You made a bunch of good points, which you undermined with partisanship. As a result, everyone is missing the 70% truth into which you've mixed pro-Trump nugget

You made a bunch of good points, which you undermined with partisanship. As a result, everyone is missing the 70% truth into which you've mixed pro-Trump nuggets. For example: > Today, the CCP thinks of us as decadent and divided, thanks to BLM and antifa. You're right that internal division is a major geopolitical liability, but you're missing half the story. Yes, when rival powers see BLM-themed looting they lick their chops, but they also do that when they see a QAnon-themed "capitol insurrection". It takes two or more to tango. If you had talked about division more generally it would have been better-received. But yeah: Can you imagine the US having a draft? Very few people would get shot at to defend "America as an idea" any more. Pretty sure that millions of Angry Youth have more conviction in their cause than Americans have in theirs. > The Biden administration is perceived as weak gobally [...]. [...] So here we are, on the brink of war with a President who can't climb a flight of stairs on his own. First of all, I'm not convinced that Biden's administration is perceived as weak, relative to Trump. Yes, he's more conciliatory on the surface with China, just like Obama was -- but it was Obama/Biden who started the Pacific pivot. And Trump, while more "hard on China" on the surface, could well have been perceived as inexpert and flatterable/manipulable. (And Biden's physical state is mostly irrelevant. FDR was in a wheelchair and Timur was lame. Whatever. Dude doesn't go out and punch geopolitical adversaries with his fists.) But when you say > [The US] is perceived as weak gobally, which is unacceptable for a superpower - that gets millions of people killed until the US demonstrates dominance again. ... you're right. You were also right with your first six paragraphs. And your observations about strategy and tactics were interesting. These are areas where you could educate HN, if you toned down the Trump/Biden stuff. > During a border dispute in 1969, Russia decided to nuke Beijing because they wouldn't take no for an answer, but the US foolishly told them not to. The CCP has already threatened in 2020 to use nukes against the US if the Three Gorges Dam is attacked. This is the most interesting tidbit. A quote from [1]: > William Hyland, the author of this paper, was a Soviet analyst at CIA's Directorate of Intelligence before he was recruited for Kissinger's NSC staff. In this memorandum, Hyland critiqued an interagency study on Sino-Soviet relations that Kissinger has requested in National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 63. In the course of the analysis, which Kissinger characterized as "1st rate," Hyland acknowledged that a limited Sino-Soviet war was "by no means a disaster for the US." For example, implying that a war would involve Soviet strikes to destroy Chinese nuclear facilities, Hyland observed that it might be a "solution" to the China nuclear problem. The relevant Wikipedia article is also interesting [2]. [1] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict