Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a decree broadening the scope of when Moscow can use nuclear weapons in a clear message to the West and Ukraine.
There is no source for the nuclear version existing, Wikipedia has no source of a nuclear version existing. If a nuclear version of ATACMS exists it’s literally a US state secret and multiple levels of insanity would have to be limit broken for it to end up on a HIMARS truck in Ukraine.
Many levels of insanity have already been broken over the past two years if you haven't noticed. Biden himself stated that sending tanks and f16s to Ukraine would carry an unacceptable risk of escalation at the start of the war. Every red line the west has drawn for itself has been crossed. At this point, it's becoming clear that NATO is losing the war, and we're seeing increasingly desperate actions being taken.
We might as well be arguing about how you could also strap suitcase nukes to drones so Ukraine shouldn’t use drones to attack Russia either. And we know those exist
We're arguing about the US firing long rang missiles potentially capable of nuclear payloads into Russia from Ukrainian territory.
So the country of Iran still existing literally disproves this.
The problem with this argument is that Iran is not known to posses nuclear weapons.
The reality is that the old nuclear framework with MAD has been destroyed by both the US and Russia for different reasons, and as such the reality is that nobody can consider ballistic missile launches a nuclear threat. Especially since the US in 2001 unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty, and Russia followed suit. Lobbing cruise and ballistic missiles at your opponent has been a common occurrence in the last 20 years from both nuclear and non-nuclear states.
The destruction of treaties simply means that the risk of a nuclear exchange is much higher now. I strongly urge you to watch this interview with Theodore Postol explaining just how dangerous the current situation is. He's an actual expert on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH7LT1bIdpY
Like I said if this is a real line of reasoning every Iskander used in the Ukraine theater is a reason for the US to go apeshit and say they’re going to nuke the Ukranians, we should nuke them first.
If Russia launched Iskanders into US, then US absolutely would go ape shit.
The United States would level Mexico in an instant if they ordered too much shit off of Ali Baba at this point. No one is arguing that the US is a rational actor. Russia has been extremely rational and pragmatic in this war, and to ascribe the level of irrationality you’re ascribing to them right now is to literally label them in the same way the Western propaganda has been labeling them but from a position of support.
Russia has been incredibly rational and restrained, however there comes a point where being restrained starts to look like a weakness. If Russia states red lines and then allows the west to cross these lines without consequence then it encourages further escalation. At some point Russia will be forced to retaliate to make a point. Russia unequivocally stated that there would be severe retaliation the first time the idea of deep strikes into Russia was brought up.
It is entirely likely that Russia will choose to wait a couple of months until the administration changes to see what happens. However, it's important to understand that we absolutely are on the brink of a nuclear holocaust here.
We’re arguing about the US firing long rang missiles potentially capable of nuclear payloads into Russia from Ukrainian territory.
This is hilarious. The US would not need to do this. They could literally just bring up a Ohio class sub and launch a Trident tipped with MIRVs at Moscow from 4,700 miles away and it would be done with and there's be nothing that Russia could do to defend themselves, unlike a ATACMS which would be capable of being intercepted.
Nobody is going to believe that it's the Ukrainians fault that Russia got nuked dude, if the US wanted to Nuke Russia they could just fucking do it, who would stop them? Who would punish them? Standing behind Ukraine and doing it doesn't change the calculation for anyone.
There's no tangible benefits from this looney toons ass hypothetical plan where the US does a proxy nuclear strike with a weapon capable of only traveling 200 miles, can SAM intercepted, and has a limited utterly THEORETICAL payload.
You really have to be kidding me if you think the US is going to escalate to nukes via TBM instead of SLBM with a MIRV payload against another nuclear power who would immediately blame the US anyway.
The US does not need to do this, but this is literally what US is doing as we're speaking. This is happening, it's not a hypothetical. You're just making a straw man here that has nothing to do with what's actually being said to you. Nowhere did I suggest that US is going to try to hide behind Ukraine to do a nuclear strike on Russia. That's a scenario you made up.
What I actually said to you was that the US is firing nuclear capable missiles from the territory of Ukraine, and that if Russia does not respond that can be perceived as a sign of weakness and invite further escalation. Given that you yourself agree that US is unhinged, it should be obvious why this is a volatile situation.
Meanwhile, please explain to me what tangible benefit there was from the looney toons ass plans the US has pursued over the past two years. There's obviously been no rational plan here at any point in time. Why would we be expecting rational behavior from an actor that's proven itself to be utterly irrational?
What I actually said to you was that the US is firing nuclear capable missiles from the territory of Ukraine, and that if Russia does not respond that can be perceived as a sign of weakness and invite further escalation. Given that you yourself agree that US is unhinged, it should be obvious why this is a volatile situation.
Your arguing that this is the actually the plan?
Shoot "nuclear capable missiles" into Russia from Ukraine
???
Profit (?)
That makes less sense than the US straight up nuking Russia.
Meanwhile, please explain to me what tangible benefit there was from the looney toons ass plans the US has pursued over the past two years. There’s obviously been no rational plan here at any point in time. Why would we be expecting rational behavior from an actor that’s proven itself to be utterly irrational?
The gamble always was that you can use idiot Ukranians to stall Russians to a point where Russia's logistical supply dwindled to the point that it could not practically rearm due to sanctions or economic collapse.
This is literally what they tried and were successful at doing to Assad.
There was never a military victory for Ukrainians.
I'm arguing that Russia cannot set a precedent that NATO can just shoot missiles into Russian territory. Surely it can't be that hard for to understand why Russia has to respond to this.
This is literally what they tried and were successful at doing to Assad.
Except that they weren't even successful with Assad. Last I checked he's still in charge and Syria has not collapsed. Given that they couldn't even do it to a small and poor country there was no rational reason to believe it could ever work against Russia. The whole scheme was hare brained from the very start and could never work in practice. And this is my whole point, the US is not a rational actor that operating on an evidence based doctrine.
I’m arguing that Russia cannot set a precedent that NATO can just shoot missiles into Russian territory. Surely it can’t be that hard for to understand why Russia has to respond to this.
You are again changing your story to fit whatever your current line of argumentation is. You've been using Ukraine/US/NATO interchangeably and saying that's not what I said whenever I'm actually attempting to clarify your argument.
If Ukraine is NATO, then this makes no sense because Ukraine has been shooting ballistic missiles into Russia since the war became hot, Ukraine has no nukes, proliferating a nuke to Ukraine for an ATACMS ranged attack would be the dumbest shit ever.
If the US is NATO, then this makes no sense because the US can simply nuke Russia.
If NATO is NATO, this still makes no sense because by itself NATO doesn't own nukes.
The reality is that Russia has no choice, it cannot actually escalate in a sensible way that doesn't leave itself open for global retaliation if Ukraine shoots ballistic missiles inside the country. The only realistic way to read their communique is if we lose and you don't let us lose on our terms we'll use nukes.
Except that they weren’t even successful with Assad. Last I checked he’s still in charge and Syria has not collapsed. Given that they couldn’t even do it to a small and poor country there was no rational reason to believe it could ever work against Russia.
The Syrian GDP is about a tenth of what it was. The Syrian civil war has sent Syria 45+ years into the past. Jordan and Syria have literally switched places economically, which one was a regional ally of the US again? Sure Assad is holding on by his teeth, but Syria is a ruined country, it's economy prior to the civil war was literally 1/4 oil and 1/4 agriculture, both were wiped out entirely by the war. Syria also used to be a regional banking capital thanks to Assad neoliberalizing the economy, and all that capital fled during the war.
The US has ruined and degraded Syria, neutralized its regional power, and turned it into a destabilized interzone. The only worse level that Syria can go to is Libya's. That's literally a win. That's literally, if done to Russia, what the US would describe as a "good outcome" of the Russia-Ukraine war, Putin doesn't have to abdicate, he can simply be drowned in problems that take decades if not centuries to resolve without external help.
And before we do the BRICS is singing the internationale of post socialist countries bullshit, China isn't going to loan money to a Russia that was defeated in that way, because it's a high risk / low reward outcome for them.
I'm not changing any story. If you go back to the start of the discussion then you'll see that it's the same thing I keep trying to explain to you over and over throughout this thread. Meanwhile, you just keep making straw man arguments instead of engaging with what I'm saying.
The realistic way to read this is that Russia could retaliate using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and then the ball will be in NATO court where NATO has to decide if they want to escalate further towards a nuclear holocaust or back off. Both sides can play the escalation game.
Of course, Russia could also escalate asymmetrically, for example they could provide weapons to Yemen, Syria, and Iran that could shoot down stuff like F35s and get past AD. The US is incredibly exposed globally, and there are plenty of pressure points that Russia can exploit. This is the main reason I don't expect Russia to respond directly to strikes into its territory.
The US has ruined and degraded Syria, neutralized its regional power, and turned it into a destabilized interzone.
Yet, Syria is still a viable state and the US forces in the region are slowly being squeezed out. The point here was that the objective of getting a regime change in Syria failed. Again, if US couldn't even take down Syria, there was no hope of this working in Russia.
Meanwhile, you don't seem to understand the importance of Russia to China. Russia provides a shield in the west that prevents China being surrounded by NATO, and it provides China with the natural resources China needs meaning that it cannot be blockaded. These two factors make it vital to China that Russia stays stable and friendly to China. Which means there was absolutely no scenario where China could allow Russia to be defeated.
I'm not changing any story. If you go back to the start of the discussion then you'll see that it's the same thing I keep trying to explain to you over and over throughout this thread.
Yeah reading through this thread I'm getting very strong contrarian debatebro vibes from _pi. Constantly deflecting the topic of discussion and going on irrelevant tangents.
I wouldn't engage any further, this is just a waste of time.
Damascus literally doesn't have on-demand electricity, it experiences blackouts daily. More than half the people of Syria are food insecure. 6+ million people have been displaced in the last decade. The fuck you mean viable state?
Are you claiming Syrian government is going to collapse in the foreseeable future, or you have some private definition of what a viable state is that you'd like to share with us here?
Yeah a viable state is capable of defending its borders, growing its economy, and developing quality of life for its citizens. Syria is failing on all 3 counts. Just because Assad can order people around doesn't make Syria a viable state.
Last I checked Syria is in a much better situation today than it was when US started trying to destabilize it. The economic situation is improving, and US presence there is not long for this world. Meanwhile, Assad has more popular support than any western regime leaders. If we apply your metric to the US then it's not a viable state either.
Last I checked Syria is in a much better situation today than it was when US started trying to destabilize it.
Damascus today literally has blackouts daily. The US started fucking with Syria after 9/11. The Syrian energy grid was gravely damaged in 2011.
The economic situation is improving
Their GDP is not even hitting 2% growth by any realistic estimates, they're not releasing accurate data anyway. Some years in 2020-2024 the estimate of GDP growth is negative.
Assad has more popular support than any western regime leaders.
I mean, you should go to Damascus and try to express dissent against Assad.
Damascus today literally has blackouts daily. The US started fucking with Syria after 9/11. The Syrian energy grid was gravely damaged in 2011.
You did not address the point I made which is that the situation has clearly improved. The fact that you can't even acknowledge this basic fact is astounding. Syria was on the verge of collapse with US backed extremists marching on Damascus. Today, the government is firmly in control of most of the territory and economy is stabilizing.
Their GDP is not even hitting 2% growth by any realistic estimates, they’re not releasing accurate data anyway. Some years in 2020-2024 the estimate of GDP growth is negative.
Same goes for Germany and most of the EU, what's your point here?
Trump got 3x the votes of the population of Syria. Biden’s approval rating is 38.6%, the US VEP population is 253,272,570, some light math puts Biden’s approval at 97,763,212 people.
You did not address the point I made which is that the situation has clearly improved.
Yeah and you did not address the point I made which is the situation got gravely worse and is abjectly horrible
Same goes for Germany and most of the EU, what’s your point here?
You love having a selective understanding of economics. Small underdeveloped economy, small percentage growth = very bad. Large global economy, small percentage growth = good. Remember how we were talking about global south markets in the other thread? What happened to all of that?
What point are you even trying to make here?
I was trying to make a joke, because attempting to qualify Assad support is the lulziest shit when he's effectively an absolute monarch of a ruin.
Yeah and you did not address the point I made which is the situation got gravely worse and is abjectly horrible
That's not the point being debated here. You claimed that Syria is not a viable state, and so far you haven't actually managed to defend that position.
You love having a selective understanding of economics.
I don't have a selective understanding of economics. Large global economy that was built on having cheap energy is now in serious trouble because it was cut off from it. Anybody who has a clue about economics would understand how dire the situation is for Germany. Their competitors now have much cheaper input costs, and companies are closing down and laying off people left and right as a result.
In fact, the global south markets are a big part of the reason why Germany is in trouble right now. Chinese companies are eating their lunch all over the world.
Many levels of insanity have already been broken over the past two years if you haven’t noticed. Biden himself stated that sending tanks and f16s to Ukraine would carry an unacceptable risk of escalation at the start of the war. Every red line the west has drawn for itself has been crossed. At this point, it’s becoming clear that NATO is losing the war, and we’re seeing increasingly desperate actions being taken.
If you think those were real "red lines" then I've got a bridge to sell you. From the beginning of the war this was always going to slide into a proxy war because it suits the US geopolitical interests. The US was trying to finesse military exhaustion of Russia at the cost of Ukrainian blood from the beginning, they didn't "oopsie daisy" their way into the current position by crossing red lines. Biden lies about foreign policy every time he takes the podium my dude.
Nobody has ever thought that Ukraine would defeat Russia, they thought maybe Ukraine could exhaust Russia to a critical point where it would be incredibly difficult for them to rearm because of sanctions.
You're literally falling into simple US propaganda traps.
My point was that the US has shown that it is absolutely willing to keep escalating when backed into a corner. I'm not falling for any US propaganda traps, I'm just treating the US as a rabid dog that it obviously is.
There is no corner! There's literally not a corner. What is the corner here? How is America itself even losing? America the entity is literally winning because it's MIC is humming along, cash is getting transfered from the tax base to the oligarchs, and the only political argumentation about this is intranacine party politics which is also backstopped by a Western push to arm Ukraine.
Who is going to punish America? This is a heads I win tails you lose scenario for America. There is no losing, there is no corner. There's barely any blowback.
The US is losing geopolitically across the board now. We're seeing huge amounts of trade being redirected outside the dollar now as a direct result of the war. BRICS is growing by leaps and bounds. Middle East, Latin America, and Africa are becoming increasingly assertive. The whole empire is coming apart at the seams. All of this ties back to the war in Ukraine where the US overcommitted and that led to the economic war with Russia that is now turning into a bloc conflict between G7 and BRICS. The war was never about Ukraine itself.
The geopolitical losses that the US is experiencing in the economic and diplomatic sectors are entirely overblown hopium. Yes they're "bad outcomes" for the US, but the scale of these hits relative to the size and strength of the empire is not enough to make the case that the US is falling significantly faster than its overall imperial arc. It has nowhere near exhausted its options for bringing the globe to heel, and we haven't even gotten to a significant tipping point.
If these geopolitical losses were anywhere near significant you'd see a must faster escalation and scrambling to maintain dominance across the globe by the US. The reality is that if this isn't a slow burn it's going to be a precipitous fall and you shouldn't wish that on the globe given that this country has enough firepower stockpiled in the oceans to turn this planet to ash, and it's lead by the kind of people who will do that kind of thing, and spend their lives in bunkers ruling over the ash Enclave style.
It's absolutely not overblown copium. Huge amounts of trade are already happening outside the dollar, and China can obviously see they're the next target so they're redirecting their trade away from the west now as well. This should help you put things in perspective https://youtu.be/RQ3YjZAzqxA
The west has an over inflated view of itself. It's entirely possible that the managers of the empire still don't realize the amount of trouble they're in as well. Once again, you keep trying to treat US as a rational actor here which it demonstrably is not. There is vague realization that things are turning in China's favor, but there's still plenty of chauvnism to go around.
Also, I highly doubt that the oligarchs running the US really want to spend the rest of their days in a nuclear bunker. They'd much rather rule over a diminished empire.
It’s absolutely not overblown copium. Huge amounts of trade are already happening outside the dollar, and China can obviously see they’re the next target so they’re redirecting their trade away from the west now as well. This should help you put things in perspective https://youtu.be/RQ3YjZAzqxA
The video you're offering as proof is simply pointing out that US/global north goods are too expensive for markets in the global South so goods provided by China are growing at a rapid rate in comparison. That doesn't actually mean what you're saying. If BYD ships 30x cars to Vietnam but BMW has a 30x price and a higher consumer desire your point is moot.
The video is showing that the Global South has a massive population advantage over the G7, and that vast majority of the economic growth is going to be happening outside the west going forward. That fact that your main take away was that western goods are too expensive for the Global South is frankly hilarious.
that vast majority of the economic growth is going to be happening outside the west going forward
Yeah and? This is literally true at any point in the last 200 years, because there's literally more room to grow than in the West. The entire point of neocolonialism as a project is for the West to lease the global South's future and growth to itself.
And the west is now deindustrialized, and it's now entering a bloc conflict with the countries where vast majority of commodities are produces and most of the global manufacturing happens. The entire point of neocolonialism is to extract labor and resources from the countries that are colonized. Those days are now rapidly coming to an end. The empire is crumbling in real time.
Colonialism is a tool of capitalist expansion and exploitation, driven by the pursuit of profit and the need to maintain the capitalist system. It results in the domination and underdevelopment of colonized territories, while reinforcing the power and wealth of the colonizers. It is an inherent feature of capitalism, driven by the need for expansion and accumulation of capital, involving the political and economic domination of a nation by a foreign power, leading to the exploitation of resources and labor in the colonized region.
Colonies provide a source of cheap raw materials and labor, as well as new markets for the colonizer's manufactured goods. Crucially, colonialism reinforces global inequalities and uneven development. The colonizers extract wealth from the colonies, hindering their economic growth and development, while the the population of the colonizing countries benefits from the plunder.
Sure. Regular colonialism is when you force a capitalist apparatus onto a group of people and force it to extract to the economic benefit of a different group of people who typically through the explicit threat of state violence enforce profitable conditions for this economic activity. Typically what distinguishes it from capitalism is that in capitalism both groups are forced to participate in the capitalist apparatus, where in colonialism the supreme group may choose not to. Lastly the economic form this takes the shape of is typically direct ownership of raw material extraction operations, all the material extracted, and profits from the extracted materials. Colonial relationships are primarily driven by economic engines of raw source extraction to fuel large scale industrial economies. Colonial relationships are limited by the resource mix of the colonized, thus they are inefficient because they tend to make commonly extracted material over available in your economy. Some examples are like you take over a state, and that state becomes your coal extraction venture where you can just ship coal over an ocean to your state. Or how you can take over a state, and you force a capitalist apparatus that exists to provide your state with a stable supply of bananas.
Neocolonialism is the recreation of the colonial relation purely through the paradigm of the market where the same types of unequal economic relationships between colonial states and their patrons occur, but it is not directly due to the paradigms of supremacy, it is only indirectly due to the imbalances of the material history between the two groups and the mediation of the market. In essence it is saying 100 years ago I would come to your country, set up a governate and a factory and force your people to work for me, but today in order for you to build a school you have to agree to the same unequal deal as you did before to get the money to build that school, but it's not meeeee doing it, it' the maaarket. It's the supply and demand! Because neocolonial relationships are based on buyer-seller relations it allows for a more efficient economic extraction because you have more control of the kind of resources the relationship brings so it's easier to protect your domestic industry. So there's also no direct threat of state violence and it transforms the relationship between the two groups from owner and worker (or owner and property) to a more "pure form" of buyer and seller. Like if you have a country where it's an outlier in its the demand for narcotics, and it's kinda weird how its direct neighbor is a narco-state. Or how you have a group of capitalist entities, and they (and their countries) make the majority of the economic profit on the trade of a luxury crop like cocoa rather than the capitalist entities (and their countries) that actually harvest the crop. The important distinction in those two examples being that, for chocolate, Belgium and the Congo created a neocolonial relationship that previously existed as a colonial relationship, where for narcotics, the United States and Mexico created a new neocolonial relationship without a previous colonial form.
Many levels of insanity have already been broken over the past two years if you haven't noticed. Biden himself stated that sending tanks and f16s to Ukraine would carry an unacceptable risk of escalation at the start of the war. Every red line the west has drawn for itself has been crossed. At this point, it's becoming clear that NATO is losing the war, and we're seeing increasingly desperate actions being taken.
We're arguing about the US firing long rang missiles potentially capable of nuclear payloads into Russia from Ukrainian territory.
The problem with this argument is that Iran is not known to posses nuclear weapons.
The destruction of treaties simply means that the risk of a nuclear exchange is much higher now. I strongly urge you to watch this interview with Theodore Postol explaining just how dangerous the current situation is. He's an actual expert on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH7LT1bIdpY
If Russia launched Iskanders into US, then US absolutely would go ape shit.
Russia has been incredibly rational and restrained, however there comes a point where being restrained starts to look like a weakness. If Russia states red lines and then allows the west to cross these lines without consequence then it encourages further escalation. At some point Russia will be forced to retaliate to make a point. Russia unequivocally stated that there would be severe retaliation the first time the idea of deep strikes into Russia was brought up.
It is entirely likely that Russia will choose to wait a couple of months until the administration changes to see what happens. However, it's important to understand that we absolutely are on the brink of a nuclear holocaust here.
This is hilarious. The US would not need to do this. They could literally just bring up a Ohio class sub and launch a Trident tipped with MIRVs at Moscow from 4,700 miles away and it would be done with and there's be nothing that Russia could do to defend themselves, unlike a ATACMS which would be capable of being intercepted.
Nobody is going to believe that it's the Ukrainians fault that Russia got nuked dude, if the US wanted to Nuke Russia they could just fucking do it, who would stop them? Who would punish them? Standing behind Ukraine and doing it doesn't change the calculation for anyone.
There's no tangible benefits from this looney toons ass hypothetical plan where the US does a proxy nuclear strike with a weapon capable of only traveling 200 miles, can SAM intercepted, and has a limited utterly THEORETICAL payload.
You really have to be kidding me if you think the US is going to escalate to nukes via TBM instead of SLBM with a MIRV payload against another nuclear power who would immediately blame the US anyway.
The US does not need to do this, but this is literally what US is doing as we're speaking. This is happening, it's not a hypothetical. You're just making a straw man here that has nothing to do with what's actually being said to you. Nowhere did I suggest that US is going to try to hide behind Ukraine to do a nuclear strike on Russia. That's a scenario you made up.
What I actually said to you was that the US is firing nuclear capable missiles from the territory of Ukraine, and that if Russia does not respond that can be perceived as a sign of weakness and invite further escalation. Given that you yourself agree that US is unhinged, it should be obvious why this is a volatile situation.
Meanwhile, please explain to me what tangible benefit there was from the looney toons ass plans the US has pursued over the past two years. There's obviously been no rational plan here at any point in time. Why would we be expecting rational behavior from an actor that's proven itself to be utterly irrational?
Your arguing that this is the actually the plan?
That makes less sense than the US straight up nuking Russia.
The gamble always was that you can use idiot Ukranians to stall Russians to a point where Russia's logistical supply dwindled to the point that it could not practically rearm due to sanctions or economic collapse.
This is literally what they tried and were successful at doing to Assad.
There was never a military victory for Ukrainians.
I'm arguing that Russia cannot set a precedent that NATO can just shoot missiles into Russian territory. Surely it can't be that hard for to understand why Russia has to respond to this.
Except that they weren't even successful with Assad. Last I checked he's still in charge and Syria has not collapsed. Given that they couldn't even do it to a small and poor country there was no rational reason to believe it could ever work against Russia. The whole scheme was hare brained from the very start and could never work in practice. And this is my whole point, the US is not a rational actor that operating on an evidence based doctrine.
You are again changing your story to fit whatever your current line of argumentation is. You've been using Ukraine/US/NATO interchangeably and saying that's not what I said whenever I'm actually attempting to clarify your argument.
If Ukraine is NATO, then this makes no sense because Ukraine has been shooting ballistic missiles into Russia since the war became hot, Ukraine has no nukes, proliferating a nuke to Ukraine for an ATACMS ranged attack would be the dumbest shit ever.
If the US is NATO, then this makes no sense because the US can simply nuke Russia.
If NATO is NATO, this still makes no sense because by itself NATO doesn't own nukes.
The reality is that Russia has no choice, it cannot actually escalate in a sensible way that doesn't leave itself open for global retaliation if Ukraine shoots ballistic missiles inside the country. The only realistic way to read their communique is if we lose and you don't let us lose on our terms we'll use nukes.
The Syrian GDP is about a tenth of what it was. The Syrian civil war has sent Syria 45+ years into the past. Jordan and Syria have literally switched places economically, which one was a regional ally of the US again? Sure Assad is holding on by his teeth, but Syria is a ruined country, it's economy prior to the civil war was literally 1/4 oil and 1/4 agriculture, both were wiped out entirely by the war. Syria also used to be a regional banking capital thanks to Assad neoliberalizing the economy, and all that capital fled during the war.
The US has ruined and degraded Syria, neutralized its regional power, and turned it into a destabilized interzone. The only worse level that Syria can go to is Libya's. That's literally a win. That's literally, if done to Russia, what the US would describe as a "good outcome" of the Russia-Ukraine war, Putin doesn't have to abdicate, he can simply be drowned in problems that take decades if not centuries to resolve without external help.
And before we do the BRICS is singing the internationale of post socialist countries bullshit, China isn't going to loan money to a Russia that was defeated in that way, because it's a high risk / low reward outcome for them.
I'm not changing any story. If you go back to the start of the discussion then you'll see that it's the same thing I keep trying to explain to you over and over throughout this thread. Meanwhile, you just keep making straw man arguments instead of engaging with what I'm saying.
The realistic way to read this is that Russia could retaliate using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and then the ball will be in NATO court where NATO has to decide if they want to escalate further towards a nuclear holocaust or back off. Both sides can play the escalation game.
Of course, Russia could also escalate asymmetrically, for example they could provide weapons to Yemen, Syria, and Iran that could shoot down stuff like F35s and get past AD. The US is incredibly exposed globally, and there are plenty of pressure points that Russia can exploit. This is the main reason I don't expect Russia to respond directly to strikes into its territory.
Yet, Syria is still a viable state and the US forces in the region are slowly being squeezed out. The point here was that the objective of getting a regime change in Syria failed. Again, if US couldn't even take down Syria, there was no hope of this working in Russia.
Meanwhile, you don't seem to understand the importance of Russia to China. Russia provides a shield in the west that prevents China being surrounded by NATO, and it provides China with the natural resources China needs meaning that it cannot be blockaded. These two factors make it vital to China that Russia stays stable and friendly to China. Which means there was absolutely no scenario where China could allow Russia to be defeated.
Yeah reading through this thread I'm getting very strong contrarian debatebro vibes from _pi. Constantly deflecting the topic of discussion and going on irrelevant tangents.
I wouldn't engage any further, this is just a waste of time.
lol yeah strong redditor vibes 😆
Damascus literally doesn't have on-demand electricity, it experiences blackouts daily. More than half the people of Syria are food insecure. 6+ million people have been displaced in the last decade. The fuck you mean viable state?
This conversation is just silly dude.
Are you claiming Syrian government is going to collapse in the foreseeable future, or you have some private definition of what a viable state is that you'd like to share with us here?
Yeah a viable state is capable of defending its borders, growing its economy, and developing quality of life for its citizens. Syria is failing on all 3 counts. Just because Assad can order people around doesn't make Syria a viable state.
Last I checked Syria is in a much better situation today than it was when US started trying to destabilize it. The economic situation is improving, and US presence there is not long for this world. Meanwhile, Assad has more popular support than any western regime leaders. If we apply your metric to the US then it's not a viable state either.
Damascus today literally has blackouts daily. The US started fucking with Syria after 9/11. The Syrian energy grid was gravely damaged in 2011.
Their GDP is not even hitting 2% growth by any realistic estimates, they're not releasing accurate data anyway. Some years in 2020-2024 the estimate of GDP growth is negative.
I mean, you should go to Damascus and try to express dissent against Assad.
This shit is silly dude.
You did not address the point I made which is that the situation has clearly improved. The fact that you can't even acknowledge this basic fact is astounding. Syria was on the verge of collapse with US backed extremists marching on Damascus. Today, the government is firmly in control of most of the territory and economy is stabilizing.
Same goes for Germany and most of the EU, what's your point here?
What point are you even trying to make here?
Yeah and you did not address the point I made which is the situation got gravely worse and is abjectly horrible
You love having a selective understanding of economics. Small underdeveloped economy, small percentage growth = very bad. Large global economy, small percentage growth = good. Remember how we were talking about global south markets in the other thread? What happened to all of that?
I was trying to make a joke, because attempting to qualify Assad support is the lulziest shit when he's effectively an absolute monarch of a ruin.
That's not the point being debated here. You claimed that Syria is not a viable state, and so far you haven't actually managed to defend that position.
I don't have a selective understanding of economics. Large global economy that was built on having cheap energy is now in serious trouble because it was cut off from it. Anybody who has a clue about economics would understand how dire the situation is for Germany. Their competitors now have much cheaper input costs, and companies are closing down and laying off people left and right as a result.
In fact, the global south markets are a big part of the reason why Germany is in trouble right now. Chinese companies are eating their lunch all over the world.
If you think those were real "red lines" then I've got a bridge to sell you. From the beginning of the war this was always going to slide into a proxy war because it suits the US geopolitical interests. The US was trying to finesse military exhaustion of Russia at the cost of Ukrainian blood from the beginning, they didn't "oopsie daisy" their way into the current position by crossing red lines. Biden lies about foreign policy every time he takes the podium my dude.
Nobody has ever thought that Ukraine would defeat Russia, they thought maybe Ukraine could exhaust Russia to a critical point where it would be incredibly difficult for them to rearm because of sanctions.
You're literally falling into simple US propaganda traps.
My point was that the US has shown that it is absolutely willing to keep escalating when backed into a corner. I'm not falling for any US propaganda traps, I'm just treating the US as a rabid dog that it obviously is.
There is no corner! There's literally not a corner. What is the corner here? How is America itself even losing? America the entity is literally winning because it's MIC is humming along, cash is getting transfered from the tax base to the oligarchs, and the only political argumentation about this is intranacine party politics which is also backstopped by a Western push to arm Ukraine.
Who is going to punish America? This is a heads I win tails you lose scenario for America. There is no losing, there is no corner. There's barely any blowback.
The US is losing geopolitically across the board now. We're seeing huge amounts of trade being redirected outside the dollar now as a direct result of the war. BRICS is growing by leaps and bounds. Middle East, Latin America, and Africa are becoming increasingly assertive. The whole empire is coming apart at the seams. All of this ties back to the war in Ukraine where the US overcommitted and that led to the economic war with Russia that is now turning into a bloc conflict between G7 and BRICS. The war was never about Ukraine itself.
The geopolitical losses that the US is experiencing in the economic and diplomatic sectors are entirely overblown hopium. Yes they're "bad outcomes" for the US, but the scale of these hits relative to the size and strength of the empire is not enough to make the case that the US is falling significantly faster than its overall imperial arc. It has nowhere near exhausted its options for bringing the globe to heel, and we haven't even gotten to a significant tipping point.
If these geopolitical losses were anywhere near significant you'd see a must faster escalation and scrambling to maintain dominance across the globe by the US. The reality is that if this isn't a slow burn it's going to be a precipitous fall and you shouldn't wish that on the globe given that this country has enough firepower stockpiled in the oceans to turn this planet to ash, and it's lead by the kind of people who will do that kind of thing, and spend their lives in bunkers ruling over the ash Enclave style.
It's absolutely not overblown copium. Huge amounts of trade are already happening outside the dollar, and China can obviously see they're the next target so they're redirecting their trade away from the west now as well. This should help you put things in perspective https://youtu.be/RQ3YjZAzqxA
The west has an over inflated view of itself. It's entirely possible that the managers of the empire still don't realize the amount of trouble they're in as well. Once again, you keep trying to treat US as a rational actor here which it demonstrably is not. There is vague realization that things are turning in China's favor, but there's still plenty of chauvnism to go around.
Also, I highly doubt that the oligarchs running the US really want to spend the rest of their days in a nuclear bunker. They'd much rather rule over a diminished empire.
The video you're offering as proof is simply pointing out that US/global north goods are too expensive for markets in the global South so goods provided by China are growing at a rapid rate in comparison. That doesn't actually mean what you're saying. If BYD ships 30x cars to Vietnam but BMW has a 30x price and a higher consumer desire your point is moot.
The video is showing that the Global South has a massive population advantage over the G7, and that vast majority of the economic growth is going to be happening outside the west going forward. That fact that your main take away was that western goods are too expensive for the Global South is frankly hilarious.
Yeah and? This is literally true at any point in the last 200 years, because there's literally more room to grow than in the West. The entire point of neocolonialism as a project is for the West to lease the global South's future and growth to itself.
And the west is now deindustrialized, and it's now entering a bloc conflict with the countries where vast majority of commodities are produces and most of the global manufacturing happens. The entire point of neocolonialism is to extract labor and resources from the countries that are colonized. Those days are now rapidly coming to an end. The empire is crumbling in real time.
Okay lets start simple and define colonization for me.
Colonialism is a tool of capitalist expansion and exploitation, driven by the pursuit of profit and the need to maintain the capitalist system. It results in the domination and underdevelopment of colonized territories, while reinforcing the power and wealth of the colonizers. It is an inherent feature of capitalism, driven by the need for expansion and accumulation of capital, involving the political and economic domination of a nation by a foreign power, leading to the exploitation of resources and labor in the colonized region.
Colonies provide a source of cheap raw materials and labor, as well as new markets for the colonizer's manufactured goods. Crucially, colonialism reinforces global inequalities and uneven development. The colonizers extract wealth from the colonies, hindering their economic growth and development, while the the population of the colonizing countries benefits from the plunder.
Okay so what's neocolonialism then?
Why don't you explain what you think neocolonialism is and its relationship with regular colonialism. This ought to be good.
Sure. Regular colonialism is when you force a capitalist apparatus onto a group of people and force it to extract to the economic benefit of a different group of people who typically through the explicit threat of state violence enforce profitable conditions for this economic activity. Typically what distinguishes it from capitalism is that in capitalism both groups are forced to participate in the capitalist apparatus, where in colonialism the supreme group may choose not to. Lastly the economic form this takes the shape of is typically direct ownership of raw material extraction operations, all the material extracted, and profits from the extracted materials. Colonial relationships are primarily driven by economic engines of raw source extraction to fuel large scale industrial economies. Colonial relationships are limited by the resource mix of the colonized, thus they are inefficient because they tend to make commonly extracted material over available in your economy. Some examples are like you take over a state, and that state becomes your coal extraction venture where you can just ship coal over an ocean to your state. Or how you can take over a state, and you force a capitalist apparatus that exists to provide your state with a stable supply of bananas.
Neocolonialism is the recreation of the colonial relation purely through the paradigm of the market where the same types of unequal economic relationships between colonial states and their patrons occur, but it is not directly due to the paradigms of supremacy, it is only indirectly due to the imbalances of the material history between the two groups and the mediation of the market. In essence it is saying 100 years ago I would come to your country, set up a governate and a factory and force your people to work for me, but today in order for you to build a school you have to agree to the same unequal deal as you did before to get the money to build that school, but it's not meeeee doing it, it' the maaarket. It's the supply and demand! Because neocolonial relationships are based on buyer-seller relations it allows for a more efficient economic extraction because you have more control of the kind of resources the relationship brings so it's easier to protect your domestic industry. So there's also no direct threat of state violence and it transforms the relationship between the two groups from owner and worker (or owner and property) to a more "pure form" of buyer and seller. Like if you have a country where it's an outlier in its the demand for narcotics, and it's kinda weird how its direct neighbor is a narco-state. Or how you have a group of capitalist entities, and they (and their countries) make the majority of the economic profit on the trade of a luxury crop like cocoa rather than the capitalist entities (and their countries) that actually harvest the crop. The important distinction in those two examples being that, for chocolate, Belgium and the Congo created a neocolonial relationship that previously existed as a colonial relationship, where for narcotics, the United States and Mexico created a new neocolonial relationship without a previous colonial form.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: