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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26449 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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There’s ample evidence that the Chinese consult history to a greater degree in their foreign policy deliberations. In 2126, in the First AI War, when China considers how to strike our techies (being the invaluable engine to the American war machine), they may decide on a strategy of targetting them in their sleep along with their wives and children and neighbors, because this is the exact strategy that America signed off on against the Persians. The Chinese would simply be following America’s rendition of customary international law and applying it against its very authors. Consider Kissinger:

Their history is longer than ours, but they have a different sense of history. I mention in the book, for example, that when Mao notified his associates that he was going to go to war with India in 1962, he did so by invoking a war that had been fought between China and India in the Tang Dynasty, which was a thousand years earlier, and then another war that had been fought 600 years earlier. And he told his assembled generals, from the first war, you can learn these lessons. From the second war you can learn the following lessons. Not even Europeans who have a more developed sense of history than we do, would you find a leader who says, let’s learn the following lessons from Charlemagne and an American president who would say, we can learn the following lessons from President Polk. Yes, it wouldn’t be conceivable.

I don’t know if our conduct comes from a certainty that we will always be on top (despite demographic-dysgenic catastrophe), or a hardness of heart for our own descendants, or just a general disregard for longterm thinking, but the acts committed today are written down as the standards applied against us tomorrow. And this is a decent stand-in thought for those who have dehumanized Iranians or otherwise can’t empathize with anyone outside their fold. If the Iranians are “third worldists”, then at least imagine your own great grandchildren preferring not to be destroyed by China in their sleep in the next century.

USA will always be on top, because of two huge oceans that are unmovable at least on human scales. The only real danger is Brasil getting their shit together. But when it comes to odds - Brasil getting powerful is up there with the new Ayatollah becoming catholic.

And when it comes to them hitting west techies first - this scene is the biggest perversion inflicted on source material ever. But is illustrating about various defenses to that approach. https://youtube.com/watch?v=B203twyaMfM&t=34

USA will always be on top, because of two huge oceans that are unmovable at least on human scales.

Oceans historically were, and in many ways still are, bridges, not barriers. When the Royal Navy pwned the US Navy, you were our bitch, to the point where we could casually loot and burn Washington DC as a side quest while fighting the Napoleonic Wars. The oceans give the US the option (just as the English Channel gave the UK the same option) of neglecting you land forces and being a pure sea power - as long as the US rules (or at least contests) the waves, you are indeed safe from invasion (as we were and probably still are).

The nature of late C20/early C21 air and sea power makes the oceans a barrier to attack even if the US wasn't a major naval power - sea power is carrier-based air power and land-based aircraft have a massive advantage over carrier-based aircraft with equivalent men and materiel. This means that the late C20/early C21 USA was impregnable because the USAF could defend the coasts against the navy of a somewhat superior adversary. (This is the "The Falklands War wasn't supposed to be winnable for the British" argument - the RN overperformed and the Argentinian Air Force underperformed). But that tech stack is obsolete, as Russia learned en route to the bottom of the Black Sea and the US is currently learning the hard way in the Gulf. Will the same logic apply in a world where sea power consists of drone carriers escorted by laser cruisers? I don't know.

I think you're not wrong that different takes on foreign policy are informed differently by history, but I don't think that is necessarily a better take. If it were, Putin's "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" might have landed differently. How is citing the history of the Kievan Rus working out for him?

I do think it's important to consider the long-term impacts of normalizing certain types of uses of force, though.

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