To be blunt, have you read a history book? People have been killing the outgroup in brutal struggles for power since time began. Are you aware of the phrase "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"? It comes from the Siege of Melos in 416 B.C.

I don't like it, but that's the way the world works, and has worked forever. Criticizing people in power for their actions is good. Saying "if only this other country was in power, things would be different" is foolish.

[–] porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

To be blunt, have you? If you had you would know that even among empires not every one behaved with the same level of bloodthirstiness every time. The leap from "people have been violent forever" to "therefore they must be the maximum amount of violent at all opportunities" is totally unsubstantiated.

Sure, what they can get away with to achieve their goals is one factor in how countries behave. But it is totally absurd to suggest that a country's culture would have no impact on the approach they take to foreign affairs. It has dramatic impacts on all their other laws and ways of doing things, by what possible crazy coincidence would foreign policy always be totally identical regardless of culture?

So yeah, things would be different. Way back in this discussion you snarkily characterised a straw man arguing that things would be perfect and people singing kumbaya, but nobody (here arguing against you in this thread) thinks that. This meme is about dropping bombs. We have substantial real world evidence that China does not prefer to take that approach. The USA absolutely does prefer to take that approach, even when other options would be more successful.

[–] m_f@midwest.social 0 points 2 hours ago

I'm not saying "therefore they must be the maximum amount of violent at all opportunities". Can you point to any period in history in which empires were just chill and sung kumbaya all day long, though?

We have substantial real world evidence that China does not prefer to take that approach.

We have zero evidence that China would not take that approach in a world without Pax Americana (as much as I think the term is silly, it's a convenient shorthand). We do have a lot of evidence that China is a normal country like everywhere else and pushes their interests where possible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_salami_slicing_strategy