Can you point to any period in history in which empires were just chill and sung kumbaya all day long, though?

Ok, you just keep doubling down on straw men and not actually responding to any points made, so I guess we’re done here.

You’re entirely ignoring davel’s point. The reason the US bombs is because of what davel calls “Imperialism,” and linked to examples of it. What you call “human nature Imperialism” and what davel calls “Imperialism as a stage in Capitalism” are fundamentally different concepts, you’re talking past davel, and davel is 100% correct here.

The reason the US bombs countries is not because humans are mean. The US bombs to protect its interests. This you both agree on. However, davel has successfully identified why the US’ interests depend on bombing others, and China’s interests do not.

To simplifiy davel’s point, Capitalism centralizes and spreads, until it spreads along international lines. This results in the country with more Capital leveraging this to gain favorable trade deals, so it can super-exploit foreign countries for super-profits. The bombing the US does is to keep their power projected and punish those turning against it.

China does not have a Capitalist system, it has a Socialist Market Economy. China manufactures the vast majority of its own goods, rather than manufacturing overseas, so its interactions with the Global South have a fundamentally different character. China wants to uplift the Global South so that the Global South buys from China and makes them even more money.

Both countries are acting in their own interests, but because of the structures in place, this results in the US bombing and plundering, and China building up infrastructure and hospitals. Even when China wants resources housed in the Global South, this difference in internal structure makes trade more mutually beneficial, rather than plunderous.

Imperialism is human nature, yes.

It is human nature in the sense that humans have been known to do it. It is not human nature in the sense that humans will always do it when the opportunity presents itself.

Are you really trying to argue that Communists can’t be imperialist?

That would be a strange form of communism. Imperialism is, however, baked into capitalism, because once the capitalist class has absorbed the domestic, it tries to exfiltrate new resources abroad and subjugate new labor abroad and access new markets abroad. That is what the UK did, and that is what the US, as the global imperialist hegemon, has been doing for decades, along with its imperial core junior partners.

China is super xenophobic, like many Asian countries.

Those savages. Yeah, that doesn’t sound racist at all, not orientalist at all. Are you Josep Borell?

If China then decided that they want to finish the job on making the Korean peninsula Chinese, who would realistically stop them?

What are you talking about? Koreans are still in Korea, speaking Korean. If it were in China’s “nature” to make Korea Chinese, then why didn’t they do it at any point over the centuries?

I don’t think China would drop bombs as soon as possible. I think they’ll start dropping bombs as soon as that is the best or easiest way of achieving some goal.

See, now that’s totally different, as a claim, slightly more reasonable, glad you clarified.

I also, I dunno, I think I just dispute that the disposition of the US empire would immediately lead to some sort of mass arms race, or struggle. I think at most you’d expect to see some more minor movement on china’s other political objectives, like just, taking control of taiwan, which I imagine would be a pretty much instantaneous and relatively bloodless kind of move, since they’re most of the way there already. But militaries, and military spending, isn’t infinite, it’s a direct drain on the economy in real terms, especially with modern warfare, as we’ve seen with ukraine, and especially with the threat of nukes.

We’re able to produce all that military shit because we just dump a frankly massive and insane portion of our economy (and especially our extractive economy) into it, in a kind of constant feedback loop where people in power pay themselves. People who work at lockheed martin get hired from positions as US military personnel, where the FAANG is a revolving door with the CIA, that sort of shit. All as sort of a massive sunk cost, that would be pretty hard to disentangle from while maintaining the US economy, since the US economy is so tied to the US empire. We can look at the sort of, landscape that emerged out of the slow dissolution of the new deal, and post new deal government projects, as being less a sort of desert where everything just fell into ruins, and more being a morph kind of slow and incestuous merge between government organizations and private companies, since the “necessity” of those organizations still existed.

I think there’s also definitely some extent to which we’re getting cooked by china more than we realize with this kind of stuff because our economic metrics are so fucked as to be almost certainly useless.

If you can get your objective without draining massive portions of your economy, then there’s really no reason to, and I don’t think china would have many problems taking really any soft power objective they set their eyes on. Obviously I’m not a soothsayer, so I can’t say what the landscape would form into given this hypothetical, but I don’t see a whole lot of geopolitical conflicts of interest, or uncrossable roads, so far as china is concerned in terms of their longer term economic growth or outlook.

I think there’s also something to note there about how like, I dunno. I think it’s naive to think that military conflicts purely arise out of a latent cultural xenophobia. I think it would be naive to say that plays no role, either, but I don’t think it’s as nearly shaping a factor as people make it out to be. Certainly, if your nation’s finding itself in such a position where someone so idealistic and delusional is making your higher level decisions, and especially your military decisions, as the US currently finds themselves in, you’d probably be cooked like, whatever that person’s position is. Probably there’s some sort of back and forth here also about china’s interactions with their uyghur population, perhaps, as an example of how they’ve responded to that kinda stuff, and I don’t think they have a bad track record.