To repeat: the geopolitical equivalent of a tree is about ready to fall unheard in the global forest. Once the Trump/Putin peace deal is inked, not one element of the neocons’ scary bedtime stories about Russian aggression will be heard anywhere on the planet.
To wit, Putin has no interest in what will be the nationalist anti-Russian rump of a neutralized Ukraine. There will be no Russian flag flying over Kiev or Lviv.
Likewise, nothing untoward will happen in the three Baltic states, either. That’s in part because once they see that poking the Bear next door doesn’t pay and isn’t safe, the often noisy anti-Russian fulminations of politicians in these countries looking for some cheap campaign demagoguery will go radio silent forthwith.
The same goes for Poland. And why in the world would Putin invade eastern European countries like Slovakia or Hungary, which have stoutly opposed the NATO aggression in Ukraine or even Romania, which actually elected a Russian-favoring president until it was ixnayed by Brussels and the CIA. And, then, after having even failed to conquer all of Russian speaking Donetsk, what kind of idiot actually thinks that Germany, Italy, France and England are next in Putin’s alleged expansion plans?.
With respect to China, the single most important thing to recognize is that it is the very opposite of the old Soviet Empire, which was based on economic autarky and scant trading relationships with the world outside of the Warsaw Pact. Accordingly, had it been both inclined and capable of offensive military aggression toward the rest of Europe and or even the US – for which the now open archives of the old Soviet Union reveal scant evidence – there would have been no collateral disruption of its basic economic function. The latter was purely an internally-focused regime of centralized state socialism, which, needless to say, didn’t work but didn’t depend upon commerce with the so-called “free world”, either.
By contrast, after Mao was sent off his rewards in Red Heaven, China pivoted sharply to the outside world under the leadership of Mr.Deng and his successors; and they did so under the banner of so-called Red Capitalism, which amounted to an extreme version of export mercantilism.
Consequently, China’s exports soared by 14X during the two decades between 2000 and 2022, rising from $250 billion to $3.5 trillion per year. So doing, the Chicoms essentially took themselves hostage, meaning that every province, city, village, factory, rail line, trucking operations, warehouse and port operation along the length and breadth of China got deeply entangled with just-in-time economic production for customers across the planet, as depicted in the graphic below. Accordingly, China’s economy would collapse on the spot were Beijing to disrupt the daily flow of $10 billion of merchandise goods to Europe, the Americas and the balance of Asia.
Indeed, had its post-Mao leadership been hell bent on foreign conquest, which most clearly it was not, the Beijing regime’s very survival would have been compromised by the resulting disruption to the greatest factory-economy the world has ever seen.
That’s surely why Washington’s idiotic “domino theory” during the Vietnam era was repudiated in spades by subsequent history. That is, Washington wasted 59,000 American lives and upwards of 3 million Vietnamese lives before eventually fleeing from Vietnam. Yet afterwards the Chinese didn’t even try to capture Hanoi because Beijing was busy building-up a massive manufacturing and export economy.
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