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That is a very complicated question, but in short: Russia’s economy is supported by oil. Oil is pretty much the one thing that they’ve still been consistently
by ketzo 4y ago
That is a very complicated question, but in short:
Russia’s economy is supported by oil. Oil is pretty much the one thing that they’ve still been consistently able to export.
China’s economy is based on exporting lots and lots and lots of manufactured goods. Many of them are essential, but many of them could be banned tomorrow.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y agoThe point being that Russia would be more desperate due to fewer options? Not trying to argue, just curious.
- ketzo 4y agoThe opposite, actually — people NEED Russia’s oil. They don’t have the option to stop buying it without a lot of pain. So Russia’s biggest money-fountain has stayed on despite sanctions. Meanwhile, China exports a lot of things that people don’t need. You can turn those off quicker. Again — huge oversimplifications. But I think reasonably solid mental model.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Meanwhile, China exports a lot of things that people don’t need. You can turn those off quicker. It's not like that's all they export. They export a lot of essential things, and cutting them off would probably far more economically disruptive to their customers than to them. They're store shelves won't be empty, and given their political system they can probably deal with the fallout much more effectively. There are also a lot of alternative producers of oil, while there's no other advanced manufacturing giant on the scale of China that people can shift their orders to. It would make the COVID supply chain difficulties look like a joke.
- jacobolus 4y agoIt’s not a complicated question. It’s a very simple question with a simple answer: one man (Vladimir Putin) wanted to go to war and made the (initial and ongoing) decision despite it being a clearly terrible idea to anyone else watching. How Russia got itself to the point where one person has consolidated all authority, surrounded himself with corrupt sycophants, and cannot accurately gather or integrate information from the rest of the society is the complicated question here. It’s a pretty good demonstration for anyone watching around the world that unchecked power can lead to disastrous decisions. It should inspire us to stand up for democracy and against corruption and consolidation of wealth and power in our own societies. It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside; the best we can do is speculate. My speculation is that involves some combination of (a) doing what he thinks will best maintain internal political control, (b) satisfying an egoistical urge for historical glory, and (c) a narcissistic belief that others must bow to his personal whims and a raging narcissistic grudge when they do not.
- Maursault 4y ago> It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside; Entitlement. The closest you came was the descriptor "narcissistic" in (c). Narcissism is supposed to be a rare condition, but it is found everywhere. It is easiest to understand leaders like Putin, Jong-un, Xi, DeSantis and Trump, if framed in psychological terms like narcissism with symptoms of entitlement, grandiosity, attention seeking, arrogance, bullying, lack of empathy, and a fear of criticism.
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- QuarterReptile 4y ago>It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside; the best we can do is speculate. Russia has no convenient geographic features to protect it from invasion, so it relies on long distances. Those distances are much shorter than they used to be, and Russian doctrine for at least the past decade has been focused on creating confusion and chaos in Eastern Europe. The chaos is here, and they probably misread the international community on what they could get away with. Now that they're in it, though, I think Putin is the biggest obstacle to Russia extricating themselves from the debacle.
- herbst 4y agoTo my understanding blaming Putin personally is just a weird thing the media is doing to make Russia seem more crazy. Pretty sure in reality it's not one man alone doing crazy decisions without the whole state organ being behind him.
- jacobolus 4y agoThere are a whole bunch of people in the “whole state organ” who were opposed to one extent or another. Some of them mysteriously fell out of windows or shot themselves in the back of the head. Others were fired or jailed. Others were publicly humiliated. The rest fell into line. Invading Ukraine certainly wasn’t, say, Elvira Nabiullina’s choice, or the choice of the oligarchs with homes in London or NYC. The turnover rate at the top ranks of the Russian military the past 6 months is higher than a typical McDonalds.
- rurp 4y agoRussia has even put their energy exports at risk though. They are already trading at a discount and things could get much worse if the war continues to escalate. If Putin advances to using nukes or mass slaughtering of civilians, things will eventually reach a point where the neutral countries finally cut ties. Russia starting a nuclear war would be bad for China, India and others; there's some point at which they'll cut off Russian trade.
- jonny_eh 4y agoRussia has been mass slaughtering citizens. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2022/09/22/new-mass-graves-found-in-ukraine-as-putins-atrocities-continue/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2022/09/22/new-mas...
- okasaki 4y agoYes and they're taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die.
- jakubadamw 4y agoI understand your snark is simply meant to signal your sympathy towards war crime negationism, but the Gulf War incubator reference does happen to be on topic and not in the way you may have intended. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/09/europe/gallery/mariupol-hospital-bombed/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/09/europe/gallery/mariupol-h...