Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

Hmm. Italy allies with an evil dictatorship that has a concentration camps for millions of minorities, and prosecutes religion by shutting down churches and jailing pastors. Sounds familiar...

Yes, Italy is also allied or has trade partnerships with Saudi Arabia or Israel.

Yes, Italy is also allied or has trade partnerships with a country that tortures prisoners, overthrows democratically elected governments, invades countries on the whims of its military industrial complex, uses drone strikes indiscriminately, and who tech economy thrives on oil/oligarch money...

The US has allied itself with China since the 80s...

US declared China as main competitor last year (as declared by VP pence), enforced high tariffs as punishment on China, and the US military is on high alert with China as the main enemy focus for years to come. Because they realized Xi Jing Ping the dictator was a paradigm shift.

Europe is now just doing the paradigm shift, urging its member states to act as a unified front against China. Something that Canada, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, India, New Zealand, and Vietnam has started to do

Trolling like this will get you banned here. Please don't.

Also, it looks like this account is using HN primarily for political and nationalistic battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity HN exists for. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart? We'd be grateful.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19470535 and marked it off-topic.

The US is not an ally of China. It cooperates with China to maintain peaceful military and political relations in Asia and it has vast trade with China. There's a dramatic, fundamental difference between being an ally and being a global competitor that you try to get along with (ie try not to go to war with as you collide repeatedly on matters of perceived national interest).

Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. Those are allies of the US. I don't think there's actually much confusion in the difference between a US ally relationship like Britain and the modern US relationship with China.

>There's a dramatic, fundamental difference

Yes, the difference being "when it suits the US it's OK, when it suits somebody else, it's bad".

The difference between being an "ally" of US or not only has to do with its current economic interests. Until recently China was viewed as a big friend. And the US only decided to do something against it when it became clear that China would not allow US companies to control their economy. In the list of US "friends" we see dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Thailand, and countries with numerous human rights violations such as the Philippines. This is not a great track record for a country that purports to be the champion of democracy around the world.

>China is built on thievery and finally after decades of escalating theft US is looking like we’re being more aggressive, maybe.

Yeah, more proving my point.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2013-02-01/piracy...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

Not to mention that the same exact argument was once leveled at the "subpar" "copycat" "ripoffs" of Taiwan and Japan (regarding cars, electronics, etc) back in the 60s and 70s. Funny how that turned out...