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Yup. This idea of geographical, ideological alignments or lack thereof between blocs or countries entirely misses what's actually going on. It's why it's rarely revealing and it fails to create useful predictions. Instead I find that looking at the owner class as acting against the working classes domestically and internationaly provides a much better picture of the world.
Wouldn't the US working in ever deeper cooperation with both China and the EU be better for business? Billionaires move pretty easily between all three anyway.
By all appearances they've never fully committed with China because of the ideological gap, and are cutting out the EU now do to new, emerging ideological differences.
Lots of US and EU billionaires are working in deep cooperation with China. Tesla's, Apple's, NVIDIA's (until they got cut off recently), Ford's, VW's, and many many others. Heck, Taiwan's billionaires are all-in with China. There is however an intra-class competition for profits. If Elon was able to buy up all the major American and Chinese companies and collect profits from them, he would. Their current owners wouldn't like that. My claim is that this is the major driver behind what sometimes appears as ideological or geographical misalignment. Depending on who's billionaire political reps get in power, there's a "shift in ideology" which serves to legitimize the state promoting that billionaire's interests.
"EU is too far left. It's overregulating AI and not paying its fair share for NATO" - an ideologically structured message that translates to Big Tech and the American MIC currently own this government. They want access to the EU market for cloud services and they want the EU to buy more weapons. If you pay close attention you could even catch how the ideological disagreements change depending on the state of negotiations.
At the same time this class works to reduce the share of profits labour gets among other class war fights anywhere they operate since that's a common interest. Another common interest is not paying taxes. Or offloading negative externalities on the working class.
I recall recently when the EU decided to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs, VW started lobbying against the tariffs. I was initially baffled. VW said that the tariffs, protecting EU workers, many of which VW workers, would hurt VW's bottom line because of expected losses in China, due to likely counter-tariffs. Think about that. There's no Western values VW cares about. They're ready to throw out meausres that would save their European factories in order to keep their Chinese factories running and selling product. They act internationally and prioritize cooperation with whichever jurisdicrion yields the highest profits. In this case cooperating with China and their Chinese competitors.
This is why leftists and unionists say that labour organization has to work internationally to be truly effective. Because the owner class cooperates across borders.
For me, this theory of the world has given me explanations with fewer contradictions and significantly better predictions. That's a sign of a good theory and I'm sticking with it until it breaks. 😊