You can disagree if you are the US because the only reason China has that narrative is because they are now "close" to the US and believe that they deserve a larger share of the global pie. While the logic is sound, it's a self centered logic that is only acceptable for the one that isn't at the top.
Cold War against China?
- Thread starter VorZakone
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One thing we can’t do is go around shooting each other in the dicks.
Not in terms of open war between the superpowers themselves, but in its entirety the Cold War was a constant succession of devastating "hot" wars & internal conflicts between their allies and proxies, partly involving the army of one superpower directly.
So I go with the post you quoted, "war of some kind" was a main characteristic of the US/USSR rivalry. It was just that MAD prevented escalation beyond a certain point.
You know people don't literally mean west when they say that right
And we are on a globe, everything is at the west and the east at the same time.
In my stupidity it amazed me to learn that the US and Russia are 2.5 miles apart (and around 50 miles across the Bering Strait)
Personally I don't have a problem with China becoming (or already being) a superpower with huge influence - can they be any worse than America has been with their influence on the world? I highly doubt it. Also, we probably can't do anything about it so why worry? Best get into bed with them like everyone else will.
Yep. Beyond little and big Diomedie, you can apparently see the Russian mainland from US mainland in Wales AK.
I'm receiving this book in a few days to educate myself on the topic. It's gotten very good reviews.
What a ridiculous take. Surely you would prefer something that still resembles a democracy than a totalitarian regime , if you had the option to choose ?
Anyway , make sure you start on your Mandarin lessons if you want to get into that bed early.
It's a realistic take. China are well on the way to being a superpower and America is on the wane. You can either stick your head in the sand and pretend it isn't happening or you can engage with them and try to make the most of it. You might not like how China's government works but we are well in bed with the likes of Saudi Arabia and I don't see them as being much better so let's not kid ourselves here. You can throw your hands up and be disgusted if you want but the reality is that as China's influence grows you are probably better off in the long term accepting it because damned sure you can't change it.
By the way learning Mandarin would be an excellent thing to do if you were young and looking for potential lucrative employment/investment opportunities so it's a bit odd that you would suggest it as some sort of proof that I'm being ridiculous.
Making "most of it" purely for profit reasons is what has led to the current situation. They should have never been allowed into the WTO with their human rights record.
Perhaps not, but they were. I prefer to deal with the reality of the situation rather than getting hysterical about hypotheticals.
It really depends on what the CCP's ambitions are. Personally I want the chinese people to be rich and healthy, but it comes down to what it's goverment inlfluence wants over the rest of us. My father and grandfather had to watch their family friends be strangled to death by Mao's redguard during the cultural revolution and then they were stripped of all their possesions and thrown unto the streets on India. It's always left a rather cold attitude towards the CCP in our family.
That's a more balanced take on it and yes I agree, however people tend to always assume the worst. Will China's influence in the world be any worse than Americas? We don't know that answer yet but it would need to be pretty awful to match America.
Im not sure thats ever a consideration of the WTO...
WTO Accession Process
By the way there are only 14 countries not members of the WTO
Yet they were admitted in 2001. I remember there were quite a bit of deliberations about this.
Is it so easy to forget that, without the USA, the UK could not have defeated Nazi Germany by itself? Or that, without the Americans, post-war Soviet Russia would likely have occupied most of Western Europe?
American influence has not all been about the Vietnam war, or propping up far-right governments in South and Central America.
China is a totalitarian, expansionist state. The USA is not.
There's a third country which did most of the heavy lifting that you're forgetting here.
The second world war was won because of Russia much more than the USA (who mostly wanted to pull out of the war and very reluctantly got involved in the first place). American influence has been both good and bad but mostly very, very bad in my view and in the view of most of it's neighbours.
Do you mean Stalinist Russia, which earlier had entered into a treaty with the Nazis whereby they could divide up Europe between them?
Russia only fought against the Nazis when that treaty was dumped and Germany invaded them.
Similar to America then by not wanting to get involved till Pearl Harbour? Only that the Russians utterly defeated the Nazi's on the Eastern Front which ended the war. The UK were effectively on their knees and America was actively looking a way out of the War. Without Russia the Nazi's would likely have won.
And the US only entered the war in 1941 after the Pearl Harbor attack.
But the US's Internal politics are very different from its external politics.
America might be a democracy within its own borders, but it has no problem propping dictatorships or even creating them out of scratch in foreign lands. Its main concern is about maintaining military hegemony, which itself is a hangover from the days of trying to contain the USSR. The US has arguably been a force against freedom and democracy in the developing world after WW2.
China might be autocracy, but its overriding policy is to maximise profits through trade. A long history of cultural isolationism means they don't care how foreign nations conduct themselves.
For a self-proclaimed 'world policeman', the US barely give a feck about the people their policing. China are more likely to be a 'world transfer agent' who wants to facilitate trade.
WW2 complexities aside, I'm very happy my country remained on the western bloc and didn't end up on the other side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. In a world of greater and lesser evils I would much rather be allied with the US rather than China. Also feck China for what they did and still do to do the Tibetan People.
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True. But unlike Russia they had not previously aided and abetted Nazi Germany. And unlike Stalinist Russia, they did not murder 20 million of their own citizens.
China. The Raiola of geopolitics.
No, they helped dictators do these things across the globe using their intelligence services and Armies. Lets be serious for one second here, the US have had a terrible influence outside of their borders and they caused deep and long misery on millions of people, now it's fair to mention their sidekicks, France and the UK, who have been happy to help them.
And anyway that wasn't the point, the USSR was the main reason Nazi Germany lost the war.
That's so true. The whole debate on the US blocking trade with China was based on the inability to react to the likes of Huawei and xenophobia in my opinion. How the US could attempt to kill a huge company while pretending they were proponents of free trade was beyond me. The only argument they had was "data" which is why the US want the sector anyway.
China has obvious internal problems and does stuff that most of us don't agree with, but you don't exactly have to go far to see Western countries doing pretty despicable things both within the respective countries and globally.
Why does your causal reasoning stop there? If you go further back, you'll see that one of the reasons why Stalin entered into this agreement was the realization that if the Western powers were happy to sell out their democratic ally Czechoslovakia to Hitler, they wouldn't hesitate to do so to the Soviet Union later. The Soviet Union, at least officially, were quite prepared to confront Hitler before the Treaty of Munich.
Now obviously they weren't really ready, and at that point neither was Germany (or the UK, France, Poland, Italy, or anyone else). There was also definitely an element of dividing Europe up between them in Molotov-Ribbentrop, but in the end Germany was largely defeated by the Soviet Union.
Edit: I should add, the Soviet leadership were also probably thinking back to the Russian Civil War, when the Western powers who were now looking for their help sent armies into Russia to assist the Whites.
No, Hitler's decision to invade Russia was the biggest reason why Nazi Germany lost the war. Otherwise Stalin would have been quite happy to continue dividing up Europe with the Nazis.
And without the USA and UK, if Russia had defeated Germany by itself, it would then have gone on to occupy much of Western Europe ... which under Stalin would have meant countless millions more people being murdered.
Do you follow the same logic with Japan and destroy your first claim?
Lots of discounting of the lend-lease act here. Just so you all recall this is what the US sent the Soviets to help battle Hitler between 1941 and 1945.
- 400,000 jeeps & trucks
- 14,000 airplanes
- 8,000 tractors
- 13,000 tanks
- 1.5 million blankets
- 15 million pairs of army boots
- 107,000 tons of cotton
- 2.7 million tons of petrol products
- 4.5 million tons of food
Does China have clear allies?
It's one thing becoming a superpower but even the US needs the likes of Canada, UK, France and Australia+NZ to get things done and coordinate operations.
China on its own can't do that. Having India as an enemy also will be a problem to them.
It's one thing becoming a superpower but even the US needs the likes of Canada, UK, France and Australia+NZ to get things done and coordinate operations.
China on its own can't do that. Having India as an enemy also will be a problem to them.
Japan and the US weren't Allies when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour.
No is suggesting that the US didn't play a major part but without the USSR actually putting the manpower of the eastern front, the 15m of army boots aren't beating the Nazis.
What are you on about?
Without the equipment, 7.5 million shoeless infantry aren't beating the Nazi's either.
Who has been discounting the lend-lease? Just because someone's not talking about the US saving Europe for once, doesn't mean they're actively slighting the US war effort. Lend-lease was big.