171–180 of 339 posts
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It’s certainly a cop-out if you use such a segmentation to argue that things are peaceful.
Is it really a cop-out if most people are not involved in a conflict? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-state-based-con...
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There are so many wrongs with your statements that I don't know where to start. I'll just tackle one of them. "build a high speed rail network", implying that US is failing there. China is suffering from a $1 TRILLION debt for its rails https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/C... , while ridership collapses https://japan-forward.com/weak-demand-for-chinas-high-speed-... . Cities in China are suffe…
The thing is, debts are just numbers on paper at the end of the day. You can erase them, but the infrastructure will remain. Erasing debts wipes out (most) savings and hurts rich people. So it's not something that can be done lightly, but it is an option. Also, Chinese HSR ridership is back up after COVID restrictions were lifted.
The first time I heard Eric Weinstein call for periodic above ground nuclear weapons demonstrations[1], I thought it was nuts. That's because I grew up with the threat of the H-Bomb[2] and the impending nightmares that I've had ever since (though thankfully they are infrequent these days). Seeing how casually people dismiss the possible effects of a war involving 10,000 of these weapons has caused me to re-evaluate t…
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Haber-Bosch was just before WWI, not WWII
WWII started just before WWI. Some people call the Second World War part 2 of the first. At the time people were worried that the settlement with Germany was just an armistice. Those people turned out to be right. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that we should be very very careful treating the wars like they were unrelated incidents. They absolutely were not.
The long post-war era of peace is due to a number of factors, but the one we don't talk about enough is that the U.S. spent untold trillions of dollars becoming a global police force. This may be the biggest factor. I believe it is certainly the prerequisite for any others to have had an effect. The problem is that the U.S. has a tiger by the tail: if they want to continue in this role, they'll need to step up spendi…
I mean, even if there was no China. OK. Great. Now what? You've still got India giving Russia as many drones as Russia desires every month. Is India, or even South Africa for that matter, ever going to lose its ability to produce drones for Russia? No.
The essential problem is that we live in a multi-polar world. Multiple nations can sustain themselves. Multiple nations can arm themselves. Multiple nations can exert influence in arenas that previously only the West could exert influence. China, the US, India, Russia, the EU. All of these power centers are realities, and they all sometimes have conflicting agendas. We're even reaching a point where they need each other less and less. In fact, the linkages in terms of, for example, global trade at times may be driving some of the problems. (See climate change.)
I'm not sure we know how to operate in this world. We focus so much on one "adversary", and without fail, we end up in conflict with another of the global powers or civilizations. I think this is because of the strangeness of this environment to us. Ukraine is a good example. You could argue that we didn't even bother to understand India's position on this before we issued an edict regarding sanctions. An edict that India promptly ignored. That's kind of a tell tale sign that we didn't really understand the underlying environment. Worse, I'm not sure we even tried to understand it? Did anyone ever actually solicit India's input in any meaningful way? I'm not sure they did.
So as long as that lack of understanding persists, I'm pretty sure we'll continue to stumble from one crisis to the next. None of which will be the crisis we plan for.
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The language in your post (particularly where you say "over a decade") misleadingly suggests that there was significant buildup pre-2014. And that poor, frightened Russia has just reacting the way any country would, in response to this imagined buildup.
How is 8 years not "nearly a decade"? How is +150% over 3 years "imagined"? I understand this is an emotional topic for some, but let's not be obtuse about the basic numbers.
By invoking the number "10", subtracted from 2022 -- you're making an allusion to Russia's claims that it was significantly threatened by Ukraine's buildup or NATO musings pre-2014 to do, well -- what it just had to do to protect itself.
How is +150% over 3 years "imagined"?
When it alludes to the pre-2014 situation -- as your post does.
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You posted a lecture in which Mearsheimer says Russia will never try to conquer Ukraine, because "Putin is much too smart for that" -- and ask us to accept him as an expert?
He predicted "Putin will wreck Ukraine" and this is happening now.
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The military took many lessons from Vietnam that didn't work in the Middle East. As one example, at the start of the war in Afghanistan, Marine scout snipers would operate in two-man teams. This was a Vietnam-era SOP that favored stealth over firepower--two men can't lay down much heat, but they don't need to if the enemy can't find and engage them. It's pretty easy to hide a couple guys in a jungle, so it worked wel…
Super cool insight, I wonder what the turnaround or bureaucratic process is of fundamentally changing an SOP. It can't just be generals mandating these things (or is it?). Changing organizational processes tends to be extremely hard in large orgs, and I wonder how the military deals with it.
It's worth noting that this was one of many incremental changes. When I started that deployment in 2009, snipers were going out in 5-man teams. The team that got hit actually did technically consist of 8 men (as was already the SOP), but they were split into two four-man elements that took different positions about a kilometer apart. The mandate going forward was that all 8 team members had to be within earshot of each other at all times. It was the latest of many orders in the trend of ratcheting up firepower at the cost of concealability.
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Deveraux explicitly endorses (1) in the article: > If anything, I think cultural values have lagged, resulting in countries launching counter-productive wars out of cultural inertia (because it’s ‘the doing thing’ or valued in the culture) long after such wars became maladaptive. Indeed, I’d argue that’s exactly what Russia is doing right now.
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In other words, the USA acknowledged that they had provoked the Soviets.
But somehow bringing NATO to Russia's doorstep should not be seen as provocation?
It's very tempting to paint your military enemies as cartoon villains. In fact, painting Putin as a cleptocratic thug is easy. It gets you reelected at home. But openly humiliating him is bad foreign policy.
RFK Jr's message is that Ukraine did not benefit from this war. Their young men are being sacrificed to an American plan to wear down the Russian army.
Why provoke the war when realpolitik says it's better to compromise?
Cui bono? Who benefits from this conflict? American military contractors, and American exporters of natural gas.
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WWII started just before WWI. Some people call the Second World War part 2 of the first. At the time people were worried that the settlement with Germany was just an armistice. Those people turned out to be right. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that we should be very very careful treating the wars like they were unrelated incidents. They absolutely were not.
More descriptively, there was a cascade of revolutions and coups across Europe and Asia in the wake of WWI: Russia (1917), Germany (1918), Turkey (1919), Hungary (1918, 1919), Afghanistan (1919, independence), Egypt (1919, independence 1922), Morocco (1920, French conquest resumed), Mongolia (1921, independence), Italy (1922), Iran (1921, 1925), Portugal (1926), Poland (1926), Lithuania (1926), Arabia (1925, Saudi co…
Perhaps the declining role monarchs across the world was a causal factor there -- countries of citizens trained to live with a highly authoritarian structure, who because of prior experience gravitated towards fascism/communism (also highly authoritarian)