No. of Recommendations: 9
Indeed. What you're missing is that they have new incentives in place. Not pissing off the United States is one of them.
I guess I am missing how that changes the incentives.
They still have all of the incentives they had before to piss off the United States. Their entire form of government is repugnant to the United States and the rest of the western rule-based order, so they have to remain at a remove from the West. They cannot form a durable alliance with the United States while remaining a military dictatorship, especially a socialist military dictatorship. Which means they have to form alliances with the Sino-Russian sphere of the world. They still also face all of the internal factors that cause them to act the way they do.
We were able to hit them militarily? That's not going to do what you seem to think it will. None of these guys were unaware that they lacked the ability to deny the United States from doing what it wanted there. And these are guys who are the military dictators brutally ruling a country who have killed and risked death in their ascent to power - they're not going to start wetting the bed (or bending the knee) just because we conducted a special forces raid there. These aren't pantywaists. There's lots of metaphors for that, but one of the most expressive is Jules' quote in Pulp Fiction where he notes "I hate to shatter your ego, but this ain't the first time I've had a gun pointed at me." Just because we can kill them whenever we want to doesn't mean they're going to start doing whatever we want.
I think Trump views them as being a part of one the a) Problem b) Potential Problem or c) Not A Problem categories. As they were on the 2nd they were in the b) category trending to a). Now they're in the b) trending to c) direction. As long as that arrow points in the Not Problem direction then he's likely very happy.
Well, if he were to think that, then he would be a fool. They haven't changed categories or trend at all. They're still in the b) trending to a). Everything about the country points to a continued shift towards the Sino-Russian camp of the world, in opposition to the United States. Us seizing their head of state and expropriating their oil isn't going to change that...which is what you would need to happen for the arrow to shift direction.
They make their moves. Some big, some small. We make our moves. Some big, some small. It all adds up.
No, it doesn't necessarily all add up. Sometimes the small moves don't add up to anything. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, but most single steps are just single steps - and don't lead to a long journey. If you increase China's cost of oil by 0.01%, that doesn't do anything - either alone or in combination with other stuff. It's too small to matter and will get dwarfed by other impacts. Just because we're in a Cold War with China doesn't mean that everything we do matters to that Cold War.
