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It was Bush Senior, Clinton (with PNTR), Bush Junior. The story of why the US thought PNTR was a good move is long, and has to do with the events of 1989. Also... Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were both very different from who we have today. China was not necessarily friendly, but they thought there was a good chance of them becoming friendly, especially if their market opened up. For several years after Tiananmen, the Democrats in Congress actually wanted sanctions against the PRC, but it kept getting vetoed, so as not to torpedo the chance.


> China was not necessarily friendly

It also wasn't a dictatorship. China under Xi is stupider, more short-term oriented and weaker than it was when it had internal competition for power.


I'd blame the prevailing economic mantra that "profits are the only things that matter" more than any set of UD presidents.


Its both though.


It's both in the sense that politicians are executives whose job it is to meet the demands of Capital. This also means that politicians are beholden to Capital and their personal ideological inclinations are largely irrelevant — the only options are to serve Capital or be ejected from their position.

The individual executives serving Capital are interchangeable.




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