Yeah China enduring is not much comfort if the hegemony does not fall. The third world needs liberated, not continued oppression with some mitigation here and there.

Yeah it’s not that China is going to be destroyed just that our hopes for the fall of US/NATO hegemony in our time are not looking to bear fruit. Best case scenario even 5 years ago was multi-polarity is established, the US stumbles its way through it happening and basically is locked into losing power but their level of planning, coordination and frankly setting the chess board has been unnerving to watch.

It’s not that I thought the US wouldn’t resist, it’s that I hoped China and many other actors would move more strongly to counter these chessboard setting moves and that they’d be less successful than the first cold war but the fact is it seems the same old tactics with minor updates yield fruit. I mean Ukraine over the course of 18 years and with an 8 year intensification phase being turned into a bloodied battering ram against Russia and a factory for churning out west loving Nazis and mercenaries was not really in my sights or on my bingo cards in say 2016 though the signs were obvious, it just wasn’t something I as a westerner was aware of. Just as most of us aren’t aware of the details of US influence operations in central Asia that are bearing fruit, there were definitely likely signs.

It’s hard not to doom a little (pessimism of that intellect hits hard) given climate change is coming and when that hits many of the over-exploited areas are not going to have the same options for throwing off their chains and developing independently.

That and the whole nuclear war thing. I can’t help but think part of what informs China’s decisions is the likelihood of a US in free-fall nuking them regardless of the danger of being nuked back and that they feel until they can neutralize that threat (not likely in the next few decades with any tech on the horizon) they and the rest of the world are held hostage by a “mad-man” with a loaded nuclear gun who doesn’t care about dying and may be willing to do a suicide run on the earth merely if they lose their hegemony. And in light of that there’s a desire to placate or at least not rock the boat too much in hopes there can be a reasonably slow loss of power that won’t cause the US to lash out. But that slow-down means the US can fight at full speed and full force while their adversaries hold an arm behind their back and hesitate.

Nuclear weapons I think are the worst thing to ever be invented. Without them the world would have turned against, and destroyed the US and other European powers last century in protracted conventional wars or at least dethroned them and forced them to draw inwards and lick their wounds from the blood-letting the USSR and friends would have inflicted. We’d be well on the way to world socialism. But because of nukes China didn’t take the south of Korea, because of nukes the USSR hesitated at many turns when it came to confronting the US, because of nukes the voices of weakness and compromise within the party seemed reasonable and were elevated. It all comes down to that. If I had a time machine I’d murder every member of the Manhattan project and convince Einstein not to write his letter. Yes they would have been invented eventually but without the war-time impetus for an all-in project it might have taken another decade and a half and there might have been more organized scientific opposition to the creation of such a weapon. Without them Japan would have perhaps been subject to some soviet input in capitulation terms and perhaps their fascists would have been executed instead of put in government all at once. It does seem like the invention and use of nuclear weapons was a negative hinge point in history from the viewpoint of the struggle for liberation.