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America Can’t Surpass China’s Power in Asia, But It Can Still Prevent Chinese Hegemony
(www.foreignaffairs.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Remember when the USA stopped supplying the Japanese with oil during world War 2? The USA has a gigantic military presence in Japan and laws governing their military, you want them to just leave and let Japan "do their thing"?
Yes, the US should close ALL of their foreign military bases and just let the countries “do their thing”. The world would demonstrably be a better place. We are the baddies
You're an American? Wow, must be sad waking up every day thinking you're the bad guy. Especially, as you look into your smart phone screen, you realize it took a global economy to make that piece of technology and a free society to allow the freedom of information flow that you can read.
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And I’m sorry, but if you are an American and think anything less than, “holy shit, we are the most evil society to ever exist” then you are either incredibly ignorant or a psychopath.
There's plenty of evil to go around for every country, so I'm not sure where you're going with that.
I know that you don’t know and that’s what’s so frustrating. I’m so sick of you holy than thou liberals. You really are more despicable than conservatives who are simply lizard brain sadists. Simply look at how many deaths we are responsible for compared to LITERALLY EVERY OTHER COUNTRY OR HORRIFIC REGIME EVER. How much suffering we are responsible for, how many people we have incarcerated compare to LITERALLY EVERY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. How many homeless people we have, children suffering from food insecurity, racial disparities at all levels of society from access to education, housing, food. How everyone is always toiling away so that they don’t end up homeless and on the streets. Medical debt, educational debt. Things that don’t even exist in actual civilized societies. And that’s not even touching the surface of our horrific foreign policy since our existence. Constantly looking for new people to enslave and exploit.
I’m tired of making excuses for ignorant liberals after seeing their reaction to Oct. 7th. Yeah, you’re the pathetic product of your material conditions, but if you can’t see that you are the German populace quietly supporting the Nazi regime in 1930s Germany then truly history is meant to repeat itself.
Read some theory. It covers all of that
I love it when both libs and conservatives don’t realize that I understand their position better than they do.
The US was literally a state sponsor of Japan's invasion of China, over the course of which more Chinese people were murdered than during the Great Leap Forward. The US was the single primary supplier of oil, steel, iron, copper, and essentially everything that Japan needed to wage war in China from 1937 until 1941 (when the bulk of Chinese casualties occurred due Japanese atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre). Without the US, Japan would not have stood a chance.
Henceforth why the USA did an oil embargo on Japan. Then Japan sneaked attacked the USA for doing that (pearl harbor). Sucks what happened to China, but not everything is America's fault.
Ok, maybe I wasn't clear enough for you.
80% of Japan's oil was from the US. Similar numbers held for steel, iron, bauxite, etc. The US wasn't a war profiteerer in a sea of war profiteers, but the sole reason Japan was able to invade mainland China in the first place. If the US had not supplied Japan, the Pacific Theatre would not exist. 20 million Chinese civilians need not have died.
It's absurd the level of apologism some people have for what was plainly genocidal foreign policy. If the war had ended in November of 1941, America would have been remembered as the key foundation of the Axis Powers in the Pacific.
There's a theory that the US, UK, and France were in fact not perturbed by the rise of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The primary geopolitical foe of Germany was the Soviet Union, and of Japan was China. Both these countries were, if not governed by communists, seeing communism rise rapidly. They were also clear targets, given their richness of resources and geographical proximity. That's why the UK and France signed the Munich Agreement and the US supplied Japan to such a degree - the hope being that the fighting would stamp out the communist threat and allow the "civilized" powers to sweep in and subjugate a battered Germany and Japan. In fact, this isn't really a theory: French and British leaders at the time basically admitted as much.
What could you possibly be implying? I have no idea what you could possibly think would happen if the USA just stopped dominating Japan.
If you don't know what I'm implying, look at what Japan did before the USA joined ww2
Are you implying that there's something inherent in Japanese people that would cause them to revert back to committing atrocities and that the only thing stopping them is the USA dominating them while the USA commits atrocities? Of course that would also be coupled with the belief that the atrocities the USA commits are not inherent in the American people, right?
It's nothing against the people of Japan, but their geography. They need to import their oil and lots of other stuff, so if they didn't have major global allies and markets, the country would need to lash out.
Obviously the first question you asked is loaded, so I won't answer it. Any atrocities committed by American actions are obviously bad, but you'd have to be more specific about what atrocities for me to answer.
So Japan is a risk because of resource scarcity? Someone really needs to get on dominating Europe.
America seems to think that, just because they were the global hegemon, that any rising power also seeks hegemony by military power.
Historically, this is supported by the post-Cold War context: the Warsaw Pact, NATO, and US enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine maintained American dominance in the West.
But then, the USSR collapsed. It's a new world, old man.
It’s the projection of hegemonic capitalist imperialism, that can’t see things through any other lens than capitalist imperialism. It’s so hegemonic that even most of the non-wealthy see it this way, be they “conservative,” “liberal,” or even “ultra-leftist”.
Is there any evidence that China wouldn't want to be a hegemon?
Yes. They are Marxist, from their founding through today, with everyone from peasants to school children studying some of the most advanced political science developed to date. This understanding of the world concludes that global hegemony is unsustainable and leads to total social collapse. There are other ways to succeed that don't inherently involve failure. China has no interest in failing in the exact same way Western Europe and the USA are failing. They have no interest in building an empire that will, by all analysis, collapse. They want to build something better, not equally terrible.
Yes, just look at the BRI compared to the US interventions in the global south
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Their latest official map.
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A lot of people focus on China's actions in Africa as China being peaceful, but China has border disputes with most nations surrounding it, including adding more claims recently. It also has claims to the South China Sea that are well beyond any other kind of claims that other countries have. It also tends to treat a lot of those claims rather aggressively with its surrounding nations, trying to isolate each neighbor and use the size disparity to get a favorable agreement.
5 words:
- Tibet
- Hong Kong
- Taiwan
- Macau
Past, recent past, near future, and the next in line.
The whole One Belt One Road initiative?
I've followed the developing belt and road initiative and it works like this: China invests in various countries' infrastructure to expand trade capacity. So far the only criticism the western media has leveled at it is that it is supposedly a debt trap. And the big evidence for that is Sri Lanka's port. However, the majority of Sri Lankan debt is held by Western banks. The Chinese loan was not at a higher interest rate. Yet somehow, China is to blame? In what way do you consider the BRI to be a hegemonic project?
That's a very naive take. Even if BRI was only meant for trade - so much influence on trade necessarily means that China will have greater political power over included countries. The debt trap thing is also true - the westerners noticed it because they employed the same tactics to gain influence over other countries. These are pretty hegemonic things to do.
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Found the white supremacist. "China bad because I just know they are."
Dont even bother citing your state department propaganda, you're a misanthrope.
Fyi, The peoples liberation army is one of the most capable armies in the world. You just never notice it because China is a peace first nation in nearly all of its foreign policy encounters including Palestine and Taiwan.
Hopefully they’re one of the most capable armies, and hopefully we never have to find out.
The country that reveals the most corruption is likely to be less corrupt than the country that reveals the least corruption.