I think a Russian war with a European state has probably increased simply based on Russia’s revealed willingness to go to war
I don’t think this is right- “Russia” doesn’t make actions, Vladimir Putin does; Putin is 70, so he seems unlikely to be in power once Russia has recovered from the current war; there’s some evidence that other Russian elites didn’t actively want the war, so I don’t think it’s right to generalize to “Russia”.
This makes me more confused about whether China committed to a military confrontation with the West. If it has, and China believed it had more military-industrial capacity than the West (which is what I’d believe if I was China), then now is the perfect opportunity to drain Western stocks further and prop up its ally (?) by pumping weapons into Russia (see previous forecasting question).
A US-China war would be fought almost entirely in the air and sea; Ukraine is fighting almost entirely on land. The weapons Ukraine has receive are mostly irrelevant for a potential US-China war; e.g. the Marines have already decided to stop using tanks entirely, and the US being capable of shipping the vast amounts of artillery ammunition being consumed in Ukraine to a combat zone would require the US-China war to already be essentially won.
Weapons being sent to Ukraine are from drawdown stocks, which Taiwan itself hasn’t previously been eligible to receive. Taiwan instead purchases new weapons, but there are many, many other countries purchasing similar types of weapons, and if the US were to become concerned, I’d expect it to prioritize both Ukraine and Taiwan over e.g. Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
(There is some overlap, to be clear, and this might change in the future.)
The US midterm elections have now occurred. There was extensive discussion about the OR-06 primary, where many EA’s tried to help Carrick Flynn win the nomination.
While I cannot find an online link, I was told that Flynn’s supporters were extremely confident of a general election win if he won the primary. It is not clear to me why this would be so. Metaculous bears this out, his odds of winning the general were barely below his odds of winning the primary:
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9700/carrick-flynn-to-win-or-6-democratic-primary/
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9701/carrick-flynn-to-win-or-6-general-election/
538’s model showed the GOP candidate ahead in the lead up to the election: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/house/2022/oregon/6/
Democrats somewhat outperformed their polling nationwide; OR-6’s returns aren’t yet in, but Andrea Salinas, the Democrat, currently holds a 2.4% lead. Given how narrow the race is, and how Flynn lost the primary despite his financial advantage, it’s likely that he would have lost the general election had Salinas decided not to run.