Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 14 of 33

What Should Europe Do About American Cannibalizing It & The Chinese Threat?

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On January 13, 2025

14 Comments

So, Trump has threatened, most of the world, including most Germany and much of Europe, with 25% tariff rates. Under Biden, with the destruction of three of the four underseas pipelines from Russia to Europe, along with sanctions, Germany in particular and Europe in general have been losing energy-price sensitive industry to America. They close down in Europe, they open up in the US. Natural gas from America is much more expensive than Russian gas.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are coming on strong in automobiles and other consumer goods. Right now it’s mostly hitting European exports, so much so that BMW is planning on shutting down plants. The Euros have sold a lot of cars to China, but domestic producers are now cheaper and in many cases better, especially EVs.

Down in Africa, practically every country that France had troops in has or is planning to kick them out. The French bought a lot of resources from their ex-colonies at cheaper than market prices and screwed their ex-imperial possessions on loans and even charged some for “infrastructure built during colonization.” Now that those nations can get security from Russia and goods from China, they’re kicking the French out en-masse.

No love lost. Can’t imagine why people would be upset by being conquered, then charged for it. Ungrateful bastards.

Anyway, all of this has put Europe in a pickle. They’re behind China, the US, Japan and South Korea technologically. Their goods can’t compete with Chinese goods, and they’re losing their access to cheap resources from Africa, and have cut themselves off (with an explosive assist, almost certainly from the US) from cheap Russian resources. Meanwhile Trump is threatening Greenland, and saying the Euros need to spend more money on NATO.

Fun times in the garden. Nothing the Euros don’t deserve for refusing to end their vassalization back in the 2000s when they were up and the US was other occupied, but water under the bridge and all that.

So what should the Euros do? (Not what will they do. They love being American vassals and may well hug trumps leg as he kicks them until they cough blood.)

Well, for one, end the anti-Russia BS. If the Eastern Euros don’t like it, the Westerns should just kick them out of the EU or end the EU and start something else. Poles talk big, but they suck at the Euro teat. The Americans aren’t going to send them as much money as the EU does. If they want to be anti-Russia while Germany loses all its industry, get rid of them.

Russia has constantly stated its happiness to start selling to Europe again. Sure, China and India will buy their resources, but without Europe they lose a lot of bargaining power. Plus they built all the infrastructure and it can be fixed.

Second, reasonable trade deals with everyone else the US under Trump is fucking with tariffs. Canada and Australia are a good start. Japan seems to be avoiding the tariffs, but is worried and still pretty anti-China. Cut a deal with them as well.

The issue is that Europe has a high cost structure. Prices for their goods can’t compete with China. They need resources. Canada and Australia and Japan are high cost producers.

Form a trade bloc. Put up their own tariffs so that their domestic industry can compete. Insist that the Chinese build factories in country to avoid the tariffs. Europe’s still high income. Foster tech transfer from China. Massively invest in tech and science. Shut up about Chinese human rights, it’s none of their business and after Gaza it’s laughably hypocritical. China isn’t genociding the Uighurs, even if they don’t treat them great. So zip it.

Make your own trade area, consisting of high income, high cost structure nations with whom you can compete. Tell the US to fuck itself (politely but firmly) and rebuild the European military, not as part of NATO but independent.

France has nukes, expand that program and get them on modern missiles. Put allies under the European nuclear shield.

Form, in other words, a third pole.

Oh, there’s more that needs to be done. Neoliberal austerity needs to end, rents and housing and stock bubbles need to be slammed into the ground, and it needs to be policy that if you want to get rich you have to actually make stuff. No more finance bullshit, or landlordism.

But start by ending Europe’s vassalization and forming their own bloc.

Europe needs to grow up. The era of being America’s ally, and having a good standard of living without really having to work for it is over. America’s declining and they want to cannibalize their vassals to slow or (they hope, but hah) reverse the decline.

Don’t let them.

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Tracking the Signs of Decline in America

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On January 2, 2025

22 Comments

If you want to be a decent analyst, let alone a forecaster, you need to know how to find real information. A lot of official statistics are either useless (inflation, unemployment numbers) or misleading.

Russia, with assists from Iran and North Korea and China (in non military goods, though often useful for making military goods) is out producing NATO in war material. If you just look at the GDP of NATO vs. Russia/China/Iran/NK you’d predict that couldn’t happen and you’d be wrong and like a lot of people you’d think Ukraine might or would win the war.

Most people go on and on about how the US still has a bigger economy than China, but China has way more industry and leads in about 80% of technological fields even as the US can barely build ships, is losing its steel industry and is only creative in biotech and infotech. These same people will tell you how well the US economy is doing. China’s shifting its house building to primarily government. Meanwhile:

Eighteen percent last year.

Since 2020 billionaire wealth has doubled.

GDP tells you how much activity in your country is conducted thru money, as opposed to unpaid labor. That tells you much economic activity you can easily tax. That’s all it tells you.

It doesn’t tell you how well off your people are. It doesn’t tell you how healthy they are. It doesn’t tell you (directly) how many tanks you can build, or planes or missiles. It doesn’t tell you if you can feed your population if foreign shipments are disrupted. It doesn’t tell you how many of them have homes and how many of those homes are good. it doesn’t tell you how many people do or don’t have healthcare. It doesn’t tell you how advanced you are technologically. It doesn’t tell you if your flagship airplane company can’t design and build good planes any more.

It also doesn’t tell you that America is doing better than Europe and its other allies because US economic policy is set up to cannibalize their industry. When Germany loses energy-intensive firms, a lot of them move production to the US. Burning down America’s allies to slow America’s decline isn’t a sign of strength.

America’s in decline because its entire political-economy is set up not to be productive or to spread wealth around, but to funnel money to the rich without them having to produce much of anything. China’s stock-market trades sideways, like America’s did in the 50s and 60s. Americans make money on housing and stocks without having to do a thing. Private Equity makes money by buying companies with debt, loading the companies up with that debt and then driving them into bankruptcy, destroying real productive economic activity in exchange for dollars in a declining country.

Real power comes from real production, technology, a healthy and loyal population, and the ability to turn all of that into military power when necessary. America’s military, for years now, has been unable to meet recruiting goals. Its enemies are ahead on missiles and drone, catching up on airplanes and outproducing it massively in ships.

China’s rising. Russia’s rising. America and its allies are in serious decline.

THE END

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Some Countries Need Less Population

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On December 23, 2024

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There is a genre of population decline doomerism. An example:

Here’s the thing, Japan imports about sixty percent of its food. Japan is, by any reasonable measure, over-populated.

If you can’t feed your population and if there is no reasonable prospect that you could feed your population, perhaps you have too many people?

Another country for which this is true is Britain, which imports about 80% of its food. Yet the British have also been importing over a million people a year.

One might suggest, as well, that any country which has a large number of homeless people is also overpopulated: clearly it has more people than it is capable of taking care of. (Though we all know that’s usually a choice, not a constraint.)

The world is overpopulated by humans and our domesticated animals. We are in classic population overshoot.

When climate change and ecological collapse and resource depletion hit, there isn’t going to be enough food to go around. When that becomes the case, countries are going to prioritize themselves first and their close allies second. Entire countries which are now breadbaskets will either produce less, or will no longer produce enough for themselves. When the Gulf Stream turns off, which is expected any time in the next 50 years, for example, Europe as a whole will face a huge food deficit.

Better to start shedding population now, gradually, than to do it thru famine, food riots, revolution and war.

If you can’t feed your population, you have too much population. (Partial exception for city states and small states. Partial.) If you can’t house your population, you have too much population.

There are very few countries in the world which genuinely need more people. Russia, perhaps. Japan doesn’t. China doesn’t. India doesn’t. Most European countries don’t. Most African countries don’t. Etc…

Population doomers never ask the simple question: Under what circumstances is population growth good and under what circumstances is population decline good?

And for whom?

There was no better time to live in Medieval Europe than after the Black Death.

Decline now, while it’s gentle. If you insist on not doing so, you will do it the hard way.

(Much of this is driven by prioritization of GDP, a desire for low wages, and a deep misunderstanding of what makes an economy strong. More on that in the future.)

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Elon Musk Threatens Congress Successfully

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On December 20, 2024

20 Comments

This is some amazing shit:

Congress was about to vote on a bill called a “Continuing Resolution”, which would fund the operations of the federal government. But yesterday, Musk started tweeting around the clock about how he hated the bill and that he would fund the campaigns of politicians who ran against Congress members who supported it.

….Shortly after Musk decided he was against the Continuing Resolution, Trump and JD Vance issued a statement saying they were against it, too. The politicians in Congress fell in line, and now it looks like the government funding plan is dead.

Here’s the thing. Being rich only means you’re good at making money in a specific way. It doesn’t mean anything else. Gates, for example, pushed the “Common Core” education changes, and there’s no evidence they did any good and some reason to think they were harmful.

We have a rich man (maybe a billionaire) as President. We have Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent a lot money helping Trump win as one of the most important people in the new administration, who has said he wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Money is the ability to tell people what do. It let’s you control their actions, either directly or indirectly.

FDR defined fascism as:

Ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power

The US has been trending towards oligarchy for ages. The final victory for oligarchy was probably “Citizen’s United”, which made money the same as speech and thus protected under the first amendment.

The famous Princeton oligarchy study, which used data from 1981-2002, which is to say from back when the rich weren’t nearly as powerful as they are now, found that:

…when one holds constant net interest-group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change (refer to the top panel of figure 1).

By contrast—again with other actors held constant—a proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time. Similarly, when support for policy change is low among interest groups (with five groups strongly opposed and none in favor) the probability of that policy change occurring is only .16, but the probability rises to .47 when interest groups are strongly favorable (refer to the bottom two panels of figure 1). Footnote 41

Musk is the world’s richest man. He threatened members of Congress using his money, and they caved.

It’s always amusing when Americans call Russia an oligarchy. It isn’t. Russia’s oligarchs have very little power compared to Putin. If they cross him, he destroys them. They do what he wants, when he wants or they go to jail or have to flee the country, giving up any wealth in Russia.

America, on the other hand, is sickeningly an oligarchy and it’s going from indirect to direct oligarchical control.

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How The Resource Squeeze Will Play Out

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On December 17, 2024

11 Comments

Contrary to what many economists will claim, we’re going to move into a resource constrained era. This is a combination of climate change, environmental collapse and civilization decline.

Simply put, per capita, there’s going to be less stuff. As Gibson’s line runs, the future will be unevenly distributed. This will hit some places harder and sooner. Germany and Europe are in decline already. China is actually increasing production and availability of most products. The US is in decline, but actively cannibalizing its allies, especially Europe, but also Taiwan, so the stuff shortage will be slower and there may be short to medium term increase.

This is exacerbated in most countries by the insistence of elites that they need to grow their wealth and income in both absolute and relative terms. They must have more, and they must increase the percentage of their society’s wealth and income. So even as there is less to go around, they must have more. When they try to deal with problems like climate change they institute policies like older retirement ages, reduced pensions, lower welfare payments, cuts and privatization of healthcare and regressive carbon taxes. They don’t get rid of, say, mega-yachts and private jets, or tax the rich more and distribute to those in need.

This isn’t just a matter of greed. Capitalist elites are in a Red Queen’s race. If they fall behind other elites, those elites will buy them out (often whether they want to be bought out or not), and they will fall out of the true elite, those who control profit-making enterprises. They may still be wealthy, but they will lose their power and cease to be players.

So we’re caught in a situation where per-capita resources will go down even as elites take a higher share.

I’m sure you can understand what this means to you and those you know. Maneuvering around this means either being extremely valuable to elites, and irreplaceable, or finding ways to insulate yourself from their demands, which is difficult, since they have most of what you need and control the legal system and the violent enforcement mechanisms.

There will be a backlash. How successful it will be remains to be seen, but there is a point where people realize that risking their lives or even losing them is a better bet than remaining with the status quo. Food and water riots, “terrorism” and perhaps Mangioning elites will become a trend.

Plan for this, because it’s already started. You see it already in the vast numbers of homeless, the endless healthcare rationing, and the constant push to privatize and thus profitize ever bit of government which might make a profit if its put in hands which can squeeze.

If your having a good lifestyle doesn’t make some member of the elite richer than squeezing you into homelessness or denying you care, then you’re in the line to go on the butcher’s block.

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Taking the Hit For Stopping Genocide

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On December 11, 2024

23 Comments

I’ve noticed something interesting. Every time I write about what might be done to stop the Israeli genocide, actions which would require serious fighting, people say “well I understand whey they don’t want to do that because Israel will bomb the hell out of them.”

And that’s true (though not as true when it comes to Iran, which has plenty of effective AD.)

The issue here is that there’s a genocide going on. My estimate for casualties is over half a million, and other people are starting to make the same estimates. For the past two months Israel has basically let no food into Northern Gaza. The number at the end will probably be over a million dead.

So you’re either willing to do what it takes to stop it, or you aren’t. Both Hezbollah and Iran pulled their punches and let Israel set the tempo of engagement, choosing when and where to fight, instead of engaging it when Hamas still had a viable fighting force. Iran had the missile capacity to wreck Israel’s air defense and air bases. Instead they let their proxies fight alone, and that went very badly for them.

With the fall of Syria, well, it’s no longer possible to stop the genocide. Senior Iranian leadership told their juniors they were going to intervene, then didn’t.

At least half a million people are going to die because no one was willing to do what it took to stop it.

It’s unfair this was on Iran and Hezbollah. It’s an amazing indictment of every great power in the world, and the local Arab states that none of them did anything meaningful to stop a genocide and that many helped the genocide along.

As for Iran, they themselves have pointed out that one has to resist America and Israel wherever they attack, because the plan is to end up taking out Iran. Khameini, if he hasn’t already, needs to get his head out of his ass and build nukes. And if Russia and China want to keep Iran as part of their great alliance, they need to take action.

As for Hezbollah, well, they’re cut off from land resupply from Iran. Israel and America will get to them. Playing everything cautiously did not work.

America is falling, there is no question about that. But Empire’s rarely go quiet into the night. The Age of War and Revolution continues.

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US/China Trade War Heats Up

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On December 5, 2024

12 Comments

So, China has put export controls on rare earths.

People think “well, we’ll just mine them ourselves” but it often isn’t that simple. Gallium is refined as part of the process of aluminum smelting, for example, and the US has no aluminum smelting industry left.

More generally speaking the world is unfolding as I predicted: it’s splitting into two trade blocs, a cold war is developing (the Syrian “uprising” is a cold war maneuver) and the US is trying cannibalize its satrapies: that’s what Trump’s tariffs on allies are about.

Since the 50s it was deliberate American policy to offshore industry to its allies, especially South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, but also to Europe and the Anglosphere to some extent. Now it wants to pull that back in. This has been especially noticeable, of late, in Germany, where heavy industry is shutting down and much of it is moving to the US.

The problem, of course, is that China’s cost structure is lower and they are pulling ahead technologically. The Chinese believe in technology in a way the West hasn’t since the 60s—it’s good to them. They want more robots, more drones and more automation. They’re not scared of automation taking jobs, they associate rapid technological advancement with prosperity.

The problem with bringing industry back to the US isn’t just cost-structure, it’s the so-called competency crisis and the sparseness of the vast numbers of small industrial suppliers. The ecosystem which supports and allows rapid re-industrialization doesn’t exist in the West any more. A simple example is that almost all of the world’s machine tools and basic electronics which are needed to do everything else are produced in China (with a small machine tool industry barely surviving in Germany.)

The West is going to have increasing problems with resources, as well. Most of the “South” would rather do business with China, for reasons we’ve discussed ad-infinitum. As the US cannibalizes its allies it will also have difficulty with trade: if Europe’s poor and everyone else would rather buy Chinese, who are you going to sell to?

Trump’s tariff plans aren’t exactly stupid, but they require real industrial policy at the same time and managing relationships with trade partners, including partners the US insists on treating as enemies, and Trump isn’t up for that, any more than Biden was.

So America will decline, but will decline less fast than its allies, and the world will split into two competing blocs. Only this time the “Western” bloc will be the weaker, less technologically advanced one.

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Health Insurance CEO Assassinated

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On December 4, 2024

20 Comments

Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare. Apparently there had been threats, and those threats were related to denial of care. Even the Feds thought he was denying too much care (which takes some work, since denying care is the industry profit model.)

He had been chief executive since 2021, during a time in which the parent company and his division were rattled by federal investigations, even as it enjoyed profitable growth. The division has been criticized by congressional lawmakers and federal regulators who accused it of systematically denying authorization for health care procedures and treatments.

There doesn’t seem to be much sympathy, and indeed there is much satisfaction and even glee, among commenters.

I have been expecting, but not seeing, a wave of assassinations of important people in the US and the West for some time. I still think it will happen, it’s just taking longer than I thought.

The bottom line is that people like Thompson get rich by hurting other people. That’s what they do. Billionaires, executives and politicians all make their living plus a lot by taking from people weaker than them. Grocery chains raising prices faster than their costs’ insurance companies denying care to spike profits; banks creating fake documents to foreclose homes; private equity buying profitable businesses, larding them up with debt and then shutting them down.

Politicians making laws to benefit the rich, cutting their taxes, giving them huge subsidies and cutting programs for the poor and middle class. Politicians letting people be homeless and stealing their possessions when they raid homeless camps.

And so on. Entire books have been written about this and been non-exhaustive.

Powerful people get rich by killing, impoverishing and hurting people weaker than them and it’s very odd that more of those people, or their families or friends don’t return the favor with prejudice.

Thompson’s assassination will cause more execs and CEOs to bodyguard up, but that doesn’t matter much. Modern IEDs and drones are very very effective and getting cheaper all the time, though civilian drones are extremely restricted in the US, which has lead to China being the world leader.

I suspect they’re restricted in part to make assassinations harder. Guns are nice, drones are better.

Chinese leaders make the lives of most Chinese much better, not worse, so they aren’t scared of assassination.

Anyway, if you want an economy which works for everyone you can’t ask nicely, powerful Westerners only respond to fear. So if there are more assassinations, if it becomes a “thing”, well that might turn out very well for the majority. (Or it might not, but when the status quo is unbearable, people often lash out.)

This is just an observation of how things work, of course. One should never ever assassinate someone just because they are killing and impoverishing lots of people and would happily kill and or impoverish your friends and family or you because they need a fifth luxury home, third private jet and a second mega-yacht.

That would be very anti-capitalistic and un-American and letting the rich kill and impoverish you is what America is all about. You should be honored to die or live on the street or scream in agony as your health care is denied so some executive can increase profits by .01% and get a bigger bonus.

Die for the American way. Live homeless for freedom!

Update:

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