The US is our friend, China is not.

" For the past few weeks, we've been deluged by various retrospectives on Donald Trump's first year in office," wrote P Khanna. "Yet all had the same fatal flaw: the fashionable trait of heaping blame on Trump for America's abdication of global leadership." So, what is the flaw in "America's self-centric world view"? "China is the top trading partner of more than 120 countries, versus just over 50 for the US, Europe exports more in capital around the world than America does. Japanese capital is funding AI research around the world. Russian are again selling weapons." Which means that the world has become multipolar" and "Trump, like Obama before him, is really just an accessory". Maybe, but, purely from India's point of view a strong US is infinitely better than a strong China. Perhaps, Khanna is young and does not know how India averted millions of deaths from famine only due to US help under its Public Law 480 program in the sixties. It is only natural that the US would want India's diplomatic support against its enemies in return, but this is seen as humiliating by Indians. While begging for US help our leaders made friends with the Soviet Union, signing a friendship treaty in 1971, and criticised US bombing in Vietnam. And what has China given us? The humiliation of the 1962 war is still raw among all of us who are old enough to remember. Even today China taunts us about 1962. It is building infrastructure in Doklam, probably in preparation for an armed attack at a future date. An aggressive nation, China has no real friend except perhaps Pakistan, a failed state which breeds terrorists within its borders, wrote Prof B Chellaney. So loving is the friendship that China sealed its border with Pakistan to stop terrorists infiltrating into its territory. "The thing is: China doesn't need allies," wrote one Zhou Bo. "Today, China is the second largest economy in the world and a nuclear weapon state." "More importantly, China is not a hegemonic power with an ambition to police the world with a Pax Sinica." Indeed. While its army continually threatens India with incursions into our border China is forcing other countries to follow its diktats by using debt as a weapon. Complete opposite to what the US did to help India despite our hostility. South Africa is waking up to the Chinese threat and there is anger in Australia regarding bullying by Chinese students to respect Communist Party propaganda. China is far from replacing the US as an economic power and will not do so in the medium term, wrote R Sharma. Thank God for that.