#tooze

in terms of actual productive capacity, China's economy is significantly larger than the US's. he cites the GDP adjusted for PPP being China-favored since 2016 and that China consumes around double the energy of the US

US Steel hasn't been globally relevant in half a century, it's all Japan, China, and South Korea now

US Steel isn't even the largest steel producer in the US

The execs in US Steel are begging to get the deal sent through because the offer is probably overvaluing them by quite a bit

The largest steel producer in the US isn't globally relevant at all (ranked 15th in steel production globally), but it still produces vastly more steel than the US could possibly want for military reasons. Steel just isn't a weapons production bottleneck anymore like it was in the past

While Nippon Steel is serious about their offer, this is a pretty small part of their overall global strategy

The scandal entails Mearsheimer’s refusal to see Putin’s aggression as anything other than the behaviour of a great power at bay. Unlike Applebaum, Mearsheimer has little at stake in either Russian or Ukrainian history. What he is doing is simply elucidating the implications of his favourite IR theory, known as “offensive” or “great power” realism. Russia is a great power. Great powers, the theory goes, guard their security through spheres of interest. The US does so too, in the form of the Monroe doctrine and more recently in the Carter doctrine, which extends America’s interests to the Persian Gulf. If necessary, those zones are defended with force, and anyone who fails to recognise and respect this fails to grasp the violent logic of international relations.

[...] The frank assertion of the claims of power sits poorly with an ideal of universal rights.

[...] It should be acknowledged that his approach offers real insight. Indeed, though it is not stated out loud, Mearsheimer’s diagnosis of the Ukraine crisis is shared de facto by a large part of the US foreign policy establishment. The promise of Nato membership bounced through by the Bush administration in 2008, was an act of hubris. The West will not abandon Ukraine, but nor will it intervene militarily. Part of the rage against Mearsheimer is deflected frustration on the part of liberals who recognise in his frankness with regards to the actual limits of Western commitment – and there are good reasons for those limits. A direct confrontation with Russia is something that Nato has always tried to avoid. The US made it clear to Putin that there would be no military participation. Emergency weapons deliveries go a long way towards blurring that line. A no-fly zone would be lethally dangerous.

But for all that, to claim this as an intellectual victory for Mearsheimer’s realism would be perverse. He is no doubt right about the underlying causes of tension. But that is not the same as actually explaining war, any more than gesturing to imperialism is an adequate explanation for why the Kaiser gave the Austrians a blank cheque in July 1914. The realist model is grossly underspecified and fails to grasp the qualitative shift implied by the opening of hostilities. The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz may have said that war is the extension of policy by other means. But that still raises the question of why anyone, great power or not, would resort to such a radical and dangerous means.

In Moscow itself, none of the serious foreign policy establishment – all devotees to Russia’s future as a great power – believed that Putin would go to war. They were incredulous not because they do not understand the logic of power, but precisely because they do. They saw no good reason for Russia to risk employing the means of all-out war, with all its hazards, uncertainties and costs. Events are proving them right.

Morality and legality are one reason for opposing war. The other is simply that over the last century at least, it has a poor track record for delivering results. Other than wars of national liberation, one is hard pressed to name a single war of aggression since 1914 that has yielded clearly positive results for the first mover. A realism that fails to recognise that fact and the consequences that have been drawn from it by most policymakers does not deserve the name. That does not mean that wars will not occur. But to postulate the future as an endless repetition of the hyped-up militarism of 1914 is to deny any capacity for collective learning. And it is counterfactual, especially in an age of nuclear armaments. As Specter shows in his meticulous chapters on trans-Atlantic realism in the postwar period, Vietnam and nuclear armaments led the classic realists to take a decidedly cautious approach towards war. In this regard Mearsheimer’s offensive realism, a coinage of the post-Cold War era, fully deserves its name.

In light of war’s hazards, it is tempting to say that if Mearsheimer’s glib talk about the logic of great power conflict did indeed provide Putin with an excuse for Russia’s disastrous invasion, rather than a servant of Russia, Mearsheimer is a secret weapon in the armoury of the West, helping to lure Putin to disaster on the rocks of a grisly new Afghanistan. If we want to understand what happened in the Kremlin to precipitate the criminal folly of the invasion, what we need are not platitudes about the security dilemmas of great powers, but a forensic account of an epic failure of decision-making and intelligence. And we need to understand not only Russia, but also how Ukraine, a state that seemed so weak, has so far been capable of mounting such effective resistance. Above all, we need to start by acknowledging that for the vast majority of analysts, this war has delivered a shock that does not confirm, but puts in question our sense of reality.

In any case, the crucial point is that the West expected sanctions to be delivered as punishment in a postwar situation with Ukraine crushed, humiliated and occupied. The continuity of energy supply from Russia to the US and European states is an emblem of how people expected the war to go. We would punish Russia’s crime but life would go on.

By the first weekend of the invasion that seemed increasingly incongruous. How can Europe and the US still be buying Russian gas and oil when Russia is waging this murderous, brutal and incompetent war against such a heroic, good-natured people? The brilliantly orchestrated spectacle of Ukrainian resistance has made a huge impact on global public opinion. It is yet another demonstration of the way in which battlefield events can change history, especially when relayed by TikTok.

[...] In trying to make sense of the Napoleonic war, the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz discerned three separate moments in modern conflict. The first was the reality of combat and its mastery. The second was the force of passion, an irreducible element of violent conflict. And finally there was the dimension of policy, or “politik” — geopolitical calculation. Any one of these moments has the capacity to escalate a war. Since last week we have seen all three reinforcing each other in a terrible spiral.

In the economic realm the US and Europe have applied sanctions that were never previously considered. The freezing of Russia’s central bank reserves means crossing the Rubicon. It brings conflict to the heart of the international monetary system. If the central bank reserves of a G20 member entrusted to the accounts of another G20 central bank are not sacrosanct, nothing in the financial world is. We are at financial war.

This is made all the more emphatic by the decision to apply the most draconian financial sanctions to a violator of international law not in retrospect but in the middle of an ongoing conflict in an attempt to cripple the aggressor-state. It is the difference between punishing an assailant for their attack and intervening in a fight to wrestle the assailant to the ground.

The latter is clearly the more committed position. It changes your relationship to the person on whose behalf you intervene and the person whom you seek to immobilise. Unlike in a court judgement you surrender the idea of a higher authority. It may be the right thing to do but it is a far more dangerous and indeterminate situation. Any claim to neutrality disappears. As the person intervening you must expect not only to dish out coercion, you must expect to get hurt yourself and the assailant has little reason not to up the ante.

Putin underscored that logic on Sunday with his nuclear saber rattling. That is not aimed at Ukraine. It is aimed at Europe and the US who have, from Russia’s point of view, made themselves party to the conflict.