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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   18746 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.

Economically, the Chinese are far ahead of where the Soviets were relative to the US during the Cold War, and the last time there was a hot war they chased the Eighth Army halfway down the Korean peninsula while at a severe technological disadvantage, so they seem plenty worthy to me.

For a more recent example/counterpoint (though still relatively ancient) look at the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese got their asses wrecked in a month or so, where it took the US a decade to withdraw.

Americans have this funny, somewhat childish manner of scoring wars on style points. Basically it's a generalization of how tough guys in a bar in Alabama or whatever might boast. I lasted 10 years! I could go on, just got bored! One against ten! Machismo. Very impressive for scoring mates. The question is, have the objectives been ultimately achieved? What was the war even about? We don't really have a good understanding of what the Sino-Vietnamese war was about.

As for the objectives, here's the perspective from the other side:

Vietnam is different from the rest of Asia because it does not depend on the U.S. for security and China for trade. In fact, it is the opposite. Vietnam depends on the U.S. for trade and China for security. … Vietnam heavily depends on China for its security. This is not to be confused with an alliance relationship, in which Vietnam needs China’s assistance against a particular threat. Security dependence in this context means that China can militarily hurt Vietnam on both the continental and the maritime domains while Vietnam cannot hurt China in return because of Vietnam’s limited resources and weapons inferiority vis-à-vis China/.

Whether Vietnam can economically develop in a peaceful environment is up to China. Vietnam was on the brink of economic bankruptcy when it tried to arms race against China between 1978 and 1991. Only after China ended its “bleeding Vietnam strategy,” normalized ties with Vietnam, and settled the land border and Gulf of Tonkin disputes in the 1990s and 2000, could Vietnam decrease its military spending in service of domestic economic development. It is not a coincidence that Vietnam always affirms its pledge not to host foreign military bases on its soil and not to join any alliances against China in high-level exchanges with China to assure China of Vietnam’s peaceful intentions. Avoiding a second Chinese invasion has been at the center of Vietnam’s defense policy since 1991. Even in the absence of such an invasion, Vietnam cannot and should not seek to arms race with China as a deterrent. Also, maintaining amicable Vietnam-China ties matters to Vietnam’s own relations with its neighbors Laos and Cambodia, as Vietnam must convince China that it has no intention of turning Laos and Cambodia against China.

China’s importance in Vietnam’s security thinking thus dwarfs that of the United States. The U.S. cannot protect Vietnam from a second Chinese invasion because Washington’s ability to project power onto continental Asia is limited. During the Cold War, the U.S. military could not defeat an inferior Chinese army in Korea and Indochina.

It's similar to how Russians «lost» the Winter War. While it was a catastrophically bad, shameful operation and @Stefferi's people eliminated a much greater absolute and vastly greater relative share of the adversary's forces than Vietnam ever did, very impressively so, the question is: who got what he wanted? Who lost? Soviets achieved their minimal goals. Finns lost land.

We don't really have a good understanding of what the Sino-Vietnamese war was about.

Really? I thought it was a relatively straightforwardly punitive operation designed to punish Vietnam after Vietnam retaliated to repeated Cambodian aggression by invading Cambodia and decapitating their government (stopping the Cambodian genocide). Obviously the Vietnamese and Chinese both can claim to be the winners (Vietnam: we stopped them! China: we went as far as we needed to go to make our point!) but if the motives are obscure it's news to me. (And I would be happy to update my understanding here.)

Yes, that's fair. I mean that «punish» is a lousy theory of victory. What goals did China actually hope to achieve versus what it achieved? In Korea, it's pretty simple, they wanted to prevent the collapse of DPRK and maintain a defensive buffer at a minimum, eliminate South Korea as a stretch goal, and they succeeded in their minimal goals. Americans also succeeded in their minimal goals, then MacArthur developed more maximalist ambitions, suffered a defeat, and the American strategy got scaled back, so nominally it's a «stalemate» for the entire war.

I think that Chinese regional strategy has the minimum goal of «have no actively hostile nation on its border», and it's been broadly successful. There's still India and they are militarizing the border, but luckily it's a border that neither side can exploit for a meaningful invasion.

In Korea, it's pretty simple, they wanted to prevent the collapse of DPRK and maintain a defensive buffer at a minimum, eliminate South Korea as a stretch goal, and they succeeded in their minimal goals.

A more cynical answer is that, in 1950, Mao and the PRC was saddled with an alarmingly large number of veteran soldiers left over from Nationalist China. They were of highly questionable loyalty (having fought the last 10 years against the PRC) and the PRC government couldn't afford to pay them, being desparately poor at that time. So by launching them into a spectacularly bloody war against a foreign country, he managed to both eliminate them in a cost-effective way and boost his own popularity by riding a wave of nationalism.

Do you think it made strategic sense to have a border with an American protectorate?

It's not like these answers are mutually exclusive. Both can be true.

I mean that «punish» is a lousy theory of victory.

Hmm, I don't think so. Punitive expeditions are about as old as mankind. Vietnam attacked China's ally and China could either do nothing (devaluing its worth as an ally in the future) or do something. It chose to do something.

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