The era of the superpower is over. The new missile and drone technologies have made naval dominance impossible and ended the ability to devastate relatively advanced nations without them being able to shoot back. There is no power in the world that has the capabilities and might of the old USSR and the USA from 1945 to 2010 or so.
We have three great powers: China, the US and Russia.
There are regional powers: Brazil and Iran and the EU and Turkey and Japan and even India, which punches way below its population numbers.
But even a backwards, bombed to hell country like Yemen can defy America’s hold on the seas.
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The EU is particularly amusing, in that they could have been one of the great powers, but over and over again chose austerity, contraction and vassalage to America. The ship is sailing out of port, it’s theoretically possible they could turn it around, but politically impossible. Their day: indeed, their centuries, are done. Pathetic.
This is going to be a fair different and more constrained world. There will be more wars and revolutions. Great Powers will actually have to seriously compete for the allegiance of important minor powers, though China’s been doing this for a couple decades now, offering huge benefits compared to the US.
Russia’s getting in on the game. Where China offers development, Russia offers to fix your military problems for you, or at least make them manageable and to sell you oil and grain cheap.
America and its allies offer your elites membership in the club, in exchange for impoverishing or otherwise screwing over your own population. If you don’t do what they say, they lecture the hell out of you and try to sanction you into an early grave, if they don’t launch a coup or use you as a cat’s paw in a war.
If America wants to compete, it’s going to have to start offering some deals that don’t suck.
Nations will be more free to act as they choose than they have been in, literally, centuries. Since they were forced into unnatural shapes and relations by the great powers and superpowers, this will lead to significant changes, especially in places where ridiculous borders were drawn which ignored geography and ethnicity. (This is most true in Africa, but not only there.)
But the most important thing is simply that the age of the military colossus is over. China is the new industrial colossus, but climate change and environmental collapse is likely to spike that before they reach their full growth.
Welcome to the post-European Age.
Geoff Dewan
“If America wants to compete, it’s going to have to start offering some deals that don’t suck.”
Occurs to me that this pretty much applies to the Democratic Party as well.
Feral Finster
“The EU is particularly amusing, in that they could have been one of the great powers, but over and over again chose austerity, contraction and vassalage to America. ”
Europeans like being slaves.
Purple Library Guy
As a partial aside, I have come to the conclusion that if anything or anyone ends up saving us from climate change, it will be China. China has their industrial machine humming away on the energy transition–solar panels, wind, batteries, electric cars (and buses and high speed trains) and so on. But the thing is, pretty soon they’ll be mostly finished with the big key stuff. And then they’ll have all these factories all dressed up with nothing to produce.
The Chinese government would prefer not to shutter half those factories. History and what they’re already starting to do suggests they’ll export the hell out of all that stuff, and if it doesn’t export fast enough they’ll make big deals with other countries to get them to buy it, Belt-and-Road style. So basically, they’ll energy-transition every country that isn’t a close enough US ally to join the trade war, which would include most of Asia including central, most of Africa, and most of Latin America (these days probably including Mexico even). Europe is doing its own transition.
That leaves northern North America, which although it’s kind of moving away from free trade may still find it awkward to try to maintain the old style technological matrix all by itself when everyone else has gone electric, especially when there’s strong domestic political pressures to shift. Furthermore, once the transition is part way along, oil demand will drop and oil companies will go broke and lose a lot of their political clout. So the US and Canada may be laggards for a while, especially if the oil companies succeed in installing climate denier fascists in government, but if China converts the rest of the world and the EU changes over as well, they will eventually have to make the change-over.
Mark Level
All true as true could be, Ian. Obvious, but amazing how none of the MSM would admit anything here. Maybe people aren’t as stupid in ‘Murica as I think; the Washington (CIA) Post lost over half their readers in the last year, now they’re losing more Blue MAGA morons like Stephen King who are unsubscribing because they wouldn’t endorse Kamala!!
I’ll differ with Feral Finster on one thing– it’s the Euro. (& Australian) elites who like being slaves. To be fair, like here, the “comfortable” voters are too stupid & the poor too checked out to revolt (France during the Gillet Jaunes revolt was an exception.) And people like Ursula Van der Lyin’ imagine that they are powerful & in control while taking orders & flushing their countries down the tubes.
In closing, great minds think alike– Caitlin Johnstone’s “The West Has Pretend Heroes” fits pretty well with what you are saying. Like the late, great Bill Hicks used to joke, “Have you ever noticed that people who don’t believe in evolution look kind of unevolved?”
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-west-only-has-pretend-heroes?publication_id=82124&post_id=150885121&isFreemail=true&r=9ik3n&triedRedirect=true
Feral Finster
“I’ll differ with Feral Finster on one thing– it’s the Euro. (& Australian) elites who like being slaves. To be fair, like here, the “comfortable” voters are too stupid & the poor too checked out to revolt (France during the Gillet Jaunes revolt was an exception.) And people like Ursula Van der Lyin’ imagine that they are powerful & in control while taking orders & flushing their countries down the tubes.”
@Mark: I get what you are saying, but since it is only the elite who matter and who make the decisions, any distinction is academic.
Joe
The most arbitrary and ridiculous border I know of is the one between Mexico and The USA.
Dan Kelly
@PLG
the old style technological matrix all by itself when everyone else has gone electric
Do you mean the old style ‘oil industrial’ matrix?
What does ‘everyone else’ going electric mean exactly? Or, if not exactly, then at least stated a bit more precisely?
Are Russia and China currently in the process of replacing all their heavy machinery, ships, trucks and cargo carriers and all the oil-based industrial processes that currently allow for ‘everyone else’ – including themselves – to ‘go electric’…with electric?
Are there energy sources – other than nuclear – that have the energy density necessary to power the above?
oil demand will drop and oil companies will go broke and lose a lot of their political clout
They allegedly haven’t had said clout for decades anyway.
This is supposedly what brought Trump to power, among many other things. He was alleged to represent the old crudgy oil interests that the tech-bro/finance dems across the aisle had rightfully steered clear of in the interest of saving humanity from the climate catastrophe that was brought to us by scientists and engineers – the same brilliant people who will audaciously steer us out of this quagmire that is going to kill most of us anyway.
Except for those lucky enough to live in the far reaches of Russia, which will be a Floridian paradise for the few lucky survivors.
With lots of oil and natural resources to burn to boot!
Remember, it wasn’t the oil companies that were leading the charge for Bush Jr’s Oded Yinon plan – Eretz Israel wars. Going back to Bush Sr and the preceding Reagan years, you will find many statements from representatives of oil majors calling for stability in the region.
The ‘oil companies’ – which are in actuality multinational globalized conglomerates who must remain viable to lenders – they will consolidate, move into other areas. Some will close.
What of the ‘BRICS’ countries? Are they basing their entire emerging multipolar world framework on a basket of their electrical doodads?
The question is rhetorical.
bruce wilder
The 19th and 20th centuries saw the emergence of the common man. His mass, his energy, his intelligence drove everything. Power flowed from organization of common men. Public opinion ruled nation states where kings previously held sway over kingdoms. Mass production and mass distribution, public education and the printing press, standard spelling and pronounciation, standard weights and measures, statistics, broadcast media and communications, General Electric, General Mills, General Motors. From the triumph at Valmy to the triumph at Gettysburg to the triumph at River Rouge to Los Alamos to landing a man on the moon, the ability to organize a common effort at scale proved to be the winning hand.
The relative dominance of the U.K., the U.S., Western Europe and Japan was based on getting to the future, a future of mass mobilization for production and consumption, sooner rather than later.
Slowly, which is to say at a rapidly accelerating pace over a period longer than a human lifespan and so not quite noticeable until it springs full-grown, like Wisdom borne from the headache of Zeus, something else is emerging. Human ambition and human numbers have hit their collective heads on the ceiling of earth’s carrying capacity, the ability of the natural environment to absorb the waste attendant on human activity.
The wiser course, imho, would be to collectively hold back, but self-restraint is not the elite spirit of the age. With the continuing advance of technology driving up and up the productive capacity of a few leveraging machines and the greed of a different few expanding their consumption, on a finite planet, something has to give and that something will be human mass.
If population growth accelerated the growth of surplus from scale by mass production industry and mass armies, what comes next seems likely to feed on surplus made available by the abandonment of resources by a shrinking, aging population even while the insatiable greed and power lust of a few drives toward obscene levels of consumption. The few seem likely to try to do without the many, without the mass. It is hard to read anything else into the employment of “artificial intelligence” as robot assistance, beginning with that pre-eminent symbol of Fordist industry eclipsed, the autonomous, driverless automobile. If you can eliminate the driver, why not eliminate the passenger, too? What fate mass consumption in a world where producers are desire-less machines? As that service class of technicians and designers in actual command of the technology concentrates, and the consumer class commanding financial wealth and ownership also concentrate, do they fight or merge? And, how do they eliminate the surplus population, that useless mass of eaters and farters, which claims neither ownership of the means of production nor technical command of the means of production?
I expect these questions to be contested if not resolved by war, as so many questions of economic competition and conflict have always been. The supersonic missile that sinks the aircraft carrier or the drone that targets the soldier in a trench are merely opening salvos in this new era of war. Wars have always been arguments, however grotesque— attempts to persuade. Can you argue with or persuade a Waymo? Does it care if you tip? Surely it knows if you tip in this age of mass surveillance. It might learn to care in some way, the better to target and manipulate. It is a momentous thing, this driverless taxicab. An elaborate bundle of machinery to control processes for producing transport services, the automobile, but given purpose and intention by the driver. And, the driver given direction as to intended purpose by the paying client (or the owner in the case of chauffeur as driver). I am presuming that removing the driver from the immediate vicinity of the vehicle by substituting artificial intelligence as mediator of purpose and intention does not actually eliminate the human driver — merely puts him or her at some remove, introduces a time delay and additional layers of anonymity and denial of responsibility for consequences. It is a scary proposition, removing the most important safety feature in the design of the system: the skin in the game, the stake put at risk by the controller. The passenger still has skin in the game, even if the “driver” does not. It is hard to see that as a stable social relation.
This problem has always been central to the pathologies of capitalism: the specialization of labor in production means that technical knowledge and control is the province of producers within the scope their organization of production allows, but they do not necessarily have to eat their own dog food. Libertarians argue for the magical cleansing power of “competition” and sunshine (transparency and labeling), but mostly that is idiocy taking a brief for thinly disguised predation and fraud.
What supercharges this social tension, to my mind, is the removal of the common man from production. That the pilot is on the same plane as the passengers is an important brake on the pathology of the people who run Boeing or American Airlines. That masses were once needed to staff the factories was a reason to treat the mass of consumers reasonably well. When the mass of consumers was needed to staff the military production of WWII was when social conditions improved. We are testing both whether we need masses at all and whether production in anonymous, irresponsible “hands” can be trusted.
In war, the misery of common soldiers and their capacity for mutiny and fragging have been important brakes on the pathology of strategic leadership. Not much of a brake in many historic conflicts. We are in the not too distant future going to try to do without. It might be a short trial indeed, if we go quickly enough to assassinations by Tesla Ninjas. Time will tell, I suppose.
Sorry for the meandering.
Alan Sutton
No need to apologise. A meandering in the open air which produces many avenues to explore. You may be right. It is at least one way of looking at it and as brutal as it sounds, is not false only because of that.
Tallifer
Europe has never been and shall never be united. The Romans, the Franks, the Holy Roman Emperors, the mediaeval Popes, Napoleon and Hitler all failed. Likewise the League of Nations and the European Community. Too many sovereign principalities and demagogues. Which makes the practical unity of China and Russia all the more amazing. Russia reminds me of 18th century Prussia: economically and demographically a pipsqueak, but a great power through shear balls.
Purple Library Guy
In answer to Dan Kelly’s questions, which he claims are rhetorical so he doesn’t have to deal with the answer . . . “Yes.”
Yes, China (not Russia yet for obvious reasons, but when the time comes China will help them) is shifting all that stuff. Yes, there’s technologies for all of it and yes, they work. Yes, the energy sources involved are not just adequate but cheaper and plentiful . . . the main reason things are changing over is not climate change, it’s been made clear that nobody’s doing dick all because of climate change–we just happened to get lucky in that the replacement technologies are superior. Yes, the BRICS are going to go electric, in many cases allowing them to leapfrog, to skip creating expensive fossil fuel infrastructure.
Oh, but there’s one “no”: “They [oil companies] allegedly haven’t had said clout for decades anyway.”
Um, what the fuck? Nobody alleges that. Because it’s moronic, and the only people moronic enough to imagine something that stupid are the alt-right and they wouldn’t allege that because they love oil companies. Which would in turn be because a ton of the funding for the propaganda alt-right people are marinating in, was bought by oil companies.
Dan Kelly
In answer to Dan Kelly’s questions, which he claims are rhetorical so he doesn’t have to deal with the answer . . . “Yes.”
And yet here I am PLG, dealing with the [non-specific] ‘answer’ you have given.
Yes, China (not Russia yet for obvious reasons, but when the time comes China will help them) is shifting all that stuff. Yes, there’s technologies for all of it and yes, they work
Oh? Where is all the battery-powered heavy machinery in China?
Here is an example – local to me – of what is going on:
https://pressofatlanticcity.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/nj-truck-emissions-rule/article_79f9f4d8-a4ed-539f-a4a8-9d8de3659a0c.html
The truck drivers and others quoted here may or may not be ‘alt-right’ – I do not know. That is not the point, and attaching a label them simply serves to further mask the truth that is right in front of us.
I will help you here, PLG.
Here is a video about ’11 New Electric semi-trucks available you must see!:
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=rKZVX3ga1FY
These aren’t anything approaching a replacement for what we have now. Read the comments from people who live and breathe this industry.
Do you see the lies? Do you see what is going on in the interest of profits?
This is all akin to growing corn for fuel.
Diesel engines, incidentally, are much more efficient than gas engines and thus produce less CO2.
The question was rhetorical because I correctly anticipated your incorrect response. It’s rather easy to do, frankly.
And here we are.
Dan Kelly
What of the ‘BRICS’ countries? Are they basing their entire emerging multipolar world framework on a basket of their electrical doodads?
This was the actual statement to which I – admittedly somewhat wise-assedly – then responded with the ‘rhetorical question’ statement.
The straightforward answer to this is: No, they are not basing the emerging BRICS framework on electrical or battery or ‘renewables’ or anything of the sort. They are basing it on the resources they control which lead to those ends.
The sun is ‘renewable.’
Purple Library Guy
So you’re saying that present electric trucks are not that long range and the infrastructure for them is so far lacking, therefore no transition is taking place.
A few years ago you’d have been able to say that kind of stuff about cars–the range was poor, there weren’t any charging stations, they were really expensive. Now it’s clear that in a few years the majority of cars sold worldwide will be electric, and the Chinese sell models for less than ten grand US. A few years before that you’d have been able to say that solar and wind were too expensive to ever see widespread deployment. Now solar is the cheapest power there is in most places and wind is not as cheap as solar, but still damn cheap. In some places building new solar is cheaper than using existing coal plants! A few years ago people could say that steel was a huge stumbling block, that there was no electrified technology for making steel, or that concrete was a massive problem, that there was no way to make zero-emission concrete. Not any more, there are multiple solutions for both. Some of the concrete ones actually ABSORB CO2.
Electric is trickling into small use-cases as well, all those little things . . . I just saw a Youtube ad for an electric snowblower.
For the general broad case of industrial processes that require high heat, which have needed to burn natural gas or maybe coal to get that level of heat, some people recently started a company selling these partially-conductive ceramic bricks which can be superheated by putting an electric current through them; blow air past them and you have superheated air, works just like superhot flame . . . and they store the heat, which is useful as well. For many industrial processes, they make a drop-in replacement for natural gas burning. Not long ago, this technology did not exist; currently, it is not widespread. But it or technologies like it will be moving forward.
So long haul trucking will shift later than short haul trucking or buses, but after all, a few years ago there WERE NO electric semis. If your list of 10 is not ready to take over the world of trucking, the fact is that list of 10 EXISTS, although just a few years ago there was no such list. Like cars and power sources and etcetera, the technology will advance and the infrastructure will get built. The writing is on the wall.
There are two areas I can see that present significant problems, and trucking isn’t one of them. One is shipping, for which some solutions have been floated but they all have drawbacks, and the other is planes. In the end shipping will probably get sorted out, but planes may just have to use some kind of synthetic fuel, which would be stupidly expensive. But planes are frankly marginal compared to the size of the whole economy, even the whole transportation economy. If they’re the only thing with that kind of kludge solution, it won’t be that huge a deal.
Purple Library Guy
Incidentally, long haul trucking ought to be a marginal technology in the first place. If the trucking industry paid their expenses in the same way that the train industry does, they would not be able to compete. But the government subsidizes trucking by not making them contribute their share of the building and maintenance of the highways and roads they use, while rail companies pay the entire cost of building and maintaining railroads. Either take trucking off the government teat or put rail on it (nothing wrong with government building and maintaining transportation infrastructure, but treatment should be equal), and trucking would almost certainly shrink in importance a great deal.
different clue
Oil companies don’t have infinite clout. But they have enough clout to get the results they want in the area they care about.
They used their clout over a 30 year period to fill the collective brainspace with a cloud of fake FUD about the reality of manmade global warming. They have brought American society to the point of 50% of Americans believing that global warming is a liberal hoax. And they have made American political society paralyzed enough on the question that weaning off and shutting down the oil industry will remain unthinkable for enough more decades to give the oil industry time to find, drill, frack, pump and mine another few-couple trillion barrels of oil and tar to burn up in all the engines and boilers of the world and put all the carbon up in the air all around us.
Now that’s clout.
Jorge
China has a small but interesting percentage of long-distance trucking using compressed LNG.
https://www.ft.com/content/301f0161-e9a2-4b3b-bfdc-d838e765aceb
Accd. to some, the Texas oil patch (Permian Basin) is peaking in oil and is delivering more and more natural gas. Meaning, the US should import these trucks.
different clue
@Jorge,
If we Americans are not smart enough to make compressed LNG trucks, then we should let China build LNG truck factories here to sell us here the trucks they make here. They could repatriate the profits to China all they like, but at least one more bunch of American workers would not be turned into destitute paupers.