A dictatorship with the explicit goal of invading Taiwan, which is not only a close ally, but also of global geostrategic importance.
That's not "hype".
That's not "hype".
People really need to dial down the hype, engage with the real world where large countries get to have a sphere of influence and start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable. I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given what acceptable US foreign policy looks like. One of the two is worse and it isn't the policies written in Cyrillic.
1) "we" (the US) are not hitting the Russians, "we" (Europe including the UK) are providing them with weapons for their self-defence, since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border. I am no longer clear what, if any, assistance the US is providing. It is also very important in this that no NATO or EU forces are engaged directly with Russian forces yet, despite persistent incursions into EU airspace and occasional sabotage operations in Western Europe.
The UK is developing special US ITAR-free missiles for this purpose: https://www.thedefensenews.com/UK-Develops-Three-Low-Cost-Lo...
2) "start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable": I think we're past the point of pretending that international law applies evenly, and back to Mao's "power comes out of the barrel of a gun".
If we go back to a Cold War multipolar world between China, the US, Europe, and Russia, the only one of those which hasn't made public statements threatening European territorial integrity is China.
(at this point I would expect India to start asking whether they get to be a world power or not and what they're going to do with that, too)
If your argument is preventing trouble on the Polish border, why is the strategy dumping billions and billions of dollars in weapons into the most corrupt country in Europe, who happens to be on the Polish border? Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now?
The sensible thing to do would have been to encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border. This strategy actually employed seems like the most direct way to trigger a humanitarian catastrophe on the Polish border. It looks very destabilising. It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked.
Can we please be honest about our motivations here? We're all more likely to get what we want. Ideally peace and prosperity.
As sovereign citizens of their own country, Ukrainians have the right to decide under which flag they want to collectively pursue peace and prosperity. I believe they have made that choice clear through democratic means, something Russians have not experienced in a long time. If Russia is allowed to take Ukraine, it will move on to Poland next, and then to claim the remaining former Soviet states. A line must be drawn somewhere.
Much like Iran. And yet we took out their leadership just this year (again) because we think they picked the wrong flag.
Apparently such behaviour is tolerable. If it is tolerable, we should tolerate the Russians doing it too, even if it is on their own border instead of the other side of the world.
No, it was incredibly stupid for the US to do so, everyone who has done more than a cursory look at the results of wargames and previous interventions knew this. It wasn't even a good idea in Iraq with Saddam Hussein (second time, the first at least was to stop him invading Kuwait), probably not even Afghanistan.
And yet there are no sanctions against the US for its obviously reckless interference in other countries.
I guess "tolerable" has more than one meaning, so I should have checked which one was intended before starting my previous comment with just plain "No", but before reading your reply I hadn't considered that.
The lack of sanctions is due to how power works rather than anyone else agreeing with them in any specific case: the USA has got too much of the money that everyone else wants, and too many weapons which everyone else wants pointed in the right direction rather than to find they're now standing in a position to read the sign saying "front towards enemy" with a wire trailing off to a nearby bush.
This does not change that it was incredibly stupid for the US to attack Iran in particular, so stupid that it cost the US a significant part of its own matériel, made the remaining matériel less scary as a threat, and reduced the economic relevance of the USA's money, all at the same time.
Every US leader before Trump made sure to not damage those things, and thus retained both hard and soft power. Trump's throwing both away rapidly, at such a pace that it's no longer inconceivable that the rest of the world will be able to sanction the US without fear of what retaliation may result. Consider that Trump's poor choices mean in particular that the EU got away with telling Trump to take a hike over Greenland, and China got away with telling Trump to take a hike over tariffs. With the kind of damage he's doing to the USA's power, this shift may be shockingly sudden when it does happen, with nobody being able to see exactly how close the transition is even 12 months before the world order changes. (I am not saying this is 12 months away today, I'm saying nobody will know even when it is 12 months away).
So, stuff is shifting today specifically because of the USA's "reckless interference in other countries", with emphasis on the "reckless" part. There is a degree of governmental tolerance for the "interference" part, out of fear, meaning the condemnation (such as it is) is somewhere between "toothless" and simply not joining in with the misadventures. Trump appears to be trying to punish every nation who didn't help him attack Iran, but between them and all the nations the US failed to defend from Iranian counterstrikes are rather a lot of nations who are all now looking to each other for military and economic collaborations.
It may not look much on paper; it remains to be seen if it is much in practice. China will of course be happy to substitute for the USA everywhere, but for the rest of us this changes which hyperpower we find ourselves forced to kowtow to, this time less metaphorically and more literally. Reasonable chance a lot of nations make their own nuclear deterrents either way, with all the extra risk that comes with. I didn't want to predict anything past 2031 even before all this geopolitical rifting started.
Allegedly this was in reaction to the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 on March 10, 2019, near Addis Abeba, killing all 157 people on board. The factuality of the incidence is, however, questionable. I haven't seen a single convincing photo of the crash site. The 737's large modern turbofan engines are said to have been buried in a crater 10 m deep, which is totally implausible and reminiscent of the Shanksville part of the 9/11 hoax. Well, it's just mirroring brazen US lies, basically any BS will do.
https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo-contest/202...
The story goes that a UN delegation was among the victims of the alleged crash. I read somewhere that this was, basically, “world leaders uniting in protest” against the wave of airline terrorism perpetrated by the US (CIA/NSA/wtf) via cyber attacks, one of which was GermanWings 9525 which was crashed into a mountain via remote cyber hijack (remote control system compromised, probably industrial espionnage) on March 24, 2015, shredding to pieces all 150 people on board, mostly from Germany and Spain. The perpetrators had the NYT announce it was “wilful pilot action”, which is factually correct, but they blamed it (via French investigative authorities) on Andreas Lubitz instead of on the CIA or whatever US agency was responsible.
Not sure to what extent US cyber terrorism has been “covered” by HN, probably close to zero, although it couldn't be more “on topic” for US “Hacker News”.
You’re on HackerNews, this website attracts free thinkers, we’re not the group that our influenced easily by propaganda, open your mind, read some data, visit the country and then form an opinion. Dont parrot the propaganda of non-free media.
I don't need to read our media (that's perfectly free, thanks for your concern), to have an opinion about Russia. Especially on this very day.
It's always amusing to hear this and point out what some Ukrainians are... not equal to other Ukrainians and therefore are not allowed to have the right to decide under which flag they want to collectively pursue peace and prosperity.
Somehow it's always only one flag what is 'right' and anything other is 'not right'.
And that's even without statements like "it's really obvious that Russia fakes votes".
In the case of the South though, I believe they could have had a peaceful secession had they not fallen victim to their own version of the "sphere of influence" argument: they refused to tolerate a free North to which slaves could escape, resulting in opening fire on Fort Sumter.
They didn't actually say that, though I can see how one might read it that way.
valid cases for secession. In the case of the South though
It's like Al Gore "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" being taken as "I invented" rather than "This was invented, I took the initiative in supporting it when that happened".
An example of "valid" secession is the split of Czechoslovakia.
"Peaceful" is introducing a what-if about whether and why the Confederacy started the actual armed conflict part of the secession.
I have introduced a line break into the original comment as a demilitarized zone.
(we can also see the sort of "historical sliding window" effect as to legitimacy here. At what point does de facto line on the ground become baked in to legitimacy? Does California have a right to exist? Clearly more so than the occupation of Crimea, but is it just time that makes it so?)
As for the US - you could say we had two kerfuffles along these lines, or we'd still be Brits. Win some, lose some. And notably we probably would have also lost against the Brits if not for the French. Granted they didn't then try to take us under their wing as part of France, so the similarities end somewhere - but on the other hand that might have indeed been the exact outcome had we been majority ethnic French. Kind of an amusing parallel timeline to imagine.
It became 'majority Russian' 50 years before that, pay attention to the bar labeled 10. Don't use BBC as a source of anything.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Crimea
Unfortunately for Ukraine, Russia is still strong enough to count as a sovereign nation, Russia is not yet weak enough that it is unable to prevent others (Ukraine) from telling them (Russia) to stop throwing high velocity explosives over the border. That had too many negatives in a row, I hope I phrased that right.
According to what idea of "sensible"?
> encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border.
This would still have resulted in millions of refugees, plus some unknown number of people killed by Russian forces exterminating any local pro-Europe political supporters. Remember Euromaidan. It also snuffs out a democracy, which is not a good precedent to set.
The second motivation is the belief that the invasion, if permitted, will not stop at Ukraine. This is why Finland and Sweden joined NATO after it happened.
> Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now?
Russia can retreat into their internationally recognized borders at any time.
> Can we please be honest about our motivations here?
Can we be honest about the motivations of Russia in capturing and annexing other countries, something forbidden by both the post-WW2 international order and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum (which also justifies Europe's security provision to Ukraine)?
The US has around 900 military bases abroad. Far more than all other countries combined. These bases are a constant source of threats and bullying, deploying and projecting a GDP largely based on death and destruction. Why don't the US retreat into their internationally recognized borders?
(Some exceptions apply for e.g. the Chagossians)
In case of United States Army installations in Germany:
" The legal status of Americans stationed in Germany is governed by special international agreements including the NATO Status of Forces Agreement.
People stationed at overseas bases or posts must remember German laws apply to them, too. To protect yourself, know what rights you have as an American. Whether German authorities exercise their right of jurisdiction depends on the circumstances of the case. "
https://www.ramstein.af.mil/About/Fact-Sheets/Display/Articl...
In case of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base:
"At the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2013, Cuba's Foreign Minister demanded the U.S. return the base to Cuba."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_Naval_Base#Cold...
Another special case is the UK sovereign bases in Cyprus, which really are UK territory; I only know about those because during Brexit they kept getting mentioned in the treaty documents.
Bonus pull out sovereignty section: to whom does Transnistria belong? How about Nagorno-Karabakh?
Mostly they were allowed there by the government of the place.
They are criticised for the exceptions.
> GDP largely based on death and destruction
For all the flaws of the USA, this is not really what their GDP is "based on", though perhaps one could say that functionally they hide conscription by giving many unemployed men a Hobson's choice of signing up vs. going hungry.
If “nukes” existed many of these bases, being somewhat removed from human settlements, could be destroyed much more effectively and without much “collateral damage”. As the US and NATO hide behind Ukraine, other “players” could hide behind just any type of “terrorist”, just as the US/UK have done again and again.
Everything Russia touches becomes more corrupt. That includes Hungary btw. And speaking about it, that includes Ukraine - anti Russians politics was also the anti-corruption politics.
> The sensible thing to do would have been to encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border.
Imagine if the British had responded this way to the invasion of Poland in WW2.
Worse: which side of the border is Auschwitz located?
> It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked.
Ukraine had nukes, gave them up. Was probably sensible at the time, but the observed behaviour is now "having nukes means you don't get invaded, giving them up means you do". Russia invading at all is pushing nations more in the direction of getting their own nuclear arsenals to deter Russia.
(Also, but entirely separately, Trump's USA sabre-rattling over Canada, Greenland, war with Iran, and disengagement from previous allies everywhere, is pushing nations the same way but to deter the USA(!) or China).
« getting their own nuclear arsenals to deter Russia » – Stuck in the 20th century? Everyone can see that nukes don't work, else Russia would have used them in March '22, on military objects, and to draw a line; not “democratically” on women and children as the US did, of course (in truth the US used a kind of napalm, poison gas, pumpkin bombs, flash bombs, and coloured smoke bombs, see “Hiroshima revisited” by Michael Palmer). “Nukes” are just an elaborate deception created from 1945 through the 1950s, basically in maintenance mode ever since.
Other than being at war with the nation who had allied themselves with the USSR's joint invasion of Poland?
Also, why even ask? It's not like the post-WW2 international order was good for the Polish. Failing to defend Poland from the USSR, regardless of how this can be attributed to war exhaustion or foolishly believing Stalin's word, doesn't make that failure good.
Failing to defend Ukraine now, would be like failing to defend Poland then.
> And what was their “response” when confronted with reports of Polish atrocities against Germans in “Western/Northern Poland” during the August crisis?
I had to look this up. I think I know what you are now. Someone in the modern age who has the benefit of hindsight calling what was actually done an "atrocity", using the framing of the invader which we now know to have been exaggerated for propaganda to create a casus belli, says something very specific about their worldview.
> Stuck in the 20th century? Everyone can see that nukes don't work, else Russia would have used them in March '22, on military objects
Tell that to Russia. They keep threatening the use of them against everyone who aids Ukraine.
Their nukes may or may not work. But they're definitely afraid of other people's nukes.
And also definitely, the USA is afraid of other people's nukes.
> see “Hiroshima revisited” by Michael Palmer
Jesus, you're also a conspiracy theorist?
We have film footage of plenty of nukes past the 50s, the physics isn't particularly fancy, and with that era's stealth technology Japan would have been unable to avoid noticing the kind of airforce capable of delivering that kind of destruction by conventional means.
« USA is afraid of other people's nukes » – And of extraterrestrians, too. It's all just propaganda playing back in people's minds.
« conspiracy theorist? » – The book I referenced has lots of hard empirical facts, notably the medical details, which the author is professionally qualified to assess.
« film footage » – Huge quantities of explosives, WWII production kept going. As for Japan, their gov had to collaborate somehow, and eventually resigned themselves to do so because the US wouldn't accept their capitulation and instead kept democratically napalming women and children.
The think tank argument is very valid though. You can no longer find "Project for the new American Century" online, but they laid out the invasion of Iraq before 9/11 (the pretext) even happened.
On the other hand distance from Kaliningrad to Berlin is just 618 km, 384 mi or 333.94 nmi.
https://metro.co.uk/2025/06/17/russia-upgrades-nuclear-sites...
Geopolitics 101 also says that in a war between countries armed with ICBMs delivering nuclear weapons, distance doesn't matter, everyone dies. Especially with second-strike capability like Dead Hand (Sistema "Perimetr").
I can't tell if you're a tankie or a bot but Russia is right now conducting an unprovoked war against a democracy with no foreign policy goal other than to destroy Ukraine and seize its assets.
Where Russia has been forced out of Ukraine it's left behind war crimes and mass civilian graves. So experience shows, there is no safe surrender for Ukraine, they have to fight until they win.
There is no world where Putin's Russia is the good guys.
Remember, Putin is the only person with the luxury of stopping the war any time he likes.
Right-wingers in Eastern Europe (who aren't obviously paid by Russia) are way more anti-Russia than the ones in the US.
You also do have to keep track of internal factions. We're all, me included, using "country name" in this thread as a synechdoche as if all of a country had a unified political axis of action, when we know that's an oversimplification.
This is how we get Israel/Likud and Iran/IGRC who are practically co-evolved to escalate against each other, to which the only reasonable response of third parties is to acknowledge that both are bad and attempt to de-escalate, as in e.g. the Camp David Accords era, before either of those factions came to power.
> Right-wingers in Eastern Europe (who aren't obviously paid by Russia)
I don't think enough was made of https://newrepublic.com/post/209035/hungary-prime-minister-v... - the amount of money involved was a significant fraction of the Hungarian budget.
Also I've yet to meet a single person who was "pro-palestine" and simultaneously sympathetic to russia. Quite the opposite.
Of course as you say there's also people trying to lump the many "we should stop mass murder of civilians" people into the same bucket as the negatively polarized "we hate Israel therefore we're going to support Iran" few. Discourse is exhaustingly stupid.
https://kyivindependent.com/pro-palestinian-activists-destro...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7x68jrdmlo
https://time.com/6589923/nancy-pelosi-pro-palestinian-protes...
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/russias-...
And this isn't counting the countless TikTok influencers, trade unions, etc... that are all anti-"war" and have pro-IRGC and pro-China views.
And while you're kind of right that few are outright carrying water for Russia, at least publicly, they all conveniently support what Russia supports.
The average joe in the US (and presumably the west more generally) does not care one whit about the causes of russia or iran.
It's not about caring about Russia or Iran specifically. It's about the fact they're swayed by propaganda so the end result is they end up unwittingly adopting the worldview pushed by enemy propagandists and helping to destroy western civilization.
Sure, my wondering "why are we burning billions in iran" happens to align with iran's interests. It's also directly representative of my own interests. The fact that some subset of people will be swayed by propaganda does not constitute a valid argument against a given position.
If we uniformly apply the same standard you're demonstrating here then your own position would be attributed to being swayed by state propaganda and thus your actions interpreted as helping american propagandists destroy civil society.
tl;dr You're espousing anti-intellectual BS that has no place on HN. Kindly take your braindead political takes back to twitter or wherever the hell they came from.
ChatGPT write this?
> Sure, my wondering "why are we burning billions in iran" happens to align with iran's interests
So naturally you're against lots of other programs that waste billions? Or just this one?
> your own position would be attributed to being swayed by state propaganda and thus your actions interpreted as helping american propagandists destroy civil society
Except my position is pro-west and anti-terrorist supporting dictatorships. It's the old duck test: if it walks like a duck...
And for the record, I'm against both sides of the horseshoe who are bought by enemy propaganda...
US was basically supporting Russian invasion in negotiations. What are you on about here.
EU is supporting Ukraine in their self defense. Eu also know they are the next if Ukraine falls. USA did the right thing in the beginning, but as Trump gained power, his admiration to autocrats made him switch the sides.
Somewhat cynically it's entirely to do with which country they attacked. Had they moved on one farther away from mainland europe I doubt we'd have heard nearly as much about it.
That said it would still be wrong just as much of US (and yes Chinese) foreign policy is morally wrong. Such should be called out rather than engaging in whataboutism.
The moral arguments for doing that appear to all be rank hypocrisy given what we tolerate of ourselves. So if we go back and accept a certain level of cynicism when asking "why?" what exactly is the upside for us in Ukraine? The downsides seem to be enormous and when pushed for what the actual reasons are the best people have seems flimsy and poorly thought out in relation to the risks. This war could have been approached as though it was the US or China who had instigating it and ended with a call-out as opposed to millions of casualties.
The winning strategy in these things seems to me to be much more of the Chinese approach where you sit tight, set up an impressive defensive perimeter and grow your economy until all your opponents bankrupt themselves in stupid wars.
(P.S.: Xi Jin Ping is as unelected as the British Prime Minister, but I don't see people calling the UK a dictatorship.)
In that same period Xi has changed the rules so that he can hold on to power indefinitely.
(Neither Britain nor Germany have term limits for their head of government, so China removing its term limit is just bringing it at par with the two most prominent European democracies)
They were not able to ignore public opinion indefinitely and could be removed from power without the need for term limits.
No one can remove Xi from power if they don't like the way he performs. No one in China can even publicly discuss his performance except to praise him.
That's what makes China a dictatorship and the UK a democracy.
The British PM was elected, what on earth are you talking about? He won an election to his seat in Parliament just a few weeks ago.
But that’s not necessary or expected under the British system, being an MP and Party Leader is enough. If Burnham radically departed from Labour’s manifesto you could then argue he call a general election to establish legitimacy for that, but it isn’t required.
British law doesn't even require the Prime Minister to be an MP, technically Parliament could elect any random bozo from the street to be PM.
"Deng Xiaoping put the limits in place in the 1980s as part of his effort to ensure that China was never again subjected to a crushing dictatorship like that of Chairman Mao and the turmoil it occasioned. China’s Communist system not accepting the Western notion of formal checks and balances, Deng instituted a system with Chinese characteristics designed to prevent return of one-man rule or a cult of personality by preventing leaders from staying indefinitely in power."
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/7-things-you-need-to-know...
Similar in Russia, 2020 constitutional amendment gave Vladimir Putin legal authority to stay in office until 2036.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_limits_in_Russia#Russia_u...
I think it's a safe bet that China will invade precisely when they think this won't cause them severe negative losses.
This will likely be when Taiwan finds itself no longer a close ally of the USA, nor of global geostrategic importance.
Of course, "safe bet" doesn't mean "in all possible timelines"; they may end up echoing the Bay of Pigs, Hormuz, or stumble against the hubris that turned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand into a world war where all belligerents had the mistaken belief they would win.
But you can’t really take a feudal term and apply it to modern politics. Taiwan doesn’t resemble a vassal in any meaningful way.
And the stronger state exercises a lot of influence on the weaker state, especially in terms of foreign policy, and potentially provides it with protection from other strong states.
Not sure exactly how much this would apply to Taiwan in particular, but I think the idea in general can be meaningful in modern politics.