Wondering what you all think is coming in the next 5-50 yrs? With the debt we have I can’t see how anyone could possibly fix things. I’m not sure how to even begin speculating on it, opinions? Anyone have any books to recommend shining light in this area, whether historical or speculation on the future?
Dollar is no longer reserve currency, and it all comes flowing back
I predict the outbreak of major, regional war by the end of 2013, latest. 
Edit to add: I mean regional war somewhere outside the US. How that will come back to the US territory is anybody’s guess at this point. Chinese occupation and a Chinese “Marshall Plan” imposed on the US? Who knows.
Clayton -
Well this is depressing.
Central bank is more dangerous than chinese army.
Nothing. Nobody will figure out the best way to bring about the changes they want, the old fogeys in the power structure will die. Their children have proven themselves worthless, and will get bored or overwhelmed and just sort of go away.
The government will run out of money. Mass layoffs remove the “safety nets” and the loser douchebag hipsters, busybodies, old guy on your block who sits in a lawnchair and watches everything, will start getting their asses kicked and a certain sense of normalcy will return.
@Habba: Wishful thinking. You’re forgetting that the US doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The world is filled with bloodthirsty, cutthroat opportunists circling like vultures around any faltering politico-economic system. If the US goes on the auction block, it won’t be US citizens making the winning bids. Say hello to your new, colonial masters.
The fact is that the US is in roughly the same position vis-a-vis Asia that Europe was vis-a-vis the American continent 100 years ago. A century ago, Europe, not America, was the industrial powerhouse and global center of science and academic learning. Today, Asia seems pathetic to the blathering American pundit. But the facts on the ground show that Asia - not the US - is the center of real free trade. The US economy is choking to death on an 85-year-old culture of entitlement. Asia is (so far) free of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions and senseless “safety” regulations.
The US military strength is vastly overestimated. We’ve already spent our coffers - to start a war with anyone, at this point, on any pretext would virtually guarantee military defeat. How? Read here.
One of the ways the US contributed to the defeat of Germany during World War II was the Sherman tank. Despite its vast inferiority to a German Tiger tank (the Sherman couldn’t even dream of going toe-to-toe with a Tiger), the US mass-produced so many Shermans so cheaply, that the Allies enjoyed the advantage of just having more overall armor. With some improvised reinforcements made to the Sherman and a couple late design updates, it could almost take out a Tiger and - being nimble - could sneak up handily behind other German tanks and take them out from the rear.
What people forget is that large-scale war is fundamentally an economic proposition. They get so wrapped up in the strategy and tactics, the pomp and drama that they forget that it all has to be paid for somehow. The idea of “dollars per kill” has no meaning to the Pentagon because it believes it has (and basically does have for the present moment) an infinite supply of cash. Compare the next-generation Humvee (the JLTV):
To these:
Assume each motor-bike costs $3,500 (the military has to pay more for everything, right?) aend let’s say $1000 for the grenade launcher (plus some grenades). You equip 96 motorbikes+RPGs for the price of one of those JLTVs pictured above. Let’s say the US Army invades with 100 of its latest JLTVs. Scary for Iran, right? But for the same price that the Army paid for the JLTVs, Iran can equip and deploy 9,600 motorbikes. Imagine you are one of the soldiers in a group of 100 JLTVs and over the ridge you see 20,000 Iranian soldiers riding 9,600 motorbikes, each equipped with RPGs (that they have been trained to shoot properly).
No sweat, you say, the surrounded US Army column will simply call in air support and napalm the pesky Iranians like taking a flame-thrower to so many mosquitos. That’s where the War Nerd article above comes in. Without carrier support, pray tell, where will these fighters come from? From Iraq, where the indigenous population is planting all those IEDs that created the need for the Pentagon to devise a freak of nature like the JLTV in the first place? From Afghanistan, where Afghan police are killing US soldiers and allies? Sorry, Diego Garcia is too far away. Pakistan? Errrr, wrong answer. Saudi Arabia? Wrong again. India, maybe? Oh boy would we have to eat some humble pie and kiss some major ass. The Indians aren’t stupid enough to fall for our tired tungsten-filled-gold-bars-right-out-of-Fort-Knox trick.
But the entire US military-industrial-complex is infused with the mentality of invincibility, from the lowliest janitor scrubbing toilets at Lockheed’s skunk-works all the way up to the Pentagon brass. We think we can’t be beaten because we’ve spent trillions and trillions of dollars building “unbeatable” weapons. My prediction is that - soon after the Obama-rubber-stamp election - the testosteronal USG is going to really pull the pin on the Middle East (as if Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Arab Spring weren’t enough). There are a variety of narratives that could lay the pretext. Israel “went rogue” and “bombed the Natanz facility”. But - as the faithful allies that we are - we must stand abreast when the filthy Allah-worshipping Muslims begin attacking the “Holy Land.” Holy! What a joke! Or, we send a few of the kind, warmhearted gentlemen from the Special Activities Division to paint up a speedboat like an Iranian navy boat, put an Iranian flag in it, then pay some idiotic teenagers a bunch of cash to gun it on a path straight through a US carrier group. Or, now that the Marines are in Libya, we might have some of our NATO-flagged intelligence operatives (they’re still our boys, born and raised out of Langley) that have been native on the ground for years form occupation-resistance posses. Hell, these posses would probably attract the attention and support of, say, Hezbollah. There are literally thousands of possible pretexts for a general land war across the southern belly of the Asian continent.
As difficult as it might be to believe at this point in time, I believe that we would not survive active counter-attack from China, Russia and Iran. China has the economic fundamentals to beat us. I don’t think Russia and China are going to stand by while we rampage around their back yard tearing up and trying to seize oil pipelines that constitute a massive component of their oil supply. And all of China, Russia and Iran are thinking about war in terms of dollars per kill. Dollars per helicopter shot down. Dollars per tank destroyed. Dollars per aircraft carrier sunk. We can’t beat that. Our military sees the JLTV (some models cost as much as $900K apiece!!) as the future. It’s a wheeled vehicle, for God’s sake! And they’re thinking of paying nearly a million bucks a pop for a wheeled vehicle??
And if we even so much as falter, the whole house of cards comes crashing to the ground in an instant. The Fed, the debt, the $5T/year budget, all of it. The US economy will burst and the vultures will swoop down and pick up the pieces for a penny on the dollar. At that point, the US will be begging to be allowed into the EU. On the strictest austerity terms - including payment of outrageous war reparations to China - we might be let in, yoked to the European VAT taxes and dream of vacationing in Guangdong Province one day when we retire.
Clayton -
I know it is not quite a fair comparison, but how many Somailians did the U.S. marines manage to fend off? Those motorbikes can’t do anything about the air superiority we have either…
One of the several hundred U.S. bases in the region (Saudia Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Yemen, Qatar, Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey…)
Why? Why? Why? There’s no reasoning at all here.
India would probably be the “no” of the three you present. India supports Iranian nuclear ambitions because India and Iran both dislike Pakistan and Pakistan has nukes. Pakistan’s youth and prestige from nuclear weapons makes Iran look like a punk and India insecure since they, obviously, do not trust them with those weapons.
Saudi Arabi lets Israel use their airspace and the U.S has numerous bases there, so why exactly can’t there be air support from there?
Egypt and Libya were a big deal because they are eliminated as support regions and more likely now classified as hostile regions. I think the U.S. claimed to support their revolutions because they thought that if the people participating in the revolution knew that the U.S. supported their revlutionary actions, that they would see that as a sign to end their participation in the revolution. It’s the “Don’t do what they want us to” type of reasoning.
Okay. This all seems like a bluff.
This would be the case if China’s success in the world wasn’t codependent with the U.S.'s success in the world. When the US goes down it will take Saudi Arabia and China with it. When Saudi Arabia goes down (the House of Saud is reliant on income from U.S. treasuries) every avaricious sect of power in the Middle ease will activate. It won’t just be Iran and the U.S./Israel, it will be Shia/Sunni as well. And this will stretch from Afghanistan to Egypt. Oil will be gone for EU and China. Russia will end up with economic power (energy) over EU and China. The U.S. is trying to keep China as a counterweight to Russian influence all over East Asia and The middle east. We are at the same time preventing China from making advances in oil agreements in North Africa, Indonesia, and the Phillipines (and AU for that matter). We want their energy potential contained to importation…If they start attaining money then they can actually develop a military that could compete with ours.
You fret about ballistic missle programs from China, but forget to mention the worldwide systems of the U.S. We don’t need to send our carriers within 2000km (15oo miles?). We have missles that can span the entirety of the globe if we needed them to. We have missles that go 9 times the speed of sound and span half of the world. You also take the rhetoric of a government “research paper” that is essentially the military saying that, “our most powerful war asset is useless because of some Chinese STS missiles…give us more money…?”
The thing about the Russian and Chinese energy agreement…is that Russia is going to “sell” them energy. And the Chinese economy does rely on the U.S. to consume their product. If the U.S. cannot consume, the Chinese will have to find another export market to make the money to get more energy resources from Russia, particularly. The key here is that Schiff’s vision of the Chinese ‘consuming their own product’ in response to the U.S. decoupling leaves them with fewer energy resources since they are consuming their product; in order to sustain production levels that the U.S. maintains through constant credit expansion. They need to maintain output levels to maintain the trade relationship that the yuan is gaining. I don’t think that it is realistic that they switch over inside of twenty years. The market is not going to take over, people. I know, it sucks, but the Chinese are mercantilists…
I agree, however, that it is unlikely that the U.S. comes out the (or even “a”) victor in this. Even though, I’m pretty sure the US gets the oil it consumes from Canada and Mexico, exclusively. Meaning that the petrodollar system is there simply to support the dollar, not US oil flows; yes the two are indirectly related. But Canada will never stab us in the back and Mexico, I bet, will be scared to. So, even if the dollar goes down, the NAU will (probably be created) stay together and keep the oil in its war machine. Don’t think that we won’t be able to participate due ot lack of capital or energy.
You also have to consider the amount of time and resources that US/NATO has spent creating leave behinds and sleeper cells. The Al Qaeda groups are partially malleble by the U.S. In Syria and in Libya they did what we wanted, in Egypt they did not. Sure, they won’t let the US stomp all over them, but if we have simliar interests Al Qaeda will work with the US. I’m sure that Georgia will be an intersting experiment in U.S. countermeasures to Russian alliances in the region. We are good at exploiting civil wars, after all…
You say this, but I wonder what the U.N. will have to do with that. What happens when two veto holding members of the U.N. security counsil veto each other’s war justification? The U.N. is in the U.S. for God’s sake. It would be suicide for anyone involved to leave. Or if people walk away from their nuclear non-agression treaties as threats?
I think the war is more than a year off, however, there are a few more things that have to happen to turn diplomacy to the point of declaring war. If some of those things happen soon, then I’d reconsider.
P.S. Israel knows that this is now or never. Their window for how much international support will be there if they do it is shrinking. And, personally, I think it has already closed. If Obama wins, we’ll remember him as the one who stood in the way of an Israeli attack. Like it or not, The Obama/Carter foreign policy is fundamentally different than the Nixon/Reagan/Bush Sr/ Clinton/ Bush Jr/ (Romney). I know it is wont for libertarians to smash together “simliarities of administrations within ethics” (drones/torture, etc) but the fact is there are different interests involved in Obama than there were with Bush. And it is apparently Israel missing from Carter/Obama. They aren’t the same kind of cold warriors. They would rather side with the tons and tons of Arabs in the middle east that the tiny Israel. The goals of both camps are the same, but on thinks that an Israeli satellite is bad and that regional cooperation is better and one thinks that a hostile wedge satellite will prevent foreign transgressions (due to the unpredictability of truly hostile nations).
@Aristophanes: Well, as I noted already, we are technically unbeatable. But there’s a world of difference between being able to rebut every argument on an Internet forum as to how the US might be defeated and the US actually being undefeatable. And I think this is precisely the Pentagon’s biggest problem. They have war-gamed every scenario, they have R&D’d every conceivable defense system and munition. They have purchased the latest and greatest weapons systems by the cargo-ship-load. But that’s not the same thing as beating everybody.
Germany placed itself in precisely this position twice, in WWI and again in WWII. In order to win, Germany had to secure a swift defeat on the Western front then race to the Eastern front to defeat the Russians (the Schlieffen plan). In WWII, Germany had to defeat all the Allied powers (something they did not come nearly as close to accomplishing as the history books often dramatize it).
What happens if - in response to a US land war in Iran - Russia moves into Eastern Europe and China moves toward US Pacific holdings, at the same time? It’s no longer as simple as “Oh yeah, we can beat the Russians in Eastern Europe” and “Oh yeah, we can beat the Chinese in the Pacific”… can you do both at the same time? And the answer to this question is not an issue for tactical war nerds. It’s a matter of economics. Can the US economy - in its current, strangled state - actually produce the horsepower required to fund and fuel a multi-front, globe-spanning military conflagration with multiple hostile powers having comparatively unhampered economies? I don’t believe it can and I think that will come as a shock to Americans every bit as large as the shock the Germans got when they discovered their superior military technology was not sufficient to defeat the Allies.
Clayton -
That is incorrect on so many levels.
The Chinese are actually starting to worry me less than they used to. Every day I’m reading addtional articles about just how much of an illusion their economy really is (such as massive steel holdings vaporizing and getting rehypothecated over and over for collateral). If it came to an all out war, the 1 trillion dollars we owe them would disappear. And what would happen if the U.S. suddenly stopped exporting corn and soybeans? Although they do have a better manufacturing base, what exactly do they make that we can’t live without? A bunch of cheap crap, sure, but the basics of food, energy, etc… we have to be better situated than them, at least with Canada to the north and Mexico to the south.
The war would certainly have to be economic. There is just no way possible for any army to cross the Pacific Ocean if the U.S. didn’t want it too. How would you realistically get 5 million Chinese across that water?
I have lost some faith in one’s interpretation of world events…
Think about how easy it is to obtain a nuclear weapon on the black market. Notice how one has never ever ever eever been used. Even though they’ve been floating around the East EU/CAsia, & MEast for 25 years. If terrorists were really interested in detonating one, they would have. My guess is that NATO, Israel, and the US saw to buying as many of those as they could. If we really do arm certain terror groups and we needed to arm them with something serious, we could. I think this prosepect alone should warrant another approach to looking at U.S. war policy in the future.
Well, Eastern Europe is NATO’s defense line. So, it would actually be like 16 nations that defended that territory (all of EU forces deployed would be more intense than what is seen in Libya and Syria (NATO is itchin to do something)). When you say US pacific holdings you are referring to Indonesia, Phillipines, Hawaii, Austrailia, etc., right? I bet if you asked people from virtually all of the Indochina region states that they would rather have the pseudo indpendence that the US has given them than allowing China to take them over.
By the way, the Asian conspiracy theorists think that SARS was a U.S. chemical attack. So, they know how we look at defeating them. The Necons aren’t afraid to talk about targeting specific genotypes with biological agents and “converting them from a terrorist weapon to a useful political tool.”
Yeah, but like I said before China and the US are codependent. So is Saudi Arabia. Go back and think why Nixon/Kissinger setup the trade relationships with China and Saudi Arabia. Russia scared the shit outta them back then. They wanted to build the Chinese economy to prevent the USSR from dominating Asia. How do we do that? Buy things from them (on credit if we have to). Build them up and create a counterweight to the USSR. Saudi Arabia is a similar arrangement. “Oil for dollars and nothing else and we help you keep power.” That combination of petrodollar system, ending the gold standard, and guaranteed trade relationship with China are why the US has been so successful and why it will probably fall so hard.
When Saudia Arabia goes down half of the bad image of the U.S in the middle east is gone. Israel may be Issac to our grand strategy of retaining influence of the area (I thought for sure Egypt was, but not anymore…). China is not “unhampered.” Russia I am not completely sure about. They have serious capability and stand to gain a lot out of the breakdown of China and the middle east, but I don’t know if they think that the world will allow them to flex it like the U.S. does (and gets away with).
The worry is not wheether they will invade the U.S. The worry is how to motivate and ally with all of the other nations that won’t want the Chinese to invade their country. India and China aren’t friends either. There are just as many Indians as there are Chinese (roughly I think).
This is possibly the worst post I’ve ever seen on the internet. I honestly would prefer “U mad becuas the US will get it’s ass kikced by china?” to this kind of intellectual mockery. How is the US NOT the center of trade? I don’t think any rational person would say that the wealthiest society in the world, which sits between two oceans and has free access to every continent on Earth, which has powerful allies with their own navies in every region, which controls the Panama canal and has an uncontested control over ALL of the world’s oceans because of its massive navy isn’t the center of trade because it has welfare programs. You actually believe that there will be a (religious driven, because it wasn’t unrealistic enough before) war with Iran? And any war with between the US and China would be utter suicide for the regime which depends upon economic growth for stability. It fails on so many levels I won’t even sink myself to the level of addressing it. Feel free to keep ranting about how the US is arrogant, will collapse and be shat upon by every nation on Earth (if you must), just do five seconds of research to make sure what you are saying is factual and accurate.
Please quote where I said this.
Never said it wasn’t, though I question whether the phrase “center of trade” even has any meaning.
History proves that this is completely backwards. Europe was the premier consumer of US production before WWI and WWII (who else was there??). The war destroyed Europe and enriched the US.
Well, this post sure hasn’t.
I’ve done my homework, my friend. Let’s dance.
Clayton -
You sort of implied (in my perception) that Asia is more capable of trade and capital accumulation than the United States. North America is inherently advantaged because of its position. I would sooner see Mexico become the world power than China.
America doesn’t rely on Europe. China’s entire economy, however, is structured around exports, and requires an insane amount of raw material imports (oil, coal) to make it work. The government has power because of the continued economic growth; China is an inherently unstable region and while there isn’t a threat currently, if exports and raw materials were blocked, incomes in the coast would quickly fall to explosive levels. China has fundamental, debilitating strategic weaknesses. It relies on the East and South China seas for trade. There are numerous islands that surround the area, not to mention the support the US has from Australia and Japan. We would only have to maneuver outside the sphere to cut off trade. Try seeing things from their viewpoint. It would create the ultimate strategic nightmare for China, which has an insufficient navy compared to the US; China is still building its first aircraft carrier right now while the US has had a developed navy since 1922. They would have to rely on ground based missiles to fight.
China understands how vulnerable it is. They plan to build ports in Burma [http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/burm-m23.shtml] to escape encirclement. However, the area lies close to Australia’s sphere of influence, and it could never completely replace the mainland ports. Furthermore, the Chinese army is designed as a domestic security force and I have doubts about their ability to even attack Taiwan, much less sustain combat there or occupy it (or some South Asian country for sea access). That’s not the image they want you to see, but it’s the reality. They pose absolutely no threat to the Untied States or any of its allies. Logistics? Please. If any war happened the Chinese army wouldn’t be able to keep its interior stable, much less “attack” the US. We would barely even have to fight; simply cutting off China would win the war.
Your entire post seems like some sort of xenophobic rant. Russia is still trying to regain its feet. They rely entirely on ports which could potentially be cut off by other countries. Maybe in 20-30 years, once it has regained some of its former power, there could be a real threat of invasion, but not now, and certainly not against all of Europe.
I’ll just say this for now:
What mean “we”, paleface?
The US and its allies.
And why do you use the pronoun “we” to describe the US (government) and its allies?
Habit, I guess.
Ha. This is like the first thing that Rothbard says is wrong in The Anatomy of the State. That the main thing we need to abolish is the notion that you, the individual, are the government, and therefore refer to the government as yourself. I myself am still guilty of the habit, but we really need to make a habit of getting rid of it.