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New Silk Roads and an Alternate Eurasian Century

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Sigbold
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06 Oct 2014, 9:47 am

tomdispatch.com

Quote:
During Iraq War II (2003-2011), I used to imagine that the Chinese leadership would gather weekly in the streets of the Forbidden City, singing and dancing to celebrate American idiocy. Year after year, when the U.S. might have faced off against a rising China, as its leaders had long had the urge to do, it was thoroughly distracted by its disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. I can't help but think that, with a bombing campaign revving up in Iraq and now Syria, the boots of 1,600 military personnel ever closer to the ground, and talk of more to come, with Iraq War III (2014-date unknown) predicted to go on for years, they are once again rejoicing. For all the talk in recent years about the Obama administration's military ?pivot? to Asia, there can be no question that its latest Middle Eastern campaign will put a crimp on its Pacific ?containment? planning.

In the meantime, the mood in China has clearly been changing as well. As Orville Schell wrote recently, after a contentious visit to Beijing by 90-year-old Jimmy Carter, the president who more than 30 years ago sponsored a full-scale American rapprochement with the new capitalist version of Communist China:

Quote:
?In short, what used to be referred to as ?the West? now finds itself confronted by an increasingly intractable situation in which the power balance is changing, a fact that few have yet quite cared to acknowledge, much less to factor into new formulations for approaching China. We remain nostalgic for those quaint days when Chinese leaders still followed Deng [Xiaoping's] admonition to his people to ?hide our capacities and bide our time? (taoguang yanghui). What he meant in using this ?idiom? (chengyu) was not that China should be eternally restrained but that the time to manifest its global ambition had not yet come. Now that it is stronger, however, its leaders appear to believe that their time has at last come and they are no longer willing even to press the comforting notion of ?peaceful rise? (heping jueqi).?


At the moment, of course, the Chinese have their own internal problems, ranging from an economy that might be bubblicious to an Islamic separatist movement in the backlands of Xinjiang Province and the latest Occupy movement making waves in that modernistic Asian financial hub Hong Kong. Nonetheless, go to Beijing and the world looks like a different place. Pepe Escobar, TomDispatch?s peripatetic wanderer on the Eurasian mainland, which he?s dubbed Pipelineistan, has done just that. He's also visited other spots along the future ?new Silk Roads? that China wants to establish all the way to Western Europe. He offers a vision of a different Eurasian world than the one reflected in news reports in this country. If you want to understand the planet we may actually be living on in the near future, it couldn?t be more important to take it in. Tom

(...)


A potentially interesting article about the changing geopolitical landscape across Eurasia. And how China and Russia are countering the USA economic moves.



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08 Oct 2014, 4:16 pm

While the US and Europe do think they are, or were, great, they are less than a billion, counting Canada, Australia, and New Zeland.

The BRICS cover about 85% of world population. Russia, Iran, the Stans, have most of the oil and gas.

China has made a deal for the Afganistan copper deposits, perhaps the largest left. That comes with a rail line to China, and Walmartistan trade goods. Extending the rail line to Iran, brings oil and gas through Afganistan.

Another branch from China, to Moscow, to Berlin, can be a superline. Power and fuel pipelines, water, and much larger trains, wider, four rail tracks, taller, three decks high, and fast.

Russia has the only working Breeder Reactor, several more in the works, and built 600 foot underground. A Tesla Supercooled underground transmission can reach Berlin to Beijing, and Iran can supply the fuel.

Suddenly everyone else is living in the old world, with their first wave experimental atomic reactors, burning gas, oil, coal to produce power, heat buildings.

New distrabution hubs would form along the rail line. A string of new cities.

China has the construction manpower, Russia the resources, and Germany the technology. The other two are good, but Germans come up with the new good stuff.

Electric power can be sold to Europe for less than they can produce it for.

While the US and UK seem to want to keep the EU down, Russia and China see customers, that need a good economy.

If Germany jumps ship, the EU and NATO are over.