Asklemmy

They are fumbling now because of their hubris, overextension, and the contradictions of the system.

In the '90s, they believed that exposing China to capitalism would naturally and inevitably cause the fall of the Communist system, so they threw the doors wide open.

2001 is when China joined to the WTO and also when...9/11 happened, crippling and distracting the Western empire for two decades.

When Hillary Neocon Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, she unveiled with much fanfare the "pivot to Asia". The Obama administration spent the next 8 years trying to replicate the EU and NATO in Southeast Asia. (TPP and the Quad).

Trump-1 came into office and immediately withdrew the US from the TPP. He did some blustering and flailing around with tariffs, which people seemed to think constituted containment of China at the time.

Biden came into office and he and the other Western leaders sabotaged and escalated their way into the Ukraine war. (Read up on the Istanbul process before you get annoying in the replies, Libs). You can read The New Atlas for excellent analysis about how this is a substrategy for Chinese containment, which is an argument that I agree with. However, it had the effect of once again paralyzing, weakening, and distracting the Western imperial alliance.

Now we are in Trump-2. He committed perhaps the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the US empire when he went on the attack against India with tariffs to try and separate them from Russia. This blew black in the most spectacular fashion by driving them closer to Russia and kicking off a rapprochement with China that is still bearing diplomatic fruit to this day. Therefore, we can say that Trump severely weakened the overall strategic plan for the Asia Pacific region by single-handedly preventing TPP and the Quad from coming into force as tools of the US empire (for the forseable future), unlike NATO and the EU.

At the present day, the empire is struggling to extricate itself from Ukraine without having a Kabul / Saigon moment. The Western armories are bare, having sent everything they can spare and very much they could not spare in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the proxy conflict. The F-35 fighter jet is STILL NOT OPERATIONAL ACCORDING TO THE PROGRAM'S OWN DEFINITION. By contrast, at the 80-year commemoration parade, the Chinese unveiled no fewer than a dozen new weapon systems, many a generation or more ahead of their US counterparts.

They are failing everywhere and cannot admit it. A humiliating defeat in Ukraine is inevitable, now the only question is whether the Russians will end up with Odessa. American warships are powerless against Chinese hypersonic cruise missiles. Japan tried to ramp up the rhetoric on Taiwan only to get slapped down by the US. We are witnessing the death throes of a wounded animal with suicidally inflated ego. Unfortunately, this wounded animal also has nuclear weapons, so it's a very dangerous time for all of us.