MTLNOVEL Chapter 1126: Sufficient Leverage
Peaceful development is a beautiful imagination!
The current social structure is designed, if you want to climb up from the bottom, you'll occupy more resources of the Earth...
The two Washington Consensuses, the privatization tide, and the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union, all these events led the world into a unipolar mode.
After World War II, America, the world's largest industrial nation, dismantled the Bretton Woods System, then discovered the wonders of money, and the transfer of industrial capital began.
America leveraged its invincible military to bind NATO and then maximized the global influence of its financial industry.
By then, they no longer wanted to engage in low-end labor...
A large amount of manufacturing began to transfer to places around the world where labor was relatively cheaper, and the post-war world order was thus established, making globalization a major topic.
Next, it was up to each country to find its position within this pre-designed structure!
For those poor countries, either you have abundant resources or an excellent geographical location...
If you have neither, then industrialization is almost the only remedy.
But industrialization has a huge problem, which is overcapacity.
When excess capacity becomes a burden and even affects the livelihood of the people, enough markets must be found for this excess capacity.
Since the rise of industrial civilization, wars often stem from the competition for markets!
When an industrial nation finds that its products can't sell and its economy has problems, their best choice is to destroy the opponents' means of production and seize their markets.
Peaceful development is just a beautiful imagination!
Everything in this world is limited: land, food, energy, resources, industry, finance...
Having more of these can practically improve the living standards of the country's people.
Yet seizing these things touches on others' interests, even challenging the original international order.
The financial crisis of 2008 made the entire world realize that the American model was not so reliable.
A mighty financial system could not support a stable economic structure; since then, the New Deal has been constantly mentioned, and it was realized then that a completely free economy harbors unforeseeable risks...
The Black man in the White House was made dizzy by the financial crisis, exhausted by the healthcare reform bill, yet he did not forget to adjust the big ship of America, starting a strategic pivot eastward from 2012...
On one hand, asking Old Mother to pour money to buy their national debt while explicitly proposing the East Asia Rebalance Strategy, increasing its regional influence to squeeze Old Mother's development space.
America is always serious about hammering the world's number two!
The Island Nation was hammered for decades and couldn't recover, England quickly declined, never to regain the grandeur of the Empire on which the sun never set.
Big Mouth Tang is essentially continuing the path of the Black man, just more shamelessly; he not only wants to force Old Mother to transfer part of its export industry through a trade war, but doesn't even spare his own allies.
In the capital system, there is no such thing as peaceful development, it's just that most industrial nations began by exploiting inwardly to complete the original accumulation, and after success, they can start transferring the system costs outward.
The only benefit is that when you have nothing, the original exploitation during the startup phase doesn't feel so harsh.
But after succeeding and entering the phase of transferring system costs outward, you face challenges from all sides!
Why has Old Mother encountered so many White-eyed wolves despite being continuously kind?
Primarily, it's because the other side, after completing the initial original accumulation, is more eager for the financial and technological capital from Europe and America.
Because financial investment yields quicker and more aggressive returns, European and American technological capital offers larger benefits and also carries sales channels.
Old Mother's choice to buy globally, sell globally, and dominate the low to mid-end industrial chain is determined by geography, population, resources, and development time nodes.
If the Earth were seen as a business field, a full industrial chain would mean you have interests clashing with all industrialized nations.
The only ones without fundamental interest conflicts with Old Mother are actually those energy countries, natural resource countries, and deeply bonded interest nations...
There's no fundamental interest conflict with energy countries because Old Mother is the world's largest energy buyer, and they themselves do not have a strong will to develop their industry, since that's hard work after all.
There's no conflict with natural resource countries because Old Mother not only needs to procure sufficient natural resources but also provides a large number of tourists to these countries centered on the tourism industry.
As for deeply bonded interest countries, there are currently many...
The development over the past few decades has deeply embedded European and American industrial and financial capital into every aspect of the country, while they have taken away a huge amount of wealth, which is also why Old Mother can still maneuver with ease under pressure.
Unfortunately, unless there can be a new breakthrough in technology or world circumstances in the future, the so-called deep cooperation partners still have to choose.
Taking another step forward without a hot war or with only small-scale hot wars, or even just maintaining the status quo, requires extremely complex maneuvering and adapting to the times...