It’s also worth keeping in mind that if the USD/CNY exchange rate fell in line with the two countries’ PPP, China would be biggest economy in the world by a margin of nearly 30%.

You’re correct, but are getting downvoted by people who treat the whole topic like they’re supporting a sports team.

Basically the US was the worlds police until recently.

For the most part, only they saw it that way. The very fact that America refuses to recognize the ICC tells you everything you need to know about how good faith their “world policing” actually is.

What they’ve actually got a history of doing is describing foreign incursions to protect their own economic interests as “police actions” rather than formal declarations of war, in order to ignore various laws and international conventions. America has not been the good guy since 1945.

Yeah it’s just so nakedly transparent how dishonest their posturing is about Europe not doing enough on defense.

Turns out what they actually meant was “our entire economic system is predicated on infinite unending YoY growth targets, and we’ve run of ways to grow, so now you all have to start spending more money on feeding this fucking beast we created”.

Also this theme of “how dare you take advantage of us all these years” is exactly the kind of talk domestic abusers use.

It wasn’t until all this kicked off that I learned just how many companies that I thought were European were in fact owned by American conglomerates.

Which makes MAGA’s “the world is taking advantage of America” rhetoric all the more infuriatingly hypocritical. You spent decades using the strong dollar to go on a massive global shopping trip buying up every other country’s companies, and are now crying foul that those companies you own are supplying their local markets instead of importing from the US?

Reminder that after setting the political stage for the Khmer Rouge to take power with the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, the US Government continued to recognize Pol Pot as its rightful ruler all the way through to the early 1990s, simply because the actual Cambodian government of the 80s was installed with Vietnam’s help.

The USA seems to be on an never-ending quest to fuck Indochina over for no fucking reason.

The horrible cruelty regarding Cambodia is that the reason they have such a high trade deficit is that most Cambodians are too poor to be able to begin to afford anything that America has to offer.

It’s one of the poorest countries in Asia, they could cut their tariffs to 0% and the net effect would be less than the measurable rounding error on total American exports.

Trump is going to tank the economy of an already poverty-stricken country and plunge it into exactly the kind of instability that destroyed it once already just because “fuck you, give me more”.

It’s sickening how they genuinely think they’re bailing Europe out and deserve compensation for it, when they themselves are a big part of why there’s so much instability in the region to begin with.