“The arc of the United States since the 1990s can be described as ‘violent decline.’”

Mao said at the Supreme State Conference on September 8, 1958:

U.S. imperialism invaded China’s territory of Taiwan and has occupied it for the past nine years. A short while ago it sent its armed forces to invade and occupy Lebanon. The United States has set up hundreds of military bases in many countries all over the world. China’s territory of Taiwan, Lebanon and all military bases of the United States on foreign soil are so many nooses round the neck of U.S. imperialism. The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses round their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression. The longer the U.S. aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become.

I was led to this by Michael Lind's article today in Unherd. 

Michael Lind reminds us that China is essential to the Russian war effort. 

He is interesting but should not refer to Russia or Iran as Chinese proxies They are not, any more than Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian proxies.

They are China's allies, faced in Iran's case with an unprovoked American attack, in Russia's case by American expansion.

It would be fairer to call the United Kingdom America's proxy but even our worm has recently turned slightly.

China is not a threat to Europe or the West. 

Europe and the West have no real interest in Asia, whether Persia or Japan.

America made Iran and Russia threats, of course.

I quote from the article.

Since 1979, when it fought a brief war with Vietnam, China hasn’t fought any wars, although it has engaged in border skirmishes with India and has bullied other countries with shows of force in the South China Sea. By avoiding military quagmires and concentrating on internal development and strategic trade, China in the last three decades has become the dominant manufacturing power on earth.

And here is the absurd result. Even though the United States gets less than 10% of its oil from the Persian Gulf, American soldiers must die or be maimed for life and American taxpayers must spend hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent Iran, whose largest customer is China, from blocking oil shipments to China by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq — all of whose largest trading partner is also China.

Meanwhile, American taxpayers must also spend money on European bases and fund the war in Ukraine to protect the European Union, which imports one and a half times as much from China as it does from the United States, from a hypothetical invasion by Russia, whose largest trading partner is… also China. In East Asia, Washington spends a fortune to defend Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — all of which trade more with China than with America — from a hypothetical attack by China. Why China would want to attack its trading partners is never made clear.