China might be able to do that through economic strength, but it will be some time before Russia or India can.
What about ICBM’s?
As an Indian, my perspective on the matter is - I hope it isn’t us. It probably won’t be either. For many reasons, but also because I don’t think we have the ambition. Our concerns are primarily regional. We have a large border with China, and we wish to maintain rough parity with them because China claims part of North Eastern India as its territory. And of course we have Pakistan. You’ve come to think they’re bad because of the double dealing and the use of Islamic terrorists to try and further their agenda, remember we’ve been dealing with that sort of thing from pretty much the instant both countries came into existence 60 years ago. So yeah, we want to build and maintain large superiority to discourage adventurism from the Pakistani side. I don’t see a constituency for wanting military influence in the world at large. And that suits me just fine.
I think Brazil has more corruption than any other BRIC nation doesn’t it? Or is the corruption just being publicized by them hosting the World Cup?
Not according to the Corruption Perceptions Index put out by Transparency International. They give Brazil a 42, in comparison to China’s 40, India’s 36, and Russia’s 28. (The highest score was Denmark and New Zealand’s 91 and the lowest was Afghanistan, North Korea, and Somalia’s 8.)
There’s a saying I’ve heard: Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be.
I did see that Little Nemo after I posted then I went a’ hunting and came across
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-18020623
and many others and realized I was wrong it wasn’t corruption it was red tape that is the problem. I was totally wrong of course but corruption that stops progress or bureaucracy that stops it, either way it stops.
Good news is, I would think red tape is easier to cut than corruption so Brazil should be in this discussion.
:eek: What would Chandragupta Maurya say?!
If you insist on looking at EU as one unit in terms of power status, and then discount it due to it not having means to project power, that seems a bit odd.
You can look at goings on in Africa for a start, then look at Ukraine, this is very much a power struggle between one former superpower and the EU, whilst military power is not being projected directly from the EU, the influence is enough to cause Russia to annexe part of it and to continue with a campaign of intimidation, and yet Russia will still lose out in the end, due to economic influence of the EU.
As for not investing in power projection, I’d say the new carriers which will operate under some form of shared ownership shows the EU will spend and pretty heavily - a carrier on its own is vulnerable, so when you do think about the cost of them, £6Bill apiece, you also need to factor in the escort fleet and aircraft, which means a commitment well in excess £12 bill per group.
http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/the-equipment/ships/future-ships/aircraft-carrier
Brazil is, IIRC, the seventh or eighth largest economy in the world right now. Just overtook Russia (though it has about 40% more people).
The thing with the EU is that it looks impressive but I think it’s a false appearance. Its “growth” is really consolidation.
I’m not saying this to knock Europe. Pretty much the opposite. Europe’s problem is that it’s already one of the most highly developed regions in the world. And while that’s great for the people living there, it also means that means there’s very little room for further development. Europe is already fully developed (with the exception of Eastern Europe where communism held those countries back.)
The EU is growing in the sense that a bunch of strong national economies are combining into one super-economy. But the whole will still be pretty much the sum of its parts.
I don’t know that there can or will be another “superpower.”
DEFINITELY not in the military sense. Russia can become a strong regional military power again, but they’re never again going to be able to project military power far from their own borders.
China can’t even conquer neighboring Taiwan.
As for the USA… we’re the closest thing the world has to a military superpower, but we’ve already seen just how little that’s often worth. The “good” news is that we can send 100,000 armed men anywhere in the world in a hurry. The bad news is, 100,000 men aren’t nearly enough to impose our will in most countries.
The word ‘growth’ in either military or economic terms is subject to some interpretation here.
Growth of say 15% may seem impressive, but that depends upon the base level, and just 1% may not seem much, until you consider the total size of an economy.
India could grow by pretty significant number, that does not mean it has a larger expansion than Germany, which is after all on of the big 4 economies of the world.
Then you have per capita income, along with other more nebulous measures of personal wellbeing.
The per capita measure is flawed in absolute terms because a lesser income does not necessarily translate to a lower standard of living, which is where the wellbeing comes in using things such as lifespan, infant mortality etc
In those forms of social measure, the US comes out high but other much smaller nations come out higher, but there can be no denying the power of the US economy, so personal wealth and wellbeing do not go hand in hand with international economic power.
In the following chart the US is near the top, India a way behind Russia, but given the larger population size of India it would seem there is greater scope for improvement, but that may not translate into power - if it happens at all.
In the meantime, is national power and national status really that important ?or perhaps you prefer to examine what is important to you and yours, try out the following, I think you will enjoy it
Whatever Chanakya told him to?
Do they look at it the same way? “If we could only accomplish this…” “As soon as we can pull this off…” “At very least, we should be able to…”
Is it seen as a major definitional obstacle to their own self-image as a mighty nation?
The great superpowers of my day were the Soviets and the U.S. Every attempt they made to project power beyond their borders failed miserably. The last true superpowers were Britain and France back when they had empires. Look at the failure of Cheney’s empire, look at that Idiot Putin stuck with subsidizing all of Crimea just to port a largely non-existent navy. There ain’t enough stuff in the world for India, China, and Brazil to all become wealthy economic/military superpowers. Hopefully they will look at my own country’s follies and failures and decide to go in a different and more humane direction. But I ain’t holding my breath waiting…
Nothing last forever, but the USSR’s intervention in Hungary, in 1956, was a big success in every way except morally. And their 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia also did what it was designed to.
The US projections which didn’t fail miserably, during the same era, were mostly in south and central America. You might not like what we did in the Dominican Republic (1965-66) or Chile (1973), but I don’t know how you can call them miserable failures.
I’d also argue that the US invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, did not rise to the level of a miserable failure. A lot of people in Kuwait actually look on it as a success.
There are many examples of deterrent US aircraft carrier deployments that weren’t followed up by war, and thus were other than miserable failures.
Our nuclear missile submarines (as well as those of the USSR) are another example of projecting power beyond national borders where there has not been, to date, a miserable failure.
One more thing about non-miserable-failures.
The one intervention that I thought was sure to be a miserable failure, Afghanistan, so far is not. The goal was to prevent use of Afghanistan to launch mega-terror attacks on the US, and, well, there haven’t been any since that invasion. Meeting your goal is not a miserable failure.
Even from a humanitarian standpoint, it’s far too soon to brand it a miserable failure:
You might say that when the US withdraws, then it will become a miserable failure, as today in Iraq. We’ll see.
Oh, and I should have mentioned the biggest not-miserable-failure when it comes to projecting force beyond out borders. Ever since we starting having US troops occupy bases in Europe, that continent’s endemic warfare has stopped (except for in the Balkans, where our interventions of fifteen years ago were far from miserable failures).
If there was some way to add up the successes and failures, it might be a wash!
Your not going to like this, and I disagree with the veiled Obama criticism, but it’s in the ballparK of correct:
Chile? Replacing the moderate communist Allende with the monstrous murderous hell-on-whiles dictator Augusto Pinochet (pronounced “Pig, pig, pig, sooey.”) was definitely no triumph for the U.S. It was a ham-fisted, criminal CIA intrusion on another nation’s internal affairs…which might have been excusable if it had actually served either our purposes or was of some benefit to the Chilean people. It was neither. It didn’t advance world democracy, and it led to thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of exiles.
How do you assess it as being successful to any degree at all?
He acknowledged that success doesn’t have to be moral. So it was a success in the sense that Allende was overthrown and Pinochet did seize and hold power.