USA vs China and Rusia

[steve_bank]

Putin tries to paint a moral equivalence between his invasion of Ukraine and what America and allies did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is plenty to criticize the USA for, but there is also a fundamental difference between Russia and the USA and allies. Post WWII we did not enslave or exact tribute. We helped rebuild Japan and Europe including Germany. Today our past energies are free, independent with good economies.

NATO and the EU provided stability for unprecedented peace and economic growth.

South Korea is free and independent.

We did invade Iraq on what turned out to be a false pretext, but we did hand the people freedom and democracy, and helped rebuild the country, but they descended into factionalism and civil war.

We tried to turn a tribal culture in Afghanistan into a modern democracy and failed. Not enogh people stood up for their contry.

In contrast Russia sought to seize, control and dominate politically, socially, and economically. It carried through after the fall of the Soviet Union.

We do aggressively promote democracy and free market economics. Historicaly it leads to econmic growth and liberal freedoms.

Is the USA no better or different than China and Russia today?

All three want to make the world in their image.

Putin’s rationalization is America does what we are doing, so we are morally justifiedin expansionist acquisition and domination by militarily means.

Is there any difference between the USA and Russia/China?

I say yes of course.

What should the role of the USA be in the world, should we aggressively promote our values? Liberal values.democratic

The key difference of course is that US is a democracy while Russia and China are not. I don't know as much about Russia as I do China. China does care about making money and economic happiness. But they are really driven by control of resources and working with partners (other countries) that are dictatorships. From their point of view, it's difficult dealing with countries that have governments that constantly change. The US went from Obama, to Trump, to Biden! Not an easy transition for a country with a 40 year goal of gradually taking over resources and land. Obviously, Mad Vlad is adopting the same strategy. But he's just not very bright. He's turned all the countries except China and India against him. But even China is getting tired of it:

MSN

www.msn.com

Uh oh!

I thought China was democratic or has democratic processes up to a certain level of government.

Well, it's a one party democracy. And the person at the top of the democracy very rarely changes. We can debate over and over again about who has a real democracy. But to me the key is change. Democratic governments are accountable to the people. If Russians had freedom of press and could vote, there's no way that they'd reelect Putin. Putin is starving their country, bankrupting them, turning the world against Russia. A healthy democracy has a steady change of government that mostly reflects the changing opinions of it's populace. (please note that I said mostly!)

The Chinese look at us and our problem and say no thanks.

From a 90s news show did in China in the 90s the question was aked what would the average Chinese citizen say about American free speech. The response was what good is free speech if all pple do is shout at each other.

Do we really change government? Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi.

The Chinese have become very good at defining long term goals, developing plans, and executing to plan. We are unable to do that. We have an aging electric grid and we do nothing. Conservatives say let the free market deal with it.

One of our fundamntal flaws is a religious faith that the free market will take care of all problems.