Terrorism, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Outsourcing Wars
What all the wars of this century have in common.
24 comments
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
In the 90s, Russia was a spent force. The consensus was that free enterprise had defeated Communism. And it had. Russia isn’t fighting for Communism, but for market dominance.
A generation later we’re watching what may be the largest outsourcing war of a new century.
Russia, like China, rebooted its economy by exploiting the growing desire of western liberalism to accommodate environmentalists and socialists by offshoring their ‘dirty’ industries.
The United States outsourced its manufacturing to China which took on everything from making dollar store trinkets to recycling our used soda bottles while our elites focused on preparing the populace for the “jobs of the future” that would all involve using a computer. Now the PRC has a rising middle class and America has a falling one. China is building entire new cities for its middle class while the American middle class can no longer afford to buy a house or a car.
Europeans outsourced the responsibilities of powering their cities and heating their homes to Russia. While they tinkered with windmills and solar panels, Russia built an energy monopoly. Now it’s expanding its monopolistic control the way that most powers and empires used to.
Russia may want all or part of Ukraine for nationalistic reasons, but, more importantly, because of pipeline routes and energy reserves. The underlying motive for this war is gas and the European nations decrying the invasion were the ones who provided the motive for the war.
The PRC may also be obsessed with claiming Taiwan because of its nationalistic One China program, but the island refuge also possesses TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor foundry which dominates chip manufacturing. If China were to take Taiwan and then help North Korea swallow up South Korea, the PRC and its allies would control over 80% of global semiconductor contract manufacturing. And that would provide China with a virtual monopoly on the future.
The Clinton administration’s vision of a world in which the dirty work of manufacturing could be outsourced to China because we would all be working on computers is colliding with the reality that Communist China is bent on controlling the tech industry. China manufactures 90% of laptops and 70% of the smartphones that we use. Solidifying control over Hong Kong and then taking Taiwan is Xi’s equivalent of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with tech instead of energy.
Western imperialism once sought to monopolize control over international resources. And then the nations that had once colonized America, Africa, and parts of Asia decided that imperialism was a bad thing and that it ought to be replaced by an international system in which some of those colonized nations would be offered the opportunity to meet the needs of the West in exchange for limited profit margins. Generations of liberal diplomats foolishly thought that such a system would be sustainable and that the wealth would not be used to build new empires.
But that’s exactly what happened.
The flow of oil money into Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, and Iraq was used to finance everything from the Islamization of Pakistan to the Iran-Iraq War, the Jihad against Israel, the attacks of September 11, the Arab Spring, and numberless other expansionistic wars and conspiracies.
All of these are ultimately aimed at building a Caliphate, an Islamic empire, that would reclaim the old glories of the Mohammedan conquests. They appear so chaotic and scattershot because, unlike Russia and China, there isn’t a single imperial entity, but a hundred aspiring ones all of whom, like ISIS, claim that they have the blueprint for a single unified Ummah.
The common denominator is that the vast majority of Islamic terrorism is financed by oil money.
China and Russia, likewise, had no interest in playing second fiddle to America or Europe. They used the influx of money to expand control over resources and rebuild their old empires.
American and European elites had become finicky about dirty work. The added cost of leftist policies, whether labor or environmental, made it easier to turn over the problem, whether it was making overpriced sneakers, hardware, or providing reliable energy to former enemies. Even the most socialist leaders had come to think of the world as a set of commodity exchanges. They outsourced the dirty work and salved their conscience by financing some local NGOs.
That’s how we ended up with the War on Terror, now the Ukraine war, and quite possibly a Taiwan war before too long. Western nations may have decided to abandon imperialism, but all they did was outsource it to the Muslim world, to Russia, and China who are happy to take it on.
Outsourcing has a high cost and not just in the human rights abuses that Western companies like to ignore. The plight of women dying in Vietnamese sweatshops or African 8-year-olds working on cocoa plantations has evolved into regional and even global wars.
Two decades into the new century, we are in the middle of two outsourcing wars. Is there any doubt that as China, Russia, and the Muslim world strive to reclaim their empires using the consumer spending and energy needs of Western nations, that these will not be the last wars?
Or that if we continue to outsource our industries, we will also be outsourcing our future?
Empires and poor nations outsource vital resources and industries. We can either build empires, grow poor, or become self-sufficient. What we cannot do is try to have an empire that can sustain global supply chains and give us favorable access to resources without the imperialism.
That is a foolish post-war fantasy that had us playing the American grasshopper to China’s ant.
America can be self-sufficient to a large degree, but there’s no evading the price that we pay for the lives that we want to live. We will have to come to terms with ugly realities about human nature, politics, and dirty work. Because there’s more than one kind of dirty work out there.
The green fantasy in which we can leave behind pollution and unsightly factories by embracing solar panels, electric cars, and products with green labels is a lie. Green products are no cleaner, they’re just marketed that way. Behind the scenes there are still strip mines, grimy factories, and exploited workers because it takes even more dirty work to make something look shiny and clean.
Outsourcing has come to mean paying China, Russia, and the Muslim world to allow our elites to live in a fantasy world. That has devastated the American working class far more than all the pollution in the world could. And it has unleashed a series of wars which are only beginning.
It’s all a question of what sort of dirty work we’re comfortable with.
Will American elites reconcile themselves to factories and offshore oil rigs or to foreign wars? Or will they go on pretending that there is some magical clean solution to the dirty realities of life?
America can reclaim its industries or be forced to fight foreign wars to protect its outsourcing.
The outsourcing wars have already killed over ten thousand Americans. And as they escalate into potentially direct confrontations with China and Russia, not to mention Iran and Pakistan, they could easily kill tens of millions. If we want to stop the wars, we have to stop funding Chinese, Russian and Islamic imperialism with our wealth and our industries.
The only way to bring the troops home is to bring the industries and resources home.
Posts
Yeah, the idea that we can do without that energy is mind-boggling.
My friend when I was 4 years old had a toy steam engine that he showed me that boggled my mind. Ever since then I have been thinking about the relationship between machines and energy. At first in my 4 years old brain I thought the steam engine had some magical powers, you just switched it on and it went to work. Took me a long time to figure out that machines need energy.
Looking at the world, with literally countless numbers of machines doing countless amounts of work, how are those machines going to operate without energy? I suspect that abstract view is one thing Greta's Green Gremlins are lacking.
𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙇𝙞𝙛𝙚 𝙍𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙉𝙤𝙬! 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙠 𝙁𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝘾𝙤𝙢𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙩 𝙊𝙛 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙃𝙤𝙢𝙚 𝘼𝙣𝙙 𝙍𝙚𝙘𝙚𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙁𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩 𝙋𝙖𝙮𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙘𝙠 𝙒𝙞𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣 𝘼 𝙒𝙚𝙚𝙠. 𝙉𝙤 𝙀𝙭𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙉𝙚𝙚𝙙𝙚𝙙, 𝙉𝙤 𝘽𝙤𝙨𝙨 𝙊𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙎𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙𝙚𝙧... 𝙎𝙖𝙮 𝙂𝙤𝙤𝙙𝙗𝙮𝙚 𝙏𝙤 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙊𝙡𝙙 𝙅𝙤𝙗! 𝙇𝙞𝙢𝙞𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙉𝙪𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧 𝙊𝙛 𝙎𝙥𝙤𝙩𝙨 𝙊𝙥𝙚𝙣...
𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀.....> http://Www.NETCASH1.Com
Having lived through the change, it had many sides to it, and the dirty work is one angle definitely. Here in the UK we were heavily unionised and they refused to allow any technology be introduced because it put their jobs (power base) at risk. Also the corporatists, wanted to be seen to operate globally and growth was seen as far more important as the money markets became freer and they cared not one jot about where their profits came from.
But the enviro-nazis completely ignore so much of the damage transporting products over vast distances has too.
This, along with Daniel's other featured article appearing here today re: the Ukraine/Russia gas connection, is an extremely important, profound article. Greenfield's writings and views should be far better known. He writes multiple articles daily, some quite lengthy, in contrast to overpaid, self-indulgent, lionized ignoramuses and mediocrities such as, say, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, whose output consists of merely two or three columns per week. Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch are also brilliant and prolific. They and Greenfield routinely provide information and commentary found nowhere else.
Hear, hear!
Friedman is a peculiar case. He was very popular at one time with the Democrat intelligentsia. Anyway, sometimes he writes stuff that is half very good, then half completely wrong.
It certainly is worth asking how much of this would be happening if Trump were still in office.
"Russia, like China, rebooted its economy by exploiting the growing desire of American corpocrats to smash organized labor."
FIFY.
The Taiwanese giant semiconductor manufacturer TSMC will blow up every piece of their equipment and destroy every design spec before they let the ChiComs have them. While one can sincerely hope that nobody calls their bluff in a ChiCom invasion, I for one think that they would do it. But a far greater threat than invasion lies in the large-scale straw purchase of their stock by third parties, thus turning over control to the Middle Kingdom.
They might try. I think flooding Taiwan with anti-ship missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank missiles, and putting new construction vulnerable to ChiCom missile attack underground could balance the equation, because such defensive missiles are cheaper than offensive weapons like ships and planes.
Of course, the Taiwanese need to be trained to use them, and have enough fighting spirit to resist an invasion.
The question is whether all of these problems - or many of them - are due to bungling or were created by design. The globalists are anal-retentive elitists who care nothing for the middle class or the mostly working-class people who fight their proxy wars. The world is their sandbox and they want it to be neat and tidy and under their total control. For them, truly representative government is the enemy and "democracy" is a slogan used to fool people towards anti-democratic ends.
That reminded me, a few decades ago there was a TV series about oil and its relationship to war and the world economy. With the great Peter Ustinov narrating I think. Anyway, at that time, no thinking person could deny the importance of oil.