Militärisch, diplomatisch und wirtschaftlich stellt Peking auf Schritt und Tritt die Dominanz Amerikas in Frage. Könnte es es bald überholen?
https://www.thetimes.com/article/669bd10b-95d6-4dc6-8ad9-06e9145da1a4?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Reddit#Echobox=1744458407
42 Kommentare
***From The Sunday Times:***
At the end of a week in which the Trump administration’s battle with China reached new heights, the fear is that this is just the start. From trade and finance to actual military capability, the People’s Republic has spent decades preparing take over as the world’s most powerful nation — and it is becoming clear that that moment is now much closer.
Trump and his team have sought to tackle one manifestation of declining American power — a trade deficit that last year topped $295bn in China’s favour. However, their approach has only exposed the scale of the challenge facing Washington across multiple fronts.
There was a long-held assumption that China’s own demographic and economic concerns would deter it from pursuing a full trade war with the United States, since access to American markets is so important. But the Trump tariffs brought tit-for-tat actions that have dispelled this belief.
On Wednesday the White House announced a 90-day moratorium on most of the tariffs that have upended the world economic order, but increased its tariffs on Chinese goods to 145%. Beijing responded with a 125% tariff on US imports while the Chinese commerce ministry declared that the tariff hikes exposed “the blackmailing nature of the US. China will never accept this … China will fight to the end.”
China is retaliating from a position of strength. Although it had a massive volume of sales to the US prior to the tariff battle beginning, they only amounted to 2% of its total GDP.
He could avoid announcing the tariffs, and increase cooperation with Europe and the US’ asiatic allies and partners
China is too big to fail just how the US is too big to fail.
How can he stop China, when the US cant even stop Russia over Ukraine.
„Can Trump stop himself from pushing the world towards China?“ Sounds more appropriate.
Remember when Russia invaded Ukraine to stop NATO expansion and ended up with double its border space being shared with NATO and an expanded NATO… Trump is doing the same here with trade and tarrifs.
Things were going well when Biden was in office; probably little chance now, due to poor decisions.
>Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: „Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.“ … It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
Before Trump, China was the world’s boogeyman. Now it’s the US.
The fact that ASEAN, EU, S Korea, Japan, etc are negotiating deals with China left and right means the US is no longer the leader of the free world and it is the US that handed China the global throne.
There is no longer a free world. There are now giant powers establishing spheres of influence and Trump is to blame for it.
And if push comes to shove that the US goes all in and make the trade war into a hot one as a last ditch effort to preserve itself, it will be slugging it out alone, without allies, because of Trump.
Without an industrial complex worth that name, the USA would need to ask for iron, aluminium etc. to China to wage war on China. Of course China knows it and it sleeps well.
He could have by doing nothing at all. Now it’s probably too late
I don’t think there was ever a point where we could stop China from becoming a superpower; only delay it, and be better prepared for it. We needed to rely less on their manufacturing of critical goods and strategic resources, while shoring up partnerships in the Pacific – especially Southeast Asia. We also needed to support growth in the Americas so that we could „onshore“ that stuff to friendly countries our hemisphere.
Unfortunately, Trump seems to be speedrunning China’s rise and making them look like a more stable, dependable power. Because they may be authoritarian and belligerent with a lot of their neighbors, but they are predictable.
That’s going to be a massive challenge without any allies.
Its insane that the administration apparently wants to focus on combating China, but alienating every single ally on the way. This obviously includes Europe, but more importantly Japan and Taiwan.
If the US wants to drag down Europe we will naturally gravitate to China even if our values don’t align.
This is why American exceptionalism is poison. Him and his supporters genuinely believe in the authoritarian mindset that „bigger“ countries should be able to bully others, and it’s never going to be successful; there is a reason the world moved away from this, and it’s not going to change soon.
I know it’s already been mentioned that Chinese sales to the US only make up 2% of its GDP, but the US also needs to sell a frightening amount of T-Bills due its incredible deficit, of which China buys around 10%. China could simply stop buying. It has more tools in its arsenal. Not to mention the bond markets are still not stable.
All that’s going to happen is that Trump is going to grovel in private once his advisors convince him there’s no way out and that he will incur intense political and economic backlash, then Xi and Trump will go back to their respective peoples and say they „won“.
American hegemony, gained in part through America’s economic prowess, is coming to an end and it’s all because he decided to wreck things by himself. Xi is probably kicking his feet in glee right now.
Trump made China a bigger superpower when he decided to use North Korea as his model for reshaping America.
Any attempt to “box them in” like the USSR is fundamentally flawed; China is a global economic and trade powerhouse and widely seen as a reliable (or at least stable) partner, the USSR was an autarky-driven pariah state with few exports besides weapons. The best way to combat China would be to bolster our own manufacturing (to compete with them abroad and insulate ourselves from them), and build up a reputable image as a stable and easy-to-work with country, not a country that see-saws every 4 years and whose first instinct is to bomb you if we don’t like you. That will take time, decades, to start to bear fruit, and would require a fundamental re-orientation of how the US sees its foreign policy. And even then you wouldn’t be “stopping” China, merely competing with them to box them out of a few key regions like Western Europe, Japan, etc.
No way. Trump is not a leader. He is a conman. He demonstrated his lack of leadership during his first term and was not invited back for a second. Now, thanks to Musk and his money, he is back in our faces for a 2nd term. Thanks to Scotus, he is without guardrails. Heaven help Americans and America. We are in deep do-do.
Nope. China is a 5000 year old civilization. They are in life for the long run. The US, not quite so much.
I think the more important question at this point is: Can Trump even stop facilitating the rise of China?
Should ask, can Trump make people pay their eggs for 10usd without any fuss? Lol
lol….no..but I bet he can enrich himself at the expense of the US population. Trump is another billionaire clown with the same exact agenda as the rest of them. Only one way out now that the system will only protect billionaire clowns, no matter what they do.
edit: [Nailed it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoTV-J7QtLM)
At this point he suicided the US and no one will trust them, the USD will lose influence, the world will fragment as he doesn’t understand cooperation and the power vacuum will be filled by the other big players, aka China…
Major Fail for all of us, but win for his nepotistic goals, he will get richer, just too bad he had to destroy the US in the process since it seems Americans can protest and riot like the French.
He’s helping a lot actually.
Demographics will stop China from becoming the worlds next superpower
he’s doing a good job making China look good and the US looking like the villains
Why would they stop them?
We could also just enjoy being human together and stop. We’re already all connected through the internet and the planet. We should really start to evolve past this narrative by now. These discussions would be really worthless once people actually start building their own systems and work together to make this planet even a nicer place and I bet that most of humanity wants this. Think about why it’s not happening, maybe start fighting that instead of following illusive greedy people who are trying to keep you as individual as possible.
Not after what he’s done in the last 100 days. If anything he’s made their rise to superpower inevitable by alienating Americas allies and driving the middle countries toward China. The Biden administration, as was the Obama administration, working on a very effective plan to contain China. The Transpacific Partnership would have effectively put all of China’s neighbors into the US trading sphere, Trump trashed it. Biden built out the AUKUS which is now teetering, the 5 eyes members won’t share intelligence with the US because Trump and his gang are incompetent and don’t protect the information. China’s rise is pretty well assured now thanks to Trump.
USA is already the world super power and will be for time. Within the span of 3 months, however, Trump has destroyed the soft power the USA— tariffing reliable allies, cutting international aid, leaving international organizations in which they were the top funder and supporter (WHO), so Trump is doing the opposite of what is intended. It is important to note, however, that China are powerful but have many internal issues— lack of births due to the one-child policy, over production but under consumption (see Ghost Cities), and corruption. I think China has asserted their soft power in poorer nations (Silk Road), and the USA had the advantage of asserting their power upon other western countries. Trump destroyed that soft power.
Nope.
I think there is fundamental misunderstanding of what mr Trump doing / trying to do.
He is not trying to „stop China from becoming the world’s superpower“ or anything like that „geopolitical“
If anything he rather isolationist. What he is doing is 100% about internal politics and not foreign. He definitely care how it looks like to American public – so it will not looks like we are loosing place, but that is it. Nobody want to pay any for „stop China“ – so he represent that public sentiment as well as worry about a jobs. That what he need to fulfill – that expectations, not some big ideas. Ad Si sort of the same position.
Bettridge’s law.
Other presidents could, Trump is playing hopscotch against Xi’s chess, and he’s a fat piece of shit who can’t hop without rolling over.
Stop China?
Trump is helping China become the world’s superpower by being mega unreliable, a total dick to allies and an outright bully to small nations.
China is going to have an easy time getting creds everywhere..
I don’t know what his plan was, but he probably also doesn’t know. Just wants to put out cool tweets
It’s like asking if a monkey can make an omelette. Technically, yes, but practically no.
Stop? I thought he was actively trying to accomplish it?
Not really
What this episode has shown very clearly is that China has diversified itself to the extent that no threat really works on them. Xi didn’t blink when the sanctions were forced on them and came out looking strong. optically they look every bit a super power now.
Yes he can, he just needs to do the exact opposite of everything he has done since day 1
Could he? Maybe.
Has he displayed an interest in doing so? Not really.
Damage is done. The US alliance network is what kept the US as the most powerful country in the 2020s. Now the alliance network is gone.
I think it’s obvious China is the more powerful country. China moves so fast. The high speed rail went from a tiny airport to central city to more HSR than the rest of the world combined. Chinese automotive was a nonentity in 2015, now they are the largest car exporter.
That production can be set to missiles quite quickly. Right now batteries are what the production is set to.
Trump would have to stop being Trump to impede the resumption of China’s rise now. All China has to do now is sit back, shut up, and politely be the biggest trade partner of choice in the world while the US attacks and sidelines all their own allies.
Admittedly it’s still to be seen if „politely shutting up“ is in China’s wheelhouse. I did notice a lot of the wolf warrior cadre getting sidelined or demoted post COVID, but Lu Shaye (loudmouth ex-ambassador to France) has been named as senior envoy to Europe. China made the mistake during the last Trump presidency of seeing their path to the top as a foregone conclusion and commenced insulting their trading partners as if they were already the dominant global power. If they repeat that again with Lu Shaye in Europe, they won’t get concessions in Europe as well as being shut out of the US market. That would put a firm ceiling on China’s rise.
He’s helping them!
No person in US history has hastened and damaged the interests of the United States more than Donald Trump, and the only reason he’s not in jail is because of treasonous collaborators in the federal department of justice who slow-boated what should have been a prosecution and life-time incarceration for espionage or treason.
China is already a superpower – it’s so very, very thoughtful of the author to couch the discussion as if it hadn’t happened 20 years ago, China has been an economic near-peer for more than a decade and increasingly they can compete in high-end technologically critical areas and surpass us in some areas – while it’s also still true that Chinese research is actively harmed when the US cut’s it’s research budgets China has long ago tried making itself friendly to research and development.
In this area, it’s clear the President has plainly made clear that science, scientific advancements, and the direct economic growth tied to higher education , research and development grants is something he has stated publicly he does not support. So the easiest way for other nations to succeed is for the United States tot fail – Donald Trump was paid by Chinese and Russian elements to ensure that, among other things is exactly what happens.
The payment or quid-pro-quo might never be revealed but his open espionage as a private citizen was problematic to say the least. The closest proximate case law was the selling of US secrets to Israel or Russia/China and all of the individuals involved have either been repatriated to the country they spied for, or died in prison. The Rosenberg’s were executed.
Should some twist of fate allow President Trump to become a proper citizen again – the statute of limitations for espionage is 10 years – the acts of concern were in 2021- meaning it’s not until 2031 that Mr. Trump can be said to put out of the reason of being imprisoned by a proper trial.
This is the real „reason“ he wants to continue to be president, because in so being, it’s literally the only thing keeping him from being prosecuted and as he just committed flagrant insider trading on national fucking television – that’s 3-5 years right there.
So he’s not the most subtle criminal – we just cannot handle our political booze when it comes to degenerates in high places, of course as everyone watching their 401k turn into a 301k over the last few weeks probably goes a very long way to making prison rather than the Presidency a likely career choice for the President.
Especially if the 2026 elections turn into a bloodbath. If Trump were to lose the house – and/or the senate due to losing his „base“ in some measure or another – Trump would almost certainly get impeached – and removed – of course the Vance Presidency does not carry quite the same vibe of invulnerability, as was said decades ago , DJT has a teflon umbrella just big enough for one, so they would have to basically suspend the right to vote to keep old JD in play.