Russia is more baffling because it was 100% a US client state, the reactionary lib compradors the US chose and propped up are still in power, and Russia was licking America's boots and begging for approval right up until 2014. The way American officials managed to alienate their own handpicked puppets like that is astounding.

Like I genuinely can't understand how and why the US decided to do that, it's like the real scary, cynical old cold warrior demons won and got the complete American hegemony they'd spent their lives angling for, and then they retired happy and their successors just flailed around and undid it all within twenty years. Like it's this self-defeating blend of grifters trying to engineer conflicts so their arms dealer stocks go up, and dipshit true believers who think the US is some divine force of ontological good and purity who are entirely guided by the unhinged propaganda the grifters draw up for them, and nowhere in any of this is there a single cynical statesman monster capable of coldly planning for hegemony left holding any sort of power.

It's a truly impressive level of rot and collapse that's only picking up speed as the world catches on to the fact that the machine of imperial hegemony has been hollowed out by graft and no one's going to fix it.

The US started pushing Russia and China into hostile relations with the US after the West screwed up the Yugoslav war.

At the time, they were really against the NATO air strikes in Serbia. Slobodan Milosevic and his brother proposed that Yugoslavia join the Union State of Russia and Belarus. And NATO almost attacked Russian troops near the border between Kosovo and Serbia for no reason. In addition, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in 1999, which further deteriorated relations, which never improved.

The 90s peace should have never happened.

They were also high on end of history histrionics and genuinely believed that economic prosperity would lead to an american style free market economy. And I don't think people were silly to think that way in the 90s. You had to be in the know to realize the fundamentals at play. That China, unlike the Soviets, did not privatize the commons but instead implemented a market economy. The only hint of how things were going was how Japan was forcefully turned into an american sharemarket economy. China by all indications did not have to and didn't.

Did Japan's real estate bubble crash heavily during those times?

The US reined in their vassals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord

It crashed in 1991, but I think the yellow scare lasted into the mid 90s for some people. I remember my parents always acting like stuff made in Japan was inferior to American made products.

Oh yeah, totally. Chuds have motives all wrong though, like always

I think you mean "Infernal Affairs".

They were better times.

I recently torrented the entire Jackie Chan filmography and worked through some of them. They don't always hold up, but they're always fun and have such a different style than current movies. It's mostly a shame for kids.