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OT: World Politics

Meanwhile China sits eagerly awaiting the mutual destruction of Russia and the West so that it can pick up the pieces without ever getting its hands dirty...
 
AP79 said:
Meanwhile China sits eagerly awaiting the mutual destruction of Russia and the West so that it can pick up the pieces without ever getting its hands dirty...
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China as we know it today cannot exist outside of the current international economic order. The only way "The West" is destroyed is if this goes nuclear, which is highly highly highly unlikely.
 
There is a gap between what these countries need to thrive (stability, trade, investment) and what these regimes need to survive (conflict, repression, active measures.)

In the end, dictatorships founder on their incapacity to give their people what they need. Putin had skillfully managed expectations of Russians with the Animal Farm approach, but transition will be a dangerous moment. As with Kim Jong Un and Bashar al-Assad, we can expect severe repression inside Russia as the next generation burnishes their cred.
 
lecoqsportif said:
There is a gap between what these countries need to thrive (stability, trade, investment) and what these regimes need to survive (conflict, repression, active measures.)

In the end, dictatorships founder on their incapacity to give their people what they need. Putin had skillfully managed expectations of Russians with the Animal Farm approach, but transition will be a dangerous moment. As with Kim Jong Un and Bashar al-Assad, we can expect severe repression inside Russia as the next generation burnishes their cred.
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I'm not exactly a demographics zealot, but Zeihan makes a good point re: Russia's future. It started this game with 8 million men of fighting age and if this goes on for a few more years probably ends it with ~6 million. At their current reproduction rates, a future Russia is basically cold North Korea. But as the power of the central authority weakens, I don't see how this doesn't end in some sort of Balkanization.
 
MindzEye said:
China as we know it today cannot exist outside of the current international economic order. The only way "The West" is destroyed is if this goes nuclear, which is highly highly highly unlikely.
Click to expand...

Putin is facing pressure at home, he knows he's not surviving this. Don't discount his ability to resort to stupidity in order to stoke his ego.

Meanwhile China's end goal is to dismantle the current financial system in order to replace it with a new system that privileges them. Any weakening of the West is beneficial to them. They have an interest in using Russia as a pawn to achieve this goal, in whichever way they deem necessary, regardless of how that impacts the Russians.

Unfortunately, the chest thumping Russians are too shortsighted to see this play unfolding right before their very eyes.
 
AP79 said:
Putin is facing pressure at home, he knows he's not surviving this. Don't discount his ability to resort to stupidity in order to stoke his ego.
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I disagree quite a bit here. He's made a number of moves over the last few months shuffling important people around (and jailing others) to ensure that he does infact survive this even if it goes poorly. You don't put an economist from outside military in charge of the military if you're planning on going out in a blaze of nuclear glory. You don't put the closest thing you have to children in positions to succeed you if you're planning on leaving nothing behind but a crater. A year ago there were real questions about what a post Putin Russia even looked like, but it's pretty imaginable today. The one guy everyone saw being a threat was Patrushev, but he's just given Patrushev a stealth promotion disguised as a demotion (while giving his lapdog, Shoigu, Patrushev's old job on the security policy hot seat) and given Patrushev's son a huge promotion (to be one of Russia's deputy PM's).

AP79 said:
Meanwhile China's end goal is to dismantle the current financial system in order to replace it with a new system that privileges them.
Click to expand...

Well, yeah....but that's kinda real hard. The whole BRICS thing has been a wet fart and that was the only bullet in the chamber imo. Since they even mumbled about de dollarization the rest of the world is all in on the US economic order, Biden has deep dicked OPEC into submission, & the Chinese economy has run into some massive systemic issues. The two biggest economies in the world are in the process of reshoring a shit ton of their supply chains (Mexico just passed China as the US' biggest exporter, for example) and China's demographics are straight up broken. If Russia was the mechanism they were using to challenge the west, it was a massive miscalculation.

Chinese ascension was always a dodgy proposition imo. Their Asian neighbours either don't trust them or see them as direct competitors/adversaries and the west, with or without the US aren't in a rush to align on that level behind a dictarorship. I guess there's Stubb's "global south" that could potentially align with them, but the "B" in Brics doesn't seem to be in a huge rush to get further into bed with them than they already are (60 billion in trade isn't nothing of course, but it's less than half of US-Brazil trade) and that's the biggest member of the "Global South" by a factor of ~5. Africa is more likely to be careening towards a future of competing blocs than they are in any sort of continent wide agreement on anything. They have deep, deep security issues to deal with before they're even a few decades away from tipping the balance of world power .

So yeah, we all know what China wants, but it's pretty clear that they're not getting it. Russia going off the reservation in any real way pushes the world closer to the west imo, not further.
 
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