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I don't know how you can complain about weasel words and deliver this whopper in the same post... Less than maximally desirable ceasefire conditions? Has the war situation developed not necessarily to Ukraine's advantage? I recall you saying things like 'oh the April '22 ceasefire talks were a dead end since the Ukrainians couldn't accept the demilitarization/no NATO terms'.
What kind of ceasefire terms are they looking at now, compared to then? How much more lost land are they looking at? How much of the country has left, never to return?
The military advantage of American aid is that you lose hundreds of thousands of men in a meatgrinder, get your whole country intensively bombed and depopulated and finally lose more land than you would've without it? And the biggest gamechanger, the most important weapon in Ukraine's arsenal is the DJI Mavic and other Chinese drones/electronic parts?
The sanctions on Russia have had no significant impact on military capacity or state stability. In fact Russia, Iran and North Korea have somehow managed to outproduce the West in munitions while China has both a qualitative and quantitative lead in drones. US ISR has been pretty effective but that's about it.
The US goal has been clear, to restore Ukraine's pre-2014 borders and prop up the old world order by bringing Ukraine into NATO. This clearly hasn't worked. Ukraine's borders and territorial control are looking pretty patchy. The mirage of NATO membership is as distant as ever. The war situation is not reassuring for not-quite-treaty allies of the US. Reframing the goal to 'at least things haven't yet gotten catastrophically worse' is not sufficient, especially since the disasters are nearly all self-inflicted.
The DMZ was fairly calm before the whole Axis of Evil/pre-emptive strike idea which was rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. Iran's influence was limited and there were opportunities to work with them before the US started hacking away at MENA, rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. Now there are a host of Iraqi militias fighting for Iran, they've achieved something close to Sun Tzu's ideal of perfection in turning a major enemy into an ally without fighting. We did that for them, at great expense.
How could ISIS have emerged if Saddam wasn't dethroned and Syria wasn't destabilized?
Russia's military threat was minimal before the 'all of Russia's neighbours should be brought into NATO' policy, rooted in misplaced conceptions of American strength. There was a moment where Russia was cooperating with us on anti-terrorism and energy but that was thrown away.
China would be vastly easier to deal with if it weren't for all the other crises and about 15 years where naval modernization was on the backburner compared to fooling around in MENA and now Europe. And it's still happening. China may well orchestrate some disaster in the Middle East before they move, knowing the US will pull carrier groups away to defend their highest priority, Israel.
China simply isn’t a civilizational foe of the United States. I don’t care about Taiwan and neither should you. Xi Jinping does not seek to invade and subjugate the Japanese (let alone the Americans), something even most extremely online Chinese ultranationalists don’t care for. China is a distraction, and the US has - if anything - a lot to learn from the successes of Chinese civilization.
All the Chinese want to do is control their own backyard, something they will always find difficult due to the vast majority of their neighbors hating them. Their economy is fragile, and their demographic trajectory / aging population is the stuff of nightmares. The Chinese have never sought a global empire, have rarely even sought to spread their ideology.
Russia is always going to be more of a civilizational threat to Europe and European civilization than China. Not that it has to be, of course, and not that that threat is great or immediate or terrifying (it isn’t). But China is even less of an issue.
Germany never sought a global empire until it did. America never sought a global empire until it did. China has global interests due to its size and power. Power and world hegemony is seductive for anyone.
China's backyard is extremely valuable real estate: South Korea and Taiwan are vital for chipmaking. Intel is a laughing stock, knocking out Taiwan would rip out the spinal cord of the US economy. There'd be an instantaneous economic crisis in the USA, China supplies America with enormous amounts of goods. Not just cheap plastic, everything from medical precursors, machinery for ports and microelectronics for missiles comes from China. Everyone keeps going on about the fragility of the Chinese economy, I think it's the complete inverse of reality. In manufacturing they produce about as much as the US, Germany and Japan combined. They have the biggest trade surplus in the world because their economy is productive, not because it is fragile and weak.
And it's the same with demographics. The second most births in the world behind India, more than double the US birth rate? A population as large or larger than all Western civilization combined? Absolute size is what's important, not proportions.
If China wins a convincing victory in Asia, they can brain-drain the remnants of TSMC, subordinate South Korean industry and secure first place in high technology. The world would be their oyster. I agree that we have much to learn from China but their competence is precisely why they are threatening.
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I appreciate your pre-emptive concession of your lack of ability, which was certainly well warranted by what followed.
I hope that made you feel better.
In the sense of avoiding a mess rather than stepping in it, I suppose.
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