I don’t feel the question really is if China can win a hot or economic war with the US. It is is there will be anything left of the humanity or world at that point.
Whether it be nuclear holocaust, biological plague, environmental degradation to the point of human extinction, or climate change; I can envision many scenarios where either everyone loses, or China wins nothing but a pyrrhic victory.
Oh boy am I glad we are all getting a resurgence of interest on military theory recently.
I am with the assumption we are speaking economically and geopolitically too, duh.
Now other than nukes, which is a loss for everyone, I don’t see a scenario where China loses either. I don’t think the question is if China can win, it is can it win before climate change destroys humanity.
We can see already China emerging as the leading power. Peace deals in the middle east which feel like they came from nowhere from the major regional powers. Now European leaders are making visits to Beijing to discuss solutions for the Ukraine conflict. Even the Ukrainian government is shy to criticize China’s close relationship with Russia, due to their hopes of economic rebuilding. THE FUCKING FACIST PUPPET STATE WITH THE US COMMANDING IT!
I believe with China now truly established as a DOTP and soon to be leading power, it will guide the intertwined multipolar world against the new threat of natural disaster. In a way mirroring the struggle of primitive communism, it will once again be humans vs nature, except it will be trying to.
Though most of the periphery is becoming more stable with industrialization and nationalization, the core is becoming increasingly unstable while deindustrialized and privatized. They have switched places in a way. And that is right as we are tipping over the edge of Western economic collapse.
With the rolling back of child labor laws, women and queer rights disappearing, continued ecological destruction, decaying infrastructure and industry, economic collapse, and Florida to vanguard fascism in the states. Are we at a point to see the possibility of a Protracted Peoples War? With its balkanization seeming eminent, huge swaths of a mountainous terrain, and easy access to firearms, are the proletarian forces able to carry out an organized armed struggle?
I am under the impression, the left in the core will form as two intertwined groups, Indigenous Liberation and Ecological Warrior Melons (green on the outside, but red on the inside). I don’t feel I have to explain why Indigenous liberation and ecological protection go hand and hand. We are at a point where the majority of Americans realize we are running out of time with the system we have, and will begin to resort to desperate measures. With all the major chemical spills, nuclear leakage, and continued oil drilling, industrial sabotage seems like a reasonable means to an end for the public. There needs to form a radical guerrilla group with the goal of disrupting environmental devastation, a sort of carbon partisans. As these carbon partisans grow, they will open up with more and radical ideology and missions.-------
I realize I have completely skirted off the original topic, oh my lord. Hey at least its some discussion on this community haha. So what do you think, will Protracted Peoples Wars be possible?
Even the Ukrainian government is shy to criticize China’s close relationship with Russia, due to their hopes of economic rebuilding.
Even Poland of all countries opposed direct US order to antagonize China.
I know some people are predicting a sort of civil war scenario in the US, and I wonder if that would be an opportunity for PPW. We could be like Lenin exploiting help from the Germans to take down Russia. The current surveillance network could be weakened in that event allowing us to do some actual guerrilla fighting.
I think people REALLY romanticize guerrilla fighting a lot… It’s not just about surveillance, there are several modern advancements that make guerrilla fighting in a modern nation ineffective at best and suicidal at worst.
Just look up any video of the ukrainian war. The ease and precision with which modern militaries can locate and hit targets is so high that even modern, trained soldiers find themselves with a thermobaric grenade on their lap while sitting inside a camouflaged bunker.
Also, the western population just does not have the skills to survive in a guerrilla settings. Most americans can barely cook, you think they have a chance at surviving and maintaining a healthy body while living as guerrillas? Vietnamese villagers definitely had that in them, Jaycee from the free greater Seattle area maoist polycule most likely does not.
The only people in the west who might have a chance at guerrilla fighting are former soldiers and such - a demographic which is not gonna be on our side
I understand your cynicism for lack of a better term, but I think that things will turn out better than you expect. Just eyes up and don’t give up.
Thank you, but i must say that i am not really feeling cynic myself - i just intervene on this kind of topics because i feel like people just think of these things as… Idk, an easy and glorious walk in the park?
I too believe things will turn out better, one of my core beliefs if that in a way or another this generation willlive to see a major global political change. But right now, in this modern context, popular power lies in other areas i believe. Things like nationwide strikes, blockades and mass demonstrations have proven (in recent history!) to be far more effective than guerrilla’ing.
And this is because the gap between soldier and civilian has widened massively during the modern era. In 1944 you could grab a random italian farmer and you would have yourself a man who’s strong, healthy, has the skills to navigate and living the land off-grid, can hunt… AND all you need to train him for is how to use a simple rifle and a maybe throw a grenade, because that what they fought with at the time. That’s how countries at the time managed to conscript unimaginable numbers of soldiers in short times.
Nowdays people are far less used to living outdoors, far less used to physically intensive activities (all of this is in general, btw) and less used to violence. On top of that, the amount of equipment a civilian would need to master to be even remotely effective against a modern military is far, far greater. More complex firearms, longer ranges, anti-tank and anti-drone measures, jamming and spotting technology… Plus all the tech knowledge needed to communicate and cooperate on safe channels, which is a task and a half in the modern era
Parties were also more militarized back then, right now no western leftist party has even an hint of the idea of a military command structure. Which would make waging a coherent campaign much more difficult.
I just can’t imagine any western government falling from a guerrilla war in which the national army gets defeated on the field. Other routes will need to be taken, i find the idea of trying to fight the government on the field extremely dangerous.
Excellent points, though take note, the goal of guerrilla warfare isn’t to defeat the enemy, but to drain his resources. Another aspect of this is the designed escalation of guerrilla warfare: No government would use a drone to take out five guys in the forest. Those guys are still at the local level, even if they plan to later on build up against the government. Quite simply the higher government wouldn’t know too much about it at first, and those 5 guys would just be dealing cops.
Now you do make note of only soldiers being prepped enough to fight a guerrilla war, true. But oppressed minorities are disproportionate servicemen. Now where are these minorities mainly located. The Southern and Southwestern US. Where are areas best suited for guerrilla campaigns? The Southern and Southwestern US. Where are the largest indigenous reservations? The Southwestern US. What does the Southwestern US have? A large mountainous border with Mexico. What areas will be affected more and more by Climate Change? The Southern and Southwestern US. If a protracted struggle were to happen, it would have to happen there.
Now I agree that for current goals, organized demonstrations and blockades will do. For now. Besides without that radical minority, what teeth do the masses have? Which is why I imagine that would be guerrillas start off as industrial saboteurs. Those types who care deeply about the environment to a radical extent most likely have the knowledge of the land. And, at least to the liberal view, these carbon partisans are attacking specific organs of land exploitation and not the state itself. WE know that the state will protect private property and is the whole point of the state, but if the goal isn’t necessarily an overthrow of the state and “just” dismantling regressive ecological exploitation systems perhaps the guerrillas wouldn’t be wiped off the Earth and instead the state bends its knees instead of provoking a revolution.
Instead of waiting for American class consciousness to rise from a change material conditions, the best way to get them off their asses is Climate Action because they can see it affecting them already and it’s detrimental and existential. Clearly the system needs to change, many Zoomers know that even tho they have no idea how they want change. Why worry of some gommunist famines if doing nothing to the systems leaves you with a pain 10x worse than any fascist propaganda could cook up. That is why we need Melons and no more electoralism from the libs.
This would be a good place to remind ourselves that the American Empire is largely built off of illusion and projection. It’s true relative power peaked and has since only continued to wane.
Recruitment is decaying, basic training standards are decaying, even the quality of potential draftees is sharply decaying. US military gets less bang for its buck as corruption ensures it is stocked with weapons and equipment that are heinously expensive and yet laughably unreliable and ineffective (in relation to its cost). Like everything under such unadulterated capitalism, like every major facet of the US empire, its military is killing itself. All leadership positions are filled by corrupt cronies and nepotist gloryhounds who are constitutionally incapable of making sound and pragmatic decisions. The military rank and file is composed of the desperate, the directionless, the deluded and cowards who quiver unless they fight alongside overwhelming odds.
Likewise, fascists in this country are complete cowards. Their only experience doling out violence is against the most softest, vulnerable targets, again only executed comfortably when they have overwhelming odds; if they don’t have their dozens of thousand-dollar toys with all the attachments and a score of buddies goading them by their side, they are too scared to even harass a grandmother. They are all bark and no bite. They are bullies and they are insecure.
The surveillance state was built solely to collect information…and it does. But, as usual per the complete lack of capitalist foresight, it collects so much information it is not effectively filtered, let alone processed, assessed, and sound decisions made from it. We now have every facet of politically-involved society casually making remarks of violence, treason, and terrorism, and there is little they can do beyond flagging buzzwords and telling the algorithm to boost/suppress in response. Their large scale social engineering projects have been wildly successful and have made tangible enforcement of capitalist hegemony unnecessary for decades…and they are out of practice. The CIA and FBI is not as sharp as they were relatively a half century ago. Again we can see the rot of capitalism is manifesting at a perfect time.
These are all generalizations. USian communists of course have our own severe problems, we too are weak and our minds are poisoned. Not all of our enemies will be teddy bears. But there is a desperate psyop to maintain USian military supremacy in the mind’s eye of those who flirt with the idea of challenging it…but it is a paper tiger.
We as individual communists can learn urban warfare, gardening, and how to speak to the general USian, we can physically train our bodies, we can mentally improve to withstand hardship and to be proactively brave. We can evolve, and adapt, and grow, and we will.
But the USian Empire? It will only continue to rot. It will become more brutal, cruel, and insane as it draws its last breath. But it will be defeated easier than we imagine, when our imagination is only fueled by inescapably powerful dystopian nightmares that the CIA wants us to think of when we imagine our enemies. Our enemies are brats and twisted nightmares. They are sick dogs that need to be put down, not competent ultrawarriors operating an omnipotent Matrix.
Yeah, it’s important to understand the US does not produce weapons for self-defence. If you look at Russia for example, or Belarus, they’ve outright told weapons manufacturers that they’re doing their duty for the country and if they fail they would be jailed. The US is in a strategic position to prevent its soil being attacked, and they are the main purveyors of war today, so they don’t need to actually be efficient with their military tech and production.
In the end the bloated military budget just gets redistributed to the contractors who make a ton of money on it and deliver subpar weapons and equipment.
We see now that Russia, for example, is not anywhere close to running out of ammo and missiles in Ukraine, but NATO is finding it difficult to keep pumping equipment to Zelensky.
It’s the same thing in China – amplified by the fact that China also produces a TON of things. They know how to get supply lines going. The PRC has never started a war, what they produce in their military is for local use and for actual defence purposes.
That’s why when people tell me you can’t beat the US because they spend trillions on the military, I tell them this is not an indicator of efficiency. If anything, it’s an indicator of inefficiency.
Some years ago, they had to replace so-called “dumb” bombs (just the plain old bomb that you drop from a plane to hit a land target) with “smart” bombs (that could essentially hit their target with 100% accuracy or close to). The US spent billions of dollars retrofitting every single bomb in their arsenal with a device that could steer the bomb and report its location on GPS in real time. This means every bomb manufactured in the US today, as well as the whole existing arsenal, needs this single-use device to be manufactured, bought, attached, and spent.
Russia instead developed software for their jets that would calculate a trajectory for the bomb, using surrounding data (like wind speed) and their GPS variants, and then drop the bomb at the right time. It works just as well.
I am less worried about China and their capability to defend themselves, but overseas Chinese/Asian people will be in terrible danger, especially those of us who live in the US or Canada.
Believe me, anyone whose actually paying attention in the military doesn’t either. At best, we’re hoping for a draw.
People tend to think of an eventual us-china war as a deathmatch scenario where we see troops on the ground clashing around cities and whatnot. This won’t be the case. The only battlefield is the western pacific, to which china is much closer. The US could keep dominance here as long as it had the edge in naval tonnage and tech - now that it doesn’t, it’s objectively not even a contest. IF, IF china decides to strike, all it has to do is send a salvo of ballistic missiles on the main island bases and make use of their ample anti-ship missile inventory to allow their numerically superior navy to pick off american vessels.
You can (and should) check out recent wargames, blue consistently loses and (i shit you not) they sometimes repeat the game with new rules in order to give blue a chance. Some common themes are american planes performing decently in the air but getting destroyed in scores while on the ground, unsustainable logistics, and nearly defenseless aircraft carrier groups. The island chain strategy was formulated with cold war era tech, it’s just not up to par in the modern world where drones and guided missiles can strike anywhere at anytime. Kind of like Russia had to learn the hard way that tank columns get rekt by any idiot with a 80$ drone or a javelin.
Years of US hegemony kind of portrayed a different reality, but the matter of fact is that the closest territory to china the US can logistically and tactically HOPE to defend properly is hawaii.
Kind of like Russia had to learn the hard way that tank columns get rekt by any idiot with a 80$ drone or a javelin.
I have to ask if you mean something specific. Some particular incident.
I don’t know about China, but the US rhetoric on the matter feels like we’re hyping ourselves up for an extermination campaign. That war will be cataclysmic because it’s going to be a matter of survival.
Tbh think that that kind of rethoric has been a thing in every conflict since ever, countries need to justify war by talking to the enemy as if it is an existential threat which will destroy us if we don’t destroy them first.
Countries at war or preparing to be generally talk about how the other nation is a threat for the current international political order, how they are a threat to our “way of life” and “culture”, how it is a “terrorists regime” or whatever… All stuff that implies a need to strike first before too much damage is done, it implies that fighting is a necessity. People are not going to be persuaded to enlist by saying “china is kind of minding his buisness but if the MIC manages to get us into a war with them we might have to defend a couple of island bases thousands of kms away from here”
To that i would add that by now we have it on good faith that people are not going to nuke each other. Just like they didn’t in the cold war, even if at points it felt almost certain that nukes were gonna fly
Nukes, but then everyone else also loses.
China has hypersonic ICBMS, which means they could technically counter US nukes. Whether they could actually achieve that (there’s ways to overcome these defences) is another thing, but certainly I’d expect that the nukes would be struck down somewhere over the Pacific.
I take it that nukes these days are made so that a specific process has to happen for the reaction to trigger, they can’t just detonate from being hit mid-air.
China has hypersonic ICBMS, which means they could technically counter US nukes
Yeah, USA admitted even the DPRK currently owned ICBM’s would be enough to reach and overwhelm their west coast defenses, and China have more and better ones, though the exact amount is unknown.
I’d expect that the nukes would be struck down somewhere over the Pacific.
Not really, no country have ability to nullify full or even partial scale nuclear deployment. It would stop some, but for example USA currently have 400 land and 280 sea based ICBM’s, each with multiple warheads. Not counting tons of shorter ranged missiles.
I take it that nukes these days are made so that a specific process has to happen for the reaction to trigger, they can’t just detonate from being hit mid-air.
Yes, afaik it isn’t completely impossible to detonate nuke mid air with hit from defense weapon, but the probability is extremely small.
