I don't spend time here but the balloon was fun enough. So... how about a saturday essay?
Exactly...don't even bother wasting any brain cells reading WSJ opinion, or any anti-China opinion articles for that matter.
On the contrary.
Always strive to know the mind of your adversary.
In this instance this is just one strand of thought coming from a specific circle but it is relevant nonetheless because It tells you how your adversary wants its underlings to think and, more importantly, feel.
For all our self-importance and arrogance human nature is simple and predictable. For all our delusions of rationality and free will we are slaves to our instincts and evolutionary legacy. As such if your adversary is bound to commit mistakes he will tell you in advance what these mistakes will be.
Among many reasons why Putin failed in Ukraine was what he told his underlings - there will be no invasion, it's just an
exercise. And because he wanted everyone to think that he made it look like an exercise. And thus when it failed there was no way out of "
special military operation" that was meant to be only an
exercise.
This is how it works in the natural world and in ours as well. You just need to let him speak while you listen.
All we do in communication is projection. We project on others while they project on us. This is why remaining silent is the most powerful move. You can only reveal nothing by remaining silent.
So...
First take a look at page three of "the saturday essay" and consider that it took two weeks to respond to Russia's invasion of Ukraine:
Kagan's essay is not just a book promo:
Yet those examples should give Chinese leaders pause, for both Japan and Germany, while accomplishing amazing feats of rapid expansion for brief periods of time, ultimately failed in their ambitions for regional hegemony. They underestimated both the actual and potential power of the U.S. They failed to understand that the emergence of the U.S. as a great power at the beginning of the 20th century had so transformed international circumstances that longstanding ambitions of regional hegemony were no longer achievable. At this moment of high tension over Taiwan and the Chinese spy balloon detected this week over the U.S., Xi Jinping runs the risk of making the same historic mistake.
It's an intentional and
timely statement from certain political circles in Washington.
But look what else is said in this paragraph: "
rapid expansion for brief periods of time". Brief periods of time? Brief?
Germany, known as Holy Roman Empire, has
always been a leading economic power in Europe only divided politically since the Reformation and the disastrous 30 years' war. Germany was Prussia's imperial brand because HRE was Austria's. To use "brief" in Germany's context says everything about Kagan's knowledge of history.
But if this is how he views Germany why doesn't he see America in those same terms? What was different between Imperial Germany since Unification in 1871 and the United States since after The Secession War? Both were politically very similar, had rapidly growing industrial economies and were emergent imperial and colonial powers having to contend with established colonial empires. The only advantage that the U.S. held before WW2 was oil production. Germany had none, America had most of it.
In 1930s U.S. held 40% of global industry
because of oil and not because of factories.
Here's LoN table of crude oil production:
Note that in 1937 out of 279 million tonnes 173m came from U.S. (62%) and 218m from Americas (78%) which could easily be blockaded by US Navy.
Here's steel production for comparison:
In 1937 Germany is able to generate 40% of U.S. steel production in with below 50% of U.S. population.
What Germany lacked was energy for modern industry which is why it lagged in production of automobiles or aircraft behind the U.S. It's hard to build economies of scale around a product if you have no fuel to use it. America had oil which is why everyone had cars and cities were planned irrationally due to abundance of cheap energy.
There is nothing today that resembles oil in its impact on industrial capacity except oil, still. Not even electronics. By the time shortage of semiconductors or microchips becomes a problem shortage of oil would have long decided the outcome of a conflict.
In WW2 the side that had access to oil would have modern logistics already at its disposal. The side that didn't have it would have outdated logistics because even fully mobilized wartime economy can never beat economies of scale of peacetime economy. That was the decisive advantage that the Allies had in WW2 over the Axis. They had oil to build their war economy around it and when war began they cut access to oil putting the advantage to work.
WW2 was not won by technology. It was won by oil.
(and numbers)
It can't be done anymore. China is an industrialized country with logistics and technology as modern as that of the US. And the oil market looks starkly different today.
US and Canada production is comparable to Russia and China - enough for a war. The other main source of oil lies just across from Pakistan - quite unlike where Germany had to go in WW2 to get to Soviet or British sources.
Neither could imagine that the U.S. of 1939 would become the U.S. of 1942, producing weapons and materiel at a rate that defied all past experience. Between the summer of 1940 and the summer of 1945, American shipyards produced 141 aircraft carriers, eight battleships, 807 cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts, and 203 submarines. American auto manufacturers and other industries converted their assembly lines to produce 88,410 tanks and self-propelled guns, 257,000 artillery pieces, 2.4 million trucks, 2.6 million machine guns and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. The budding American aviation industry eventually produced 170 aircraft per day for a total of 324,750 over the course of the war.
All of which was financed by historically unprecedented transfer of wealth, exceeding that of WW1. Britain bakrupted itself to cover it. Bretton Woods system was established to fund repayment but it was bled dry by 1971 by U.S. military buildup post-WW2. Afterward Reagan and Bush Jr had to borrow from Japan/EEC and China respectively to finance smaller shorter increases in military spending.
At their peak in 1941, the Axis powers had a combined GDP larger than that of the U.S. and only a little smaller than the combined GDP of the U.S. and Britain. Today the U.S. and its allies and partners (which includes most of Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and others) produce over 50% of the world’s wealth, while China and Russia together produce a little over 20%.
1941 GDP is primarily goods. 2023 GDP is primarily services.
In 2015 US had 80% GDP in services and 20% in industry (including oil and gas) while China had 40% in industry (mostly manufacturing).
Output is affected by currency value. Excluding oil China in 2015 is US in 1940. US is Britain. We all know what happened to Britain.
We don’t know what a more fully mobilized 21st-century America would look like, but there is reason to think it would be formidable. This year the U.S. will spend less than 4% of its GDP on defense. That is a peacetime military budget and a comparatively low one. In Dwight Eisenhower’s last budget in 1960, the U.S. spent 9% of GDP on defense; in the Reagan years it spent just under 7%. If the U.S. spent 7% of GDP on the military today, it would amount to annual defense spending of almost $1.6 trillion, compared with the slightly over $800 billion it currently spends.
That reason absolutely exists and even has a classification:
So... why do I think this essay to be so relevant?
Because it is an entire argument based exclusively on what US did 110 and 80 years ago.
And it's not written by a nobody. WSJ. Brookings Institution. Kagan's wife in Biden administration. These people are very influential.
Let your adversary talk. You keep quiet.
Read it again. Pay attention to
what is being said.
There's not a single argument based on current U.S. potential.
Every contemporary comparison uses past as reference for how the comparison should be understood. It's as if Kagan didn't understand what current potential is or...
...as if he did.
I'm old enough to remember what he and his ilk were saying in 2001. They were
very much aware of their then
current potential.
When your adversary comes to the battlefield and tries to intimidate you by listing his past glory you know that he already lost the battle in his mind. It's a last resort. You might as well not do anything and he will defeat himself.
So... sometimes reading an anti-China WSJ essay is exactly what you need.
