Over the last week, Sri Lanka has been hit by their worst national natural disaster since the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Over 2 million people (about 10% of the population) were affected; the death toll is currently climbing past 600; nearly a hundred thousand homes have been damaged or destroyed, transport infrastructure is heavily damaged; industry has been damaged; and farmland has been flooded. The cost of damage so far looks to be about $7 billion, which is more than the combined budget spent on healthcare and education in Sri Lanka.
While there is plenty to say meteorologically about how this yet another concerning escalation as a result of climate change (Sri Lanka does experience cyclones, but they are usually significantly weaker than this), it's important to note that such disasters are, to at least a certain extent, able to warned about and their impacts somewhat mitigated. However, this requires both access to early detection and warning equipment, and an economy in which development is widespread - in this case, particularly in the construction of drainage systems and regulated construction, which has not generally occurred.
The IMF, on its 17th program with Sri Lanka, is doing its utmost to prevent such an economy from developing, as they instead promote reductions in public investment. On top of this, the rebuilding effort for Sri Lanka is already being planned and funded, and such donors include, of course, many Sri Lankan oligarchs, who will rebuild the damaged portions of the country yet further according to their visions, while sidelining the working class.
Perhaps neoliberalism's decay into its eventual death occurring concurrently into the gradual intensification of climate change and renewed wars signifies the rise of the era of disaster capitalism.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
China can certainly protect its own territory and its immediate vicinity - but what capacity does it have to actually deploy forces further away, like, say, to Iran, or even further away, to some Latin American country now that the US is flexing its muscle in that region more visibly? There's a reason the US fields literally tens as many times worth of heavy transport aircraft compared to other countries (https://hexbear.net/post/6836613/6714558#%3A%7E%3Atext=massive+transport+aircraft+like+this+are+a+very+US-specific+niche).
The Soviets back in the day made major investments in their airborne forces precisely because they realized, especially after Cuba, that they didn't have much capacity at all to project power outside of Europe - if the Americans actually had done a ground invasion, there wasn't much the Soviets could do (other than escalate to nukes, of course, but that's not exactly the ideal scenario). However, that capacity has of course substantially degraded in the post-Soviet years. China, on the other hand, never had such capacity in the first place, although they have been building it up recently - even so, their heaviest airlift aircraft, introduced a little over a decade ago, has less capacity than the lighter American one. I posted some time ago about some (alleged) deal with the Russians focused precisely on the development of airborne forces, so if that's true, it's a further indication of China working towards improvements in that area, but it'd still be a long way off from actually bearing results.
We can mock the US for its corrupt MIC and decaying equipment and recruitment crisis all we want, but at the end of the day, they are still the only power actually capable of deploying and sustaining large military forces at great distances. There are different kinds of military power - life isn't a videogame, where we can just quantify militaries as some abstract number of points and say "well, country A has more points than country B so they'd win" (although honestly, even strategy games still have the concept of different factions with different strengths, so even that isn't the best comparison... now that I remember, Red Alert 2 literally had America's faction-unique power being free paratroopers they could drop anywhere).
Whatever capabilities Russia and China might have, they simply cannot compete with the US when it comes to faraway deployments. It's unfortunate, but such capacity is very expensive to build up and sustain (in fact, the US itself is now struggling with it - USAF plan to fly C-5, C-17s even longer elicits concern), and countries that aren't imperial hegemons will find it pretty difficult to justify such investments - the Soviets could, since they were competing with the US, but even still, they couldn't reach anywhere near the American levels of airlift capacity, and of course Russia today is no USSR.
I guess we can hope that with American reindustrialization unlikely to happen, their airlift capacity will slowly wither away and eventually China will end up superior just by virtue of actually continuing to build planes (as has pretty much already happened with sealift capacity). But in the immediate moment, the US is still ahead.
As I mentioned to the other user, I think we’re talking past each other. Russia and China are certainly capable of forming defense networks to secure the Silk Road. If they cannot do so, then China’s entire Belt and Road is vulnerable.
I certainly agree with your assessment here. But as I’ve said, war isn’t about annihilation of the opponent’s forces (although Russia is being forced to do so in Ukraine and is seemingly capable of holding off the entire NATO/Collective West, so I wouldn’t write them off just yet), it’s about exerting the high costs to make your opponent think twice about freely roaming the Iranian airspace and dropping bombs as they wish.
Even the promises of a security guarantee, which would drag the US into a long war and exert high political and economic costs at home, would make the US think twice about their decisions. It is the lack of such cooperation between the countries that emboldened the US.
So, yes, I won’t deny that the US is still ahead, but that doesn’t mean China and Russia cannot provide the defense cooperation that they did more than half a century ago. What made the US imperialists feared Mao was his willingness to fight a “10,000 years war with the imperialists”. This kind of mentality does not exist anymore in today’s China, who has since benefited much from the dollar hegemony and a US-led neoliberal free trade model.
The thing about defense networks is that they have to be reciprocal - Iran entering into such a pact would benefit their defense, but also potentially drag them into other conflicts. Military alliance between co-equal partners (rather than a hegemon and its vassals) inherently involves the sacrifice of some degree of sovereignty - and not all countries are willing to do that. The DPRK weighed these aspects and accepted a treaty with Russia, and did indeed end up having to deploy troops to fight Ukraine, as well as in more ancillary roles (I think there was something about them helping with mine-clearing?). Would the Iranian government have been fine with sending soldiers over to Kursk? How would the Iranian populace have reacted?
This is what always annoys me about the "China/Russia should have aided X country" discourse, it seems to ignore that the X country in question kind of has to ask for aid in the first place - has there been indication that the Iranians asked for such support and were rebuffed? You generally can't just start leaving missile systems at someone's doorstep like a cat with dead mice. You can't just walk up to another country and go "we're in an alliance now" (again, unless you're the hegemon and just giving your vassal an order). There's a reason the US did so many coups and interventions and other schemes - the actual populaces of many of the countries in which the US has a presence didn't exactly agree with the idea, and had to be suppressed. Would the Iranians accept Chinese or Russian bases on their territory?
Alliances are a fraught affair, and their history is full of switching sides, refusing calls when war actually starts, and lots of ass covering (even NATO's famous Article 5 that bloodthirsty chuds love to meme about is deliberately phrased as "such action as [the country] deems necessary", because no-one sane would actually sign onto absolutely irrevocably having to fight WW3 because some Baltic dipshit started shit, they want to keep their options open).
Fighting off an enemy close to your home-turf is very different from being able to sustain a military campaign on the other end of the world. The logistical strain is much lesser, reinforcements can be brought in much faster, troop morale can be kept up more easily as they have a very direct and easily comprehensible idea of why they're fighting which they wouldn't necessarily have overseas. Ukraine has also conducted this war in a rather sub-optimal manner for political reasons (although admittedly, given the glacial pace at which NATO militaries are learning lessons from it, they'd probably perform even worse).
Okay, but treaties for defense cooperation are meaningless without the actual military capacity to provide said cooperation. The Soviets could, conceivably, deploy a decent amount of troops and assets to help protect some faraway country, because they had made substantial investments to develop that exact capability. They were still far behind the Americans even after all these investments, and this clearly did not help to stop a wide variety of American military interventions.
Today, Russia and China have way less capability than the Soviets had (although fortunately, as mentioned above, American capability is decaying as well). There's simply not much they can actually promise any prospective alliance partner - they can sell them equipment (which both countries are in fact doing, although Russian exports have somewhat slowed down due to the need to prioritize arming their own military), but as for sending allied troops (or air-defense systems, which would still involve personnel to staff them) over in an actual war? They just don't have that much capacity for it. The only viable thing would be a full-hog "you invade Iran, we invade Taiwan and the entire Pacific" (or in Russia's case, "we invade, uh, Europe I guess?") type deal - which is:
A type of deal that no-one's actually entered into since WW1. As mentioned above, even NATO isn't this kind of deal - and if, God forbid, we do get a real escalation into WW3, that "such action as deems necessary" part is going to be tested pretty hard, and we're going to see a whole lot of interpretations of "deems necessary". The fucking Axis in WW2 wasn't that kind of deal - Bulgaria didn't join the war against the Soviets, and Hitler had to do a whole diplomatic charm offensive of "just one more offensive bro, this time we'll finish them, I promise" to get Italy and Romania to commit troops for the push into the Caucasus.
What good does that do the invaded country? Like, yes, certainly some of the invader's resources will be diverted to handling the other front that just opened up, but they're still getting invaded! Again, referring back to WW1 - what happened to Serbia? The Entente wasn't able to deploy forces to actual Serbian territory in time, they got defeated and occupied, and had a good dose of ethnic cleansing done to them for good measure. So again, bringing back the fact that a pact ought to be reciprocal - why would Iran, or any country for that matter, enter into an alliance which can only promise them "well, in the long run we'd win! (notwithstanding any brutal occupations you might have to suffer in the meantime)". Ostensibly, there should be a deterrence effect, but you're betting a lot on that - and, well, that was the deal with the whole network of treaties European powers had prior to WW1, and look where that got us.
And I again have to bring up popular support - it's easy for Mao to make declarations about millennium long wars, but how would the Chinese people, after decades of civil war and warlordism, and an incredibly brutal war with Japan, have actually handled getting into one? Intervening in Korea's one thing, this would be another. Like, we do the whole "Stalin shouldn't have stopped at Berlin" bit, it's a fun joke, but the reality is that war exhaustion is in fact a real thing, and the world war getting restarted and having to continue for years more would have rather disastrous consequences for the Soviet home front (there was literally already a famine happening!). Don't we, in our efforts to counter anti-communist propaganda, constantly talk about how communist countries weren't
totalitarian dictatorships and were, in fact, in a lot of ways more genuinely democratic compared to liberal "democracies"? Communist countries can't just declare global anti-imperialist jihad willy-nilly, as much as we might think it would be cool and based for them to do so (the "we" here being a group mostly living in the imperialist countries that would, hopefully, be getting defeated, thus saving "us" the trouble of having to build an actual communist movement at home since millions of people from the developing world will instead have spilled their blood to win that battle)
Incredible sentence
Military alliance/serious materiel support seems on contingent on a foundation of joint training and interoperability. The US has gotten a lot of mileage out of all their training programs for locals in the areas they want to interfere with, like school of the americas. Does China do officer or elite soldier training, or much in the way of joint ops?
So, I guess we can split the training up in two branches - training on how to operate equipment, and training of officers in tactics & strategy.
For the first one, China does of course export plenty of military tech, and that obviously involves training people on how the equipment works. Recently there was a bunch of drama over Argentina's fighter jet procurement, where the US pulled all the stops, even including diverting equipment meant for Ukraine, in order to make sure Argentina bought American rather than Chinese - and their explicit stated motivation was to prevent "a way for China to make inroads in what the US considers its backyard" as a "Chinese jet buy would come with Chinese infrastructure — PRC provided contractors and trainers, at the very least". So, clearly the US is pretty worried about the prospect of countries developing a military training relationship with China, and considers countering it a higher priority to even their imperial misadventure in Ukraine. Now, while a Chinese export deal didn't happen in this case, I think there's reasons to be optimistic, as the prospects of the West managing to actually re-industrialize are slim, and with their industry instead continuing to decay, eventually countries just straight up won't have an option of buying any reasonable amount of Western gear.
As far as officer training though, they're nowhere near where the Soviets were (I recently posted something about Mogadishu, and a fact I learned myself for the first time
was that the guy behind it trained at the Soviets' Frunze Academy). They have been increasing their joint trainings, but from the maps shown in that article it does still seem to be mostly "in their backyard" as it were, in Southeast Asia and neighboring countries. And this is still joint training, not other countries' officers coming over to China and living there for years while they study at an academy. Now, there are a lot of African immigrants going to China for higher education, but I assume very few of them are going for military stuff specifically (and China itself would need to have academies that actually accept foreign students in large numbers, which I'm not sure they do, @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net might be able to better clarify on that question).
One of the "good" things about being an imperialist piece of shit is that since you're constantly getting in all these fights, you get to regularly advertise your military prowess and technology to prospective clients. A more peaceful country doesn't get that opportunity. Now, back in the day many guerilla movements were influenced by Mao's writings (and there were numerous cases of movements in third world countries turning Maoist after being disappointed with their Soviet advisors not really giving them anything that they could work with, being in an undeveloped and non-industrialized country), but as far as modern conventional militaries, China's record in that area just isn't very good. Their intervention in the Korean war was impressive, but it was mostly a light infantry force, certainly one that came up with very clever tactics in order to effectively fight a technologically superior foe, but this still means that they didn't exactly get to demonstrate much prowess in combined arms warfare. And the later Sino-Vietnamese war isn't exactly a shining example.
(Although it can be argued that geopolitically it was actually a rather successful move as part of the greater post-Sino-Soviet-split maneuvering - in fact, this ties into exactly what I've been talking about with power projection and how getting into defense cooperation that you can't actually back up can be very discrediting - China was essentially trying to make the point to the Vietnamese of "don't buddy up with the Soviets, they won't be able to actually help you", and the conflict served as a very direct demonstration of that, and was thus somewhat embarrassing for the Soviets. But, however clever it may have been in the realm of subtle geopolitical intrigue, the way the conflict actually proceeded on the ground still just doesn't serve as good advertising for the military.
We can contrast this here with the American wars in Iraq, which were great advertising, even if the eventual outcome was a brutal grinding insurgency - I've talked about before how the "shock-and-awe" method of war did, in fact, have a lot to do with why the later insurgency could happen, because for however impressive it looked on a map timelapse video to see how quickly coalition forces advanced, in reality they
Didn't actually destroy the Iraqi military as a fighting force, and when they later did like the most incompetent occupation government of all time and fired everyone, there were now suddenly a whole lot of not-dead former soldiers with an axe to grind. Contrast this with a grinding attritional conflict like WW2, where there wasn't any post-war Nazi insurgency because basically every able-bodied male, and a whole bunch of non-able-bodied ones, was either dead, in a hospital, or in a prisoner camp.
Didn't actually bother securing a whole bunch of military targets, which allowed large swaths of military materiel to be taken by insurgents. The IED crisis that coalition forces suffered was literally their own fault - they moved so fast they kind of forgot to make sure that there weren't a bunch of bases with tonnes of bombs sitting around, unguarded since they had, in their infinite wisdom, fired the guards.
But the American political establishment cleverly drew a clean dividing line between the invasion and the post-invasion insurgency - and as we all know, events in the past don't actually affect events in the future, everything happens in a vacuum
We have to remember that just because militaries deal with very serious topics of killing people for geopolitical ends doesn't mean that the people in them are immune to being taken in by cool-looking shit and blindly following trends. If everyone thought through the deep implications of everything, we wouldn't have to deal with the scourge of advertisement to begin with, but it does actually work on people.
)
So, I guess we can split the training up in two branches - training on how to operate equipment, and training of officers in tactics & strategy.
For the first one, China does of course export plenty of military tech, and that obviously involves training people on how the equipment works. Recently there was a bunch of drama over Argentina's fighter jet procurement, where the US pulled all the stops, even including diverting equipment meant for Ukraine, in order to make sure Argentina bought American rather than Chinese - and their explicit stated motivation was to prevent "a way for China to make inroads in what the US considers its backyard" as a "Chinese jet buy would come with Chinese infrastructure — PRC provided contractors and trainers, at the very least". So, clearly the US is pretty worried about the prospect of countries developing a military training relationship with China, and considers countering it a higher priority to their other imperial misadventure in Ukraine. Now, while the failure in that case .... reasons to be optimistic
As far as officer training though, they're nowhere near where the Soviets were (I recently posted something about Mogadishu, and a fact I learned myself for the first time
was that the guy behind it trained at the Soviets' Frunze Academy). They have been increasing their joint trainings, but from the maps shown in that article it does still seem to be mostly "in their backyard" as it were, in Southeast Asia and neighboring countries. And this is still joint training, not other countries' officers coming over to China and living there for years while they study at an academy. Now, there are a lot of African immigrants going to China for higher education, but I assume very few of them are going for military stuff specifically (and China itself would need to have academies that actually accept foreign students in large numbers, which I'm not sure they do, @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net might be able to better clarify on that question).
One of the "good" things about being an imperialist piece of shit is that since you're constantly getting in all these fights, you get to regularly advertise your military prowess and technology to prospective clients. A more peaceful country doesn't get that opportunity. Now, back in the day many guerilla movements were influenced by Mao's writings (and there were numerous cases of movements in third world countries turning Maoist after being disappointed with their Soviet advisors not really giving them anything that they could work with, being in an undeveloped and non-industrialized country), but as far as modern conventional militaries, China's record in that area just isn't very good. Their intervention in the Korean war was impressive, but it was mostly a light infantry force, certainly one that came up with very clever tactics in order to effectively fight a technologically superior foe, but this still means that they didn't exactly get to demonstrate much prowess in combined arms warfare. And the later Sino-Vietnamese war isn't exactly a shining example.
(Although it can be argued that geopolitically it was actually a rather successful move as part of the greater post-Sino-Soviet-split maneuvering - in fact, this ties into exactly what I've been talking about with power projection and how getting into defense cooperation that you can't actually back up can be very discrediting - China was essentially trying to make the point to the Vietnamese of "don't buddy up with the Soviets, they won't be able to actually help you", and the conflict served as a very direct demonstration of that. But, however clever it may have been in the realm of subtle geopolitical intrigue, the way the conflict actually proceeded still just doesn't serve as good advertising for the military.
We can contrast this here with the American wars in Iraq, which were great advertising, even if the eventual outcome was a brutal grinding insurgency - I've talked about before how the "shock-and-awe" method of war did, in fact, have a lot to do with why the later insurgency could happen, because for however impressive it looked on a map timelapse video to see how quickly coalition forces advanced, in reality they
Didn't actually destroy the Iraqi military as a fighting force, and when they later did like the most incompetent occupation government of all time and fired everyone, there were now suddenly a whole lot of not-dead former soldiers with an axe to grind. Contrast this with a grinding attritional conflict like WW2, where there wasn't any post-war Nazi insurgency because basically every able-bodied male, and a whole bunch of non-able-bodied ones, was either dead, in a hospital, or in a prisoner camp.
Didn't actually bother securing a whole bunch of military targets, which allowed large swaths of military materiel to be taken by insurgents. The IED crisis that coalition forces suffered was literally their own fault - they moved so fast they kind of forgot to make sure that there weren't a bunch of bases with tonnes of bombs sitting around, unguarded since they had, in their infinite wisdom, fired the guards.
But the American political establishment cleverly drew a clean dividing line between the invasion and the post-invasion insurgency - as we all know, events in the past don't actually affect events in the future
)
Agreed and no major disagreements here. It really shows how Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard was a total fraud and that Trump’s B-2 bombing completely shattered the illusion. Without military alliance, the Eurasian strategy is extremely vulnerable and doomed to fail.
Having said that, I still wouldn’t take it so far as to say that it is not worth mounting a defense just because the US has overwhelming military power. If so, then you might as well submit to the fate of getting steamrolled by the US military. Why bother put up a defense at all? I still believe that a willingness to provide security guarantee can at least make the US less emboldened with its operations in the Middle East.
I think you've misunderstood my argument about US military power (or I haven't made myself clear, the comments are getting kind of long
) - the US's superior airlift capacity and airpower doesn't necessarily translate to them being able to easily steamroll anyone. My argument is just that Russia or China have a very limited capacity to meaningfully help, in a direct military way (rather than just selling weapons), a country far from them, which presents complications in the formation of any prospective alliances, as it's difficult for those countries to justify entering into such an arrangement with someone who won't even be able to help them that much. We should note that alliances between countries that aren't in close geographic vicinity have been relatively rare throughout history.
This doesn't mean that those countries are helpless by themselves, or even that what limited Chinese/Russian aid could be provided would be worthless - the US may have superior airlift capacity, but it's still not infinite, and airpower by itself doesn't win wars. It has long been the fantasy of Strategic Air Command ghouls that if only they were given enough gajilions of dollars, eventually the US would never again need to risk a single soldier and would just be able to bomb anyone into submission, but that has so far not materialized - eventually, some actual fighting on the ground has to happen for any strategic results to actually be achieved. The US has a capacity to deploy troops that no-one else has, but the deployment itself doesn't equal victory
(This is a further point as to why it's difficult to justify developing this capability - all these resources spent, and it doesn't even guarantee you that you'd be able to do anything other than bully countries which are practically city states like Grenada and Panama. Only real sicko ghouls would bother... And again, a historical note - the very idea that a state could military aid one so far away within a reasonable timeframe has only been a thing for less than a century, back in the day you'd be like a Roman client kingdom and wait for several years for some consul to mobilize a bunch of legions and drag their ass over to Asia Minor or wherever).
Ideally, everyone could get together and go "we can very slightly help each other out", and make arrangements, but it's just hard to do so in practice - any security guarantees by Russia or China just wouldn't be treated very seriously, since they wouldn't be able to guarantee all that much. Russia even did have bases in Syria, and the country still fell (although that had more to do with its own military collapsing - the Russians did bomb the hell out of the HTS forces, but this in fact proves exactly the point I made above, airpower doesn't win wars, someone has to fight down on the ground, and if those guys give up...). China's last experience with this kind of stuff is what, tributary kingdoms in the 18th century? Well, I guess we can count the Korean war in a way, but "hundreds of thousands died and we ended up with the country split in two" isn't a scenario anyone would want to emulate - we can recognize how impressive it is for the North Korean and Chinese forces to have achieved even this given the imperial might they were facing, but "we can get things down to a stalemate, very bloodily" still just isn't a very enticing offer to other countries.
So, countries in the region wouldn't necessarily be willing to accept anything (again, there has to be input from the protected country, you can't just go declaring that you guarantee this or that country without telling them first), and I kind of doubt the West would really take such things seriously anyway, given their rabid dog behavior - how many "red lines" have they crossed in Ukraine? The Europeans are on the cusp of discrediting their entire banking system just to keep Ukrainian financials going.
The Soviets could have more credibly given proper guarantees, but current Russia or China cannot. And if they do give guarantees, the US acts anyway, and the guarantors are exposed as not being able to actually provide meaningful counters, it would make them even less credible (and this has already happened to some extent for Russia, with the Syria kerfuffle as mentioned above, as well as the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict).
As for the bombings - we still don't really know how much meaningful damage was actually done. Recently the Israelis came out with a statement that they overestimated the damage they did (although we of course have to consider the possibility of this just being more "they're literally days away from developing a nuke" propaganda to justify more military action). I don't think it makes sense to frame this as some completely geopolitics-upending move. The US being able to sneak in and hit a few highly specific targets doesn't prove they'd be able run a sustained bombing campaign - and again, airpower doesn't win wars.
Good points, and it actually illustrates why military alliance is critical for the whole Eurasian strategy to work, as I mentioned before. The failure to take this into consideration really showed how inferior the Chinese foreign policy is compared to the USSR’s.
That’s my point - the real damage is Russia and China pulling away from Iran and the rest of Middle East. The physical damage is superficial and symbolic, but it does the job of scaring away Chinese investors.
I agree that Chinese policy isn't necessarily the most optimal, but I feel like you're somewhat nostalgically overrating the success of the Soviets' policy, outside of "their backyard" in Europe.
Cuba's like, the one big success, and that involved threats of nukes, which isn't exactly something one should do often. The Soviets weren't able to do much for other Caribbean or Latin American countries - they didn't stop Grenada, they didn't stop Panama, they didn't stop a multitude of coups. Over in the Middle East, they couldn't stop a coup in Iran (which is actually arguably as much "in their backyard" as the Warsaw Pact states, and in fact had been partially occupied by the Soviets just some years prior), and while their military support to various Arab states at least allowed them to resist Israel (which the Soviets actually supported at first, something I feel a lot of people forget), in the end this didn't stop the eventual Israeli ascendancy. And of course, one of the notable instances of the Soviets actually intervening directly (rather than just providing arms) - Afghanistan - was a grinding counter-insurgency that didn't exactly do them much good.
Hell, it was China itself which demonstrated the limitations of the Soviets in the Sino-Vietnamese war (I talked a little about this in this other comment, in the final section). I think I learned of that interpretation of the war from you, on a previous account, although I may be misremembering. Again, one of the points I want to emphasize is that making security guarantees that you can't back up can turn out worse than if you hadn't gotten involved in the first place - being shown on the international stage as unable to actually fulfill your commitments can be very discrediting to any further efforts.
The Iran-Iraq war is also an event that I think is very relevant - for one thing, the Soviets supported Iraq, which I wouldn't exactly consider their brightest moment, morally speaking, but it also clearly demonstrates why the formation of regional defense networks isn't trivial. How would such a network navigate the various regional conflicts and disagreements between the parties involved? Sure, it's easy to imagine the scenario of the alliance resisting an outside enemy, but what happens if there's a conflict within the alliance, either between separate members or internal conflict in a particular member? The Warsaw Pact had to militarily intervene in member-states twice to deal with the latter scenario, which of course had political costs, and the second time Romania refused to participate (which soured relations with the Soviets) and Albania just left the alliance altogether. There were also various conflicting territorial claims between the members which had to be managed.
Now, these difficulties don't mean that you should just give up and not try in the first place, but we just have to recognize that forming and successfully maintaining a defense network of co-equal states is, indeed, difficult - NATO doesn't necessarily serve as a successful example of longevity given how many of its members basically don't have sovereign foreign policy (and back when some did, there were events like the French and British pulling their Suez scheme and pissing of the Americans, and the French partially dropping out precisely to maintain their independence). Yes, it'd be nice if we could all put national chauvinisms aside and get together, but that's idealism - the actual real process of achieving that would be long and arduous. And in the mean time, all these conflicting national interests have to be managed somehow, and foreign faraway powers are going to have a very hard time doing that without being viewed as imperial meddlers, however fair or unfair that view may be.