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Comment by stogot | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think China does not want to fight?

Their society is rapidly improving. The less they fight, the better off they'll be. What will fighting get them apart from ruin?

It isn't a guarantee of peace, obviously. The same logic applies to everyone and there are still a lot of wars. But the warmakers tend to struggle to achieve the sort of results that the Chinese do and as a government they have a 50 year history of success through peace not war.

Their society is rapidly stagnating with a disastrous demographic profile. And since it's now a dictatorship the decision ultimately comes down to one man: Chairman Xi. No one knows what's going on in his head so we have to assume the worst.

Them having very few youths is hardly an indicator of war is it? I was more concerned when they had a big excess.

Russia is pretty short of young people these days too, and they're all too happy to throw the ones they still have into a pointless war.

Yeah but the Russians didn't declare war because of their demographics. In fact, if you ask them why this happened Putin gave a whole speech [0] on this when he sent the troops in, which can be neatly summarised:

> We are talking about what causes us particular concern and anxiety, about those fundamental threats that year after year, step by step, are rudely and unceremoniously created by irresponsible politicians in the West in relation to our country. I mean the expansion of the Nato bloc to the east, bringing its military infrastructure closer to Russian borders.

It isn't obvious that China is dealing with the same sort of pressures in East Asia.

[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-putin-s-declar... - although technically I suspect he was declaring Special Military Operation.

I think it's well-established that Putin's posture on the subject isn't sincere or an accurate assessment of their government's actual motive for war.

If NATO anxiety was the primary factor for the war in Ukraine, Russia wouldn't be so blasé about draining troops and hardware from its borders with NATO countries to throw them into the meat-grinder.

They would still probably do it, mind you, but it would be a huge scandal and a subject of existential dread for Russian media and elites.

The fact that they've been stripping their NATO borders bare with barely anyone noticing or caring shows that nobody views the prospect of a NATO invasion as realistic. It was always a fig leaf.

(Although maybe there were scandals and I never heard of them. My exposure to Russian media is filtered through Western media. But I heard about other scandals and anxieties.)

> The fact that they've been stripping their NATO borders bare with barely anyone noticing or caring shows that nobody views the prospect of a NATO invasion as realistic.

Nobody has ever suggested that there was a prospect of a NATO invasion of Russia. That is crazy talk; it'd be the end of civilisation in the northern hemisphere. They aren't deploying troops to ward off a NATO invasion, that is what the ICBMs are for.

Right. But why is NATO "bringing military infrastructure closer to Russian borders" a concern to Russia if they aren't worried about a NATO invasion?

So what's really going on? Well, Putin said "rudely". Russia feels insulted because everybody wants to be in NATO, and nobody wants to be Russia's buddy... if you take Putin's words at face value.

If you don't, then I think Putin is terrified of Ukraine's revolution against a Russia-friendly leader. He doesn't want a western-friendly revolution in a culturally-Russian-adjacent country to succeed - there's too much chance that Russians might decide that they like the idea.

Because the major point of that infrastructure is to kill lots of Russians? It isn't hard to understand the motivations here, we've seen the US throw a massive hissy fit in the Cuban Missile crisis because of Soviet gear in Cuba and that was much more benign than a full military integration. And the US has a history dating back more than a century of tolerating no rival military powers in their hemisphere [0] let alone on their borders. There isn't anything to wonder at here - the Russians see their security interests as covering their border regions. In a display of outrageous hypocrisy the US also sees their security interests as also covering Russia's border region. Kremlin concern over this is hardly unexpected.

The way the Ukraine war has played out makes it pretty clear the Russians did have legitimate concerns. When the US invades Iraq with no moral justification, everyone moves on. When Russia invades Ukraine with no moral justification we see a similar response from most of the world ... except NATO that goes in and orchestrates what Wikipedia suggests are half a million casualties of the Russian armed forces [1].

Why might Russian military planners feel this is a threat? Because they can count corpses and they're not stupid. If you want to argue that they underestimated the threat NATO posed them in Ukraine and so Putin was lying that is one thing, but if so his propaganda happened to be truer to reality than he thought because he made a great point. NATO is out to get the Russians.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...

We've seen the US throw a massive hissy fit in the Cuban Missile crisis because of Soviet gear in Cuba and that was much more benign than a full military integration.

Except there was no "full military integration" in the works, or even any "gear" deployed in Ukraine before Putin started throwing his massy hissy fit in 2014.

Because the major point of that infrastructure is to kill lots of Russians?

The point is to gently remind the current regime of the borders of NATO states, and of this thing known as Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.

Cool story. At that point we get back to:

> If NATO anxiety was the primary factor for the war in Ukraine, Russia wouldn't be so blasé about draining troops and hardware from its borders with NATO countries to throw them into the meat-grinder

> Because the major point of that infrastructure is to kill lots of Russians?

Because the major point of that infrastructure is to kill lots of Russians if they invade.

> Why might Russian military planners feel this is a threat? Because they can count corpses and they're not stupid.

Because they can count corpses after they invaded.

The logical conclusion was "don't invade", not "hurry up and invade while you still can".

HDI growth in China is levelling out, and irredentist claims to Taiwan are a foundational piece of the CCP's ideology. The "strategic ambiguity" could be tolerated while Taiwan was relatively unimportant, but now that TSMC is one of the most important companies in the world, China is certainly at least considering war.

Countries don't always behave logically, see Russia & the self defeating war in Ukraine.

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