How the United States could devastate China by quickly decoupling | Hacker News Reader

How the United States could devastate China by quickly decoupling

foreignaffairs.com

18 pointssuraci29 comments

I think we should ignore people in universities since they're the ones who brought us here, advising us to embrace global trade and admit China into the WTO under the obviously wrong thinking that trade would somehow magically transform them into a liberalized ally.

What ended up happening was the complete deindustrialization of the US and decimation of the working class, massive trade imbalance and essentially handing over untold wealth to the despotic Chinese regime.

Only an academic could come up with such a disastrous plan under such sophisticated and intelligent pretense.

Let me just elaborate that a country like the US that artificially floats it's own currency as the global base currency will of course piss away its wealth and through bypassing the natural corrective mechanism [0] will have no way to reverse course.

[0]: lost wealth (typically gold reserves) -> a weaker currency -> global economic incentive to begin exporting valuable goods and begin steadily recouping the lost wealth

While I agree with you on this particular article, I disagree with your broader conclusion of anti-intellectualism. How exactly do you think we might get ourselves out of this situation if we don't even use a map?

Anti-intellectualism has helped bring us to this position, by neutralizing opposition into the easily-discardable "they took our jobs" rather than focusing on the actual mechanism by which the US working class was getting screwed - massive money printing to maintain price inflation (the official policy, in direct opposition to the marketing refrain that offshoring would reduce prices). That newly-printed money (representing the economic gains from offshoring) was then mostly given away to banks to loan back to us and otherwise pump up the asset bubble (ie "the rent is too damn high"). But even that realization has been neutralized by anti-intellectualism, with the myopic focus on the "deficit" and "government debt" in lieu of overall fiscal responsibility - once again helping to facilitate the trend of looting by the upper class with the cover of achieving society-wide austerity while turning a knob that does nothing of the sort.

Now this same anti-intellectualism has brought us Trumpism with its blind anger. All swagger and impotence, alienating our long-time allies and destroying our cherished American freedoms, putting us in a much worse position to do anything about China. And of course cheered on by the same people who've finally realized they've been had - by the previous scam quickly disappearing in the rear view mirror.

We won't see eye-to-eye on this, who exactly were the reasonable intellectuals that were going to save us? Maybe Hayek or Mises, Keynes won the day and look where we are.

The past century is defined by Progressivism, from the New Deal and subsequent Great Society, which was hoisted by the World Wars and complete centralization of society into the administrative state run by supposed experts.

At every level it's been experts and intellectuals of all sorts, think someone like Paul Krugman - there's countless others, who we're told have it all figured out and we should simply accept all their demands and if anyone disagrees well they're rubes and what do they know.

That happened because capital wanted it to happen. Blaming academics is just fascist garbage that avoids addressing the real issue.

Of course capital is saying now it can fix all the problems they caused. I’m sure you believe them too.

> Blaming academics is just fascist garbage

isn't this flamebait?

Your initial post mirrors fascist rhetoric and is just an ideological rant.

Maybe try explaining how academics strong armed capital into deindustrializing and you’d get a better response.

The fact you went right to rules lawyering shows your weak position.

No, what you posted was flamebait: a rant against “academics” (all of them?) presented without evidence by a brand new account. This is just calling it out.

> presented without evidence

I laid out how globalism was pushed by the economic academic consensus as the enlightened approach to international relation with China.

I said that it has clearly failed to advance US interests over the past 30+ years and resulted in the decimation of the working class in America and hollowing out of the economy.

I don't think that's a rant, nor argument without evidence.

Exactly. Castigating an entire group of people as a useless, singleton hivemind.. that reeks of the stench of despicable, blind hatred.

I love it when capitalists complain about capitalism working as intended. Everyone wants a free market until they're just not good enough to compete. Then the whining starts.

Anti-intellectualism is a noxious disease symptomatic of ignorance and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

One thing that confuses me is how short-term Americans tend to think about certain issues. For example, how can you be so certain that a country like China cannot transition into a more democratized society? Are you basing that assumption solely on the developments of the past 20 years? Is that the extent of your perspective? Think about how much democracy existed when the United States transitioned from an agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse. How long did it take Western countries to evolve into democratic societies? And let’s not forget that democratic systems themselves can evolve over time.

> "It pits two dramatically different political systems—one democratic, the other authoritarian—against each other."

Mmmm, it feels like that distinction is becoming a little less stark/relevant as things progress.

I think this is overestimating the importance of GDP and underestimating the importance of real goods. The US' GDP may be higher, but in times of upheaval like is being discussed things like patents on Chinese-manufactured goods and our massive financial industry won't be as practically valuable despite driving GDP up significantly.

The article acknowledges this to some extent and expects the US to be able to pivot but fails to recognize how close China is to being able to do the same. Things like DeepSeek and BYD cars have shown that the gap is not as wide as traditionally thought.

5-10 years ago decoupling would have had a much bigger impact, but the threat has been looming this entire time, giving China plenty of time to prepare.

"The United States’ alliances are an incredible power resource, and its actions should not undermine them."

Well, too late. The article repeatedly makes the point that any blockade strategy requires allies on board in order to be effective. What allies? The US is now an enemy to its former allies.

But let's say the blockage/decoupling works and China's GDP is crushed by 40%. Then what? Do you think China will be like: "good one USA, guess you win this one?". Let's not forget that China is the #1 trading partner for an estimated 120-140 countries. And this doesn't even account for a possible pivot to China from Europe.

The idea that you can marginalize and decimate China economically in any lasting way with no existential side effects is ludicrous.

So this decoupling talked about here, does it rely on the allies to the US to be the best friends and co-operate well with each other ?

Just wondering.

http://archive.today/neTDh

And why exactly do you wish to devastate China? Why would you want to devastate anyone?

I conclude that the authors must be very nice people.

The authors make a case that China's GDP is overestimated from past night time studies so I ran an analysis on which country produces the most nighttime lights.

110 RUS 926043522.5

136 USA 816841431.0

24 CHN 541388528.0

21 CAN 537446163.4

16 BRA 259637239.0

62 IND 229451980.0

4 AUS 173842078.0

63 IRN 152673182.8

84 MEX 116989787.0

3 ARG 110292451.1

Russia is the real secret superpower?

China’s population is packed into dense urban areas and high-rise buildings, unlike the sprawling suburbs of the US... Could this mean fewer distinct “dots of light” on the map, even if economic activity is high? It looks like measuring overall light intensity is a part of the analysis as well which should help counter this...

Did you filter out gas flares? Russia is a huge energy producer with lots of flaring.

My question is...why? What's the motivation here?

China legitimately should be scared—Trump is willing to hurt them even if it hurts the US more. They are not dealing with a rational actor.

I'm kind of surprised they are allowing him to continue.

What does China have to be scared of? Their biggest geopolitical rival is burning every bridge they have with their (former) allies, destroying their own economy and essentially ceding superpower status to anyone willing to fill the power vacuum. All China needs to do is stand back, let it happen, and look like the adult in the room. If I were them I'd be more concerned about Europe than the US.

    Never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake. - Sun Tzu, or Napoleon. Somebody definitely said it.

All true, but a huge portion of their economy comes from selling us goods.

It's a big world. The collapse of the US is going to hurt everyone but China can survive the loss of the US as a trading partner by pivoting to other markets more so than the US can survive the loss of China and maybe everyone else by trying to roll back the clock on globalism. If anything, that just creates leverage for China against the US.

China should not be scared. We shouldn't keep ratcheting up pressure. China should be reassured that there is no need to escalate, not scared/threatened.

This article starts out insightful but ends up preaching to maintain the status quo. Europe tried to dangle economic cooperation as a carrot in front of an increasingly aggressive Russia, so how will that tactic work any better with China? If China goes for Taiwan, they will do so with the assurance that economic sanctions cannot harm their war machine, same as with Russia. Decoupling with China after a war starts would be pointless.

I don’t know if I can stand duplicitous neoliberals pretending like they were hawks the whole time for yet another war.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com