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America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that. Russia is basically on its way out as a military power
by kiba 11mo ago
America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that.
Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine.
As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.
- the_gipsy 11mo agoAmerica is on a isolation downward spiral. Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. See point one, America is alone now, it will take decades to repair the damage.
- pfdietz 11mo agoSome would dispute the "downward" part there. Not trying to be the world's policeman would allow tremendous downsizing of the military and its associated expense. Decoupling and isolation is a very rational response if nuclear proliferation is going to accelerate, in order to avoid having entangling alliances pull the country into a nuclear equivalent of the first World War.
- the_gipsy 11mo ago"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions. At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.
- pfdietz 11mo agoStrategic motivation? If one assumes the US is going to be globally involved, yes, but that's begging the question. Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military. I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obligation to defend the "free world" from authoritarians, and (after WW2) a desire to keep small countries (and recent WW2 enemies) from deciding their only option for defense was their own nuclear deterrent.
- amanaplanacanal 11mo agoI don't see much evidence that's the US wants to defend the world from authoritarians. Some of their closest allies are authoritarian countries.
- pfdietz 11mo agoExpansionist authoritarians, which in the post war world was communists. Why would the world need defending from non-expansionist authoritarians?
- amanaplanacanal 11mo agoMaybe. They seem to actually like expansionist authoritarians now. Evidence being the Russia Ukraine peace effort.
- pfdietz 10mo agoAnother thing the US did in the post-war world was apply economic leverage to dismantle European empires. This can also be viewed as defending nations against external coercion.
- tim333 11mo ago"strong economic and strategic motive" behind Afghanistan? They did it to get Bin Laden basically. America are like a slightly corrupt and violent world police.
- torginus 11mo agoSo they invaded Afghanistan to grab a Saudi national hanging out in Pakistan?
- tim333 11mo agoMostly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#US_invasion_and_Islamic_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#US_invasion_and_Is... Apparently the invasion was Oct 2001 and Bin Laden hiked over into Pakistan in Dec 2001
- pfdietz 11mo agoI think it had something to do with 9/11 being an act of war from Afghanistan against the US. Nations are responsible for the actions of groups inside their borders against other nations.
- torginus 11mo agoIt was not an act of war since Afghanistan didn't have an official government - in practice the Taliban ran things - but the attacks were carried out by the Al Qaeda which was spread over the Middle East. The Taliban might have been sympathetic to it but they were not actively supporting them or had any official collaboration with them.
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago>Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. They have been moving across Ukraine at a literal snails pace.
- dmpk2k 11mo agoThat is how attrition war works. Until it doesn’t.
- _heimdall 11mo agoAre you expecting Ukraine to ultimately buckle and collapse if the war of logistics continues for long enough? It doesn't seem like Russia has the will, or potentially the capability, to actually conquer Ukraine rather than squat on some of their land and hope to move their border.
- bildung 11mo ago> Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd. Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.
- watwut 11mo agoUnfortunately, yes. USA is doing everything but openly support Russia at this point too. It could have been different if Ukraine got proper support, but instead it is being undermined. Europe could do more, but at least most states dont play for Russia (Hungary and Slovakia excepted).
- somenameforme 11mo agoI think literally nobody knows the price either side is paying right now. And I do mean literally, including Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. The fog of war applies to participants, let alone outsiders who are basing our views on figures and claims that obviously going to be driven heavily by propaganda. But beyond this, I don't think this war is about Ukraine anymore than a war in Taiwan will be about Taiwan. It's little more than a proxy for hegemony in both cases. Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands. NATO did, and we pushed forward against endless threats of it being a redline, essentially as a means of indirectly imposing our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance. And similarly, for those that don't the Taiwan-China history - the Mao led Chinese revolution was a success. The existing government of mainland China fled to Taiwan where they brutally oppressed the locals, in an era known as the 'white terror' [1], and established power through 40 years of martial law. And of course we backed them, solely to use them as a weapon against China, because geopolitics. This is why these wars are so important for the participants. The US couldn't care less about Ukraine, but withdrawing without ruining our ability to militarily threaten other peer or near peer countries is difficult. And similarly the last thing Russia needs is more land, but if they never act on claims of red lines, then they can never expect their interests to be considered in the case of a conflict in interests between them and the West. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
- TheOtherHobbes 11mo agoRussia is on the same spiral, but further ahead. They're going down together. The US has some chance of pulling out of the nose dive, but it's slim. They may or may not take Europe and Ukraine with them. China is better placed to survive, but has its own structural issues.
- MonkeyClub 11mo ago> Russia will conquer Ukraine Perhaps the objective isn't to conquer the whole of the Ukraine, but only most of it, leaving the western parts independent. This seems to be pushed as the right approach wrt the Ukraine in Alexander Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, which apparently is used as the source for Russia's current "Eurasianist" geopolitical doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
- tim333 11mo agoIn March 2022 Russia occupied 27% of Ukraine. They have now lost much of their artillery tanks and then army and now control 19% of Ukraine while their oil refineries blow up, and recently tankers. I'm not sure the conquest is going quite to plan.
- expedition32 11mo agoChina hasn't started a war since the 1970s.
- kevin_thibedeau 11mo agoThey're doing a good job as belligerents against the Philippines.
- roenxi 10mo agoLiterally yes, because they haven't started an actual war. If the US manages the same in Venezuela then they'll be doing a good job there too. The difference between China and the US is China (humorously, probably because of US pressure) keeps re-investing their economic surplus and the US keeps blowing big chunks of it on meaningless wars. That seems to be the big factor of why China had this huge industrial economy appear out of nowhere and the US has been sort of lurching along for the last 20 years. Hard to believe it, but trillions in investment is better for people's wallets than trillion dollars in making life horrible for goat herders in the middle east.
- closewith 11mo agoOkay, as Devil's Advocate, you could say the same about the US. It was unable to conquer Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria.
- firesteelrain 11mo agoThis is a false equivalence. The United States was not trying to “conquer” those countries in the territorial sense that Russia attempted with Ukraine. Those conflicts were limited political or counterinsurgency objectives fought under strict constraints, often without public support, and with no intention of annexation. Comparing that to a conventional invasion aimed at seizing and absorbing a neighbor’s territory is analytically inaccurate. US did defeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And indirectly Syria by supporting the insurgency (and we had bases in that Country). It is also worth noting that the US and South Vietnam had effectively contained the North by 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct US involvement and the North violated those terms two years later when it launched a full-scale conventional invasion. South Vietnam collapsed only after the US withdrew military support. Same with Afghanistan. Iraq is flourishing without Saddam and without war. It toppled Saddam’s regime in weeks, and the country now has an elected government, functioning institutions, and no US occupation. Whatever its internal challenges, Iraq is not a case where the US attempted and failed to annex territory. It demonstrates that these were limited political interventions, not conquest wars.
- CMay 11mo agoI'd also add that the Vietnamese LOVE the US.
- berdario 11mo agoDespite what the USA did in its invasion of Vietnam, not because of it. Vietnamese are trying to not forget their history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Remnants_Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Remnants_Museum (I'm not sure how many Vietnamese actually love USA, vs how many don't... I just want to remind that different people in the same society might hold different opinions, and the sentiment is certainly not monolithic)
- somenameforme 11mo agoI think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics. Most people don't realize is that war is essentially a giant deadly game of logistics, and so the typical plan for Russia would be to simply destroy the logistics pipelines arming Ukraine. But thanks to the people 100% responsible for maintaining Ukraine's military managing to maintain a strategically accepted neutrality, it's impossible to fundamentally disrupt their logistics pipeline outside of small scale black ops stuff. So that has turned this war into a war of attrition where Russia is advancing slowly, but mostly setting the goal as essentially having Ukraine simply run out of Ukrainians. And they seem to be succeeding. Once the real death tolls for this war are revealed, people are going to be shocked. You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age (in a country with a severe demographic crisis) if you're not suffering catastrophic losses, especially since as the amount of territory you have to defend decreases, you need fewer soldiers to maintain the same defensive density.
- artursapek 11mo agoWhen would the real death tolls be revealed? When Ukraine does a census?
- somenameforme 11mo agoOnce the war ends and both sides can start clarifying their troop classifications. There's always going to be uncertainty because an MIA could be dead, or it could be some guy who successfully deserted and started a new life for himself somewhere. But as both sides return captured troops, exchange bodies, and so on - everything will be made much more clear. And there will also be less political motivation to lie.
- amanaplanacanal 11mo agoDo you think Ukraine has more casualties than Russia? Or is it simply that Ukraine had a smaller population to begin with?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]