How the hell can "what criteria makes Trump a fascist?" be closed as "opinion-based" on a political site?

@BenVoigt, we all know enraged liberals wouldn't stop there, and the Russian state knows it too. I suspect China also needs Ukraine to be at least humbled, in order to set an example for Taiwan. Putin would have to at least eat a bullet to back down now. And the analysis I've heard is that his "inner circle" are even more radical. In terms of troops disobeying, it sounds like wishful thinking - you're either escalating gradually when some soldiers' families have already been destroyed, or you're responding all-out to incoming armageddon where you can be the last vengeance for your family.

If total war is on the cards, then there's nothing to threaten Putin with, because anything you've actually got you're going to throw at him. Be realistic. Nobody thinks Putin or the Russian state could survive backing down in Ukraine. The worst fears of Ukraine's sponsors though, is that Trump not only will back down, but will benefit in the opinion polls from doing so. It's completely asymmetrical to consider what Trump and the USA now has at stake compared to what Putin and Russia has. And that's what will determine the outcome. (2/2)

@BenVoigt, another outcome that doesn't classify as Russian win, but also doesn't classify as Western win, is nuclear armageddon. If NATO is seriously willing to press the button to defend it's members' integrity, then why wouldn't Putin be, and I don't see how any of the outcomes you mention are consistent with Russian national integrity. If one holds that Russia can't afford to back down in Ukraine now, then NATO has the choice between total war with a nuclear power (perhaps because it cannot back down either, although many think Trump may back down quite casually), or NATO backing down.1/2

@JochenGlueck, it's no different than I'm referring to Putin, Biden, or Tusk as "one man shows".

@JochenGlueck, yes but not with advanced technologies only Zelensky's backers possess (and which he never possessed independently). Putin would be hard faced to blame Biden or Donald Tusk for every drone bomb or howitzer blast Zelensky sends over.

@bharring, you mean if Russia beats the US in Ukraine? The reality is, Russia's success is equivalent to the US and China's acquiescence to the law it will have laid down for itself on this occasion. It will have dictated the verdict in its own trial.

"Under such circumstances, who then can blame Ukrainians for aspiring for nuclear weapons?" - nuclear weapons aren't a universal shield. If they were, the USA and USSR would only have needed one each during the cold war. Where conflicting states differ in size and economic power, the larger would simply respond to the smaller with proliferation of weaponry and weapons technology that the smaller cannot match. The only stability is achieved when equal-sized regimes treat each other as peers, as the USA and USSR ultimately did.

@ItalianPhilosopher, if the NATO members have already resolved to make Russia lose, then it's difficult to understand what the extra threat of triggering article 5 even is. Article 5 is only a deterrent if they're going to let Russia win, otherwise it's going to be total war anyway. Russia is not going to back down, because they all remember - government and citizens alike - the last time they let Western liberals collapse their state. As for neutral territory, Russia will of course judge that the NATO members are not neutral at all but part of the enemy collective they are fighting.

The very meaning of "rationality" is a politically contestable term, often driven by questionable assumptions about what people's goals are - typically assumptions that are already falsified and known to be inconsistent with evidence.

@ItalianPhilosopher, it is to the extent that China are playing the liberals at their own game, and beating them at it. China employs more coal miners than the entire rest of the world combined - we in the UK have fewer coal mining deaths not because it's safer here, but because the liberals offshored our entire coal mining industry and left fellas on the scrapheap and their sons following them to die of drug overdoses instead. I would talk of the bourgeoisie, but liberals are a much wider force of lick-boot defenders of the bourgeoisie.

Q: How do you tell they're pumping propaganda? A: Their lips are moving!

@JBentley, some of the supplementary information was to explain both why the Chinese regime has an interest for now in keeping standards low, and also why Western liberals have an interest in keeping standards permanently low. The OP seemed to proceed from uncertainty whether China could be coerced into higher standards, rather than that the West actually wants to enforce low standards abroad. The final paragraph was remarking on whether "over-capacity" - the thing which the OP says is the result of low standards - is even real or not.

@Tom, military competition between nations I guess is a background feature of the 20th century. The Bolshevik revolution succeeded because the West was tired from WW1 and couldn't muster soldiers willing to attack Russia. Mao's revolution succeeded similarly after WW2 when the West was already tired out and couldn't mobilise soldiers to fight the scale of it (as illustrated by the American fate in Vietnam).