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I've said before that I had stopped posting here because it's a purely American Affairs Discussion community and, for a non-American, those affairs are only instrumentally interesting due to their effects elsewhere, and they become less interesting as America recedes from the world stage. The silence on the ongoing global events reinforces my impressions both of the US and of this forum. It's a pity because in terms of the culture war, it's very significant. The Red Tribe basically won politically. Nowhere has this been made more obvious than at the yesterday's session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, that hive of globalists Alex Jones warned us all about. For decades, the narrative around these parts has been that Europe has lost its way, is Communist, is being demographically replaced etc, and only the Serious Big Brother across the Atlantic can steer the ship. Lately there's even talk that Europe is basically «over», and America is what remains of the West, and so the US must take direct stewardship over the imperiled land. For example, one of the justifications for the seizure of Greenland from a MAGA loyalist Scott Greer:
(Needless to say, every accusation is a confession; very soon, Scott Bessent EXPOSED Denmark's treatment of Greenland in front of millions! – according to some Floridian patriot. This propaganda is gaining steam in conservative sources that belong to the American influence network).
I've seen that the rumors of European death are very much exaggerated. Europe very much still exists. But the sensibility of the United States of America on the world stage is now one of openly admitted exceptionalism and essentialist superiority. We've seen the birth of an assertive Judeo-Christian civilization-state with Latin American characteristics, and it's clearly separate from what can be called «Western Civilization». The focal point of the rupture was of course Greenland again.
I mainly want to get the conversaton going so I'll just share some quotes without commentary.
Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce:
This is of course not so much Monroe/Donroe doctrine as invoking Light Unto the nations/Shining city upon a hill with some geopolitical dressing, only cruder, with more stick and less carrot than ever. The reactions are understandable.
Mark Carney, a long-term advisor to Justin Trudeau with all his disastrous policies, was projected to soundly lose the elections to Pierre Poilievre, a very US-style conservative self-identifying as a «simple goy from the prairies». What reversed their odds was Trump's tariff war on Canada plus endorsement of Pierre as his agent to make Canada the 51st state (Poilievre, being a simple goy but not insane, obviously denied any such intention).
Yesterday, Carney delivered a speech that I think ends the North American fraternal relationship and likely the entire post -WWII order. Some excerpts:
Others are saying similar stuff, have been for a while. Merz on the end of the Pax Americana, Macron obviously.
The engagement with China is a common theme, spearheaded by Carney. His partnership with China in particular is prompting Americans to fantasize of seizing Alberta. Maybe that'll happen too.
You really should follow the WEF content on your own to form an opinion though.
The other day @TiltingGambit said:
I am not sure who's going to be American ally in WWIII now. It's my impression that @TiltingGambit has been projecting, because he, as a true American, felt that there is nothing worth learning about affairs of barbarians in China, Europe or anywhere else. This is a very Qing-like attitude. Yes, there's significant consumption of MCU capeshit, we all write in English, Americans are the top content creators on Tiktok, I'm just not seeing how this translates into political loyalty.
So. The costs of winning the Culture War. Any takes on this?
Edit. I explain my focus on this topic, since many are very disappointed.
I was pleasantly surprised to read a post from you that was not just more long-winded China-boosting, but you had to go and spoil it there at the end. I used to find your posts much more interesting before you developed this fixation, tbh. Do you live in China? If you do not, I strongly recommend you move there and work there. As your Carney quote points out, it's important to "name reality." The most famous Chinese sage even has a term for this, 正名. You'll love it.
Anyway, to address your main point, I don't see any rebuttal from you about why TiltingGambit is wrong, just more of your typical sneering about how Americans are arrogant and dumb. It almost seems personal. Chinese cultural output has made great strides in the last 15 or so years (when I was in college studying Chinese, China would come out with a martial arts movie that did decently in the US and the world maybe once every few years -- usually by Hong Kong directors) but it is anemic compared to that of the U.S. Now they produce web novels that are read by gray tribe weirdos (I say this with fondness) but nearly zero normal or high status people in the west consume Chinese content. An improvement but hardly a threat to American culture hegemony.
The way I see the Euro/Canadian threats to cozy up to China is that if they are still truly Western countries, they are probably bluffing. What European nation would willingly submit to Ottoman or Mongol hegemony just to spite the Pope? Overtures, sure, symbolic gestures and treaties maybe, but never submission. If the enlightenment "globohomo" religion has mutated and innovated to such a degree that it is no longer recognizably a strain of Christianity (the soil of western civilization) but some new thing that sees both the Western Christian nation state and the Chinese civilization state as equally alien and thus roughly equivalent, then, well, the threats are probably genuine and there is probably no way to stop the break up of what was once called "western civilization."
I'm seeing two types of responses from "our American friends" on Greenland. One is just the ugliest bullying, the joy in humiliating us for no reason, who they equate, in their mind, to the hated blue tribe.
And the other is total complacency; as if ignoring trump's constant threats, insults, and outrageous declarations that one or both allies will not defend the other, was the only option for america's (at this point, nominal) allies, indefinitely. Just pretend it's not happening, quietly absorb any pain that comes your way, and hope that things will go back to the way they were; "Nostalgia as a strategy", as Carney put it. I'm questioning whether war for Greenland or Canada would even wake these people up, or if they'd just act like the Japanese government over manchuria initially: "disregard that, it's just our army, we have nothing to do with that". "Shoot back? C'mon, we're both of christian culture, where's your loyalty to western civ?".
You have to understand the average American's experience of Europeans, aside from visiting them as open-air museums, is
Red Tribers and even libertarians resent the example Europe provides the Blue Tribe, with the decadent welfare regimes and hate speech laws. Europe further has the audacity to provide the illusion that these are sustainable ways to run nations, which just increases the volume of the voices shouting down sensible domestic policy in the US.
If you're really confused about the Americans here becoming vitriolic about Europe seemingly out of nowhere, it's because these resentments among the right have been present for a long time but the Motte has selected for Europeans who have grown weary of the way things have been run there.
As a privacy advocate and a fervent hater of advertising, I will say that the problem isn't the banners, it's the cookies. The EU showed rare common sense by mandating that...
...if you are going to stalk someone on their private machine doing their private stuff...
...until you know enough about them to manipulate them into making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make...
...so you can sell that information to anyone who wants to manipulate them...
...then you have to at least tell the person you're stalking.
The entire tech industry collectively responded by saying 'but if we bug them until they agree to being stalked, then it's okay, right?'
You can just like, block cookies. In truth no one who doesn't care enough to block them cares enough about being tracked to where the cookie banner is doing any positive work.
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But it's not "seemingly out of nowhere"! If you're an European who's been using the Internet for decades then that entire time has meant encountering American conservatives and libertarians shitting on Europe and pouring scorn on it! And it is assuredly just as annoying to see European rightwingers (and, of course, liberals and left-wingers too) adopting and trying to ram through simplified American slop ideologies that they haven't bothered to even try to localize.
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You only have to wait out Trump. The sneering at America from the general direction of Europe isn't going to stop, ever. Yeah, you have to put up with Trump doing his Sam Kinneson act in your general direction for a while. In the overall scheme of things, it really is no big deal.
There's talk, and there's what trump is doing. Those aren't jokes, or some trash-talk at the ballgame. When he says he doubts we will come to america's aid, insult aside, that means america possibly won't come to ours. So our alliance is worthless, and we need to make new arrangements immediately.
If he attacks greenland or canada like he threatens, it's even simpler: we'll just shoot, and people will die - maybe even a real war like russia-ukraine. It's not like Ukraine's weakness stopped ukraine from shooting back, like many thought. Or the fundamental stupidity of the operation stopped Putin from attacking.
No, that is not what that means. In fact what he is quoted as saying was
Which contradicts your interpretation quite explicitly.
Did he threaten? Or did he merely "not rule out" things. These are very different; the US has a long tradition of not ruling out things just because someone asks, and Trump knows that. He actually threatened tariffs.
The man is a raging narcissist, if you take him at his word that "he'll come to our rescue 100%", when he started all this by writing "[he] no longer thinks only of peace" because "we" denied him the nobel peace prize, you are far gone. I am not delegating my security to this child with a gun.
He lies so much that people have to invent new categories beyond "liar" for what he is, like "post-truth communicator", but you expect us to trust him, when he shows us only contempt?
Take him seriously, not literally. Suddenly what he says is to be interpreted literally? I'll tell you what he means seriously : "since we are better than them, we will do as we please."
Europe was more than happy to do so for decades, and frankly still is given the pitiful increases in military size and weapons production since Russia invaded Ukraine.
My favorites are when, roughly a decade ago, Germany had less than 10 fully armed and operational fighter jets and ZERO operational submarines.
This seemed so implausible to me that I went and hunted for accurate sources ... and found references for both claims. So... wow.
I'm also not usually a fan of the "child with a gun", but even stopped clocks get to be right twice a day. "I just really do question whether or not they'll come to [our rescue]" seems to be a reasonable concern, if not about intentions (Germany did stick it out in Afghanistan for decades), then at least about recent capabilities vs peer adversaries. They're in an at least an order of magnitude better shape now, and still improving, but is that because they've fixed the root problems or just because they got tired of being repeatedly embarrassed by leaks to the press?
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You're complaining about what he says, and then when he says the opposite of the bad thing you're complaining about, you're substituting your own headcanon instead. This is not a valid complaint.
Clown nose on, clown nose off, shtick. If he's a clown, I don't want him in charge of our defense. If he's not a clown, he hates us, fuck him.
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So basically, you hate him because he's telling you the truth.
Your local elites are, and honestly, they have to. Imagine giving you a gun- if they started rewarding people who did that, then they'd get political power and try to compete, and why would you want subjects to do that?
But if they let the US do that- if they simply pay them as mercenaries with the odd disruption to your economy and perform/impose American religious rites on the population- your local power brokers can be as corrupt as they like. And the powerful in your nation that don't want to do that will be out-competed by those that do, so it wouldn't matter how virtuous your population at large is anyway.
Indeed.
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This is reality. Trump is dispensing with some of the polite fictions because they are distorting peoples' perception of actual reality. In reality, there are not many scenarios where Europe can possibly come to America's aid in any substantive way other than moral support, regardless of treaty obligations. That's Europe's choice, and for better or worse it makes them a much less valuable ally.
So I interpreted it correctly. Let's just wind this thing down. I am honestly tired of explaining the value of an alliance with a bloc with a huge economy and population and very similar interests. I can't do it anymore, despite being an Americanophile through and through. We are too far apart on what we think the other brings to the table. Or maybe we hate each other like an old couple.
I want merz and everyone to tell trump to fuck off in no uncertain terms and stop giving him face-saving exits. Full tariffs, leave ramstein, etc. It's headed towards it anyway. They are slowly learning to deal with Trump's trick of defect defect defect until he finds resistance.
Why would you suppose we have very similar interests?
What sort of American?
There's a considerable number of Americans who would welcome this, I'd imagine.
I don't want to live in Europe. I don't want to live anywhere like Europe. I don't want where I live to become more like Europe, even marginally. I would prefer actual war against the authorities to this happening. Your entire social consensus is inimical to what I view as fundamental human rights and basic principles of liberty. We are not friends in any meaningful sense; you are allied with my tribal enemies, and will be for the foreseeable future.
Again, Carney says it best:
I perceive integration with Europe one of the major sources of my subordination.
No matter which way net subordination actually flows, maybe it's time for a peaceful divorce then.
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You are vastly oversimplifying. There are twice as many people in Europe as in the USA - we are not 750 million clones of Angela Merkel or Schultz.
What makes a friend? Personally, I read much of what you write with interest and appreciation. Whatever you may believe, there is some level of sympathy between many Europeans and Americans like you. It's nosediving lately because so many Red Tribers are grinning and making teabagging gestures as Trump threatens to come over and take our stuff because he feels like it and we can't stop him, but it's there.
Sure, Europe and America are too integrated. That's partly because integration has been pursued vigorously by America over the last 50 years for obvious reasons, but it's likely harmful now. But there are levels of integration between 'you are allied with my enemies and I despise you' and 'Europe? never heard of it'.
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oh generally, if you can like people in general. It's ideological convergence mostly: individualism, freedom (especially speech), plus a certain "moral affinity for the strong". I think american hegemony was largely beneficial.
You: have a pathological hatred of the blue tribe, which you transfer onto europeans. One day, frustrated in your attempts to provoke a civil war at home, you'll charge naked at Greenland or Vancouver. Decoupling from such volatile and extreme polarization makes sense, of course.
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This is a bigger issue than most non-Americans think it is, though. Or at least their elites. Turns out that when you treat your country as an economic zone people won't go to war, and when you treat your young like that they will hang the old out to dry. It's not 1900 any more.
We already know how much disruption modern citizens will tolerate to their daily lives without picking up a rifle themselves because 2020. The people can care a lot less about who runs their country.
How do you explain how hard ukraine and russia have been going at it?
People in 1900 didn't think it was 1900, either. They thought they "were over" war, too. Then they partook in it with gusto, partly because of that evergreen illusion.
The one-word (and the 20th century) answer is "nationalism", the one-sentence answer is "because being under the Russian empire is still in living memory and they would prefer the American one, also conscription" on the Ukrainian side and "because the Army is paying quite a bit, also conscription" on the Russian side.
The world was a lot more multi-polar back then and the subjects living under those empires actually felt common cause with that empire. Hence colony willingness to participate in the Great European Mass Suicide of 1914. No, I think the only war your average first-world citizen would fight (ignoring the US, because they're the only Western country for which the above applies) is civil, let alone its average military-aged male.
Jingoism is still mostly the domain of the old, though.
Any nation can do conscription and pay. Pacifists are always disappointed. People of all ages love war initially, it's cool.
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Byzantine Egypt before the Arabs, 18th and 19th century Hungarian and Polish leadership and national heroes constantly worked with and fought for the Ottomans...
Many thousands of examples, the Hungarian ones are mostly in Hungarian only though:
Most of these examples were from Crimean War. At this time, religious passions and crusading spirit were things of the past and these Polish heroes were fighting on Turkish side together with Western allies. If they were traitors of Christendom, so were Viscount Palmerston and Napoleon the Third.
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I don't think the analogy holds. Aren't those examples of people either collaborating with a fargroup or cooperating with a hegemon who already ruled them? The analogy would be the Poles or Hungarians opening the gates of their capitals to allow the Ottomans to install a new government, not a few adventurers or bold dhimmis acting independently in service of a foreign adversary.
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Just to reiterate, I am definitely not American. But I think it does demonstrate the OP's mindset that he's still suspicious that I am, in fact, lying about my nationality in his response to you.
It's like somebody on twitter voicing complaints about BLM, to then be accused of being a white supremacist, and then posting proof that they're actually black. It really jiggles the narrative in an awkward way.
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I do not care what you find interesting or not, nor do I find your attempts at psychologizing insightful. China is roughly half of effective humanity on most important metrics, so it is more rational – even for Americans, or perhaps especially for Americans – to be «obsessed» with them than with petty dramas of American social decay, like a low-IQ enforcer killing a twitchy activist or the other way around, some state-level DEI/anti-DEI regulation imbroglio, a slapfight, a shooting, a bill, a parochial religious disagreement, or any other of our usual topics. Thinking about this from first principles, American prestige is insanely inflated. At this point it's only solidly backed by the hypothetical returns on AGI.
I do not really want to debate the relative Chinese «soft power». They've made some progress; in the end, they're profoundly inferior in messaging to the US and even Japan and will continue to be inferior. I simply think it doesn't matter much, most of the goodwill America gets from other countries is based not on media exports or high-quality propaganda but on actual strategic interests and demonstrable benefits of cooperation. And American media as of now has become repetitive slop with questionable ideological payload, nobody gets inspired to defend Democracy Human Rights by Captain America, it's just (at best) neutral entertaining content, like Labubus or Funko Pops in the physical realm. Holding Funko Pop IP is not really a source of political loyalty, it's a source of Funko Pop revenue. If the ROI on continued cooperation nosedives, you still get reaction like Carney's. So my objection to TiltingGambit is just that: the US won't have «all the allies» specifically on merit of its «charismatic cultural export». It's a cute way of expressing pride in your nation's strengths but it's basically a joke, like a German saying foreigners would die for German beer and autos, or an Italian claiming there are Pasta Nationalists all over the world. (That said, he claims to not even be American, so I guess we can conclude this pride narrative also gets exported).
To have All The Allies, the US will need to continue being the version of itself that's profitable to be allied with – security guarantees, reasonable economic relations. In peacetime, this is realistic and not that expensive. For the profits to outweigh the costs of opposing Chinese industrial machine in the hypothetical WWIII, either the machine needs to be somewhat less impressive than it's shaping up to be, or America will have to be more generous than it's being under Trump. Charisma is overrated, mostly due to motivated reasoning about comparative advantages.
See, ironically, this is a pretty non-Western worldview. The whole premise of the Rules-Based International Liberal Order was that you don't have to kowtow to the strong. This is the idea China espouses, too – they constantly drone on about the UN Charter and the equality of nations. It's easy to dismiss as insincere, but how exactly is it insincere? Sure, they can punish a country for crossing their «red line» with a tariff. But weaponization of tariffs is routine now. In contrast, Trump not only tariffs at will, sometimes very pettily, making up red lines on the go, but he demands precisely submission, ritual humiliations, he will even flex it by publicly leaking private conversations where he's asked not to do just this. (Or making up the whole thing to flex before his sadistic fans, which is pathetic in its own way. But he's doubling down.)
At this stage, your argument amounts to a purely racial one. Profitably working with China in a context that gives them leverage is automatically «submission» and so «unacceptable to Western countries». Working with the US is honorable alliance between Free White Peoples, reasonable submission to the primus inter pares, even as the hegemon explicitly frames it as a hierarchy where he's the lion and you're the small dog (thus getting raped). …I guess I don't know, I'm not a Western person, maybe this whole story of the Hajnal Line anti-racism was a lie, and y'all are invested in White Supremacy enough to accept such blatant gaslighting indefinitely. Maybe that's the Soft Power, the Charisma. But I'm getting the impression that this is not the case.
You've probably missed that I propose another thesis: Americans do not belong to the Western Civilization proper. They self-identify as «Judeo-Christians», they're heavily Latin American, they have unique rites and beliefs, strengths and weaknesses, they treat «the West» as adversarially and extractively as the East, and in fact Trump thinks much better of Xi than of any European leader. It's about as distant from Europe as Islam is. The «globohomo» didn't have to mutate all that far, and this year's WEF demonstrates that Americans have been making up bizarre headcanon bullshit about the «globohomo». It can judge this wholly new civilization as alien, but Christianity would concur.
It's not exactly media or propaganda, but much of the goodwill depends on both elite and popular moral/ideological alignment - freedom, progress, democracy, rule of law, capitalism, not being evil totalitarians, racism sexism bad, etc. People genuinely believe in the stuff, in a softer but still significant version of the way people used to be religious. And also care about them as symbols for less pure but no less powerful social animal reasons. And I think that effect explains as much of the turnaround we're seeing now as material interests do.
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Ilforte-Kendi going woke was not on my 2026 bingo card. But then again, Ritchie Hanania leading the anti-Trump vanguard wasn't either. I guess I'm just bad at these things. An anti-forecaster.
Replying to some of your other comments here, why the obsession with Marvel and funko pops? American cultural exports and soft power extend way beyond that, and you know it.
Look at the top grossing movies of 2025. Ne Zha 2 tops the list with an impressive 2.2 billion, of which 50 million was from outside China. Second highest grossing Chinese movie, the battle at lake Changjin made just over 900 million and 890 million of that was domestic sales. Zootopia 2 grossed 1.7 billion with 1.3 billion of that from international markets. 8 of the top 10 grossing films are American.
Next - some significant fraction of Chinese can talk intelligently about the lakers or European football. How many Americans have heard of Lin Dan or Shi Yuqi? What about famous American musicians? Half of Tay-tay's death march was sold out international venues. Globally, do you think more people can describe the gist of the declaration of independence or Xi Jinping thought?
You can sneer at Marvel and other lowbrow entertainment exports, but I would bet the pattern replicates among 'elite' media as well if you could slice the data properly. Canada is so steeped in American culture they have to force Canadian TV/radio stations to play a certain amount of Canadian content.
Seriously, though. You should go back to making fun of teenage girls from San Francisco tweeting 'defund the police.' The crowd loves it. Make a patreon and gofundme, some Thiel acolyte with deep pockets will buy you a Trump Gold Card and you can come home to the motherland. It's gotta be better than inflation-land, unless you're really into dancing tango or something.
I think that's representative of the level of American cultural development. Ne Zha 2 is also representative of China (it's high production value slop).
Again. What of it? Are you saying that the Canadian pivot is because they've become fans of Lin Dan? My thesis is not that the Chinese soft power is very deep (though in some segments it's growing, and it'll help product sales etc.), it's that the popularity of your national media does not translate into political allegiance. That's not how the causality flows. America did not become the Shining City Upon a Hill and the leader of the strongest military alliance in history by producing popular media slop, it's just one of the many facets of their current eminence. Great Britain's greatest media days were after the British Empire collapsed. Hong Kong out-soft-powered all of China, their content was popular in the Mainland, they still got crushed and now they pitifully complain in the UK to stop the construction of the Mega-Embassy. It's all a very big attention sink, but a very minor factor, at the end of the day.
And indeed, an overwhelming superiority in cultural exports can even undermine you. What good did BLM protests in Chelyabinsk do for the USA? Brainrotten Russian teenagers may hunt for signs of racism at home, but they know where Saint Floyd perished, and won't buy into the more carefully curated myth of Jeans, Bubblegum and Freedom like their parents did. It's actually pretty hard to have both a vibrant and a propagandistically coherent cultural scene. The dividends on having everyone just use your memes, your frameworks, your critiques, live in your world, are… unclear to me. Something something master's tool master's house? Sorry, I'm not that Kendi yet.
What was your point again?
You have no idea how little this pitiful anklebiting attempt (or whatever it was) stings. I have no need to seek or beg or whore myself out, and I could come to the US any time I wanted, welcomed and accommodated, within the last 2 years.
Pleasuring the North American crowd is beneath me. I only talk of what I find interesting. Sometimes I get carried away.
Then how did we get there? Military power alone isn't sufficient; we never conquered Europe. US GDP wasn't orders of magnitude greater that Europe's in the late 20th century. America became the Shining City Upon a Hill by producing film, TV, literature etc proclaiming itself to be so. No, cultural output isn't a geopolitical 'I WIN' button, but it's a piece of the puzzle.
I imagine it was a bit harder to spread propaganda in the age of sail, but who knows? Maybe you're right. I admit I'm ignorant as to what soft power the empire could wield in her day.
Yes, if we were playing a game of risk and you offered me a choice of a 7.5 million person city state that makes kung fu movies versus a 1.3 billion person police state I'd also choose the police state. Life isn't a Foundation novel.
But America is not HK, and...well...I guess China actually is China, but my point stands. I'd take America's soft power stat over China's any day.
Because if there's one great and terrible thing about the USA, it's that it's optimized for giving you what you want. You can have a big house in the suburbs with your own yard, you can have a giant car, you can do drugs, you can play video games for 16 hours a day, you can hire a tutor for your kid, you can get rich playing arcane financial games or spend your life moving bits around instead of manufacturing hard goods. Broadcasting that to the world makes people want to come here. People who explicitly do not want anyone else to come here are tarnishing that image because it furthers their goals.
I resent the accusation of podophilia. Feet are gross.
Regardless, it was just a joke that I thought you would find funny. You had a line 6 or 7 years ago about the tweet about BLM by some San Francisco teen thundering? trumpeting? across the Atlantic or something along those lines. I thought you'd also find it funny how quickly the child prodigy becomes the prodigal child (less the repentance) when a fickle crowd stops liking what you have to say.
As for the rest, why Argentina man? Aside from the aforementioned tango, what is there? A woman? Your other line that stuck with me was 'women demand, men provide.' Provide her the white picket fence and large backyard.
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Not sure what you're trying to imply here. 50 million outside of China is quite impressive. Not as impressive as the Japanese or the Koreans, of course, but still. Even if that 50 million consist of 20 million overseas Chinese primarily in SEA, still.
The fact that you have heard of Lin Dan and Shi Yuqi (I have no idea who this is) is a win. I'm celebrating every win whenever I can. It's getting better, that's all I know.
And, I know Americans here care less about "jungle Asians" than us even, but they do like our cultural exports. It might be true that any good upright western nation do not like us or consume our cultural exports. But I consider dominating the SEA novel/drama/whatever slop that's getting created in the millions by uninspiring Chinese youth a major win. Not a historical anomaly either.
Whichever way you slice it, it just had minimal impact outside of China. 50 million USD for Ne Zha 2 versus 1.3 billion for Zootopia 2. Add up the international earnings for all the American offerings and it's more than 2 OOMs higher. Expressed as a fraction of earnings, 50 million of 2.2 billion is 2% of earnings, whereas the majority of the American films profit was overseas.
Yes, it is. I'm not out to trash Chinese culture or people, but I want to push back against American cultural exports being 'capeshit and funko pops.'
I played and watched a lot of badminton in the era when Lin Dan was a beast. Apparently Shi Yuqi is world #1 since Viktor Axelsen is aging out, but I've never watched him play. Growing up, most of my closest friends just happened to be Chinese.
Yes sure comparing ourselves to American it’s not that impressive. But consider this: I grew up in a time where your average Chinese laughs at you if you compare us to the Americans. What you listed here sounds pathetic to your people maybe, but sounds impressive enough to me.
But looks like we do have an agreement here that it’s getting better.
Sounds like you’ve had a very Chinese social circle and probably still do, given you play badminton. My wife tried to get me into it, but I just can’t handle the smell of the courts around me, that disgusting mix of rubber and BO. Hope you don’t have to suffer that.
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It interests me that Japanese and Korean cultural exports are very popular globally while Bollywood seems not to have quite made it. I would be interested in any theories why.
Possibly American occupation of a relatively small country led to more cultural meeting and greater feelings of familiarity. (India occupied by UK yes but India is much bigger and maybe less cultural impact long term especially after decolonisation.) But China buys American/Japanese stuff too.
Bollywood has a western fan club- the same people who really like fifties blockbuster productions. In other words, the feature length singing and dancing is just genuinely a lot less popular than Japanese exports or mass produced slop music and soap operas.
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It's an indictment on Chinese culture that we can have an international community that is absolutely aghast at the US diplomatic and cultural engagement right now. But exactly zero rich, first world nations, are seriously discussing swapping alliances to China.
We have countries that are dominated by left wing groups that would rather cut off the left pinky of their first born child than build a tank instead of a solar panel. But instead of broaching the Chinese alliance conversation, they're pumping billions into their own military industrial complex.
The USA is literally in the process of threatening war with EU members and destroying NATO. This is a geopolitical conflict, ostensibly to keep China out of the sphere of influence. You cannot argue that the prevalence of alliances with the USA are all just geopolitical and divorced from cultural influence or politics when the US is positioning itself as a geopolitical threat. Chain smoking Danish politicians are sitting in the war room as I type this, very definitely not considering a formal alliance with China.
When I say nobody likes China, I'm not saying people like the USA. I'm horrified by Trump, I'm horrified by US liberals, I'm horrified by the cultural exports of the US that divide society. In an alternate timeline where Europe had not chosen managed decline, I could see the EU as a viable alternative for leadership in the international community.
But in the current timeline, we have a belligerent USA that is still the preferable ally when one looks at China. If you're unwilling to entertain why people aren't voting with their feet in a very straight forward geopolitical conversation, I don't consider you a person who is seriously interested in the questions you're asking.
The US pride narrative? Mate, I'm on record calling the American geopolitical strategy "retarded".
And their geopolitical engagement is still somehow more alluring than whatever Beijing is trying to do. If WWIII happens, the worst possible outcome, in any rational person's mind, is China winning. The boomers in Brussels know this. The China experts in Australia know this. The Indians, the Iranians, the Turks know this. If a ship gets sunk in the SCS tomorrow, the free world holds their nose and rallies under the freedom eagle in 5 minutes flat. Are you disputing that, or is your complaint that they should get to know China and swap sides?
Have you considered that the major cultural «defect» here is simply that China is not offering alliances to anyone? That they have strictly one ally, and that ally is Pakistan, which they use solely to keep India distracted? That they believe, and perhaps reasonably, that they do not need any allies or supplicants to achieve what they want? They don't even try to arm Iran. They are watching Russia and Ukraine bleed, and calmly sell weapons to both sides, and lobby for more EVs in the EU. They did not bother to loudly condemn American aggression towards Greenland, just reiterated the commitment to the UN Charter and asked to not be used as a pretext. They don't care.
NATO was not formed at the behest of smaller nations; it was a deliberate American project of expanding the US-UK alliance network in the face of the very credible and loudly proclaimed Soviet expansionism. You are talking as if China is proposing a counter-NATO security bloc a la the Warsaw Pact, and is being rejected because Wukong is an inadequate counter to Spiderman. Tell me, had the Soviets wooed the world with their high culture? Was it Rachmaninoff or Tarkovski that kept Czhechoslovakia tethered, or perhaps the Strugatsky brothers? No, it was a crude ideology and the threat of violence. During Mao's era, Chinese culture was incomparably more ghoulish and impoverished than it is now, and yet they had a far greater global reach. Maoism still finds some purchase among American intellectuals – with no input from Beijing.
What you confirm to me is that for a Westerner it's largely pointless to study China. All that expertise, just to play a glass bead game with your starting priors.
Not sure if you've studied this, but the official Chinese position on the matter of great power politics is:
Obviously the lofty rhetoric about never bullying smaller states may sound very quaint now. But the philosophy, I think, is straightforwardly upheld. They do not intend to act as a superpower no matter how strong they get. They consider it a distraction.
Yes, I am. I think the «free world» makes concerned noises, cancels some trade deals, and politely offers Trump to sort it out or whatever. The French are not going to lose their entire fleet (which they may need to defend from American aggression, as they have known for a while) in the South China Sea. Had the «free world» truly cared about preventing Chynese domination, it wouldn't have traded the recognition of Taiwanese sovereignty for the privilege of investing into the Mainland economy.
In any case, when those 49K Chinese EVs arrive to Canada, we'll see what soft power with Chinese characteristics looks like in a rich first world nation.
Okay, and that's what Trump is doing because he believes (rightly or wrongly) America doesn't need allies and supplicants, and you're bitching about that? It's okay when Our Guy does it but not when Their Guy does it?
You should be worried about Chinese isolationism because they rolled over Mongolia and Tibet and if ever they really feel like it they'll roll over India as well like a Katarmari ball, because fundamentally China thinks everyone else is shit, and that includes so-called Asian compatriots. They hate the Japanese, what do you imagine they think of India?
I fucking believe Xi on "China will never ever" the day I see him handing back national sovereignty to Tibet. The only reason "China is not behaving like a superpower" is that they consider these territories as already belonging to them. Can't be a superpower if you're just taking back your own property.
What is this, just face-saving? The conceptual difference is that the US already has an alliance network, so it makes no sense to just dismantle it, even at cost. But, like, I'm not really "bitching", I'm okay with it, go on. I'm not sure what's better for me in the end, because one important variable is how the desperation dynamics affects the severity of American chimpouts, and I don't have a model for it.
The practical difference is that without allies, within 3-5 years you cease being anything remotely like a peer power to China. It's just unserious to talk about. It's not only a matter of industrial scale, brainpower and state capacity (China outclassing the US in each), it's that they are a near-autarky, and half of your advanced economy including the MIC is dependent on allied supply chains (a fact obscured by relative share of trade in GDP, but a true one). Obviously this means that even Trump's USA is unlikely to torpedo the current system, but it's worth keeping in mind the alternative.
They think vastly better of India, Russia, America and cockroaches than of the Japanese. You have no clue what you're talking about if that's your argument.
And indeed Tibet is internationally recognized Chinese clay. The territorial claims of the PRC are consistent since before the formation of the PRC and only were scaled down over time. CIA-supported governments in exile do not inherently override governments of nation states. "Free Tibet" is some vintage psyop, I'm sort of confused to still see it. Maybe we'll feel this way about Gaza in a few decades.
I can see you will enjoy your future as Philby in Moscow, Chinese version.
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What's next? She didn't break up with me, I broke up with her?
China has been desperately chasing allies for decades. When the Sino-Soviet split happened, China was left in the Cold. Since then they've been wildly pursuing allies like a realestate agent at a local barbecue. Either Blunderous demands of allegiance or paying off weak nations with checkbook diplomacy that lasts about as long as the infrastructure project takes.
It just doesn't work. China tried to bully a third world Pacific nation by screaming at a foreign affairs minister in his own office:
Fast forward and:
China literally cannot work out how to make friends. They sign projects worth billions of dollars with desperate pacific nations who pocket the money and then swap back to the US as soon as a new Blackhawk variant is released. When China tries to bully instead, countries just form new defensive blocks against them.
Portraying a total inability to do diplomacy on any level as a conscious choice by the CCP is absolute cope. They are desperate for allies, they want allies, they're paying big money for allies, and they cannot get them.
If you are posting CCP propaganda with a straight face, I don't think I have anything else to say. It goes without saying that CCP members saying "We come in peace" can be regarded with some skepticism. I have never met a China analyst, either Western or Chinese raised, who doesn't quote the CCP position and then instantly translate it into what it actually means: usually domestic virtue signaling. Sometimes a balancing act against perceived criticism. Never the words that were said.
Yeah so let me reiterate: even in your most motivated, pro-China reasoning, you cannot envision a world that doesn't immediately freeze trade with China and pray to god that Trump fixes it. We both conclude that chortling Frenchmen would rather the despicable Trump sends a hundred thousand marines to machine gun down the CCP headquarters than live in a world with a victorious China.
So... what's your actual criticism of my previous post? You made a whole new post to attack my previous one, but when it comes down to it, you agree I'm right. What's going on here? Because right now I would suggest that your post is exactly the type of bizarre and inconsistent messaging from Chinese media/political/cultural exports that the rest of the world finds so uncharismatic and unconvincing.
I think it's distinctly un-scary. I know I have a lot in common with a pair of guys in Milwaukee. Because I listen to them sit around and review movies inbetween jokes about alcoholism.
Full-scale cultural compatibility, e.g. New Zealand and Australia, is one of the most powerful forces of peace going.
I know nothing of the Mike and Jay of China because the CCP won't let me.
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Notably, none of this has any relation to «cultural exports» which you started with in your argument about WWIII alliances, so I assume you've quietly conceded the point.
Still, I think this is cope and embarrassing narrative peddling.
They have terrible diplomacy, sure. Just like they have terrible propaganda. But you're desperately trying to shoehorn trade deals into the form of alliance building. I believe they genuinely expected that dysfunctional African or Oceanian states can be a good investment and grow even at a fraction of their speed. You're imagining that all those BRI projects are some very long, awkward, failed foreplay to a military alliance. I'd need to see actual Chinese proposals to this effect to believe it. Papua New Guinea signs defense treaty with Australia. Is this really a big deal? China has a profitable bilateral relationship with Australia as such.
Wolf warrior diplomacy is commonly understood to have been an appeal to domestic audience in the age of social media, like bizarre American behaviors are.
And yet your only scenario for the war is «South China Sea». They are openly saying they intend to take Taiwan, «easy way or the hard way», in Trumpspeak. This is what that navy is primarily for, as well as other assets in the theater – overmatch against any conceivable allied fleet. Is it common among «analysts» to interpret it as the first step to world domination?
Your analysts must be trying too hard. People usually mean what they say.
I guess your kind of jaded analysts who don't believe propaganda, all these think tank morons with Chinese characters in Twitter handles, who have lived in China long enough to infer menacing signals from how many cups are before Xi, also analyzed Chinese Miscalculation last October, when they Showed Their Hand and Revealed Being A Bad Actor Before the World, Inviting American Retaliation. Do you remember that phase? I do, the entire Analyst Community, people like Greer, Doshi, they were unanimous that China just can't into diplomacy and blundered to save face again, or it was a rogue MOFCOM or MSS agent, or that the Analysts (and Bessent) need to publicly insist on this to give Xi «face» when he rolls export controls back, etc. etc, all this condescending and ignorant garbage from a position of control. How has that worked out? The US was the one miscalculating, Xi never had to save face, Trump fumed a bit and went to Busan to ask for a ceasefire, and that was that. And then Korea signed on to the currency swap with China. In general, for all that they're failing in diplomacy, the decoupling from them is going very poorly indeed.
No, I do not permit you to «reiterate». No, we do not both conclude. I didn't say that, your rephrasing is a retarded American fantasy. Why do you need to do this? Just directly mock what I actually say, if you would be so kind.
I meant more like «Macron freezes those optically significant FDI projects he's been begging China for in Davos». Not even trade with Russia is totally frozen. You're delusional if you believe Europe reacts stronger to Taiwan because «China cannot into diplomacy» and ultimately «China bad media exports». All those lurid images are completely detached from the scenario I mentioned.
I suppose what is going on here is that, at least for the purposes of this debate, you're incapable of communicating in plain language, and it's obnoxious of you to pretend to, so I won't cooperate.
Yeah sorry mate, this is too tiresome for me. Nothing you've said changes that in practice, on the ground, Chinese cultural exports, political engagement and geopolitics don't work. I use the phrase "uncharismatic" but sub in "ineffective" or whatever you need. China has no allies, nobody likes what they produce, and nobody likes what they say. China got rich building things that were invented by westerners. Not by producing novel goods that everybody loves. Yes yes, you can say "that doesn’t prove anything" all you want. But it does.
Your whole assessment of my statement was that I must be a dumb American with no sense of China. You were wrong on both points.
I have no secret agenda of pro-American sentiment. My last post was attacking a guy who said the US policy re: Greenland made sense.
You need to do better than this to be taken seriously while talking about the CCP. Obvioisly stated intentions matter. Obviously stated intentions aren't the full story when said by a notoriously propaganda driven political party.
You can hardly accuse me of being unfair after making a whole post which concludes that I am "projecting" as a "true American" who knows nothing and doesn't want to know anything about China. You agreed the world would cut ties with China and back the USA. Don't get pissy about me mixing in a joke.
I can only roll my eyes so much.
You made a post and used me as an example to prove your point. You got embarrassed because your foundational premise was wrong. Next time, just say "lol my bad. I still think Americans exhibit this behaviour" and I wouldn't even have engaged. But you're tripling down into CCP fantasy land where no failed project is actually a failure, no diplomatic incident means anything, and no allies was actually the plan all along!
That'll be all from me. I'm fine for some interesting China shilling, which can be genuinely good to read. China is an interesting place that we don't talk about enough. But no, Chinese culture is brittle, and the CCP knows this. Hence the top down protectionism.
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This is just kanging that gets produced in a terminally ill society that's running out of a things to boast of and so points to legacy and accumulated prestige. Nobody cares anymore for what the ingenious whites claim to have invented, sorry to say, that's a very boomer-coded thing in a very non-white and industrial world. This is the kind of thing that «everybody loves» in 2026.
Concretely, China gets from the EU, for starters:
What China does not get: military bases in Europe, even though the US (still has bases in Europe) has been rude lately while they're nice and only formally Communists, anything about "alliance".
I think they're fine with this trade.
I guess I need to make it clearer for you. I said that the world will do nothing substantial, nothing beyond symbolic handwringing, unless China actually loses the war. It'll be treated by Europe (nevermind Russia, Africa, India, LatAm, Middle East…) about as seriously as the Israeli war/genocide, or less than that: condemnations + weapons contracts.
Mind you, it's if there is any war, which there likely won't be as the US will retreat and Taiwan just fold.
It's not my foundational premise that you're an American. My "foundational premise" is that your beliefs are representative of Americans and I think they're wrong.
I didn't mind you engaging initially, I thought you might go beyond "uncreative bugmen low EQ" cope mixed with geopolitical concern trolling.
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America is a lot like Russia. It sees itself as the defender of Europe and the bulwark of European values. Meanwhile actual Europeans see them as a bunch of borderline-savages, and as much of a threat as the are a protector.
Part of why America is being so miserly today though is that it genuinely doesn’t have much to give. It’s heavy industry is gone, and other countries have caught up enough on its technological edge that it can’t cruise by on fancy widgets. And the people are too pissed off and distrustful of their government and economy to eat the half a million deaths that a major war requires.
Old Scranton Joe was more generous with the aid to Ukraine than the Don, but he was being a lot more miserly than Europe and the American deep state wanted. He was a bit out to lunch, but his one real red-line policy position that he was cogent of and involved in was no American ground troops in Ukraine. And the delusional deep state flacks (who mostly happen to be Butthurt Belt exiles) hated him for it. That’s why they turfed him out in favor of Kamala, an out-of-her depth human hamburger that would do whatever the CIA told her to.
The Biden administration's limits went a lot further than that - as a matter of vibes it was "nothing that could be considered as a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia because of the risk of nuclear armageddon" and more specifically it included
The restrictions on Ukraine using British kit to attack into Crimea or Russia proper were relaxed by the lame-duck Biden administration, and never reimposed by Trump.
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Well Russia is also clearly divergent from the «Western Civilization» the central example of which is obviously Western Europe, eg France. In the most divergent dimensions, Russians are just living the way Europeans did 200 years ago, and that's enough to be seen as basically a species of non-human vermin and infinitely more distant than the Japanese or Koreans. People are massively sensitive to morally coded deviations, but big structural differences don't necessarily register. Dealing with an «alien civilization», so long as it's at all functional, is not psychologically harder than dealing with a «wayward cousin».
But I don't think so. Like, 200 years ago was 1820s. That's the time just after French revolution and Napoleonic wars. Britain in the meantime held regular parliamentary elections (though not with universal vote yet). I don't think anybody would look on European culture of late pre-Victorian era and regard it as "species of non-human vermin". Yes, there would be some things there that we may consider outdated, but "infinitely distant"? Russia, however, never embraced the values that Europeans held at that time - like the concept of personal authonomy, limited participatory government, pursuit of rational knowledge for the betterment of humanity, etc. Not that these values by itself don't have problems, and surely European implementation of them had plenty of flaws, but the point is it was something they valued, and Russia didn't value it then and doesn't now.
Yet I think Brits looked at Kaiser's Germany and saw exactly that, even a century later. Was Germany not European? Of course, the entire «Evropa» concept is retconned, Europeans didn't think of themselves as a unified culture. They could talk a good game about shared White superiority compared to other races, but they easily dehumanized each other too. Russia was at the margins of Europe, but it's a matter of timing and degree, not kind. Prussia was another outlier. When did their absolute monarchy end, 1848?
Chutzpah. Soviets bought the rational knowledge stuff hook line and sinker, 80s-90s were a time of genuine enthusiasm about democracy human rights, and even today Putin pretends to be an elected representative with all the dressings of a parliamentary system. You know this, of course.
Yes, but this is war propaganda. You can not judge war propaganda on the same footing as genuine cultural standards. In the absence of war, nobody in Britain though Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, Bach, Beethoven, Strauss, (insert 9000 names here) were brute apelike savages. Nobody thought Euler, Gauss, Cantor, Bayer, Daimler, Zeiss, (insert another 9000 names here) were illiterate idiots. Yes, English, French, Germans (when they finally appeared, and every flavor of them before) and so on squabbled constantly and dissed on each other constantly. But there's no doubt they were closer culturally to each other - and they knew it - then, say, to Japanese, or Chinese, or Russians, or Mongolians, or Zimbabweans. Yes, that did not prevent them from killing each other, nothing ever does. But they never genuinely considered each other's cultures subhuman vermin.
It is true, the communists were modernist rationalists. But they also were internationalists - which meant, they wanted nothing to do with the old Russia (they tried to do away with everything traditional, including alphabet, calendar, holidays, names, etc. - with varied degrees of success, modernism has its limits, as they soon learned). And as soon as communists were overthrown - actually, as soon as their revolutionary fervor weakened - modernist rationalism went away. All kinds of esoteric new-age mysticism became popular already in 1970s, and in late 1980s-90s had absolutely bizarre things going on (read about Alan Chumak and Anatoly Kashpirovsky, for example). So, as Russia were returning to its traditional national values (Orthodox Christianity started its resurgence about the same time) rationalism's popularity faded.
I'm sure Chinese and North Koreans pretend even harder, but nobody - including themselves - believes in this pretense. And, what is very important, nobody cares, especially in Russia - Russians are completely fine with fake elections, because they don't really value free elections - they are completely ok with fake-electing the same Tzar for life, if he doesn't treat them too badly (in this case, they'd kill him and put on a new Tzar for life). Everybody in Russia knows elections are fake and the parliament is a dressing for what Putin wants, with less power than medieval nobles' assemblies under absolute monarchs. They are absolutely fine with it.
All this is special pleading.
Is the current perception of Russians not war propaganda? In times of peace, or even during the Cold War, our high culture was considered continuous with the European one in a manner that high Japanese or Zimbabwean culture obviously wasn't, and the Russian thinking class was deeply integrated into the European network, worked and studied in Europe. I don't feel the need to namedrop. Now, of course, irate Ukrainians get a platform to claim that Pushkin was a mediocre imperialist savage or demand reassignment of historically recognized national identities of scientists. But that's noise. Rhetoric about a small sliver of «basically Aryan» elite and the mass of subhuman orc peasants underneath is likewise motivated and unchanged since Nazi rationalizations of their losses. Sure, Russia is relatively less productive than the highest tier of Western European states, and was later to the party. A difference in degree, not kind.
I believe this is retconning, the cancerous nature of German culture was a legitimate topic of debate. But the point is not so much how they regarded each other at the time as how a modern day enlightened Brit or a French would view a normal 19th century European, with his belligerence and his backwards views on various social matters.
I get that you emigrated around that time and will never refuse to dunk on the Slav goyim. But by this standard, how is the US part of the rational knowledge tradition? 100+ million Evangelicals, megachurches, charismatic pastors, absurd sects, widespread science skepticism and conspiracy theorizing, Psi as a legitimate military research field, open appeals to theology in policymaking. On the other hand, the US happens to have the world's premier scientific institutions and technical companies. Russia can't boast of the same, it merely has better IT sphere than all of Europe and some universities supplying talent to American megacorps. Rationalism has never and nowhere been default mass culture.
There's no Orthodox resurgence as of 2025, Russia is a transparently secular state, despite government's awkward efforts to astroturf belief.
And I'm sure this is poorly thought-out rhetoric because no, neither Kim nor Xi pretend to be elected, as there is no institution of general elections of leaders in those nations. «Representing the people» from @Eetan is absurd goalpost movement – is L'État, c'est moi a claim to have democratic mandate as well?
You're shoehorning it.
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This is the case all over the world. Every regime except Taliban and Gulf monarchies claim to represent "the people" and rule in their name, every colonel who just gained power by coup says he is really defending democracy. Last man who failed to conform to this unwritten rule was late Emperor Bokassa the First.
Looks like total Western cultural victory. When you start seeing various strongmen repudiating this charade and crowning themselves as kings, sultans and maharajahs, you will know that Western supremacy is fading and multipolar, multicultural world arrived for real.
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The French are a dying cucked people. Why should anyone care what they say? They are to be pitied and an object lesson of what not to do; not a group to be modeled.
France is likely to be the last euro country standing.
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I think this applied to both Americans and Russians.
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'Lieber Turk als Papst'.
Yes, and also the Franco-Ottoman alliance. But neither the Dutch nor the French actually wished to dominated by Turks. It was a classic outgroup vs fargroup dynamic.
Factually there were plenty of Greeks who preferred the Turks to cooperating with the west in the waning days of the Byzantine empire, of course.
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