Natalie Winters

I mean, perhaps that's a bleak, black-pilled take, but we've spent so long here, right?

That was always sort of my favorite refrain from my legacy media betters over at the White House.

that dismantling USAID was coming after American soft power.

The not so secretive secret in the room, with the room being the world abroad, is that American soft power has been kind of absent for a while.

And American soft power is exporting ideologies

that the people on the ground there do not support, do not believe in.

Meanwhile, China is dealing in Belt and Road, infrastructure, ports, stealing technology, basically importing their people to these third world countries and taking over the entire economy, essentially hacking not just the critical infrastructure, but the entire economy, cultures, and societies of

Dozens, dozens of countries, even countries in Europe have signed on to Belt and Road.

And I mean, you see it.

I mean, I'd encourage people to actually go over there.

Even you see it in an hour drive, whether it's the countryside or the most urban areas, all of the new construction projects that are going on, it's all Chinese money.

the rare earth mines that are being built, even in countries like Laos, which of course border China, but there's negligible infrastructure there.

It's all Chinese.

And the businesses that are running it, they're all Chinese.

They're importing Chinese people to do the work, short of it being the slave conditions that they have the native population working in.

But it really is...

quite alarming and deafening to see the kind of bleak Thucydides trap mindset and action whereby it is a world in which China replaces the United States as the rolling kind of global hegemon.

But it's moves like this that give you a little bit of hope that we can push back.

But we should not underestimate the pace and rapidity and the iron fist, for lack of a better word, that China is moving with.

Well, this New York Times article is quite interesting.