International Affairs

Swimming, Soaring, and Biting Dragon

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There are a few essays filed today at Strategypage.com that concern how China is developing into a credible future threat.

One of the most exciting developments in weapon systems over the past several years has been the emergence of sophisticated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, robot planes that are controlled from the ground which are unfettered by the frailties that come with having a human pilot on board. This article details how the Chinese are looking to field their own version of the Global Hawk, one of the more capable UAVs in the US arsenal.

The reason why this is interesting to observers in the West is due to the fact that this new aircraft is intended to be used for maritime patrol, even though China is hardly a great naval power. The only credible justification of the expense for development and deployment of the new weapon is as yet another tool to be used in the military conquest of Taiwan, a goal the communist government of China has never been shy about expressing.

The Chinese have no real chance of landing troops on Taiwan unless they first neutralize any US aircraft carriers in the region. This article details how Chinese submarines are stalking American carriers, something that strongly reminds me of the bad old days of Soviet/American cat and mouse naval games during the Cold War.

If you should be moved to click on that last link, please note how some Chinese subs are being deployed even though they are unsuited to this kind of work because of excessive noise. This shows that the Chinese military understands that real world training is paramount if one is to have an effective military. It also indicates that they are well aware that the Americans are very unlikely to attack the Chinese vessels, and so they can gain that training at very little risk to their scarce and expensive submarine fleet.

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Random Thoughts

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The big war (not the Iraq campaign) isn’t over. We have continuing problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but we’ve suppressed our enemies for a while in most places. However, eventually we are going to have to fight large battles again, because our enemies will eventually attack us in a way that we can’t ignore. I suspect that we are now in a situation like that of Israel, which has never been allowed or willing to defeat its enemies decisively and so has to fight a major campaign every decade or so. We will probably have to keep fighting until we develop the political will to win decisively. This is going to be true no matter who is President or which party is in charge in Washington.

One counterexample to my speculations is Korea, where we have been in a mostly peaceful stalemate for more than fifty years. And there are always conflicts simmering around the world that rarely do us harm. But North Korea is an isolated regime that seems likely to fall apart eventually. Radical Islam is a much more distributed, dynamic, ambitious and aggressive enemy that does not seem likely to stop fighting unless it is defeated. Remember the anecdotes that suggest that the Syrians and Iranian mullahs and Hamas want Obama to win? The usual assumption by Obama critics is that Hamas et al favor Obama because they think he’s one of them. I suggest that they are favoring him because they think he’ll pursue policies that will make it easier for them to defeat us.

In the old days America could walk away from wars, because most of the costs of our walking away would be borne by non-Americans. Technology has removed this security and we should update our sense of security accordingly. Most of us haven’t, or have become complacent, because 9/11 now feels like distant history. But the metaphor of distance is misleading here. We are not physically more distant from threats; advances in technology and in the technological sophistication of our enemies may even make us more vulnerable. Like it or not we are probably going to be at war for many more years, even if it doesn’t feel like war most of the time.

If Chavez Sweats, Then So Does Putin

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Instapundit links to this article on Hugo Chavez’s  financial  woes  exacerbated  by  rapidly  falling oil prices. I think it important to remember that Russia remains just as dependent on oil revenues as Chavez’s  regime and while Chavez’s is merely annoying, Russia has nukes.  

The great oil bust of ’83 triggered the fall of the Soviet Union. We should keep an eye things over there.  

Stresses of Globalization

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Unfortunately in the year XXXX the whole world was one large international workshop. A strike in the Argentine was apt to cause suffering in Berlin. A raise in the price of certain raw materials in London might spell disaster to tens of thousands of long-suffering Chinese coolies who had never even heard of the existence of the big city on the Thames. The invention of some obscure Privat-Dozent in a third-rate German university would often force dozens of Chilean banks to close their doors, while bad management on the part of an old commercial house in Gothenburg might deprive hundreds of little boys and girls in Australia of a chance to go to college.

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Guineans mark ’50 years of poverty’

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I was reviewing headlines and saw this stark headline on the BBC News Africa section titled “Guineans Mark 50 years of poverty“.

Fifty years ago the country of Guinea on the West (duh… I said East originally, sorry I am directionally challenged) coast of Africa achieved independence from France.   Celebrations were recently held to mark this anniversary and the BBC correspondent heard the cries of “fifty years of poverty”.   The article goes on to interview a man at a train station who laments that the trains used to run when the French ruled the country but now they have collapsed like everything else as the country runs low on electricity and other elements of a civilized society.

Guinea took their opportunities for independence and squandered them with 2 brutal dictatorships over the last 50 years as strongmen systematically looted the mineral rich country and let the infrastructure collapse.   This is a sad story since the country has access to the ocean and a coastline as well as mineral wealth.   Unfortunately it shares borders with failed states and risks becoming one itself as the strongmen wind down their time in power, with no likely successors in sight.

In college I remember reading articles, books and novels about how horrible colonialism was and certainly this is not something that anyone would willingly embark on in this day and age.   I don’t remember, however, seeing how a country that has been independently managed for fifty years managed to do it so badly, in the aptly summarized “fifty years of poverty”.   For many years the blame was always on the formal colonialist rulers for this or that, the borders, or how one ethnic group was favored over another.

At some point, likely today for Guinea, this doesn’t make sense any more.   From the fact book, the average life span of a Guinean is 54 years old; so they don’t have any memory of the former French rulers while they were in power.   At some point they need to look at how they have mismanaged their country and hopefully find a way to change it from within.

I will wait in vain for colleges to re-appraise their brutal picture of colonialism with a more nuanced picture, contrasting the infrastructure development and investments during colonialism with the asset stripping, infrastructure decay, and utter chaos that came after they left.