That’s why breaking the US up into pieces is so important, as hopefully they would at least have to use those nukes on the parts that seced instead of other countries that have done nothing, on top of such breaking up leading to deteriorated nuclear weapons infraestructure for at least a while.

but seem to be focused on solely military targets for the time being.

Apparently they hit at least one oil rig as well.

Nice to see that this is affecting oil as well which hopefully will weaken the petrodollar soon. And with a weaker dollar and more direct trade in everything it would be really nice for high tech goods to be affected as well, perhaps breaking quite a few western companies/monopolies/oligopolies on the way.

:)

Privateering coming back in the arctic, and pacific.

Anti-ship missiles, cruise missiles, drones and many other solutions would make it not sustainable for long enough to hurt these countries, specially if Russia nuked whoever gave support to such privateers as their new nuclear doctrine (that they presented in the last 48 hours) would likely require they answer like that.

Using environmental concerns to pass a UN resolution putting major restrictions on what can be shipped through it.

That’s why veto power exists, and if Russia lost their veto power then Russia would not follow anything comming out of there and the UN itself would likely go the way of the League of Nations.

“Accidentally” crashing a nuclear powered sub and having its reactor melt down up there so a choke point is unusable forcing ships to go through NATO waters to bypass radiation.

Two can play that game. Although I don’t think there are any chokepoints for that anyway.

Doing “military exercises” in the Bering Strait constantly.

If civilian ships got hit by the “exercises” that would be an act of war because to the victim that is just a direct attack on them.

False claims of Russian/Chinese boats entering US Alaskan waters constantly, and disputing the maritime boundaries constantly changing where they claim the line is to confuse captains. Firing warning shots at any ships that cross the line that they move every morning.

That’s the same as invading and taking Russian land and would likely be considered an act of war and nukes might fly. And there is also many ways to avoid crossing into the wrong borders anyway so it shouldn’t be a problem.

Plus this doesnt even take into account that the US is working to create a maritime exclusion zone around Chinas entire coast.

Again, the US can circle China as much as they want but they can’t fully block them without attacking China/Russia which would be considered an act of war.

This will work for now, but the end goal needs to be a huge railway project connecting Russia and China over land deep within their territory where its safe from any attack. High speed cargo trains running from the Chinese coast up into Russia all the way to Moscow would be an economic game changer.

It would be good but those lines are still attackable by drones and missiles, that’s why there is no way for the US to block them without nukes flying being a very high likelyhood.

As long as it’s not blocking Russian ships from the Black Sea the US can do anything and not much would come out of it straight away. Some countries would try to become independend of the canals but that would likely not lead to war.

On the other hand, the US literally shooting at Russian or Chinese ships would be a declaration of war that would require an immediate response of those attacked else it would just escalate to them losing more ships and probably even their ports and coastal infraestructure/cities being targeted soon as well.

Ya i wouldnt be so sure it cant be blocked.

It can be blocked but only by force and the only countries that can do this are the US itself, the baltics, the scandinavian countries, occupied Korea or Japan, neither of which could attack Russia/China without a high likelyhood of getting nuked in return. Meanwhile, the Suez can be closed and there is nothing Russia or China could do (other than going around or making more trains).

Hopefully this means something like sanctions on the colonists from BRICS is also being worked on in the background and close to becoming reality.

Although it would be nice if they could do anything, what about congress and/or other parts of the government that can block the president?

I know that if this happened in my country the president would either have to basically sell the country to get even mediocre laws passed, or more likely with the even farther right congress of now, would get impeached in no time, though I don’t know how much of this applies to Sri Lanka.

Of the 31 Abrams tanks the U.S. sent to Ukraine, six have been destroyed

Is it really that low? I was pretty sure it was at least double that many by now.

but when Iran gives Russia missiles suddenly it’s a problem

Not even that. They probably just invented it to try to use this as an excuse as there isn’t even any evidence of that.

I guess they could also do something like destroying GPS satellites or undersea cables as well, which might be a better approach if they don’t want to kill anyone in NATO countries while hurting them considerably.

I don’t see many chances of the US backing down of striking Russia by use of Ukraine, specially as they likely accept their own propaganda that Russia won’t or can’t do anything, so we unfortunatelly might know soon enough.

It’s likely, specially as from what I hear China was able to sell steel in Brazil cheaper than the local production too, so something likely changed/improved in China recently. It could be, at least in part, due to less internal demand, but cutting off the middlemen might have helped too.

The 2.5% in this case comes from all the international trade from Russia in 2023-2024, where 42% use Yuan to 39.5% the dollar.

So not globally passing the dollar yet, but it’s nice that there are examples for others to see the new opportunities.

Probably something like the smaller producers sold locally, governing their prices in part by what bigger producers set. Meanwhile, large producers could likely pay for the price discovery, individually or in a group, or they had many contacts which allowed them to have an idea of what would be fair. But it was likely the US was stealing quite a lot as middlemen, which can now be at least atenuated somewhat by having many people trading directly and perhaps even more “state help” to figure out good prices long term.

I would be interested in understanding this better as well, and nice to see that the new system is already being used. Whoever is not using the new system yet will likely do the math to see how good it will be for them.

Edit to add another point: Large producers would likely buy smaller local producers’ production as well in case the export price was good, so the smaller producers would increase their prices when they knew the bigger producers were buying a lot.

Even just a country existing independently by themselves is already enough for them to do whatever they can to demonize and attack them as such an independent country will be a symbol of hope for other countrries wanting the same.

I guess there might have been some confusion from what I said to here.

I never said the Ukrainian puppet regime would never do something like irradiating Russia and Europe by blowing up a nuclear power plant, I just said that if they were going to bomb a nuclear power plant, releasing a lot of nuclear materials, there was no reason for them to go out of their way to get more nuclear materials to throw at it as just blowing it up conventionally would already be spreading a lot of radiation and adding more would likely not even make a difference.

So, either they would be attacking the nuclear power plant with conventional weapons or they would get nuclear materials to attack a city with a dirty bomb, but there is no need to attack a nuclear power plant with a dirty bomb as it is redundant and counter productive, so it might be that the news is either really bad propaganda or mistranslated/misreported.

The attack is intended to use radioactive warheads to target spent fuel storage sites at a nuclear power plant, and the ammunition has already been delivered to Zhovti Vody.

Where do I even begin to talk about how dumb this is?

It’s like saying you will make nerve agent just so you can bomb a nerve agent plant. It doesn’t make sense. Not even for the Ukrainian regime.

I guess you could add extra radioatice stuff to make sure it to gets mixed with everything else at the target site, but if you just use normal shells/bombs you can at least claim it was a mistake, so I really don’t see how this makes sense as is.

If they want to bomb a nuclear power plant normal bombs, perhaps bunker busters, sufice. There is no need to do any more than that.

The only reason I can see for them to be searching for “radioactive materials” to target the plant it would be if they wanted spent uranium rounds, but that wouldn’t be used because it is radioactive but because it is “harder”.

So, either this is some dumb propaganda piece, some even dumber plan, or some dumb reporting or translation on what should be really serious.

Nice to see them doing something like this.

Now it would be nice if they could coodinate with the next two biggest producers, Russia and Tajikistan, the three of whom toghether have almsot 90% of the world’s production, to also do something similar in exchange for investment. Or perhaps it might be better to just do the same restriction to another important resource.

There were also some very uncofirmed talks about China stopping drone parts exports too, which if they really did could have a massive impact on west.

If they finally can get this done hopefully this also blocks the US from remaining in Syria as well, as I doubt Turkey will allow the US to remain in Syria using Turkish territory to maintain their bases.