I just read an article about Chinese concerns regarding the recent US government shutdown and looming debt ceiling issues. It's really no surprise that China would be concerned about the US' ability to pay its debts being as how China is the largest foreign holder of US debt.
Anyway that's not what I'm thinking about though. In the comments section someone mentioned that China has ulterior motives for proposing a new world reserve currency and that those motives likely involve removing the US as the world's premier economy and supplanting it with China. The commenter went on to state that the world should be wary of China and Russia. I'm quite sure that China and Russia would say the same about the US.
In truth they would all be right, all nations have hidden motives and agendas usually aimed at increasing their own clout while decreasing the clout of others. The world is and has been in a constant state of war, it's just that war doesn't always take the form of physical confrontation. All nations are constantly vying for the alpha male position. Much of this competition comes from fear, the fear that if they are not fighting tooth and nail for the top spot then they'll fall into insignificance, they'll fall into a so called third world state.
I can't say that they're necessarily incorrect in that fear. As a nation if you're not in a position to extort or forcibly take what you need then you're not likely to get it because all the big fish are going to hoard it all for themselves, largely because they're afraid if they do not then someone else will.
This is highly self destructive behavior. The citizens of these nations must work themselves to the bone day and night in an effort to ensure their nation remains competitive in this international confrontation. In our efforts to establish ourselves as dominant we've condemned ourselves to such round the clock labor that we have no time left to enjoy life. We think that working hard to outperform the next guy provides us with strategic resources and peace of mind, but in the end we have no time left to enjoy those resources and while we might feel safe with all of our military might, we have given up our entire lives in the pursuit of that might.
It's a bit of a catch-22, if we don't work hard enough to compete we die out, but if we do work hard enough to remain competitive we lose our lives to the effort. We die either literally or figuratively so we end up with the question of why even bother? What's the point of fighting for something if it doesn't make you happy? In fact we'd probably be much better off dead than condemned to an eternity of hard labor.
The US only fears China because China fears the US and China only fears the US because the US fears China. China knows if the US doesn't have a strategic reason to share its wealth with China then it wont and the US knows the same about China.
There is a strategic reason though, one that nations across the globe have overlooked. If the US shares its wealth with China then China will have no reason to forcibly take it from the US and if China shares its wealth with the US then the US will have no reason to forcibly take it from China. Once we remove our fear of one another we have no reason to condemn ourselves to an eternity of hard labor in order to protect ourselves from our enemies. Because there will be no enemies.
It is in our best interests to face our fears and defeat those fears for if we do not we will be condemned to our own personal hell. While we most certainly can fight over the resources we only end up condemning ourselves to a life worse than death. Go ahead and fight, go ahead and hoard it all, you'll get what's coming to you and there's literally no way around it.
P.S. If there were an alien race out there Earth would probably be the easiest planet in the universe to conquer. Divide and conquer is a highly effective strategy and the aliens wouldn't even have to bother with the divide part, we've done that for them.