GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
#1 US AIRCRAFT CARRIERS FACE SHORTAGE
#2 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND THE FINANCIAL TIMES ON THE BALANCE OF POWER
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#1 US AIRCRAFT CARRIERS FACE SHORTAGE
NIKKEI ASIA
“ The U.S. Navy faces a shortage of aircraft carriers on the Atlantic coast with no East Coast-based ship ready for deployment to replace USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which has been responding against Houthi attacks in the Red Sea for months, as the country focuses on bolstering its presence in the Pacific Sea amid fraught tensions with China.
The U.S. Navy instead has redirected the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a San Diego-based carrier, to move from the South China Sea to the Red Sea as a stopgap measure, until the next East Coast-based carrier is ready.
The Navy is stretched dangerously thin, analysts say, as the U.S. seeks to address crises in Ukraine, Israel and the Red Sea, all the while keeping an eye on China in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
James Holmes, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, told Nikkei Asia that the U.S. Navy has too few ships to meet the demand — at a time when demand is multiplying in theaters all around the Eurasian periphery.
“The tendency among decision makers in Washington is to try to meet all demands,” he said. But trying to do everything means that “we thin out the naval resources available for any given theater of operations, weakening us relative to competitors in that theater. If we’re weaker we may not prevail if we get in a fight.”
Elizabeth Dent, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in a recent policy paper that the absence of a carrier strike group in the Red Sea for two to three weeks — until the Roosevelt arrives — “sends a worrisome signal at a time when the Houthis are increasing the tempo and severity of their attacks on commercial and naval vessels.”
The U.S. Naval War College’s Holmes noted the navy is currently half the size it was during the 1980s, and “the more you try to meet escalating demands with a finite and dwindling supply of assets, the harder you run the ships that comprise the fleet.”
That typically results in longer periods in shipyards after returning, he said, predicting the Eisenhower would face prolonged maintenance when it returns to Norfolk.
Now is the time for the U.S. to pressure European-Atlantic allies to do more, Holmes said. “We have borne the burden of their defense since 1945. Russia should be mainly their problem so we can pivot to East Asia, our main problem.”
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
The US is the world #1 power in the world. It is, currently, the largest economy in the world with the biggest military. Time is always operating and the US dominance is under threat but for today in 2024 the US is the largest Empire in the globe. Its position is at one and the same time a positive and a negative. It is good news and bad news. It has helped to sustain US world power but it is also contributing to the US loss of power.
With power comes overstretch and this is the issue raised by the problems of the US as it faces a shortage of aircraft carriers. It is good to bear in mind the theses of Yale historian Professor Kennedy who made a big impact upon the academic world with his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers when he described the situation that arises when an Empire extends itself beyond its military-economic capabilities and ends up collapsing as a consequence.
He drew on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire whose initial strength and power fell away in the 4th and 5th centuries to the Saxons and the Huns. In the modern world overstretch was the experience of Napoleon and France after his failed attempt to conquer Russia. It is also widely accepted that the Nazi Reich of A Thousand Years foundered when, like Napoleon, it attempted unsuccessfully to invade Russia and suffered an irreparable setback at Leningrad in 1943. Italy in North Africa and Japan in China also suffered terminally during World War 2 from overreach.
Kennedy’s theory has its critics but it gains added impetus with the cited words of James Holmes, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, who told Nikkei Asia that the U.S. Navy has too few ships to meet demand — at a time when demand is multiplying in theatres all around the Eurasian periphery. “The tendency among decision makers in Washington is to try to meet all demands,” he said. But trying to do everything means that “we thin out the naval resources available for any given theater of operations, weakening us relative to competitors in that theater. If we’re weaker we may not prevail if we get in a fight.”
The US’s 750 military bases spread around the world come at a price – overstretch and over-expansion. China, in comparison, has just one overseas base in Djibouti. It will deliver more links around the globe for the purpose of servicing its large non-military maritime fleet but will not, as the US has done, place soldiers and pilots and aircraft on foreign soil.
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#2 CHINA-RUSSIA. ALLIES OR RIVALS
WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Relations between China and Russia are at a historic high as the authoritarian powers band together to confront what they see as a Western campaign to hem them both in. But in Central Asia, which Moscow regards as its backyard, the friendship that Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared as having “no limits” is colliding with Beijing’s global ambitions.
That tension hovers in the background with Xi and Putin both in Kazakhstan this week for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional political and security bloc. Xi is scheduled to continue on to Tajikistan as part of his eighth visit to Central Asia since becoming China’s president in 2013.
China has seized on the Ukraine invasion to chip away at traditional Russian spheres of influence. In Central Asia, as in the Arctic, Moscow’s reliance on Beijing to sustain its war machine forces it to acquiesce to the encroachments.
Across the strategically situated region, Beijing is drawing local economies into its orbit. Chinese investments are diverting the region’s young workers away from Russia. A Chinese-funded railroad promises to connect it with Europe, bypassing Russian territory. Chinese renewable energy projects are helping reduce its reliance on Russian gas.
For Tsarist Russia, Central Asia was akin to what the West was to American pioneers: a supposedly wild territory to expand into, modernize and extract resources from. The exploitation and modernization continued under the Soviets, who jealously guarded the borders of their empire against Chinese encroachment.
The power shift in the region has been in the making for years but accelerated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was seen by many in the region as a blithe and ominous violation of the territorial integrity of a fellow former Soviet republic. Instead of supporting Moscow, all five Central Asian states opted to stay neutral on the invasion.
“China provides an image of the future for Central Asia. Russia is a shortsighted political regime that doesn’t invest in Central Asia’s own strategic goals,” said Temur Umarov, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
For China and Russia, two land-based powers, Central Asia is an increasingly important thoroughfare. It gives Putin more direct access to markets in South Asia. And it is central to Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, the vast infrastructure project that aims to connect China through various land and sea routes with the rest of the Eurasian continent.
For years, Russia and China have had a tacit division of labor in the region: Russia is the main security provider while China focuses on development and investment.
Now, Beijing is tipping that balance by leaning harder into its role—using its enormous economic clout to increase its political sway. Trade between China and Central Asia rose to $98 billion last year, more than tripling since 2016.
The Peng Sheng Industrial Park in Uzbekistan, where Qulmatov works, was launched with Chinese funding near the central Uzbek city of Sirdaryo in 2009. With a recent influx of investment, it is now home to more than a dozen Chinese companies.
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
The key relationship in international affairs is between China and Russia – not the US and Europe or the EU and China. The power balance in the world is fragmenting. The world is no longer one-dimensional. There is no centre of the Universe. The international structure of world power is breaking up. It is becoming multi-polar. There is the US. There is the EU, There is China. There is Russia and there is BRICS.
The rise of BRICS and the Global South is undermining previous power structures. The relationship between the US and the EU does not have the stability of the old US/Western Europe structure of Kennedy/Macmillan/Adenauer and De Gaulle. Increasingly the US refers to the new Axis of Evil – Russia/China/Iran and N Korea – in an effort to rally support for the continued world leadership of the US.
The US views China as a fundamental challenge to its hitherto unquestioned world dominance. The US saw off the Bolshevik challenge from the USSR with the fall of Gorbachev but now it is faced with a China that does not fall in with the US baton.
Aside from the above article in the Wall Street Journal focusing on the relationship between China and Russia, there is also an item in the Financial Times that focuses on what it refers to as a “deadly quartet of nations”
“China is among the countries that pose a “deadly” threat to Britain, the peer leading the UK government’s strategic defence review has declared. Lord George Robertson, a former secretary-general of Nato and ex-Labour defence secretary, said that the new review would bring “fresh eyes” to the threats and challenges facing the UK in the coming years.
“We’re confronted by a deadly quartet of nations increasingly working together,” he said, in a reference to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. His language marked a stark pivot from rhetoric about Beijing deployed by the previous Conservative government, which described China as an “epoch-defining challenge” and only used the term “threat” in an economic context.
Asked about this shift, Robertson said: “The Nato summit last week in Washington made it perfectly clear that the challenge of China was something that had to be taken very, very seriously indeed.” He said developments in the “Asia-Pacific” region could be repeated “in the Euro-Atlantic area very quickly afterwards”.
China is being identified as the leader of the pack orchestrating a “deadly” threat to the world generally. These are strong words. The US has problems with N Korea and with Iran but bracketing them perspective. . together with China and Russia as a New Axis of Evil points to a world moving towards the outbreak of hostilities. The four nations – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – are not acting in concert. There is no conspiracy of aggression. There is no common goal.
The world is changing and the term “multi-polar” best identifies the state of the world today. It is fragmenting. An example is the War in Ukraine. There is unity of action between the 32 members of NATO but that is as far as it goes – it receives no endorsement from significant countries such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico, Malaysia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. The list is lengthy and significant because it spells the end of the one dimensional First World/Second World. Looking forward we can anticipate changes to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Group of 7, and the United Nations. There always tensions between Change on the one hand and Stability on the other. The World is entering upon a decade of Change coinciding with the emergence of China as the largest economic power but, most significantly, a never-to-be Superpower. How is that possible?
GRAHAM PERRY
