerned with Russia, then Russia is pretty free to roll in.
Militarily, the EU outweighs Russia by a large factor. As you would expect from someone with 5 times the population and 10-15 times the GDP.
The problem would be coordination and leadership. If the US just shrugs and abrogates all militarily leadership, EU is almost certainly not going to act as a unified single actor.
Ukraine is, after all, not an ally.
It is quite possible that such an event could result in a serious reorganization of the EU militaries though, and not to Russia’s advantage.
No, but Putin is probably smart enough to grab while the grabbing’s good and stop once it’s not. I don’t think that he’ll go all Napoleon/Hitler and decide that there’s no such thing as “too much expansion”. But that’s going to be little comfort to the people in mainland Europe, and none at all to any countries that he can safely invade.
Are there any other prime targets, beyond the Ukraine?
He’s cozying up to Turkey. Are there any countries that the Turks would want taken out?
Putin, I think would very much like to reconquer the Baltics. But as long as he believes the EU and NATO would back them up, he is not going there. He seems ok with having ex-SSRs as client states, maybe more ok than he can economically afford.
The nearest non-NATO thing I think him and Turkey could agree on would be Iran, which is absolutely not a pushover.
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and, as someone else pointed out, Georgia.
The Baltics are NATO members, so Putin probably won’t just roll in the tanks, but he can do a lot of really heavy-handed political interference, right up to sponsoring coups d’etat.
