Or because those countries baseline size means their natural growth trajectory will not threaten western incumbents the same way PRC growth would, including mo

Or because those countries baseline size means their natural growth trajectory will not threaten western incumbents the same way PRC growth would, including modest 2% military budget which is enough to make everyone shit bricks. Nor would I characterize those countries as "largely" aligned with LIO seeing current headlines and it's not like India doesn't antagonize neighbours when PRC started spread influence in south Asia. Difference between RU and PRC is RU actually mired in kinetic war with neighbours vs PRC grey zone that pushes region to some security hedging but not at expense of PRC trade. IMO that's natural/forgone, and let's not forget PRC antagonism was rarely PRC initiated. SKR over THAAD, Japan was always weary. PRC also last to reclaim/militarized SCS started by Vietnam (barring Brunei) but doing so at PRC scale revealed gap in capability causing others to hedge and they still do. Current US posture in region under Trump and Biden admins still pale in comparison to initial deterrence proposals of ringing PRC with missiles and agile basing. AU is AU they couldn't stay neutral if US pushed. But overall current US posture is still shadow of what they thought they could get despite going HAM on diplomatic efforts. On India, note elsewhere I said I'm optimistic they'll get shit together eventually but unlikely to replicate PRC because they lack same levers for state capacity. It's not unreasonable to observe India does not have the same favourable headwinds as PRC in 2000s, i.e. PRC+1 is mostly shifting to where PRC willing to shift and that's ASEAN not India who is unlikely to capture PRC levels of manufacturing base and ability to snowball development for the simple reason that PRC is not willing to relinquish manufacturing advantage and west can only shift so much. The fact that India is at PRC early 2000s indicators despite starting with comparable if not favourable conditions and still not addressing some of the major social hurdles PRC has mostly addressed at the time (i.e. single language to facilitate migrant / labour transfers), reflect inherent inefficiencies that is relatively more difficult to coordinate around. India on par with PRC in 2000 is still India 20 years behind due to systemic differences that extrapolated will unlikely see India catch up at 1:1 time scale. And yes consensus in washington was OPM fair game but PRC industrial espionage that pushed up PRC industry to compete with west was the real concern. Entire MIC2025 drama. And circling back to India this is exactly why they're not squeezing the level same tech transfers PRC was able to because everyone wised up. The playbook doesn't work as well anymore. US willing to cripple JP semi despite JP being fully LIO aligned, ultimately no one is going to want India to repeat a PRC including the PRC. Nevermind studies showing export oriented models working increasingly less well - countries milk industrialization opportunities faster and settle at lower levels of income due to labour saving technologies that remove a lot of human potential from being realized. Will India make it? Again IMO, yes, but it will take longer and the race against Indian demographics much more difficult. PRC "only" saddled with 600m farmers and informal economy "halfwits" despite deliberate family planning policy to mitigate, India will likely have 1B+ having tried and fail family planning of their own, that's another tier of drag to govern around. >No country has ever transitioned from a developing country to an advanced economy with as crippling a Human Capital Handicap as the PRC today. Sure but PRC doesn't need to be advanced across the board it needs regions to be sufficiently advanced to compete with advanced economies and by and large it already has at the scale of tier 1/2 efforts. PRC isn't a large country - it's a massive country the scale dynamics operates differently than turkey mexico or malaysia. At PRC scale, 5M STEM per year is enough to saturate/build up strategic industries with talent and directly challenge advanced economies across the board vs 100,000s of from "large" countries that still has to pick and choose. I'm one of the first to note PRC isn't going to uplift everyone to advanced indicators but it will uplift enough to be extremely competitive and resulting in advanced economies also suffering malaise (which many already are) by spreading out the pie. Convergence is as much about PRC doing better but also incumbents doing worse because they need to compete with segements of PRC that can compete. And that segment set to massively expand in next 30 years while current level is already competing/leading in industries with historically dominant western share. Time and effort has been put in via initiatives in 90s and early 00s and we're approaching divident reaping phase. There's a decent report on PRC leveraging scale in domestic efforts and eventual effect on oversea share of incumbents and effect was something like 50-90% reduction in operating margins of leading (mostly western companies) when PRC pushes surplus abroad. Hence why PRC competitiveness at even current PRC scale enabled by low % per capita skill is making advanced economies justifiably nervous.