https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-cold-war-2669160202/
Nice to see your hard earned tax dollars are going towards such a fabulous cause. Meanwhile I’ve heard it said that Chinese and Russian bots exploit divisions in the Western world by talking about things like poverty, homelessness, gun violence, racism and sexism. Well maybe you should start doing something about those issues to stop them being used as fuel for alleged foreign propaganda efforts hmmm?
On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.
Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.
On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?
So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.
The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…
(I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)
what if we just stopped having a cold war
That would be perfect, yes
I don’t think China wants to be the enemy of the US. They are the largest trading partner of the US. They seem genuinely interested in cooperating and bettering their own society. USians seem to be the ones bent on enmity. The US apparently thinks building infrastructure and developing the economies of other nations is ‘malign influence.’ The US killed citizens of allied nations through propaganda to ensure they wouldn’t become friendlier with China, who was offering them vaccines while the US and Europe were hoarding their own.
The US sees ‘being a large country and having influence’ as threatening, there’s no way to peacefully coexist with a country that sees everyone else as a threat by default.