It's more that bankers are good at taking advantage of political strife to get more control. Nozzie Germany? Propped up by the "allies" (banking oligarch network)
Soviet Union? Propped up by the "allies" (banking oligarch network)
CCP? Propped up by America (banking oligarch network)
Step one find candidate pawns in a region
Step two give pawns resources and weapons (on friendly loan terms!)
Step three let pawns fight
Step four PROFIT! by scooping up devalued property, lending even more money for rebuilding, and collecting on your loans
Communist regimes collapse by trying to do half ass capitalism to compete, which is hard because when people get a taste they like it and want more of it.
Most of the time the "communism" is only for like the period of the first dynasty, then it rapidly morphs to a much less ideological and more like state capitalism or national socialism form.
CCP is communist in name only, they have all the trappings of national socialism (even camps for problematic minorities!).
Thing is I don't want us to go in and try to stop them, we shouldn't have gotten involved in Europe (both times) either.
I mostly just want our officials and bureaucrats executed if they take bribes or collaborate with them.
You have been deceived.
Eric Swallowswell doesn't get away with boning a Chinese spy because the Chinese are so powerful - he gets away with it because the corruption in the US is endemic and not a single American leader or LEO agency does anything about it.
Dianne Fineswine doesn't get away with having a Chinese spy on staff because the Chinese are so powerful - she gets away with it because the corruption in the US is endemic and not a single American leader or LEO agency does anything about it.
The people that make these decisions are AMERICANS, not the CCP. Home-grown traitors enabling the CCP are the problem, because all that has to be done to end CCP influence is to STOP OUR "LEADERS" TAKING CCP BRIBES.
Bruh there's no chicom agents flipping power switches that need to be hunted down, the people responsible for this are the same as 95% of our problems - OUR OWN GODDAMN "LEADERSHIP" FROM LOCAL TO FEDERAL.
China is largely a distraction from the real enemy, and without decades of our corruption, China wouldn't even be relevant.
THERE ARE PEOPLE WITH SKILLS IN THE MILITARY WHO COULD STEP UP.
Step up and do what, cuddle the gas lines no one bothered to insulate to warm them up? Shoot ice off wind turbines with their rifles?
Only useful thing NG could do is provide heated tents and MREs to people without power. This is a "years of stacking poor decisions" problem, not a "we need warm bodies right meow" problem.
I've been thinking about that a little, there seems to be demand for an explicitly on-prem home automation/security solution. I'm playing around with the NVidia Jetson as a possible platform, since it's inexpensive and has quite a lot of compute horsepower including hardware video codecs.
Threatened empires are the most tyrrannical. Healthy empires don't have to be because the majority of the populous is happy with the conditions - bread and circuses work well. America's biggest danger is comfort, the Wall-E outcome.
When boots start replacing bread as the means of pacification, that's weakness showing and usually a delta is on the way.