Back in the 70s and 80s, the USSR’s economy was in terrible shape. It hadn’t always been, that’s a triumphalist myth: for a long time it out-performed the West, and economic textbooks of the 50s discuss the problem that the Soviets were growing faster than we were.
So Reagan’s administration came up with a plan: they’d increase defense spending, the Soviets would have to do the same, and the strain would screw over their economy. There’s various arguments, but it seems to have worked.
Recently Trump suggested that Russia, America and China all cut their defense spending in unison. Russia was interested, China said no.
Now, of course, the US spends way more than anyone else on its military, but that’s mostly because it over-pays for everything because of vast corruption.
But the real issue here is that China is a rich state, and the US is not. Forget GDP, it’s completely misleading. China is ahead in everything that matters: 80%+ of tech fields, has more population and the largest industrial base in the world and it’s the main trade partner of more nations than anyone else, including America.
This graphic is illustrative, but it applies to everything except planes and launch capacity, and soon it will apply to them too:
As Keynes once said, “we can afford anything we can do.” The corollary is that we can’t afford anything we can’t do. China can afford almost anything because it can do almost anything. Within four years it will have cheaper and more lift capacity than the US. Its civilian airliner industry is taking off, it’ll take longer, and the competition is Airbus, not Boeing, but they’ll win that competition too: even if Airbus avoids the Boeing quality collapse, Chinese jets will be cheaper and about as good.
China can easily afford its military budget. I’d guess it could double or triple it and be OK. The US is struggling: the Trump cuts are a reflection of that, and are at the same time reducing government capacity, of which China has plenty, and unlike America government, they’re competent and at this point not even very corrupt and what corruption does exist is honest corruption—you can take a cut, but you have to deliver on time and on budget.
So China’s laughing at America. “No thanks. We’ll just keep out-producing you and we know you can’t keep up, but feel free to try.”
mago
Back in the US/Back in the USSR. . .
sorry can’t help myself.
Jerren
I’m fascinated with this line of thinking. For any that don’t already know, Dimitri Orlov wrote a very interesting book called ‘Reinventing Collapse’ about his travels to and from the disintegrating USSR over a number of years. He projects how a similar event might play out in the U.S, with many novel observations. (USSR didn’t have mortgages, for example. Also, the working class had long distrusted basic institutions and so had developed a fledgling ecosystem of practical workarounds.)
Niall Ferguson wrote an essay las summer called “We’re All Soviets Now” that makes a sanitized version of Ian’s argument for the mainstream. Ian, your analysis over the years has proven more insightful and predictive than these arrogant talking heads. Thank you for the work you do. Without the independent media we’d be in much worse shape.
GrimJim
A new creeping worry has been taking up mindspace lately.
Trump and the MAGAts and Elon and the Tech-bros and the Christofascists and the Oligarchs are not going to be satisfied with simply crashing the government.
They are going to have to crash the whole worldwide system, if they want to maintain their power, wealth, and position.
They don’t just want to create “isolationist” USA, they want to make sure the rest of the world is so damaged, they will never be a threat of any sort – military, economic, cultural, what have you.
So the “creative destruction” we are seeing applied to the Federal government will also be applied internationally.
Canada, Panama, Greenland. Crazy ass tariffs. This is all just the start to completely upend and destroy the international system.
They not only do not want any other powers in a multi-polar system, they don’t want any sort of potential resistance at all.
They want the rest of the world supine and defenseless against them.
Trump and the MAGAts out of hate and jealousy.
Elon and the Trch-bros because they will stand no rivals.
The Christofascists out of hatred, racism, and hubristic application if prophecy.
The Oligarchs because they want untraveled access to resources.
So eventually, and sooner than later, it will become obvious that their plan, as terrible as it is, is to destroy the whole system and create world-wide anarchy.
At that point, someone in a position of power with a decent number of nukes and tge needful delivery system will decide they have a better chance of surviving by hitting the US with an EMP, a la “One Second After.”
Tomorrow? Next month? Surely, not more than a few years from now.
Either they strike first or they fall…
Cor
There’s no such thing as honest corruption…
Emma
As Dimitri Orlov noted more than a decade ago. No, it’s far worse than 1980s USSR now and it’s going to be far worse than 1990s Russia.
After surveying the carnage of the last week (in Gaza and amid the US civil bureaucracy, but then having to deal with a particularly clueless pair of in-laws this week, I’m not sorry. I’m an accelerationist now.
GrimJim
“I’m an accelerationist now.” — Emma
We are all accelerationists now.
I dread reading the news. I dread opening the Internet, as you can’t get away from it.
They are now affecting everything you see and hear.
And if there is no stopping them because there is no one left with the guts, well, they need to just damn well get it all over with.
That way we can pick up whatever pieces are left and try to move on.
The problem is, it is not like fighting a dragon, which is a comparison I often see.
It is like fighting a cancer that has metastasized.
There is no head to cut off, you have to somehow kill every last bit of it.
Because if you do not, it grows right back and tries to kill you again.
We are dealing with many cancers. The Lost Cause. Dispensationalism. The Robber Baron Oligarchs. The KKK Deadenders. The Anti-New Deal Capitalists. The Anti-Great Society/Anti-Civil Rights Thermidorians. The Randian Objectivist Libertarians. The Reaganites. PNAC. The Tea Party. MAGAts.
They are all now in power. Their leaders, like Trump, are not the disease, they are merely symptoms. It is one vast tangled hydra.
Cut one head off, two grow in its place. Some heads breathe fire, others poison. Most just blindly gnaw away at anything in reach, sometimes even other of its own heads.
There is no way to defeat it.
All you can do is wait for it to finish feeding on itself, then pick off the remaining pieces.
Unfortunately, a lot of innocent people will die — millions, if not billions — before that happens.
But push it to feast upon itself faster, and maybe, just maybe, it will do less damage to everything else.
We can only hope.
GrimJim
“For any that don’t already know, Dimitri Orlov wrote a very interesting book called ‘Reinventing Collapse’ about his travels to and from the disintegrating USSR over a number of years. ” — Jerren
Dang, I haven’t thought about Orlov in years. He wrote great stuff.
Sadly, I think he was too optimistic.
If we only could just split up along some sort of ethnic/political lines as the Soviet Union did.
But the US is even worse off than Yugoslavia was.
Our ethno-religious mix is not remotely as neat and tidy as it was in Yugoslavia.
Nor is it even just a matter of urban versus rural.
Take a map of the US. Break it up into pieces by county and metropolitan areas — and break the metropolitan areas into boroughs.
Jumble them all together in a bowl, then pull them out one by one and assemble a patchwork quilt from the pieces.
That’s where we really stand.
Bits of bright red, royal blue, and deep purple, mixed with crimson, and viridian, and violet, next to brick orange, eggshell blue, and indigo, divided by black, and white, and yellow, here a bit of green, there lots of brown and grey, with dots of jale, ulfire, and dolm all over.
It is going to get real ugly, real fast, when the shooting starts.
And all but a few are like fish when it comes to governments, federal, state, county, and municipal — like fish and water, they have no idea they live their entire lives wrapped in and fed by them, until suddenly they are no longer there, and they are suddenly gasping for water as they die flopping on the beach.
In Soviet Russia, they had long before adapted to living without a functional government, so the disaster was minimized.
USAns have never lived without a government and have no idea how central it is to their everyday life.
They are about to start finding out as DOGE and Trump and crew start taking a chainsaw to the federal government.
But what they are doing is all merely prelude.
The Berlin Wall fell November 9, 1989.
The Soviet Union fell December 26, 1991.
Took a bit over two years from the first real cracks to the final collapse.
We will be lucky if we have that long.
The Yugoslav Wars lasted 10 years, and really, never ended.
They lost less than 1% of their population, though upwards of 20% was displaced during the war. Germany lost about 10% of its population during WWII, including military and civilians; the Soviet Union lost about 15% overall.
The deaths from the collapse of the United States will make those figures pale in comparison…
someofparts
This post from NCap this morning explains WHY the techbros are wrecking the US economy. Satan will give these guys bonuses for going above and beyond anything he could have imagined.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/the-dark-enlightenment-the-tech-oligarch-ideology-driving-doges-destruction.html
Feral Finster
I suspect that the reason that the Soviet Union started to collapse when L.I. Brezhnev made his “stability in cadres” speech. He probably had to, but from that point on, the Soviet system selected for careerists instead of True Believers.
Eventually, the people who ran the USSR worked out that if they privatized, they could expropriate a bigger share of The Goodies for themselves.
someofparts
grim jim – Anyone who can face the grim truths of our times as you do is doing important work. If more people woke up as you have we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now.
That said, let me speak here are someone who is at least a couple of decades, or more, older than I imagine you are. Give yourself some kind of break my dear. Find whatever silly thing works for you to give yourself a mental break from the awfulness from time to time. The reason for this, which I understand very clearly because I am so old, is that so much stress without relief is absolutely wrecking your health. All of the horrors all of us see every day are bad enough. Developing serious health issues at an early age will compound your misery. If only for the sake of your value to the community, please take care of yourself.
someofparts
as someone
somecomputerguy
Respectfully, Reagan did at trillion dollar arms build-up, against an enemy that was collapsing by the time he took office. He said it was necessary because the Soviets were ten feet tall.
Thanks CIA. We should have disbanded that organization.
The Soviet system was in trouble by the late ’60s and by the mid-70s The Soviets knew their problems were serious.
Soredemos
@somecomputerguy
A compelling thesis I’ve heard is that the Sino-Soviet split forced the USSR to divert resources to guarding against China and simply didnt have the means to operate on two fronts at once like that.
As Welsh has said, the Soviet Union started behind and always stayed behind.
Marx and Engels always imagined communism emerging out of already highly developed capitalist economies. The point of Das Kapital and other related writings isn’t that capitalism is cruel or evil. It’s that is has various fundamental contradictions that, Marx thought, would inevitably result in it imploding on itself. Workers would eventually unite in pursuit of their best interests and sorze control of the infrastructure capital had built. Society would outgrow capitalist while reaping the benefits of what capital had built.
The point is that capitalism has genuine strong points, and is revolutionary in its own right when it comes to replacing feudalism. Marx never imagined a communist revolution in a predominantly backwards place like Russia. The Soviet Union was insufficiently developed and had to attempt to catch up while mossing an entire phase of historical development.
The CCP is well aware of all of this and is attempting to have its own managed capitalist phase. This is what that ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ stuff is all about. The vague end goal, at least for certain true believing ideologues, is still some form of true communism and a withering away of the state.
Mark Level
I love Grim Jim’s commentary and am not worried about GJ’s mental health. If the truth is objectively horrible, best to look it full in the face. Not just philosophically, but in terms of developing a survival strategy.
I would compare the US now to the 3rd Reich about mid-1943 when people started to realize it could not win. It put on a vicious fight for a while longer, but once the Germans were driven, starving and freezing, hundreds of miles back to the West (as Napoleon’s forces earlier had been) there was nothing to be done to save that Lebensraum “Vision.”
Just today I took major comfort from this conversation between Nima of Dialogue Works and Col. Larry Wilkerson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPT_Wh6q2Og
Wilkerson is quite clear that the “amateurs” running Trump “diplomacy” are going to fuck it all up and bumble into a regional war, most likely in Western Asia, a war the US will decisively lose. . . He does show grudging respect for Witkof, but says the rest of them are in way over their heads, empty primate shrieking and poop-flinging. (Not too different from drooling Joe’s shrieking, “The US is the GREATEST military force that ever existed in human history!!”
Of course, Wilkerson admits if the US goes to full nuclear war, it’s all over for everyone. He bluntly states that no previous superpower that fell (leaving the Soviets out of the equation, since it was a voluntary stand-down) had Nukes at the time. They could decide to take the whole world down with them, I’d put the odds at 50/50, so that remains the one major fear to rightly hold. Not that there is anything that us peons can do to stop this.
Purple Library Guy
@GrimJim I agree that very likely what Musk and the Technobrats want may well involve crashing the whole world system, not just the USA.
But too bad. What the Trump phase is starting to teach Americans is, you can’t always have everything you want. Trump wants Canada, for instance–he can’t have us. He wants a US with a magically reborn economy because he waved a magic tariff wand and willed it so–he can’t have that either. The United States does not control the whole world, Silicon Valley enshittifying “platforms” do not control the whole world. They will no doubt TRY to crash the world system, but I see no reason to expect them to succeed outside the US itself and maybe Britain.
Other things may crash the world system. Climate change and general environmental overshoot, for instance. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel et al., not so much.