US cyber capabilities have an edge because they can analyze all of our data stored with US tech companies and they have interception points on all major internet cables.
Their human intelligence is much better prepared to "convince" someone to act against their own interest if they can look at your last ten years of communication, family pictures, and web browsing history before they even meet you.
Imagine working in a foreign country where death penalty is applied to certain crimes, like blasphemy or homosexuality. They just need to find one person in the target organization who has a secret twitter account that talked badly about god and then they hit them up and tell them to plug in a certain USB stick to a certain system. Cyber operation succeeded because they have a shell.
Other than Americans wanting to feel superior (no offence intended, I'm sure most countries want to feel that when possible!) is there actually any public evidence that's the case?
Even when it comes to superiority of physical military forces, different people (with a range of different biases) have different opinions on stuff like whether a hot, all-out (but non-nuclear) war between USA and China would prove one or the other to be stronger, and while you may read that and think "I know which side is better and anyone who disagrees is just buying into delusional propaganda" at least to form that view you've had the ability to follow a lot of publicly available details on military developments over the years, learning about current and next gen fighter jets, drones, ships... etc.
But when it comes to cyber stuff, both offensive and defensive, it's generally a lot more secretive in terms of stuff that's actually been done (see for example the speculation in this thread that US power grid failures in recent years might have been caused by foreign adversaries - there's no evidence that's true, but if the US and China had both spent the last decade trying to take offline as many of the other country's power grids as possible we likely wouldn't have heard about it). Yet alone for hypothetical but saved for war capabilities. If a hot WW3 broke out tomorrow, who actually knows what hacking tools any country (from superpowers to smaller players) actually has, waiting to be used? Presumably they all spend a lot of effort trying to learn about each other's capabilities, and maybe they're successful enough that they actually do all know most of what everyone else can do - but they don't then announce that the way we hear about North Korea testing a new missile or about America developing a new fighter jet. I feel like we the general public just have no idea how advanced or not wartime capabilities might be. Am I wrong? (I may well be, as I'm in no way an expert in this field; I just believe that things like the document you linked are massively influenced by both the politics of the authors and the information available to them.)
The Danes would have allowed all those things without the annexation, think new sub pens for our Virginias, Space Force base expansions and so on. There is simply no need to piss off an ally with this nonsense.
I think the best outcome would really be the US' current allies are just waiting until trump goes and he doesn't break too much and the new person goes back to a more stable posture.
It's probably a more realistic outcome however is that no one really trusts the US any more and trump has just hastened the decline as the EU looks inward more, and other areas move more quickly to get support from china.
I hope they are more long-sighted than that. They did the same thing with Bush II's "with us or against us" rhetoric and actions. Appease the POTUS while he's there and hope the next one is a little better. Obama was more conciliatory to our allies' needs, but the cycle has been like this since 2001. The US is getting less stable instead of more stable, so I don't know what Europe is hoping for.
> The US is getting less stable instead of more stable
> I hope they are more long-sighted than that
Quoting you out of order, but when one puts all three together what do you believe the long-term plan should be? America is, by your own admission, becoming less stable, and currently threatening annexation of multiple countries. What exactly do you think "less stable" looks like after this?
> I think the best outcome would really be the US' current allies are just waiting until trump goes and he doesn't break too much and the new person goes back to a more stable posture.
This seems to be what most of the EU leaders think. However, it's not plausible that Trump is an aberration, given that he's been elected twice. Europe/EU/the West need to understand that the US populace doesn't seem to care about their alliances any more.
And this is fine, that's their total democratic right, but there's going to be really large downstream consequences over time.
> I think the best outcome would really be the US' current allies are just waiting until trump goes and he doesn't break too much and the new person goes back to a more stable posture.
I’m afraid that ship has sailed. This was the general feeling during Bidens’ presidency. After Trump’s reelection, it’s clear that the USA is permanently one swing state away from electing a tyrant.
I think the rest of the world will need to see a widely held conviction of never again and fundamental changes to America’s democratic system, before trust can be rebuilt.
Completely different matter. Military concerns aside, the main problem for China there is they know they're absolutely going get killed diplomatically and economically in the aftermath. The leadership knows well what would happen or else they would've done it long ago.
That is the reasoning that is most at risk here. China's tactical ability to succeed in Taiwan is not really related to America's ability to succeed in Venezuela.
However, assuming the US gets away with this diplomatically, this does set a real precedent that countries can get away with this diplomatically; which will make it harder to organize diplomatic and economic responses to China.
I disagree. This doesn't really change anything. It's not like China needed justification to invade Taiwan, they already do, nor it is not like China or Russia follows the rules based order, see South China Sea or Ukraine. From their perspective, the rules based order was created by the US to attack them, and the West hypocritically apply the rules where they see fit.
Ultimately, the international rules based order was mostly created to protect smaller and weaker powers that be and to constrain the strong. Since nobody can enforce international law, the strong do what they like anyway.
Anthropic probably doesn't have the independent capabilities to perform a full definitive attribution of sophisticated cyberattacks. They likely detected misuse of their tools and then worked with/provided information to the intelligence community (who are familiar with the modus operandi of Chinese APTs) who then did the attribution.
It doesn't really matter how advanced your supercomputing infrastructure is .... the simulation is as good as the input and data from actual tests.
The big question is whether China is confident enough with the data they have from 47 tests.
Any non-subcritical testing is a gift to China as they are severely lagging behind US on number of tests conducted and therefore amount of data collected about warhead design.
Resumption of tests would add fresh data to verify new warhead designs over the decades since the last test. US would have a lesser need for new data given the amount of testing done during the cold war.
If US does conduct a nuclear test I bet a whole slew of test from China would come very shortly after that. Work has already been noticed in recent years in the test tunnel.
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