Are we on the verge of another world war?

Then add Elon vs Zuck. POW!!!!!!

US sending military to Taiwan to train soldiers. Scary.

Let’s hope so. We’re long overdue a bit of mass destruction and countless millions dead.

Think of the cool video games and movies we’d get out of it too.

Yeah and it will accomplish so much. Just like WWII. All we did was swap allies. China and Russia were friends Japan and Germany enemies. Now roles have switched but it’s still business as usual. Insane.

I think we have been in one, low grade, since around 2001, after September 11. The enemy has changed several times (remember reading 1984?) but we (the US) have been fighting one supposed enemy or another since then.

Sure, things flare up and calm down from time to time, but the Rump years (and his inattention to foreign relations, and his support of dictators, and his ham-handed way of dealing with China, and his disdain for international organizations) made things far far worse.

Getting the US out of the Iran JCPOA treaty was a huge contributor to the current situation. Instead of containing Iran, Trump made things worse. Far worse.

I don’t know how much of a shooting war World War IIII will be, but it’s well on its way.

The optimistic part of me feels like this is the collapsing of the authoritarian, illiberal experiments in running major countries, and the democratic world order will spread from here. Just as Jim Crow’s arguably most overtly violent phase was in its death throes in the 60’s, the collapse of the Mao and Stalinists was always going to be the most dangerous phase. Nuclear attacks are possible, but I don’t expect the rest of the world to go down the Dr. Strangelove path and blow up the world. Ukraine could be lost, and the west would feel the pressure, but long term, the regimes controlling Russia and China are doomed.

At any rate, at least we’ve learned that we can’t capitalism the world into a freer place, which is good to know.

Russia has been threatening the world with nukes since 1950 or possibly before. The rest flips around daily so I don’t see that as threatening. It might happen tomorrow, but I stopped stressing over it a long time ago!!! When I was in the 1st & 2nd grade, we did daily drills on how to dive under our desks & cover our heads to protect us from a nuclear attack. I was never comfortable thinking that my scrawny little arms were going to be much protection, but that’s what we were pushed into doing to give the appearance that we were going to be OK.

A world war would be good for the world’s economy & would thin out some of the population which would assist in decreasing some of the hostilities that we have right now. NOT a pleasant thought, but history has shown it to be effective!!!

Good thoughts from all but it’s still a spooky situation. A threat against one NATO nation is a threat to all and Putin threatening use of tactical nukes could post an indirect threat to Poland. And I believe SEATO has the same policy. And Russian ships infringing on Japanese and Philippine territorial waters is dangerous brinkmanship. The CIA is never around when you need them. Someone needs to whack Putin.

I do not think so but Russia is a loose canon at the moment. If there was ever a time for the united states to pull some imperialist shenanigans it is now. While Putin scares me, a power vacuum in Russia scares me more. The US and its allies need to install one of their guys to fill that void. Preferably without bloodshed. There is a lot of corruption in Russia that needs to be taken care of. This is especially true considering the lax security around their nuclear materials.

As for China, as long as their economy is intact, they have too much to lose by going to war.

Hopefully not.

No country wants a full-scale war, especially not with a nation with nuclear weapons.

The Russian leadership is dangerously unstable, crazy, and violent. That seems like the worst situation, but there are few situations where the conflict in Ukraine spreads to NATO that could end up well for Russia.

Similarly, China probably knows it can’t really get away with capturing Taiwan via an attack. It too is rightly afraid of actual war with the US.

They might both be hoping though that we get another crazy administration, and might think the odds of getting one in 2024 are higher if conflict is going on. The real situations and considerations are always much more complex, and not transparent from the position of someone who just tries to follow what’s going on by reading/watching media stories.

Gorbachev, a Russian leader before Putin, told them that they needed to just leave the US alone as we were so fragile that we would IMPLODE from the inside. It appears that he was smarter than he was ever given credit!!!

I’m NOT saying it shouldn’t make you anxious. There are some things that are beyond our control & I tend to chalk up this current situation into the “I can’t fix it” category. During the reign of terror, I was more anxious than ever before because suddenly we had the nut job leader with an itchy trigger finger!!! The current nut job is more than likely to talk them off the ledge before working out a compromise.

I hope not ,but there is huge money in war, all I can say is thank God I am to old for military anything.

Crazy times. Might need to move to some remote place. My dad keeps recommending Uruguay. It’s not really remote, but it would be away from the chaos hopefully, and away from a lot of radioactive fall out.

I would think Ukraine tenacity would make China and Putin think twice about going after more, but the fact is Taiwan is very vulnerable.

I think the US, UK, CA and a few other militaries should go to Taiwan now and let Xi Jinping say, “crazy Americans think I would attack Taiwan, I would never do that.” Then he can save his soldiers from dying and save face.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have no patience for a downturn in the economy and inflation, and going into a war would cure some of that and be a distraction and send government money to manufacturers, and a lot of people in government have friends in engineering and manufacturing.

War is a business. It’s up to the people to be against war.

What with Putin rattling his tactical nuclear weapons and shifting them around to remind us he’s got them and Trump holding the nuclear attack codes for the western world in his shower room, I reckon we have ten.

Ten what …….. decades? ………..... years?…………………. months?

Nine.

The big destabilizer is climate change.

We have already seen wars resulting from climate change; that is what the dispute in Syria was about, because al-Assad cannot get water to appease the farmers. It is already threatening to destabilize India and China.

I’m optimistic that nukes will deter WW3. Mutually assured destruction has a way of quashing imperial ambitions. I do think climate is going to produce lots of conflict in the coming years.

Climate will be one of the big things that disrupts nations and causes massive migrations within countries and across borders. It will lead to upheaval and conflicts. Governments need to be planning for it if they aren’t already. Not sure those will be world wars, but might cause lots of smaller local wars. I’m thinking it will cause a lot of poverty and very difficult living conditions, because there will be a lot of refugee situations and a lot of property loss.

I agree about climate change causing potential issues, but this is a different thing. The combined naval force mucking around in the South China Sea is bound to antagonize China. And Australian aircraft flying around out there sending coded messages to the Americans? WTF is going on? And then we go ape shit over a stupid balloon?

@NoMore China has already been threatening Taiwan.

I suck at war games, but the way I see it, US and other nations did nothing when Putin was threatening Ukraine and starting to line up troops. People wanted to believe Putin would do nothing. What if America and other nations had gone to Ukraine preemptively? Not firing anything, but there, ready. Maybe Putin would have thought twice.

Maybe it’s the same with China? Stop it before it starts, and if it starts have troops and seamen there already. It takes time to move troops. If we plan to help defend Taiwan, if we wait then we would be behind.

I want to be a pacifist, but with these leaders that we have right now it doesn’t seem possible.

@JLeslie Good point, I hadn’t looked at it that way. I think one thing stirring China up is Japan talking about how the naval maneuvers are good “practice” for the Japanese / American alliance. China is still leary of Japan because of things that happened during WWII. And while I whole heartedly agree with Japan, I think they could have worded that a bit better.

@NoMore Good point. The Japanese have been vicious to the Chinese historically.

Red China has had a standing policy of invading Taiwan since the time of Mao. They have only recently become powerful enough to maybe pull it off. Sanctions aren’t going to deter the CCPs imperial ambition, but collective military antagonism might. Watching the Russian regime crumble from within will also give them pause. The real trick will be how to give Xi a way out of his own insane rhetoric so that he can maintain face.

@Smashley China has a standing policy of considering Taiwan Chinese and that’s not unreasonable given their strong historic and cultural ties. Museums in Taiwan are full of artworks Chiang Kai-shek removed from the Forbidden Palace in Beijing in 1949. President Xi’s rhetoric has some justification.

@flutherother – the Chinese people are lucky for any culture Taiwan managed to save after the communists drove out the nationalists and proceeded to liquidate their own history and culture. They consider the island Chinese because it is, but it belongs to the Republic of China, not the Communist Party. It is the last stronghold of the republic that used to exist on the mainland but was driven into exile by mad Mao, and the communists never forgave them for escaping.

I am not sure why the first Gulf War was not considered a World War. A lot of countries were involved, mostly on our side.

It cracked me up when we went to visit the Taiwan National Museum – Chinese dissidents had absconded to Taiwan with the best historical artifacts from China small enough to fit in a shipping container. Communists were going to destroy them anyway. Now they want them back.

I think the Taiwan Palace Museum curator got it right when he said that the artifacts in both mainland and Taiwan museums are “China’s cultural heritage jointly owned by people across the Taiwan Strait.”