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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Trump is right that Putin almost certainly wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he had still been in office.

I think Trump is almost certainly wrong here. Trump is more isolationist than Biden and I think support for Ukraine is lesser under Trump and Putin almost certainly knows this. Whether Trump or Biden probably wouldn't have made much difference at all, as the internal and geopolitical considerations are much more important than who is US President. But if you are going to bet as to who would support Ukraine more, I think it's unlikely you pick Trump.

You're right regarding the median case, but the Trump card is that he's a madman and thus high-variance; a 100% likelihood of supplying weapons to Ukraine is less relevant than a 10% chance (potentially even a 1% chance) of "NUKE MOSCOW LOL".

The 2017 Korea crisis ended very positively mostly because of everyone being shit-scared of Trump, for instance. Of course, if Kim hadn't blinked then we could have wound up with a small nuclear exchange, but that's the tradeoff of being a madman.

Does North Korea have the capacity to actually hurt us? I thought they could hit SK and maybe Japan, but not the USA.

The answer to that is a bit complicated.

At the time of the crisis, NK had just unveiled Hwasong-14 ICBMs capable of reaching part of the 'States, but not all of it - that's part of what triggered the crisis in the first place.

Now, they have Hwasong-15s, Hwasong-17s and Hwasong-18s, which as you can see can hit anywhere in the USA. (They might not be able to get Argentina, but it's unclear why they'd want to.)

On the other hand, they may or may not have enough of them to actually get nukes through ABM. They certainly don't have enough nukes to fully destroy the US after accounting for shootdowns and misses, hence why I called the worst possible outcome a "small nuclear exchange" (assuming the PRC didn't come in).

Also, I should probably point out to you that I live in Australia, not the US.

Yeah, I think we know he isn't and wasn't but since the media were loudly claiming he was it was still necessary to assign a legit percentage probability to the idea that maybe the media wasn't crazy (and Trump was), achieving the same effect.

What I'm less sure is that the same effect isn't in play for a litteral dementia case; what's to stop Biden to have an episode and decide that he needs to resist the Soviets by sending American troops to Ukraine?

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