People said this about Russia for the longest time and were wrong. Dmitri Alperovitch predicted the Russian Invasion 3 months before it happened and he’s predicting a hearty chance that China will attempt to invade Taiwan in 2025 - 2030. If you don’t have similar credo about past events like that, then I wouldn’t trust your opinion over his.
Russia isn’t China. People may have disagreed over the timing, but the Russians already seized crimea and interfered with US elections to advance their Ukraine policy.
Russia is a declining petrostate. China is the world’s factory. Antagonizing their biggest trading partners won’t be a winning strategy for many years, if ever.
It's very revisionist to act like the prevailing wisdom was that a full invasion was coming. Please cite your assessment or prediction about the upcoming Russian invasion at least a month before it happened, since it was so clear.
We’re talking on a message board. Nobody here has “geopolitical cred”
You can be pedantic about Nostradamus like predictions. But if you were surprised that Russia invaded Ukraine, your threshold for surprise is low. After all, they annexed a big part of the country a few years ago.
> But if you were surprised that Russia [China] invaded Ukraine [Taiwan], your threshold for surprise is low.
After all, they claim it's their territory, won't disavow claiming it through force, dissuade other countries from even visiting it, regularly perform military drills around it, and annexed Tibet while people today were still alive.