China is Losing the New Cold War

In contrast to the Soviet Union, China’s leaders recognize that strong economic performance is essential to political legitimacy. Like the Soviet Union, however, they are paying through the nose for a few friends, gaining only limited benefits while becoming increasingly entrenched in an unsustainable arms race with the US.

When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the Communist Party of China (CPC) became obsessed with understanding why. The government think tanks entrusted with this task heaped plenty of blame on Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist leader who was simply not ruthless enough to hold the Soviet Union together. But Chinese leaders also highlighted other important factors, not all of which China’s leaders seem to be heeding today.
.. But overseeing a faltering economy was hardly the only mistake Soviet leaders made. They were also drawn into a costly and unwinnable arms race with the United States, and fell victim to imperial overreach, throwing money and resources at regimes with little strategic value and long track records of chronic economic mismanagement. As China enters a new “cold war” with the US, the CPC seems to be at risk of repeating the same catastrophic blunders.
.. China spent some $228 billion on its military last year, roughly 150% of the official figure of $151 billion.
.. the issue is not the amount of money China spends on guns per se, but rather the consistent rise in military expenditure, which implies that the country is prepared to engage in a long-term war of attrition with the US. Yet China’s economy is not equipped to generate sufficient resources to support the level of spending that victory on this front would require.
If China had a sustainable growth model underpinning a highly efficient economy, it might be able to afford a moderate arms race with the US. But it has neither.
.. China’s growth is likely to continue to decelerate, owing to rapid population aging, high debt levels, maturity mismatches, and the escalating trade war that the US has initiated. All of this will drain the CPC’s limited resources. For example, as the old-age dependency ratio rises, so will health-care and pension costs.
.. while the Chinese economy may be far more efficient than the Soviet economy was, it is nowhere near as efficient as that of the US. The main reason for this is the enduring clout of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which consume half of the country’s total bank credit, but contribute only 20% of value-added and employment.
.. the CPC is that SOEs play a vital role in sustaining one-party rule, as they are used both to reward loyalists and to facilitate government intervention on behalf of official macroeconomic targets.
.. Dismantling these bloated and inefficient firms would thus amount to political suicide. Yet protecting them may merely delay the inevitable, because the longer they are allowed to suck scarce resources out of the economy, the more unaffordable an arms race with the US will become – and the greater the challenge to the CPC’s authority will become.
.. The second lesson that China’s leaders have failed to appreciate adequately is the need to avoid imperial overreach. About a decade ago, with massive trade surpluses bringing in a surfeit of hard currency, the Chinese government began to take on costly overseas commitments and subsidize deadbeat “allies.”
.. Exhibit A is the much-touted Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a $1 trillion program focused on the debt-financed construction of infrastructure in developing countries.
.. An even more egregious example of imperial overreach is China’s generous aid to countries – from Cambodia to Venezuela to Russia – that offer little in return.
.. from 2000 to 2014, Cambodia, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe together received $24.4 billion in Chinese grants or heavily subsidized loans. Over the same period, Angola, Laos, Pakistan, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela received $98.2 billion.
.. Like the Soviet Union, China is paying through the nose for a few friends, gaining only limited benefits while becoming increasingly entrenched in an unsustainable arms race. The Sino-American Cold War has barely started, yet China is already on track to lose.

Tune Into The Real Ronald Reagan

There is nothing clandestine about Dugger’s quarry of new material, though Reagan’s staff has done its best to play it down. The material consists of transcripts of several hundred five-minute radio spots that Reagan broadcast after he left Sacramento in 1975; a series that ended the day he announced for president in 1979.

There can be no doubt whatever that these broadcasts express Reagan’s own personal, instinctive attitudes to the important foreign and domestic issues of the day, as opposed to cooler or more cautious or veiled attitudes he may have been advised to express then or later.

Reagan himself, in the last of the broadcasts, states that he wrote them all with his own hand. “I’ve scratched them out on a yellow tablet in airplanes, riding in cars, and at the ranch when the sun went down.”

They reveal him as perhaps a cleverer man than most reporters think he is. You may accept neither his premises nor his conclusions, but you will conclude, I submit, on reading these scripts, that Reagan writes better than you would expect. He has a sure sense of how an issue can be turned, sometimes twisted, to his advantage. And he has a real flair for one-liners.

The transcripts also reveal–and this is the heart of Dugger’s contention–a harder, nastier political style than that of the relaxed, tolerant personality Reagan has so carefully cultivated in the White House.

.. “He was presenting himself to the country as a moderate,” this is Dugger’s key charge, “but these transcripts show that deep down he was a hardline right-wing ideologue with fully formed and recently expressed prejudices on all of the outstanding issues of the day.”

.. The transcripts contain too much that supports this harsh judgment. All the clich,es of the Californian radical right are trotted out without inhibition.

Eighty per cent of air pollution,” the president believes, “comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes but from plants and trees.” Banning pesticides like DDT leads to “political pollution.” Smoking pot leads to sterility.

.. The social attitudes revealed are uniformly indifferent to the old, the poor, the weak, and always coincide with the interests of the rich, corporations, and the financial Haves. The president is more moved by “the injustice done to Allan Bakke” than by the plight of those on welfare, and it is “demagoguery” to believe that income taxes should be progressive, that is, should increase with the size of incomes.

.. More surprising, and more unpleasant, is the president’s habit of using the sly, indirect way of the propagandist, using code language to suggest more than he quite says right out.

.. He does not explicitly advocate the death penalty, for example. That would sound too bloodthirsty. Instead he quotes with approval the father of a murdered man who says, “after two years the murderer of my son goes free, but my son is dead.” Because the late senator Joe McCarthy did not start to make his unsupported allegations about communists in government until after Alger Hiss had been charged with perjury, it does not follow, as Reagan implies, that those who oppose McCarthyism believe that the Cold War existed only in the minds of reactionaries.

.. There is a good deal of old-fashioned chauvinism to be found in the broadcasts. The Caribbean, Reagan concluded because Michael Manley was prime minister of Jamaica, “is rapidly becoming a communist lake in what should be an American pond.” What should be? The Caribbean basin? The Atlantic? The whole great gulf of ocean itself?

..”Maybe there is an answer–we simply do what’s morally right. Stop doing business with them. Let their system collapse.”

What if it doesn’t collapse?

.. Ronald Reagan is the leader of elements in the government who want the United States to obtain a first- strike capability

.. not all Reagan’s ideas are mistaken. His reaction against the New Deal, as Dugger says, would not have taken him to the White House unless it expressed authentic grievances, genuine second-thoughts about what had been accepted wisdom, real pain experienced by those who had not been preferred targets for the benevolence of the liberal system.

It is true. but that does not make the real Ronald Reagan, revealed behind the mask of amiability in his radio scripts, any less profoundly disturbing.

Putin Tells Voters He Would Save USSR if He Had a Time Machine and He Makes ‘Really Tasty’ Salad

Russian President Vladimir Putin, while fielding questions from supporters on Friday, said he is a mean salad maker and would prevent the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union if he could travel back in time.

Unfortunately, our Western partners, having divided the USSR’s geopolitical legacy, were certain of their own incontestable righteousness having declared themselves the victors of the “Cold War.”

They started to openly interfere in the sovereign affairs of countries and to export democracy in the same way as in their time the Soviet leadership tried to export the Socialist revolution to the whole world.

Putin Unveils Nuclear Weapons He Claims Could Breach U.S. Defenses

Russia has developed nuclear weapons capable of penetrating U.S. defense systems, the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, said Thursday, sharpening rhetoric against the West and raising the prospect of a new arms race with Washington.

In language reminiscent of the Cold War, Mr. Putin used his annual state- of-the-union address to boast about Russia’s military prowess and show off a series of new armaments, including intercontinental ballistic missiles and underwater drones.

“Efforts to contain Russia have failed,” he said to Russia’s political elite gathered in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hal

.. Mr. Putin said would consider any nuclear attack on its allies an attack on Russia and would launch an immediate response

..  “Russia’s growing military might is a reliable guarantee of peace on our planet because it ensures the strategic balance in the world.”

.. The Trump administration has warned that Russia and China are moving to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenals in a bid to “return to Great Power competition.”

.. The U.S., he said, had exploited Russia’s economic, political and military weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union to ignore Moscow’s views, including by moving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization closer to Russia’s borders.

No one listened to us. Listen to us now,”

.. Mr. Putin said the Syria campaign had allowed the military to show off the results of a modernization program he launched in 2011. “The whole world knows the names of our newest airplanes, submarines, air-defense systems,” he said.

.. Ivan Konovalov, an independent defense analyst in Moscow, said the speech demonstrated how quickly Russia’s arms industry is developing.

“It is developing some of the best weapons in the world, and the United States, if they want to maintain parity, has to answer the challenge quickly,” he said.