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Comment by mu53 | Hacker News Reader

The US is not going to help defend Taiwan is a fair thesis, but reciprocally, China is not going to attack Taiwan.

Even if Russia gets all of it's demands in the peacemaking process with Ukraine, that war has done permanent and lasting damage to it's economy and global position. For China to attack Taiwan, it would give up any hope of continuing it's healthy trends towards increased economic and political importance.

Eventually, Taiwan will re-join China when it is sufficiently strong. It's symbolism as a continued humiliation by the west is more useful as propaganda than an actual military target.

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> that war has done permanent and lasting damage to it's economy and global position

Assuming the Ukraine is forced to surrender and Russia keeps the territories, Russia's reputation will increase. They'll be able to say they fought NATO and won. Even today, people say with a serious face that Ukraine started the war and many believe it.

Russia is damaged, but if it's allowed to win, it will recover and become a beacon for the global authoritarians/south.

Unfortunately, dictators don't care much about damage to it's economy as long as they continue to be in power. When they expand and occupy more land, they will look very good in their country's history book which is a huge motivation for dictators. That's the reason why nobody thought Putin would seriously consider invasion but he did. And China will definitely attack Taiwan when the timing is right. Even if a million people dies, Xi would still be considered a hero by most chinese people if he took back Taiwan.

> Unfortunately, dictators don't care much about damage to it's economy as long as they continue to be in power.

It's not a dictator issue. The stock markets have been crashing lately due to "non-dictators".

> Even if a million people dies, Xi would still be considered a hero by most chinese people if he took back Taiwan.

I doubt most Chinese people care. They have better things to worry about these days e.g. crashing real estate.

It remains to be seen if the person I think you are referring to is a non-dictator. He said he would be a "dictator on day one", and he sure was, but then he somehow forgot to revert to non-dictator mode...

Regarding "crashing real estate": actually, most other countries would love to have built enough to bring down real estate prices. Being able to afford a place to live is good for most people! But of course, investing in real estate makes you interested into increasing the value of your property, so you're now incentivized to stop more real estate being built (and also to stop anything else that might decrease the value of your property - thus NIMBYism).

Russia is out of the AI race. That has been lost and there's no way to reverse it.

If Russia wouldn't have started a war, it could have focused on building huge datacenters. It has all the energy it would have needed, now all it can do with it is sell it to China for cheap.

What does Putin care about AI? From his perspective, a war and making Russia bigger, and being the supreme commander, is more fun.

Remember, he's old, probably a bit tech incompetent (compared to most people here).

> [Russia] could have focused on building huge datacenters.

Maybe that's what you think is important (or even what is important), but Putin is a different creature

AI will, after all, become the second biggest weapon humanity has ever created.

That's only relevant to Putin's decision making processes if he shares that perspective.

"Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind," [...] "It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world."

Vladimir Putin, 2017-09-01

https://www.twz.com/14141/putin-says-whoever-has-the-best-ar...

Oh, and:

"The most powerful AI chips in the world will be made right here in America and it'll be a big percentage of the chips made by this company (TSMC)"

Donald Trump, 2025-03-04

https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202503040017

In which regard?

> Russia is out of the AI race. That has been lost and there's no way to reverse it.

Huh, anybody with a laptop and an internet connection can be in the AI race within a few months if not weeks or days.

Have you seen Russia's laptops?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16827/russia-to-build-riscv-p...

> Unfortunately, dictators don't care much about damage to it's economy as long as they continue to be in power.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted but you are completely right. I would refer people who don’t believe this to Stephen Kotkin or Sarah Palin.

The US is not going to defend Taiwan because of chips, but China is also not going to attack Taiwan because of chips - if they do, they'll attack it for the same reason Putin attacked Ukraine: an "us vs them" mentality helps keep dictators in power, and nothing creates such a mentality better than a war. We can only hope that China is sensible enough to see the downsides too, but the current international climate is not a real deterrent. And I have to admit China has a better claim to Taiwan than Russia to Ukraine - they never recognized Taiwan's independence, while Russia (together with the US and the UK) agreed in 1994 to guarantee Ukraine's security in exchange for it renouncing the ex-USSR nuclear weapons stationed on its territory (https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1082124528/ukraine-russia-put...) - and now they're "guaranteeing their security" by invading them.

Putin was popular in Russia in 2022 and his domestic enemies were weak. Putin didn't need a war to hold on to power. Wars are sometimes fought to distract from domestic problems, but that wasn't the case here. Putin has argued for more than 20 years that the Russia/Ukraine border was not determined correctly when the USSR fell and that the 1991 borders were "unfair" to Russia. Add to that Ukraine's cultural shift away from Russia, messy elections, NATO, and the belief that Russia would easily defeat Ukraine and it's pretty clear why Putin decided to invade in 2022. No reason to hypothesize alternative theories. Putin is still very popular especially among older generations despite the heavy cost of the war.

> continuing it's healthy trends towards increased economic and political importance.

They "just" need to flip the script: be the single superpower that all countries are dependant upon, and then take over Taiwan. And then announce "Does anyone have something to say about what I just did?", and enjoy the silence. Already China is investing all over Africa, buying their compliance (which is what the US also did in the past).

Thanks to Daddy Issues 1 (Musk) and 2 (Trump) in the White House, their path just got a lot easier.

The response of the Russian 2014 invasion of Crimea was also quite muted because the EU was dependant on Russia's energy..

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