First off, the Chinese don't seek global hegemony like the Western powers, no matter what the projection and propaganda says. (This is far too big of a topic for short comment but the Chinese have never done Roman-style imperialism in all of their history. Also, according to my research, China hasn't made a new territorial claim in over 70 years, since the KMT era)
Second off, I did some comparisons on this website. I honestly wasn't sure what I was going to see but China's pyramid is better than all the "developed" countries and it really blows their East Asian neighbors out of the water. Therefore, I don't buy the argument that China is doomed by its demographics, unless we are saying that all the peer comparison nations are even more doomed.
I happen to believe that the Chinese are right and we are entering a New Chinese Century, with the Middle Kingdom once again the economic center of a prosperous and powerful Asia. They are on the cusp of completely defeating "containment", and have built an industrial ecosystem unlike anything the world has ever seen.
I totally agree that strategic missile defense technology is very destabilizing and dangerous. However like always, the enemy gets a vote.
Myself and others believe that in developing and announcing these weapon systems the Russians have achieved their goal of restoring their nuclear deterrent.
On that basis I would agree that I think tactical nukes would be the way the taboo is broken if it happens in our present cycle of instability.
I think it follows from the great power geopolitics logic except they are already too late. They failed to contain Brazil, and they can't even confidently bully Venezuela.
it seems like there is a division between North and South America. The Mexicans and Canadians have offered up essentially no resistance. Lots of failed States and vassals in Central America and the Caribbean. By contrast, it seems like South America is proving more difficult to subdue. By that same geographic logic, I think they will end up with domination over Greenland if they keep pursuing that strategy
it's possible that it is a short-term or rhetorical-only shift and the empire will continue overextending trying to control the whole world
Well nobody knows the future but the times are extremely dangerous. I'm not personally yet seeing signs that the logic of MAD is failing, but things could change very quickly, especially if there was a direct hot war and US forces were facing humiliating defeat.
I think our best hope lies in incompetence exceeding malevolence... Hardly comforting
They are fumbling now because of their hubris, overextension, and the contradictions of the system.
In the '90s, they believed that exposing China to capitalism would naturally and inevitably cause the fall of the Communist system, so they threw the doors wide open.
2001 is when China joined to the WTO and also when...9/11 happened, crippling and distracting the Western empire for two decades.
When Hillary Neocon Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, she unveiled with much fanfare the "pivot to Asia". The Obama administration spent the next 8 years trying to replicate the EU and NATO in Southeast Asia. (TPP and the Quad).
Trump-1 came into office and immediately withdrew the US from the TPP. He did some blustering and flailing around with tariffs, which people seemed to think constituted containment of China at the time.
Biden came into office and he and the other Western leaders sabotaged and escalated their way into the Ukraine war. (Read up on the Istanbul process before you get annoying in the replies, Libs). You can read The New Atlas for excellent analysis about how this is a substrategy for Chinese containment, which is an argument that I agree with. However, it had the effect of once again paralyzing, weakening, and distracting the Western imperial alliance.
Now we are in Trump-2. He committed perhaps the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the US empire when he went on the attack against India with tariffs to try and separate them from Russia. This blew black in the most spectacular fashion by driving them closer to Russia and kicking off a rapprochement with China that is still bearing diplomatic fruit to this day. Therefore, we can say that Trump severely weakened the overall strategic plan for the Asia Pacific region by single-handedly preventing TPP and the Quad from coming into force as tools of the US empire (for the forseable future), unlike NATO and the EU.
At the present day, the empire is struggling to extricate itself from Ukraine without having a Kabul / Saigon moment. The Western armories are bare, having sent everything they can spare and very much they could not spare in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the proxy conflict. The F-35 fighter jet is STILL NOT OPERATIONAL ACCORDING TO THE PROGRAM'S OWN DEFINITION. By contrast, at the 80-year commemoration parade, the Chinese unveiled no fewer than a dozen new weapon systems, many a generation or more ahead of their US counterparts.
They are failing everywhere and cannot admit it. A humiliating defeat in Ukraine is inevitable, now the only question is whether the Russians will end up with Odessa. American warships are powerless against Chinese hypersonic cruise missiles. Japan tried to ramp up the rhetoric on Taiwan only to get slapped down by the US. We are witnessing the death throes of a wounded animal with suicidally inflated ego. Unfortunately, this wounded animal also has nuclear weapons, so it's a very dangerous time for all of us.
Remind me, which international alliance was putting its full military and financial support behind these "goat herders" during the failed US occupation?
Hello 'worlder, welcome to the side of the fediverse outside of the NATO media bubble.
If you want to know the truth, I will lay down a trail. If you literally respond to this by calling me a Russian troll then you are a joke. If the Russians could actually do informational warfare as well as the West none of us would be having this conversation.
The 2014 coup was orchestrated by the United States and brought a radical Nazi faction called the Banderites into power in Ukraine.
The Banderites spent the next 7 years conducting a genocidal campaign in the Donbass against ethnolinguistic Russians.
Over those 7 years the West sabotaged and undermined three separate peace agreements, known as Minsk one and two and Istanbul. These facts have even been documented in the western press. Look up Angela Merkel conceding that the only point of the Minsk agreements was to stall and rearm the Ukrainians, and look up how Boris Johnson sabotaged the Istanbul agreement.
Now that that history is out of the way we can talk about the present day. The Russians are completely dominant on the battlefield. The Ukrainian military is in an advanced stage of collapse. Despite this, the Ukrainians and Europeans are continuing to sabotage peace talks by making completely absurd demands (as the party that is LOSING BADLY). The reason this is happening is because the point of the war from the beginning was to weaken Russia. Unfortunately for them this might be the greatest backfire in human history. They are extremely unable to cope with this, hence the hysteria and nonsense.
If I literally had any fucking money to spare, I would buy gold in Singapore as a hedge against the massive money printing that will have to come because of the brewing pan-Western sovereign debt crisis.... As it is just trying to save this paper money and buckle up for whatever comes
Who needs strategic autonomy when you can have vassalage and managed decline?