Comment by graemep

> Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU

And many other places - most countries depend in US tech and increasingly so (recent NH stories about Vietnam mandating banks only use unrooted mobile phones). Just card payments not working would be an economic disaster. So would closing down all the businesses and services that rely on AWS, GCP and Azure. So would whatever the US chose to do through Apple, MS, and Google OSes.

> we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond

I am more optimistic than you about this. Russia is struggling just against Ukraine. They might just invade the Baltic states but anything more would force Western Europe to commit and the Russians know this. Even in Ukraine they invaded because we had signalled we would do nothing by not responding to the previous invasion of Ukraine, to threats to invade and previous Russian invasions of other countries.

> The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that - RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance

If Greenland becomes independent in a few years time would it then become more of a threat?

> RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance

China is building its armed forces, and there are ways of getting a country within your sphere if influence short of invasion.

> I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.

We all do but I think we are living in a new cold war.