>>483568>when the Empire has indeed conquered - installed whomever they like on all of the thronesThe Saudis have gone from compliant US client-state to almost neutral.
Iran is turning into a regional power that can increasingly often ignore US demands.
So you're wrong in that regard.
>I imagine re-uniting with Taiwan comes about by reconciling with the GMD and basically saying "we're not doing communism any moreGMD ?
The Chinese are not exporting communism anymore, that's the concession they granted, that's a big one indeed , but i don't see any evidence that China internal politics are up for debate. Since Xi took over, more state powers have been delegated to provincial governments, which if anything makes it harder to exert transnational influence, and probably increases the political power of the local demos.
I think the time-table for Chinese communism is a long one. They'll continue the current system till 2035, after that they have planned extensive expansion of social welfare type stuff, which will be fully implemented by 2050. The first glimmer of what can be considered orthodox communist economics shows up in the time-table for 2078. Full communism is marked for the mid to late twenty second century. On the one hand, so far they've stuck to their time-tables to a tee, some of their goals get completed up to a year ahead of schedule. But
communism several generations down the line i grant you the skepticism.
Anyway back to the topic, the amount of leverage the US had on the Taiwan question has decreased since the Ukraine and Gaza crisis. The US has lost a lot of international diplomatic capital and they burned hard-power capacity on those 2 crisis too, so there is also less hard-power available for making threats.
>China isn't interested in telling>anyone in the Middle East what to think or which god to pray to.OK but nobody said anything of that sort.
>They're more than happy to sell Israel<weaponsSo far the Chinese have mostly bought a lot of weapons from Israel, which may have been a means to get their hands on US designed weapons.
The Ukrainians have used a lot of Chinese made DJI drones, that's the closest thing you can find to China supplying a war-zone. It has to be said DJI drones are civilian and definitely not weapons. I don't think you can accuse the Chinese for other parties weaponizing this. Almost everything can be weaponized.