What Bush is Not Saying 

What Bush is Not Saying

A while ago I posted what is probably a stale cliche--that China and India are bound to take over soon.

Robert Kaplan on Slate discusses a CIA report that comes to similar conclusions.

The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players--similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century--will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.


In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"--probably the single most powerful country--but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"--not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others--will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.


There's some talk about Europe becoming more important to much of the Third World than the U.S., partly because the euro is doing well against the dollar right now. This I think is more of a long-term kicker:

...China is displacing the United States all across Asia--in trade, investment, education, culture, and tourism. It's also cutting into the trade markets of Latin America. (China is now Chile's No. 1 export market and Brazil's No. 2 trade partner.) Asian engineering students who might once have gone to MIT or Cal Tech are now going to universities in Beijing.


How long-term are we talking? It's still striking that the U.S. is the only country with big aircraft carriers--and it has 12 or so. I like the story about how China asked to tour one of them--probably with the most advanced technology sealed off. The Americans responded that the Chinese could see anything they liked--probably expecting that they would be amazed and intimidated. Indeed, the story goes that the Chinese returned home and said: don't bother even trying to build one of those things. It costs the economy of a good-sized country.

As far as I know, the U.S. is also practically the only country now with a real air force--maybe Israel has one as well.

So there is reason for skepticism.

But then Mark Helprin weighs in--the Republican who did at least some work for Bush senior, and has consistently had doubts about the present Iraq war. (Link from Peggy Noonan in the WSJ).

By taking intelligent advantage of the fertile relation between economic development and military capacity, China will be able to leverage its extraordinary growth into superpower parity with the United States. Without the destruction of Chinese social and political equilibrium, this is only a matter of time. And just as we had no policy for dealing with the rise of Germany, Japan, and (prior to the late 1940s) Russia, we have none here.


But with the exception of South Korea, which chafes under our protection and may eventually break from the fold, our major allies in the Pacific are islands, and conveniently in this regard our strengths are the air, the sea, space, and amphibious warfare. We have not since the Korean War been able to face China on the mainland, but if we vigorously augment what we do best, we and our allies--by deterrence and maneuver rather than war--can hold the chain of islands well into the coming century or longer, after which our objective would be to contest the open ocean. China's objective is to establish a defensive line to the east of the chain, and it is building up its navy accordingly. But we, to prepare for the coming maritime century in the Pacific, are forcing naval strength to its lowest levels since the 1930s.


Hold the chain of islands and contest the open ocean? Those aircraft carriers will come in handy. At any rate, Helprin takes for granted that Bush, the next time there is a student protect in Beijing, is not going to send in troops.

Helprin also predicts problems with old-fashioned, i.e. non-terrorist-induced epidemics.

There have also been comments recently that it is India--with its English language and political traditions--that will grow more than China--and that there is a natural alliance between India and the U.S. See Glenn Reynolds here, and John Derbyshire here.

UPDATE: It's hard to resist a joke. From a real news story--India plans to send an unmanned mission to the moon, we get from Fark: "India plans two moon missions. First will map lunar terrain, second will establish call center." And we can spin it out from there: soon a software consulting shop.... (via Hit and Run)

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