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Why is everyone preparing for war so hard
by seydor 3mo ago
Why is everyone preparing for war so hard
- kingkawn 3mo agoCuz they don’t believe in anything else anymore except violence
- goalieca 3mo agoBecause China has stated they will take Taiwan, they have been threatening Philippines sovereignty too. Japan and others are on edge too. China currently has been behaving very adversarial and has a huge fraction of the minerals under their control that this article is posting about. I think sovereignty is a good thing. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
- ta20240528 3mo ago[flagged]
- yadaeno 3mo agoreflect on what? both things can be true at the same time.
- GlickWick 3mo agoWhile true, China's threat has been going on for a long time and they've been running repeated exercises on how to do it, how to take US warships out, etc. Additionally, US support for taking Greenland is virtually zero. Chinese support for taking Taiwan is frighteningly high.
- idiotsecant 3mo agoChina is not an irrational actor. They know that the most effective way to take Taiwan is slowly, through soft power and political subterfuge. There is no need or advantage to a full frontal assault.
- Someone1234 3mo ago> There is no need or advantage to a full frontal assault. Perhaps, but in the last year China did build these: https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/03/stairway-to-taiwan-the-chinese-amphibious-bridging-system/ https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/03/stairway-to-tai...
- ceejayoz 3mo agoUnless China has some very interesting new anti-drone tech, those look like nice big targets.
- lenerdenator 3mo agoThey're exactly as rational as any other group of humans. They've repeatedly stated that they'll use force to take Taiwan if necessary. They are building the military power to make the full frontal assault. I don't get why there's so much "oh, China's different" talk on here or on other online forums. I often wonder how much of that is organic versus something their propaganda/agitation ministries puts on.
- GlickWick 3mo agoRational or not, they're building warships and an invasion fleet, along with the ability to stifle any US attempt to stop them. This is not the action of someone hoping for a slow victory. The person at the top of the chain was asking why everyone is preparing for war. This behavior from China is why. It predates any of the Greenland Trump idiocy, too.
- lardosaurusrex 3mo agoThe USA keeps threatening my country; Canada. I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that going "but china" isn't going to help the US much going forward.
- goalieca 3mo agoI'm in canada. I don't think the two are even comparable.
- Teever 3mo agoYou're sort of right. What the US is doing in Canada right now is more comparable to what Russia was doing in Ukraine in the early 2010s[0] The upcoming Alberta separatist referendum that is funded and boosted by foreign agitators isn't intended to succeed. It's intended to cause a festering wound in Canada to prevent it from growing in strength and independence from America. As far as I'm concerned America has already lost the next impending major war. They've spent the past 25 years blowing trillions on purposefully unwinnable wars that serve to enrich American oligarchs. This has left the American military structurally weakened and mis-optimized to fight small groups of terrorists instead of fighting an enemy with comparable and perhaps superior ability. We've also seen the decimation of the manufacturing base in America and with it the economic security that it provided the middle class and with it the power and skill set that comes from being able to design and build thing. Finally, the United States' recent choice to blow half their stockpile of numerous kinds of missiles all all at once while at the same time lacking the supply chain or even the manufacturing base to adequately restock their munitions as the nail in the coffin for the American empire.[2] So what's going to happen in a world where America can't win a global conflict but is still protected from invasion by thousands of nuclear weapons? America is going to decline into a regional power that attacks its neighbours with impunity. You're already starting to see it and it won't be long until you see articles like this[1] about Alberta. I don't want it to be this way, but it is. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487443 [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hit-with-demand-for-answers-over-secret-13b-raked-in-from-venezuelan-oil-revenues/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hit-with-demand-for-answ... [2] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitions-iran-war-ceasefire https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...
- amykhar 3mo agoAnd yet all sorts of people are advocating for using Chinese LLMs because they are less expensive. It seems like a very risky move to save a few dollars.
- lenerdenator 3mo agoIt'd be interesting to know how much of that is truly organic support versus what the CCP pushes out across the internet as agitation/propaganda. Are they cheaper? They are open-weight, so in theory, they are cheaper to run and do with them as you wish. The problem is that they come from a place with a long and storied history of attacking digital assets in the US and the West in general.
- znort_ 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
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- maxglute 3mo agoThat's misattribution of the the why. The real why is US can't do the sensible thing and cede regional hegemony to growing PRC. There's always the normal solution of watching PRC bomb PH schoolgirls while buying their rare earth and selling them semi, like the rest of the world when US bombs school girls. The why is US leadership pathologically can't not fight, including the fights most of their pop don't want to fight.
- jorblumesea 3mo agogreat distraction for the masses from the files
- robotnikman 3mo agoI hope its less because of war and more because its better to not be so dependent on other countries, similar to how Europe is trying to rely less on the US for digital infrastructure. I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.
- ido 3mo agoIn the 70s it was offshoring to Japan. China’s market opened to the west in the late 80s/90s.
- seydor 3mo agoWhen goods don't cross borders, armies do. Dependence is necessary for peace
- actionfromafar 3mo agoPerhaps necessary, but definitely not sufficient, as demonstrated by Russia willing to gamble everything on Ukraine.
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoWar with China has been on the roadmap for 10+ years.
- AnimalMuppet 3mo agoYeah, but not for 2030. IIRC, Xi has demanded that China's military be ready to take Taiwan in 2027.
- ColdStream 3mo agoTrue but it also looks like a Hail Mary shot for them. If they make the move and it doesn't work, the internal pressures from the people could topple a lot of the power structure. They probably won't move until they have a very decent chance of pulling it off but they are running out of runway to build that force.
- narrator 3mo agoThe military build-up in China is world war scale.
- georgemcbay 3mo ago> Why is everyone preparing for war so hard Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming. If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).
- pfdietz 3mo agoCanada needs a nuclear deterrent.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoHumans have had major wars throughout history, it's unrealistic to really think that will change. It's in our nature.
- georgemcbay 3mo ago> Humans have had major wars throughout history, it's unrealistic to really think that will change. Sure, but now all the major powers have society ending devices to deploy when they go to war. And when you combine that with the fact that the US is currently actively proving it can't impose its will on even Iran despite having a much stronger conventional military, when the next war breaks out between major nuclear powers it is likely to accelerate to the worst possible outcome very quickly.
- seydor 3mo agoYet we have wars for oil, not water.
- ColdStream 3mo agoAlmost definitely this. It explains the build up of forces, signaling of land grabs, hardening of boarders and increase of surveillance. It is all about built a fortress. There is a lot of dramatic stories in the climate change space but when you see the military's and actuaries around the world talking about the conditions of the coming decades in very matter of fact terms, that is why I worry. They are the level heads that are signaling to those in power, now is the time to harden defenses. Both external and internal. There have been many Climate Risk Assessments by many countries that we only have little pieces of, but due to freedom of information requests and what bits we have are fairly grim. Here in Australia there was a report that is still not public on this. But the more open politicians that have seen it said they had to change all their future plans and promises based on what the findings were. That we are moving towards a much more unstable and resource limited world. As it has been termed by many militaries, Climate change is a threat multiplier. I have said it for a long while now, in future we will welcome immigrants with open arms. Those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones. I really hope I am wrong but I can see many hermit kingdoms rising and they will loot others before they go hungry.
- gustavus 3mo agoA lot of the answe are reddit-esque throwaway answers and political shill bots, but for a more nuanced answer. For a long timeant people were brought up on the "End of History" idea. That after the Cold war mankind would all get together and sign kimbaya, that war as we knew it was over, sure there would be atrocities and "policing actions" that would be needed to stop some bad guys but everything was good wars of the past were over and it was all good. This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves. The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict. The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link. The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.
- seydor 3mo agoChina is dependent on world exports for its future and seems to be trying hard to keep that going, particularly under Xi. It's the US that seems hellbent on breaking globalization. Also, technological changes in our times are slow compared to the end of 19th century. Nukes are 60 year old tech and cheap drones are not particularly sci-fi tech machines.
- jandrewrogers 3mo agoA war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more. As time has passed, reality has not diverged from those models, so confidence in the conclusions have grown. It is worth noting that this pre-dates current political dramas, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, etc. The underlying strategic geopolitics driving it is much deeper than those issues. It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.
- Jalad 3mo ago> A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more Do you have more information about this, or a source?
- ceejayoz 3mo agohttps://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/russia-nato-arms-germany-war-canada-9.7232514 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/russia-nato-arms-germany-wa... > Germany's defence minister is frank and plain-spoken, but also deliberate with his words and intention. When he talks about Russia, the future of the West and the possibility of another European war, the message however becomes stark: "Our experts say it can happen in 2029." > In remarks published Wednesday, Generalleutnant Christian Freuding, the inspector of the German Army, said the 2029 date was not a figure pulled out of thin air by his government's national security establishment, but an actual consensus view among Western allies. https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-mark-rutte-says-europe-must-prepare-for-scale-of-war-our-grandparents-endured/ https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-mark-rutte-says-europe-... > NATO Chief Mark Rutte urged member countries to do more to prepare for the possibility of large-scale war, warning that Russia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years.
- CamperBob2 3mo agoRussia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years. Russia can't even take the country next door. How exactly are they going to attack NATO? With a bunch of rusty nukes that almost certainly no longer work, and that would get their (relatively few) major population centers vaporized by nukes that almost certainly work just fine?
- znort_ 3mo agobecause the empire sees no other way but war to maintain dominance, scratch that, avoid dissolution. so folks all over the world prepare, and rightly so if u ask me. spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw. btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.
- ColdStream 3mo agoI have always figured the fermis paradox is that civilizations run out of resources before they can become large scale sustainable. Having wars over a shrinking world would accelerate this however.
- ifwinterco 3mo agoWar is profitable and the people who profit run the US and Europe
- znort_ 3mo agothat's one term of the equation. the other is that war is the tool of banking cartels.
- RetroTechie 3mo agoBecause some idiot leaders threw diplomacy & international law out the window? So.. back to how things were done in the old days.
- mindslight 3mo agoThe Juche is on the loose.
- pianopatrick 3mo agoThis level of preparation does not strike me as "so hard". Seems to me that if we in America and Europe were really preparing for a war there are a lot of things we would want to do that we are not doing.