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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

I find it funny that people talk about a US/China war as a real possibility. You are aware that that would be the end of life on earth as we know it, right?

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Unfortunately, "it would end life on Earth as we know it" is not, on its own terms, a thing that will stop it from happening. All it takes is the people who can make the decision deciding to do it because they think they will come out ahead, and not caring about what it may do to anyone else. And they don't even have to be right. They just have to think they will come out ahead.

Don't mistake talking about a thing as advocating for that thing. It leaves you completely unable to process international politics, and frankly, a lot of other news and discussion as well. If you can only think about things you approve of, your model of the world is worse than useless.

Pretty likely, I think, it'd be a geographically restricted war.

The countries wouldn't fire nukes against each other's mainlands but maybe against each other's fleets. Pretty likely

We haven’t really tested the idea of a geographically restricted war. During the Cold War there were some pretty transparent proxy wars, but the proxy still allowed for backing out and saving face.

I don’t think geographically restricting a war is even possible, really. The US’s typical game plan involves hitting the enemy’s decision-making capabilities faster than they can react. That goes out the window if we can’t hit each other’s mainlands. A war where we don’t get to use our strongest trick and China keeps their massive industrial base is an absurd losing one that the US would be totally nuts to sign up for.

Anyway, we and China can be perfectly good peaceful competitors.

What even would be the goals of such wars?

Destroy the other country?

Take it over?

Be in a 1984 style „fake“ war forever?

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