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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the loss of life is kind of horrifying. Especially when you consider the vast majority were unarmed transport ships of some kind. I cannot imagine slowly trawling along in some tanker when suddenly you're under fire from a uboat with no way to shoot back.

I feel like we're 'sleepwalking towards war' today with China over Taiwan (many top military brass have said they expect a war later this decade), and to be brutally frank, it's kind of insane to me that the powers that be have decided a mountainous island and some computer chips are worth the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands or even millions of human lives. I hope sanity prevails.

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What would be the more sane version? Allow nuclear armed states to invade whoever they want whenever they want?

This comment comes from a misguided position of believing USA are in the position to allow or disallow. As this article shows, ‘disallow’ is not as straight forward as it seems.

It's not solely up to the USA. The larger question remains, how does the world prevent nuclear states from simply taking over their neighbors?

By giving nuclear states a vested interest in maintaining the world order as it is. We've mostly managed to do that so far, even if with Ukraine and potentially Taiwan it's looking a bit iffy.

Yeah, and obviously so long as that continues then the US won't go to war... the conversation is about what happens if China invades Taiwan.

It seems like the current system is working, since it hasn't really happened?

Otherwise wouldn't Russia have just walked into Ukraine with a nuke saying "we're the boss now or eveyone is dead"?

Russia has consistently used nuclear blackmail in Ukraine.

The West has responded with a very slow, incremental ramping up of aid to avoid triggering it.

If Russia didn't have nukes, the situation in Ukraine would look very different.

Why is Russia fighting an actual war with half a million casualties if nuclear blackmail works?

Nuclear blackmail is what stops NATO from ending the war overnight tomorrow with a massive air assault on Russian troops in Ukraine. Instead, we ship arms over the border and wring our hands with every small ratcheting up of aid calibrated to hopefully not trigger it.

Blackmail doesn't have to be perfect to be functional. The West has correctly assessed "they're not going to nuke us over x" so far, but it remains a consideration.

A less charitable view of the strategy is that the west is letting Ukraine bleed out defending itself with too little support to win, and too much to lose.

The current war situation is quite convenient for the US. They watch the Russians screw themselves up in Ukraine while mostly supplying it with aging weapons that were mostly sitting around close to being decomissioned. O handy way to get rid of old inventory and also to push Eastern European NATO members to update their stuff: donate your USSR-made scrap to Ukraine and we'll give/sell you more modern NATO compatible equivalents. Putin was dumb enough to start a war and enable this. And this time the US reacted with more than just sanctions.

Things may very well work out that way for the arms industry.

But it's not just like US policy in Ukraine is just a big sham to get these countries to buy modern weapon systems, if that's what you're insinuating.

Of course it's not a big sham, we want more modern US or NATO weapons systems. Most of us also want our Soviet inventory donated to Ukraine and getting used against the Russians. I'm not insinuating anything, just stating a fact.

Ah, okay - my mistake.

At least the excess inventory will finally be put to good use, then.

It's a sad day that machines of war are better when "put to use" than recycled or left to rott in museums. But I agree that use against an unprovoked invader is more just than 'peace' under the boot of a dictator.

“The US” isn’t doing that. Democrats are trying to defend our ally, and Republicans are trying not to. The net result is a rather incoherent US position, not a malicious one.

Totally coincidentally, Republican media figures are being discovered to be essentially Russian stooges. It’s very shocking, if you happened to ignore their constant purveyance of Russian propaganda.

Another way to think about it though is without nukes there’d be nothing stopping NATO and Russia blowing the crap out of each other. That might not actually be better.

If we ignore nibbling up bits of various sovereign nations while we look away and hope it stops, sure.

Russia isn’t gonna stop with Ukraine just like they didn’t with Georgia and Moldova.

NATO has completely undermined itself by watching Russia attack its neighbours and responding so weakly. What’s the point of a nuclear deterrent if your key strategy is going to be appeasement?

Did you read up about MAD and how computers evolved because the US was calculating what to nuke in the USSR in the event of a nuclear strike?

The point of nuclear deterrent is to have it, not to use it. If one has too much of it they'll go bankrupt like the USSR. None and they'll get attacked or invaded. That's why nobody attacks North Korea and Iran mainly uses proxies to attack Israel.

That’s a bit simplistic.

Plenty of countries have no nuclear weapons and aren’t attacked.

The USSR didn’t fall because it had too many nuclear weapons.

Plenty of nuclear armed countries have been attacked or invaded.

Who is under the impression that the USA allowing/disallowing is straightforward? Do you think it's some secret that war is costly?

sadly for some people yeah

The more sane version is China leaving Taiwan alone.

Well... sure.

... I dunno, not going to war over something like that, maybe?

So to allow nuclear armed states to invade whoever they want, got it.

Ah, thank you for adhering to general internet commenting guidelines, where we insert words into others mouths that aren't the most generous interpretation of what they could be saying. No, I certainly wouldn't have stepped back further, as another respondent said, and argued that China should leave Taiwan alone, nope - I definitely insinuated that nuclear-armed states should invade folk at their own whim and we should do nothing about it.

Yep, you're right, that's definitely where I was going with it.

Edit: To make things perfectly clear, "not going to war" starts with "don't invade another country". I'm not sure how that isn't obvious.

The premise of the conversation is China deciding to invade Taiwan.

"Would prefer if they didn't" is a sensible position to hold and not an actual contribution to the conversation.

No, the premise of the conversation is "sleepwalking towards war". Sleepwalking involves doing things that you're not aware you're doing, which could have dire consequences. The alternative is to wake up and be conscious of moving things in the right direction.

Sensible positions worth holding are valid contributions to conversations.

Okay then we can conclude here: everyone agrees that we should avoid sleepwalking into war.

Fruitful! Highly informative as to what decisions need to be made henceforth.

Not sure why you feel the need to gatekeep the kinds of responses we can give to your question - you asked, and I sure wasn't the only one with that answer. But maybe you're right - maybe we should cherry pick what we discuss, you never know if Xi will stumble upon this very HN thread and realize that he needs to change course thanks to our highly informative discussion.

No one here thinks Xi should go invade Taiwan.

Yeah, that's the "just give Hitler Czechoslovakia and hope he's satisfied" approach.

It hasn't historically worked that well.

"Not going to war" starts with "don't invade another country".

China gets to "don't invade another country" with regards to Taiwan.

If China chooses to invade, the US is left with a choice of how to intervene. "No war" isn't on the table any more, even if the US choice is "don't get involved in the war and let our ally get clobbered".

Except China doesn't consider Taiwan another country and goes to lenghty efforts to prevent anyone else from doing just that.

When I say I 'hope that sanity prevails' I'm hoping that China realizes Taiwan isn't worth the cost. I'm also extremely dubious that it's worth 10's or even 100's of thousands of American lives for us to intervene. I'm happy for us to sell Taiwan as many weapons as they want for them to defend themselves, but I draw the line at putting American lives at risk for a country that has taken a negligent attitude to it's own defenses in the hopes that we bail them out.

Directionally agreed, but what gives you reason to say Taiwan has neglected its own defenses in the hopes that we bail them out?

I compare them with Israel, another small nation with high defense needs. They've spent less than 2% of their GDP on defense until very recently, they don't have a strong history of conscripting and training their civilian population. In short, they seem to have operated under the assumption that the united states would ride in to save the day.

I am a little sick of seeing the US, a country with two friendly neighbors, and massive oceans between us and our nearest peer adversaries spend ~ 1T / yr on defense to be the 'world's police'. The real threat to our security is at home.

Why is 2% a meaningful number? Less than that is insufficient and more than that is sufficient? Taiwan couldn't effectively defend itself against China regardless of how much it spends on defense. Nor could any other country on the planet except potentially the US.

> I am a little sick of seeing the US, a country with two friendly neighbors, and massive oceans between us and our nearest peer adversaries spend ~ 1T / yr on defense to be the 'world's police'.

If you think the US isn't a major beneficiary of global peace and open trade, you are very mistaken. It isn't a charity project, it's a strategy.

> The real threat to our security is at home.

What does this mean?

>Taiwan couldn't effectively defend itself against China regardless of how much it spends on defense.

They don't have to be able to defeat China to deter them, they simply have to make an invasion too costly to be worth it. Google porcupine strategy.

If Taiwan was serious about their defense, they would have a higher percentage of their population conscripted and trained for longer. They would have been spending a much higher proportion of their GDP on defense. The fact that they've done neither of these things tells me they're passing the buck to us and expecting the US to pay the cost (in both money and lives) of their defense, and I don't think we should.

>If you think the US isn't a major beneficiary of global peace and open trade, you are very mistaken.

You don't think the world had free trade before US hegemony? The truth is that other countries would step up and help shoulder the burden instead of simply relying on us to do everything.

I'm extremely doubtful of the benefit to the average us citizen of the tens of trillions of dollars in us military expenditures since WWII. I think we would find ourselves in a more stable, prosperous country had we spent that money on education, infrastructure and healthcare.

Regardless, I'm not interested in continuing this conversation further. We're not going to change each others minds.

Again, what benchmark are you using to assess the sufficient level of deterrence, GDP ratio, or conscription?

As far as I can tell, we have solid empirical evidence that those things are sufficient, based on the fact that China hasn't invaded.

> The truth is that other countries would step up and help shoulder the burden instead of simply relying on us to do everything.

Right... and they would each overlay their own protectionist policies.

I don't know who in here said the US's military expenditures are optimal, but it wasn't me. I hope you find 'em so you can tell them they're wrong!

That seems to be the recent business plan of the military industrial complex. Wars aren't popular among US voters, and military recruitment numbers are struggling. Instead, if we sell slightly dated weapons to foreign armies then the money keeps flowing into our war economy.

I think this strategy will only work because of MAD, and it's essentially a modification of our previous proxy war strategies that existed prior. It has several risks and benefits. I'm worried that the separation Americans feel (we aren't at war, one of our allies we are heavily supporting is) isn't the same level of separation that the other side of the conflict feels. I'm worried that some of these allies will be manipulated into conflicts in order to generate customers. I'm worried that if our soldiers are needed too many of them won't have combat experience, which improves their effectiveness. I'm worried that the loss of life will have less of an emotional impact when it's happening to other people far away.

The benefit of not risking American lives while still maintaining cashflow for weapons R&D is massive though.

Not a new strategy, predates MAD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

> I'm worried that some of these allies will be manipulated into conflicts in order to generate customers

Manipulated into being invaded?

Isn't that the current status quo?

No, as evidenced by the massive amounts of western arms currently preventing the rape and pillaging of the capital of a democratic European city.

Why should China be an exception?

It can be said as well that war between China and the Philippines may break out even before that given their current encroachment on a number of strategically important shoals in the South China Sea.

Things are escalating in a very scary direction between the two countries coast guards.

That being said the Pacific has not changed in the last 80 years and it will still be eerily similar to the naval escapades seen then - but I anticipate with far greater loss of life despite autonomous capabilities (due to range of weapon effectiveness and lethality of munitions).

A long time ago I was a Merchant Marine cadet. One of the classes we had to take during senior year was on working with the Navy during conflict/all out war.

As we were working through the Convoy Operations unit, I remember thinking that it was basically bullshit. You're in a group of other merchant ships being protected by the US Navy, but the maneuvers were based on an enemy with a WW2 level of technology. If you are attacked by any modern force that somehow managed to get through the outer ring of defense, as a merchant vessel, you might as well start lowering lifeboats.

Well, that and the 23 million people who live there.

Big wars are also historically how we (humanity) have gotten out of financial depressions.

Superficially, it might look that way, but war is a drag on the economy. Generally, there have to be sacrifices made to support a war economy.

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