I believe him re: the US, but disbelieve him over his lack of expansionist plans.
“I believe him re: the US, but disbelieve him over his lack of expansionist plans.”
True, but protecting shipping lanes and access to raw materials will often look ‘expansionist’. In most cases, true Expansionist societies have an ideology driving them. In the case of Hitler, it was Nazism, racial purity, and ‘living space’ for his people, for Stalin of course it was Communism, for the US, it’s obviously Climate Change and Globo-homo. It’s difficult to assign anything like that to China as one would be hard-pressed, for example, to find modern China extolling the ‘virtues of Communism’ or any other overriding cause they feel they need to push on to the world.
But who knows, eventually we will find out regarding China.