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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, it is possibly a best case scenario for the US, in the sense that now we are getting an example of what happens when a leader pushes through sanctions and it gives us a sense of just how catastrophic a Chinese invasion of a foreign neighbor would be.

So far, it also shows that the theory that a strongly interconnected economy can prevent war is pretty moot. The EU and the US applied just about every economic sanctions (except imports of oil and gas in the case of EU) and Putin won't stop.

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I've not really seen people discussing this, but it seems like one of the biggest 'results' of this invasion as far as long term geopolitics goes. Personally, I'd bought into the idea that heavily intertwined economies tended to prevent war. I'm much less convinced now, inasmuch as it seems fairly clear that autocrats with the power to wage war may yet do so on much more ideological grounds, economics be damned.

> I'd bought into the idea that heavily intertwined economies tended to prevent war

Hardly a novel error, at least: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

Yes, I think the real takeaway is that people are not rational actors and people in positions of massive power even less so.

I think there was an assumption baked into globalism that heads of state would behave in the best interest of their citizens, but that's only even approximately true when the country is a functioning democracy. In an authoritarian state, what's good for the leader may vary wildly from what's good for the people. One could argue that the entire point of autocratic power is for the leader to be able to do what their people don't want.

And once you have someone with that level of power and no obligations to the masses, there should be no expectation that they will be have rationally or in the economic interests of the entire country. As long as it benefits their perverse psychology or isolated offshore bank accounts, it's on the table.

Pretty thin experiment to be making conclusions on though.

There can be lots of scenarios where the last 70 years saw lots more war.

Especially the "people in power are even less rational" part. The 99% might seem more predictable than the 1% only because the law of large numbers smooths out the random, unpredictable irrational acts.

That's a good point. It may simultaneously be true that globalism doesn't prevent irrational war to the degree that we had hoped, but it does still prevent it more than some other economic alternative.

(Personally, I think the best way to prevent war is non-corrupt democracies with little autocratic power concentration and a strong fair press. Most people don't want to go to war and kill others, so when you give the entire populace agency over what the military does, you get a lot less irrational wars.)

I think given the speed of information today people have too high exceptions just how fast something like sanctions would take to work.

it is not a "One Click, Buy now, next day delivery" Amazon Prime type of thing, we have come to expect INSTANT RESULTS, that is just not how Geo Politics works

I also find it amusing when people say Gas price increases are due to Russia... Those are comming for sure, but no there has not been enough time for Russia's action to impact gas prices.. not yet.... But brace for it...

Politicians love to Cease on current events to explain economic results that are actually months or years in the making

Prices change in anticipation of changes to supply and demand, even if those changes have not occurred yet. The stock market will swing down on the announcement of an interest rate hike, even if such a hike hasn't taken place yet. So it's entirely reasonable to attribute price increases to current events (although it is still worth pointing out that it's only a contributing factor, since inflation has been quite high for months).

You forget one critical thing, there is vast difference between stock and Commodity trading which is 100% speculation based vs Physical goods pricing which is not.

The idea that business are adjusting their physical goods sold pricing based on news events is laughable, I know of ZERO businesses that do that.

The price of gasoline seems to follow extremely tightly with the price of crude oil.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2501/crude-oil-vs-gasoline-price...

Yeah I think it takes only one madman at the rudder to grind global trade and diplomacy to a halt.

> So far, it also shows that the theory that a strongly interconnected economy can prevent war is pretty moot.

This sounds a little no true scottsman, but I'm not sure Russia was heavily interconnected. What necessary good(s) do they lose out on when/if the world refuses to export to them? They're fairly self-sufficient, as I understand it, which makes sanctions relatively weak.

> The EU and the US applied just about every economic sanctions (except imports of oil and gas in the case of EU) and Putin won't stop.

To some extent, sanctions work more as a threat than a punishment, but threats only work if they are credible. The goal of these sanctions might not be so much to stop Putin (he clearly won't be stopping in the near term, for a number of political, psychological, and sociological reasons) but to a) damage the Russian economy and reduce their capacity to execute this war in the medium term, b) use that example as an object lesson for other countries who are considering expansionism, and c) lend credibility to future threats of sanctions.

The gas+oil spigot is not completely turned off yet, even by sanctions adherent countries. The real difficulty comes if there's an end run around the sanctions by China and/or India. Imagine an exodus from that market. Imagine Apple having to exit China. And imagine all the services and trade with India. Those are very different spigots than oil and gas. Closing those is going to involve a lot of pain.

Investing in those countries always involved tradeoffs. But the idea any country would help another in a blatantly illegal war of aggression to expand borders - it's so contrary to the U.N. charter and post-WW2 world that it's really quite surprising. China? As a founding member of the U.N. and permanent member of the Security Council helping Russia in any capacity? I am surprised. China may have lost upwards of 15 million in WW2. Have we forgotten everything?

I am surprised by the direction China took here. This is a European war, not a US one, to me they had everything to gain by painting themselves as a supporter of Ukraine (getting preferable treatment from the EU) than as a neutral party.

China being against US interest in general makes perfect sense to me, but against the EU it just does not make as much sense.

China is against the West (or anyone else) intruding on other nations issues (specially China's and its neighbours)... so, it's not suprising they won't wish to take sides on a fairly regional fight they have very little historical or economical interest in. Other distant, large but non-aligned countries like India and Brazil seem to have taken similar positions - not taking sides, just hoping for peace.

The interested parties in this war are NATO countries and Russia, besides Ukraine, because the war is a consequence of decades of hostilities regarding the re-alignment of the ex-USSR territories East of Poland towards the West and against Russia.

Members of the Security Council are obligated to intrude. That is the agreement they are a party to. If China cannot perform that duty, they need to withdraw as a permanent member of the Security Council.

Russia has announced they have the right to expand their borders using aggression. They have committe the supreme international crime, as judged at Nuremberg. If countries aren't subscribing to that world view anymore, then we are lost. We are doomed to have a world war three. The entire fucking point of these institutions is to prevent another one. If nothing else China should be an institutionalist, preserving the international system of laws for its own long term interest.

Maybe it's lost on people, but Poland told NATO in 1993 that if they weren't allowed to join, they were going to build their own nukes. Because they didn't trust Russia. They weren't the only one.

If the U.N. Charter system dissolves, the NPT falls soon after that. And then it's an arms race.

> China being against US interest in general makes perfect sense to me, but against the EU it just does not make as much sense.

I'm not sure if EU can be considered as a party able to care about own interest. It's just a group that is more concerned about US than common European interest. If it were an independent factor, we would already have own army and there would be no US occupation^H "support" troops scattered at every strategic point in Europe.

And Europe would have strong rules that would limit the influence of US traditional and social media in Europe, that basically create what Europeans think and want.

So yes, if China wants to be number one, it will focus on harming the current number one, and not his minions, which will sooner or later just change their master when number one changes.

> It's just a group that is more concerned about US than common European interest. If it were an independent factor, we would already have own army and there would be no US occupation^H "support" troops scattered at every strategic point in Europe.

US as Europe's whipping boy knows little bounds. The US has repeatedly asked EU countries to stop funding Putin's war machine and fund their own militaries with something substantial. Most EU countries have continued to poo-poo this, forcing US to spend 4% GDP on defense while Germany has gotten away with 1% while funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Trump was threatening to remove majority of military funding to Germany and they were aghast, "how dare the US not spend their $ to protect us." Of course people like you still somehow make US patronage of your defense into an "occupation." We'd be ecstatic if you actually funded your own instead of making us just to keep international order.

If spending money on military and "defending" Europe doesn't serve American interests, why not just leave Europe and let us defend ourselves? Your army stays to make sure it protects your interest, not ours.

If you think USA is doing us a favour, just leave Europe, and Middle East, and Africa, and Asia. Just go back to your continent and let us deal with Putin and other challenges best we can. We don't need neither your "protection" nor your "protection fee".

Maybe without US warmongering, we would not need to be afraid of Russia. German technology and Russian resources is something that USA might be scared to death to end its world domination.

I take the opposite lesson - for the next generation, no one will think about invading a neighbor without remembering how devastating the sanctions were to Russia.

How devastating were they really? The west is cutting off Russia, but China will be a good enough market for Russian resources for the next decade. Sure Russia will be poorer as a result, but their invasion of Ukraine is about as bad as it can gets (no believable motive, lots of sympathy for Ukraine, very publicised destruction in videos and pictures from Russia) so they got the worst possible sanctions we could impose and yet Russia is still bombing Kyiv, they didn't sue for peace in exchange of lesser sanctions.

> How devastating were they really?

Well, we don't know, and won't for years perhaps, I should've clarified that I'm guessing about what will happen in the long-term, not asserting that Putin will say, "Oh gosh, look at the stock market, I'd better withdraw" in the next few days. But it does seem like the sanctions will have the effect of impoverishing and weakening Russia for decades.

Perhaps in a further destabilized future, Russia could emerge stronger and more independent. Russia may be forced to become more self reliant.

China as a monopsony buyer of Russian gas will be able to set the price, even one that does not recoup the capital costs.

Even before the invasion, the Power of Siberia had been viewed as extremely unprofitable (it seems likely that corruption played a major role in driving up costs), and then there's the further issue that more work is necessary for it to send its total capacity, which is a fraction of what it sends to Europe.

> Yet the project does not appear to be as grand a success as Moscow would have liked it to be. To begin with, the capacity of gas production on the Russian side of the border is open to doubt. The Chayanda gas field in Yakutia region, currently the only source of gas for the pipeline, can produce up to 25 bcm a year.

> To deliver 38 bcm to China, Gazprom has to develop another large field, Kovykta in the Irkutsk region some 800km south of Chayanda, and connect it to the Power of Siberia with another pipeline, which has not been built yet. The completion of the infrastructure needed for pumping the required volume to China is probably going to take more than 10 years, according to Gazprom’s pre-feasibility study of the project.

> ...

> Currently Gazprom sends westwards about 200 bcm annually via a number of pipeline routes. The Power of Siberia project, however, has a limit of 38 bcm and it is unlikely that another major pipeline project would be launched any time soon. Thus, the Russian company would not be able to switch export flows as it pleases.

> China as a monopsony buyer of Russian gas will be able to set the price

Is it just China? EU also will continue buying gas, and prices are much higher now than year ago.

EU will continue for now, but there's a significant push to move away from Russian gas in many European countries in the next year or two. And if Russia takes over all of Ukraine, I expect sanctions to target energy as well. If they target oil, Putin has threatened to shut off European access to gas - we will see if that's a bluff or not.

> EU will continue for now, but there's a significant push to move away from Russian gas in many European countries in the next year or two.

the question is if those countries will have strong commitment to invest into significant and non-trivial infrastructure rebuild, or it will be just speeches from politicians.

> Russia takes over all of Ukraine

I don't think this was ever goal of Russia. I think they wanted to occupy some southern and eastern regions, force Ukraine to recognize Russian Crimea and set some puppet government in Kyiv.

I believe Ukraine and Russia will reach some agreement soon, Ukraine will likely lose some territory and political independence, and in 3 years Europeans will mostly forget about this stuff, will be destructed by other issues and continue buying Russian oil and gas.

> and set some puppet government in Kyiv

That's what I meant by taking over all of Ukraine. If Russia sets up a puppet government, then I expect further sanctions. Maybe they won't if a settlement is reached with the current government.

It’s still to early to see all the effects of the sanctions. That was something repeated several times.

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