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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.
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.
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.
Nah, I know you have a rep as some kind of Good Poster Emeritus, but all I've ever seen you post is Chinese propaganda. Like literally nothing else. This guy snipped your balls.
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