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Comment by almostnormal | Hacker News Reader

Full scale is unlikely. Russia could not, but they might send 250k/year to die in Estonia. EU and Nato (with or without US) would defend. But I doubt they would go all the way through Russia to force them to stop.

Nuclear option is not likely to be used for some "minor" conflict like that, because it would go both ways quickly.

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Since the cold war, it was always understood that it would be OTAN that would have to resort to nuclear weapons to halt a mythical soviet attack on western europe. There's no conceivable scenario the United States could sustain the logistic chains to engage in a sustained land war in Europe against the soviets in the cold war, and now even less so.

Given the preponderance of artillery of the Russians, I really doubt the current numbers from the delusional british about their losses in Ukrain, but supposing Russia would incur 250 deaths year to subdue Estonia is beyond the realms of the most fantastic political sciences major military fantasy.

The United States fought for 20 years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban regime with the Taliban at the cost of more than 2 trillion dollars. Even nominal success like Desert Storm were not the military triumph it seems as besides Saddam's army being a poor excuse of a military force, widespread bribing was used to guarantee several Iraq's military units would not fight.

Hitler employed 111 divisions on the Barbarossa plan, with the known results. The US has currently 5 divisions equivalent in state of readiness plus some other ten that would take take time. Any serious american operation against Russia in Eastern Europe would thus necessitate a draft in far bigger proportions than the Vietnam's era Draft, in a population that is way less jingoistic than the boomers eager to prove they were up to the heroic acts of the silent generation that overcome the Axis in the battlefield. A lot of american industrial production has been downsized and sizable parts of it depend on global supply chains.

While american weaponry are technologically impressive, most of it was designed by the most byzantine and politicized proccess you could imagine with the goal of guaranteeing politicians votes in their turfs and to maximize returns for the Military Industry shareholders. American weaponry is maintainance intensive, have low availability and depend on optimal conditions to be operated and mantained. They also depend on robust ISR. All things that a smart enemy with hypersonic weapons and space capabilities would make sure to deny on the first day.

The idea that the United States could prevail in a direct lan war against Russia or a naval conflict against China is a fantasy.

There is a straightforward way to win a naval conflict against China, which is basically a repeat of the strategy used with great success against Japan in WWII. Use mines and submarines to cut off their fossil fuel, food, and fertilizer imports. Starve them to death. Chinese leaders are aware of this vulnerability, and are working hard to reduce dependence on foreign energy as well as building a blue water navy that can protect their sea lines of communication. But progress has been slow.

As for Russia, their internal economy is very weak and they have far less industrial capacity than the old USSR. The only way they are able to financially sustain the invasion of Ukraine is through huge fossil fuel exports. Those exports pass through a limited set of choke points including pipelines, refineries, tank farms, and ports which are impossible to defend and can be wrecked with stand-off weapons. Some of your criticisms of overly complex US weapons systems are valid, but our cruise missiles are proven to work reliably.

It doesn't make much sense to be measured by classical armies if all these countries unfortunately have nuclear weapons and can use them in case of a critical situation. And that's the scariest part. :( It's better to find a middle ground in negotiations somehow.

Yes, actually, that's my point. Escalation is inevitable should a real war start. And it will be the United States that will have to resort to nuclear weapons to avoid a defeat. It will work, and you could probably even say thereafter that the US won the war. But, it will be a pyrric victory.

Sounds good. Everyone loves negotiations when they get what they want. Do you think those negotiations will result in China and Russia ceasing their attempts to seize territory from our allies? If not then we might have to take other measures. Regardless of which side is right or wrong, we seem to be on a long-term collision course for fundamental geopolitical reasons that will extend beyond the current US presidential administration.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm Russian. But I'm sure that Russia has no intention of seizing territories of Western countries, Russia already has a very large territory. Ukraine is a different story, there really are a lot of people there who used to live in the same country with Russia(USSR) and speak only Russian language and really sympathize Russia. I'm not saying it's good to seize territory even in that case, but all other countries that has little only Russian language speaking population have no significant reason to be afraid. As I wrote earlier NATO currently has more troops and equipment than Russia.

The current Russian leader sees the collapse of the USSR as a "tragedy". And since 1990 they they have invaded Georgia, Moldova, and now Ukraine (after repeatedly promising that they wouldn't). That looks like a pattern. I understand why Russia is doing it to create defensible strategic depth due to lack of natural geographic barriers around their population centers. But that doesn't make it right, and regardless of moral issues Russian expansionism is certainly contrary to the interests of the USA and its allies. Who will be the next victim, perhaps Estonia?

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-rues-soviet-colla...

I bear no ill will towards Russian people but while the current malign leadership remains in power we should use all means short of war to contain, undermine, impoverish, and generally humiliate the country. Grind them into the dust until they can no longer present a credible threat. But that's just my opinion.

I think the collapse of the USSR was more bad than good, not because of the loss of territory, but because of the collapse of socialist and communist ideals. I believe that better than people are more equal, and there are no billionaires or multi-billionaires. Individuals do not need wealth of this size.

But Russia is not taking people off the streets to war by force currently. Most of those who fight for Russia really believe that they are right. And almost everyone who wanted to could leave Russia. Currently it's not like in WW2 and Hitler. Russian soldiers do not kill civilians on purpose(maybe with the exception of single crimes that are being investigated), it has no point, (although it is possible that by mistakes, this is a war, unfortunately) and in Russia there is not even the death penalty, although in the US there is.

Russia always proposes some kind of settlement so that there is no war. Sometimes they are not so terrible, for example, simply not to make Russian-speaking citizens second-class citizens, not to forbid them anything. Sometimes the demands are of course not entirely adequate, but this is not always the case. And other side can offer some middle ground.

I believe that an invasion in any Baltic country is possible only in one case, if they completely cut off the food supplies of Kaliningrad, and if the sea route is completely blocked, and the people in Kaliningrad will suffer without food.

I didn't support Putin in the last elections, for example, especially because of the change in the constitution. And I don't really understand why he didn't find an adequate successor, for example. I'm saying this just so you don't think that I think Russia is always right. Yes, you may think differently. And I may be wrong.

>and in Russia there is not even the death penalty, although in the US there is.

Aside from all the rest of the nonsense and foolishness you've written about Russia and the supposedly lovely ideals of the USSR's bloody, genocidal history, this particular nugget stood out.

Russia has no formal death penalty, sure. Instead it's government illegally murders opponents domestically and internationally, frequently and in sizable numbers while lying about having done so. Aside from the U.S death penalty laws being completely different in nature to such a mafia practice by the Russian government and its agents, at least the U.S, formally and through due process, executes its criminals without concealing what it does.

> But I'm sure that Russia has no intention of seizing territories of Western countries /---/ I'm not saying it's good to seize territory even in that case, but all other countries that has little only Russian language speaking population have no significant reason to be afraid.

Well, that's exactly the problem. Several countries in Europe have more Russians in their population than the Kherson oblast (<14%), which Russia officially annexed.

You right. At the beginning, this territory was not included in Russia’s demands; the war led to this situation. :(

Former Soviet person here. I grew up in Kyiv, than we moved to Tallinn after Chernobyl.

Estonia has over a quarter of its population as Russian speakers.[1]

They don’t want to have Russians take back over.

1. https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/library-document/fe...

Yes, I somehow understand this, people are different. I hope that there will be no such thing. It's hard to describe all here in comments. And I fully understand, for example, the country's desire to encourage people to learn the main language of the country.

There was a real danger of people colliding in Ukraine at that time. If everything had been completely peaceful, no seizures would have happened. After all, there really were supporters of the old government and opponents of it. Or even if NATO had signed an agreement that would definitely not accept Ukraine, perhaps for at least 50 years or some rather long period.

Unfortunately, many people no longer trust the West and NATO, they have failed to fulfill the role of an impartial leader who sets an example for others. They have committed too much deception for their own benefit.

In short, and very very roughly, I'm probably a proponent of a kind of balance. Which side is weaker (the whole NATO is clearly stronger when compared than Russia) that side is currently "right", and we need to look for something like a middle ground. If Ukraine had not received huge assistance from NATO countries and the government had not sought to join it, it would have been a different story. Yes, there is some deception on the other side, too, of course.

If you think about it well, then everything in life is not so simple.

This is delusional. There's no real way the United States military and NATO can effect a long sustained blockade on China. American Industry will slow to a halt before the chinese will feel the pain. The Chinese may like our dollars. But we rely on their manufacturing.

People sometimes fail to understand the real world meaning of having a trade deficit of more than one trillion dollars.

Not at all. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention but the process of decoupling the USA from China is well underway. A lot of manufacturing is moving to other countries like Vietnam and Mexico. Losing access to cheap Chinese imports would be painful but mainly just for consumers. We don't rely on them for strategically important stuff, especially not for military equipment.

If there is a conflict with China then I doubt that other NATO members will play much of a role since they have no critical national interests in the Indo-Pacific region. It will mainly just be the USA with perhaps some assistance from a loose coalition of Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Vietnam, Philippines, and/or India.

Beijing's main concern is an uprising by the population. They are right to be concerned: there have been dozens of uprising and civil wars in Chinese history each of which has killed millions of people. Beijing has successfully used export industries to give 100s of millions of citizens manufacturing jobs which provide a good-enough living to keep their population from revolting. In other words, Beijing has been dependent on exports just to avoid social chaos. In contrast, the US has not been and is not dependent on exports to anything like the same extent.

Beijing did not want the trillions of US dollars it owns: it does not have some master plan the implementation of which requires $trillions. These trillions are an unwanted side-effect of Beijing's policy over the decades of keeping the dollar strong relative to the yuan to makes Chinese good cheap in dollars to encourage owners of dollars to buy Chinese goods (which, again, it does to try to avoid social chaos).

And also, like other commenters have mentioned, China needs to import food, fertilizer and liquid fossil fuels to prevent its people from starving whereas the US is self-sufficient in liquid fossil fuels and food (though I don't know about fertilizer).

The reason it is prioritizing electric vehicles is because right now, if China stops being able to import enough liquid fossil fuels on tanker ships (e.g., from the Gulf and from Russia's European ports), it loses the ability to deliver food to its people. If they manage to make their electric-vehicle infrastructure robust enough, then in some future year, they'll be able to run their delivery trucks on electricity generated from coal, which it has enough of without having it import it.

Beijing is currently in a weaker position than Washington economically and militarily and the difference is quite significant. If Beijing ever launches an attack on Taiwan, that is a strong sign that the leaders in Beijing think the gulf between China and the US is widening (i.e., China is falling ever further behind) because if they thought that the gulf were narrowing, they would conclude that they can afford to wait and snap up Taiwan in the future.

The USA imports a significant fraction of fertilizer (including from China and Russia). But longer term we're in pretty good shape as long as we can get past these ridiculous trade disputes with Canada and Mexico. In particular a lot of fertilizer uses natural gas as a key input, and we're fortunate to have a lot of that.

https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2025/02/tariff-threats-and...

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