PEPE ESCOBAR—BRI represents a massive geopolitical and financial investment by China, as well as its partners; over 130 states and territories have signed on. Beijing is using its immense pool of capital to make its own transition towards a consumer-based economy while advancing the necessary pan-Eurasian infrastructure development – with all those ports, high-speed rail, fiber optics, electrical grids expanding to most Global South latitudes.The end result, up to 2049 – BRI’s time span – will be the advent of an integrated market of no less than 4.5 billion people, by that time with access to a Chinese supply chain of high-tech exports as well as more prosaic consumer goods.
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LARRY WILKERSON —Absolutely. Let’s face it, Sharmini. We’re looking at an all-volunteer force, the personnel cost of which are better than 50 percent of a $700+ billion budget. And just heading up, we’re looking at people costing now the Army last year almost half a billion dollars just to recruit 9,000, three brigades of noncommissioned officers now are out trying to recruit. We’re paying these people. We’re paying them bribes to serve. They’re coming from the third and fourth quintiles in America. They’re coming from West Virginia. They’re coming from Mississippi. They’re coming from Louisiana. You know, most Americans, 99 percent of America has no skin in the game. And so, they don’t realize even these wars are going on, nor do they realize that we’re contemplating more of them, nor do they realize that we’re doing things in the South China Sea, for example, or in the Strait of Hormuz with Iran that might lead to even more conflict.
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PEPE ESCOBAR—The eagle’s reaction to the dragon’s New Silk strategy took some time to swing from inaction to outright demonization – complementing the joint description of both the dragon and the bear as existential threats.And yet, for all the spinning crossfire, Eurasia-wide players are not exactly impressed anymore with an eagle empire armed to its teeth. Especially after the eagle’s crest was severely damaged by failure upon hunting failure in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Eagle aircraft carriers patrolling the eastern part of Mare Nostrum are not exactly scaring the bear, the Persians and the Syrians.
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—Trash Revolutions are the best… but not all Trash make great revolutionaries.This was the case in China, where by the mid-1960s many in the Chinese Communist Party lost their willingness to identify with the poor and to share in their hardships – thus, they had lost the most important two traits which had propelled them to victory.The adults in the room, unlike the hardcore capitalists eager to criticize socialist societies at the first pause for breath, understand that the mere proclamation of socialist victory does not translate into an immediate paradise of equality and opportunity. This article seeks to explain why a retrenchment of revolutionary asceticism, a second so-called “cultural” revolution, was needed in already-Red China.
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ANDRE KORYBKO—China must avoid being drawn into “mission creep” all across the world in defending its Silk Road interests, to which end it’s likely to avoid having any significant military presence overseas, let alone in actual conflict zones apart from the Hybrid War experiences that its peacekeepers are presently learning from. Thus, China will probably step up its training, advisory, and assistance missions to its many partners as part of its own multipolar version of the US’ “Lead From Behind” strategy, which could for example see future aircraft carrier deployments off the African coast in order to help its in-country allies respond to anti-Silk Road militants.
