The Chinese leader has flown out to South Africa for the summit but asked his commerce minister to read out his remarks.

  • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    It’s long been thought the only reason there’s been no WWIII is because countries that don’t necessarily like each other have created mutually beneficial trade deals together.

    And then Russia decided to go to war regardless. I’m not sure whether this has shown us that war prevention based on mutual trade is an illusion, or that Russian economic difficulties prove that it works. Maybe time will tell, but in any case I’m not sure the dead will be happy that Russia’s economy will suffer.

    I mean, it makes perfect sense that you’re not going to start a war for economic reasons if it’s worse than just trade, but what happens when someone decides that they want war for reasons other than economic. For example, country A has a lot of people with their main nationality in the bordering countries, and someone stirrs up nationalist sentiments and they want their country to ecompass all regions where their nationals live, regardless of economic benefits/drawbacks.

    • Kes@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      They didn’t intend for there to be a war. They fully expected to just walk in without much resistance, take over the country without much hassle similarly to how they took over Crimea, install a puppet government, and have the west barely react just as we haven’t been reacting to their annexation of parts of Georgia, Crimea, and their conflict in Donbass for years

    • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Toxic ideologies. It’s kind of crazy how they can drive countries to do things against their best self interest.