american influence is a good thing?

At this point the American Empire is self-perpetuating via the internet and the English language

Even if China gains an economic, political, and military edge over the US that will be through great effort and it won’t be a massive advantage

American cultural victory is assured, effortless, total, and disconnected not only from the state but even from America itself - much as shadows of the Roman Empire still existed as late as 1923

Doesn’t matter, it (and Chinese, and Russian, and…) will be exerted regardless just due to the US being a country with the economic and cultural stature it has

Eh not really tho... Yeah they definitely play an part in maintaining the American empire that's often overlooked, but if you take away all other instruments for American imperialism their empire would crumble

With your edit though I definitely do agree that American cultural victory is assured for at least the foreseeable future and that doesn't take much active effort anymore

The Empire of the United States would crumble, but the American Cultural Empire would remain, thus I don’t see the US losing a battle of influence with China (although it depends on what influence is, and even then perhaps China gaining political influence would open it more to latent American cultural influence)

I think China doesn't really have the same universalist goals that the US does, I don't think China wants to spread their own cultural or ideological values to other countries. This has been the case since the days of Mao when he sided with the Americans.

China - unlike the US - is currently solely focused on economic influence, and I dont really see that changing any time soon

And even if they would want to, I don't think they could, mostly for the reasons you stated, but also because of China's own incompetence in those aspects

I agree, as China is the prospective challenger, if there is a confrontation it will likely set the terms since the US has more to lose if the status quo shifts, and China is now powerful enough that the US can’t really “preemptively” initiate a confrontation. But of course, this also means that it’s very possible there is no confrontation if China doesn’t want a drastic change, but I only have a tenuous grasp on contemporary Chinese political thought, and what I do know I’m not sure how it would translate to foreign policy. In general, the West has a poor understanding of China (while they understand us quite well).

The failure of Chinese cultural soft power is an interesting point as well, China is definitely punching below it’s weight in that aspect (although not as badly as Indonesia, which is virtually invisible globally despite having 200 million people). This is also despite China having two models of very successful soft power in Japan (more organic) and Korea (more manufactured), but both have managed to make their culture known worldwide, so I’m not sure what the obstacle is for China, perhaps here it is politics.

No

yea when i say influence i really mean control

id like for the us government so exist as long as possible (or at least enough for me to be long dead lol)

Your mans wylin

Do not claim him I've never watched that slimeball

the country of Iran is not going anywhere anytime soon and the Ayatollah is not getting displaced anytime soon either, so therefore sanctions are failing

It only is on paper. It almost never actually works that way in practice, and it ends up disproportionately hurting citizens instead of the government. Usually there's an inverse effect where the actions from sanctions can end up radicalizing a population instead of pushing the population to topple a government - the latter of which the entire point of sanctions is usually built on. A place like Syria is a great example of this, if anything the sanctions and sectarian conflicts only served to realistically reinforce Assad's government. People in the US don't really understand historically just how hard it is to economically squeeze or isolated a country's leadership out. I mean, there are countries which historically have essentially been empires of dust due to their extreme poverty and war-stricken nature, and still have not had even a thought of leadership change. It's foolish to think that you can force that no less in an even more globalized economy.

China doesn't really want to spread their value system though, I think that's probably the biggest misconception about their government currently - in fact they aren't even attempting to export their culture, beyond for tourism reasons (i say this completely unironically). They're looking to spread their economy and essentially financial opportunity more than they are anything really ideological or cultural. It's not like the US where we want to nationbuild to make every country a mini-US; China really doesn't care outside of primarily financial incentive. As someone else said in this thread as well, China doesn't have any form of cultural soft-power; in fact they've honestly never even really tried to do so. Virtually all soft-power globally comes from either the US or countries within the sphere of US allyship/influence (i.e. Japan as someone else said in the thread). This is true even in China itself.

i get u

i mean if the goal being sought cant ultimately be reached i dont think its good to hurt a country’s population just for the f*** of it (or in general lol)

but what do u do at that point man?

I just don't think it's the US's job to get involved or mediate conflict. Like, it's very transparent that this isn't about morality, it's about arbitrary US interest - and US interest that doesn't even benefit the US people, it benefits essentially a small fraction of the upper class and those in the permanent quasi-governmental sphere of influence.
Like if the US cares so much about sectarian conflict and morality, why did the US not care about nagorno-karabakh (of which a NATO partner was literally involved nonetheless)? How about the tribal sectarian conflicts in Niger, Mali, and Northern Nigeria? I mean, you can go down the list, and I don't think it's that people shouldn't care about this stuff globally, but it's a endless blackhole; you can't expect a completely outside and uninvolved entity to mediate things most of the time it has either no investment in (or worse if you look at the middle east, stuff it doesn't even understand fundamentally). There's a difference if there's explicit help being requested by an ally, but that's not what really happens in 95% of these cases. The US just inserts itself and because we aren't really an ideologically coherent state but one run by a mixed basket selection of profiteers, opportunists, and actual mixed ideological actors (misguided/deluded or not), we can't even guarantee a consistent outcome (or even one meaningful half the time - many times the moral concern is a front for opportunity).
And moreso, if the government is supposed to be some global moral actor policeman, it also lends to just increasingly hard and spiraling questions about responsibility and obligation, especially when you consider that vs the responsibilities domestically, which are increasingly more and more of an unsolved and growing burden. Let's focus on the domestic public first here before we start having any other ambitions, you can still have diplomacy without making everything about conflict and war

I'm at the border w 92,000 slimes (please putin let me leave the military)

@krishna_bound

Do you know about the Chinese political climate? Do you think Strauss and Schmitt truly enjoy a good deal of influence (eg article below), or is it overplayed? I am mostly curious in how Western and Chinese philosophy are being synthesized, and which strands of Western thought are used versus those that are ignored.

tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/leo-strauss-china

just as a quick response w/o typing anything up you can read a ton of reigning chinese political theory on these sites

readingthechinadream.com (highly recommended because it has basically everything on it)

mediafire.com/folder/cnnb5nzyo5xj1sx,60wuceq9tydgs7h,2a5pmeiwwge3yzk,x6gxyyzhg2e7fxv/shared - translation of "America v America" by Wang Huning

i thought i had more links but i guess that's it for the time being unless i can dig up some other stuff in my bookmarks

Schmitt definitely isn't anymore influential there than here from what I know. I mean, people know the name, and i'm assuming most scholars have read at least The Concept of The Political (based) or Theory of the Partisan, but it definitely hasn't influenced their politics on a practical level. My understanding is that Strauss himself is influential though, especially as very similarly Strauss was an extreme influence on early Neoconservatism in the US.
I mean, there's a sort of irony that prior to Reagan, the actual roots of Neoconservatism originally came all from essentially revisionist communists/socialists...like people don't remember that people literally accused Reagan of being Trotskyist lmao. This was because people like Lipset were literally trotskyists who then became conservatives; this was actually pretty common in mid-1900s american socialism (george s schuyler - author of black no more is another example, albeit more egregious because he went like hardcore communist -> full on neocon).
The thing which is important to understand is that post-Deng and especially post general China globalization, the country's top theorycrafters became fiercely academic in a way oriented towards Classical Liberalism - like if you read much of the stuff on the first link here, you'll probably be shocked at how American most of it sounds. Most of it is a synthesis of Classical Liberalism and conservative concepts popularized by Reagan's adminsitration (not that they cite him, but they're the same regardless). So even if there's no direct Strauss influence, there's indirect, because Strauss->Reagan for example. One other important thing to note is obviously the cultural influence of Confuscianism & Legalism (and Taoism to a lesser extent since that was eliminated way more), and just how well some of those concepts fit traditional classic liberal (think early 1900s liberalism) frameworks. One of the most important things to note is that long term virtually everything supressed by the cultural revolution in china just came back full force post-Deng and virtually everything attempted ot be sequestered ideologically at the time is now at the forefront of Chinese policy-making; I mean if you read top Chinese theory, 99% of it is just straight up condemning and s***-talking Mao and the Cultural Revolution and just talking about how important Democracy is and individual freedom and free speech and s***.
Once you really learn about China's actual top theorycrafter it feels like you're jolting out of the matrix into real life because the amount of western propaganda and mystique we've put the country in is not only decades outdated but blatantly wrong lol

Appreciate it

I can attest that personally I don’t know much about Chinese thought outside the basics and sort of vague suppositions… what do you think is the reason for the liberal/conservative turn? Maybe a combination of Confucian influence with an admiration for American wealth and power?

imo it's not really that complicated, post-Mao the country increasingly opened and it's like it's possible to just destroy defecting ideologies, even with something as powerful as a cultural revolution. so you have reform and reform and economic liberalization and opening to global influence, and that allows the residual latent ideologies to come to the forefront over time, and then a level of political liberalization is obviously going to in turn follow economic liberalization, so you then get to where we are now. I think it also helps it just all fits in the frame of their goals post-reforms.

Well it def aint radicalizing the people to become regimme supporters. Even religious folks hate the ayatollah these days. You talking about a guy who initally banned western made covid vaccines .... he is an idiot and 80%+ of the iran population knows it.

if the country's leadership isn't doing anything to even remotely hede american/western requests despite crushing sanctions it really means it's not working. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's destroying the country, it makes life there ridiculously hard, but you've even said it yourself, the leadership there is still insanely rich, so it's fundamentally not displaced power at all