U.S. Unveils Strategy for Nuclear Threats from China and Russia | TIME - Oct. 27, 2022 |

The Biden Administration unveiled a new defense strategy Thursday that puts the U.S. military on a Cold War-footing with China and Russia, detailing a plan to confront two nuclear peer adversaries for the first time in history with a multi-year build-up of modernized weaponry, enhanced foreign alliances and a top-to bottom overhaul of the American nuclear arsenal.

The 80-page document serves as the Administration's roadmap for global security for the decades to come, and makes clear the U.S. faces two powerful but very different competitors. It characterizes China as a long-term "pacing challenge" with its growing power projection in the Pacific region, while deeming Russia to be an immediate "acute threat" amid its ongoing war with Ukraine and continual threats to launch a nuclear strike.

'Sapere aude'

US Defence Strategy Brands China as Greatest Security Challenge & Russia as 'Acute Threat'

"We are living in a 'decisive decade,' one stamped by dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and our environment," said US president Joe Biden.

The defense strategy that the United States pursues will set the Department's course for decades to come. The Department of Defense owes it to our All-Volunteer Force and the American people to provide a clear picture of the challenges we expect to face in the crucial years ahead--and we owe them a clear and rigorous strategy for advancing our defense and security goals.

The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) details the Department's path forward into that decisive decade--from helping to protect the American people, to promoting global security, to seizing new strategic opportunities, and to realizing and defending our democratic values. For the first time, the Department conducted its strategic reviews--the NDS, the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and Missile Defense Review (MDR)--in an integrated way, ensuring tight linkages between our strategy and our resources.

The NDS directs the Department to act urgently to sustain and strengthen U.S. deterrence, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) as the pacing challenge for the Department. The NDS further explains how we will collaborate with our NATO Allies and partners to reinforce robust deterrence in the face of Russian aggression while mitigating and protecting against threats from North Korea, Iran, violent extremist organizations, and transboundary challenges such as climate change.

The PRC remains our most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades. I have reached this conclusion based on the PRC's increasingly coercive actions to reshape the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to fit its authoritarian preferences, alongside a keen awareness of the PRC's clearly stated intentions and the rapid modernization and expansion of its military. As President Biden's National Security Strategy notes, the PRC is "the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order, and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so."

[...]

2022 National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review | USNI News |

'Sapere aude'

Exactly my thoughts when diplomacy is willingly set aside to let trench warfare come to Europe. Stupidity all around for the survival of capitalism and hegemony.

The Geopolitical Boomerang: Can We Still Hope to Meet the Climate Challenge? |

Just a few months before, in November 2021, during the opening ceremony of COP26 in Glasgow, Boris Johnson was playing to the Davos crowd, calling for the re-enchantment of capitalism as solution to the climate crisis: "We in this room can deploy hundreds of billions. No question. But the market has hundreds of trillions. And the task now is to work together to help our friends to decarbonize...".

The friends in question are the fossil fuel majors, old industrial giants, or smart tech multinationals -- of which several (Shell, Apple, Walmart, and others) have annual revenues that surpass the GDP of many nations -- who are supposed to invest massive amounts of money to decarbonize the global economy and rise to the climate challenge. But we know that decades of effort to mobilize different market strategies, from voluntary commitments to the idea of a single carbon price, to attempts to "de-risk" green investments to redirect private savings, have never had the expected results. Political effort and economic tools have all proven insufficient; they all fundamentally fail to address reality.

We are no longer -- if indeed we ever were -- looking at an orderly and gradual transition, facilitated by global consensus, to a greener world. Yet this illusion, along with several others we will come back to, have for three decades tacitly accompanied the global governance and even the framing of the climate problem. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has violently shattered these illusions and its shock wave has exposed the contours of disorderly and unequal dynamics, driven by conflicting forces, in a highly confrontational landscape. The geopolitical lack of thought concerning climate governance is now coming back to us like a boomerang, exposing the fragility of a system that has relied on the civilizing force of markets and the virtues of broad, almost universal international cooperation.

The impasse over climate governance is also paired with great difficulties in the democratic functioning of Western states. Inabilities to agree at the national level, the rise of populist movements (the anti-democratic machinations of Trump in the United States or Bolsonaro in Brazil, the rising turnout for the extreme-right in France or Italy, violent anti-vax protests, campaigns against wind power), as well as the explosion of social grievances in countries in Europe and elsewhere, can be seen all over. Never has the dream of erasing development inequalities at a global level and social inequalities at the nation-state level through the virtues of soft trade and market forces alone seemed so vain.

'Sapere aude'

Sat Apr 6th, 2019 at 03:52:48 PM EST

G7 politicians only know how to play "Total World Domination" aka "Superpower" aka "Great Game" aka "Top Gun" aka FPTP aka Win/Lose aka Prisoner's Dilemma aka primacy, and they don't even observe their own rules. Anyone who's familiar with Piaget's observations of developmental psychology, in particular Moral Judgment of the Child, knows how, when, and why "self-organizing" players dispense with cheaters. No doubt there is an analogue buried in primatology litchitchure.

CN, RU, indeed ROW are not playing the same game.