They would also be abusive, but currently the country projecting the most power in the world is undoubtedly the US. It’s not good to have a single world power that is so dominant. Us peasants are given little goodies if the ruling class feels the need to compete instead of simply occupying the number one spot in the world uncontested.

Wait, people actually think Russia or China would be any different of they had the US’ influence?

They’ve got different leaders, different economies, and different cultures. Brazil, India, and Indonesia would also be different were they to enjoy US influence.

Any country that ends up with that amount of influence will inevitably resort to bs to maintain that power

There’s a big difference between soft influence and hard military power. In the wake of WW2, the US enjoyed both by being the last major industrial power still standing. This offered their financial sector an enormous amount of sway in how developing/recovering countries reentered the industrial world. Similarly, they only had one remaining international military peer by the end of the war (in part because they helped the USSR rearm in the wake of German continental invasion). So they were free to throw out both banks and military bases on a global scale.

But all of this was a consequence of a unique historical moment, created at the end of the 19th century colonial era and perpetuated by the US/Soviet schism during the Cold War.

We’re no longer in a Cold War, we don’t have a single globe-spanning economic superpower, the US has repeated demonstrated an inability to project its military across hemispheres, and the soft financial power of the western states has eroded significantly since the 2008 financial crisis.

The BS we’re seeing today is not a failure of large influential blocks to maintain influence. Its a failure of a large mercantile system to reconcile with the contradictions of an economy that demands infinite continuous upward growth.

If the US focused on internal development, rather than profit-seeking outsourcing, China and India would be integrated partners rather than rivalrous superpowers. If the US had struck a detante with the USSR and integrated their economies, rather than playing wack-a-mole with anti-colonialist uprisings across Latin America, Asia, and Africa for sixty years, we’d have a more stable industrial base and fewer poverty-driven insurrections. If the US had stopped sucking at the teet of Middle Eastern fossil fuels and pivoted to green/nuclear energy back in the 60s/70s when the time was ripe, we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a climate apocalypse that threatens all the capital accumulation we’ve achieved to date. And we wouldn’t have the Radical Islamic Extremism boogeyman to whip everyone into a terrified lather.

There are so many moments when things could have gone differently (for better or worse - I guess we could be living in Nuclear Winter right now). This history is not a given and the future is not set in stone.

I have a VERY hard time believing you’re in .ml and haven’t seen users acting like Russia and China can do no wrong

It was the most Tankie toxic instance that was around during the reddit migration, once the Gaza shitshow started full scale, they were celebrating the slaughter of Isreali citizens that Isreal used as an excuse to up their warcrimes on Gaza. Most of the new lemmy migrants realised real quick we had no tolerance for these bloodthirsty fucks and started blocking them en mass, at that point .ml was relatively low radar despite what ml stands for, but as more of us started blocking anything and everything hexbear, ml started recieving more users who werent satisfied being disgusting in silence

Yeah, most of these responses from me now aren’t fully for the people I’m talking to, Tankies here argue in INCREDIBLY bad faith, they lie about their intentions and purposely leave out parts of their beliefs they know are unpalatable, so I block the people I’m responding to fairly quickly. But I put rebuttles up when I have spare emotional/mental energy so that those who read can start seeing these guys for what they are (obsessed with violent revolution)

Sure, but that’s not why they picked it