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Humiliating and economically and molitarily destroying a threat to Western Europe, a major China supporter and potentially crucial resource supplier is handling a whole host of simultaneous crises. Let's stop pretending this doesn't make geopolitical sense.
I suspect they very much can and that Chinese military will not substantially outperform the Russian one, but in any case the materiel going to Ukraine is chump change in comparison to its benefits, whether political or logistical. Everyone is upping their defense budgets; do you think it'd have been such an easy sell without supporting Ukraine?
I wish Western "anti-Interventionists" and such were honest about their beliefs, instead of coming off as two-bit dictator stans with motivated reasoning. What the US is doing now is executing a rational strategy for a soon-to-be total hegemon. This is the birth of the empire; mopping up Taliban will become trivial after these big wars with nuclear-armed sources of systemic interference are done. If you have any real criticism of Pax Americana, do make it.
Look at Marseille, what is the biggest threat to the city? Russians plowing through half of Europe and temporarily holding it for a period of time that will be insignificant in the grand scale of things? Rather, it is globalist interests who want to replace the nations of Europe with a global market run by a handful of financial interests who bombed Libya to pieces and flooded Europe with migrants. The invasion of Iraq was a much bigger threat to Europe than Russia and China ever were. China has no chance whatsoever to actually occupy Europe or North America. It isn't a threat. The main threat is due to the same financial interests who now want another third world war, wrecking their own countries by outsourcing production to China to dump their working class. '
The same globalist interests that opened up for islamic immigration leading to waves of terrorism in the west on top of vast problems with rape, were the same people who's pointless war in Afghanistan caused a surge in the supply of heroin in the west. The war in Afghanistan caused a large wave of migrants, and the war was neatly summarized by NATO troops loading hundreds of migrants onto cargo jets to fly them to people who had nothing to benefit from this war. I am not really pro taliban, but their delivery of karmic justice to the people who cut the heroin price in half in Europe while getting eight people in Sweden stabbed by an Afghan refugee is something I applaud.
The US empire is crumbling which the increased spending on the military shows. Empires require expansion, and there are few good provinces left for the US to incorporate. Meanwhile, the imperial core is withering and the cost of maintaining the empire is surging. The current rhetoric is around increasing spending to defend Taiwan, not to go on some new venture of expansion. Slowed growth with increasing maintnance costs and lower cohesion in the core are solid signs of an empire in decline. Russia and China are not going to steam roll the US just like the British Empire wasn't steamrolled by another power. It simply became impossible to maintain.
The reason empires require expansion is because the parasitic imperial class grows (it takes an interest in the system as a whole to slow this growth and everyone in the system is interested only in maintaining his position in the system - hence, no one checks the growth of the parasitic load). The US empire is mainly a system of parasitism on Americans rather than one where foreign conquest yields returns.
Even the foreign clients are much like domestic USG clients - an excuse to take money from Americans, take a cut and give it to the foreign client in exchange for their main service - hostility to USG enemies (Americans).
This makes the historical comparisons difficult - this is rather a unique historical situation.
Of course the one way that USG actually does collect a benefit from running its empire is that the empire uses dollars and USG controls those and can issue them at will - that acts as a silent tax on the entire empire that can't be evaded.
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