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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Again I feel like anything I say is just some dude talking from a safe place far from the front lines. But I think the west could have acknowledged the fear of the NATO, the EU could have told Biden that we prefer a good relation with Russia and that if we think our culture is in fact more free, it will leak into Russia via the internet. This discussion can and will take very long. I just wanted to say I’m disappointed in almost all aspects of the situation and humanity is suffering and it hurts. Us against them is not constructive. Much hate will be created and we know what hate leads to from yet another popular franchise. It takes a long time to extinguish.

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> if we think our culture is in fact more free, it will leak into Russia via the internet.

Do you think Russian leaders should allow this to happen?

That's exactly the strategy we've been trying with both Russia and China for several decades now - playing soft and hoping they mellow with time. Obama tried a 'reset' of relations with Russia to improve relations in 2009, the result was the invasion of Crimea.

Democratisation through osmosis has utterly failed. The result has been the subjugation of Hong Kong, genocide in Xinjiang and the invasion of Ukraine. Taiwan is next unless we wake up and make it perfectly clear to these people we absolutely will meet force with force and that we have plenty of hard power to use alongside our soft power. It may be too late for Ukraine, we failed them miserably by playing nice too long, but it's not too late for Taiwan.

Ukraine is both bad and good lesson for Chinese: bad, because nobody intervenes with an army. Good, because it shows what the consequences for the economy of the invader are. And the West should buckle up and prepare for retaliation - this is especially important in essential areas such as drug production. If China attacks Taiwan, it will set the clock back two decades or more, for everybody.

Taiwan is not Ukraine. Biden has clearly stated that the US will go to war to defend Taiwan, while he had made it entirely clear that he will not go to war over Ukraine.

The fact that Taiwan has been a us ally for decades and the US has strongly implied in the past and now clearly stated that they will defend them matters. The US had never even implied they would defend Ukraine and had no treaty obligation to do so.

Also China is not Russia, while it's building a formidable navy, air-force and ground force and may be more capable than their Russian conventional counterparts, their nuclear deterrent may not be enough to deter an American intervention in Taiwan. Their nuclear force is small, and though rapidly growing, currently not enough to reliably threaten the US, the destruction is not so mutually assured in the China US equation.

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