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Comment by jasonvorhe | Hacker News Reader

If the West is so hellbent on cracking down on everything we allegedly stand for (democracy, free press, free speech, etc) all that other fun illusionary stuff) why not skip the war with China and Russia and just settle with what we have and shake hands with them ?

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Realpolitik.

China and Russia that supply us with gas and cheap plastic and do as they're told are fine.

A china or Russia that don't do as they're told must be dealt with. No amount of democracy or freedom or lawful behavior changes that. That's why we did nothing to make Russia open and democratic and part of a global future, when they literally begged us to.

Multi-polarity is already happening, there's not a lot the West can do to change that.

I don't know, it isn't going great for Russia. The US has pretty successfully isolated them and they're stuck in a pointless meat grinder war-for-nothing in Ukraine.

We will see what happens with China, personally I don't fancy their chances either. They're boxed in pretty effectively in most directions and reliant on US trade (and debt).

We will see...

The intelligence agencies and military need to stay busy and gain practical experience, if there is some sort of real conflict. Civilian life doesn't really afford them that opportunity. There are many anecdotes throughout history of comfortable empires falling from lack of experience in the field. Proxy wars and espionage campaigns are good practice, probably the best you'll get in the 21st century (so far).

Sure, they're basically building up their own enemies only to then either suffer the blowback or fight and disarm them.

You might want to actually go and read a few things about how they differ before making such uninformed statements.

Uninformed statements aren't necessarily idiotic, and even if they were, we don't need to call it as such to express disagreement.

This is very much civility for the sake of civility which is not without problems but is the culture here. Editing the post to remove the word idiotic and replace with uninformed.

There are people who know them from reality, not from some book sponsored by the CIA.

What are you even talking about? Be specific rather than tossing around vague insinuations.

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