| > The dependence between China and the West works both ways, and yet look what is happening. Yes it does, but the economies of the West are so far and beyond Russia that China is not at least publicly taking a strong pro-Russia stance. > Regardless of the reasoning why it should not, the direction is clear, and it won't be the first time that economies have been terribly damaged due to security concerns. We'll just have to leave this one to the history books. I'm not exactly sure what you are talking about here. Would you care to elaborate? For example, I wouldn't say any direction is clear. History and humanity is far too crazy and unpredictable for that. But if I had to take a stab I'd say the direction that's clear here is that the West and its diplomatic resolve was far stronger than China or Russia anticipated, and China would prefer to stay in salvageable graces with the West than to meaningfully assist Russia - if anything it seeks to take advantage of Russia's weakened position. > Much of the rest you write is true, but once again we come to production and transportation costs. If the price of extraction and transportation drops below a profitable level over the long term, production will drop. If Russia can extract and transport gas at a lower energy cost than any other producer can do the same for Europe, Europe will have an increased disadvantage in manufacturing until sufficiently cheap alternatives are built. You're certainly aware of this, so I'm not even clear what we're debating here. Idk either because I was mostly responding to your specific comment regarding American strategists "being concerned" as you noted. I noted that European countries can bring online alternative energy sources, and that the energy market is more global (oil and gas specifically) so China buying Russian gas wasn't as big of a deal to American strategists as you implied. I'm not sure the relevancy here of production and transportation costs specifically and even more specifically without specific analysis. As I noted previously, there are different grades of oil, for example. Just because a pipeline comes online doesn't mean that all of a sudden China has cheap oil and nobody else does, particularly because all they are doing is replacing suppliers in some instances and not in other instances. In the case where they are replacing suppliers those suppliers either have to take production offline, or they have to sell elsewhere. If China's demand is 100 barrels and they get 50 from Russia and 50 from Saudi Arabia and then they now get 60 from Russia and 40 from Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia is still going to sell those 10 barrels (now available on the market) or lower supply to protect prices. Again this is also an oversimplification! Nobody has provided anything other than armchair economics. You're trying to vastly simplify the global energy and oil and gas markets to make a point, but I'm largely rejecting that point for the reasons stated previously and also here. |