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It's a slow, ongoing process. The more the US tries to use force to make countries fall in line, the more people look to alternatives. Countries that used to be unaligned are looking at China and countries that used to be aligned with the US are looking at playing the field.
Yup. Sadly the US has handed the 21st century to China without a fight.
I remember what some Hong Kong dude said to me once... "China is the future, and it's a bleak future".
That's never actually been true. US force bent the world after WW2, from the Years of Lead to the Jakarta Method. Vietnam is the exception that still proves the rule - we were doing profitable business with Vietnam barely twenty years after the last helicopter left Saigon. Similarly, we fully control the Sunni Triangle in the south of Iraq, we've flattened Libya, overthrown Syria, and we're currently strangling Iran to death.
The world has never been more beholden to the US than it is today. Trump hasn't changed that. If anything, he's accelerated it.
Countries in the BRI:
Countries in BRICS (red/orange):
I'm not sure that iron fist strategy is working out so well. The US is clearly in a state of decline and the soft power it's able to wield today is considerably less than it held in the past, because the right is high on their own supply and doesn't understand that you need soft power in order to rule the world.
While it's true that the US was pretty brazen in invading Korea and Vietnam, it was also able to control the narrative better and did things either covertly or had some sort of pretense for it, and the postwar order also involved significant economic investment in places like Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, all of which helped generate soft power.
I disagree. It was more beholden to the US during the 90's and 00's when it was the only real superpower. But it abused that status and that's what allowed China to present itself as a more stable and reliable trading partner and thereby begin to challenge US hegemony. I don't see how anyone can look at the world today and think that the US is more dominant than it was after the fall of the USSR or think that it won't continue to lose ground to China in the foreseeable future.
For every Venezuela, there's a Colombia.
The BRICS aren't outside US sphere of influence. India is squarely within it. South Africa is very friendly. Brazil is friendly. Russia had been friendly under Bush and early Obama. And China's our number one trading partner - hardly an enemy, except in the fevered imagination of anti-China hawks.
I gotta disagree. Absent a serious geopolitical rival - the USSR - we've rapidly expanded our influence across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia.
India's a great example. They were squarely in Soviet influence in the 80s and fell out rapidly with the disintegration of the Soviet sphere.
Same with Argentina, Yugoslavia, even Cuba and North Korea. Countries that flirted with Socialism prior to '91 fled from it afterwards. Countries committed to Marxist Leninism thawed to capitalist experimentation. All that came out of American think tanks and propaganda mills and lobbying firms.
The US lacked global financial and technological dominance in the 60s and 70s. The catastrophes of Korea and Vietnam were far realer in the moment. It wasn't until Reagan and Clinton they they were massaged away.
The US gained influence and continues to gain influence through it's corporate expansion. The US Federal Government might be losing its grip, but that's less and less the seat of real material authority.
But they aren't wholly within it either.
Is that so? Then why didn't they cooperate with the US oil embargo on Russia?
Yet more reason why US influence was greater during that period than it is now.
It's actually #3 after Canada and Mexico.
What made the USSR a more serious rival than the PRC? The USSR was generally committed to deescalation and detant.
China's trade policy serves several purposes:
Providing Chinese people with access to foreign goods, to avoid repeating the dissatisfaction that contributed to the USSR's collapse
Expanding China's geopolitical influence, and building up a competing market such that countries have another choice besides the West
Making Western aggression costly through economic dependency.
In other words, they are building soft power, which is proving highly effective at swaying countries away from the US.
I can't understand why you simply don't recognize the utility of soft power. And yet you talk about corporations being "the seat of real material authority," yes, that's correct, but how do they wield and exercise that authority? Is it through hard power? Does Amazon have aircraft carriers and a standing army? No, obviously, if hard power was all that mattered, then it would make no sense to say that corporations are more powerful than the government. The government could, if it wanted to, seize every Amazon warehouse and throw Bezos in prison, while Bezos does not have that capability over the government. Even through your own hard power lens, your perspective makes no sense.