Tom Bilyeu

It used factories, ports, loans, trade deals.

While America fought wars in the Middle East, outsourced jobs to China, deficit spent its way into grotesque inequality and argued with itself at home.

China absorbed technology, capital, and leverage.

Hundreds of millions were pulled out of poverty.

Supply chains were rerouted.

Influence was massively expanded.

And slowly, but surely, China grew to rival the US as a peer and Venezuela became the new Cuba.

Once you understand that, Trump storming in and snatching up Maduro and vowing to run the country in a way that's advantageous to the US stops looking like the lunatic move of someone who wants cheap oil and a violent end to drug smuggling and looks more like the lunatic move to fend off the only country

that is a true threat to our dominance.

For decades after the Cold War, the US could afford to look the other way as China gained strength.

We could and did tell ourselves a story that prosperity would turn China away from communism and make it just as freedom-loving as America.

But it didn't because that's not how value systems work.

Make no mistake, China is executing on a longstanding plan to return them to a position of glory and global influence.

Their culture is one with rigid hierarchies where they believe they were destined to influence global politics.

You can't blame them.

America is the same, as was England in its time, Holland in its time, Spain in its time, and so on and so forth.

But while you might not be able to blame them, you have to face the fact that them exerting their will will have consequences.

As they say, ambition grows in the Eden.

And as China has grown economically, their power has grown and so have their ambitions.

China refers to itself as the Middle Kingdom, the literal translation of China's name for itself, Zhongguo.