How a French judge was digitally cut off by the USA
heise.de
heise.de
That is from that article..
It's a bad situation.
Politics (almost) never works like this. In a secret vote, you don't even know who voted yes or no or at all.
Si vis pacem para bellum
I also wonder what good any sort of military/defensive pact is if any country can unilaterally decide when or when not to participate. It means you can’t depend on it and you may as well not have it then right? To be clear I am not saying military pacts are a good thing, but they do currently exist and participating counties can’t (at least shouldn’t) just pretend they aren’t part of one when it’s inconvenient.
Is such a thing even possible in the EU? I understand that it's an economic and policy bloc. Does Brussels have the authority to raise an army from EU members?
It's all dependent on the national government voluntarily following the advice of Brussels, and in most cases they don't really have the resources the EU wants them to commit to "The Ukrainian nationalist Cause".
The problem with the way they talk at the big conferences is that there is almost no link between the rhetoric of existential crisis and the bills being passed at the national level.
The last numbers from Ukraine was a army of maybe 900k uniformed troops(thats up there with America) and as a response to that army's failure to drive Russia back Germany is talking about raising their armed forces less then a 3rd of that by 2030 thats just not real mobilization and thats my point about not taking the logistics serious.
Were the EU to mobilize as if it mattered to the actual population of the EU it could raise several time the army Ukraine have but nobody is actually suggesting that because the people in charge of the actual policy making don't really believe that Russia is a threat to any of the NATO member states.
> Ukraine was a army of maybe 900k uniformed troops
you have provided only 1 number and it was not about EU.
If we are in the world you describe, EU might as well do as it wants - its downside has been capped.
It would be a major blow to Ukraine if the US stops selling weapons to them via European buyers. There is a real threat of this if Trump feels the need to coerce Ukraine into supporting his peace plan.
The ones in Ukraine got moved into Russia, in exchange for Ukraine receiving money and security guarantees.
Signed 5 December 1994
1. Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders (in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act).[10]
2. Refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of the signatories to the memorandum, and undertake that none of their weapons will ever be used against these countries, except in cases of self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. (...)
The Budapest Memorandum is not a treaty, and it does not confer any new legal obligations for signatory states.
It also states that many Ukrainians at the time considered that keeping the nukes was an unrealistic option since all maintenance and equipment required to maintain them were located in Russia, Ukraine was under a financial crisis at the time and had no means to develop those things itself. I just can’t understand people now claiming it was a mistake to give up the nukes. Russia might have reasonably invaded Ukraine as soon as it was clear they intended to keep them as they knew they didn’t really have the ability to use them and no Western government would support them using them and starting a war that would likely contaminate half of Europe and cause terrible loss of life. It was absolutely the right thing to do for Ukraine. Even if that didn’t save them from future aggression, which I think was mostly the fault of the West for not being prepared to really sign a binding document and put the lives of their own soldiers on the line.
It's not quite the same, since Ukraine was part of the USSR, and Ukrainian scientists, engineers, and tradesmen contributed to the effort. Germany, on the other hand, was never part of the American federation, and didn't contribute to American weapons development...since Wernher von Braun/Operation Paperclip.
Ukraine at one point wanted to formally claim ownership over the weapons, as after all breaking the permissive action locks wasn’t that difficult. The US talked them out of it, as a lead up to the Budapest Memorandum.
We all know how much the security guarantees of that agreement were worth.
They were worth 30 years of peace. It wasn't a treaty. Everyone knew it was a handshake agreement without consequences for breaking it. It prevented an immediate war in eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR. A war that could have been much worse involving nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately the war came 30 years later.
For something as serious as giving up a nuclear arsenal it’s reasonable to expect to get more than 20 years of peace and for the co-signers to actual fulfil their parts of the agreement, whether legally binding or not.
The end result is that no country will soon trust a Russian non-aggression promise and none will trust an American promise of support.
It is also widely believed to have had a hand in the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin in 2004, in order to give an edge to his pro-Russian opponent, Viktor Yanukovych.
But even if that’s not true there’s ample evidence of overt Russian influence campaigns to support Yanukovych in that election, which was just 10 years after the Budapest Memorandum.
This is not an accurate comparison.
It's not that Russia had nukes in Ukraine and withdrew them. Many of the Soviet soldiers manning them were Ukrainians and stayed behind. Much of the infrastructure for maintaining the Soviet arsenal was also in Ukraine and had to be rebuilt in Russia. The situation was more akin to if the US broke up and Louisiana (which has a lot of nuclear warheads stationed in it) is dealing with whether they are now a nuclear power, or if they need to hand them over to South Carolina or something.
Russia is the single legal successor of the USSR, so all Soviet nukes became Russian nukes, regardless where they were located. So after the USSR broke up, Russia did have nukes in Ukraine and withdrew them.
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Mears...
He was right in 2014:
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-t...
And he is still right:
https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/who-caused-the-ukraine-wa...
It ignores that people should have their right to self-determination, don't want to live under russian oppression. As somebody whose family lives were ruined by exactly same oppression of exactly same russia (err soviet union but we all know who set the absolute tone of that 'union' and once possible everybody else run the fuck away as quickly as possible) I can fully understand anybody who wants to have basic freedom and some prospect of future for their children - russia takes that away, they subjugate, oppress, erase whole ethnicities, whoever sticks out and their close ones is dealt with brutally.
Not worth the electrical energy used to display that text. Unless you enjoy russian propaganda, then all is good.
I think the real difference lies in whether one believes Ukraine deserves to decide its own path, or if it's forever doomed to be a chess piece on the board between spheres of influence, which seems to be the mindset both Putin and Trump are stuck in.
3. Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus, and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
4. Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
Both seems to not happen as stipulated.
Edit: I didn't read properly, 4 obviously didn't happen, my bad.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...
> 3. The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the Republic of Belarus of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
the US regime is attempting to do this
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memorandum_on_Security_Assura...
I don’t know this. Thank you.
Economic coercion attempting to violate sovereignty would be something like the threatened (actual?) tariffs on Brazil for imprisoning Bolsonaro.
In the 90s. Twenty years buys lots of time for code cracking, reverse engineering and—if that fails—bullshitting.
With the benefit of hindsight, Ukraine should have kept its nukes. (Finland, the Baltics, Poland and Romania should probably develop them.)
They would've quickly sold them to Iran like they did with nuclear capable missiles. [0]
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005-05/ukraine-admits-missi...
Unclear. A nuclear Kyiv would have different security incentives than a non-nuclear one.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/world/europe/ukraine-zele...
And in any case it's was not simply removing the safety devices on the weapons, you need to be able to target the ICBMs at Russia, which Ukraine could not do:
> In fact, the presence of strategic nuclear missiles on its territory posed several dilemmas to a Ukraine hypothetically bent on keeping them to deter Russia. The SS-24s do not have the ability to strike targets at relatively short distances (that is, below about 2000 km); the variable-range SS- 19s are able, but Ukraine cannot properly maintain them. [...] the SS-19s were built in Russia and use a highly toxic and volatile liquid fuel. To complicate matters further, targeting programs and blocking devices for the SS-24 are Russian made. The retargeting of ICBM is probably impossible without geodetic data from satellites which are not available to Kiev.
> Cruise missiles for strategic bombers stored in Ukraine have long been 'disabled in place'.[...] As with ICBMs, however, retargeting them would be impossible for Ukraine, which does not have access to data from geodetic satellites; the same goes for computer maintenance.
From SIPRI research report 10; The Soviet Nuclear Weapon Legacy
So Ukraine did not have usable weapons at hand. But it did, and does, certainly have the capacity to build entirely new weapons, if given time.
Agreed. But nobody was invading Ukraine in 1994.
The weapons were seen as a security liability. In reality, they were bargaining chips.
> to me it doesn't seems like an incredibly bright idea in a world where the existing nuclear states doesn't want anyone else to get nukes too
To be clear, Kyiv made the right decision given what they knew in 1994. Non-proliferation was in vogue. America and British security guarantees meant something.
If Kyiv knew what we know today, that the Budapest security guarantees were worthless from each of Washington, London and Moscow; that wars of conquest would be back; and that non-proliferation would be seen through the lens of regional versus global security, it would have been a bright idea to demand more before letting them go, or at least to drag out negotiations so Ukraine could study the weapons and maybe even extract some samples.
> SS-24s do not have the ability to strike targets at relatively short distances (that is, below about 2000 km)
Again, having the nukes would give Kyiv leverage. At a minimum they'd have HEU and a proven design to study.
And again, don't undervalue bullshitting in geopolitics. If Kyiv said they have a short-range nuclear missile, it would not be credible. But would it be incredible enough to green light an invasion?
And doing that for some design info is really not worth the risk: just recruit some soviet weapons designers, for sure there are Ukrainians in that project already.
We literally don't know. A large part of stockpile stewardship programmes at the Sandia national labs is aimed at answering this question.
Ukraine *desperately* needs to be a nuclear weapons state. Nothing else will suffice. They need more than one bomb, really more than three or four. Putin has to be terrified that no matter how many nuclear strikes he endures, another waits to follow. When he fears that, the war will end.
As has been illustrated so well over the past few years, the power of nuclear weapons is a paradox. It allows you to make the ultimate threat. But that threat isn't credible unless people believe you'll use them. Because the consequences of using them are so severe, they're only credible if used in response to a correspondingly severe threat. Russia's arsenal hasn't allowed it to stop a constant flow of weapons to its enemy, an enemy which has invaded and still controls a small bit of Russian territory, and which frequently carries out aerial attacks on Russian territory. Ukraine faces much more of an existential threat (Ukraine has no prospect of conquering Russia, but the reverse is a serious possibility) so a nuclear threat from Ukraine would be more credible, but it could easily still not be enough. Certainly they're not an automatic "leave me alone" card.
He'd be backed into the door marked "exit". There is no corner to trap him here.
>End the invasion after suffering a nuclear strike
And why do you believe that Zelensky or whoever is in charge would nuke Moscow first? Do you think that, if they had say 30 nukes (plenty for a few relatively harmless demonstrations) that this would be the first target? Obviously they'd pick something that he could decide to de-escalate afterwards.
>they're only credible if used in response to a correspondingly severe threat.
You mean such as the severe threat that Ukraine has endured for a decade at this point? The war now threatens to make them functionally extinct. Many have fled and will never return, their population is reduced to something absurdly low, many of their children have been forcibly abducted to be indoctrinated or tormented/tortured.
That condition you impose was pre-satisfied.
>Certainly they're not an automatic "leave me alone" card.
Of course not. They'd have to be used intelligently (readers: "used" does not imply detonated). It's not entirely clear to me that this would be the case with Ukraine/Zelensky. But nothing less at this point will suffice. Even if the US promised to put 150,000 troops on the ground, this wouldn't end. It would only escalate. Perhaps to that nuclear war you seem to fear.
Not sure what the consequences of attacking NATO has to do with this.
> Just as I’d prefer that IN or PK or both not having those weapons.
The only reason we haven't seen a Ukraine-like invasion in that region is that they both have nukes. MAD works.
They also have another $1B budgeted in defense spending for Ukraine next year https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-committee-backs-m...
Of course it would be absolutely disgraceful for the US to drop sanctions on Russia and have normal relations with it while it continued its invasion. But that's what the US voted for.
The reason US sanctions Russia is because the US has been pushing its oil insustry in Europe. For instance, EU tariff deals included buying a minimum amount of hydrocarbon products:
> As part of this effort, the European Union intends to procure US liquified natural gas, oil, and nuclear energy products with an expected offtake valued at $750 billion through 2028.
In that context, US sanctions on Russia serve a purpose which isn't solely helping Ukraine ; I don't see the US lifting these sanctions anytime soon.
The latest demand for Ukraine to just completely surrender.
I see it as a great opportunity, that we in the EU get our shit together, to not be dependant on the US anymore. Nor russia. Nor china.
So far we still can afford the luxory of moving the european parliament around once a month, because we cannot agree on one place. Lots of nationalistic idiotic things going on and yes, if those forces win, the EU will fall apart.
If russia graps most of Ukraine, this would be really bad(see the annexion of chzech republic 1938, that gave Hitler lots of weapons he did not had), but it is totally preventable without boots on the ground (russia struggles hard as well). Just not if too many people fall for the russian fueled nationalistic propaganda.
USA all but openly support Russia by now.
The people volunteering and driving know Europe is at war. They all say nobody else where they live realizes this.
It's frustrating.
too bad that Cuba is right on its own border :)
For all intents and purposes, Ukraine's border with Russia is way further away (like magnitude) from EU/NATO than US<>Russia (who are neighbors) or US<>Cuba (who are also neighbors).
Kaliningrad literally shares borders with Poland and Lithuania. 0 km is the smallest distance possible. Russia and Ukraine both border EU and NATO countries.
What argument did I even make? Are you saying it's absurd that Russia's border to Ukraine is further away to the closest EU/NATO member than Cuba is to the US? Because if so, I think you need to open up a world map.
1. Russia aims to either capture Ukraine outright or exert influence over it, which puts eastern EU states at grave risk. Note that Belarus, a Russian vassal, already borders the EU and was used by the Russians to launch the Ukraine invasion.
2. Russia already borders — and menaces - the EU in the Baltics.
I'm pretty sure everyone I know would rather get imprisoned than go die in the mud to protect property they don't own, on the orders of a government that doesn't care about the same things they care about.
When we talk about it, it always boils down to a discussion on how to best desert/escape at different stages.
But leaving all moral questions aside, where to go?
South america might turn into a war zone as well. Africa partly is already. Asia similar.
New Zealand sounds good, but even Peter Thiel found out, that money will get you only so far in buying a safe haven.
So personally I would opt for fixing the problems in europe. And am on it within my abilities. But .. with limits. I do not trust my politicians either and I am multilingual and traveled the world a lot. So in the end I would also rather take my family and leave, then being ordered to go fight in a war with half working equipment, because corruption and proud incompetence prevented preparation. (Many in the german military for instance hold the opinion, that they don't need to learn from the incompetent ukrainians, because they are all fighting wrong)
So whatever happens (apart from nuclear holocaust everywhere around the world) will be so slow we will have time to react. Already biggest arming of whole european continent since WWII is happening, and any bad news is pushing more money and focus into building more and more.
I know it sounds gloomy, but only if you have your head too close to the screens daily. Worse had come and gone than incompetent russians.
Depends where you live I suppose. The baltic states are rightfully worried and take it a bit more serious.
And yes, russia on its own is not that dangerous to whole Europe. But russia in combination with north korean soldiers and supported by china .. and some european states that switch sides (Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, ..), that would be dangerous. Lot's of things can happen. Also the EU can transform into an evil empire if we don't watch out. So no, I am not too worried about immediate war, but the traction right now is bad.
Was your point that europe is immune to fascism and imperialism somehow?
I'm guessing in the worst case South America/AU/NZ/JP/UAE/Canada would be the goals.
The only real risk I see is essentially waiting too long and getting detained right as they begin to close off the borders for people of fighting age.
Uh, nuh https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/polish-pm-says-two-resp...
That's the biggest question of the century. Imagine that EU and China make a deal, and they backstab US and Russia respectively. EU and China are physically so far away from each other that there's no way they'd actually run into direct conflict, meanwhile by backstabbing, both of them could easily get what they want. What I'm trying to say is that if you flipped the alliances and aligned EU with China and US with Russia, Russia would collapse within one battle maximum while EU's support would be just enough to push the 50/50 chance of Taiwan invasion towards decisive Chinese victory. Everyone happy - China becomes the world's #1 superpower, while EU remains undisputable #2 and US gets sent back to lick its wounds. Sure, EU might suffer from severing its ties with the US, but if the alternative scenario is US abandoning EU and the latter facing Russia alone, then this stops being such a crazy idea.
How does EU even remotely benefit from this bizarre fantasy scenario where it flips alliances toward China? The fundamentals don't change. EU has no tech and doesn't produce anything. China would only exploit the partnership even more than they already do.
What a poor attempt at trolling!
But the point is still that the economic fundamentals don't change by shifting alliances. EU would still be under the same pressure.
Ive heard the same sentiment locally and at some conventions with low/no European representation.
Its also a corrolary to "china steals tech"... Except for all the tech they're innovating and creating.
Invasion doesn't have to mean they plan to roll tanks all the way to Paris.
Have you realized Russian agents blew up a train in Poland this week, after some weeks prior flying planes and drones into NATO airspace and disrupting air travel in Denmark with drones started from shadow fleet tankers. The grounds for further action are being tested as we speak.
Invasion just means Russian soldiers enter Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finnland. Countries parts of which Putin painted rightfully Russian territories in his speeches. I wouldn't bet a lot on that not happening, especially if the geopolitical situation deteriorates in favor of Putin.
Reversal of what Russia sees as a great injustice. The 2021 ultimatum[1] issued on the eve of the war can be summed up as a return to the Europe of 1989 with everything that it entails.
So invasion means a full war with NATO?
These sorts of wars are very rare in the modern era. They gambled entirely because they faced an army they were 10x the size and they got embarrassed. There's near zero strategic logic in trying again vs NATO after they lost most of their fancy gear.
And despite how things have fared in Ukraine thus far, the Baltics are a much softer target. If Ukraine does end up falling to the Russians, it’ll be used as a springboard by the Russians, potentially supported by Ukrainians disillusioned with the West’s betrayal. It would certainly not be the first time that Russia has annexed Ukraine and mobilized its people against Russia’s foes.
They would still have to contend with an insurgency on occupied territory, but that is something Russia has considerable experience with, including Ukraine in the past (mopping up the remaining nationalist resistance after WW2).
(Edited for a less confrontational beginning of the first sentence.)
If Russia's jets can't operate over Ukraine they won't do much in Europe except self-defense of their own homeland.
China on the other hand is a very very serious opponent...
In France recently the army chief-of-staff declared that we must be prepared to "lose its children" in a war, if it wants to avoid it. Of course we should. The resulting outcry may be a sign we've already lost.
The sooner the EU rids itself of the US the better
I thought the only way USA was supporting Ukraine was by no longer refusing to sell them extraordinarily expensive weapons. So, no longer [openly] hampering them.
But Europe’s leaders on the other hand do seem invested in escalating this conflict, a lack of finances notwithstanding.
Second my point is understanding the Russian POV, regardless of the correctness of that POV.
Third, your comment is off base historically. The timeline is:
2007 Putin’s Munich speech warning against NATO expansion to Eastern Europe.
Feb 2008 US ambassador warning that NATO expansion to Ukraine was a red line for Russia.
April 2008 Bucharest summit Ukraine and Georgia were not given MAPs due to France and Germany objections but were promised NATO accession over their objections.
August 2008 invasion of Georgia.
Nov 2013-Feb 2014 Euromaidan protests overthrowing Russia-sympathetic Yanukovych
2014 invasion of Crimea
Feb 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
Besides this Putin has argued for the invasion of Ukraine as restoration of historical Russia as part of his nationalist ideology. And other examples of NATO expansion such as Baltics, Poland and Finland have not led to Russian attacks.
Overall the concerns many European leaders have about Russia need to be tempered by a better understanding of Russia’s actual perspective (as I said not the same as advocating for that perspective).
> First off, what I stated is a view held by reputable scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, and John Mearsheimer, not just a view you (also) can find in Russian propaganda.
> Overall the concerns many European leaders have about Russia need to be tempered by a better understanding of Russia’s actual perspective
If anything, the Anglo-American world has lived for too long in a fantasy land constructed by reputable and disreputable scholars from afar, instead of listening to those with lived experience and knowledge accumulated over a lifetime.
The closest thing I could find about this was that in one of his books he acknowledges partial financing of this one book from a small prize from a Russian internet forum. That’s all I could find. Chomsky and Sachs supposedly fall under this umbrella too, according to you. Presumably criticizing American foreign policy is equivalent to Russian propaganda in your view.
Nor are any of the conspiracy theories you attribute to them something I could find evidence of.
My point there in my comment about these three holding these views was that this isn’t simply Russian fake news. It’s held by some reputable scholars as well. Your response is to claim these scholars too are Russian propagandists, bolstering your case with outright fabrications.
The US leadership openly refers to Ukraine as a proxy war. I do think it’s worth listening to critics of US foreign policy in that context, and not limiting our information diet to European politicians.
> ... from a small prize from a Russian internet forum.
No meaningful discussion takes place there. You can assume that all organizers and domestic attendees are acting under FSB instructions. It is solely an operation by the security services to manipulate Western visitors and turn them into useful idiots. Thus, at least in Eastern Europe, where these tricks are well understood, anyone attending such events is automatically considered suspicious: they must be either utterly clueless or working for Russia. Mearsheimer, somehow, has fallen even deeper and started accepting money.
And it shows. You can look up on YouTube his attempt to debate the Polish foreign minister, completely misrepresenting certain diplomatic events, unaware that Sikorski had been there in person, leading an official delegation. How anyone can take such a buffoon seriously remains a mystery to me. To Russians, he has been one of their best investments. Tens of millions of people have been exposed, through him, to the ideas instilled in him at places like Valdai, believing them to be high-quality expertise from a reputable scholar, when in reality they are nothing more than laundered propaganda.
Criticizing American foreign policy doesn’t make someone a Russian propagandist.
You have named 3 people out of 8 billion alive, so 0.00000004%. That doesn't sound like a consensus, or even a majority. It sounds like 3 dudes saying a thing.
> The timeline is: 2007 Putin’s Munich speech warning against NATO expansion to Eastern Europe...
So as far back as 2007, we have recordings of putin threatening other countries against exercising their sovereign rights, in violation of international law. Not great for russia.
Unfortunately for the world, the timeline starts far before that, with russian invasions and annexations of their neighbors. If we look further back, we see russian genocide of Ukrainians during the holodomor. If we look even further back, we see russian ethnic cleansing of Ukrainian Tatars.
Based on this history, and the admissions of russian officials, we can conclude that russia just wants what Ukraine has, and hates Ukrainians for saying no.
Previously when the US reneged on the JCPOA viz Iran , they had a similar law/faclity that theoreticall could have been used but never was.
As an addition the EU Commission is currently imposing pretty similar sanction on a Journalist [1] so yeah i dont see much movement on that law being used.Most likely they will try to wait it out.
[1] https://www.public.news/p/eu-travel-ban-on-three-journalists
> Alina Lipp runs the blog “Neues aus Russland”, in which she systematically disseminates misinformation about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and delegitimises the Ukrainian government, especially with a view to manipulating German public sentiment as regards support for Ukraine.
> Furthermore, she is using her role as a war correspondent with the Russian armed forces in eastern Ukraine to spread Russian war propaganda. She regularly appears in troop entertainment and propaganda shows on the Russian military TV channel Zvezda.
> Thus, Alina Lipp is engaging in and supporting actions by the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten security and stability in the Union and in a third country (Ukraine) through the use of coordinated information manipulation and interference, and through facilitating an armed conflict in a third country.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ:L_202...
So the EUV blockade has absolutely been effective and the fact that the PRC is paying so many shills to convince westerners otherwise just shows how behind they are.
It’s a thing you’d prefer to avoid, sure; but some degree of prognostic uncertainty is totally routine (in fact I would call that definitional: no predictions are truly certain until they’ve come to pass, and by the time that happens it’s usually too late to act). It’s not “bad” any more than mortality is “bad”—it just is, whether or not we wish it were; wisdom lies in managing it as best you can.
In the sense that the gp used the word, I think they allude to a tradeoff: you can reduce the probability of an underestimate by increasing the probability of an overestimate. I took their comment to imply that it would be wiser to risk an overestimate than to risk an underestimate on questions of “can Chinese society achieve a massive goal on a tight timeframe if their leadership decides it’s important.”
Much better than sarcasm then =)
It's not actually a strategy at all. It's the organic result of being the global reserve currency. Foreigners want American dollars so that they can trade with everyone else and are incentivized to do whatever it takes to get it.
Also, the "massive trade imbalance" is only an imbalance in goods. When you take services & the flow of foreign investments/loans into consideration as well, things don't look anywhere near as uneven as Donald Trump would like you to believe.
Trump wants us to give up high value jobs in designing hardware and software so we can make less working in factories again.
It's not even just jobs, it's also the tax revenue itself.. the population is overburdened with taxes and increased prices combined with relatively lower wages due to excessive inflation the past few years. While tariffs can increase prices, they can also eat into the margins of foreign production leading to more insourcing of jobs.
Beyond those aspects is being able to handle production of critical infrastructure in times of supply constraints... such as war or a global pandemic. You can increase from 50% production of medications to 100% of domestic needs pretty easily, but scaling from 0% is almost impossible in any reasonable time frame.
And how far out is that?
My guess is that it's at least 10 years away, but that could obviously change depending on what resources they're willing to commit. But even at that point they'll be 2 decades behind ASML's EUV tech so it probably won't be competitive.
GP must have been asking for the non-PRC shill opinion.
> My guess is that it's at least 10 years away,
That doesn't sound at all like a lot. China has a uniquely effective industrial espionage... industry, combined with a very thick geopolitical skin and disregard for international demands. This helps accelerate any process that others have already perfected.
We'll start to see the real deal if/when China eventually catches up to the leaders in every field and the only way to pull ahead is to be entirely self propelled (you can't take advantage of someone else's draft when you're in front of the pack).
These guys have a 100% market share https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems at the 'extreme' end and, obviously, everyone else is trying but haven't really shown much promise.
Here's a good background article on the topic: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/...
What was the incentive/funding for their attempts? In a non-national-security scenario it makes sense not to try too hard because you can just buy ASML's solution.
With China it's a bit different, if they decide it's a matter of national security and pour Manhattan-project-levels of money/resources into it, they could make faster progress.
Force Chinas growth to be more expensive. It has nothing to do with not believing China can do it, it's about slowing them down in a task we believe that they can do.
Note that this calculus only makes sense if you invade China while they are busy with the EUV machines, otherwise they catch up technologically and then build all the scary military.
Of course, the the calculus doesn't make sense at all, because the obvious order when you can't do both is you build enough military to feel safe first, then you try for the tech race.
Literally zero actual wars with a technological component have progressed like this. (The first tradeoff to be made is the one Russia is making: sacrificing consumption for military production and research. Guns and butter.)
We're not anymore in the swords vs guns era. We're talking about hypersonic missiles vs super intelligent hypersonic missiles. Still, all it takes is 1 dumb missile to pass through the defenses and an entire city can be wiped off. At the end of the day, they don't care if a missiles didn't reach the precise target. As you can see in Ukraine, Russia is bombing all types of buildings, they don't give a damn about schools, kindergarten or so.
The tech component is not everything.
These are still hypotheticals. Every war since the Civil War has had a decisive technological component. If the model doesn't apply there, this time probably ain't different.
Yes. Concern around Soviet space and missiles capabilities overtaking America’s directly lead to Kennedy changing his mind on no boots on the ground.
(The Vietnam War started with America betting on BVR, with the long-seeing but minimally-agile F-4 Phantom. Soviet MiG-21s, on the other hand, blended into civilian traffic. This lead to disaster. When the MiG-25 rolled out, we countered with the F-15 Eagle. But it came too late, which meant we couldn’t establish air superiority with long-range aircraft alone.)
Note: I’m not saying this was the decisive component. It was one among many, and not the most important. But if we had F-15s at the outset, when the Soviets had MiG-21s, there is a better chance the skirmish would have stayed in the skies and Vietnam would have stalemated like Korea.
Now China has to build EUV themselves, then mass produce chips. It slows them down regardless and costs them resources.
Cut off the market before it becomes a problem.
---------
Militarily, delaying China into 2040s after the USA has stealth destroyers of our own (beginning production in late 2020s, mass production in the 2030s) means China has to fight vs 2030s era tech instead of our 1980s era Arleigh Burke DDGs.
What, do you want to have the fight in late 2020s or would you rather have the war in late 2030s? There is a huge difference and USAs production schedule cannot change. But we can change Chinas production schedule.
But it's not slowing them down. It's forcing them to accelerate development ( aka investing more into the sector ). Has china invested more or less? It's amazing how blind people are to this counterintuitive fact.
Of course investing into chip development is slowing China down. Its slower to build their own than for us to give them those chips.
Yes! Remove the impetus for them to innovate and make them reliant on our exports.
"Give them"? I love sneaky propagandists. No, make them pay for it. It's what we do to our "allies" so that they are dependent on american tech.
> Of course investing into chip development is slowing China down.
From a myopic narrow point of view. But viewed more broadly, it has accelerated china's tech development.
> Its slower to build their own than for us to give them those chips.
In the short term, but not the long term. Just like banning china from participating in the international space station forced china to accelerate their development of their space program.
Yes. I'm fine with this.
Weakening China in the short term means pushing the Taiwan war timeline by years. Years that we will spend building up the DDG(X).
As I said before and I'll say again: USA is weak in 2020s but strong in the 2030s. We only need to delay China by a few years and the DDG(X) changes everything.
----------
You need to understand that I make my view based on the perceived strength of the US Navy. The US Navy is getting huge upgrades and a few years of delay makes an incredible difference.
> USA is weak in 2020s but strong in the 2030s.
The US is the largest economy with an unparalleled military at the moment. What are you talking about?
> The US Navy is getting huge upgrades and a few years of delay makes an incredible difference.
For what? The US Navy will play no role in a war between china and taiwan.
No offense, but who gives a shit about taiwan? Not americans. Only chinese people care about taiwan.
Uhhhhh, Taiwan is an island dude. That's either Marines or Navy. I'm betting Navy will do the heavy lifting given that China is missile heavy.
Marines might be used to shore up anti-landing defenses if China decides to send boots on the ground. But ideally the US Navy prevents the landing entirely.
Said war taking place while we have 1980s-era Arleigh Burke Destroyers would be an attack while our Navy is at our weakest. Anything we can do to delay said war until after the DDG(X) upgrade is to our advantage.
> No offense, but who gives a shit about taiwan? Not americans. Only chinese people care about taiwan.
I'm American and I care? That's why I'm arguing on this point.
Current wargames suggest that USA will be willing to dedicate like 2 carrier strike groups for the defense of Taiwan. I'm not sure if it's enough (especially with the aging Arleigh Burke destroyers), but that's the level of commitment mostly assumed in this scenario if not more.
We have like 14 Carrier strike groups for a reason. We can spare two of them to this task, maybe more.
https://www.huawei.com/en/media-center/company-facts
“The company's commitment to innovation is highlighted by its substantial investment of 179.7 billion yuan ($24.77 billion) in research and development (R&D), accounting for 20.8 percent of its annual revenue. Its total R&D investment over the past decade has reached 1.249 trillion yuan ($172.21 billion).”
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-03-31/Huawei-reports-solid-2...
They have the incentive, the government backing, exist in a mature ecosystem of tech rivalled only by the US, … If any corp can do it, Huawei can
I know some people live in the IT bubble and measure whole reality by it, but that's not so much true for the world out there. They have ie roughly F-35 equivalent, minus some secret sauces (which may not be so secret at the end since it seems they stole all of it).
You are making a mistake of thinking of them as yet another russia, utterly corrupt, dysfunctional at every level and living off some 'glorious past', when reality is exactly the opposite.
Without EUV, they very much are.
> but aren't our processes running into the wall of soon trying to make transistors smaller than an atom?
No, the finest pitches are still in the low double digit nanometers in 2 nm processes. The "2 nm" nomenclature hasn't denoted a physical dimension for decades.
For making a limited quantity of chips, for research purposes or for some special applications where the price is irrelevant, there would be no problem for China to make today ICs with e.g. a 2-nm CMOS process, by using electron-beam lithography. (Obviously, for developing a 2-nm process many other problems must be solved first, but lithography is not a roadblock, so the process can be developed before having EUV lithography, because test wafers can be made with e-beam lithography.)
Moreover, they have enough money and people to ensure that an alternative EUV technology will be developed, eventually. I might take them 5 to 10 years, but not more than that.
The attempts to sabotage China should have been started more than a decade earlier in order to have chances of success. Now it is too late and the cleverer way would have been to try to accelerate progress in USA, instead of trying to hinder progress in China, by using means that have totally discredited USA as a product supplier all over the world (i.e. by using the dubious legal theory that USA can dictate what to do to the owners of products that include components "made or designed in USA").
Apple disrupted Nokia and Blackberry. ARM is currently disrupting Intel.
What if someone lands on a break-through using a completely different tech: what if X-ray lithography [1] becomes viable enough that they don’t have to acquire state-of-art EUV machines from ASML?
[1] X-ray lithography was abandoned in the 80s but it is being revisited by Substrate https://substrate.com/our-purpose. They are an American company that hopes to make it commercially viable by being cheaper and far less complex than EUV.
E-beam is still used for making DUV/EUV masks where the low write speed can be tolerated but no one in the industry thinks it will replace EUV in the silicon litho steps any time soon.
But lay people eat this crap up and journalists turn a blind eye either because they're literally paid PRC shills or because clicks are everything now a days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process
not too shabby of a fall-back.
Their "7 nm" relied on multi patterning DUV which leads to restrictive design rules, more steps and masks and lower yields, which is why I put it in quotes and said it's uncompetitive.
The last DUV node was 10 nm, that's the best logic node they have which is comparable to TSMC/Samsung/Intel's 10 nm.
Which is cool, but there are limits to the number of times you can do that.
At the end of the day, the little man has to flip the switch.
And yet, it's anti-PRC shills that are all over social media. Go figure.
(from context)
It is spelled "lever."
But British English pronounces it like "beaver."
And American English pronounces it like "never."
My guess is that China will be highly reluctant to restrict exports of manufactured goods going forward. Doing so would directly threaten their own power base, just as the Trump administration's actions are currently taking a sledge hammer to the U.S.'s power base.
Ultimately, this kind of power is illusory. If you ever use it, you lose it.
That happened in 2018 too. All the projects at that time broke because China does it cheaper.
The thing that isn't available in most countries isn't the minerals.
The chip ban on the other hand is about R&D and labor, both things that do not diminish over time. Instead, the ban seeks to slow down Chinese advancement in areas relying on those chips, AI in particular. Both measures will lead to short-term issues, long-term lost growth, and mid-term new industries in the respective countries/markets.
But the threat of using it can tie up a significant amount of your adversaries' resources.
The best example with China is actually their rare earth wolf warrior bullshit. It’s taken a lever that could have been decisive in a war and neutered it.
It's either that the leadership is so caught up in their own ivory tower bubble of pure rhetoric to realize they havent really put in the logistics to actually affect reality or that they somehow don't really want the consequences of actually changing things.
For this is pretty clear what they need to do to create any real digital sovereignty and yet the seem to not really be willing to take the obvious step of just banning the use of any technology that have any dependency of foreign owned/managed cloud services or closed source products, and ordering their technical staff to start making changes even if it makes stakeholders annoyed, and yet the keep letting companies like IBM/RedHat and Microsoft pretend they can and should be a part of the digital sovereignty transformation project.
We saw the same when safe harbour collapsed and with the cookie directive where rather then doing something effective they found some way to fix it by changing a few words in an mostly unenforced set of click wrap contracts/licenses. .
The antitrust fines they impose on those American companies may simply be regarded as a cost of doing business.
When it comes to being indifferent to the welfare of the general populace, they are just as bad as anything else.
You nailed it right on the head. Those fines are peanuts for big corporations.
I am from Denmark and it's been interesting seeing our politicians dance around the very plausible direct invasion threats made by the current US president against Greenland, where our PM made strong declaration while her ministry of defense kept increasing it's dependency on American planes ect.
And it's the same story almost everywhere for the digital sovereignty stuff, yes they claim to want it but when the legislation arrives it's nothing and there is no urgency within the technical departments actually running government it to change anything.
> contribute to solidarity and mutual respect among peoples, free and fair trade, eradication of poverty and the protection of human rights [0]
Notably absent from these values are wishes to make the EU more resilient against foreign threats to the global supply chain.
[0] https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
Archive link: https://archive.is/TleMk
There is an English version of Le Monde as well.
I'm very curious what would happen then? Nothing presumable, as nothing ever happens, or it might be another step to separate the EU market from the US.
How is this legal / OK?
You may regard them as such, but they are not in any sense frivolous. It is the law that if-x-then-y, it's not a discretionary item that one interprets. And to be clear, these are not "indirectly" making payment processors stop serving the person, it is very clearly direct and you do not, as a company, have a choice in the matter.
2. The US Government plays incredibly fast and loose with laws that compel foreign policy from it. If its adherence to them is discretionary, you can absolutely piss on it for being discretionary in this case.
The only exceptions are the high end enterprise accounts.
I didn’t claim any company received a binding order to do this or that?
If you are asking how it's OK, it's not. It's wrong on many different levels. But it's legal (or at least the US has laws that mandate that same thing, I don't know if they were the ones applied here).
So people don't think this is a new thing; when I worked in retail banking in the (very) early '90s it was made clear to us that any transaction in US dollars is subject to US regulation. The hypothetical scenario was that an Ethiopian arms dealer buys Russian product from a German dealer in Switzerland if they do it in USD it is the purview of the US to prosecute that crime.
My memory is hazy, but I don't think that when I was being taught it that it was a new thing.
1) It must suck for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to be subject to a rogue French judge.
2) It must suck for the judge to face consequences from the US.
How is the french judge "rogue"?
How is a ICC warrant "extra territorial"? It only calls for the arrest of the individual inside ICC member countries.
What's a bit of truth in the face of that
Even ignoring that one of these cases involves death and destruction and the other doesn't
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFUkfmnCR7U
the scale of destruction in Gaza is horrendous: Its dense cities reduced to rubble, as though after a nuclear strike. The death toll is not yet known. the lower bound - the number of bodies counted by the ministry of health - is at around 69,000, while the Lancet estimated over 186,000 (and that was over a year ago), or nearly 7.9% of the entire population of the Gaza strip. Around 90% of the deaths are civilians (though estimates vary on that point as well).
The US has been participating in this operation, with funding, provisions of services, equipment and most of the weapons platforms, armament and ordnance, diplomatic backing, and even military presence of aircraft carriers and other forces. US tech companies have sold Israel cloud services and various computing solutions; US military, auto and other industries are in on the action as well.
Now we see the US and some of its corporations flexing the imperial muscle to try and deter international institutions for holding Israel accountable.
The ICC has tried several political leaders before, and even convicted and jailed some, but - they were not important enough to US' strategic interests (or if you like, the interests of the donors and backers of the political elite), so the US did not have any such qualms.
Having said all this - it is interesting to note the article does not mention the judge's accounts with Google or Microsoft, e.g. for email or office app services. I wonder if he has any, and whether those have been excepted or whether it's a different story.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-he...
If anything, the MoH numbers are lower than the actual death toll. Even the IDF said internally the numbers were right and their own statistics state that 83% of casualties in Gaza have been civilians.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/israeli-intelligence-health-...
> have already been statistically dubious
No, they have not. You're citing an opinion piece in a pro-Israel publication, the author of which has never conducted any investigative work on the matter, and its arguments are rather frivolous.
For a discussion (and refutation) of that claim in the professional press, see:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
What _is_ certainy the case, though, is that the ministry is not counting deaths where the bodies do not reach its employees/representatives. And - it is not including deaths which may indirectly caused by the Israeli onslaught. For example, if you die of cancer and you might have gotten treatment had it not been for the destruction of the hospitals and the lack of water, electricity etc. - you are not included in the count.
The AP ran a story about how they count:
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-mini...
which also includes their record from past Israeli military campaigns against Gaza, vis-a-vis the UN figures.
However, if you look at the few times that IDF published casualty estimates, they were pretty close to the numbers published by Hamas.
That's perhaps one of the saddest things about this war: there are so many casualties that even Hamas doesn't need to inflate the number.
In a decentralized world, the US could huff and puff as much as they please, no one would give two fucks.
But when the US have an actual say in every cent that moves from account A to account B in every country that still harbors the illusion of sovereignty ... well your sovereignty does not actually exist.
as bizarre as it this situation is, similar power was leveraged to deny american it services to a non-european company outside of the eu [1].
of course not involving the exact judge, but this just highlights the geographical concentration of major web services.
If you do that then the US would respond by doing things like attempting to block EU laws that affect US companies. They're American companies. You can't just block them. American companies won't refuse to follow American law. If you put them in a position where they are forced to either follow American law and European law that are in conflict then they'll be forced to withdraw from the European market.
In France, there is the CB system, that can be used in France to pay by card. Outside of France, it's VISA/Mastercard only. So the others judges can't even pay anything by card, even in they own country. I'm not sure they can even get money from an ATM.
A cosmic game of uno? i reversed your reverse!
Had to go into settings, manually reject each kind of cookie, and then there's no way to confirm, just a way to go back to the first page, and nothing to click but "accept", which seems to imply that you'll end up taking all the cookies anyway. In the end I just closed the tab without reading.
Basically any time you search for information in german, you get this "start an indefinite subscription to open this page" or "confirm that your consent to tracking is freely given" model, which I find highly ironic given that germany is one of the main forces in european lawmaking but then doesn't actually want to comply
There is a guy on here, weev (username rabite) who was soft sanctioned by the US and can't use banks that transact in the dollar. Last I read of his comments, he was in Ukraine or Transnistria, surviving off of crypto and direct rents from crypto purchased real estate.
I assert, they are a perfect example.
"Please, Donald Trump, kill the Jews, down to the last woman and child. Leave nothing left of the Jewish menace..."
re: ukraine, I'm not sure how that's remotely relevant here and frankly I think you're doing ukrainians a profound disservice by comparing the two
if you look at my background, you'll see I understand this better than most
By dismissing and frankly belittling my statement, you are falling for the same trap that justified so many dead Ukrainians.
Weev meanwhile is just a fucking Nazi. This exact thread is about a person who is not a Nazi facing persecution, and yet you go out of your way to use a literal and explicit Nazi as your example.
In fact, nearly every time I see people make this kind of "Oh it could happen to you, it happened to <X>" they seem to pick people who are damn Nazis.
Gee, I wonder why those are the cases they know about?
Secondly, where are his (justified!) rantings about the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles?
Being nasty (or even evil) is not the same as being a Nazi. Being virulently anti-Jewish is not the same as being a Nazi. Belonging either in a mental institution (without internet access) or belonging in a prison (still without internet access) is not the same as being a Nazi.
There are so many different kinds of evil in this world. Don't pretend they are all Nazis.
I agree with your overall point (hence "all of the above is true") and am merely trying to make it clear that the guy you're talking about is a nazi and that I think it detracts from the argument. There are plenty of better examples.
If you know any other HN users that are 'soft' sanctioned or worse, feel free to speak up and let me know there are better HN users to showcase.
They have previously sanctioned other people within the ICC - the prosecutor and deputy prosecutor.
He definitely deserves what he got.
https://www.union-syndicale-magistrats.org/sanctions-america...
In it he specifically mentions that family cannot buy stuff for you because that is a crime if they are in the US or are US nationals, and that your direct family is banned from entering the US (p 4). He does not specifically state whether his family are sanctioned or not but he says that is a risk when he talks in general terms on page 7 about the impacts of the sanctions regime for other judges. Perhaps he is simply not married himself.
Either way, for some reason the news coverage didn’t include these parts of the letter, maybe they didn’t read the whole thing.
He's being sanctioned as a result by the USA, which flowed down to US companies who must follow US law.
I think that is the most important point in the article.
I'm aghast as to what people seem to think they have authority on simply because they're using the internet.
There is a real world out there and it is quite different from online echo chambers, to say the least.
This isn't really about the ICC judges. It is about the failure of the major Western countries who are part of the ICC to come to the defence of the judges who they have appointed to make those decisions, and the control Israeli politicians exercise over the White House, ie the US President himself.
Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
Sanctions of those kind or usually applied to corporate entities, state entitities or militant political groups aka "proscribed terrorist organizations". They are not intended to applied to individuals carrying out their legitimate duties in organizations approved or even created by America's own allies under principles America subscribes to, even if they are reluctant to submit themselves to those organizations.
And yet on account of Israel, the US applies these sanctions to judges carrying out the duties lawfully, and somehow they don't see how whimsical, capricious, petty and infantile such decisions are and the poor light they present the US in.
I mean, it’s causing a small rift in the GOP. Time will tell if that escalates any though. I stand firm in my believe that nothing ever happens though.
Because they aren't under their jurisdiction? Because they might believe the court is biased against them?
> Americans don't seem to understand how the moral character of their politicians and their political system is relentlessly degraded by the so called Israel lobby, or they don't care, or have resigned themselves to it.
> And yet on account of Israel, the US applies these sanctions to judges carrying out the duties lawfully, and somehow they don't see how whimsical, capricious, petty and infantile such decisions are and the poor light they present the US in.
You seems to be confused this is done not for Israel's sake but for USA - they don't want the precedent of non-ICC member's government being judged in ICC to protect themselves.
As a result of what ? What’s the trigger cause of the US sanctions ?
ICC can’t issue warrants against non ICC countries?
And non ICC countries are squarely within their rights to retailiate. Most minor former colonies of the EU countries can't, but the US, China, Russia can.
The "The Hague Invasion Act", where the US authorizes itself to invade an ally (the Netherlands) to break war criminal suspects out of prison, was signed in 2002. The US has always been a "rules for thee but not for me" type of place and the digital sanction discussed here fits in a long line of behaviors by the US government. Trump has changed the scale and intensity of it all but the basic direction has always been the same.
And they basically put it into writing, they're not the only country that would do something if an active duty military officer was arrested.
Here's a map. [1]
[1] https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/05/ICC-Mem...
I think it looked like that, because the US always been very effective at propaganda, and until the internet and the web made it very easy for people to communicate directly with each other without the arms of media conglomerates. It's now clearer than ever that US never really believed in its own ideals or took their own laws seriously, there are too many situations pointing at the opposite being true.
Don’t get me wrong - Jim Crow was horrific. But it was state level after effects of the civil war and failure to establish absolute dominance over the southern states in reconstruction. Cultural problems we fought a civil war over and we’re still dealing with today. But one difference of the goal with slavery and Jim Crow is subjugation not extermination
It's thanks to the US, that crimes against humanity is only considered when there is an active war of aggression, precisely because Jim Crow was a current thing at that time.
As are the Japanese.
So yeah, the US didn't spend years doing horrible stuff to humans like the Nazis did, the US wasn't exactly an angel in that conflict, by a long shot. But neither was pretty much any nation, I guess it kind comes with the whole "world war" thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
100k dead, 1M homeless, mostly civilian.
However, one main difference people in this thread seem to forget is that America’s civilian kills were about dealing damage to an enemy country within enemy territory. It’s horrific but the main difference was that Germany mass executed and actively tortured civilians within its own territory. America never did that and as horrific and regrettable Japanese internment camps were, and full of racism and prejudice, and failing to even uphold the Constitution and just being abject failures in treating people humanely, comparing them to Nazi concentration camps indicates a complete and utter failure in understanding how different the situation was; America was not trying to actively exterminate Japanese citizens within its borders as a matter of policy.
The closest American came to Nazi Germany was the persecution of black people within its borders but even while Nazi germany was inspired by Jim Crow in terms of how to treat Jews, it’s a failure to recognize that Nazi Germany ran off with the idea when they started setting up death camps. The closest American came to that was lynchings which never reached the scale or official government sanction that concentration camps did.
The closest American could be said to have done that was the Trail of Tears and their treatment of Native Americans; American has always struggled to contain the racist instincts of a significant part of their population but it is not unique in this challenge.
Collateral damage is one thing, the deliberate targeting civilians en masse is another. I understand the US Armed Forces and IDF currently justify their excesses by blurring the two concepts together, but they are legally distinct concepts.
That's some position to take.
They're still there last time I checked. Hiroshima has a population of ~1m. Nagasaki closer to 300k.
> how that isn't a "Crime against Humanity"
An invasion of Japan would have cost an order of magnitude more lives. It was the 4th year of an extremely bitter conflict that Japan started. There were no real good options on the table. Only "shit" and "extremely shit".
This is an argument by equivocation. There’s still a “World Trade Center” in NYC but it’s not the one that fell in 2001. Nor does saying it’s so restore the dead to life.
> An invasion of Japan would have cost an order of magnitude more lives. It was the 4th year of an extremely bitter conflict that Japan started. There were no real good options on the table. Only "shit" and "extremely shit".
This is a legal defense strategy that was never heard before an international tribunal because, notably, one was never held.
I don’t have the energy to skim through the Nuremberg transcripts right now, but I also believe “it was the best of bad options” was a legal defense attempted there, with mixed results.
EDIT: I’m being rate limited, so I can’t answer any more questions today. But suffice it to say that in Truman’s place I would have extended the relative protection that Kyoto received to every large Japanese city and contained the air force to bombing primarily military and industrial targets, with the understanding that precision bombing was not as advanced in 1940s as it is today.
Here is a more in depth analysis of options other than nuclear bombardment (though it only discusses nukes, which is not the primary locus of my criticism). https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-altern...
Also I did not say they were “erased from the map,” that was a different commenter.
Japan had dispersed industrial production widely by that point, including into workshops in people's homes. The Allies were already doing regular bombing.
Japan outright refused to surrender. They had a faction that tried a coup to prevent the surrender even after the nuclear bombings. Regular bombs would surely not have been enough. Strategic bombing doesn't work.[1]
What's your next idea?
I read the article you posted with alternatives. Delaying the second bomb - good idea, but it still means one was dropped. Allowing the Soviets to invade - it's hard to say having Japan divided for 40-odd years like Germany ended up would've been a better outcome, but idk perhaps.
1. https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
Of course this argument never uses the much more horrifying and abysmal firebombing of Tokyo, because it doesn't come from a place of historical knowledge, but rather trite lies.
Hell, the Allies told Japan (literally) "Surrender or face prompt and utter destruction", while Japan knew they were utterly cooked and already lost the war like a year ago, and they simply ignored it. Japan was not totally ignorant of the concept of a nuclear weapon either, as they had competent physicists and a low effort nuclear weapons program.
If you do not want your city turned to ash, do not START a war of aggression on your neighbors and the damn world because of imperial ambitions, and then do not continue such war long after it was clear you had already lost, including instructing and training your citizens to die en masse for the emperor.
The Japanese were actively trying to erase a billion people. Actions have consequences.
There was no end to Imperial Japan without just staggering death of japanese people. It doesn't matter whether that death came from Chinese soldiers or nuclear fire or Russian waves or American Marines.
If you don't want people to kill you, start by not becoming an absurd cartoon villain.
Imperial Japan was the exact horrific Fascism as the Nazis, and anything less than unconditional surrender was unacceptable.
Internment was fucking awful, and I think it's very telling we never interned German Americans even though we knew Germans DID sabotage US industries during WW1 but I guess Germans are too white for the racist Americans who thought Hitler was a cool guy to get uppity about.
For what it’s worth, I did try to limit my claims in this thread to the notion that maybe the firebombing of Tokyo was a crime against humanity, and avoid yet another pointless relitigation of the use nuclear weaponry.
I don’t know what to make of your whataboutism, however. Nobody here is arguing that the Tokyo tribunal should not have been held, as far as I can tell.
The situation we find ourselves in is that the American of today does not represent us well. I have hopes for the future, but time will tell.
>The situation we find ourselves in is that the American of today does not represent us well.
The system can't represent a contradictory set of ideals.
That's great, too bad none of those people sit in positions of power or anywhere near your government, because from the outside for the last two decades or more, those ideals are not visible to us at all, neither when we look at the foreign policy nor internal.
I'm sure the tides will eventually turn, but we're talking decades more likely than years, since it's been turning this direction for decades already, and I don't see it tipping the balance in the other way even today or the near-future. GLHF at the very least, I do hope things get better for everyone.
I just don't get it - unless all those ideals were just a show from the start.
There does seem to be some slight improvements of this situation as of late, video game companies and other obvious sectors getting more unions. But still, even on HN you see lots of FUD about unions, I'm guessing because of the shitty state of police unions and generally the history of unions in the US, but there really isn't any way out of the current situation without solidarity across the entire working class and middle class in the US, even if they're right, left, center or purple.
The No Kings protest was estimated at 7 million people.
Go out, stay out until change is enacted. It's called striking, and if you had any sort of good unions, they'd be planning a general strike for a long time, and it should go on until you get change.
You know, like how other "modern" countries do it when the politicians forget who they actually work for.
Add in how large the US is, it's population size, distribution, how far most people live from Washington D.C. and a cultural knee-jerk response to anything remotely seen as bullying of digging their heels in or fight back means they're far, far more difficult to do effectively here than in "modern" countries.
Yeah, but thankfully, solidarity kind of solves that, as people fired from their jobs because they're striking would be supported by the community. But, if the country doesn't have a history of having built such a community, often with big help from socialist and left-leaning groups, the options you have available today are kind of few.
But best day for it is today, even if yesterday wasn't very good.
It was just an astroturfed Democratic party rally that drummed up participation by mass text spam from Indian call centers. The turnout was positively geriatric.
Incidentally, the Democratic Party has started running into a severe issue with text spammers and fake orgs asking for donations and raking in millions, and the people doing it are people who are actually involved with the party.
Those Constant Texts Asking You to Donate to Democrats Are Scams
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/mothership-strate...
The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine
https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mothership-vortex-...
We are a nation of selfish, narcissists that have no concept of consistent long lasting care based communities.
What little care we give each other is mediated through transactions or cult based social alignment.
Everything else is fantasy coping mechanisms to maintain in/out group distance so that people feel temporal “safety”
It looks like Musk was able to buy Twitter and, together with the other media magnates, force a massive societal change in USA. At least from the outside looking in, before this year USA seemed to be a democracy (with some factions doing their best to subvert that) and the Constitution seemed to be a widely supported basis for that democracy. But now, the Constitution has been torn to shreds and seemingly with massive support from people who will call sand wet and water dry if Trump tells them communists don't agree with it and that his clever uncle told him so.
Which is why, from its very inception, the US has employed mass genocide at home, invasions & regime changes in the America's, then post-slavery apartheid at home, with invasions & regime changes in the rest of the world.
That's not anti-American rhetoric. That's just historical fact.
So, commingled with those facts, where does "law, love & fair play" come in. If you're honest, THAT was the propaganda. And the above realities, that was the truth.
The America of today IS the America it has always been. Its just that the propaganda mask can't be reattached with more duct tape. America started by geniciding non-whites at home, and rounding up & dragging non-whites TO America, in chains.
Now it's genociding non-whites abroad (primarily the Middle East), and rounding up & dragging non-whites FROM America, in chains.
When you focus on the common threads throughout American history, and strip away the fluff, you realise ... that's the real America (which still has the largest slave labour force in the world, through indentured workforces via its prison system).
The thing the person you're replying to points out is that, while you may be earnest in your comment and representative of a majority of US citizen, that is not how the US as a country has worked for a very long time, and it was possible because you and your fellow citizen were either too ignorant or not involved enough.
I'll simply point to the history of Central and South America as evidence of my claim.
Why did good honest people of the US reelected Bush Jr. after the illegal invasion of Iraq when no WMD was found?
The US looked like it stood out but it has its own internal and external legal problems such as slavery, Native American repressions, the legacy of slavery, anti-Asian policies, coup-ing foreign countries, etc etc etc
The US obeyed its own (highly immoral) laws on slavery, genocide of Native Americans, etc.
I'll give you the point about promoting coups in foreign countries (couping is actually the verb).
More generally, as a foreigner who now lives in the US, I held Americans to a higher standard than, say my own government or major other governments. Not anymore, I feel like there’s just different trade offs in living in different countries.
What has changed is we know about it.
The US took everyone's gold under the bretton woods system, and then Nixon "temporarily" ended dollar gold convertibility when France asked for it's gold back.
You're in a bubble.
Do the right thing to serve their own interests.
One country's war criminal is another country's military hero. Same as it ever was.
That's… kind of the point? To not have to kill and destroy each other to settle disputes.
Isn't actual law a social contract aswell?
Yet two of the most powerful thugs: Putin and Netanyahu won't go near an ICC signatory state.
Also, if look at the exact plane movements of his visits, they specifically avoid the air space of countries that do take the ICC seriously.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_prime_mi...
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/netanyahus-jet-largely-avoid...
Its been very useful at doing the same thing the ad hoc international war crimes tribunals that preceded it did but with greater regularity and without as much spinup/winddown costs for each conflict they address.
> The very concept of an International Criminal Court, operating in some idealistic moral space above war and diplomacy,
That's not its concept or where it operates, though.
> If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
I think you’ve confused the ICC with the ICJ or the UN itself. The ICC does not exist to arbitrate disputes between nations in place of settling them by war.
The problem is that only the US has the power to material harm people to such a degree by doing so.
The amount of control that Big Tech has consolidated into a handful of US megacorporations is a massive danger to the entire world. The US devolving into an overt kleptocracy is a huge threat to freedom everywhere. Who can push back? Obviously not China or Russia, where the problems are even worse.
Of all the wealthy world, the EU basically stands alone as the only entity that has strong enough democratic institutions, capital, and expertise to plausibly develop some kind of alternative.
Why not China or Russia or any other country with the capability? Competition is good even if some or all of the players are bad individually.
As the US becomes less ideologically predisposed to defend Europe, expect the US to take more advantage of the dependency, as the threat to walk away will become more real.
The nuclear deterrent is just as strong as it needs to be. If nuke strikes come, we're all dead regardless if we have 5 or 500 bombs to drop on Moscow.
And again, this is irrelevant to abusive authority on technology. If "Europe" wasn't "dependent on US defence" would they send a destroyer fleet to the US cost as a retaliation?
The US is using its tech companies to pressure foreign democratic allied countries over political issues. This is undermining the free trade that allowed these companies to exist in the fireplace.
Continued moves in this direction will just push nationalistic ideas in European nations to cut out US influence entirely.
Sure... Until Trump says it is.
Which is all fine and dandy- not my country. But there is a golden rule that had been established between Europe and America.
Do not interfere with internal affairs.
The US is now openly engaged in destroying liberal democracy.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/us-evangelical...
> One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.
> Hagee, despite having a long history of antisemitism – he has suggested Jews brought persecution upon themselves by upsetting God and called Hitler a “half-breed Jew” – founded Christians United for Israel in 2006.
Supporting Israel is valuable to Trump because many of his donors are these Zionist Jews.
I haven't followed in the recent past, but a few years ago, if my memory serves, Netanyahu was largely funded by a group of US Evangelists.
It's not Israel or Zionism controlling the US. It's some subset of US Evangelists using Israel as a puppet for whatever eschatological purpose they have in mind.
On the personal/political level - Trump's largest political backers in the 2024 campaign have been: Elon Musk, Timothy Mellon, and Miriam Adelson. Musk is an avowed Zionist, Mellon I don't know about, but it is Adelson's $108 Million that come attached with the string of staunch support for Israel and its policies of death destruction and oppression.
A blood soaked FOREIGN war criminal. Why jeopardize american relations with france or the EU over a foreign war criminal? It is amazing the stranglehold one tiny country has over the political, media and financial elites of this country.
The US is pure mafia.
It doesn't stop him, merely means anything requiring an actual identity is likely done by proxy of his wife/mistress/cousin.