Do we really need to OWN icebreakers? Maybe we could start a website where countries and companies who own icebreakers can operate them for the benefit of other countries and companies who want to use them. They just walk to the shore in the Canadian north, click the "Call Icebreaker" button on the app and wait for an icebreaker someone else owns to arrive.
Generally speaking, states try to avoid having critical dependencies on other states, because they become points of leverage for adversarial foreign policy. For the purposes of keeping America running, yes, we really do need to own icebreakers in the same way that we need to own powerplants, steel mills, chip foundries and and refineries.
In this case though we're talking about Canada - the Canadian and US economies are incredibly linked. Personally, I'm a Canadian who makes money examining the US healthcare market and reselling that data to other Americans - there's lot of crossover here.
Versus being quite literally held hostage by a non-cooperating foreign power for political gain?
Things like energy independence sound cute and quaint until you find yourself being taken advantage of at best, or ground to a halt during armed conflict at worst.
Yeah, and then we'll enter a cycle of repatriation when it gets painful enough. Generally speaking, it's precisely the bean-counter mentality of aggressive cost reduction (with a narrow definition of "cost") that gets us into this position to begin with.
Fun times when our Space Shuttle program shutdown we had to rely on Russian Soyuz to get astronauts to and from ISS. Well, whenever Russia didn't like something the US was doing, guess what the bargaining chip was?
That would depend on one's strategic goals and priorities. Personally, I do not believe the US should be the world police so I don't think it is necessary.
I think in this case the US is mostly concerned with securing the increasingly lucrative exclusive economic zone north of Alaska. Anything beyond that we can use air power over sea power, now that we've given up on desert power.
OK, the who would you suggest should be the world's police?
The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate.
It is obvious that all nations do not agree to this. E.g.: China on Tibet, Taiwan, 9-dashed line, etc., Russia in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine. Those authoritarian states think it is perfectly fine to use force or threats of force to occupy & annex other territories and peoples.
The fact that we also have global shipping and travel at a relatively low cost (cheap enough to make & ship goods petty much anywhere-to-anywhere, and international travel is available to non-elites), is a direct result of US Navy keeping a lid on piracy.
Anarchy, or unpoliced random aggression would be a very bad option.
So, if the US does not do it, who do you think would do a better job, Putin, Xi, Kim, someone else?
> OK, the who would you suggest should be the world’s police?
> The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate.
If that was true, it would be inconsistent with any one nation or narrow relatively fixed set of nations being the world’s police, as that would indicate that the age of imperialism was not over and that the world had a single imperial power or small group of such powers.
The central institution in the aspirational design of the order you describe had a solution to the problem: the UN would itself be the world’s policeman, via a centralized military command to which all member nations would subordinate command of designated units of their armed forces for the purpose.
This…did not work out in practice, and is one of the very many pieces of information suggesting that your accurate description of the aspirations which people at the end of WWII had for the postwar international order were never realized.
> Anarchy, or unpoliced random aggression would be a very bad option.
It would be, but its mostly what we have between the major powers, with the major powers (alone or in combination) policing everything else, with…issues where the policing desires of the major powers conflict.
Just like in past ages of imperialism.
The main difference is that the fact that the major powers are also nuclear powers exerts constraints on the form of their direct conflicts mostly to forms that are at least partially deniable to prevent pressure of uncontrolled escalation which could lead to nuclear annihilation.
> that would indicate that the age of imperialism was not over
Wide berth between an imperial power and one that survives on a system of alliances. Balance of powers realism works, but it’s far more brutal than a uni or bipolar world order.
> the UN would itself be the world’s policeman, via a centralized military command to which all member nations would subordinate command of designated units of their armed forces for the purpose
Many states have tried this. It never works. Either you centralise command. Or you get the Holy Roman Empire.
>>aspirations which people at the end of WWII had for the postwar international order were never realized.
Yes, the UN failed to live up to that aspiration.
Of course some kind of Shangra-La where there is no conflict and no authoritarians trying to take over would be fantastic. The problem is that it is just that - a fantasy. We must deal with the reality of the world.
This is in no small part to the failure of including as permanent members on the Security Council the authoritarian states of USSR and China, which have done little but abuse the system attempting to game it for their own interests.
So, yes, we are down to a choice. Either:
1) The nations attempting (however imperfectly) to let their people live self-determining lives, and elect self-determining governments step up and enforce that aspirational world order as best they can.
or
2) Abandon attempts at suppressing imperialism and maintainting order, and allow again states to engage in war of all against all.
Suggesting that #1 is the same as imperialism, or as #2, is absurd.
We can seen where the policing has broken down, because the states trying to maintain democracy and the Post-WWII world order have tried appeasement or failed to police. It is endless war crimes, cities reduced to rubble, internment "reeducation" camps for millions.
So, if you are going to throw accusations that the US, UK, FR, NATO, attempting to maintain whatever peaceful world order is some kind of problem or is illegitimate, you need to come up with a better and viable solution.
> We can seen where the policing has broken down, because the states trying to maintain democracy and the Post-WWII world order have tried appeasement or failed to police.
We’ve also seen where it succeeded in its real goals, which are often not democracy or any rules based order, but the parochial security and economic interests of the powers doing the “policing".
We've also seen that the power that holds itself up as the primary architect and enforcer of a “rules-based international order” particularly refuses (often with histrionic gestures, like the act nicknamed the Hague Invasion Act) to subject itself to the the rules and institutions of that order.
> It is endless war crimes, cities reduced to rubble,
Yes, we've seen that caused by the active engagement, not merely the restraint, of the “policing” powers.
> So, if you are going to throw accusations that the US, UK, FR, NATO, attempting to maintain whatever peaceful world order is some kind of problem or is illegitimate,
What I said was the suggestion that powrful countries policing the behavior of others is not imperialism but something categorically different is self-delusion.
Its others making the implicit claim that imperialism is illegitimate and what is legitimate is some other order that exists only in fantasy.
(I can certainly conceive if something that would be legitimate in a way that the imperialist order is not, but as I see no obvious pass yo achieving it, its not worth advocating.) But in the meantime, without a route out, the best way to mitigate the worst potential harms of the imperialist order starts with recognizing the nature of that order for what it is, and understanding where it is prone, by nature, to oroduce bad outcomes.
The age of imperialism is not over, except where someone enforces it. That someone is mostly the US, but UK and France also do a lot of work that I know of. None of them are perfect, all have a lot of blood on their hands, but overall imperialism is mostly dead despite many who would turn to it if they could.
In economic theory there are good reasons to say that every country has better options than imperialism - but imperialism often looks easy.
> The age of imperialism is not over, except where someone enforces it. That someone is mostly the US, but UK and France also do a lot of work that I know of.
I would suggest that “the age of imperialism is over only to the extent that what were among the last of the great imperial powers enforce that condition” is absolutely no different than “the age of imperialism continues, under some of the same imperial powers as its most recent previous form”.
Yes, when a central power (the metropole) dictates outcomes and behavior to other powers (the peripheries).
> which is not what we are doing
Its exactly what the upthread claim is that we are doing. I’m not as much arguing whether or not that is happening, as that the assertion that it is happening and that it is a constraint on imperialism is self-contradictory.
> The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate.
Why bother with the 'annex' part when you can just overthrow governments you don't like and replace them with ones you do?
Even if that were still being done, it is obvious that the authoritarian states think annexing is very important (again, look at Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Tibet, Yuhigurs, etc.). But, nice try with the false equivalency and whataboutism.
Is it not? Afghanistan in 2002, Iraq in 2002, Haiti in 2004, Libya in 2011, the US is taking sides in the civil wars in Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, and there's whatever happened in Bolivia in 2019.
If those aren't recent enough for you, then it's mildly surprising you'd bring up Chechnya (under Russian (then Soviet, then Russian) control since the mid-19th century, most recent major operations ended in 2009), Tibet (annexed in 1950, previously under varying levels of Chinese control up thru the mid-Qing), and the Uighurs (Xinjiang / the Tarim Basin was first occupied by China as early as the Han dynasty and has been under Chinese control since 1884 (Qing then RoC then PRC)).
I was interested in Arctic tourism. Some of it happens on Russian nuclear powered icebreakers. For giggles, I thought I'd buy one if I won the powerball. No powerball is sufficient, I was looking at about $2.5 billion. And I'm pretty sure that it would be a violation of the NPT for Russia to sell me one. Although the white Persian cat with a diamond collar would merely be a violation of good taste.
As a Canadian I fully support this approach - it's not like the US and Canada could ever effectively have highly contentious relations due to our economic interdependence... and we make good stuff up here, know how to build things that deal with ice and train our crews to deal with ice - ice breakers need special knowledge to operate safely and well.
Oh yeah. This was a snarky comment. Serves me right for trying to be clever over a text channel. It is very easy to misinterpret this as a legit comment.
Anyone interested in angel investing for my startup? It's like Uber, but for $50-100 million specialty ships of which there are only a handful in the world, owned and operated by only a few nations, one of which is currently sanctioned by the US government.
I like the cut of your jib, @fragmede. Though it's probably more like "Move at a moderate speed and break ice." (Which DOES sound like my company's product development process.)
