| > It doesn't sound like fatalism at all. Recognizing and accepting reality - things as they actually are - isn't the same thing as being fatalistic. As opposed to being wildly delusional about the context for example, which is the guiding philosophy of the do-something-to-stop-China cohort. You can't stop China as they imagine it and thinking that it's possible is quite irrational. Accepting reality? Years of life in China will make anybody lose touch with one, especially living in the most Potemkin town of them all. > It's why whenever people talk about ganging up on China, they're always extremely vague about it. That's because it's entirely bunk. Do something! What? Something! Do a thing! Which thing? The thing! It's identical to bumper stickers that (used to) say: Save Tibet, it's largely empty virtue signaling or wishful thinking. It's not realistic. First, the West has a giant arsenal of means not simply "to do something", but outright destroy China as a state. The West remains the preeminent political, military, economic power of the world by a giant extend, way more than China, Russia, Iran + 10 other rouge states combined. You don't "contain" your enemy, you defeat him, this is how the West needs to start thinking. — It's a giant power, the West only needs to use it. The West has a way more means than China has to do anything to the West. The direct military attack being only one of many things possible on the list. It's just the Western unwillingness to admit that it can do something, because admitting to it will be be followed by a compulsion of doing so. West's internal problems are a malaise of heart, while its problem with China is a malaise of mind. The material problems can be fixed, but what's being kept created by your own mind cannot: the Western fixation on impotent "realpolitik China strategy" is one of this kind, and its fixation on China's economic strength is another. China as a state entity existing in a physical world is much a lesser threat, and danger than the China which exists in the heads of Western elites, and all kinds of wormtongue "strategy advisers", Kissingers, and co. I'm fully agreeing on the point that the West can't win without a dramatic change happening inside their heads first. For the West to defeat China, first it will need to defeat itself, and own weaknesses, all what holds it back. Foreign policy making wormridden by "political strategists," pathological addiction to backstabbing of critical allies, refusal to look at politics from classic military dimension; Elite culture dominated by defeatist people selling wholesale "China model" koolaid like Tim Cook, and Sundarajan Pichai, universal hostility to useful business, and industry by political backstabbers, useful idiots, and wanton saboteurs-profiteers; The giant Trump electorate, you will have to find a way to live along with these people, but that doesn't mean surrendering to them! Propaganda of inaction, and isolationism exactly of this kind led to US staying out of WW2 until it was tool late; |