Posted on 09/05/2004 3:23:34 PM PDT by AndyJackson
I think he merely pointed out the obvious fact that this may lead to some strategic tensions in years to come as Asian demand for resources increases. He in fact spent a fair amount of time discussing why we continue to get away with it. As wealth elsewhere increases, and demand for resources increases, price will increase. Either our productivity will have to increase proportionately wrt the rest of the world, or by simple economic laws our share of the take will decrease.
China might take away the Pacific region someday (there is a significant Chinese influx there now), but the rest of Siberia is just a money pit. It is about as important to Russia as the tundra is to Canada. On that one I agree with you. China will indeed connnect as it is connecting to the world economcy. The main issue is whether it will be like Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries as it moves along that path.
Thanks, SAJ, interesting analysis.
China?
Funny, that you find him such a lightweight. Rumsfled listens to him and he serves as Assistant for Strategic Futures, Office of Force Transformation (OFT), Office of the Secretary of Defense, which is the group that Rumsfeld assigned to figure out to tear the Pentagon out of the cold war and move it into the 21st century.
Folks sure forget things quickly around here. The Cold war ended largely because people figured out that the major powers were going nowhere with enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons pointed at each other. Those aresenals still exist and those rules (it is suicide to strike a vital interest of a nuclear power) still exist.
To be very blunt, no China is not going to swipe Siberia from Russia.
If China ain't then I suppose no one will (except maybe the Islamacists who don't seem to need nukes).
FAPP....for all practical purposes
And it is what to do about the ISlamacists that this whole thing is about. I think that with the recent incident in Russia along with the rest of the internal debate here in the U.S., the stretegic decisions about whether to tolerate it or fight it are settled. Kerry's ship sank, and we will fight on. Russia will now join the fight. I suspect tolerance for Arafat just dropped another point on the world scale, and while Old Europe will continue to defend him, they are becoming irrelevant.
You have to remember that a large part of his intended audience are senior (O5-O6) active duty military officers who have a lot of other things on their minds. In order to communcate he has to engage and entertain.
One of the most amusing moments was when he said "Let's just round them all up and force them to conver to Christianity... oops there I go channeling Ann Coulter... well let me tell you what it is like to be skinny"
Well, that settles that issue (Barnett's support of Kerry).
thanks for the cite
No nation is going to take **all** of Siberia, for the reason stated in my comment. However, that said, the notion of another nation taking some chunk of Siberia has been around for centuries, dating to at least the Khanate.
More recently, at least Japan (as witness their concept of the ''Northern Resource Area'' before and during WW II, and the trade component of casus belli for the Russo-Japanese war of 40 years earlier) and China (lumber and minerals were routinely taken from Siberia during the Ming and Qing ('Manchu') dynasties) have had designs on Siberia.
England had what we might nowadays call a ''look-see'' at the proposition when she was involved in the Opium Wars, but cooler heads prevailed, fortunately. In the 1890s, even the U.S. Senate toyed with the notion of extending the Seward purchase into Asian Russia (the czars were always needing money for their assorted multi-front wars), and had McKinley not been assassinated, the U.S. might very well have ended up owning a piece of Siberia.
Likely the most obvious candidate today would be China, and I should suppose such an action on their part would NOT be a matter of simple greed or expansionism. We don't get the chance to observe just how unstable the PRC is. It's quite easy to design an historical ''what-if'' game wherein China, in an attempt to rally national unity due to desperation of solving its internal problems, might concoct a ''war'' out of thin air wherein the object would be the taking of some portion of Siberia. Is this likely in the absolute sense today, or in 5 years' time? No. In 50 years' time, however, all bets are off; tell me how relatively stable both Russia and China are, as unisoverign nations, and I'll give you a guesstimate of the possible sequel. The probability at that time, possibly even a decade or so sooner, will be well above zero.
Geopolitical weakness has ALWAYS bred opportunism, in any period you like of mankind's history. Until/unless Russia can become something resembling a modern coherent nation, it will continuously be a target of such opportunism, whether military or economic (you can ask Soros about this latter point, to name just one example).
China is not going to swipe a significant and valuable part of Siberia from Russia. Period. It would be suicide and both sides know it.
Now THAT position would have been strategically indefensible. We would have held Vladivostok with our sea power and the Russians would have held or retaken everything else because of their land power.
Barnett Posts more recently
September 05, 2004
This election is looking better and better for Bush
“Internationally, Taking Sides in the U.S. Presidential Race: In Europe, seeing ‘a world election in which the world has no vote,’" by Patrick E. Tyler, New York Times, 4 September, p. A10.
“Bush’s Second Term: Aiming for a transformation,” by David Brooks, NYT, 4 September, p. A27.
“Kerry Urges Voters to Look Past Bush’s ‘Last-Minute Promises,’” by David M. Halbfinger, NYT, 4 September, p. A1.
Already the Europeans are fretting over four more years of Bush, but they see it coming, primarily because “he comes over as a strong leader and John F. Kerry doesn’t.”
I think David Brooks has it right: Bush’s second term will be more transformational than the first. Already, he’s rewritten what it means to be Republican, which used to mean small government but now means a very activist government and a very activist foreign policy.
Meanwhile, Kerry’s latest pitch is to beg voters not to listen to Bush’s promises. That sort of tack worries me a lot. Doesn’t sound like a winner’s approach, now does it? Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at September 5, 2004 09:25 AM
You're most welcome. I'm not saying that he is a bad advisor in that capacity. He might be a great tactical advisor for all that I know.
But beware of anyone who implies that our President and Republicans want one world government. Our Party and President have absolutely refused to put us under UN jurisdiction on a number of important issues while only delivering empty ruses that imply false fondness for cozyness with the UN gang. We refuse when we must and pretend when that will defuse or postpone fights until we wish to fight.
It's common knowledge that Kerry and the Democrats are those who want one world government.
Feeding conspiracy fodder ("globalization," ad infinitum, falsely/erroneously assigned to us) to our domestic kooks and foreign enemies--even if only dim folks are affected by it--is one tactic toward getting Democrats in the White House, and that's the most dangerous tactical propaganda against us that anyone can issue, IMO. Issuing any piece containing that word used frequently and libelously in our behalf during the last days of a campaign is antithetical to our effort.
Yes. Go to his website, where he says he is convinced Bush is better fit to lead this country in war and through transformation, but that he thinks Dems do better on domestic policy, so he will vote for Kerry. I thought his presentation at the National War College (shown on C-SPan last night) was extremely interesting nevertheless.
Too abd he is a long-time Dem who can't make the break like Zell has.
I criticised exactly ONE sub-premise of his argument, and fairly so, I believe. It is simply not rational to assume the longer view status quo for Russia and China, and to lump either of them into one part or the other of the ''Core/Gap'' dichotomy. This may be a convenient device, in the aid of having a nice, tidy theory to present, but this can in no sense be termed ''real-world''.
The phrase ''it's all a dog's dinner'' refers, in the conclusive paragraph, to the broad conditions involving Russia and China, NOT to the general notion of globalisation (with which, I fear, we're rather stuck in the long run), nor to ''Core/Gap'' worldview (although I think his focus on geopolitics and economics is relatively overstressed compared to the importance of ingrained cultural mores), nor to any other portion of his discussion.
This gentleman aside for a moment, you can hardly be impressed, over any significant period of time, with the ''track record'' of practical results that have devolved from the adherence of governments and financial markets to finely-spun academic theories. Can you say ''War on Poverty'' and ''Great Society'', both of which devolved from impeccable (cough) academic sources? Can you say ''Long-Term Capital Management'', two of whose chief partners were Nobel Prize winning academics? Would you care to sit for another hundred or so examples, just off the top of my head?
Beware embracing theory UNTIL there has been demonstrated some practical real-world result.
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