• merde alors
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    29
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    5 days ago

    or they changed. 30 years is a long time.

    their debut was released

    • 3 years after the fall of Berlin wall
    • a year after the dissolution of USSR
    • 9 years before the September 11 attacks
    • 15 years before iPhone
    • 24 years before the election of a reality tv entertainer/real estate conman as POTUS
    • China wasn’t a superpower back then
    • EU didn’t exist in its current form
    • Apartheid was still an actuality
    • internet wasn’t omnipresent
    • jaybone@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      5 days ago

      How was China not a superpower then?

      They were easily a superpower since before they were backing Vietnam and Korea in our shitty wars with them.

      • MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        5 days ago

        China’s GDP was lower than Canada’s. Economic strength is not the only factor of a superpower, but it’s significant. It’s hard to project power effectively without sufficient wealth to fund those efforts.

        • jaybone@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          4 days ago

          Fair enough. How many resources did the US waste in Vietnam and Korea fighting someone who was not a so called superpower?

          • MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            4 days ago

            Quite a lot. The US did the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan too. Who cares about who the enemy is or how many people die if they military industrial complex is making bank?

            A country doesn’t need to be a superpower to project some power, but very few rise to the level of global hegemony. I think China is probably in the superpower tier today. The belt and road initiative is classic economic hegemony shit.

      • merde alors
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        5 days ago

        In 1944, during World War II, the term was first applied to the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States. During the Cold War, the British Empire dissolved, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union to dominate world affairs. At the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States became the world’s sole superpower, a position sometimes referred to as that of a “hyperpower”. Since the late 2010s and into the 2020s, China has increasingly been described as an emerging superpower or even an established one, as China represents the “biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century” to the United States, as it is “the only country with enough power to jeopardize the current global order”.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpower

      • merde alors
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        4 days ago

        anybody from South Africa to reply to this?

        or is this about the apartheid in Israel/Palestine?