At most that was a couple of decades, it's not like that's an ancient status quo.
Sure. The century-long peace following the Napoleonic Wars was also some decades.
Our default state, unfortunately, is war. But we sought to change that after the horrors of WWII (and the nuclear bomb), and it's worth nothing where those noble goals succeeded. It's sad that project is over. But something being sad doesn't mean it isn't true.
In a geopolitical context, the words and actions of the powerful are what count. And those words and actions currently point–uniformly–towards sovereign borders not being a red line.
It's not. It's the same standard that existed forever.
> Russia has promulgated it through its actions in Georgia and Ukraine. China with Tibet and Taiwan. America with Iraq, Venezuela and Iran.
Don't forget India with Goa and pakistan, bangladesh, etc.
You are my favorite hindu zionist. I mean you are my favourite hindu zionist.
Literally down thread (well, up now–I commented before you got downvoted) [1].
> You are my favorite hindu
You're a recurring racist troll. News at 11.
Insane that people see a list of common actions by Russia, China and America and still conclude Chinese victimhood.
And the body count from all of those tiny border skirmishes together? Its less than these 24 hours in Iran, right?
I'm being consistent with my goalposts.
India [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%...
Bear in mind that we're comparing this to the USA and Israel's military record over the last 40 years.
Disputed border region. Used military force to intervene. That's an attack.
> Could we set the standard at "at least one piece of military equipment fired on people"?
Why not tens of soldiers killed? (And on what planet do "the 4th (Highland) Motorised Infantry and 6th (Highland) Mechanised Infantry Divisions" of the PLA not contain military equipment?)
> we're comparing this to the USA and Israel's military record over the last 40 years
No, you are. The list I stated was China, Russia and America. You're trying to argue that China upholds the rules-based international order around respecting sovereign borders. That would be news in Taipei.
You're arguing that China is the real bad guy while USA/Israel are doing 10x that in the current 24 hours.
If we ignore proxy wars, sure.
And you're still arguing a straw man. Nobody in this thread ever said that China was as warlike as Russia and America (and Israel and Iran). Just that it has embraced the same geopolitical philosphy and standard.
> Casualties: 35 combatants killed
Uh-huh.
So, half of the number of people we killed in our Venezuela attack. Of which half were innocent civilians.
Hey, could you really quick remind me how many civilians the US killed in Afghanistan? Something like 500,000 right?
Not here to say China is a good guy by any means, but your example was so bad I laughed out loud.
The examples I gave were Tibet and Taiwan. I was asked to give "one country China has attacked/invaded in the last 40 years," a timeline chosen to exlude the Sino-Vietnamese war [1] and encompass the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. I did, prioritizing directness, recency and death toll.
I'm not saying China is as militarily forward as Russia or America (or Israel or Iran). I'm saying that the double standard isn't a double standard, it's one Xi explicilty embraces with his rhetoric around Taiwan.
In this thread the only reason people have brought up Chinese issues are because the strong defensiveness of others like China is some saint. They’re not.
Also I think two more examples were missed, how Ukraine wouldn’t have been invaded without china’s tolerance of their ally doing it, and Hong Kong repression. Also how Iran and Ukraine make it much more likely they finally go for Taiwan like they’ve been posturing to do.
To deny China isn’t like Russia and the US in this regards is like thinking Trump was going to be the peace president as he claimed
I have Indian heritage, and I heard this take growing up, and I'll concede that India is on the peaceful side of the international median. That said, the folks in Sri Lanka [1][2] and Bangladesh [3] would aggressively disagree. (Book recommendation: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida [4]. Also, anything by Assamese authors.)
And this thesis really only applies to modern India. Pre-EIC India was a subcontinent of warring states. And even for the "modern India" designation, we have to ignore the violence of political integration [5][6].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_intervention_in_the_Sri...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffna_hospital_massacre
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Moons_of_Maali_Almei...
Sri Lanka is more complicated, but India was never directly involved in the conflict. Except for the peace keeping forces it sent, and those too targeted the Indian Tamils, which was the reason they assassinated Rajeev Gandhi.
Well yes, we turned them into a suzerainty. The Iranians didn't like it when America did it through the Shah. The Bangladeshis don't like it when Indians think they should be a supplicant sovereign. (Sheikh Hassina was to New Delhi what the Shah was to D.C.)
Like, America rescued Japan from a ruinous autocracy. It would still be mean and violent to demand their gratitude for us nuking them.
> India could have easily took over Bangladesh
And it would have had another Kashmir. In practice, buffer state was the only correct play. (Arguably, it's what China should have done with Tibet.)
> India was never directly involved in the conflict. Except for the peace keeping forces
Yeah. The entire American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan was done with "peacekeeping" forces. The peacekeepers in both cases committed documented atrocities.
The huge part you are missing is, India did the atrocities against it's own people. LTTE were Tamils of Indian origin. My original comment said India has never been an aggressor to it's neighbors.
Everyone always says this. Taiwanese are ethnically Chinese. Ukrainians aren't real. And India wasn't subjugated by the British, it was part of the British Empire and thus a domestic concern.
> LTTE were Tamils of Indian origin. My original comment said India has never been an aggressor to it's neighbors
If you redefine neighbors to being inside India, and then excuse atrocities inside India, sure. By that definition, nobody has ever been an aggresor to its neighbors.
1987–1990: India deployed ~70,000 troops to Sri Lanka and engaged in combat during the civil war.
1987-1990: Indian peace keeping troops only targeted Indian Tamils, which was the primary reason they assassinated Rajeev Gandhi.
https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/conflic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Pakistan_wars_an...
That's always been the nature of partition.
So the Mughals defeated and assimilated the Sultanate of Delhi ruled by the Afghan Lodi dynasty. Then they defeated and assimilated the Rajput Kingdom of Mewar ... who were Hindu ... ah, I've got it, you must mean Hindus. So excluding Shah Jahan and the Taj Mahal from being Indian I guess. I'll figure this out eventually.
Right then: Rana Sanga (the Rajput Maharana of Mewar) invaded and captured lots of territory belonging to the Malwa Sultanate, the Gujurat Sultanate, and the Lodi dynasty (again). So there you go. You can't say that those places were India at the time, and you can't say he was from the wrong culture, checkmate.
It's like saying that the English never invaded anywhere before 927. Of course they didn't, because the first English king was crowned in 927, and before that the English were the West Saxons, South Saxons, East Angles, Middle Angles, South Angles, Men of Kent, two flavors of Northumbrians and a few stray Welsh, and they were all busy invading one another.
China doesn't belong on this list. Nehru's government was aggressively pro China. China returned the favour by invading Tibet and then attacking India [1].
If Mao hadn't done that, we'd probably be living in a Sino-Indian world order today. (India and China have surprisingly few fundamental geopolitical overlaps, the Himalayas neatly partitioning their spheres.)
Hmm, so in eastern Kashmir, in fact. Versus Tibet!
Your turn.
I see you had shifted the goal posts from being aggressor to "disproportionate response". My original comment said India has never been the aggressor and thanks for finally agreeing to that. I will not comment on the response being disproportionate or not, because that is just an attempt to derail the original conversation.
What do you mean? China has bought Tibet from the British. And what have they done with Taiwan?
China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1951 [1].
You may be thinking of Hong Kong, which the British invaded and annexed from the Qing dynasty [2] and then handed back to China in 1997 [3] under conditions that Beijing defaulted on in 2019 [4].
> what have they done with Taiwan?
Same as America has been doing with Greenland.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hong_Kong
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handover_of_Hong_Kong
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...
So, nothing?
No. Threatening to invade a sovereign country, and then staging materiel to do it, is not "nothing." At the every least, it's something the U.S. (and China and Russia) once criticised others for doing. And it's something we've each done.