Showing posts with label Hegemonic Transition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hegemonic Transition. Show all posts
10 January 2009
21 May 2008
Welcome home, Dear (Dr.?) de Montebello
Met Director Will Become Professor at N.Y.U. Institute
I should have bet money on this.
29 April 2008
I can't wait to start clinging to guns and religion...
So we all know that my adopted "province" (oh, so provincial), Ohio, has a massive and well-deserved inferiority complex, both in comparison with present Others and past Self. Now, my home province, Ontario is poised to join the ranks of the embittered.
08 February 2008
A New Arms Race?
Or rhetoric for domestic consumption (in Russia and abroad)?
The BBC reports that Putin, addressing his advisory state council, declared in response to NATO missile-defense deployments, that "It is already clear that a new phase in the arms race is unfolding in the world."
Time for a brief reality check / hastily-researched figures and back of the envelope calculations...
PPP-adjusted GDPs: United States, $13,860,000,000,000; Russia, $2,076,000,000,000 (CIA factbook).
Looking just at the U.S. and Russia, the former in 2005 spent 4.06% of its GDP on the military. Russia's numbers are not known, but making a brief calculation it would have to spend roughly $562.7 PPP-adjusted US dollars, or 27% of its GDP annually, to match U.S. defense spending. Since it has a fair degree of catchup to do in order to, as Putin implied, restart an arms race in hi-tech weaponry, it would probably have to spend considerably more. According to globalsecurity.org, Russia budgeted in 2006 $22.3 billion (non-PPP adjusted) for its military, already a 23% increase on the previous year. A new armaments program for the years 2007-2015 was also announced in the sum of $186 billion - but it's unclear whether how much of this sum would be on top of annual military spending. In brief, Russia doesn't seem to be the best-positioned candidate for an "arms race" with the United States - even before counting the other NATO countries.
Of course, both countries continue to possess the ability to destroy the world several times over, which leads to the question: what exactly would they be racing toward?
My half-baked attempt to rationally assess the likelihood of Putin's remarks being meant seriously, of course, falls easy victim to the observation that there doesn't need to be a rational basis or real material capability in order to construct an "arms race," as attested to by the late Cold War from, say, 1970 onward.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
