Aaaaand I was 100% WRONG About China

[JasonBlack]

(08-28-2022, 02:10 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: To use a common phrase, China is "too big to fail." It won't fall so soon after its modern peak just a few years ago. But it may undergo revolution in the mid-2030s. We'll see just how far it goes.

"Too big to fail" applies only to fiscally broken systems insofar that they have the coercive (usually military) clout to force others to give up resources in order to continue to fund the status quo. Most likely, what we're going to see is a sharp recession over the remainder of the 2020s, followed by one or both of the following
1) rekindling of nationalistic zeal, culminating in an expansionary, Russia-esque war campaign
2) Internal revolution, similar to what you just described, but probably a bit sooner (say, 2026 to 2031 if I had to give an approximate date).

Option 2 would likely take a bit longer, as the Chinese have the military to pacify their own people for a few years, but an external conflict would go into effect sooner.

Quote:We can't let the world burn. The world is burning from this "let things happen" ideology. We are all interdependent, and we are one world community, like it or not. The climate crisis is just one proof of that. It requires global cooperation to solve. Covid is another proof of that. Technology is yet another. The rise and fall of imperialism is another. Western colonialism made the world one, but now after the world wars The West is not ruling the world anymore. All regions and all races and nations are rising up and have their place, and borders cannot be walled off. The nationalists, trumpists and social conservative/America Firsters don't like it. It is a matter of them learning to adjust.

If that's what you want, then your best bet is voting for 90s/2000s style neocon (probably from among your generation's ranks).....but no one else outside the billionaire globalists wants to continue policing the world.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting a wall. Outside of the most populist 20% or so of the right, neither is anyone else. I'm not even suggesting protectionism. What I'm saying is that the global system of "free trade" enjoyed by most of the world today is made possible only by the Breton Woods agreement. More specifically, we gave the world a choice at the end of WWII:
1) If you join us, we will give you
- aid to rebuild
- preferential trade terms
- protection of all oceanic shipping routes courtesy of our navy.
2) And in return, you must
- stop fighting each other
- adopt the US dollar as your reserve currency
- purchase your oil in US dollars
- give us free reign to set global security policy as we see fit

There is no question there have been a lot of abuses here (I assume we can agree on that much), but the point is, we aren't seeing trade deficits and lower wages by coincidence, nor were the seeds of this trend sewn during the Reagan Administration. What we are seeing was by design ever since Bretton Woods was agreed to in 1944.

What I'm proposing is simple: we need to stop being the security force for the entirety of the world's oceans and re-negotiate obscenely disadvantageous trade deals in favor of terms that will better serve our national interests.

tl;dr:
1) The internecine wars of Europe only came to an end when America stepped in and made them stop via Bretton Woods and various accompanying treaties.
2) The current expenses levied to police the current system and trade deficits incurred to encourage cooperation never really served the US's best interests.
3) Even if we pretend for a moment that they did, the Soviet Union collapsed on Christmas of 1991, rendering the initial motivation for the arrangement obsolete. The oldest Gen X were barely 30, the oldest millennials around 10 (I was but a 5 month bundle of joy). As such, conservative Gen X and millennials have no interest in defending this system, while liberals of all generations never wanted this level of world policing in the first place.