UNFORTUNATELY Facts often play little role in the decisions nations make to go to war.

This ironically is this is an historical fact that makes your point of view ludicrously naive.

All too many wars in history were started in spite of the facts clearly painted going to war as the worst possible option, a lose lose for both sides.

WWI comes to mind.

Logically and rationally it was insane for Europe to go to war over the assassination of a that Duke, but they did.

It didn’t end until millions of people died, and Russia and Europe completely devastated.

The facts in Napoleon’s day said leave Russia alone. She will be the death ofyou and your Empire. Yet he chose to invade, and we know what happened.

125 years later, despite all the facts saying stay the course, and the UK will fall, Hitler grew impatient, and ignoring a mountain of facts invaded Russia, hmmm.

You blithely ignore the elements that would far more likely trigger conflict with China.

#1 is nationalism – a desire for war driven by nationalism will not be detered by your facts, because those facts would be called lies disguising Russia’s weakness.

How you can believe China has truly accepted their losses to Russia, considering their extreme passion in the South is a mystery, especially since the “facts” have little to do with how approach the issue in each sphere.

The one fact that does matter is it would achieve quite a bit of China’s short term goal of gaining regional supremacy forcing SE Asia to fall in line.

Doing the same with Russia requires China to master a far more complex set of issues, and thus is a long term goal.

#2 The fact that the rapid development of China has yet to reach the vast majority of the nation, actually provides an impetuous to taking action. Should a war be as devastating as you believe, the vast poor of China would not notice a big drop in standards. So going to war with Russia would cost far less to China as a nation, than it would cost Russia, because the relatively better off Russian would lose far more of what made life in Russia with its cold winters possible.

All in all though, I agree no war is eminent or likely between Russia and China.

I just don’t agree the facts will pay much of a role should a war scenario start to develop.

Both sides will come up with the ‘real facts’ to justify their actions.

China is waiting for the right situation to develop vs. a vs. Russia. In the meantime they will focus on SE Asia were they will master the skills they will need to take back the Chinese Siberian territories, and probably more.

This will probably take decades. Though PR China will do all it can to hurry it up as it grows in strength.

Changes like the rapid drop in Russia’s population as a whole not just in Siberia.

This problem is worse in Russia than any other nation of Europe, and Putin doesn’t seem to be doing anything to fix it.

Finally you dismiss the one method China would probably most prefer as the tactic to take back what China considers stolen territory – Economic domination.

As the size of each country’s economies become more and more skewed in China’s favor, China will gain vast leverage. Short of shutting out Chinese wealth, Russia will eventually reach a point that “power in Russia” becomes something the future rich China can buy either directly or through proxy as a first step towards a peaceful reclamation of lost territories.

(I subscribe to JRL too but haven’t yet read today’s issue).

I’ll drop David an email.

ZB seems more rational when discussing foreign policy issues not dealing with Russia.

As for GF, I think he comes across better on account of some of the other commentary getting propped.

Post 2

This piece concerns GF:

http://www.rttv.ru/About_Us/Blogs/Friendly_Fire.html

“…But it was one hundred degrees hotter than the temperature of the fire in which Copernicus was burned.” (c) Yulia Latynina, “The Steel King”

If it wasn’t for Yulia, we would never have found out that Krovavaya Gebnya ™ has also burned Copernicus.

For dessert: “It thrashed like the needle of an oscilloscope, up and down…” (c) Yulia Latynina, “The Land of War”

@Mike, Re-”I missed Golts’, which is probably not missing much”

China is mentioned once in that article, but I know that Golts has written many articles criticizing Russia for antagonizing the West and selling advanced arms to the Chinese, which he believes will probably be used against it.

Of course in practice this is an extremely remote prospect, which will in any case lead to China’s destruction unless they develop really good AMD and anti-biowar capabilities.

Re-Brzezinski,

That dude still lives in the 1990′s or perhaps much earlier (I remember in one interview he said that most Russians outside Moscow and St.-Petersburg live like 19th C peasants and therefore the country will decline and fall apart), so I don’t hold his analysis in high regard. In general he is very much inferior to G. Friedman and co. as a geopolitical analyst.

What you raise relates to the saying of trying to be “more Roman than the Romans.”

This just begs for a conspiracy theory.

The reality is probably more complex. Pro-western Russian “liberals” are basically a bunch of racists who can discuss the superiority of “Europe” over “Asia” with a straight face, something that would be laughed at even in modern Europe. Clearly, their mentality is quite European, except it is about 75 years behind their object of adoration. I would guess that their anti-Chinese propaganda is driven not by genuine fear of China, but by disingenuous desire to influence Russian public opinion toward a pro-western position. They have been partially successful — they did manage to advance a racist agenda, but they certainly did help improve the image of the west, quite the opposite.

In the west, anyone who cares about the relationship between Russia and whatever group of countries that can be described as “the west”, is mostly self-delusional. Every policy paper I’ve read, much like Brzezinski quoted by Michael, assumed that Russia would have no choice but to come crawling to the west just because Russia is supposedly “afraid of China”. This grand delusion is quite convenient because it relieves the authors of thinking of ways to accommodate Russia’s interests — after all, Russia will have no choice, according to them.

In reality, of course, the supposed “fear of China” does not exist in Russia. So why is this delusion being perpetuated despite the absence of corroborating evidence? The reason is the same as with every other western (but mostly American) policy failure due to their misunderstanding of the wants and needs of the other party. The unfortunate penchant for hiring propagandists in other countries by paying them “grants” and “fellowships”, and then also using them to figure out the public opinion in those countries, creates a biased system with a positive feedback that is completely closed off from reality. It’s perfect for recycling misinformation, even for amplifying it.

The way it works in this particular case is that Russian “liberals” funded from the west, with all their racist zeal, inform their western handlers that they dislike China. That is exactly what their handlers want to hear, because any trouble between Russia and China plays into their hands. And of course, they cannot trust any other sources because they don’t own them. Russian “liberals”, after realizing what their handlers want to hear, have to turn up the heat, and claim that Russians are even afraid of China. That goes over even better. And so the initially misguided message gets amplified as it bounces back and forth between the two parties who are not interested in reality and cannot trust any sources they don’t own or are owned by.

Same system works on the Chinese side, where Chinese “analysts” can write long articles in English about alleged problems in Sino-Russian relations, while official Chinese media are positive on Russia, and Russia in general enjoys a very good image in China.

How these delusions can lead to tragedy can be observed in the Iraqi debacle, where some clowns in Washington seriously believed that Iraqis would welcome their “liberators” with open arms. The result is a million lives lost for no reason and no progress. Why? Because first Washington paid Iraqi dissidents, and then believed what the dissidents had to say.

What’s the moral of the story? People you pay are the last people you want to believe. Whoever heard of a prostitute being truthful with a client?