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-_-_-_-_-  13d ago (noahpinion.blog)   1801 thread views

Noah Smith: Manufacturing is a war now

noahpinion.blog

Industrial policy has been a frequent subject on Smith's blog, for those who don't follow it. (He's for it, and thinks that Biden's industrial policy was mostly good - it's worth following the links in this post.) This post focuses on defense-related geopolitical industrial policy goals and pros and cons of anticipated changes under the incoming Trump administration and Chinese responses. Particularly, he highlights two major things China can do: Restrict exports of raw materials (recently announced) and use their own industrial policy to hamper the West's peacetime industrial policy (de facto policy of the last 30 years). These are not extraordinary insights, but it's a good primer on the current state of affairs and policies to pay attention to in the near-future.

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It has proven itself incapable of behaving in a civilized manner and should be incapacitated whether it has moral responsibility or not (rabid bear).

This standard means the US empire needs to be incapacitated as well. What the US has done in Libya, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc is well beyond the bounds of 'civilized' behavior. You don't get to talk about the evil Russian empire while defending the same empire that dumped agent orange on Vietnam.

Vietnam was before Russia had its own Afghanistan debacle, ancient history. I’ll grant that the US has a weaker record of peacefulness than China. I don’t want to get into a discussion of the US’ moral responsibility and war justifications either, it’s largely irrelevant. Most of the reasons why Russia should be fought and China let off the hook apply to the US as well: order of magnitude stronger, no expanding-expansionist goals, no nuclear threats.

Pretty sure that the US has been trying to expand into Russia and China for the last half century.

To quote @netstack

The legacy of WWII was that you don’t have to literally occupy a territory to get value from it. Set up the right rules, and the subsequent international order serves your interests.

The US is very keen to make Russia and China follow US rules, and I'm pretty sure they would bring about regime change if they could.

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