Commenter: "That's totally not evidence of being more militaristic, US just has more friends"
You just contradicted yourself. Having more military bases IS being militaristic.
Your metric is flawed.
No.
They're not saying that. You're making an illogical argument.
The mere fact you made three edits tells us that you know your "logic" just isn't.
Bases in Japan as a result of levelling all the major cities and using two atomic weapons .. "allies".
Call it what you like, the US has a habit of beachheading bases across the globe and never leaving.
1. Is America today more militaristic than the PRC?
2. Has America been successfully militaristic in prior generations including ones which are now dead?
Each requires different evidence, answering one does not answer the other.
2. Yes.
America has been sabre rattling about the South China Sea for two decades now, a sea named after China that China has sailed through for some 4,000 years.
Is it any wonder that China builds out a navy to defend waters off its own shores that America has crossed an ocean to patrol?
I'm not particularly anti-US, just an observer of the world and history in general. Post WWII the US has been number one and it wants to keep that crown despite China advancing faster than any other nation for the past decades.
The language used to describe and name things is vastly more powerful than people give it credit for. Just because the British were lazy in their administration and named it after something else nearby doesn't mean that the entire sea belongs to the current Chinese state.
"Off its own shores"!? Is that what the kids are calling it these days? [0]
As an "observer of the world", I suggest checking exactly how much and how far the PRC has been claiming exclusive ownership over waters that are closer to their neighbors' shores. (Neighbors with their own ancestors who probably did even more sailing.)
North Korea has an ongoing war with South Korea for the last half a century. There's a mutual defense treaty between South Korea and US to provide mutual aid if either faces external armed attack. North Korea also has a mutual defense treaty with China. Thus US need bases around South Korea.
See, the problem with this is that he never did threaten that. It's CIA propaganda. Indeed such a threat would make zero sense even logically, since from the standpoint of China (and the US State Department) Taiwan _is_ China.
Xi Jinping opened the Chinese Communist Party's twice-a-decade National Congress on Sunday by pledging to never renounce using force to take control of Taiwan
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/10/chinas-xi-says-outs...
Chinese President Xi Jinping has met former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou and said that outside influence cannot stop the “family” reunion between Beijing and Taipei....Beijing views the self-ruled island as a province that must be reunited with mainland China, and it has not ruled out using force to assert its claims to Taiwan.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-calls-taiwa...
China's "reunification" with Taiwan is inevitable, President Xi Jinping said in his New Year's address on Sunday, striking a stronger tone than he did last year
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/xi-warned-biden-summit-be...
Chinese President Xi Jinping bluntly told President Joe Biden during their recent summit in San Francisco that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with mainland China but that the timing has not yet been decided
The US has also never engaged with the Houthis, except to protect marine shipping. There was never an attempt to "defeat" them by the US.
From the list I can see on Wikipedia, all of the nearby bases are in Korea and Japan.
More useful might be a map of US forces near China, not caring about who owns the base. And some comparable maps from the last 50 years to see how it's changed over time.
In any case, my point is that you only attribute fault to one side, when you have the other side making claims and starting to flex in front of smaller countries. Let's cut the BS here, that is not China playing nice and promoting stability.
It also doesn't take much to understand that the smaller, way less powerful countries that feel threaten will try to find allies. Who's the other big guy in the Pacific? Of course they want the US to be near them and on their side in case shit hits the fan.
This reminds me of Russia, which invaded Ukraine to keep it under their control, but then is surprised to learn that their actions made Ukrainians dislike them even more and are shocked that other countries that could rushed to join NATO. People like you course blame the US alone, missing the fact that NATO would crumble (like it was already happening) if Russia didn't make weekly threats about nuking European cities or actually invaded their neighbours.