Ukrainian military keeps Russian civilians in ‘concentration camps’

The cruelty is the point. Nazi-loving bastards like these think if they torment and abuse and terrorize and do human rights atrocities on enough civilians that Russia will submit to more favorable terms or that it will somehow benefit them militarily by making them divert more to defense. Besides that from the US point of view it’s about punishing the civilian population for not submitting to them, no different than bombing the Vietnamese or Korean people or using depleted uranium in Iraq.

Elite US unit training against China / US war plans over Taiwan and area denial problems

To be honest I think we may be a bit overly optimistic about how a conflict here would go. Meaning that the US may have area denial weapons including advanced naval mines, hunter-seeker semi-autonomous or swarm-directed naval (undersea) and air drones, etc which they may be able to use with other capabilities (I wouldn’t put it past them doing something like deploying chemical or radiological weapons to be honest among other things) to stop the PLA from being able to take Taiwan right away and buy enough time to change the course of things.

Given the US will likely instigate the actual war over it and know the time and place so be prepared when they tell their pawn to declare independence or do something else unacceptable they will have that advantage.

Then for the US it’s simply a matter of more area denial, sending in their own troops via air and fighting a vicious and bitter fight to inflict casualties on any attempted landings or air-drops all while pounding and destroying China’s navy to the best of their abilities with beyond the horizon weapons leaving China only the option of hitting US land bases in Japan, occupied Korea or using very long range weapons to hit further afield but certainly denying China any kind of conventional naval battle. People like to imagine and I myself am guilty of this the US just kind of steaming in while whistling and doing an attack run on a Chinese naval blockade, where-after the Chinese use dongfeng missiles to send their carriers to the bottom. Sadly the US knows this possibility which is likely why they’ll keep most of their ships away or at shallow port in Taiwan itself and use their island chains plus mines and drone warfare launched from beyond the horizon and their puppets in Japan to do continuous area denial.

As with Ukraine the point isn’t to win, it’s to kill Chinese, attempt to humiliate them, cause friction internally by killing large numbers of people to prompt anti-militarist/anti-government/anti-party sentiment they can work with. I would expect other humiliations like blowing up the chip foundries and destroying all the data while killing or forcibly evacuating all their chip scientists. Other humiliations and offenses include seeing to the removal of most of the valuable historical objects from Taiwan’s museum that the nationalists looted on their way out of the mainland to be taken to US museums as plunder and prizes.

Western firms pulling back from China

Basically it looks like decoupling is going full steam ahead and we are heading back to a cold war situation with two camps and some groups trying to straddle between them. Many, many people doubted this could happen. I hoped it wouldn’t happen but they’re going to do it and no having to rely on some raw materials type inputs from China doesn’t mean much, the US relied on Soviet titanium it bought up through shell companies and that didn’t change the nature of the blockade and embargo the US effectively had on the entire Soviet bloc.

The US’s task is not easy here given how many countries want to get involved with BRICS but even if they lose most of the global south they still have enough plundered wealth, technological head-start, and momentum to continue on fighting bitterly for some decades I think.

One must remember the situation for the US at the end of WW2 and the start of the last cold war was hardly ideal either. Europe was full of communist resistance fighters and the left was genuinely popular, anti-imperialist movements were sprouting across the globe, many of them sympathetic to the USSR or helped by them. Yet over the decades that followed they did Gladio, they did a variety of coups, of fostering instability, of color revolution type activities, of installing dictators and so on and managed to stop the pink/red tide and claw back wins. They only really lost in direct confrontations with Vietnam and China by proxy in Korea (DPRK would have lost were it not for China’s help) and even in those cases they severely punished and set an example for any who would resist them by bombing their peoples viciously, subjecting them to biological and chemical warfare, and of course destroying their industry, homes, crops, etc and setting their development back decades.

Overall I am feeling less hopeful than I was a year ago or three years ago. Anyone have any push-back (ideally with sources) to make me feel a bit better? Because it looks like we’re settling in for a long and very hard battle with the strong possibility of many more proxy wars like in the first cold war and China facing some serious headwinds of their own with the US and Europe potentially being able to decouple before China can have alternatives in Africa able to cushion the impact.