US still has the high ground. The commanding heights of international finance. They have a lot of these nations in debt, and they play dirty. They can with sanctions levers crush a country economically by forcing others to not do business with it (and countries know this and this is part of the locking you in a room with China threat). China isn’t going to coup these nations and install a corrupt comprador with military officers that trained in China who they’ve ideologically adjusted and spied on and know who among them will listen to their plea and not report it but the US might and can and has established methods for doing so.
I look at it from a view of human relations as well, the classic case of the abuser and the hostage victim who sticks with them because change is scary and because the abuser has convinced the hostage victim that they’re not strong, that they can’t survive without them and that those trying to help them are actually going to hurt them. The US offers a gradual choice, nothing sharp, just obey a little bit, then a little more, then a little more as they reel you in. With China you have to make the sharp break, you risk painting a big target on your back and being one of only a few who does so and drawing the full might of the empire to repeatedly punch you in the face while others look on. You don’t know how it will all shake out, the prudent, risk averse thing is to take the obeying a little bit choice, is to think you can take that and create wiggle room and strategize and see how things shake out but when everyone else takes the same deal they find themselves in the same place of oh shit no one else small stood up to them we can’t stand up to them at the next demand because again we don’t know if we’ll get repeatedly beat on by this violent, deranged empire using military and economic means. So it’s a kind of ratchet effect. And what’s especially clever about this is they use Trump, a man the US propaganda apparatus casts as an aberration to do this. Many nations will foolishly think that they should make a deal now, give a little and that in 4 years there will be a more reasonable “normal” US president who will reverse this, thus it appears even more wise to capitulate a little now because you believe this is just a passing storm instead of understanding this is bi-partisan consensus and a Democrat in the white house in 2029 won’t roll this back but iterate on it.
And if China is forced into a position of sanctioning/retaliating against dozens and dozens of countries who all take the same deal from the US it acts as a lever pushing those nations further away from China while the US continues to reel them in. It only works if most nations believe China’s threat and find it more credible and fearsome than the US threat. If a large group of nations just accepts it, it further pushes the US point that China wants control over your nation, will not allow you to take actions negatively affecting it, acts only in dangerous self-interest and that it’s better to stick with the trusted abuser you know (USA) than go with China who all US propaganda says is so horrible after all and besides who is after all a communist nation which is naturally scary to all capitalist nations. If they truly believe in the multi-polarity project they might better understand that standing now is for themselves but how many do is the question.
So it’s a calculus that has a risk of being decided based on propaganda assumptions carefully seeded by the US.
I think it’ll be interesting to see who the next Pope is, I think there’s a good chance regardless of any beating on the drums of helping the poor how much that person pushes (which I think was what Francis was after more than any reformism to the way the church views women’s/gay rights) the reactionary culture war, pushes anti-LGBTQ+, pushes anti-trans, pushes “traditional” roles of the sexes with women relegated to an inferior place. Those kinds of things play very well in places like Africa and Latin America where a lot of that red in the top map is and can be used to stir up anti-China sentiment on the basis of casting China as an enemy of traditional values. Because that’s the shift US propaganda outlets themselves have been making under Trump, from trying to portray the US as a beacon of progressive rights to moving to “trad” much in the vein of how Russia pushes its own appeal to reactionaries internationally. This is to say nothing of just having the next pope come out and call China an enemy of Christianity and urge all Christians and believers world-wide to unite against the “atheist communist dictatorship” while playing up Tibet, Xinjiang, etc and insisting that China intends to force your country to allow gay marriage and so on and so forth and use the retaliation China does against countries who agree to US exclusion of China as proof they’re not really for a multi-polar world but for controlling you and that if you’re going to be controlled it should be by a “trad” country like the US who will help you fight the scourge of these scapegoated sexual minorities, of feminists, etc. Is anti-colonialist sentiment strong enough to overcome this? I’m not optimistic in Latin America, in Africa I don’t know.
To be clear there are a lot of places this can go wrong but there are a lot of ways it can go at least partially right for the US and end up with cold war 2.0 bloc situation.
US still has the high ground. The commanding heights of international finance. They have a lot of these nations in debt, and they play dirty. They can with sanctions levers crush a country economically by forcing others to not do business with it (and countries know this and this is part of the locking you in a room with China threat). China isn’t going to coup these nations and install a corrupt comprador with military officers that trained in China who they’ve ideologically adjusted and spied on and know who among them will listen to their plea and not report it but the US might and can and has established methods for doing so.
I look at it from a view of human relations as well, the classic case of the abuser and the hostage victim who sticks with them because change is scary and because the abuser has convinced the hostage victim that they’re not strong, that they can’t survive without them and that those trying to help them are actually going to hurt them. The US offers a gradual choice, nothing sharp, just obey a little bit, then a little more, then a little more as they reel you in. With China you have to make the sharp break, you risk painting a big target on your back and being one of only a few who does so and drawing the full might of the empire to repeatedly punch you in the face while others look on. You don’t know how it will all shake out, the prudent, risk averse thing is to take the obeying a little bit choice, is to think you can take that and create wiggle room and strategize and see how things shake out but when everyone else takes the same deal they find themselves in the same place of oh shit no one else small stood up to them we can’t stand up to them at the next demand because again we don’t know if we’ll get repeatedly beat on by this violent, deranged empire using military and economic means. So it’s a kind of ratchet effect. And what’s especially clever about this is they use Trump, a man the US propaganda apparatus casts as an aberration to do this. Many nations will foolishly think that they should make a deal now, give a little and that in 4 years there will be a more reasonable “normal” US president who will reverse this, thus it appears even more wise to capitulate a little now because you believe this is just a passing storm instead of understanding this is bi-partisan consensus and a Democrat in the white house in 2029 won’t roll this back but iterate on it.
And if China is forced into a position of sanctioning/retaliating against dozens and dozens of countries who all take the same deal from the US it acts as a lever pushing those nations further away from China while the US continues to reel them in. It only works if most nations believe China’s threat and find it more credible and fearsome than the US threat. If a large group of nations just accepts it, it further pushes the US point that China wants control over your nation, will not allow you to take actions negatively affecting it, acts only in dangerous self-interest and that it’s better to stick with the trusted abuser you know (USA) than go with China who all US propaganda says is so horrible after all and besides who is after all a communist nation which is naturally scary to all capitalist nations. If they truly believe in the multi-polarity project they might better understand that standing now is for themselves but how many do is the question.
So it’s a calculus that has a risk of being decided based on propaganda assumptions carefully seeded by the US.
I think it’ll be interesting to see who the next Pope is, I think there’s a good chance regardless of any beating on the drums of helping the poor how much that person pushes (which I think was what Francis was after more than any reformism to the way the church views women’s/gay rights) the reactionary culture war, pushes anti-LGBTQ+, pushes anti-trans, pushes “traditional” roles of the sexes with women relegated to an inferior place. Those kinds of things play very well in places like Africa and Latin America where a lot of that red in the top map is and can be used to stir up anti-China sentiment on the basis of casting China as an enemy of traditional values. Because that’s the shift US propaganda outlets themselves have been making under Trump, from trying to portray the US as a beacon of progressive rights to moving to “trad” much in the vein of how Russia pushes its own appeal to reactionaries internationally. This is to say nothing of just having the next pope come out and call China an enemy of Christianity and urge all Christians and believers world-wide to unite against the “atheist communist dictatorship” while playing up Tibet, Xinjiang, etc and insisting that China intends to force your country to allow gay marriage and so on and so forth and use the retaliation China does against countries who agree to US exclusion of China as proof they’re not really for a multi-polar world but for controlling you and that if you’re going to be controlled it should be by a “trad” country like the US who will help you fight the scourge of these scapegoated sexual minorities, of feminists, etc. Is anti-colonialist sentiment strong enough to overcome this? I’m not optimistic in Latin America, in Africa I don’t know.
To be clear there are a lot of places this can go wrong but there are a lot of ways it can go at least partially right for the US and end up with cold war 2.0 bloc situation.