FLBear5630 said:
Redbrickbear said:
FLBear5630 said:
KaiBear said:
Doc Holliday said:
They want WW3
Only because they believe they won't be doing the dying .
The reason Ukraine and Taiwan are vulnerable and in the positions they are in is because they are isolated, to be picked off at Russia and China's convenience. If Taiwan was included in with S Korea, Japan, Singapore and Australia they would be in a safer position. Same with Ukraine, if they were admitted in the 90's with Poland and the Baltics all this would not have happened.
A counter argument would be that Taiwan and Ukraine are so vial to China/Russia that if Taiwan had been included in a "Pacific NATO" and if Ukraine had been allowed to join NATO in the late 90s it would have set off a war much sooner. These adversaries being of course nuclear armed
Just as the USA has a sphere of influence (one of the largest on earth...or that the earth has ever had) other nations have spheres of influence as well.
China has long said that Taiwan is a redline for them (status quo must remain, no USA troops on Taiwan, no military alliance)... And Russia has said the same about places like Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia.
They have shown that they will fight for these areas.
The question of course for us is.....what does this matter to the American people?
These places are not vital to the USA. We can make semiconductors in S. Korea, Japan, or here at home as easily as we can in Taiwan (small island of barely 23 million people). And Ukraine's rusting out factories and farmlands are not of vital importance to the USA. Not while we have the American Midwest (greatest farm belt on earth) and the Canadian farming prairie provinces.
Actually, Ukraine had more Nukes and if they didn't follow our lead in Bucharest they would not be in this mess, We were supposed to defend them. Not binding, I know. Your word is you bond, right.
As for Taiwan, there were decades that the West could have secured Taiwan and China would do nothing.
1. Ukraine was/is broke...they could not afford to maintain those nukes...nor did they have operational control of the nukes to begin with (Moscow did). Its also one of the most corrupt nations on earth. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Those nukes also "belonged" to the Soviet Union....and the Russian Federation is the successor to the USSR in terms of legal agreements...so a case could be made they belong to Russian anyway.
"With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the United States
considered the Russian Federation as the successor state of the USSR"
"The Russian Federation succeeded to the Soviet Union's seat, including its permanent membership on the Security Council in the United Nations after the 1991..."
https://www.gmfus.org/news/despite-threat-it-faces-ukraine-was-right-give-its-nuclear-weapons[It is not simply a matter of
Ukraine not being safe today because it did not keep its nuclear weapons. At the time it took the decision,
not only did it not have operational control of its nuclear arsenal, it also lacked any experience in controlling it and the budget to operate even the
TU-160 bomber jets it inherited. Ukraine had inherited not a traditional army, but an enormously powerful military without,
as James Sherr writes, "a Ministry of Defense, without a General Staff and without central organs of command-and-control."
Without a capable military imbued with the knowledge of its own nuclear program, its stockpile would have constituted not a deterrent or safeguard for newly independent Ukraine but a large danger to itself and the world.
Thus, newly independent Ukraine could have become a target for bad actors or other states intent on obtaining nuclear materiel or weapons. It is even not inconceivable that Russia would have at some point attempted to retake the Soviet arsenal that had been left in the country.]
2. If this was the case than it would run contrary to the policy advice that every American President from Truman to Trump has been given.....keep the status quo in Taiwan (that benefits us)....don't antagonize China over Taiwan...something that might make them invade.