News

7 readers

5 users here now

Breaking news and current events worldwide.

founded 1 year ago

China is in default on a trillion dollars in debt to US bondholders. Will the US force repayment? (thehill.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Now that the relationship with China has soured and the People’s Republic of China has become the greatest adversarial threat to the U.S. and Western security, policymakers should revisit thi…

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You know, it hadn't occured to me before now, but Trump did an unexpected piece of damage when he started his trade war.

The initial steps of a war footing with the west would involve the cutting of financial ties in a strategic way to cause hassles in western markets without drawing too much suspicion.

Before those would have looked out-of-place and very noteworthy. Now they blend in. Are they actually ... considering attacking Taiwan soon? That strikes me as sheer suicide, the west hasn't been this up-in-arms for decades. That makes intervention about a million times more likely.

They do know that while Taiwan has no direct military guarantees from the US, they do have some from our immediate allies, right? And we are not the types to sit out a fight anymore, getting smacked with that error twice in the last century taught us our own valuable lesson, sending us into an overcorrection in the other direction. We do the whole intervention thing now, often.

I hope I'm reading too much into this. I've always been in the war-is-actually-unlikely minority, but these moves seem strangely timed to me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Trump did an unexpected piece of damage when he started his trade war.

And that's why economists all agree that trade wars are bad.

And we are not the types to sit out a fight anymore, getting smacked with that error twice in the last century taught us our own valuable lesson, sending us into an overcorrection in the other direction. We do the whole intervention thing now, often.

Well... I would argue that the US has been pretty good at avoiding confrontation. Obama should have done more to stop North Korea. Obama, Trump and Biden collectively aren't doing much about the militarisation of the South China Sea.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

IMO the problem really got rolling with President Bill Clinton gave China most favored nation trading status, eliminating a lot of barriers for US business to ship jobs and production to China. The hope at the time was that a country that became Capitalist would always become a Liberal Democracy. That prediction was very, very wrong.