US Grand Strategy - As per Kaplan

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AndrewS

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Kaplan's view of what US Grand Strategy should be, taken from the book:
  • Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

America Must Prepare for the Coming Chinese Empire

The last thing American policymakers or strategists should assume is that somehow Americans are superior to the Chinese.

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Just4Fun

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Kaplan's view of what US Grand Strategy should be, taken from the book:
  • Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

A declining empire will never have any grand strategy, or it will not be called a declining empire.

The most pressing existential challenge that any declining empire faces is the War-debt noose, where the declining empire has to borrow money to fight unwinnable wars to keep its extended control and influence alive, but each unwinnable war will only further worsen the dying empire's financial situation. Look how the British did in its Boer wars one hundred years ago. It borrowed money from the US again and again, to fight in Southern Africa again and again to keep its influence and control alive. After each of Boer wars ended, the British was more indebted than it was before the war started. Eventually, the US threw the book at the British and declared that itself was the king of the world.

The middle east wars is America's version of British Boer wars. The US can't simply walk away from the ME wars because the safety of its dollar depends on the Saudis' support. The Saudis are facing life and death threat from Iran's Shiite religious force, thus have to leverage its petro-dollar power to use the US to fight for them. The two have been using each other, and will continue to do so for their own survival. The US, therefore, is in a position where it can't run away from ME wars, and can't win ME wars either. After each of ME wars, the Americans only find that their war debts have enlarged another magnitude.

The British people were lucky because its currency, the pound sterling, was never over-supplied. So, they can live a relative quiet life after the pound sterling was abolished as the world currency. For the American people, they will not be so lucky. The over-supplied dollar will collapse once the petro-dollar is gone. And every American will see their assets shrinking as the dollar is depreciated in value.
 

gelgoog

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Well, I would not underestimate the pain and suffering the British had when they lost their Empire.
The British were under strict rationing (i.e. food and clothes) for many years after WW2 is over. You read that right.
The British government did that to minimize imports to the bone so they could pay off the huge debt they incurred with the US.
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Even after rationing was over the British government controlled many sectors of the economy.
You could say the ending of the "special period" in the British economy only came with the discovery of the North Sea oil & gas fields.
Which are now running out.

Ancient Rome had similar issues and it basically solved things more than once by falling back into more defensible borders and making internal reforms. One example of the first would be Emperor Hadrian and an example of the latter would be the reforms by Emperor Diocletian. The US has basically next to no border issues, despite what you might hear from Trump. Only an island nation like the United Kingdom would be in a better position.
 
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Just4Fun

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Well, I would not underestimate the pain and suffering the British had when they lost their Empire.
The British were under strict rationing (i.e. food and clothes) for many years after WW2 is over. You read that right.
The British government did that to minimize imports to the bone so they could pay off the huge debt they incurred with the US.
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Even after rationing was over the British government controlled many sectors of the economy.
You could say the ending of the "special period" in the British economy only came with the discovery of the North Sea oil & gas fields.
Which are now running out.

Ancient Rome had similar issues and it basically solved things more than once by falling back into more defensible borders and making internal reforms. One example of the first would be Emperor Hadrian and an example of the latter would be the reforms by Emperor Diocletian. The US has basically next to no border issues, despite what you might hear from Trump. Only an island nation like the United Kingdom would be in a better position.

The US has basically next to no border issues, despite what you might hear from Trump.

You have underestimated the dollar's over-supply problem. If the dollar's status of world currency is gone, the US will dissolve, and every state border may become a national border. No one knows how many border issues will emerge after US dismantlement.

Once there is another currency that is safe enough, and big enough to contain the Saudis' money and wealth, the petro-dollar is dead, and so is the dollar's status as world currency for international trade. Then, the over-supplied greenbacks that were previously held by the Saudi Arabia and other countries must flow back to the US, causing dollar depreciation, washing-out Americans' wealth and worsening US national debts.

Every American will be financially distressed under such a depressing condition. Every state will have the motivation, the rights, and the means to mitigate its own financial losses at the expenses of other states, and some rich states will inevitably exercise their constitutional rights to declare independence. A second US civil war may follow after the death of the dollar as world currency. But, nevertheless, the US will never be what we know today.

Don't call this is a fantasy, or a delusion. The disintegration of British Empire can forecast what will happen when the US becomes not-so-rich and not-so-promising. Ireland walked away from the British union right after the British Empire lost the control over India, and Scotland is now preparing to walk away too. Wales and London city may follow the suit.

This is what you are supposed to get when you have a culture, and a constitution that promotes self-determination and individualism. You can't criticize the rich are too selfish when the union doesn't provide a bright future. (Now, you should know why all Western countries are in fact small tribes.)
 

gelgoog

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In the case of Europe the different tribes arise because of geography. Just look at Switzerland as an example of this.
The economies and languages basically diverge. It is a kind of Galapagos environment.
You can make some sort of Empire out of it. The Romans did it, and the European Union is kind of doing it.
Even China has had periods of warlordism and even separate flourishing Kingdoms. But its geography is much more suitable for Empire.
In the case of the US the problem is the core of the country has just too much power so the other places can't emancipate.
You could consider Texas and California to be possible examples of places which could go its own.
But at least in the case of California it does not control its own water supply. That leaves Texas.
It is really close to the mouth of the Mississippi river. So it is quite vulnerable.

I do agree that a lot of unrest could happen but I do not see a separation in the foreseeable future.
 

AndrewS

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You have underestimated the dollar's over-supply problem. If the dollar's status of world currency is gone, the US will dissolve, and every state border may become a national border. No one knows how many border issues will emerge after US dismantlement.

Once there is another currency that is safe enough, and big enough to contain the Saudis' money and wealth, the petro-dollar is dead, and so is the dollar's status as world currency for international trade. Then, the over-supplied greenbacks that were previously held by the Saudi Arabia and other countries must flow back to the US, causing dollar depreciation, washing-out Americans' wealth and worsening US national debts.

Every American will be financially distressed under such a depressing condition. Every state will have the motivation, the rights, and the means to mitigate its own financial losses at the expenses of other states, and some rich states will inevitably exercise their constitutional rights to declare independence. A second US civil war may follow after the death of the dollar as world currency. But, nevertheless, the US will never be what we know today.

Don't call this is a fantasy, or a delusion. The disintegration of British Empire can forecast what will happen when the US becomes not-so-rich and not-so-promising. Ireland walked away from the British union right after the British Empire lost the control over India, and Scotland is now preparing to walk away too. Wales and London city may follow the suit.

This is what you are supposed to get when you have a culture, and a constitution that promotes self-determination and individualism. You can't criticize the rich are too selfish when the union doesn't provide a bright future. (Now, you should know why all Western countries are in fact small tribes.)

The US disintegrating over the US Dollar losing its reserve status is not realistic.
Wales and London are not going to declare independence. Although Scotland may do so.

Plus you have to be distinguish between different places in the West.
The Scandinavian countries are almost as "collective" and "income equal" as Japan for example.
 

AndrewS

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U.S. Versus China: A New Era of Great Power Competition, but Without Boundaries
New York Times
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WASHINGTON — When President Trump
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President Xi Jinping of China this week to discuss contentious trade issues, they will face each other in another nation that was once the United States’ main commercial rival, seen as a threat to American dominance.

But the competition between the United States and Japan, which
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the
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this week for the first time, settled into a normal struggle among businesses after waves of American anxiety in the 1980s. Japan hit a decade of stagnation, and in 2010, China overtook it as the world’s second-largest economy.

There is no sign, though, that the rivalry between the United States and China will reach the same kind of equilibrium. For one thing, Japan is a democracy that has a military alliance with the United States, while China is an authoritarian nation that most likely seeks to
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. In China’s competition with the United States, a rancorous trade war has persisted for a year, and issues of national security are
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into economic ones. Some senior American officials are pushing for “decoupling” the two economies.

The main elements in relations — economic and commercial ties — have become unmoored, and few agree on the future contours of the relationship or the magnitude of the conflicts.

For American officials, the stakes seem much higher now than in the race with Japan. Most economists estimate China will overtake the United States as the largest economy in 10 to 15 years. And some senior officials in Washington now view China as a steely ideological rival, where the Communist Party aims not only to subjugate citizens but to
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— particularly surveillance, communications and artificial intelligence technology — and
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across
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and
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.

Though Mr. Trump incessantly praises Mr. Xi — he said they
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— the idea of China as a dangerous juggernaut, more formidable than the Soviet Union, has become increasingly widespread in the administration. It was articulated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a visit to the Netherlands, part of a weeklong trip across Europe this month in which he talked about China at each stop.
“China has inroads too on this continent that demand our attention,” he told a news conference in The Hague. “China wants to be the dominant economic and military power of the world, spreading its authoritarian vision for society and its corrupt practices worldwide.”

The
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issued by the White House in December 2017 sounded the alarm: The United States was re-entering an era of great power competition, in which China and Russia “want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.” But since then, Mr. Trump and cabinet officials,
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and other foreign policy matters, have failed to outline a coherent strategy.


That has left administration officials struggling to piece together an approach to China that has elements of competition, containment and constructive engagement, none of them sharply focused.

Mr. Trump’s closest advisers on China are split on strategies. His top foreign policy officials,
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and
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.
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, have pushed for tough policies, as has Peter Navarro, the trade adviser and creator of a polemical book and documentary film,
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In the opposite camp are
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— among them Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Stephen A. Schwarzman and Steve Wynn.

Midlevel bureaucrats are formulating their own ideas. The view of a drawn-out ideological conflict was laid out in stark terms by Kiron Skinner, the head of policy planning at the State Department,
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.

“This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before,” she said. “The Soviet Union and that competition, in a way, it was a fight within the Western family.”

Now, she said, “it’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”

Many analysts have tried to discern whether the striking remarks point to a new policy direction. Officials say privately that is not the case.

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to
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— critics say they see strategic ambiguity without the strategy.

“The economic and security and technological and even scientific components of the U.S.-China relationship are now being conflated,” said
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, a professor of government at Cornell University who studies
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and nationalism. “What’s worrying to many is not being able to decipher different levels of risk and how far and how quickly the efforts to indiscriminately decouple the United States and China will go.”

That idea of decoupling rests on the premise that two economies so intertwined poses a significant security risk to the United States. The linking accelerated when China
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in 2001 and in recent years had seemed irreversible. But Mr. Trump’s hard-line trade advisers want the two nations to unwind their supply chains, which means some American businesses exit China, and others stop selling components to Chinese companies.

Mr. Trump is narrowly focused on
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deficit with China, which many economists say is not meaningful. But his imposition of tariffs and the general uncertainty around the economic relationship are forcing some American companies to rethink keeping operations in China. And putting Chinese companies, notably Huawei, the giant maker of communications technology, on what officials call an entity list to cut off the supply of American components is
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.
 

AndrewS

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... continued

“After a long period of globalization and squeezing out economic efficiencies, you do see national security rising to the forefront,” said
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, director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the
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.

That has not gone unnoticed in China. This spring, with trade tensions rising, Chinese state-run television began showing
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depicting American aggression. Newspapers ran editorials on the war.

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, executive dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at the Renmin University of China, said in an interview that the new model for United States-China relations was “fight but not break.”


The fallout from the struggle is widening. Chinese security officers have
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in apparent retaliation for the
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of Meng Wanzhou, a top Huawei executive, on an extradition request by the United States. The F.B.I. has been
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of Chinese scholars suspected of intelligence ties.

Some observers say they fear a new Red Scare.

“Rather than proclaiming a ‘whole of society’ threat from a hostile ‘civilization,’ U.S. officials would be wise to emphasize the value that immigrants from China and other countries have brought, while establishing policies to safeguard against theft of intellectual property,” Ms. Weiss said.

The case of Huawei is at the nexus of concerns in Washington over both Chinese economic dominance and security threats. The Trump administration has been pushing countries to bar Huawei from developing
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, arguing it
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. Huawei, a private company, denies the charge.


But the
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to adopt a ban,
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, shows how nations are unwilling to jeopardize their economic relations with China. That includes Japan, where the government has not issued a ban and is trying to
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with China in other ways — at the G20 in Osaka, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plans to host a dinner for Mr. Xi.

The Trump administration has also been
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China’s Belt-and-Road infrastructure projects and what American officials call
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with
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.


Some American companies are trying to bypass the limits set by the Trump administration on their dealings with China. Semiconductor companies, for example, have found a legal basis for
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the Commerce Department prohibition on selling components to Huawei.

But the administration itself sometimes pulls punches on China in the name of economic relations — a sign that the traditional foundation of the relationship still stands to a degree.

Since last year, the administration has debated imposing sanctions on Chinese officials for their role in interning one million or more Muslims in the Xinjiang region. Though Mr. Pompeo and other officials have pushed for the sanctions, the Treasury Department, led by Mr. Mnuchin, has
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for fear of derailing the trade talks. So the administration has taken no action.

China’s extraordinary
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are one major reason many American officials have abandoned any notion of a future turn toward liberalism within the Communist Party.

For their part, Chinese officials have seized on the Trump administration’s actions to argue that the United States is trying to stop China’s rise. On Tuesday, People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper,
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urging citizens to fight for the nation’s dignity.

“The Chinese people deeply understand that the American government’s suppression and containment of China is an external challenge that China must bear in its development and growth,” the paper said, “and it is a hurdle that we must overcome in the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
 
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