The post WWII system was imperfect in many ways, but it was also mutually beneficial and worked out pretty well despite the problems.

And we're throwing that all out the window.

US military bases aren't what made those countries modern, prosperous, democratic places. It took the will of the people to rebuild something better after the war.

don't make it out like its a favour. The US have done very well out of their defense umbrella ensuring its global dominance for most of last century.

Most powers have to pay in blood to do what they want geo politically without question. The US inherited a global state where many potential rivals were weak and helped keep them weak. It was a cost worth paying and its a shame that current US leaders are so cheap and foolhardy to not see what they're throwing away.

You seem to imply the US reaps no benefit from providing security?

Britain essentially ceded its bases to the US at the end of WWII - these things aren’t as durable as they may seem.

All that economic surplus - and much more - flows back to the US. How do you think the US can sustain that amount of USD printing without inflation ? The rest of the world is buying those dollars.

It'd be nice to avoid that part.

I don't perceive those problems to be inherent to the territories or peoples of the countries. All have had potential to change and have done so extensively since the Second World War. There isn't a universal explanation or root behind the issues these countries are facing today, unless you are willing to abstract it to just "economics".

>Oh but they put down a few solar panels

the few solar panels in question are a united kingdom worth of green energy each year, about a royal navy worth of marine tonnage every two and they lifted more people out of poverty over the span of two generations than most of the rest of the world combined. Shenzhen produces about 70% of the entire world's consumer drones, now the primary weapon on both sides of the largest military conflict in the world. Xiaomi, a company founded in 2010 15 years ago decided to make electric cars in 2021 and is now successfully selling them.

As Adam Tooze has pointed out it's the single most transformative place in the world, if you're not trying to learn from it you're choosing to ignore the most important place in the 21st century for ideological reasons

Their economy lifted a bunch of people out of poverty. That's positive.

However, in terms of 'democracy' they're still way worse off than the US right now, even if the US is headed in a bad direction.

> They're polluting

They absolutely are, but per capita, USA is polluting 49.67 % more than China.

Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/carbon-fo...

They're also speedrunning a world class power distribution system and deploying a massive amount of renewable power amoung a whole mess of other infrastructure. They've got the ability to focus an entire nation into achieving technical goals and they're rapidly improving quality of life in average while maintaining an industrial base that the US can only remember fondly. They might not meet western standards for individual freedoms and rule of law, but they're undoubtedly a rising world power.

I used to pretend China wasn't absolutely smashing the USA, but it looks like it is. They basically make everything modern civilization relies on, that's an insane amount of leverage over the rest of the world. That combined with renewables and nuclear and their diminishing need for foreign oil because of that is pretty incredible.

This doesn't make much sense. Since the late 19th century, every country that got rich also heavily polluted the environment, though increasingly less over time. As it stands, fossil fuel demand in China has plateaued. The "wage suppression" thing also doesn't track; their citizens got much, much richer since Nixon's visit, despite being on average poorer than Westerners. Their GDP per capita is low because there's like a billion of them in the country.

The only thing to say is that it's still authoritarian. Once that gets a hold of a country, it's very difficult to shed off. Interestingly, both South Korea and Singapore shifted away from being dictatorships and were not ideologically socialist. Countries taken over by Communists remain authoritarian. The true believers will never give that up.