BahRamYou
2hr ago
I seriously doubt this is the case, and I don't actually think this dynamic shows up in geopoliticking. If MAD is being deployed and the costs of a first strike are far too high on either side, then the "freedom of action" argument clearly fails.
I would argue that it shows up quite frequently, and in fact was at the heart of Cold-war decision making. The acoup article on it was good. Having more nukes, more delivery systems, and also more defense systems, allows us to push the "red lines" forward to control borderline territories. Having fewer, and using them only as a last-ditch resort, means that countries struggle to project force outside their boundaries, as China does today. It's not about evaluating the number of dead, it's about the chance of starting such a war. The USSR in contrast was able to invade prague and dominate eastern Europe, secure that the US would never risk war over some distant city. But now, the calculus is on the opposite foot- there's no way the PRC would risk nuclear war to protect Tehran, or even Pyongyang.
It has, at least on paper, several advantages over THAAD;
That seems like a rather fear-mongering article, essentially taking all of China's claims at face-value despite a complete lack of tests, while assuming that the US can't do anything in response (eg, using satellites to increase tracking range instead of relying solely on THAAD). It's probably written to encourage more spending on missile defense. But yes, I do agree that THAAD isn't a huge central point for this discussion, it's just one of many weapons systems where the US now enjoys a considerable advantage that it never had before.
BahRamYou
2hr ago
Currently you're burning through interceptors and, if this is not AI fog of war slop, even losing F-15s (alledegely to friendly fire, I presume due to lack of relevant training. Should have called upon Ukrainians to teach you guys air defense). But long term, Iran is poised to lose the war, of course, so the sense of invulnerability will be restored.
What F-15s were lost? Is this something Russian or Chinese media is saying? Everything I've read says that the US has lost absolutely zero planes so far, just a few unfortunate men on a base in Kuwait that was struck by a missile. But other than that one incident, US missile defense in this conflict has been outstanding.
I don't want to say there's nothing to multipolar agenda, obviously China prefers Iran to remain a thorn in the US/Israeli side and also to buy cheaper oil. But that's a benefit of bounded and not great value, and ineptitude and duplicity of the mullah regime qualifies it further.
Sure, I never claimed that there's some great love affair between China and Iran. It was always just a partnership of convenience. Nonetheless, it was a real partnership, and I'm not how China is going to deal with the loss of this oil supply, on top of the loss of Venezuela. I suppose they'll just become even more dependant on Russia, just as Russia is dependant on the money they get from selling oil and gas to China. But if that link is broken, both nations fall apart.
Discounting the fraction of the economy involved in fossil fuels and agriculture (a generous choice), I'd say the US would end up roughly as complex as China.
Why do you discount fossil fuels and agriculture? Both of those fields are actually quite technologically advanced in the US. We're not some 3rd world nation doing subsistance agriculture or relying on foreign companies to drill oil for us. Those are some of the most crucial and high-tech fields in the economy! Meanwhile, the areas which China exports to us are in manufacturing, which is something we are actively trying to increase. Many Americans would consider it a great boon to have more manufacturing jobs and less imports from China. But if the US stops exporting food and oil to China, I don't see how China replaces those.
Currently estimated at 600 warheads, vs American stockpile of 3700. It's a completely sufficient deterrence. You glibly dismiss 50-90 million dead Americans, I suspect that's a lowball but the point is that you're unlikely to destroy China either, for all the memes about Three Gorges Dam.
No I don't glibly dismiss it at all, I simply recognize the reality that the US now has far more relative power in nuclear weapons than it had at any time in the Cold War, when the USSR generally had more warheads. It's not about fighting China directly, it's about gaining operational freedom to act in other areas, as I wrote here . If China wants to invade Taiwan, they must be terrified that it would end up in a nuclear war with the US. The US can freely act against other countries with no such worry about China.
What I want to say is that this isn't just a funny hypothetical. "How do we fight China" is the question on the mind of American planners,
America has many planners, who can plan a great deal of actions. That's how we fight Venezuela, and Iran, and aid Ukraine, and perhaps take down Cuba, and who knows what else, all simultaneously. Because we are a world power with global concerns. That is rather different from the state of China, which has to spend 50 years worrying about how it can take over some small offshore island because it represents a huge political threat to the legitimacy of their government. But sure, we can also plan for how to win a war against China, that's a fun hypothetical for our military planners to consider :). Starving them of oil seems like a good first step.
BahRamYou
2hr ago
But as some Gulf states recently found out, it also paints a bit of a target on your back for anyone who wants to strike back at the US but can't.
Did it? It seems like they were barely damaged by this at all, despite Iran launching everything they could. The US missile defense tech held strong, and now they've had a major regional threat removed. It seems like being a US ally is a great deal for them! Soon, virtually all of the Middle East will be firm US allies, which rather amazing when you think about what it was like a few decades ago.
So the outcome of a nuclear war with China after you spend 5% of your GDP on missile defense might be that you manage to H-bomb all of China's big cities, and they only manage to nuke LA from subs and NYC by smuggling in a nuke in a container ship. So instead, China decides to nuke Japan, South Korea, Australia plus any other countries in the Pacific which host US military. Which then motivates your remaining allies in Europe to swiftly kick you out before you get them nuked when you repeat that game with Russia.
At the end of the day, you might have thrown China back a decade (because for a regime change, you would need an invasion, and I simply do not see that happening) while only having lost your empire and tanked the global economy. Do you think Trump would win the mid-terms under these circumstances?
I would simply not go to war with China, but continue to topple every other tinpot dictatorship around the world, to create a worldwide network of US aligned states while completely isolating China. Meanwhile, we continue to increase our space tech advantage, and utterly starve them of fossil fuels. In that case, yes, I think Trump and future Republicans would easily win elections.
Meanwhile Europe keeps asking us for more military aid in Ukraine to deal with Russia. Well, it's obvious that we could destroy the Russian conventional forces if we wanted to, it's only really a question of how we manage their nuclear threat. So this provides us a convenient excuse to increase our nuclear defense.
BahRamYou
3hr ago
I see it less in terms of "winning" the nuclear war, and more in terms of "which side has more freedom of action?" Having more nukes (as well as more ways of delivering them) buys the US considerablly more freedom of action. China is forced to evaluate everything as an all-or-nothing war for survival; the US has considerably more flexibility.
Notably, during the Korean war when we were actively fighting with China, we still didn't dare attack China directly for fear of triggering a nuclear war. Similarly, during the Vietnam War, they were able to supply North Vietnam freely with weapons and support- the US had to go out of its way to avoid hurting China or the USSR. That no longer seems to be the case- as long as we're not actually attacking China directly, the US seems to have considerable freedom of action to do what it wants. We can stop their investments in South America, stop their oil purchases from Iran, ban their tech companies, and even topple governments that they were on friendly terms with. Even if we were to go invade North Korea tomorrow, what do you think China would do about it?
And that's just for now. Despite their considerable advances in many fields of technology, China still lags behind the US in aerospace tech. The Hongqi-19 has never been tested in combat, and does not seem to be particularly more advanced than THAAD. If the US continues to invest in ground based defense like THAAD, plus gets a working space defense working through Golden Dome... China rapidly runs out of options to hurt the US. But I suppose they can just scale up mass production of nukes, like the USSR did in the 80s... how did that work out for them.
BahRamYou
4hr ago
"Soft Power" has an abysmal record, methinks. I do think Trump prefers the carrot to the stick, but the stick gets results.
I'm starting to question if there's even a difference between the two. In the words of Osama bin Laden: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse." Hard power naturally creates its own soft power, as people flock to support the winner. And its hard to look "cool" with just soft power when you keep losing every direct fight.
I think that for a long time people thought that the US was relatively toothless, as nations like Iran publically insulted us and sponsored asymmetric warfare against us. That led to a lot of people taking the leftist line that the US was imperialist, corrupt, evil, etc. Well, no more- it turns out that when you just go in and knock over dictators, people like you.
BahRamYou
4hr ago
Yeah, I think people are underestimating what a big deal it is to change the regime of Iran. Even if it had no broader reaching effects, we're talking about a very large and old center of civilization. Nobody really cared much what happened in Afghanistan, but people are going to start caring about Iran once relations open up and we can go visit there and talk to them as normal human beings.
BahRamYou
4hr ago
Sure, that's the conventional wisdom. I've heard that sort of thing all my life, that Korea, Vietnam, etc. prove the limits of what strategic bombing can accomplishment. But I'm not so sure that's a universal truth, or simply a limit of 20th century technology. It's sort of like how electric cars were always slow and useless, until suddenly they weren't. Previous wars involved bombing wildly and indescriminately, with the US first being unable to hit its targets (most of the 20th century) and then struggling to identify just who it should be targeting (most of the war on terror). It no longer has that limitation- It knew exactly where all the key leaders of Iran were, and targetted them very precisely in the first day of the war. It can continue to do this as long as anyone in Iran tries to resist. But so far there hasn't been any organized resistance, and the Iranian people seem pretty happy that their dictator is gone.
BahRamYou
4hr ago
I didn't mean to say that attacking China would be easy. I meant that Trump has supreme command of the US military and he can order that if he so chooses. I agree it would be crazy but there's really no one who can prevent such a war if he's really determined.
More likely I see him continuing to go after small 3rd world dictatorships that he can topple within a week. So maybe North Korea.
There's always this two-step dance about what exactly the SCO is. I think the legal details are unimportant, since these aren't countries that are going to be follow the exact letter of any treaty. The fact remains that they were cooperating, and Iran was one of very few countries directly helping China, and now they're gone. All China has left is, what, Myanmar and North Korea? Good luck with that. Any country that starts helping them too much because of "Belt and Road" or whatever can easily be "convinced" to change their ways by US military power.
How many Americans can Russia and China kill? 30 million? 40? 50? 90? It would be the greatest catastrophe in American history by far.
Notice how even your largest numbers still fall far short of total annihilation. The fear during the cold war was that they might kill everyone, with just a few scattered survivors living in underground bunkers. Now the best they could possibly hope for is just massacring some cities, while the US would certainly survive and overwhelmingly destroy them in response.
BahRamYou
4hr ago
Aegis and THAAD are both fully capable of hitting a ballistic missile in terminal approach, they just need enough missiles to hit all the warheads. Or we could shoot in midcourse with GMD, and we are developing the possibility for even boost phase kills with Golden Dome. Until now, the US was willing to play along with MAD and leave itself vulnerable, but there's no reason it should continue like that forever. North Korea especially should be feeling nervous right now.
BahRamYou
14hr ago
My understanding is that all of the Houthi missiles and drones came from Iran. So it makes sense that bombing Houthis wouldn't really stop the missile attacks, at least not without completely genociding them which the US was obviously unwilling to do. But with Iran's regime gone, the Houthi's will no longer have a source of weapons. This clears up a lot of problems if you can simply stop the weapons at the source, instead of trying to target every single insurgent.
But yes, maybe I'm wrong and Iran is still firing missiles all over the place forever, in which case this looks horrible for Trump and the USA as a whole.
BahRamYou
14hr ago
Why do you think we need to do central planning? I don't see how that helps anyone.
The US military is no longer just a hammer. It's very much a smart hammer, honed by 20 years of the global war on terror and cyber/intel development. That helps a lot if you need to find insurgents, or shoot down an ICBM.
BahRamYou
14hr ago
Well, I fully expected the US to win, but I thought it would take a lot longer than this! Maybe I missed the discussion on this from the past 2 years. The saying among neocons during the 2000s was "everyone wants to go to Baghdad, but only real men want to go to Tehran"- even the hardline hawks expected that a war with Iran would be tough.
And I'm certainly not saying the US is immune to nukes, or should seek out such a war. Just that, if it does happen, the losses would be a lot less than people might expect based on cold war thinking. And we've just seen that the US has immense power to devastate a country in the opening hours of a war, before it even has a chance to launch its missiles.
Are we in a new age of hyperpower?
OK, this war in Iran is only 2 days old, and as we all know "truth is the first casualty of war." So this is very much a hot take, and we'll need a lot more time and thoughtful analysis to see how this plays out.
But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power. I can only imagine how Trump and other leaders must be feeling, let alone the actual soldiers who drop the bombs. Already this year we've fought and- it seems- won two wars! The first one with absolutely no losses, and this one also seems quite low casualty. This was done purely with American military (and help from Israel), no NATO help necessary. Iran has spent the last 40 years building up a gigantic military, and now it all just looks like an absolute joke. All their leadership is dead within the first day, and the US has massive air superiority over most of the country. It's now basically just a choice of what targets we want to bomb.
I took this chance to go check back in on Venezuela. I couldn't find many good sources there, but so far it seems... basically fine? There's no civil war or hardline Maduro loyalists fighting to the death. The new president has taken over with basically no issues, and she seems to be cooperating quite well with the US. Lots of Venezuelans are happy that this happened. Of course there are still many problems with the country, but it's fair to chalk that war up as a win.
But what about China? We're supposed to be in a new "multipolar" age, right? The US can't just go throwing its weight around wherever it wants because there are other powers to stop us. Iran was heavily involved in selling oil to China, and was a military ally of them through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Well, so far all China has done is say mean things about us. They can't even say it openly, they have to do it in phone calls to Russia. So apparently they're not much of a counter at all.
I think we've reached a tipping point where US air power just crushes all of its adversaries with no counter. It's not any one weapon, but a combination of factors- more satellites, better human intelligence, more stealth aircraft, better radar, more JDAMs and stand off munitions, cyberattacks, and now AI to help us identify targets. The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground, unless we want to send special forces to arrest someone like we did to Maduro. And we've got 100 next-gen stealth bombers currently in production, plus... whatever the hell the F47 next-gen fighter can do, so I expect this dominance to increase over the next decade.
But what about nukes? Soviet nukes held the US in check throughout the cold war, surely those also put a break on US imperial ambitions? Well, to some extent they still do, but the US has made some very impressive progress in missile defense lately. THAAD is now hitting its targets with an impressively high success rate, and was recently used to help defend Israel against Iran's missile barage. The main limiting factor there is just building more interceptors, and Trump is pushing for massive funding there as part of his Golden Dome project. That also opens up some intriguing options in space- and, oh hey, would you look at that, the US also has SpaceX utterly dominating LEO launch, and it will likely get even more dominant there if/when Starship becomes practical. Meanwhile China has a relatively small nuclear arsenal, and Russia's is just leftover Soviet junk that might not even work anymore. I think we are rapidly reaching a point where the US has overwhelming nuclear dominance.
The question then becomes- what do we do with this power? Trump used to always preach the merits of isolationism, and he made a big splash early in the Republican primary by being the only candidate who strongly denounced the Iraq war. He clashed heavily with Marco Rubio over that issue. But now he has Rubio as his Secretary of State, and he seems to have rapidly "evolved" to favor military interventions. But, being Trump, he still makes speeches about "taking Venezuela's oil" and other me-first boasting. So far no such boasts about Iran, but I can only assume there will be some.
My guess? He keeps doing this. Cuba is an obvious target, they're pretty much falling apart already. Next would be Panama, where he always talked about wanting the Canal back. After that... I have no idea. Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? He could potentially attack all of those places, if each one is as fast and decisive as this current Iran war seems. I... don't think Trump would actually invade Greenland, or attack China, but... who can say? If he chose to do those things, who could stop him?
BahRamYou
2d ago
No idea about that particular drone, but there sure is a lot of buzz around Iran right now. Trump has said he's "not happy" with Iran, and betting markets have shown a huge spike in the odds that the US strikes Iran by the end of February. As in, by tomorrow.
BahRamYou
2d ago
But where will you get your recommended dose of crazy autistic neckbeard condescension?
BahRamYou
3d ago
Did you feel like the employees there are/were heavily using AI in their regular job to become more efficient now? Do they have have agentic AIs that can totally replace some people's jobs?
BahRamYou
3d ago
Could be a lot of things. It definitely sounds a lot better to say that they made massive layoffs because of AI then because "we had too many useless employees doing nothing" or "our stock was way down so we had to try something drastic." But given that they're a fairly mature software service company, I can actually see them being a prime use case for AI making their employees more efficient.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Do you get the same problem with it that I usually do? That is, the first attempt is really good, and a few additional prompts make it even better. But the more I work with it, the more it seems to get stuck in weird errors or unnecessarily complicated code. After, like, 10 prompts, if it's not working perfectly I just have to start from scratch. It's like pastry dough- a little kneeding is necessary, but too much can ruin it.
BahRamYou
6d ago
I think some countries/cultures are just better at certain things than others, and it's almost random as to what and why.
Like, sure, we could make excuses why Americans don't need to learn other languages, and that's certainly part of it. But early Americans didn't need to know Latin, and yet apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities. We also don't need to be good at niche winter olympic sports, yet we still consistentlly do well and are currently 2nd in medal count, behind Norway (which has the advantage of basically inventing most of the winter olympic sports). We are consistently bad at professional international football/soccer, despite spending increasingly large amounts of money on it, while tiny poor countries like uruguay and croatia do increasingly well at it.
Looking internationally, the pattern becomes increasingly strange. Germans do great at learning English as a second language. Dutch, even better! French... not so much. Swiss people learn English, but struggle with whichever of French/German is their non-native language. Meanwhile Belgiuns, Luxembourgians, and Alsace–Lorrainians (in my highly subjective experience) learn all 3 languages with no problem. 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics in the US are all over the place in terms of language skills, but tend towards English-only as they get more removed from their parent country.
In asia, it's even stranger. Japan has been heavily promoting English since the 50s, but is still terrible at it, despite massive amounts of English loanwords. Korea used to be pretty bad at it, but now seems very strong. Taiwan is incredibly strong at teaching ESL. I challenge anyone to find a consistent pattern there.
My only guess is that you need the right balance of resources and motivations. You need enough money to properly teach children a second language, but not so much money that they feel like they don't need to bother. They need to be constantly immersing with the second language, but not so much that they just forget their first language. They need to feel like the target language is "cool" and exotic, but not so distant that it's overwhelming. Basically, they need the right mix of "want" and need" to feel like "I will learn this language within the next 5 years"- not so quick that they give up when faced with drawbacks, but not so distant that they slack off and feel like it will never happen. Willing to spend some money to help them learn, but also willing to just grind and memorize.
BahRamYou
6d ago
It would be interesting to research how this tracks with overall demographics of society, especially in historical times. After WW2 there was a huge shortage of males (because of the war) and also a huge baby boom (...maybe because of the war? But maybe other reasons too? Still not fully understood). As a result, there were a lot of young women, so I think people just didn't notice or didn't care as much about age gaps. If anything, they were more worried about the opposite- what if a woman couldn't find a suitable husband!? Disaster!
Nowadays the population pyramid has been inverted. There's more people above 30 than below, and more men than women below 30, so the competition to date under-30-women is intense. I think it's natural that society in general takes a harder look at such relationships (are we sure there isn't an unhealthy power dynamic there?) and also that under-30 men would feel jealous and protective.
They do, and I have tremendous respect for China's ability to do high tech manufacturing at massive scale. But I still argue that they're a step behind the US in terms of the most cutting edge tech. We see this in many areas- stealth, radar, targetting, cyberwarfare, AI, and now space launch. We will if they ever manage to catch up and surpass us in one of those fields. But they better do so soon, because their population is rapidly aging.
We arguably did just face that! If you count Iran's Basij force of 25 million reservists. But it doesn't matter how big their army is, no one moves without command and logistical support. And they're also not zombies, they're not going to march themselves off to die in North Korea if they have a choice.
(but yes, I am perhaps speaking too lightly and glibly. I'm sure the people in the Pentagon take this a lot more seriously than I am. But still... just imagine the possibilities...)
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