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Comment by po1nt | Hacker News Reader

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That's an excellent outcome to hope for. The odds are that we have already used up our "stopped clock is right every 12 hours" karma. Not that anyone should feel sorry for Maduro.

Unfortunately I believe an invasion of Greenland is more likely.

as far as Trump capitalizes on Europe's demise, this won't happen

The news of Europe's demise are greatly exaggerated. What's it going to do? Sink in the ocean like Atlantis?

The roman culture of old surely did. I don't see anyone trying to claim the temple of Jupiter anymore?

While it is possible for modern Europe to repeat the mistakes of Rome, that played out slowly over centuries.

I'd be more concerned with making sure to not repeat e.g. the surprise rapid end to the USSR, along with a few other sudden scenarios like "gets invaded".

But a third of the world still celebrates Saturnalia!

Nope, nukes will prevent that.

Episodes like these only serve to cement that Iran and North Korea are right to think that having nuclear deterrence is the only viable insurance policy.

(Delivery & effectiveness is another subject on its own but still)

I thought exactly this. The first comment talked about potentially destabilising not only the country but the entire region. In reality it perpetuates violence globally.

Not sure why you're putting Iran and North Korea together here, as Iran is hoping for a nuke, while NK already has them, and has for many years. And yes, calls for toppling the brutal NK dictatorship have completely disappeared once that happened - so the theory is extremely soundly proven.

Because they're trying to get one for the stated reason of it working as a deterrent.

North Korea is not trying to get a nuclear bomb, they've already got nuclear bombs and have for more than 10 years.

This is why I'm confused. They're also not the only examples of dictatorial states getting nuclear bombs - surely the Soviet Union and China are earlier examples of that.

I was speaking of Iran. You could use other examples of successful nuclear deterrence, yes.

What we saw with Venezuela was something nukes wouldn't prevent. Doing the same with Putin is infinitely harder, but if it did occur, chances are whoever fills in the power vacuum in Russia would be pretty happy with their situation.

> but if it did occur, chances are

With nukes "chances are" is not an argument.

I'm not saying chances are with regard to nukes, I'm saying with regard to whoever gets to take over Russia. In either case they definitely aren't using nukes because it means mutual destruction over one man who has 0% chance of ever returning to Russia.

Yeah, that was actually a good demonstration of a way out of Russian aggression. I wonder if that was one of the goals.

Scare Putin to shievers. Bro already spent the first year of the 2022 invasion in a bunker. I'm sure he liked that.

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