Re: Why the US won't attack countries with nukes

Post #89,189 by deSitter 3/18/03 4:09:31 PM Reply	Re: Why the US won't attack countries with nukes Why isn't China blustering behind their longtime proxy? Because they don't need to. They're going to kill us economically, as Khrushchev once promised. -drl
Post #89,190 by ben_tilly 3/18/03 4:17:17 PM Reply	Conventional Western Wisdom holds... that by the time China is in a position to kill us economically, they will be us. At which point they won't bother because it would be bad for their own business. I am not stating a position on this policy. Just that it is the policy assumption. Cheers, Ben "good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not" - [link\|http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-devel/2000-October/003023.html\|Stefano Mazzocchi]
Post #89,207 by dmarker 3/18/03 5:00:19 PM Reply	US current global strategy has China already contained ... China Russia & Europe in order to grow or boom economically need two natural items - Water and Oil. Water to irrigate & grow food, Oil as the lifeblood of industry. Water is not a problem for these countries (China gets too much in short bursts). Oil: US has just engineered a stranglehold on 'Stans' oil (Oil rich region is the nth Stans, piping the oil thru Afghani-Stan avoids it having to pass into Russian controlled areas. US has a stranglehold on oil from the 'Americas' (ie Venezuela, etc:). US is withing weeks of securing a stranglehold on M.E. oil. So in terms of superpower supremacy, any other budding superpower will really have to wrest control of a major source of oil, from the US. If super powers were to go to war, the one controlling the flow of oil has the best chance to choke of the industry & military of the challenger. Economic WW2 (with US as incumbent & Europe led by France as challenger) looks like a hands down open mezzaire win to US. As for China, as long as Taiwan is not integrated & Nth & Sth Korea split & Japan remains unmilitarized, US has many cards up her sleeve to use to destabilize China should that ever become neccesary. Also for China's boom to continue for any time, she must consume growing amounts of oil & like US does not have the needed reserves withing her own borders. With US having got control of the vast majority of oil, US can effectively control China's destinty to some significant degree (Hey China, you can grow but on our terms & only as long as you never try to usurp our world leadership). As said once before, just watch National Geographic channel to see how we animals (ie Dog packs for QAD comparison), establish leadership and maintain it <g>. Cheers Doug Marker Spectres from our past: Beware the future when your children & theirs come after you for what you may have been willing to condone today - dsm 2003 Motivational: When performing activities, ask yourself if the person you most want to be would do, or say, it - dsm 2003
Post #89,219 by rcareaga 3/18/03 5:26:03 PM Reply	Digression -- Khrushchev They're going to kill us economically, as Khrushchev once promised. You would appear to be alluding to Khrushchev's famous "We will bury you" remark. This was widely reported in the American press at the time (1959) as though the Sovs had brigades of Stakhonovite shock troops, shovels at ready, poised to heap earth upon our helpless living forms. The truth, as you probably know, was tamer: Khrushchev in fact employed a Russian aphorism, considerably older than Marxism itself, the sense of which was "we will be there for your funeral," i.e., we will outlive you. It was rather a prediction of the outcome of the ideological pissing match in which his empire and ours were then engaged, and not a threat to entomb us before our time. As it turned out, of course, he got it bass-ackwards: the USSR was, to its vast surprise, the guest of honor rather than a satisfied onlooker when it came time to hold the obsequies, and a new era of American triumphalism was launched. (He said "Your grandchildren will live under communism." In fact, his son Sergei is now an American citizen. Then again, Eisenhower's granddaughter is married to one of the old USSR's senior rocket scientists. We may assume that both statesmen, forty years ago, would have found this state of affairs difficult to credit.) Actually the Sovs were outproducing us late in their history in many of the indices (steel, concrete, traditional smokestack industries) K had in mind. Alas for Khrushchev and communism, the USA was already running in a different race by 1980. As to China...they have lots of still-untapped potential there, and one of the few economies in the world presently firing on all cylinders. Of course, they also have a massive disenfranchised peasant population to whom the "New China" looks an awful lot like both the old ones. I suspect, though, that China will be a few decades addressing their internal issues before they undertake to eat our lunch. cordially, "Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist."

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