China, Russia and Iran Are Reviving the Age of Empires | Hacker News Reader

China, Russia and Iran Are Reviving the Age of Empires

bloomberg.com

9 pointsBondi_Blue11 comments

TFA tiptoes around US hegemony; as I see it JFK was the last person who seriously proposed[0,1] an end to the Age of Empires, and both he and Khrushchev were cancelled shortly after demonstrating they could work together, having successfully defused the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[0] https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-john-...

[1] EDIT: Upon reflection, Gorbachev did what he could; it's not his fault that you can lead people to water but you can't make them drink.

Gorbachev is the main historical reason as to why the entire post-USSR space with the exception of Baltics is one massive powder keg. He did absolutely nothing to make sure that the transition would be even remotely reasonable.

The transition (especially in comparison to things like Partition of India, or more recently the Breakup of Yugoslavia) was surprisingly reasonable.

The USSR changed the socioeconomic system for its 290 million people, and did so with what, hundreds or thousands of deaths? (I think Romania alone had more deaths during transition than the entire rest of the Warsaw Pact)

I mean, more like 100s of thousands of deaths.

First Armenia Azerbaijan War: Unavoidable.

First Chechen War: Unavoidable.

Tajikistani Civil War: Unavoidable.

Those alone together are around 200k deaths. When I say unavoidable I mean that once Soviet Union disintegrated along the individual SSR conflicts those conflicts were basically guaranteed to happen, and Gorbachev and his friends did nothing to even prepare for it. I'm not even talking about what sort of damage you should assign to the fact that the average life expectancy drop over the period 1989-1995 in ex-USSR republics was around 3 years(so apply that to 290 million.

Ah, with the exception of the First Chechen War I'd been unaware of these.

Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territory... fairly accurate?

Yeah, I'm hoping Milei's Argentine shock therapy will turn out a little less fucked up than the extreme libertarian/privatisation FSU 90s experience...

EDIT: (a) with hindsight, what would you have done differently?

(b) it looks like Yeltsin was calling the shots by late* 1991 (I'm still a little disappointed Brexit didn't involve "Boris on a Tank" in Westminster), so we only need to pin the First Nagorno-Karabakh War and the South Ossetia War on Gorbi.

* Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPydylSQyTg

>Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territory... fairly accurate?

Yes, its fairly accurate.

In terms of what I would've done differently:

First NK War: It was incredibly clear that this would explode already during Glasnost, as Armenians made it quite clear they wanted either independence or reunification in like mid 80s. I'm not sure how this would be managed, because Armenia would never give up on either NK independence or reunification and Azerbaijan was always guaranteed to immediately ally with Turkey after separation(and they would want a land connection via Nakhichevan anyway). It would probably need an international intervention right from the get-go.

Tajikistani Civil War: Once again, problems here started with Glasnost. Over the 80s it basically got revealed that there was a still a substantial religiously Muslim population that was not really interested in liberal democracy. Here there was a very simple solution: Either significant devolution or country had to split up. Tajikistan is exactly like Afghanistan in that tribal identity dominates allegiance to the "nation".

First Chechen War: Simple. He had to basically remigrate all Russians out of Chechnya(given that they were resettled there by the USSR in the first place, after Chechnyans got deported due to collaborating with Nazis in large numbers), then build a massive border wall and then grant them independence.

>it looks like Yeltsin was calling the shots by late* 1991

Yeltsin was a disgusting idiot, which makes sense given that he drunk 24/7, but at the same time he already got handed a very bad situation. On the southern border of Russia, the situation basically was

"Here Boris, my Perestroika has created an entire southern flank of countries who want a caliphate and who want to kill russians which were resettled there by Soviets. Enjoy, I'm out!"

> do you have any opinions on the effect of the cancellations of Kennedy and Khrushchev on détente?

Don't know enough about Kennedy, I wouldn't say Brezhnev was anti-détente, it's just that Khruschev was very pro peace. Part of why he got cancelled(Famous quote from Molotov: "We dropped our pants before the West. It turns out that the goal (of USSR) is not to fight against imperialism, but to fight for peace".

Fair enough, those all sound much better than what actually happened (although massive border walls are easier to say than do, and the current Tsar might lack for Cossacks without Chechens?)

Running the numbers, I'm still impressed with what was historically managed:

  country  pop(m)  deaths(k)   ratio
  USSR       290      50       0,17
  India      361    1000       2,8
  Yugoslavia  23,5   135       5,7

by these numbers, Gorbachev's devolution worked about 15 times better than Mountbatten's.

> "...Enjoy, I'm out!"

Did Yeltsin really get handed a bad situation, or did he grab one? I'm calling it as: ломаешь, покупаешь.

Re: Molotov, the fight against imperialism took somewhat longer than expected, according to https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...

> In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America. To him it was a sham, a front for the great capitalist trusts, which—even though the capitalists themselves might not know it—were doomed to get bigger on a shrinking market, until international capitalist war, bankruptcy, and working-class revolution was the result. Lenin was as sure that this would happen as he was that the sun would rise the next morning. The only dispute was the matter of timing; a few Bolshevik pessimists thought that the capitalist world might last into the 1920's.

I'd say that the USSR owed its existence to the German Empire and the British Empire having gotten into a Sith Master/Apprentice game in 1914 (and then their descendants in 1939...) which the Russian Empire (as part of the global British imperial strategy of "let's you and him fight") got dragged into.

So, as pure fantasy: in a brighter future (a прекрасное далёко?) instead of also playing Sith Master/Apprentice, the post-{Great Patriotic War,WWII} US and USSR would have converged on something closer to a western european social democratic model, where competing corporations tackled the problems they were suited for, and collective congresses tackled the problems they were suited for.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqOo_bZ4AYE

Sorry, did not see you responded, responding late.

>Gorbachev's devolution worked about 15 times better than Mountbatten's.

Oh, I'm not arguing about that. I was making more of an objective case, sorry if it wasn't clear, I think the British decolonialization was handled horribly. But Gorbachev already had the benefit of hindsight and he was kind of the initiator of a whole lot of it, whereas Mounbatten was basically handed a hot potato by Atlee(and here Churchill escapes criticism even though some of his behavior throughout his carrier made the Labor rapid decolonization inevitable).

>US and USSR would have converged on something closer to a western european social democratic model There is a very interesting book kind of related to this, The Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin. A lot of parallels between the US and USSR in terms of what actually happened.

>current Tsar might lack for Cossacks without Chechens? The unfortunate reality of the Ukraine War seems to be(according to Russians I keep in contact with) that the Varangian Guard/Swiss Mercenary thesis for Chechens, which was sold and shilled by pro-Putin mouthpieces for the last 20 years as part of the reconciliation, is completely destroyed for the ordinary russian. Akhmat and all other "commandos" are viewed as tiktokers by the majority of russians, it seems. There will be a lot of ethnic tension due to that, I think.

>I'd say that the USSR owed its existence to the German Empire and the British Empire The classic Russian historiographical view(i.e most Russian historians) is that some sort of civil war was basically inevitable in some capacity after the loss in the Russo-Japanese War(and the absolutely horrible way it was conducted), but it could've maybe ended up in a highly depowered monarchic system without WW1, instead of outright communism.

>Did Yeltsin really get handed a bad situation, or did he grab one? Yeltsin did grab it with both his hands, the comment was more about how pathetic Gorbachev's behavior was during that time. As soon as he left office he basically set up shop doing historical revisionism with the Gorbachev foundation about how "actually here is why perestroika was awesome" whilst everything went to shit around him(on the basis largely of his own policies and his dilapidation of the Soviet state).

That all makes sense; I probably won't have anything new to say until I've checked out Martin's book (as well as Jaimoukha's on the Caucasus, as recommended by alephnerd)...

Thanks very much for the reply! (I enjoy multi-{day,week} convos, but HN makes them difficult to continue)

EDIT: OK, I guess one thing: as to "Cossacks" I'd meant the analogy to be use against domestic, not external, enemies; maybe I'm reading too much between the lines when I hear rumours of Chechens involved in violent altercations throughout the RF but never being prosecuted?

They can try reviving the age of Empires.

US hasn’t directly gone into a war with another nuclear superpower.

When it does, it gets dirty pretty fast.

It hasn’t been a 100 years since nukes were used. And those nukes were weak sauce.

The world will slowly get bloody.

AI won’t help. It only adds to the fire.

Of course, let's talk about China, Russia and Iran. Not about the US and Israel, who have been bombing everywhere in the ME for decades, and are currently engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide.

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