Honestly, if Xi would have just chilled his tits and taken a less confrontational approach vis a vis Taiwan and their idiotic and entirely irrelevant “nine-dash line” (I honestly view it with the same level of seriousness as that one time Trump drew on the hurricane forecast map with a sharpie and was like “HURRICANE GO HERE BECAUSE I BIG STRONG PRESIDENT”), they’d probably be in a far better position geopolitically.
The west was entirely willing to work in good faith with them, but Xi is stuck in a frustratingly Kissinger-esque zero-sum “great power” worldview, and doesn’t want to be partners with any other nation or regional alliance that they aren’t ultimately in control of. The consequences of that unnecessarily confrontational strategy are blatantly obvious at this point.
Nonsense; there was zero chance that the West would be willing to work in good faith with China when China grew economically and politically powerful enough to actually rival the West.
I disagree with that sentiment. The West was willing to put up with a lot of crap from CCP, but the refusal to allow a somewhat level playing ground, the tying of the fixed exchange rate of the remnibi to the dollar and the growing hostility and aggression towards Taiwan caused a lot of mistrust to grow and fester. When you look at the early 2000’s, the West was willing to play ball, just as it was playing ball with Russia at that time. Authoritarian strongmen are the issue here, not the West’s attitudes towards those respective nations.
Honestly, if Xi would have just chilled his tits and taken a less confrontational approach vis a vis Taiwan and their idiotic and entirely irrelevant “nine-dash line” (I honestly view it with the same level of seriousness as that one time Trump drew on the hurricane forecast map with a sharpie and was like “HURRICANE GO HERE BECAUSE I BIG STRONG PRESIDENT”), they’d probably be in a far better position geopolitically.
The west was entirely willing to work in good faith with them, but Xi is stuck in a frustratingly Kissinger-esque zero-sum “great power” worldview, and doesn’t want to be partners with any other nation or regional alliance that they aren’t ultimately in control of. The consequences of that unnecessarily confrontational strategy are blatantly obvious at this point.
Nonsense; there was zero chance that the West would be willing to work in good faith with China when China grew economically and politically powerful enough to actually rival the West.
I disagree with that sentiment. The West was willing to put up with a lot of crap from CCP, but the refusal to allow a somewhat level playing ground, the tying of the fixed exchange rate of the remnibi to the dollar and the growing hostility and aggression towards Taiwan caused a lot of mistrust to grow and fester. When you look at the early 2000’s, the West was willing to play ball, just as it was playing ball with Russia at that time. Authoritarian strongmen are the issue here, not the West’s attitudes towards those respective nations.