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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The Asians have potentially just given huge amounts of real stuff to the US in exchange for ... arguably the exposure? They could have just taken the day off instead and been economically in the same position. "No better alternative" is a bit of a trick in assuming that the natural order of the world is Asians slaving away making life better for someone foreign. It didn't have to be that way.

I'm not saying that they've certainly made a mistake, but "no better alternative" is unimaginative. This is China and Japan we're talking about here, they absolutely had the power to make their own alternatives. Will they be surprised if the US doesn't pay them? The Russians saw it coming, they were doing exercises and whatnot years in advance of the asset seizures.

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Japan doesn't. It is essentially a US vassal state when it comes to international disputes.

For China: Where would they put that money? They can't keep it in the Yuan because it strengthens their currency which destroys their export economy. So they have to buy other currencies to reduce demand for their currency while strengthening others. Which currency can they go to? The answer: USD. It's the only one that can support their scale.

Sure can they make up another currency? I think they've been trying to do a BRICs currency for a while now. However, you can be sure if that gains traction that the US will start doing something about it, either covertly or kinetically. It is that much of an existential threat to the US.

> The Russians saw it coming, they were doing exercises and whatnot years in advance of the asset seizures.

You're trying to pretend that causality goes the wrong way around. The invasion of Ukraine caused the asset seizures.

Well actually, the collective reaction of the west, including the virtual exclusion of Russia from all western economic activity could not have come as a surprise to Putin. This is in fact the only sense I can make of the overt aggression towards Ukraine: Putin and his clique already held the short end of the stick after Maidan, Georgia, Syria etc: i.e. the west were not going to make life easy for him anyway, so they devise a clean cut, a return to the cold war that they all were so familiar with - and with an expectation that the west would overstretch on armaments and financial crisis. This theory is supported by the obvious strategic investment in an alternative international currency that has been building for a long time - efforts that have been more fruitful after the invasion if anything - also possibly already predicted.

But I'm not sure. It might be crediting them with more brains than they have.

I don't disagree with you.

But consider this. The way you're putting is "Russia did X therefore they knew (meaning predicted/guessed) that Y was gonna happen". I don't disagree. However, the other person said "Russia saw it coming, it was doing X before Y". This inverts the causality because it suggests that Y was gonna happen regardless, and as a consequence they started X ahead of time. Russia wants to be a superpower, but somehow is always the victim.

I don't think the relation is all that strong. The US wasn't especially sanctioned after Iraq for example. As far as I know no US assets were frozen and seized. Although, to be fair, maybe people were sanctioning them and nobody noticed because the US is pretty robust. Stealing stuff isn't a usual global response to unjust wars.

The US was looking for a good excuse, and it got one. But I doubt there was a rule on the book saying that they were going to wipe their owings to Russia if the Ukraine was invaded. It isn't like Ukraine is in NATO or has some sort of defensive treaty with the US, all the activity is their initiative because they want to give Russia a black eye/topple Putin.

Hindsight is 20/20 here and the default hasn't even happened yet.

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