Comment by YetAnotherNick
4 days ago
You think if say US bombs all the CCP's planes, CCP would sit silently and accept defeat? Same thing happened with Ukraine. NATO couldn't escalate the war at any cost, so they can just play safe and only do things that don't risk escalation.
The NATO strategy in Ukraine hasn’t been great for Ukraine, but the old cold warriors of the 1980s would be pissing their pants to find how well it worked against the Russians.
Wiping out significant portions of their army, navy, and air force for a fraction of a single year’s budget and not a single American death?
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From a geopolitical standpoint, for the US specifically, yes. It's probably the most cost-effective (in money and lives) military spending the US has done since WWII.
From a human standpoint, I wish they'd given the Ukranians ATACMS and HIMARS and F-16s on week two, when it was abundantly clear they had the will to fight. The dribbling out of slowly expanding limits has been painful to watch.
Nuclear weapons don't win wars though. Once you launch, you're dead. The retaliation will guarantee your own destruction.
The Cold War led to the arms build up it did because of exactly this paradox: on close inspection, it seemed unlikely the US would lose the Eastern seaboard cities just to protect Berlin, for example.
If the Russia case suggests anything it's that yes, they'll sit silently and absorb the losses behind all the nuclear bravado.
I'm not sure I would consider Russia having sat silent though. They've continued the war for nearly 2 years now (or 10 if you go back to 2014) and have worked with allies to have foreign troops fighting on Ukrainian soil.
The full scale invasion is entering its fourth year in fact. But I was addressing the nuclear war fears expressed above. Experience show you can hit anything in Russia (including the Kremlin) without nuclear retaliation.
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