politics

This stuff is why I say don't count the US out or laugh at the idea of its plan of encircling, blockading, and decoupling from China.

It's "moderate rebel" proxies and terrorist groups it supports to destabilize regions including markets for consuming goods as well as raw minerals (both of which China needs) have been wildly successful for many decades and I see no Chinese counter to that at present. Russia is doing slightly more to counter that but only barely and it's more a taking the edge off thing as we saw with Syria where Assad eventually fell anyways because Russia wouldn't commit the necessary level of support. Frankly the US can afford to do these things in 12 places at once while Russia can't afford to counter them in even a third.

For every AES (Sahel) that tries to throw off the shackles of neo-colonialism and succeeds for a time (how long is anyone's guess) there are a dozen examples of countries the US successfully suppresses, color revolutions, coups, destabilizes, debt-traps, installs compradors in, etc.

China has an uphill fight and I'm increasingly doubtful the US goes without a world war against it. Even proxies that don't "win" their war like Ukraine do provide benefits for the west, arm sales, knowledge on cutting edge enemy tactics and weaponry, experience, and battle-hardened "moderate rebels" which leave the battlefield at the end or in Ukraine's case even before the end to directly serve in the intelligence agencies or proxies of those agencies around the world. We've already seen that with Ukraine bragging about countering Russia's anti-colonial Wagner group helping the Sahel states and that's the tip of the iceberg.

The US is stoking a hundred fires and has means to turn many of them on short notice into an inferno. Even if they can't they just keep stoking it and burning and they still win by default by denying China new markets and resources while already controlling the old existing markets and resources.

There are going to be a hundred color revolutions, palace coups, moderate rebels taking down or throwing a nation into instability, compradors turning around to betray and sell their nation out, etc that are going to be popping up and going off against China and Russia from Africa to central Asia in the next 15 years as the US fights like hell to enact the project for a new American century.