Comment by expedition32
6 hours ago
I was thinking the other day that China is playing it smart. They just have to keep doing what they are doing and they'll win.
Xi isn't doing anything ostentatious like sending his navy to the Persian gulf or overtly dropping weapons supplies in the Middle East. After all they are going for the economic win- something that always eluded the USSR.
Let Trump hang himself and the Chinese make it out like the good guys. After all the most important thing nations want is not human rights it's stability.
I hate to agree the Chinese government is competent in foreign affairs, but it's true.
Fundamentally China isn't Russia or USA which both have a proclivity to become entangled in foreign problems. For the US (I'm american) the civil side has four strategic risks:
- weak to no show congress which has ceded war making to the executive branch
- civilian leadership who think bomb it and declare success which is naive
- the inability to stop being suckered in by our own hurbris when others say but we can't get it done without US involvement
- an economy post WWII built on cheap oil, which has tentacles into the mideast
Meanwhile after having pissed away 50 years of culture wars particularly since newt gingrich and the tea party, the US fiscal situation is deplorable.
Most maddening? We did this to ourselves. Blaming immigrants isn't the flex people think it is
The most stable systems are parliamentary democracies.
Sure, you might be switching governments often (and that's a feature, not a bug) at times, but things change slowly.
Which is what you need in a mature rich democracy.
The last thing you want is to elect hard to boot and control individuals like in presidential and semi presidential republics.
Aren’t they going to lose about half their population in the next 75 years?
That’s… problematic
Who needs people to fight wars when you've got robots? "China’s armed forces are testing humanoid robots against combat requirements and studying how the machines might fight alongside soldiers." -- MSN
That's the trend in most populations over the next 100 years anyway.
Well, not countries which have large amounts of immigration and robust systems to integrate immigrants.
Unless of course they elect anti-immigration populists and ruin their appeal. Then they're doomed to shrink.
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Given the course of climate change, that's likely to happen everywhere. That includes the US.
"It is often easier to not do something stupid than it is to do something smart."