I totally agree that strategic missile defense technology is very destabilizing and dangerous. However like always, the enemy gets a vote.
Myself and others believe that in developing and announcing these weapon systems the Russians have achieved their goal of restoring their nuclear deterrent.
On that basis I would agree that I think tactical nukes would be the way the taboo is broken if it happens in our present cycle of instability.
Thank you very much and I also completely agree with your analysis. The ignorance of history on display is truly frightening.
I didn't know the Ukrainians were finally willing to concede on the NATO question. As you say, a victory for sanity and realism.
Fascinating question, and highly relevant.
A few points:
So we agree on what is going to happen?
Well nobody knows the future but the times are extremely dangerous. I'm not personally yet seeing signs that the logic of MAD is failing, but things could change very quickly, especially if there was a direct hot war and US forces were facing humiliating defeat.
I think our best hope lies in incompetence exceeding malevolence... Hardly comforting
They are fumbling now because of their hubris, overextension, and the contradictions of the system.
In the '90s, they believed that exposing China to capitalism would naturally and inevitably cause the fall of the Communist system, so they threw the doors wide open.
2001 is when China joined to the WTO and also when...9/11 happened, crippling and distracting the Western empire for two decades.
When Hillary Neocon Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, she unveiled with much fanfare the "pivot to Asia". The Obama administration spent the next 8 years trying to replicate the EU and NATO in Southeast Asia. (TPP and the Quad).
Trump-1 came into office and immediately withdrew the US from the TPP. He did some blustering and flailing around with tariffs, which people seemed to think constituted containment of China at the time.
Biden came into office and he and the other Western leaders sabotaged and escalated their way into the Ukraine war. (Read up on the Istanbul process before you get annoying in the replies, Libs). You can read The New Atlas for excellent analysis about how this is a substrategy for Chinese containment, which is an argument that I agree with. However, it had the effect of once again paralyzing, weakening, and distracting the Western imperial alliance.
Now we are in Trump-2. He committed perhaps the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the US empire when he went on the attack against India with tariffs to try and separate them from Russia. This blew black in the most spectacular fashion by driving them closer to Russia and kicking off a rapprochement with China that is still bearing diplomatic fruit to this day. Therefore, we can say that Trump severely weakened the overall strategic plan for the Asia Pacific region by single-handedly preventing TPP and the Quad from coming into force as tools of the US empire (for the forseable future), unlike NATO and the EU.
At the present day, the empire is struggling to extricate itself from Ukraine without having a Kabul / Saigon moment. The Western armories are bare, having sent everything they can spare and very much they could not spare in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the proxy conflict. The F-35 fighter jet is STILL NOT OPERATIONAL ACCORDING TO THE PROGRAM'S OWN DEFINITION. By contrast, at the 80-year commemoration parade, the Chinese unveiled no fewer than a dozen new weapon systems, many a generation or more ahead of their US counterparts.
They are failing everywhere and cannot admit it. A humiliating defeat in Ukraine is inevitable, now the only question is whether the Russians will end up with Odessa. American warships are powerless against Chinese hypersonic cruise missiles. Japan tried to ramp up the rhetoric on Taiwan only to get slapped down by the US. We are witnessing the death throes of a wounded animal with suicidally inflated ego. Unfortunately, this wounded animal also has nuclear weapons, so it's a very dangerous time for all of us.
First off, the Chinese don't seek global hegemony like the Western powers, no matter what the projection and propaganda says. (This is far too big of a topic for short comment but the Chinese have never done Roman-style imperialism in all of their history. Also, according to my research, China hasn't made a new territorial claim in over 70 years, since the KMT era)
Second off, I did some comparisons on this website. I honestly wasn't sure what I was going to see but China's pyramid is better than all the "developed" countries and it really blows their East Asian neighbors out of the water. Therefore, I don't buy the argument that China is doomed by its demographics, unless we are saying that all the peer comparison nations are even more doomed.
I happen to believe that the Chinese are right and we are entering a New Chinese Century, with the Middle Kingdom once again the economic center of a prosperous and powerful Asia. They are on the cusp (speaking in years) of completely defeating "containment", and have built an industrial ecosystem unlike anything the world has ever seen. Of course that all goes out the window if the nukes start flying.