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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?
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 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 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.
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.
Personally I find the lack of charisma to be the most attractive feature of Chinese power, and the presence of cultural charisma to be the most frightening thing about America.
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