If the US tried to blockade China from transporting food from, say, Africa, China would use its naval escorts to put the USA in the position of “fight or get out of the way.”
Against the US Navy? In the Indian Ocean? Good luck.
It seems like you’re treating conventional forces—nay, any strategic asset at all including sanctions and blockades—as pure deterrence, and therefore we’re out of luck as soon as our adversaries calls the bluff. That’s not how any of this works.
Meanwhile, the USA would be viewed as using their military to attempt to enforce the starvation of 1.5 billion people. That seems unlikely to fly in America, unless China’s behavior was widely viewed as being on par with the Nazis or North Korea.
It flew in 1940 against Imperial Japan, and it flew again in 2022 against Russia. We’re not talking about sanctioning China out of the blue here, but as a retaliatory measure against an invasion of Taiwan. In this context China absolutely is on par with Imperial Japan.
Along with low unemployment, the US is also facing high prices for all sorts of goods. This is the basic tradeoff predicted by the collapse of globalization, and the principle of comparative advantage says that limiting trade is fundamentally net negative-sum. The US decision to pursue a trade war with China is controversial among economists.
Your argument only works under the naive assumption that rules are absolute and unbreakable, which is approximately true within functioning states with state monopoly on violence, but falls short in the context of international politics. When your intellectual property gets stolen or your capital gets stuck in China, what authority are you going to appeal to?
It seems like you’re treating conventional forces—nay, any strategic asset at all including sanctions and blockades—as pure deterrence, and therefore we’re out of luck as soon as our adversaries calls the bluff. That’s not how any of this works.
Your wording is a little to imprecise and abstract here to be easily debatable, in particular the phrases “as pure deterrence” and “we’re out of luck.”
My model here is based on this post. In its terminology, I am saying that threatening to blockade each others’ maritime trade (as opposed to embargoes) would be a ‘false note’ in the logical thesis of their maneuvers, because it would risk escalation of direct conflict over a prize that’s not worth the risk for either of them. I don’t think that either country would even threaten it, because it would undermine their credibility.
This doesn’t at all mean that the United States is helpless to watch China invade Taiwan, just as it has not been reduced to a state of helpless passivity as Russia invaded Ukraine. Conventional forces can be used for interior maneuvers to indirectly compete with adversaries within the window of freedom of action. There are things the USA can do with its conventional forces that allow it to compete with China, including specifically over the status of Taiwan, without crossing a red line.
It flew in 1940 against Imperial Japan, and it flew again in 2022 against Russia.
Japan was engaged in a war against the United States. Russia is not being blockaded, and it is specifically blockades that I am arguing the United States would avoid. The United States is not embargoing food shipments to Russia, as far as I am aware, and of course if it did, Russia could still attempt to import food from a country that’s not imposing sanctions. Russia is also a major agricultural producer, so I think it is not correct in any sense to say that the USA is using its military to impose starvation on Russia.
Your argument only works under the naive assumption that rules are absolute and unbreakable, which is approximately true within functioning states with state monopoly on violence, but falls short in the context of international politics. When your intellectual property gets stolen or your capital gets stuck in China, what authority are you going to appeal to?
Which specific part of my argument “only works under the assumption that rules are absolute and unbreakable?” Please base your rebuttal on specific quotes.
Global trade certainly entails precisely the risks you describe, but that is a risk that businesses can plan for, mitigate, and price into their products. The point of globalization is removing the legal barriers to businesses figuring out how to do so.
We are certainly seeing that this may come with externalities, short-sightedness, and national security problems that the market’s ill-equipped to handle. However, this to me is an argument for some sort of regulatory nuance, not a full-scale rollback of globalization.
As a note, my current level of interest in engaging with you further is low. This is because of imprecision in your language, what I perceive as falsehoods and misrepresentations of history (in the “Imperial Japan/Russia” quote), and non-specificity in how your rebuttals tie into the specific content of my posts. If your approach is the same in future replies, I will probably skim the response and them move on from this discussion.
Against the US Navy? In the Indian Ocean? Good luck.
It seems like you’re treating conventional forces—nay, any strategic asset at all including sanctions and blockades—as pure deterrence, and therefore we’re out of luck as soon as our adversaries calls the bluff. That’s not how any of this works.
It flew in 1940 against Imperial Japan, and it flew again in 2022 against Russia. We’re not talking about sanctioning China out of the blue here, but as a retaliatory measure against an invasion of Taiwan. In this context China absolutely is on par with Imperial Japan.
Your argument only works under the naive assumption that rules are absolute and unbreakable, which is approximately true within functioning states with state monopoly on violence, but falls short in the context of international politics. When your intellectual property gets stolen or your capital gets stuck in China, what authority are you going to appeal to?
Your wording is a little to imprecise and abstract here to be easily debatable, in particular the phrases “as pure deterrence” and “we’re out of luck.”
My model here is based on this post. In its terminology, I am saying that threatening to blockade each others’ maritime trade (as opposed to embargoes) would be a ‘false note’ in the logical thesis of their maneuvers, because it would risk escalation of direct conflict over a prize that’s not worth the risk for either of them. I don’t think that either country would even threaten it, because it would undermine their credibility.
This doesn’t at all mean that the United States is helpless to watch China invade Taiwan, just as it has not been reduced to a state of helpless passivity as Russia invaded Ukraine. Conventional forces can be used for interior maneuvers to indirectly compete with adversaries within the window of freedom of action. There are things the USA can do with its conventional forces that allow it to compete with China, including specifically over the status of Taiwan, without crossing a red line.
Japan was engaged in a war against the United States. Russia is not being blockaded, and it is specifically blockades that I am arguing the United States would avoid. The United States is not embargoing food shipments to Russia, as far as I am aware, and of course if it did, Russia could still attempt to import food from a country that’s not imposing sanctions. Russia is also a major agricultural producer, so I think it is not correct in any sense to say that the USA is using its military to impose starvation on Russia.
Which specific part of my argument “only works under the assumption that rules are absolute and unbreakable?” Please base your rebuttal on specific quotes.
Global trade certainly entails precisely the risks you describe, but that is a risk that businesses can plan for, mitigate, and price into their products. The point of globalization is removing the legal barriers to businesses figuring out how to do so.
We are certainly seeing that this may come with externalities, short-sightedness, and national security problems that the market’s ill-equipped to handle. However, this to me is an argument for some sort of regulatory nuance, not a full-scale rollback of globalization.
As a note, my current level of interest in engaging with you further is low. This is because of imprecision in your language, what I perceive as falsehoods and misrepresentations of history (in the “Imperial Japan/Russia” quote), and non-specificity in how your rebuttals tie into the specific content of my posts. If your approach is the same in future replies, I will probably skim the response and them move on from this discussion.