Category: geopolitics
TheMotte pre-Ukraine
Lot’s of IR stuff in this thread:
What I am wondering is whether our eagerness to expand NATO is having more drawbacks than benefits. Russia’s weakness (which they are well aware of) is that because much of their land is currently tundra, the majority of their civilization is in the west, uncomfortably close to NATO. The Kremlin doesn’t want NATO forces within “rapid striking distance” of Moscow, which I can totally sympathize with, because I wouldn’t want Russian or CCP forces situated in Mexico. They’ve made it absolutely clear that this is a red line for them. I don’t think they particularly want to invade the Ukraine, they just don’t want the Ukraine to join NATO because they perceive that as a threat, and they’re probably going to do whatever they have to in order to stop that threat
GF on UNSC
My girlfriend had an off-day today, which meant she spent her afternoon watching YouTube videos on the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. Through a segment on Seth Meyers, my gf found her way to the live recording of the United Nations Security Council giving their votes on a (largely symbolic) resolution. Here’s how she summarizes it:
It’s the tone. you have to watch the tone! Everyone is like “you suck!”, US was like “that’s right!”, UK was like “that’s right!”, but Brazil was like “we find the situation deeply troubling….”
It was cute. That’s all. Not a good day for many people today, so we should appreciate the treasures along the way.
F-35 was a success
The reason the F-35 was ‘worth’ the trouble is that it got over a dozen first-world militaries using the same combat system, rather than every nation trying to create less effective national champions. Aside from raising the standard, the distributed industrial base and procurement means that everyone involved- which is to say- American allies- can cross-train, cross-supply, and even loan/borrow/otherwise support eachother’s air operations with minimal trouble, greatly increasing the self-reinforcing nature of the American alliance network. While- at the same time- ensuring that all participants are tied to the American logistic chain, meaning that anyone who wants to keep a world-leading aircraft operational won’t go rogue against American interests.
The F35 is a political and logistical success as much as a technological success, and those are far harder to arrange at scale.
chinese debt trap
Theoretically but from a different perspective, I’d argue that the countries don’t really have an incentive to push back. I’m going to just paraphrase from Prof. Brautigam’s book The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (Oxford Press, 2010) here. Essentially, the ‘debt trap’ meme is drastically overplayed here and the lending program has been largely received positively by the governments that take on China’s loans. Brautigam is rare among Western academics with her research as she has conducted a fair amount of field research, so a lot of what she cites comes from government documents and on-the-ground analysis. From that, Brautigam argues that China’s lending diplomacy seems to in actuality be much more about sharing China’s development experiences with countries that might not traditionally attract a lot of outside investment and countries that participate seem to be rather receptive of these lending tactics in part because they have no where else to turn to. One prime example here is the whole development cycle of an Indonesian port; she writes about it here.