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Yeah because you outsourced the crap out of them and then acted surprised when they leveraged that economic power.
On the other hand, China is also probably the one country where they successfully kept the CIA out. Can't coup your way out of this one.
"Electoral interference" is illegal, but "shaping and changing the PRC" is just business.
You are giving a very sinister lean to shaping and changing. I think its clear that they wanted China to be another Japan, not any number of failed coups in the middle east or Central/South America.
The only reason there wasn't a coup in Japan like a lot of other south/east asian countries is that after the aftermath of WW2 there was no need of one
A nation of 330 million cannot control a nation that has 1 billion more people. Nations should also be free to choose their own destiny. A logical fallacy many in the West fall for is assuming the rest of the world wants to be like them and should be like them. If I have a 3000 or 4000 year-old civilization why should I take marching orders from a baby state that’s not even 300 years old like the US?
The British Empire and basically the world was controlled by a single city of ~1million. And besides the historical and current examples of smaller cities controlling much more land and people then they had themselves, the statement doesn't make sense. Why can't a nation of 330 million control a nation of 331million?
Those days are long past and were a historical anomaly. We live in a world where Afghanistan defeated the US-led coalition forces.
Nations should also be free to choose their own destiny.
Dictatorships are not about choice.
Turns out "hopefully they'll be less cunty when they get rich and powerful" may not have been the most sound strategy.
"... holding in one’s head multiple truths at the same time and working iteratively to reconcile them."
That sounds really hard, have you tried cognitive dissonance?
Just a few weeks ago, Taiwan held historic elections without any major cross-Strait incident, in part because all sides — Washington, Beijing, and Taipei — worked to reduce miscommunication and misperception about their respective intentions. That is an outcome few may have foreseen in August of 2022, when most expected the cross-Strait situation to grow more tense, not less. But it’s no guarantee of future trends, and the risk remains real.
This approach has been the hallmark of Biden's foreign policy. They're working behind the scenes subtly and competently, making progress in ways that doesn't really track with the 24-hour news cycle and clickbait journalism. It's good to see the efforts paying off, but they really, REALLY need to work on their messaging.
Beijing has never cared much about the result of this Taiwanese election because the majority of Taiwanese support improving relations with China (see: votes for KMT, TPP). This entire claim of "tense cross-Strait relations" is a manufactured concern so Biden can knock a win.
The most significant recent tension in cross-Strait relations has been the declaration of the Taiwan Strait as international waters (induced largely by FONOPS declaring it as such) and the ending of some of Taiwan's special economic statuses for trade with China (induced largely by increased arms trade with foreign powers). Everything else is just posturing to save face on both sides.
That's nonsense, even if you pretend Taiwan is a part of China, which is clearly nothing more than a useful fiction for all parties, there is a space even at the narrowest point of the straight that is just EEZ. Which is a region that is free to navigate but the host country has exclusive rights to minerals, fishing etc within that region.
This is just strictly not true, otherwise Canada's Northwest Passage would be considered EEZ and not part of internal waters. EEZ is drawn from the extant point outside of the baseline.
Turns out you can't do regime change through the threat of genocide on a country with a bigger military than you. Go figure.
BRICS nations like China are desperately trying to move off the dollar, which is a major tool of US control. The problem is, nobody trust the Yuan, the Ruble, or any of their other fiat currencies. They can't trust each other, so the US remains the global currency hegemon. But that is a privileged position it basically only got because everybody else was blown up after the world wars. The US's position in this area will continue to erode.
There is a fantastic overview of how the US uses the dollar to control other countries and extract trillions of dollars from them while keeping them in a cycle of debt. The Human Rights Foundation https://youtu.be/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009 and another one on how France abuses its currency influence in Africa to keep the colonial legacy alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg&pp=ygUxaG93IGZyYW5jZSBjb250cm9scyBlbnRpcmUgZWNvbm9taWVzIGZyYW5jb2RvbGxhcg%3D%3D
What will replace it? My bet is on Bitcoin. A few smaller nations (Ecuador, Argentina, El Salvador) have embraced it as a way to reduce the control the US has over their economies. The blowback from the world bank, IMF etc has been very telling. They do not like the idea of a country that doesn’t want to get stuck in a cycle of debt, restructuring, and subservience to the dollar. Throughout history, countries have had to choose between minting their own currency which many lack the political stability to do, or using the currency of another country as the expense of their own sovereignty. But now there is Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a politically neutral currency that cannot be controlled by any nation state or even group of nation-states. It is immune to corruption and human error. It just works well to send money from A to B and nobody can cheat it. It's market cap is 850 billion dollars, that puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On par with Switzerland. Higher than sweden. Higher than Israel. Higher than vietnam.
Bitcoin's fiscal policy is clear and predictable. 21 million coins will be minted. No more, no less. And if you have a private key, you can spend your coins. Nobody else can spend them. It has kept that promise for 15 years. 365 days a year. 7 days a week. 24 hours a day. Without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or a single hack. And there's no reason to think it can't keep that promise another 15. The incentives and security mechanisms built into Bitcoin the past 15 are the same it will have the next 15.
Anybody can use Bitcoin with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. With Bitcoin lightning, you can send an international transaction in under a second for pennies in fees. No credit check required, no middlemen, no nonsense. It doesn't matter if your country doesn't have stable banking infrastructure or a government constantly devaluing your currency. And it does all of this with less than 1% of global energy usage, mostly from renewables, since miners tend to chase the cheapest electricity which tends to be made from renewables at off-peak hours.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
