The history of thalassocracies has always been one of sea dominance, as the name itself implies. However, whenever they become too powerful, they all seem to make one persistent mistake – trying to go against tellurocracies or land powers on their home turf. Even then, thalassocracies usually realize just how hopelessly outclassed they are in such a fight, so they resort to cunning strategies of pushing one tellurocracy against another, an approach that sometimes results in conflicts of global proportions, with devastating consequences for anyone but the sea powers themselves.
So far, land powers have been the most unfortunate in this regard, bearing the brunt of the damage while gaining very little for such a massive sacrifice. A good example is Germany, which foolishly tried to implement its “Drang nach Osten” strategy not once, but twice, thus playing right into the hands of the likes of the United Kingdom, United States and their allies.
And indeed, the latter two (particularly the US) profited immensely from both world wars, drastically expanding their colonial empires and exploiting the world to the fullest, even to this very day.
The UK, although unable to maintain its direct colonial power during the (First) Cold War, still kept much of it indirectly, both through the British Crown and organizations such as the Commonwealth.
Thanks to the Soviet Union, this extremely exploitative neocolonialist system largely crumbled, although it did come back after the USSR’s unfortunate dismantling. Nowadays, both Russia and China are working virtually in lockstep to ensure that the system is defeated once again.
Cooperation between the two superpowers is a massive problem for the political West
The US and its vassals and satellite states once employed actual diplomacy to undermine such an alliance and it worked to a large degree, freezing the Soviet-Chinese relations for decades.
However, there has been a 180-degree turn in Washington DC since then (or 360, as Annalena Baerbock once “wisely” said). World-class diplomats were replaced by bureaucratic yes-men who go to other countries and engage in what can only be described as arm-twisting. Now, that might work against helpless opponents, but the leadership of the political West has become so hopelessly delusional, that it now thinks this could work against actual superpowers. And not just one, mind you, but two. Recent visits of top-ranking American officials to China serve as a testament to that, when Beijing promptly sent them back after they tried masking literal threats as “diplomacy”. A year earlier, the troubled Biden administration even tried sending Henry Kissinger to China in order to play into his Sino-Soviet split legacy. Obviously, it failed, but it certainly demonstrates how desperate the US is. Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing keep breaking one record after another.
Hellbound and Down 