Here is Trump’s new NATO that disrupts the Chinese One-Belt One-Road Initiative.
Here is another case of the wrecking crew making their own disruptive reality while the opposition is wondering “What’s happening?” It seems we’ve been too conservative in our imagination of the pushback that the global fossil fuel industry will exert on those states that have reserves of fossil fuel. I wonder when Nigeria signs on.
China is our new enemy, despite Democrats’ efforts to renew the Cold War. How many votes did HRC lose by calling for shooting down Russian planes in Syria?
Voters in the Midwest woke up to the fact that their jobs were lost to China and India, not Russia.
Guess who is making an entire renewables industry from scratch? China. The US has had 40 years to be disruptive through creating a renewables industry and green jobs. That meant sacrificing lots of capital, plant, and equipment, retraining and retooling. But squeezing labor was so much more profitable and enriching of the CEOs. We are looking at the long term consequences of Reaganism–an international system of nuclear armed, fossil fuel states, with illiberal agendas. Guess where we just showed up in history as the result of a weird election. Squarely aligned with the past.
That’s good for China. What does it do for us?
BTW, I haven’t forgotten the melamine in Chinese baby food. As much as possible I avoid Chinese food (not Chinese restaurants, Chinese imported food). One think that raised my hackles on TPP was the prohibition of Country of Origin labeling.
It means that private investors who are smart will be going ahead and building the wind and solar generation infrastructure anyway (unless there is a government ban) and undercutting the price of fossil fuels fairly rapidly. (Nothing a good large war can’t turn around as far as demand for fossil fuels.)
At a minimum they will be using Chinese or Chinese-mined rare earths for some of the materials.
It means that US workers will be condemned to sitting outside the booming economies that are driving down costs of production other than labor and looking on like the Russians and the Chinese did during the 1950s and 1960s.
Yes, health and safety are big issues in China (and the corruption that causes those incidents), but with deregulation we in the good ole US will soon be back to the days described in The Jungle. One would think that manufacturers would be proud of where they made their products.
If US private investors don’t take up the renewables challenge, where it puts us is in a polluted mess.
Exactly!
Rec’d that because it’s true. Still, what does it prove about the need for war with Russia.
To my mind it shows that the Trump White House in pushing the Axis of Oil is working counter to the national security establishment. That’s kind of awkward since he’s the commander-in-chief.
Wonder when they will wish they had treated Obama better.
Never. You knew that, Tarheeldem.
The powers on the other side are the European Union (with or without the UK), India, and China.
The conflict zones: Nigeria, Indonesia, Norway, Venezuela (especially), Mexico — any fossil fuel states that have not aligned with the Oil Axis. Does that explain the pressure on Qatar at the moment?
Roll out this line of thinking into a foreign policy.
Welcome to the land of Sauron.
○ Informed Comment and Readers Clueless on Syria
On Syria, Prof. Joshua Landis had some excellent authors writing on the background of rebel forces and the sectarian/civil war. Indeed, he too is a guest in worthwhile interviews by Sophie Shevardnadze @RT. 🙂 It’s not black or white as today’s version of the John Birchers in the Republican and Democratic parties play make-believe in Washington DC.
○ America’s Failure — and Russia and Iran’s Success — in Syria’s Cataclysmic Civil War | TPM |
○ The Syrian War
My analysis before the military intervention by Russia …
○ Turks and Sauds to Install Sunni Terror in Damascus, Syria by Oui om May 9th, 2015
Michael Klare about the Obama administration in 2014 …
○ A Global Warming President Presides Over a Drill-Baby-Drill America
Obama succeeded in flooding the market with fossil fuel forcing a sharp decline in profits for oil producing nations causing great depletion of income and wealth. Obama targeted the Sunni Gulf States, Russia and Venezuela.
Trump has no great plan on foreign policy, he’s followong the lead of his benefactors (Koch Bros on coal) and MIC on Saudi Arabia. Quite similar to George Bush after 9/11.
>>Obama succeeded in flooding the market with fossil fuel
you’re saying that the Saudis don’t take care of their own interests without being told by the U.S.? GMAFB. This is not the first time they’ve kept production high to screw other producers.
The Saudi strategy since the Carter administration is to try to lower the oil price to the point that retains profit but does not trigger transition to renewables. So far it’s worked, but it is a balancing act.
Now with wind costs undercutting other sources and solar moving in the same direction, Saudis seek the assistance of American power exactly at a point in which the President’s interests align with theirs. That hasn’t happened since 1968.
While Trump has no great plan on foreign policy, likely some brought into the Trump administration or some already in Congress do have such a plan. The relationship with Saudi Arabia is a traditional American one (credit FDR). It is the relationship with Russia and the logic of an alliance of the global oil powers that offers some explanation of “Why Russia?”
Saudi Arabia is the power within OPEC, which the US and Russia have played against during the past 40 years. US oil policy traditionally (and through Obama) was to break OPEC’s hold on energy prices. The US gripe with Venezuela is its independence from American pressure. (The remnant of US understanding of the real purpose of the Monroe Doctrine.)
The MIC is a bit flummoxed at the moment relative to Russia, but understand that the worlds most expensive military runs on oil — even yet. And so to the rest of the world’s militaries (cough, China, India, even Japan).
There is a geopolitical realignment going on now that Trump has essentially proclaimed the end of the US as the sole superpower through his actions. That is what those in the MIC who are permanently attached to that “greatest power in the World” tag line of the Cold War very anxious about the future. If that’s the way it’s going, it is what it is. Those of us who have tried to stop the march of folly really never had a chance. Anybody younger than 35 likely does not remember the cold fear of the Cold War. Or commie-bashing politics against Democrats.
Spot on! They never lived with megadeaths, the Positive Control Line, et al.
You write:
Right on point.
Karl Rove to the journalist Ron Suskind, 2002:
Fifteen years and three presidents later, even truer now than it was when Rove said it.
AG
Just like truth, solutions are so archaic an approach to politics, say the politicians.
Everybody is some damn hyped on being “history’s actors”.
After 15 years, they succeeded in blowing sole superpower status and having some sort of economy other than austerity. Now they’ve rearranged the entire basis of deadly quarrels.
When I was a kid I read a Heinlein Juvenile that was an allegory of the American Revolution but on Venus. At the end of one chapter, a rice farmer is explaining to the young protagonist how the Federation (Earth) will never attack because it would be an economic disaster for them. I always remembered the beginning of the next chapter (emphasis added by me).