What does any of that matter to the issue of China controlling its backyard? Russia is China favorable and certainly anti-US. Vietnam is a joke as are any of the countries you think might be any sort of threat, while the US is broke and has to garrison the entire world. What juice does the US actually have to fight where the fight would actually be? China doesn't need to power project and would economically collapse without Chinese goods, something rubbed in our faces with inflation right now due to supply chain issues.
...Vietnam beat China in the war they fought back in 1979.
If China cannot power project, then they cannot function as world hegemons.
And no, the world would not collapse economically without Chinese goods. If all Chinese. exports suddenly cut off right now, that would certainly
hurt, but there are plenty of other nations that can provide cheap labor. Since you seem to be unaware, China
imports raw goods, and
exports semi-processed and finished goods.
Their import dependencies include fuel, fertilizer, and
food. They cannot sustain themselves without these imports, and would be in danger of starvation quickly. Meanwhile, literally nothing that they export cannot be produced somewhere else.
Also, the fact that you don't understand that having multiple hostile nations on your borders is a liability, not an advantage, reveals that you understand basically nothing about military strategy.
If the Saudis accept Yuans the end of the petro-dollar/USD as the global reserve currency is nigh. With it the entire US economy will implode, because the only thing currently propping us up is the money printing enabled by being able to export massive amounts of dollars.
This is yet another over-simplification. If the petro-dollar fails, that will certainly
hurt the dollar as a whole, but claiming it'll be a one-off 'the whole system sinks' is ridiculous simplification.
You keep asserting that the US still is 'far more powerful' than China without providing any evidence. On the contrary the US position is crumbling and China is now the decision make vis-a-vis the Russia situation. Only US client states are sanctioning Russia anyway, while most of the rest of the world maintains trade and China is actively considering military support to Russia:
EU official threatens trade measures against Beijing if the arms’ deliveries go ahead.
www.politico.eu
You have a very bizarre definition of 'crumbling.' The US and every other major nation in Europe are unified in opposing Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and have been and continue to send them aid in fighting. The Chinese by contrast are
considering helping the Russians out, and...
...To you, this is a sign of American weakness and Chinese
strength?
Russia is getting its military
decimated by a vastly smaller nation with inferior equipment. If we count Russian interests as being the same as Chinese interests, this is weakening China's position. If we don't, this is completely neutral to China, neither benefitting or weakening them.
How does this indicate Chinese strength in any way at all?
The US is falling apart from within, but with help from China exploiting our retardation:
en.wikipedia.org
I don't know how you can sit here and say the US position is strong enough to resist China, but is at the same time feckless, can't control Russia of all countries or its vital partner in Saudi Arabia, and has to go begging to Venezuela and Iran for oil.
It's simple; you can be in a more powerful position, but have incompetent leadership screw that up.
A good mirror example would be how China had the opportunity and strong position to win a lot of prestige and some measure of influence through the Olympic games, but instead they humiliated themselves from start to finish. Their infrastructure for the games was shit, the food was shit, the experience for the visiting athletes was shit, they showed their police state nature by cracking down on reporters, they humiliated themselves every which way.
The Biden administration gave the textbook military example of this in the utterly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. They had the upper hand in equipment, training, and manpower, but they screwed everything up, and thus the US was humiliated.
Watch the entire world economy implode if that happens. You clearly have zero idea how important Chinese exports are to the world economy. They aren't the world's largest exporter for no reason.
China has been the largest exporter of goods in the world since 2009. Official estimates suggest its total exports reached $2.641 trillion in 2019.
www.investopedia.com
.
You have a very funny idea how dependency works in import and export industries. The only time that what you provide, whether it's in raw materials or finished goods, can be considered a lynchpin, is when
people can't get it anywhere else.
And there is nothing that China provides which cannot be had somewhere else.
As I've said before, it would hurt to have Chinese exports
suddenly cut off, but China getting cut off from world trade would hurt them far more than the rest of the world.
Because
they wouldn't be able to feed themselves anymore.
So the Japanese, South Korean, American, and European economies take a massive hit if not outright collapse without Chinese imports.
So is every friggin' economy in the world. You act like the Chinese can simply be cut out of world trade and everything functions as if normal.
No, I did not. I simply have stated that this would be harmful, rather than apocalyptic.
No if all of those countries did that there would be a collapse in global economic functioning and the rest of the world would probably go to war to get them to change their minds or find land based trade routes with China.
China now has access to a bunch of Russian oil (remember when we were talking about the context of the global situation as of today?) so could survive being embargoed much more readily than everyone else cut off from Chinese exports. Same reason that Russia hasn't imploded, it has Chinese trade and enough regional friends that it can survive being cut out of the US system. Meanwhile the US economy falling into recession:
Kitco News collects and features the top financial, economic and geopolitical news from around the world. Kitco's aggregated sources include some of the top newswires in the world including the Association Press, Canadian Press, Japanese Economic Newswire, and United Press International.
www.kitco.com
Of course the US yield curve is flattening. We have a Democrat in the White House who has deliberately torpedoed our economy. That lack of performance should be expected to last just as long as the Democrat in the White House does. Don't try to turn this into a global trend.
Also, Russia sells less than half of its oil to China, which isn't enough to service all of China's needs. They're still selling plenty to Europe.
Korean War and the invasion of Vietnam. They defeated the US quite badly despite being massively damaged in WW2 and the US having the single greatest economy in history to the point with very little WW2 damage and massive firepower commitment to the fight.
This is where you go from just being wrong, into being
hilariously wrong. Let's start with Korea.
So, even by the
Chinese numbers, they suffered as many dead as South Korea, the US, and all allies
combined, at almost 200k
. The North Koreans suffered more than that between two and four hundred thousand all by themselves. On top of that, the end of the war was an indecisive cease-fire that divided the country in half, and continues to this day.
Note, this is a war fought right next door to China, and very close to Russia, whereas the various allies had to send their forces and manpower around the world to support the South Koreans, and the Chinese and North Koreans
still suffered disproportionate losses, when using
their numbers. US estimates have them taking twice as many fatalities as the Chinese numbers do.
Then let's move on to Vietnam, the definitive 20th century example of how politicians can lose a war.
The Vietnam war lasted twenty year, from 1955-1975, but
American involvement trailed off in the early 1970's, and by 1973, the US was completely out of it, with the communists breaking the peace treaty (of course) that involved the US withdrawing basically the instant the US finished pulling out.
The Chinese had almost no direct military involvement, primarily serving as the conduit through which the soviets shipped war material to support the North Vietnamese. Depending on whose accounts you believe, they either stole from those shipments to buff up their own military, or shipped additional material to help support the North Vietnamese.
Either way, it was not a victory the Chinese could be said to win; that was an outcome fought for by the North Vietnamese, and the traitors within the American media establishment and Democrat Party. Something they certainly did win, but unlike the Korean war, where enormous waves of Chinese soldiers moved in to rescue the North Koreans, and fought all the way to the end of the war, Chinese military forces had just about no involvement in the actual fighting.
Yet for all the fact that you had China and Russia both supporting the North Vietnamese, it *still* took them two years after complete US withdrawal to actually win the war.
And four years after that, China started a war with Vietnam, and lost it in less than four weeks.
So, for your two 'victories' for China, we have a draw with massively more losses suffered to earn it, and a war China did not actually meaningfully fight in, followed up by a loss to Vietnam.
Really, this is indicative of your whole take on the issue of Chinese power. They do have some power, they do have some advantages, and the US is in decline, and does have some serious problems.
But your understanding of where those things balance out right now, and how those things all
work, is so incredibly warped it's kind of bewildering. Particularly in how you seem to be blind to the fact that China has weaknesses, not just the US.
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