I don’t think that this same reasoning applies to China, as some have suggested. The USA doesn’t dominate China’s economy, and a sanctions war would be far too damaging for both sides.
I think you got it backwards—China is much more vulnerable to trade disruptions than Russia. China is not self-sufficient in agriculture and energy, neither does it have sufficient naval power or allies to protect its vital trade routes. It has 10 times the population of Russia which is a huge burden, not asset. While comprehensive sanctions and embargo against Russia will cause living standards to drop, China would literally starve.
I see this conclusion as a corollary of my big-picture belief that today’s world is by and large overpopulated (Russia is an exception), and that this fact is being obfuscated by short-term concerns like the inverted age pyramid.
I think you got it backwards—China is much more vulnerable to trade disruptions than Russia. China is not self-sufficient in agriculture and energy, neither does it have sufficient naval power or allies to protect its vital trade routes. It has 10 times the population of Russia which is a huge burden, not asset. While comprehensive sanctions and embargo against Russia will cause living standards to drop, China would literally starve.
China may be far less self-sufficient in energy and agriculture than Russia, but simultaneously able to exact higher costs on the USA and Europe if it came to a battle of sanctions.
Consider that just as enacting a no-fly zone in Ukraine would mean shooting down Russian planes, interfering with China’s trade (beyond denying access to ports of countries allied against China) would mean sinking Chinese ships. Which means war. I’m considering scenarios in which the USA and Europe would seek to sanction China without resorting to attacking China directly.
Agricultural products and energy are commodities that China would be more able to acquire from countries less aligned with the USA. They’d have all sorts of goods that the USA and Europe had just refused to import to offer in exchange.
Meanwhile, a significant chunk of the USA’s living standards and technology infrastructure depends on imported Chinese goods. If the USA decided to sanction China, it would be a more severe blow both to ordinary people’s standard of living and a threat to the USA’s technological dominance than any impacts we’re suffering from sanctioning Russia. This limits our ability to sustain any such embargo, both because it would be unpopular and because it would cause problems to the interests of the US state.
So it’s not so much that the USA can’t hurt China with sanctions in theory, but that in practice, it has less ability to impose and sustain them. Or that China would have to commit a much more serious violation of US interests to motivate such sanctions than anything comparable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is my model, and I’m interested in updating the particulars (and altering the model if the facts disagree with it), if you have more specific information! Thanks for the point about China’s agricultural vulnerability. It’s a fact I was unaware of, even though the fact itself doesn’t seem to be evidence against the argument I’m advancing.
Consider that just as enacting a no-fly zone in Ukraine would mean shooting down Russian planes, interfering with China’s trade (beyond denying access to ports of countries allied against China) would mean sinking Chinese ships.
Civilian ships are not heavily armed. They can be stopped without violence; it’s called a naval blockade.
Agricultural products and energy are commodities that China would be more able to acquire from countries less aligned with the USA.
They most definitely can’t. China represents one fifth of world population; there is no viable replacement at this scale that doesn’t also rely on maritime transport, which is why a huge population is a vulnerability.
Meanwhile, a significant chunk of the USA’s living standards and technology infrastructure depends on imported Chinese goods. If the USA decided to sanction China, it would be a more severe blow both to ordinary people’s standard of living and a threat to the USA’s technological dominance than any impacts we’re suffering from sanctioning Russia.
I think these statements are backwards. The US initiated a trade war with China as a response to threats to our technological dominance, and together with the pandemic has led to our current period of rapid economic de-globalization, the effect of which has been the fastest re-industrialization in the US since WWII and record-low unemployment numbers since normalized relationship with the PRC. All of which is past and present tense, i.e. not even a prediction. Neither is it partisan talking points; the course has stayed pretty much the same under both Trump and Biden.
A lot of the things you wrote run contrary to the general impression I have of the situation. (Admittedly, I haven’t been paying very much attention to the situation, but still...)
Civilian ships are not heavily armed. They can be stopped without violence; it’s called a naval blockade.
It seems really obvious to me that this is the kind of measure that would be perceived as a clear escalation? It doesn’t really matter whether you’re sinking the ships or just blockading them; if you’re actively making moves to prevent unaffiliated vessels from other countries from navigating international waters, that seems like a pretty central example of “aggressive military action”, and would almost certainly invite retaliation in kind. Given that, is there some interpretation of this quote that isn’t as insane as it sounds?
Agricultural products and energy are commodities that China would be more able to acquire from countries less aligned with the USA.
They most definitely can’t. China represents one fifth of world population; there is no viable replacement at this scale that doesn’t also rely on maritime transport, which is why a huge population is a vulnerability.
That definitely sounds wrong to me. A cursory look reveals that the top three producers of wheat in the world are China, Russia, and India, in that order; collectively these three countries account for ~40% of the world’s wheat, and the trade relations between said three countries have been quite clear for a while now, but have especially crystallized over the last few weeks. China in particular shares land borders with both India and Russia, which minimizes the need for “maritime transportation”, especially with Russia’s recent forays into the Arctic. As for energy, here are the rankings for oil and natural gas, for which the amount of procurement in non-US-aligned countries is (again) substantial, with Russia once more leading the charge in both categories.
At least at first blush, this seems like it cuts pretty hard against your core claim. It’s certainly possible that a more sophisticated analysis might reveal complicating factors, but if so I’d ask what specifically you think those complicating factors are, and how they overturn the case outlined above.
Meanwhile, a significant chunk of the USA’s living standards and technology infrastructure depends on imported Chinese goods. If the USA decided to sanction China, it would be a more severe blow both to ordinary people’s standard of living and a threat to the USA’s technological dominance than any impacts we’re suffering from sanctioning Russia.
I perceive these statements as not only false, but backwards. The US initiated a trade war with China as a response to threats to our technological dominance, and together with the pandemic has led to our current period of rapid economic de-globalization, the effect of which has been the fastest re-industrialization in the US since WWII and record-low unemployment numbers since normalized relationship with the PRC. All of which is past and present tense, i.e. not even a prediction. Neither is it partisan talking points; the course has stayed pretty much the same under both Trump and Biden.
I don’t think you’ve done a good job establishing causality here. It’s all well and good to post unemployment numbers, but without something tying those numbers to the trade war, it’s not clear to me what the right conclusion to draw actually is. This is doubly true considering that the source you posted actually shows approximately constant unemployment from 2017 onward (discounting the obvious blip in 2020), which means the timing doesn’t match up to the trade war started by the Trump administration.
I’ve also seen sources claiming that the trade war lost rather than created jobs on net; here’s an example of an article from January 2021 asserting exactly that. Given this, I think it’s an open question whether things like trade wars (or other forms of deglobalization) are more likely to hurt or help; and for what it’s worth my instinct is definitely on the “hurt” side more than the “help” side. Once more, if you have a sophisticated argument for why this isn’t the case, I’d love to hear it.
It seems really obvious to me that this is the kind of measure that would be perceived as a clear escalation? It doesn’t really matter whether you’re sinking the ships or just blockading them; if you’re actively making moves to prevent unaffiliated vessels from other countries from navigating international waters, that seems like a pretty central example of “aggressive military action”, and would almost certainly invite retaliation in kind. Given that, is there some interpretation of this quote that isn’t as insane as it sounds?
It seems like Russian and Chinese psyops have really managed to subvert the narrative here in the West. Suddenly, economic sanctions and blockades are seen as “escalation”, “aggressive military action” and “insane”. But blatantly invading peaceful countries minding their own business and murdering tens of thousands of people? That’s just “defending our security interests”, and somehow it’s all NATO’s fault anyway. The funny thing is you would usually expect this sort of double-standard word games from the dominant power, not from the runner-up. In the end, all the world’s military might is worth nothing if one has no spine.
That definitely sounds wrong to me. A cursory look reveals that the top three producers of wheat in the world are China, Russia, and India, in that order; collectively these three countries account for ~40% of the world’s wheat, and the trade relations between said three countries have been quite clear for a while now, but have especially crystallized over the last few weeks. China in particular shares land borders with both India and Russia, which minimizes the need for “maritime transportation”, especially with Russia’s recent forays into the Arctic. As for energy, here are the rankings for oil and natural gas, for which the amount of procurement in non-US-aligned countries is (again) substantial, with Russia once more leading the charge in both categories.
India is also the second largest grain consumer in the world, and is effectively neutral with regard to import/export. India’s net grain export amounts to ~400,000 tons, while China imports nearly 10 million tons. That is assuming China’s domestic production remains constant, which it most definitely will not because agriculture is a heavily industrialized sector. Oil and gas aren’t just for keeping the lights on, they’re vital in the production and distribution of food.
That land border between China and India by the way? It’s the friggin’ Himalayas; the most impassable terrain on the planet. Trade flow through there is utterly negligible. Disputes over that very border is also the root of frosty relationship between the two countriessince the 1960′s, ironically, which brings me to the next point: Why in the world would India come to China’s aid? Aside from Pakistan (which is China’s closest ally), China is the rival India is facing on the world stage. If anything, India is more likely to be the one doing the blockade.
Russia doesn’t look much better. Sure, there is the Trans-Siberian railway, but it is already running at capacity, and it still is pitiful compared with maritime trade (~1%). There is a good reason why maritime powers have ruled the world for the last 500 years. The oil pipelines going from Siberia to China isn’t even connected to the rest of the Russian pipeline network, which why all the recent talks about China supplanting Europe as Russia’s main energy customer is nothing but hot air at least in the short term. Thousands of kilometers of pipelines through Siberia isn’t built in a day. Looking at the mid term though, it could go either way. Maybe trade ties between China and Russia will deepen, or there could be a regime change pushing Russia towards the West, or Russia may collapse altogether as a nation and descend into internal ethnic conflicts. It’s anyone’s guess depending how this war with Ukraine goes.
So, I did say in my previous comment that my analyses were merely surface-level, and it was entirely plausible to me that “more sophisticated” analysis would overturn them… but unfortunately, after reading your comment, I have to say: more sophisticated analysis this is not. To begin with:
It seems like Russian and Chinese psyops have really managed to subvert the narrative here in the West. Suddenly, economic sanctions and blockades are seen as “escalation”, “aggressive military action” and “insane”. But blatantly invading peaceful countries minding their own business and murdering tens of thousands of people? That’s just “defending our security interests”, and somehow it’s all NATO’s fault anyway. The funny thing is you would usually expect this sort of double-standard word games from the dominant power, not from the runner-up. In the end, all the world’s military might is worth nothing if one has no spine.
Fundamentally, a “naval blockade” is an activity wherein one country’s ships engage in physical interference with another country’s ships. In general, physical interference is viewed as an escalatory move, and physical interference backed by the threat of physical violence even more so. That a sufficiently tense standoff could become a casus belli follows from this fairly directly (and, in fact, such an outcome is not without historical precedent).
I don’t consider the above logic particularly difficult or subtle; nor, it seems to me, is this line of argument anywhere addressed in the above quote. Instead, I see what looks to me like a series of gratuitous tu quoque arguments, many of which impute to me positions which I at no point even gestured toward in my previous comment, much less endorsed.
I will be blunt: this is not virtuous epistemic behavior, especially on a site such as LW. (Yes, what Russia is doing in Ukraine is bad; no, that has nothing to do with whether imposing a US naval blockade on China’s maritime trade would be a safe move. I am amazed I have to clarify this.)
India is also the second largest grain consumer in the world, and is effectively neutral with regard to import/export. India’s net grain export amounts to ~400,000 tons, while China imports nearly 10 million tons. That is assuming China’s domestic production remains constant, which it most definitely will not because agriculture is a heavily industrialized sector. Oil and gas aren’t just for keeping the lights on, they’re vital in the production and distribution of food.
There look to be a number of strange assumptions in this paragraph. To start with, the latter half appears to take as given the notion that China will begin running out of oil and gas at some point (why? how?), and uses this premise (which is nowhere justified or even further discussed in the entirety of the remaining comment) as a starting point to argue that its domestic grain production would be affected.
The first half, meanwhile, seemingly takes for granted India’s 2018-19 export numbers, while ignoring the fact that India has always had a large surplus of grain relative to the amount exported—a surplus which is only growing as time passes. The reason, then, that India’s export numbers have not grown alongside its production surplus is that it has managed to capture relatively few foreign markets, with its main customers being far smaller neighboring countries such as Bangladesh. If new markets open up, India has more than the necessary supply to increase its exports drastically; and, in fact, producers are already gearing up to do so.
That land border between China and India by the way? It’s the friggin’ Himalayas; the most impassable terrain on the planet. Trade flow through there is utterly negligible. Disputes over that very border is also the root of frosty relationship between the two countriessince the 1960′s, ironically, which brings me to the next point: Why in the world would India come to China’s aid? Aside from Pakistan (which is China’s closest ally), China is the rival India is facing on the world stage. If anything, India is more likely to be the one doing the blockade.
Starting once more from the bottom rather than the top: India’s trade relations with China have always been decent, geopolitical rivalry notwithstanding. The notion that geopolitical concerns would prevent producers from going where the money lies is itself a strange one; not long ago, for example, India explicitly refused to mirror Western sanctions on Russia despite significant pressure to do so, and have since signed several additional trade agreements with Russia—and on the China front, they hosted a visit from China’s foreign minister less than a week ago, right after declining a similar visit from a UK delegation. And, considering both countries’ participation in BRICS, it seems like utterly wishful thinking to believe that India would refuse access to China’s wheat and grain markets should they become available, much less that they would impose a naval blockade against said country.
The point about the Himalayas, on the other hand, is well taken; it’s true that trade along those routes is mostly negligible (although I wouldn’t count it as anything close to assured that things will remain that way, if circumstances necessitate otherwise). However, the issue is largely moot, as reliance on a land-based trade route would only be required, again, if a naval blockade against trade between India and China were imposed, and that argument remains as ridiculous as it was when it was first put it forth.
Russia doesn’t look much better. Sure, there is the Trans-Siberian railway, but it is already running at capacity, and it still is pitiful compared with maritime trade (~1%). There is a good reason why maritime powers have ruled the world for the last 500 years. The oil pipelines going from Siberia to China isn’t even connected to the rest of the Russian pipeline network, which why all the recent talks about China supplanting Europe as Russia’s main energy customer is nothing but hot air at least in the short term. Thousands of kilometers of pipelines through Siberia isn’t built in a day. Looking at the mid term though, it could go either way. Maybe trade ties between China and Russia will deepen, or there could be a regime change pushing Russia towards the West, or Russia may collapse altogether as a nation and descend into internal ethnic conflicts. It’s anyone’s guess depending how this war with Ukraine goes.
You’re absolutely right that critical infrastructure isn’t built in a day, but it’s that precise fact that allows one to get a read on what countries’ intentions are before those intentions become a physical reality. And in point of fact, Russia is breaking more ice in Siberia, a move whose purpose can only point in one direction. It seems to me that, short of a full regime change in Moscow (which itself seem to me like wishful thinking), closer relations between China and Russia are basically an inevitability; and given that that’s the case, the Western sanctions against Russian exports can only benefit China, who gains the leverage to purchase those exports at a large discount. I don’t see how you argue otherwise—literally, as in: you do not argue otherwise, anywhere in your comment that I can see.
Concluding Thoughts
That’s it for the object-level points. On a higher level, though: I want to note that it’s not clear to me what you’re trying to argue anymore. A lot of the things you wrote read like… well, to be blunt, it reads like like what you’re really trying to express is “yay US, boo Russia / China!”—which would explain why, for example, you brought up Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, apropos of nothing, in a discussion about whether physically blockading Chinese trade vessels would be a good idea.
And, like, if that’s what you want to express, then… great? I share those sentiments too: obviously it’d be a great outcome if the morally better countries triumphed by default, because the nasty authoritarian countries imploded due to worse management / demographics / whatever. (Or because the US exercised its magical capability to impose maritime trade blockades on near-peer powers without retaliation.) But if you let that sentiment leak into your object-level analysis, I don’t think the results will be all that pretty.
It sounds like one important crux here is the capacity of the USA to block China from international maritime trade with willing trading partners, without doing anything China would consider an act of war.
My expectation is that if China was in extremis, facing the threat of starvation, that they’d use their navy to escort their civilian transport ships. 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.” After all, as you say, China would have their back to the wall.
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.
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. Maybe tariffs hurt China more than the USA. But they also hurt both economies in a way that undermines their standing relative to the rest of the world.
So it seems we also have some fundamentally different views on the net impact of globalization, as well as the USA’s ability to prevent China from engaging in trade with willing partners without an act of war.
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.
Civilian ships are not heavily armed. They can be stopped without violence; it’s called a naval blockade.
How would you do a naval blockade without violence? If you’re not willing to fire on or board (by force) blockade runners, then what stops them from just ignoring your “blockade”?
Unless the crew takes up arms, I don’t see why boarding blockade runners involves violence. Armed resistance is just plain stupid from the perspective of the crew as there is no hope of winning.
With a billion people to pick from, do you really think China would be unable to crew a ship with people willing to resist boarders despite the likelihood that they would die in the resulting violence?
They only need one such ship to test the blockade, and demonstrate that its enforcement is an act of war.
And then what? Incite outrage on social media? Protest at the UN? It’s important to remind ourselves from time to time that beyond the social reality, there is also a physical reality where if the oil stops flowing, it stops flowing.
Your claim was that a blockade could be imposed without violence being involved. I think that claim is clearly false, as it seems you now admit.
You’re now claiming that it doesn’t matter if violence is involved. But if that’s the case, why did you think it was relevant to claim that violence wouldn’t occur?
Obviously, it does matter. After the US kills the crew of a Chinese merchant vessel, China will have no problem justifying sinking any US warship that gets close to a Chinese ship, whereas if merchant ships had just not tried to run the blockade, out of fear, sinking US warships would seem like China was starting the war.
And of course China can sink the US warships. Surface warships in today’s world are only good for show, and for intimidating poorly-armed parties. Perhaps the US would then resort to sinking Chinese merchant ships without warning using submarines or cruise missiles? Do you see how maybe this isn’t really an ideal approach...?
I think that claim is clearly false, as it seems you now admit.
Ok, I think I’ve seen enough internet arguments to know where this is going. Getting your opponent to “admit” stuff, old yet familiar tactics. Thank you for making me realize my error, and taking the decision off of me.
Goodbye LW, it’s been fun but we’ll both be better off without one another.
I think you got it backwards—China is much more vulnerable to trade disruptions than Russia. China is not self-sufficient in agriculture and energy, neither does it have sufficient naval power or allies to protect its vital trade routes. It has 10 times the population of Russia which is a huge burden, not asset. While comprehensive sanctions and embargo against Russia will cause living standards to drop, China would literally starve.
I see this conclusion as a corollary of my big-picture belief that today’s world is by and large overpopulated (Russia is an exception), and that this fact is being obfuscated by short-term concerns like the inverted age pyramid.
China may be far less self-sufficient in energy and agriculture than Russia, but simultaneously able to exact higher costs on the USA and Europe if it came to a battle of sanctions.
Consider that just as enacting a no-fly zone in Ukraine would mean shooting down Russian planes, interfering with China’s trade (beyond denying access to ports of countries allied against China) would mean sinking Chinese ships. Which means war. I’m considering scenarios in which the USA and Europe would seek to sanction China without resorting to attacking China directly.
Agricultural products and energy are commodities that China would be more able to acquire from countries less aligned with the USA. They’d have all sorts of goods that the USA and Europe had just refused to import to offer in exchange.
Meanwhile, a significant chunk of the USA’s living standards and technology infrastructure depends on imported Chinese goods. If the USA decided to sanction China, it would be a more severe blow both to ordinary people’s standard of living and a threat to the USA’s technological dominance than any impacts we’re suffering from sanctioning Russia. This limits our ability to sustain any such embargo, both because it would be unpopular and because it would cause problems to the interests of the US state.
So it’s not so much that the USA can’t hurt China with sanctions in theory, but that in practice, it has less ability to impose and sustain them. Or that China would have to commit a much more serious violation of US interests to motivate such sanctions than anything comparable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is my model, and I’m interested in updating the particulars (and altering the model if the facts disagree with it), if you have more specific information! Thanks for the point about China’s agricultural vulnerability. It’s a fact I was unaware of, even though the fact itself doesn’t seem to be evidence against the argument I’m advancing.
Civilian ships are not heavily armed. They can be stopped without violence; it’s called a naval blockade.
They most definitely can’t. China represents one fifth of world population; there is no viable replacement at this scale that doesn’t also rely on maritime transport, which is why a huge population is a vulnerability.
I think these statements are backwards. The US initiated a trade war with China as a response to threats to our technological dominance, and together with the pandemic has led to our current period of rapid economic de-globalization, the effect of which has been the fastest re-industrialization in the US since WWII and record-low unemployment numbers since normalized relationship with the PRC. All of which is past and present tense, i.e. not even a prediction. Neither is it partisan talking points; the course has stayed pretty much the same under both Trump and Biden.
A lot of the things you wrote run contrary to the general impression I have of the situation. (Admittedly, I haven’t been paying very much attention to the situation, but still...)
It seems really obvious to me that this is the kind of measure that would be perceived as a clear escalation? It doesn’t really matter whether you’re sinking the ships or just blockading them; if you’re actively making moves to prevent unaffiliated vessels from other countries from navigating international waters, that seems like a pretty central example of “aggressive military action”, and would almost certainly invite retaliation in kind. Given that, is there some interpretation of this quote that isn’t as insane as it sounds?
That definitely sounds wrong to me. A cursory look reveals that the top three producers of wheat in the world are China, Russia, and India, in that order; collectively these three countries account for ~40% of the world’s wheat, and the trade relations between said three countries have been quite clear for a while now, but have especially crystallized over the last few weeks. China in particular shares land borders with both India and Russia, which minimizes the need for “maritime transportation”, especially with Russia’s recent forays into the Arctic. As for energy, here are the rankings for oil and natural gas, for which the amount of procurement in non-US-aligned countries is (again) substantial, with Russia once more leading the charge in both categories.
At least at first blush, this seems like it cuts pretty hard against your core claim. It’s certainly possible that a more sophisticated analysis might reveal complicating factors, but if so I’d ask what specifically you think those complicating factors are, and how they overturn the case outlined above.
I don’t think you’ve done a good job establishing causality here. It’s all well and good to post unemployment numbers, but without something tying those numbers to the trade war, it’s not clear to me what the right conclusion to draw actually is. This is doubly true considering that the source you posted actually shows approximately constant unemployment from 2017 onward (discounting the obvious blip in 2020), which means the timing doesn’t match up to the trade war started by the Trump administration.
I’ve also seen sources claiming that the trade war lost rather than created jobs on net; here’s an example of an article from January 2021 asserting exactly that. Given this, I think it’s an open question whether things like trade wars (or other forms of deglobalization) are more likely to hurt or help; and for what it’s worth my instinct is definitely on the “hurt” side more than the “help” side. Once more, if you have a sophisticated argument for why this isn’t the case, I’d love to hear it.
It seems like Russian and Chinese psyops have really managed to subvert the narrative here in the West. Suddenly, economic sanctions and blockades are seen as “escalation”, “aggressive military action” and “insane”. But blatantly invading peaceful countries minding their own business and murdering tens of thousands of people? That’s just “defending our security interests”, and somehow it’s all NATO’s fault anyway. The funny thing is you would usually expect this sort of double-standard word games from the dominant power, not from the runner-up. In the end, all the world’s military might is worth nothing if one has no spine.
India is also the second largest grain consumer in the world, and is effectively neutral with regard to import/export. India’s net grain export amounts to ~400,000 tons, while China imports nearly 10 million tons. That is assuming China’s domestic production remains constant, which it most definitely will not because agriculture is a heavily industrialized sector. Oil and gas aren’t just for keeping the lights on, they’re vital in the production and distribution of food.
That land border between China and India by the way? It’s the friggin’ Himalayas; the most impassable terrain on the planet. Trade flow through there is utterly negligible. Disputes over that very border is also the root of frosty relationship between the two countries since the 1960′s, ironically, which brings me to the next point: Why in the world would India come to China’s aid? Aside from Pakistan (which is China’s closest ally), China is the rival India is facing on the world stage. If anything, India is more likely to be the one doing the blockade.
Russia doesn’t look much better. Sure, there is the Trans-Siberian railway, but it is already running at capacity, and it still is pitiful compared with maritime trade (~1%). There is a good reason why maritime powers have ruled the world for the last 500 years. The oil pipelines going from Siberia to China isn’t even connected to the rest of the Russian pipeline network, which why all the recent talks about China supplanting Europe as Russia’s main energy customer is nothing but hot air at least in the short term. Thousands of kilometers of pipelines through Siberia isn’t built in a day. Looking at the mid term though, it could go either way. Maybe trade ties between China and Russia will deepen, or there could be a regime change pushing Russia towards the West, or Russia may collapse altogether as a nation and descend into internal ethnic conflicts. It’s anyone’s guess depending how this war with Ukraine goes.
So, I did say in my previous comment that my analyses were merely surface-level, and it was entirely plausible to me that “more sophisticated” analysis would overturn them… but unfortunately, after reading your comment, I have to say: more sophisticated analysis this is not. To begin with:
Fundamentally, a “naval blockade” is an activity wherein one country’s ships engage in physical interference with another country’s ships. In general, physical interference is viewed as an escalatory move, and physical interference backed by the threat of physical violence even more so. That a sufficiently tense standoff could become a casus belli follows from this fairly directly (and, in fact, such an outcome is not without historical precedent).
I don’t consider the above logic particularly difficult or subtle; nor, it seems to me, is this line of argument anywhere addressed in the above quote. Instead, I see what looks to me like a series of gratuitous tu quoque arguments, many of which impute to me positions which I at no point even gestured toward in my previous comment, much less endorsed.
I will be blunt: this is not virtuous epistemic behavior, especially on a site such as LW. (Yes, what Russia is doing in Ukraine is bad; no, that has nothing to do with whether imposing a US naval blockade on China’s maritime trade would be a safe move. I am amazed I have to clarify this.)
There look to be a number of strange assumptions in this paragraph. To start with, the latter half appears to take as given the notion that China will begin running out of oil and gas at some point (why? how?), and uses this premise (which is nowhere justified or even further discussed in the entirety of the remaining comment) as a starting point to argue that its domestic grain production would be affected.
The first half, meanwhile, seemingly takes for granted India’s 2018-19 export numbers, while ignoring the fact that India has always had a large surplus of grain relative to the amount exported—a surplus which is only growing as time passes. The reason, then, that India’s export numbers have not grown alongside its production surplus is that it has managed to capture relatively few foreign markets, with its main customers being far smaller neighboring countries such as Bangladesh. If new markets open up, India has more than the necessary supply to increase its exports drastically; and, in fact, producers are already gearing up to do so.
Starting once more from the bottom rather than the top: India’s trade relations with China have always been decent, geopolitical rivalry notwithstanding. The notion that geopolitical concerns would prevent producers from going where the money lies is itself a strange one; not long ago, for example, India explicitly refused to mirror Western sanctions on Russia despite significant pressure to do so, and have since signed several additional trade agreements with Russia—and on the China front, they hosted a visit from China’s foreign minister less than a week ago, right after declining a similar visit from a UK delegation. And, considering both countries’ participation in BRICS, it seems like utterly wishful thinking to believe that India would refuse access to China’s wheat and grain markets should they become available, much less that they would impose a naval blockade against said country.
The point about the Himalayas, on the other hand, is well taken; it’s true that trade along those routes is mostly negligible (although I wouldn’t count it as anything close to assured that things will remain that way, if circumstances necessitate otherwise). However, the issue is largely moot, as reliance on a land-based trade route would only be required, again, if a naval blockade against trade between India and China were imposed, and that argument remains as ridiculous as it was when it was first put it forth.
You’re absolutely right that critical infrastructure isn’t built in a day, but it’s that precise fact that allows one to get a read on what countries’ intentions are before those intentions become a physical reality. And in point of fact, Russia is breaking more ice in Siberia, a move whose purpose can only point in one direction. It seems to me that, short of a full regime change in Moscow (which itself seem to me like wishful thinking), closer relations between China and Russia are basically an inevitability; and given that that’s the case, the Western sanctions against Russian exports can only benefit China, who gains the leverage to purchase those exports at a large discount. I don’t see how you argue otherwise—literally, as in: you do not argue otherwise, anywhere in your comment that I can see.
Concluding Thoughts
That’s it for the object-level points. On a higher level, though: I want to note that it’s not clear to me what you’re trying to argue anymore. A lot of the things you wrote read like… well, to be blunt, it reads like like what you’re really trying to express is “yay US, boo Russia / China!”—which would explain why, for example, you brought up Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, apropos of nothing, in a discussion about whether physically blockading Chinese trade vessels would be a good idea.
And, like, if that’s what you want to express, then… great? I share those sentiments too: obviously it’d be a great outcome if the morally better countries triumphed by default, because the nasty authoritarian countries imploded due to worse management / demographics / whatever. (Or because the US exercised its magical capability to impose maritime trade blockades on near-peer powers without retaliation.) But if you let that sentiment leak into your object-level analysis, I don’t think the results will be all that pretty.
It sounds like one important crux here is the capacity of the USA to block China from international maritime trade with willing trading partners, without doing anything China would consider an act of war.
My expectation is that if China was in extremis, facing the threat of starvation, that they’d use their navy to escort their civilian transport ships. 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.” After all, as you say, China would have their back to the wall.
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.
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. Maybe tariffs hurt China more than the USA. But they also hurt both economies in a way that undermines their standing relative to the rest of the world.
So it seems we also have some fundamentally different views on the net impact of globalization, as well as the USA’s ability to prevent China from engaging in trade with willing partners without an act of war.
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.
How would you do a naval blockade without violence? If you’re not willing to fire on or board (by force) blockade runners, then what stops them from just ignoring your “blockade”?
Unless the crew takes up arms, I don’t see why boarding blockade runners involves violence. Armed resistance is just plain stupid from the perspective of the crew as there is no hope of winning.
With a billion people to pick from, do you really think China would be unable to crew a ship with people willing to resist boarders despite the likelihood that they would die in the resulting violence?
They only need one such ship to test the blockade, and demonstrate that its enforcement is an act of war.
And then what? Incite outrage on social media? Protest at the UN? It’s important to remind ourselves from time to time that beyond the social reality, there is also a physical reality where if the oil stops flowing, it stops flowing.
Your claim was that a blockade could be imposed without violence being involved. I think that claim is clearly false, as it seems you now admit.
You’re now claiming that it doesn’t matter if violence is involved. But if that’s the case, why did you think it was relevant to claim that violence wouldn’t occur?
Obviously, it does matter. After the US kills the crew of a Chinese merchant vessel, China will have no problem justifying sinking any US warship that gets close to a Chinese ship, whereas if merchant ships had just not tried to run the blockade, out of fear, sinking US warships would seem like China was starting the war.
And of course China can sink the US warships. Surface warships in today’s world are only good for show, and for intimidating poorly-armed parties. Perhaps the US would then resort to sinking Chinese merchant ships without warning using submarines or cruise missiles? Do you see how maybe this isn’t really an ideal approach...?
Ok, I think I’ve seen enough internet arguments to know where this is going. Getting your opponent to “admit” stuff, old yet familiar tactics. Thank you for making me realize my error, and taking the decision off of me.
Goodbye LW, it’s been fun but we’ll both be better off without one another.