Equation
Lieutenant General
Trump as not as smart as you think either. If he was, then America would be winning as we speak.
Trump 2.0 official thread
- Thread starter siegecrossbow
- Start date
It's actually impressive how quickly America squandered its unipolar dominance after the USSR bit the dust.
I don't know who said it but he said the cold war was a dark alley knife fight. The USSR died in the alleyway and the US is dying on the hospital bed.
They drank their own koolaid.
It's really quite simple - Putin has a backbone, and he has the ability to stand up to Trump. Also, he acts the way that Trump would like to so there's a bit of push there as well. If you look a bit further afield, you'll find that Trump admires other leaders like Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping as well.
The US isn't necessarily trying to provoke China. They've been trying the same containment strategy they used against Russia and the Soviet Union. The big mistake is the one that you've identified: they don't know what the heck China is in the first place!
I hear a lot from commentators that China is looking to expand into the Pacific or how it's planning to be a world hegemon, and it's a made up belief that flies contrary to the evidence. China is so uninterested in becoming any type of hegemon that it only has one ally, and with no interest in getting any more. It even prefers relatively equal-equal partnerships than in senior-junior ones. And when your planners misunderstand your opponent by this much, how good are your strategies going to be?
The other, and even bigger misreading is that China isn't interested in any kind of fight with the US in the first place. And it only makes sense, once upon a time, China was terrified of getting invaded by the Soviet Union or the US, but those days are long past, and the PLA has been moved from a defensive stance to an offensive one. And with its territorial integrity secure, what in the world does China gain from going to war against the US? The only major question that's left is Taiwan, and Taiwan is not a problem that should be solved militarily anyways.
It's precisely that the US was the sole superpower that they declined so quickly. If they had a tough opponent to deal with, then a lot of the corruption and poor moves would have been punished and rectified. But because poor performance was rewarded at every level, this became the norm, and there's no push back for improvement. Even now, there are strategy influencers who get away with trying to downplay China's capabilities so there's no reason for the US to worry!
I do think it makes sense for China, not so much to *expand* into the Pacific, but rather to clear the U.S. *from* the (Western) Pacific and secure military hegemony over the region, in something approximating the position the U.S. has attained in the Western hemisphere.
To do otherwise would condemn China, for the foreseeable future, to constant military tensions and arms racing within its own neighborhood.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
lol
lol
tomorrow will be interesting
What will he be able to do? All of the European leaders are attending the meeting with Zelensky. That is a total rebuke of Trumps attempt at a peace process. We've already seen the Trump regime attempt to bully Zelensky in a public manner. I cannot see that happening again and I don't see the US being able to bully all of the European powers together.