China kept a tiny nuke force for its whole history until very recently, so that disproves your point, doesn't it?

Not at all. Why would it expand its nukes if they're never going to be used anyway? Why did the US and Russia make enormous investments in nukes?

I don't think the Russian nuclear launch chain of command is insecure enough to result in a wildcard launch. Putin and his Oligarchs do not want another Valentin Savitsky to end the world and kill them.

The point is not that another Arkhipov incident is imminent, only that if use of such weapons was not unthinkable then, it definitely is not the same now.

I'm content to rely on MAD forever, if the alternative is "allow myself to be raped by nuclear blackmail forever". Why would anyone agree to that?

No, you prefer to rape others with nuclear blackmail instead...

The elites who rule Russia are no different than plenty of elites in the West. They are rich and lead pampered lives of luxury, far better than the average Westerner. The Russian nuclear codes are not in the hands of some random Gopnik who doesn't care if he lives or dies. The fact that Western politicians actually care about social welfare isn't the weakness you think it is. GJ contradicting yourself on your "all politicians are the same" line, though.

You're better than low IQ takes like this. I said that they are all equally immoral and have as little regard for human life as the worst of them. Obviously, a guy who had to be a taxi driver to supplement his FSB income is going to look at the world differently from someone who lived his whole life in luxury like your "moral" president Biden.

Nobody does, which is why no one has ever used nukes. It's why Hitler didn't use chemical weapons in WW2.

And so they're not going to provoke a nuclear confrontaton.

US sanctions are an "individual choice" on the nation-state level. They are not an attempt to destroy a country's economy, but rather to make it so America is not complicit in their war machine.

Like you're complicit and funding the war machines of Azerbaijan in Armenia and Saudi Arabia in Yemen? Oh right. Not to mention your own war machine.

Quite frankly your victim routine means nothing: the West isn't going to stop using sanctions to punish nations who behave badly.

Behave badly. Jesus Christ, the nerve of a guy living in a country responsible for millions of deaths in the past few decades. I don't expect these career criminals to stop abusing their power. I hope that Russia and China will smash Western hegemony so that they can't abuse their power as they do now.

That is, in fact, how laws work. US corporations are required to obey US laws, and if we sanction North Korea or Iran, they have to cut ties.

So yeah, you're defending the right of your tyrannical government to get in the way of commerce between private parties in order to advance its nefarious geopolitical interests. And so your comparison with a boycott of the groomers at Disney was completely misplaced.

God willing, one day we will sanction China.

It'd be funny if China turns into a """"""""democracy""""""""""" like your Empire (though with less running over old ladies with horses), and you have to struggle to find another excuse to sanction and destroy the country.

Cause I believe in your good intentions, and that for you it's not "sanction China so we retain global hegemony". I don't believe in the good intentions of the leaders who have deceived you.