China has done well to build a new Silk Road via rail, which has recently made it all the way to Tehran. That will certainly limit the effectiveness of any attempted sea blockade.
I mean not really. You can only ship so much via a single rail line and it doesn’t reach markets in Africa or allow African ore or products to be brought back to China, it doesn’t reach most of west Asia/middle east, it doesn’t reach LatAm, etc. The amount you can ship on a train vs a cargo ship is pretty substantial too. Train loading points become bottlenecks compared to sea ports.
Having looked at the belt and road while it’s definitely a contingency lifeline it’s hardly insurmountable and is meant more to tie other nations closer to China economically to make them less useful to the west but that will take years to really unfold. The west is great at introducing insurgencies and they need only do so in a few key countries with CIA assets repeatedly blowing up rail lines and bridges to bring this route to a crawl. I assure you they’ve thought of this and have plans in the wings.
India alone would have more than enough motive and reason to agree to help the US in disrupting the B&R west of India via clandestine operations given their desires to take Chinese manufacturing and make it Indian manufacturing.
I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, the US is so weak it couldn’t defeat Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world. On the other hand, it will certainly continue supporting Al Qaeda/ISIS spinoffs for as long as they’re at all effective, as shown most recently in Syria.
What that means for China and the Global South isn’t obvious, but Pakistan’s military victory over India gives us some hope if not insight. China’s military tech outclasses the West’s. If it comes to a fight, the West will lose. Nukes are all the West has left up its sleeve.
China has done well to build a new Silk Road via rail, which has recently made it all the way to Tehran. That will certainly limit the effectiveness of any attempted sea blockade.
I mean not really. You can only ship so much via a single rail line and it doesn’t reach markets in Africa or allow African ore or products to be brought back to China, it doesn’t reach most of west Asia/middle east, it doesn’t reach LatAm, etc. The amount you can ship on a train vs a cargo ship is pretty substantial too. Train loading points become bottlenecks compared to sea ports.
Having looked at the belt and road while it’s definitely a contingency lifeline it’s hardly insurmountable and is meant more to tie other nations closer to China economically to make them less useful to the west but that will take years to really unfold. The west is great at introducing insurgencies and they need only do so in a few key countries with CIA assets repeatedly blowing up rail lines and bridges to bring this route to a crawl. I assure you they’ve thought of this and have plans in the wings.
India alone would have more than enough motive and reason to agree to help the US in disrupting the B&R west of India via clandestine operations given their desires to take Chinese manufacturing and make it Indian manufacturing.
I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, the US is so weak it couldn’t defeat Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world. On the other hand, it will certainly continue supporting Al Qaeda/ISIS spinoffs for as long as they’re at all effective, as shown most recently in Syria.
What that means for China and the Global South isn’t obvious, but Pakistan’s military victory over India gives us some hope if not insight. China’s military tech outclasses the West’s. If it comes to a fight, the West will lose. Nukes are all the West has left up its sleeve.