This was a funny read but you make a massive mistake in believing that all effects are linear. E.g a study stated that half of all Americans would die in a nuclear war (1974), you calculated that since nuke count had declined by 75% that deaths would decline by 75%, leaving only 12.5% dead. Not true. Either way a nuclear war would destroy the power grid, which would cause an estimated 60-90% of Americans to die in a year, as per a USG commissioned report ( https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA484672.pdf ). There are many other cases of this type of calculation and it's silly.
It's not entirely silly to attempt to calculate these things. If 90% of Americans died, as you say, we would still have to measure that against the risk of global economic collapse, which would kill more people.
The fact that you attempted to calculate the death toll of a nuclear war isn't silly, but your method of doing so (assuming deaths in a nuclear war is linear to the amount of nukes) is silly. You did similar things with other 'calculations'.
Which is why the first section of this article is warning in all capital letters: "These are really rough sketches with much work needing to be done... This is going to be dirty. Lest you waste your time reading some doodle-brained claptrap, proceed with caution."
This is cartoonish geopolitical fanfiction passed off as rational strategy. The author’s “analysis” boils down to: since mass slaughter and collapse have happened before, we can treat nuclear apocalypse like another pesky detail in some cost-benefit spreadsheet. It’s the smug detachment of someone who’ll never face the consequences of their armchair belligerence. The piece dresses up a nauseating indifference to human life in pseudo-quantitative hand-waving about GDP and “global order,” as if that justifies risking a planet-wide death spiral.
And don’t miss the implied moral math: pushing a nuclear-armed state to the edge is fine, because hey, other wars were bad too! That’s like arguing: “People drown in floods anyway, so let’s go ahead and blow the dam.” It’s a pathetic attempt at sounding worldly and tough, but it really just screams “I can’t fathom actual human suffering.” The writer’s tone—somewhere between sneering contempt and schoolboy militarism—shows exactly how unserious and callous this whole take is. It’s the swagger of someone who believes they’re immune from the fallout, both literal and moral.
This guy sounds like someone who'd murder his non-white neighbors, and then uses his token black friend to say the "he's not racist" version of something like this - https://x.com/USGLC/status/1864869776796831825. You're just a wannabe edgelord Dem, but considering most Democrats "think" like you, with Putin as the devil himself ... interesting.
I suspect you may have missed the point of the piece. Sure, it treats human lives as abstractions, but there is no other way to understand the two devastating scenarios being compared here. The author is not saying that nuclear war is fine. It just won’t cause the extinction of the human race. The breakdown of the global economic order will also cause a comparable amount of death and destruction (as we saw with the fall of the Roman Empire).
I’m not sure the calculations are correct, though. One concern is that nuclear war would likely also cause the collapse of the current economic order, so it might include both calculations.
Sure, human lives end up as abstractions in these calculations, but let’s be honest: the moment we start weighing the “comparable” death toll of nuclear war against the slow rot of global economic collapse, we’re already playing a deranged numbers game. It’s not that we can’t imagine two dire scenarios—it’s that treating them as if they’re somehow equivalent or inevitable totally ignores our capacity to prevent both. The piece sets up a false binary: either we risk nuclear confrontation or watch the global order crumble. It’s a clever rhetorical trap, but it skates right over the vast territory in between, where nuanced diplomacy, strategic restraint, and concerted international effort might still preserve global stability without rolling the dice on Armageddon.
As for the claim “nuclear war won’t end the world”: That’s an extraordinary gamble. Even if it doesn’t snuff out every last human, it would unleash instantaneous, unimaginable suffering, irradiated landscapes, collapsed infrastructure, and yes, a shredded global economy—basically both nightmares at once. We don’t need a precise calculation to know it’s not worth it. The people who talk so breezily about “acceptable losses” or “comparable suffering” are usually those who assume they’ll never be caught in the blast radius or scraping for survival after the fallout. It’s easy to treat these scenarios as academic exercises when you’re confident you’ll still get to wake up in a world that, for you, still functions.
“Advocating disarmament” is just another convenient strawman. The existence of nuclear weapons and the logic of deterrence don’t mean the only two roads are either blowing up half the planet or surrendering all arsenals. We’re decades past needing nuclear stockpiles that could end civilization multiple times over. But hey, if the best this crowd can do is reduce every argument to “Do you want to give up all your guns, then?” (something your people do all the time) it just shows how small-minded and insulated this thinking is. They’re not arguing strategy; they’re clinging to a simplistic power fantasy (very Dahiya doctrine your people like to employ).
This is exactly the anti-life, anti-human code embedded in establishment policy: people, their well-being, their communities, all become abstractions in a numbers game—acceptable collateral in service of some cosmic chessboard. Claiming we must tolerate the perpetual threat of global annihilation in the name of “order” or “stability” (forgetting that there are alternatives, just where their / your people aren't at the top) is nothing but moral cowardice. It’s the posture of someone who trusts their own position as untouchable, a bully coddled by their bunker who pretends that holding the world hostage is just good sense. It’s not “realism,” it’s the swaggering, diseased logic of people who’ve long forgotten what it means to value human life in the first place.
Don’t pretend that the conversation begins and ends with a simple yes/no ultimatum like “Do you support unilateral disarmament?” The world doesn’t break down into that childishly binary logic. Acknowledging that nuclear weapons pose an unacceptable long-term risk to humanity doesn’t automatically mean throwing down every arsenal overnight. It means recognizing that clinging to overkill capabilities invites accidents, miscalculations, and future horrors. It means pushing for arms reduction, global treaties, and realistic steps that wind down these monstrous stockpiles without naïvely disarming in isolation.
Don’t pretend we’re locked in a do-or-die moment that justifies clutching at global dominance. The majority of people in the U.S. aren’t eager to police the world, and doubling down on some desperate “hold the line at all costs” strategy isn’t sustainable. It’s the international equivalent of a controlling partner who, seeing their grip slip, tries even harder to dictate every move—only to push others further away. This approach isn’t about protecting anyone; it’s about refusing to let go of the reins, regardless of who gets hurt. That’s where the supremacist undertone kicks in: a quiet assumption that if we’re not in charge, we’ll trigger disaster, so better to break everything than share the stage. It’s not strength, it’s fear—fear of equality, fear of losing exclusive privileges, fear that the world won’t need you to call every shot. And no amount of pseudo-rational bluster can hide the fact that it’s a toxic, self-fulfilling excuse for endless escalation.
I'm going to make up a ridiculous scenario where the only two options are you raping your daughter or your mother. Do you support raping your daughter?
No, I'm not asking for a ridiculous scenario, I'm just asking if he supports a policy, yes or no. I assume you also are unwilling to be honest about your beliefs.
Shouldn't the rational thing to do then be to freeze the Russo-Ukrainian conflict at the existing front lines, but with extraordinarily solid guarantees that Russia will never try invading Ukraine again at any future point in time? This would leave the lion's share of the Ukrainian population and territory in the Western orbit, after all, either with or without NATO (yet, at least--even Finlandization was not permanently sustainable, after all).
The main point of the war for the West was to ensure that Ukraine's human capital remains in Western hands and to ensure that Ukraine remains a viable and existing pro-Western political and social model in the East Slavic world. Crimea and the Donbass--even the Crimean Corridor--matter much less in comparison to this.
The rational thing to do in Ukraine is to massively increase spending and increase government spending on industrialism by 100x. We should be beating China. Since Trump is likely going to abandon Ukraine, I have no choice but to accept that fact and move on and vote for Democrats in 2028. If he surprises me, that will be good. I say 90% chance Ukraine is subject to Russian invasion again 20 years down the line, 10% chance Trump makes a good deal that prevents this.
Anatoly Karlin would probably strongly disagree with you that the Russians are winning right now. At best, they might be tactically winning but not strategically winning. Conquering the occasional town or city in the Donbass every now or then at a very high cost does not alter the big strategic picture here.
Anatoly Karlin is a retard. 2024 has been a much more kinetic year than 2023. Adviika, Vuhledar, Niu York, and Krasnohorivka were all static fortresses until this year. They're now all in Russian hands. Velka Novolosika, Kurakhova, Pokrosk, Toresk, and Chasov Yar will all fall in the next few months. The gains have accelerated, and corruption in Ukraine has stopped them from building additional fortifications east.
And if you believe the meat assault garbage, you're a retard too. There has never been one video of a meat assault, yet "elite human capital" just believes it without question.
It’s frankly deeply retarded to assume that you need a “deep water navy” to protect trade.
Piracy is only limited to a few hotspots around the world. DENMARK sent ships to protect against piracy around the Horn of Africa.
Now if tiny DENMARK can help protect trade, are you seriously suggesting that China would somehow be unable to protect an oil tanker from a handful or pirates in a speedboat?!
Piracy is currently, in 2024, limited. That would not be the case if you removed the NATO Navy. You're making future predictions based on current conditions, without understanding the foundations of those conditions. You are arguing for defunding the global police and arguing that crime rates would not change.
Like Wolfgang Pauli said: You’re so far off the mark, you’re not even wrong.
NATO doesn’t have a navy, and it does very little to prevent piracy. Aside from a few efforts that China was also involved in.
Now NATO members have navies, and they’d still have them even when NATO gets disbanded. Virtually every nation with sea access also has a navy.
In the unlikely event that worldwide piracy would suddenly spring up after a NATO disbandment, those pirates would be prevented from suppressing trade by said navies, including the Chinese.
Like… What do you think happened before NATO was around? You do realize that piracy wasn’t a major issue? You do realize that NATO hasn’t always existed, yea?
I understand where you're coming from and your instincts are not all wrong.
But details matter. Here in 2024, very little of the world is at the Malthusian carrying capacity frontier, where any reduction in economic output results in starvation. The vast majority of the world's population would not starve to death if economic output dropped in half.
Also, if the US disappeared tomorrow, world trade would not drop in half - other powers with an interest in global trade (not least China) would step forward and police the oceans.
On the other hand, global nuclear war would probably kill more than 50% of world population.
Africa imports 85% of its food. That means, in Africa alone, 1.17 billion people would die if global trade was disrupted. Now, maybe you hate Africans and think that's a good thing -- or maybe you love them and you weren't aware of this, I don't know. That's a separate debate.
But global nuclear war wouldn't kill 50% of the world's population, because it would be concentrated in Europe, America, Russia, and China, who have a combined population of only 2 billion. Even if the death rate was 100%, that's only 25% of the global population -- not 50%. If you admit that global trade would also collapse, this number might increase to 50%, but then you are conceding my initial point: a collapse in global trade would be catastrophic, and should be considered to be comparable to nuclear war in its destructiveness.
China doesn't have a deep water navy to police the ocean. China's economy would collapse if America disappeared, because the Chinese economy is dependent on exports to NATO countries.
Thank you for at least considering a charitable interpretation of my forgetting about Africa. In fact I didn't think about it at all - you are correct that much of Africa is indeed near the Malthusian limit (generally not quite at it). I agree a cutoff of trade would be particularly disastrous there.
But the US is far from alone in its ability to police the seas. China has been actively building up its navy to match the US (see for example https://www.csis.org/analysis/unpacking-chinas-naval-buildup ) and stopping pirates doesn't require a modern navy anyway (the British were able to do it 200+ years ago).
And other rich countries would immediately fill any gap left by the disappearance of US naval forces - purely out of self-interest, to keep trade going.
I do agree that a "collapse" in global trade would be catastrophic. I just don't think that would be the consequence of the US dropping out.
Let’s just start with the basic premise: That it’s EITHER nuclear war or American collapse.
Well, American collapse will come anyways. But by cashing in the chips and cashing out in Syria and elsewhere, AT LEAST it can be a managed collapse that will take decades and leave Americans well off anyways.
I meant Ukraine. And NATO isn’t winning in Syria, a gang of Jihadis are. If Assad loses power the country likely goes back to civil war and possible disintegration. Neither the Kurds, Alawites, Shia nor Christians would feel very comfortable being ruled by jihadis.
Israel won, it gained Hermon, it destroyed the strategic reserves, it cut off the Iranian supply line to Hezbollah. Assad did lose power, btw. The Alawites are doing fine so far, no genocide.
Lol! Wrong. And Syria is already slipping into yet another war. The different factions are all securing as much territory as they can, before it kicks off again.
The Sovietunion is dead and gone. Nobody is reviving it. Russia isn’t even interested in all of Ukraine, at most the four Russian regions. And that is only after the West escalated the war. Originally they were after a regime change and an end to NATO membership.
Russia isn’t “hostile to the west”, they’re merely protecting their interests and responding to NATO expansion.
Wouldn’t nuclear war also collapse the global economy though, much worse than the disappearance of America, leading to the same issues that a hypothetical end of American supremacy would? I don’t understand your argument. The American decline will likely happen slowly and painfully and it will hurt the global economy, but it will be something everyone can adjust to to some extent before the whale carcass finally explodes. Also, a nuclear war is much more likely to cause global destruction than the loss of Ukraine, as America may be weakened somewhat by a loss in Ukraine (I think not really, the war has been a humiliation for Russia) but it isn’t a terrible omen
You make a very good point about warfare though. If Nukes were not invented, we may have been pushed into a corner of MAD anyways by biological weapons and incendiaries. Nukes were also quite small before the hydrogen bomb and couldn’t even destroy the entirety of a reasonably large city. If MacArthur decided to create a nuclear wasteland on the border of North Korea I really doubt the world would have been engulfed in nuclear apocalypse. No country had ICBMs yet so nukes had to be delivered the old fashioned way which required air superiority
Both nuclear war and the collapse of America would be harmful. The choice isn't between catastrophe and normalcy, but two forms of catastrophe. People who say we should avoid ANY CHANCE of nuclear war at ALL COSTS, and who wish to accelerate a collapse of the American empire, are embracing a nihilistic global catastrophe on the scale of nuclear war.
You predict that America will decline. I agree, all systems fail. I will die, you will die, America will die, the sun will die, etc etc. So why do anything? Why eat healthy and go to the gym? The problem is timescale. There's a difference between being 95 years old and giving up on life, and being 15 years old and giving up on life. There's a difference between "America will die in 20 years, so let's just peacefully disarm now and get it over with" and "America will probably die in 400 years, so let's just get it over with."
Regarding Ukraine, let's be realists. The war in Ukraine is not a black or white issue. I am a defensive maximalist who believes we should dedicate $5 trillion in loans to Ukraine and rebuild our industrial economy over the next two years to beat Russia ten-fold. But that's probably not going to happen. So instead, what is going on? Is the west getting anything at all out of a half-measure in Ukraine? Yes, it is getting a victory in Syria, since Russia cannot afford to reinforce Assad while Kursk is still occupied.
The only troops which Russia can spare abroad are its Wagner troops in Africa. This is part of a deal with China, where China uses Russia as a mercenary force to cover its own ass. China is afraid of the PR backlash of using Chinese mercenary troops, so they use Russian ones. If Russia doesn't obey China on this, there is a threat of Chinese trade slowing, and the Russian economy collapses. Syria is different. China doesn't care about Syria, it cares about Africa, and Russia simply cannot afford to expend troops where it is not directed by its master.
As a result, the war in Ukraine has defeated Assad, which cuts off the flow of weapons between Iran and Hezbollah. If you look at a map of Lebanon, there are only two countries which border it: Syria and Israel, and the Iranians are not going through Israel... Hezbollah has been around since 1982, but once Damascus falls, the organization will be threatened with total collapse. At the very least it will be weakened. At that point, Israel will have a free hand in Gaza.
I've also argued that Ukraine acts as leverage in a negotiation with Russia over Iran. Trump can go to Putin and offer Ukraine in exchange for the isolation of Iran. Everything is connected. It's not "just Ukraine." This is a proxy war between America and China, where Ukraine is our proxy, and Russia is China's proxy. Each piece plays a role.
I have never advocated for ATACMS on Kursk or any part of Russia. There is no reason to violate this red line. The fire should rain on Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea. Russia should be defeated by a war of attrition with overwhelming firepower concentrated on the occupied territories. Ukrainian pilots must be trained to build a superior airforce which can attain air superiority. Before I would permit the use of long-range missiles, I would permit a no-fly zone, to include Kiev, Odessa, and Lviv. Before I would allow long-range missiles, I would even permit NATO troops stationed in Kiev and Odessa to guard against surprise attacks, which would free up Ukrainian troops to fight in the east.
To prevent nuclear war, this should be a defensive war, not an offensive one. There is too much equivocation between maximal defense and unrestricted war. The two options should not be "give up" or "nuke Moscow." That is a false choice presented by the neo-isolationists. It will be funny to me if ATACMS bomb Moscow and Putin does nothing, but I am not advocating for that.
"Regarding Ukraine, let's be realists. The war in Ukraine is not a black or white issue. I am a defensive maximalist who believes we should dedicate $5 trillion in loans to Ukraine and rebuild our industrial economy over the next two years to beat Russia ten-fold. But that's probably not going to happen."
It can't happen. NATO can't even outproduce Russia in artillery shells. NATO has shown no capacity to up industrial production to fight a real sustained war.
We don't have the industrial or state capacity to outbuild Russia, let alone Russia's allies. Keep yacking about GDP with you and your EHC buddies, while neglecting that most of it is money made from Google searches and boomerposting on Facebook. You can make weapons out of those.
It isn’t a choice between two catastrophes, it is a choice where two catastrophes are increased in probability in both choices — if we decide not to be pussies the probability of nuclear war goes up but the probability of collapse goes down — or does it? Nuclear War is much more likely to cause a total collapse of the American state than perhaps anything else in the world. The second choice is to be a pussy, and supposedly this raises the chance of losing America, but there is a big difference between America losing global hegemony and America disappearing entirely. America would continue to exist and be a very prosperous country even if it was a neutral power that kept to itself militarily. The world would probably even still use USD. This can only be changed if another country’s currency is much stronger and more stable than USD and everyone else switches over to it
Yes, you are correct. In both cases, we are speaking of an increase in probability, not certainty. Maybe I am wrong, America disappears, and China does fine without us. The historical evidence is against this, in the case of the Bronze Age Collapse, and the collapse of Rome.
Additionally, there are degrees of pussyness. Perhaps we could launch a first strike on Russia, destroy all its nukes, and then shoot down whatever nukes come our way in retaliation. I am not advocating that, and so I endorse a certain amount of pussyness. But when people say things like "we should have never sent weapons to Ukraine, because this increases the risk of nuclear war" they are engaging in too much pussyness.
There has never been a world empire in history which voluntarily contracted and survived the contraction. Grow or die. This is a question of will: do we want to grow, or not? Yes, growing risks death and destruction, which can be minimized, but not eliminated. The pussy maximalists state that no warfare is ever acceptable to promote American geopolitical influences. Pussy maximalism is logical and reasonable from the Chinese or Russian view, but I have contempt for Americans who promote it.
They do so because they are conservatives who think whining on behalf of gay people of color makes America inferior to China. My argument is that this is a false choice, because China could not survive without American support, so they are really arguing for a global collapse of the economy for the sake of "owning the libs." Very petty and small minded.
>Perhaps we could launch a first strike and knock down everything thst comes our way
Unfortunately our nuclear missile defense tech is pretty bad. It’s not as simple as deflecting smaller missiles with more basic trajectories like the iron dome. If missile defense tech outpaced missile offense tech then warfare would be changed forever.
> There has never been a world empire in history which voluntarily contracted and survived the contraction. Grow or die.
That was at a time when economies were more or less zero sum. All of the European empires that collapsed still survive today in a weakened state because they can sustain their economies through technological development. The British are kind of a dead society but for reasons not caused by the collapse of their empire. America doesn’t need to be an empire in order to exert influence on the world because it is already so successful compared to all other countries. This will only change if demographic changes turn America into Brazil. If you want America not to collapse you should be entirely concerned with stopping the great replacement and dysgenics or at the very least encourage a meritocracy while halting mass immigration (mainly for the reason that even skilled immigrants will promote unskilled immigration)
> They do so because they are conservatives who think whining on behalf of gay people of color makes America inferior to China.
It’s hard to say. China is pretty terrible, but America is also responsible for most of the bad things in the western world at least partially. I don’t think I’d much mind if the world was dominated by a Confucian state, but I don’t want it ruled by the CCP. The RoC was really supposed to be the world power of the 21st century. They just got extremely unlucky taking the brunt of the combat in WWII. Imagine Taiwan but ginormous and with a population over 1 billion
1. I agree that missile defense is inherently suspect. Hypersonic missiles have already defeated all of the missile defense systems AFAIK. I don't advocate for a first strike.
2. I don't agree that prior economies, like medieval economies, were zero sum. They were much smaller, sure, but not zero sum. The British are a really good example proving my assertion: they no longer exist as a sovereign state. They are a puppet of America. Case in point.
Regarding Brazil, you have to multiply IQ by population, and subtract the axis of negation. Based on Israel, I think America can afford to lose 4 IQ points before its influence begins to drop off a cliff (from 97 to 93). Assuming that 350 million Hispanics with an IQ of 89 invaded America, it would still be above this threshold.
Demographics vs institutions would be a good debate topic. My thesis is that institutional collapse, historically, is much more threatening to empires in the short term than demographic collapse. Rome is an example of this.
Toward this end, I argue that elite immigration from your high IQ meritocratic Viveks, Ushas, and Kash Patels is more threatening to American institutions than 300 million Jorges. I think most conservatives are biased in their analysis because of aesthetics, crime, taxes, and other mundane issues. They are concerned with their quality of life, not the stability of institutions, and this is the wrong way to approach the problem.
3. I'm open to working with Taiwan; I don't think Chinese people are ontologically evil. I just think that the CCP is objectively harmful to NATO hegemony and should be dismantled. Leftism is a net good for global culture, so that's a more fundamental issue that needs to be decided in order to assess the impact of America.
Out of curiosity: How would you feel about World War II from the perspective of 1939, especially without the benefit of hindsight? If the Anglo-French make guarantees to countries like Poland and then fight, then they risk huge deaths and casualties, on the scale of WWI, especially if there will be no successful anti-Nazi coup in Germany afterwards (and having the Anglo-French support Poland's hard line on Danzig and the Polish Corridor pre-war would probably make it more difficult to rally support in Germany for an anti-Nazi coup). On the flip side, though, the Anglo-French are likely to eventually win--though in the off chance that they would lose, things are likely to get very catastrophic. But even if they win, the Anglo-French are likely to see massively increased colonial unrest afterwards since their colonial subjects will want more rights and perhaps even independence after bleeding themselves try fighting for their colonial masters in two bloody European Great Wars within a 30-year time period.
Meanwhile, if the Anglo-French refuse to make any guarantees to countries like Poland and instead completely stay out of Eastern Europe, then Hitler would be able to expand into Eastern Europe unopposed by the West, into Poland and possibly the Soviet Union as well. The Anglo-French would save hundreds of thousands or more of their own lives and their own financial situation would also be much more secure (no need to rely on and to repay huge US loans and whatnot), and there would also likely be less colonial unrest as well. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany would get a lot of new de facto colonial subjects, but would also face a gigantic headache for many decades to come due to the need to aggressively garrison its new conquests and to aggressively squash any local unrest over there.
I view WWII as an internal conflict between British nationalists and British internationalists. Had the British nationalists aligned with Hitler, the world would be very different. Since the internationalists won, Hitler was defeated. In France, the nationalists won out and the French surrendered. I can't really blame them because the French army was extremely weak, demoralized, and incompetent, so fighting to the death for the British was out of the question. Fascism was extremely popular in France, relative to Britain or America, especially in the army.
"It’s 1939, and you’re in charge of Britain. Hitler has just invaded Poland. Do you declare war? One advisor tells you, “yes, we have to declare war, otherwise Hitler will succeed in conquering Europe.” Another tells you, “no! War would lead to the deaths of untold millions!” Both of your advisors are technically right: without opposition, Hitler will indeed conquer Europe. But, war will lead to the deaths of untold millions."
That's in fact similar to the argument that Philippe Lemoine makes against Western military assistance to Ukraine. Without the benefit of hindsight, one could have very plausibly argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to take over Poland and the Soviet Union so that he would have a gigantic headache on the shoulders of his regime for many decades to come afterwards. Why have hundreds of thousands of Anglo-French troops get killed and severely wounded and exhaust Anglo-French finances for an outcome that would be inevitable anyway, simply over an astronomically larger timescale?
"If Britain stayed out of the war, millions still would have died. The death count wouldn’t have been that much different — it just would have shifted from Germans to Russians. America would still become involved in the war through the Pacific Theater rather than the European one."
Actually, it's entirely possible that Russia would have fallen in 1942 or 1943 (possibly in 1942) without Western Lend-Lease aid. And it's unclear that Japan would have actually attacked the US had Britain already made peace with Nazi Germany. Or that Nazi Germany would have subsequently declared war on the US in response to such a Japanese move. Maybe in this scenario, Hitler is able to use his country's dominance of Europe to broker some sort of deal between Japan and the US, for instance, even if the Japanese have to make significant concessions, like withdrawing from French Indochina?
"Russia, facing certain doom, would appeal to America for direct assistance, and gotten it due to Hitler’s declaration of war. American troops, after conquering Japan, would land in Vladivostok to reinforce Siberia. The war would have dragged on much longer than 1945, killing more people."
Not sure that Americans would actually be willing to fight for the USSR against Nazi Germany if Britain wasn't still involved in this fight. Especially if Hitler would not have declared war against the US after Pearl Harbor or if Pearl Harbor would have never occurred at all in this TL.
Without the benefit of hindsight, an Anglo-French observer back in 1939 could have conceivably predicted that Nazi Germany was going to get a gigantic headache if it was going to take over Poland and the Soviet Union, a situation similar to what Yugoslavia was facing in Kosovo in the 1920s and 1930s. What wouldn't be foreseeable would be the sheer brutality that the Nazis would be willing to engage in to crush and quell dissent. Even Kristallnacht was extraordinarily mild in comparison to what came later, after all.
I meant after conquering Russia, and without the benefit of hindsight. With the benefit of hindsight, he’d be much more eager to engage in mass murder than anticipated before the war, though if the West did not declare war on him, then he might still somewhat limit his brutality in order to preserve semi-normal relations with the West.
But would the US have been as bold and audacious about this had Britain not been in the fight any longer? Or would Britain making peace vindicate the US isolationists, thus causing them to put more pressure on FDR to reach a peaceful settlement with Japan?
Perhaps, I was more challenging the prevailing narrative of the intransigence of the Japanese. It's precisely the opposite. The moderates in Japan lost power each time they reached out to FDR and got the door slammed in their face.
Arguably, the Anglo-French also made a huge blunder in supporting Polish obstinance on Danzig and the Polish Corridor to the hilt. They should have at least made their guarantee to Poland conditional on Poland reaching an agreement with Nazi Germany over Danzig and the Polish Corridor beforehand.
I mean the ultimate problem in the European theatre was Versailles. It carved up Germany and humiliated them without occupying them to enforce the demilitarization. Of course the Germans were going to be pissed off and want to return large German enclaves to the country. What did France and Britain expect? A proud and extremely effective militaristic country to just lick its wounds and go away forever?
But you are right about the Danzig. It was insanity to guarantee Poland without any mechanism to actually defend it. And double insanity that they just tossed Poland to Stalin in the end.
Yeah, the mistake of Versailles was in not holding many more plebiscites and also in pushing huge reparations onto Germany while simultaneously selectively applying the national self-determination principle, especially in ways that disadvantaged the former Central Powers. And Yes, Versailles didn’t weaken Germany enough to enforce the peace long-term, and it didn’t help that Russia went Bolshevik and that the US descended back into isolationism. Arguably Russia was an especially crucial factor here. It would have been much easier for the Anglo-French to form an anti-German alliance with a non-Bolshevik Russia, whether SR-led or White-led.
Hitler’s pre-war ultimatum to Poland was actually pretty reasonable on its face:
Poland was guaranteed to keep Gdynia and to get an extraterritorial road connecting Gdynia to the rest of Poland if the proposed plebiscite in the Polish Corridor would have gone in Germany’s favor. Not holding any plebiscites in the Polish Corridor back in 1919 was a huge mistake, IMHO.
Arguably the Anglo-French should have aggressively pressured Poland to accept Hitler’s ultimatum and to make their own military support of Poland contingent on Poland’s acceptance of this ultimatum. Maybe Hitler would have still attacked Poland later on, finding some other excuse or pretext (such as Poland’s Anglo-French alliances), but then this ultimatum could have been used by the Anglo-French as a bargaining chip to try inducing an anti-Nazi coup within Germany—with the promise that they can get a status quo ante bellum peace if they will actually succeed in overthrowing Hitler and the Nazis and subsequently end the war shortly afterwards. Of course, for this to actually work, you’d likely need to have France avoid falling as well.
Nuclear war will have eugenics effect too, especially in destroying the so called IQ-Shredder cities with their dysgenics pops (you are a leftist right? I'm not sure how you would feel your main habitats (big cities) getting destroyed lol)
And yes, whoever arise from the ashes is going to be stronger than whoever ends up dead
I wouldn't call cities IQ shredders. Whose fertility declines more with urbanism: high IQ or low IQ? I contend it is low IQ, despite the caricatures and anecdotal examples of "welfare queens," there is evidence that welfare for single mothers decreases fertility.
This was a funny read but you make a massive mistake in believing that all effects are linear. E.g a study stated that half of all Americans would die in a nuclear war (1974), you calculated that since nuke count had declined by 75% that deaths would decline by 75%, leaving only 12.5% dead. Not true. Either way a nuclear war would destroy the power grid, which would cause an estimated 60-90% of Americans to die in a year, as per a USG commissioned report ( https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA484672.pdf ). There are many other cases of this type of calculation and it's silly.
It's not entirely silly to attempt to calculate these things. If 90% of Americans died, as you say, we would still have to measure that against the risk of global economic collapse, which would kill more people.
The fact that you attempted to calculate the death toll of a nuclear war isn't silly, but your method of doing so (assuming deaths in a nuclear war is linear to the amount of nukes) is silly. You did similar things with other 'calculations'.
Which is why the first section of this article is warning in all capital letters: "These are really rough sketches with much work needing to be done... This is going to be dirty. Lest you waste your time reading some doodle-brained claptrap, proceed with caution."
This is cartoonish geopolitical fanfiction passed off as rational strategy. The author’s “analysis” boils down to: since mass slaughter and collapse have happened before, we can treat nuclear apocalypse like another pesky detail in some cost-benefit spreadsheet. It’s the smug detachment of someone who’ll never face the consequences of their armchair belligerence. The piece dresses up a nauseating indifference to human life in pseudo-quantitative hand-waving about GDP and “global order,” as if that justifies risking a planet-wide death spiral.
And don’t miss the implied moral math: pushing a nuclear-armed state to the edge is fine, because hey, other wars were bad too! That’s like arguing: “People drown in floods anyway, so let’s go ahead and blow the dam.” It’s a pathetic attempt at sounding worldly and tough, but it really just screams “I can’t fathom actual human suffering.” The writer’s tone—somewhere between sneering contempt and schoolboy militarism—shows exactly how unserious and callous this whole take is. It’s the swagger of someone who believes they’re immune from the fallout, both literal and moral.
This guy sounds like someone who'd murder his non-white neighbors, and then uses his token black friend to say the "he's not racist" version of something like this - https://x.com/USGLC/status/1864869776796831825. You're just a wannabe edgelord Dem, but considering most Democrats "think" like you, with Putin as the devil himself ... interesting.
"You're racist" lol
I suspect you may have missed the point of the piece. Sure, it treats human lives as abstractions, but there is no other way to understand the two devastating scenarios being compared here. The author is not saying that nuclear war is fine. It just won’t cause the extinction of the human race. The breakdown of the global economic order will also cause a comparable amount of death and destruction (as we saw with the fall of the Roman Empire).
I’m not sure the calculations are correct, though. One concern is that nuclear war would likely also cause the collapse of the current economic order, so it might include both calculations.
Sure, human lives end up as abstractions in these calculations, but let’s be honest: the moment we start weighing the “comparable” death toll of nuclear war against the slow rot of global economic collapse, we’re already playing a deranged numbers game. It’s not that we can’t imagine two dire scenarios—it’s that treating them as if they’re somehow equivalent or inevitable totally ignores our capacity to prevent both. The piece sets up a false binary: either we risk nuclear confrontation or watch the global order crumble. It’s a clever rhetorical trap, but it skates right over the vast territory in between, where nuanced diplomacy, strategic restraint, and concerted international effort might still preserve global stability without rolling the dice on Armageddon.
As for the claim “nuclear war won’t end the world”: That’s an extraordinary gamble. Even if it doesn’t snuff out every last human, it would unleash instantaneous, unimaginable suffering, irradiated landscapes, collapsed infrastructure, and yes, a shredded global economy—basically both nightmares at once. We don’t need a precise calculation to know it’s not worth it. The people who talk so breezily about “acceptable losses” or “comparable suffering” are usually those who assume they’ll never be caught in the blast radius or scraping for survival after the fallout. It’s easy to treat these scenarios as academic exercises when you’re confident you’ll still get to wake up in a world that, for you, still functions.
@Nostradamus: "The piece sets up a false binary: either we risk nuclear confrontation or watch the global order crumble"
Having nuclear weapons risks nuclear war. Do you advocate unilateral disarmament? No? Ok, you risk nuclear war!
“Advocating disarmament” is just another convenient strawman. The existence of nuclear weapons and the logic of deterrence don’t mean the only two roads are either blowing up half the planet or surrendering all arsenals. We’re decades past needing nuclear stockpiles that could end civilization multiple times over. But hey, if the best this crowd can do is reduce every argument to “Do you want to give up all your guns, then?” (something your people do all the time) it just shows how small-minded and insulated this thinking is. They’re not arguing strategy; they’re clinging to a simplistic power fantasy (very Dahiya doctrine your people like to employ).
This is exactly the anti-life, anti-human code embedded in establishment policy: people, their well-being, their communities, all become abstractions in a numbers game—acceptable collateral in service of some cosmic chessboard. Claiming we must tolerate the perpetual threat of global annihilation in the name of “order” or “stability” (forgetting that there are alternatives, just where their / your people aren't at the top) is nothing but moral cowardice. It’s the posture of someone who trusts their own position as untouchable, a bully coddled by their bunker who pretends that holding the world hostage is just good sense. It’s not “realism,” it’s the swaggering, diseased logic of people who’ve long forgotten what it means to value human life in the first place.
No it's a direct question, not a strawman. Did you answer it in that wall of text? Yes or no? Do you support unilateral disarmament?
Don’t pretend that the conversation begins and ends with a simple yes/no ultimatum like “Do you support unilateral disarmament?” The world doesn’t break down into that childishly binary logic. Acknowledging that nuclear weapons pose an unacceptable long-term risk to humanity doesn’t automatically mean throwing down every arsenal overnight. It means recognizing that clinging to overkill capabilities invites accidents, miscalculations, and future horrors. It means pushing for arms reduction, global treaties, and realistic steps that wind down these monstrous stockpiles without naïvely disarming in isolation.
Don’t pretend we’re locked in a do-or-die moment that justifies clutching at global dominance. The majority of people in the U.S. aren’t eager to police the world, and doubling down on some desperate “hold the line at all costs” strategy isn’t sustainable. It’s the international equivalent of a controlling partner who, seeing their grip slip, tries even harder to dictate every move—only to push others further away. This approach isn’t about protecting anyone; it’s about refusing to let go of the reins, regardless of who gets hurt. That’s where the supremacist undertone kicks in: a quiet assumption that if we’re not in charge, we’ll trigger disaster, so better to break everything than share the stage. It’s not strength, it’s fear—fear of equality, fear of losing exclusive privileges, fear that the world won’t need you to call every shot. And no amount of pseudo-rational bluster can hide the fact that it’s a toxic, self-fulfilling excuse for endless escalation.
It’s Macnamara’s slide-rule crackpot realism, without the realism or the numeracy.
@Prince Kudu’Ra: do you support unilateral nuclear disarmament?
I'm going to make up a ridiculous scenario where the only two options are you raping your daughter or your mother. Do you support raping your daughter?
No, I'm not asking for a ridiculous scenario, I'm just asking if he supports a policy, yes or no. I assume you also are unwilling to be honest about your beliefs.
Yes, I agree that these are far from the only options and we ought to do everything we can to preserve global stability.
Shouldn't the rational thing to do then be to freeze the Russo-Ukrainian conflict at the existing front lines, but with extraordinarily solid guarantees that Russia will never try invading Ukraine again at any future point in time? This would leave the lion's share of the Ukrainian population and territory in the Western orbit, after all, either with or without NATO (yet, at least--even Finlandization was not permanently sustainable, after all).
The main point of the war for the West was to ensure that Ukraine's human capital remains in Western hands and to ensure that Ukraine remains a viable and existing pro-Western political and social model in the East Slavic world. Crimea and the Donbass--even the Crimean Corridor--matter much less in comparison to this.
The rational thing to do in Ukraine is to massively increase spending and increase government spending on industrialism by 100x. We should be beating China. Since Trump is likely going to abandon Ukraine, I have no choice but to accept that fact and move on and vote for Democrats in 2028. If he surprises me, that will be good. I say 90% chance Ukraine is subject to Russian invasion again 20 years down the line, 10% chance Trump makes a good deal that prevents this.
Russia will never agree to that. What do they gain? They are winning.
Anatoly Karlin would probably strongly disagree with you that the Russians are winning right now. At best, they might be tactically winning but not strategically winning. Conquering the occasional town or city in the Donbass every now or then at a very high cost does not alter the big strategic picture here.
Anatoly Karlin is a retard. 2024 has been a much more kinetic year than 2023. Adviika, Vuhledar, Niu York, and Krasnohorivka were all static fortresses until this year. They're now all in Russian hands. Velka Novolosika, Kurakhova, Pokrosk, Toresk, and Chasov Yar will all fall in the next few months. The gains have accelerated, and corruption in Ukraine has stopped them from building additional fortifications east.
And if you believe the meat assault garbage, you're a retard too. There has never been one video of a meat assault, yet "elite human capital" just believes it without question.
I guess we’ll see what will end up happening.
It’s frankly deeply retarded to assume that you need a “deep water navy” to protect trade.
Piracy is only limited to a few hotspots around the world. DENMARK sent ships to protect against piracy around the Horn of Africa.
Now if tiny DENMARK can help protect trade, are you seriously suggesting that China would somehow be unable to protect an oil tanker from a handful or pirates in a speedboat?!
Lol!
LMAO even!
Those deep water navy is also what suppress the said piracy from taking hold though, and to keep the local hegemons from becoming their own pirates
Piracy is currently, in 2024, limited. That would not be the case if you removed the NATO Navy. You're making future predictions based on current conditions, without understanding the foundations of those conditions. You are arguing for defunding the global police and arguing that crime rates would not change.
Like Wolfgang Pauli said: You’re so far off the mark, you’re not even wrong.
NATO doesn’t have a navy, and it does very little to prevent piracy. Aside from a few efforts that China was also involved in.
Now NATO members have navies, and they’d still have them even when NATO gets disbanded. Virtually every nation with sea access also has a navy.
In the unlikely event that worldwide piracy would suddenly spring up after a NATO disbandment, those pirates would be prevented from suppressing trade by said navies, including the Chinese.
Like… What do you think happened before NATO was around? You do realize that piracy wasn’t a major issue? You do realize that NATO hasn’t always existed, yea?
I understand where you're coming from and your instincts are not all wrong.
But details matter. Here in 2024, very little of the world is at the Malthusian carrying capacity frontier, where any reduction in economic output results in starvation. The vast majority of the world's population would not starve to death if economic output dropped in half.
Also, if the US disappeared tomorrow, world trade would not drop in half - other powers with an interest in global trade (not least China) would step forward and police the oceans.
On the other hand, global nuclear war would probably kill more than 50% of world population.
That is worse. Much worse.
Africa imports 85% of its food. That means, in Africa alone, 1.17 billion people would die if global trade was disrupted. Now, maybe you hate Africans and think that's a good thing -- or maybe you love them and you weren't aware of this, I don't know. That's a separate debate.
But global nuclear war wouldn't kill 50% of the world's population, because it would be concentrated in Europe, America, Russia, and China, who have a combined population of only 2 billion. Even if the death rate was 100%, that's only 25% of the global population -- not 50%. If you admit that global trade would also collapse, this number might increase to 50%, but then you are conceding my initial point: a collapse in global trade would be catastrophic, and should be considered to be comparable to nuclear war in its destructiveness.
China doesn't have a deep water navy to police the ocean. China's economy would collapse if America disappeared, because the Chinese economy is dependent on exports to NATO countries.
Thank you for at least considering a charitable interpretation of my forgetting about Africa. In fact I didn't think about it at all - you are correct that much of Africa is indeed near the Malthusian limit (generally not quite at it). I agree a cutoff of trade would be particularly disastrous there.
But the US is far from alone in its ability to police the seas. China has been actively building up its navy to match the US (see for example https://www.csis.org/analysis/unpacking-chinas-naval-buildup ) and stopping pirates doesn't require a modern navy anyway (the British were able to do it 200+ years ago).
And other rich countries would immediately fill any gap left by the disappearance of US naval forces - purely out of self-interest, to keep trade going.
I do agree that a "collapse" in global trade would be catastrophic. I just don't think that would be the consequence of the US dropping out.
China doesn't have a deep water navy. China's economy is dependent on NATO. If NATO collapses, China does too. China is not independent.
There’s a lot wrong with your analysis. A LOT!
Let’s just start with the basic premise: That it’s EITHER nuclear war or American collapse.
Well, American collapse will come anyways. But by cashing in the chips and cashing out in Syria and elsewhere, AT LEAST it can be a managed collapse that will take decades and leave Americans well off anyways.
What does it mean to "cash out in Syria"? NATO is winning in Syria.
What does NATO actually win in Syria? More refugees?
Jews won again, sorry chud.
Israel won, sure. They've been buddy buddy with Al Qaeda for some time now. But what did NATO win?
I meant Ukraine. And NATO isn’t winning in Syria, a gang of Jihadis are. If Assad loses power the country likely goes back to civil war and possible disintegration. Neither the Kurds, Alawites, Shia nor Christians would feel very comfortable being ruled by jihadis.
Israel won, it gained Hermon, it destroyed the strategic reserves, it cut off the Iranian supply line to Hezbollah. Assad did lose power, btw. The Alawites are doing fine so far, no genocide.
Lol! Wrong. And Syria is already slipping into yet another war. The different factions are all securing as much territory as they can, before it kicks off again.
The Sovietunion is dead and gone. Nobody is reviving it. Russia isn’t even interested in all of Ukraine, at most the four Russian regions. And that is only after the West escalated the war. Originally they were after a regime change and an end to NATO membership.
Russia isn’t “hostile to the west”, they’re merely protecting their interests and responding to NATO expansion.
Russia is China's proxy.
A simplified and also clearly incorrect take.
Would a revived Soviet Union really be in the US's own interests? Especially if this revived Soviet Union will be very hostile to the West?
If not, then why not let Russia reintegrate Ukraine back in 2013-2014?
Wouldn’t nuclear war also collapse the global economy though, much worse than the disappearance of America, leading to the same issues that a hypothetical end of American supremacy would? I don’t understand your argument. The American decline will likely happen slowly and painfully and it will hurt the global economy, but it will be something everyone can adjust to to some extent before the whale carcass finally explodes. Also, a nuclear war is much more likely to cause global destruction than the loss of Ukraine, as America may be weakened somewhat by a loss in Ukraine (I think not really, the war has been a humiliation for Russia) but it isn’t a terrible omen
You make a very good point about warfare though. If Nukes were not invented, we may have been pushed into a corner of MAD anyways by biological weapons and incendiaries. Nukes were also quite small before the hydrogen bomb and couldn’t even destroy the entirety of a reasonably large city. If MacArthur decided to create a nuclear wasteland on the border of North Korea I really doubt the world would have been engulfed in nuclear apocalypse. No country had ICBMs yet so nukes had to be delivered the old fashioned way which required air superiority
Both nuclear war and the collapse of America would be harmful. The choice isn't between catastrophe and normalcy, but two forms of catastrophe. People who say we should avoid ANY CHANCE of nuclear war at ALL COSTS, and who wish to accelerate a collapse of the American empire, are embracing a nihilistic global catastrophe on the scale of nuclear war.
You predict that America will decline. I agree, all systems fail. I will die, you will die, America will die, the sun will die, etc etc. So why do anything? Why eat healthy and go to the gym? The problem is timescale. There's a difference between being 95 years old and giving up on life, and being 15 years old and giving up on life. There's a difference between "America will die in 20 years, so let's just peacefully disarm now and get it over with" and "America will probably die in 400 years, so let's just get it over with."
Regarding Ukraine, let's be realists. The war in Ukraine is not a black or white issue. I am a defensive maximalist who believes we should dedicate $5 trillion in loans to Ukraine and rebuild our industrial economy over the next two years to beat Russia ten-fold. But that's probably not going to happen. So instead, what is going on? Is the west getting anything at all out of a half-measure in Ukraine? Yes, it is getting a victory in Syria, since Russia cannot afford to reinforce Assad while Kursk is still occupied.
The only troops which Russia can spare abroad are its Wagner troops in Africa. This is part of a deal with China, where China uses Russia as a mercenary force to cover its own ass. China is afraid of the PR backlash of using Chinese mercenary troops, so they use Russian ones. If Russia doesn't obey China on this, there is a threat of Chinese trade slowing, and the Russian economy collapses. Syria is different. China doesn't care about Syria, it cares about Africa, and Russia simply cannot afford to expend troops where it is not directed by its master.
As a result, the war in Ukraine has defeated Assad, which cuts off the flow of weapons between Iran and Hezbollah. If you look at a map of Lebanon, there are only two countries which border it: Syria and Israel, and the Iranians are not going through Israel... Hezbollah has been around since 1982, but once Damascus falls, the organization will be threatened with total collapse. At the very least it will be weakened. At that point, Israel will have a free hand in Gaza.
I've also argued that Ukraine acts as leverage in a negotiation with Russia over Iran. Trump can go to Putin and offer Ukraine in exchange for the isolation of Iran. Everything is connected. It's not "just Ukraine." This is a proxy war between America and China, where Ukraine is our proxy, and Russia is China's proxy. Each piece plays a role.
I have never advocated for ATACMS on Kursk or any part of Russia. There is no reason to violate this red line. The fire should rain on Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea. Russia should be defeated by a war of attrition with overwhelming firepower concentrated on the occupied territories. Ukrainian pilots must be trained to build a superior airforce which can attain air superiority. Before I would permit the use of long-range missiles, I would permit a no-fly zone, to include Kiev, Odessa, and Lviv. Before I would allow long-range missiles, I would even permit NATO troops stationed in Kiev and Odessa to guard against surprise attacks, which would free up Ukrainian troops to fight in the east.
To prevent nuclear war, this should be a defensive war, not an offensive one. There is too much equivocation between maximal defense and unrestricted war. The two options should not be "give up" or "nuke Moscow." That is a false choice presented by the neo-isolationists. It will be funny to me if ATACMS bomb Moscow and Putin does nothing, but I am not advocating for that.
"Regarding Ukraine, let's be realists. The war in Ukraine is not a black or white issue. I am a defensive maximalist who believes we should dedicate $5 trillion in loans to Ukraine and rebuild our industrial economy over the next two years to beat Russia ten-fold. But that's probably not going to happen."
It can't happen. NATO can't even outproduce Russia in artillery shells. NATO has shown no capacity to up industrial production to fight a real sustained war.
The question is of Will, not of potential.
We don't have the industrial or state capacity to outbuild Russia, let alone Russia's allies. Keep yacking about GDP with you and your EHC buddies, while neglecting that most of it is money made from Google searches and boomerposting on Facebook. You can make weapons out of those.
It isn’t a choice between two catastrophes, it is a choice where two catastrophes are increased in probability in both choices — if we decide not to be pussies the probability of nuclear war goes up but the probability of collapse goes down — or does it? Nuclear War is much more likely to cause a total collapse of the American state than perhaps anything else in the world. The second choice is to be a pussy, and supposedly this raises the chance of losing America, but there is a big difference between America losing global hegemony and America disappearing entirely. America would continue to exist and be a very prosperous country even if it was a neutral power that kept to itself militarily. The world would probably even still use USD. This can only be changed if another country’s currency is much stronger and more stable than USD and everyone else switches over to it
Yes, you are correct. In both cases, we are speaking of an increase in probability, not certainty. Maybe I am wrong, America disappears, and China does fine without us. The historical evidence is against this, in the case of the Bronze Age Collapse, and the collapse of Rome.
Additionally, there are degrees of pussyness. Perhaps we could launch a first strike on Russia, destroy all its nukes, and then shoot down whatever nukes come our way in retaliation. I am not advocating that, and so I endorse a certain amount of pussyness. But when people say things like "we should have never sent weapons to Ukraine, because this increases the risk of nuclear war" they are engaging in too much pussyness.
There has never been a world empire in history which voluntarily contracted and survived the contraction. Grow or die. This is a question of will: do we want to grow, or not? Yes, growing risks death and destruction, which can be minimized, but not eliminated. The pussy maximalists state that no warfare is ever acceptable to promote American geopolitical influences. Pussy maximalism is logical and reasonable from the Chinese or Russian view, but I have contempt for Americans who promote it.
They do so because they are conservatives who think whining on behalf of gay people of color makes America inferior to China. My argument is that this is a false choice, because China could not survive without American support, so they are really arguing for a global collapse of the economy for the sake of "owning the libs." Very petty and small minded.
>Perhaps we could launch a first strike and knock down everything thst comes our way
Unfortunately our nuclear missile defense tech is pretty bad. It’s not as simple as deflecting smaller missiles with more basic trajectories like the iron dome. If missile defense tech outpaced missile offense tech then warfare would be changed forever.
> There has never been a world empire in history which voluntarily contracted and survived the contraction. Grow or die.
That was at a time when economies were more or less zero sum. All of the European empires that collapsed still survive today in a weakened state because they can sustain their economies through technological development. The British are kind of a dead society but for reasons not caused by the collapse of their empire. America doesn’t need to be an empire in order to exert influence on the world because it is already so successful compared to all other countries. This will only change if demographic changes turn America into Brazil. If you want America not to collapse you should be entirely concerned with stopping the great replacement and dysgenics or at the very least encourage a meritocracy while halting mass immigration (mainly for the reason that even skilled immigrants will promote unskilled immigration)
> They do so because they are conservatives who think whining on behalf of gay people of color makes America inferior to China.
It’s hard to say. China is pretty terrible, but America is also responsible for most of the bad things in the western world at least partially. I don’t think I’d much mind if the world was dominated by a Confucian state, but I don’t want it ruled by the CCP. The RoC was really supposed to be the world power of the 21st century. They just got extremely unlucky taking the brunt of the combat in WWII. Imagine Taiwan but ginormous and with a population over 1 billion
1. I agree that missile defense is inherently suspect. Hypersonic missiles have already defeated all of the missile defense systems AFAIK. I don't advocate for a first strike.
2. I don't agree that prior economies, like medieval economies, were zero sum. They were much smaller, sure, but not zero sum. The British are a really good example proving my assertion: they no longer exist as a sovereign state. They are a puppet of America. Case in point.
Regarding Brazil, you have to multiply IQ by population, and subtract the axis of negation. Based on Israel, I think America can afford to lose 4 IQ points before its influence begins to drop off a cliff (from 97 to 93). Assuming that 350 million Hispanics with an IQ of 89 invaded America, it would still be above this threshold.
Demographics vs institutions would be a good debate topic. My thesis is that institutional collapse, historically, is much more threatening to empires in the short term than demographic collapse. Rome is an example of this.
Toward this end, I argue that elite immigration from your high IQ meritocratic Viveks, Ushas, and Kash Patels is more threatening to American institutions than 300 million Jorges. I think most conservatives are biased in their analysis because of aesthetics, crime, taxes, and other mundane issues. They are concerned with their quality of life, not the stability of institutions, and this is the wrong way to approach the problem.
3. I'm open to working with Taiwan; I don't think Chinese people are ontologically evil. I just think that the CCP is objectively harmful to NATO hegemony and should be dismantled. Leftism is a net good for global culture, so that's a more fundamental issue that needs to be decided in order to assess the impact of America.
Out of curiosity: How would you feel about World War II from the perspective of 1939, especially without the benefit of hindsight? If the Anglo-French make guarantees to countries like Poland and then fight, then they risk huge deaths and casualties, on the scale of WWI, especially if there will be no successful anti-Nazi coup in Germany afterwards (and having the Anglo-French support Poland's hard line on Danzig and the Polish Corridor pre-war would probably make it more difficult to rally support in Germany for an anti-Nazi coup). On the flip side, though, the Anglo-French are likely to eventually win--though in the off chance that they would lose, things are likely to get very catastrophic. But even if they win, the Anglo-French are likely to see massively increased colonial unrest afterwards since their colonial subjects will want more rights and perhaps even independence after bleeding themselves try fighting for their colonial masters in two bloody European Great Wars within a 30-year time period.
Meanwhile, if the Anglo-French refuse to make any guarantees to countries like Poland and instead completely stay out of Eastern Europe, then Hitler would be able to expand into Eastern Europe unopposed by the West, into Poland and possibly the Soviet Union as well. The Anglo-French would save hundreds of thousands or more of their own lives and their own financial situation would also be much more secure (no need to rely on and to repay huge US loans and whatnot), and there would also likely be less colonial unrest as well. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany would get a lot of new de facto colonial subjects, but would also face a gigantic headache for many decades to come due to the need to aggressively garrison its new conquests and to aggressively squash any local unrest over there.
I view WWII as an internal conflict between British nationalists and British internationalists. Had the British nationalists aligned with Hitler, the world would be very different. Since the internationalists won, Hitler was defeated. In France, the nationalists won out and the French surrendered. I can't really blame them because the French army was extremely weak, demoralized, and incompetent, so fighting to the death for the British was out of the question. Fascism was extremely popular in France, relative to Britain or America, especially in the army.
"It’s 1939, and you’re in charge of Britain. Hitler has just invaded Poland. Do you declare war? One advisor tells you, “yes, we have to declare war, otherwise Hitler will succeed in conquering Europe.” Another tells you, “no! War would lead to the deaths of untold millions!” Both of your advisors are technically right: without opposition, Hitler will indeed conquer Europe. But, war will lead to the deaths of untold millions."
That's in fact similar to the argument that Philippe Lemoine makes against Western military assistance to Ukraine. Without the benefit of hindsight, one could have very plausibly argued back in 1939 that Hitler should be allowed to take over Poland and the Soviet Union so that he would have a gigantic headache on the shoulders of his regime for many decades to come afterwards. Why have hundreds of thousands of Anglo-French troops get killed and severely wounded and exhaust Anglo-French finances for an outcome that would be inevitable anyway, simply over an astronomically larger timescale?
"If Britain stayed out of the war, millions still would have died. The death count wouldn’t have been that much different — it just would have shifted from Germans to Russians. America would still become involved in the war through the Pacific Theater rather than the European one."
Actually, it's entirely possible that Russia would have fallen in 1942 or 1943 (possibly in 1942) without Western Lend-Lease aid. And it's unclear that Japan would have actually attacked the US had Britain already made peace with Nazi Germany. Or that Nazi Germany would have subsequently declared war on the US in response to such a Japanese move. Maybe in this scenario, Hitler is able to use his country's dominance of Europe to broker some sort of deal between Japan and the US, for instance, even if the Japanese have to make significant concessions, like withdrawing from French Indochina?
"Russia, facing certain doom, would appeal to America for direct assistance, and gotten it due to Hitler’s declaration of war. American troops, after conquering Japan, would land in Vladivostok to reinforce Siberia. The war would have dragged on much longer than 1945, killing more people."
Not sure that Americans would actually be willing to fight for the USSR against Nazi Germany if Britain wasn't still involved in this fight. Especially if Hitler would not have declared war against the US after Pearl Harbor or if Pearl Harbor would have never occurred at all in this TL.
I disagree that Hitler would have had a hard time in Russia without American Lend-Lease. I have a much higher opinion of the Germans than Philippe.
Without the benefit of hindsight, an Anglo-French observer back in 1939 could have conceivably predicted that Nazi Germany was going to get a gigantic headache if it was going to take over Poland and the Soviet Union, a situation similar to what Yugoslavia was facing in Kosovo in the 1920s and 1930s. What wouldn't be foreseeable would be the sheer brutality that the Nazis would be willing to engage in to crush and quell dissent. Even Kristallnacht was extraordinarily mild in comparison to what came later, after all.
I meant after conquering Russia, and without the benefit of hindsight. With the benefit of hindsight, he’d be much more eager to engage in mass murder than anticipated before the war, though if the West did not declare war on him, then he might still somewhat limit his brutality in order to preserve semi-normal relations with the West.
"for instance, even if the Japanese have to make significant concessions, like withdrawing from French Indochina?"
The Japanese actually offered this to the US and the US told them to fuck off.
But would the US have been as bold and audacious about this had Britain not been in the fight any longer? Or would Britain making peace vindicate the US isolationists, thus causing them to put more pressure on FDR to reach a peaceful settlement with Japan?
Perhaps, I was more challenging the prevailing narrative of the intransigence of the Japanese. It's precisely the opposite. The moderates in Japan lost power each time they reached out to FDR and got the door slammed in their face.
Yes, that might make sense.
Arguably, the Anglo-French also made a huge blunder in supporting Polish obstinance on Danzig and the Polish Corridor to the hilt. They should have at least made their guarantee to Poland conditional on Poland reaching an agreement with Nazi Germany over Danzig and the Polish Corridor beforehand.
I mean the ultimate problem in the European theatre was Versailles. It carved up Germany and humiliated them without occupying them to enforce the demilitarization. Of course the Germans were going to be pissed off and want to return large German enclaves to the country. What did France and Britain expect? A proud and extremely effective militaristic country to just lick its wounds and go away forever?
But you are right about the Danzig. It was insanity to guarantee Poland without any mechanism to actually defend it. And double insanity that they just tossed Poland to Stalin in the end.
Yeah, the mistake of Versailles was in not holding many more plebiscites and also in pushing huge reparations onto Germany while simultaneously selectively applying the national self-determination principle, especially in ways that disadvantaged the former Central Powers. And Yes, Versailles didn’t weaken Germany enough to enforce the peace long-term, and it didn’t help that Russia went Bolshevik and that the US descended back into isolationism. Arguably Russia was an especially crucial factor here. It would have been much easier for the Anglo-French to form an anti-German alliance with a non-Bolshevik Russia, whether SR-led or White-led.
Hitler’s pre-war ultimatum to Poland was actually pretty reasonable on its face:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_German_ultimatum_to_Poland#:~:text=The%201939%20German%20ultimatum%20to,negotiate%20on%20August%2029%2C%201939.
Poland was guaranteed to keep Gdynia and to get an extraterritorial road connecting Gdynia to the rest of Poland if the proposed plebiscite in the Polish Corridor would have gone in Germany’s favor. Not holding any plebiscites in the Polish Corridor back in 1919 was a huge mistake, IMHO.
Arguably the Anglo-French should have aggressively pressured Poland to accept Hitler’s ultimatum and to make their own military support of Poland contingent on Poland’s acceptance of this ultimatum. Maybe Hitler would have still attacked Poland later on, finding some other excuse or pretext (such as Poland’s Anglo-French alliances), but then this ultimatum could have been used by the Anglo-French as a bargaining chip to try inducing an anti-Nazi coup within Germany—with the promise that they can get a status quo ante bellum peace if they will actually succeed in overthrowing Hitler and the Nazis and subsequently end the war shortly afterwards. Of course, for this to actually work, you’d likely need to have France avoid falling as well.
Nuclear war will have eugenics effect too, especially in destroying the so called IQ-Shredder cities with their dysgenics pops (you are a leftist right? I'm not sure how you would feel your main habitats (big cities) getting destroyed lol)
And yes, whoever arise from the ashes is going to be stronger than whoever ends up dead
I wouldn't call cities IQ shredders. Whose fertility declines more with urbanism: high IQ or low IQ? I contend it is low IQ, despite the caricatures and anecdotal examples of "welfare queens," there is evidence that welfare for single mothers decreases fertility.
I don't think GDP would *necessarily* go down, and I will write an article on the relationship between natalism and GDP. Working on it.