So who is winning then?
Yeah, China feints about what hurts China, then when US tries to double down on it, they open themselves up to being hooked in the face.
What China is doing isn't particularly complicated. If you look at the chief strategist of China, you can see he is a cautious, calm person, and you can see that in his writing as well.
My guess is that he follows a simple basic rule/assumption. China will always beat US 1v1. This is quite factual truth, probably not even an American nationalist will dispute you on this point.
So therefore, China's grand strategy boils down to maximally stripping US off their protections. Either kill them (like Ukraine), economically ruin them (like UK and EU), or just make them infight (like Zionists, eurocrats and liberals).
It's not about appeasing individual NATO countries, it's about casting doubts within them and playing them off against eachother.
Whenever NATO starts to infight, the non politically correct statement US uses to rally them has always been "we are all white Europeans, if we stick together, we can plunder the rest of the world and we'll all be rich, so stop arguing already". Except this statement doesn't work anymore since China has worked relentlessly to siege the US alliance network until there's no more money they can easily get from anywhere anymore.
The "chaos" that you're seeing now is that the pie for NATO is running out, and because of the strategic engineering China has made, they can't plunder another pie, and hence start loudly blaming eachother for who took bigger slices.
To expand on what I think Zhongnanhai is thinking
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For the past 30+ years, the bottom 50% of Americans have seen their incomes actually decrease.
If you think about it, this is amazing statistic.
What happened to all the economic gains in terms of technology, productivity and globalisation over the past 30 years?
The answer is that all these gains over the past 30 years have flowed to the rich in America.
And this occurred during both Republican and Democrat governments.
The studies also indicate that in terms of actual decision-making, American politicians has been captured by interest groups and money. That is not democracy. As the Financial Times (London) points out, this describes a plutocracy.
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And if we look at what Trump is proposing, it is essentially:
1. lower taxes for the rich
2. cutting government spending, which is disproportionately consumed by the working class
3. increased tariffs on imports. These costs will be paid disproportionately by the working class, not the rich
So if anything, incomes for the bottom half of Americans will continue getting worse, along with even more wealth inequality as the rich get richer.
But the American working class doesn't understand this.
All they see is the left/right divide, and populists like Trump blame immigrants and foreign countries as the reason why the working class is getting poorer. (The solution to this problem is actually higher taxes on the wealthy and more redistribution)
So in 10 years, we can reasonably expect to see the Republican party and Republican Presidents become even more nakedly populist than Trump. We'll also see more outright and blatant corruption, such as the Trump and Melania memecoins recently launched with no other purpose than to scam Americans and enrich the Trumps. Plus Trump has normalised domestic vindictiveness and political purges in the US government.
So American internal divisions should become far worse in the future.
Something similar is happening to other already developed countries.
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The situation feels very much like a Marxist description of capitalism and the divide between the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie.
And there are parallels to the early twentieth century when the US government was controlled/run by the Robber Baron Oligarchs of the era.