Oh wow, I didn't realize I was such an obvious "use memes to laugh away your fears" kind of guy but you nailed it. Thanks for the recommendation internet stranger.
It’s out of date compared to the level an American made modern AD platform could reach, mostly because the f-22 is basically impossible to upgrade, making it age quicker than any over aircraft in the USAF fleet.
When compared to a j-20 it’s still more than adequate
China and Russia have been showing a lot more confidence recently. Putin flew to Beijing, [Xi] Jinping is visiting Hungary. Russia and China both reevaluating their borders again. They're up to no good, and we are too busy struggling with ourselves to properly respond.
There was no surprise invasion of Ukraine either. I don't really understand these comments about desensitizing. Was anyone actually fooled by Russia's claims of 'just another drill?' Zelenski told his people not to worry, but they were preparing for an invasion all the same. I doubt he even believed what he was saying, but he didn't want to start a panic. US intelligence said it was an invasion before it started. I guess Fox News and similar idiots claimed it wasn't an invasion, but they lie so much over everything that I don't think even thier own viewers take them that seriously. If something goes in a direction they don't like, Fox will course correct quickly.
Yep, around 2 weeks+ before the invasion of Ukraine there were bags of blood being brought to the medical tents that were set up. Even after noticing the huge buildup in the weeks leading up.
In winter 2022, during their another military drill, the moment Russia deployed field hospitals with a lot of refrigerated blood for blood transfusion, and mobile crematoriums - was a good indication that this was not a drill, and that invasion was inevitable.
What similar China’s actions can indicate real invasion, considering that it’s not through land but by a sea?
Pretty much.
Russia’s Cozy/Fuzzy Bear exploit did just this during, and up to the 2016 election. Sowing division in our populace using social media was a pretty successful clandestine operation on their end.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_Bear](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_Bear)
Not to mention it’s been balls deep in our government (NSA, Pentagon, White House, CISA) stealing vital information since 2010. Just this year they infiltrated Microsoft. No one knows if we’ll ever truly get rid of this threat or what/how much information it’s taken or will continue to take.
I’d like to think we pose a higher threat in cyber espionage/warfare. But damn do they have some serious talent in that realm, albeit with a shitty military.
Right at the start of all this russia bullshit, I said the best move (and I still do) would be to completely sever any russian connection to the internet outside Russia. They are using it as a weapon, fuck em.
we'd need chinas support, or else we'd have to block china too. either that or block the old fashioned way, but destroying the physical links.
regardless, it's not easy easy as saying it sounds.
I guess that's the main difference, if a dictator says get X done now, it'll usually just get done asap, rather than having whole parties debating in the pros and cons for ages first.
Because let's be honest nobody under them is going to tell the dictator with no regard for human life "no".
As such it'll allow them to make moves faster. Just look at the crap and delays with aid going to Ukraine and the restrictions around how they're allowed to use the weapons. If a dictator said "get that aid to them, now." It'd be done real quick.
That being said a benevolent dictator seems an impossibility and as such, they're all a bunch of nobheads who are evil.. despite having the power to do good as fast as they want
It's a strength but also a massive weakness. If Putin wasn't surrounded by cronies maybe they wouldn't be bogged down in a multi-year war that was supposed to last a week. And if Saudi Arabia wasn't a dictatorship maybe they wouldn't be sinking their national wealth into building Neom, possibly the biggest waste of money in history.
Too many checks and balances can be crippling, but too few can be a disaster.
A strong head of government relies on the head making good decisions which is impossible when you are surrounded by incompetent people.
It isn’t like the days of monarchy’s past where an intelligent good ruler had a reasonably good chance of achieving their goals. The world is far too complex and integrated for one person to run a country successfully when they are surrounded by yes men
I'm pretty sure monarchies past are rife with idiotic and ruinous decisions driven by one man's ego
It's literally why so many societies kept trying and occasionally succeeding in, killing them and overturning the system.
Saudi Arabia is an interesting example. The current prince is relatively progressive (the word relatively does a lot of heavy lifting) compared to his father and most of the country, so he does promote things like basic Women's rights, some worker rights and some parts of western culture.
Edit: since people seem to be misunderstanding, no, he is by no measure progressive by western standards. He's still a dictator with little to no respect to human rights or general liberal values. Yet he's still a massive improvement compared to those that came before him and other regional dictators and leaders.
Saudi is also interesting insofar as how they control the population and keep them invested in the royal family. The whole country is desert and the royalty subsidizes energy and drinking water to the point that it’s basically free. If they revolt, no more water or a/c
Yes, but that also brings up the issue of who is actually a citizen of SA.
>RIYADH, May 31 (Reuters) - The population of Saudi Arabia has reached 32.2 million, 42% of whom are foreign nationals with 63% of Saudis under age 30, the country's general authority for statistics said on Wednesday.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-population-322-mln-median-age-29-years-old-general-authority-statistics-2023-05-31/
Nearly half the population are foreign nationals. Vast majority of those are unskilled laborers, with notably terrible living conditions. Modern slavery with extra steps.
>Turkish police believe that Khashoggi was tortured and killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul
>according to an anonymous Turkish source, the killing took about seven minutes and forensic specialist Salah Muhammed al-Tubaigy, who had brought along a bone saw, cut Khashoggi's body into pieces, while Khashoggi was still alive, as he and his colleagues listened to music.
No, not even that.
Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows to be eliminated for eating crops but when they disappeared then insects ate even more crops, contributing to 40 - 60 million deaths in the Chinese famine, all caused by the same dictatorship in power in China today
And then he tried to have farms converted into steel mills. And he forced all of the educated people in China to go work on farms. And then he basically stood by while the red guards just started torturing and killing educated people in his name. And then generally held back the prosperity of the nation until he finally died and reformers got a foot hold in the CCP.
I'm not sure which is more shocking - that anyone with an IQ above room temperature made it out of that generation, or that they still worship Mao for all that bullshit.
While dictatorships can get things done more quickly, they also tend to get stupid things done quickly too. When no one can question the leader it means sooner or later a really bad idea is going to get executed even though everyone except leader knows its a really bad idea. A similar risk is that known issues are never acknowledged because it's not allowed, which can lead to insidious corruption within your military that renders it far less effective than its supposed to be or even catastrophic disasters (ex: Chernobyl's meltdown was due to a reactor design flaw that was kept secret by the government).
The war in Ukraine is an outcome of 20 years of rule, not 2 years of madness. The average joe Russian still supports the war because he is indoctrinated for decades that this is what must happen. As soon as globalization started to grind its gears (read 2016 onwards) Russia and China started to pump up their war rhetoric because without that build-up they cannot justify their current dictatorships. Before it was “our benevolent leader made our lives better” , now “we must realize our potential as a nation in order to survive” .
ehh, if a dictator says "Get X done now" there's a good chance that
a) Getting X done now was a stupid decision caused by the Supreme Leader smelling their own farts and believing all the flattering misinformation fed to them by their cronies
and/or
b) Supreme Leader's cronies will put up a good performance of "Getting X done" while in actuality using "Getting X done" as an opportunity to siphon state funds into their own pockets, building their personal power base and sabotaging their rivals. And Supreme Leader tacitly encourages the disunity and infighting so that no single faction is strong enough to overthrow them.
There's a reason why most dictatorships are poor as fuck, extremely corrupt and utterly dysfunctional compared to their democratic counterparts.
As absurd and broken and compromised as most democracies are, they still have a far better track record of governance overall than their autocratic counterparts.
Even China, one of the most successful and powerful authoritarian states of the 21st century, is currently facing the consequences of the bad decision making and execution endemic to authoritarian governments
Like their much vaunted high speed railway system turning out to be (mostly) a big ol waste of money, with many lines being seriously under occupied, and most traffic being better served by much cheaper and more efficient regular trains.
Or the 3 Gorges Dam turning out to have been an environmental, humanitarian and economic disaster - which could have been avoided by simply building smaller, cheaper dams along the Yangtze tributaries to control floods better and generate more electricity at a lower cost.
Or throwing away decades of accumulated international goodwill in a couple months with comically immature "wolf warrior" diplomatic insults meant to show how "tough" and "strong" they were, which only served to alienate potnetial allies.
Or going all in on the construction industry and real estate to drive the economy and generate government funds.
Or imposing overzealous, poorly managed COVID lockdown procedures long after they stopped making sense.
And so on. Flashy, ostentatious, useless displays of raw power that are great at pleasing the one man audience that is the supreme leader, and letting government officials steal state funds, but bad at actually achieving their stated goals.
Notice how shitty dictatorships love military parades that feature soldiers performing circus performer like "martial arts" displays to show how masculine and tough they are. Woah, that shirtless commando with the six pack can break a concrete block with his forehead! Ignore the other thousand malnourished conscripts stealing potatoes from the supply depots because their corrupt commanders are stealing their lunch money! It's a pretty fitting parallel to authoritarian government as a whole.
China only made it as far as they did after opening up because Deng and the CCP, quite wisely, used to subscribe to a policy of avoiding too much concentration of power into one person. They knew just how destructive one man dictatorship could be, because of their experience with Mao, and they didn't want a repeat of that. That's all out the window now, with Xi
I mean yeah sure, democracies aren't immune to making stupid decisions, and failing to get shit done, and having everything compromised by corruption.
But they have far more checks and balances in place to prevent even more stupid decisions from being made, as well as ensuring a certain baseline leve of competency and transparency - opposition politicians, independent academics, humanitarian and civil rights groups, independent media, protestors, grasroots organisations etc.
Functioning democracies also allow you to cycle out bad leaders and administrators more often and without violence and upheaval. Transitions are more stable.
Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows to be eliminated for eating crops but when they disappeared then insects ate even more crops, contributing to 40 - 60 million deaths in the Chinese famine, all caused by the same dictatorship in power in China today
A benevolent dictator is a paradox. Someone who is genuinely benevolent would simply not do the things that are required in order for him to seize power and become one in the first place.
It's like saying someone is an unbigoted racist, you just can't have both.
> That being said a benevolent dictator seems an impossibility and as such, they're all a bunch of nobheads who are evil.. despite having the power to do good as fast as they want
Lol, love the disclaimer "PS I don't promote authoritarianism"
It's an honest observation. China gets shit done a lot faster than the Western world. That's in part because they're still developing, but the fact that the government is authoritarian and can force shit even if there's a lot of disagreement probably also plays a big part.
Every system has its advantages and disadvantages, political systems are not exempt. I think Churchill phrased it best. "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others"
I think the way democracy is applied in most countries today has some glaring weaknesses which make it an ineffective form of governance a lot of the time.
- It's inherently myopic. The main concern of politicians is getting re-elected the next cycle. This means they're only thinking as far ahead as their voters. Big global challenges that require long-term commitment get pushed to the sideline because the immediate consequences of dealing with them would make politicians unpopular.
- Global challenges also require concensus to be properly addressed which is difficult to reach when the opinions of everyone are all over the place.
- A lot of this has to do with misinformation, and this will only get worse with the rise of AI. People are very prone to all sorts of biases and it's become almost trivial for malicious actors to abuse that.
- Polarization. Misinformation is also used to purposely pitch people up against one another. It becomes worse when politicians, instead of trying to fight it, just run with it and go full populist. It's easier to put the blame for all the shit on the other guy/side than to actually fix it. I think this is a real problem for almost every democratic country. But I think it's particularly bad in the USA because the two party systems lends itself to an antithetical relationship. Instead of seeing people/parties as partners in governance, they're seen as opponents or even enemies that must be defeated.
- Certain types of lobbyism. Corporate interests should not take priority over that of citizens just because companies can fill the pockets of politicians and help them get elected. That's not lobbyism, that is corruption.
I'll join you in saying that hoping for a benevolent leader with the right answer to everything, is probably not the way to go. But we should be open to an honest discussion on how some aspects of democracy can be made more resilient to the problems of today while still retaining the affordances it has given its citizens over the decades.
The lack of response to the belligerence of Russia and China is not only about the threat of nuclear escalation, it's also a symptom of deeper problems within our own societies.
China’s one-child policy has effectively sealed a population collapse that will likely end its aspirations to global leadership, so I’d say dictatorship has some serious shortcomings.
I don't think it's the best example. It's obviously in conflict with basic human rights so it was an awful policy to begin with, but it got there as a somewhat sensible response to a big spike in population growth after the great leap forward. China was at that time a country that just experienced a terrible famine so I can understand their reluctance of suddenly having a lot of extra mouths to feed. Ethics asside, it wasn't necessarily a bad decision for that time practically speaking. But the policy should have never lasted as long as it did.
I've lived in China, I still have friends and acquaintances there. The reason young people aren't having children there is no longer related to the one child policy, it's the same reason as most of the rest of the developed world. A lot of youth are choosing not to have children because it has become very expensive to do so. It's a problem in the USA, it's a bigger problem in Europe, it's an even bigger problem in Japan, and it's catastrophic in South Korea.
All democratic places, and a lot of it is related to the shortsightedness of governments that keep pandering to the older majority of their voterbase. Because keeping status-quo for as long as possible is what wins re-elections. Even though it doesn't take a genius to realize that marginalizing the youth, the part of the population that is active and should be keeping your economy afloat, is the worst thing you can do for your country in the long term.
So yeah one child policy was a terrible, unethical choice. But I wouldn't use it as a gotcha for authoritarianism when most democratic places are also experiencing problems with declining population.
this is one of the biggest fallacies out there
a dictator might be fast, but totally useless, cause its usually him calling the shots, however stupid and uneducated that is
the fact that China changed its course of meritocratic roots and getting ahead in the global race of nations was undercut by Xi's more one-person autocratic government, its exactly looking like the bane thats gonna make China not competitive enough in the long run, when you compare it to meritocratic free market economies. China leaving behind its pre-Xi westernization process is whats gonna be its demise, totally the opposite of what your implying with the "effectiveness" of dictators
One day they will attack and learn that things aren’t as easily understood and straightforward as they thought. No modern military has conquered and occupied a country without the intervention of an outside force. As long as there is an outside force interested and involved in removing the occupation, it won’t last. USSR has tried, US has tried. Russia is trying again.
Something to note: many world leaders are known and referred to by their surnames, like you did with Putin. However, mandarin naming conventions have someone’s “first” name as their family name. So the equivalent for China’s leader would be to just call him Xi.
\* we are too busy struggling with ourselves to properly respond.
While we have plenty of blame to accept ourselves, a good portion of these divisions are being pushed by the authoritarian/adversary countries.
They are absolutely gearing up for war. They won’t let us get a chance to get back on our feet by defeating their paid for pawns and online armies. They have to move and they know it.
Pretty much every analysis says China will reach the zenith of it's power relative to the us within the next 5 years. If they want to take Taiwan they need to do it soon.
It may not be a coincidence that there's been so much meddling in our affairs & manipulation of people through social media from those two nations to help create all this instability that has us distracted.
Well, we do just so happen to have a full carrier strike group south of Tiawan in Singapore at the moment...and another full carrier strike group out in the Pacific near Japan...and a Marine ARG, which includes an LHA that is its self a small aircraft carrier, as well as having a couple ships full of Marines, their gear, and their landing craft. I'd say we might have had some idea this was possible and just might have arranged to have a frightening amount of firepower in the region that could get to Taiwan very quickly if there was an actual need to. We may be walking softly, but there are a couple of our biggest sticks nearby, just in case.
Sadly they are having a good-ish year while we in the Democratic world are in one of the biggest election years in history. It is awkward timing for sure. But once elections are done and mandates are had, we'll slowly be in a more steady position. As I heard an employee of one of the US defense primes say in a subreddit (paraphrased):
If you could see the scale of the buildup that's now occurring, you'd understand.
The West and its Pacific allies is the far greater power.
**From The Telegraph:**
China launched surprise “punishment” drills encircling Taiwan, just days after the inauguration of a new Taiwanese president Beijing has denounced as a “separatist.”
The two-day exercise began abruptly at 7.45am on Thursday and involved [aircraft and ships surrounding the island](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/27/taiwan-strait-china-freedom-of-navigation-us-navy/) to “test” their combat capabilities, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said.
Experts said the drills simulated a[ full-scale attack on Taiwan](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/04/07/china-taiwan-invasion-war-usa-russia-ukraine-xi-jinping/) for the first time, rather than just a blockade.
Launching the exercise, China’s military put out a series of posters touting what it called its “cross-strait lethality”. They featured images of missiles, jets and boats next to blood-stained text.
“The weapon aimed at ‘Taiwan independence’ to kill ‘independence’ is already in place,” it declared.
Taiwan condemned the manoeuvres, which come just three days after Lai Ching-te took office as the country’s new president – a man Beijing has long distrusted as a dangerous separatist and who Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, described as “disgraceful” earlier this week.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which claims Taiwan as its own despite never ruling there, has refused to renounce seizing the island by force. It has also ignored Mr Lai’s repeated invitations to talks.
In a defining speech on Monday to set the tone for his administration, [Mr Lai told China to cease military and political intimidation](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/20/taiwan-president-urges-china-cease-military-intimidation/) of his country and respect its democracy.
The drills present an early test of the Lai presidency, although Taiwan has long been subjected to sustained Chinese military and economic coercion tactics in recent years.
Taiwan’s defence ministry condemned the drills as “irrational provocation that has jeopardised regional peace and stability” and said it had put its forces on alert to protect its territory.
“We seek no conflicts, but we will not shy away from one. We have the capacity, determination and confidence to safeguard our national security,” the ministry said in a statement that also urged citizens to “stand united.”
The PLA said the drills serve as “strong punishment for the separatist acts of ‘Taiwan independence’ forces” and as a warning against “interference”, in reference to Western support for Taiwan.
**Article Link:** [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/23/china-military-drill-surprise-punishment-taiwan/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/23/china-military-drill-surprise-punishment-taiwan/)
Think penis envy on a poster.
Jet centered with rushing clouds and bold letters above and below giving the plane a wake of words
A ship crashing at you taking up the whole frame with words mimmicing it's top and bottom
Not great like the golden age of Soviet propaganda posters from the mid twentieth century.
Theres a difference between Ukraine and Taiwan tho considering Taiwan has a defense treaty with USA.
If China does a Crimea kind of attack on Taiwan and USA/Taiwan doesn't immediately push them out tho, then we are in real deep shit.
Don't get me wrong, I wish we did more to protect Ukraine and push out Russia, but when China/Russia starts poking at Nato countries or countries with defensive treaties with USA/EU like Russia did with Crimea, that will be the deciding factor for the future of the modern western sociaty.
If we still do nothing and doesn't immediately push them back we will be in deep shit.
There is no such treaty. The US maintains a policy of "Strategic Ambiguity" with regards to Taiwan. Basically, the US doesn't commit to much of anything to, "keep all parties guessing whether, and to what extent, the U.S. military will intervene in a war across the Taiwan Strait."
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2023/01/strategic-ambiguity-may-have-us-and-taiwan-trapped.html
I hope Taiwan is working with Ukraine to learn all they can about drone warfare. Taiwan needs and I'm sure has excellent air defense. China needs to cross open water to invade Taiwan, and they can't do that if their fleet is sunk by drones along the way.
That said, I hope cooler minds prevail and China realizes how disastrous a war over Taiwan would be to everyone. Can we please just get back to competing economically and raising the standard of living for all of our citizens? Putin missed that memo.
Taiwan does have a shitload of ASMs. Harpoons and their own Hsiung Feng, the latter mostly deployed on trucks (highly mobile, hard to neutralize preemptively).
If China sends a fleet to invade, it will face a hell of a barrage of missiles.
Lessons were definitely learned from Ukraine. In the event of an actual attack, China’s landing craft would be massacred at sea by drone swarms both in the water and in the air as well as thousands of long range anti-ship missiles launched from Taiwan’s hills. The landing craft are slow, easy targets. All of these destroyers and cruisers that China has on display today are totally useless in actually landing troops on beaches. The best they can do is blockade the island but then they would face continuous attacks from the island. Helicopter assaults won’t work, it would be Hostomel 2.0 but far worse for China.
What is china’s goal? They can’t capture the island without their landing craft. Maybe just destroy the island with bombers and missiles? But to what end? What’s the purpose? China has a lot to lose and very little to gain. Today’s display is just that, an exercise to make China look tough, but at the end of the day there’s no way China can take Taiwan by force other than to completely destroy it.
This is called posturing folks. They normalize these types of drills through repetition until one day it’s not a drill and we’re not prepared like we should be.
Yeah I remember everyone crowing about being "alarmist" because they "do this all the time" when almost every single Western intelligence agency was saying the invasion was imminent.
Pretty easy to be a dick to others when nobody will do anything to counter you… our countries have become a bunch of BS on the world stage (all of them…)
Step 1: Recognise Taiwan as a state (its a recent fad to recognise states I've noticed, so why not Taiwan)
Step 2: Sanction/Take action against China (whatever that may be) for infringing on a sovereign state
Step 3: ????
Step 4: Fallout 4
Step 4 is why we don't do steps 1 and 2
In truth the Taiwan situation is in some ways more dangerous for China than it is for us. They need to be theoretically ready to militarily intervene at any time with little to no notice, should Taiwan formally declare independence. We on the other hand will get far more warning if China is readying an actual invasion fleet and not just sabre rattling, the US saw the invasion of Ukraine coming and it's far harder to conceal a major naval invasion than a land one.
> dangerous for China
I don't see how that would make it dangerous for China or why they absolutely have to invade if Taiwan formally recognizes that it is and has been an independent state for a long while now.
Because from their perspective it's a part of China declaring independence. No country in the world would simply not respond at all to parts of themselves declaring independence. The fact that it has already been de facto independent for a long time doesn't matter at all in this logic, it's all about legal recognition.
Step 1b: Form POTATO (Pacific Ocean & Trans-Atlantic Treaty Organization).
Step 1c: Accept Taiwan.
Step 3: Stop doing business with A\*holes.
Step 4: Deploy iron curtain made out of Slaughterbots.
Looking at comments, it's legit crazy how many people are clearly pro-China and Anti-Taiwan over obvious blind anti-americanism.
Same energy as college kids worshipping Che Guevara/Osama Bin Laden tbh, this site is fucking cancer
I wonder why communist China didn't pursue the Chinese nationals that fled onto Taiwan when they were winning the mainland. Did the Nationalists shore up the island defenses in time to stop them so Communist China decided not to invade at that point? Why didn't they (Taiwan) just declare independence then? While the PRC was at its weakest? It would have saved so much ambiguity today.
They tried twice. The US (under Eisenhower) passed the Formosa Resolution to send the US navy to defend the remaining ROC forces in Taiwan (note that during the civil war the USSR was supporting PRC with US supporting the ROC). This was under Cold War tensions to "prevent the spread of Communism".
Suffice to say that the PRC does not think fondly of the US ever since.
As for Taiwan seeking independence is a relatively recent development (~1990). They still had plans to retake the mainland prior to then, a progressively smaller proportion still do.
Daniel Ellsberg (the journalist who published the Pentagon Papers) published documents showing that US military leaders were calling for a nuclear first strike against China to defend Taiwan, even when they believed that the Soviet Union would retaliate in-kind against the US. The belief was that defending Taiwan with conventional arms would inevitably result in a nuclear war (which the Eisenhower administration was comfortable with).
[https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/politics/nuclear-war-risk-1958-us-china.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/politics/nuclear-war-risk-1958-us-china.html)
As to why Taiwan didn't declare independence: they weren't interested. Chiang Kai-Shek viewed ROC as the rightful rulers of all China, and believed they would oust the PRC and resume its rule over the mainland.
Taiwan. I love you, so take this advice while you can.
Develop nukes as soon as possible.
Ukraine is what you get when you give up a nuclear deterrent.
I'm aware US put pressure on it to stop the last time, but things has changed. US direct support seems 50/50 at best. But nukes guarantee protection.
I'd say go full steam on a nuke program, or at the very least force to the US to sign a public mutual defense treaty that is very clear the US will get militarly involved.
Trump hates China and Chine invading Taiwan has the potential to knock the US off from a world leading position. Not Trump, not any other US president and people in charge would let that happen.
Didn't Trump go up against China when it came to Taiwan? He even called Taiwan to congratulate the president on the win. He was the one talking about moving all US factories out of China shortly after that call. That's what I remember anyways.
I like to think that we (U.S.) show a lot of restraint and careful response so that when we curb stomp their shit , we can say, look we practiced restraint. I know, without a doubt, there would be heavy losses on every side. But there will only be one GDP left standing.
China and russia are buying time. They are influencing our election pushing for trump. If he wins, 100% china and russia will be more aggressive and you can expect taiwan invasion and russian invasion elsewhere.
That would be the move if you want to trigger the Chinese invasion with 100% certainty. Remember Cuba and the threat to the escalation of the Cold War it meant. It's the same red line for China as it was for the US, they would make a move regardless of consequences.
Would China actually invade if Taiwan came out and was like “Yeah we got ICBMs from the West a couple months ago.”
Don’t you go into M.A.D at that point which pretty much halts any chance of war? I don’t see China taking the risk in that scenario (they won’t win or the cost will be too great).
Food? - F-22 Raptor
*Would you intercept me?*
*I’d intercept me*
*I’d intercept me so hard!*
Frick, now I've got to figure out how to deepfake an F22 Raptor onto Buffalo Bill's body so I can watch this comment thread
Just go watch HabitualLineCrosser on YouTube to satisfy the need for Intercept memes.
Oh wow, I didn't realize I was such an obvious "use memes to laugh away your fears" kind of guy but you nailed it. Thanks for the recommendation internet stranger.
Glad I could help.
It puts the lotion on the lotion on skin or it gets the aim-120 again.
Following, lmk when you figure it out
Goodbye forces, i’m flying over you Goodbye forces, Passing with the F-22
Someone go check on the kid.
OH GOD HES NOT IN HIS HANGER!!!
fuck fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!
KID LISTEN ILL GIVE YOU THE NUKES IF YOU COME BACK NOW-
***LET ME EAT***
Senpai, intercept me!
This doesn't taste like lead paint!
Ffffffffftohyeaaaaaah
Raptor just chomping at the bit to be let loose
“I’m about to turn China into West Taiwan” - The Buff, probably
"you get an air launched cruise missile, you get a cruise missile, everyone gets an air launched cruise missile"
“The China Sea is about to be upgraded to an ocean”
Clever Girl....
Supposedly nearly out of date, there's an f-22 super raptor in the works
It’s out of date compared to the level an American made modern AD platform could reach, mostly because the f-22 is basically impossible to upgrade, making it age quicker than any over aircraft in the USAF fleet. When compared to a j-20 it’s still more than adequate
The Raptor is actually being upgraded right now.
As said in another comment, I was being hyperbolic: the f-22 can be upgraded, but only slightly, at a high cost, and not all parts of the aircraft.
China and Russia have been showing a lot more confidence recently. Putin flew to Beijing, [Xi] Jinping is visiting Hungary. Russia and China both reevaluating their borders again. They're up to no good, and we are too busy struggling with ourselves to properly respond.
Also this is straight out of Russia's play book, continue to do drills near the border to desensitise everyone. Then one day do it for real.
My troops are merely passing by
<.< (DECLARE WAR!)
You forgot to quick save
Special military operation
I should have known Gandi or Frederick of Germany.
"Me? Declare war? Why, I never!" -- Montezuma
WE JUST PASSING BY
Exactly. One of these days they will look like they are setting up for "just another drill", but it will be the real invasion.
The invasion force will be massive and the buildup will be easily noticeable by satellite. There will be no surprise invasion of Taiwan.
There was no surprise invasion of Ukraine either. I don't really understand these comments about desensitizing. Was anyone actually fooled by Russia's claims of 'just another drill?' Zelenski told his people not to worry, but they were preparing for an invasion all the same. I doubt he even believed what he was saying, but he didn't want to start a panic. US intelligence said it was an invasion before it started. I guess Fox News and similar idiots claimed it wasn't an invasion, but they lie so much over everything that I don't think even thier own viewers take them that seriously. If something goes in a direction they don't like, Fox will course correct quickly.
Lots of high ranking German politicians didn't believe Putin would pull the trigger.
Remember what Russia was trying to claim that it wasn’t going to make an attack and then it did it anyway? It’s just a special operation!
I remember so far back when the Ukrainian and Russian Twitter accounts were memeing back and forth about possible invasion
Lots of high ranking german politicians were bought by putin.
Lots of high ranking German politicians were on putins payroll though
Yeah, I can see the ASEAN countries being Germany in this context. “B-b-but we had such a friendly trading relationship!”
I mean, Fox News hosts have Putins dick so far up their asses you can see it when they talk.
Yep, around 2 weeks+ before the invasion of Ukraine there were bags of blood being brought to the medical tents that were set up. Even after noticing the huge buildup in the weeks leading up.
In winter 2022, during their another military drill, the moment Russia deployed field hospitals with a lot of refrigerated blood for blood transfusion, and mobile crematoriums - was a good indication that this was not a drill, and that invasion was inevitable. What similar China’s actions can indicate real invasion, considering that it’s not through land but by a sea?
The existence of those mobile crematoriums is just so fucking grim.
Actually in comparison to the reality of this war it's probably up there with the most humane things. The alternative is not quite so... convenient.
I would venture a guess that China moving their navy into position to block potential responses by Japan and the U.S. would be one of the actions.
The buildup of transport ships would be it. They can't get mass troops there any other way.
Massive build up of troops and transport ships along the coast would be a huge clue
"They attacked us during a drill. We had to defend ourselves, it's not a war."
Just watch for medical battalions showing up with blood.
It's slmost as if us struggling with ourselves was part of their plan...
Pretty much. Russia’s Cozy/Fuzzy Bear exploit did just this during, and up to the 2016 election. Sowing division in our populace using social media was a pretty successful clandestine operation on their end. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_Bear](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_Bear) Not to mention it’s been balls deep in our government (NSA, Pentagon, White House, CISA) stealing vital information since 2010. Just this year they infiltrated Microsoft. No one knows if we’ll ever truly get rid of this threat or what/how much information it’s taken or will continue to take. I’d like to think we pose a higher threat in cyber espionage/warfare. But damn do they have some serious talent in that realm, albeit with a shitty military.
Right at the start of all this russia bullshit, I said the best move (and I still do) would be to completely sever any russian connection to the internet outside Russia. They are using it as a weapon, fuck em.
Presumably there is some reason why we don't do that.
we'd need chinas support, or else we'd have to block china too. either that or block the old fashioned way, but destroying the physical links. regardless, it's not easy easy as saying it sounds.
It's literally in their plan. Fund all kinds of identity politics and activism to sow division.
Sounds like we need a false flag to get us all to come together
I hope it's aliens. I need aliens for my 21st Century Bingo card.
And dumb people down via Tik Tok.
I guess that's the main difference, if a dictator says get X done now, it'll usually just get done asap, rather than having whole parties debating in the pros and cons for ages first. Because let's be honest nobody under them is going to tell the dictator with no regard for human life "no". As such it'll allow them to make moves faster. Just look at the crap and delays with aid going to Ukraine and the restrictions around how they're allowed to use the weapons. If a dictator said "get that aid to them, now." It'd be done real quick. That being said a benevolent dictator seems an impossibility and as such, they're all a bunch of nobheads who are evil.. despite having the power to do good as fast as they want
It's a strength but also a massive weakness. If Putin wasn't surrounded by cronies maybe they wouldn't be bogged down in a multi-year war that was supposed to last a week. And if Saudi Arabia wasn't a dictatorship maybe they wouldn't be sinking their national wealth into building Neom, possibly the biggest waste of money in history. Too many checks and balances can be crippling, but too few can be a disaster.
A strong head of government relies on the head making good decisions which is impossible when you are surrounded by incompetent people. It isn’t like the days of monarchy’s past where an intelligent good ruler had a reasonably good chance of achieving their goals. The world is far too complex and integrated for one person to run a country successfully when they are surrounded by yes men
I'm pretty sure monarchies past are rife with idiotic and ruinous decisions driven by one man's ego It's literally why so many societies kept trying and occasionally succeeding in, killing them and overturning the system.
Saudi Arabia is an interesting example. The current prince is relatively progressive (the word relatively does a lot of heavy lifting) compared to his father and most of the country, so he does promote things like basic Women's rights, some worker rights and some parts of western culture. Edit: since people seem to be misunderstanding, no, he is by no measure progressive by western standards. He's still a dictator with little to no respect to human rights or general liberal values. Yet he's still a massive improvement compared to those that came before him and other regional dictators and leaders.
He is pretty progressive for a Saudi, yes, which is a bit like being the world's tallest dwarf.
Thanks for the chuckle
Saudi is also interesting insofar as how they control the population and keep them invested in the royal family. The whole country is desert and the royalty subsidizes energy and drinking water to the point that it’s basically free. If they revolt, no more water or a/c
Doesnt SA have like $5000 UBI for its citizens?
Yes, but that also brings up the issue of who is actually a citizen of SA. >RIYADH, May 31 (Reuters) - The population of Saudi Arabia has reached 32.2 million, 42% of whom are foreign nationals with 63% of Saudis under age 30, the country's general authority for statistics said on Wednesday. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-population-322-mln-median-age-29-years-old-general-authority-statistics-2023-05-31/ Nearly half the population are foreign nationals. Vast majority of those are unskilled laborers, with notably terrible living conditions. Modern slavery with extra steps.
Are you talking Bone Saw?
As I said, RELATIVELY progressive
Does that mean they killed him BEFORE cutting him up?
>Turkish police believe that Khashoggi was tortured and killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul >according to an anonymous Turkish source, the killing took about seven minutes and forensic specialist Salah Muhammed al-Tubaigy, who had brought along a bone saw, cut Khashoggi's body into pieces, while Khashoggi was still alive, as he and his colleagues listened to music. No, not even that.
Yes, so imagine how worse his ancestors were.
Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows to be eliminated for eating crops but when they disappeared then insects ate even more crops, contributing to 40 - 60 million deaths in the Chinese famine, all caused by the same dictatorship in power in China today
And then he tried to have farms converted into steel mills. And he forced all of the educated people in China to go work on farms. And then he basically stood by while the red guards just started torturing and killing educated people in his name. And then generally held back the prosperity of the nation until he finally died and reformers got a foot hold in the CCP. I'm not sure which is more shocking - that anyone with an IQ above room temperature made it out of that generation, or that they still worship Mao for all that bullshit.
You don't become a dictator by being benevolent.
While dictatorships can get things done more quickly, they also tend to get stupid things done quickly too. When no one can question the leader it means sooner or later a really bad idea is going to get executed even though everyone except leader knows its a really bad idea. A similar risk is that known issues are never acknowledged because it's not allowed, which can lead to insidious corruption within your military that renders it far less effective than its supposed to be or even catastrophic disasters (ex: Chernobyl's meltdown was due to a reactor design flaw that was kept secret by the government).
The russian disaster in Ukraine it's quite an exemple of that.
The war in Ukraine is an outcome of 20 years of rule, not 2 years of madness. The average joe Russian still supports the war because he is indoctrinated for decades that this is what must happen. As soon as globalization started to grind its gears (read 2016 onwards) Russia and China started to pump up their war rhetoric because without that build-up they cannot justify their current dictatorships. Before it was “our benevolent leader made our lives better” , now “we must realize our potential as a nation in order to survive” .
You are undervaluing the massive amounts of corruption and low quality of life in dictatorships. Not everybody is the rich guy in a dictatorship
ehh, if a dictator says "Get X done now" there's a good chance that a) Getting X done now was a stupid decision caused by the Supreme Leader smelling their own farts and believing all the flattering misinformation fed to them by their cronies and/or b) Supreme Leader's cronies will put up a good performance of "Getting X done" while in actuality using "Getting X done" as an opportunity to siphon state funds into their own pockets, building their personal power base and sabotaging their rivals. And Supreme Leader tacitly encourages the disunity and infighting so that no single faction is strong enough to overthrow them. There's a reason why most dictatorships are poor as fuck, extremely corrupt and utterly dysfunctional compared to their democratic counterparts. As absurd and broken and compromised as most democracies are, they still have a far better track record of governance overall than their autocratic counterparts. Even China, one of the most successful and powerful authoritarian states of the 21st century, is currently facing the consequences of the bad decision making and execution endemic to authoritarian governments Like their much vaunted high speed railway system turning out to be (mostly) a big ol waste of money, with many lines being seriously under occupied, and most traffic being better served by much cheaper and more efficient regular trains. Or the 3 Gorges Dam turning out to have been an environmental, humanitarian and economic disaster - which could have been avoided by simply building smaller, cheaper dams along the Yangtze tributaries to control floods better and generate more electricity at a lower cost. Or throwing away decades of accumulated international goodwill in a couple months with comically immature "wolf warrior" diplomatic insults meant to show how "tough" and "strong" they were, which only served to alienate potnetial allies. Or going all in on the construction industry and real estate to drive the economy and generate government funds. Or imposing overzealous, poorly managed COVID lockdown procedures long after they stopped making sense. And so on. Flashy, ostentatious, useless displays of raw power that are great at pleasing the one man audience that is the supreme leader, and letting government officials steal state funds, but bad at actually achieving their stated goals. Notice how shitty dictatorships love military parades that feature soldiers performing circus performer like "martial arts" displays to show how masculine and tough they are. Woah, that shirtless commando with the six pack can break a concrete block with his forehead! Ignore the other thousand malnourished conscripts stealing potatoes from the supply depots because their corrupt commanders are stealing their lunch money! It's a pretty fitting parallel to authoritarian government as a whole. China only made it as far as they did after opening up because Deng and the CCP, quite wisely, used to subscribe to a policy of avoiding too much concentration of power into one person. They knew just how destructive one man dictatorship could be, because of their experience with Mao, and they didn't want a repeat of that. That's all out the window now, with Xi I mean yeah sure, democracies aren't immune to making stupid decisions, and failing to get shit done, and having everything compromised by corruption. But they have far more checks and balances in place to prevent even more stupid decisions from being made, as well as ensuring a certain baseline leve of competency and transparency - opposition politicians, independent academics, humanitarian and civil rights groups, independent media, protestors, grasroots organisations etc.
Functioning democracies also allow you to cycle out bad leaders and administrators more often and without violence and upheaval. Transitions are more stable.
Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows to be eliminated for eating crops but when they disappeared then insects ate even more crops, contributing to 40 - 60 million deaths in the Chinese famine, all caused by the same dictatorship in power in China today
A benevolent dictator is a paradox. Someone who is genuinely benevolent would simply not do the things that are required in order for him to seize power and become one in the first place. It's like saying someone is an unbigoted racist, you just can't have both.
> That being said a benevolent dictator seems an impossibility and as such, they're all a bunch of nobheads who are evil.. despite having the power to do good as fast as they want Lol, love the disclaimer "PS I don't promote authoritarianism" It's an honest observation. China gets shit done a lot faster than the Western world. That's in part because they're still developing, but the fact that the government is authoritarian and can force shit even if there's a lot of disagreement probably also plays a big part. Every system has its advantages and disadvantages, political systems are not exempt. I think Churchill phrased it best. "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" I think the way democracy is applied in most countries today has some glaring weaknesses which make it an ineffective form of governance a lot of the time. - It's inherently myopic. The main concern of politicians is getting re-elected the next cycle. This means they're only thinking as far ahead as their voters. Big global challenges that require long-term commitment get pushed to the sideline because the immediate consequences of dealing with them would make politicians unpopular. - Global challenges also require concensus to be properly addressed which is difficult to reach when the opinions of everyone are all over the place. - A lot of this has to do with misinformation, and this will only get worse with the rise of AI. People are very prone to all sorts of biases and it's become almost trivial for malicious actors to abuse that. - Polarization. Misinformation is also used to purposely pitch people up against one another. It becomes worse when politicians, instead of trying to fight it, just run with it and go full populist. It's easier to put the blame for all the shit on the other guy/side than to actually fix it. I think this is a real problem for almost every democratic country. But I think it's particularly bad in the USA because the two party systems lends itself to an antithetical relationship. Instead of seeing people/parties as partners in governance, they're seen as opponents or even enemies that must be defeated. - Certain types of lobbyism. Corporate interests should not take priority over that of citizens just because companies can fill the pockets of politicians and help them get elected. That's not lobbyism, that is corruption. I'll join you in saying that hoping for a benevolent leader with the right answer to everything, is probably not the way to go. But we should be open to an honest discussion on how some aspects of democracy can be made more resilient to the problems of today while still retaining the affordances it has given its citizens over the decades. The lack of response to the belligerence of Russia and China is not only about the threat of nuclear escalation, it's also a symptom of deeper problems within our own societies.
China’s one-child policy has effectively sealed a population collapse that will likely end its aspirations to global leadership, so I’d say dictatorship has some serious shortcomings.
I don't think it's the best example. It's obviously in conflict with basic human rights so it was an awful policy to begin with, but it got there as a somewhat sensible response to a big spike in population growth after the great leap forward. China was at that time a country that just experienced a terrible famine so I can understand their reluctance of suddenly having a lot of extra mouths to feed. Ethics asside, it wasn't necessarily a bad decision for that time practically speaking. But the policy should have never lasted as long as it did. I've lived in China, I still have friends and acquaintances there. The reason young people aren't having children there is no longer related to the one child policy, it's the same reason as most of the rest of the developed world. A lot of youth are choosing not to have children because it has become very expensive to do so. It's a problem in the USA, it's a bigger problem in Europe, it's an even bigger problem in Japan, and it's catastrophic in South Korea. All democratic places, and a lot of it is related to the shortsightedness of governments that keep pandering to the older majority of their voterbase. Because keeping status-quo for as long as possible is what wins re-elections. Even though it doesn't take a genius to realize that marginalizing the youth, the part of the population that is active and should be keeping your economy afloat, is the worst thing you can do for your country in the long term. So yeah one child policy was a terrible, unethical choice. But I wouldn't use it as a gotcha for authoritarianism when most democratic places are also experiencing problems with declining population.
this is one of the biggest fallacies out there a dictator might be fast, but totally useless, cause its usually him calling the shots, however stupid and uneducated that is the fact that China changed its course of meritocratic roots and getting ahead in the global race of nations was undercut by Xi's more one-person autocratic government, its exactly looking like the bane thats gonna make China not competitive enough in the long run, when you compare it to meritocratic free market economies. China leaving behind its pre-Xi westernization process is whats gonna be its demise, totally the opposite of what your implying with the "effectiveness" of dictators
Even if you somehow lucked out and got a benevolent dictator, their replacement almost certainly wouldn't be.
It’s almost like certain forces are sowing discord within 🤔
One day they will attack and learn that things aren’t as easily understood and straightforward as they thought. No modern military has conquered and occupied a country without the intervention of an outside force. As long as there is an outside force interested and involved in removing the occupation, it won’t last. USSR has tried, US has tried. Russia is trying again.
Last time I checked, Russia is occupying a quarter of Ukraine and Georgia..
Something to note: many world leaders are known and referred to by their surnames, like you did with Putin. However, mandarin naming conventions have someone’s “first” name as their family name. So the equivalent for China’s leader would be to just call him Xi.
\* we are too busy struggling with ourselves to properly respond. While we have plenty of blame to accept ourselves, a good portion of these divisions are being pushed by the authoritarian/adversary countries.
They are absolutely gearing up for war. They won’t let us get a chance to get back on our feet by defeating their paid for pawns and online armies. They have to move and they know it.
— *but don't worry, they just bark and never bite*. I wish I could be this naive.
I didn't say that.
China and Russia are both on the clock of demographic decline, they have to act now or shut up
Pretty much every analysis says China will reach the zenith of it's power relative to the us within the next 5 years. If they want to take Taiwan they need to do it soon.
It may not be a coincidence that there's been so much meddling in our affairs & manipulation of people through social media from those two nations to help create all this instability that has us distracted.
Well, we do just so happen to have a full carrier strike group south of Tiawan in Singapore at the moment...and another full carrier strike group out in the Pacific near Japan...and a Marine ARG, which includes an LHA that is its self a small aircraft carrier, as well as having a couple ships full of Marines, their gear, and their landing craft. I'd say we might have had some idea this was possible and just might have arranged to have a frightening amount of firepower in the region that could get to Taiwan very quickly if there was an actual need to. We may be walking softly, but there are a couple of our biggest sticks nearby, just in case.
Sadly they are having a good-ish year while we in the Democratic world are in one of the biggest election years in history. It is awkward timing for sure. But once elections are done and mandates are had, we'll slowly be in a more steady position. As I heard an employee of one of the US defense primes say in a subreddit (paraphrased): If you could see the scale of the buildup that's now occurring, you'd understand. The West and its Pacific allies is the far greater power.
Getting us to the point we're struggling too much internally to respond was step 1 of their plan, and it's gone better than they could have imagined.
To me it says they are scared and scrambling. Just a bunch of pandering for help and show of balls meaning they fear something.
**From The Telegraph:** China launched surprise “punishment” drills encircling Taiwan, just days after the inauguration of a new Taiwanese president Beijing has denounced as a “separatist.” The two-day exercise began abruptly at 7.45am on Thursday and involved [aircraft and ships surrounding the island](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/27/taiwan-strait-china-freedom-of-navigation-us-navy/) to “test” their combat capabilities, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said. Experts said the drills simulated a[ full-scale attack on Taiwan](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/04/07/china-taiwan-invasion-war-usa-russia-ukraine-xi-jinping/) for the first time, rather than just a blockade. Launching the exercise, China’s military put out a series of posters touting what it called its “cross-strait lethality”. They featured images of missiles, jets and boats next to blood-stained text. “The weapon aimed at ‘Taiwan independence’ to kill ‘independence’ is already in place,” it declared. Taiwan condemned the manoeuvres, which come just three days after Lai Ching-te took office as the country’s new president – a man Beijing has long distrusted as a dangerous separatist and who Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, described as “disgraceful” earlier this week. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which claims Taiwan as its own despite never ruling there, has refused to renounce seizing the island by force. It has also ignored Mr Lai’s repeated invitations to talks. In a defining speech on Monday to set the tone for his administration, [Mr Lai told China to cease military and political intimidation](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/20/taiwan-president-urges-china-cease-military-intimidation/) of his country and respect its democracy. The drills present an early test of the Lai presidency, although Taiwan has long been subjected to sustained Chinese military and economic coercion tactics in recent years. Taiwan’s defence ministry condemned the drills as “irrational provocation that has jeopardised regional peace and stability” and said it had put its forces on alert to protect its territory. “We seek no conflicts, but we will not shy away from one. We have the capacity, determination and confidence to safeguard our national security,” the ministry said in a statement that also urged citizens to “stand united.” The PLA said the drills serve as “strong punishment for the separatist acts of ‘Taiwan independence’ forces” and as a warning against “interference”, in reference to Western support for Taiwan. **Article Link:** [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/23/china-military-drill-surprise-punishment-taiwan/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/23/china-military-drill-surprise-punishment-taiwan/)
I’d love to see the propaganda posters it said China was putting up. I wonder what their current propaganda graphic design style looks like.
They're in the article
Think penis envy on a poster. Jet centered with rushing clouds and bold letters above and below giving the plane a wake of words A ship crashing at you taking up the whole frame with words mimmicing it's top and bottom Not great like the golden age of Soviet propaganda posters from the mid twentieth century.
Cant wait to be drafted to fight on the trenches in Taiwan
Beaches*
Mountains most likely. Taiwan is very mountainous and many of the fighting will be denying passes and tunnels through them.
Doubt there would be a draft outside of Taiwan.
One of these drills is going to be either a blockade or straight to invasion.
Soooooo this sounds like one of those things that they do a few times until no one bats an eye and then do a full on attack.
I heard this story in Ukraine before...
I’m not sure if China has the appetite for war. russia is always involved in wars, China hasn’t been in one for 40-something years.
This is what happens when you let Ukraine bleed for years. Sometimes when you give away Czechoslovakia, you lose Poland.
...and millions of lives. They haven't learnt have they, Chyna and Pussland have
Most don't really care. They just want the headlines to go away so they can continue to fuck us over in peace.
Yupppppp it’s like they are trying to fill a vacuum here
Theres a difference between Ukraine and Taiwan tho considering Taiwan has a defense treaty with USA. If China does a Crimea kind of attack on Taiwan and USA/Taiwan doesn't immediately push them out tho, then we are in real deep shit. Don't get me wrong, I wish we did more to protect Ukraine and push out Russia, but when China/Russia starts poking at Nato countries or countries with defensive treaties with USA/EU like Russia did with Crimea, that will be the deciding factor for the future of the modern western sociaty. If we still do nothing and doesn't immediately push them back we will be in deep shit.
There is no such treaty. The US maintains a policy of "Strategic Ambiguity" with regards to Taiwan. Basically, the US doesn't commit to much of anything to, "keep all parties guessing whether, and to what extent, the U.S. military will intervene in a war across the Taiwan Strait." https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2023/01/strategic-ambiguity-may-have-us-and-taiwan-trapped.html
When the president have publicly said they will defend Taiwan if attacked(Biden) I would say that's as official as we get it.
Id like to think that Poland is now of the line of thinking of wishing a motherfucker would
I hope Taiwan is working with Ukraine to learn all they can about drone warfare. Taiwan needs and I'm sure has excellent air defense. China needs to cross open water to invade Taiwan, and they can't do that if their fleet is sunk by drones along the way. That said, I hope cooler minds prevail and China realizes how disastrous a war over Taiwan would be to everyone. Can we please just get back to competing economically and raising the standard of living for all of our citizens? Putin missed that memo.
Taiwan does have a shitload of ASMs. Harpoons and their own Hsiung Feng, the latter mostly deployed on trucks (highly mobile, hard to neutralize preemptively). If China sends a fleet to invade, it will face a hell of a barrage of missiles.
Problem is, China will send their own barrage of missiles to disable Taiwanese defences. It will be a game of who hits who first unfortunately.
Taiwan has a fuck ton of patriot and other SAMS
Don't forget F16s. If those are in the air they can take out cruise missiles pretty effectively
Lessons were definitely learned from Ukraine. In the event of an actual attack, China’s landing craft would be massacred at sea by drone swarms both in the water and in the air as well as thousands of long range anti-ship missiles launched from Taiwan’s hills. The landing craft are slow, easy targets. All of these destroyers and cruisers that China has on display today are totally useless in actually landing troops on beaches. The best they can do is blockade the island but then they would face continuous attacks from the island. Helicopter assaults won’t work, it would be Hostomel 2.0 but far worse for China. What is china’s goal? They can’t capture the island without their landing craft. Maybe just destroy the island with bombers and missiles? But to what end? What’s the purpose? China has a lot to lose and very little to gain. Today’s display is just that, an exercise to make China look tough, but at the end of the day there’s no way China can take Taiwan by force other than to completely destroy it.
They can blockade it. Taiwan can't survive too long isolated. Which only works if the US abandons Taiwan, though.
Unfortunately the economic competition destroyed the planet.
limited resources in the world, you want your country to be the one that starves?
The Ukrainian heroism will also hopefully inspire Taiwanese to defend their country and joining the military.
This is called posturing folks. They normalize these types of drills through repetition until one day it’s not a drill and we’re not prepared like we should be.
See Ukraine 2022
Literal Soviet military doctrine called “Maskirovka” And we know the CCP likes to copy paste Russia
Has modern China ever had a unique idea or thought? Lmao
Complete digital surveillance and censorship of their whole population, they can claim that innovation.
Inspired by Westetn literature about police states... so, nope.
They called the Russian troops mobilising posturing too... I'm just sayin
No one with any brains did. Western intelligence was flagging it as a legitimate signal Putin was going to invade for months.
Yeah I remember everyone crowing about being "alarmist" because they "do this all the time" when almost every single Western intelligence agency was saying the invasion was imminent.
Yet China calls other countries doing UN missions in the Yellow Sea "provocative". China's double standards are comical.
Pretty easy to be a dick to others when nobody will do anything to counter you… our countries have become a bunch of BS on the world stage (all of them…)
A bunch of rich 'fils a papa' leaders trying to act though in front of cameras.
I think the Chinese dictatorship needs to redefine the word ' surprise' You fucking bullies
Step 1: Recognise Taiwan as a state (its a recent fad to recognise states I've noticed, so why not Taiwan) Step 2: Sanction/Take action against China (whatever that may be) for infringing on a sovereign state Step 3: ???? Step 4: Fallout 4
Step 4 is why we don't do steps 1 and 2 In truth the Taiwan situation is in some ways more dangerous for China than it is for us. They need to be theoretically ready to militarily intervene at any time with little to no notice, should Taiwan formally declare independence. We on the other hand will get far more warning if China is readying an actual invasion fleet and not just sabre rattling, the US saw the invasion of Ukraine coming and it's far harder to conceal a major naval invasion than a land one.
> dangerous for China I don't see how that would make it dangerous for China or why they absolutely have to invade if Taiwan formally recognizes that it is and has been an independent state for a long while now.
Because from their perspective it's a part of China declaring independence. No country in the world would simply not respond at all to parts of themselves declaring independence. The fact that it has already been de facto independent for a long time doesn't matter at all in this logic, it's all about legal recognition.
Step 1b: Form POTATO (Pacific Ocean & Trans-Atlantic Treaty Organization). Step 1c: Accept Taiwan. Step 3: Stop doing business with A\*holes. Step 4: Deploy iron curtain made out of Slaughterbots.
If we suddenly stopped doing business with assholes, our economy would collapse
Time to smoke 3 packs of cigarets a day so i can practice my best “Hey smooth skin” impression.
Looking at comments, it's legit crazy how many people are clearly pro-China and Anti-Taiwan over obvious blind anti-americanism. Same energy as college kids worshipping Che Guevara/Osama Bin Laden tbh, this site is fucking cancer
Reminder this platform was bought out by the ccp not long ago, reddit has been a shadow of it's old self for long while now.
Bots
A lot of bots and trollfarms.... even the stockmarket is a target, for those who havent noticed.
I wonder why communist China didn't pursue the Chinese nationals that fled onto Taiwan when they were winning the mainland. Did the Nationalists shore up the island defenses in time to stop them so Communist China decided not to invade at that point? Why didn't they (Taiwan) just declare independence then? While the PRC was at its weakest? It would have saved so much ambiguity today.
They tried twice. The US (under Eisenhower) passed the Formosa Resolution to send the US navy to defend the remaining ROC forces in Taiwan (note that during the civil war the USSR was supporting PRC with US supporting the ROC). This was under Cold War tensions to "prevent the spread of Communism". Suffice to say that the PRC does not think fondly of the US ever since. As for Taiwan seeking independence is a relatively recent development (~1990). They still had plans to retake the mainland prior to then, a progressively smaller proportion still do.
Daniel Ellsberg (the journalist who published the Pentagon Papers) published documents showing that US military leaders were calling for a nuclear first strike against China to defend Taiwan, even when they believed that the Soviet Union would retaliate in-kind against the US. The belief was that defending Taiwan with conventional arms would inevitably result in a nuclear war (which the Eisenhower administration was comfortable with). [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/politics/nuclear-war-risk-1958-us-china.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/politics/nuclear-war-risk-1958-us-china.html) As to why Taiwan didn't declare independence: they weren't interested. Chiang Kai-Shek viewed ROC as the rightful rulers of all China, and believed they would oust the PRC and resume its rule over the mainland.
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Taiwan. I love you, so take this advice while you can. Develop nukes as soon as possible. Ukraine is what you get when you give up a nuclear deterrent.
They were at most two years off from developing a fission bomb before the US caught wind of it and pulled out all the stops to tell Taiwan to stop.
I'm aware US put pressure on it to stop the last time, but things has changed. US direct support seems 50/50 at best. But nukes guarantee protection. I'd say go full steam on a nuke program, or at the very least force to the US to sign a public mutual defense treaty that is very clear the US will get militarly involved.
It could happen after the U.S. election if Trump wins, so there is perceived weak point in U.S. foreign policy.
Trump was more anti China than Biden. Biden was more anti Russia than Trump.
100% sure Trump will let Putin and Xi do whatever they please. He will probably even tout their narrative about it.
Trump hates China and Chine invading Taiwan has the potential to knock the US off from a world leading position. Not Trump, not any other US president and people in charge would let that happen.
Russia invading has limited effect on the billionaire class China invading Taiwan is a different story.
His first term pretty much proves you’re wrong though.
Didn't Trump go up against China when it came to Taiwan? He even called Taiwan to congratulate the president on the win. He was the one talking about moving all US factories out of China shortly after that call. That's what I remember anyways.
I’m not voting for trump and never have but this narrative is tiring and straw man insanity
I like to think that we (U.S.) show a lot of restraint and careful response so that when we curb stomp their shit , we can say, look we practiced restraint. I know, without a doubt, there would be heavy losses on every side. But there will only be one GDP left standing.
Putin to Winnie "just tell them it's a special military operation and not an invasion, you'll be fine".
But but but, im told the USA is the baddies. Seriously fuck China and Russia
Maybe the US can have Taiwan repair a carrier or two and just station the support ships in the area permanently.
Dont they always do this everytime theres a new head of state in Taiwan?
This is so childish. China is run by middle schoolers.
The US would like to thank China for the valuable tactical information, it should make things even easier.
Give them nukes.
And the F22
China and russia are buying time. They are influencing our election pushing for trump. If he wins, 100% china and russia will be more aggressive and you can expect taiwan invasion and russian invasion elsewhere.
Home and abroad, America's enemies support Trump
I hope that TikTok can be banned before a war in Taiwan begins so that the app won't be filled with tons of Anti-Taiwan propaganda before then.
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I agree, just gifting them a few nukes pre-programmed to hit Beijing would create a local MAD situation and deter any invasion.
That would be the move if you want to trigger the Chinese invasion with 100% certainty. Remember Cuba and the threat to the escalation of the Cold War it meant. It's the same red line for China as it was for the US, they would make a move regardless of consequences.
Would China actually invade if Taiwan came out and was like “Yeah we got ICBMs from the West a couple months ago.” Don’t you go into M.A.D at that point which pretty much halts any chance of war? I don’t see China taking the risk in that scenario (they won’t win or the cost will be too great).
I bet they’re gonna do something before the election in the US hoping Biden will have a weak response because he’d be worried about optics.
I'm so fucking sick of communist countries and their brutal ways.
I'm sure Taiwan wasn't watching very closely, not evaluating tactics and plotting their defense.