I'm sure Xi is beyond having his feelings hurt by Biden, but just look at Bilken's reaction lmao.
Inviting a head of state to your country to publicly insult them is unacceptable anywhere, so this is only going to further tarnish the shitty reputation of American diplomacy.
Ehh it kinda makes sense if you agree with the idea that liberals view any deviation from Western liberalism as ontologically wrong and evil. Just jarring to see it said out loud in a diplomatic setting.
Look, he is. He's a dictator in the sense that he's a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that's based on a form of government totally different than ours,
May as well give the quote. Seems like, insofar as it has substance, it just circles back around to gommulism bad
Nah, Trump likes Xi. He’ll be all over the place about China, but on an individual level he can spot a winner, and he likes winners. He might even still call Xi a dictator, but he’d be like “and that’s good, because he’s a very smart man. Very smart. China is lucky to have him. Some of us aren’t so lucky, if you know what I mean.”
Trump would, if he believed Xi was a dictator, get really fawning and sycophantic for him in person. He seems to have a dictator fetish as an actual preoccupation.
The benefit of Trump over Biden as a president is that there’s always a chance that Trump accidentally does something good out of vanity or incompetence or laziness, whereas Biden will always follow the same playbook that continues to make everything terrible. Like, I could easily see Trump hearing about the pro-Palestinian protests and saying something off-the-cuff that criticizes Israel or is supportive of Palestine, because he doesn’t actually care either way except insofar as it affects what people say about him in the moment.
The one thing they seemed to get was resumption of direct military to military hotlines. Not sure how useful that's gonna be if they piss the Chinese side off though. Not hard to order the generals to pick up the phone, listen to the yank, then say "okay" and hang up.
It's definitely useful for when the americans are doing their stupidly fucking dangerous freedom of navigation missions through chinese territory. During these missions the US ships have to turn off various monitoring equipment among other things. It's so fucking easy for one or the other side to misinterpret one another if they ever do something they're not expected to do in those situations, without communication they will default to assuming the worst and that's where it gets hairy, everyone starts shooting, and then everyone else in the region starts shooting because everyone is shooting. Launch after launch will happen because there's no de-escalation channel or way to just say "shit that was a mistake we're sorry" when something actually goes wrong.
Imagine when a ship gets spooked, does something unexpected, then some scrambled jets get shot down, then even more shit happens, and every single asset in the region just acts independently based on the information they have at hand (the ship/jets nearest to me just got blown up, we should release our payload into the target). It's a huge cascade.
I heard they did get the Chinese to stop supplying the chemicals used to make fentanyl to Mexico. (as I understand it previously Chinese companies were selling chemicals that have legitimate and legal industrial uses in larger quantities than the legal market can support, similar to how American gun manufacturors make 40% more guns than the legal gun market can support)
Really think they're fucking up by reopening the military communications link. I guess China has to to show they're the reasonable party, but the US is just going to do what they were already doing. That is, ratcheting up tensions as much as possible whenever it suits them (pelosi fucking off to Taiwan for personal gain, that whole weather balloon embarrassment) then privately calling the PLA to say don't worry bro it's no biggie we promise. And then a month later doing it all again. I just don't see what China has to gain apart from the initial PR boost.
speaking of that, even though the US has openly admitted that the balloon wasn't a surveillance device and didn't collect any data, just yesterday my local news station was still calling it a "spy balloon" lol
Yeah I've noticed that here too. It seems like the final stage of disinfo is for people to repeat the lie on their own without any outside influence. It's the same deal with the Uyghur thing - official government sources dropped the narrative ages ago, but you'll still hear it repeated as if it were historical fact from journalists, influencers, redditors, etc.
If I remember the articles correctly, they never denied it being a surveillance device, just that it transmitted (collected?) any data. So the running media story was "spy balloon that wasn't actively spying". That raises the question of "why?", but libs never seemed to bother with that one.
The way he says this makes me think there's probably a whole school of thought in the establishment ghoul circles that revolves around wording things in specific ways that translators will soften or "interpret" in a way that makes them sound not as bad in alternate languages.