Jean Pisani-Ferry — The Global Economy’s Three Games

Three major players – the United States, China, and a loose coalition formed by the other members of the G7 – are shaping the future of the international economic and geopolitical order. And they are all engaged in three contests simultaneously, without knowing which one is the most important.

This is about international relations, geopolitics and geo-strategy, and these fields are generally analyzed in terms of game theory.

The only one that can know which game the US is currently playing is Donald Trump and he is not saying. My money is on the third scenario, and I suspect that China and Russia see it that way, too.

Project Syndicate
The Global Economy’s Three Games
Jean Pisani-Ferry | Professor at the Hertie School of Governance (Berlin) and Sciences Po (Paris), the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa chair at the European University Institute and senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank

Jon Hellevig — Russia and China Will Win the New Arms Race

Let us now return to the paradoxical military spending figures. There is no doubt that America spends nominally much more than China and Russia put together, but the question is not about how much one spends but what one gets for the money. I need to point out that we do not know for sure know how much these countries actually spend on the military because at the end of the day the budgets are not all that transparent. But let’s assume that the United States spends at the level of $700 billion, China $220 billion and Russia from $40 to 50 billion (it is very difficult to state in dollar terms due to the very volatile currency exchange of the ruble to the dollar). Hereby I do not think it makes a lot of a difference what the European vassals of the USA spend. I will concentrate here on Russia, but most of the considerations apply to China as well. By these figures it would seem that the USA spends around three times more than China and Russia taken jointly, and some 15 times more than Russia alone. But there is a difference between spending and spending. Mainly I have in mind here the capability of these countries to develop and produce new state-of-the-art weaponry….

What goes unmentioned is one of the the greatest assets and liabilities of the US. The US is favored geographically by its relative isolation from the Eurasian landmass, but it also hampered logistically by length and number of supply chains. There is a saying among military strategists, "Logistics is everything," a corollary of which is, "An army travels on its stomach."

Hellevig also makes this important observation, which I have been hammering on for some time.

Both countries understand very well that the objective of the U.S. led Western elite is to achieve absolute world hegemony and that for this purpose they need to subjugate China and Russia. Hereby it is clear that this strategy foresees the subjugation of Russia in the first place either by a regime change operation or open war, or by wearing it down with economic warfare and terrorism. With Russia under its control, the West would then move to encircle China with sanctions warfare and the military. No other country in the World could go on maintaining an independent stand against the West once China and Russia had succumbed. It is from these considerations that I sum up the Russian and Chinese defense expenditures in comparing them with those of the West, and in particular with the American spending.

This is a given in geopolitics and geostrategy.

Anyway, expect trillions in new arms spending globally and a heating up of the global arms trade.

Russia Insider

Russia and China Will Win the New Arms Race

Jon Hellevig, Awara Group