Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
- 23
- 2
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I mean, let's game this out. Assume you're Putin, and assume you think there's a reasonable likelihood that the balloon's going up in East Asia and that it goes Badly for the PRC and DPRK to the point that they're in danger of getting knocked over in spite of their own nuclear arsenals (e.g. because a false alarm led to nukes getting launched already, and their arsenals have been taken out by the Western nuclear retaliation).
Option 1: stay neutral. Upside: Russia gets to sit it out and laugh. Downside: in the aftermath, while Russia's own relative weight to throw around goes up quite a lot because the PRC and DPRK are wiped off the map and the West has had a few cities nuked, it's still probably going to be smaller than the West because the PRC doesn't really have enough nukes to wipe us off the map, and it won't have the PRC to prop it up against Western trade embargoes and such in the future.
Option 2: declare that Russia will launch All Of The Nukes (which is ~10x what the PRC has) if the West starts taking the fight into NK and China or starts methodically nuking Chinese cities to force surrender.
2a) This might work, as Mao's threat did in Vietnam, allowing a white peace and thus the continued power of the anti-West bloc.
2b) It might also not work, in which case Russia also gets wiped off the map and the West gets substantially more destroyed than in Option 1.
From Putin's point of view, clearly 2a > 1 > 2b. But depending on the exact utility he assigns to each and his opinion of 2a's vs. 2b's conditional probabilities, he may or may not think 1 > 2 as a whole.
1 is best for Russia. Even the limited nuking from what missiles China and NK has will be enough to lead to a huge economic crisis and political crisis of legitimacy in the US; isolationism will surge, Putin will be free to expand Russia’s influence in the relevant key regions (Middle East, Africa, Central Asia) and can restore Russian de facto control of countries near the border like Mongolia where Chinese influence is growing.
2a has all of that barring the Mongolia point; the basic idea of this scenario is that things have escalated far enough for the Chinese deterrent to not be enough to deter the West from forcing PRC and DPRK state extinction, which probably means that PLA/KPA nukes have burned cities. The difference between 1 and 2a is that when the West says "fuck this, we burn a city every hour until you unconditionally surrender and admit an occupying force" and/or simply invades NK en route to Manchuria and Hebei (probably the former, for exactly the same reason as in those clips; invading China would be a bloodbath worse than even Downfall would have been and it's not clear it would even succeed without a countervalue nuclear bombardment to soften them up), Russia says "no, white peace or you burn too" and this actually succeeds at deterring the West.
(To be clear, if I were Putin I'd pick 1. But I'm not Putin, and he's been putting out some signals hinting at 2. If we're unlucky, I guess we'll find out how genuine those signals are.)
I suppose 2a contains multiple possibilities, I was thinking more like “nobody gets nuked, Russia just signs guarantees with China/DPRK”. In 2a, if Russia threatens America into abandoning Taiwan and possibly SK, the PRC controls those new territories, and expands its influence in the South Pacific. But the US and allies aren’t necessarily going to abandon the regions that Russia cares more about at all. It depends on whether losing Taiwan actually causes a true crisis for American identity, and my feeling is it doesn’t. Most Americans don’t care, and a sizeable faction in the security state has been preparing to lose Taiwan since the 1970s; only TSMC temporarily complicated things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link