Hannah White2 said:Don't lose sight of the fact that the USA is basically the engine room for everyone else right now—it’s the consumer base that's keeping so many people afloat. Honestly, it's the reason millions of Chinese people have any kind of lifestyle at all, and why we even consider China a superpower today. They are exactly the kind of customers you'd want in your corner.
Every Arab person knows that if that economy takes even one little stumble, they can just head out and start raising horses in peace...
The first rats to scurry out of their holes would be the Russians and the Chinese on one side, and then you've got those fanatical Islamic warriors on the other (aiming at Israel). That would be the opening act for World War III. And let's be real, Europe showed what it's capable of during the last big war.
But they only really step up once an enemy has already stomped through half the continent.
Poverty, disease, millions dead, nuclear weapons (Israel), and all that mess... nobody wants to see that happen, not now and not ever.
Neil Conaugh (I might have misspelled the name, so please excuse me)
,a historian and head of the business department at the University of Edinburgh, writes in his book rise of money that—and I will intentionally avoid using the terms USA and China here—the leading elites of the USA and China are not actually adversaries, but rather engaged in the greatest partnership in human history...
He even goes so far as to call this hybrid entity "KinoAmerika"...
The Chinese finance American debt, while Americans reciprocate by purchasing their goods...
Only someone deeply resentful or backward-looking would truly desire the downfall of the USA; the author of the post above
is merely simplifying complex issues, turning what ought to be a sensible critique of a maddeningly self-destructive and speculative financial system—a system driven by a greed for massive short-term gains that destroys the American middle class and those who depend on their spending—into some sort of ideological, anti-hegemonic pamphlet intended to birth new "righteous" nations that build their trade advantages solely by exploiting their own citizens... 🤷
At the end of WWII, the USA found itself in a unique position where the outcome led, quite inevitably, to the dollar becoming the world's dominant currency... back then, European leaders actually viewed the USA as a desirable hegemon...
The USA was the only healthy economy at the time, holding two-thirds of the world's gold reserves and accounting for over 60% of global production...
Back then, the USA pulled up Western Europe, Japan, and later South Korea and Taiwan economically—sometimes through direct aid and sometimes simply by opening its vast markets to their products... though, frankly, the primary motivation was
to pull those nations away from the potential embrace of communism, and the USA correctly calculated that steering these countries toward them would be best achieved by fostering their economic prosperity...
For me, the most vital issue is dismantling a system that works specifically to disenfranchise labor and treats both manual work and R&D as mere expenses to be cut... this is especially true for blue-collar jobs that once allowed people in the West to live comfortably, but are now being systematically eroded by cheap labor from the East due to a silent, unspoken agreement...
And I would love—much like a suggestion I saw on a blog I stumbled upon via a link here on this forum—to see the world move toward increasing labor rights in those countries with cheap labor... then we would finally see a real market competition...
Furthermore, I would particularly like to see the Chinese stop keeping their yuan artificially low...
I don't know about you all, but I am practically counting down the days until that damned yuan strengthens...
just as it should have happened long ago...