I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect.

I’m terminally-online enough that I am used to the paths of most arguments that have appeared on this website about politics, but – and I say this to be transparent – this one baffles me and I don’t know how to respond to it. I’ve seen people say it but, well, it gets hard to explain within rule 1.

Maybe if we agree that “NATO is an extension of US foreign policy” we can sidestep the issue for now.

I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.

This one I am much more used to. Remembering that NATO is a military organization and not, you know, “who controls the internet,” I’d like to just present you with a simple pair of questions:

1. How many of the past thirty years has the US been at war?

2. How many of the past thirty years has China been at war?

Beyond that, for all the fearmongering people do, China is remarkably less interested in unilaterally dictating relations than you might think, so explaining things in terms of “which country is the master of the unipolar world order” is not justified. Unipolarity has only been the state of things for a little over 30 years (and only obvious for a little over 40) and was unheard of before that. There is no reason to suppose that the future can only be unipolar, especially if the country that ushered in unipolarity and viciously guards it with world-historic levels of violence (the US) is no longer the strongest force.

China has shown every indication of seeking bilateral development and cooperation. An example in severe microcosm is the US banning China from the International Space Station and China responding by making its own space station which the US isn’t banned from, nor most other countries (though I think it is still a finite list and not totally open, owing in part to being a new program). Stories like “debt traps” from China are grotesque projection, as China doesn’t do things like forced restructuring or asset seizure, unlike the IMF.

I truly think this sort of “US is the least of the available evils” ideology has a hard time existing except in a subcultural bubble where it meets no challenge at all, because it is an astoundingly flimsy position.