- Ukraine downed a Russian Su-34 fighter jet over Kursk amid an ongoing territorial push.
- The Su-34, worth around $36 million, is Russia’s most efficient fighter bomber with advanced tech.
- Ukraine has previously held long kill streaks with Russian Su-34s.
There were some talking heads some months ago saying that the Ukraine war would determine if China expands into Taiwan militarily or russia economically. No need for weapons in the second case.
I still don’t really see China attacking Taiwan as a particularly likely since it would involve tangling with the US, which may not come to anything but is an unknown factor.
China won’t militarily invade Taiwan until they have their own semiconductor foundry that rivals TSMC
Haha.
China is one of the most impatient countries around, driven by the whims of the general secretary. Just look at how badly they rushed into HK, all they had to do was follow the original dates and it would’ve been a smooth transfer, instead they rushed in and caused huge conflicts, in turn dropping the one country two systems bullshit narrative and souring Taiwan off any chance of reunification.
They’re currently pumping ultranationalism hard with their gen z/alpha, and are facing potential future economic issues, a war is a great outlet for angry young people. I could easily see them rushing into armed conflict with Taiwan without having their own foundries. Same as that spectacularly backfired “wolf warrior diplomacy”.
Its about face not economics. You can’t except rationality from human actors.
China has done pretty well expanding economically and mostly staying out of warmongering. I really hope that continues, but switching to a more militaristic approach with their recent military expansion would be bad for us all …. Probably including them
Certainly including them. China has benefited greatly from their trading relationship with the rest of the world and continues to do so, and unlike Russia their foreign policy is much more pragmatic than personal.
The only way they make a play for Taiwan is if they are convinced they can do it without the US becoming materially involved. This would most likely mean winning so quickly that the fighting is already over by the time the US can seriously mobilize, but even that would likely turn into a larger conflict.
China has to maintain the idea that any day now they’ll retake Taiwan, for a number of reasons. Mostly because it’s a necessary pillar of their internal politics. But in practice the real value they obtain from it would be seriously diminished by the astonishing costs. The biggest practical benefit would be ability to completely control the world’s supply of semiconductors (sure was a genius idea to let everyone outsource that to TSMC), but that value will diminish if the US and other countries continue to invest in domestic chop production (add that to the list of actually good things Biden did by the way).
China has been escalating its practice of economic imperialism for year now. They have been fortifying the waters around the islands they claim, but aren’t under their control. They have been running into more and more economic issues, and are not recovering from them as well as they had been. Given this, I do not for a second believe China will never get into the expansion game.
So they’d become a kind of vassal state?
I could totally see that, especially if something happens to Putin.
What I saw was that North China is DRY. They need tons of water. And russia has lake Baikal nearby. These kinds of Nestlé-style tricks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlUJwbL7SM8
Imagine all the anger russians feel towards the US for not being able to magically fix their country in the 90s but now turned towards their growing and grabby neighbour.
Wait, did Russians really believe the U.S. was supposed to fix it after the collapse of the USSR?
That’s not how government works what the hell is wrong with people over there
I’m exaggerating for the sake of argument, but I’ve seen tankies and russians on youtube make this argument unironically to justify why russia had the right to do whatever it wanted to recover its empire and that they had a right to revenge for the “decade of humiliation” and shock therapy.
I don’t see anyone seriously making these arguments. What I do see is a nasty situation in Eastern Europe thanks to decades of privatization and looting of the domestic economies. There’s a reflexive anti-Americanism that suggests simply divorcing from the western economy will restore the eastern states to a more normal economic path. But Putin isn’t exactly Lenin (or even Khrushchev), so there’s no reason to believe a Russian capitalist oligarch looting the Bulgarian or Estonian economy would somehow benefit anymore more than the UK/US doing it.
For what it’s worth the west had a history of helping in these events, we did fuck all for them really when the Soviet Union broke apart.
It wasn’t our job, but it woulda gone a LONG fucking way to bettering relations.
I could see feeling bitter we didn’t help but to take it as far as blaming us for their woes is just classic “it’s their fault” mentality.
Look at Japan and Germany as examples of how it may have played out.
But Japan and Germany were occupied, the US had skin in the game, influence over russia was more hands-off.
Although funny enough that’s what we promised to do in Japan after WWII.
https://youtu.be/YzRWPGSaKDk
They did experience rapid economic growth, and did move to a democratic government, though as usual the right wing leadership took hold both here and there, and we just wanted Japan as a military base to counter those commie Russians, and they wanted to nullify the treaty preventing them from having a standing army
Don’t know about “expect”, but at the time there seemed to be popular hope that with the collapse of USSR they would get some of that sweet western prosperity. When that did not come to pass even when by all accounts the Russian government of that time was trying to lean into normalized relations with the west, then some “the west still keeps us down” narrative is unsurprising. It was in the midst of continued economic struggle that Putin came along and started reasserting a more nationalistic philosophy in Russia.
While it might not have been reasonable to expect, in retrospect it might have been in NATO’s best interest to be more proactive in helping Russia during that window where they were actually friendly. They might have managed to avert Putin’s rise to power.
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:/ huh? So, why are the russians resentful for the 90s towards the US? That’s what I am talking about, during Yeltsin post-USSR, not Gorbachov.
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No, they wouldn’t, one period was communist, the other was anarcho-capitalist 💀 none of the points you made remotely apply.
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The coup that brought Yeltsin to power is believed to have been a plot by US intelligence services. And the post-90s break up of the USSR resulted in a pillaging of national assets through privatization, which upset a lot of people.
Everything is an american coup to some people, even when the USSR military performs a coup against the leader of the USSR 😔
Americans have a long and storied history of sponsoring coups.
Yeltsin didn’t restore Gorbachev after the coup. He took the leadership of the country for himself and dissolved the entire Communist Party. Then his governing coalition instituted a rule that effectively allowed him to impose privatization by fiat in defiance of existing laws.
This lead to the era of Russian gangster capitalism that plunged the country into a near-decade long depression, as the country was opened up to foreign industries looting the nation’s capital stocks and resource reserves for the enrichment of a handful of Yeltsin’s closest allies (most notably, a young St. Petersburg mayor named Vladimir Putin).
yeah, I know. Putin is also probably an american agent. It’s all the US, everywhere in the world whenever a country fucks up.
China is expanding into both economically. That’s been the strategy for the last 50 years.