The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War

by Jim Sciutto

“I’m the president of Ukraine,” he told reporters in February, “and I’m based here, and I think I know the details better here.”[2] In a January phone call, Zelensky communicated the same concern to the US president, even as Biden again shared the US intelligence assessment that Russian forces were set to invade. And he had even sharper criticism for the US as it and other western nations began to evacuate their diplomats from Ukraine. “Diplomats are like captains,” Zelensky said. “They should be the last to leave a sinking ship. And Ukraine is not the Titanic.”

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“Given the fact that fifty percent of commercial traffic goes through the strait every single day for the world, and seventy percent plus of semiconductors are made in Taiwan, well, that could be disrupted. We’d have potentially an economic crisis of global proportions.”

TAIWAN’S EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS WILL XI OR WON’T XI?

“We are a democracy, and we’re not supposed to be lied to [to] get us into wars,” Kelly said pointedly. “And in all of the wars, with the exception of the first Gulf War, people like me were told, ‘This is important. Defend your country. Every red-blooded American boy is going to go and do his part.’ ”

As recently as July 2023, Russia carried out one in a series of tests of a new nuclear-powered torpedo. The Poseidon torpedo carries its own nuclear reactor to power its motion. The size of a city bus, it doesn’t fit inside conventional torpedo tubes. “They have to build a sub around it, essentially,” the senior US military official told me.

....torpedo the size of a bus needs a new word.