On Saturday, March 12, 2022 at 12:29:51 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:

"There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the war and is responsible for how it is being waged. But why he did so is another matter. The mainstream view in the West is that he is an irrational, out-of-touch aggressor bent on creating a greater

Russia in the mould of the former Soviet Union. Thus, he alone bears full responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.

But that story is wrong. The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis which began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine, but also has the potential to escalate into a

nuclear war between Russia and NATO.

The trouble over Ukraine actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration pushed the alliance to announce that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members”. Russian leaders responded immediately with

outrage, characterising this decision as an existential threat to Russia and vowing to thwart it. According to a respected Russian journalist, Mr Putin “flew into a rage” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the
eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” America ignored Moscow’s red line, however, and pushed forward to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. That strategy included two other elements: bringing Ukraine closer to the EU and
making it a pro-American democracy.

These efforts eventually sparked hostilities in February 2014, ...

The next major confrontation came in December 2021 and led directly to the current war. The main cause was that Ukraine was becoming a de facto member of NATO. The process started in December 2017, when the Trump administration decided to sell Kyiv “

defensive weapons”. What counts as “defensive” is hardly clear-cut, however, and these weapons certainly looked offensive to Moscow and its allies in the Donbas region. Other NATO countries got in on the act, shipping weapons to Ukraine, training
its armed forces and allowing it to participate in joint air and naval exercises. In July 2021, Ukraine and America co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region involving navies from 32 countries. Operation Sea Breeze almost provoked Russia
to fire at a British naval destroyer that deliberately entered what Russia considers its territorial waters.

The links between Ukraine and America continued growing under the Biden administration. This commitment is reflected throughout an important document..."

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis

John Mearsheimer's conclusion is clear: the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis.
Wrong-headed policy also has its consequence. In this case, China is the obvious winner of this international crisis. In addition, the conflict contributes to US strategic decline. And in Daivd Goldman's article, prospect of US strategic decline also
makes some prominent American strategist mad. In short, "They cannot bear the idea that America might have to share power with a rising China, and in their heart of hearts, they prefer a war, even a losing one, to this sort of humiliation."

https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2022/03/11/americas-strategic-thinkers-cant-think-that-americas-power-is-fading

"China is the obvious winner in the present international crisis. It has the luxury of choosing between two outcomes that increase its power: to act as a friend of all the parties in the Ukraine dispute and mediate the conflict, or to gain the battered
Russian Federation as an ally. It probably can do both.
...
The United States put Ukraine on track for a violent confrontation with Russia by undermining the Russian-backed Minsk II agreement, which would have kept Ukraine out of NATO and allowed home rule for the Russophone provinces Donetsk and Luhansk within a
sovereign Ukraine.

Russia charged that Washington intended to move nuclear missiles to the Russia-Ukraine border 300 miles from Moscow, and invaded Ukraine to preempt this. Whether the Biden administration insisted on Ukraine’s option to join NATO out of design or
incompetence, US policy is now in ruins.

That leaves Washington debating how to deal with a China that fields 400 city-buster nuclear weapons and the ICBMs that would be needed to deliver them, as well as about 1,300 medium-to-long-range surface-to-ship missiles that probably can sink US
aircraft carriers – not to mention a host of other strategic weapons.

It also leaves Washington a couple of steps away from a nuclear confrontation with Russia, which last October tested a submarine-launched hypervelocity glide vehicle, a super-fast cruise missile that could hit Washington in 60 seconds from a submarine a
hundred miles offshore.

And it also leaves the United States with the prospect of the union of Russia’s formidable technical talent, including a cadre of engineers as large as America’s, with China’s burgeoning high-tech industry.
The simplest solution, in the view of former Defense Department official Seth Cropsey, is military confrontation with China. “One would expect the Russian invasion to formalize the return to traditional great-power politics, what theorists of
international relations call ‘multipolarity,’ a system in which multiple political and military centers of gravity exist,” Cropsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal on March 9.

“This prediction is alluring and wrong,” Cropsey added, because of China’s lust for conquest: “China remains the crucial actor. The Communist Party under Mr Xi … drew a unique lesson from the Soviet collapse. The Soviets failed not because they
didn’t integrate capitalist insights into their economy but because they never went far enough in their external expansion.”

I should add that Cropsey, a dedicated amateur cellist, is a personal friend; I have dined at his home in Washington and think him personable and literate. But the above statement suggests that he is subject to a maniacal delusion. China’s strategic
thinking says exactly the opposite, that expansion caused the downfall of the Soviet Empire.
On this topic, I recommend a recent essay by Professor Wen Yang of Fudan University, a prominent columnist for the leading Chinese news site “The Observer.” Wen writes: “World hegemony exercised in the name of liberalism must be opposed by the
people of the world, and world hegemony exercised in the name of communism also must be opposed by the people of the world.”
From the ashes of Ukraine, Cropsey avers, will arise a strategy for world domination that I would characterize as straight out of Fu Manchu:

China will use Russia’s increasing isolation to transform Moscow into a petrochemical satellite, taking advantage of Western sanctions to secure Russian energy flows indefinitely.
In turn, China hopes that Russia, humbled or emboldened by its Ukraine adventure – and with or without Mr. Putin at the helm– will occupy Western attention as Beijing gobbles up the choicest Pacific possessions and extends its economic and
diplomatic tendrils into the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. Far from accepting independent Russian action, China is counting on Russian failure to accelerate the satisfaction of its boundless appetite.

Another old friend, former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, has taken the opportunity of the Ukraine war to promote his “Strategy of Denial,” which amounts to mining the Taiwan Strait and otherwise reinforcing Taiwan to forestall the mainland attack
on Taiwan that Colby, like Cropsey, believes to be imminent.
I have known the affable Mr Colby – grandson of the late CIA chief William Colby – since he was a law student at Yale. I reviewed his book here, concluding:

There is a close analogy here to the outbreak of war in 1914. An American attempt to deny China access to Taiwan would have the same effect as the Russian mobilization that triggered the conflict, in Christopher Clark’s authoritative account.
If one side mobilizes, the other must also try to avoid a catastrophic disadvantage – and this is how great powers “sleepwalk” (Clark) into wars they do not want and cannot win.

I have asked Colby numerous times in public forms how likely he thinks it is that China’s DF-21 or DF-26 missiles could target and destroy an American carrier under full steam. Answer came there none.
If the US takes military measures that make it possible to ditch the One China policy and establish Taiwan as a sovereign state, China may well act preemptively and seize the island by force. If US planes try to stop this, China may sink the carrier that
launched them. That could start a nuclear war, as Admiral James Staviridis describes in his 2021 thriller 2034.
Colby’s reluctance to answer the decisive question – whether Chinese missiles can sink US carriers – puts him in the company of the naval strategists of 1940 who watched torpedo bombers sink their battleships from Taranto to Singapore to Pearl
Harbor.
Military logic, though, has little to do with these outbursts. Cropsey, Colby and other old friends simply cannot wrap their minds around the miserable fact that American power is fading, the consequence of thirty years of grotesque blunders following
the end of the Cold War. They cannot bear the idea that America might have to share power with a rising China, and in their heart of hearts, they prefer a war, even a losing one, to this sort of humiliation."

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Monday, March 14, 2022 at 9:30:13 PM UTC+8, ltlee1 wrote:

On Saturday, March 12, 2022 at 12:29:51 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:

"There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the war and is responsible for how it is being waged. But why he did so is another matter. The mainstream view in the West is that he is an irrational, out-of-touch aggressor bent on creating a

greater Russia in the mould of the former Soviet Union. Thus, he alone bears full responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.

But that story is wrong. The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis which began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine, but also has the potential to escalate into a

nuclear war between Russia and NATO.

The trouble over Ukraine actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration pushed the alliance to announce that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members”. Russian leaders responded immediately

with outrage, characterising this decision as an existential threat to Russia and vowing to thwart it. According to a respected Russian journalist, Mr Putin “flew into a rage” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and
the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” America ignored Moscow’s red line, however, and pushed forward to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. That strategy included two other elements: bringing Ukraine closer to the EU and
making it a pro-American democracy.

These efforts eventually sparked hostilities in February 2014, ...

The next major confrontation came in December 2021 and led directly to the current war. The main cause was that Ukraine was becoming a de facto member of NATO. The process started in December 2017, when the Trump administration decided to sell Kyiv �

�defensive weapons”. What counts as “defensive” is hardly clear-cut, however, and these weapons certainly looked offensive to Moscow and its allies in the Donbas region. Other NATO countries got in on the act, shipping weapons to Ukraine, training
its armed forces and allowing it to participate in joint air and naval exercises. In July 2021, Ukraine and America co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region involving navies from 32 countries. Operation Sea Breeze almost provoked Russia
to fire at a British naval destroyer that deliberately entered what Russia considers its territorial waters.

The links between Ukraine and America continued growing under the Biden administration. This commitment is reflected throughout an important document..."

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis

John Mearsheimer's conclusion is clear: the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis.
Wrong-headed policy also has its consequence. In this case, China is the obvious winner of this international crisis. In addition, the conflict contributes to US strategic decline. And in Daivd Goldman's article, prospect of US strategic decline also

makes some prominent American strategist mad. In short, "They cannot bear the idea that America might have to share power with a rising China, and in their heart of hearts, they prefer a war, even a losing one, to this sort of humiliation."

https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2022/03/11/americas-strategic-thinkers-cant-think-that-americas-power-is-fading

"China is the obvious winner in the present international crisis. It has the luxury of choosing between two outcomes that increase its power: to act as a friend of all the parties in the Ukraine dispute and mediate the conflict, or to gain the battered

Russian Federation as an ally. It probably can do both.

...
The United States put Ukraine on track for a violent confrontation with Russia by undermining the Russian-backed Minsk II agreement, which would have kept Ukraine out of NATO and allowed home rule for the Russophone provinces Donetsk and Luhansk within

a sovereign Ukraine.

Russia charged that Washington intended to move nuclear missiles to the Russia-Ukraine border 300 miles from Moscow, and invaded Ukraine to preempt this. Whether the Biden administration insisted on Ukraine’s option to join NATO out of design or

incompetence, US policy is now in ruins.

That leaves Washington debating how to deal with a China that fields 400 city-buster nuclear weapons and the ICBMs that would be needed to deliver them, as well as about 1,300 medium-to-long-range surface-to-ship missiles that probably can sink US

aircraft carriers – not to mention a host of other strategic weapons.

It also leaves Washington a couple of steps away from a nuclear confrontation with Russia, which last October tested a submarine-launched hypervelocity glide vehicle, a super-fast cruise missile that could hit Washington in 60 seconds from a submarine

a hundred miles offshore.

And it also leaves the United States with the prospect of the union of Russia’s formidable technical talent, including a cadre of engineers as large as America’s, with China’s burgeoning high-tech industry.
The simplest solution, in the view of former Defense Department official Seth Cropsey, is military confrontation with China. “One would expect the Russian invasion to formalize the return to traditional great-power politics, what theorists of

international relations call ‘multipolarity,’ a system in which multiple political and military centers of gravity exist,” Cropsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal on March 9.

“This prediction is alluring and wrong,” Cropsey added, because of China’s lust for conquest: “China remains the crucial actor. The Communist Party under Mr Xi … drew a unique lesson from the Soviet collapse. The Soviets failed not because

they didn’t integrate capitalist insights into their economy but because they never went far enough in their external expansion.”

I should add that Cropsey, a dedicated amateur cellist, is a personal friend; I have dined at his home in Washington and think him personable and literate. But the above statement suggests that he is subject to a maniacal delusion. China’s strategic

thinking says exactly the opposite, that expansion caused the downfall of the Soviet Empire.

On this topic, I recommend a recent essay by Professor Wen Yang of Fudan University, a prominent columnist for the leading Chinese news site “The Observer.” Wen writes: “World hegemony exercised in the name of liberalism must be opposed by the

people of the world, and world hegemony exercised in the name of communism also must be opposed by the people of the world.”

From the ashes of Ukraine, Cropsey avers, will arise a strategy for world domination that I would characterize as straight out of Fu Manchu:

China will use Russia’s increasing isolation to transform Moscow into a petrochemical satellite, taking advantage of Western sanctions to secure Russian energy flows indefinitely.
In turn, China hopes that Russia, humbled or emboldened by its Ukraine adventure – and with or without Mr. Putin at the helm– will occupy Western attention as Beijing gobbles up the choicest Pacific possessions and extends its economic and

diplomatic tendrils into the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. Far from accepting independent Russian action, China is counting on Russian failure to accelerate the satisfaction of its boundless appetite.

Another old friend, former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, has taken the opportunity of the Ukraine war to promote his “Strategy of Denial,” which amounts to mining the Taiwan Strait and otherwise reinforcing Taiwan to forestall the mainland

attack on Taiwan that Colby, like Cropsey, believes to be imminent.

I have known the affable Mr Colby – grandson of the late CIA chief William Colby – since he was a law student at Yale. I reviewed his book here, concluding:

There is a close analogy here to the outbreak of war in 1914. An American attempt to deny China access to Taiwan would have the same effect as the Russian mobilization that triggered the conflict, in Christopher Clark’s authoritative account.
If one side mobilizes, the other must also try to avoid a catastrophic disadvantage – and this is how great powers “sleepwalk” (Clark) into wars they do not want and cannot win.

I have asked Colby numerous times in public forms how likely he thinks it is that China’s DF-21 or DF-26 missiles could target and destroy an American carrier under full steam. Answer came there none.
If the US takes military measures that make it possible to ditch the One China policy and establish Taiwan as a sovereign state, China may well act preemptively and seize the island by force. If US planes try to stop this, China may sink the carrier

that launched them. That could start a nuclear war, as Admiral James Staviridis describes in his 2021 thriller 2034.

Colby’s reluctance to answer the decisive question – whether Chinese missiles can sink US carriers – puts him in the company of the naval strategists of 1940 who watched torpedo bombers sink their battleships from Taranto to Singapore to Pearl

Harbor.

Military logic, though, has little to do with these outbursts. Cropsey, Colby and other old friends simply cannot wrap their minds around the miserable fact that American power is fading, the consequence of thirty years of grotesque blunders following

the end of the Cold War. They cannot bear the idea that America might have to share power with a rising China, and in their heart of hearts, they prefer a war, even a losing one, to this sort of humiliation."

US will continue to engage in war to remain in supreme power. They will remain on economic and financial sanctions. The future of war will be nuclear and bio war. US will continue to participate and agitate allies to contain countries.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Wednesday, March 16, 2022 at 7:33:15 PM UTC, stoney wrote:

On Monday, March 14, 2022 at 9:30:13 PM UTC+8, ltlee1 wrote:

On Saturday, March 12, 2022 at 12:29:51 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:

"There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the war and is responsible for how it is being waged. But why he did so is another matter. The mainstream view in the West is that he is an irrational, out-of-touch aggressor bent on creating a

greater Russia in the mould of the former Soviet Union. Thus, he alone bears full responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.

But that story is wrong. The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis which began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine, but also has the potential to escalate into

a nuclear war between Russia and NATO.

The trouble over Ukraine actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration pushed the alliance to announce that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members”. Russian leaders responded immediately

with outrage, characterising this decision as an existential threat to Russia and vowing to thwart it. According to a respected Russian journalist, Mr Putin “flew into a rage” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and
the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” America ignored Moscow’s red line, however, and pushed forward to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. That strategy included two other elements: bringing Ukraine closer to the EU and
making it a pro-American democracy.

These efforts eventually sparked hostilities in February 2014, ...

The next major confrontation came in December 2021 and led directly to the current war. The main cause was that Ukraine was becoming a de facto member of NATO. The process started in December 2017, when the Trump administration decided to sell Kyiv

“defensive weapons”. What counts as “defensive” is hardly clear-cut, however, and these weapons certainly looked offensive to Moscow and its allies in the Donbas region. Other NATO countries got in on the act, shipping weapons to Ukraine,
training its armed forces and allowing it to participate in joint air and naval exercises. In July 2021, Ukraine and America co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region involving navies from 32 countries. Operation Sea Breeze almost provoked
Russia to fire at a British naval destroyer that deliberately entered what Russia considers its territorial waters.

The links between Ukraine and America continued growing under the Biden administration. This commitment is reflected throughout an important document..."

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis

John Mearsheimer's conclusion is clear: the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis.
Wrong-headed policy also has its consequence. In this case, China is the obvious winner of this international crisis. In addition, the conflict contributes to US strategic decline. And in Daivd Goldman's article, prospect of US strategic decline also

makes some prominent American strategist mad. In short, "They cannot bear the idea that America might have to share power with a rising China, and in their heart of hearts, they prefer a war, even a losing one, to this sort of humiliation."

https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2022/03/11/americas-strategic-thinkers-cant-think-that-americas-power-is-fading

"China is the obvious winner in the present international crisis. It has the luxury of choosing between two outcomes that increase its power: to act as a friend of all the parties in the Ukraine dispute and mediate the conflict, or to gain the

battered Russian Federation as an ally. It probably can do both.

...
The United States put Ukraine on track for a violent confrontation with Russia by undermining the Russian-backed Minsk II agreement, which would have kept Ukraine out of NATO and allowed home rule for the Russophone provinces Donetsk and Luhansk

within a sovereign Ukraine.

Russia charged that Washington intended to move nuclear missiles to the Russia-Ukraine border 300 miles from Moscow, and invaded Ukraine to preempt this. Whether the Biden administration insisted on Ukraine’s option to join NATO out of design or

incompetence, US policy is now in ruins.

That leaves Washington debating how to deal with a China that fields 400 city-buster nuclear weapons and the ICBMs that would be needed to deliver them, as well as about 1,300 medium-to-long-range surface-to-ship missiles that probably can sink US

aircraft carriers – not to mention a host of other strategic weapons.

It also leaves Washington a couple of steps away from a nuclear confrontation with Russia, which last October tested a submarine-launched hypervelocity glide vehicle, a super-fast cruise missile that could hit Washington in 60 seconds from a

submarine a hundred miles offshore.

And it also leaves the United States with the prospect of the union of Russia’s formidable technical talent, including a cadre of engineers as large as America’s, with China’s burgeoning high-tech industry.
The simplest solution, in the view of former Defense Department official Seth Cropsey, is military confrontation with China. “One would expect the Russian invasion to formalize the return to traditional great-power politics, what theorists of

international relations call ‘multipolarity,’ a system in which multiple political and military centers of gravity exist,” Cropsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal on March 9.

“This prediction is alluring and wrong,” Cropsey added, because of China’s lust for conquest: “China remains the crucial actor. The Communist Party under Mr Xi … drew a unique lesson from the Soviet collapse. The Soviets failed not because

they didn’t integrate capitalist insights into their economy but because they never went far enough in their external expansion.”

I should add that Cropsey, a dedicated amateur cellist, is a personal friend; I have dined at his home in Washington and think him personable and literate. But the above statement suggests that he is subject to a maniacal delusion. China’s

strategic thinking says exactly the opposite, that expansion caused the downfall of the Soviet Empire.

On this topic, I recommend a recent essay by Professor Wen Yang of Fudan University, a prominent columnist for the leading Chinese news site “The Observer.” Wen writes: “World hegemony exercised in the name of liberalism must be opposed by the

people of the world, and world hegemony exercised in the name of communism also must be opposed by the people of the world.”

From the ashes of Ukraine, Cropsey avers, will arise a strategy for world domination that I would characterize as straight out of Fu Manchu:

China will use Russia’s increasing isolation to transform Moscow into a petrochemical satellite, taking advantage of Western sanctions to secure Russian energy flows indefinitely.
In turn, China hopes that Russia, humbled or emboldened by its Ukraine adventure – and with or without Mr. Putin at the helm– will occupy Western attention as Beijing gobbles up the choicest Pacific possessions and extends its economic and

diplomatic tendrils into the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. Far from accepting independent Russian action, China is counting on Russian failure to accelerate the satisfaction of its boundless appetite.

Another old friend, former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, has taken the opportunity of the Ukraine war to promote his “Strategy of Denial,” which amounts to mining the Taiwan Strait and otherwise reinforcing Taiwan to forestall the mainland

attack on Taiwan that Colby, like Cropsey, believes to be imminent.

I have known the affable Mr Colby – grandson of the late CIA chief William Colby – since he was a law student at Yale. I reviewed his book here, concluding:

There is a close analogy here to the outbreak of war in 1914. An American attempt to deny China access to Taiwan would have the same effect as the Russian mobilization that triggered the conflict, in Christopher Clark’s authoritative account.
If one side mobilizes, the other must also try to avoid a catastrophic disadvantage – and this is how great powers “sleepwalk” (Clark) into wars they do not want and cannot win.

I have asked Colby numerous times in public forms how likely he thinks it is that China’s DF-21 or DF-26 missiles could target and destroy an American carrier under full steam. Answer came there none.
If the US takes military measures that make it possible to ditch the One China policy and establish Taiwan as a sovereign state, China may well act preemptively and seize the island by force. If US planes try to stop this, China may sink the carrier

that launched them. That could start a nuclear war, as Admiral James Staviridis describes in his 2021 thriller 2034.

Colby’s reluctance to answer the decisive question – whether Chinese missiles can sink US carriers – puts him in the company of the naval strategists of 1940 who watched torpedo bombers sink their battleships from Taranto to Singapore to Pearl

Harbor.

Military logic, though, has little to do with these outbursts. Cropsey, Colby and other old friends simply cannot wrap their minds around the miserable fact that American power is fading, the consequence of thirty years of grotesque blunders

following the end of the Cold War. They cannot bear the idea that America might have to share power with a rising China, and in their heart of hearts, they prefer a war, even a losing one, to this sort of humiliation."

US will continue to engage in war to remain in supreme power. They will remain on economic and financial sanctions. The future of war will be nuclear and bio war. US will continue to participate and agitate allies to contain countries.

The US will certainly continue to do what it wants to do.
The problem with US strategists is that too many of them are seeing the world through a zero-sum lens.
Straightly speaking, China is not any kind of winner. If it has a choice, it certainly would choose no war/special operation over war/special operation. Like the rest of world, China is suffering the bad economic consequence of the war.
Given the current Cold War world order framework, Xi was in no position to advise Biden to withdraw NATO membership offer to Ukraine. He is also in no position to advise Putin not to invade.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Thursday, March 17, 2022 at 7:26:39 PM UTC+8, ltlee1 wrote:

On Wednesday, March 16, 2022 at 7:33:15 PM UTC, stoney wrote:

On Monday, March 14, 2022 at 9:30:13 PM UTC+8, ltlee1 wrote:

On Saturday, March 12, 2022 at 12:29:51 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:

"There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the war and is responsible for how it is being waged. But why he did so is another matter. The mainstream view in the West is that he is an irrational, out-of-touch aggressor bent on creating a

greater Russia in the mould of the former Soviet Union. Thus, he alone bears full responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.

But that story is wrong. The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis which began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine, but also has the potential to escalate

into a nuclear war between Russia and NATO.

The trouble over Ukraine actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration pushed the alliance to announce that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members”. Russian leaders responded immediately

with outrage, characterising this decision as an existential threat to Russia and vowing to thwart it. According to a respected Russian journalist, Mr Putin “flew into a rage” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and
the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” America ignored Moscow’s red line, however, and pushed forward to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. That strategy included two other elements: bringing Ukraine closer to the EU and
making it a pro-American democracy.

These efforts eventually sparked hostilities in February 2014, ...

The next major confrontation came in December 2021 and led directly to the current war. The main cause was that Ukraine was becoming a de facto member of NATO. The process started in December 2017, when the Trump administration decided to sell

Kyiv “defensive weapons”. What counts as “defensive” is hardly clear-cut, however, and these weapons certainly looked offensive to Moscow and its allies in the Donbas region. Other NATO countries got in on the act, shipping weapons to Ukraine,
training its armed forces and allowing it to participate in joint air and naval exercises. In July 2021, Ukraine and America co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region involving navies from 32 countries. Operation Sea Breeze almost provoked
Russia to fire at a British naval destroyer that deliberately entered what Russia considers its territorial waters.

The links between Ukraine and America continued growing under the Biden administration. This commitment is reflected throughout an important document..."

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis

John Mearsheimer's conclusion is clear: the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis.
Wrong-headed policy also has its consequence. In this case, China is the obvious winner of this international crisis. In addition, the conflict contributes to US strategic decline. And in Daivd Goldman's article, prospect of US strategic decline

also makes some prominent American strategist mad. In short, "They cannot bear the idea that America might have to share power with a rising China, and in their heart of hearts, they prefer a war, even a losing one, to this sort of humiliation."

https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2022/03/11/americas-strategic-thinkers-cant-think-that-americas-power-is-fading

"China is the obvious winner in the present international crisis. It has the luxury of choosing between two outcomes that increase its power: to act as a friend of all the parties in the Ukraine dispute and mediate the conflict, or to gain the

battered Russian Federation as an ally. It probably can do both.

...
The United States put Ukraine on track for a violent confrontation with Russia by undermining the Russian-backed Minsk II agreement, which would have kept Ukraine out of NATO and allowed home rule for the Russophone provinces Donetsk and Luhansk

within a sovereign Ukraine.

Russia charged that Washington intended to move nuclear missiles to the Russia-Ukraine border 300 miles from Moscow, and invaded Ukraine to preempt this. Whether the Biden administration insisted on Ukraine’s option to join NATO out of design or

incompetence, US policy is now in ruins.

That leaves Washington debating how to deal with a China that fields 400 city-buster nuclear weapons and the ICBMs that would be needed to deliver them, as well as about 1,300 medium-to-long-range surface-to-ship missiles that probably can sink US

aircraft carriers – not to mention a host of other strategic weapons.

It also leaves Washington a couple of steps away from a nuclear confrontation with Russia, which last October tested a submarine-launched hypervelocity glide vehicle, a super-fast cruise missile that could hit Washington in 60 seconds from a

submarine a hundred miles offshore.

And it also leaves the United States with the prospect of the union of Russia’s formidable technical talent, including a cadre of engineers as large as America’s, with China’s burgeoning high-tech industry.
The simplest solution, in the view of former Defense Department official Seth Cropsey, is military confrontation with China. “One would expect the Russian invasion to formalize the return to traditional great-power politics, what theorists of

international relations call ‘multipolarity,’ a system in which multiple political and military centers of gravity exist,” Cropsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal on March 9.

“This prediction is alluring and wrong,” Cropsey added, because of China’s lust for conquest: “China remains the crucial actor. The Communist Party under Mr Xi … drew a unique lesson from the Soviet collapse. The Soviets failed not

because they didn’t integrate capitalist insights into their economy but because they never went far enough in their external expansion.”

I should add that Cropsey, a dedicated amateur cellist, is a personal friend; I have dined at his home in Washington and think him personable and literate. But the above statement suggests that he is subject to a maniacal delusion. China’s

strategic thinking says exactly the opposite, that expansion caused the downfall of the Soviet Empire.

On this topic, I recommend a recent essay by Professor Wen Yang of Fudan University, a prominent columnist for the leading Chinese news site “The Observer.” Wen writes: “World hegemony exercised in the name of liberalism must be opposed by

the people of the world, and world hegemony exercised in the name of communism also must be opposed by the people of the world.”

From the ashes of Ukraine, Cropsey avers, will arise a strategy for world domination that I would characterize as straight out of Fu Manchu:

China will use Russia’s increasing isolation to transform Moscow into a petrochemical satellite, taking advantage of Western sanctions to secure Russian energy flows indefinitely.
In turn, China hopes that Russia, humbled or emboldened by its Ukraine adventure – and with or without Mr. Putin at the helm– will occupy Western attention as Beijing gobbles up the choicest Pacific possessions and extends its economic and

diplomatic tendrils into the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. Far from accepting independent Russian action, China is counting on Russian failure to accelerate the satisfaction of its boundless appetite.

Another old friend, former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, has taken the opportunity of the Ukraine war to promote his “Strategy of Denial,” which amounts to mining the Taiwan Strait and otherwise reinforcing Taiwan to forestall the mainland

attack on Taiwan that Colby, like Cropsey, believes to be imminent.

I have known the affable Mr Colby – grandson of the late CIA chief William Colby – since he was a law student at Yale. I reviewed his book here, concluding:

There is a close analogy here to the outbreak of war in 1914. An American attempt to deny China access to Taiwan would have the same effect as the Russian mobilization that triggered the conflict, in Christopher Clark’s authoritative account.
If one side mobilizes, the other must also try to avoid a catastrophic disadvantage – and this is how great powers “sleepwalk” (Clark) into wars they do not want and cannot win.

I have asked Colby numerous times in public forms how likely he thinks it is that China’s DF-21 or DF-26 missiles could target and destroy an American carrier under full steam. Answer came there none.
If the US takes military measures that make it possible to ditch the One China policy and establish Taiwan as a sovereign state, China may well act preemptively and seize the island by force. If US planes try to stop this, China may sink the

carrier that launched them. That could start a nuclear war, as Admiral James Staviridis describes in his 2021 thriller 2034.

Colby’s reluctance to answer the decisive question – whether Chinese missiles can sink US carriers – puts him in the company of the naval strategists of 1940 who watched torpedo bombers sink their battleships from Taranto to Singapore to

Pearl Harbor.

Military logic, though, has little to do with these outbursts. Cropsey, Colby and other old friends simply cannot wrap their minds around the miserable fact that American power is fading, the consequence of thirty years of grotesque blunders

following the end of the Cold War. They cannot bear the idea that America might have to share power with a rising China, and in their heart of hearts, they prefer a war, even a losing one, to this sort of humiliation."

US will continue to engage in war to remain in supreme power. They will remain on economic and financial sanctions. The future of war will be nuclear and bio war. US will continue to participate and agitate allies to contain countries.

The US will certainly continue to do what it wants to do.
The problem with US strategists is that too many of them are seeing the world through a zero-sum lens.
Straightly speaking, China is not any kind of winner. If it has a choice, it certainly would choose no war/special operation over war/special operation. Like the rest of world, China is suffering the bad economic consequence of the war.
Given the current Cold War world order framework, Xi was in no position to advise Biden to withdraw NATO membership offer to Ukraine. He is also in no position to advise Putin not to invade.

If Biden withdraws its NATO membership offer to Ukraine, then Ukraine will not what is now. Xi is in no position to advise Biden . Even Western allies in EU are not in position to advise Biden. Only NATO countries can advise Biden.
So, seriously, US is the one agitating a war on Ukraine. If Biden is successful in their NATO membership offer to Ukraine, it can use the same offer to other countries of influences, too.

Henceforth, make not mistake, the Western Media is now actively told by the West and its allies to rise up more media attacks on Russia, and warping up and faking up sick children and prepaid women to tell their sad stories and the showing of building
damages in Ukraine in order to distract other world media coverages on their US and its allies that are now fueling the war with more disastrous weapons to Ukraine to destroy Ukraine and blame Russia for them.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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