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Comment by Isinlor | Hacker News Reader

China already declared that it will use force in Taiwan if "possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted".

From Chinese Anti-Secession Law:

Article 8: In the event that the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur, or that possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/...

It is USA/EU strategic interest to avoid too deep dependency on Taiwan. We should support the status quo there as people of Taiwan are prosperous and peaceful nation. But we can't be caught off guard by China as EU was caught off guard by Russia.

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This kind of bluster is a mainstay of Chinese geopolitics. The law was intentionally written in an open-ended way so that the party always gets the final say on what "completely exhausted" should mean. It serves as a propaganda tool internally and a point of leverage externally -- the party never needs to actually act on the threat for it to serve a valuable purpose.

With that being said, it's not that simple. Bluster isn't just a political tactic -- it also enables the military to slowly chip away at norms and edge closer towards a strategic advantage (e.g.: progressively violating more and more of Taiwan's sovereign airspace). If the party could have things their way, the military would merely continue pushing the envelope until one day a D-Day assault force seemingly randomly washes up on Taiwan's doorstep.

> progressively violating more and more of Taiwan's sovereign airspace

Just in terms of international law, the Chinese flights near Taiwan are provocative but don’t violate any laws. The U.S. and Russia still do this sort of thing all the time. An ADIZ is not sovereign airspace.

Launching so many missiles over a space of 36 hours that you entirely close airspace and waterways (and apparently over the island) is a little different from flying an airplane at the edge of controlled airspace.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220805-chinese-missi...

That happened during the Pelosi trip in August, and the jingoists were angry it didn't go further. The likelihood of an effective air/sea embargo on Taiwan is more likely than an initial invasion.

International law is not a good example here because actually if you look at international law then Taiwan is part of China and formally it's considered as part of China by US, EU etc. Taiwan is not a state from perspective of international law so from this perspective it doesn't have sovereign airspace.

I thought China snubbed their noses at International rulings regarding the South China Sea? Now they get respect from same authorities? Can't have it both ways. Join world system or reject it.

https://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global-memos/hague-tri...

>snubbed their noses

The PCA "rulings" aren't international law because UN (which PRC accept as international system) has no formal position on them / has not adopted any parts of the decision. Ergo, PRC's SCS position is consistent with international law - like the actual one at UN, not make believe US "rules based order" which was behind PCA lawfare campaign and the ongoing propaganda.

PRC is more firmly within bounds of the "world system", versus US who tries to enforce FONAPs despite not ratifying UNCLOS, and doesn't respect the kind of international law that it accused PRC of violating, see ITLOS ruling (an actual UN ruling) regarding UK/US military base on Chagos/Mauritius/Diego Garcia.

A lot of democracy has it both ways, why can't China?

Exactly - they’re not constrained by the same four-ish year terms held in most democratic countries, and are able to play out twenty- and even fifty-year scenarios without too much domestic uncertainty.

That strategy manifests in that slow chipping away: they don’t need to do things all at once.

It also manifests in potentially bad management that keeps itself going such as the current administration’s braindead covid policies.

Braindead from an American perspective, it is also likely those policies have averted upwards of 4 million deaths.

Exactly. Tbh its constantly surprising why Americans view the CCPs zero-covid policy as a failure. Even the most pessimistic reports (based on actual facts, not tabloid-driven wishful thinking) acknowledges that China has avoided at least 2 million+ deaths through their zero covid policy. Is the right to life no longer a human right? Or have a lot of us so internalized anti-China propaganda that we're no longer able to think logically?

> Is the right to life no longer a human right?

That's not what "the right to life" means. There are lots of policy decisions which have tradeoffs that result in more or less life lost. For example, the government could require that all car engines have a maximum speed of 25 MPH. That would empirically reduce the # of lives lost in automobile accidents, but society has judged the tradeoff (in terms of convenience, transportation time/cost, etc.) to not be worth it -- and that tradeoff does not constitute "violating the right to life".

Sweden did not enforce any lockdowns and managed to have a lower death rate than France which enforced many punitive measures on its population.

I therefore hardly think your reports are true, or right.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

Are you honestly comparing France's relatively lackadaisical lockdowns to that of China (where entire cities experienced total lockdowns, with households only being allowed to send out 1 person to get food)?

And using Covid deaths per million global stats:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

The data on the linked page above shows that China has a Per Capita covid death rate of 10.8 per million, while that of France is 2,115.56 deaths per million. Even if you were to take the side of the tin-foil hat conspiracists and multiply China's covid death rate by a factor of 10, France would still have a covid death rate that's 20 times (20 TIMES!) that of China.

The only Western country with a lower covid death rate than China is New Zealand, which has an astonishingly low covid death rate of 0.2 deaths per million - solely because for much of the duration of the pandemic, NZ literally shut itself off from the world, and only opened up a few months ago.

The remaining countries with low covid related death rates are poor African & Asian countries - either due to a nonexistent medical infrastructure that does not permit them to keep accurate infection/hospitalization/death records or because the vast majority of poor countries have a significantly young population with relatively robust immune systems due to repeated exposure to illness causing pathogens.

The other wealthy/developed countries on that list that are nearest to China are the UAE & Qatar, both with 236 and 238 covid related deaths per million respectively, Japan with 250 covid deaths per million, and Singapore with 252 deaths per million.

> Is the right to life no longer a human right?

Ah yes, China, comes to the top of the list when I think of protectors of human life. One-child policies, welding people into their apartment buildings, corralling them into COSTCOs [1] like they're farm animals being loaded into a semi-truck. Such benevolence.

> Or have a lot of us so internalized anti-China propaganda that we're no longer able to think logically?

Nah, more likely you have been drinking the pro-China propaganda like a 7-11 Big Gulp.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/xgvlm6/video_of_peo...

So between a country that implements extremely restrictive (some would say 'heartlessly' restrictive) policies in order to safeguard the lives of their vulnerable elderly population, and another country (the 'land of the free') which is so 'free' it allows 1 million+ of its citizens to die, and whose politicians have shown on multiple occasions that they care more about saving the country's economy than saving the lives of their citizens? Which would you say is a 'protector of Human life' as opposed to a 'protector of the economy'.

I would tell you to stop drinking the kool-aid, but it would be a waste of effort. Rational arguments won't work against emotion-driven beliefs and delusions (China - Those Evil Communists. 'West' - Lands of the Free and Birthplace of Freedom and All that is Good).

The fact remains that if US policies were implemented in China, it would mean the tacit acceptance of killing 4-5 million people.

It's not a fact, come on. Many countries that didn't choose to lock down their population did better. Actually, since vitamin D deficiency is a risk factor, it may have increased deaths and decreased the overall health of the population.

you gonna gamble millions of lives?

a) we don't know exactly what would happen if China implemented US policies. So that's not a fact, thats a hypothesis.

b) China lies all the time. That's a fact. May be 5 million died from covid there. who knows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_Chi...

It's actually 50 million dead, not 5 million. And some experts even say, that possibly up to 200 million Chinese have died from covid so far. All those repeated lockdowns and city-wide mass tests are just being done for the 'lolz'.

P.S. I wore my tin-foil hat while posting the above. It's pretty similar to the one you're wearing.

I could make the same baseless argument that many people also died due to the over restrictive policies and draconian imprisonment tactics.

Of course 0-covid is only possible if it is maintained forever, because like it or not the rest of the world still has covid.

I'm not sure it's the best approach, but I would figure they would wait until circulating Covid strains were acceptably less harmful and then reopen.

That’s already happening and it was the more mild omicron strain causing the latest lockdowns and the resurgence.

Their lockdowns are politically motivated: saving face because they prematurely declared victory, and a need to avoid dependence on western vaccines due to the ineffectiveness of their own vaccines—the latter really just a roundabout way to save face.

If you understood Chinese culture, you’d know that saving face is pretty important and makes you do crazy things.

So in your version of reality, 2 million+ Chinese have died due to 'over restrictive policies and draconian imprisonment tactics' post covid-19.

More likely it’s many people who are of the mindset that lockdowns did nothing/weren’t worth it, that’s prevalent in the US. If you think the activity is useless then it would look pretty bad given all the downsides of lockdowns

Probably pretty useless against Omicron. It did its job for Delta and predecessor variants.

They've also saved themselves some of the long-term cost of long COVID, which is a fun mystery we've signed up for in the US. Also weren't they working with a less effective vaccine?

They haven't actually dealt with Covid yet. Their immunisation rates are low and the vaccines they've used are not the best. It's an ongoing process where they are still flattening the curve. They aren't back to normal.

And this happened yesterday: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-delays-release-eco... . The market opinion is that the financial data is very bad so they don't want to release it. And this is quite coupled to their ongoing Covid policies.

> Their immunisation rates are low

I'm not sure that is true in general, but it is unfortunately true for the elderly in China - precisely the population they want to protect. They've sort of screwed themselves by not vaxxing the elderly at high rates.

Which raises an interesting question. In China they could make elderly get vaccinated. They close entire large apartment buildings with one person'a exposure to covid, bring them food occasionally and organize security and testing for those people. Why not go through and get everyone vaccinated? They are already monitoring their lives closely with Orwellian surveillance, why not just add on required shots on top of all that hell? I haven't seen that China disputes the usefulness of covid vaccines.

So what gives?

Could the same deaths have been prevented by deploying better policies? Remember that millions of people we forcibly locked in their homes. They faced food shortages. They have their lives ruined because they couldn’t make a living. All of this because the CCP wants zero Covid rather than a rational policy of limiting the most at risk to the disease and allowing the population to get natural immunity from getting sick.

I do not think 4 million people+ died due to lockdowns in China.

Directly? No. By suicide and future complications due to having their life upended/destroyed yeah.

The CCP should have purchase novavax for the shot (they still should given China’s low jab rate) and allowed the majority of people to live their lives. Covid for the majority posses little risk.

4 million people died due to suicide due to lockdowns in China?

There will be a lot of longer term mental damage. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3182775/huma...

Kinda hard to take this seriously when you’re using anti vaxxer slang(jab). If you didn’t mean it that way just giving you a heads up that it immediately clocked as an anti vaxx dog whistle.

I disagree that that is anti-vaxxer slang, I think it is just a Britishism. Indeed I believe their govt calls it a jab.

May be cultural differences then. In the US and Canada the anti vaxxers will pejoratively refer to the vaccine as “the jab” or taking it as “getting the jab”

All sorts of people have called getting a vaccine "getting the jab" for decades. It isn't some secret code for "I don't believe that vaccines are safe"

Huh, looks like it might be my little bubble. Went looking online and definitely see media references to “the jab” late 2021 and then it appears the anti vaxx crowd I first experienced with took it on as a sarcastic mocking of how the media used a synonym instead of calling it the vaccine.

Guess I’m one of todays 10,000

Yeah, I think jab has become accepted US shorthand for a shot and it's not pejorative. But your comment is shocking, you made a graceful acceptance that the word's definition had changed? Thank you.

The internet still holds surprises on occasion

Actually I live in Japan and Japan has implemented exactly 0 lockdowns. While policies have reduced the number of people walking about, there are still more people shoulder to shoulder on a daily basis than anywhere in the US.

Are they wearing masks?

I look around where I am and wonder why aren't more of us wearing masks?

If you are in the US, half the us thinks masks and taking care not to communicate deadly diseases to them in some evil attempt to control them. In my world, all my friends know it's real and masks help protect you, but they are just so tired of it. I'm tired of it, but I still wear one, don't eat at inside restaurants, etc. But most people stopped thinking of covid as that disease that can really hurt you, if you are unlucky enough. Half the time I'm tempted not to wear a mask - my wife gets frustrated at me, but I do wear one when out at the store etc.

Nitpick, but AFAIK China hasn't violated Taiwan's airspace. Taiwan says they'd treat it as an act of war if they did.

Taiwan has an Air Defense Identification Zone where they track aircraft and aircraft entering it are supposed to identify themselves. This extends over the Chinese mainland and it's this zone that everyone talks about China "violating". But it's Chinese airspace and ultimately they have the right to fly there without notifying Taiwan.

Chinese missile went directly over the island near the capital of Taiwan:

- https://japan-forward.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/JF-Grap...

Source:

- https://japan-forward.com/editorial-chinas-missile-tantrum-t...

not a nitpick at all, stating facts never is, regardless of the downvotes

> Taiwan's sovereign airspace

Well, only 13 countries recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country - such as the 10,000 people of the 21 square kilometer island Naura.

Also, Taiwan occupies Kinmen Island in the bay of Xiamen's harbor on the PRC mainland. The island is in the Xiamen harbor and is 10 km from the city of Xiamen. So any PRC planes flying around Xiamen are "violating Taiwan's sovereign airspace" (which almost no one recognizes as "sovereign" - one of the main parties on Taiwan acknowledges Taiwan and the mainland are all one country).

It's complicated. Even Taiwan doesn't recognize Taiwan (Republic of China) as a sovereign nation, separate and distinct from the Peoples Republic of China. There are Taiwanese political groups that do want that but they haven't gotten their way so far.

Either way, you probably meant that 13 nations have full and formal diplomatic relationships with Taiwan. Which, btw does not include the US, Japan or any EU nations.

It's not really that complicated. After WW2 the Communists drove the Republic of China govt out of mainland China. So mainland China is controlled by the communists and Taiwan by the remnants of the Republic of China government. Republic of China government still claims to be the rightful government of all of China (Taiwan included), same with the Communist government.

And the people of Taiwan don't want to communist Chinese mainland govt to come and kill all their leaders, imprison people and take away their freedom, like the folks in officially happy Hong Kong. Adding on to your comment, it's pretty obvious why anyone would want to stay out of China's control.

Chinese law should almost never be considered something that constrains the government, and especially not in grandiose cases like this. The government will do as it pleases, regardless of the law. That is more of a strong press release than a binding proposition.

However, I am not arguing that China is not serious about retaking Taiwan. They are deathly serious.

They are not retaking Taiwan. They never had Taiwan. Taiwain is the last bastion of the democratic government of china.

Chiang democratic? Sheesh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek#Mass_deaths_un...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Republic_o...:

Following the ROC government's retreat to Taiwan on 7 December 1949, the Temporary Provisions together with martial law made the country an authoritarian one-party state despite the constitution. Democratization began in the 1980s. Martial law was lifted in 1987, and in 1991 the Temporary Provisions were repealed.

ROC has been democratic since the 01990s, but it was an authoritarian dictatorship that killed millions of its own people at the time the Communists drove it out of the mainland (only to exceed its atrocities with their own) and for decades afterwards.

The KMT have an awful track record as being horrifically authoritarian.

OP isn’t wrong though contemporary Taiwan is a model democracy in a region where there are few.

I think pinning Taiwan as "last bastion" of some democracy that existed before is incorrect as any honest history of the KMT can see.

Even dishonest histories of the KMT are rarely so dishonest as to claim the ROC was democratically governed before 01949, however much they try to whitewash the mass killings. Disinformation has to be plausible to be effective.

All this arguing about what the KMT did and the relationship going back to the ROC doesn't matter. Today Taiwan is a democracy, is no threat to anyone, and deserves every right of self-determination. Democracies should work together to collectively protect each other from the authoritarian countries that want to take them over and destroy their democracies.

"going back to the ROC"? It sounds like you aren't aware that the ROC still exists; it governs Taiwan. Some of the things you say are true but it seems clear that this is purely by coincidence, not a result of any knowledge you might have of the topic.

"Chinese law" - an oxymoron ;)

They said they will retake Taiwan and they can and few will really care. So of course they will.

Whether they can or not is highly questionable. "Few will really care" is certainly false.

And in terms of nation states caring, that's also incorrect because Taiwan is a linchpin of US Pacific foreign policy and for the US to do nothing or "not care" about Taiwan being invaded would signal to allies in the region that they cannot count on the United States and that they should find their own defense arrangements. It would de facto kick the US out of the Pacific and end global hegemony overnight.

Frankly, Taiwan is a big fucking deal w.r.t US, Japanese, and Australian national defense concerns and is a big deal to other nations such as New Zealand.

I did mean few American voters

Is that true either? I'm not sure. We'd have to look at various polling results to start with and then go from there. I know in my previous suburban neighborhood and even moreso in my urban neighborhood that there are Ukrainian flags hung outside of doors and windows. I've never seen that before or anything like it.

https://www.axios.com/2022/08/24/american-support-ukraine-po...

They can't, not even remotely close any time in the next 20 years at least. Can you imagine what a landing beach would look like being pounded by drone spotted artillery? See war in Ukraine. Forget the approach, anti ship missiles, mines, sheer volume of logistics needed. Stepping on the landing beach is a suicide without absolutely astronomical advantage in air power and ability to suffer huge attrition, even then.. 155mm hidden under camo/thermal nets, DJI drone rigged with magazines of small bombs.. Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson Childs play, this would make Diep and Galipoli look like walk in the park.

I would go as far as to say that US Army + Marines + Navy could not land on Taiwan without suffering multiple brigades of attrition AFTER at least a year long blockade and air campaign. It is that hard.

PRC has to surpass US in GDP, then spend 10-20 years of US level military spending, then maybe.

China can just send cruise missiles to start and ignore beaches.

A major power with 1.2 billion people can take an island of 20 million 80 miles away from its shores.

If they want to make a desert and call it peace, perhaps. Seems like a bad strategy to smash a crown jewel before you annex it.

They will take it without a fight

That simple sentence is doing a lot of heavy dodging to ignore all of the points brought up in the post upthread about the inherent difficulties involved in naval landings.

Now, if you're going to say economic pressures will lead to political settlements without conflict, then that's a discussion to be had.

Putin called he needs your brilliant strategic advice. 1 week to Kyiv or was it 2 days? I can't recall. This kind nationalistic PRC BS is how they will start a war, get defeated than have another civil war with 100 million dead.

They will fire 10,000 drones/missles and destroy the power/water/internet/fuel since those are legit military target as we saw in iraq war 1

this is applicable to most countries...

wriggling around the law needs only an emergency.

The US isn't going to be caught off guard by China. What the west has been doing for Ukraine in the last few months in terms of weapons, the US and other countries have been doing for Taiwan over the last few decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_arms_sales_to_Taiwa...

The latest sale involves adding 60 Harpoon anti-ship missiles to the pile of hundreds they already have.

China will not have an easy time of invading such a well-armed country, and they also have to weigh the non-zero possibility of foreign intervention. It will be a costly endeavor by any measure.

China's best bet is a cultural/political/economic takeover, which will give other countries time to diversify chip manufacturing, as we are currently doing.

Taiwan imports 60-70% of it's food and they can't increase domestic production because they import fertilizer and they can't make their own fertilizer because they import natural gas, and they don't have any domestic gas fields.

China doesn't need to storm the beaches, they can passively blockade Taiwan until they give in.

Taiwan has hundreds of anti ship misiles with a range of over 100km.

China doesn’t have to storm beaches to be within shooting range.

If Taiwan were an easy conquest it would have been conquered. It’s not impossible that China would attempt some sort of belligerence, but Taiwan is capable responding to any threat with enough firepower to deter such actions.

You don't need ships to blockade

It’s not impossible.

China moves at a different pace than the West.

They might retake Taiwan in 2100, after a couple generations maybe care more about shared culture and language than democracy.

Many mainland Chinese think the best approach for China-Taiwan issue is to just wait. It's not of the best interest of Chinese people (of both China and Taiwan) to change the status quo.

On the other side, the US obviously wants to see a war between the two side of the strait. And the US is actually prepareing for it.

> by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur,

The irony here is that it is in fact China that seceded from Taiwan.

China will invade Taiwan when the cost to do so is low enough and/or they are desperate. In other words, the probability of success is considerably higher today than it will be in the future (even if the probability of success today isn't great).

Russia is a declining state relative to Ukraine & Europe, so Putin's odds of success in 2022 were considerably higher than they would be 10 years later. So if invading Ukraine was necessary at some point, 2022 was the best time to do it.

China's regime believes that invading Taiwan is necessary, but OTOH the Chinese military is getting stronger very quickly and they believe they'll be in a much better position to invade in a decade then they are now. So there is no way they're going to invade any time soon.

Avoiding a war completely is highly unlikely given Xi & China's policies. But delaying a war is highly likely. And a war indefinitely delayed is a war avoided.

> And a war indefinitely delayed is a war avoided.

You spend the rest of the comment before this talking about how war will happen when they are stronger and probably can't be avoided, so I don't know how this last sentence follows.

If you know for sure that someone will wage war on you in future, and that they will get stronger faster than you will, then it could be in your interest to go to war against them sooner rather than later.

Xi's China will wage war. It won't always be Xi's China.

So you've reversed your position about the inevitability of war with China then?

Treating political and military leaders as rational entities is dangerous.

Likewise, treating everyone you disagree with as completely insane; devoid of any reasonable motivations is a lazy hand-wavy viewpoint. It’ll also make you prone to suck up any and all propaganda that aligns with your biases.

> you prone to suck up any and all propaganda that aligns with your biases.

A phenomena that is very clear in threads about China.

Yup, general public needs to read The Art of War to understand these conflicts at a deeper level.

>> Treating political and military leaders as rational entities is dangerous.

I would think the opposite to be true.

How do you attempt to apply to game theory to a situation where the other party is completely irrational? It seems impossible to me.

Xi is one of the most rational actors on the world stage. Machiavellian rational, but rational. I recommend the Economist's podcast series on him.

I would mostly agree, but is "saving face"[0] considered rational behavior? How big a factor is that in this thread's context?

Honest questions here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)#Ch...

It's quite rational because of the crucial importance of reputation internationally, and the image of competence domestically.

If by "internationally" you mean Western countries: Xi Jinping doing dumb things to save his "face" is very detrimental to his reputation there.

No one outside of China thinks his stubborn refusal to abandon the failed Zero Covid policy is in any way a good idea. Everyone sees it as a stupid and irrational face-saving action.

Is he? I feel like everyone said this about Putin and now the narrative has changed and he's an unstable madman whose going to launch a nuke if he loses too badly in his war.

Like many politicians, Xi is ruthlessly self-interested. His actions that allow him to consolidate power aren't necessarily in the best interests of China.

> now the narrative has changed and he's an unstable madman whose going to launch a nuke if he loses too badly in his war.

Yes, this sort of narrative plays a lot better when describing someone you're actively at war with. Along with the fact that you are always winning the war. Ukraine has been winning the war with Russia for about 9 months now, according to the media.

"Ukraine has been winning the war with Russia for about 9 months now, according to the media."

What media?

In the beginning most reporting was that it would be over in a week. Then Russia had that little blunder with their first offensive. Then again most reporting was that the russian artillery steamroller would squash the Ukrainians. Now most media favor the Ukrainians due to their recent successes. Also goals and frames of reference changed. In the beginning winning for Ukraine was not letting Russia roflstomping them. Now it is throwing all russian military out of their country.

Consolidating power isn’t inherently against the interests of China. And as poster above explained, Putin is acting rationally. In fact, war is probably one of the most rational and pervasive actions throughout history. Probably every country has gone to war and it’s not always because some madman went berserk.

It’s always in our interest to simply reduce our enemy to madmen or nazis, as it justifies our own counter aggression.

>> Is he?

Yeah, Biden himself recently said that Putin is a rational actor who grossly miscalculated, because he was basically fed very bad and flawed intel. He may be blustering about nukes now, but the only way he would do that is if Ukraine turns the tables and invades Russia, or something similar.

For anyone interested, the podcast is “The Prince” by The Economist.

Xi is not rational. His isolationist policies and "return to Mao-style communism" have killed China's economy. The current zero-COVID policy is the icing on the cake: It runs completely counter to scientific thought and is impossible to achieve for 1.2 billion people. He's painted himself into a corner and is unwilling to budge (how can the Premier be wrong?), and is doing tremendous damage to China in the process.

Very little of your comment is true. I attribute increasing vitriol and false statements being thrown around as a symptom of our increasingly escalating cold war with China.

It is interesting to see how dramatically opinion has cooled on China in the past few years, simply because they have become a great power competitor.

Please be specific about which of the comments were wrong. The covid shutdowns have clearly significantly impacted China's economy. There's no doubt. They failed to aggressively inoculate their country, which is under their control. Other countries had low covid deaths, China is not the only one. Poor choices, irrationally sticking with that policy is not a great sign.

> Xi['s] ... isolationist policies ... have killed China's economy.

The PRC's GDP was US$17.7 trillion nominal in 02021, the latest year for which we have numbers, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_China. That makes it the world's second largest economy by nominal dollar value (after the US) and the largest by PPP. That's not just individual countries, either; it overtook the economy of the EU in nominal GDP in 02021 under Xi's leadership. The IMF's estimate for 02022 is US$20 trillion according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi....

This isn't just a matter of domestic numbers that can be fudged, either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports says it exported US$3 trillion worth of goods in 02021, up from US$2.5 billion in 02020, making it the world's #1 exporter, with almost twice the exports of the US at #2, though by this measure the entire EU does still exceed PRC. (The EU is excluded from the list for not being a country.)

Nor is it just a question of adding together poverty-level earnings of 1.2 billion people. The PRC's per-capita GDP is US$20k PPP. Economically, the average Chinese person is doing fine, although they're experiencing a lot of unfortunate things outside the economic sphere.

China's economy is experiencing major difficulties (Evergrande, zero-COVID lockdowns) but it is far from being "killed" or a "return to Mao-style communism", by which I charitably assume you mean 01970s-style stagnation and not, for example, the largest famine in human history.

You should take a long hard look at where you're getting your information from and how you decide what information is trustworthy.

The games played with currency and private debt that fueled the massive export boom are not sustainable indefinitely. There are already signs it may be tipping, and the world raising interest rates to combat inflation will worsen the situation. Combine that with their exports to the US falling due to sanctions and a new interest in US manufacturing. And as their population and the population of their other trading partners all shrink...

They are still growing, they are still getting stronger, but for how long? Meanwhile 70% of Taiwanese residents now identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese?

If they wait for that percentage to climb, and for TSMC to diversify fabs to other places? The cost to take Taiwan is going up, and the prize for taking it is falling with no reason to expect inflections in either. If they don't take it now, there is really no point taking it at all.

Rationally speaking, there probably already isn't any point in taking it. It would tank exports and speed the adoption of local manufacturing elsewhere. All to get a temporary stranglehold on chip supply? What would they do with those chips? They are already far too export dominated. They need consumers to reduce their exports. If they want to win the long game, let their 1% give half their wealth to educating knowledge workers to buy their manufacturing rather than exporting it.

I think people overrate TSMC are the primary motivator for the PRC, who have basically maintained the same posture toward the 'renegade province' since 1949. This is unfinished business from a civil war which never officially ended.

I agree, but I think TSMC has also assumed a geopolitical importance it didn't have previously.

for sure, but most opinion from the west inflates TSMC as primary motivator, its a complicating factor yes, but the PRC has been on about taking Taiwan for the past 70 years, before semi-conductors were even invented.

look at the top voted comment in this thread - the narrative is some sort of escalation from Xi Jinping when unification with Taiwan is boilerplate rhetoric which every leader since Deng says at Party Congress.

PRC position has not changed - commitment to unification by peaceful means, but war never off the table.

Agreed! I think there was maybe some real escalation around the time of Pelosi's visit (where Morris Chang was in attendance in her photo-op with Tsai), though, and it's hard not to see the moves in HK as threatening.

Chang is the leader Taiwan really needs, unfortunately he is unable to moderate Tsai. TSMC will eventually be a loser in the story that is currently being written

Yeah, I can't imagine he was happy with TSMC having to cancel all its sales to Huawei. But that wasn't really Tsai's fault; nobody is able to moderate the US, and the sanctions weren't a Taiwanese policy. I was thinking reunification was really the only path to saving TSMC, but if Chang agreed, he probably would've declined the invitation to the photo op; and obviously he knows more than I do about the issues.

Instead he says reunification would destroy TSMC because of how dependent it is on overseas suppliers.

hmmm....not sure I agree here.

Tsai is not entirely a creature of the US, and has indirectly - perhaps initially, inadvertently - manipulated the US by pushing for an unendorsed independence, forcing the US to deal with a situation they hadn't before considered - a 'two china' outcome.

However, now that US does sees this outcome, it cannot unsee it and is thus driving hard to secure that outcome, no doubt as a stepping stone for the long term goal of regime change in PRC

As for Chang, I think status quo is his ideal outcome - de facto independence, TSMC servicing two of the biggest economies in the world, and therefore, the entire world. Not happening now though, sadly

Hmm, interesting. I'll have to think about that.

That was an interesting idea about TSMC's influence. But the fact that there should be two separate Chinas has only become more clear each year to me, with Taiwan's increasingly democratic and successful democracy (and China's every more authoritarian and dangerous behavior). I've thought that for 30 years should be the policy, and I'm just an average US person.

Apparently you don't know what the ROC is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33256578 so maybe your opinion on this topic shouldn't count; you're just repeating things you've heard that you don't understand.

The pointless nuanced arguments about Taiwan claiming to still be the real China and mainland China also claiming the same and the US saying officially we see there will be one China seem pointless to me - I'm sure some people care. The reality of the ground and the likely future attack from China to Taiwan is what I care more about. Please don't tell me what to do.

I didn't tell you what to do, I just dismissed your opinions as amazingly uninformed. Whether you want to keep spouting amazingly uninformed opinions is up to you.

I agree with many of these points. The future is unpredictable, whoever is on top today will not be on top forever, and the idea of being governed by the PRC is very unpopular in Taiwan. And nothing you have said supports our more ignorant interlocutor's point that Xi's policies have "killed China's economy".

Still, other points I disagree with.

PRC's exports to the US are not falling; they fell in 02019 due to sanctions and in 02020 due to covid, but they're already back above their 02018 level, which was the highest in history. See https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html. They probably will not fall within the next decade or two.

If US manufacturing becomes stronger, that will increase PRC exports to the US, not decrease them. (If the US doesn't have anything to trade for Chinese products, it will not get them, which may cause them to be sold to different customers or may cause their production to be reduced.)

I think increased interest rates abroad would tend to increase PRC's exports, not decrease them. As far as I know, PRC isn't borrowing money from abroad to finance expansion of production capacity; it's lending money abroad to finance consumption of its exports.

PRC's population is not shrinking, though it's barely growing and may start shrinking soon. Most of their trading partners have growing populations.

TSMC cannot be taken, even today; it can only be destroyed. Today, doing that would be counterproductive to PRC because so much of their domestic industry depends on TSMC, but the US has forced TSMC to impose sanctions on PRC's military. This is an existential threat to the PRC. If the sanctions continue, or are removed but could plausibly be reimposed, and TSMC remains strategically important, at some point PRC leadership will act to remove the military advantage this gives the US and its satellites over them, even if that means paving Taiwan with Trinitite. The alternative is to be unable to respond to military attacks from the US.

Reducing exports only improves your economy if the exports are stolen, for example in the Congo Free State or the Irish Potato Famine. Weaker forms of this are known as "Dutch disease" or "the resource curse". This is very much not the case in PRC. Historically, export-led industrialization has been by far the most important cause of economic growth. By contrast, your prescription of import-substitution industrialization has failed everywhere it was tried, including, for decades, in PRC.

Increased exports leads to increased specialization and increased capitalization, which increase productivity. Unless, again, we're talking about enslaved laborers who are not in a position to capture any value from their increased productivity, this increased productivity leads to increased earnings, which increases domestic consumption. This has been known for centuries and is agreed on by virtually all economists.

Your implications that Chinese people do not value education, and that lack of education causes low consumption in China, could hardly be more false. Chinese culture has prized education highly for thousands of years. It's one of the key distinguishing features of Chinese culture. Expensive private tutoring companies were a hot startup sector until the government crackdown.

Related to PRC reducing dependencies on TSMC, today I saw in https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-ri...:

> GT Collection

> Great silicon part, and quite timely as we were forced by HQ last Friday to revise all product line designs to comply with 100% Chinese domestic semiconductors & passive components by latest Q4 end. All western sourced/accounts and parts are now forbidden, apart from those sourced by HQ’s registered jurisdiction.

> Worth adding to the list, we’ve also signed accounts with GigaDevice and Expressif Shanghai in the MCU and connectivity range. Thanks for the info, we’ll get in touch with WCH and have a few shipped over for bench tests.

Although another commenter claims GigaDevice and Espressif have all their parts made by TSMC?

> Expensive private tutoring companies were a hot startup sector until the government crackdown.

This is almost entirely due to the Gaokao. Also, there's a difference between prizing education as a means to make money, and prizing education as a means to make a well-rounded person. The concept of a 'liberal arts' education in China barely exists, from the standpoint that education isn't about vocational skills to enrich yourself monetarily, but to enrich oneself as a person.

Fundamentally, I don't think an authoritarian state that constricts intellectual, academic, and political freedom, combined with an educational system that acts largely as a vocational gatekeeper, is conducive to the free questioning that is at the heart of innovation.

Western education tends to teach rebellion. Rebellion against your parents, against the government, against the status quo. The way you get a Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk is to have someone, who is told no over and over again, "you can't do this", to say "f*ck it, I'm doing it anyway, no matter how stupid or impossible you say it is."

It's this rebellion that's at the heart of innovation. And I don't think Confucian or CCP values rebellion very much.

galangalalgol's assertion, as I read it, was that China was domestically consuming only 81% of its production because the populace was insufficiently educated because not enough money was being spent on education, and maybe that the cause of this was economic inequality.

Are you supporting that assertion, or are you making an unrelated point about educational models? Because the connection isn't clear to me.

To the question of vocational training vs. liberal arts education, I think you're exaggerating subtle differences in cultural attitudes toward education that really do exist. Schools in China have compulsory classes in physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and history, among other things — vocational training for a few percent of the population, but liberal arts for the rest. The most respected form of education is still calligraphy.

And, despite paying lip service to free questioning and rebellion, Western schooling consists almost entirely of intensive training in obedience and conformism: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Steve Jobs wasn't the product of the Western education system; he was the product of LSD, his machinist father, a neighborhood full of engineers, working at Hewlett Packard at 13, Hare Krishna prasad, Zen Buddhism, a pilgrimage to India, Transcendental Meditation, and Primal Scream Therapy, but especially LSD. Elon Musk isn't the product of the Western education system; he's the product of his emerald-tycoon engineer father, his supermodel mother who spent her childhood seeking the Lost City of the Kalahari, and his Commodore VIC-20.

Maybe if they'd been schooled in China they would have had the independence conditioned out of them, I suppose. But I think that's more a matter of the surrounding society than the school system.

> Are you supporting that assertion, or are you making an unrelated point about educational models? Because the connection isn't clear to me.

I'm just reacting to the point about tutoring as a proxy for valuing education, when in my experience (living in China, and with my extended Chinese family), this mostly results from pressure over the Gaokao. In the US, college admissions aren't so test focused, indeed, a lot of colleges don't even require the SAT/ACT or AP scores for application.

> And, despite paying lip service to free questioning and rebellion, Western schooling consists almost entirely of intensive training in obedience and conformism

Yes, K-12 is mostly about indoctrinating kids into the requirements of society. Nevertheless, Western kids rebel against their parents and school, and media even celebrates this rebellion. Moreover, a growing number of parents commit to alternative K-12 schooling. I sent my kids to Montessori schools when it was possible.

> But I think that's more a matter of the surrounding society than the school system

The school system is a reflection of the surrounding society. If we were analyzing a country where most of the schools were religious schools that drilled a religious book, we'd obviously view the structure of the school as based on the values of the society. To the extent that K-12 education strips kids of their individualities and passions and independence, as it happens in both the US and China, the degree of harshness is substantially more in Asia in general. US school kids come home and after homework (if they do it), tend to play. Asia is renown for kids finishing school, then beginning after-school education, tutors, etc some of them study from 13-16 hrs/day in junior year.

My son is a senior in HS, his first class is 9am, he gets home at 3:30. He has 1hr lunch, and 1hr during the school day of advisory/study hall (tutoring). 2hrs of homework a day max. So about 8-9 hrs of study total. His peer in Shanghai is doing almost double that.

I agree with almost all of your comment.

But I do think Chinese culture has greatly valued education (and standardized testing) for about 20 times as long as the gaokao has existed; in that sense, too, the school system is a reflection of the surrounding society, not only vice versa. It's true that the "education" in question has often been more a matter of convincingly repeating established doctrines than of repudiating them, and often valued because it was a gateway to material gain, by way of standardized testing.

On the other hand, I never see the kind of anti-intellectualism that got Trump elected in the US (and Hitler in Germany) in the families of my Chinese friends. I know it can exist in Chinese culture — the Cultural Revolution had plenty of it — but it doesn't seem to be a dominant thread the way it is in the US. And this is true of families from Taiwan, too; it's not just a Mainland Chinese reaction to the CR. They just don't seem to have the nerd/egghead stereotype.

(And I still don't understand why that other person thinks Chinese people don't spend enough on schooling or why they would consume more if they did.)

I definitely agree with you that the US has a really bizarre kind of anti-intellectualism going on, and the GOP is kind of leveraging it, because much of their voting base is rural and old and less educated, and so they're basically putting out this divisive message that educated people are these "other" folks, and 'real americans' are the less educated people. Sarah Palin literally said it directly in a speech. One GOP Senator called an opponent who had multiple college degrees "a snob" .

In general, I think this 'rebel' instinct can go either way. It can lead you to challenge the status quo and make an improvement, it can also lead you to think you're a rebel because you deny the moon landing, or you're a flat earther, or an anti-vaxer. Anti-establishmentarianism can turn from a legitimate gripe into a conspiracy rathole really quickly.

From "I don't wanna wear a mask or get vaxed" to "vaccines are implanting you with Bill Gates microchips!"

It's kinda weird how Americans would look down on a very qualified political candidate with lots of degrees, but then boost up a blithering idiot because "he's one of us". No where else is that attitude prevalent. When you are flying commercial airlines, do you want the unqualified, uneducated guy flying the plane? When you're getting heart surgery, do you want the guy who never went to med school doing your surgery? But somehow, when it comes to politics, the guy who studied economics, history, political science, engineering, somehow loses points.

Five digit years are annoying difficult to parse. Adding leading zeros is redundant and wrong. Once you move away from the treating the non-zero leading digits as significant it raise awkward questions like: why five digits instead of six?

Check for fifth columns. They'll probably prefer to have those than to try w/o them.

> can't be caught off guard by China as EU was caught off guard by Russia.

There's always a bigger fish.

The last time nations were obsessed with autarky, we got WW1, and soon after, WW2.

Most countries (i.e. every country not suffering from a drastic case of the resource curse) have the nature that if they trade a lot with another country, either country would lose economic value if they invade the other, _even if_ that invasion goes off stellarly well with almost no losses: The populace doesn't like being subjugated and produces significantly less.

In an inbalanced trade/dependency relationship, such as Saudi Arabia's oil vs. the rest of the world, or Russia's gas vs. europe, it's actually _both_ sides that are dependent on the other. It's the dutch curse all over again.

Go back in time:

* Europe wants more gas to grow its economy, and doesn't have enough on its own soil. * Russia has more than plenty and is willing to sell it. * We enter a period of years where europe companies and countries more and more build industry that isn't going to work out without the relatively cheap russian gas. As these industries continue to succeed and russia continues to be a reliable supplier, ever more industry takes the leap and becomes dependent on it. * This sounds like handing off quite the 'weapon' to your supplier, but, the problem is, that supplier is now just as dependent on this relationship as the consumer is: Russian economy falls apart without the trade of europe-produced goods (a lot of it by industries that run on russian gas), just as fast as europe falls apart without russian gas.

Thus, if russia were to invade europe, russia's economic value falls off a cliff, and the same applies to a lesser extent to europe. The only reason europe could in theory invade russia (assumes a perfect invasion, no nukes, no significant resistance at all, just a dejected populace), is because russia's primary value is not particularly dependent on human capital.

My theory about why this theory didn't work out and russia invades ukraine is a mix of:

* Misunderstanding by Russia of world/Europe response to this invasion. * Too much power in one person, who, like most people surrounded by yay-sayers for 20 years, has lost grip on reality. * Most of all, a ticking clock: Europe has stated they want to wean themselves off of fossil fuel within a decade or so. And so they should, but it's a torpedo to the trade dependency relationship between europe and russia.

That last one is the economic argument: Russia had to do something or their economy would fall apart if europe delivers on their plans to rapidly reduce their dependence on (russian-supplied) gas.

Thus, autarky -> war. Because if you're doing economically better than your neighbouring country, you produce more weapons and more people, and just invade em, why not.

We can trade the risk of what happened to europe, or what is likely to happen if china and the west become autarkic relative to each other (namely, that china invades taiwan) - with nukes and MAD. But that's got its own problems.

> The last time nations were obsessed with autarky, we got WW1

Were they? I thought WWI happened in the midst of first huge wave of globalization - to the point that no one thought war was possible, as it would mean collapse of international trade, and huge losses that come with it.

Many thought it was not only possible but inevitable: The Schlieffen plan, French revanchism, general military buildup across Europe, and of course Biskmark's 1888 comment:

"One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans."

You're both wrong. Many people subscribed to each belief.

The economists, globalists and industry people believed that it could never happen. The military, nationalist and political folks figured it would be inevitable, or at very least if it happened they had to win.

Many people subscribed to the argument of the economists and globalists in more democratic countries because it was a comforting illusion the people in the more militaristic autocracies, believed it was inevitable, and incidentally were the nations that hold the most culpability for WW1, Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungarian empire.

Wait a minute why is all of my description starting to sound terribly and horribly familiar to what is going on now?

Seriously those that will continue to posist that war will not come are foolish and don't realizing that the first steps are already in progress with the information war being waged right now through cyberspace.

Note I don't want a war to happen and think it will be horrible and terrible, but all the elements are in place for it to happen. A shifting balance of power into a multipolar world, multiple nations either facing decline or ascendancy, realpolitik becoming the norm in international relations, it all looks very grim unless some very wise, peace loving and capable leaders emerge on the world stage soon.

Or, like the UK, the days of Russian empire are over and the new bi-polar world will be the NATO/India/AUNZ/Asia vs China/Africa.

So another Cold War for the 21st Century if we continue to rely on a mercantilist attitude in a world where networking is more important than some trade links.

No the cold war required a bipolar world for it's stability with MAD being the keystone that held the arch together. That was the only way for it to be stable and why we didn't have a massive war, with all actions being confined to small proxy wars.

We are in a multi-polar world now, Trump pointed out and many people are starting to agree, about whether or not the US really should be so closely aligned with Europe, NATO will probably stick around but it might not be enough. Meanwhile India has happily agreed to buy all the Russian oil that Europe isn't, which is done to spit in the face of the sanctions imposed on Russia. The mutli-polar world right now is US, India, China, EU, and Russia which is still a regional power, each of which have different interests.

The problem is China and the EU are facing huge demographic shortfalls in the next 30 years that will pose existential threats to their society, Russia is in the same boat. The EU is having this problem addressed to a certain extent through immigration but the nationalistic racist attitudes of the Chinese people make this a less palatable option for them. It is likely that the demographic cliff is going to continue to stress Chinese society to the breaking point until it snaps and begins an international incident that could quickly escalate to a global war. The best thing the US could do to preserve it's interests is do whatever we need to to schmooze up to India and cement an alliance with them, as they represent the best regional challenger to China and if they end up on the side of the CCP will cause huge problems as at that point a Bejing-Delhi alliance will be able to exert control over 1/3 > of the world's population. (This assumes they will be able to control all of Southeast Asia through soft and hard power)

it seems that only our instutions, or big chunks of the whole global trade system, want this war; but this this point, a lot of those systems are automated by rules and regulations and a overly complicated network that become inentelligible to the people 'running' it.

nobody that is alive and sentient (in the traditional sense) wants a war... and yet, we all see it looming.

Sounds a lot like how the assassination of the heir appearant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire led to the UK declaring war on Germany for marching through Belgium.

No one wanted the war, many knew it would be horrible, and yet it led to the most nightmarish collective human experience in human history.

>Europe has stated they want to wean themselves off of fossil fuel within a decade or so.

And to think that in the 80s Regan tried (but opposed by business) to impose sanctions on europe because of the USSR gas pipelines. What a circus. Europe got hooked on USSR gas in less than 20 years, and has been planning to wean off for 10.

Europe after WW2 relied on the US to defend against Russian aggression, and not even 30 years later, in a master class of cleverness played both sides by buying, and then becoming dependent, on Russian gas, only for the Russians to become aggressive again.

Where the cleverness falls apart is that cheap Russian gas was on bought time, and now all the europeans have to show for it is massive debt, expensive social programs, a lack-luster military and closed nuclear plants. Good job...

It’s less that Europe is using more Russian gas than they had insufficient infrastructure to get alternatives to Russian natural gas.

Ukraine was invaded because they have a great deal of oil and natural gas and could therefore significantly impact the Russian economy especially if the world starts to reduce Fossil fuel use.

> Russia had to do something or their economy would fall apart

Ukraine would solve nothing in the Russian economy.

Ukraine would simply secure two things: Crimea (which is essential to Russia and was strategically exposed), and complete control on all main gas infrastructure towards Europe. It's not a coincidence that the invasion was launched when it became clear that the new gasduct to the North was dead in the water (because of American opposition to it): Putin wanted to make gas furniture to Europe strategically independent from other countries (i.e. completely dependent on Russia), one way or the other. The original calculation was probably "You don't give me Nordstream, so I'll take everything else". Obviously it didn't go as planned.

If I created the impression that this invasion was a smart thing, I didn't intend to do that. It's more: Russia is up the creek without a paddle and wanted to do something, on the bizarre but common logic of 'well, doing _something_ is better than _nothing_". Or similarly atrociously reasoned bullpuckey such as 'we have to have a bufferstate because otherwise NATO will attack us. Us, being a state with ICBMs".

"That last one is the economic argument: Russia had to do something or their economy would fall apart if europe delivers on their plans to rapidly reduce their dependence on (russian-supplied) gas."

Putin didn't have to invade! If he was truly worried about Russia's economy he could have (and should have) gone about instituting reforms/policies to encourage economic diversification and growth. I fail to see how even a successful invasion of Ukraine results in economic upside for Russia. They were doomed to fight an insurgency for years which costs money, or they're going to spend resources rebuilding a country they just fought a war in.

> Putin didn't have to invade! If he was truly worried about Russia's economy he could have (and should have) gone about instituting reforms/policies to encourage economic diversification and growth.

Yes, absolutely. Russia, 60m people (or how much is it? More even) notwithstanding, is essentially a petrostate. It was too hard to try to get the population-driven productive elements to compete against the easy resource money.

I mean, Norway is right fucking there. This war is on them, entirely, for failing to prepare for the inevitable day when the natural resources are no longer enough to bankroll the entire state.

But, doing it _now_ is not possible without major political upset, so the major political players, not wanting to be 'upset' out of a window (hey, you live by the sword, you die by the sword, I'm sure the political elite is aware of the usual way to deal with higher ups that need to be lesser higher up: By taking that literally) - start a war.

I don't get the feeling that the majority of the Russian Elite wanted this war. They only started getting suicided after the war started and they criticized Putin. Sure the ex-military, arm-chair warriors and nationalist delusionists wanted this war, but that's a small minority. America has it's share of crazy vocal "bomb, bomb, bomb" folks too - see John Bolton, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Pompeo etc....

Outside of Putin's delusions of grandeur for an empire that never existed I still fail to see ANY upside for Russia for this war.

Does it make sense for PRC to blockade Taiwan and stop TMSC delivering/producing chips?

I guess only if PRC is embargoed (US Sanctions TMSC). Maybe next year.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-gives-reprieve-least-t...

no it doesn't.

that would be equivalent to shooting themselves in the ocean.

for now, they are still under the thumb of the american navy. how else would they ship out all the consumer goods? and to whom? USA is their biggest buyer.

OK: PRC blockades Taiwan leads to american navy blockading PRC

Nobody wants that.

If the US only put a partial blockade for Chinese bound ships in the Strait of Malacca, that would be enough. China is starved for oil too. They're trying to mitigate the Strait issue with the oil pipelines through Xinjiang and into the Caspian, but those are years away still.

"EU was caught off guard by Russia"

You've got to be kidding me. Putin had been warning West since the Munich speech in 2007. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Munich_speech_of_Vladim...

Yes, the warning signs were there, but the EU was merrily speeding past them, finding reasons to argue against all of the warning signs. NS2 is one of the most emblematic signs of this: it was clearly going to tie Germany's energy needs closer to an already-proven-unreliable partner (Russia), increase the ability of Russia to use gas transit as politics, countries like Poland and the US were screaming at the top of their lungs "THIS IS A BAD IDEA" and until February 2022, Germany was responding "it'll be fine, nothing bad will come of this."

So I think it's fair to say that the EU was caught off guard by Russia, even if because of the EU's willful ignorance of affairs rather than Russian duplicity.

"already-proven-unreliable"

How so?

Russia has switched off the gas before, such as when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Hell, there's a Wikipedia page listing all of the Russia-Ukraine gas disputes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...). One of the stated motivations for Nord Stream 2 was to improve reliability of gas to Europe in case Russia decided to cut off the gas because of a spat with one of the transit countries.

>>>Russia has switched off the gas before, such as when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Russia switched off the gas 7 years after Putin was screaming from the rooftops that the US sticking ABMs in Eastern Europe was a red line for Russia. That's Russia being an unreliable partner?

Russia switched off the gas essentially because a pro-Russian Ukrainian government was insufficiently pro-Russian.

You mean, he was actually pro-Ukrainian?

The only thing this wikipedia page shows is that the Ukraine is an unreliable transit country stealing gas intended for the Europe.

So is Poland, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamal%E2%80%93Europe_pipeline#...

What do you mean specifically?

Are you pretending to not understand your own arguments?

No. Which disruption particularly you blame on Russia?

Well if you've been warning someone for 14 years and literally nothing has happened, why is it unreasonable to be surprised?

Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, then Ukraine in 2014. Pretty sure that's "literally" something happening.

And yet, they were caught off guard.

No, they weren't.

It really seems that much of the EU thought Putin was bluffing right up until the end of February. EU leaders proudly saying they had personal assurances Russia wouldn't invade again. There was incredible amounts of inaction. Only a handful of countries were shipping weapons, mostly non-EU.

Sorry, you may claim that the EU was indulging in wishful thinking, but you can't call it 'caught off-guard'.

It’s also in the US’ strategic interests to simply make it clear that China can’t have Taiwan regardless of the TSMC however

Of course it is in the US strategic interests, the problem is having strategic interests doesn't automatically give the US rights to intervene. Contrary to Ukraine (plain violation of the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation) the situation in Taiwan is complicated (for those who doubt it please at least make the effort to read the Wikipedia entry). Now given recent history I don't doubt the US will not let it slip when their strategic interests are at risk, but at least be lucid. Edit: To clear doubts I should add I would obviously prefer Taiwan stay an independent free democratic country. I'm only tempering the argument I sometimes see (maybe wrongly here) "it's in our best interests" = "it's the right thing".

Taiwan as a piece of land has much more strategic importance than Ukraine. Ukraine's grain and terrain are the two things that are important about it from a utilitarian sense.

Ukraine as a piece of land was Russia's only warmwater port.

> Ukraine as a piece of land was Russia's only warmwater port.

Why is this obviously incorrect statement that can be easily disproved by just checking the map is being repeated again and again on HN? It is only second in popularity to "Russia invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO on its borders" which can also be trivially disproved by finding Estonia or Latvia on the map...

>>>Why is this obviously incorrect statement that can be easily disproved by just checking the map is being repeated again and again on HN?

Can you list the other warm-water ports used by the Russian Navy? Here's a paper on the subject from the Air Force Journal on European, Middle Eastern, and African Affairs: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/JEMEAA/Journals/...

>>>It is only second in popularity to "Russia invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO on its borders" which can also be trivially disproved by finding Estonia or Latvia on the map...

While technically true, there is a big difference between the Estonian/Latvian border, and the Ukrainian one. I discussed this 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30513745

> Can you list the other warm-water ports used by the Russian Navy?

OP didn't say anything about Russian Navy specifically. However, do you suggest that Russian Navy couldn't use Novorossiysk for military purpose if need be?

> While technically true, there is a big difference between the Estonian/Latvian border, and the Ukrainian one. I discussed this 7 months ago

Well, Russia is now getting additional 1,340 km border with a new NATO member (real, not imaginary one like Ukraine) and is apparently completely unfazed by it. In fact they continue to move military from that border into Ukraine. Really makes you think whether they were really worried about spooky-scary NATO or pursuing some other goal in Ukraine all along...

Regarding other analysis from your comment - this is not WW2, nobody is tank-rushing capital of nuclear superpower via highways lol.

EDIT: Also, I've re-read comment you referenced again and for a person with a lot of "defense consultant"-related buzzwords in profile you seem to be awfully poorly informed about European history. "Keep in mind this is a country who's arguably most important holiday commemorates the war where they lost 25+ million lives fighting off an invasion from a hostile alliance on their western border." is either intentional manipulation or pure ignorance because USSR _were_ part of the alliance and were happy to divide Poland and massacre its people at the beginning of WW2. They like literally started the whole thing themselves, but miscalculated with choosing their allies!

>>>OP didn't say anything about Russian Navy specifically.

To discuss options for Russia's future without the specific context of its national security interests is meaningless when the country's decision-makers are almost entirely from said national security apparatus.

>>>However, do you suggest that Russian Navy couldn't use Novorossiysk for military purpose if need be?

This 2013 report suggests that Sevastopol has superior all-weather access compared to Novorossiysk: [1] I'm not familiar enough with the meteorology of the region to articulate why. They probably could switch to the Caucasian coastline as a fallback plan, but I'm sure Russia looks at the problem from the lens of "we're a nuclear-armed Great Power, why the fuck would we compromise on this?" Sevastopol definitely provides better power projection across the whole Black Sea. [2]

>>>Well, Russia is now getting additional 1,340 km border with a new NATO member (real, not imaginary one like Ukraine) and is apparently completely unfazed by it.

I think they were completely blindsided by Finland abandoning its long-standing neutrality, and have very few tools in their toolbox to leverage. While the Finnish border threatens their access to the North Sea, it poses less of a risk to Moscow than the Ukrainian border does. If you wanted to take Moscow from Finland, you need to secure the M-11 highway as an MSR....which means you have to secure St. Petersburg (good luck storming a city of 5 million+) or bypass the metro area and leave your supply line exposed. Russia is moving conventional combat power from the North, just as Russia is moving conventional combat power from everywhere into the Ukraine wood-chipper. They've also stepped up rotations of nuclear-capable strategic bombers in the north as a compromise to signal "don't try anything stupid up here, we've got nukes!" Of course the Finnish Air Force is rather large and capable, so I'm not sure how credible that threat is. Overall I now rank Putin pushing Finland & Sweden into NATO as the greatest geopolitical failure of the 21st century, dethroning the invasion of Iraq. Interestingly, Stalin made some similar blunders in the late 1940s/early 1950s against the West.[3]

>>>Really makes you think whether they were really worried about spooky-scary NATO or pursuing some other goal in Ukraine all along...

Even when Putin had Ukraine as a borderline vassal state they were bitching about NATO expansion in their near abroad. Some of these arguments were made in the US Congress before Putin even came to power. [4] In particular, skip to the comments by Jonathan Dean and Michael Mandelbaum.

>>>this is not WW2, nobody is tank-rushing capital of nuclear superpower via highways lol.

It doesn't matter what you or I think about tank rushes, what matters is what the Russians think about tank rushes. [5] In case you missed it, they initiated this invasion with a multi-axis armored blitz towards Kiev combined with an air assault to secure a nearby Aerial Point of Debarkation. The Russian military establishment has maintained that the offensive is the key aspect of warfare, and that the tank is the key component of the offensive, since the 1930s. Their current military thought leaders also place a priority on "active defense" aka preemptive elimination of threats. [6]

The qualifier "of a nuclear superpower" doesn't add much to the conversation. Of the major nuclear powers, only India has a capital closer to an adversarial border than Russia (I don't count Pakistan or Israel as "superpowers")....and India maintains an exceptionally large tank fleet, and has fought some of the largest post-WW2 tank engagements between their capital and their border with Pakistan.

>>>you seem to be awfully poorly informed about European history

Pretty sure ad hominems are against HN guidelines, but since you wanna go there...

>>> USSR _were_ part of the alliance

Oh? What "alliance" was that, specifically? As always, the devil is in the details. There were only two signatories to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: the Soviet Union and Germany. The Soviets had a bilateral agreement for the partition of Eastern Europe. That made them "co-belligerents", not "allies". They never signed any treaty with the Axis at large (for example, the Pact of Steel or the Tripartite Pact). They submitted a revised proposal for joining the Tripartite Pact to Germany which was quietly ignored as preparations for Operation Barbarossa were already underway. At no point in time was the USSR allied with Italy, Romania (14 divisions, almost 10% of the invading forces), Slovakia, Finland, or Hungary. There is one thing we can agree on: the Soviets absolutely miscalculated....when they took their Western neighbor at his word that he would adhere to the Non-Aggression Pact that they had signed.[7][8][9][10] And you wonder why the Russians have no desire to repeat that mistake, when we tell them NATO isn't a threat?

TL;DR = Read more. Condescend less.

[1] https://jamestown.org/program/the-future-of-the-russian-blac...

[2] https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2022-04-27-from-sevastopol...

[3] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/docum...

[4] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-105shrg46832/html/C...

[5] https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2016/04/...

[6] https://community.apan.org/wg/tradoc-g2/fmso/m/fmso-monograp...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac... [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-belligerence#Germany_and_th... [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_Pact#Soviet_Union [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa#Order_of_...

EDIT: forgot these two additional general resources on understanding Russian national security thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

https://csl.armywarcollege.edu/usacsl/publications/RUSSIAN%2...

> This 2013 report suggests that Sevastopol has superior all-weather access compared to Novorossiysk: [1] I'm not familiar enough with the meteorology of the region to articulate why. They probably could switch to the Caucasian coastline as a fallback plan, but I'm sure Russia looks at the problem from the lens of "we're a nuclear-armed Great Power, why the fuck would we compromise on this?" Sevastopol definitely provides better power projection across the whole Black Sea. [2]

You are moving the goalposts again. OP stated that Russia don't have any warmwater ports outside Crimea which is obviously incorrect.

> I think they were completely blindsided by Finland abandoning its long-standing neutrality, and have very few tools in their toolbox to leverage.

They could sign a peace agreement with Ukraine and quickly move their armies north no attack Finland, no? I mean, if Russia _really_ considered having (more?) borders with a NATO-member an existential threat (like they always pretend when discussing Ukraine in that context), then that would make total sense.

> Even when Putin had Ukraine as a borderline vassal state they were bitching about NATO expansion in their near abroad. Some of these arguments were made in the US Congress before Putin even came to power. [4] In particular, skip to the comments by Jonathan Dean and Michael Mandelbaum.

Well, Ukraine offered to commit to neutrality multiple times during peace negotiations in February and March, but Russia rejected the proposals and proceed with annexing more Ukrainian lands. Isn't it by now settled that they were just using NATO boogieman as a pretext for trying to (re)build their empire?

> It doesn't matter what you or I think about tank rushes, what matters is what the Russians think about tank rushes. [5] In case you missed it, they initiated this invasion with a multi-axis armored blitz towards Kiev combined with an air assault to secure a nearby Aerial Point of Debarkation.

Which failed spectacularly and kinda proves my point?

Also, they assumed that after initial missile barrage on Ukraine military assets they will achieve complete air superiority which didn't happen. I don't think anyone expects NATO to quickly achieve air superiority in Russian airspace, including Russia's own military analysts.

> The qualifier "of a nuclear superpower" doesn't add much to the conversation.

Of course it does! Russian nuclear doctrine permits them to conduct the first strike when "existence of Russian state is in danger", so they will most likely just tactical nuke the shit out of (hypothetical) NATO grouping on their border that is in the process of assuming attack formations. This also coincides nicely with their "escalate to de-escalate" playbook.

> Of the major nuclear powers, only India has a capital closer to an adversarial border than Russia (I don't count Pakistan or Israel as "superpowers")....and India maintains an exceptionally large tank fleet, and has fought some of the largest post-WW2 tank engagements between their capital and their border with Pakistan.

I have no knowledge of India's or Pakistan's nuclear doctrines. Do they permit first strike?

> Pretty sure ad hominems are against HN guidelines, but since you wanna go there...

Where is ad hominem exactly? Your portrayal of the start of WW2 makes you look on either misinformed or malicious (more on your talking points later). The fact that in next paragraph you are seemingly making U-turn on that doesn't change the formulation of your previous message.

> Oh? What "alliance" was that, specifically? As always, the devil is in the details. There were only two signatories to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: the Soviet Union and Germany. The Soviets had a bilateral agreement for the partition of Eastern Europe. That made them "co-belligerents", not "allies". They never signed any treaty with the Axis at large (for example, the Pact of Steel or the Tripartite Pact). They submitted a revised proposal for joining the Tripartite Pact to Germany which was quietly ignored as preparations for Operation Barbarossa were already underway. At no point in time was the USSR allied with Italy, Romania (14 divisions, almost 10% of the invading forces), Slovakia, Finland, or Hungary.

You are arguing semantics here (co-belligerent vs ally, etc.) while seemingly agreeing with me that USSR was one of the states that started the whole WW2 on the side of "evil western allies".

> TL;DR = Read more. Condescend less.

Well, you keep repeating Russian propaganda talking points and make it look like they were just peacefully minding their own business in thirties and then sneaky westerners cowardly back-stabbed them in forties. This is one of their favorite tropes how the whole world is against them and keep trying to either attack or contain them for no reason what-so-ever besides maybe some ingrained "russophobia". The very existence of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact secret protocols was denied by soviets for longest time BTW.

These details, your comment history, repeatedly calling Kyiv "Kiev" and doubling down on describing Russian invasion in Ukraine as completely self-defensive measure against menacing NATO expansion makes me doubt you are arguing in good faith here, but calling someone a paid shill will indeed be against HN rules...

Was away from HN over the weekend, hence the slow response...

>>>OP stated that Russia don't have any warmwater ports outside Crimea which is obviously incorrect.

If Sevastopol is highlighted for its warm-water access, but Novorossiysk is not, then the issue is at best unclear.

>>>They could sign a peace agreement with Ukraine and quickly move their armies north no attack Finland, no?

Even leveraging interior lines and Russia's robust rail transportation network, pivoting 150,000+ men >1,100km (roughly the distance from Kursk to Petrozadovsk) is not something that happens quickly. Also, not all "NATO borders" are created equal. As I said, sharing a hostile border with Finland and sharing a hostile border with Ukraine do not present the same security implications for the heartland of the Russian state.

>>>Ukraine offered to commit to neutrality multiple times during peace negotiations in February and March, but Russia rejected the proposals

Did Russia reject the proposals, or did the West torpedo the negotiations? https://www.globalresearch.ca/diplomacy-watch-did-boris-john...

>>>Which failed spectacularly and kinda proves my point?

Yet the American "Thunder Run" into Baghdad was a spectacular success, and Russia's own armored drive on Tblisi in 2008 was also reasonably successful. The tactical concept isn't the failure point, the abysmal incompetence of the force trying to execute it is. Russia's armored blitz into Grozny in 1995 was also a brutal and costly failure. They had the same problem then of a poorly-led and poorly-supported underskilled army driving into urban terrain held by experienced and well-led veterans.

>>>Also, they assumed that after initial missile barrage on Ukraine military assets they will achieve complete air superiority which didn't happen. I don't think anyone expects NATO to quickly achieve air superiority in Russian airspace, including Russia's own military analysts.

The Ukrainians are turning off the search radars on their SAMs, and get fed extensive intelligence from practically every NATO ISR asset in Europe. They largely only activate their big long-range SAMs after NATO has already tipped them off to a threat. Combine that with generally threadbare Russian ISR of the Deep Battlespace, and Russian Air Force pilots not having the skill/experience to do very large US/Israeli-style strike packages. All of that has kept the airspace surprisingly contested.

By contrast, none of those limiting factors would apply to US airpower if we needed to peel back Russia's IADS. It's the one thing at which we are absolutely exceptional, and while Russian SAMs are still very respectable hardware, their personnel have demonstrated they are so incompetent/poorly trained....we'll probably walk all over them. Hopefully we don't have to find out.

>>>I have no knowledge of India's or Pakistan's nuclear doctrines. Do they permit first strike?

Same here, no clue.

>>>Where is ad hominem exactly? Your portrayal of the start of WW2

Rather than engage with the argument you attempted to attack my credentials and/or regional knowledge. I did not make a "portrayal of the start of WW2" [emphasis mine], as my comments contain no temporal specificity. I said that the Soviets were on the receiving end of an invasion from an alliance on their western border. That's an indisputable fact. I didn't clarify WHEN, merely that it happened, and that it colors their logic and thought processes.

Here's another statement about an adversary within my actual Area of Operations: "North Korea was on the receiving end of a bombing campaign that destroyed every structure larger than a footbridge in the country." That doesn't imply that the war was started by a US bombing campaign, nor does it assign any moral justification to North Korea's actions. It merely provides context for things that affect our military planning today, such as North Korea having thousands of underground facilities. The entire country is an underground bunker complex. I have to constantly bring this up to shake overconfident Marine Corps officers out of their complacency, by comparing a fight in North Korea to "like invading Iwo Jima, except the defenders have fortified a territory the size of Indiana". But back on subject...

The key take-away is that the physical borders of the Russian state are demonstrably insecure from the west. Attacking along the Warsaw-Minsk-Moscow axis has been used in 1812, 1915, and 1941 for a reason, all with catastrophic implications for Russia. Russia will continually act with extreme paranoia regarding its European frontier, probably until they have reliable buffer states as far as the Carpathian Mountains. Watch this Finnish Colonel for some background: https://youtu.be/CvonRMSuFpw

>>>keep repeating Russian propaganda talking points

Dates. Distances. Timelines. Treaties. US Congressional discussions. You have contested the accuracy of none of them. If you conclude that they are all "Russian propaganda", perhaps you are simply DEEP in an ideological bubble?

>>>and make it look like they were just peacefully minding their own business in thirties

Don't put words in my mouth, at no point have I implied that. Your inference of such is entirely a product of your own biases.

>>>repeatedly calling Kyiv "Kiev"

I also refer to Volgograd as "Stalingrad", Myanmar as "Burma", and sometimes even Ho Chi Minh City as "Saigon". Again, anything you infer from that is a product of your own mind. Unless you spell Munich as "München" regularly, and do the same for every other native-language rendition of every city, in every conversation, then demanding usage of "Kyiv" is just a meaningless virtue-signal. As a side note, do some Google Searches with the date range feature. Reuters.com was using Kiev vice Kyiv in their English reporting as late as 2019. Why did they wait 5 years after Putin invaded the Donbas to switch? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-rally-idUS... Reuters is still using "Munich", BTW. Those dastardly Anglophiles. /s

>>>but calling someone a paid shill will indeed be against HN rules

I'm not just a defense contractor, I'm also a NATO military officer. Just because I serve Russia's #1 geopolitical adversary doesn't mean I let my brain fall out of my head to be filled with whatever palatable nonsense is swallowed uncritically from major western sources. The number of field grade officers I knew who took the "Ghost of Kiev" at face value was equally shocking and disappointing. You must understand the context of why your opponent is making the moves that they make, or you will be surprised, caught off guard, or otherwise ill-positioned to send as many of them to Hell as possible. I find "Pressing 'X' to doubt" on most of the talking points coming from friendly sources more useful than the opposite approach.

Also spend some time lurking on the various intel fusion chatrooms on SIPR or JWICS if you have an appropriate security clearance, and read some of the historical orders for things like when we wanted to put anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe in 2007 (IIRC there are EUCOM Campaign Orders for that, you can search on Intelink.sgov.gov on SIPR). It's important to grasp what we're REALLY doing and not just what we say we are doing. You'll find yourself with far more questions than answers.

> If Sevastopol is highlighted for its warm-water access, but Novorossiysk is not, then the issue is at best unclear.

You seem to be hellbent on dying on that hill, but I don't see what is "unclear" about it since anyone can easily verify with 2 minutes of googling that Novorossiysk (as well as multiple other ports in the region) are warmwater. As someone who visited eastern Black See coast in January I can attest that water there is indeed in liquid aggregate state during the winter :)

> Even leveraging interior lines and Russia's robust rail transportation network, pivoting 150,000+ men >1,100km (roughly the distance from Kursk to Petrozadovsk) is not something that happens quickly.

But they would have managed by now if they wanted to, wouldn't they?

> Did Russia reject the proposals, or did the West torpedo the negotiations? https://www.globalresearch.ca/diplomacy-watch-did-boris-john...

Well, I think you could find some hot take on Twitter (which your linked article seems to be based on besides unnamed "multiple former senior U.S. officials") that supports any kind of wild theory on any subject. (maybe martians torpedoed the negotiations? go figure!)

However, Zelensky had always been reasonably pro-Russian until such political position became completely untenable. Remember that the guy was elected on program to "stop the war that is only going on because Poroshenko and his goons are making millions on it and we just need to stop shooting and make peace with Putin", etc. so I don't see any motivation for him to continue it instead of reaping significant political benefits from bringing the peace to his people. I guess next thing you are going to tell me is how revolution in 2014 was completely orchestrated by the West (my friends that participated are still waiting for their paychecks BTW!) and other such talking points that people with your views likes to repeat ad nauseam...

> Yet the American "Thunder Run" into Baghdad was a spectacular success, and Russia's own armored drive on Tblisi in 2008 was also reasonably successful. The tactical concept isn't the failure point, the abysmal incompetence of the force trying to execute it is.

Both of these were executed in conditions of air superiority, which is exactly what I talked about in very next sentence of my previous comment, no?

> By contrast, none of those limiting factors would apply to US airpower if we needed to peel back Russia's IADS. It's the one thing at which we are absolutely exceptional, and while Russian SAMs are still very respectable hardware, their personnel have demonstrated they are so incompetent/poorly trained....we'll probably walk all over them. Hopefully we don't have to find out.

You assume NATO will just "walk over" Russian layered defense of endless Thors, Pancirs, Buks, S-300s and S-400s in hours to allow tank blitz on Moscow? That is a quite a surprising take for me, but okay. I mean, Ukraine _slowly_ putting them out one-by-one with HARMs, but it takes quite some time...

> Rather than engage with the argument you attempted to attack my credentials and/or regional knowledge. I did not make a "portrayal of the start of WW2" [emphasis mine], as my comments contain no temporal specificity. I said that the Soviets were on the receiving end of an invasion from an alliance on their western border. That's an indisputable fact. I didn't clarify WHEN, merely that it happened, and that it colors their logic and thought processes.

> Here's another statement about an adversary within my actual Area of Operations: "North Korea was on the receiving end of a bombing campaign that destroyed every structure larger than a footbridge in the country." That doesn't imply that the war was started by a US bombing campaign, nor does it assign any moral justification to North Korea's actions. It merely provides context for things that affect our military planning today, such as North Korea having thousands of underground facilities. The entire country is an underground bunker complex. I have to constantly bring this up to shake overconfident Marine Corps officers out of their complacency, by comparing a fight in North Korea to "like invading Iwo Jima, except the defenders have fortified a territory the size of Indiana". But back on subject...

Something that is factually correct but presented in certain way is one of the best and most effective kinds of propaganda. A quote from the master of the subject:

"Good propaganda does not need to lie, indeed it may not lie. It has no reason to fear the truth. It is a mistake to believe that people cannot take the truth. They can. It is only a matter of presenting the truth to people in a way that they will be able to understand. A propaganda that lies proves that it has a bad cause. It cannot be successful in the long run."

I believe is is important to frame the start of WW2 in the correct way. There is a reason why USSR/Russia propaganda always insist on framing that their Great Patriotic War started in 1941, and the reason is not because USSR had nothing to do with it in 39-40, quite the opposite in fact.

>The key take-away is that the physical borders of the Russian state are demonstrably insecure from the west. Attacking along the Warsaw-Minsk-Moscow axis has been used in 1812, 1915, and 1941 for a reason, all with catastrophic implications for Russia. Russia will continually act with extreme paranoia regarding its European frontier, probably until they have reliable buffer states as far as the Carpathian Mountains. Watch this Finnish Colonel for some background: https://youtu.be/CvonRMSuFpw

As a highly experienced military officer with access to all kinds of closed chatrooms with scary-looking abbreviated names what is your assessment on the likelihood of western invasion into Russia in 21st century? What would be the motivation of invaders and their plan to prevent the war from quickly escalating into nuclear? Do you believe that Russian analyst has different assessment than you on the matter? If so, why?

> Don't put words in my mouth, at no point have I implied that. Your inference of such is entirely a product of your own biases.

And I suggest that framing and wording of facts presented by you is an indication of your biases. Apparently we will have to disagree on this one.

> I also refer to Volgograd as "Stalingrad", Myanmar as "Burma", and sometimes even Ho Chi Minh City as "Saigon". Again, anything you infer from that is a product of your own mind. Unless you spell Munich as "München" regularly, and do the same for every other native-language rendition of every city, in every conversation, then demanding usage of "Kyiv" is just a meaningless virtue-signal. As a side note, do some Google Searches with the date range feature. Reuters.com was using Kiev vice Kyiv in their English reporting as late as 2019. Why did they wait 5 years after Putin invaded the Donbas to switch? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-rally-idUS... Reuters is still using "Munich", BTW. Those dastardly Anglophiles. /s

I don't see anything funny or "virtue signaling" on having courtesy to use geographical names preferred by people that live there. I didn't know that Germany prefers "Munchen", but I happen to mostly call it like that my whole life because that is how it is called in my native tongue (Russian).

> I'm not just a defense contractor, I'm also a NATO military officer. Just because I serve Russia's #1 geopolitical adversary doesn't mean I let my brain fall out of my head to be filled with whatever palatable nonsense is swallowed uncritically from major western sources. The number of field grade officers I knew who took the "Ghost of Kiev" at face value was equally shocking and disappointing. You must understand the context of why your opponent is making the moves that they make, or you will be surprised, caught off guard, or otherwise ill-positioned to send as many of them to Hell as possible. I find "Pressing 'X' to doubt" on most of the talking points coming from friendly sources more useful than the opposite approach.

So let's assume for a second you are actually who you say you are, as opposed to some FSB-dude (or even better-trained Olgino worker) and present you with very simple question: do you believe that security concerns are indeed _the main motivation_ for the invasion? no empire-rebuilding for ideological reasons and political gains involved?

Ok, I'll concede on the Black Sea ports discussion. Further digging points to this being an area of almost-negligent oversight in common discussion. For example:

Lastly, because of Russia’s geographical limitations, the research de facto chooses two of its only naturally occurring warm-water ports. Novorossiysk in the Black Sea was excluded from the analysis because it is primarily an economic port housing only part of the Black Sea Fleet (BSF),

from: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/JEMEAA/Journals/...

>>>I think you could find some hot take on Twitter (which your linked article seems to be based on besides unnamed "multiple former senior U.S. officials")

The article links to Ukrainian Pravda which cites unnamed sources close to Zelensky. So are the Ukrainian journalists credible in their reporting, or not?

>>>But they would have managed by now if they wanted to, wouldn't they?

They don't have the manpower, partly because in their arrogance they waited 6 months too late to mobilize.

>>>I guess next thing you are going to tell me is how revolution in 2014 was completely orchestrated by the West (my friends that participated are still waiting for their paychecks BTW!)

Fully orchestrated? No. Subsidized and facilitated by the US State Department and NGOs? Yes.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ukraine-tape-idUSBREA...

>>>You assume NATO will just "walk over" Russian layered defense of endless Thors, Pancirs, Buks, S-300s and S-400s in hours to allow tank blitz on Moscow?

Not in hours. I'd assume at least 30 days for a thorough air campaign, with 1000+ sorties per day for at least the first week.

>>>Something that is factually correct but presented in certain way is one of the best and most effective kinds of propaganda.

With that mindset almost anything can be misconstrued as propaganda.

>>>I believe is is important to frame the start of WW2 in the correct way.

Except the point was never about the start of WW2. It was about identifying the terrain-related strategic vulnerabilities of central Russia which spans centuries. The purpose of highlighting the WW2 experience is simply that it is still within living memory and colors perceptions of Russian decision-makers more than, say, the Battle of Borodino.

As an aside, I also argue we should consider WW2 as starting in 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Eurocentrism of the major Allied Powers is the only reason we don't.

>>>what is your assessment on the likelihood of western invasion into Russia in 21st century?

Extremely extremely low. Always has been, just look at our force posture. But I absolutely assess that we aim to neutralize Russia as a Great Power, through a mix of external and internal pressures. I'd also argue that we've deliberately destabilized the nuclear MAD balance of power in pursuit of this goal, and everything that has happened in Eastern Europe in the past 15 years is fallout from that.

The same jerk has been running Russia for 20+ years, but compare what his security concerns were in 2001: https://ibs.colorado.edu/johno/pub/Putin_911.pdf

Look at our security relationships in the early-GWOT era: https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/33912.htm

>>>What would be the motivation of invaders and their plan to prevent the war from quickly escalating into nuclear?

1) Undermine a Eurasian-spanning power bloc (reference Brzezinski's "The Great Game" for why)

2) Prevent the creation of an alternate reserve currency backed by Russian natural resources (oil + gold, Gaddafi wanted to do this before he was killed)

3) Finally eliminate the most credible nuclear existential threat to the US (China's nuclear triad, in contrast, is small and inadequate)

I don't think escalation can be prevented with sufficient reliability to approve a conventional regime change operation. The problem is, Russia's paranoid leadership likely sees things differently.

>>>Do you believe that Russian analyst has different assessment than you on the matter? If so, why?

Yes, because their lived experience and cultural environment is completely different. Their historical trauma + cultural ego/chauvinism combine to cause them to weigh the variables in the equation differently than I would. The Marine Corps suffers from similar issues, just in a different context. Our historical trauma = the Navy "abandoning" us at Guadalcanal, so we have an irrational attachment to maintaining our own air support, with stupidly-expensive/complex VTOL performance requirements. Our organizational chauvinism reinforces our refusal to source assistance from our sister services because we think we can do anything and everything by ourselves.

>>>do you believe that security concerns are indeed _the main motivation_ for the invasion? no empire-rebuilding for ideological reasons and political gains involved?

I think there must have been an assessment of security concerns and economic trends that led to "if we don't knock Ukraine out of NATO's orbit permanently NOW, it will only become impossibly difficult to do so in the future". Combined with a REALLY poor intelligence assessment of the West's reaction AND overestimating their own ability to successfully execute a regime change against the largest country in Europe, which has had 8 years of combat to improve itself.

But aren't the four (security, empire-building, ideology, politics) always inextricably linked? National leaders express "security concerns" usually because The Other Guy is interfering with their empire-building, both foreign and domestic. I loathe every time I hear a general talk about our vague "national security interests". A friend of mine used to provide communications support for Tier 1 spec ops units. He said "I didn't kick in doors with them, but I traveled with them and made sure they had working radios. What I learned was..... everything is about money, family, and power."

> The article links to Ukrainian Pravda which cites unnamed sources close to Zelensky. So are the Ukrainian journalists credible in their reporting, or not?

Dude, I'm Ukrainian and Pravda isn't exactly considered a paragon of journalistic integrity here. In fact, they are exactly the ones who would publish articles based on twitter hot takes and "unnamed sources close to X".

> Fully orchestrated? No. Subsidized and facilitated by the US State Department and NGOs? Yes.

> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ukraine-tape-idUSBREA...

Sigh People with your political inclinations (usually Russia-sympathizers) always bring "Nuland tapes" like some kind of slam dunk. They were discussing who would they have preferred to work with in future Ukrainian government. What exactly is so scandalous here in your opinion? You don't believe Russian diplomats had been discussing their preference at the time? Or that there weren't any strong words exchanged in private conversations of Ukrainian government officials regarding US president elections in general and Donald Trump in particular in 2020, for example? Were US president elections "subsidized and facilitated" by Ukraine?

Also, the conversation about the subject always goes in following way in my experience:

- The revolution was fully orchestrated by the evil collective West!

- How?

- Okay, maybe not orchestrated but payed for!

- People who participated still waiting for they paycheck, where do they apply?

...

- Okay, okay, but US gave some humanitarian aid aNd hEr tApeZ!!1

I personally know a lot of people who participated directly (for free, no Nuland or "drugged oranges" involved, if you get the reference), donated money, food or medical supplies, so please spare me your lectures about western spies paying opposition and hiring nazis to overthrow the legitimate government...

> Not in hours. I'd assume at least 30 days for a thorough air campaign, with 1000+ sorties per day for at least the first week.

I don't get it. You state they are afraid of sudden decapitating tank blitz on Moscow... that will be preceded by 30 days of bombardment? How does that make sense? Won't Russia just retaliate with nukes? (again, which is explicitly allowed by their nuclear doctrine and fits well with their "escalate to de-escalate" playbook)

> With that mindset almost anything can be misconstrued as propaganda.

With your background you should understand better than most how modern propaganda works. It is not a leaflet or poster with "Tovarisch, motherland calls you to kill evil nazi Ukrainians! Apply Now!" (though that still do exist and has its place in the toolkit) but bunch of dudes on payroll performing organized campaigns in social media to distort facts, set the framing and control the narrative. Your message history on HN fits that description perfectly BTW ;)

> Except the point was never about the start of WW2. It was about identifying the terrain-related strategic vulnerabilities of central Russia which spans centuries.

Except that they didn't have nukes during that invasions!

>1) Undermine a Eurasian-spanning power bloc (reference Brzezinski's "The Great Game" for why)

Russia creating "Eurasian-spanning power bloc"? With what? Dude, they have been getting their asses kicked by bunch of poorly-trained Ukrainians with some outdated stuff (Stingers, Javelins, M777s), some nineties tech (HARM, etc.) and very few relatively modern but limited pieces of equipment (~30 launchers with GLMRS, no ATACMS). You assume US are threatened by _that_ and are plotting to prevent Russian glorious domination of Eurasia?!

> 2) Prevent the creation of an alternate reserve currency backed by Russian natural resources (oil + gold, Gaddafi wanted to do this before he was killed)

Russians seem to be doing very well in sabotaging their natural resources business empire themselves at the moment, no need to tank-rush Moscow for that.

> 3) Finally eliminate the most credible nuclear existential threat to the US (China's nuclear triad, in contrast, is small and inadequate)

Fully eliminate nuclear threat... by provoking nuclear war with biggest adversary?

> I don't think escalation can be prevented with sufficient reliability to approve a conventional regime change operation. The problem is, Russia's paranoid leadership likely sees things differently.

Or they just pretending that they are "being threatened by big-scary NATO at their border" to legitimize their conquests?

> Yes, because their lived experience and cultural environment is completely different. Their historical trauma + cultural ego/chauvinism combine to cause them to weigh the variables in the equation differently than I would.

Aren't analyst supposed to analyze military capabilities and scenarios objectively? I mean, how stupid can they be? It is not like their analysis is performed by Kadyrov and Prigozhin, right?

> Our historical trauma = the Navy "abandoning" us at Guadalcanal, so we have an irrational attachment to maintaining our own air support, with stupidly-expensive/complex VTOL performance requirements. Our organizational chauvinism reinforces our refusal to source assistance from our sister services because we think we can do anything and everything by ourselves.

Irrational attachment or people who produce and sell the necessary equipment lobbying for that? There are clear financial incentives for military-industrial complex to keep things "with stupidly-expensive/complex VTOL performance requirements" which I consider more relevant explanation than some "historical traumas".

> But aren't the four (security, empire-building, ideology, politics) always inextricably linked? National leaders express "security concerns" usually because The Other Guy is interfering with their empire-building, both foreign and domestic. I loathe every time I hear a general talk about our vague "national security interests". A friend of mine used to provide communications support for Tier 1 spec ops units. He said "I didn't kick in doors with them, but I traveled with them and made sure they had working radios. What I learned was..... everything is about money, family, and power."

When US invaded Iraq or Afghanistan they didn't try to annex the lands. And even if you suggest it would be unfeasible to annex lands thousands kilometers away, they still could have easily annexed nearby Panama in 1990, for example. Here we see very clear divergence of stated goals ("We just want Ukraine to commit to not let spooky-scary NATO in", as if NATO is actually anxious to get in in the first place...) and actions (ethnic cleansings, forced deportations, annexations).

Do you think there was any realistic scenario where NATO could have accepted Ukraine with significant chunks of the country occupied by Russians since 2015 even without the invasion? And you think Russia didn't understand that Ukraine was not going to be accepted any time soon?

>>>>Dude, I'm Ukrainian

Well, your country being invaded by an incompetent horde of brutal assholes surely influences your ability to dispassionately assess the strategic situation, and the motivations of said assholes. I can understand it's hard to hear that the people slaughtering your countrymen aren't 100% at fault...more like 95% at fault, with the other 5% being sustained multi-decade provocation from....the country that is giving you every weapon imaginable to repulse the murderers. But Ukrainians are dying due to fallout from a chain of events initiated 15+ years ago, by DC think tankers with an irrational willingness to antagonize a Great Power on the opposite side of the planet.

>>>>They were discussing who would they have preferred to work with in future Ukrainian government. What exactly is so scandalous here in your opinion?

I would argue it wasn't a conversation of "wouldn't it be nice if" but them making decisions about who would be the leadership of Ukraine, which isn't something that should be decided by US State Department officials.

>>>With your background you should understand better than most how modern propaganda works.

These days we call it "information operations" and "psychological operations".

>>>> People who participated still waiting for they paycheck, where do they apply?

Don't be naive. The bottom-rank locals in any revolution don't get a paper trail directly back to the US government. Most people who are getting suitcases of US dollars have enough sense to keep their mouths closed about where it came from. $50,000 from an American who "works for an NGO" so the Maidan protesters can buy supplies -> $1,000 spent on supplies "with their own money" and $49,000 quietly pocketed.

>>>>You state they are afraid of sudden decapitating tank blitz on Moscow... that will be preceded by 30 days of bombardment? How does that make sense? Won't Russia just retaliate with nukes?

In order to retaliate with nukes, their nuclear deterrent and MAD has to be credible. Which brings us back to why they were so pissed off in 2007 about ABMs in Eastern Europe: putting an ABM umbrella on their doorstep means you can shoot down their nukes (boost-phase intercept profile), which means the conventional invasion of Russia can proceed with impunity.

>>>>Russia creating "Eurasian-spanning power bloc"? With what?

The Russians would be the western anchor of a military and economic partnership largely led by China. Putin and Xi have been orchestrating such for years.[1][2] The Russian military and Russian natural resource exports would be the main leverage against nations west of the Urals.

>>>>Dude, they have been getting their asses kicked by bunch of poorly-trained Ukrainians with some outdated stuff

Which has left a ton of military professionals flabbergasted. The Russians have demonstrated an embarrassing level of incompetence from the highest ranks to the lowest, and I don't think even people with a low opinion of the Russian military anticipated this poor of a performance. Well-respected combat veterans have held the Russians in pretty high regard since at least the Battle of Debaltseve. [3][4][5] But the Emperor has no clothes, so to speak. Their industry already wasn't able to sustain their grand military ambitions, but it certainly can't replace their losses, compensate for the brain drain, compensate for sanctions, etc....So the Russians are feeding themselves into a Ukrainian woodchipper, basically taking them out of the "Great Game" for at least the next 10 years, if not 20-40.

>>>>Russians seem to be doing very well in sabotaging their natural resources business empire

I think Putin expected the natural gas stranglehold on Germany to keep the Europeans on the sidelines. Not anticipating the severity of economic sanctions and the rapidity of Europe switching to alternative energy suppliers is just one of his MANY egregious miscalculations before undertaking his invasion.

>>>>Fully eliminate nuclear threat... by provoking nuclear war with biggest adversary?

1) I think the policy wonks wanted to salami-slice and encircle Russia until they could get good-enough ABMs in place. Putin has reacted kinetically before that could be completed. 2) Yes, whoever is sticking to the agenda of antagonizing Russia is an asshole, gambling the lives of the whole planet.

>>>>Aren't analyst supposed to analyze military capabilities and scenarios objectively? I mean, how stupid can they be?

I don't think most intel analysts are stupid, just human. On the contrary, the most consistent problem I see with them is the same Dunning-Kruger Effect seen on HN: they are intelligent, but think they are smarter/more knowledgeable about certain specific domains than they actually are, and come to egregiously bad conclusions due to underestimating the gaps in their knowledge base.

>>>>Irrational attachment or people who produce and sell the necessary equipment lobbying for that?

Both. But in the F-35's case definitely the blame lies mostly with the Marine Corps. Our demand for VTOL capability compromised the kinematics of the entire platform.[6]

>>>>When US invaded Iraq or Afghanistan they didn't try to annex the lands.

The US approach to imperial domination doesn't rely on "painting the map" directly. We dominate people's central banks and financial systems instead.[7][8] It's all about maintaining the Petrodollar/global reserve currency system, which allows us to essentially tax the entire planet and give every country monopoly money in return. Monopoly money which we also spend on our gigantic military, which enforces the acceptance of said monopoly money.

>>>>(ethnic cleansings, forced deportations, annexations)

I'd say these are business as usual for brutal sociopathic Soviet-trained leadership, and also the only way that Russia has any hope of controlling the vast territory it's trying to bite off from Ukraine: get rid of all of the locals. Then there is no one to support an insurgency, no one to vote the "wrong" way during referendums, etc...

>>>>Do you think there was any realistic scenario where NATO could have accepted Ukraine with significant chunks of the country occupied by Russians since 2015 even without the invasion? And you think Russia didn't understand that Ukraine was not going to be accepted any time soon?

That would be the case if NATO adhered to the letter of its own laws/documents/policies. But I think the Russians don't consider that possibility as something they want to bet their future on. It would mean putting the future safety of the Russian State entirely in the benevolent hands of NATO decision-makers. I think after the 2007 ABM dispute, any perception of NATO benevolence in Putin's mind was shattered. Maybe we'll carve out a special exception for Ukraine. Maybe we'll re-write NATO's Articles to remove the "no existing territorial disputes" clause. Or maybe the US would just bully/bribe every other member into voting "Yes" to Ukraine. These sound unbelievable to most Westerners, but they are probably all realistic risks in the brain of a KGB field agent. So after Ukraine's constitutional amendment in 2019 [9], Putin probably decided to seize the initiative. If he spent a few months figuring out exactly how to respond, that would put him Summer-Fall of 2019....planning to execute an early 2020 full annexation. Then COVID hit, and Putin waited until the global pandemic was stabilized before setting in motion staging his troops for invasion (Fall 2021 with a planned January invasion)...then he had to delay AGAIN after Big Daddy Xi told him "Don't fuck up my Olympics with your war." So world events may have delayed a Spring 2020 invasion until Spring 2022, which means we're actually witnessing the fastest possible turn-around time for a Russian offensive, assuming Ukraine's amendment was the straw that broke the camel's back. It also means Putin may have planned an invasion while notoriously-anti-interventionist Trump was in office, but ended up getting puppet-on-warmonger-strings Biden in the White House by the time everything was ready. shrug Entirely supposition on my part.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/russia-and-chin...

[2] https://jamestown.org/program/russia-and-china-a-mutually-ex...

[3] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/pentagon-fig...

[4] https://warontherocks.com/2016/05/fixing-nato-deterrence-in-...

[5] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/facing-the-facts-of-...

[6] https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-alli...

[7] http://iskra-news.info/news/segodnja_nochju_iz_borispolja_v_...

[8] https://www.globalresearch.ca/libya-all-about-oil-or-all-abo...

[9] https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-president-signs-constitution...

> Well, your country being invaded by an incompetent horde of brutal assholes surely influences your ability to dispassionately assess the strategic situation, and the motivations of said assholes.

Dude, I'm not the hyper-patriotic type of Ukrainian :)

> I can understand it's hard to hear that the people slaughtering your countrymen aren't 100% at fault...more like 95% at fault, with the other 5% being sustained multi-decade provocation from....the country that is giving you every weapon imaginable to repulse the murderers.

You seam to have _very_ poor imagination then (ATACMS long overdue? DPICM? Abrams? Finally start teaching Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s? Some Patriots maybe?). Also, now you seem to be putting words into my mouth since I've never said that it is "100%" their fault.

> I would argue it wasn't a conversation of "wouldn't it be nice if" but them making decisions about who would be the leadership of Ukraine, which isn't something that should be decided by US State Department officials.

Can you provide exact quotes where they are making such decisions?

> These days we call it "information operations" and "psychological operations".

Your point being?

> Don't be naive. The bottom-rank locals in any revolution don't get a paper trail directly back to the US government. Most people who are getting suitcases of US dollars have enough sense to keep their mouths closed about where it came from. $50,000 from an American who "works for an NGO" so the Maidan protesters can buy supplies -> $1,000 spent on supplies "with their own money" and $49,000 quietly pocketed.

I'm not being naive and I stand by my words. I remember back in 2004 there were indeed significant amount of people on Maidan Nezalezhnostii who were being paid daily to stand there with orange stripes. In 2014 main driving force of the revolution were middle-class people donating stuff or risking their lives directly by participating. All other forces were at best secondary and at worst inconsequential. Opposition politicians where routinely booed by the revolutionaries due to their meek positions and indecisiveness.

It seems you are intelligent person, but think you are smarter/more knowledgeable about certain specific domains than you actually are, and come to egregiously bad conclusions due to underestimating the gaps in your knowledge base ;)

> In order to retaliate with nukes, their nuclear deterrent and MAD has to be credible. Which brings us back to why they were so pissed off in 2007 about ABMs in Eastern Europe: putting an ABM umbrella on their doorstep means you can shoot down their nukes (boost-phase intercept profile), which means the conventional invasion of Russia can proceed with impunity.

That is strategic nukes. What about tactical nukes delivered by cruise missiles? Won't Russia just tactical nuke the shit out of theoretical NATO army that is in the process of assuming attack formation near their border?

> I don't think most intel analysts are stupid, just human. On the contrary, the most consistent problem I see with them is the same Dunning-Kruger Effect seen on HN: they are intelligent, but think they are smarter/more knowledgeable about certain specific domains than they actually are, and come to egregiously bad conclusions due to underestimating the gaps in their knowledge base.

You provided both a detailed description and a great example of described phenomenon in the same message ;)

> The US approach to imperial domination doesn't rely on "painting the map" directly. We dominate people's central banks and financial systems instead.[7][8] It's all about maintaining the Petrodollar/global reserve currency system, which allows us to essentially tax the entire planet and give every country monopoly money in return. Monopoly money which we also spend on our gigantic military, which enforces the acceptance of said monopoly money.

I know cool-realpolitik-kids like to explain everything in the world with "petrodollar", but I don't see how it is really relevant for invasion in Afghanistan, for example. Also, petrodollar system in not straight up win as such people seem to assume when describing it in edgy and simplified way e.g. "we just give everybody fake-monopoly money and force them to accept it with our military!!1". You can read a simple and balanced analysis that also discusses flaws of petrodollar system in [0].

> I'd say these are business as usual for brutal sociopathic Soviet-trained leadership, and also the only way that Russia has any hope of controlling the vast territory it's trying to bite off from Ukraine: get rid of all of the locals. Then there is no one to support an insurgency, no one to vote the "wrong" way during referendums, etc...

But why do they need all the referendums/annexations business if they invaded just to not let spooky-scary NATO in? BTW Russians themselves don't claim that they invaded only (or even mainly) because of NATO, so I don't know why you chose it as (another) hill to die on.

> That would be the case if NATO adhered to the letter of its own laws/documents/policies. But I think the Russians don't consider that possibility as something they want to bet their future on. It would mean putting the future safety of the Russian State entirely in the benevolent hands of NATO decision-makers. I think after the 2007 ABM dispute, any perception of NATO benevolence in Putin's mind was shattered. Maybe we'll carve out a special exception for Ukraine. Maybe we'll re-write NATO's Articles to remove the "no existing territorial disputes" clause. Or maybe the US would just bully/bribe every other member into voting "Yes" to Ukraine. These sound unbelievable to most Westerners, but they are probably all realistic risks in the brain of a KGB field agent. So after Ukraine's constitutional amendment in 2019 [9], Putin probably decided to seize the initiative. If he spent a few months figuring out exactly how to respond, that would put him Summer-Fall of 2019....planning to execute an early 2020 full annexation. Then COVID hit, and Putin waited until the global pandemic was stabilized before setting in motion staging his troops for invasion (Fall 2021 with a planned January invasion)...then he had to delay AGAIN after Big Daddy Xi told him "Don't fuck up my Olympics with your war." So world events may have delayed a Spring 2020 invasion until Spring 2022, which means we're actually witnessing the fastest possible turn-around time for a Russian offensive, assuming Ukraine's amendment was the straw that broke the camel's back. It also means Putin may have planned an invasion while notoriously-anti-interventionist Trump was in office, but ended up getting puppet-on-warmonger-strings Biden in the White House by the time everything was ready. shrug Entirely supposition on my part.

So what stopped spooky-scary NATO from accepting Ukraine after it first applied in 2008? And how much more time did sneaky US need to finally "bribe" all the other members to accept Ukraine as-is after the previous war? It is another favorite Russian propaganda talking point ("NATO was plotting to accept Ukraine!!1") when in reality it seemed to be completely not interested.

[0]: https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/

>>>Can you provide exact quotes where they are making such decisions?

Transcript here: ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957 )

Nuland: Good. I don't think Klitsch should go into the government.

Pyatt: Yeah. I guess... in terms of him not going into the government, just let him stay out and do his political homework and stuff.

Nuland: [Breaks in] I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience. He's the... what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside.

Pyatt: Yeah, no, I think that's right. OK. Good. Pyatt: ... so I think you reaching out directly to him helps with the personality management among the three and it gives you also a chance to move fast on all this stuff and put us behind it before they all sit down and he explains why he doesn't like it.

So they came to an agreement that Klitschko should be outside the government, Yatseniuk should be in the government, and then got into the details of how to manage Klitschko (and later in the conversation, bring in other diplomats to help) in order to ensure they achieve what they wanted. It may not be apparent to a non-native speaker, but this isn't a conversation where they are just speaking hypothetically.

>>>Won't Russia just tactical nuke the shit out of theoretical NATO army that is in the process of assuming attack formation near their border?

Satellite ISR has a decent read on when/where nukes are being handled for the tactical varieties, and especially for the launch platforms. I would expect them to be priority targets during the air campaign. I would also expect the planning process to have Positive ID of x% of tacnuke platforms as a critical piece of the Go/No-Go Criteria...in other words, the invasion wouldn't be launched until the likely number of tacnuke "leakers" could be reduced below a certain threshold such that it wouldn't derail the armored thrust.

>>>I don't see how it is really relevant for invasion in Afghanistan

The initial invasion was an outlier in response to a Black Swan event, so no that's not directly relevant to the Petrodollar. Staying as long as we did? Arguably enabled us to threaten Iran from multiple directions, and also put US forces straddling the lines of communication between Iran and China (via the Wakhan Corridor). Those aspects supported Petrodollar maintenance.

>>>You can read a simple and balanced analysis that also discusses flaws of petrodollar system in [0].

I think I bookmarked this ages ago and forgot to come back and read it more thoroughly. Overall I agree that the dollar is due for a reckoning, and when it comes I expect a collapse of both the Western "international order" and the US economy. Hence why I think our global strategy reflects protection of the Petro even in cases where our values suggest we should have different priorities (example: not executing regime change in Saudi Arabia). But my point still stands: we can replace a nation's government, integrate their central bank, and despite not formally annexing their territory still benefit from their country economically, because we need to keep as many banks as possible generating demand for our toilet-paper-money, which they need to buy energy to run their economy at all.

>>>But why do they need all the referendums/annexations business if they invaded just to not let spooky-scary NATO in?

Ya gotta keep up appearances, for the benefit of the masses. And it creates a paper trail to trot out in international forums such as the UN later. "See, we totally did everything the democratic way. It's all above-board. Will of the people. We've got the paperwork." "Your referendums are BS because you killed half the people living there first." "You don't have the documentation to prove that."

>>>BTW Russians themselves don't claim that they invaded only (or even mainly) because of NATO, so I don't know why you chose it as (another) hill to die on.

It figures prominently in Putin's Victory Day speech: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/68366

Last December we proposed signing a treaty on security guarantees. Russia urged the West to hold an honest dialogue in search for meaningful and compromising solutions, and to take account of each other’s interests. All in vain. NATO countries did not want to heed us, which means they had totally different plans. And we saw it.

Another punitive operation in Donbass, an invasion of our historic lands, including Crimea, was openly in the making. Kiev declared that it could attain nuclear weapons. The NATO bloc launched an active military build-up on the territories adjacent to us.

Thus, an absolutely unacceptable threat to us was steadily being created right on our borders. There was every indication that a clash with neo-Nazis and Banderites backed by the United States and their minions was unavoidable.

Let me repeat, we saw the military infrastructure being built up, hundreds of foreign advisors starting work, and regular supplies of cutting-edge weaponry being delivered from NATO countries. The threat grew every day.

>>>So what stopped spooky-scary NATO from accepting Ukraine after it first applied in 2008?

Strong opposition from France and Germany. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/09/04...

>>>how much more time did sneaky US need to finally "bribe" all the other members to accept Ukraine as-is after the previous war?

Looks like it took until 2021. Germany's new foreign minister is pro-Ukraine and seems at least open to the idea: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/is-the-ne...

But I SUSPECT the French were still opposed until this latest invasion. I don't have a clear picture on what Macron or his government thinks right now, other than being pissed off at the Biden Administration for fucking over France for the Australian nuclear submarine contract.

> So they came to an agreement that Klitschko should be outside the government, Yatseniuk should be in the government, and then got into the details of how to manage Klitschko (and later in the conversation, bring in other diplomats to help) in order to ensure they achieve what they wanted. It may not be apparent to a non-native speaker, but this isn't a conversation where they are just speaking hypothetically.

Oh please don't give me that crap. Your interpretation was not shared by mainstream press at the time as well [0]. Their English mastery is also apparently not good enough to understand the nuance!

Even if we assume your interpretation to be correct, I still don't understand how it would "prove" that the revolution was "Subsidized and facilitated" by the US.

> Satellite ISR has a decent read on when/where nukes are being handled for the tactical varieties, and especially for the launch platforms. I would expect them to be priority targets during the air campaign. I would also expect the planning process to have Positive ID of x% of tacnuke platforms as a critical piece of the Go/No-Go Criteria...in other words, the invasion wouldn't be launched until the likely number of tacnuke "leakers" could be reduced below a certain threshold such that it wouldn't derail the armored thrust.

So remind me again how is that mythical highway to Moscow is so important in case of all-out planned invasion that will be proceeded by at least 30 days of high intensity bombardment and highly likely escalate to nuclear exchange of some intensity? Won't Russians mine the shit out of it, blowup all bridges and evacuate everything and everyone of importance from Moscow to far east during that 30 days?

> I think I bookmarked this ages ago and forgot to come back and read it more thoroughly. Overall I agree that the dollar is due for a reckoning, and when it comes I expect a collapse of both the Western "international order" and the US economy. Hence why I think our global strategy reflects protection of the Petro even in cases where our values suggest we should have different priorities (example: not executing regime change in Saudi Arabia). But my point still stands: we can replace a nation's government, integrate their central bank, and despite not formally annexing their territory still benefit from their country economically, because we need to keep as many banks as possible generating demand for our toilet-paper-money, which they need to buy energy to run their economy at all.

Did you read it all, thoroughly or otherwise? The author stipulates that petrodollar system may not be beneficial for US anymore and that abolishing it would eventually lead to better outcomes for US themselves, instead of "collapsing both the Western "international order" and the US economy. [1]

> Ya gotta keep up appearances, for the benefit of the masses. And it creates a paper trail to trot out in international forums such as the UN later. "See, we totally did everything the democratic way. It's all above-board. Will of the people. We've got the paperwork." "Your referendums are BS because you killed half the people living there first." "You don't have the documentation to prove that."

But to keep spooky-scary NATO out it would have been enough to maintain puppet people republics indefinitely. Formally annexing the territories is only needed for building an empire, otherwise it doesn't make sense to pay the very high cost that Russia is incurring due to sanctions.

>It figures prominently in Putin's Victory Day speech

Well, on Victory Day NATO is a good boogieman apparently. On other days of the week it could be biolabs, "same people", Nazis, water to Crimea, etc. I could provide links for all of these, but I assume you are familiar with them.

> Strong opposition from France and Germany.

So you are saying there has never been a consensus among NATO members regarding accepting Ukraine and that some of its most prominent members strongly oppose it? Seems we are in agreement on this one!

[0]: https://www.politico.eu/article/us-suggests-russia-is-behind...

"In the phone call, Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador in Kiev, are discussing the planned government reshuffle ... The two diplomats express reservations about Klitschko, who is best known as a world boxing champion."

[1]: https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system

"At first, having the global reserve currency is an exorbitant privilege, because the benefits of hegemonic power outweigh the costs of maintaining the system. Over time, however, the upside benefits stay relatively static, while the costs keep compounding over time, until the costs outweigh the benefits.

And from there, the value of the system depends on who you ask. Folks who are often on the higher end of the income spectrum who worked in finance, government, healthcare, or technology benefitted from this system, since they obtained many of the benefits of globalization and none of the drawbacks. Folks who are often on the lower end of the income spectrum, specifically those that make physical things, are the ones that benefitted least and gave the most up, since their jobs were outsourced and automated at a faster rate than other developed countries. But now with China also undermining the structure of the system, even the geopolitical/hegemonic benefits for the political class are subverted as well.

As the system frays, it’s easy to point to external nations as the cause of this fraying. When they begin pricing things outside of the dollar-based system, or employing mercantilist currency policies, or building pipelines, or deciding to do something with their dollar surpluses other than reinvest them in US Treasuries, it can seem as though they are undermining an otherwise sound system.

In reality, those external actions are a symptom of the more underlying flaws in the system: the fact that the United States is no longer big enough as a share of global GDP to supply enough dollars to fund global energy markets and global trade, the fact that the United States has to run persistent trade deficits to get dollars out into the system, and the fact that an all-fiat global currency system incentivizes mercantilist currency manipulation by many countries to generate trade surpluses against the US wherever possible."

"In addition, a system constructed around the US dollar decades ago when the US was 35% of global GDP, doesn’t work as well when the US is only, say, 20% of global GDP. It’s not about how big the US military is to keep its hegemonic status; it’s about whether the global monetary system as currently structured is still mathematically viable, and whether it even still supports the interests of the United States.

Put simply, there is a natural economic entropy to global reserve currency status, because inherent flaws in the system continue compound until they reach a breaking point. The challenge, of course, is identifying ahead of time where that breaking point is. A change in the global monetary system doesn’t necessarily mean bad things for the United States (indeed, the United Kingdom had an economic boom in the post-war years after it lost reserve currency status), but it does mean making a trade-off between international interests and domestic interests, and re-aligning trade as needed to obtain the desired balance."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novorossiysk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murmansk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladivostok

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaliningrad ......

Russia has plenty of allies it can use as a warm water port and Crimea was already lost.

The soviets used this ad a phrase given how many times China doesn’t follow through with a threat.[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning

Seems like bluff

Sounds like normal foreign relations/diplomacy. It's all grey areas where politicians politick and diplomats maneuver to get what they want without anyone losing face.

But when politicians and diplomats make a miscalculation, soldiers die.

Not just soldiers.

Nah, fuck it. We're allowed to commit to war too. Xi Jingping is a tyrannical insane dictator and his successor will be worse. He needs to be stood up to, and no one is in a better position to do that than the US.

How about you send your own ass to war instead of others'

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why Xi Jinping and not, say, MbS?

MBS isn't making claims on his neighbors territory for his own.

I think he's literally in the process of invading and subjugating a neighbor, actually. The Saudis might not call what's going on in Yemen an invasion, but it sure looks like it from here.

Yemen and the treatment of Khashoggi and many others by the Saudi govt could eventually yield a case for helping their neighbors resist them. Yemen is pretty horrible. We are stuck with oil dependence for now.

> We are stuck with oil dependence for now.

We produce more oil domestically than we consume.

Yes, but it's a global market and there is not a barrier to oil at our border. SA increasing or decreasing world oil supplies affects the oil prices here. There's a separate discussion about the refineries in the US affecting the price of gas at the pump much more than the price of the oil. But let's focus on the fact that SA can increase or decrease the price of oil form them, it's a world wide commodity, and their actions affect the price people pay for oil in the us, because it's a world wide commodity.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN, regardless of how bad someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Xi Jingping is a tyrannical insane dictator

His people like him. Who are we to decide whether he is “tyrannical” or “insane”?

The west has this constant undercurrent of “we know what’s best for you” when talking about other countries and their leaders.

Its neither warranted nor welcome by the locals.

How do you know "his people" like him, when anyone who criticizes the Chinese government either disappears or shuts up when the government threatens their family?

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