And so do the hiduvatas. I'm forced to encounter enough of these mfs irl. What's your point?

No. In this specific situation where everyone else has already slipped the tariffs?

China is the biggest target, it hasn't been isolated from the world economy or the free trade system. America is making an attempt to isolate china but how many countries will play along?

What soft power they retain will be aimed at “traditional values” crowd

Fair enough. But there is more to soft power than just cultural factors. The reliability of the American market itself is in question, and this is not a good thing. America going with fascist aesthetics is nowhere near as America trying to interfere with the global gravy train.

It is impossible to convince the Europeans to side with the global south out of the goodness of their hearts (which they don't have). However, fucking with their wallets will cause everyone except the most ardent European hitlerites to rethink their relationship with America.

Russia has a low unemployment rate and a strong trade surplus, which are the 2 macroeconomics factors that are really important. The former means that they are running their economy close to its physical limits, the latter means that their financial position wrt other countries is improving over time.

The government deficit itself is not really so important, since the conservation of money during trading means that

Net debt of Russian private sector + net debt of Russian government + net debt of rest of world to Russia = 0

Since money can only flow between these 3 sectors.

So as long as there is a trade surplus, the "net debt of rest of world to russia" is increasing, and this can be divided between the government or the private sector.

As a side note, this is why austerity efforts are always doomed. Any debt that the government isn't picking up is picked up by the private sector. Only actual way to reduce debts is by fixing the trade balance.

I never said this would work I just said I think this is their thinking.

It would have been best to clarify this in your initial comment.

I think it would be a mistake to view China as isolated in this. First of all, Russia, Vietnam and Iran are pretty strong partners to have. Secondly, there is the BRICS bloc, which has been growing largely due to American abuses of the international finance system. America flip flopping so hard on tariffs and then extorting every country in the world will no doubt cause American soft power to decline rapidly in the coming years as countries grow weary.

Also, on a purely military and industrial basis, China outclasses the whole of the west by such a margin that there really isn't anything to worry about. China of all countries cannot have its industries decimated short of nuclear strikes.

I would have defended against agreeing to specifically target civilians, yes.

This is only something that you have assumed that other people want. Dismantling a settler colonial state is not genocide, on the contrary, it prevents future genocides. And obviously, a settler state can only be dismantled through violent forceful actions, especially against those who seek to uphold it. Any pretenses otherwise are just as delusional as the belief that Nazi Germany could have been destroyed without killing the millions of soldiers of the Wehrmacht who fanatically defended the regime to the very end.

Or in other terms, there are no wars against the leaders, the very concept is nonsensical. Leaders don't fight wars, soldiers do.

Damn, I was about to wonder what the fuck was going in Japan.

Wouldn’t it have been better to fatwa specific Israeli leaders instead of the entire country that is full of civilians who didn’t cause this?

I hate this excuse liberals keep making, either to whitewash the actions of nations that have lost their minds, or to do cringe "I hate the government not the people" sthicks.

The government doesn't fall from the heavens. The Israeli leaders, just like the Americans or Nazis did not come out of nowhere and cause mass hypnosis amongst the innocent populations whose only crime was to be too weak to resist hypnosis. These leaders emerged from the population. They were supported by the population before they acquired legislative/executive power (that's how you aquire the power in the first place). Their commands mean nothing if the population doesn't go along with it. These leaders are leaders of nations only so long as they represent the wills of their nations, and the will of their nations is to kill, to loot and to worship their capitalist masters.

No man, and I mean none at all rules alone. One comes to realise this truth when one converses directly with the supposed innocents in America, or Germany or Israel. These people by and large know that their governments are involved in genocide (at this point, who isn't aware?), and if they aren't actively cheering it on, at the minimum they are going along with it.

India’s navy is still orders of magnitude below the standard of the modern Chinese fleet, and their doctrine is outdated in modern naval warfare

This assumes that things remain the same for the foreseeable future. If WW3 starts and finishes by the end of the decade, I would agree with this point. However, it is difficult to imagine that India will make no headway in military modernisation by 2030, especially if it has plans to participate in hostilities against China.

Not to mention, in a collaboration scenario, the west can help india speed up modernisation (and it will have its own internal initiative as well)

Also, their land borders with China are all nearly impassable Himalayan mountains and narrow passes,

They don't need to conquer China through the himalayas. They just need to occupy Chinese efforts and attention.

the least capable major power in the world militarily relative to other similarly sized countries

The only country with a similar size is China.

1. I wasn't purely talking about military strength. India has a relatively large industrial vase (decent amounts of steel production and large labor pool) which could in theory supply the west
2. India has the ability to help enforce a blockade of the straits of malacca.
3. India has borders with China, meaning they could occupy a front and divert resources
4. India is building up missiles and ships. It's not as if they don't have any domestic production of weapons.
5. India has a large population for youth, and therefore could supply the west with a large amount of manpower

I still think that in a ww3 scenario, China will win no matter what, but the west could drag things out much longer if they have India.

Please don't ...

If china manages its relationship with India we'll enough that the us can't get Indian help during ww3, then that's pretty much checkmate for the us.

Nuclear war or help from India is literally the only possibility of western imperialism ever defeating china (although in either scenario, western imperialism will also collapse).

Please no exploitation of gnc folk 🥺

The European Union is in many ways the successor to the third and second reichs (4rth reich basically), and faces many of the same problems.

It was more or less founded as the "european steel and coal community", which was an economic agreement that finally gave german industrialists access to French and Belgian and other European coal and iron ores (gaining access to these natural resources was a key German war aim in both world wars).

Over time, this economic "partnership" has expanded more and more, giving German industrialists greater and greater access to European markets and European labor. This culminated in the 1990s with the maastricht treaty (establishing the EU and euro), and the conquest of the former USSR by European capital.

Effectively, the German imperialism problem was solved by rolling over to its war aims in peacetime. This is the real secret to "European peace". Although it should be noted that countries like france are too big to be exploited, and instead participate in the EU as exploiters.

Today then, we have a situation that can be understood as "what if nazis won the war and cleaned up their PR?"*. The answer is a system of imperialism that has survived for a remarkably short amount of time but already seems to be on its last legs.

Like all bourgeois economies, imperialism could give Germany and its exploiter compatriots a shot in the viens. Capital was exported and labor was imported, allowing western European capitalists to eventually destroy by market forces the post-war bargaining power the working class had achieved.

However, the new markets they gained access to filled up with capital quickly, while birth rates in the core collapsed (partly due to the capitalist dismantling of social safety nets).

EU capital is furthermore, facing competition from American capital and Chinese industry. For instance, did you know that US capital has an FDI of $4 trillion in europe**? Meanwhile EU capital has invested only $3.4 trillion in the US (same source). The difference doesn't sound like a lot, but the EU stock market is around $12 trillion while the American one is about $46.5 trillion. Relative to their mutual sizes, EU capital faces more competition from US capital than vice versa.

All of this had culminated in weak and inconsistent returns on European, especially German capital. Look at this data for returns on German bank equity for an idea.

Combine this with the rise of populist movements, and an inability to produce things, it becomes clear that the EU and western European imperialism as a whole are no longer sustainable in its present state. They are on a path to inevitable self destruction. The same was true of the third reich, which had reached its terminal crisis through a somewhat different mechanism, taking on unsustainable levels of debt (in secret) for rearmnament. It was the reason it literally had to go to war, or it would have gone bankrupt. Today, the drums of war beat loudly in europe once again.

*this is more literal than you might think, given how big of a role actual nazis (and their ideological successors) have played in the EU and NATO

**page 9 of the source I have linked

Wait till you see what I'm cooking up next

There's a little bit of discussion on the hexbear post going on.

Why does this formatting look so weird 😭

`

 undefined

        mag = 1000;
    n = 2;
    N = 1000;
    
    Data = zeros([n N*mag]);
    
    %%%%%%%%%%LOOP
    
    for i = 1:N
    
        %Net production of [MOP; MOC]
        o = rand([n 1]); %[MOP; MOC] of net production
        o = o./sum(o); %Normalise the net production
        
        %Direct Labor use for [MOP; MOC]
        l = rand([n 1]);
        
        %Technical matrix:  [MOP to MOP, MOP to MOC;
        %                    MOC to MOP, MOC to MOC]
        A = rand([n n]);
        
        %Gross production
        O = (eye(n)-A)\o;
        
        %Gross labor use
        L = O.*l;
        L = L/sum(L); %Normalising gross labor use
        
        %LTV prices calculation
        LTV = sum(((eye(n)-A)\eye(n)).*l)';
        
        %Randomised prices
        P = rand([n mag]);
        
        %Interindustry flows
        %F = A.*(O'); %Physical flows, NOT USED IN THIS SIM
        
        %Inter-industry sales
        R = O.*P;  %Market value of gross production
        C = A' .*O*P; %Costs of inputs to production
        
        %Industry to consumer sales (assuming consumers save/lose nothing)
        S = o.*P; %Sales to consumers
        Y = sum(S); %Total consumer spending = wages paid out
        W = L.*Y; %Wages paid out vector by industry
        
        M = R - C - W; %Net Income by industry
        M = mag*M./sum(abs(M),2); %Normalise net income
        
        specific_price = log((P(2,:)*LTV(1))./(LTV(2)*P(1,:))); %the x-coordinate variable
    
        Data(:,(1+ (i-1)*mag ):(i*mag)) = [specific_price; M(1,:)]; 
    
    end
    %%%%%%%%%%LOOP
    
    pts = linspace(-3, 3, 251);
    H = log(histcounts2(Data(1,:), Data(2,:), pts, pts));
    imagesc(pts, pts, H);
    axis xy;
    set(gca, 'XLim', pts([1 end]), 'YLim', pts([1 end]), 'YDir', 'normal');
    colormap copper
    a=colorbar;
    a.Label.String = "Density of simulation outcomes [natural log scale]";
    
    xlabel {Ratio of actual price to LTV price [natural log scale]}
    ylabel {Net income of sector 1 [linear scale]}
    
    saveas(gcf,"repro.png");
    `
  

My approach in the sim was:

1. Randomly generate a 2-sector economy a. generate 2x1 net production vector (total product sold to consumers) b. generate 2x1 direct labor vector (direct labor needed to produce 1 unit of gross output) c. generate 2x2 technical matrix (row i column k tells how many units of product i is needed to make 1 unit of product k)
2. Calculate the economy a. Calculate gross production as (Identity_matrix - technical_matrix)^-1 * net_production Gross production is a 2x1 vector of the total production of both sectors. The gross products of both sectors have to be consumed as intermediate goods to support the production process (ex - some electricity is needed to make steel, and some steel is needed to make electricity). This formula for computing the gross product can be found from Paul Cockshott's Towards a new socialism b. Calculate the gross labor use for each sector by multiplying their gross production and direct labor use per product.c. Predict LTV prices for sector k by calculating how much gross production would be needed to produce 1 unit of net output (formula in 2a), then finding how much labor would be used to do that gross production (formula in 2b)
3. Randomly generate a 1000 pair of prices (1 per sector) and compute financial flows (so this step is repeated 1000 times for each pair of prices)a. Each sector pays the other for the product it purchased from that sector and at the price that was generated.b. Each sector sells its net output to consumers at the randomly generated prices.c. It is assumed that consumers are not going into debt, which means the total money they spending on net consumption comes from the wages (or dividends) paid by industry. Wages are paid by each industry proportionally to their gross labor usage
4. Repeat steps 1-3 a thousand times. This gives an overall 1 million data points from 1000 distinct economies.

Adding on to what the others are saying, I would like to emphasise that western military strategists had also predicted that NATO expansion would cause a disastrous outcome, and they predicted it many years in advance of NATO actually expanding into Ukraine.

Literally, read this article published in 1997 by George kennan in the NYT.

Literally 25 years before the war it was predicted that NATO expansion could be America's worst foreign policy mistake in the post-cold war era.