Re: Core Article: Towards a New Russian Century?
- From: alfatols@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:17:00 -0800 (PST)
On Jan 13, 3:10 pm, kiril <kir...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
MHN Parée wrote:
The twentieth century was, above all, a Russian century. Granted,
Germany was the most important challenger Great Power in the first
half of the century, while in the second the United States begun to
assert itself on the world stage. Nonetheless, Russia, under its
Soviet incarnation, was the key focal point of world history. It is
hard to imagine a movement like Nazism arising in Germany, or indeed
fascism in general, without the spectre of communism hanging over a
country. Similarly, the US was only brought permanently out of its
traditional isolationism by the Truman Doctrine - their pledge to
"support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed
minorities or by outside pressures", or, in other words, to contain
communism.
Sure and the tooth fairy is real. The cold war was a great pretext to
engage in colonialist meddling in countries at the *expense* of democracy.
Examples: Guatemala and Iran where democratic governments were overthrown
by the US and puppet death-squad dictators installed.
As for Hitler, to fob him off on Russia is simply inane. His rise originated
in the treatment of Germany at the end of WWI and the subsequent economic
meltdown in the country. In the absence of communism there would have been
nazi-social democrat street fights. The spectre of communism helped move things
along but it is not the only causative agent as claimed by this article.
This article will be about Russia's place in the world in around 30
years time. In particular, will it be able to reclaim its former
mantle as a superpower? Does it have the potential to usher in a new
Russian century?
Today, the world's only country with the whole plethora of attributes
- economic, technological, political, military and strategic - that
make a state a superpower is the United States. Nonetheless, there are
important trends at work that threaten to undermine this full-spectrum
dominance. We have identified the three most important of these as
economic (re)convergence, exponential growth in IT and global climate
change.
The US only dreams of full spectrum dominance and does not have it. Given
the current trends it will not have it in the next 30 years.
The rest of this article is cornucopian drivel. The coming fossil fuel
shortage shock will be the biggest story in global economic evolution and
using current GDP trends is a waste of time. Also, this author seems to
think that Moore's law is some fundamental technological behaviour and not
a transient regime. Let's see some working qunatum computing CPUs before
assuming that the transition to sub 10 nanometer IC component scales will occur
smoothly (already at 65 nm the parasitical tunneling currents are a problem).
Hello,
I am this article's author.
We are aware that the spectre of communism wasn't the only thing to
propel Germany into Nazism, other factors being economic depression,
Treaty of Versailles-angst, etc. However, we do argue that without
Communism the likelihood a movement as extreme and singular as Nazism
could arise would have been much less and the 20th century would not
have been defined by ideological conflicts. (Instead, it would have
been dominated by nationalist and anti-colonial themes).
We never claimed the US has 'full spectrum dominance'. What we are
saying is that, on every metric that makes a superpower, the US is the
top of the league. Hence its nuclear-strategic power is balanced by
Russia; its economic by the EU and increasingly China; its
technological by Japan and the EU. Overall, its a dominant power,
because of European disunity, Japanese demilitarization, Chinese
technological lag and Russia's small economic size.
We discussed criticisms to the article here, including the topic of
Peak Oil, here: http://darussophile.blogspot.com/2008/01/mailbag-back-from-russian-century.html.
About Moore's Law, it has successfully described the growth of
computer power for over 4 decades. Whenever it seemed to be in danger
of going obsolete, a new paradigm allowed it to be continued (e.g. the
replacement of vacuum tubes by integrated circuits).
The current paradigm, integrated circuits, is projected to be able to
run its course up to 2020. As for later, there's a variety of other
possible paradigms - nanotubes being the most likely - on offer after
that.
BUT, if you a right, If I am wrong, if computing power growth slows to
a crawl and peak oil destroys civilization, then Russia won't just be
one of 3 poles in a tripolar world - it will be the world's new
hyperpower - at least until it too sinks into oblivion.
-stalker
.
- References:
- Core Article: Towards a New Russian Century?
- From: MHN Parée
- Re: Core Article: Towards a New Russian Century?
- From: kiril
- Core Article: Towards a New Russian Century?
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