So now we can add “directly capturing a sovereign leader” to the list of crap the US has done. So what do you think will actually be “the straw that broke the camels back” for world leaders to actually do something? Think it’ll be significant or something mundane?
But they aren’t wholly within it either.
Is that so? Then why didn’t they cooperate with the US oil embargo on Russia?
Yet more reason why US influence was greater during that period than it is now.
It’s actually #3 after Canada and Mexico.
What made the USSR a more serious rival than the PRC? The USSR was generally committed to deescalation and detant.
China’s trade policy serves several purposes:
Providing Chinese people with access to foreign goods, to avoid repeating the dissatisfaction that contributed to the USSR’s collapse
Expanding China’s geopolitical influence, and building up a competing market such that countries have another choice besides the West
Making Western aggression costly through economic dependency.
In other words, they are building soft power, which is proving highly effective at swaying countries away from the US.
I can’t understand why you simply don’t recognize the utility of soft power. And yet you talk about corporations being “the seat of real material authority,” yes, that’s correct, but how do they wield and exercise that authority? Is it through hard power? Does Amazon have aircraft carriers and a standing army? No, obviously, if hard power was all that mattered, then it would make no sense to say that corporations are more powerful than the government. The government could, if it wanted to, seize every Amazon warehouse and throw Bezos in prison, while Bezos does not have that capability over the government. Even through your own hard power lens, your perspective makes no sense.