this is a hodgepodge of tough-guy "realist" contrarianism. most of your statements do not connect into a thesis except maybe an impressionistic summary would be

this is a hodgepodge of tough-guy "realist" contrarianism. most of your statements do not connect into a thesis except maybe an impressionistic summary would be "since Russia plays chess, US is screwed." this is just hyper-masculine posturing - because the US seems soft, optically, and yet we are somehow simultaneously hegemons, we are both reponsible for the war and also doomed to lose. China is choosing a stance of non-neutrality. They seem to think that destabilizing all the regions outside of China is somehow going to help, or that a weaker Western bloc is somehow to their advantage. I obviously can only speculate but that is how it looks to me. I think it is a major error, because I think we could do better by repatching globalism and trying to de-fang nationalism, instead of going back to the dark ages and hoping to simply out-survive the other losers of global war.