by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
On May 3rd, Japan’s NikkeiAsia headlined “China and India to drive half of 2023’s global economic growth: IMF”, and opened:
China and India will account for more than half of this year’s global growth, the International Monetary Fund predicts, underscoring the Asia-Pacific region’s strength amid rising uncertainty over the U.S. economy.
The IMF forecast in April that Asia-Pacific real gross domestic product will increase 4.6% in 2023, an upgrade of 0.3 percentage point from last October’s projection. It sees the global economy expanding 2.8%.
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China will contribute 34.9% of the global growth, and India 15.4%, according to the IMF. These add up to 50.3%.
The Asia-Pacific region as a whole is projected to drive about 70% of global international economic growth, increasing its presence as Western growth slows. …
Asia has natural advantages over America. At the end of World War II, America was undamaged but Europe and Asia were devastated. The U.S. Government thus basically controlled the world. But that was a temporary situation, and America is now clearly a declining power, even though the people who control it (its few super-rich) are showing that they’re willing to risk going to a world-destroying World War Three (against Russia and China) in order to prevent Asia’s natural advantages from relocating the world’s economic and political dominance there. It’s a losing American effort, but the question is whether those Americans’ resistance to that natural economic and political move to Asia will hold out until the result is WW III (the American billionaires’ last gasp for global dominance) and everyone loses (because that’d be the way a WW III would end: lose-lose instead of win-lose, and the exact opposite of win-win).
The world’s largest continent is Afro-EurAsia, which has 57% of the planet’s land-area and 86% of its human population. Asia is, by far, the largest landmass, and it’s the eastern 82% of the largest northern continent, which is EurAsia. Asia has 30% of this planet’s land, and 60% of the planet’s human population. Europe has 6.8% of the planet’s land, and 10% of its population. All of those areas are within the vast Afro-EurAsian continent. They thus all have land-access to each other, which is a great natural advantage. By contrast, the entire Western Hemisphere, including all of the Americas, has only 29% of the planet’s land, and only 12% of its population. It’s just a very large island (as compared to the continent of Afro-EurAsia).
To be on the Afro-EurAsian continent is to have land-access to 86% of the planet’s population. To be in the Western Hemisphere is to have land-access to only 12% of its population.
A ship that crosses the thousands of miles of an ocean, in order to send goods to another continent, has far fewer stopovers en-route to also sell en-route to, as does a truck or train or plane that might have hundreds of such stopovers en-route, to which it also can sell those goods. Also, picking up goods while shipping across an ocean can’t be done at even nearly as many stopovers as land-travel offers.
Russia in northern EurAsia is by far the world’s largest country at 17 million square kilometers and consequently also has more natural resources than any other country does. China in southern Asia borders on Russia and, just as Russia by far leads the world in natural resources, China by far leads the world in human resources.
Furthermore: not only do those two giant countries complement each other, but they share the same ideology, which rejects any imperialism as a matter of basic principle, and requires win-win games instead of the win-lose games that America and its vassal nations (‘allies’) require (they call it “supremacy” or “hegemony”).
Furthermore: all of the Third World or “global south” suffered being vassal nations in European and American empires, and therefore know that imperialism is evil, and that what’s needed instead is only win-win games — the ideology that Russia and China advocate.
Consequently: the billionaires who run America won’t likely get the cooperation they are seeking from the global south to join the U.S. empire’s war to conquer Russia and China.
There is a fictitious lore in America that in the 1800s a widespread belief was “Go west, young man”, but at the present stage in human history, more realistic advice would be “Go east, young person,” or, in particular, for young persons to consider relocating to China, Russia, or at least to countries in Asia that are friendly to those two.
What does this mean regarding U.S.-and-allied countries? Regarding Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, it means saying no to the U.S. Government’s demands, since those demands are for war against both China and Russia. Regarding European countries, it means the same thing — and the U.S. regime’s blowing-up the Nord Stream pipelines in order to cut off the lowest-cost energy supplies to Europe, which were from Russia, displays how toxic the continued adherence to U.S. commands is and will be. Regarding Latin American countries, it also means that continued adherence to U.S. commands will mean following in America’s footsteps the path to decline.
