Pour Yourself a Strong Drink Before Reading This One
The US won’t be the only superpower by the year 2030? Don’t look so shocked — it was inevitable. It also isn’t true.
American power was bound to decline in relative terms, as China caught up and Russia regained its footing. It’s also the human nature that when one power is dominant, smaller powers will band together against it. That has nothing to do with whether a power is relatively benign, like the US, or an evil empire like Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.
But we also seem to be entering a period where all powers might be in decline. China may grow old before it grows rich, to borrow Mark Steyn’s memorable phrase. Not helping things are China’s “Potemkin skyscrapers.” When their bust comes, as it must, it’s going to be brutal. And tough to climb out of while also in a demographic decline.
Speaking of demographic declines, Russia never did regain its footing. And the population is shrinking by nearly a million a year. Russia has a lot of people — and a lot of years — before it ceases to exist. But Moscow is also finding it’s tough to be a mineral-based power in an information age. They should have learned that lesson in the mid-’80s, but… still nope.
And Russia is just the meaner, more brutish version of what’s going on in Europe and Japan. Awash in debt and scarce on babies is no way to go through life, folks. Yet we seem to be catching …down… with them.
There’s a nugget of a bad Will Smith (or a good Vincent Price) movie in there somewhere.
What do all these impending failures have in common? Bad governance. Western nations have ridiculed and disincentivized family and babies. And who can afford the little ones in Obama’s economy, anyway? Russia got there sooner, as utter hopelessness merged with free abortion-as-contraception. China went with a one-child policy that might have seemed like a good idea at the time — but is proving troublesome as the country will end up with 100,000,000 too many men.
What it comes down to is, the human race may well become the first species to legislate itself out of existence.
So: Welcome to a world without superpowers. Or people.
In 1939, we had an Army smaller than any of the combatants in Europe or Asia.
We got over it.
I’ll believe that China is a threat to the United States when the affluent members of the Chinese elite stop buying real estate and educating their kids in America and Canada. Trust me, there’s no one like a refugee to tell you where the corruption is and how best to avoid it.
The biggest problem with this scenario is that this is 100M men with no real consistent sexual outlet or ability to procreate and build a family. A situation ripe for revolution. If the Chinese government doesn’t find an outlet for all that testosterone, they’re going to become enemy #1 to the people, with all the internal revolution and bloodshed to accompany it.
And believe me, the Chinese government is well aware of the demographic time bomb sitting in their laps. My concern is that they will (as so many autocracies have in the past) manufacture external targets against which to throw these “extra bodies”. A few well-timed wars does wonders for culling the herd.
It’s really a race between real internal reform and demographic suicide. Of course, internal reform may simply be another Cultural Revolution. Problem solved! Right? Right?
Bingo!
It seems to me that the U.S.’s number one geopolitical challenge in the Pacific over the next 20 years is to make sure that China’s excess-males problem is contained within China. In other words, make sure that the cost of war is too high to make it a realistic outlet for all that ambition. Failing that, it needs to be contained within the “first island chain”. If we can’t pull that much off, then there’s gonna be real trouble.
Those 100,000,000 “extra” men are pretty much all “little emperors.” They are the sole hope and focus of their two parents, and 4 grand parents. The government sends them off to fight and die, and it faces a bloody revolution at home, as each military death results in 6 people with no hope, and hearts full of hate.
If it doesn’t send them off to fight and die, it ends up w/ a massively f’ed up society where 30% of males are SOL for sex unless society goes hard core for polyandry. And I’m sure all those males will be totally fine with sharing their wives with other men. Not.
So China has to send them off to fight, rape, and bring back wives / concubines / slaves. At which point Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, and everyone else in the general vicinity gang up together, and solve China’s population “problem” for it, rather permanently.
It really is past time to get to work on SDI.
One word: Sexbots.
The drawback to being at the top of the food chain with no natural predators is you have to be your one predator and control your only population. If it isn’t read tape, it’s war disase and famine… not sure which one is better.
I’ve always felt that the real problem in the Middle East is Polygamy. Having 4 wives (especially if you control them) sounds great on paper but in reality only the rich guys get that. A rich guy having four wives means three poor guys get none, and in a harshly controled regime that doesn’t even allow women to be seen in public let alone have sex outsid of marriage means a lot of angry frustrated men with no sexual outlet for whom a bomb vest and 72 virgins seems pretty appealing. Seems to me the Chinese are about to face the same problem the Arab world has been.
Here’s the big question:
Is China in a super-bubble,like Japan was in 1986 or Greece in 2006?
And if so, and either the economy collapses or there’s a full-on revolution, what does that mean for all those companies that outsourced everything to China?
I hope they have some backups back home.
Yes, China is experiencing a massive real estate bubble.
Yes, it will collapse eventually. Probably within a decade. Possibly much sooner.
Yes, when that happens, China will experience serious civil unrest.
The implications for the US-based outsourcers are significant but not dire. The usual arrangement is to partner with an overseas company that owns and operates the actual factory, kinda like Apple does with Foxconn. If the factories in China become inoperative, production will shift elsewhere, the oursourcers generally do not have a lot of physical assets located in China.
It’s not that we won’t have any superpowers, but that we’ll have alot of tiered powers. No one wants to fight the United States (and that’ll hold true in 2030) but Vietnam or Turkey or Poland is not the United States (and it’s iffy if the US will back any of them- even Poland- by 2030), and they can easily fall victim to the disease of short victorious wars.* That’s the problem for countries like Russia, China, and even India. They have demographic problems (at differing levels) and their neighbors are often weak, comparatively speaking.
In an age where economies and/or freedoms are repressed, I can easily see these countries thinking about 1914 all over again. This is not in terms of the alliance structures, but this is in reference to how they are balanced geopolitically and strategically.
*See: Russia, 1904.