Everything seems obvious when we are seated on our sofa within the comfort of our homes.

Exactly.

Witness the internet's finest self decorated armchair field marshals sitting in front of their computer screens strategising with captain obvious on planning in hindsight on HN.

Your master war strategy can never be wrong after the event happened!

What's to stop Putin from doing this again after Ukraine? Serious question, if sanctions don't work and he discovers he can annex whatever he wants using traditional military power - then where does it end?

How do you comment your NATO countries invading half of Middle East and killing 1.5mil people in just 20 years so that your economy could prosper? Did you consider sanctions then?

CCP's statements today makes me believe CCP will watch this and see what response West can muster. If sanctions is the best we can have, then God bless Taiwan because it is harder to sanction CCP effectively.

> pussyfooting

Thing is, if you don't want to go for Global Nuclear War from the start, then you have to apply graduated sanctions. If you pile in with maximum sanctions as soon as the first bullet is fired, then you no longer have any purchase.

Suppose you apply maximum sanctions over Ukraine? What do you do when Russia decides to attack Poland?

> Might need to consider sanctions with China as well...

No chance in hell our elites will allow that.

We've ignored the Uighurs, we ignored China antagonizing Taiwan, we've ignored China antagonizing the rest of the Asian-Pacific region, we've ignored China lying about COVID, we've ignored China stealing our technology, we've ignored China spying on US politicans.

We've got corporations and universities bending over backwards to partner with China. We have our celebrities apologizing to China and asking everyone to play nice so the elites' meal ticket isn't ruined.

No sanctions of any substance are going to happen.

> We've ignored the Uighurs

Who is this "we", that has a responsibility, nay duty, to protect the Uighurs from their own government? It sounds as if "we" must be the Global Police Force, an idea that I find rather frightening.

Bad stuff is happening all over the world; it's been going on forever. It's bad, and we don't like it; but that doesn't mean we all have some kind of moral duty to go to war to try and make things less bad. That would be a recipe for permanent global war.

That was sort of my point, though. The idea that our elites are now going to take a harder line on China for their involvement with Russia is laughable, given what they've turned a blind eye to in the past.

There's too much money on the table for them to risk angering China.

If they reacted too forcefully, that could mean retaliation by Putin and escalation of the conflict into WW3. Do we really want that? As a Belgian citizen, I'd rather not wake up to artillery fire in Brussels...

Sometimes, trying to be nice at first turns into deadly encounters. Sometimes, employing force early means not having to employ even more force later on. Difficult balance I guess.

Did we learn nothing from World War 2? Appeasement doesn't work on someone like this. Only force. The only thing keeping dictators like this in check was the threat of nukes and mutually assured destruction. Apparently that has stopped working. So now what? It's not going to stop with Ukraine.

> As a Belgian citizen, I'd rather not wake up to artillery fire in Brussels...

I live much nearer to the conflict, and me neither, but turning a blind eye to the problems only make them brew...

I'm no fan of war either, but this needs to stop.

History has shown that trying to let people like Putin take chunks of land as they please doesn't end well. They don't one day decide, "Yep, that's enough! Sorry for the trouble, lads!"

They see how easy it is and do it again and again until one day they're bombing your home because you're in their territory.

Biden made it clear, if russians open fire on US troops (NATO), we have WW3.

That's just what Russia wants - they are waiting to use all the goodies they found from the SolarWinds attacks. China and Russia are taking America down, IMHO.