Because, as multiple US officials have stated throughout the last several years, this is a proxy conflict between Russia and the US with Ukraine as the battle ground and Ukrainians as the fighting force on the US side.

And accomplished very little honestly. How do they expect to win a near-peer conflict, let alone a peer conflict

No you don’t. Hong Kong was occupied by the British, brutally. You were never occupied, you are the occupier living in an anglo state based on British common law. No one ever force-fed your school children propaganda glorifying your occupier and villifying your fellow countrymen. None of your countrymen ever worked tireless for half a century to ensure the occupier would leave and then worked diligently to give your fellow tortured and estranged brethren a path that allowed you to maintain self-governance even with elements of the occupier’s culture just to ensure you felt safe and respected in one country with two systems.

You know nothing about what the Hong Kongers felt, throwing Molotov cocktails and police forces that spent weeks defusing the situation with as little violence as they could manage. You live in an occupier culture where your police literally itch for the opportunity to crack the skulls of hippies, liberals, blacks, Muslims, and anyone else they think is beneath them

You have no idea what you’re talking about and even less of an idea of what the Hong Kongers are talking about. If you really cared about them, you would research their history and understand what they’ve been through. Instead, you just read your domestic propaganda that villifies one group and glorifies another group of the same peoples continuing the terrible legacy of the British occupation, but you don’t care about that.

It means pro-Western empire. Hong Kong was occupied by Britain and only developed a “pro-democracy/anti-China” movement when the British decided to develop it as a leave-behind spoiler when they realized they had no legal basis to extend their lease of the island past 1999

Timing like this isn’t an accident. Here are three possible meanings, I wonder if there are more:

1. A message from Ukraine to the US that “we are competent and capable. Invest in us”
2. A message from US to Russia that “we still have lethal intelligence capabilities within your borders that you are unaware of and we can use them against your most defended people. You need to behave.”
3. A message from Russia to the US that “whenever you develop an intelligence asset within our sphere of influence, we will know about it and we will neutralize it. You have no leverage here.”

I think there’s ample evidence against that hypothesis. Cost overruns and project cancellations abound in the US MIC. From Minutemen nukes to fighter jets to hypersonic missiles, nothings is really going right. As we saw in West Asia, the USA doesn’t even have enough body armor for its forces, and it certainly can’t care for its casualties. There’s really no way it’s going to win a war that it has to go literally to the other side of the planet to conduct. It will be so heavily dependent on vassals, like The Philippines, Japan, and occupied Korea that every single thing it does will be done in a way that is completely fragile and smothered with paranoia if not constant sabotage.

As far as I’m concerned, all the military strategists who believe that the window for winning a war against China is closing are only taking into account paper capabilities and not taking into account the USA’s inability to actually produce, maintain, and deliver those capabilities in a sustained conflict. To me, that means the window is likely closed. Then take into account that both China and Russia have been very successful in counter-intelligence and the intelligence fiasco that is Ukraine and I don’t think the US military strategists are even working with an accurate picture of China’s capabilities and capacities. I fully believe the window has closed and it’s just going to take some time for the reality on the ground to reach the strategists.

Got it. You do know how ignorant you sound - you’re just OK with it.

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-technology-tracker-the-rewards-of-long-term-research-investment/

China doesn’t need the USA’s technology anymore as they are absolutely dominant globally in the supermajority of high tech research

Jesus, do you have any idea how ignorant you sound?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-process_people's_democracy

Or in the a.i. remake of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

we need to stay the course

Sunk cost fallacy. The trade war is a collossal mistake on the part of the US. It can accomplish nothing. Trump’s entire strategy was based on the idea of tarrifs being more undesirable for his opponents than for him. He was wrong.

China is not worried if the US issues a full embargo on Chinese exports to the USA. China’s focus is on the rest of the world when it comes to trade and it’s only focus on the US is worrying about US military adventures that it needs to defend against.

As for Hong Kong, you mean the city that England stole from China when they devastated them after getting half their people addicted to opium because it was the only thing the English could figure out how to sell? You mean the city that was run as an oppressive colony by brutal British governors until they realized they were finally going to have to give the city back and then decided to do a complete propaganda/indoctrination move, enrich token Hong Kongers, “enhance” the already existing indoctrination in schools that worshipped British “civilization” and propagandized their captive audience to fear and loathe their own countrymen? That Hong Kong situation that China has successfully worked through so far in a processes of integration, deradicalization, and respect? That situation? Where the protests in Hong Kong saw protestors throwing fire bombs at police force weeks on end but never escalated into a police riot like what happens in the US? That situation?

I have no idea what your potatoes are saying to you but you don’t know anything about me. Check out my comment history and you’ll see I am not sock puppet

You’re a nincompoop not because I disagree with you but because 1) you thought free speech was the domain of the left and 2) you think the center right is the new left.

These are both demonstrably inaccurate statements about reality and represent a form of vibes-based politics, quite commonplace, wherein ignorance is considered to be a position from which respectable opinions can be formed. It’s poppycock. All of it. Your skull is full of mashed potatoes.

You, Steve, are a full blown nincompoop

You miss the point. There are no other sources. Everything you have linked in this argument is traceable back to Adrian Zenz. This is why media literacy is so important. Go digging through your “news” articles and see if you can find the source for their claims. You will find that there is a massive web of “sources” that are all self referential for this particular topic and they all trace back to things published by Adrian Zenz. Zenz’s original reporting has been thoroughly debunked because his reporting was bad faith speculation on cherry-picked datasets with forced interpretations. But none of the derivative articles have ever been retracted and none of have changed their position.

Dessalines is not telling you that everyone who disagrees is an anti-Semite. They are saying that all of your sources traceback to the same anti-Semite

There’s a difference between calling someone delusional and accusing them of believing there’s a conspiracy. There is literally a conspiracy. But the commenter may be delusional.

There is literally a conspiracy happening between the trump admin and bukele. Like literally secret meetings to discuss and plan criminal acts and keep them from scrutiny

This is real propaganda shit. Grasping at straw to make a non-story into a vehicle for sinophobic rhetoric.

It’s going to be based on when retailers pay the price. Most retailers have inventory from before the tarrifs still.

Come on! Consulates are cheap compared to military bases. Close some overseas bases!