That’s the key word. Negotiations.
This is not the first time we have supported the Russians in some form. We sent them an awful lot of stuff to fight the fascists AND the Finns (thanks for reminding us of your involvement).
Look up US lend lease aid to the Soviets to get a sense of the epic scale of our material aid.
Without our aid, Finland might be a Reichkommissariat today.
Yeah I know. But that situation was 100% different. There was a common enemy. I suspect European countries are not Russias and USAs common enemy.
If I give a better example: do you think you’ll support Taiwan in the future?
If a company looks at how it has been doing things and sees another company doing it better; then decides to improve itself by adopting those superior methods; that is an example of the dialectical.
A deficit? A porous border? Low quality education? Obesity? Drug addiction? Pointless wars? Talk of civil war? Low voter turnout? Creation of inner cities? An incredibly high prison population?
It just seems that you’re making a terrible mistake. But we’ll see. I hope that I’m wrong.
Well, Hitler declared war on the USA, so there is that aspect of it. Prior to that we had already been in a soft war with Germany over Atlantic shipping routes and our lend-lease aid to the UK. It was all but inevitable.
Our competition against the Soviets was ideological, and always has been up until the election of Donald J. Trump, which appears to be driving a nail into the ideology in a rather comprehensive fashion.
My father spent his late teenage years as a tank commander in W. Germany, as did many Americans. All ready to be the first to die to defend our ideas if the Soviets pushed west. People believed in American ideas then, and many of us still do.
I do, even if the language of our agreements is quite vague. I believe we will sink the Chinese navy and many, many Taiwanese will likely perish. The amount of weaponry the Chinese have arrayed against Taiwan is mind-boggling. But they still need to get across all of that water to occupy it, and we still own the waves.
Chinas navy sure looks mighty on paper, but they have never fought on the water like this before. Nor has their been any large scale naval conflicts since WWII, when the aircraft carrier concept surprised everyone who believed battleships were the core of naval strategy.
That revolution in military affairs may repeat itself, depending on how all of the new technologies actually get applied. The aircraft carrier is still the cornerstone of American force projection, and it is the only airfield in the world that moves at 35+ knots. Whether they will become death traps for 5,000 people at a time remains to be seen.
Carriers aren’t easy to sink at all. The last one sunk was done deliberately in 2005. The USS America survived weeks of target practice, eventually requiring explosive demolition to put it under the waves.
It was laid down in 1960 and the Nimitz and now Ford class carriers are even more difficult to sink.
LOL yeah it can be loosely applied that way, but you don’t need to understand Hegel to succeed in business. It might even work to your detriment by sending you off in the wrong direction.
I worked on the largest, most complex SAP implementation in history and I can assure you that zero time was spent framing business problems through the lens of Hegel.
All of the problems you mention are exacerbated by Democratic Socialism, while the antidote has always been the rejection of those ideas.
That it doesn’t eliminate everyone’s personal problems will continue to provide Socialists a way to find problems in the world through Marxist critique, then use the dialectic to synthesize their way into the next set of wild ideas.
Without being propped up by tax dollars and the scale of the Socialist grift being laid bare, I doubt many people will continue to buy it.
Especially since it is becoming very, very uncool at an astounding rate. Gone are the days of the counterculture, where Marxist professors could pretend to have the secret knowledge to fix society.
It may or may not be a mistake, but it won’t be terrible. Whatever Russia gets from this won’t make a big difference in the big picture. It’s a nation that will always screw itself and never achieve what the Western nations have achieved. Twojar does make a good point about the US and positive outcomes, although like everything in the world, there have been negative ones as well. But overall, the US has been successful, especially in comparison to Russia. Russia sucks today. When it was the USSR under communism, it sucked. China is still communist and doing better than Russia today. it isn’t only the US however, the west is better because of its values and governments which are not really that different from the US. Judging Europe by its woke activists is the same as judging the US by its activists.
Which Europe has done.
I doubt many Americans or Europeans know who Hegel is.
This applies to our government as well, that is one of the missions of DOGE. We’ll see how far RFK is allowed to go with regard to subsidizing things like corn.
True that.
What you will gain from protecting Taiwan? From a realpolitik standpoint.
Soviets were ideological opposed to US and West-Europe. That’s 100% true, and thank god Soviets lost that competition. Is modern Russia (authoritarian dictatorship where there are no civil rights or freedoms) somehow less opposed to US?
To compare to Ukraine, Taiwan is a major strategic ally, a major economic partner and has a much better political system that values human rights and liberties. Ukraine has always been a backwards land of corrupt remnants of the Socialist grifters that were never up-rooted, similar to Russia in that regards. An oligarchy with little to offer the USA except a place for our political crooks to launder their money.
That is partly why I suspect there is a LOT more to the Ukraine war story than is publicly known at this time. That’s always been true in war. Everyone lies during peacetime, but the deception takes on a whole new form when the racket of war is being both planned and conducted. It will likely be decades before a clear picture emerges for you and I to examine.
Back to the Pacific…
Japan is our biggest ally in Asia, and if you look at a map you will see how Taiwan joins with the southern Japanese archipelago to from a blockade around most of China’s coastline. Taiwan’s strategic importance is hard to understate, simply for the geography. Those islands are all aircraft carriers, missile bases, and naval resupply hubs.
Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing is one of planet Earth’s economic crown jewels at the moment. Its success compared to China has always been an embarrassment to the CCP, lending an ideological component as well.
Defending Taiwan gives the USA a chance to sink the Chinese navy, setting their shipbuilding back by years and securing American global naval dominance.
A conflict over Taiwan would be very, very different than anything that’s happened before. A staggering number of missiles will be launched in the first days and weeks of the war. Nobody REALLY knows how good they are at taking out things like destroyers and aircraft carriers, but we will surely find out if that war kicks off. Naval warfare has always been fast and deadly and that has only become increasingly true.
Sophisticated missiles are hard to make, and can be fired a lot faster than they can be produced. A protracted war might see missile stockpiles depleted rather fast, turning it into a war of industrial capacity to produce ships, planes, missiles and drones. The drones are another big x-factor.
Crippling China’s navy and denying them the geography and the industry on the island, as well as use of the South China sea, could bring about a neutering of China that would be an economic, social and humanitarian disaster, in addition to all of the political instability such a thing would produce.
I don’t see any protracted land wars unless they successfully land troops on Taiwan, sink or cripple the US navy and establish reliable supply lines from the mainland to support an invasion. That does, however, remain a possibility. They have been building up their military for this singular goal for quite some time. Have weapon, will hunt.
I imagine South Korea could be invaded if N. Korea gets roped in, which they likely will. They can simply launch artillery shells against Seoul, and that’s going to be a problem. We would likely attempt to move north and occupy that ground as soon as possible, which won’t be easy.
For now, the USA remains the most autarkic nation in history, with only a few key resources like tungsten, molybdenum, titanium and a few others being firmly controlled by China and Russia. We rely on Taiwan for semiconductors, which are vital. Semiconductor capacity is being built up here, but that takes time in both infrastructure and human resource development.
To me, Taiwan is the biggest concern for a flashpoint that might spark a large-scale global conflict, where China might align with Russia and create problems for everyone else.
Please invade Russia from the west if this happens. The treasures of Murmansk and the glory of conquest await the Finnish people.
Yes, because it is an oligarchy with no possibility of exporting whatever political ideology pretends to guide it. College students will not become enamored with Putin and dedicate years of study to his political philosophy, going on to infect other young minds with the same virus.
Putin poses zero ideological threat, zero conventional military threat and has no distinct advantages over us with nuclear and digital warfare.
Huh? Are we joining forces with Russia now? If I see two dumbasses fighting on the street corner and don’t get involved, I’m not siding with either.
I want to clarify that I’m asking sincerely.
I understand the point of view that US does not care anymore what happens to democracy etc. outside of it’s borders. But I’m thinking about the difference of Ukraine and Taiwan in this light.
But now you’re defending the one who has started the fight. Telling his lies.
US did not repeat Soviet propaganda as truths when aiding them. It might be an strategy for negotiations, but it’s unprecented if I remember correctly.
But if you are a cop, what do you do?
Now add to that, what if you are a cop on the take and it’s from the side that one of the dummies is on?
It is true that we weren’t selling Americans the ideas of lend-lease with Socialist ideological messaging, but we didn’t exactly go out of our way to call them out on it, either. There were other priorities at the time.
That isnt the scenario at all though
Lets say theres a crowd of people on the street watching a fight, one of the two people fighting is your friend who you get along with and the other is a guy with a history of fucking you over and to this day continues to meddle in your life
Everyone in the crowd agrees your friend is just defending themselves from the attack the other guy started
So you try to stop the fight, and the way you do it is by pulling the other guy aside, asking him what he wants, telling your friend “well I guess youre just going to have to give it to him … Oh and by the way you should have never started this fight in the first place”
Thats much more akin to what is happening that “I see two dumbasses fighting and Im not geting involved”
Depends on how close to shift change it is and whether there’s a call on it.
That’s not really applicable to this situation, though, since the U.S. is not the world police.
I agree, bad analogy. I have let two assholes go at it for a bit in my professional capacity as a part-time backup dive bar bouncer.
I still ended up saving a guy from an even more serious beating than he got, getting feebly attacked for my efforts.
I don’t think anyone should leap to any conclusions about how I managed to break that fight up any more than people should leap to conclusions about Trump’s dive bar bouncing methods.
I appreciate the detailed response. I can see the Taiwan and pacific having more geopolitical importance tp US than Europe.
I also agree that Russia is not a major threat to US. It could not even take on Europe, but the raising instability might cause war, and that’s scary for us.
I need to note that while Ukraine is not perfect, it did try to become better. Ukraines moving towards west and democracy was a threat to Putin, thus the war.
This conversation has lighted a bit how US people tend to see Europe and the power politics conserning it. Sorry about occasional ranting. This thing gets me heated up, since Russia is the geopolitical issue no 1. In here where I live.
