Ian Welsh

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

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 21, 2024

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On January 21, 2024

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Global power shift

China Is the World’s Sole Manufacturing Superpower

Richard Baldwin [VoxEU, via Naked Capitalism 01-17-2024]

…The US is the world’s sole military superpower. It spends more on its military than the ten next highest spending countries combined. China is now the world’s sole manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined. This column uses the recently released 2023 update of the OECD TiVA database to paint an eight-chart portrait of China’s journey to superpower status and the asymmetric impact that its dominance has had on global supply chains….

When it comes to gross production, China’s share is three times the US’ share, six times Japan’s, and nine times Germany’s. Taiwan, Mexico, Russia, and Brazil now have higher gross output than the UK. Canada is further down the ranking, in 15th place….

China’s dominance is less stark in exports (Figure 3), though the rise is equally amazing. In 1995 China had just 3% of world manufacturing exports, By 2020, its share had risen to 20%. The corresponding fall in the G7 share was less dramatic than for its share of production….

Figure 4, left panel, shows that the US relies far more on Chinese manufacturing production than vice versa. 2 While shocking at first sight, this should not be unexpected. It is natural that a country with 11% of the world output buys more from a country that produces 35% than vice versa, but the numbers are astounding. China was more exposed to US inputs before 2002, but the US has had greater exposure since then. In 2020, the US was about three times more exposed to Chinese manufacturing production than vice versa….

Robust growth in 2023: China maintains top position in global shipbuilding sector for 14 years

[news.cgtn.com, via Naked Capitalism comments 01-17-2024]

In the past 12 months, China’s shipbuilding output reached 42.32 million deadweight tonnes (dwt), a year-on-year increase of 11.8 percent, accounting for 50.2 percent of the world’s total.

The new orders rose 56.4 percent year on year to 71.2 million dwt during the period, taking up 66.6 percent of the world’s total.

By the end of December, the volume of orders on hand was 139.39 million dwt, up 32 percent year on year, accounting for 55 percent of the world’s total.

In 2023, five Chinese shipbuilding enterprises ranked in the global top 10 in output, seven in top 10 for new order volume, and six for holding orders, said the MIIT.

The US, Israel Have Lost Battlefield Control – Houthis Have Attacked US Destroyer, Hit Greek-US Owned Bulker; Iran Has Hit US Base in Kurdish Capital, Erbil

John Helmer [via Naked Capitalism 01-17-2024]

 

Oligarchy

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Open Thread

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On January 20, 2024

10 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Second Most Important Story In The World

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On January 19, 2024

34 Comments

If you pull way back and take the historical perspective, a lot of stories, aren’t.

I stand second to few in my abhorrence of the Israeli project to ethnic cleanse and genocide Palestine, but it’s been ongoing for a long time and involves about five million Palestinians plus various supporters of genocide and people trying to stop genocide. It’s moving towards the end-game, as Israel loses deterrence because of its military’s sheer incompetence and changing military technology, but it’s playing out more or less as expected: the tiny colonial enclave surrounded by hostile natives is in decline as its super power sponsor is in decline.

The Ukraine war is important because it’s another indicator of the end of the American century and Western hegemony and the first major war which shows how new battlefield tech works in practice. But, pull back a bit and well, it’s just a sign of something inevitable, which is the end of Western hegemony. And that was signed when the US decided to send its industry to China: the actual decision was made back in the 90s.

US internal political shenanigans, like Texas illegally defying the Federal government over immigration and attempts to keep Trump off the ballot and so on are important: but they’re just the logical consequence of American economic decline and of neo-liberal ideology. Don’t decide to become a plutocratic oligarchy by electing Reagan, and none of this happens. Again, the decision was made a long time ago, but also, whatever, the US was never going to be number 1 forever.

The rise of China is also a sort of semi-story. The place that was the technological and economic leader for most of the last 2,000 years is regaining is prominence after a period of decline caused by an unevenly spread technological renaissance. This isn’t a surprise, it’s almost an inevitability. though when and how it happens matters to those of us around when it does.

But Covid is a real story. It’s probably a black plague level story. A virus that badly damages immune systems and which leaves many people crippled but alive. That matters, because it’s changing the cycles. Empires rise and fall, tech breakthroughs happen, are clustered and give an advantage then disperse, and military tech changes in ways which change war, often for centuries, but major major plagues, well, they’re hardly unknown, but it’s been a while and Covid is a big one.

It’s not the deaths that matter so much. It’s the disabling. This lovely chart runs to the middle of 2023.

As for Covid, well, it’s a pandemic. That means it runs in waves.

Ain’t that something? Turns out declaring the pandemic over and the pandemic being over are two different things.

Increasing levels of people not being able to work and needing to be supported is a big, big deal, for reasons I assume are obvious.

We’ll talk more about this soon, real soon, because Covid was a test and we failed as a species, no one handled it properly even though doing so would have been fairly simple. And why we couldn’t handle Covid is why we can’t handle anything else, including the most important “story” or problem in the world.

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The Weird Pro-Biden Messaging

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On January 17, 2024

25 Comments

Democrats, Democrats never change.

It’s all, “well yes, Biden is bad, especially that *cough* Gaza thing, but, ummm, Trump will be worse. So hold that nose, crawl up to the cesspit and vote Biden.”

I mean, I’ve always been anti-lesser evil, but is there any line?

We’re talking a full blown genocide, with deliberate starvation of the population. Only one working hospital remains in Gaza and it is under attack as I write this. If you want to, and you have a strong stomach, you can find such fun videos as a father who is a doctor amputating his own daughter’s leg, on his kitchen table, without anaesthetic. (There is no anaesthetic left in Gaza, all surgery is without anaesthic. Welcome to Hell.) Babies died abandoned in incubators and Palestinians running to get food from aid trucks are gunned down by quad-copter drones.

Israel couldn’t do this without the US, which has been in constant bomb and missile airlift mode since it started. Further, the only person who could stop the genocide with a single phone call is Joe Biden.

But sure, vote for him because Trump would be worse. Vote for a genocider.

There will be some commenters, I bet, who say, “but Trump would be worse: he’d support the genocide and do other bad things.”

Possibly true.

“Vote Beelzebub, he is 3% less bad than Satan.”

Let’s explain basic politics in a democracy (the same rules apply in non-democracies, with slight adjustments.)

You have power if you can deliver voters, volunteers or money in sufficient quantities to make a difference, and no one can get those voters, volunteers or dollars without going thru you.

That is it, that is all. If you want to have influence on policy, you must have enough voters/money/volunteers who will only make that difference if they get what they want and who will absolutely work against you if they don’t. Doesn’t matter if it’s single payer or “don’t genocide”. If enough people won’t say “you don’t get what you want from me if I don’t get what I want from you” then you have no power. None.

The right has power because they will absolutely vote against and work against people who cross them and are loyal to those who do what they want. Say what you want about Trump and the right: he gave them the abortion ban they’ve been wanting for generations. He did that. They got what they wanted from him, the single most important thing they wanted.

“Progressives”? No principles. They believe in nothing. There is no red line they will not cross, no slight or betrayal they will not forgive if it is wrapped in a smarmy right wing Democrat’s lying lips.

Fortunately, in this case, there are lot of Muslims in Michigan, a battleground state. And apparently there is a red line for them, “you killed my relatives!!!!!” So there’s a good chance Biden will lose, even if the usual suspects whine that he’s better than Trump, even if he did everything he could to make a genocide happen.

But until there is a voting/giving/volunteering bloc with actual principles which aren’t garbage and which they can’t be cajoled out of with empty promises and lies and “but he’s even worse!”, no one’s getting a better country or world, for that matter.

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The Terminator Future (The End of Meat)

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On January 16, 2024

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This is my third piece this week on how the world is changing and why. The first handled the geopolitical, the second the military tech at this moment and how that is making empire difficult.

This one is about the future.

There’s going to be a period of war which is all about autonomous robots. Drones, missiles, robodogs with guns, tiny swarms, etc…

Humans are a stupid and inefficient way to apply force: most of the human body is not designed for combat: we are slow, clumsy and easily damaged and destroyed compared to what we can build.

As the cost of autonomous robots (and they will be autonomous because remote control is a weakness) continues to plummet and as the knowledge of how to build them spreads, they will replace humans on the front lines. Humans will be victims, but not primary combatants.

At the state level this means that states which can produce the most robots will win: the robots will be expendable and used in vast numbers. The chain of resources to manufacturing and the ability protect that chain will be what matters.

For smaller groups, robots will offer cheap violence against soft targets (and sometimes hard targets.) A militia can be people who build drones then use them to attack a governor or an activist they hate.

Let’s give one concrete example. Say it’s twenty years from now, you’re China and some piss–ant country like Yemen is causing problems hitting your ships with drones and missiles. You warn them and they don’t stop.

Fine. Release a few million autonomous hunter-killer drones. They will crawl over every single inch of land, not even in the mountains will it be possible to hide. No matter how  many robots Yemen has,  you’re China, you have magnitudes more. You can’t lose.

In time there will be, as the gamers say, a “meta”–we’ll figure out how autonomous robots work, and how to fight with them and defeat them and so on. But during the adoption period (and remember, that period is usually 30-40 years and sometimes longer) those who figure out how to use robots best will punch far higher than their apparent weight, and if anyone can obtain a monopoly on some for of advanced weaponized robot which is effective (like European ironclads when no one else had any), well, they will do very well and may be able to parlay that into a long period of dominance.

Don’t be sure you know exactly how this will play out. For example, a decentralized model where every citizen builds and contributes drones may turn out to be very strong versus a centralized model. Or it may not. We don’t know yet.

But the time of meat as the right way to fight is coming to an end.

(Or has it? We’ll come to that in the next article in this series.)

Our fundraiser ends Friday. We’re about $400 from the final goal, which is an article on the Medieval credentials crisis.

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How Changing Military Technology Has Contributed To End of Empire

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On January 15, 2024

16 Comments

Before WWI, strategically, machine guns were offensive weapons. They were used to expand the European empires against opponents who didn’t have them.

Come WWI, it turned out that they were defensive weapons which made offensive operations very hard if both sides had them.

Armor and air made fast offensive operations possible in WWII, and aircraft carriers made air the queen of the ocean and the king of force projection against nations without large air forces.

Over the past twenty years two major things have changed in military technology. I’ve written about both in the past.

The first is the spread of cheap and effective drones and missiles. It was always clear that drones were not going to be weapons of the powerful. What matters for weapons systems is who can afford them. If you need aircraft carriers and you’re not a major country, you’re shit outta luck. The end of medieval nobility arrived with gunpowder weapons, specifically cannons. King could afford them, nobles couldn’t, and old style castles couldn’t stand against them.

Another thing about drones and missiles right now is that defenses against them aren’t very good. Hit missile defenses with a large enough wave of attack and some will get thru, and if you have decent intelligence, some will get thru and destroy some of the air defenses.

In the old days if you wanted to bomb, bomb away and inflict terrific damage on someone without them being able to strike back, you had to have a lot of aircraft and either basing rights or aircraft carriers. Now they just have to be in missile and drone range. And often the missiles and drones are way cheaper than the defenses.

This means it’s easy to hurt the other guy. No more Israel pounding Lebanon and Lebanon can’t strike back, even though Israel’s military budget is way more than Hezbollah’s. Likewise missiles and drones are great at shutting down naval traffic, as the US, UK and Israel are discovering.

But what has happened at the same time is increased strategic ability to defend. Improvised explosive devices, cheap drones and missiles, and the way that armor (tanks, etc…) has become almost worthless. You can’t punch thru, anymore, if you don’t exhaust the defender first or take them by surprise. We’ve seen that in Afghanistan, but we saw lesser version in Iraq and Afghanistan; the US could take the cities, but everywhere else they were in danger: take out a convoy and get hit by IEDs and guerilla attacks.

It’s easy to hurt the other guy, but it’s very had to take and keep territory. “Big Arrow” war requires massive overmatch in forces.

To put it crudely, any pint-sized country or reasonable sized militia is in the game: they have weapons that can threaten anyone near them. There’s no “stand off and bomb”, not even for the US, unless it wants to withdraw from its overseas bases. The enemy can almost always hit back. If Israel goes to war with Hezbollah, Hezbollah, with at least 150k missiles can and will flatten Tel Aviv if Israel decides to flatten Beiruit.

One-sided deterrence is broken. “You win on the ground quickly and you can’t hit us from the air without us being able to retaliate.”

That the new military technology status quo.  There are exceptions, and there are particular cases (many people think that navies are essentially obsolete except for submarines in any real war, and submarine detection technology is advancing so quickly that even subs may be useless soon.) But basically, it’s hard to conquer someone who’s properly prepared (Armenia was not, Ukraine was, Hezbollah is, Hamas is.) And it’s hard to shut down drone and missile based retaliation, so you can’t have nice little colonial wars like Gulf I where you hit them and hit them and all they can do is take it.

War, war always changes.

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The Sun Sets Slowly—Then Quickly

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On January 14, 2024

15 Comments

And there are moments when you realize it is setting:

The people of the mountain have checkmated the people of the sea. As commenter VietnamVet wrote:

The Five-eyes Oceanic Empire is dying before our eyes. UK, Canada, Australia, and the USA (let alone New Zealand) simply do not have armament or manpower to occupy Yemen to push the Houthi back far enough from the Gate of Grief at the mouth of the Red Sea to reopen the Suez Canal to western shipping. A global logistic choke point has closed. The second, the Panama Canal, is limiting ships due to the drought.

The American and UK navies both have manpower shortages. When the aircraft Carrier Gerald Ford left the region, it was already vastly undermanned:

In the face of a massive shortage of Navy sailors, America’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), has downsized, cutting the crew aboard by hundreds of sailors.

The cuts appear to be deep and dramatic. Over the past six months to a year, some 500 to 600 sailors have left the USS Ford and not been replaced. In fact, the USS Ford has shed so many crew members that the ship’s company (core crew members that operate the vessel) is now below the Ford-class Carrier Program’s original Acquisition Program Baseline objective of 2,391 billets—a goal set back in 2004 that many observers considered unrealistic.

On top of this, ships can only store so many missiles. Every missile salvo reduces the amount of time before they have to return to base. America and Britain have been sending vast numbers of missiles to Israel and Ukraine and western manufacturing capacity is vastly below what is needed to refill stocks.

Meanwhile the Yemenis live in a mountainous country and their missiles are all mobile. It is impossible to take them out just with naval power: boots on the ground are necessary: a full invasion and occupation, in fact and that just isn’t happening: the US might be able to do it by going all out, but it would have nothing left for anywhere else.

So fundamentally, the US can’t invade and it can’t stop the Yemenis from shooting missiles. It might be able to bomb a lot, but that won’t stop the Yemenis: the endured one of the longest and most brutal bombing campaigns of the last hundred years just recently.

The US — the West, doesn’t have deterrence. We can’t do anything to the Ansar Allah which will make them back down and we don’t have the ability stop them by main force.

Trying to stop them by main force has made the situation worse: now even more vessels can’t enter the Red Sea—commercial cargo lines are not going to chance being shot up.

America is a naval empire. It, like the old British empire, rests on being able to keep the shipping lines open and on using naval power (and air power) to hurt nations while those nations can’t fight back. In the 19th century the Brits would park ironclads off the coast and just pound cities, and there was nothing those cities could do in return.

This is, then, one of the key moments in the end of Western hegemony. The point at which we no longer have deterrence; at which we can no longer “big foot” other nations.

The end of Western dominance is close, very close. I can taste it, like a hint of salt on a sea breeze. The Chinese are only behind in a few technological areas. Once other nations can get everything they need from China/Russia and other lesser nations they will be free to throw off the Western order, because the new and improved missiles make “stand off and bomb” far less effective than it used to be.

They don’t have to be scared of us, and soon they won’t need us.

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$900 To Final Fundraising Goal

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On January 14, 2024

I’m going to bring the fundraiser to an end on Friday. We’re c.$900 short of the final goal. If we reach it I’ll write an article about the Medieval credentials/academic crisis. The remaining chapters of “Creation of Reality” which were part of the fundraiser will be published over the next week or two, in between more topical articles.

I’m very grateful to everyone who has given. Thank you.

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