Estamos chegando perto do fim da era nuclear? E do próprio planeta, com uma guerra nuclear? Winslow Myers (WP)

 A hipótese é aterradora, mas plausível, dada a proliferação nos últimos anos e a existência de ditadores malucos. O autor convida os EUA a se desnuclearizarem unilateralmente, com precauções. Não sei se funcionaria, com os generais paranoicos do Pentágono. PRA

The Nuclear Age Is Already Over

BY WINSLOW MYERS

The Washington Post, May 9, 2024

 

Either nuclear weapons kill us or we move beyond them, soon. Via mass death or the building a new security system, the nuclear age is finished. The nuclear deterrence system that the world presently relies upon for its security is rotten, evil, completely unworkable, and obsolete. It is nuclear war waiting to happen, a war no one can or would win. But we remain ostriches with heads deep in sand, waiting passively for an inevitable holocaust apparently too big to prevent.

Somebody somewhere on this small planet has got to begin the process of leading the way out of this morass

• of paradox: the assumption that mutual assured destruction can preserve life forever.

• of hypocrisy: our nuclear weapons are good and necessary but yours are bad and we will not allow you to possess them.

• of illusion: the experts will somehow prevent nuclear war from ever happening.

• of collective insanity: our launch-on-warning policy allows our leaders only minutes to decide our collective fate. And to retaliate against a bolt-from-the-blue attack by North Korea, for example, the U.S. would have to fly its ICBMs over the land mass of Russia, presently our mortal adversary. But even without nuclear weapons, the armed forces of the United States could utterly obliterate North Korea, and Kim Jong Un knows it.

The United States, based in core principles like the value of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, should make a precious gift to the world and sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It would be the first of the nine nuclear powers to sign and the initiative would be welcomed with relief and jubilation by the vast majority of the world’s citizens.

Then what? Rapid and destabilizing American unilateral disarmament? No. Begin instead with well-advertised gestures over time. Have the generals and political leaders admit freely in an international forum like the United Nations that military advantage via nuclear war is impossible, that the nuclear arms race toward ever faster delivery vehicles leads nowhere good, and that resources presently expended on nuclear weapons programs are desperately needed for meeting the global climate emergency.

Pledge no-first-use, and no nuclear retaliation against aggression, on the basis of the potential of nuclear winter as planetary suicide. Bring home five nuclear-armed submarines. Shut down one of our programs of nuclear weapons modernization. Aggressively initiate arms control proposals, which, combined with an ongoing series of gestures, would add credibility to our overall stance.

Then watch for mutual responses from the other nuclear powers. Worst case scenario, there would be none, in which case we can always reverse course, either gradually or rapidly as the situation may demand. What are we so afraid of?

It is an important fact that Putin, a leader as ruthless in his own way as Hitler, has more nuclear weapons at his disposal than any other nation, but so far, and may it continue, he has not used them. Why? Is it because he fears our nuclear weapons? Or is it because in spite of his gross deficit of compassion for Ukraine, he knows that turning swaths of that nation into radioactive desert does not fit any sane conception of military conquest?

Of course “conventional” war itself is equally insane. The October 7^th Hamas attack and what has followed is a tragic case in point. The immense loss of life in the Israeli military’s “conventional” response can only concentrate our minds upon what the massive loss of life in a nuclear war would look like. But if we must carry on with deterrence, think of it as a stage in moving beyond war altogether, and base it instead upon our conventional weapons, which are more than adequate for the job. Especially emphasize defensive weapons like those which protected Israel from Iran’s recent missile and drone attack, making possible the de-escalation which followed.

A world beyond war itself is possible. Viable alternative security systems have been elaborated in great detail. But we can take a sensible step in that ultimate direction quite safely, which is to unilaterally start backing off the nutty, silly, irrational hair-trigger nuclear system presently holding the whole world hostage.

 

Winslow Myers is author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide.” He serves on the Advisory Board of the Washington Post.

A destruição da aliança atlântica por Trump - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 

Today's WorldView

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  The Washington Post, Feb 13, 2024 The    As Trump spooks Europe, Biden stirs global anger over Gaza war Then-President Donald Trump with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, on July 7, 2017. (Evan Vucci/AP) Former president Donald Trump’s latest rhetorical grenade shook the West’s preeminent military alliance. Over the weekend, he said he would encourage Russia to attack U.S. allies in NATO if they failed to invest enough on their national defense. The remarks, as well as separate comments about ending U.S. aid to foreign countries, “set off fresh tremors across Washington and in European countries already worried about America’s reliability as an ally in a potential second Trump administration,” my colleagues reported. Trump has long grumbled about the United States' outsize role in NATO and casts President Biden’s support for Ukraine’s struggle to resist Russian invasion as a costly drag on the U.S. taxpayer. The sentiment has captured a segment of the Republican Party, which has blocked the Biden administration’s attempts to earmark some $61 billion in fresh funding for Ukraine. To European onlookers, Trump’s stated hostility is a line in the sand. “Everyone should watch this video from Trump and then understand that Europe may soon have no choice but to defend itself,” Norbert Röttgen, a senior German lawmaker and former chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the German parliament, wrote on his Facebook page. “We have to manage this because anything else would be surrender and self-abandonment!” Trump, in the eyes of some European critics, is an existential threat to the Western alliance and its political ethos. “The current presidential campaign only confirms that he has not changed his reckless attitude towards allies,” Marko Mihkelson, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Estonian Parliament, told my colleagues. “Unfortunately, he is therefore a very convenient tool for Putin’s Russia, which is waging war against the West.” “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S., and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement. During his term, Biden reinvigorated the transatlantic alliance, assuring European counterparts about U.S. commitments to their security while coordinating a robust, collective effort to support Kyiv. European diplomats in Washington barely disguise their confidence and trust in the Biden administration, and their apprehensions of what may come should Trump defeat him in November. But on the other key battlefront in the global conversation, Biden has unsettled myriad political elites with his perceived complicity in Israel’s relentless war against Hamas in Gaza. The Israeli campaign, which has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians, many of whom were children, took another deadly turn Monday with the expansion of operations in Rafah, a southern city along the territory’s border with Egypt that’s now hosting more than a million cornered Gazan refugees.

O impasse na Ucrânia: poucas armas, poucos avanços nas frentes de batalha: O Ocidente perdeu a vontade? - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (WP)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  The Washington Post, Jan 31, 2024 Email

Ukraine’s hopes for victory over Russia are slipping away A member of a Ukrainian air defense unit in the woods north of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Alice Martins for The Washington Post/FTWP) It’s hard to ignore the sense of desperation in Ukraine’s corridors of power. Nearing two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, authorities in Kyiv maintain their long-standing entreaty to partners in the West: Deliver us more arms, more aid, more political commitments. President Volodymyr Zelensky toured Western capitals at the end of last year, pleading for support amid growing international fatigue with the conflict and paralysis in U.S. Congress over new supplemental funding for Kyiv. Around the same time, his top general, Valery Zaluzhny, bemoaned the “stalemate” that had set into place after the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023 failed to make strategic headway against Russia’s deep defensive lines. U.S. officials and their Western counterparts, as my colleagues reported over the weekend, anticipate a lean year ahead, where Ukraine’s increasingly exhausted forces focus more on consolidating their defense than chipping away at Russia’s land-grabs. The Kremlin controls roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s internationally-recognized territory — including Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014, and a broad sweep of Ukraine’s southeast. The U.S. view of the course of the conflict undercuts Zelensky’s stated ambition of driving Russia out by this October. Last week, Pentagon officials came empty-handed to a monthly 50-nation coordinating meeting for Ukraine, with future U.S. money for arms and aid snared by domestic politics. On the front lines, reports indicate stocks of ammunition and artillery shells are running low for many Ukrainian units. “We get asked what’s our plan, but we need to understand what resources we’re going to have,” Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko told my colleagues. “Right now, everything points to the possibility that we will have less than last year, when we tried to do a counteroffensive and it didn’t work out. … If we will have even less, then it’s clear what the plan will be. It will be defense.” Looming far away from the battlefield is the political drama in Washington. House Republicans have already stymied the latest tranche of funding that President Biden is trying to allocate for Kyiv. Analysts believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is holding out for a potential return to power of former president Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential candidate for the November election. Trump may scale back support for Ukraine and take a friendlier view of the Kremlin’s security concerns in Eastern Europe. As my colleagues reported, the Biden administration and European allies are working on a longer-term, multilateral plan aimed at warding against this scenario and future-proofing support for Ukraine. That includes pledges of economic and security assistance that stretch into the next decade, and may pave the way for Ukraine to get integrated into Western blocs like the European Union and NATO. Biden is set to unveil the U.S. plank of this strategy in the spring. “The policy holds risks, including political ones, if Ukrainians begin to blame their government for stagnant front lines,” my colleagues wrote. “Likewise, in Western capitals, officials are keenly aware that their citizens’ patience with funding Ukraine’s war is not infinite. Amid the planning, Washington also seems to be readying the argument that, even if Ukraine is not going to regain all of its territory in the near term, it needs significant ongoing assistance to be able to defend itself and become an integral part of the West.” But, in the near term, both the shortfalls on Ukraine’s front lines and divisions in Washington may cement the fate of the war. “While the first half of 2024 may bring few changes in control of Ukrainian territory, the materiel, personnel training, and casualties that each side accrues in the next few months will determine the long-term trajectory of the conflict,” wrote Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. “The West in fact faces a crucial choice right now: support Ukraine so that its leaders can defend their territory and prepare for a 2025 offensive or cede an irrecoverable advantage to Russia.” The West may have already squandered its best chance to enable Ukraine to fully liberate its territory. In his new book, “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence,” Wall Street Journal international correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov outlines how Western governments slow-rolled military support to Ukraine out of fear of triggering a possible nuclear-armed escalation with Russia. The United States and its allies have sent Ukraine an unprecedented flow of aid, but critics say the overly careful calibration of that support undermined the Ukrainian war effort. “The United States and its partners held back from supplying Ukraine with Western-made capabilities at a time when they would have had the biggest effect, and prohibited Kyiv from using Western weapons to strike military targets on Russian soil,” Trofimov wrote, in an adapted excerpt from his book published in The Washington Post. “By the time many of these Western systems did arrive, in the second year of the war, Russia had built up defenses, mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops and switched its industries to wartime footing. The best window of opportunity for a clear and quick Ukrainian victory had disappeared.” Other experts aren’t so sure, and contend that the Biden administration had a responsibility to avoid a spiraling confrontation with Russia. “More aid, sooner, would have been better — but there’s no guarantee it would have brought a decisive Ukrainian victory,” wrote Bloomberg Opinion columnist Hal Brands. “The best guarantee of that outcome would have been threatening direct military intervention, a strategy that virtually no one wanted to pursue because the risks were so obvious and, potentially, so severe. Indeed, it would have required Biden to more aggressively cross Russia’s red lines at the very moment when uncertainty about Putin’s response was at its peak.” Instead, Ukrainians and their boosters lament what could have been after Ukrainian forces surprised virtually everyone in repulsing Russia’s initial offensive on Kyiv and defiantly standing their ground in the early months of the war. “He opened his mouth like a python and thought that we’re just another bunny,” Zelensky told Trofimov in a 2022 interview, referring to Putin. “But we’re not a bunny and it turned out that he can’t swallow us — and is actually at risk of getting torn apart himself.” Russia, though, has also stood its ground, withstood international sanctions and is preparing for fresh offensives in Ukraine, on top of its incessant, indiscriminate missile barrages into Ukrainian cities. Kyiv knows its ability to resist hinges on foreign backing. “We wouldn’t survive without U.S. support, it’s a real fact,” Zelensky said in a television interview this month.

O exodo armênio, milhares de anos depois do primeiro - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

 Ishaan Tharoor (WP), September 26, 2023

An Armenian exodus raises the specter of ‘ethnic cleansing’ Ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh wait to drive to Kornidzor, the town in Syunik region, Armenia, on Monday. (Vasily Krestyaninov/AP) An entire community may be on the verge of abandoning its ancestral homeland. After months of blockade by Azerbaijan, thousands of ethnic Armenians motored out of their highland enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh toward sanctuary in Armenia. They were leaving behind towns and villages that have sat for years within Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory, but which had maintained de facto autonomy in the form of the unrecognized republic of Artsakh, a medieval Armenian name for the contested region. But what existed for centuries may be about to vanish in days. Last week, a lightning-fast Azerbaijani campaignoverwhelmed armed separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh and compelled Artsakh’s authorities to agree to disband their territorial defense forces and enter into negotiations about terms of a de facto surrender. The advances marked the biggest escalation in the conflict since a brief war in 2020 saw the superior Azerbaijani military take back major swaths of land, which had been seized by Armenian forces in earlier rounds of fighting in the 1990s. Now, the autocratic government in Baku may for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union be able to extend full control over the majority-Armenian enclave. That shifting reality sparked an exodus. The victorious Azerbaijanis agreed to open up the lone corridor connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, precipitating a huge flow of refugees fleeing the enclave and a potential future of Azerbaijani rule. Baku insists the region’s some 120,000 ethnic Armenians are welcome to remain as citizens of a reintegrated, pluralist Azerbaijani state. But Karabakh’s residents had endured nine months of blockade that saw grocery stores emptied of food and hospitals bereft of vital medical supplies. This immediate experience of enforced deprivation simply added to the depth of enmities between both sides and a long history of atrocities and violence. “Our people do not want to live as part of Azerbaijan. Ninety-nine point nine percent prefer to leave our historic lands,” David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, the president of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh, told Reuters. “The fate of our poor people will go down in history as a disgrace and a shame for the Armenian people and for the whole civilized world.” No Azerbaijani official has given an order of expulsion. But many residents of the region feel they have little choice. “People right now say everyone is leaving,” Marut Vanyan, a local blogger, told Politico. “In Stepanakert [the region’s capital], there is no second opinion, everyone is trying to find a few liters of petrol and be ready any time, any second, for when we are going.” In neighboring Armenia, the embattled government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan looked on helplessly, offering safe haven for thousands of ethnic Armenians and urging Azerbaijan to guarantee the safety of Nagorno-Karabakh’s population. “If proper conditions are not created for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to live in their homes and there are no effective protection mechanisms against ethnic cleansing, the likelihood is rising that the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh will see exile from their homeland as the only way to save their lives and identity,” Pashinyan said Sunday. U.S. and European officials have pressed Baku to assuage growing fears over such “ethnic cleansing.” Samantha Power, chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development, arrived Monday in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, at the head of a U.S. delegation. A letter from President Bidento Pashinyan conveyed support for ongoing efforts to forge regional peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and decried the recent violence, but said little explicitly condemning Azerbaijan’s actions. David McAllister, chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Guardian on Monday that the European Union “should make it clear that any attempt to remove or coerce the Armenian population from the Nagorno-Karabakh region will have serious consequences for our relations with Azerbaijan.” For years, Armenia counted on its close ties with Russia to act as a buffer against Azerbaijan and a safeguard of de facto independence of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. But Russian peacekeepers stood aside earlier this year as Azerbaijan choked off the key highway into Nagorno-Karabakh and did little to thwart last week’s crushing military operation. The Kremlin explicitly dislikes Pashinyan and appears to be stoking anti-government unrest against his rule. “Since Pashinyan’s rise to power in a popular revolution in 2018 against successive authoritarian and massively corrupt regimes, Armenia has moved closer to Washington and refuses to endorse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Al-Monitor explained. “At the same time, Pashinyan is seeking normalization with Turkey in the hopes this would fend off further Azerbaijani aggression, but so far to little effect.”

Ukraine’s hopes for maximal victory look remote - Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall (WP)

 

The Washington Post, August 20, 2023

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall   Email   Ukraine’s hopes for maximal victory look remote Ukrainian forces fire toward Russian positions in the Kharkiv region last month. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post) Everyone expected Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russian positions to be tough. But perhaps not as tough as it has been. After more than two months of attritional warfare across a vast front line stretching from the country’s east to the south, Kyiv’s forces have yet to forge any major breakthroughs. While exacting a grievous toll on the invading Russians, they have sustained significant casualties and found themselves bogged down by a thicket of Russian minefields, trenches and other fortifications. Their gains have been only incremental, no matter the billions of dollars in Western aid invested in preparing Ukraine’s push to reclaim lost territory. The difficulties, my colleagues reported at the end of last week, have led the U.S. intelligence community to conclude that the Ukrainian counteroffensive will fall short of at least one of its key goals — reaching the key southeastern city of Melitopol. It is “a finding that, should it prove correct, would mean Kyiv won’t fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push,” my colleagues John Hudson and Alex Horton wrote. Melitopol, which straddles two key highways and a railroad line, is seen as the gateway to Crimea. Recapturing it would cripple Russia’s ability to reinforce the peninsula and would deliver a demoralizing blow, creating myriad strategic headaches for the Kremlin and opening the door for Ukraine to press further toward Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014. Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, have insisted that their troops will reclaim every inch of Ukrainian land lost to Russia, including Crimea. In public, Western politicians and diplomats have embraced the vision, reiterating that their governments would back Ukraine in its defense for as long as it takes. In private, conversations are darker and more skeptical, with many officials gloomy about Ukraine’s prospects to expel the Russian invaders. The new U.S. intelligence assessment reflects a less-spoken, but emerging consensus. On Friday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan attempted to play down its significance. “Over the course of the past two years, there have been a lot of analyses of how this war would unfold coming from a lot of quarters,” he told reporters at Camp David ahead of a U.S.-convened summit with South Korea and Japan. “And we’ve seen numerous changes in those analyses over time as dynamic battlefield conditions change.” But U.S. officials and their European counterparts are increasingly more circumspect about what they hope Ukraine’s counteroffensive can achieve. “I had said a couple of months ago that this offensive was going to be long, it’s going to be bloody, it’s going to be slow,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Post last week. “And that’s exactly what it is: long, bloody and slow, and it’s a very, very difficult fight.” “To commit our reserve forces we need to be sure that the pathways are clear,” Yuriy Sak, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister of defense, told my colleague Susannah George. “We would rather go slower and make sure that we preserve the lives of our troops.” An analysis from the Institute for the Study of War published after my colleagues’ report said that “it is premature to make assessments about the overall success of ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive operations occurring along several lines of advance toward several different apparent objectives.” Away from the front lines, the war is intensifying as well. While Ukraine has stepped up drone attacks into Russian territory, Russia continues its indiscriminate campaign of missile strikes on Ukrainian civilian areas. On Saturday, a Russian attack on a public square in the northern city of Chernihiv killed at least seven people, including a child. Zelensky, who was on a trip to Northern Europe in search of further military assistance, vowed to “respond tangibly.” The reality of this difficult fight has led to some unusually blunt admissions. A top NATO official, Stian Jenssen, triggered a Ukrainian outcry after he was quoted at a public event in Norway suggesting that he could see a scenario where Ukraine received membership in the Western military alliance if it accepted some territorial concessions to Russia. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, for whom Jenssen is chief of staff, had to walk back his subordinate’s remarks. “It is the Ukrainians, and only the Ukrainians, who can decide when there are conditions in place for negotiations, and who can decide at the negotiating table what is an acceptable solution,” he said, echoing rhetoric that Western officials have routinely put forward when confronted with questions about the endgame in Ukraine. But Ukrainian concessions appear to be something many in Western countries are willing to countenance. The U.S. role in supporting Ukraine will probably become more polarizing at home as the war drags on and the 2024 elections draw nearer. Some polls now show a majority of American voters, especially Republicans, are skeptical of additional aid to Kyiv. That’s being picked up by some of those vying to be the Republican presidential nominee. “Our goal should not be for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to lose. Our goal should be for America to win,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a surprise dark horse in the race, told CNN on Thursday, suggesting American investment in Ukraine’s fight for survival was pushing Russia and China closer together. “I would freeze the current lines of control, and that would leave parts of the Donbas region with Russia,” Ramaswamy said. “I would also further make a commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO.” Such a proposal explains why the Biden administration thinks Putin is invested in fighting this war through to the 2024 election. “Putin knows that the leading Republican candidate for president next year, former president Donald Trump, would end U.S. support for Ukraine, and that there are others like him in Europe,” wrote Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman and U.S. diplomat. “A forever war favors Putin, not Ukraine.” In his op-ed, Malinowski suggested the best pragmatic solution for the Ukrainian endgame would combine supporting Kyiv’s counteroffensive as far as it goes until some point next year before the major NATO summit in Washington. There, the Western military alliance would commit to extending membership and treaty protections to Ukraine over the territory it controls. That would mark an implicit concession of territory to Russia, but make real a strategic nightmare for Putin of converting a nation whose sovereignty he has long dismissed into another strong NATO member on his borders. Talk of endgames in the war, though, remains fanciful. So far, no Russian commitment to good-faith negotiations materialized. “No one is seriously considering or discussing a diplomatic end to the war: a notion that looks to many high-profile Russians like a personal threat, given all the war crimes that their country has committed and the responsibility that the entire elite now bears for the carnage in Ukraine,” wrote Tatiana Stanovaya in Foreign Affairs, referring to the consensus view among the Kremlin elite. “Peace for Ukraine must at some point involve negotiations with Russia,” wrote Brookings scholar Constanze Stelzenmüller in a recent essay. “But given the Kremlin’s implacable attitude, the burden of proof for the credibility of its negotiating offers would be extremely high. An armistice based on a freezing of the status quo in the form of continued Russian occupation of Crimea and the Donbas would reward Putin’s aggression and merely pause hostilities.” To avoid “the risk that an end to the war becomes an interregnum between wars,” she concluded, “only the strongest guarantees — a clear, constructive, and hopefully short path to NATO and EU membership — can satisfy Ukraine’s security interests, and indeed those of the Western alliance.” A total diplomatic victory for Kyiv could help make up for the absence of a total military one.

China-USA: dois gigantes econômicos, com problemas opostos: deflação-inflação - Adam Taylor (WP)

 

By Adam Taylor with Sammy Westfall   Email   China’s falling prices are a more profound problem than U.S. inflation A customer at a food stall in Shanghai on Monday. (Raul Ariano/Bloomberg News) The United States and China are the world’s two most important economic powers. But the biggest economic problems they face are polar opposites. The United States has struggled with rising consumer prices over the past 18 months, with inflation still considerably ahead of the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target despite attempts to slow down spending. China faces a different problem: Deflation. According to official statistics released Wednesday, consumer prices had fallen by 0.3 percent over the last year after being stagnant for months. And while America has a startlingly tight labor market, with more job openings than out-of-work people, China is facing enormous unemployment problems. The unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-oldshit a record 21 percent in June — though some experts believe it is actually even higher. There is one significant similarity, though it doesn’t look good for Beijing. While China has a 5 percent official target for economic growth this year, that growth is year on year with 2022, a year where economic activity was severely limited by “zero covid” rules. Economists from Bloomberg News have said growth would look more like 3 percent under normal circumstances — not so far above the 2.5 percent that JPMorgan now predicts for the United States. That slower rate would be well off-track for a country that was, pre-pandemic, a driver of global economic growth. And there are more worrying signs for China too, including declining international trade, spiraling government debt and domestic property investment. On a global level, it is China that is the outlier rather than the United States. The inflation and job market woes seen in the United States are echoed across almost all major economies. Economists attribute this to government stimulus packages and structural unemployment during the pandemic, as well as increased spending after covid-19 subsided. In the United States and elsewhere, this presents an immediate political problem. While President Biden has claimed that his “Bidenomics” is creating a “soft landing” by bringing down inflation without causing a spike in unemployment, polls show that ahead of the election many Americansare still feeling the pinch of higher prices and fear a recession. The problems in China’s economy may also be a result of covid-19, but they are distinct — and perhaps more drastic. The country’s stringent response to the pandemic — the “zero covid” policy that implemented mass lockdowns, testing, quarantine and border control — may have saved far more lives than the less organized efforts in the United States and elsewhere, but it ended abruptly and chaotically, negating many of its successes. It may have left a far worse economic hangover. Writing in Foreign Affairs earlier this month, U.S. economic policy expert Adam Posen argued that what we are seeing now represented the “end of China’s economic miracle,” linking the strict covid-19 rules to a growing economic anxiety that causes people to hoard their money, despite low-interest rates, leading to deflation. Economists have also tracked a huge decrease in foreign direct investment in China, likely both a result of covid-19 restrictions and economic gloom in the country but also the trade war initiated by the Trump administration against Beijing. How bad could things get? One common point of comparison is Japan, another once-rising Asian economic power that caused major anxiety in Washington and Europe. Booming in the 1970s and 1980s, the bubble burst in the 1990s and the country entered decades of economic stagnation and deflation that effectively made its citizens poorer and its national debt more burdensome. But China of 2023 is not the Japan of 30 years ago. China has a population of 1.4 billion, more than 10 times the size of Japan even now. When adjusted for purchasing power, its economy has been bigger than the United States since 2015: Japan’s was never more than half the United States’. Moreover, Japan is a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. China is an autocracy that has become only more closed off over recent years. Even getting economic data is becoming more difficult, with the word “deflation” taboo in official language and an anti-espionage law making officialscautious of speaking to outside experts, even privately. “You’ve got an economic slowdown that would worry any country, coupled with a China that always likes to put on a brave face to the world and a leadership that is particularly image-conscious,” Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong, told the Financial Times. “Put those three factors together and it’s the recipe for a very non-transparent economy.” At the same time, there are persistent fears about China’s foreign policy intentions — President Xi Jinping has hinted at major action against the self-governing island of Taiwan, risking a global war that could drag the United States and others in. Just this week, The Washington Post broke the story of how China had infiltrated Japan’s defense networks. Japan’s economic fall to earth was a peaceful affair. In a New York Times column last month, economist Paul Krugman argued that the country had actually handled its key economic problem — a demographic shift from a young to an elderly society — relatively well. China, another aging society, faces a similar problem. It may not handle it anywhere near as well. “So, no, China isn’t likely to be the next Japan, economically speaking,” Krugman wrote. “It’s probably going to be worse.” For the rest of the world, that makes China’s economy one to watch closely. Any turmoil in the country could spark unexpected consequences elsewhere in the world, both economically and politically. As Posen writes, for the United States it could well be an opportunity to put this economic rivalry to bed. At the least, China’s dreams of economically eclipsing the United States may be forever delayed.