I spend a lot of time grasping at straws these days, and Politico has kindly sent a couple wafting my way of late, viz., The U.S. Can’t Force the Rest of the World to Support Ukraine. Here’s Why. and A Forecasting Model Used by the CIA Predicts a Surprising Turn in U.S.-China Relations, said surprising turn being conciliatory in nature.
The first, by Daniel Depetris and Rajan Menon, is the more substantial and data-driven of the two, pointing out that substantial though second tier powers like India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey and Indonesia—oh, and Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Pakistan—are mostly sitting this one out, almost as if they don’t care whether or not good triumphs over evil, As Depetris and Menon demonstrate, these countries have good, solid economic reasons for not getting into a pissing match with Putin’s Russia, which, come what may, is never going to invade them, and, unlike the good old USSR days, isn’t trying to overthrow their corrupt, capitalist governments. These days, the “Coalition of the Willing” sounds a lot like the “Coalition of the What’s In It For Me?”
The second straw, touting some inside information from the CIA, is a bit more wispy. According to “Bob Davis”, whose own name sounds a bit wispy, there’s this guy, Jon Grady, a grad student at New York University, who (apparently) is “a preternaturally patient 32-year-old with a shaved head”.1 Jon licensed some seriously intense game theory software from another NYU guy, the preternaturally named Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who apparently is quite the thing among the shaved-head set, and, well, started playing games.
You’ll have to read Bob’s piece for the details of how all this works out, but the bottom line is that China and the U.S. will likely have the good sense to realize that trading together is more profitable than fighting together. Which, frankly, is something I find a little hard to believe.
What I can believe in, a little, is geography, which comes up in another attractive straw—a recent article in the New York Times by Damien Cave, Why China Is Miles Ahead in a Pacific Race for Influence, explaining that, despite all the huffing and puffing by President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken, the race for dominance in Asia is already over, and China has won—perhaps because China is an Asian country, and the United States is not.
Miles count, after all. In his article, Cave says that Richard Herr, an American law professor in Australia who has been a democracy consultant for Pacific countries since the 1970s, can’t understand why the U.S. hasn’t improved the main airport for the Solomon Islands since we built it in World War II, the Solomons being a worry thanks to a security agreement the island chain’s government recently signed with China. Perhaps the U.S. has been “neglecting” the Solomons because the Solomons are 8,400 miles from Washington, DC, versus 4,000 from Beijing? Would that make a difference? Is that one reason why China is, you know, miles ahead?
China is not only 4,400 miles closer to the Solomons, and virtually anywhere else in Asia, but it has four times as many people as the U.S. It is a prodigious market, and its continued growth is likely, if not guaranteed. Perhaps China’s many internal problems, its corruption, its ugly legacy of totalitarian oppression which it refuses to disavow—and is quite likely to continue to insist on viewing as an era of heroic sacrifice—will lead to collapse, or at least a significant contraction. But if that happens, it will be China that will overcome China, not the U.S.
There are, unfortunately, a hell of a lot of unfortunate straws—or are they bricks?—out and about that I am dodging rather than grasping. Over at the New York Times, non AV fave rave Christopher Caldwell has a painfully cogent column, The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame., whose painful cogency was only amplified by President Biden’s recent decision to send advanced missile systems to Ukraine. So keep your heads down, kids. Some of those “straws” can be lethal.
Afterwords, Special Realpolitik Edition
Back in the day, the British navy ruled the Caribbean. As the U.S. rose, the Brits retreated. Britain made no attempt to resist the economic rise of either the U.S. or Germany. The British only became provoked when Germany sought equality with Britain at sea while seeking to pressure France, and thus the rest of western Europe, into political subservience.
Berlin is 687 miles from London. Beijing is 6,700 miles from Washington, DC. China is surrounded by many large neighbors—Russia, India, Japan, and Indonesia—and some smaller yet potent ones—South Korea and Vietnam—with whom it has had historically poor relations. The U.S. has an entire hemisphere of its own and faces no meaningful rivals whatsoever. Yet Biden and Blinken seem determined to do their damnedest to give Russia and China a common purpose and common enemy, while demanding that other Asian nations take part in a bruising, massively costly political rivalry which has no foreseeable end and no relevance to their actual interests. You’d think that someone could think of these things.
1. Not sure how Bob sussed out the “preternaturally patient” part. Because Jon put up with Bob’s questioning?
