At the same time, fibre-optic drones have being successfully fielded by Russia and now increasingly by Ukraine. Immune to jamming with a minimum range of 10km.
There is no way these technologies won't be at least trialled for mil use, not when electronic warfare is employed to this degree.
I pay for Kagi because it is a genuinely good search engine. I pay for both because I de-googled my life and I understand that one needs to pay for a service one way or another.
The price is negligible in the grand scheme of things. I've had nights out that cost more but gave me less.
If Ukraine stops the fight they cease to be a sovereign nation. If Russia stops they loose face. The former is existential, the latter is not. Why is this so hard to understand?
Any ceasefire or peace without security guarantees will be used by Russia to rearm and try again in a few years time. It will be a continuation of the conflict that started in 2014. That, too, isn't hard to understand.
Giving Ukraine all the weapons it needed and asked for, instead of destroying them soon, would be a good start. Also, you know, not forbidding Ukraine to use its long-range drones to damage Russia's oil industry would also be helpful. This is to get started. I can continue.
Winning the attrition war. They have most likely less than a year left before their economy crumbles. 21% interest rates, capital controls, official 10% inflation, annihilated non military sectors (fe cars), forcing their banks to give loans to anything military adjacent while forbidding them to call them in.......
I am sure the Europeans would be willing to shoulder more of the cost but the US has been cutting Ukraine off from intelligence sources and now also support. There is no cost argument for that.
Also do you really think that these decisions will not cost the US in lost sales, reassurances for everything because of lost trust....
Absolutely. With Russia disintegrating China can get it's lost territories back and dominate Russia's former pacific region.
Right now China is pressuring Russia into lots of one sided deals and is taking over large parts of the economy but that holds no candle to taking over the Vladivostok region.
The real story here, contrary to the framing, is that Rubio admits that a reverse Kissinger - splitting Russia and China - is NOT achievable.
He says that the US will "[never] be successful completely at peeling [the Russians] off of a relationship with the Chinese,” and that the best outcome the US could hope for is "to have a relationship" with Russia so they don't exclusively deal with China.
That's actually realistic and indeed probably the best outcome the US can possibly hope for.
I see many people commenting that the US is trying to pull a reverse Kissinger, wooing Russia away from China, completely missing the obvious truth right before their eyes: if there's a split happening, it's a Euro-US split.
That's a common flaw in human nature, we're often incapable to conceive that the status quo we've lived with our entire lives has fundamentally changed. We look to patterns from the past, seek to refight the previous war; it's far easier and more comforting to believe you're still in the box even when the box has disappeared.
Russia isn't going to split again from China, there is not a single chance in hell, it learned that lesson the hard way... Putin, as a famously keen student of history, understands how much damage that did.
And why would he? What benefit would Russia possibly derive from this? The world has changed: as we've seen during the Ukraine war the West unleashed its entire economic arsenal against Russia, only to demonstrate its own impotence. Russia last year was Europe's fastest-growing economy even when completely cut off from Western markets. So if the West's maximum pressure amounts to so little, its maximum friendship isn't worth much more.
It's utterly delusional to think that the two torch bearers of the Global South would split just as the emergence of the long sought multipolar order is finally coming true, all in exchange for a return of Western trade which they now know is dispensable, and an end to sanctions which they now know don't hurt much.
Also, kind reminder that Kissinger didn't actually split Russia and China: he took advantage of an already existing split. Geopolitically speaking, it's incredibly hard to split powers - especially great powers, but it's much easier to leverage an existing split. And looking at the landscape, those that are already split - or rather splitting - aren't Russia and China, but very much the U.S. and Europe.
A Euro-US split was bound to happen sooner or later, as the cost of the alliance increasingly outweighed the benefits on both sides. Especially with the rise of the Global South, China in particular, which initiated a profound identity crisis: suddenly you had countries "not like us" being far more successful, taking over an unsurmountable lead in manufacturing, and increasingly science and technology.
At some point there are three choices in front of you: join them, beat them, or isolate yourself from them and slowly decay into irrelevance. The West has been trying the "beat them" approach for the better part of the past 10 years and we've seen the results: an increasingly desperate series of failed strategies that only accelerated Western decline while strengthening the very powers they meant to weaken.
It also tried the "isolate yourself" approach with the various plans of "friend-shoring", "de-risking", "small yard, high fence", etc. That wasn't much more successful and the West undoubtedly sees the writing on the wall: the more you isolate yourself from a more dynamic economy, the further behind you get.
This leaves us with "join them", and here Trump's calculation seems to be that if the U.S. does so first, it undoubtedly can negotiate much better terms for the U.S., much like China did with Kissinger back in the late 1970s when it joined what was at the time still the U.S.-led international order. With Europe, like the Soviet Union back then, left with no choice but to accept whatever crumbs remain.
The situation of course isn't exactly similar. We're outside the box, remember... For one the U.S. isn't remotely in the same conditions as those of China back then and, unlike the Soviet Union, Europe lacks both the military might to resist this new arrangement and the economic autonomy to chart its own course. Which means that in many ways, geopolitically speaking, the U.S. is in better conditions and with more leverage than China had (and therefore able to get itself a better deal), and the EU ends up in worse conditions than the Soviets.
Still, the fundamental reality remains that Trump, for all his faults, seems to have understood earlier than Europeans that the world has changed and he'd better be the first to adapt. This was clear from Rubio's very first major interview in his new role as Secretary of State when he declared that we're now in a multipolar world with "multi-great powers in different parts of the planet" (https://state.gov/secretary-marco-rubio-with-megyn-kelly-of-...).
As a European though, I can only despair at the incompetence and naivety of our leaders who didn't see this coming and didn't adapt first, despite all the opportunities and incentives to do so. They foolishly preferred to cling to their role as America's junior partner, even as that partnership was increasingly against their own interests, something which I've personally warned about for years.
Turns out, strangely, that the Europeans were in fact in many ways more hubristic and more trapped in the delusions of Western supremacy than the Americans. The price for this hubris will be very steep, because instead of proactively shaping their role in the emerging multipolar order, they will now have to accept whatever terms are decided for them.
Can you point to a single thing that China did to help Russia at its own expense?
Certainly not resource deals, where China sets cut throat prices.
Talk is cheap and China holds historical grudges, like those lost territories, forever. Having strong dominance over the northern pacific areas would also be far more stable and lucrative than any geopolitical advantages that might be very fleeting.
As for Europe and the US, time will tell. The US is going to pay a high price for the lost credibility. Would you really make yourself dependent by buying US weapons and leave yourself open to such thuggish blackmail tactics we have seen the last weeks? Also the US is a consumer based society that tries to change to a more balanced system. Absolutely understandable but very hard and risky.
We are moving to a multipolar world order and its going to be a time of blood and iron. Russia was just the one making the first move and with the US no longer interested in a rule based world order the mice are coming out to play. I sincerely hope I am wrong.
I don't think that anyone can seriously predict how things will fall out.
The fact that people who are paid to predict future didn't predict China's unprecedented rise in EVs is all that you need to know how manipulated with lies our information ecosphere is.
Our experts completely misjudged China and its ability to innovate. Now they're ahead everywhere.
@China, sure they got a good thing going. We will see how long it lasts.
@Rare earths. That has been obvious from the start. There are always massive potential resources everywhere. Trillions in Afghanistan, Ukraine....and if you don't have an ambiguous enough surveying report you can always postulate a pipeline is going to be build there, like with Syria. It seemed to me that was always some kind of intentional face saving exercise to please Trumps electorate, but I might be overestimating him. That extortionist act of him is doing so much damage, it is not rational.
I don't get how this isn't obvious. If you can't defend your territory without relying on another country, you are not truly sovereign. The larger union might be sovereign, but you aren't, and your protection is only as strong as the larger union.
I don’t think you have to go quite that far. NATO was intended to provide cover against the other superpower bloc in Europe. That superpower isn’t really a superpower anymore, but the remnant that legally succeeded it still has a lot of nukes.
Arguably in a world of superpowers, only superpowers have total sovereignty under your definition, hence why I said it was a sliding scale. 95% of any individual nation or most configurations of alliances you could technically (though maybe not plausibly) come up with would still get crushed by the French military in a mano a mano military conflict. They can defend themselves, but what if they have to defend themselves alone vs the United States, Russia, the PRC, or a medley of European great powers? NATO keeps them from having to go it alone, and NATO plus the EU takes a couple of those possibilities off the table, at least for a while, but in Charles de Gaulle’s time, France still had a colonial empire they were trying to keep together (and they still have a fair number of overseas territories outside of metropolitan France) and the plausibility of NATO keeping it together was all up in the air.
Throughout the duration of the Cold War, I don’t think you can make a winning argument that on balance the US was ever a bad ally, but as an old European leader, he was definitely right to be skeptical about the tradeoffs, and right to think that if France has more power, then it wouldn’t need to cede sovereignty or at least much sovereignty to all these newfangled international institutions popping up across Europe.
I don't think the issue is whether or not it's obvious. It boils down to weighing the risks. It seems to me that the weight has favored dependence on another superpower for the past several decades. I'm sure everyone involved understood that the consequence of that decision was quasi-sovereignty. I'm not in Europe, so I'm not sure what the UK government has been saying this whole time, but it probably sounds really bad to admit that publicly. So, I'm sure they perform lingual acrobatics to try to reassure the public that they are truly independent when it comes to military security.
Perhaps it's a naive take, but I'm just armchairing this from the perspective of playing a 4x grand strategy game and the sort of decisions you have to make in these contexts.
Anything can be called 4D chess if we add enough layers to the logic. I agree that what you're describing makes sense; but I think it's probably more in line with the bureaucratic mindset to observe this is the result of decades of kicking cans down the road.
Yes, unlike the "player" in a 4x game, there's too much discontinuity in administrations between decades. Makes it very easy to kick the can down the road.
An odd take. How can you downplay the iPod and then jump over the iPhone? They also got the iPad, Air Pods, Apple Watch, and Face ID just right. Not always as era-defining as the phone, but certainly pushing their own category.
Of course, the VR thing is a remarkably well engineered thing nobody needs.
Pay wall but headline has me in high spirits. Good riddance, Elon remains a fart face but anything that hurts the blight that is these consultancies is welcome.
So Pete here uses Bryan's marketing notoriety to draw people's attention to his own marketing services, one of which is being a LinkedIn ghost writer. Colour me amused, there's a clever remark buried somewhere in here. But time is running out, so I will leave thinking what special kind of tool hires a LinkedIn ghost writer.
There is no way these technologies won't be at least trialled for mil use, not when electronic warfare is employed to this degree.
https://thedefensepost.com/2025/01/08/ukraine-fiber-optic-dr...