| 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 |
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.