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Wednesday, May 27, 2026 - 18:56 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Sacrifice For The Sinners (Temporal, II)

"There are so many errors there.
I do not even know where to start."

- applicable to many mainstream media analyses of geopolitics



They indeed toll for thee!
(Source: facebook.com)


The on-again, off-again Hormuz senjata has seen Iran and Oman reportedly now considering setting up a permanent toll, if under the legal dodge of imposing them as a fee for services rendered, specifically the extremely important service of choosing not to blow transiting ships up. While U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has indicated that a toll would make a diplomatic deal infeasible, it is frankly not very clear as to whether calling it a fee would make the business more palatable, from how he apparently acquiesced to China's transcription hack in bypassing extant sanctions.

From a local angle, the immediate concern would be how a potential toll-called-fee would reflect on Singapore's sticking our neck out on refusing to pay one, with our Foreign Minister's tête-à-tête with his Iranian counterpart seemingly not having the intended effect. It might be a difficult time to be a minister here, one fears, with a DPM getting panned for not achieving an essentially-impossible task as previously explained, amidst questioning of so-called "economic strategy" alongside high costs and ongoing AI-based layoffs. The CEO of Standard Chartered did apologize after being knocked by our former President, amongst (some) others, for referring to replaced employees as "lower value human capital", but this notably did not affect the reality of workers being retrenched nonetheless.

More bending of "international law" continued with India for example rejecting a ruling by the Hague-based Court of Arbitration, in what appears to increasingly be a choose-your-own-authority scenario for nations, as with the effective rejection of the ICC (and ICJ, for that matter) by Singapore. Despite our Senior Minister's typically-neutral-coded comments from his recent (budget) visit to Shanghai, one can only hope that our leaders have not promised some of the same thing to both Team Red and Team Blue (i.e. rehypothecation, in the financial context), and thus left one or the other party with less than they thought had been agreed to.


A Ripoff Of Understanding

A shopkeeper hired an orange boy in a red baseball cap, and noticed that he was often laughed at by customers, for always picking the nickel when they offered that or a dime as a tip.

"Son, don't you know that the dime is worth more than the nickel, despite it being smaller in size?"

"Well, if I took the dime, the game would be over!"



An objective assessment of what's going on
[N.B. With compliments to Google Nano Banana and GPT Image 2.]


Returning to sacrifices and The Greatest Game proper, let us set the stage by recounting a couple of high-profile domestic scams from the past month. In the first, a 75 year-old lady gave S$600,000 over three years, to Elon Musk impersonators who convinced her that he needed her to help save his businesses, after also introducing her to TRUMP and Mark Zuckerberg. The victim in the second case lost nearly five million dollars, this time because our Prime Minister supposedly approached him requesting urgent funding assistance, due to the Hormuz crisis. As it happened, our PM didn't (who could have thought?!)

Less-than-salutary online comments have tended to focus on how these scamees had managed to amass such fortunes while being so bereft of judgment and common sense, but the realisation here should be that people are generally only too easily swayed by peer pressure and compliance to groupthink, even where no internal consistency is to be had. A gross overestimation of one's own competency may also play a role, perhaps best exemplified by potbellied spectators yelling after a missed basket or goal that they could do better.

The great irony here, then, is that intelligent readers will quite likely concede the above points... while possibly stubbornly holding on to the (standard mainstream media) viewpoint that TRUMP actually doesn't know what he is doing, and that his decisions and moves thus far are not part of some complex 5D chess scheme; because, come to think of it, Tesla isn't doing that well leading into the SpaceX IPO... perhaps Musk (net worth: over US$700 billion) does need a spare few hundred grand to tide him over in the meantime?


No really, it will pass this time!
(Source: malaymail.com)


But perhaps such is the genius of TRUMP, that he can repeatedly riff off the same playbook, and have his foes steadfastly refuse to admit that they have been had (again); put it this way, Cao Cao only managed to pull off the false promise of an upcoming plum grove just once, to get his troops to march onwards to the river. For TRUMP, this is basically right after every stock market close nowadays - and it's still working!

All this is probably in service of a greater mission, however. On this, let us refer to a pair of commentaries in The New York Times, that were published immediately before and after POTUS had visited China. While the liberal NYT can hardly be accused of being a fan of TRUMP, they would be uniformly dismissive of China's potential in their opinion pieces, describing the PRC as "much weaker than they seem" and "not rising for (much) longer". In this, the eminent Gray Lady reflects "America First", if perhaps not in the active TRUMPIAN sense that is denounced by Democrats and Washington D.C. career politicos; instead, this is "America First" in the possessive, not as a prize to be won or a title to be sought, but as an inherited birthright that brooks no debate. America is First - in peace and war.

This attitude is entirely understandable, by the way. America has been near-universally recognized as the premier superpower of the world since the crumbling of the old empires at the end of World War II some eighty years past, and the only superpower upon outlasting the Soviet Union about thirty-five years ago. Very few of the living remember it any other way. Before continuing, allow me to admit to being a great admirer of the U.S.A. - like so many others - for all their accomplishments past and present. This includes air travel, the Internet, the WWE, and of course the Pax Americana, a near-unprecedented period of global peace and prosperity, barring some unhappy outliers such as being Vietnamese in the 1960s, or Iraqi in 1991/2003.

But will America be First for much longer?


A receding target?
[N.B. China looked well on track to surpass the U.S., until the well-timed Covid pandemic tanked their progress wholesale, to a 4.5% growth target.]
(Source: economist.com)


In his May 12th op-ed, Stephens kicks off with the bold claim that China's economy would most likely never overtake America's, much as previous contenders such as the Soviet Union, Japan and the European Union had failed. This is hardly an original assertion, but slightly odd in some respects. Firstly, it is unsure as to whether the E.U. had ever truly considered themselves an economic rival; secondly, China had the largest economy in the world as recently as two centuries ago, with America hardly a blip on the chart then; and thirdly, the writer had - probably wilfully - neglected the elephant in the room:

China's population is over four times that of America's.

The Soviet Union, for all their boogeyman cred during the First Cold War, had a population roughly comparable to the U.S. through its peak and dissolution. Japan's population never exceeded about half of America's. As such, to overhaul America in economic Strength, these two would have had to (significantly) surpass them in per-capita GDP. The European Union had actually exceeded the U.S. in terms of nominal GDP for brief periods, while being roughly equal in purchasing parity power terms, but this was never particularly meaningful given that the E.U. is composed of very many sovereign states, each with their own motivations and objectives. China, in contrast to all of the above, is a single, unified country - and moreover one that only needs to hit 25% of America's per-capita GDP to match them, a benchmark attained by Cuba, Latvia, Barbados and Saint Kitts & Nevis, among others.

This uncomfortable fact has led to Western Team Blue pundits consoling themselves about China's demographic trends, as Douthat then does in his May 16th piece on China's crashing fertility rate. To wit: "Just how confident can Chinese people really be in their culture's future if the rising generation is so disinclined to reproduce*? Just how confident should China's leaders be that they can outlast the United States if their population could be cut in half over the next few generations?" This however may neglect that current projections would have China's working age (not total) population declining... to over 600 million by 2060, or still about twice America's current total.

The mainline narrative on China's economic troubles is seemingly being amplified by non-Chinese thinktanks and pundits, with even usual apologist Kishore Mahbubani recently claiming that the U.S. lead over them would only widen, alongside projections of India's forthcoming demographic rise. All this however glosses over some fundamental inconsistencies and problematic assumptions, chief amongst them being that the average worker in China will, for some reason, never be more than about a quarter as productive as his American counterpart (about this, OECD estimates the figure to be near 60% by 2035). It is a great irony, then, that any suggestion of ethnic disparities would be entirely racist and verboten in American universities... whose politically-correct international relations experts would then effectively swear blind that Chinese citizens can never match up to Americans output-wise, in their public theses. Something doesn't quite add up.



Will get around to them someday
[Embiggen!]


Here, one important observation might be made. While there has been a surplus of popular and academic literature insinuating ulterior motives by China in their developmental process, such as Doshi's The Long Game above, or Pillsbury's The Hundred-Year Marathon, it might be recognized that the actual issue is China's raw scale. In particular, it is difficult to brand "catching up with Lithuania's per-capita GDP of about US$30000" as some particularly malevolent strategy... but for that China would all but indisputably dethrone America as the world's leading superpower, from having about 150% America's aggregate nominal GDP, if they achieved that. This then implies that there is basically no way for China to not be recognized as a geopolitical threat by America, bar complete stagnation.

But what about the authoritarian and oppressive (at least in Team Blue's telling) CCP, then? Unfortunately, one believes that China's governing philosophy is not the primary concern either, and that most of the antagonism would remain even were the CCP to be replaced by a democratic system (as hinted by our 20 year-old comic). The justification derives from America's treatment of post-war Japan, who were undeniably democratic - heck, America designed Japan's government themselves! None of this precluded America's hostile intent towards Japan when the latter drew close in economic terms in the 1980s, which was only resolved when Japan fell off the radar soon after.

Having established the above facts and considerations, a natural question presents itself: if GEOTUS TRUMP is not doing what he is doing, can America remain First in the world?

My short and perhaps bitter answer is: probably not.


[*An argument that happens to apply to most of the developed, Western and democratic world too.]

[To be continued...]



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