[AYBABTME]

I mostly agree with everything you say, I just see the balance lying elsewhere on the spectrum. I think China is on it's way to securing its energy supplies with renewables but not quite there, and that the US is taking this window of opportunities to do what it can to attempt to degrade China.

Whether China plans to actually invade or blockade Taiwan or not doesn't matter if the US thinks it will. AFAICT the US is convinced it will, and the mere threat of this is enough to justify Venezuela and Iran, I believe. Higher oil prices are less worse than no more semiconductors.

And I think Russia might have gained some territory, but at the cost of being completely sucked into the conflict, having lost strategically by (1) being unable to support and defend its proxies and (2) having its arsenal and technology thoroughly analyzed and proven ineffective against US weapons. All actors involved know this and it will not remain, but until solved this means that the US knows it can strike countries defended by Russian weapons, at least until counter measures are researched, developed and distributed. This is a temporary advantage and moment of clarity that lasts a few years, not a sustained advantage.

The risk of the US being equally sucked into Iran and suffering the same fate is very high. And China's best strategy here is probably to sit and wait and help US opponents keep the US busy for a while, like the US did on Ukraine with Russia.

[jmyeet]

The US is an arms dealer empire. It's economic strength and power come from its ability to sell weapons. The military budget is pushing $1 trillion (and probably will exceed it with supplemental funding for the Iran boondoggle). Rumor has it the administration will be asking for $1.5 trillion in the next Budget. That is a staggering and utterly unsustainable level of spending. Most of that is going to defense contractors.

The US doesn't want to live in a multipolar world. It wants to remain the hegemonic global superpower, basically to make a handful of really wealthy people even more wealthy at the expensive of everyone else.

So do I believe the US wants to treat China like an enemy that "needs" to be degraded? Absolutely. Do I think it should be that way or has to be that way? Absolutely not. But that is a minority position in US political circles. One thing the Republicans and Democrats are united on is the US imperialist project.

You have a handful of candidates like Graham Platner who think the path forward with China is one of cooperation not competition [1]. The Democratic Party, just like the Republican Party, hates this kind of rhetoric. That's what we're dealing with.

Part of selling that is convincing everyone is that China is or wants to do the exact same imperialism that the US is doing. What's China actually doing? The Belt and Road Initiative [2] where China basically sues its massive trade surplus to go around the world and build ports, airports and roads and to fund mines, farms, power plants and oil and gas. All on significantly better terms than the World Bank and IMF offer [3], so much so that Africa is considered "lost" to US interests in favor of China.

Fun fact: the United States Africa Command is headquartered in Germany [4]. Why? Because no African country wants it. It's one region where the US only has a handful of bases (eg Djibouti, Kenya).

When the country that produces most of the world's weapons is telling you that there's some big military threat that can only be solved by selling more weapons I just ask: consider the source.

[1]: https://x.com/PollTracker2024/status/2028936316285546537

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative

[3]: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/chinese-and-world-bank-len...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Africa_Command

[CMay]

You have to be corrected on a few critical things. The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for. The geographic perfection it lucked into. The allies it has (which, despite appearances, are still there.) The economic influence it has. The human talent it has soaked up from around the world as people moved to the US.

China can't replicate any of those things in the next 100 years. They are also handicapped by their ideology, which weakens their capacity to work the necessary logic for critical outcomes. They've tried and failed to achieve some kind of belt and road initiative to make up a bit of the difference in their supply chain dependencies. They've tried and failed to clone so many of our technologies, but what gets promoted are the ones they've succeeded at.

One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"

China constantly contradicts itself about its ambitions. What you need to understand, from all this stuff you've been writing in this thread, is that China is no longer China. That great history, so much of its critical culture from the past. It's all trashed. China is now communist. It's now what communism wants, not what China wants or needs. Taiwan isn't about reunification with a brother, it's about communists crushing democracy.

If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism. Comintern believed that communism could not co-exist with capitalism, so communism would have to be established globally. This threatened Japanese and German sovereignty. Granted, the Japanese and Germans had their own ideological problems, but just the threat of global communist expansion was enough to start a race for global resource control.

We downplay this about WW2, but if you want to understand anything about US national strategy, it is that we have been hedging our resource control against a potential flaring up of global communist ambitions again.

Now what is China doing? They're building the largest military in history that has no use other than expanding. Xi Jinping is purging his military like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland.

The contradiction about communist ideology is that it is anti-western and anti-imperialism, but the success of communism is that it has to become western to suck less and it has to manufacture a psychological empire to succeed. Western "empires" have largely been a result of good fortune in water access. The US is the absolute pinnacle of that. Russia and China are worse off and since they are at a disadvantage there, the alternative is psychological expansion.

China is trying to make up the difference by using a massive population, but the entire logic around it is weak. China is easy to choke off and scale down. It would go the same way World War 1 and World War 2 went, except with more turmoil in each other's countries. It's easier now than ever to project power from inside enemy's countries than to need to send ships and missiles thousands of miles to reach them. The issue is that, China is more fragile in this regard than the US is in every regard despite all their social controls.

[jmyeet]

> The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for.

This is high school propaganda. It's classic "they hate us because of our freedom" nonsense.

What principles? America was established on white supremacy, slavery, genocide, religious intolerance and exploitation. The government we formed was by and for wealthy white slaveowners.

Do you know when the last slave ship survivor died? It was 1940. Slavery survived in practice well beyond Emancipation. Forced servitude existed up until 1941 [1] and that only happened because of the propaganda threat from World War 2.

You're right about the geographical "luck" (other than, you know, the whole genocide part of it).

> [China is] also handicapped by their ideology

No, they're not. The reason the US goes after communist and socialist governments so vehemently is because any success threatens capitalism, not the other way around. If these systems were all doomed to fail, why can't we simply serve as a good example? Why do we need to militarily intervene, overthrow governments and starve countries that dare do anything different? Don't you find that odd?

China has transformed itself over recent decades and brought ~800 million people out of extreme poverty in the last century. All while living conditions and infrastructure crumbles in the West.

> One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"

I don't know what point you think you're making with this. It can just as easily be used to justify imperialism because "we don't like anyone else succeeding". What kind of argument is that? If anyone needs to be contained, it's the US military, actually.

> China is now communist.

This isn't really true in practice. Sure it's the Chinese Communist Party and you may see labels like "socialist/communist transitional state" but what China really is is a command economy [2]. Chinese people have seen their standard of living change massively in their lifetimes. What do we do? Further concentrate wealth in the hands of the 10,000 richest people because it matters that Jeff Bezos has $210 billion instead of $200 billion.

> If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism.

This is hitorically revisionist nonsense. Communism (if you define the USSR as such) saved Europe by defeating Nazi Germany at terrible cost. Stalin tried to warn Britain and France about Hitler and form an anti-Hitler alliance. Britain and France refused.. Japan was imperialist. Germany was imperialist. WW2 started at near the peak of the British Empire. Communism didn't cause the Rape of Nanking or the Holocaust or Japanese internment in the US.

For the rest of it, all I can say is "read a book".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_slavery_in_the_United_S...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy

[CMay]

You're making a lot of weak arguments that aren't based in real historical context.

Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism. You could argue there were reformers in past decades that held sway, but he doesn't want to see himself get replaced with a reformer.

There has never been a communist state, when we talk about communists we talk about movements that aspire to communism. Maybe the old CCP operated things more like a command economy, but today's China is more like planned mercantilism, which is a weaker regression from "capitalism" which is itself an inaccurate Marxist caricature of how regulated free markets actually work. The CCP leadership are very firmly Marxist-Leninist.

Industrialization amplified power potentials of trade and production, which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them both. Look at the first actions Japan took and who made those decisions and what they were concerned about. Look at the first actions the nazis took in Germany, look at who they allied with Japan against, look at the book Hitler wrote about the threat he saw, look at who he labeled and what he did with them.

Russia is the largest country on Earth, by accident? No, because it expands its empire. China is huge, because it's never expanded its empire, it was just born that way? No, it has taken over adjacent regions and expanded its culture. It even tried to expand into Russia, but Russia threatened to nuke them.

Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism. Marxist global expansion is itself a contradiction, because they hate imperialism, and yet aim to achieve the same goals. Communist International in the USSR was a prime enemy that Japan and Germany allied against. The US got Stalin to dissolve Comintern to try to deflate German and Japanese motivations, but also because the US was very anti-communist. We just saw Germany and Japan as the more immediate threats to the world.

Russia couldn't have beaten Germany without aid being shipped in from the US constantly.

What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.

Personally, looking at the kind of things you write, I think you should step way back, forget everything you've been taught and instead focus on the fundamentals. Go back into history and just understand the basic behaviors of countries, like they are organisms. How trade, industry, economy, military, geography, psychology, culture, communication, transportation, demographics, power imbalances, etc all contribute to the various behaviors and outcomes. Then you can say, ok, there are all of these details, but how many of the details are just....details and not the trend?

The threat that China poses is unmistakable. They have the warped ideology, societal repression, information control, massive state propaganda, most rapid military build-up in history, they have the largest global network of spies in history, they're threatening almost all of their neighbors (not just Taiwan) and so on. The list just keeps going.

If you think the US should simply sit back and watch it unfold without pushing back at all...yeah, we're not that naive.

[jmyeet]

> Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism.

Good. It also doesn't make China Communist, let alone establish that "Communism = bad" as you assert.

> ... which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them bot

Are you really saying that Japan and Germany had to do Imperialism and the Holocaust because there was a Communist movement in their countries? Really? That's one of the silliest things I've ever read.

> Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism.

Fascism is capitalism in crisis. Fascism and imperialism are the ultimate forms of capitalism. "The threat of a more equitable distribution of wealth made us kill millions" is the biggest pro-capitalist cope.

> What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.

Most (if not all) wars since 1945 were instigated by or materially supplied by the US. Saddam Hussein was our puppet until he wasn't. We even looked past him using chemical weapons on Kurds and feigned indignation only when he turned on us. Weird. We them fueled the Iran-Iraq war for 10 years killing more than a million. We then starved the Iraqis for a decade before killing millions more of them in the so-called "War on Terror" when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 all while ignoring Saudi Arabia who materially supported 9/11. We even covered for the Saudi involvement.

The world would be a demonstrably better place without the US.

> The list just keeps going.

I once heard a quote that the only thing Americans know about is WW2 and they don't know much about that. You're making that point. Repression? You mean like locking up and deporting them for saying "Free Palestine"? Oh wait, that's us.

History will judge the US as the Evil Empire, with or without your DARVO.

[CMay]

You're ignoring things I already stated, such as communism is an aspiration. So of course China is not realized communism, because communism has never been realized at the national scale. The people in charge however, are absolutely communists.

Do you know why Hitler blamed the Jewish people and had them separated out? He blamed the Jewish Bolshevik revolutions in Germany for causing Germany to lose World War 1. Hitler's actual belief was that Bolshevism was a Jewish mechanism to achieve global control. Bolshevism is born out of Marxism and is essentially communist. The "headquarters" of communism was Comintern in Russia. Many of the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia and elsewhere were Jewish. Marxism also comes from Karl Marx, who was Jewish.

This is why he put Jewish people in concentration camps, because he believed with conviction that they were a threat to German sovereignty. This is also why he planned from the very beginning to attack Russia, even while temporarily allying with them. Japan also saw Marxist revolution inside China as a threat to its sovereignty, but it ended up fighting both the communists and the anti-communists.

Obviously many atrocities were committed in these wars. We are lucky that the US saved Russia and China, because they are much weaker adversaries than an expansive Germany or Japan had they conquered their respective regions.

We didn't start World War 1, but we helped finish it. We didn't start World War 2, but we helped finish it. We didn't start the Korean war, the communists did backed by Russia. We didn't start the Vietnam war, but it probably started similarly.

We didn't put Saddam Hussein in power and he was never our puppet, but Iran was a much greater threat than Iraq was and that's why we provided him weapons when he was fighting Iran. Saddam Hussein was afraid of the Islamic revolution and saw it as an existential threat. There were border fights even beforehand. Saudi Arabia also saw the Islamic revolution in Iran as essentially the next Hitler. The reason that war started, was because Iran was trying to export its Islamic Revolution into Iraq, which is the same thing it's been doing again in recent years. Yes, Saddam eventually became a problem for us, but it's more nuanced than you present it.

There are a lot of details around 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan that maybe you aren't aware of, but I don't feel like going into them at present.

Both Marxist movements and Islamic movements have these kinds of extreme radical qualities about them that countries feel the need to defend against. When a country has any sort of power, it gains some capacity to export its way of thinking through investing people, funding and even hardware into that goal.

China is simultaneously threatening to export its ideology in psychological warfare and expand militarily.

I guess you'll never believe any of this, anything else I say or research any of this objectively to decide if it has merit. I can't fix that, that's up to you.