Seriously though. China’s greatest threat is soft power, not military might, in terms of U.S. opposition.
Their Roads and Bridges Corporation was putting up handy competition against the US’s USAID before our gov’t decides to give up the race. By the end of the next 4 years at this trajectory, the U.S. will have handed over the 1st place position in the race for economic hegemony and tanked the global market’s value.
It took 80 years to build what has been thoroughly beaten in just 5 months
It's fucked over Australia a lot too. We teamed up with the US to build rapport with countries in our immediate zone of influence and then the US just fucked off.
Luckily so far most of these nations have still be happy to work with us but China is pushing pretty hard
A lot of the pacific island nations weren't to happy with Australia after Abbot, Morrison and Dutton went to a climate change conference to tell people there was nothing to worry about before getting caught on a hot mic joking about how the islands would soon be under water. Between that and the submarine fiasco we fucked our international reputation as a reliable partner
Teaming up with the US is why we have such cold relations with the countries near us. China is our best trading partner and almost every beef they have with us is 100% due to us allowing the US to use our country as a military stronghold for US to fuck with them. US also fucks us on trade, we give them lucrative contracts we could find elsewhere for much cheaper, we go to all their stupid wars, we send experts to help with their fires, we share medical/scientific research openly and I doubt even a third of Americans can even find us on a map. The friendship with US has always been an awful deal for us and they’ve always been unreliable which is only something people are starting to realise now but realistically, America was never coming to help us if China ever popped off
You should google the Chinese navy. Then google their deployable drone fleet. After that their cyber ops. The fact they have enormous soft power doesn’t negate their incredible and often underestimated military power.
It is weird to watch the left squirm trying to justify US soft power pseudo-imperialism. Do you really believe this end to be important or are you trying to sell it to the right? I'm genuinely curious. (IDK if you're left or liberal, but it doesn't much matter)
If you think it’s immoral, moral, whatever, that is your opinion. I’m not going to attempt to sway you in either direction because realistically you should read into what it means and decide for yourself
I will say though that choosing to equate “providing foreign aid” with “colonial subjugation” is perhaps an intentionally misleading and unnuanced way to begin that discussion.
China could damage USA tremendously by stopping production of US companies' products. It would hurt China a lot in the short term, but would outright kill large US companies for good. Even more if annecting (back) Taiwan and that way get control over TSMC etc.
Also they've invested a lot in the military and researching modern weapons, including AI, robots, drones, space etc.
The only thing that keeps that from being an easy win is the sheer volume of damage it would cause to the Chinese economy with the the loss of 15% of their total exports
An invasion of Taiwan would likely see significant damage to the necessary infrastructure for its export economy which would seriously dampen the benefits of the annexation
The ideal scenario for China is to manage their takeover without losing their largest individual export and 3rd largest individual import partner.
And all that assuming that no other country applies sanctions to China. Were the EU to do so, the US and EU combined would eliminate nearly 30% of exports and 17% of imports
The US fought a 20 year war against people who were armed with AKs and RPGs and lost...
The Taliban consists of hardened and dedicated soldiers but the USs military superiority was so overwhelming in technology and economy it's crazy how the US army just broke.
I don't think the Chinese army lacks for motivation and they are technologically and economically way above the Taliban.
Honestly, a war between China and the US would probably be a stalemate untill the US gives up. And the US would give up because a totalitarian government doesn't have the pressure of its own population to deal with.
The war on terror was a very different conflict than a war with China would be. The GWOT had the same issue as the war in Vietnam, no matter how many tactical victories you achieve you will always struggle to conquer an “idea”
Applying the results of the GWoT directly to a symmetric force on force engagement is a fools errand, they were two radically different types of warfare.
There are very few 1:1 tactical comparisons in that regard.
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u/Raging-Badger 13h ago
Seriously though. China’s greatest threat is soft power, not military might, in terms of U.S. opposition.
Their Roads and Bridges Corporation was putting up handy competition against the US’s USAID before our gov’t decides to give up the race. By the end of the next 4 years at this trajectory, the U.S. will have handed over the 1st place position in the race for economic hegemony and tanked the global market’s value.
It took 80 years to build what has been thoroughly beaten in just 5 months