First off, thanks for the substantive response. I appreciate these sorts of discussions over people just trying to dunk on each other like it’s twitter.
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.
China is super xenophobic, like many Asian countries. They won’t even try to hide it behind a facade like the West does.
They don’t bother using bombs right now, because it would give the US an excuse to get involved, and the US currently outspends the next 11 countries combined. That would be a total shitshow for them no matter what happened. Nobody bothers trying to outspend the US, because you’d wreck your economy and get nothing. If the US went poof though, you’d get a game theoretic situation where everybody invests in the military because everyone else is investing in their military and you don’t want to be left out. If China then decided that they want to finish the job on making the Korean peninsula Chinese, who would realistically stop them?
The belt and road initiative is a great extension of soft power, but that says nothing about how they’d use hard power if given the opportunity.
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?
Those savages
If that’s what you jump to, you might want to introspect on that. They’re not savages for being xenophobic, that just makes them human like the rest of us.
If it were in China’s “nature”
That paragraph is a commentary on power relations and geography. It’s not in “China’s nature”, but if they decided to invade in a world that looked like ours today but without the US, there would realistically be nobody to stop them. Perhaps North Korean nukes would be enough of a deterrent actually, but shy of that there would be no realistic opposing force.
If that’s what you jump to, you might want to introspect on that. They’re not savages for being xenophobic, that just makes them human like the rest of us.
You are the one saying that they are xenophobic, and I reject your racist, orientalist, essentialist claim. Yours is an idealist position, not a materialist one, yet you’re the one trying to argue that communism as idealist.
It’s not in “China’s nature”, but if they decided to invade in a world that looked like ours today but without the US, there would realistically be nobody to stop them.
You say, “if they decided.” What’s the point of this hypothetical? You’re doing a lot of mental gymnastics to construct a straw man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc
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.
The threat of nukes is real. I wouldn’t expect any major wars between nuclear states right away, but there would be a lot of consolidation of smaller countries without nukes into larger countries with nukes. In this scenario if you’re Japan, you will have the option of getting nukes ASAP or deciding if you want to learn Russian or Chinese.
I think it’s naive to think that military conflicts purely arise out of a latent cultural xenophobia
I’m not claiming that only xenophobia leads to military conflicts. It is often used to whip up support for conflicts that people in power want, though.
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
Soft power is preferable, yeah. The real measure is when someone has something you want and they say “no”.
our economic metrics are so fucked as to be almost certainly useless.
Definitely agree that they’re all fucked up. It remains to be seen how much it helps vs hurts though. Like the saying “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”, sometimes the fact that the metrics are all made up can be useful. I say that as someone that doesn’t like how little they resemble the real world.
