What American "weakness" actually means and what people think it means. There is a great divergence here in definitions that is critical to understanding balance of power relations and Chinese perceptions of American vulnerability that I think Americans simply do not understand.
This is particularly notable when reading what the DC strategic circus has to say about the topic, whether from the left or right since there is actually marginal difference here. When some interchangeable think tank, journalists, or bureaucrat in the security services writes
about American weakness, they are actually primarily deploying it as a rhetorical weapon against domestic weakness, because what they are not actually analyzing is American capabilities, but rather the meta-coherence of the wide American propaganda network. When the DC blob
writes that Trump has weakened America, what this means is he has primarily made the normal signalling and concensus building within their group incoherent. He has introduced dissonance into their carefully crafted reality of events that is duly regurgitated out through media
He has in effect made their transparent lies a little too transparent. Like social taboos in polite society that should be maintained to reduce frictions, Liberalism demands certain taboos and little white lies as to how foreign politics works and exposing them is can be either
embarrassingly declasse or even dangerous. This isn't actually a weakness at all, because America fundamentally still maintains hegemonic control of the discourse before or after. Like the recent elections farce demonstrates, a simple but empty change in figureheads resets the
signal on strength/weakness, though of course the American right will now signal that Biden is "weakening" America. To the Leninist or at least someone outside the imperial bubble, this is all fundamentally theatrics, a play to entertain the voting plebes. Actual weakness is the
gradual decay in state capacity and institutional effectiveness, the loss of capabilities, social dysfunction, etc. The emblobbening of the American people and the deleterious impact that 40% obesity rates have across every sector of American society. The precipitous rise in
bastardry and single parenthood that have massive long term negative socio-economic effects. The transformation into a multi-racial majority-minority state. The dysfunction in military procurement as well as an increasingly racially stratified officer-enlisted military. There are
any number of similar metrics which point to a degenerating state-society, the most immediate of which is the US non-response to covid. Trump gets all the blame, but the institutional factors had set up America for failure no matter which figurehead was at the helm. These are
all actual weaknesses and all the more glaring because not only are they recognized as such, but the solution is not to fix them which would require energy the American state can no longer muster, but to use propaganda to turn them into strengths. Thus fat acceptance and anti-fat
shaming. Strong single women who don't need no man. Neverending immigration. Women, lgbtqwtfbbq celebrated for conducting drone strikes as empowerment.
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