(1) Much of the focus on China future involvement in wars deals with Taiwan and Iran . IMO this is some what misdirected rather or sometimes misguided . Future wars will involving China will be proxy wars that take place in Africa and the Asia - Pacific region. (2) If the Global economy crashes extreme left and wing organizations will link up with terrorists or be accused of doing so. From then on it will all depend on whether US or China backed regimes come up trumps.
1) Been there, done that. Beginning with the 1931 invasion of Manchuria (China), Japan tried to form its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It reached as far west as Burma and as far south as New Guinea and threatened Australia. We blew it to smithereens in 1945. Fourteen years all told, the last 3 of which were not happy times in Tokyo.
China has no naval tradition as Japan had. You cannot transport significant numbers of troops, tanks and humvees by sampans. Our first supercarrier - angled flight deck - cost under $1 b. Today’s supercarriers cost $8 b. without counting the Air Wing, which would raise it to $10 b. Each. We have 8 in the water and 2 more are under construction. Whether or not they are added to or replace older vessels depends in part on what the Chinese do. See Note 1. CVN-68 is the Nimitz, first of a class of 10, and the last 2 are about to be finished. CV-67, the JFK and last non-nuclear powered, is being decommissioned as I write this.
Which I take it means China can cause mischief in Africa but it cannot support a meaningful insurgency or counter-insurgency.
As for Taiwan. China and the United States have achieved a very harmonious relationship DESPITE Taiwan. As a matter of interest I have recently learned that many of the HIGH tech parts in our electronic goods “Made in China” actually are produced in Taiwan. But ASSEMBLED in China. As China moves more towards laissez-faire capitalism to fill its socialist needs, Taiwan may be much less of an issue for both the US and the PRC.
Don’t overlook China's internal problems that while 300 million Chinese are enjoying a taste of the good life in varying degrees, there remain 1 b. Chinese trapped back in the Great Leap Forward days of Mao. Going nowhere fast! China has polluted itself near unto death! Olympic athletes are bringing canned oxygen with them to Beijing. That sounds like LA in the 1950s.
2) It is neigh onto impossible for me to conceive of what would happen today if we re-run the Great Depression of the late 1920s stretched into the late 1930s. I don’t know what brought on the Great Depression. A perfect storm of adverse economic conditions around the world? France and Britain unwisely depended on German reparations to pay their huge war debts. All three had lost upwards of 20-33% of their war age men. That factor alone would have crippled an all male workforce for decades. Germany was bankrupt before the Weimar Republic was created at Versailles. Russia (by then the USSR) was flat busted and internal turmoil brought on by a decade of low agricultural output killed off 10 million Kulaks.
US farmers were lured by artificially high prices for grain in the aftermath of WW1 when Herbert Hoover lead an effort to feed starving people in Western Europe. American farmers went deep into debt buying the new motorized farm machines in anticipation of an ever growing market for their produce in Europe, but then Mother Nature gave Western Europe 3 or 4 successive good growing seasons and demand for American crops collapsed. The US farmers faced a mortgage meltdown of their own by the mid-1920s.
After Mussolini made the trains run on time, Fascism swept across east and west Europe so that by June, 1941, when the Second World War began in earnest, all of Europe west of or on the Danube was under one form or another of Fascism. Only the British Isles and the United States (barely) escaped it’s appeal. Thanks in large part to Churchill and Roosevelt. Respectively.
I’ve said a lot (as usual) but I cannot offer a glimpse into our world in say, 2010 or 2011 with a world-wide economic collapse. It’s too much for me to do when sober. Maybe a bottle of 5 star Hennessy will help?
Africa will become a corrupt version of what Asia is today in economic terms . Africa is next continent where the worlds focus will be on.
Mr X11, I’m not so hopeful that even your dire prediction - which would be an improvement for most Africans - is possible. Those people really are dark skin and that does not bode well for them vis a vis the white skin people. We have destroyed their native subsistence culture - we collectivized agriculture - which would have seen those who practice it through hard times, but now, they have all the bad parts of Western Civ with none of the good. If calamity hits China and the US, a holocaust will strike Africa! And the West had better be wary of stray nukes! No thanks to Bush43.
Note 1. The USS Forestall is the first supercarrier with an angled flight deck which allows aircraft launch and recovery at the same time. CV-59. 1955. The newest carrier class - the Gerald R. Ford class - is now being built as CVN-78. CVN-79 and CVN-80 are planned. The “N” of course means nuclear powered. It is alarming (to me) that this ship - CVN-78 - is under construction by the Northrop-Grumman Shipbuilding Company. Please GOD if you really do LOVE us like YOU say, save us from the Military Industrial Complex. Airplane manufacturers have morphed into boat builders. Sweet Jesus, Come Quick!
[edit on 4/20/2008 by donwhite]
