What Would America Look Like If It Lost Wwiii?

If Ukraine falls, I think the West will undergo a major &quot;moral hangover&quot;. The West has this strong &quot;freedom ideology&quot; which is pretty powerful both inwards and outwards, it has used it in Ukraine, giving it full blessing in terms of moral support. The West has pretty unilaterally proclaimed Ukraine to be the morally right side fighting for its freedom and that the West stands besides it in its rightful cause.<p>But now, if Ukraine is abandoned, it&#x27;s not because too many American lives were dying or anything like that, it will be because it costs some money (even if it&#x27;s not a huge sum in the larger scheme of things). The freedom narrative are just words, now exposed to be empty of substance. This will have ripple effects on the image of the West both inside and outside.

The capitalization &quot;Wwiii&quot; threw me for a loop; because every word in the title is capitalized, it didn&#x27;t occur to me that this was a proper noun, let alone an abbreviation. Until I read the comments, I thought this was going to be about something random like, I don&#x27;t know, a weird bacteria responsible for all of the biodiversity in the western hemisphere.

What an embarrassing article. In Ferguson&#x27;s scenario, there&#x27;s nothing stopping China from &quot;unleashing chaos in major cities&quot; <i>right now</i>. Why doesn&#x27;t China do it, if the US can&#x27;t&#x2F;won&#x27;t do anything to China in return? Then that somehow turns into Chinese overlords running things in DC and Chinese censorship of the Internet. And all, in Ferguson&#x27;s tortured logic, for the thoughtcrime of not willing to spend enough money on Ukraine.<p>I&#x27;ve read RAND&#x27;s and others&#x27; summaries of wargaming a China-US war, and know that defending Taiwan would be difficult. I hope Ukraine can hold out. But <i>bien-pensants</i> like Ferguson making up idiotic scenarios and warp them for the outcomes that support their worldviews does not help.<p>Another in this vein is from Lucian Truscott. &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.salon.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;28&#x2F;you-cant-win-a-by-dribs-and-drabs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.salon.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;28&#x2F;you-cant-win-a-by-dribs-and...</a>&gt; Hard to believe that Truscott is, or was, a respected writer during the glory days of New Journalism. You know a piece is bad when even the perennially word vomit-welcoming places like &#x2F;r&#x2F;politics don&#x27;t feature it. (To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, the absence of posts with 17.5K upvotes and 2.5K frenzied comments repeating Slava Ukraini and denouncing Ruzzia is the curious incident.)

This isn&#x27;t the title of the post. It is misleading. I first thought it was a typo, but it is an opinion piece about WW III. The actual headline is &quot;If You Think World War III Is Unimaginable, Read This&quot;

This is shifting of the Overton Window in plain sight. Lubing the public to accept the blood thirsty policies that are coming.<p>The drums of war are slowly sounding, and nobody will benefit from this.<p>What&#x27;s worse, we can only stand in the corner as spectators, unable to counter this immeasurable inertia of our own animalistic nature.

I remember when WWIII meant we all lose, in (depending upon where the boomers may be) half an hour or less.<p>Have there been significant advances in mineshaft technology since then?<p>see also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;994700393&#x2F;nuclear-war-card-game-50th-anniversary-edition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;994700393&#x2F;nuclear-war-c...</a><p>or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multiple_independently_targetable_reentry_vehicle#MIRV-capable_missiles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multiple_independently_targeta...</a>