Some comic relief is in order.
Great thread on the current Armenian vs Azerbaijani kerfluffle.
Very very bad.
Always amused me that neither the armed forces nor the police have a proper combatives system in the UK.
Any idea how much the aukus deal is worth? I’ve played enough war games to know 8 nuclear subs is probably better than 12 diesel subs from France.
The deal involves US/UK nuclear sub tech you can’t actually buy (unlike diesel subs), thanks to non-proliferation treaties but also the fact the US/UK would simply never sell it. In terms of the value to Australia I’m assuming some of the work will still be done in Oz, maybe more than the 60% of the prior deal, maybe less, but the total amount put into it is certain to exceed the 30-40 million euros of the French deal. BAE is building Type 26 frigates in Adelaide, so they already have a site to do the work. The subs are going to be more capable which means more weapons and systems, though that money will at least initially mainly go to the US/UK. Nuclear propulsion and fuel will be entirely from the US/UK, as I don’t think Oz has any nuclear energy?
I’m not up enough on things to know why France is so pissed off about this.
Losing a £30 billion contract that they signed 5 years ago might have had something to do with it
ah, yeah. That would do it.
I didn’t realize there was a contract like that.
Ok!
Thank you.
Current projections suggest China’s medical and social security spending will have to triple as a share of GDP, from 10 percent to 30 percent, by 2050 just to prevent millions of seniors from dying of impoverishment and neglect.
China’s spending will not have to do anything. I think the author has forgotten China is a deeply autocratic state, unworried about deploying genocidal levels of force against its own population if necessary. If China was a democracy, it would have torn itself apart long ago, having to rule over a diverse country of vast rural areas and enormous urban conglomerations complete with massive industrial projects. China has no problem ruling with an iron fist, and will not somehow give way to the wishes of the populace, cf. Hong Kong recently, an issue that was a million times more visible than anything in mainland China.
I do expect to see conflict in Asia, but I do not believe China is in decline. Declinist narratives are very common and usually wrong. China undergoing strain is expected, and I fully predict them taking a beating in the South China Sea, but you can’t isolate them from resources, and walling them off from global capitalism is going to take more than a carrier group.
China isn’t Germany in 1914 or Japan in 1941, not even close. Both of those countries were faced with a very real prospect of being choked off from foreign resources and trade they fundamentally needed in order to exist.