>"Focusing only on the negatives of a foreign country is not unless the goal is to agitate the populace for conflict and war."

Western news media news is designed for western audience consumption. Pointing out the suffering of people in other countries is something that people with empathy want to know about. For example, when Western media points out the suffering of Palestinians, we hear that this is because of anti-Israel bias. The reality is, most people aren't opposed to Israel, they're concerned with the suffering imposed by the occupation, and the ancillary effects on their own national interest due to regional instability. The goal of the media isn't conflict and war, it's awareness and political change. If there's a genocide happening, I want to know about it. If the US backed Saudi proxy war in Yemen is destroying huge number of lives because of American made weapons or policy, I want to know about it, and if a large US trading partner is locking people in Xinjiang and even manufacturing with slave labor, I'd rather buy my products somewhere else.

>"Take your imagined trilateral water war as an example, have you looked into how minor the supply is to India?".

Of course, have you? There are 130 million people who live in the Brahmaputra basin. And 1 billion downstream of the Hindu Kush. You don't think India is concerned about the dams going up in Kashmir and the Tibetan Plateau? "damming for electricity has little effect on total volume of flow" you're talking past damns, the concern is over future mega dams.

>"Otoh, when US dammed the Colorado the water was diverted for agriculture and urban consumption. The river basically dried up before reaching Mexico."

Yeah, and that was bad for both the environment, and for Mexico, which is exactly why people are concerned about China's activity, not just for geo-political reasons and the 1+ billion people dependent on the Tibetan plateau water supply, but the environmental damage that could result as well. Your own example shows exactly why those dependent on Tibetan and Hindu Kush supplies should be concerned about dam building, in which they have little say over.

By all means, use past US transgressions as a road map for why we should be concerned. Take Belt and Road Initiative. Sucker someone into taking a large loan, make them use the loaned money to buy from your own country's companies, and then when the debtor can't pay, seize concessions. The US played this out extremely well all over the world (see _Confessions of an Economic Hitman_ https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins...), and it's being repeated: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lank...

It's because of how awful the US's policy was in doing the same thing in South America and Africa that I'm concerned now about what I see happening now, essentially neo-colonialism.

However, the real issue I sense, is that a lot of 五毛 and 玻璃心 don't want to hear any criticism, even if it's legitimate, because of elevated nationalism dialed up by Xi over the years. And it is this rising nationalism, in the US with Trump, in Europe (e.g. in Hungary), and in China that we should be worried about. We've managed to temporarily put down Trumpism here, but Xi made himself President for life, and authoritarianism combined with rising nationalism and economic power is not a good recipe, if the 20th century taught us anything.

You might like this one, not sure how much of it is true and how much is made up

https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins...

https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins...

Since we are at it, I suggest reading John Perkins's "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man":

https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins...

Also, any book on past and current colonialism (say, current actions of the US military in Africa).

How do you like your illegitimately rich country?

https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins...

This is a great project, the only thing that concerns me about it is the very large loan from the IMF denominated in USD they took out in order to build it. Could well have been the work of EHMs

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/...

You find the jihadis "unreasonable".

Look, this is the list of things you could find "unreasonable":

(a) the jihadi position on God

(b) the jihadi position on US policy

(c) the jihadi method to affect change - violence

Lets deal with them one by one.

(a) is loony but pretty much irrelevant. You wouldn't feel any better if they converted to Shintoism and continued the jihad, would you?

(b) US policy is well studied so you can't really deny its lousiness. Example references:

http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/...

http://www.amazon.com/Power-Systems-Conversations-Democratic...

http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/037...

http://goingtotehran.com/

(c) you can only condemn the violence if you would not do the same thing in their place.

To me, that means you should be able to sell them a peaceful method as being more effective than jihad. Well, we have a historical record.

The peaceful, liberal, pro-democratic reformers in the middle east seem to have gotten defeated and tortured by the CIA and their local satraps. Like what happened to my family.

On the other hand Jihad seems to be winning in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and so on.

http://zenhuber.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/preview-bin-laden-dea...

So you don't have a very strong case.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (http://amzn.to/2ZdEWA) is the story of companies that do exactly this thing, on purpose, to use the oppressive debts of the poor countries to control their behavior.