A thought: the China/Russia combined operations drill that happened recently seems more like a show of weakness, than strength; if they were in a position of strength we would see it in Ukraine, or the Taiwan Strait, and not at some public relations-planned site in the middle of nowhere.

@7 if it's the first of its kind they'd have to do it between their two nations, otherwise the logistics would be incredibly complex to ship/supply Chinese forces to/in Ukraine and vice versa

@7 we're in 1930 not 1938 and Ukraine is China, if I had to guess

@skells I think that would be correct if Russia weren’t deadlocked in the Ukraine, and if it weren’t done as a PR campaign. Two birds with one stone, to be sure, but look at what’s between them – it’s not that great of terrain to be practicing in considering their interests. The BRICS nations will appreciate it, certaily.

@7 Russia doesn't need the commodities Japan did, what it wants is BRICS to break from the West/multipolar world

US wants Ukraine to be another Afghanistan

Russia wants to show cajones in resisting US hegemony

place your bets

@skells I’m done even feigning sides in this matter, I’m in it for studying the military strategy and geopolitics. I want BRICS to break away for all the positive and negative reasons, and I want the US to make it’s death rattles, and I want to see the patriots rally for exactly what they were against a few years prior, and I want to see what comes of it all. The US has done such an amazing job at crippling itself that it’s six-to-five and pick-‘em what would happen if a world war broke out; it’s no who is stronger, it’s can the Americans reinvigorate a national war industry given the last 40 years, and can they do it before the Chinese and Russian junk-heaps are able to do what little they would need to do? And that’s if a declaration of war didn’t crack the country into pieces and leave a far bigger mess to clean up for any invading force.

@7 my hope is that neither sides have it in them for a world war and a relatively peaceful, natural devolution of centralised state power occurs

tbh I think most everyone other than the upper echelons (and their respective NPCs) of US and EU are hoping for that outcome.

If it came to it both could swing hard - the historical precedent (read Franks/Crusades) is for the West to sweep all before it in decisive battles while bleeding out strategically

@skells I spend a lot of time looking at what could happen, and a problem with that, with general alt-history stuff, is that reality tends to be quite boring. I can’t say I’d be surprised if something like you describe here came to be – attrition in Russian factories, major losses like the Moskva, trade deals that have to be worked out as fast as possible to recover from this decision or that decision, and eventually everyone starts running out of munitions, the war gets even less civilized, and the negotiating table becomes the subject of pop discourse. Or something equally bland and steeped in thousand-page documents.