Trump 2.0 official thread

[PiSigma]

So great leader finally realized that we don’t grow coffee and bananas in the states?

Lame. How will you become a true banana republic without growing bananas

 

[CMP]

Vast Sums? China barely spend 1.2% of GDP officially on the military. China is still mainly running on easy mode when it comes to military. If China really gets serious about the military. They will be producing 2-300 fighter jets per year. atleast 200 destroyers will be in the navy.

Isn't it hilarious when someone who fancies himself a historian of 19th century European geopolitics tries to treat that all as analogous to modern geopolitics, and then actually doesn't know a damn thing about the current balance of military industrial capacity, fiscal/financial capacity, and costs to produce? If we're going to insist on using historical analogies, China today, technologically, industrially, and militarily, is like post-WW2 US, having opportunistically come out on top in a massive war. Historically, that would be WW2 for US, but tech war, cold war, trade war, financial war, bio war, cyber war, and spy war for China today. The US today is more like pre-WW2 UK. In a fiscally and financially tenuous position and on the verge of a black swan setting off a massive geopolitical retrenchment. This has arguably already begun, but one could argue the current US over-investment in and under-performance (revenues, profits, meaningful productive implementation) from the AI bubble is another potential financial crisis in the making. Even OpenAI's $200/month subscription is loss-making. They gain 1 dollar for every 7.5 they spend, and that's not counting the ridiculous $1.5 trillion in capital expenditures they have already signed up to. Not to mention their LLM fucking sucks. After having used ChatGPT, Grok, Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi, Z.ai, etc., it's clear to me that among them all the most prone to "hallucinations", aka being stupid and wrong, is ChatGPT. You really can't trust a single damn thing it tells you, and half the citations are misinterpreted or entirely irrelevant to the question and answer.

 

[Thecore]

I would argued that the Unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 effectively killed the Concert of Vienna because both France (the continental status quo power) and Britain (the maritime status quo power) refused to give the unified Germany its proper place in the then international system. That led to the tragedy of WWI. So the problem for China that it faces the same old problems Kaiser’s Germany faced prior to WWI. However such a Great War may not be favourable to China since it is surrounded by powerful maritime powers AND continental powers bent on cutting off China’s trade routes. China itself today is a blend of maritime and continental power. It is a continental power because it has vast strategic depths like the old third-line along with a fully domestic defence industrial base. But it is also a maritime power because it increasingly relies on maritime trade routes to import raw materials and export of goods, forcing Beijing to have no choice but to spend vast sums on PLAN buildup (like Germany’s high seas fleet).

You forgot the third pillar. Strategic nuclear power. If push comes to shove, no country will sacrifice their own major population centers to "avenge" Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. A huge reason why the US was the preeminent global power post WW2 was simply that they showed that they were psychotic enough to unleash weapons of mass destruction on civilian population centers. Where is the so called "taboo" that resulted in the US being ostracized from the global "community"? Yet to be seen. With the current global reliance on China for almost the entirety of their consumption, full stop, I argue that hypothetical 1MT+ strikes on any surrounding threats in the event of a shooting war would NOT result in pariah status for China, past a year or two of initial shock. As the US has proven over and over and over again, it's always way more actualized to ask for forgiveness after the fact rather than permission before.

 

[Phead128]

I would argued that the Unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 effectively killed the Concert of Vienna because both France (the continental status quo power) and Britain (the maritime status quo power) refused to give the unified Germany its proper place in the then international system. That led to the tragedy of WWI. So the problem for China that it faces the same old problems Kaiser’s Germany faced prior to WWI. However such a Great War may not be favourable to China since it is surrounded by powerful maritime powers AND continental powers bent on cutting off China’s trade routes. China itself today is a blend of maritime and continental power. It is a continental power because it has vast strategic depths like the old third-line along with a fully domestic defence industrial base. But it is also a maritime power because it increasingly relies on maritime trade routes to import raw materials and export of goods, forcing Beijing to have no choice but to spend vast sums on PLAN buildup (like Germany’s high seas fleet).

China is the equivalent of the Roman empire of Europe, or if Germany unified the European continent. You can't compare a massive continental size power like China with a small country like Kaiser Germany. China is no longer the Qin dynasty in Warring states period where it's surrounded by roughly similar size/power neighbors, China is a colossus in terms of territory and population compared to all of its neighbor except perhaps India which itself is hobbled by innumerable issues.