The United States has made a fatal strategic mistake by forcibly playing this card!

Author: Rong ping source: official account: Rong Ping (id:rongping898) has been authorized to reprint

The underlying logic of modern big country competition has changed. It used to be the competition of geographical sphere of influence, but now it is the competition of industrial system and supply chain. The most serious mistake made by the United States in its competition with China is to try to solve industrial problems by geographical means, and then forcibly create an exclusive industrial economic sphere of influence.

In the western political logic, the rise of great powers is bound to be accompanied by the expansion of the sphere of influence. This expansion is strictly military and highly exclusive, that is, it controls a certain area by means of violence, and generally does not allow other big powers to interfere. The key is that the starting point for big powers to expand their sphere of influence is to maximize their interests. If other big powers join in, it does not conform to this principle.

It is precisely because of this that the expansion of the sphere of influence of great powers often results in bloody and cruel wars, and there are two kinds of wars.

One is the war against the countries within the scope of influence sought: for example, the US Mexico war!

After the war between the United States and Britain, the United States began a huge process of industrialization, which is no different from other European countries. The deeper the degree of industrialization of the United States, the greater its ambition to seek raw material markets and dumping places that can further support industrial upgrading. Therefore, with the intervention of big capitalists, the plan of territorial expansion by force was put on the agenda of the White House.

The question is in which direction?

Canada is British territory. In 1912, James, the then president of the United States As soon as Madison threatened to go north and annex the whole of Canada, and finally drove the British forces out of the American continent, he was beaten by the British, and even the presidential palace was burned.

During the second American British war, the British army set fire to the White House

Persimmons always need to be kneaded soft. Mexico, which is located in the East and south of the North American continent, is just right. The territory is large, but the strength is not strong, so it is easy to be manipulated. In this way, the United States first incited the plantation owners in Texas in Mexico to rebel and asked them to join the United States. Then, taking advantage of the Mexican government’s sending troops to suppress, the United States forcibly occupied 2.3 million square kilometers of land originally belonging to Mexico, including today’s New Mexico, Texas and California.

The victory of this war enabled the United States to obtain vast and fertile land and rich mineral resources, laying a solid foundation for the westward movement that will determine the U.S. industrial output in the future!

The other is the war against other powers within the scope of influence sought: for example, the war between Japan and China and Russia.

The Sino Japanese War of 1894 was a war between Japan and China for control of the Korean Peninsula; The Russo Japanese war in 1903 was a war between Japan and tsarist Russia for control of Liaodong Peninsula.

It can be said that all great power wars in the colonial era, in the final analysis, were pots of contention for sphere of influence, which is why many western scholars have been tireless in advocating the Thucydides trap. In their view, our rise will also engage in the expansion of sphere of influence, and the current western Pacific region is the traditional sphere of influence of the United States, so China and the United States will collide head-on sooner or later!

This is a typical frog in a well!

It’s right to take history as a mirror, but regardless of the changes of the times, they are forced into a fixed role to copy and scrape together, and the things they get will only be nondescript.

Russo Japanese War

Of course, if the war could not fundamentally solve the problem, or if the spheres of influence of many major powers were intertwined and overlapped, a situation similar to the peaceful partition of China in the late Qing Dynasty would occur. However, these are temporary. The subsequent World War I and World War II have proved that as long as the core of the competition among great powers is still the struggle for the sphere of influence, violent and exclusive large-scale wars will certainly break out!

In addition to military and exclusivity, the expansion of the sphere of influence also presents another feature: Geopolitics! That is, the expansion of the sphere of influence of a great power is usually determined by its geopolitical basis, so it is also called the expansion of the geographical sphere of influence.

To put it simply, in the era of great powers striving for hegemony, the primary direction of the expansion of the sphere of influence of a great power after its rise is mostly from its own side, from near to far.

There are two reasons for this feature:

First, the strategic delivery capacity is limited. The longer the distance, the weaker the delivery and control.

Second, the essence of expanding the sphere of influence is to grab more rich economic interests. The closer the territory of the expanded sphere of influence is, the more efficient the connection is, the greater the value of the economic interests will be. On the contrary, the farther the distance is, the transportation cost and the low connection efficiency will explain a large part of the benefits.

Some people will say that Europe is an exception. They are willing to stay close and seek the far, and have their sphere of influence extended to America and South Asia, which are thousands of miles away from their homeland.

Actually not!

At the beginning of the rise of the European powers, they also expanded nearby. After the British Plantagenet dynasty became strong, it pocketed most of France’s territory; During the Napoleonic Empire, it reached Russia from the English Channel. It’s just that there are more and more immortals in the temple, and it’s more and more common for people to touch the whole body. They don’t dare to play too much, so they just go to America to play the business game again.

In the Americas and Asia, where there are not many great powers, the great powers strictly abide by the principle of geographical location from near to far when expanding their sphere of influence.

The United States first defeated the nearest Mexico and established its hegemony in the southern part of the North American continent; Then he defeated Spain and gained hegemony in Central America; Then it continued to expand through Central America to South America, and finally realized the political ambition of “America is America of Americans” in Monroe Doctrine.

The Japanese route is similar.

The Sino Japanese War of 1894-1895 defeated China and seized control of the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan archipelago, which were closer to China; The Russo Japanese War defeated tsarist Russia and further expanded its sphere of influence to Northeast China. After 1937, one side expanded from Northeast China to the north and south of China, the other side expanded from the Taiwan archipelago to the nearby Philippine Islands, and finally landed in Indochina Peninsula.

The competition among great powers centered on the expansion of geographical sphere of influence lasted for hundreds of years until the end of the Second World War.

First of all, the World War II prompted the competition pattern of world powers to shift from multi power coexistence to two power hegemony. The United States and the Soviet Union launched fierce competition on a global scale, which also meant that the boundaries of the sphere of influence that the great powers needed to protect were upgraded from local areas to the world, and the cost and burden of governance increased sharply.

Secondly, the traditional Western geopolitical theory says that space is used to exchange time. For example, the geographical distance between the United States and East Asia is too far, and it takes a lot of time to rely on local forces. It would be better to integrate East Asia through the projection of the third largest archipelago in the Pacific, and then bring it into its own sphere of influence. In this way, the mobilization of the U.S. military can save a lot of time. However, with the progress of technology, especially the emergence of strategic missiles and other precision guided weapons, the geographical sense of space is becoming weaker and weaker, and the underlying structure of the traditional geopolitical theory has been passively shaken.

Finally, the military effect, which played a key role in the expansion of the geographical sphere of influence, was unprecedentedly weakened!

In the era of great powers striving for hegemony, military power is not only the driving force to promote the expansion of the geographical sphere of influence, but also the umbrella to maintain the geographical sphere of influence. After World War II, on the one hand, the cost of war became higher and higher. The cost of war here includes the following two points:

First, the cost of war between big powers is getting higher and higher, because there are mutually destructive nuclear weapons;

Second, the cost of war between big and small countries is getting higher and higher. The Vietnam War has brought down the American economy. Fortunately, the information industry revolution has come back, but the Soviet Union’s luck is not so smooth. A wave of war in Afghanistan directly plays the funeral march.

Even the one-sided wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 21st century have burned a lot of money in the United States. The unit price of a Tomahawk cruise missile is $1.2 million; The unit price of a precision guided shell is 800000 US dollars; The unit price of a B2 stealth fighter is $2.2 billion! There are also personnel allowances, spare parts losses, fuel supplies and other expenses. Modern war is really more exaggerated than the golden ten thousand liang of artillery.

On the other hand is the big explosion of population and technology!

This is the world population growth curve. It can be clearly seen from the graph that during the cold war, the world population increased by nearly 3billion, more than in the past 200 years.

The size of the population and the advanced level of technology determine the size of the governance cost.

In the past, when the population was small and the information and transportation technologies were underdeveloped, the military was the least costly and the most effective means of governance. As soon as several battleships went to the port, hundreds of combatants could control tens of thousands of square kilometers of land as soon as they landed.

However, after the Second World War, the population explosion met with the technology explosion. The speed of information dissemination was faster, and the traffic was more convenient. No one wanted to be a slave to anyone. If they picked up a guy, they would start an uprising. The source of troops was not a problem at all, and the trick of military governance would naturally be out of hand. Otherwise, the United States would not promote the collapse of the colonial system, but would inherit the mantle of Britain.

What did Marshal Peng Dehuai say about that famous saying:

The victory of the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea eloquently proved that the days when Western aggressors could seize a country by erecting a few cannons on the eastern coast for hundreds of years are gone forever

War cannot be fought easily, and the means of military governance cannot be used. What should we do? Fight for internal power. Whoever can survive will be the winner. And the last point is: less internal contradictions than the opponent!

So how can we make our internal contradictions smaller?

Two words: economy!

Because economic problems are the root cause of all social problems, when the economy is well run, all problems are not problems, and all major problems are minor problems. If the economy is not well developed, various social contradictions will breed and become prominent. Especially after the rise of Internet technology, a small contradiction is properly operated, and minutes converge into a hurricane like the butterfly effect, thus causing national unrest. In addition, the population explosion after World War II also doubled the social contradictions during the economic downturn.

The reason why the United States was able to defeat the Soviet Union was that it relied on a relatively reasonable industrial division of labor, so that the member states of the United States family could live a good life while maintaining high population growth. Therefore, there were relatively few social contradictions.

However, the Soviet Union was still clinging to the set of things that the great powers were striving for hegemony in the late period: that is, maintaining absolute rule over the sphere of influence by means of military violence. This not only alienates a group of allies, but also ignores the economic development, leading to more and more social problems. Therefore, the internal contradictions of the country and the internal contradictions of the camp are intertwined and stacked, coupled with the accurate infiltration of external forces, it’s strange that we don’t lose.

After the end of the cold war, the real sense of global integration was finally realized——

American technology and capital, Chinese labor force and heavy industry system, oil and gas resources in the Middle East and Russia, mineral resources in Australia, rubber resources in Southeast Asia, spare parts in Japan and Europe And so on. All countries participate in the same process according to their own advantageous resource endowments.

In this process, the underlying logic of the core competitiveness of large countries has quietly changed from the competition in the geographical sphere of influence to the competition in the industrial system and supply chain. In other words, who can make more young friends live a happy life is the final winner. The old days when those who have big fists and many younger brothers can be the boss are out of date.

Compared with the expansion of geographical sphere of influence, the biggest difference between industrial system and supply chain competition is that the former stresses the exclusivity of zero sum game, while the latter stresses multi win and compatibility. We are open to each other. Whoever does the best in different links will use whose products. In this way, the cost is low and the cost performance is high. Naturally, more and more money will be made. Here is the secret of the global economic prosperity in the past 40 years.

From the TPP to the Indian Pacific economic framework, what the United States is doing now is to solve industrial problems by geographical means, that is, to use his so-called geographical sphere of influence to forcibly create an exclusive industrial and economic sphere of influence, which is actually putting the cart before the horse.

Some people may not understand this passage. Let me put it another way: the United States believes that Japan and South Korea are his traditional brothers, so it requires Japan and South Korea to cut industries with China; Although not all of Southeast Asia is its younger brother, it feels that its fist is big enough to “persuade” those countries to cut industries with China by violent means.

Is it possible?

Except that Japan has similar ideas out of some ambition, South Korea and ASEAN are unwilling to do so, because once they are cut off from China’s industry, their economy will inevitably avalanche.

So you can see that when the United States played the card of dividing the industrial sphere of influence by geographical power, the Indian Pacific economic framework, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said frankly that it would pay a high price not to do business with China; Mahathir, the actual leader of Malaysia, said that the Indian Pacific economic framework is a political framework, and it is wrong to exclude China; Even his younger brother, South Korea, briefed China on the specific situation at the first time of the meeting and said that he would continue to strengthen cooperation with China.

What do you mean that a just cause has more help than an unjust cause? That’s what we call it!

Times have really changed.

The underworld has been swept into the garbage heap of history. If the United States still clings to the fetid ideas of the colonial era, it must be the next one to be swept into the garbage heap of history!