The problem for the empire: reality always wins. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:
It’s funny how much empire apologia in the 2020s consists of westerners saying that governments who aren’t aligned with the United States shouldn’t have the security concerns they have and shouldn’t regard their national interests the way they do.
Armchair proxy warriors against Russia defend the NATO expansionism which led to the war in Ukraine by saying that Russia should simply not have taken issue with a western military alliance amassing war machinery on its doorstep. If you bring up the fact that a great many western analysts spent a great many years warning that the actions of NATO powers after the fall of the USSR was going to provoke Russia into war, their only argument is to say that Russia should not have been provoked by those actions.
You see the same thing with regard to China. Beijing’s standoff with Taiwan is essentially an unresolved civil war that’s been frozen in its current state (largely by US interventionism) since the creation of the PRC, with a historical background that stretches back centuries. The western response to the Chinese push to reunify the island with the mainland has been to insist that Beijing simply begin regarding Taiwan as a sovereign nation, despite the fact that those western governments themselves do not recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty due to the complex nature of the standoff.
