No, you got it exactly right with

China invests in many African and Latin American countries

Western countries don’t invest, they exploit. They can’t even conceive of working with other countries as equal partners. People who project the same intent on China’s Belt and Road projects do so out of either ignorance or ill intent.

It’s quite clear that what China is doing is building up the industries and infrastructure of other countries under very favorable terms for their partners so as to build an international community that mutually benefits from trade. It just undermines US hegemony, by which I mean the insidious, parasitic stranglehold on global trade created by Western monopolies, cartels, and mob-like financial institutions intent on sabotaging the economies of most countries for US benefit.

If Western European countries embraced the Belt and Road Initiative, they too could see a great benefit, but not nearly as great as what China and West Asia would see. This is part of why the US works so hard to destabilize West Asia through war: they know that the Silk Road was the greatest trade route in the world and the vast amount of wealth it created all along its length. This would be the Silk Road 2.0, resplendent with modern modes of transportation that would completely change how trade is done throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, let alone the effects on other continents.

Combine these efforts with BRICS leading to the decline of the petrodollar and you’ll see that the efforts of China to unite the world are about to kick the shit out of the sand castle that is the US’ dominance over the global economy. All of the nasty trucks they’ve used to devalue foreign currencies while artificially bolstering the dollar have become precarious. This is why the US is upping its aggression towards China despite having no chance of coming out ahead in a direct war with China. They see the writing on the wall and are desperate to prevent this. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but with all the momentum behind BRICS and the extent to which their military might is overextended right now, I don’t see any way the US can prevent the erosion of their global economic power in the decades to come. I just hope we can prevent it from doing the damage they will try to inflict while fighting this downfall.

I would bet that most countries only continue to put up with the fits the US throws out of a fear of military or economic retaliation and we already see the later eroding. Give it time and you’ll see them put up with less and less as alternative power structures begin to dominate.

China is proving Mao right, that the US was a paper tiger all along.

The United States has set up hundreds of military bases in many countries all over the world. China’s territory of Taiwan, Lebanon and all military bases of the United States on foreign soil are so many nooses round the neck of U.S. imperialism. The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses round their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression. The longer the U.S. aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become.