The USSR collapsed in large part due to an erroneous strategy of attempting to "hug Europe to death" through energy and resource export integration during the détente period (early 1970s-late 1980s). The "gas station as a country" phenomenon began then, not with the rise of Gorbachev, Yeltsin or Putin, who merely led it to its logical conclusion. However, this focus on the export of raw resource and energy commodities had the effect of diverting economic attention from the technologically innovative and high complexity, high value-added manufacturing focus which made the Soviet Union a near-peer competitor with the Western Bloc and ahead of it in selected industries. This put the USSR at the bottom end of the value chain, a net importer of desirable high value-added commodities, creating black markets and their composite new-class forces which served as the reactionary basis for the overthrow of the socialist system and the looting of the remainder of national industry. A liberalizing political-economic and cultural contagion that would spread throughout the eastern bloc and lead to the Yugoslavisization of those countries into the IMF debt-trap system that served as a lever to destroy the basis of the socialist system. The contemporary developments in the post-Soviet space must be understood in light of this history. Additionally, we must develop a comparative analysis of this phenomenon of Soviet-European convergence (until the former gave in) with the entirely different and clearly ongoing phenomenon of Sino-American divergence. The latter is a different beast altogether and to understand the causes of China's rise and its structural ability to continue to do so, the political-economic differences in the key relations mentioned must be an important part of the story. First, China has primarily become an exporter of medium to high complexity and medium to high value-added manufactured goods. Secondly, it is primarily a creditor and not a debtor. Thirdly, it is far larger than the USSR or the Eastern Bloc or even the entire global north combined (the EU, the US, Japan, South Korea, Canada, NZ, Australia, etc... all together account for 1.3 billion people, 100 million fewer than China). Fourthly, and this is crucial: China is the leader in 37 out of 44 critical and emerging technologies. It has near monopolies on solar and drones, it was first to the west in hypersonic missiles, 5G. It is a talented leap-frogger. There is no technology gap working against China and no vicious cycle of raw materials export dependency fueling it. If anything, it has a crucial hold on Rare Earths and other key raw materials of modern industry that can provide it a secondary source of leverage. Fifthly, China has few or no weaker allies that depend on it. It has no foreign military presence, no large-scale nation-building projects and it doesn't need to create them due to its massive size. Its Belt and Road Initiative has laid the groundwork for Eurasian industrial and transport integration but it has not left China exposed to significant risk of potential quagmires. Additionally, the US is busy fighting Russia through Ukraine and Iran through Israel. It does not have the single-minded focus it seemed to have before it dove in 2022 into a prolonged and attritional conflict in Eastern Europe and even less focus with the recent developments in West Asia. Its hands are so full that it has been forced into a semi-détente with China in San Francisco. In other words, as John Mearsheimer has pointed out, America is busy with secondary and tertiary geopolitical theaters whilst putting the most important one, the Asia-Pacific, on hold, thus potentially enabling one or two more decades of peaceful and fast-paced development of China. On the surface, the US resembles the overstretch of the late USSR and the growing technological gap in many key and emerging industries vis a vis China. The state of the World gives us cause for optimism. By https://www.twitter.com/orikron
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