China isn't necessarily bullying the US, it bullies other countries. My point was that China isn't good at international relationships. They have squandered the relationship with the US and have bullied other smaller countries to the point that even Vietnam would much rather deal with the US than with China.
Look at the India relationship, it's awful. China has no clue how to create positive and mutually beneficial relationships around the world.
It sees everything as a zero-sum game. The US, despite it's flaws, is excellent at building and maintaining deep economic and political relationships around the world. Europe, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, all have had benefited massively from their relationships with the US.
China's CCP has had 50 years to develop ties with Vietnam and the Vietnamese hate the CCP.
"It sees everything as a zero-sum game. The US, despite it's flaws, is excellent at building and maintaining deep economic and political relationships around the world. "
I can't believe I'm reading this here. The USA has bullied its will in the world unopposed (except a little by the URSS) since the end of the Second World War. Just go to wikipedia and read, for instance, the history of any country south of Rio Grande . Or Iran, now that is fashionable.
Any large country will try to exert influence to keep the world in a state they are happy with. It's an extension of human nature. Considering what the US could have done, their footprint has been relatively mild. Most "interventions" were to keep authoritarianism limited. If you are pro-authoritarianism, you indeed may see such moves as sinister. (I won't put a value judgement on authoritarianism in this post.)
We could find many more examples of fights against authoritarianism, for instance:
"The 1953 Iranian coup d'état,[..], was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the United States [..] and the United Kingdom [..]"
"Mosaddegh had sought to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a British corporation (now part of BP) and to limit the company's control over Iranian oil reserves"
Put it in context. The USSR basically occupied all the countries near it. Every country was effectively ruled by Russia. The US didn't occupy Canada, or France, or the UK, etc.
Yes, the extremely weak countries were pawns but, relatively speaking, the US let France be France and Canada be Canada.
It's got nothing to do with being relevant, or having delusions of grandeur. It's just a matter of not having terms dictated by the US, Russia or nowadays China within our effective perimeter. Back then acquiring nuclear power was essential to those aims, and building a European block was also the right answer for the foreseeable future. Stumbles aside, it seems to be fairly reasonable and workable to me. You can't just pretend everything's fine and be a good boy for the overlord of the day.
In the 50s a number of people were acutely aware of the bullet we dodged in WW2 (we came quite close to being scraped apart into rump states).
The US let Canada be Canada by forcing them to renegotiate NAFTA and then unilaterally imposing steel and aluminum tariffs while the negotiations were going on as leverage?
The US is by far the biggest bully in the world and has been since WW2.
The Belt and Road initiative has been a debt trap for African nations, and countries are increasingly skeptical of signing on. This has been a recurring topic in the Economist for the last year at least.
I've read a bit into that conflict while I was traveling in Vietnam and it definitely is interesting. Vietnam had just finished the American war (their independence war) and had a pretty strong military, they were well on their way to uniting indochina.
China invades to interrupt vietnam's invasion of cambodia (splitting vietnam's forces), but takes relatively heavy losses due to outdated military strategy (essentially losing to a bunch of militia on their way to the capitol).
Had Vietnam been allowed to take cambodia/laos/etc, a united indochina could have been a pretty serious player in the region, and served as a counter to China. Instead China essentially aborted that plan, and can now push its southern neighbors around.
Look at the India relationship, it's awful. China has no clue how to create positive and mutually beneficial relationships around the world.
It sees everything as a zero-sum game. The US, despite it's flaws, is excellent at building and maintaining deep economic and political relationships around the world. Europe, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, all have had benefited massively from their relationships with the US.
China's CCP has had 50 years to develop ties with Vietnam and the Vietnamese hate the CCP.