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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

US policy is now one of forcing the world into a zero sum game and it is a shame because the world isn't zero sum. This means the world will loose the gains from friendship and cooperation that increase the overall outcome for everyone. It is like living in a city where crime is expected so everyone puts up iron bars on their windows and the parks are all locked-down nightmares. When there is trust and cooperation you can have nice things like open parks and friendly establishments but when trust and cooperation go away you get bars on windows. This is a shame. I am ashamed of the US. I am ashamed that we are so shortsighted and scared that we have to play the bully and force a minmax solution when things could be so much better for everyone.

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> It is like living in a city where crime is expected so everyone puts up iron bars on their windows and the parks are all locked-down nightmares.

That's life in Brazilian big cities.

Brazil has been very violent for a long time because the government enforces a zero-sum game against the population. The poor half of the population is overwhelmingly colored people and the richer white half would rather burn it all down than share it better. Brazil is one of the most unequal societies on the planet.

If we go that direction globally, security will erode everywhere.

Trust me, we don't want that. You don't want every metropolis to become like a big Brazilian city.

Go find some Brazilian media website and read the news. It's pretty grim. It's what society is like with persistent high inequality, a forced zero-sum game to preserve status quo and the resulting general insecurity.

You can find the same thing (well, similar) in San Francisco, Oslo, Antwerpen. It's plain refusal to police and hold up societal values.

That is a simplistic assumption. These cities you mentioned have nowhere near the same problem that Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, for example, have.

Brazilian police do overwhelming policing against poor communities and the resulting brutalization only compounds the problem.

El Salvador is strong evidence that the issue is a lack of enforcement. It hasn't been well covered in the mainstream media because it goes against the typical narrative. Their homicide rate in 2016 was 107 - one of the highest in the world and several times that of Brazil. As of 2024 it's 1.9, a fraction of even the US' rate. [1]

The solution? Round up obvious gang members, who conveniently like to mark it all over their body, throw them in prison, throw away the key. If they get violent in the process then don't even bother with the whole prison thing. Were the people just terrified about this horrible abuse of power? No, their Supreme Court made an exception to allow him to run for another term and he won with 80%+ of the vote, his party gaining a super majority, and El Salvador is rapidly going from one of the most dangerous places on Earth to a very safe one.

"First they came for the gang members... and then life was pretty great and everybody lived happily ever after." BTW similar sorts of crackdowns have also happened in numerous places including Thailand and the Philippines (in both cases over drugs), with similarly resoundingly positive results. Enforcement works.

[1] - https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-homicides-gangs-bukel...

I mean, it is covered by mainstream media. There’s like 4 articles on it in the last year in the NYT. Here’s one: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/opinion/el-salvador-safet...

Let's see how incarcerating poor people in droves without due legal process will play out in the long term. Brazil has been doing that for a long time. We have very strong nation wide crime syndicates expanding into Latin America now.

The problem with El Salvador is that it's a better lock up 9 innocent people than let one guilty person go free type of problem now. And it is guilt by how you look and some association.

It's great if you're a tourist with limited Spanish ability and are tired of Costa Rica. Very shitty if you have any family members that get thrown in jail forever with out due process based on how the government felt they looked.

It's also apparently great if you live in El Salvador. His approval rating is > 90% and has been flirting with getting mighty close to 100% +/- statistical noise. Gang tattoos are not random - they are intentionally designed and chosen to indicate your unambiguous affiliation with a specific gang in order to prove loyalty and acceptance. In many cases they can also go much further indicating rank, crimes committed, and more.

They are also often done in very visible places, including the face and hands. Here [1] for instance are various individuals with MS-13 (which was a group initially started by Salvadoran migrants in LA) tattoos. You're not going to make a mistake there, and the gang itself would have also also taken care of imposters.

The groups expressing concern about the gang members tend to be Western human rights organizations in different countries. The president of El Salvador has offered to allow the countries of these groups to take in as many of the prisoners as they would like, if they'd like to more personally look after and ensure their rights. His offers have not been accepted.

[1] - https://yandex.com/images/search?text=ms13%20tattoos

there's no similarity. A general property of cultures that are like Brazil's is over-policing.

> a general property of cultures that are like Brazil's

Interesting take. Another such "superior" culture (or rather, superior military-industrial economy built on sustaining/managing conflict) exports mass policing technology to Brazil. https://idanlandau-com.translate.goog/2016/02/04/technologie... (in Hebrew: https://idanlandau.com/2016/02/04/technologies-of-oppression...)

...which is OP's point, that it needn't be zero sum, at least not from regional/global superpowers.

As a quick proxy:

Intentional homicide rate per 100,000 in Brazil: 20. In Norway: 0.725, Netherlands: 0.691. United States: 5.763

Not even the US, which those of us in Europe often consider crime-ridden, is nearly as dangerous as Brazil.

Colombia, 25.269. It mysteriously increases with proximity to cocaine.

Hmm, but the Netherlands, though. OK maybe scrub that theory.

Oh, are you talking about Ecuador? Or maybe it's most of latam at this point.

I am living now in Portugal (has its own defects, won't hide it) after 10 years in Ecuador. Here, people park their cars in the street and expect them to be there next day. That would be crazy talk in Ecuador.

And then in Estonia you can drop your wallet or phone, and someone will take it to the police, and you get it all back without even a cent missing. We have robots on the streets, we can leave things like bicycles outside, every store is 80% self checkout with no security guards to speak of.

I lived in Buenos Aires for a year and it made me realize how good I had it. The contrast is so massive that it might as well be two different planets.

Portugal has its issues and it has some bad places, but overall is the most peaceful place I ever live. I wish one day I could go back and live there, but by the look of it it has become expensive to retire there.

Well Ecuador is special even when compared to its neighbour, Peru. The difference at the border is stark.

> globally, security will erode everywhere.

Just a day or so ago, Trump was asked about AUKUS, the closest military alliance that the US is a part of. He didn't know what it was.

For some months now, the Australian Liberal party has been going on and on about building nuclear power plants.

It's not about the electricity generation -- when pressed they'll admit that it might be as little as 4% of the supply -- but secretly it's about giving us the option of building nukes to defend ourselves in case our relationship with the US falls apart.

We can't be the only country thinking like this. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and many others have the industrial base and most have nuclear power plants already, nuclear engineers, etc...

I just checked: Singapore has started talking about building nuclear power plants also.

Sigh...

Not to go too much on an AusPol tangent, LNP Nuclear stuff is more about delaying the green-power transition.

It keeps coal / gas power around for a nuclear future that is decades away at best (and never more likely). It’s a sop to the oil and mining companies. https://youtube.com/watch?v=JBqVVBUdW84

That is probably 75% of the reason, but it does dovetail very nicely with the acquisition of nuclear submarines with nuclear weapons capabilities.

I thought I was just imagining things, but I looked it up and it turns out that the Liberal party has been flirting with arming Australia with nukes since the 1990s or maybe the late 80s.

The planned AUKUS submarines have no nuclear weapon capabilities. They're nuclear powered attack submarines that use conventional weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSN-AUKUS

> In January 2023, it was reported that the submarines were likely to incorporate a vertical launch system (VLS) for land-attack missiles. This would be a first for Royal Navy SSNs, which currently launch land-attack missiles via their torpedo tubes. A VLS system was described as likely to increase interoperability options with the US Navy since future US land attack missiles may not have a horizontal launch option.

The Tomahawk and basically every similar cruise missile can easily be outfitted with any warhead. SLBMs aren't the only delivery platform.

the enrichment required for a bomb vs a reactor is a bit (a lot) different. how will all these countries that are not allowed to have nukes hide their enrichment facilities that cannot be used for reactor fuel? hollow out a mountain like NK?

Why would they need to hide them?

> these countries that are not allowed to have nukes

Who says they are not allowed?

Countries with them.

Like the US, which was offering military protection in exchange for allies not building nukes.

The assurances have now been shown to be worthless.

Yes, and it’s actually even worse, it wasn’t just ‘not building them’ with Ukraine, they were stripped of them.

Countries like North Korea and Pakistan managed to build nuclear weapons and credible enough delivery systems a couple of decades ago How difficult do you think it will be for other countries with today's much more modern technology if they really want to build them? Id be very surprised if the likes of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Israel or even Iran don't already secretly possess nuclear weapons. I'd expext at least several others have ongoing programns - the cautionary lesson from the different fates of Saddam, Gaddafi, Zelensky and Kim has certainly been learned.

One way to read Iran's ballistic missile attack on empty Israeli desert is as a demonstration that Israel's defence is unable to stop anything even approaching 100% of ballistic missiles. With nuclear weapons, the cost of even 1 leaker is unacceptable. You notice Netanyahu's public feud with Iran appears to be winding down.

Israel has had nuclear weapons for decades.

Isn't Singapore's interest primarily in small modular reactors for their power grid? https://www.eco-business.com/news/singapore-prime-minister-s... We're talking about civilian technologies here, not nuclear profileration.

Maybe think about switching to buying French submarines.

> the government enforces a zero-sum game against the population

Can you expand on what that means, in laymen terms?

They assume there's a fixed amount of wealth to go around and if they give anything up they should immediately get something more valuable in return else they're losing out.

In reality, by making certain trades or investments new situations and opportunities can be created, making everyone better off.

If someone is winning, it must mean someone else is losing (hence the "deal" sums to zero)

There is no comprehension that an agreement might actually benefit both sides

This is presumably why you hear such things as "Canada is screwing us for 200 billion dollars a year" because we buy things from them

Edit: you can see it in this thread, too. As though helping poor people could have no benefit to the rich

I've seen it with people complaining about paying taxes for public transit, even though they only drive a car. Bonus points if they complain about traffic in the same rant without ever putting 2-and-2 together

In a zero-sum game you benefit only when somebody else loses and vice-versa.

Which means if you make a deal with someone and they benefit from it - you lost. In other words - you should only do deals that hurt others.

It's a truly vile view of world, but what's more important is - it's false and counterproductive. There's no place for international cooperation in zero-sum universe. There's just exploitation through military or non-military means.

In a zero-sum game world USA does not join WW1 nor WW2. Instead it waits for Europe to collapse and invade to establish "American Europe". Anything else is suboptimal.

NATO makes no sense in zero-sum game world. NATO clearly benefits smaller countries which means it hurts USA. NATO should be therefore dissolved and let's shake them small countries for protection money.

The funny thing is - in such a world USA loses and China wins.

>In a zero-sum game world USA does not join WW1 nor WW2

WW2 is not the best example. The USA got attacked (Pearl Harbor). The USA didn't enter WW2 until the USA got attacked.

> In a zero-sum game world USA does not join WW1 nor WW2. Instead it waits for Europe to collapse and invade to establish "American Europe". Anything else is suboptimal.

That would have led to Soviet Europe. This is a very naive take, the involvement of the US on WWII was absolutely a rational calculation based on a zero-sum game (defeating the Nazi and establishing spheres of influence). The game becomes positive sum on the basis of long term economic development.

By denying access to basic services like education and health care, brutalizing the poor and enforcing laws selectively (black kid with few grams of weed = dealer; white kid with 50g and a digital scale = user), the government makes sure that the only options available to poor black people are misery or crime. Prisons are overcrowded and become effective schools of crime. Once you're through the system, you have very little option besides continuing to practice crime to feed yourself.

An extremely regressive tax system and overly complicated bureaucracy, designed to extract bribes, all but guarantee that only the well connected can invest and thrive, and makes sure that there is very little social mobility. Free education is available at all levels, but public basic schools are atrocious and public colleges have competitive admission, meaning that those with access to private education growing up get a subsidized degree from the government.

Building codes are rarely enforced so slum dwellers need not be paid more than enough to eat.

It is all very well thought out. Brazil is not underdeveloped. Brazil is a slave society with extra steps.

Being honest, this is 100% in big cities, but in the countryside it doesn't hold. A lot of cities between 100k-300k are pretty safe to live, people with gates leaves them open, even leave their cars entire open while getting a beer inside the house (all unlocked).

Most of the 50 most violent cities in Brazil aren't even the biggest in their State. The top 3 are all between 100 thousand and 150 thousand inhabitants. They all have homicide rates that are 2x to 4x as much as the national average. By comparison, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are much, much safer.

https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2023/07/20/anuario...

Reading down the list, I’m not sure the US is doing much better than Brazil. Mexico is stand out terrible.

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

This list does not have the latest data from Brazilian cities. The Brazilian list I linked has dozens of Brazilian cities with a homicide rate of around 80 per 100.000.

New York City is one of the largest and safest places to live.

As someone who had a broken lock on their outer front door for a very long time, I could attest to this.

> this is 100% in big cities

Comparing Brazil with Mexico with Madrid with Tokyo and coming to the conclusion that "is all the same" seems farfetched.

Policies that see "the poor" as the problem instead "poverty" create violent dystopian cities. Good policy works and make big cities great places to live. Reducing inequality, giving good safety nets to citizens, treating drug addiction as a disease, etc. make a difference. Not 100% of big cities are the same.

I think they meant big cities in Brazil vs the countryside in Brazil.

Not big cities across the world.

Yes, I meant in Brazil.

Off-topic: I really need to add more context to my replies without considering the parent comment, it's not the first time that caused confusion.

It works wonders in San Francisco, doesn't it?

I am not American, so I could be wrong, but is San Francisco a good example of a city with low inequality? My understanding is that the opposite is true.

I read the parent comment as being sarcastic.

Neither am I. I just wanted to point out that the policies suggested in the parent comment didn't work out.

As someone who’s lived in Latin America this is something I try to point out to people in the US every chance I get. If you have hundreds of millions you can post up in some remote mansion and get things delivered but even then your staff might steal things, your kids are targets, etc. And for everyone else, even the 1%, it’s not going to be a fun life. I’d much rather pay some more taxes and know that everyone has a safety net and UBI so that a much smaller fraction (never zero) are going to be so desperate, drug dependent, etc to commit crimes, especially the harder core ones. If you’re in the top 1% and everyone else is poor and desperate you are going to lack connection, community and safety. That's not good. We are all happier in a more equal society.

> We are all happier in a more equal society.

Fully agree. I've seen this to be the case

It's basically the Back to the Future II world / timeline, which makes sense when you consider who Biff was based on.

An interesting fact about that timeline is that the writers based it partially on what they thought the world would be like if Trump was president.

oh wow. ist that documented somewhere?

Look for Bob Gale, the writer, in Variety magazine.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/back-to-the-future-writer-biff...

I had to try to find a source for Trump being inspiration for Biff as it just sounded "too good" to be true and apparently it has been stated by screenwriter Bob Gale who wrote it together with director Robert Zemeckis:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/23/back-to-the-fut...

Trump has always been a caricature of the rich asshole. They even made fun of him in a Robocop movie, if I remember correctly.

It's funny as a non-US how many (older) films etc. he's mentioned in (or even cameos in), having never heard of him until (not long before) his first term.

e.g. I watched American Psycho last night, in which there's some 'is that the Trumps', 'why would Ivanka Trump be here'.

I can top that. As a child I was a fan of a relatively unknown sitcom titled “Out Of This World” and I rediscovered it a couple years ago. It was truly surreal to hear Donald Trump mentioned in a show from 1987–1991. (American Psycho is from 2000.)

The novel is from 1991.

I dont remember how much it carried over to the film but in the book, Trump is the person the titular psycho...

> idolizes above all others. Bateman talks about him constantly, citing incredibly specific details of his life of luxury, and is often distracted by the thought of seeing Trump or his wife Ivana out in New York City.

At least some of his cameos were down to Trump demanding them in return for the use of locations he owned.

E.g. that's the case for Home Alone 2, where he demanded the cameo for the use of The Plaza Hotel:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/us-celebrity-news/real-reason-d...

Trump was the prototypical 1980s rich person. E.g. see Roger Ebert's Wall Street review:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wall-street-1987

Or his cameo in the Home Alone 2 film, in the Plaza hotel which he owned.

I think Stephen King wrote a novel about a US president who was a crook trying to trigger WW3. Based on Trump he said. Had one of the Sheens in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film)

Which is ironic, because Trump seems pretty against war on the whole.

He says that, but what do you call being aggressive and hostile to allies -- i.e. threatening military force to take the Panama Canal and Greenland -- while aligning with Russia and China, who play the long game and will pretend to be friendly until the moment they see an opening and take it?

1. People think he's crazy, so he's taking advantage of how they underestimate him.

2. He's taking advantage of anchoring bias: he makes a completely outrageous first offer which then makes any subsequent offer seems more reasonable, even if it was higher than you would otherwise accept. He does this all of the time, and it's a standard negotiating tactic in general, but it sometimes works well for Trump because of how people see him (see point 1).

How is undermining America’s alliances in security and trade with other democracies advantageous? How does that ultimately help us as a county?

Yes, he's of the opinion that the alliances in security and trade have not been a net benefit to the US. Is that shocking to you? He's literally been saying that for years. And thus, he's acting to change those agreements to make them more advantageous and to stimulate domestic production to compete with foreign labour (that's ultimately what tariffs do). He's going about it in his usual bombastic and ham-fisted way of course, but he's doing exactly what he's always said he wanted to do.

Well that’s certainly the opinion, but the point is that no evidence has been presented to support it.

It's completely self-evident that lots of manufacturing has left the US due to trade agreements. This has resulted in certain classes of cheap goods but also made the US vulnerable in key goods (like electronics), and inhibited automation.

It's also not at all obvious that the US has been more secure in its role as world police. Arguably, it led directly to 9/11 and decades of pointless death in the Middle East.

All of the arguments that the status quo was more secure and better economically are weak, at best, given the complexities of the counterfactuals.

I think the arguments in favor of a globalized economy, as well as the transition to a knowledge economy, are abundant and pervasive. I’m not going to argue in favor of them because they are already so powerful and obvious.

If people conflate their current economic misfortune with a US foreign policy of encouraging global cooperation and participation, then they haven’t thought much about cause and effect.

Someone who cared to address the newfound lack of upward mobility in our society would insist on domestic policies that ensured economic surplus was explicitly invested toward the public good.

It has nothing to do with "current economic misfortune". It's simply a fact that globalization makes a country more vulnerable on many dimensions. This was clear during COVID when all of the supply chains collapsed upon countries closing their borders.

While globalization certainly has advantages that have been espoused at length, little thought has been given to their clear downsides, like decimating domestic production and the vulnerabilities inherent to distributed supply chains.

As for the "transition to a knowledge economy", this too entails similar problems. The previous trajectory was simply untenable.

I’m against these vulnerabilities as much as anyone, but if we want to move the world forward as a whole, nationalist protectionism cannot take us there. If every country wasted its resources building up its own fully independent industrial supply chain, and kept it fully modernized abreast of other nations, the average citizen’s standard of living would have a very low ceiling indeed. There’s a reason why corporate mergers happen.

If you want to see truly prosperous societies then you have to maximize peaceful international cooperation through shared democratic values. That takes educated citizenry with post-material values who will be invested in the stability and longevity of such an international system.

And they need to cooperate against authoritarian bad actors like Putin, who seek to divide and conquer.

Trump's for whatever is good for Trump. Stopping a war so he can bring his buddy Vlad back in to the fold? Sure. Starting a war so he can annex Greenland? Probably also sure.

> Starting a war so he can annex Greenland? Probably also sure.

Oh please.

That's the other fun side of Trump. He says a ton of outrageous things but, if you like him, you just pick and choose which bits are ridiculous and jokes and which are truthful when it's actually impossible to figure out which is which. Is he going to take over Greenland with force? His followers will say probably not because they don't see it. Is he going to introduce tariffs to Canada? His followers will say yes because they do see it. Has he done either? Not yet. Will he? Who knows!

But whether he's serious or not about a claim really comes down to whether someone likes it or not. Regardless, I'd argue that's a really poor way to lead.

I don't like Trump at all, but I'm not blind to history. He likes building things, particularly with his name on it. Even with Gaza his inclination is to build something in that completely devastated area.

He's also very sensitive to public opinion of him, and he knows public opinion is against military conflict. People are sick of it.

So war is the complete antithesis of everything he's ever demonstrably cared about. That's a pretty solid piece of evidence that lets you distinguish what seems reasonable, but that gets conveniently ignored by people that let their feelings about him influence their judgment.

I think there's more going on with the war than just he's anti-war, but I can kind of see this argument. But if we take it as true, it would seem that he's bad at working towards the things he professes to want. He either doesn't understand them or he pushes to get the fastest result without thought as to whether that would be the best.

This is my explanation for what you describe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43219380

I don't like it, but I can't deny that he's made it work more often than expected. Possibly with some negative downstream effects we haven't seen yet. Time will tell.

What?

He's threatened Panama, Denmark, and Kanada (his supposed allies) with military action.

He's stated that he would let Putin "do whatever he wants".

He's now abandoning Ukraine and doing Putins bidding (Putin who is one of the biggest warmongers and dictators in modern times).

He plans to "level Gaza" (which means genocide) so he can build luxury hotels.

Even if you take him for his words, which you shouldn't, he's a warmonger not a peace lover.

> Even if you take him for his words, which you shouldn't

This is exactly the kind of unhinged take on Trump that drives me crazy, and I'm not even a fan. On the one hand you say he's a liar and you can't believe anything he says, but when it's convenient for you, suddenly everything he says is completely literal.

The fact of the matter is that Trump has never initiated any serious military action, and he has a deliberate and predictable tactic of making outrageous offers and threats to put people off balance to make them compliant and accept worse offers than they otherwise would have (anchoring bias). This is a standard negotiating tactic, Trump just does it bombastically like no one else.

> He's stated that he would let Putin "do whatever he wants".

The US is not the world police. Other people being warmongers doesn't make Trump a warmonger because he "lets them".

> He plans to "level Gaza" (which means genocide) so he can build luxury hotels.

No, he didn't suggest killing anyone, he explicitly said they would be relocated. That's closer to ethnic cleansing, but decidedly not genocide.

Except the movie came out in 1989. Trump wasn’t really well known in the media when the movie was written. There wasn’t even a trump tower.

He was well known in the 1980s, with a reputation for poor taste even then. He first ran for President at 41 and was on the cover of Newsweek in 1987:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160312080447/http://europe.new...

Doonesbury and Bloom County, popular comic strips running in most newspapers, had arcs involving him, too:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160306081734/http://doonesbury...

In addition Trump Tower was opened in 1983.

Here is a more nuanced take imho:

* After decades of reckless spending and lax economic management the US is going broke in a number of ways. In particular dealing with the national debt before and after Covid are very different beasts

* Coupled with similar problems in other countries and gradual global demographic decline, the global future looks like a zero sum game

* In its relations with other states, America has tended to leave a lot of money on the table since the Cold War era, in order to curry political favor, which it can no longer afford to do

* Republicans speak and campaign more openly about this than Democrats even though they both agree on the fundamental ideas I just outlined

* This is why Republicans are currently ascendant with the electorate and Democrats are seeing some of their worst numbers ever in favorability polls

* It is eminently reasonable to not prefer zero sum geopolitical games because they tend to cause poverty and war, but we've boxed ourselves into this future through decades of poor decisions

I don't agree with your conclusions, but I feel you're arguing in good faith and therefore don't deserve down votes.

I'm not sure America actually has left a lot of money on the table. I see America having benefitted a lot from the post cold war world order (as indeed have most of its allies), and my take is that the kind of extraction of value that Trump has been attempting is at very best only beneficial in the short term.

But again, I appreciate when people with different viewpoints can discuss them civilly, so I gave you an upvote.

Me too.

American working and middle classes have been devastated over the course of forty years by bad trade deals.

They’re the constituency that supports Trump.

Numbers like GDP or total wealth will be highly misleading — and it’s unsurprising that the opinion of the petite bourgeoisie (who primarily make up HN) differ from those groups.

Why isn't the answer wealth redistribution instead of tearing down the world order, tearing down the government, and hoping something positive miraculously comes out of it someday down the road?

Presumably because they view the US as best for their classes when it was easier to do business and less beholden to international affairs while simultaneously not believing that empowering the government in such a manner will benefit them.

When the party advocating wealth redistribution also calls them “deplorables” and flagrantly provides worse services (eg, NC disaster vs CA disaster) that seems like a reasonable belief.

Do you have evidence for NC disaster services being worse than CA disaster services (as provided by the Federal government)?

What you're describing is an American domestic policy issue.

There's no dispute that America has become incredibly more rich and powerful over the past 40 years. The fact that that money is increasingly funneled to fewer and fewer people (as a percent of the population) is something that can be changed locally, without changing our foreign policy stance.

It's not a surprise that the "devastation" of the middle class coincides with the continued reduction of tax rates on the entities collecting all that money. The America that MAGA seems to think was great was one of higher taxes and more social programs.

No, they’re coupled issues — eg, open markets forces domestic labor to compete unfairly.

The manner in which those people accrued wealth is deeply related to the issue, by subverting the working and middle classes domestically.

I understand that many of the petite bourgeoisie believe that destruction of those classes via internationalism is a means to usher in communist policy — but that’s opposed wholesale by the American working and middle classes.

> No, they’re coupled issues — eg, open markets forces domestic labor to compete unfairly.

You're still describing economic policies though, not diplomatic ones, and while they're not entirely disconnected, trying to fix international economic issues by burning down alliances is likely to result in a lot of negative second order effects while not even addressing the main economic concerns.

If we're ascribing bad faith motivations to particular viewpoints here though, I'll point out that conflating concerns about trade policies with the idea that America should entirely abandon any interest in the rest of the world is enormously helpful to countries that would like to pursue far more aggressive imperial ambitions currently being blocked by American power. Having rightfully angry people in America's rust belt become convinced that the only way to revitalize the industries that used to power their cities is to let Russia reform the Soviet Union has got to feel like the political victory of the century to Moscow.

can you explain how an increase in tax rate would help the middle class gain more wealth? it already makes sense that decreasing tax rate, and therefore increasing income, but decreasing income to increase wealth doesn’t make sense to me.

Thank you! Yes I was, and I'm of the view that our greatest strength as a democratic society is our ability to discuss opposing views civilly. I spend a lot of time overseas in societies where this ability is not present and Americans really, really underestimate how bad things can get when you lose it.

So "leaving money on the table" is admittedly very vague, using it here I'm principally referring to two things:

1) For many decades we've had a trade posture and foreign policy regime which emphasized moving production offshore. This generated a lot of corporate profits and some consumer benefits but was absolutely decimating for working class incomes and job prospects. We "left money on the table" here in the sense that money which would have been generated in the US and paid wages in the US tended to end up mostly in the hands of wealthy people in poor countries (and to some degree in the hands of their middle classes).

2) The other way we left money on the table was by opening up our markets to countries which didn't reciprocate in kind -- we reduced our tariffs on them, and they didn't reduce their tariffs on us. This again encouraged the flow of production, jobs, capital etc. out of the US and again hit the most vulnerable economic classes hardest.

The net result of this is that we have a lot of money in the US in a record few number of hands -- when you add corporate consolidation & monopolization to the mix you have a pretty complete picture of why a lot of people in this country are struggling.

So did we benefit from these policies, yeah, we did in certain ways that accrued particularly toward the top of our economic pyramid, but it seems that the bottom of it has had just about enough of this and is getting loud about it at the ballot box.

Those are valid problems, but siding with Russia against Ukraine and attempting to extort natural resource wealth from the latter doesn't address any of those issues. I understand and to a large extent agree with the domestic discontent about who has benefited and who has been hurt by decades of American trade policies, although I think much of that complaining ignores the real benefits it brought to American consumers in the form of cheaper and more available goods. But addressing those issues doesn't require flushing American foreign policy and diplomacy down the garbage disposal and in fact doing so is likely counter-productive.

Do you have an example of a civil discussion? I'm not sure what you refer to.

I don't think this is the future or anyone is boxed in.

Trump & Co are by no measure the sharpest tools in the shed. In Trumps own words they have been up against some really inept people, who have all lost credibility.

Therefore the counter-reaction, which is building, will come, and it won't look like what Trump & Co are used to dealing with in the past. I think that's what interesting about where the story goes next. Whose is going to lead? What are they going to stand for? How are they going to organize? Its an opportunity for the best in America to shine.

Cooperation is never a zero sum game compared to non-cooperation.

That is pretty much the definition of it.

And for example free trade is a flavour of it.

Free trade as implemented in the past seems to have been the opposite of democratic cooperation. Non-elected appointees making free trade agreements behind locked doors, which effect ignore the citizens interest and makes industry regulation irrelevant. It was free trade that enshrined current copyright laws world wide with 90 years after the authors death, which few people in the world voted for.

Free trade only reflect cooperation if done transparently, chosen by the people, and which does not bypass industry regulation that people voted on. If that is not possible then the trade agreement need to reflect the different national views on things like minimum wage, environmental issues, safety standard, animal well fare, justice system, trade marks, and so on.

Further to this point, what people call "free trade" is in many cases actually not free at all. A good example of this is the bilateral relationship with Thailand, they put tons of tariffs on US imports, and the US puts very few tariffs on Thailand. Why? The rationale for this is ostensibly that the US would like to have more political influence in Southeast Asia, or hasn't totally internalized that the Cold War is over, or something.

(It also so happens that Thailand places very low tariffs on Chinese goods - and their government has been currying political favor with Beijing for a long time - they are happy to enjoy unrestricted access to US markets and seem quite confident that the status quo will endure so if we are trying to buy political influence with them, we seemingly have been so toothless that it isn't even working!)

The US has deals like this all over the planet where it gives other countries unrestricted access to its markets, in return for what is not clear. A lot of these deals contributed to the movement of US manufacturing to places like Thailand, which hit the US working class in the wallet very directly. Sure there are also good deals that we should preserve as-is but it doesn't seem unreasonable at all to me that some of these be subjected to scrutiny and revision.

That’s why Trump saying he’ll normalize tariffs is popular:

Many Americans feel cheated, whereby they give better terms to other parties and don’t even get respect in return. So they now support a movement to mirror that behavior.

This is an example of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma: one side defected on a partnership for their benefit, trust collapsed, and now the originally cooperative partner is acting selfishly as well. Reciprocation is a fundamental part of relationships.

The US isn’t the entity that needs to hear “cooperating is better than a zero sum mindset”.

Edit to respond:

Most of those people are upset about that as well:

- foreign owned farmland and corporations;

- foreign owned condos, etc;

- inflated stock prices enriching Wall St relative to Main St;

…and so on. What you’re describing is the concerns of the petite bourgeoisie who have benefitted from inflated stock prices, housing prices, and land prices.

For Trump supporters, ending that distortion in the market while boosting domestic labor is a win-win.

Americans will “feel cheated” again when reality arrives and learn that a huge part of their economic power is based on the world dumping trillions of dollars of their savings into us stocks, bonds and real estate, thus making the US dollar artificially strong, making it possible for Americans to buy stuff and being rich. Wait until foreign money and trust starts leaving the US to see how “betrayed” you really get, now it has been la la land, let’s wait for the next act..

I don't think the average American knows about what tariffs USA has against Thailand.

I think they feel cheated because they are told to feel cheated.

I assume the intended audience for the tariff talk is rust belt workers (who swung the election) who feel cheated for more dramatic reasons like their company folding while foreign suppliers thrive.

> Many Americans feel cheated, whereby they give better terms to other parties and don’t even get respect in return

> - foreign owned farmland and corporations;

That's hilarious. Many languages have a specific term for US private equity investors that rush in, buy up entire countries' corporations, then try to squeeze out every cent of profit.

Especially after the fall of the Berlin wall and the iron curtain this became a massive issue. See also https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuschreckendebatte

Every American - even the demographics that typically support Trump - has benefited from this.

> Many languages have a specific term for US private equity investors that rush in, buy up entire countries' corporations, then try to squeeze out every cent of profit.

Sure — the US bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie benefitted. But they’re not the ones supporting Trump or feeling cheated.

> But they’re not the ones supporting Trump or feeling cheated.

One of the groups most benefiting from the US dominance in the past decades were the farmers. Which is one of the larger lobby blocks and voting groups supporting trump.

And the logic doesn't compute either. Average people around the world got exploited by western, but primarily US, billionaires.

So the average people, the proletariat, should unite and revolt against those billionaires.

Instead the US proletariat voted to give billionaires even more power, in the hope that "their" billionaires would exploit foreigners more than themselves?

Free trade is built on top of economic systems which themselves are built on top of zero sum games. The only thing we can put economic value on are goods and services that use finite resources (oil, lumber, human labor, etc).

A forest, for example, has no economic value but lumber does.

Free trade may optimize how goods and services are dispersed but it can't escape the zero sum game that is foundational to economics.

I don't think it is merely a matter of redistribution. It can escape the zero-sum game through productivity gains, technological progress, recycling, and better legislation (for example, policies that regenerate forests). It may even create new industries as replacements. Because of this, I don’t believe it is inherently a zero-sum game.

> The only thing we can put economic value on are goods and services that use finite resources

A software patent does not consume physical resources (aside from the initial human labor) yet holds tremendous economic value. An app can be easily duplicated, making it a virtually infinite resource, while the patent remains attached to its novel functionalities.

> It can escape the zero-sum game through productivity gains, technological progress, recycling, and better legislation

Isn't that just a temporary reprieve of optimization in a broader zero sum game though?

All of those feel to me like ways to take advantage of inefficiencies in the system rather than escaping the game all together.

There is always the possibility to dig deeper mines, explore further into space or just give people the possibility to live more a comfortable life.

But it is not only about that. Trade is also for comparative advantage. If you ever played settlers boardgame with more than two players you'll soon realize that whoever trades the most wins. And it does not really matter who you trade with, it is just reaping the benefits of trade instead of being stuck with 10 wood that is of low value to you but of high value to someone else.

What you're describing is a zero sum game. The world is limited to the board game, and whoever is best at trading and strategy collects the most finite resources and the others lose.

(Sorry if I lost the thread here. Most here were trying to argue that trade and globalization are a way to escape a zero-sum game).

I get your point, but I don't think a board game is a good abstraction to collapse the real world into. The world is not a fixed, closed system with finite resources. In a board game, expansion and innovation are not possible, only trading and strategy, as you mentioned, can optimise the system to some extent. Moreover, winning in a board game happens solely because of its rules, whereas in the real world, one person's success does not necessarily mean another's loss. Trade can be mutually beneficial, driven by each party's ambitions.

Innovation is an interesting wrinkle in the comparison for sure (I used the comparison only to continue with the previous commentor's point). Innovation only increase the potential usefulness of resources though. Assuming that will always avoid hitting the boundary of the zero sum game assumes perpetual innovation at a good enough pace to keep up.

Trade is an interesting one because it can be mutually beneficial, though it rarely includes everyone. Two countries can trade and both be better off, but other countries excluded may now be worse off. Trade also can't be mutually beneficial with regards to relative gain. Both sides can gain in trade or cooperation but one will always have gained more than the other. That doesn't make my point by the way, but an interesting related dimension to the whole topic.

My post had two paragraphs.

The first tried to explain that it does not necessarily have to be a zero-sum game.

The second paragraph tried to explain that, even if you do see it as a zero sum game, trade between two parties, or trade in general, can give you benefits over ones who are not part of the trade.

Obviously I am trying to describe this in simple terms without writing a book. But i do think the board game analogy holds even though it is very simple.

That's a very limited (XIXth century?) perspective.

A forest (like, anything) has economic value, as soon as you get people to adopt/believe in it.

A forest may even have a greater economic value than the lumber it could produce, if it would, for instance, help/ensure the prosperity of something else that has economic value (leisure, wildlife, heat protection, soil water retention, etc.).

I completely agree outside of economics. I put much higher value on a forest than lumber. Economically, though, where is the forest ever accounted for?

In your strategic business plan, by IFRS accounting standards (existing and developing).

You have several options, account for it as lumber (but... well), or as a carbon sequestration well (so you could get carbon credits, IAS 38), or as an ecosystem providing services (several frameworks under work here), or as a contingent liability or asset (IAS 37, can be in the balance sheet if the probability of event/impact is high/certain).

Even if you forget to account for it, your insurance likely will remind you about it.

Once someone can "own" the forest, that be a bit of a cheat around the whole idea. I'm thinking out loud here, but I think all of you're examples are actually valuing the financial mechanisms rather than the forest itself.

The carbon credits are given economic value, its just not a physical resource like lumber so its harder to distinguish that the credit holds the value rather than the forest.

You ask me how to account for it. In accounting, that’s how, and you can get creative too.

Sure, but in those accounting mechanisms are you valuing the forest or the financial asset the paper ownership of forestland grants you?

I'd expect the lumber or carbon credits, for example, to be the actual asset accounted for rather than the forest itself.

War is a negative sum game. Peace is a positive sum game.

The reality is China is now the top trading partner for most of the world. China is producing 50% of the world's steel. China has 200x the shipbuilding capacity of the United States, etc etc. Cooperation with China is positive sum for nearly the whole world, but China as the preeminent geopolitical power is incompatible with the unipolar moment where America led the world and decided the rules of the road, and could force dissenters to comply at gunpoint. China is far more relatively powerful than the USSR ever was, much less China+Russia+Iran+North Korea combined.

This is what we're seeing play out in microcosm in Ukraine, where Russia is to a large degree being backstopped by Chinese industrial and economic and diplomatic power. Hard choices are required, and there can be a lot of productive debate on the specifics of those choices. But much of "the west" seems stuck in the 1990s, where America can simply will the world it wants into existence by believing in it enough.

If America and the EU had started dumping 10% of GDP into the military 5 or 15 years ago things would likely look very different now, but we didn't and no one wants to do that now either because it would be incredibly painful for millions of people who in a democracy could vote out the leaders who enacted that policy. Hard choices are required, but we're getting mainly empty rhetoric and wishcasting, by those who wish things were otherwise. I also wish things were otherwise - but that and $5 will get me a cup of Starbucks coffee.

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences." - Winston Churchill

And what is striking is that, so far, China is effectively defeating the USA as the world leader, piece by piece, without firing a shot.

Or at least, has a golden opportunity window to do so within the next 2/3 years, while Trump/Musk & co are dismantling the country capacity to function.

China has done that by ruling internally with an iron fist and ruling externally with financial influence.

The U.S. is actually trying a play from the same playbook by abstaining from deploying troops.

When was the last time you saw China getting torn apart in the media for failing to prop up a failed state? They're doing "greenfield" diplomacy without historical baggage.

And the only weapon required was making a constituency of American ignorance, resentment, and mean-spiritedness.

> If America and the EU had started dumping 10% of GDP into the military 5 or 15 years ago things would likely look very different

is this a typo? US already has the highest military budget in the world, the last thing it needs is to put more money into it.

> After decades of reckless spending and lax economic management the US is going broke in a number of ways. In particular dealing with the national debt before and after Covid are very different beasts

Most of the reckless spending is by Republicans via unfunded tax which grows the deficit

Then when they’re in opposition they suddenly become deficit hawks

Republicans don’t mind the debt pile growing providing it’s the rich getting the money, they object when it’s ordinary people’s lives who are being made better

The US has never been richer, adjusted for inflation, both in aggregate and per person. [0]

The idea that there have been decades of reckless spending and the US is going broke I think is not at all a nuanced take.

Anecdotes about the inflation of prices of eggs (which is 0.05% of US economy) don't change the overall facts that are material.

I will grant you that debt servicing needs immediate attention. Blowing up 100 years of foreign policy has nothing to do with that, however.

The number of NATO members spending 2% or more on defense went from 3 to 23 in the past 10 years. Their spending almost doubled in the past 10 years, while the US only grew 15% (actually shrunk in PPP terms). [1]

The US has been successfully pressuring NATO allies to pick up the bill, without having to call Ukraine a dictator and cede Ukraine to Russia without US security guarantees, and promote politics of appeasement that will lead to China taking Taiwan which is the only material place that produces the future's most important geopolitical asset: chips.

The US looking to reduce debt also isn't compatible with raising tariffs on everyone including allies, reducing taxes and warding off cheap immigrant labour, it's the opposite. Trump seems to have 25% good ideas, 75% bad ideas, and 90% poor execution that causes a lot of collateral damage. Penny wise pound foolish comes to mind a lot when I look at his policy choices.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat... [1] https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2024/6/pd...

Averages hide extremes. In this case it hides how much poorer the poor got and richer the rich got. America is not "rich" in a way that benefits the middle class.

And to address that gap between the rich and poor, Trump is ... firing middle-class government employees, cutting taxes (which primarily favors the rich), and toying with cutting social programs?

Median personal income shows the same trend. It's not an inequality issue.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N

"The number of NATO members spending 2% or more on defense went from 3 to 23 in the past 10 years"

Which is the reason that maybe Trump is not working for Putin? By scaring Europe into re-militarizing, that is bad for Russia.

Not just 2%, but what if this spurs Germany into "hey, lets ramp this Military up and take on Russia again". That isn't good for Russia.

And this Trump attack on Ukraine, will unite the Ukraine people.

The things Trump does backfires? Or is that the plan. He's getting a militarized Europe and a United Ukraine. If he wants the opposite, then this is really bad way of going about it.

EDIT: Just trying to find a silver lining. Maybe a wakeup call by a global all powerful tyrant will move the world toward some unity?

There is absolutely zero real life evidence that anyone can possibly point to that supports the Trump is secretly a genius and is playing 4D chess theory.

I didn't really mean he is doing it on-purpose, 4-D Chess style. Just a thought, he could be achieving the opposite of his desires, and by accident helping Europe?

If Trump does accidentally manage to unite Europe, have them end the Ukraine war, and all without US involvement and spending… he will of course immediately claim full credit.

I think it’s pretty likely that he is smart enough to try and use “madman theory” to gain his advantage. Whether that plays out to be a good strategy in the long term remains to be seen. However, in the past it has worked to a degree when leaders have utilized it.

> By scaring Europe into re-militarizing, that is bad for Russia.

Any anti-Russian benefit that has is dwarfed by the pro-Russian benefit of having a wedge driven between the US and Europe, which is what is happening. Even a Europe that invests more heavily is defense is far less scary to Russia than the threat of US military power, especially in the short to medium term. The US has military capability that will be difficult for anyone to recreate, even advanced economies like those of Germany, simply because of scale and long experience.

The best outcome for the US/European alliance would be a more militarily capable Europe still strongly allied with the US. Maybe that was the 4D chess goal, but if so Trump appears to have way overshot it.

The problem I see is that while Europe is waking up to the fact that they need to invest more in defense, they haven't realized yet that they need to build a military that can actually project power if they want to replace/augment the US. That's a different beast. And you are right, no single country in Europe could do that, and it would indeed be very bad if they would try. What has to happen is that Europe, ideally including the UK, comes together to form such a military.

how about a far target of doing anything possible against China? Abandoning EU (thus pushing them to ramp up) and seemingly siding with Russia if needed.

Honest question: do you feel rich?

Yes, although I'm not in the US.

If Republicans would be oh-so concerned about the US "going broke" they wouldn't be pushing through trillions in tax cuts.

And much of this meeting with Zelensky had nothing to do with the budget (or at least the bits I've seen). It's just Trump being upset Zelensky isn't bending over backwards to praise Trump and being obsessed with shown to look "better" than other presidents (which is why he goes off on a tangent about Biden and Obama, disconnected from what Zelensky actually said).

Not everyone benefits from cooperation. Feuds are a great "business opportunity" - while everyone's divided and at each other's throat, you can take them out (or extort/bully) one by one, without any consequences, especially if you have the biggest and scariest stick in the block. So, solidarity, cooperation, and people sticking up for each other are absolutely awful for thugs and bullies.

The US already had all the power when people called it the leader of the free world, when people start using the word "bully," that signifies a major shift.

It will result in a loss of power. Isolation is not a strengthening posture. You need allies to succeed over the long term. This looks like the beginning of the downfall of the United States from every measure.

I don't disagree. But then for most of the 7,000 years of recorded history, GDP (and all the might that wealth ensures) was strictly a function of population. It wasn't until European colonialism came in the 1400s and industrialization in the 1700s that guns, resource extraction, and productivity gains changed the game.

But WW2 ended colonialism and 90s globalization spread industrialization worldwide, leaving us all in the slow roll of reverting to the mean now. At the end of which, the ancient civilizations of China and India, with nearly 3 billion people between them, will return to global dominance.

Oh, I don't think it is the US as a whole that's meant to benefit from this coercive behavior. And it's not just the foreign policy. While Trump keeps pointing fingers at those "who are to blame for our problems" (transes stealing our children, biden stealing elections, immigrants stealing jobs and welfare, Ukrainians stealing aid) and the society stays divided on these issues, plenty of opportunities for business (extortion) arise for himself and his buddies, especially now that his hands are not tied by anything. This strategy worked wonders for another narcissist bully thug named Putin. That's basically divide and conquer.

What will Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's wealth look like when the us dollar isn't the main transfer currency, the world sees the biggest financial crisis in the last couple centuries and everyone wants to cash out on their US bonds because all of a sudden there's 0 trust in the US government?

That's what we're headed towards. The 'dark enlightenment' fascists think they can accelerate a switch of global banking moving towards cryptocurrency. Good fucking luck trading a bitcoin when normal finance is blowing up, grocery stores are going to struggle with stocking their shelves.

The thing that crypto correlated the most with so far has been tech stocks, the most exposed ones. So I don't think crypto will hold much longer than those and will crash earlier than the rest if your scenario was to be true.

Also, if crypto would be to become any money, then it would not produce any yield in average. So it would not be interesting to hold, the whole scenario makes no sense.

They don't have to care because there is so much wealth to acquire in the short term. Trump alone will enrich himself with billions in bribes from foreign companies. The DOGE/Project2025 annihilation of government programs will result in drastic privatization with all of the billionaire class benefitting immediately.

All of the dark outcomes you describe are possible while a certain class has profitted already so much they don't care and will happily retreat into their bunker.

The world, including the US, will be poorer and less safe if the US moves to zero sum geopolitics and mercantilism of 19th century. And the losses will be burdened on everyone else other than the very rich elites. Indeed, even a short review of America's own history would be proof of this.

Even the rich will be worse off. Just relatively less so. It's utterly irrational, but that's what happens when a population feels disillusioned with the status quo, and capital does all it can to push that unrest in any direction but reducing wealth inequality. Turns out the next easiest outlet is to appeal to humanity's worst tendencies, resulting in the rise of fascism.

This will play out over and over in liberal democracies so long as they abide a large wealth gap. It's anyone's guess whether we'll figure that out before there are no democratic states left.

The status quo in western countries of giving absolute primacy to the needs/demands of capital above all else has indeed failed. The share of national income going to the middle and working classses makes this obvious. Yet, this is not being resolved. Instead, the very same groups that have benefitted from the status quo have managed to acquire power on the back of a disaffected populous, and they hold a fundamental belief that multi-lateral institutions/geopolitics do not act in the US's (or their) economic interest.

How did we actually escape the zero sum game that is economics?

Oil, lumber, plastics, steel, human labor, electricity, etc are all still finite resources.

It seems like we've been playing in a much larger zero sum game, and that allowed us to gain temporarily profit from that much larger game. We can't escape it though, only finite resources have economic value.

Because we found something to addd on to each of them.

Oil - nuclear power - renewable energy Lumber - is renewable Plastics - use less (packaging) and more renewables - but yea this is limited and we need all oil for this. Also recycling. Steel - recycling Human labour - animal power - engines - for thought - computers then AI? Electricity - renewables - fission.

There is a lot of leeway if we don't waste the resources and ingenuity and discoveries have made it a non zero-sum game.

A related point I've heard here is that we ultimately only get one shot at bootstrapping ourselves into a truly advanced civilization no longer entirely reliant on finite resources. If we screw up the transition and expend those finite resources, especially fossil fuels, before we move beyond them, we won't have enough foundation left to try again. Nuclear and renewables might replace fossil fuels, but if you run out of fossil fuels before nuclear and renewables can pick up the slack, you're doomed to regress to a pre-energy society and it will be impossible to get back to a point where nuclear power is achievable without cheap fossil fuel energy.

The key here for me is that treating economics like a zero sum game now makes it significantly more likely we end up at a place where it really is zero sum because zero sum thinking is nearly always short-sighted by definition, and getting to the next level requires more strategic thinking.

> no longer entirely reliant on finite resources

I've never quite wrapped my head around what that looks like. What resources could we possibly use that aren't finite?

Maybe we don't hit max utilization for a while, that happens after large innovation jumps, but there's always a cap in natural resources somewhere.

That's a valid point. On long enough timescales, even stars will burn out. But the cap I was thinking of was less in terms of capacity and more in terms of longevity. There's an upper limit to how much energy we can generate with solar panels on Earth for example, but we'd be able to sustain that capacity for a long, long period of time.

On that kind of timescale, it's far less likely we run out of energy before we can move to a new alternative (perhaps an alternative planet). You're right that no resource is infinite, so maybe the better way to phrase it is resources where we won't run out of them before we are unlikely to need them again.

That probably runs into Jevan's Paradox - we may get more efficient but we'll just increase our use to take advantage of the resources we already have.

In what you describe I can't help but see us stuck on a treadmill, endlessly chasing the next innovation to replace the current tech before we run out of resources. We won't be arguing about oil the next time around, bit maybe lithium?

I can't help but wonder what the point is. We could just use less and accept enough rather than constantly wanting the next big thing. I could have 10% of what I have today and still live a more comfortable life than almost all of human history.

Economics is not zero-sum.

People working together are more productive than each person trying to subsist alone. The same goes for countries. The world economy is incredibly complex, and no country can produce everything by itself.

That works in the short term, but the broader game is still zero sum.

There's only so many resources to go around, and at least with how we treat economics the only things of value are scarce.

Innovations and cooperation can give periods of optimization so it feel like the zero sum is no longer zero sum. At the end of the day it is though, and there's probably a decent case to be made that what we're seeing happen today is due in part to us having optimized as far as we can for this round.

How is it short-term?

Division of labor does not go away. If anything, specialization and division of labor increase as the world economy becomes more and more complex and developed.

I say its short term because the inefficiencies eventually get worked out and we're back to a point where we're utilizing all the resources we can make economic use of and we again have zero sum game.

The zero sum game doesn't stop, we just found a way to unlock new uses or new resources such that we temporarily just compete to claim those new resources.

Think of it with land. If all the land we know of is already "owned" we must compete. If we discover new land everyone can scramble to "own" that land so it is temporarily not really zero sum. Ultimately land is finite though, and we get back to a zero sum game after a brief interlude.

The point I'm making is that it never stops being positive-sum. It remains true that it's better for everyone if everyone works together. If you halt international trade, everyone will be poorer.

There is presumably still a limit though. Resources can only be optimized so much, innovation and cooperation helps but that would cap out at some point.

Take a look at plots of land in your nearby city. Not all plots of land are equally valuable. Some are empty lots, others have skyscrapers on them that earn millions in rent. Your example of land as ultimately zero-sum misses something crucial: plots don't gain or lose value in isolation. The neighborhood and neighbors contribute strongly to each property's value.

When property owners improve their land, neighbors also gain value - creating a positive-sum scenario even within your 'finite resource' example. This continuous cycle of improvement and value creation isn't just a 'temporary interlude' before returning to zero-sum; it's the persistent engine of economic growth in the west.

Since Adam Smith articulated these principles of mutually beneficial exchange in 'The Wealth of Nations,' we haven't seen a return to zero-sum economics. Instead, global wealth has grown exponentially, despite population growth and resource competition. The evidence contradicts the idea that we inevitably return to zero-sum competition after brief periods of growth.

I see you thinking, wait a minute, shouldn't we be looking at wealth per capita? Yes we should. That has gone up dramatically as well. Around 1776 when Adam Smith wrote his book, global GDP per Capita was $1012 (estimated, adjusted for PPP, 2011 dollars ), in 2022 Global GDP per capita was $15 212 (computed) [1]

[1] World in data only covers 1820 to 2022 here -mostly because earlier statistics weren't detailed enough- but it'll have to do. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...

ps. Not really related to this answer, but the time-lapse map is just really fascinating https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...

> When property owners improve their land, neighbors also gain value - creating a positive-sum scenario even within your 'finite resource' example

There is a finite pool of property and of buyers though. Its reasonable to assume they if one piece of property gains in value others lose value because they are now less desirable. I'm not arguing the math is absolutely 1:1 in price increase/decrease.

Its very easy to zoom in on one portion of a zero sum game and view it as non-zero. If costs are externalized outside the scale you're considering then it can in fact seem magical, but at the end of the day everything is connected.

Homeowners know this statement is not true.

If your neighbor's house goes up in price, yours is likely to go up too, all else being equal.

Economic interactions can create new (emergent) value, not just reshuffle existing value.

Adam Smith's recognition of this fact is what gave us the current western economies, where even poor people are relatively wealthy, compared to back in his day.

Adam Smith illustrated this 'emergent value' with his pin factory example: One person working alone might make 20 pins per day. But when ten people specialize and collaborate, they could produce 48,000 pins daily - not by using more resources, but through smarter organization. This 240x productivity gain created entirely new value without taking from anyone else.

* Wealth Of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776 (original) , pin factory example happens to be Book 1 Chapter 1; a digitized version of a 1902 reprint can be found at : https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...

> Homeowners know this statement is not true.

> If your neighbor's house goes up in price, yours is likely to go up too, all else being equal.

Sure, if you're zoomed into a neighborhood scale. That wasn't my argument though, scale matters.

If your neighborhood sees an increase in value one across town could pretty easily see theirs go down. If your city goes up because it became more desirable for any number of reasons, other cities must be less desirable and seeing values go down.

We don't have unlimited demand for real estate. Buying real estate mostly in debt buffers the zero sum game somewhat, we have a finite pool of buyers but they aren't directly limited by a finite pool of money.

Edit because I forgot Adam Smith. He wrote of a fictional past and a fictional vision for the future. His examples are fine in theory but they weren't rooted in fact.

Ah, I think the pin factory was a place Adam Smith actually visited back in the day.

But... you have me curious now.

Does this mean you reject capitalism as a system?

And Karl Marx actually I think made similar observations, just came to his own slightly different conclusions. So I'm guessing you're not exactly going to be someone who identifies as socialist either.

Can you tell me if you come from some sort of interesting social/economic/political background? I'm fascinated!

Hah, okay well let's see where this goes!

I do actually support capitalism, though my opinion is that I only really support it in theory and that the few decades I've been alive have had too much market intervention to really be considered capitalism.

I generally would trust a free market to optimize well enough, much like I would trust "the mob" in a democracy to decide its own fate well enough.

I fall very must on the side of individual liberty. That means people should be able to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't impede other's rights to do the same. It also means, though, trusting that the outcome of such a system is going to be roughly optimized and should nearly always be better than a centrally planned solution.

In the context of housing prices, neighborhoods or cities rising and falling, etc I see that as a good thing and as a sign that markets are reflecting general sentiment among consumers. We learn from why we think one market is now more favorable and respond by shifting other markets to better match that demand.

Where Adam Smith really loses me is in monetary policy. Arguments of a world before money looking like someone with bread and in need of chicken wandering around to find someone with chicken and needing bread is just ridiculous. Societies without money, or with a very loose concept of money, were likely to be much smaller groups of people (think the Dunbar number) that worked to take care of each other. You may have had someone that made bread for the community and you just went and got some when you needed it. Everything didn't revolve around IOU transactions among unfamiliar parties because you were familiar. Money is way Kore useful as a medium when you don't really know or don't really trust the other party.

Oh! That's nuanced! I was just thinking that what we call non-zero sum thinking today is the basis of both capitalism and socialism. [1] So if you reject it, I thought you must have some really interesting alternate economic theory you adhere to.

That said, do you think it's more likely that every single interaction between humans would be an exact -1/+1 value exchange, or do you think it'd be a bit more messy like -0.45/+1.213 . If the latter, couldn't -1.1/-4.5 or +2.43/+3.14159 also be possible exchanges?

[1] both capitalism and socialism (despite their many differences) share the premise that economic organization can create more value than would exist without it. They differ primarily on how that value should be distributed and who should control the means of production, not on whether value creation itself is possible.

We are escaping this zero-sum game with innovation. We are finding replacements for expensive materials or figure out how to use less of them. Innovation and knowledge are compounding: a bit more knowledge today means a bit more knowledge a year from now, and then a bit more knowledge a year later etc..

We're escaping it for a while. Innovation can't make scarce resources magically infinite.

We can absolutely find ways to optimize resources we already have and find new uses for resources, but we can't make resources out of thin air.

Innovation can totally do it.. We are escaping the finiteness of oil and gas with wind and solar power.

No, we're replacing finite oil and gas with other finite resources. Sun and wind require hardware to be converted into usable energy, that requires finite materials.

Sun and wind also require massive energy storage solutions to replace the ease of storing energy in the form of oil. Again that energy storage requires finite materials to make, maintain, and replace as they degrade.

Let's not confuse domains: while economics isn't (necessarily) zero sum, geopolitics (in terms of influence or territory) is. US policy has nothing to do with these two facts.

Yes, when you look purely at geopolitics in terms of influence or territory, then that's zero sum. But even when leaving economics out of the equation, which I find questionable, there are plenty of other aspects of politics that are not zero sum. For instance: climate politics, pandemic control, arms race prevention.

I don't disagree, but they all unfortunately take a backseat to geopolitics. When it comes to the behavior of nations, the playground politics of bully and victim has more explanatory power than all the high talk of the UN.

But is that really true? I wasn't talking specifically about the UN, but if you take a look at nations across the globe, also historically, is the behaviour of nations primarily ruled by zero-sum bully and victim politics, or by nash equilibria, i.e. compromises where both parties benefit? I would say that nations that are at war or threatening each other with war are in the minority, globally.

Hmmm, you raise an interesting question. I'm no game theorist, but are bully/victim dynamics and Nash equilibria necessarily mutually exclusive? What I'm getting at is: the threat of force determines every other player's optimal strategy, with a fight always being the last resort for everyone involved.

Under such conditions, Adam giving the bully his lunch money, Bob his homework, and Charlie his lunch may be the Nash equilbrium—that is, until Dave (who knows kung fu) moves to the neighborhood.

Two critical items who give away the total compromise of the administration.

During the conference Trump was asked when did he talk to Putin last time and said "a couple of days ago". No official communication was made about that. I am not referring to the initial call mentioned a few weeks ago.

A TASS reporter got into the Oval Office, and was kicked out when this was flagged by other members of the press. The normal accredited journalists can't easily get into the Oval Office, there is a much more rigorous process for that.

Somebody from the current US Administration, wanted this prearranged ambush, to be broadcast live to Russian audiences.

Not just the US but a lot of right wing or authoritarian govt in general.

The problem with this zero sum thinking is there is another player outside of the countries if the world; nature itself. Think natural disasters, climate change, diseases. No one can negotiate with it or form alliances. It does not care about our survival. The only choice we have is to come together to make sure we don't get screwed over.

Or... here's another strategy collect as much money as you can for yourself, and maybe your family... making hay while the sun shines... drilling and selling oil and gas... Demolish sanctions, play the stock market, kill off carbon taxes and environmental measures...

Sprinkle a little cryptocurrency backed money laundering here... some tax cuts there... Make sure your closest friends are well taken care of...

Then hole up in armed compounds with plenty of fresh water and air conditioning ... and say "f you" to everyone else.

Now you understand the rationale of America's new ruling class.

Those same people could hold up in a compound today. But they like the nice things, restaurants, social events, football games etc. They better start liking the locked down life now, because if things go bad their 20 security detail won’t protect them later.

> Those same people could hold up in a compound today.

If they did that, you'd be outside being happy or something happy-adjacent.

> if things go bad their 20 security detail won’t protect them later.

That's... very optimistic, to say the least. Historically it's not been the case.

20 armed men vs. their beach houses sinking into the ocean, forest fires burning heir land, hurricanes throwing everything every which way, and potentially nuclear hellfire... IDK, I'm betting on Nature (and man's folly wielding nature) on this round.

Which is why they build massive compounds both onshore and on various islands, and acquire the means to move between them unimpeded.

I don’t know if they’ve considered all the logistics but they do rather seem to be at the point where society’s ability to either ignore or impede them is to be done away with.

> means to move between them unimpeded

Which means are these?

> That's... very optimistic, to say the least. Historically it's not been the case.

if things go bad, what is the dork zuckerberg going to pay his burly security force in?

facebook stock? dollars?

not exactly useful

> if things go bad, what is the dork zuckerberg going to pay his burly security force in?

Same as every other autocrat: food, housing, not getting shot yourself.

> not exactly useful

And yet it usually works.

Zuckerberg will pay his burly security force by providing a better future for the security force’s family. Like fresh water and golf courses. Security forces will not leave the compound at the end of their shift-they will live there with their families.

(Edit fixed a typo in a word. Sorry I am on mobile)

OK but why should the compound be run by Zuck, and not e.g. the security force? Why not cut out the middleman?

Well, I am not an expert in governance. I just offered an example to how security forces would be compensated when there is no currency. One could imagine multiple layers of security forces... or some resources under the direct control of Zuckerberg and his direct reports, etc.... Granted, it would be a more dangerous and less fun world for Zuckerberg to live in, but I answered a hypothetical question.

Billionaire bunkers are just billionaire tombs - the only reason billionaires are in charge is the very society they plan to hide from in their bunkers. They have plans for bomb collars, but someone has to maintain them and they could deactivate them, and if your bodyguards want you dead then you're dead.

It doesn't have to be literal bunkers. Just look at the structure of your average "third world" city -- glass towers and luxury condos ringed by miles of shanty towns and slums -- and then a barrier and villas and luxury estates out in the countryside.

This is, in fact, how the end of the western Roman empire looked. No bang, just a long series of whimpers as the elite retreated to armed estates with private armies, taxes stopped being collected, overall trade declined, cities declined, and the agrarian peasantry became bound to lords and estates out of need of protection, etc. etc.

When civic institutions and the taxes that support them are openly attacked and predated upon, weakened and then combined with environmental, disease, or security crisis, one needn't think hard to picture the kind of eventual world that results.

Come together as what? What does this Beatles-era sentiment entail specifically?

Territorial disputes, when the negotiation terms involve only territorial changes is a zero-sum game. It stops being a zero-sum game once you add more terms.

A good example of an effective peace treaty was the Camp David accords that put an end to the Yom Kippur war of 1973. That used interest based bargaining instead of distributive bargaining.

The outcome that Russia is interested in this conflict is:

- annexing territory (Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, etc)

- help Ukraine facilitate the international recognition of that annexation

- Ukraine should not join NATO (this makes another invasion viable in the future)

In this deal, Ukraine gets:

- a ceasefire

- some peacekeeping help

These terms are pretty mediocre for Ukraine. This administration seems to be inclined to think that's the best Ukraine can get and they should take the offer to prevent further losses.

Oblasts like Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, etc. have a high percentage of ethnic Russians living there. That would remain a barrier for Ukraine to achieve peace even if Russians retreat to pre-2014 borders. Nobody knows exactly what percentage of Russians live there because the last census was long time ago.

That would not be a barrier for peace in Ukraine. The war is not between Russians and Ukrainians, but Russia and Ukraine - in fact, that area voted for Zelenskyy. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ukrainian_presidential_el...

Reportedly they voted for him, because he was an actor who played good guys, so people expected him to stay away from big politics.

No, where are you getting this from? His value proposal was that he was a) an outsider in politics, b) russian speaking ukranian. He was elected on on the platform of reducing corruption and negotiating the end to the Donbas conflict.

As a rumor. I admit my knowledge about it fragmentary at best.

Electing a president on the promise that he would stay out of politics. Ha!

Idk if he came up all on his own with the idea of becoming president by first playing one on TV, but I've got to admit it's absolutely brilliant.

The logic seems to be that if he's played good guys on TV, it means he already knows what common decency looks like to regular people, unlike the hardline nomenklatura gangsters who live by their own sort of thieves' honor.

Fascinating approach, and one common to East European worldviews: "these people are evil because they don't know how to be good". It's a supremely compassionate view, even if it's proven more than a little counterproductive over and over.

Do you think people expected Ronald Reagan to "stay away from big politics"?

Trump and Vance also emphasized that Ukraine’s very weak, on camera, and then Trump spent a very weird amount of time taking about how tough Hunter Biden’s laptop was for Vladimir Putin, or something, which he just brought up out of nowhere.

I think it’s a safe assumption their deal sucks.

[edit] I don’t care about downvotes but if anyone downvoted because they think I made this up… watch the video.

Well it's not totally out of nowhere.

Trump got impeached for asking Zelensky to fabricate evidence against Biden by threatening to withhold US support.

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

> The inquiry reported that Trump withheld military aid[a] and an invitation to the White House from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in order to influence Ukraine to announce an investigation into Trump's political opponent Joe Biden, and to promote a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine– not Russia– was behind interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Yes this episode about Putin and Biden was bizarre. The world was watching how Trump was arguing for sympathy for Putin, e.g. quoting Trump: 'Putin went through a hell of a lot with me ... it was a Democrat scam ... and he had to go through that, and he did go through that'.

My interpretation is that this conversation had many layers. One of such layers was that the Trump team claimed Zelenskyy campaigned for the opposition, Kamala Harris.

And one of the objectives of this whole situation was to frame the discussion as a humiliation ritual or character destruction to show what happens when you are not aligned to deter others from doing the same in the future. Shaming individuals who are not aligned is a recurring theme in rallies. e.g.: "Do you see this? Do you want to be seen treated like this? don't campaign for our opposition".

Russia just wants to retreat to pre-1922 borders.

Including the baltic states and Poland.

I'm afraid that Putin's only option left is to escape forward.

Have you heard about "Eurasianism"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasianism https://www.jstor.org/stable/4400555

Alexander Dugin? https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/aleksandr-dugin-vladimir-...

And please, don't forget China and the ideology if Tianxia (天下) and the revisionism on the 100 year humiliation (百年国耻).

Imperialism and expansionism is often rooted in the idea that the peoples of different countries and their respective governments have different merit or value, and one should rule over the other.

Once you start talking about hierarchies among nations and ethnicities, you are starting to establish connections with other concepts that relate to one type of people being exceptional and entitled to rule over others: nationalism and racism.

Imperialism, nationalism and racism are deeply interconnected: if all peoples had similar value or merit there should be no need to change borders because what's outside your borders is similar to what's inside your borders.

The way imperialists talk by highlighting how exceptional your nation and people are or can be, and contrasting against other nations and peoples. And how expanding and ruling others would further improve things.

This stopped being a territorial dispute long ago.

Russia is only interested in a ceasefire as a pause before occupying most of Ukraine.

Not a single time Russia has even hinted to accepting presence of any sort of third party force in Ukraine for peacekeeping.

> A good example of an effective peace treaty was the Camp David accords that put an end to the Yom Kippur war of 1973

You ignore the fact that in Begin and Sadat, Carter had parties on both sides very willing to sign a permanent peace deal. With Sadat even sending multiple proposals to the US & Israel prior to the 1973 war [0]. While Sadat & Begin are no saints, the incumbent and entrenched wartime leader in Golda Meir had to be thrown to the cribs for peace to come to fruition, something that the Trump Admin now seems to demand of Zelensky.

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/30036402

But they are not demanding that of Putin.

What stops Putin coming back in 5 years - as he did in 2022 after the 2014 invaison?

>[0]

This is a common take, but a pretty dishonest one (by the article author of course). It ignores the Egyptian conditions (accepting a withdrawal _in advance_, but negotiating peace afterward), the Israeli reply (offer to unilaterally withdraw from the Canal - set to December 1973 following Israeli elections), and the Egyptian need to fight to 'restore their honour' (as Sadat's wife stated).

Zelensky is no saint (the press ignores his flaws), but actually all parties to the conflict are rather close. The one remaining issue is guarantees to Ukraine (a very reasonable demand), and if Putin finally bends on that an accord will come very quickly.

Every peace negotiation process can be messy. But in the end they found a compromise that both parties were content with and have had peace for decades. That's to me a good ending.

- some peacekeeping help

Ukraine wouldn't even get much of that: this was Zelensky's point, the deal lacked any safety guarantees from the US.

There is no such deal on the table. The meeting was for a minerals deal. All the other stuff was press questions about the future of the relationship.

The U.S. pulling back from policing the world is good for everyone except the europeans who were free-riding on the american military budget. How many deaths and trillions of dollars of waste resulted from liberal internationalism in the 20th and early 21st century? Vietnam, Korea, Iraq? The Iraq War should have discredited the whole project and resulted in throwing the “promoting democracy” folks into gulags. But they regrouped masterfully.

I think American involvement in Korea is a huge positive for Korea and Koreans.

The reality of the matter is that world was going that way anyway, as a result of weakness and mistakes past admins couldn't remedy (including Trump's).

The Russian army is IMHO not anywhere near collapse, it's suffering many casualties in a useless war (for Russia), but ultimately they have x4 people and industrial advantage (!). Trump is being very crass, but any US admin would seek to close this up since simply put Ukr is losing - yet Putin cannot take Kyiv either. What's left is everyone wasting a lot of blood for a some land in Donbass.

The pressure is applied too much on Ukraine though - Putin needs to made to climb down a bit, which is difficult given his advances but maybe doable (I think a threat of unilateral EU forces deployment could do it).

Yes, exactly, and that's the one huge issue with overt Machiavellianism as a strategy.

The big question I've been asking myself for a while now is, why isn't that plainly obvious to everyone in the US? Why isn't it plainly obvious to Trump himself and to his fans?

I think the reason is American Exceptionalism, and the cultural power it has in the US.

If you start from the premise that you play in a completely different league than everyone else, there isn't much to gain from building cooperative structures.

Interestingly, I remember even Peter Thiel saying in a podcast I listened to many years ago that he thought American Exceptionalism was the biggest cultural weakness in the US.

We need to level-set the reality here.

The lines on the map in the Ukraine war do not change in Ukraine's favor unless one or both of the following happen: 1) The United States gets directly involved, and/or 2) strategic weapons are used. The Europeans are not going to be willing to sacrifice their vast social programs for a massive defense build up. I think everyone realizes this, and I think the recent election results in multiple countries there make this point.

You are complaining, I think, about the style here. An argument in the Oval Office. Well, the United States is the main reason that Russia, after its disastrous and frankly juvenile attempt at an invasion, hasn't been able to gain additional territory after the war went into the defensive. Let me repeat that: The United States is the reason this war is still on-going. And as a result of this fact, The United States is the one that gets to dictate terms.

OK, if we can dictate terms, let's tell both sides to be at peace... and while we're at it, Russia should join NATO, and let's get a side of Freedom Fries. ;-)

I understand that you are joking, but part of the problem with how people talk about this issue is that they are either not serious (you) or are imagining that this conflict is similar to things they have seen in a Marvel comic book movie (most of the rest of this thread).

I feel like that's how most people talk about most issues these days. I blame the comic book movies. Alongside a host of other innocuous looking factors that add up to the total disempowerment of the individual. The hell can any of us do, other than...?

U.S. should have responded to the letter that Russian president sent to U.S. president in 1991 suggesting that Russia should join NATO in the future.

U.S. ignored that suggestion.

And when almost 9 years later Putin pitched the same idea again - he was left ignored, again.

EU and U.S. reap what they sawed.

EU reaps what the U.S. sawed.

Russia's descent into its current state is not because it was denied NATO membership, to even suggest so is nonsensical.

It's exactly for those reasons. Just google Putin's speech in Munich's security conference. First, note in what year it has happened and then just listen to his speech, it isn't even long.

I will listen to it, but first tell me - are you suggesting that Russia is an autocratic oligarchy where any dissent is immediately crushed because Russia wasn't allowed into NATO? If it was in NATO, it would suddenly have fair democratic elections?

No, I'm not suggesting that at all, but oligarchy and lack of democracy mostly hurts the country in internal politics, not external. The war would just not have happened. As for how bad the oligarchy in Russia is now / would be (if it joined NATO) - it's no one's business but the Russians'.

The thing is - you might be right. Or you might be completely wrong - these discussions happened almost 30 years ago - even if Russia was allowed into NATO when it was originally planned, its descent into autocracy might have caused it to be kicked out, or it might have left on its own accord. Or it might have decided to attack Ukraine anyway, even while itself still in NATO. I wouldn't be so hasty to declare that if only Russia was let into NATO 30 years ago this war wouldn't have happened - we don't know.

I'm sorry, but that makes no sense to me. An attack has to have very strong reasons, as any attack is very costly, no oligarch would spend money for no reason.

So they would seek some gain then, right?

What could an oligarch possibly gain from starting a war with an allied neighboring country?

And why doesn't U.S. attack other NATO members now?

Surely it has (and had) as much oligarchy (if not more) as Russia has. (I hope you won't argue it doesn't? Since even something as ridiculous as the fact of having lobbying being absolutely legal - just can't coexist with the lack of oligarchs quite by nature/definition).

"An attack has to have very strong reasons, as any attack is very costly, no oligarch would spend money for no reason."

So why did this current attack start? It's been 3 years and there's a dozen theories as to why exactly, there is no "strong reason" anywhere to be seen.

"What could an oligarch possibly gain from starting a war with an allied neighboring country?"

Again, why is Russia in Ukraine then? They went from being brethren to portraying Ukrainians as fascist scum that need to be exterminated. Why is that?

"And why doesn't U.S. attack other NATO members now?"

Because it has more to gain by not doing so.

Again - I really can't see how you can confidently say that if only Russia was let into NATO 30 years ago this current situation wouldn't have happened.

> So why did this current attack start? It's been 3 years and there's a dozen theories as to why exactly, there is no "strong reason" anywhere to be seen. > Again, why is Russia in Ukraine then?

The strong reason for this attack was Russia's security concerns got ignored and stepped on by a military alliance (NATO).

The military alliance that claims Russia to be their most probable enemy and thus a military alliance AGAINST Russia.

The military alliance first broke some spoken agreement with Russian of non-expansion of said military alliance. Then did that again and again to the point where NATO wanted to advance in its expansion so much far as to the neighboring country to Russia.

This is simply not acceptable for Russia, so it had to prevent that expansion, which it did. It could only be done by force, if the other side refused to drop possibilities of joining NATO. They didn't drop them - they got invaded for demilitarization. They resist - they die. The ones who don't resist (civilians) - aren't targeted at all (however, in a war there are always casualties among civilians).

> They went from being brethren to portraying Ukrainians as fascist scum that need to be exterminated. Why is that?

Because that's what Ukrainian officials policy was towards Russian natives living on their land and daring to speak their native Russian language.

> I really can't see how you can confidently say that if only Russia was let into NATO 30 years ago this current situation wouldn't have happened.

How is that not clear? If Russia would be part of NATO - it would have 0 security concerns of NATO expanding up to its borders. If there would be no security concerns - it wouldn't start the special operation, there simply would be no reason to, as Ukraine would probably in that case be a part of NATO as well (as well as Belarus and probably Kazakhstan and some other ex-USSR *stans)! Just that simple.

That's a convenient narrative but it overlooks the desire to prevent normalization of hostile takeovers.

Russia tried to pretend that its satellite states and NATO were similar arrangements (with the latter thus being under US control), because that would make it seem like they were on even ground.

To the extent it ends up being true, it will be due to Russia's influence (conveniently allied with others' authoritarian tendencies).

The strong reason for this attack was Russia's security concerns got ignored and stepped on by a military alliance (NATO).

NATO is a defensive pact. Putin invaded Ukraine because he wants their port, arable land, and because he wants to go down in history as "reuniting" the Russian empire. Also, Russia has wanted to exterminate the Ukrainian cultural identity, which they've tried to do since before the Soviet Union:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russias-i...

Putin's whining about NATO is pure bullshit propaganda. Just like his claims of Nazis in Ukraine. It's all fiction, where he writes Russia as the victim.

>>This is simply not acceptable for Russia, so it had to prevent that expansion, which it did. It could only be done by force, if the other side refused to drop possibilities of joining NATO

Russia can't and shouldn't have any say in what pact or alliance a sovereign country on their border wants to join. They have no right to. And well done preventing NATO expansion - where now thanks to their actions NATO did expand right to their border. Really 4-dimensional chess play guys.

>>The ones who don't resist (civilians) - aren't targeted at all

Yes I'm sure all these bombs falling on Ukrainian hospitals are just targeting errors.

And Bucha was what? An accident?

> The strong reason for this attack was Russia's security concerns got ignored and stepped on by a military alliance (NATO).

If it were a simple individual somehow escalating to nation state level, I could understand them being initially forced to use deception, but not so for an entity that is already a nation state. Especially not so for a nuclear nation state!

Right before the outbreak of the full scale war (ignoring ~2014), Western intelligence services observed troops, tanks, military materiel amassing on the Russian / Ukranian border. In an attempt to dissuade Russia from invading the UK intelligence services decided to predict Russia's invasion publicly.

Russia repeatedly claimed "Nyet, nyet, no invasion, just some push-ups next to border!"

If a nuclear power were acting on existential security concerns, the last thing it would do is hide the connection to security concerns and pretend just doing sonme push-ups on border.

To me this invalidates this whole theory of yours and imcritic

> The strong reason for this attack was Russia's security concerns got ignored and stepped on by a military alliance (NATO).

Russia repeatedly claimed "Nyet, nyet, no invasion, just some push-ups next to border!"

If a nuclear power were acting on existential security concerns, the last thing it would do is hide the connection to security concerns and pretend just doing some push-ups on border.

To me this invalidates this whole theory of yours and imcritic

> And why doesn't U.S. attack other NATO members now?

They are. Commercially first. Through technology second (the dependance of the world upon US software and hardware technology is the perfect kill switch - and the scale and pace at which we are going to need to get out of it is immense now that it is intimately tied to our professional and personal lives... but we have no choice).

And they might go further if those firsts are not enough.

Sounds like fair play to me. Where's the border between oligarchs attacking other countries and economical concurrence between different countries?

It is not a matter of concurrence. The European market is going to be a closed, dead market to US technology.

We in Europe would never have invested so massively to rely on USSR or post-2008 Russia software/hardware tech, for obvious reasons

But we did on USA tech, for obvious reasons too (common history and values, democracies, multiple war allies, cooperation, and... US used to be the beacon of progress and freedom), that have all been brutally thrown out.

So why would we now?

The only difference would be that then NATO member Russia would be annexing other NATO members, which would be even more awkward.

You make no sense: why would Russia do it then?

It does now for the very clear reasons:

1. NATO, while being openly hostile towards Russia (you may read the current NATO's doctrine where Russia is named as the #1 probable enemy of NATO), attempted to expand to Ukraine, which is just not acceptable (to Russia) at all.

2. Russian nationals (and Russian speaking Ukrainian nationals) got oppressed in Ukraine, but that happened mostly as a result of the division of country into two parts where one was pro-Russian and the other was pro-West (EU, NATO).

I don't think the 2nd reason would even occur, since if Russia was in NATO - it would rather even seek Ukraine then joining it too. There would be no 'maidans' (coups) in Ukraine, there would be no division of the country and thus the oppression of Russian nationals (and Russian speaking Ukrainian nationals) just wouldn't have taken place then.

I think the conflicts concerning Russia then would rather shift towards Middle East (like Turkey having some beef with Russia over who supports whom in Iran, Palestine, Israel and so on) and maybe towards China/India.

> NATO, while being hostile towards Russia attempted to expand to Ukraine, which is just not acceptable at all.

That literally didn't happen. Ukraine and Georgia sought NATI membership, and in the 2008 NATO summit were (largely at Russia’s urging) rebuffed from being given Membership Action Plans; Russia immediately invaded Georgia, and Ukraine abandoned pursuit of NATO membership.

Then, in 2014, the Ukrainian people threw out the pro-Russian leadership that had come to power in the interim. Russia invaded large swathes of the country and, after that, Ukraine’s government again started seeking NATO membership.

There were no approaches by either side being made before the invasion. Pro-Russian propagandists like to pretend the 2022 escalation was the initial Russian invasion, ignoring most of the time the war has been being fought, so that they can blame the war starting on Ukraine’s response to the invasion by which Russia actually started the war.

I think you forgot that part where Putin wants to establish the Russian empire again.

Nobody gave the slightest fuck about Russia. Even the annexation of Crimea and the proxy war in the Donbas was mostly ignored.

There was ZERO chance of Ukraine joining NATO. Do you really think that Hungary, Germany, Slovakia..... would vote for Ukraine membership while there are still disputes in the Donbas and about Crimea?

@2) Sure, and Hitler also only saved the Sudetendeutschen.....

Putin himself said 2002 that he would have no problems with Ukraine joining NATO: “I am absolutely convinced that Ukraine will not shy away from the processes of expanding interaction with NATO and the Western allies as a whole. Ukraine has its own relations with NATO; there is the Ukraine-NATO Council. At the end of the day the decision [on Ukraine joining NATO] is to be made by NATO and Ukraine. It is a matter for those two partners.”

Considering that Trump now, all but disbanded NATO there should be no more reason for further Russian attacks, no?

But really, just read and watch Russian media, listen to their politicians. The aggressive imperial aim is very open, transparent and also accepted by the people.

> Nobody gave the slightest fuck about Russia.

It really is tiring listening to the Russian apologetics coming from other posters in this thread.

"Russia felt threatened"

No. Nobody wants to invade Russia.

The deal since the end of the cold war has been this: Russia can do whatever the hell it likes inside its own borders. Its oligarchs with Putin at the front can rob and pillage the country to their hearts content. Putin can use his loyal FSB to suppress the opposition, rig elections, and dominate the domestic media and brainwash his population to believe whatever he want them to believe. The rest of the world will do no more about this than hand out tiny wrist slaps, while holding their noses and trading with Russia. They kept their seat in the UN security council. They were invited into G7. They were treated as an equal to larger, richer, liberal, democracies.

The only reason there is war in Ukraine is because this incredibly generous deal was not enough for Putin and his ilk, they wanted more. More influence, more power, more vassals. They want to restore the mythical glory of the Russian empire, or the Soviet empire, or both. They want all the territories that Russia has ever held dominion over. Getting control over Ukraine would have given that dream a big territory, population, and economical boost.

> "Russia felt threatened"

Are you Russian top military executive or a president of Russia?

No? Then don't speak what Russia did or did not feel.

> No. Nobody wants to invade Russia.

Then don't name Russia as the most probable enemy in your militaristic charts in your military alliance that keeps on expanding beyond reasonable limits.

And don't expand your military alliance that close to Russia's borders.

> The deal since the end of the cold war has been this: Russia can do whatever the hell it likes inside its own borders.

The other side of the deal was NATO not getting any expansions packs. But oh, shoot, it just slipped and happened to expand to... how many countries since Soviet Union got dissolved? ah?

Destroying Soviet Union was not enough for the West and so it wants a piece of Russia now? If you think so - then come and die in Ukraine, you are welcome there.

Imagine the paradox: holding the fate of the world in your hands, but still feeling under threat from a military alliance like NATO

Easily imaginable: every country with big enough nuclear arsenal could be viewed as a country holding the fate of the world in its hands.

But since there can be multiple such countries at the same time and since no one has stopped developing arms/tech even further - I wouldn't call it a paradox when one nuclear country feels threatened by another group of both nuclear and non-nuclear countries coming closer and closer to its borders.

The difference between a rational person and a narcissist is this: one recognizes the sufficiency of world-destroying power, the other will always demand more, regardless of the absurdity.

Here is Putin 2002:

“I am absolutely convinced that Ukraine will not shy away from the processes of expanding interaction with NATO and the Western allies as a whole. Ukraine has its own relations with NATO; there is the Ukraine-NATO Council. At the end of the day the decision [on Ukraine joining NATO] is to be made by NATO and Ukraine. It is a matter for those two partners.”

Why should nations be beholden to verbal agreements that were never ratified by their elected officials, between parties that didn't exist any more in the case of the Warshaw pact and whose legal successor nation official stated they had no problem with it.

Thats silly.

Should NATO have never had any talks with Russia about a possible NATO membership because of that verbal agreement with the leader of the Warshaw Pact Gorbachev?

That was in 2002, when it looked like after years of cold war U.S. and Russia can finally become good allies. That was before U.S. along with a group of other (mostly NATO) countries invaded Iraq in 2003 without any mandate in U.N. and which Russia has opposed to and before the invasion of Libya in 2011, before U.S. carried out Arab Spring in 2010-2012 and before U.S. carried out colour revolutions, especially Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and... Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004.

It is not a secret at all that U.S. carried those out and then it became quite clear that U.S. installs marionette regimes here and there and one of the places was... Ukraine.

Right after all those Russo-American relations going up, up and up merely some years ago.

Russia didn't like being stabbed in the back at all.

You can't really bring non binding, non serious agreements that were never put in writing or ratified and that all parties declared no longer relevant back from the dead and feign moral outrage. That's ridiculous.

What does "legally binding" do good at all? There are no other laws other than the rule of the strength.

U.S. was strong for a long time. It did whatever it liked.

Now Russia restored some of its strength to the point it can show others that sometimes you have to listen to when a bear warns you (quite calmly and nicely first).

For one, if it is ratified in a democratic nation that means that the people had a say in it through their elected representatives.

That way the other party knows that this agreement has some backing and staying power.

Not some dude spouting some ideas to counterparts during very very turbulent times.

Who decides if a nation is democratic or not?

Many people (even Americans) claim U.S. is not a democracy. Every country has corruption to some degree. The only backing and staying power there is - is the force a country has and its willingness to use it to defend something.

NATO is the "Keep Russia At Bay Club". Why on Earth do you think it would welcome Russia into it!? That's like the Neighbourhood Watch letting the local criminal gangs join.

There's a reason Sweden and Finland joined NATO recently.

You're asserting things you don't know.

The war has been in the defensive for well over a year. Yes, I do know this.

Former 11A, btw.

> Former 11A, btw

You say that like it's a relevant qualification.

I would also like to mention that quoting past military service in a discussion on geopolitics is boot as fuck. So is referring to your trade by it's ID number and not just it's name.

So, y'know, okay boot.

When did language devolve to "boot" being an adjective? What does that even mean?

It’s actually a noun, in this case, being used as a pejorative to imply “infantrymen are stupid”.

That would be incorrect. It refers to the embarassing shit people in the military do, typically right out of basic (boot camp). Everyone is a little bit boot in the beginning, you just learn to cut it out.

And no, the infantry aren't stupid. Thinking that qualifying as an Infantry Officer means your qualified to run the entire war is stupid.

You’re right, one should not need extensive ground combat experience or PhD level fluency on this topic to be equipped to identify that the war is in the defensive (my initial claim, still true), and changing the equilibrium requires a massive escalation from the United States (also still true). You can continue with your name calling, if you like.

Yes, the US gets to try to force a Ukrainian surrender, we're all complaining that's a grossly immoral use of power. I don't think the Ukrainians are going to go along with it yet.

The Ukrainian terms are "all of the land back plus Crimea".

Do you understand that this does not happen without the following: massive American mobilization, 2/75 or the whole of the Ranger Battalions jumping, all US Armor units deploying to Eastern Europe, all of 4th, 5th, 6th, and honestly 7th fleet re-deploying to the Med for support operations. A massive amount of U.S. casualties.

Is this doable? No doubt. I am out of the Army, but a lot of my boys are still in, and they would love to do a peer fight instead of whatever it was we did in Afghanistan.

But I will be the adult here and point out that this is stupid.

This isn’t true.

I know that it feels like the military situation is like that. In reality Russia is much weaker than people think. Three years of war will do that to a country.

All that is needed is sanctions and enough resources for Ukraine to defend itself. And the military intelligence as a force multiplier.

Thats exactly what we have been providing. And it was working. Russian inflation is a 20%+. They are running out of soviet era equipment. They are running out of easily conscriptable men. All of this is documented using open sources.

All that was needed was time. Time for Russia to implode.

But democracy is a fickle thing, and Putin was counting on this. America will have to live with this period of infamy for a long time. And the world will suffer the consequences.

> All that is needed is sanctions and enough resources for Ukraine to defend itself.

Whatever makes you think Russia won't drop a nuke?

Edit: Since people seem confused - I mean on Ukraine. Not on the US.

On Ukraine? Or the US?

Either way - I’m pretty sure they want Ukraine and then there’s mutually assured destruction.

Because China won't let them.

Because they don't want to start a nuclear war. It's really as straightforward as that. If we assume they are willing to go for a nuclear exchange then it's a different kind of conversation, but no military expert considers this a likely scenario.

But even Russians indicate that their mid range ballistic missiles don't need nuclear wareheads to cause untold destruction - it was Putin who said that even without nukes their new missiles can level a city. He seems pretty confident in that, despite western intelligence indicating that the missiles are most likely a bluff as they are barely operational.

> Because they don't want to start a nuclear war.

How would dropping a nuke on Ukraine start a nuclear war? Nobody is going to drop a nuke back on them.

"Nobody is going to drop a nuke back on them."

That's not what military experts are saying. If the nuclear fallout reached NATO countries NATO policy would require a "proportional" response, which again, military experts suggest would be a small scale nuclear strike on a Russian facility of proportional impact. The big question then is what would happen next - either both sides cool down and see where this is going, or Russia starts attacking targets within NATO at which point we're at full WW3 level. The "nobody is going to drop a nuke back" is either extremely optimistic or extremely naive.

Keep in mind article 5 says "react as it deems necessary".

> will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary

https://www.nato.int/cps/ie/natohq/topics_110496.htm

If Poland triggers Article 5, just because fallout came to its borders, other members are free to send them iodine tablets and lead tents, rather than starting WW3.

It's not a start nuclear Armageddon article.

Again, the point is - at that point we're guessing. If Poland gets radioactive fallout on its terittory we don't know how exactly NATO would choose to react.

>>It's not a start nuclear Armageddon article.

I didn't say it was - but Russia "dropping a nuke" brings us closer to the possibility of nuclear war, not futher away from it. And according to people who are actually working with/for NATO, military generals in eastern european countries, it is not completely unlikely that NATO would decide that a strike into Russia(nuclear or not) wouldn't be off the cards if Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine brought fallout into NATO countries - and if such a strike was conducted, we don't know how that ends.

Sure, we don't know but we can guess.

While Poland can trigger Article 5, and current US admin will most likely tell them to shove it, maybe deploy some forces there. US weakening ties with EU is going to make nuclear war less likely.

Even if the next US president was very gung ho about it, the fact that Trump got elected again means the US isn't a stable partner. You don't want to enter a ten years war where every 4 years your ally might just decide to leave you hanging.

>Sure, we don't know but we can guess.

you really wanna weigh your odds of nuclear devastation on a guess?

>US weakening ties with EU is going to make nuclear war less likely.

other non-EU countries are already producing Nukes as preparation. I'm unsure about that.

> you really wanna weigh your odds of nuclear devastation on a guess?

No. But my point is you are oversimplifying it. Article 5 isn't a go to war button.

If Poland was to consider it an attack, that's not important. The question is would other members consider it an attack. To that the answer would more likely to be no.

I don't know of an adjacent country going to war because wind blew the fallout/chems its way.

> other non-EU countries are already producing Nukes as preparation. I'm unsure about that.

It could be US divestment leads to lower chance of WW3 in 5-20 years, but greater chance of WW3 in 20+ years.

>>I don't know of an adjacent country going to war because wind blew the fallout/chems its way.

You remind me of a semi-famous study that the American army did at one point. They wanted to estimate the risk of accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon, and concluded that the risk is zero because it never happened so far.

> They wanted to estimate the risk of accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon, and concluded that the risk is zero because it never happened so far.

Given it didn't happen so far, I'd say they were right on the money.

While mishandling and accidents did happen, the number of failsafes guarantees you have to purposefully activate it. Most nuclear weapons nowadays just don't have a way to reach criticality outside of nano-second controlled timing array.

> military experts suggest would be a small scale nuclear strike on a Russian facility of proportional impact

You could attack those facilities with conventional weapons too. What would be the point of using nukes to achieve the same purpose? All it would do is to make it more likely they'd escalate back.

Yes. Because resorting to nuclear weaponry is very specific.

Doing so, you break the statu quo on mutual dissuasion, and not one nuclear power wants that.

If one country drops a nuclear bomb (especially after a long escalation as we are in), other nuclear powers will _have to_ reinstate the previous dissuasion statu quo, as well as assert their status of equal nuclear powers.

And there's a single path to that: radically disarm the offender country, as soon as possible. There's indeed a risk of global nuclear war, but the most probable risk is the annihilation of the offender country + a few other casualities.

The scale of time in this matter is not in days, it's in a few hours at most: it's already been scripted in procedures for years, rehearsed, and it's already been shared among nuclear powers. If we're still able to discuss it, it's because of this doctrine of mutual dissuasion precisely.

on the contrary, even China would retaliate. It's the american equivalent of going into a texas bar and shooting a clip. You are now a proven reckless danger to everyone else and they will retaliate at once in your direction, regardless of if you were being stupid or had a specific target.

They do that because the alternative is a shootout at everone and many people in the bar will die. No single person/country is going to take those odds in an era where there are thousands of nuclear warheads now.

Russia may well, though so far their nuclear posture has been all talk and not much to back it up.

Ukraine is already asking what they gave up their nukes for.

If I was Polish, I'd want a nuclear deterrent.

If I was Canadian or Danish or Panamanian, given what Trump has said, I'd also be seeing if nukes could be developed.

Any single force that drops a nuke today [1] will get retaliated by _all_ the other nuclear powers, even allied ones, at once.

Why? Because that will be the only, short moment, where each other will have the single opportunity to:

1/ affirm they are able and disciplined to use it (credibility),

2/ disarm the offender (own security)

3/ reinstate the balance of mutual dissuasion (global security)

Playing it diplomatic would be a hint of either submission, fear, or incapacity to act against the offender - which none of the nuclear power would want to give.

And however strong, a country can defend against one strategic attack, not against a multisided one.

[1] doesn't matter what the target is: as soon as it's another country, you're toast.

You're saying you believe the response to Russia dropping a nuke on Ukraine would itself be nuclear in nature? There's no way anyone would do that, it would trigger a nuclear WWIII. No nuclear power (Russia or the others) would just sit by and let a nuke get dropped on their own head. They would immediately escalate back.

That’s exactly the doctrine in mutual dissuasion: offensive use of a nuclear weapon breaks the statu quo, where the equilibrium is only ensured if no one uses it.

The first that breaks the statu quo is not a reliable power anymore in this equilibrium and must then be disarmed.

Multilateral escalation ensues as a logic step. There’s no WWIII because this happens and is « settled » in a matter of a few hours.

Don’t want it to happen? Don’t ever use a nuclear weapon. Simple as that.

I still don't follow why the first response has to be nuclear. You could respond conventionally, and if another nuke gets used 1-2 more times, then escalate. You can get the point across without actually responding in kind the first time.

Because it’s a matter of both time (if you don’t react definitely, that means that you may have the weapons but not the discipline to use it, so no credibility), and deterrence (conventional destruction is not a deterrent in this case, and you will only refrain from using your nukes if your are confident that the response will be more nukes towards you - in which case, your initial military objective is void, because the consequence of your action is that you don’t exist anymore).

I'm sorry, I still don't follow. Both of those just sound incorrect on their face.

> if you don’t react definitely, that means that you may have the weapons but not the discipline to use it, so no credibility

You can react "definitely" with conventional weapons. I don't get it. If for some reason you really think they won't get the message that your threat is credible, you could even run a nuclear test somewhere. I see no reason why you have to perform a nuclear attack here.

> conventional destruction is not a deterrent in this case

Sure it is. Destroying/disabling your enemy's nuclear facilities would jeopardize their security, no matter how it's done -- which is absolutely a deterrent. If anything, doing so with conventional weapons should make your enemy worry more, not less.

> and you will only refrain from using your nukes if your are confident that the response will be more nukes towards you - in which case, your initial military objective is void, because the consequence of your action is that you don’t exist anymore

I don't understand this logic at all.

> I see no reason why you have to perform a nuclear attack here.

You reason like a person here, not as a state.

It’s not a matter of life and death for a few single individuals in a triangle. It is of millions of individuals at once, and whole countries.

You do not want to leave the option of a potential other nuclear attack, the scale of the damage is nothing comparable. You do not want the statu quo to be broken, to have been broken. The fact is was shows that the state in front of you (which triggered the initial nuke) effectively lost its sound mind. There is a single solution to that, however brutal it is. And that’s the perspective of this single solution that is at the core of the deterrence: if you shoot, you have the absolute guarantee that you’ll be dead in return. So you don’t shoot.

If there is no such guarantee of retaliation, you have no incentive not to use it.

> It’s not a matter of life and death for a few single individuals in a triangle. It is of millions of individuals at once, and whole countries.

OK, I think this is why we disagree -- because this isn't the scenario I was positing. I was thinking of a case where a "small" (tactical) nuke would get dropped during battle on military forces, to get them to stop fighting. Not a strategic nuke in a population center actually trying to kill millions of people. Those will provoke very different responses in my mind, and I don't think the strategic case is likely. The tactical case is what I'm not so sure Russia will shy away from.

Indeed, we see it differently.

I believe they will shy away.

It’s been made very clear to them by the OTAN (https://www.nato.int/cps/fr/natohq/topics_192648.htm?selecte... ) that it was the red line before a « fundamentally change the nature of the conflict ». That’s the diplomatic way to say: you want to nuke? Just try it, something might happen to you, fast.

China also discouraged Russia to use it, even small ones.

The OTAN capacity may seem reduced without the USA, but escalation is very much more likely since Europeans realize/accept that Russia only speaks/understands « strong language ». They got the memo several times from the US that appeasement seems not to be a working response at this time.

> It’s been made very clear to them by the OTAN that it was the red line before a «fundamentally change the nature of the conflict».

"Fundamental change in the nature of the conflict" sounds to me more like "you will now be fighting NATO", not "NATO will immediately retaliate with its own nuclear weapons." And even if they did mean what you're saying, I don't see NATO or any member following through with this.

To be clear, I don't think anyone's use of nuclear weapons is likely. I'm just saying that if Russia ends up in a situation where its only avenue for "winning" ends up being the use of nuclear weapons, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually uses one.

Note that NATO talks about the « nature », not the « scope » or region of the conflict.

I don’t think nuclear is likely either. Because of the deterrence.

But again, if Russia thinks its only way of winning is firing a nuke, I do believe they will not have the time to be disappointed about their miscalculation.

Because the retaliation is a no-brainer (and again, the scenarios have been discussed and examined for decades, and the procedures are all ready to run).

It will not be about only Russia/Ukraine or Russia/NATO afterwise but about the whole world doctrine on nuclear arsenals and their use.

If we're scared of that why don't the US surrender.

If that's the fundamental issue, everyone needs nukes, every small country.

You don't want that. Living in a small Scandinavian country, I.do think we should at least discuss it now. We can't win any war, but we could ensure nobody else can.

Then China and India would stop buying Russian oil which would bankrupt Russia in a few months.

They already did, about a month ago.

Russians are scared a nuke might turn out a dud.

Whatever makes you think they're able to drop a nuke? They have tried to threaten with that by running trials and the tally is two out of three times there was a catastrophic failure, of which one failure was in the silo itself.

This would be a problem only if there's shortage of nukes.

Since the war began I've been hearing both that Russia is weak and about to collapse, and also that if the United States doesn't directly intervene the Russians will drive tanks into Berlin by Christmas. If they are as weak as you say they are, and I'm inclined to agree, then Europe can handle this, yes?

I never said they were pushovers. Just that they were weaker than people thought.

It is clear that Europe would have more difficulty going it alone, since it does not dispose of the intelligence assets that the US has. Spy satellites, SIGINT planes, logistics, etc. Having to go it alone would clearly also impact the morale and thus the political will. But if Putin would decide to invade for example Poland, there is no doubt how he would fare.

But from an industrial and economics point of view there is no comparing. Contrary to what mr Trump has been saying, Europe has paid for more than half of the expenses so far. The overall defense budget of Europe was 217B$ in 2019 and has been steadily increasing to 258B$ in 2021 [1]. For 2024 it is at 326B$ [2]

Compare that with Russia that had a 184B$ budget this year [3]. And that is whilst being on a war footing.

Also. Let's not forget that the US, together with the EU (and Russia) offered security guarantees to Ukraine, in return for them giving their nukes to Russia (since that was making everyone anxious). Our support for them is not some sort of "gift" out of the goodness of our hearts. It is a solemn promise that we made, in return for our peace of mind. Surely the US is not the sort of country that does not honor it's commitments, but backs down when the going gets tough?

[1] : https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/EUU/eur...

[2] : https://eda.europa.eu/news-and-events/news/2024/12/04/eu-def...

[3] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...

You mean a memo, with no enforcement mechanism and no treaty stipulations. There were no guarantees involved. Everyone understood this at the time but for whatever reason that particular piece of paper comes up time and again and it gets equated with actual binding treaties. It was not.

I understand what you’re saying but appeals about “solemn promise[s]” comes across as emotional blackmail and, for Americans at least, doesn’t have the same rhetorical weight anymore.

Man this "Russia is running out of XXX" tale is becoming quite old and not being taken seriously nowadays - year by year goes with the same narrative and it's only getting objectively worse for Ukraine...

You did not take note that the Russian military is collapsing: they need north corean soldiers to come to keep up. They need Iranian drones to keep up.

Russia has NO defensive capacity left on either other borders, neither internally.

Putin, as well as Trump play it like they have a strong hand because they know they don’t really have it and they are scared others would notice it.

Why you need to imagine things? deepstate map shows really well which army is "collapsing" now

What Ukraine needs and wants is a mechanism of a security guarantee that actually works (whether it's foreign troops stabilizing the eastern areas forever or get back enough nukes to keep Russia away). This is a life-or-death question to Ukraine because without plausible and enforceable security there will not be a Ukraine.

Ukraine can certainly give up their now rump states of Donetsk/Lugansk plus Crimea if they were getting something like that in exchange. But until there is even a remote possibility for such security all they have is their terms of getting all their land back. If Ukraine now agreed to "peace" where they give up the land to stop the war then they would have to deal even further in order to gain enough security to prevent the next war from ever happening.

>This is a life-or-death question to Ukraine

Then why has Ukraine not lowered the conscription age?

Not enough guns etc. to make use of all the people.

So they decided to give the guns they do have to the 45 year olds?

1. Conscription starts at 25, not 45. (Even 25 is a lowering, it used to be 27).

2. So what? 30-45 is where their population peaks; massive dip right in the 18-30 range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine#/media...

1. Yes I know, the average age of the Ukrainian conscript is 45, which is why I referenced that number.

2. The “so what” is that it’s pretty hard to argue that the war is an existential event if you are not drafting the portion of the population best able to make war (young men).

1. Sources vary from 40-45, but also mode not mean; population demographics makes mode go like that.

2. 25 is drafting young men; given where their shortages are there just isn't a benefit to reducing this to 18.

I still don't get it.

Usually you only go up the age-brackets when you are more and more desperate, for, you know, obvious reasons. Ukraine is doing it in reverse.

Ukraine is desperate. It's (currently) a war of attrition, it keeps going until one side suffers too much and can't replace stuff. Each side has constantly shifting limiting factors.

This is also why we've seen multiple headlines about Russia running out of stuff: they did run out of some things, then shifted to other stuff and ran out of that, then shifted to other stuff… — Ukraine has a shortage of both guns and young people right now.

Or Putin could just withdraw his (and the North Korean) troops? He's so trustworthy peacekeepers won't be needed, right?

we all remember how trustworthy his words were right before the full scale invasion: UK intelligence services warned in public about Russian tanks, supplies etc amassing near the Ukrainian border, warning about what looks like preparations for invasion.

What did the Russians claim?

"Nyet invasion, just some push-ups next to border!"

And what about the longer term? No one wants to commit to this fight, how much worse is it next time? What lesson does Putin learn when he can take Ukraine? Because even if he only takes part of it on paper, he’ll end up with the whole lot. That’s what the mineral “deal” with the US really is - it’s a bribe: “when we’re in control, you’ll still get the minerals”.

How stable will the world be when Russia wins, Putin is able to rebuild, and then they want somewhere else?

You tell me, which fight is more winnable? This one or the next one?

You're completely overstating this.

So far in 3 years of war the US has, for something like <10% of their military budget, destroyed a huge chunk of Russian military capabilities, without having to set a single US boot on the ground or losing a single US citizen. On purely selfish terms, that's an undeniably great investment.

But it's not only that. The US has an immense amount of soft power that it squanders if it completely mistreats, and even blackmails, its own allies — which it is doing right now — to appease hostile powers like Russia.

So with that being said:

It's ridiculous to jump to "we're gonna have to deploy x y and z batallions" when the US administration is not even doing the BARE MINIMUM, many tiers below that: they are publicly praising Putin and berating Zelensky. So it's pointless to talk as if this was about direct military intervention when in fact even soft diplomacy is going to the way of appeasement.

Part of the issue with tech people discussing this is that they assume there is a tech solution to "human meat sacks are needed in order to control a geography". There isn't, at least not yet or anytime soon.

>massive American mobilization, 2/75 or the whole of the Ranger Battalions jumping, all US Armor units deploying to Eastern Europe, all of 4th, 5th, 6th, and honestly 7th fleet re-deploying to the Med for support operations. A massive amount of U.S. casualties.

Then China will step in and WW3 will begin.

Glad we’re all on the same page, then.

I don't agree how you would need so many forces or have many casualties given Russia is struggling right now even with Ukranians.

A no fly-zone alone would greatly diminish Russian capabilites, of which the West could easily do given the dire state of the Russian Air Force and their AAD. After that it's just a point it's a just mopping up any artillery duels and then letting the Ukranians advance in.

It is not immoral, it is amoral. There is no moral in geopolitics and international relations.

The US are not doing anything new. It's just that Trump's style is very "in your face" and that the public have been fed so much BS about "good", "moral", "democracy", etc in international relations that they actually believe it.

I don't buy the fully amorale narrative ever.

It's just as irrelevant as saying that state of individual cells is something you should ignore when establishing diagnostics of a herd.

There's a difference between low pondering and null influence within equations. And if the complexity of the phenomenon exceeds what we can forecast relevantly with equations, then pretending that we know which factor will have significant role all along the development of the situation and which are meaningless is not acting with much sagacity.

It's not a narrative. It's really a statement of fact and very relevant. That's how it works: countries act to further their interests whatever the "moral" might be.

The US, like other countries, have sacrificed tens of thousands of people or more, even entire countries, in pursuit of interests amd broader objectives, for instance.

What is irrelevant is indeed moral.

> The United States is the reason this war is still on-going.

In what way? Because it is providing assistance to Ukraine to defend itself against an aggressor?

Because if it provided the resources that were requested from the start Russian offensive would have been pushed out of the country 2 years ago. America(and most European countries too, to be fair) sat on their hands for ages before approving actual military aid. Famous thing about Germany sending helmets while other countries were sending tanks etc.

But also because if JD Vance wasn't such insufferable prick without an ounce of tact there's a good chance the agreement yesterday would have been signed. That is not Ukrainian fault, it's 100% the fault of current American administration.

Letting your interests always go last, and letting people who depend on you and have worked against you(remember Zelenski campaigned against Trump), demand things and reproach you in public, is not tact. The one who lacked tact was Zelenski, not Vance. As Trump said, "You're in no position to dictate what we're gonna feel."

As for aid, the arrogance in assuming the aid was mandatory and failing to give what you want the way you want is wrong and evil, does not endear people to aid you. And besides, any delays in aid had a much lesser effect than the EU countries buying russian gas at exorbitant prices. The sanctions imposed were immediately sabotaged by buying russian gas.

>>The one who lacked tact was Zelenski, not Vance

Hard disagree. The way he treated Zelenskyy who was their guest is unacceptable and completely tactless. He acted as if he was scolding Zelenskyy. The entire comment from Trump "look he dressed up!" was juvenile, showing zero respect. But then he called him a dictator not long ago so I don't know what I expected.

>>The sanctions imposed were immediately sabotaged by buying russian gas.

Because it wasn't possible for EU to stop buying it on a dime, not without letting its citizens freeze and go without electricity. You can argue that well, they should have gone cold if they care about it so much - I'd argue that the EU countries have stopped buying Russian gas and resources as soon as they possibly could.

>As for aid, the arrogance in assuming the aid was mandatory

That's not what I said - I said if the aid was provided when it was requested the war would have ended already.

> "look he dressed up!" was juvenile

It's worse than that.

Zelenskyy famously stopped wearing civilian suits, and is always wearing military-style clothes in public appearances to symbolise how he's defending his nation in a time of war. It's a reminder to other leaders that it's not just another trade deal, that this is a real shooting war and people are dying.

Trump hates this, and thinks it's disrespectful that Zelenskyy doesn't wear a suit when he comes to the US on official visits.

Trump generally can't stomach a real fight, and Zelenskyy can... visibly.

Hence the reaction from Trump. Zelenskyy made him feel shame through his mere dress, his shirt, so he had to do something or say something to feel in control again, to feel powerful.

>Zelenskyy famously stopped wearing civilian suits, and is always wearing military-style clothes in public appearances to symbolise how he's defending his nation in a time of war. It's a reminder to other leaders that it's not just another trade deal, that this is a real shooting war and people are dying.

>Trump hates this, and thinks it's disrespectful that Zelenskyy doesn't wear a suit when he comes to the US on official visits.

That's why they invited dress uniforms...the ones with the jackets and ties.

This is like… inviting a Mandalorian and then insisting he take his helmet off.

“You have to follow the dress code, I don’t care about your sacred oath” — said by someone who doesn’t believe in oaths.

That's tame, suits are almost global dress code in management and business circles with a few exceptions, and violation of dress code is indecent.

Say that to Churchill... :D

No, there's definitely no "dress code" in those circles.

A dress code is specifically something you impose to lower-ranking ones. That's why Trump did not like it, and why this journalist seemed upset: they couldn't bear that Zelenski was not submitting to their, very closed-minded WASP dress code for underlings.

When you're the head of state, or in power circles, there's something else, that's called a _dress standing_, which is different and opens a much wider area of possibilities.

And by that standard, boy, did Zelensky outfit outranked everyone else's in the office!

What about Churchill? His style looks like a slightly dated imperial dress code, because he was a fan of the British Empire.

When he came to the White House during WWII? Was in soldier outfit.

Oh wow, Churchill really was wearing a uniform when he visited the white house.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205140998

Yeah, no. Nothing in that discussion was tactful on America's side. This is oligarch's trying to gaslight, lie, and extort a country while getting cozy with an enemy they fought for decades. And their remarks were absolutely juvenile. THat's not how we treat allies (or at worst, ,enemy of an enemy).

As for aid, the arrogance in assuming the aid was mandatory and failing to give what you want the way you want is wrong and evil,

This is insane. He's been constantly begging and thanking the US for support for years. At no point has he even come close to "assuming the aid was mandatory".

To claim that Zelenski lacked tact while Vance did not is similarly nuts. Anyone who watched the video would understand that.

Some of the spending actually is mandatory, because it was passed and apportioned by Congress (but may not have been dispersed yet), and I think Zelensky can be forgiven for having some level of expectations on more aid given the bilateral security pact Biden signed last July and the overall glowing reception he gets in the press.

"Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation's highest office."

   - J. D. Vance

"Trump's biggest failure as a political leader is that he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people. "

  - J. D. Vance

>>The Europeans are not going to be willing to sacrifice their vast social programs for a massive defense build up.

I think you might be very surprised about that, countries on the eastern end of the EU look ready to make that trade without hesitation, as they were invaded by Russia in the past themselves and can understand the risks. Poland is already at 5% GDP spending on defence, and by all indications that number will only grow. That's war-like levels of spending.

> countries on the eastern end of the EU look ready to make that trade without hesitation

I don't think so, there already are populist opposition parties in most of these countries that want 1. their country to be more pro-RU 2. to keep the welfare state for their populist supporters going

As someone who is from one of those countries - I don't see that at all. In fact I'd say that the national mood is such that if we were attacked the nation would overwhelmingly support going to war with Russia with or without NATO support.

>with or without NATO support.

That's the rub, isn't it. The bluster about willingness to face Moscow in a war is all because of Article V and the assumption that the Americans will come and participate in a nuclear exchange.

You know Europe has funded about 2/3rds of the war costs?

Maritime power vs continental power [0]. Trump sees the world from a continental power viewpoint. In the recent past the West used to see, and operate, the world from maritime power point of view. Incidentally, China used to think like a maritime power as well - until Xi became president.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf8mCThmsGc

> Incidentally, China used to think like a maritime power as well - until Xi became president.

Historically, China is probably the single least ocean-focused country of any country to have a coast.

What about their vast fishing and shipping fleets?

China trades with almost every country in the world-that is maritime power. Since Xi became president China is acting more like a continental power-looking at land expansion at the cost of trade. Granted China did not attack Taiwan yet. Hopefully Xi sees this folly and does not attack Taiwan.

> China trades with almost every country in the world-that is maritime power.

No, that has absolutely nothing to do with "maritime power".

How do they ship goods worldwide?

Except when it comes to the South China Sea.

> I am ashamed of the US.

Don't be. I'm neither American nor European, and from my vantage point this is far less America's (US) fault than it is Western Europe's. US has been asking Europe to increase defense spending for years now, and at the beginning of the war it was below 2% (Germany was spending 1.25% in 2018). Trump said this very publicly in during his first term, and he was ignored and mostly ridiculed. Same thing with the Gazprom deal.

Europe's defence should not be entirely on the American tax payer.

> Europe's defence should not be entirely on the American tax payer

True. However.

The US has wanted to play a major role in Europe for 80 years because it meant they controlled the narrative. This, co-incidentally was favourable to European countries because they could spend their money elsewhere.

Over the past few years the US has decided that it would prefer to play in the Pacific rather than Europe and so has been edging away.

It's true that Western Europe has been slow to respond, but it's also important to acknowledge that Trump just changed the pace of this redirection and so it's not entirely on one or the other side.

You fell for the propaganda. The US is not spending for Ukraine the way Trump is trying to make it seem. Sending old equipment that is expensive to dispose of helps the US two-fold.

And yes, fighting indirectly with Russia is also helping the US two-fold. Or, was until Trump decided to wake up as a sleeper agent .

> ending old equipment that is expensive to dispose of helps the US two-fold.

You fell for this propaganda. That equipment is "old" doesn't mean it isn't actively being used. The US military uses and maintains old equipment where it still makes sense, and where there is no viable replacement.

I have made the same argument long before Trump was in the picture. Stop associating everything with Trump or propaganda - people can hold opinions which don't agree with yours.

This is a simplistic, even childlike, view of the relationship between the US and Europe. The situation is the way it is because the US wanted it like that. Statesman like Dean Acheson and George Marshall designed it this way. To throw 75 years of relative peace and stability away because you feel it’s unfair? A world that revolves around American military, economic and cultural power, and uses the U.S. dollar as its reserve currency unfair? It galls me that small, arrogant, petty people with no notion of history are throwing all this away because they have a schoolyard understanding of fair and unfair.

> It galls me that small, arrogant, petty people with no notion of history are throwing all this away because they have a schoolyard understanding of fair and unfair.

Or maybe your ivory tower understanding simply ignores the realities of the working class people who voted for Trump to do away with these policies.

I've got to imagine this forum is officially compromised at this point with these style of posts on here?

I'm shocked by the level of pro-Russia content coming from you and other posters. I hope it's just brigading. I'm devastated if any meaningful amount of Americans feel this way. It's a fall from grace I didn't think I'd see in such real time.

The fact that you interpret any pushback to your opinion as pro-Russia is one of the main problems in modern discourse. You're so ideologically captured that everything has become binary.

Quite the opposite. I've just come to the realization that discourse with individuals arguing in bad faith is more harmful to society than any fleeting chance I may have of convincing the individual their path is the wrong one.

Doubtful. Public discourse online is often not about convincing interlocuters, but mostly about whoever is watching/reading.

Hence why you waited to respond despite having made other posts since my response?

Long threads with little chance of convergence are boring, fewer people read them, reading new articles is more interesting, and people got shit to do. News at 11.

> This is a simplistic, even childlike, view of the relationship between the US and Europe. The situation is the way it is because the US wanted it...

People who do know history would tell you that you don't get peace by dismantling industrial and military capacity. To blame this on "because the US wanted it that way" is just naive. The US might have wanted it that way, but so what? It happened because it was easier to sell domestically compared to allocating hundreds of billions on say, 5th gen fighters.

Yeah, I am sure Poland would have been SUPER HAPPY if Germany would have invested more in military in the late 90s. France as well. /s

Crimea was 10 years ago now. And Obama at that time didn't intervene, in fact he called on Europe to spend more on defense. Europe is much bigger (in population) and richer than Russia. This is a different situation than the cold war.

> he was ignored and mostly ridiculed

Trump disagrees with you:

> So we raised [the defense spending of NATO members by] $130 billion almost immediately. We had a meeting with all of the [NATO] countries. I said, “You got to pay.” We got $130 billion more — more.

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...

The world _wasn't_ zero sum when we had limitless economic growth. But growth has effectively ended for the majority of people. And resource constraints look they will define the future.

Extracting resources has always been the central tenant of industrial society, and there was always somewhere new to pillage. With literally nowhere on earth left to expand this global juggernaut, it's not clear that our zero sum utopia can continue.

I'm not defending Trump's actions by any means; spitting in the face of your friends is the last thing you want to do when times are lean. But at least this administration sees the writing on the wall: business as usual is dead and we're entering an era of zero sum contraction. Their response is insane but at least they acknowledge the problem (unlike traditional liberals and conservatives who think we can keep tweaking the current system forever)

You realized all the markets have (until very recently) been going up, all the economic indicators showing green, and business was booming. My portfolio was up.

That economic activity is growth. It was still happening. Just the middle class didn't participate like it used to like in the 50s. Because the marginal tax rate back then kept as much wealth from pooling at the top.

Economic inequality is the problem, not lack of growth.

Some games are indeed zero sum, some are positive and some are negative.

You could also see that in a positive light : Europeans might get a better armies / defence in 10 years compared to if the USA continued its past behavior without Trump

The world and human society is not zero sum. The Mercantilist world view is empirically wrong.

Larger armies are negative sum for everyone. Historically, per capita GDP was flat until the 18th century, because wealth was measured in gold and people thought the best way to be rich was to keep robbing and colonizing one another.

I really don't understand this take, any other European country could fund the Ukraine war to continue.

The US no longer wanting to fund someone else's war is about as far from 'forcing' as you can get. Plus it doesn't even sound like we're withdrawing all funding, instead we're attaching a few conditions in hopes to end the killing.

It isn't about funding. It's about denigrating our allies and attacking the victim of aggression, while praising our adversaries and aggressors. Realpolitik is (correctly) in vogue as a correction to bad policies, but ideas and justice still matter.

> Realpolitik is (correctly) in vogue as a correction to bad policies, but ideas and justice still matter.

Realpolitik is, first and foremost, about (arguably ruthless) pragmatism. What's going on — the US antagonising all its allies and forging new alliances with unreliable partners —— is not pragmatic in the least.

The US is undermining the very institutions it built, like the UN, and the rule based world order.

That’s what the outcry is about. As of today, the US is no longer the leader of the free world.

The economic impact for the US in the long run will be significant. Trust is hard to build but easy to destroy.

The behaviour makes them at best a laughing stock but at worst a liability. Who wants to keep their money in the US anymore? Trump could announce next week he's freezing all European assets to fund his annexation Greenland.

The US did nothing but benefit from the war really. So any talk about ending support being in the United States' interest is a serious misreading of the situation.

The US was sending old equipment. To replace it they were and spending money on R&D and manufacturing of current and next-gen equipment for the US military, not Ukraine. The US got to observe and study the use of it's older equipment in an actual land war against a geopolitical adversary. The war has demonstrated US equipment superiority over Russian equipment.

The US did not send any troops, only old equipment and some money.

Regarding "hopes to end the killing". The killing can end today if Putin withdraws. He is the aggressor who attacked without any justification or provocation. If somebody invades your neighbour's apartment and starts looting and hurting them, do you just say "give up, it's easier"?

Some might but those are not people we respect.

The US and the west as a whole are already a very big winner for the war and it was 100% worth the investment. But for how long should it continue? Ignoring Trump's terrible negotiation strategy I still think there's value in some sort of ceasefire. Continuing a brutal stalemate is not something we should take lightly just to burn through a few more Russian tanks. It's mostly just T-60s and cheap Iranian drones left anyway. They've been thoroughly embarrassed.

The history of war is full of unhappy truces and compromise. WW2 type victories are extremely rare and take massive sacrifice.

Of course, but it is extraordinarily optimistic, naive even, to think that freezing the conflict now without any security guarantees for Ukraine is anything but a gift to Russia, who will turn to preparing the next invasion.

And keep in mind, we're not doing the sacrificing. It is Ukraine who is doing the fighting and should be calling the shots here, with our material support since we don't want to send troops (until now).

> freezing the conflict now without any security guarantees for Ukraine

From what I've read I think the only plan put forward is to have Europeans run the DMZ? The US having troops there would probably be a no-go since that's the primary power-conflict (even above NATO). I don't think there's any other option as historically there's always a third party regulating it. Maybe a subset of UN where possibly even China could have troops there.

Not sure what guarantees would exist for breaking the ceasefire though, besides the usual full sanctions/weapons/maybe troops. Who knows what happens now though :/

Why? Some accounts believe Russia will break by the end of this year as its terrible financial situation catches up to it. People are starting to doubt if they can even launch a nuke any more. It seems wise to me to push a bit harder to see if you can tip a military adversary over the edge and force a full capitulation, rather than giving them time to recover.

As long as China supports Russia there is no way Ukraine is going to break Russia. Putin cares nothing about the human cost from his side and it's unlikely Ukraine can have enough of an advantage to be able to push back.

See the "spring offensive".

The reality is more or less a stalemate at this point. While the Trump administration treatment of Zelensky is a disgrace the reality is that some sort of ceasefire around the current borders is going to be the outcome that ends this war. We can work on forcing Russia to withdraw via economic and other pressure after the hot war is over. Just like we broke up the Soviet Union.

This idea of one more year and Russia will break is just a dream with no connection to reality. Putin is going to send a million man to fight with sticks before Russia breaks. And they will.

Is China supporting Russia? I see opportunistic grabs for cheap oil and gas but nothing more than that. It’s not fixing the rampant inflation and growing budget deficit.

> We can work on forcing Russia to withdraw via economic and other pressure after the hot war is over. Just like we broke up the Soviet Union.

You think Trump plans to maintain sanctions? You sweet summer child.

North Korea is a China agent in this context. China is pretty much supplying all the goods that went away due to western sanctions, everything Russian factories need, and buying all the exports that the west is trying to sanction.

My statement had nothing to do with Trump maintaining sanctions or not. If he doesn't some future administration will. US relations with the Soviets also fluctuated during the cold war.

> North Korea is a China agent in this context.

This simply isn’t true.

> China is pretty much supplying all the goods that went away due to western sanctions

This is not correct. Some countries are being used to bypass sanctions, including China, but this isn’t happening with government support and the extra costs of evading sanctions are putting inflationary pressure on goods in Russia.

> buying all the exports that the west is trying to sanction.

Barring oil and gas, there’s nothing Russia has that China wants. And even then, they don’t have the infrastructure to buy the volumes to replace European purchases, thus the black hole in the Russian budget.

Nothing happens in China without government support. In China you either do what the government wants or you are in jail or dead.

If Xi wanted Russia to stop the war, Russia would stop the war. The war is useful for China because it splinters the west, they get leverage over Russia, and it normalizes the kind of actions that it wants to take in Taiwan.

If China objected to North Korea sending troops to Russia then North Korea would not be sending troops to Russia. Pretty much all of North Korea's trade is with China. For sure North Korea has some degree of independence but sending soldiers to die for Russia is not worth it if it upsets China. This is clearly a nod, nod, wink, wink situation here.

"Most of Russia's exports to China originate from the mining and petrochemicals sectors.[64] More than half of Russia's exports to China come from mineral fuels, oil, and petroleum products (60.7%), followed by wood and wood products (9.4%), non-ferrous metals (9%), fish and seafood (3.5%), and chemical products (3.3%). China is also gradually becoming a major consumer of Russian agricultural products.[24]: 64

The main categories of imports to Russia from China are machinery and equipment (35.9%), clothing (13.7%), chemical products (9.1%), fur and fur products (5.6%), footwear (5.3%), and furniture (3%). Chinese electronics are steadily expanding their presence in Russian.[24]: 64"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Russia_relations...

There is nothing you just said that contradicts what I wrote.

China can only support Russia in some specific, not too invasive ways. If structural points of a country break, there's no support recipe for that.

Financial and economic weaknesses are also working against Putin and his team from _within_ Russia.

> Just like we broke up the Soviet Union.

It was not entirely broken, since we have the living proof of it today in the Kremlin - same operating mode.

> Putin is going to send a million man

Why is he resorting to North Korean soldiers then? (which even then aren't infinite). Obviously, he has a problem at recruiting/training his own. Which puts him at odds with his own population.

So whose soldiers will it be next? China? not likely willing to deal with that. Iran? same. African countries? Not their war, they tell it themselves.

The issue is that Putin has cornered himself and his country, willingly, knowingly, into a no-way-out road. He had other options of both perspective and action.

The word on the street is that he's using North Korean soldiers because he can get them and he prefers that they are killed and not Russians. But he'll send Russians too.

You're applying western thinking here. The same sort of western thinking that thought Putin wouldn't invade Ukraine because what's in it for him or imagine some red lines or whatever. Russians aren't western. They don't think like us. The west always does this.

There isn't such a thing of at odds with his own population in Russia. Again you're applying western thinking to Russians. Check out some Russian jokes.

Logistics is not a matter of culture. When you run out, you run out.

Russia's population is 140 million. They're not going to run out of people. 17% of those or about 24 million are fighting age males (18-44). If you really need to you can definitely recruit 15-60 and woman.

Not sure if this is what you meant by logistics.

If you're thinking about supplying and maintaining their physical presence in Ukraine it doesn't look like that's a problem either.

"As of 2024, Russia produces about 3 million artillery shells a year, nearly three times the quantity from the US and Europe." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry_of_Russia

They're also still exporting weapons though significantly less than they used to export.

Maybe they can't sustain 10 years of war with the west continuing or increasing their level of support, assuming Ukraine can, but they are nowhere near being forced to stop [the] war.

> Russia's population is 140 million.

Alledged population. Or are we also to believe their election results?

Population alone and artillery alone are the ingredients of logistics, not logistics itself.

The failure of the initial 3-days invasion was a demonstration that the « great Russian army », even with the support of Wagner and Tchetchenia, was unable to plan, execute and sustain a flash attack.

Yes, they may improve in the meantime. But that takes years of discipline and continuous training. So while that’s an option for them, that’s also a weakness that can be decisive.

Do you have any evidence that Russia is open to a ceasefire around the current borders?

Trump is pushing it after having talked to the Russians. I mean I don't have a direct line to Putin but if Russia isn't open to a ceasefire then none of this even matters. The fight between Trump and Zelensky is about Ukraine agreeing to a ceasefire.

Trump also wants to annex Greenland, take over the Panama canal and make Gaza into a beach resort. Also let's not forget when he sent out his son in law for a school project (peace in Isreal) who came back with a detailed plan without ever talking and involving the Palestinians.

The problem with a ceasefire is that Russia has an endless history of accepting negotiations only to use them to get a tactical advantage. It is standard practice for them. So of course Ukraine is very wary unless that can be prevented.

> the reality is that some sort of ceasefire around the current borders is going to be the outcome that ends this war.

No, it won't. With sufficient outside political pressure on Ukraine, it might happen, but (like many ceasefires) it would only be a brief pause, not an end to the war.

> We can work on forcing Russia to withdraw via economic and other pressure after the hot war is over.

Sanctions almost never work without someone actually fighting on the ground. If they are not tipping the balance of an active internal or external conflict, they can be endured basically indefinitely.

(Not that Trump seems inclined to either try to force Putin to withdraw or to maintain sanctions, in any case.)

> Just like we broke up the Soviet Union.

We didn't break up the Soviet Union, the republics of the Soviet Union broke it up, largely because of a crisis of legitimacy resulting from a hardline coup against a mildly reformist leadership. The main immediate US contribution, though, was bogging the USSR down in the long war it fought in Afghanistan by aiding the forces opposing the USSR there, the outgrowth of which was both the disatisfaction that provoked the reform efforts and the strong negative reaction to the subsequent hardline coup, not sanctions imposed without an ongoing armed conflict.

Yeah. And China will also colapse anytime soon, as they say since 90s.

Some discourses are just propaganda. Specially at war time.

Comparing silly “CHINA COLLAPSE IN THREE DAYS” YouTube videos to economic analysis of observed facts, some of which I’ve pointed out, is not really a comparison, is it.

All those Russia is weak and will self-deafeat is a narrative to make people dont worry too much and do anything

Not just does the US no longer want to support Ukraine, it is basically siding with Russia by not taking a stand and criticising Ukraine. It’s neglecting the interests of it’s ally by only including Russia in negotiations.

On top of it all, it’s extorting Ukraine into giving up it’s minerals while giving no assurances in return.

And finally, most important for long term, it’s a complete policy reversal to its NATO allies, which will have a long term impact on US transatlantic relations for decades to come. Before, US was the only country to invoke Article 5. Now its recognising a weak moments for its allies and is exploiting that opportunity.

Europe doesn’t have the resources in a lot of cases. To start, a lot of what the US gave isn’t cash, it’s old equipment that was in long term storage. You can’t just place an order for 100 infantry fighting vehicles and get them in a month. For other forms of equipment, the US has a ton of industrial capacity that Europe simply can’t make up for.

> it doesn't even sound like we're withdrawing all funding, instead we're attaching a few conditions in hopes to end the killing.

There is currently no funding for Ukraine from the US. Trump has dangled offers of assistance “with conditions” but nothing concrete. Even this minerals deal didn’t actually include any security assistance or funding for weapons.

Maybe I can't expect an answer from you but maybe someone that agree with your comment can clarify for me:

Why did suddenly "end the killing" become a talking point for the people supporting this/Trump? "End the Killing of *american soldiers*(outside US)" seems like an consistent message but when this group didn't give 2 shits about Iraqi, Afgani, Vietnam, Libya, Syria, and even essentially justify warcrimes and killings, how can the movement stay morally consistent to "Oh we are doing this to save Ukrainean life" as a slogan?

"We don't want to spend our money on other nationals, but we are ok in having colonies or natural resource exploitation at your expense" is the only sensible interpretation of current presidents behavior.

A stance that seems pretty aligned with every war since 9/11, just more explicit and any pretense such as "spreading democracy" or "WMD", and less willing to commit (american lives) for profit. Wasn't support for Trump against deepstate and all this "benefiting deepstate at the expense of the common people" wars? Why can't the movement just own up to it all.

I think many were also against those wars. I would prefer much more surgical strikes rather than war, ultimately those special ops were the ones that were successful against those involved in 9/11.

There also was no forced conscription in those. The military members knew what they were getting into and made a choice to sign up anyway. That's no longer the case in Ukraine, the border is closed, citizens cannot leave, they are being rounded up and forced into a few weeks of bootcamp then to the front-lines to die. That's the antithesis of freedom.

We are burning generations of alliances, goodwill, and our own enormously successful system of government for what? Absolutely nothing. Our entire country is being sold out so a few corrupt billionaires can make out like bandits.

This it the end of an 80 year era. The US will never have as much influence and prosperity again.

The US hasn't put as much in compared to Europe as they'd have you believe. Whilst Europe has sent fewer weapons, they've been supporting monetarily. And the US was sending stockpiled weapons, marking them at book value, and then reinvesting that money into US defence firms to buy new weapons.

War is fought with weapons. If EU cannot provide weapons, Ukraine won't be able to fight the war.

And how does one obtain weapons if a country doesn't just have thousands of tanks they were going to scrap anyway?

Exactly why monetary donation from EU is useless in battle field. Ukr could buy weapons with that money, sure but what if no one is selling?

Without US, EU cannot fulfill Ukrainian needs with their current arsenal.

And let's remember that most of the Ukrainian refugees have been hosted in Europe [1], something for which I am proud of being European. This has a monetary cost that Trump's administration seems to ignore when they keep saying that the US have spent far more than Europe to help Ukraine.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312602/ukrainian-refuge...

Also Europe took millions of Ukrainian refugees, and it took the hardest blows from the sanctions against Russia.

Your take would make sense if the world was an excel sheet that needed to be balanced. I think geopolitics are a tad more complex...

I don't really understand this take, Russia can just withdraw from Ukraine and end all the killing in the first place.

Why would they do that? They're winning the war.

And Jeff Bezos could make me rich by parting with just one of his many billions. But alas, let's both get back to reality.

His ex-wife did, she's the better human.

Did Jeff Bezos enter your home and annex your attic?

Has nothing to do with it. I wrote my comment to create an equally absurd and meaningless point to illustrate how silly that "the war would end if Russia would leave" mantra is.

Like my comment, it's technically true and completely not worth discussing, because it will never happen.

By that logic, the world should have just given Hitler everything he wanted too, right, because Germany leaving would never happen. The Soviet Union left Afghanistan when the costs got too high. So did the US. Under what basis do you aver that Putin leaving Ukraine can never happen?

There is a legitimate debate as to what cost is worth paying, if any (as well as what cost comes from not doing anything - ask the Baltics), but to present the situation as fait accompli?

I agree with you. You put on your own oxygen mask before you can help others. The US has debt interest payments of over a trillion dollars a year - totally unacceptable. We can't keep funding a war that can be willingly ended.

When you say "willingly ended" what you really mean is "surrender". Don't mince the words.

No that's not what I mean. Don't put words in people's proverbial mouths.

1. learn how the deficit works. It's not the same as private interest

2. Learn how we are funding the war. It is helping us instead of costing a bunch of money.

Learn how to make a point without sounding like you don't know what you're talking about about. Spending money on this isn't helping 'us' in any positive way.

> The US no longer wanting to fund someone else's war is about as far from 'forcing' as you can get

It _was_ also their war, because it's Europe that's attacked through Ukraine, and... Europe (and Ukraine, actually) used to be allies.

Well, here we are: the USA is _not_ anymore an ally to Europe, and is objectively becoming, as a state, an adversary, so here is the most likely survival plan available to Europe now:

1/ find new partners (Canada/Australia of course; as for the big one, will be India and/or China);

2/ increase its own defence and technologies to be more independent from US ones (will hurt, for sure);

3/ close its market to USA (will hurt heavily on both sides);

4/ not even talking about the cultural reframing that will happen.

It's not a matter of "if the USA doesn't fix its course within 4 years", it's happening now.

And no one wins at this. Certainly not the USA. Trump will be gone and forgotten in a few years. USA will take, at the very best, 40/50 years to fix the damaged trust towards Europe, but also towards any future partner: how do you expect to sincerely partner with a country that behaves so erratically every 4 years, and now even ambushes guest state representatives in front of the media?

I have a different take on this situation: I have felt for about a decade that it was time for my country (USA) to slowly ease away from being the sole dominate super power and figure out how to live in a multi-polar world. I am not a fan of President Trump but I wish him good luck in moving us in the direction of coexisting with Russia and China because I think it is in the best interests of most people in most countries. I was disappointed by Zelensky yesterday and I don’t believe he acted in the best interests of his people. I like Ukraine, wonderful country to visit and nice friendly people. I would like to visit again when the war has ended.

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