The US is trying to avoid repeating the mistake it made with the USSR of allowing a hostile nation to buy its way to a modern industrial/technology base.
As far as I'm aware, the US didn't make that mistake with the USSR. IIRC, it was always under pretty strict export controls.
IMHO, if the US allowed to any country to "buy its way to a modern industrial/technology base" that country was China.
Ultimately the Soviets did end up procuring a few western machines and reverse-engineering them. This is a look at one such machine - essentially a desktop PDP-11 used by the Soviet nuclear power industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1EWsWxObjA
> All the stories about "campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers" etc is theater.
The stories might be true, but not so much about acquiring the designs as quality implementations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So...:
> Soviet industry was unable to mass-produce computers to acceptable quality standards[6] and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable.[7] As personal computers spread to industries and offices in the West, the Soviet Union's technological lag increased.[8]
> ...
> Since computers were considered strategic goods by the United States, their sale by Western countries was generally not allowed without special permission.[39] As a result of the CoCom embargo, companies from Western Bloc countries could not export computers to the Soviet Union (or service them) without a special license.[84]
On the other hand, if the USSR's aim was world revolution then yes they were inherently hostile to the US.
The US does not, and will not allow a "near peer" nation to exist, ever. It will use all the tools at its disposal to avoid that situation from ever happening, that's one of its own very core tenets for national security
Japan, China, Brazil, etc it does not matter if it's actually aggressive against the US or not
This of course also means that China not being a democracy is just convenient to make them the 'bad guys', but is not really the issue and I expect things would be exactly the same if China was a democracy.
That's, frankly, nonsense.
Things most certainly would not "be exactly the same if China was a democracy" and had political values compatible with the US.
QED.
Edit: In fact the US do not want China to become a democracy as that would actually hurt their strategy and interests against China. For instance, that would make a reunification with Taiwan more likely, which the US do not want at all.
It's not about one or the other, it's about both (i.e. China both having the power to be geopolitical rival and having incompatible political values). If one or the other would be true, the situation would be quite different.
Also, the US hasn't been "best 'friend[s]' with some of the least democratic countries on the planet." It certainly has been willing to court them and look the other way in the context of a larger geopolitical effort, but once the political necessity stops, the "friendliness" gets cold.
> Edit: In fact the US do not want China to become a democracy as that would actually hurt their strategy and interests against China. For instance, that would make a reunification with Taiwan more likely, which the US do not want at all.
Oh come on. That's utter nonsense.
The US strategy towards China was economic liberalization would bring political liberalization. Xi has demonstrated that the Americans were fools to think that, so their strategy is changing.
Because people have moral values they care a lot about, and those are frequently reflected in their political systems. I don't know so much about China in that regard, but in the West those moral values certainly tend to be conceived in universalist terms.
> It's not like the two systems need to interface in ways where that matters. If you're trying to negotiate a treaty it doesn't really matter how the other country's delegation got their jobs.
Your kind of conceiving of the "interface" as some abstract thing up in the clouds. Sure, it probably doesn't really matter so much "how the other country's delegation got their jobs," but it certainly does matter what policies their government implements or positions its pursuing. In the case of the US and China, those definitely conflict in irreconcilable ways (e.g. over the status of Taiwan, civil liberties, etc.).
It took a couple hundred years for Europeans to stop killing each other in the wake of the Reformation. Maybe we still haven't gotten over the instinct that somewhere, someone is doing it wrong and we have to do something about it.
You seem to be conflating morality with religion. There's overlap, but they're not the same.
> Maybe we still haven't gotten over the instinct that somewhere, someone is doing it wrong and we have to do something about it.
OK, see about that: are you tolerant enough to let your neighbor non-consensually beat his wife for being disobedient? Rape his kids? If you feel those things are wrong, do you think that's an instinct you should "get over"?
On one hand, you have an authoritarian one-party government (only one less party than the US :P), where you put trade sanctions on basically consumer goods, while you actually supply weapon systems to an ABSOLUTE MONARCHY in Saudi Arabia?!
It seems rather clear to me that "defense of democratic values" is absolutely not the primary motivation, but basically jealousy, and China IS a potential geopolitical (future?) rival, while the corrupt, murderous kleptocracts in Arabia are a convenient fuel provider and vassal.
I'm not saying US foreign policy is WRONG-- just don't lie to yourself and others about its motivations...
The fact that the US is not dunking on Saudi Arabia does not change the fact that the CCP is a murderous, genocidal, antidemocratic force that needs to be contained.
IIRC, the US did in fact "dunk" on Saudi Arabia after the Khashoggi murder, which kind of screwed them when they wanted cooperation to lower oil prices that wasn't given.
The people claiming it's a "genocide" don't even claim that anyone is being killed. If you actually press them, they try to redefine the word "genocide" to mean something completely different.
Words have meaning, and a word as important as "genocide" should not be thrown around in bad faith as a polemical tool.
Forcible displacement of populations and remvoing children from their parents and culture is considered genocide. For an example of the latter, see Putin's recent indictment by the ICC.
The word "genocide" means mass murder of an entire ethnic group. You're using the word because you know that that's how people interpret it, and you want the shock value.
Exactly as I said, when pressed, you try to redefine the word to mean something completely different.
By the way, even the far lesser claims you're making are incorrect. The Uyghur population in Xinjiang continues to grow, life expectancy is increasing, the language not only continues to be spoken but even continues to be the primary language used to teach Uyghur children in school. There is political repression, targeted particularly at what China regards as separatism and religious extremism, but the "genocide" accusation is pure bad faith.
No.
Whataboutism would if we were arguing about "China bad" and I pointed out "Saudis worse".
But we're not. My point is that "protecting democratic values" is quite obviously NOT the prime motivation for US foreign policy-- this can be seen VERY clearly where US interests conflict with "protection of democratic values".
The Saudis are just a very obvious recent example, but there are countless others-- like the coup against the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953, or the whole Snowden affair (spying on fully democratic allies, but also showing that even internal democratic concerns--constitutional rights + governmental agency accountability-- are secondary to national interests).
The whole Snowden thing would have been an excellent opportunity to build credibility in this regard, to reassure citizens and allies alike, by simply admitting: "We did questionable, undemocratic things, but we're gonna fix it!", start by throwing James Clapper into prison for a few years, dissolve the Guantanamo bay concentration camp, and reinforce your citizens constitutional rights to not get spied on by your own government. But alas...
/rant
Also SA is not worse than China. Saudi Arabia may have some modern day slavery going on, but China is depriving over a billion of basic freedoms and currently commiting genocide. They support North Korea, thr most oppressive regime on earth. They promote in their propaganda the worst mass murderer in History by far, Mao Zedong.
But as always, there's people like you to say "but whatabout so-and-so."
You have so far neither addressed any of my actual points nor have you tried to make arguments in favor of your view.
What are your precedents that give you such confidence that US foreign policy is primarily aimed at spreading democratic values instead of furthering US interests first and foremost?
The U.S. government is fully supportive of this one party state.
It's all realpolitik. Our leaders would never let a country's system of government override its usefulness to us. The Cold War is awash with examples of us supporting terrible dictators who aligned with us against the USSR.
That assertion appears to be an exaggeration from what I can tell. Can you back up your statement that all other parties were banned, as opposed to some?
> Ukraine suspends 11 political parties with links to Russia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/20/ukraine-suspen...
> Late last year, Zelenskyy announced Poroshenko was being investigated for treason, and this past March, 11 political parties were suspended and any of their elected members dismissed from office for being pro-Russian. Most were fringe, but one party had nearly 10% of seats in Ukraine's Parliament. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1110577439/zelenskyy-has-cons...
Certainly banning some is starting down a path, but there is a big difference between All and Some. Particularly in the context of a country being invaded.
The consolidation and control of television outlets in Ukraine by Zelensky is also worth noting, of course.
Though I'll note that a lot of the states we consider to be "One Party" actually do allow controlled opposition parties, they just never let them gain actual power. With Ukraine banning its second largest party, Zelensky's party goes from about 40% to about 60%, and wouldn't need to form a coalition government.
Can you cite your source for that information? I can't seem to find anything which matches it.
Based on below it appears they had a ~56% majority in the last election. Has there been a change in the composition since then?
"In the 21 July 2019 parliamentary election, Zelenskyy's political party, Servant of the People, won the first single-party majority in modern Ukrainian history in parliament, with 43 per cent of the party-list vote. His party gained 254 of the 424 seats.[113]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy
"All 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada 226 seats needed for a majority" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ukrainian_parliamentary_e...
Seems entirely rational to me.
They are inherently hostile. It's a joke for you to say otherwise.
A) Didn't the US prevent technology transfer to the USSR as much or more so?
B) The analyses I have seen have said that the reason the USSR fell is because it could not match the USA industrial/technology base, and specifically that in trying to keep up with US defense spending, they ended up spending 12-15% of GDP on defense (compared ~5-6% in US at the time), and that this was a big problem for them, that they were spending more than they could afford on defense.
C) At the time the USSR fell, which the US considered positive and a victory... it still didn't have a "modern industrial/technology base", did it? At that point, we started helping Russia (not the USSR) develop that, and encouraged privatization of the economy... that was done in a way to create an oligarchy... that led Russia to where it is.
i don't understand what you're talking about, a history where the US "made the mistake of allowing the USSR to buy its way to a modern industrial/technology base". By doing... what? That resulted in... what? What actions or inactions of the US or USSR are you talking about?
I fondly recall all the iPhones made in USSR that we used to buy.