Comments on Belmont Club "Pakistan again"

How will nuclear war calculate into the whole environmental sensitivity posture? Will Al Gore have enough carbon credits to trade to cover that?

Didn't BHO himself say at one point "When I actually do something I'll tell you?"

The Indians and the Chinese have to sit down and decide what the end game will look like. The Indians can't move if the Chinese can stab them in the back. I predict Endlosung in Tibet and a Chinese Corridor to the Iranian gas fields.

To spin out my South and East Asian concepts, the question is how stable is China going forward? If the loss of export markets breaks the urban economies hard enough then they will not be able to function as safety valves for rural poverty. The basic communist model has always been to fund urban industrialization by extracting resources from the rural peasantry. The refinement in the last 20 years has been that the incredibly productive Americans, especially wealth creating farmers, have stepped in to help. The chinese regime has no inherent legitimacy except for inertia. It really is a pure fascism but stripped of even the ideological pretensions that underlay Mussolini. If urban stability cracks under the pressure of 30,000,000 unemployed then the unrest that comes from poverty and corruption always left simmering in the countryside could explode. China could dissolve and do so more violently than the Soviet Union did. So the big question is does China expand like a Red Giant or collapse like a white dwarf? India needs to act fast with regard to Pakistan and can not wait while China sorts itself out.

Someday. somewhere Ngo Diem, Haile Sellassie, Perez Musharraf and Reza Pahlevi will get to play Bridge together.