JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: CHINA'S EFFORTS TO PRODUCE TOP-QUALITY NUCLEAR MISSILE SUBMARINES - AMERICA AND RUSSIA AND CHINA - NATURE OF AMERICAN HOSTILITY DIFFERENT THAN IN THE 1970s - CHINA AS A REMARKABLE, DYNAMIC COUNTRY - MOTIVATIONS FOR AMERICAN HOSTILITIES AGAINST RUSSIA AND CHINA - "MAGA" AND "AMERICAN DREAM" SILLINESS - THE COMING CRASH - GENE POOL OF AMERICAN ELITES JUST CANNOT PRODUCE LEADERS LIKE PUTIN AND XI - AMERICA OFTEN POUNDS ITS HEAD INTO WALLS - TRUMP AS HALF-MAD TELEVISION EVANGELIST

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN ANTI-EMPIRE (FORMERLY CHECKPOINT ASIA)


“China Is Figuring Out How to Build a Modern Nuclear Attack Sub, the Last Step to a Truly World-Class Navy

“The Russians could help”


https://www.anti-empire.com/china-is-figuring-out-how-to-build-a-modern-nuclear-attack-sub-the-last-step-to-a-truly-world-class-navy/


Quite an interesting piece, teasing, as it does, some details from published general information.

Yes, indeed, the Russians could help China here, but that is a far touchier matter than the huge defensive radar Russia is building for China, nuclear boats always having the capacity to be turned against Russia herself.

Things may not always remain as they are under the two most gifted and enlightened major leaders in the world, Xi and Putin.

The countries have had some serious past hostilities.

And some Americans today are advocating strategies to separate Russia and China, just as Henry Kissinger worked towards doing in the Nixon era.

I don't believe such strategies have much chance because the aggression in the relationships is now so one-sided, all of it coming from America towards both China and Russia. What motivates American hostility towards those countries is different than what it was in the 1970s, and it is different for each of them.

When China perfects its nuclear-missile fleet, it will of course be regarded as a much greater threat by the United States than has been the case. Only Russia has had the capacity literally to obliterate the United States, which, I believe, is a major reason for the endless cycles of American Russo-phobia. The world’s self-declared “indispensable nation” just rankles at the idea that (poor old) Russia can vaporize it.

America’s hostility towards China has been more about the threat of being surpassed as a world trade and economic force and influence leader. There is no chance of that happening with Russia in the foreseeable future, and Putin seeks peace to build Russia the way he knows it needs building. His armaments are his guarantee to an extended period of relative peace.

China’s nuclear forces have been much more limited, both in the total number of warheads – just a small fraction of the numbers for both Russia and America - and in the reach of the weapons carrying them from China to America, in good part owing to geography.

But as with everything else about this remarkable, dynamic country, China, that will change, a new generation of nuclear submarines undoubtedly playing a major role.

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Response to a comment saying, “I believe that the number one reason for the accelerating belligerence towards China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, et al. is their exponential national debt which is metastasizing at almost $1 trillion dollars every 6 months now. They are on the verge of financial collapse. The only arrows left in their quiver is WAR: economic, financial, nuclear war.”

Yes, but there are other important reasons.

The US simply cannot get “its head around" the idea of another country seriously challenging it to become number one in influence and trade and all that comes with those.

Remember, the belligerent slogan America has officially adopted about "full-spectrum dominance." Foolish and without logic, having no relationship to reality. Just an urge.

I do believe the US effort is doomed, and in part by that very exploding national debt you mention.

As I've said elsewhere, you cannot make it be 1957 again, which is really what the US is trying to do.

“MAGA” is just a restatement of the old advertising slogan about "the American Dream," a slogan which great and irreversible changes in the world have reduced to a threadbare memory.

American elites are addicted to what they experienced for decades, but it is coming to an end.

No doubt an economic crash is coming, but how extensive and enduring will it be?

China's brilliant Belt-and-Road Initiative insures it a great banquet of future projects for years to come while at the same time changing the world's economic geography.

However, given something the magnitude of the Great Depression striking, all bets are off.

The US often pounds its head into walls rather than act sensibly. It does so in many spheres.

Its Smoot-Hawley Tariffs had a lot to do with the Great Depression.

And look at 10 years in Vietnam, an orgy of killing, just to be defeated by a relatively poor but very determined opponent.

And now 18 years of bombing in Afghanistan, having achieved nothing but a lot of dead villagers and waves of new opioids released into the world, something the Taliban had ended.

America is just incapable of providing leadership like Putin and Xi, literally incapable. Calm, practical, not impulsive, not ideological, consistently rational.

The gene pool of America’s elites and leadership contains many religious fanatics, zealots, and ideologues from the past.

Trump resembles a half-mad television Evangelist, waving his arms, sputtering, shouting, threatening hell, one whose religion is not Christianity but some “Patriotic vision” of America's destiny and place in the world. The “indispensable nation” as that grotesque horror, Madeleine Albright put it.

None of the rest of that establishment really opposes him, even if they despise his sense of style. And, of course, he’s going to be re-elected.