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Europe Defender 🇪🇺🇺🇦
@oroborous
https://t.co/WMhhPUHrs0
Europa Katılım Ekim 2016
491 Takip Edilen6.6K Takipçiler
I’m officially in mourning and ask that you respect my privacy in this difficult time.
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@oroborous He doesn't like the consequences of their own actions, so he chooses to lash out at the consequences, deny they're happening at all, and pleads with allies to not do what he claims isn't happening. It's incoherent cope.
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What "flexible realists"? This is blatantly ignoring the reality that many of these middle powers have been aligned on many things for decades. The only difference is that they're now trying to make alignment work without US leadership. This is choosing theory over reality.
Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby@USWPColby
From our point of view, a collective middle powers strategy is based on a faulty understanding of international relations. We are flexible realists. So, we view the international scene through the prism of interest, geography, economics, military power, etc. “Middle powers” don’t have a coherent basis for alignment. 2/
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@aodanhill Tourns out that Cucurella is a legitimately good player
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Budget Vargentina are playing like scared babies vs France, and are constantly diving.
And the referee is doing NADA
x.com/i/jf/soccer/le…
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German commentator when camera panned to Infantino: "In the middle we see him who maybe can be named but who probably shouldn't be named after everything that happened during this tournament"
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Very interesting, and useful public statement for Canadian policymakers. Everyone's going to read this as Colby swiping at Carney, and he clearly is. But it might also be the most useful thing anyone in Washington has said about the middle power project that Carney has become the defacto leader of.
There’s some things this thread gives away without meaning to probably. First off, the Americans have clearly noticed and been paying attention to what Carney is up to. The Davos speech, the joint Carney/Stubb essay in the Economist, the WSJ piece on Carney from the weekend, his frequent foreign trips — clearly not going unnoticed and has generated enough attention to warrant this public statement from Undersecretary Colby. I doubt he’s doing that if they aren’t taking it seriously in Washington.
But Colby is also telling us some hard truths here, and if we're actually serious about this middle power business they need to be top of mind rather than waved away because we don't like who's saying them. One is that middle powers don't have much basis for alignment beyond a shared nervousness about Trump. The other is the one nobody wants to hear: the hard power gap is real, and it's enormous.
Convening and talking about all this is easy, but for it to mean anything is a hard part. Getting a shipyard to actually launch the submarines, standing up air defence batteries that exist outside a procurement announcement, filling the magazines back up after we emptied half of them into Ukraine. That's years of unglamorous work with no ribboncutting at the end, and it's the only thing that turns a coalition of the anxious into something a great power has to reckon with.
Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby@USWPColby
There is a great deal of hubbub about a collective “middle powers”strategy these days. At DoW, we are not concerned that this is a serious possibility. Rather, we are more concerned that a few allies and partners will *think it is* and waste valuable time, money, and political capital on a distraction. 1/
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@oroborous @fdondi1 This is a commodities supercycle story actually, the Soviets bet massively on oil and gas in the 70s and invest in uneconomical Siberian reserves, and then are totally fucked as prices collapse in the mid-80s
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China popped the housing bubble, but it did nothing to constrain the private sector debt binge.
That's the one shadow that keeps looming over the country.
Then again, I've never heard of a country entering a crisis for investing in world-beating manufacturing and technology.
Europe Defender 🇪🇺🇺🇦@oroborous
Good post. People often overlook the insane debt China has been racking up to fuel its (impressive) economic growth, both in the public and private sectors. Last year alone, Chinese publicly held debt rose by 9 (!) percentage points from 90.4% debt-to-GDP ratio to 99.2% - despite seeing strong economic growth of 5% (show in image 1). Debt-to-GDP for the total economy now exceeds 300% and continues to rise rapidly (image 2), the true pace of which seems even more staggering when looking at it in absolute terms (image 3). Debt can be a useful tool to supercharge ones development, but there is only so much headroom until a ceiling is reached, at which point something will have to give. Nobody knows where exactly that point is, but China is approaching it rapidly. Just One more of its mounting economic problems.
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@ChrisO_wiki It's funny because it's from the "pivot to Asia" guy who is sending his aircraft carriers literally anywhere but to Adia
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The problem with this thread is that it rests *entirely* on the assumption that the US is a reliable, friendly power. Trump is showing that it's anything but, as Denmark has found.
Or put another way: why should Europe buy weapons from a country that's threatening it and has already weaponised its control over technology as a coercive tool, as in the case of the ICC?
Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby@USWPColby
There is a great deal of hubbub about a collective “middle powers”strategy these days. At DoW, we are not concerned that this is a serious possibility. Rather, we are more concerned that a few allies and partners will *think it is* and waste valuable time, money, and political capital on a distraction. 1/
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Nothing screams "confidence" quite as much as an elaborate twitter essay explaining to the world why you are not at all worried about current developments.
Maybe the US is realizing it is in more trouble than it thought thanks to its repeated frustrations in the Strait of Hormuz.
Maybe Carney is a bit more successful in his strategy of creating a network of "middle powers" than the White House is comfortable with (this point is extremely fascinating, I'm gonna write a post on it some time soon).
No matter what, public pronouncements make the US appear weak and insecure - not the other way around.
Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby@USWPColby
There is a great deal of hubbub about a collective “middle powers”strategy these days. At DoW, we are not concerned that this is a serious possibility. Rather, we are more concerned that a few allies and partners will *think it is* and waste valuable time, money, and political capital on a distraction. 1/
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@shashj reads like impotent seething to me. "w-we are strong, I swear, engage with us!" he mumbles as the US gets routed from the strait of Hormuz by Iran
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Interesting thread. It can of course be true - and almost certainly is - that middle power allies both want more US engagement And also want to hedge against the very real risks of abandonment. You can see signs of that hedging in many places, even if it is limited.
Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby@USWPColby
There is a great deal of hubbub about a collective “middle powers”strategy these days. At DoW, we are not concerned that this is a serious possibility. Rather, we are more concerned that a few allies and partners will *think it is* and waste valuable time, money, and political capital on a distraction. 1/
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@MagellanQuest europeans when greeting each other: what banana do you come from?
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Europe is not experienced equally by all Europeans.
For Spaniards and Portuguese, Europe begins beyond the Pyrenees.
For Italians, beyond the Alps.
But in Central Europe and the Blue Banana, Europe feels continuous: cities, factories, railways and borders all merge into one dense network.
Geography shapes identity more than we admit.
The EU is not only integrating markets.
It is trying to correct the geography of Europe.
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@DerekCamer47001 Yes! Chinas problem is not it's debt-to-gdp ratio but the insane trajectory it's on.
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@oroborous @WEO/CHN" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">imf.org/external/datam…
China's general government debt is projected to surpass its GDP this year.
By contrast, when Xi Jinping assumed office, it was only 36.4% of GDP.
That is an insane rate of debt accumulation, given China's rapid economic growth since then.
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Good post. People often overlook the insane debt China has been racking up to fuel its (impressive) economic growth, both in the public and private sectors. Last year alone, Chinese publicly held debt rose by 9 (!) percentage points from 90.4% debt-to-GDP ratio to 99.2% - despite seeing strong economic growth of 5% (show in image 1).
Debt-to-GDP for the total economy now exceeds 300% and continues to rise rapidly (image 2), the true pace of which seems even more staggering when looking at it in absolute terms (image 3).
Debt can be a useful tool to supercharge ones development, but there is only so much headroom until a ceiling is reached, at which point something will have to give. Nobody knows where exactly that point is, but China is approaching it rapidly. Just One more of its mounting economic problems.
Michael Pettis@michaelxpettis
Very good piece by Joshua Busby on China's EV production. I only have one quibble. Busby says: "Xiaomi’s attempt to take on Apple and Tesla seems like one of those only-in-China stories. China’s scale of manufacturing — and the vast supplier ecosystems this sustains — make China arguably the only country where a mobile phone maker can try to become an EV maker as well." I would argue that the real reason a mobile phone maker in China can quickly pivot to becoming a major EV maker is because of near-unlimited financing at very accommodative terms. Anyone in China interested in expanding production capabilities in sectors deemed strategic by the government can raise enormous amounts of financing very easily, with little concern about eventually hitting hard budget constraints. But China's ability to do this wasn't an only-in-China story. It was also the story of Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. Every time Tokyo deemed a manufacturing sector to be of strategic importance, Japanese manufacturers quickly dominated that sector globally. For a while Japanese manufacturers in one sector after another seemed unassailable, but ultimately a country's debt capacity is always the constraint. No country can maintain global competitiveness forever if this competitiveness requires permanent increases in debt to fund the sources of its competitiveness (i.e., direct and indirect subsidies). The cost to Japan was a surge in overall debt that ultimate caused the whole strategy to reverse after 1990-91 in the form of an extremely difficult adjustment. China already has one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world (second only to Japan's), and it is rising at perhaps the fastest rate in history. Like Japan's, in other words, China's manufacturing success depends ultimately on an unsustainable increase in the country's debt burden. But while this cannot go on forever, Busby is right to say that EV producers in the US (and Europe) should nonetheless be very concerned. As the history of the US chemical industries demonstrates, a county's productive capacity in a particular sector can be undermined in a very short period, but it is extremely difficult to rebuild. thewirechina.com/2026/07/12/ame…
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@confusedorlean @fdondi1 I actually looked that up when I wrote the tweet. The Soviet Union started running large budget deficits only after the Perestroyka reforms, which then nevertheless contributed to its timely demise.
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@fdondi1 The Soviet Union? Qualitatively inferior oc but they spent huge amounts on a manufacturing base that wasn't fiscally sustainable
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@IlvesToomas Carney being unexpectedly successful with his project of weaving a web around/without the United States while the US military keeps getting it's teeth kicked in by Iran.
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What caused this sudden outburst?
Something happen?
Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby@USWPColby
There is a great deal of hubbub about a collective “middle powers”strategy these days. At DoW, we are not concerned that this is a serious possibility. Rather, we are more concerned that a few allies and partners will *think it is* and waste valuable time, money, and political capital on a distraction. 1/
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@USWPColby big words for someone who got routed by iran
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There is a great deal of hubbub about a collective “middle powers”strategy these days.
At DoW, we are not concerned that this is a serious possibility. Rather, we are more concerned that a few allies and partners will *think it is* and waste valuable time, money, and political capital on a distraction. 1/
English
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