Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, I admit I misjudged you based solely off of the server you're from, which was rather immature of me. I imagine you've probably noticed that .ml has a high population of overt Marxist-Leninist folks on it, and is one of the hubs of leftism on Lemmy. That certainly doesn't apply to everyone who signed up on it though. lol Centrist does make a lot more sense in hindsight. I doubt you can really call yourself center-right anymore though, in the American scale at least, simply due to how crazy the right has gotten in recent years. That Overton Window jumped like 5 notches rightward on us, and left a lot of people behind. You could be a fairly typical neolib, free-trade, privatization, etc. We have a community of them here on .world, they post a fair bit of news, you might find some like-minded people if you are.
I agree wholeheartedly. The only places I've heard that extensively discussed are more serious geostrategic groups. CSIS most prominently. Most of the media plays into the more potentially ... dramatic possibilities though. Much better as clickbait I imagine, for us peons.
Regarding navy I'm not so sure. The scale of their fleet build up is very impressive. Generally, naval ships are not exactly a hot export market, especially when you're considering the larger, more advanced blue water stuff. They're pretty clearly moving towards global power projection capabilities. This does not necessarily indicate a future of aggression, though, as such a force also has a very important role in securing the sea trade that China relies so heavily on in addition to being a strong tool for diplomatic pressure. Look at how we use ours, after all. Naval power is also the sort of thing that needs to be developed over many years, you can't just spin up the institutions and knowledge base necessary to effectively deploy to another hemisphere in just a few years, it takes decades. So I see it as a long-term investment and hedge against the future.