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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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They'd be way out on the end of it, so... not a huge loss. I'd be far more concerned if Turkey or Egypt pulled out, as they are central to transportation in the region.
I imagine this is easy to do for a government with very little stake in long-term infrastructure development and a need to score a few quick points among the reactionary "How dare all these Chinese ex-pats move into my neighborhood!" landlord wing of the current governing coalition. But in another five or ten years, they'll be out and a new pro-growth government is going to find BRI more attractive. China will still be rolling out new connections then, and Italians will only have missed out on being early adopters.
That's certainly the plan. But its becoming increasingly difficult to exploit regions of the globe that are catching up industrially. That's the core threat of the BRICS coalition. The NATO states are running out of cheap labor to buy and rich countries into which they can sell. And efforts to threaten BRICS states only force them closer together, as evidenced by the Ukraine War being the last nail in the coffin for a Sino-Soviet split.
If the American dollar keeps slipping as global reserve currency, its not clear why BRICS states will even need to trade with the western bloc at all. And as countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa pull away from the imperial core, they're going to drag a lot of their neighbors along with them.
But i'mean underlying premise of belt and road is unifying trade in eurasia bypassing sea routing, and making china less vulnerable to the blockade.
Europe seems willing to self-combust by sanctions of that trade and friendshoring usa operations, so chinese trade routes to europe will become less valuable. If i were china i would be hurrying up their double circulation (consumer-driven in lib speak) economy, cause they don't have much time left, and losing billion of customers won't be great
That's definitely one angle. But there's also a ton of underdeveloped territory in the central Asian "silk road" corridor that a Chinese land rail/road network could profitably develop. This isn't just about bypassing sea trade to continue selling to the same old western interests. It is also about turning the smattering of landlocks states into growing, modernized industrial trading partners and allies.
Access to the Mediterranian isn't just about access to Europe. You've got all of North Africa to trade with, and if they can recover from centuries of colonial rule there's no reason to believe Tunisia or Algeria cannot be as prosperous and wealthy as Spain or France in the next century. Once you've got rail access to Turkey, you're not constrained by the Suez Canal. You also have the opportunity to trade with the much-more-heavily-developed eastern end of Russia and the Balkans.
I don't think the Chinese central planners are simply giving up on sea trade. They seem heavily enough invested in Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Indonesia. But they seem fixated on real growth outside the Pacific Rim in a way that the last century of American-lead development was not. Sri Lanka, Kenya, South Africa, Iran, Venezuela, and Peru are getting the kind of attention they never saw during the 20th century.
re:central asia: say hi to pakistan
I mean yes, they do more than just trying to reach europe, they are doing stuff in africa as well, but its more longterm cause africa was for so long mining central. and usa doing fuckery there as well - like in niger: after they kicked out frenchies, usa military mysteriously remained there and usa told them they are fine with them like 3 days ago
Biden's frantically trying to force the lid back on the pot in the Middle East atm. I'm not surprised the US State Department signed Niger a day pass on their coup and politely asked to stick around, rather than going in guns blazing. There was an effort by Blinken last month to put together a "Coalition of the Willing" via Nigeria, but it got fierce push-back in the AU and fizzled out. So they don't have many other cards to play.
I more cynically think that usa found a chance to displace france from the west africa, so that euros won't even dream of having independent ressources colonies, and get them from american middleman instead.
North of africa is firmly under eu heel due to refugees concenctrations camps already
glances at Vietnam Not famously a winning move.
I don't doubt for a second that US economic planners are hoping to bend the European states into full-blown satraps, in the same way they dominated Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines. But I also see a wildfire of fascist movements in Western Europe that would suggest these efforts are doomed to fail. Much like the US tried and failed to colonize Germany during the 30s and ended up ceding half the continent to Russia into the end of the century, the game they're playing in Africa (and, to a lesser degree, the Pacific Rim and Latin America) is predicated locals doing a ton of the work for them. That's giving these areas big nationalist movements that ultimately aren't allied with the US as a whole, just a few Trumpian icons. They simply don't have enough juice to occupy every corner of the world all the time all at once.
North Africa is vomiting up refugees as their municipal and state governments collapse under the weight of the legacy of colonial rule. But to say their under the EU's heel. I don't think they are, in any practical sense. Business interests are abandoning the North African states. Tunisia, in particular, used to be this little corporate beach head for O&G and low-wage industry. But as the infrastructure collapses without a civil government to maintain it, business interests are retreating. Exxon is retreating from Libya. Spanish firms are fleeing Algeria for Morocco at the behest of the Madrid government after inter-state tensions resulted in an Algerian blockade of Spanish trade along their coast. Egypt is being bought out and carved up by the Saudis, while what's left of the English and American presence consolidate further around the Suez Canal.
This doesn't look like firm control at all. We're more likely to see a government out of Riyadh or Moscow or Beijing dictating trade flows south of the Mediterranean in another 50 years than for London or Brussells or even DC to hang on.
The west still exports a ton of technology and the US controls them which is why China had to smuggle and develop their own chip technology. Obviously China can become the new chip leader, but it's unlikely that they'll be able to be completely self sufficient to the point that no one relies on the west.
Even that has been changing. The US hasn't been a net-exporter of processing chips since COVID struck. China is approaching parity with the US (assuming they haven't eclipsed us already) and India isn't far behind. California's position as a tech hub is being eclipsed by its roll in FIRE, which makes sense because that's where all the money's at. The US simply does not reward technological innovation. We outsource that shit.
It is the western states that are ultimately unable to be self-sufficient. That's why the US is so panicked over Taiwan. Their semiconductor industry is the lynchpin of our tech sector. We can't even make cars when Taiwan Semiconductor misses its production quotas.
The US is not exporting chips, but it controls European countries that export chip technology (manufacturing and embedded parts). They prevented Scandinavian countries (forget which ones) from sending them to China, hence the shock of the breakthrough with their phones a couple months back
Sure. Because outsourcing is cheaper. But that's also what creates the risk of losing your satraps.
And the Ukraine-Russia war was a big win for NATO in so far as it tightened control over the Scandinavian states. But due to their physical proximity to Russia and their reliance on cheap raw material imports (which the Russians have in droves, but the Southern/Western Europeans don't), this is still a relatively precarious situation. Had the US simply maintained/developed their domestic chip markets, they wouldn't be freaking out every time a war threatens to erupt in the periphery.
I would say that the US firms is far more exposed to the threat of shortages and supply disruptions to critical tech infrastructure than their Chinese (and South Korean) peers.