Author: Ian Welsh Page 16 of 422

Chinese and American flags flying together

Since the industrial revolution, military power has been largely a function of three factors:

Technology
Industrial Capacity
Population

As time goes by, population becomes less important (see, rise of drones), but it still matters. Think of it as something like Tech x IndCap x (Pop x .5).

The US has a powerful military, though most of the technology is one or two generations old. The general consensus is that Pakistan’s Chinese jets (themselves last-gen tech) out-performed India’s Western jets.

At this point, China is ahead in about 80 percent of tech fields. China has 31 percent of world industrial capacity, and the US about 16 percent, meaning that China has about twice as much. Further, China owns the entire supply chain for many of its technologies, whereas the US’s supply chain is reliant on China.

Finally, of course, China’s share of world industrial capacity is increasing.

A lot of civilian industry can easily be turned into military tech. This is what made the US “the arsenal of democracy” in World War II.

China has about 230x the shipbuilding capacity of the US.

China produces about 20K civilian drones a day. The US produces about 20K civilian drones a year.

The US and Canada combined produce about 12 million cars a year. China produces about 30 million cars a year.

So in a real war, where civilian industry is retooled for military production, well, China is well ahead. In the case of drones and ships, ludicrously ahead.

The US finds itself in a similar position to Japan on the eve of the Pacific War. Japan had a powerful fleet and air force, but it couldn’t replace equipment losses to match the rate of the US, let alone expand its arsenal. If it isn’t a “short victorious war,” the US loses, unless it goes nuclear, in which case everyone loses.

This imbalance is only going to get worse. China has a ridiculously small army of about two million, with a million paramilitary. When you consider its population of 1.4 billion, well, again, China is similar to the US before WW2; an industrial behemoth with an undersize military, but which can be expected to ramp up — fast.

(These numbers are better if one includes South Korea and Japan, or even the EU, but then one has to add Russia to the Chinese side. And the way the US is acting, it’s less and less clear its allies will support it in a shooting war, especially if it starts the war. Never thought I’d say that about Japan, but Trump has really shit the bed with his insane trade war.)

All of this is going to get worse and worse for the US. China is increasing its tech and industrial lead, while the US is systematically de-funding its research sector even as erratic economic policy makes long-term investment in new industrial capacity difficult. China’s civilian airline industry is taking off, its car industry is expanding as the West’s collapse, and it’s the only real player in the drone space.

China doesn’t want a war for the simple reason that the longer they put one off, the easier it will be if it happens — and the less likely it will be to happen, because Americans will be unable to sustain the delusion that they have any chance of winning said war.

The American era is over. It’s even likely that the US will lose control of South America, which it has had since the late 19th century. (Yes, there were theoretically independent nations in South America. Theoretically.) It will be pushed back to its North American stronghold, where it even seems to be attempting to lose effective control of Mexico and Canada, which is an entirely self-inflicted wound, as both nations wanted to stay under the US wing.

Just as the sun set on the British Empire, today it is at the horizon for America, and the long European supremacy is nearly over. The world returns to its normal state, where the Middle Kingdom is the most important and prosperous country in the world.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

Amidst Everything Else, the Palestinian Genocide Is Picking Up Steam

By Ian Welsh

On May 16, 2025

Comments

A healthy person can survive forty to sixty days without food, depending on how fat they were to begin with. Women last longer than men (women are better at all extreme endurance feats I am aware of).

It’s been about two months since Israel cut off all food and water to Gaza. There were storehouses and some food, and it took about 30-40 days to exhaust the stores, but even before that, there wasn’t enough.

And even before this cut-off there wasn’t enough. There was a brief period after Trump took power with supplies moving in large amounts, but since the start of the crisis, Israel has been choking off food, medicine, and everything else, and Israeli citizens have stopped and hijacked aid trucks.

So, there aren’t any fat people in Gaza, except for some Zionist genociders who cosplay as soldiers. Most people in Gaza haven’t had enough food for well over a year.

Palestinians are going to start dying in massive numbers right about now, and the deaths will accelerate.

This is the first live-streamed genocide. Everyone knows it’s happening, and no one except the Ansar-Allah is doing shit, though credit to Hezbollah for trying until Mossad ripped them apart. (I do maintain Hezbollah’s strategy was awful, but that’s water under the bridge. At least they tried.)

I include Iran in this general indictment. It has enough missiles to really hurt Israel and proved that it could get thru the “Iron” Dome.

But, again, they’ve done more than pretty much every other country in the world.

I will note, for the record, though that it’s unlikely to matter much, that for the rest of my life I will judge people based on whether they were against the Palestinian genocide at the time. In a few years almost everyone will pretend they were against it, but we have receipts. And even if you are good to puppies and children, give lots of money to charities and are perfectly aligned with my politics on everything else, I will regard you as evil and a piece of human garbage, who could only improve the world by committing suicide, if you were OK with this.

This genocide could be stopped tomorrow by the US simply halting all shipments and aid to Israel. Even Europe, were it to act similarly, might be able to stop it.

But no one with the power to do anything decisive, is. Which means they’re all monsters.

And if you are depraved enough to think “who cares, it doesn’t affect me?”, let me assure you that on top of being human filth, you are also stupid and a fool. If they’ll do it to Palestinians, they’d do it to you and yours if they thought it was in their interest and they could get away with it.

Which, so far, they have every reason to believe they could.

Certain actions, like genocide, rape, torture and deliberate child murder have to be off the table entirely for the protection of everyone. You never want to normalize them, even if you are an evil piece of shit, because once something becomes routine, who knows who is next on the table?

Welcome to Hell.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

The Unifying Goal of Right & Center Elites

By Ian Welsh

On May 15, 2025

Comments

Getting elites attention

What the right wants from its followers is for them to be riven by hatred of any difference, thus making them easy to manipulate and willing to sell out their economic values in exchange for seeing brown people beaten, and women and trans people losing control over their own bodies.

What neoliberals want is for their followers to be convinced that each group, even each micro group, is on its own, unable to understand each other and thus that solidarity is impossible and all one can hope for is that some member of the identity group is allowed to join the elite, while most of all groups remain in poverty.

They’re very similar, really. In both cases hatred of other groups is inculcated as the core value, as a way of making manipulation easy and avoiding having to actually deal with broad issues of well being.

Both of these are variations on “divide and conquer”. It costs a lot less to give a few people something than to give many people something. “Want some women and minorities in power? Sure. Costs us almost nothing.”

“Want women to be forced to bear rape children and die in pregnancy due to lack of necessary abortions? Sure, costs us nothing. Our women can still get abortions.

“Want trans people excluded and denied health care? Sure, they’re a tiny part of the population and rich trans people will be fine.”

On the other hand giving everyone healthcare would cut a lot of profits. Giving everyone a liveable wage or assistance to those who can’t work or find jobs: that would cost a lot of profits.

“You can have anything you want, as long as it doesn’t make elites poorer.”

On that the right and center are unified.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

Capitalists Only Respond to Threats

By Ian Welsh

On May 14, 2025

Comments

Stumbled on this chart recently:

It kind of tells its own story.

It’s worth reading The Communist Manifesto. People have weird ideas about it, but a lot of it is really unexceptionable. For example, Marx and Engels demanded pensions for old folks.

Capitalists looked at this, and said, “Oh, we can do this if the alternative is worse,” and introduced them. Someone as hard-headed as Bismarck responded this way.

The threat of a credible enemy ideology which treats ordinary people better than capitalists do forces capitalists to change. For a long time, we haven’t had that, but the single party “Marxist-but-with-capitalism” CCP offers another. And yes, they do (overall), treat their workers better, as well as being better at capitalism than capitalists. No one is as obsessed with how markets actually work as Marxist economists.

Let’s look at another of my favorite charts:

Oh hey! Having powerful organizations taking the part of workers matters.

Something happened right after Reagan took power:

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Then there’s this:

(The numbers have gone down since then, but they’re still vastly high, and far, far higher than China.

Break the unions and lock up the people who won’t obey bullshit (a.k.a. drug) laws.

Class war is real, and constantly ongoing, and elites have won that war.

Power and fear is all that capitalists ever respond to.

Always remember that.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

The Horror of School

By Ian Welsh

On May 13, 2025

Comments

Back during the pandemic, two things happened with students. Overall, they committed more suicides, BUT when schools were closed, suicide rates went down. (I predicted the latter at the time.)

Then there’s this lovely chart:

Well, well, well. Seems forcing people to do what they don’t want to do, in what is usually a socially oppressive environment, is bad for them.

There are, of course, those who thrive in school, and love it — usually the socially dominant kids. But for a lot of kids, school is Hell.

I think this has a lot to do with alignment of goals. I wrote recently about the epidemic of AI cheating and how to avoid it, but I think the smartest commentary I’ve seen on AI cheating, and cheating in general, is this one:

Has anyone stopped to ask WHY students cheat? Would a buddhist monk “cheat” at meditation? Would an artist “cheat” at painting? No. When process and outcomes are aligned, there’s no incentive to cheat. So what’s happening differently at colleges?

Back in the stone age, I took an introductory sociology class. The professor asked the students who were intending to be teachers to put up their hands. A forest. She told them to keep their hands up, and asked everyone who was planning on social work to put up their hands.

Out of a class of about a hundred and fifty, only three people’s hands weren’t up.

147 students weren’t taking sociology because they were interested in it, but because it was a way-station on the way to a goal.

The problem with “higher” education is that good jobs are locked by the requirement for degrees. The vast majority of students aren’t in university because they want to learn, they’re there because they need the credential. They don’t see the applicability of what they’re learning to their future jobs, in most cases correctly, so they just want to get through the courses with the least effort possible while getting the necessary grades.

Of course, they cheat. They’re being forced to waste three or four years and huge amounts of money on a chance of getting past the gatekeepers.

I used to amuse myself by talking to graduates. I’d ask them what their major was, then discuss it with them. Nine times out of ten, I knew more about the subject than they did, even though I’d never taken a single course in the topic at hand. They’d memorized enough to pass the tests, then immediately forgot it, because it had no relevance to their goals or their life.

The only case for requiring a bachelors degree, in a job that doesn’t use the knowledge taught by that course, is that it screens out people who won’t put up with bullshit and who won’t do what their told when it doesn’t align with their goals. A B.A. certifies to potential employers that, “this person will do what they’re told and put up with your bullshit. They barely need to be coerced, they do what is expected of them.”

Problems is, it also certifies that, “they will put in as little effort in the job as they can, unless it serves them to do otherwise.”

If it were up to me, I’d make it illegal to require unrelated educational credentials. Want to hire an engineer (an actual engineer, not a programmer)? Fine, ask for a degree. But if it’s just some unrelated job, no.

But I’d go even further, I’d mandate exams to test for job knowledge. (In person, supervised) similar to how a lot of companies test programmers. “Can you actually make a small program?”

Testing for jobs used to be pretty standard. Almost all civil service jobs were gated behind exams and so were a lot of private sector ones.

Then see how they perform for a few months.

Forcing people to do what they don’t want to do is sometimes necessary, to be sure. But it has to make sense. There’s plenty of evidence that good home-schooling teaches students skills faster than classroom teaching (and no, not all home schooling is right wing nutjobs, where I grew up it was hippies.) As for socialization, there are other ways to socialize children, most of which are probably more pleasant and less harmful than the often hellish social circumstances in schools, especially high schools.

As for spending time with adults, well, that’s what children did for most of history. They weren’t stuck just with kids for most of the day, then just their parents. After all, you’re a kid for a lot less longer than you’re an adult, and it’s the adult world you need to know how to navigate.

I’m not saying mass schooling has or had no benefits. It obviously does and did. But can we find a better way to teach children?

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

“Art of the Cave”: Trump Walks Back China Tariffs For 90 Days

By Ian Welsh

On May 12, 2025

Comments

Well, maybe. Who the hell knows what he’ll do. Anyway, tariffs are back to 30% on China and 10% on America.

This is exactly what China demanded, for tariffs to go back to what they were before April 2nd.

There will still be a two month trade burp. Ships weren’t leaving China for the US at all, literally zero. Lot of freight companies are about to make a mint, though. So expect some shortages, but nothing worse than Covid, and hopefully lasting less time.

The fundamental problem remains, however, which is that there’s no certainty around any of this, so business people can’t make long term plans, including plans to build or relocate manufacturing. Trump and the US can’t be trusted to stay steady on policy, so avoiding making big plans involving the US makes sense.

The Great Power picture is clearer, however. The US tried to impose its will on China and failed. China wouldn’t negotiate till its pre-conditions were met. The world has two great powers, with the EU bidding to become the third (I think they’ll fail, but that’s what the rearmament is about.)

And, in economic terms, China is by far the pre-eminent great power. It isn’t even close. The era of American hegemony is officially over. The US tried to impose its will on the world and failed.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

Western Leaders Continue To Live In A Delusional LaLa Land With Respect To The Ukraine War

By Ian Welsh

On May 11, 2025

Comments

Putin’s goals by GrimJim

So, the Europeans have said that Russia must grant an unconditional 30 day ceasefire, or they’ll ramp up aid to Ukraine and put on more sanctions, including some against Nord Stream II. They claim Trump is onside, but Trump hasn’t confirmed this.

The Russians have indicated willingness for a thirty day ceasefire, but they have a condition: for those thirty days, weapon shipments from the West to Ukraine must stop and Putin has straight up rejected the unconditional ceasefire.

What a surprise.

What Europeans want is for Russia, which is winning on the ground, to give them thirty days to rearm Ukraine. Can’t imagine why Russia won’t go for that.

The Euros are delusional. They have no leverage. They’ve already said they intend to end all energy purchases from Russia as soon as they can. (That isn’t yet, they’re buying tons of Russian energy still, it just goes thru India first.)

Why the hell would Russia agree to give Ukraine time to re-arm and entrench without something in return.

Once again, Russia’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement is to simply win the war. And while advances are still slow, they’re all on Russia’s side and the Ukrainian army is showing signs of being near the breaking point. They’ve also been pushed past almost all of their prepared defenses.

Personally, I think Putin is being incredibly generous offering a ceasefire at all. I think that’s a mistake.

But the Euros are living in LalaLand. They don’t have any real leverage and they keep acting like they do. Ukraine is losing. Nothing the US and Europe can do, short of declaring war, will change that fact. And since the Euros have admitted the Minsk accord were signed with the intention of building up the Ukrainian army for another war, well, why the hell would Putin want to make a new deal that creates another frozen conflict?

Just insane. Europe doesn’t get that they are a has-been power, in serious decline and that they just can’t push other nations around any more. They don’t have the muscle or the industrial base or the tech lead any more.

The war will be ended on Russia’s terms unless Putin is incredibly foolish. That’s possible, contrary to the Western narrative Putin isn’t a Hawk, he’s the least Hawkish person anywhere near power in Russia. If he was to have a heart attack tomorrow, whoever replaced him would be far more militaristic and far less restrained. Putin prefers peace. He’s just learned, probably, that peace can’t be made with the West, it must be imposed.