"Europe has a special place in the venture because it was the final destination of the original Silk Road."
Is this really true? Wasn't China the final destination of the original silk road. Isn't it why we call it the "silk" road.
My understanding was that the silk road was primarily a loose idea of trade links between the middle east, india and china. Europe was an afterthought.
You could argue Europe is the final destination today since it is china wanting to get access to europe. But in the past, wasn't it the other way around?
But more to the point, Europe ( especially western europe ) is significantly wealthier than China. Why is it that China is investing in poorer european countries and not the wealthy western european countries? They can find money to fund wars all over the world, but can't find money to invest in tech/science in central and eastern european countries?
I suspect that the reason wealthy WE countries aren't investing in EE and the Balkans is that it is in general, a poor investment (due to corruption and brain drain).
The real question should then be - why is China investing in those same countries?
it's a scattershot approach. the size of china and it's appetite for growth means it invests everywhere, its concentrated wealth and power is being dispersed globally in order to throw as many seeds as possible and water the ones that seek to grow. they're in africa, south america, eurasia, se asia, oceania, western europe, the middle east. it's very similar to what japan and south korea did domestically with miracle recoveries in their respective post war periods - but on a completely global scale. you give everyone a chance, and reinforce the ones who take it with good faith, the bad self-prune themselves and behavior can now be correlated to outcome. never throw good money after bad, and always work out some deal when you get something in return for something.
china needs this to work, or it is facing a real crisis (constitutional, demographic, cultural) in the near future. the middle income trap leads to stagnation and possible revolution unless you can centralize population (it needs 100 tokyos) and largely flatten your wealth distribution before it happens, but avoiding it is preferential to dealing with its effects.
the idea that china is doing this alone is also a fantasy, in reality it's working within the global system of international lending and finance to open as many doors as possible to trade, growth, accelerated development and good outcomes for domestic populations. european and american funds can't get through the door fast enough to get behind chinese at scale manufacturing and development of the undeveloped parts of the world.
i think they will fail, but for largely unmentioned and unrelated reasons to the ones presently discussed. any system like china will risk total collapse around leadership changeover, and it needs more than 20 years to achieve new stability goals and at that moment - when xi dies - it requires a stable partner to secure the hand off, and at the rate of hysteria in america, two decades from now, i can see capricious opportunism on the part of a deflated western elite take over sound judgement and prudent long term thinking. the quiet horror of the thousands of kilometers of abandoned high speed rail like skeletal bones across the world as we enter some new global minimum is vividly in my mind as i think of the most likely outcomes.
You can actually gain a lot from investing in "poorer" Eastern European countries, like a lot of tech outsourcing occurs there because the intellecutual labour is much cheaper yet the quality of work is comparable to Western European standards.
A lot of products or scientific research can be made at a much cheaper price in East Europe and maybe even at a higher quality. The issue for Western European countries is that they don't need to and likely don't have the huge budget that China has to put into foreign investment. Also although China may seem like it is investing a lot, it's not much in terms of its budget so it seems much more affordable to China.
Also China is also investing in Western Europe as well, they are more or less doing a scattershot approach as can be seen by the German acquisition. Its probably just that Western Europe isn't as receptive and doesn't need as much.
It's not profitable because movement of skilled labor is free across whole EU.
If you've poor countries in EU then a company from rich EU country can easily buy large farmland or ship out dirty/sketchy industries (waste recycling companies who just set waste on fire) to poor countries. This way you can keep pollution away from your shores while buying the beneficail resources (like farmland) at cheap.
Resources go where money is. Now, resources can be either agriculture lands or skilled labor. If you expand the market by adding lots of poor countries to your free trade alliance, you'll notice that the rich countries get way more richer at faster rate than poor countries.
Think about an EU where every country is equally rich and has equally wealthy population.
Then buying large farmland in Romania will be cost as much as in Germany and what happens next? Romanian companies might also end up owning large lands in Germany.
How is that beneficial for rich members of EU to make poor ones richer? You end up losing country over your country's resources to foreign power.
China knows this and that's why they invest in poor countries to create a bigger market on favourable trade terms. Now, these terms don't even need to biased in favour of China if China deals with poor countries as the naturally China being richer will benefit from the effect outlined above.
So China doesn't need to be unfair to win and become rich while extracting resources from poor countries they invest in.
Is it good, bad or evil? Depends on how you think about other players like Sacadinavia and Western Europe. I don't know why we should treat China any different if I am a poor European country.
whether china does this because they cannot transition into services quickly enough and they need to manufacture a new capital stream to purchase their own products or because of some benevolent world connection plan is largely inconsequential, where there is political will there is a way.
a) china offers to triple your standard of living in the next decade through a massive transnational infrastructure project that will allow increased trade and job opportunities, growing local export sectors and connecting you into the largest economic region in the world.
b) continue to be brain drained by germany and scandinavia while their large agrobusiness interests buy your farmland on the cheap and create a monoculture base of gmo exports to feed their growing welfare states, in the name of human rights and european unity of course.
this is going to be a hard choice for easte-.... western eurasia. crimea and syria are just russia and america trying to get a station on this supercontinental train. the general tone towards china's plans, reminds me of the attitude towards japan and the shinkansen project in the 60s. sometimes pragmatic long term thinking beats moonshots. a traveler in 2050 will likely be on a high speed train from europe to asia than on a spaceship to low earth orbit.
> china offers to triple your standard of living in the next decade through a massive transnational infrastructure project that will allow increased trade and job opportunities, growing local export sectors and connecting you into the largest economic region in the world.
No, they are not. They are loaning you money so you can spend it on Chinese workers/companies and they get 100% ROI.
I don't think it's either of those things. I suspect China is doing it as a way to get a foothold in EU politics. Smaller, poorer countries are easier to bribe, coerce or just plain intimidate than say France or Germany.
Furthermore, those investments will do nothing to fix the problems those countries have. My biggest concern is that those countries will not be able to honor their obligations to China and the consequences of that.
> Smaller, poorer countries are easier to bribe, coerce or just plain intimidate than say France or Germany.
Not to mention, many of those countries are already being bullied and coerced by France and Germany anyway, so they may see some international abuse as the lesser of two evils.
Now, if countries like Romania could get their act together and stop accepting the free outward movement of people who they've just paid to educate, maybe the equation changes.
To be fair, some of that bullying is for good causes - such as human rights and rule of law.
Free movement is one of the cornerstones of the European Union. If Romania were to restrict it, I think that the people most pissed with that decision would be the Romanians. This might even be a blessing in disguise, as it could generate enough outrage to fix the problems ailing the country. Though considering the apathy and disillusionment with democracy in much of Europe, I'm not sure that even that would work.
> To be fair, some of that bullying is for good causes - such as human rights and rule of law.
I'm all for human rights and the rule of law, but the rule of law without sovereignty is just tyranny, and human rights without sovereign rights deteriorate inevitably.
> Free movement is one of the cornerstones of the European Union. If Romania were to restrict it, I think that the people most pissed with that decision would be the Romanians.
The suggestion from other member states to Romania (which, I should clarify, I have no real personal attachment to), is that they should take on migrants from even poorer economies; the problem with this is that poorer economies generally do not produce the educated people Romania is losing, but a further set of people who they must educate, and who will ultimately be able to simply hop on a bus and setttle in a place where even low-skilled work is better compensated than high-skilled work in their home country.
I don't think it's great when countries try to trap their citizens arbitrarily, but by the same token, they can not simply allow their best and brightest the option to take their skills somewhere more developed, and have that cost those people nothing. Furthermore, the end result of brain drain is a country full of nationalists and wretches, which seems to me like a bad thing to aim at, even if the process seems fair.
And what is the absence of rule of law and (in some cases) human rights abuses coupled with full-throttle sovereignty?
Because that's exactly what you get with much of EE and the Balkans. Lots of talk of sovereignty and lots of examples on how that sovereignty is being squandered and misused. I honestly think that a lot of those countries (my own included) would be better off without that sovereignty.
> And what is the absence of rule of law and (in some cases) human rights abuses coupled with full-throttle sovereignty?
A national tyranny, which I'd argue is still better than an imperial tyranny.
> Because that's exactly what you get with much of EE and the Balkans. Lots of talk of sovereignty and lots of examples on how that sovereignty is being squandered and misused. I honestly think that a lot of those countries (my own included) would be better off without that sovereignty.
I'd argue first that that's not your call to make; but failing that, we don't know what the enlightened sovereign Eastern Europe looks like, because the people you probably like the most (educated, middle and upper class) are busy leaving, and it seems to me that the people are fighting politics on two fronts (as far as I gather, the local politicians who use their weak constitutions and electoral systems to win elections with minor vote buys to crooks and desperate elderly people in the countryside; and Eurocrats who do effectively the same thing but with better haircuts).
EUs criticism of Romania has nothing to do with immigration! What Romania is expected to do is to abide by the provisions of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union which it agreed to when it joined the union. In exchange for this, they get billions upon billions in EU aid from rich EU countries tax payers' pockets - such as mine. Respecting the Charter is not an onerous burden.
And how would you stop accepting the outward movement of people educated in Romania? Not sure if you are proposing to restrict freedom of movement, but that would be pretty hard to pass, and frankly scary. As I see it, the only reasonable way to fight the brain drain is to make it attractive for young people to stay in Romania.
> Not sure if you are proposing to restrict freedom of movement, but that would be pretty hard to pass, and frankly scary.
My thought is that they should create some form of obligation or tuition option for the schools so that they don't subsidize people who ultimately leave their economy. You stay in Romania, your tuition is subsidized like normal, if you leave Romania and become resident elsewhere, you pay a bill to recover the cost of educating you.
Obviously they can't, as a matter of civil rights, prohibit people who are not criminals from leaving the country, but they have tools to enforce agreements like that at least with EU member states, and states they generally have relationships with regardless (i.e. UK).
A couple of problems with this idea - one, the people emigrating and their parents paid for that tuition through taxes. Second, what about all the people who finish college and stay in Romania, but work in some dead end job that doesn't even need higher education?
And lastly, this would mean keeping the people most dissatisfied with the current state of the country in the country. No corrupt government would want that. Much better for them to leave and not cause any trouble.
> their parents paid for that tuition through taxes
The way that (modern) governments finance programs like this is exactly the opposite of your model of it. Your parents didn't pay to subsidize your education, the next generation did (this is in part why birth/immigration rates falling is taken as such bad news).
> Second, what about all the people who finish college and stay in Romania, but work in some dead end job that doesn't even need higher education?
The next ones will know from that more about the demand for educated people, and adjust accordingly; at least they mainly wasted time and not money on getting into that dead-end job.
> And lastly, this would mean keeping the people most dissatisfied with the current state of the country in the country. No corrupt government would want that. Much better for them to leave and not cause any trouble.
Sure, but should we govern based on what the government wants? The people benefit when the legitimately dissatisfied are heard rather than just swept under the rug.
As for it being a corrupt government that encourages the people most likely to become dissidents to leave the country, what does that say about the countries receiving those dissidents? Is it moral to accept masses dissatisfied people from a country that suffers more from politics than from geography? Is that moral even when that country does have enough semblance of free expression that you could conceive of dissidents making a difference from the inside?
When Japan built its Shinkansen, she had just been thoroughly beaten in a war, and we were reasonably confident she was no longer "bad". We have no such confidences with China; she has proven herself to be "bad" at many times. She is still locking ethnic minorities in concentration camps, continues to try to take over Taiwan, has taken over Tibet, mistreats her citizens, is focused on expanding the surveillance state, and is (in my view) intent on eventual world domination. Whether she will achieve this goal is debatable, but the risk is still there, and having many developing nations beholden to her is a risk for the free world.
At some point, I would argue any nation with more people than the free world in total that also has a totalitarian government is a risk to the rest of us. It's important to bound the influence of China, because should a war break out, the scale of death would be much larger than ever seen before. This is both because of China's sheer number of bodies she can throw at a problem and because of better technology.
this is a joke right? "every nation but mine.... (acts in its own self-interest and needs to be encircled should it try to expand)".
this is exceptional in it's dullness. you want to benefit all of humanity but also out-compete every other nation on earth- but i thought a nation was just an idea, or is it an individual? maximize individual freedom, but prevent the inevitable conflict, loss, suffering and death that freedom would bring about. think totalitarian governments are a systemic risk to world peace, but not your absolutist ideas which allow no room for compromise with a simple difference of opinion but create escalating tensions and threatening rhetoric. what are you suggesting? in order to save the chinese people from themselves you will bomb them, lend them paper to rebuilt and prop up a puppet government?
china needs new markets, because the chinese people demand it, through their production and consumption.
when you anchor your superstructure of belief on a fantasy, divorced from history, politics, and the state of the natural world with it's finite resources, no good decision dilemmas, and complex inter-dependencies your conclusions are crackpot lunacies. show me an individual, and you will show me a barbarian, a beast of burden, a machine. a human being is neither free nor undivided, the very process of existence requires division, sacrifice, and the reduction of freedom. when you say 'i want to be free' i hear 'do what i say', 'think like i do'. give me the freedom to be free of you. the tyrants and despots of history, always promising the sky and offering a shallow hole in the dirt.
a close reading of the 19th and 20th century would do you well. it was the sudden contraction of american banks lending to weimar germany brought about by an ill prepared and newly formed central bank that caused communist and reactionary forces to emerge and fight for europe. trade restrictions were placed on germany with the express goal to twist the iron glove to war, largely for the benefit of expanding american manufacturing, banking and business interests in the war-weary and destitute post-war period. china is peacefully doing 80 years later what the allies did by force and no regard for human life. why else were so many cities fire bombed and destroyed? what did the americans do in korea? vietnam? what are american forces doing in the middle east? borrow, bomb and build. freedom is the carrot, capital is the stick.
the guilty man sees his sins in the faces of others. the free world doesn't look so free anymore.
so lets get down to realities, you will escalate, china will defend, you will go bankrupt since you can't manufacture a working plane anymore and the world doesn't want to buy your debt, china will take your place in the northern hemisphere and you can go back to setting up banana republics in your backyard and liberating the other america from bad ideas. how is venezeula working out?
nb. this post is largely in jest, you present and therefore receive the treatment of a fool.
Please do not take HN threads further into flamewar, or political or national battle, regardless of whether someone else started it or did worse. And particularly please don't resort to personal attacks. We ban people for doing that.
26 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 74.4 ms ] threadIs this really true? Wasn't China the final destination of the original silk road. Isn't it why we call it the "silk" road.
My understanding was that the silk road was primarily a loose idea of trade links between the middle east, india and china. Europe was an afterthought.
You could argue Europe is the final destination today since it is china wanting to get access to europe. But in the past, wasn't it the other way around?
But more to the point, Europe ( especially western europe ) is significantly wealthier than China. Why is it that China is investing in poorer european countries and not the wealthy western european countries? They can find money to fund wars all over the world, but can't find money to invest in tech/science in central and eastern european countries?
The real question should then be - why is China investing in those same countries?
china needs this to work, or it is facing a real crisis (constitutional, demographic, cultural) in the near future. the middle income trap leads to stagnation and possible revolution unless you can centralize population (it needs 100 tokyos) and largely flatten your wealth distribution before it happens, but avoiding it is preferential to dealing with its effects.
the idea that china is doing this alone is also a fantasy, in reality it's working within the global system of international lending and finance to open as many doors as possible to trade, growth, accelerated development and good outcomes for domestic populations. european and american funds can't get through the door fast enough to get behind chinese at scale manufacturing and development of the undeveloped parts of the world.
i think they will fail, but for largely unmentioned and unrelated reasons to the ones presently discussed. any system like china will risk total collapse around leadership changeover, and it needs more than 20 years to achieve new stability goals and at that moment - when xi dies - it requires a stable partner to secure the hand off, and at the rate of hysteria in america, two decades from now, i can see capricious opportunism on the part of a deflated western elite take over sound judgement and prudent long term thinking. the quiet horror of the thousands of kilometers of abandoned high speed rail like skeletal bones across the world as we enter some new global minimum is vividly in my mind as i think of the most likely outcomes.
A lot of products or scientific research can be made at a much cheaper price in East Europe and maybe even at a higher quality. The issue for Western European countries is that they don't need to and likely don't have the huge budget that China has to put into foreign investment. Also although China may seem like it is investing a lot, it's not much in terms of its budget so it seems much more affordable to China.
Also China is also investing in Western Europe as well, they are more or less doing a scattershot approach as can be seen by the German acquisition. Its probably just that Western Europe isn't as receptive and doesn't need as much.
If you've poor countries in EU then a company from rich EU country can easily buy large farmland or ship out dirty/sketchy industries (waste recycling companies who just set waste on fire) to poor countries. This way you can keep pollution away from your shores while buying the beneficail resources (like farmland) at cheap.
Resources go where money is. Now, resources can be either agriculture lands or skilled labor. If you expand the market by adding lots of poor countries to your free trade alliance, you'll notice that the rich countries get way more richer at faster rate than poor countries.
Think about an EU where every country is equally rich and has equally wealthy population.
Then buying large farmland in Romania will be cost as much as in Germany and what happens next? Romanian companies might also end up owning large lands in Germany.
How is that beneficial for rich members of EU to make poor ones richer? You end up losing country over your country's resources to foreign power.
China knows this and that's why they invest in poor countries to create a bigger market on favourable trade terms. Now, these terms don't even need to biased in favour of China if China deals with poor countries as the naturally China being richer will benefit from the effect outlined above.
So China doesn't need to be unfair to win and become rich while extracting resources from poor countries they invest in.
Is it good, bad or evil? Depends on how you think about other players like Sacadinavia and Western Europe. I don't know why we should treat China any different if I am a poor European country.
Gigantic amounts of silk were dumped into the Roman Empire and gigantic amounts of gold left to China. Which became a problem eventually.
a) china offers to triple your standard of living in the next decade through a massive transnational infrastructure project that will allow increased trade and job opportunities, growing local export sectors and connecting you into the largest economic region in the world.
b) continue to be brain drained by germany and scandinavia while their large agrobusiness interests buy your farmland on the cheap and create a monoculture base of gmo exports to feed their growing welfare states, in the name of human rights and european unity of course.
this is going to be a hard choice for easte-.... western eurasia. crimea and syria are just russia and america trying to get a station on this supercontinental train. the general tone towards china's plans, reminds me of the attitude towards japan and the shinkansen project in the 60s. sometimes pragmatic long term thinking beats moonshots. a traveler in 2050 will likely be on a high speed train from europe to asia than on a spaceship to low earth orbit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3LLgzO_PrI
No, they are not. They are loaning you money so you can spend it on Chinese workers/companies and they get 100% ROI.
The defaults aren't really defaults, they do get paid back one way or another.
Either by a 99-year lease of strategical infrastructure or something else.
Most of the countries do pay back though.
https://qz.com/1223768/china-debt-trap-these-eight-countries...
Furthermore, those investments will do nothing to fix the problems those countries have. My biggest concern is that those countries will not be able to honor their obligations to China and the consequences of that.
Not to mention, many of those countries are already being bullied and coerced by France and Germany anyway, so they may see some international abuse as the lesser of two evils.
Now, if countries like Romania could get their act together and stop accepting the free outward movement of people who they've just paid to educate, maybe the equation changes.
Free movement is one of the cornerstones of the European Union. If Romania were to restrict it, I think that the people most pissed with that decision would be the Romanians. This might even be a blessing in disguise, as it could generate enough outrage to fix the problems ailing the country. Though considering the apathy and disillusionment with democracy in much of Europe, I'm not sure that even that would work.
I'm all for human rights and the rule of law, but the rule of law without sovereignty is just tyranny, and human rights without sovereign rights deteriorate inevitably.
> Free movement is one of the cornerstones of the European Union. If Romania were to restrict it, I think that the people most pissed with that decision would be the Romanians.
The suggestion from other member states to Romania (which, I should clarify, I have no real personal attachment to), is that they should take on migrants from even poorer economies; the problem with this is that poorer economies generally do not produce the educated people Romania is losing, but a further set of people who they must educate, and who will ultimately be able to simply hop on a bus and setttle in a place where even low-skilled work is better compensated than high-skilled work in their home country.
I don't think it's great when countries try to trap their citizens arbitrarily, but by the same token, they can not simply allow their best and brightest the option to take their skills somewhere more developed, and have that cost those people nothing. Furthermore, the end result of brain drain is a country full of nationalists and wretches, which seems to me like a bad thing to aim at, even if the process seems fair.
Because that's exactly what you get with much of EE and the Balkans. Lots of talk of sovereignty and lots of examples on how that sovereignty is being squandered and misused. I honestly think that a lot of those countries (my own included) would be better off without that sovereignty.
A national tyranny, which I'd argue is still better than an imperial tyranny.
> Because that's exactly what you get with much of EE and the Balkans. Lots of talk of sovereignty and lots of examples on how that sovereignty is being squandered and misused. I honestly think that a lot of those countries (my own included) would be better off without that sovereignty.
I'd argue first that that's not your call to make; but failing that, we don't know what the enlightened sovereign Eastern Europe looks like, because the people you probably like the most (educated, middle and upper class) are busy leaving, and it seems to me that the people are fighting politics on two fronts (as far as I gather, the local politicians who use their weak constitutions and electoral systems to win elections with minor vote buys to crooks and desperate elderly people in the countryside; and Eurocrats who do effectively the same thing but with better haircuts).
My thought is that they should create some form of obligation or tuition option for the schools so that they don't subsidize people who ultimately leave their economy. You stay in Romania, your tuition is subsidized like normal, if you leave Romania and become resident elsewhere, you pay a bill to recover the cost of educating you.
Obviously they can't, as a matter of civil rights, prohibit people who are not criminals from leaving the country, but they have tools to enforce agreements like that at least with EU member states, and states they generally have relationships with regardless (i.e. UK).
And lastly, this would mean keeping the people most dissatisfied with the current state of the country in the country. No corrupt government would want that. Much better for them to leave and not cause any trouble.
The way that (modern) governments finance programs like this is exactly the opposite of your model of it. Your parents didn't pay to subsidize your education, the next generation did (this is in part why birth/immigration rates falling is taken as such bad news).
> Second, what about all the people who finish college and stay in Romania, but work in some dead end job that doesn't even need higher education?
The next ones will know from that more about the demand for educated people, and adjust accordingly; at least they mainly wasted time and not money on getting into that dead-end job.
> And lastly, this would mean keeping the people most dissatisfied with the current state of the country in the country. No corrupt government would want that. Much better for them to leave and not cause any trouble.
Sure, but should we govern based on what the government wants? The people benefit when the legitimately dissatisfied are heard rather than just swept under the rug.
As for it being a corrupt government that encourages the people most likely to become dissidents to leave the country, what does that say about the countries receiving those dissidents? Is it moral to accept masses dissatisfied people from a country that suffers more from politics than from geography? Is that moral even when that country does have enough semblance of free expression that you could conceive of dissidents making a difference from the inside?
At some point, I would argue any nation with more people than the free world in total that also has a totalitarian government is a risk to the rest of us. It's important to bound the influence of China, because should a war break out, the scale of death would be much larger than ever seen before. This is both because of China's sheer number of bodies she can throw at a problem and because of better technology.
this is exceptional in it's dullness. you want to benefit all of humanity but also out-compete every other nation on earth- but i thought a nation was just an idea, or is it an individual? maximize individual freedom, but prevent the inevitable conflict, loss, suffering and death that freedom would bring about. think totalitarian governments are a systemic risk to world peace, but not your absolutist ideas which allow no room for compromise with a simple difference of opinion but create escalating tensions and threatening rhetoric. what are you suggesting? in order to save the chinese people from themselves you will bomb them, lend them paper to rebuilt and prop up a puppet government?
china needs new markets, because the chinese people demand it, through their production and consumption.
when you anchor your superstructure of belief on a fantasy, divorced from history, politics, and the state of the natural world with it's finite resources, no good decision dilemmas, and complex inter-dependencies your conclusions are crackpot lunacies. show me an individual, and you will show me a barbarian, a beast of burden, a machine. a human being is neither free nor undivided, the very process of existence requires division, sacrifice, and the reduction of freedom. when you say 'i want to be free' i hear 'do what i say', 'think like i do'. give me the freedom to be free of you. the tyrants and despots of history, always promising the sky and offering a shallow hole in the dirt.
a close reading of the 19th and 20th century would do you well. it was the sudden contraction of american banks lending to weimar germany brought about by an ill prepared and newly formed central bank that caused communist and reactionary forces to emerge and fight for europe. trade restrictions were placed on germany with the express goal to twist the iron glove to war, largely for the benefit of expanding american manufacturing, banking and business interests in the war-weary and destitute post-war period. china is peacefully doing 80 years later what the allies did by force and no regard for human life. why else were so many cities fire bombed and destroyed? what did the americans do in korea? vietnam? what are american forces doing in the middle east? borrow, bomb and build. freedom is the carrot, capital is the stick.
the guilty man sees his sins in the faces of others. the free world doesn't look so free anymore.
so lets get down to realities, you will escalate, china will defend, you will go bankrupt since you can't manufacture a working plane anymore and the world doesn't want to buy your debt, china will take your place in the northern hemisphere and you can go back to setting up banana republics in your backyard and liberating the other america from bad ideas. how is venezeula working out?
nb. this post is largely in jest, you present and therefore receive the treatment of a fool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html