re: Good News: We’re Supporting Argentina’s Claim To The Falklands & Arming Them

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I've seen no actual evidence of what you purport.

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Then you are willfully ignorant.

They bailed. The end.

You justified them bailing.

You seem to be Europe first.

I am America first.

You do you.

Britain hasn't had a PM with balls since Thatcher

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Then you are willfully ignorant.

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Nope.

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ou seem to be Europe first.

I am America first.

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I am guided by what is correct, not some vague insane vision of the world where China is a bogeyman that is somehow capable of undermining American interests in a meaningful way. Trump's unbelievable lack of diplomatic skill has done more to hurt American interests in the long-term without China doing anything. And even then, China has real limitations on what it could potentially achieve even as a superpower. You are deep in the sauce and are barely making any sense. The US taking a stated interest in European defense after WWII and those allies following suit with what the US wanted them to do (including cutting defense spending, with the peace dividend idea originally proposed by Bush I) and somehow MAGA has convinced themselves of some great injury on the part of Europeans listening to us. It's alarming what you dudes believe about the world. And regardless, there will still be a major Atlanticist faction that will exist for the rest of our lifetimes and probably longer.

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insane vision of the world where China is a bogeyman that is somehow capable of undermining American interests in a meaningful way.

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Like I said…willfully ignorant.

You do you.

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Like I said…willfully ignorant.

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Nah.

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The US should take every single British and French territory on the globe. Including Canada.

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Why on earth would we want them? -

Saint-Pierre, Saint Pierre and Miquelon.
French Guiana.
Marigot, Saint Martin.
Guadeloupe.
Martinique.
Saint Barthélemy.
Mont Choungui,
Mayotte.
Réunion.

Falk em all

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Well then how could Trump’s “unbelievable lack of diplomatic skills” cause any measurable damage to our country at all if China poses no threat to the U.S. anyway?

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Read what I wrote again.

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Did Trump’s “unbelievable lack of diplomatic skills” suddenly cause China to actually become a real world superpower or something? Strange reasoning here.

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Buddy, before you show your inability to read, why don't you ask a question first, such as, what are the pitfalls China has to navigate of China before reaching superpower status? The first limitation is the demographic crisis. China has, within one lifetime, seen a vast amount of progress, but this progress comes with it the other costs of modernity, namely extremely low birth rates. What compounds this is that the CCP's one-child policy, which was myopic given that at the time it was enacted, the country was already seeing a precipitous drop in birth rates. Given this, China has artificially limited it's demographic potential by one generation. What this does is it limits the window and the potential duration of any Chinese challenge to US hegemony. Secondly, the continued growth of India as a rival serves as a much more natural hedge to Chinese power, as both have been historical rivals for a long time and both are driven by the same impulse, namely, that they avoid being dominated by European or foreign powers ever again. The one advantage China had relative to India during their liberalization phase was that China's landowning class was decimated by Maoist policies, and thus the new liberalization policies, which eventually included significant private wealth, were not at issue during the phase where they were building. Thus they built and built a lot and development flowed to coastal regions at the expense of rural regions, causing uneven development inside the country. And now that we are entering the 4th decade of Chinese economic liberalization, you will see more and more private interests using factions within state power structures to slow down development. At the same time, Indian development after liberalization was focused on landowners, who only began to sell to development firms after money flowed into the country from abroad. What I mean to suggest here is that the process of liberalization in the Indian sense will likely lead to better outcomes than the Chinese sense, as the growth will likely be more continual, driven by diffuse private interests rather than state demands buckling to newer landowners who might want to protect their investment. And given the potential growth of the Indian economy, combined with their still strong birth rates, poses such a significant problem for the Chinese that Indian interest in Central Asia draws in China as well and vice versa. The Indian issue is more pertinent, or rather, just as pertinent to Chinese security as the US issue, as historically, Chinese and Indian states have competed over SE Asia and India's geography prevents easy access by China to Africa or the ME.

Thirdly, the other problem is what the Chinese do with excess industrial and capital capacity. For a long time, there was plenty written about Chinese investment in Africa, but the truth was that several other nations, the UK, the US, and France, among them, were still above the Chinese in investment in the region, and the end result of Chinese investment has not resulted in anything notable. Even Chinese investment in Pakistan, which is directly driven by Chinese interests in keeping India occupied, has not resulted in meaningful gains for the Pakistanis. What I mean here is that if the US asked the Pakistanis to continue to do the 'dirty work' that the US outsourced to the Pakistanis as they did in the 80s, they would still do it despite relations between the two countries cooling significantly. I am suggesting here that there is a limit to places where Chinese investment can really enter, as they are fewer regions which Western investment does not touch, and given the choice, everyone will always choose Western or Japanese investment. The Chinese do not really want to do what the Japanese did with their excess industrial capacity in the 60's, which was to buy a lot of US bonds, as tying themselves to US treasuries while the US prepares for a possible confrontation would be akin to directly funding a war against themselves. The other limitation is their own economic structure, which has to fundamentally change in several respects for them to actually leverage internationally.

Lastly, the major place where China lags behind the West is through chip fabrication and specifically, photolithography machines, and there is no easy way to catch up other than to invest for several decades and hope for a miracle. There are other areas, such as materials engineering, where I don't think the Chinese have caught the US, but they do have good ship building capacity, something which the Trump admin correctly identified, although the report produced suggested some curious sentences about working with the Chinese, which I found odd.

That said, they do have to expend resources, significant state resources, continuing the ever eternal state security project, monies which could be better spent in several other areas but instead are used to enforce control.

My view is that Trump's wildman diplomacy works in limited, narrow circumstances, such as the Soleimani assassination. The gains of such an approach with Canada and Greenland are non-existent, the tariff approach this term makes no sense (such as why we were tariffing goods such as coffee which we barely produce) and the current Iran situation is unwinnable without a sustained ground incursion, as the 'mosaic defense' strategy employed by Iran means that it will be incredibly difficult to get a meaningful deal when there is no means by which the IRGC itself can reach a consensus, which is by design on the part of the IRGC.

Regardless, none of this is to suggest that China isn't a threat. They are, but they are a threat that has limitations to what they can achieve.

Did Denmark decide to buy European?