Are you under the impression that these peripheral countries aren't asking to join western organizations, but are instead coerced or brainwashed into doing so?
Or are you subscribing to the view point that national sovereignty should only exist for the Great Powers and everyone else should just get in line?
I've spent a lot of time in the former Soviet countries. I play sports over there so I talk with folks after games, meet families, etc.
They live in a world of fear. That fear is not of NATO.
I agree with most of this, and I really want to highlight that the 'no-fly zone' concept is something that can only come from a great power fighting a smaller power. A no-fly zone is, 'we're at war with you but we're so much more powerful that we're going to do it at minimal risk and there's nothing you can do about it.' The US can do that with Iraq and Libya and Kosovo and any number of small countries. I would have thought Russia could do it with Ukraine until last week. But for two major powers there's no such thing as a no-fly zone...there's just war. The internationally accepted step down from war is proxy war or armament, which is what we're doing. Maybe Russia is so weak it would adhere to the polite fiction of a 'no-fly zone', but I doubt it.
I think the phrase has rather morphed over the years. The original meaning (so far as my memory goes) stems for Bill Clinton's idea about how to prevent Serbia from assisting the Bosnian Serbs tear apart Bosnia and Herzegovnia in 1993 or so. It was his answer to the twin queries (1) What are you going to do about all this ethnic cleansing? and (2) Don't the Bosnians have the right to work out a civil war however they want, without interference?
Clinton was a born split-the-difference guy, of course, probably loved threesomes on Jeff's island paradise, so he came up with the idea that the justifiable thing to do was prevent Serbia from assisting the Bosnian Serbs through air power, and the deal he offered them was "You can keep your air force -- so long as you keep it within your borders, and don't fly it over Bosnia." A very different thing from just going in and blasting the hell out of Serbian air forces.
And this doesn't really seem relevant to Ukraine, except perhaps in the separatist regions, where you could argue there is a domestic civil war going on -- but even then, the separatists are *not* being assisted by the VVS anyway, so what's the point?
But yeah if you're just talking about suppressing somebody's aerial offensive and defensive assets, this is just 'establishing air superiority' and the phrase "no fly zone" seems weirdly inapt. Could be Zelensky's trying to suggest a form of Clintonian hair-splitting that would allow NATO to get directly involved while pretending to just be "allowing" Ukraine and Russia to work it out "fairly" using just ground assets. Or something like that, who knows? Why he thinks the lack of a solid *rationalization* is the big barrier to this happening is a mystery. Or maybe he's playing to a world audience, thinking the Europeans or Americans will be embarrassed at "not even" being willing to interdict Russian aerial bombardment. Although again who would be naive enough to uncritically accept that framing I dunno.
I don't think Zelensky really thinks NATO is going to impose a No Fly zone, but it's his job to investigate every possible avenue of support for his country. And a large part of the value of his entreaties is not the (minuscule) chance of actually getting NATO to take a huge jump up the escalation ladder, but the propaganda / information-warfare value, casting Ukraine further in the light of noble victimhood, drumming up public support, etc.
"maybe he's playing to a world audience, thinking the Europeans or Americans will be embarrassed at "not even" being willing to interdict Russian aerial bombardment. Although again who would be naive enough to uncritically accept that framing I dunno."
"WASHINGTON, March 4 (Reuters) - A broad bipartisan majority of Americans think the United States should stop buying Russian oil and gas and work with NATO to set up "no-fly zones" to protect Ukraine from Russian air strikes, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Friday."
Later in the same article:
"It was not clear if respondents who supported a no-fly zone were fully aware of the risk of conflict, and majorities opposed the idea of sending American troops to Ukraine or conducting air strikes to support the Ukrainian army."
Having interacted with a number of civilians about this, it seems they genuinely do not understand that a no fly zone means shooting down planes and air-war. They seem to think of it as some kind of abstract international law instrument which somehow-magically- stops people from flying. I think the most charitable explanation is that they haven't thought that hard about it.
Yes, it almost sounds like it's an ICAO policy that one could somehow invoke that would cause air travel, including hostile military aviation, to be suspended in a region, or to become clearly recognized as a war crime, or something something something.
Quite right. One of the drawbacks of the professionalization of the military is that far fewer people than at any point in history have any direct experience informing their opinion about military operations.
> Although again who would be naive enough to uncritically accept that framing I dunno.
Been avoiding Twitter this last month? ;)
I have seen far too many people, some of whom I used to respect the mental prowess of, speaking positively of the idea of a US NFZ over Ukraine. And who will. Just. Not. Listen.
"Imposing a No Fly Zone" is kinda like fighting a little kid by keeping your palm on their forehead and them at arms length while they flail at you. Harder to do with an adult bear.
>Two persons close to the Russia-Ukraine negotiations (including back channel talks) tell me Russia proposed (1) Zelensky remains pro forma president but Russia appoints Boiko as PM, (2) Ukraine recognizes L/DNR and Crimea, (3) No NATO. Ze told them emphatically no.
Boyko was the Putin proxy candidate in the last election, getting 11% of the vote in 2019. Though I suspect that number would be vastly lower now.
Yeap, I often see 2 and 3 mentioned as a reasonable compromise, but they also asked to change Ukraine's constitution to specifically nerf Zelensky.
Also to note that negotiations are complicated by a complete lack of trust in Russia - they broke both the recent Minsk accords, and also the treaty they signed when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, which says very clearly they'll respect Ukraine's borders at the time. Hard to get more untrustworthy than that.
I saw a claim elsewhere that another part of the demands was that Ukraine reduce its military to 60k people max. Which would be extremely foolish to agree to since Russia is demonstrably untrustworthy and would doubtless attack again when the situation is more in his favor. If either of these secret side conditions is true, it would be stupid for Ukraine the deal since it amounts to surrender to conquest.
That was a day one demand, that as far as I can tell, was taken off the table when it was clearly a non starter. I'm also 90% sure Putin wants the entirety of the Donbas region independent, not just the part that Putin had before the war.
I think Ukraine should only take the deal if they get back something that can be an assurance that this is unlikely to happen again. My first thought was the return of their nuclear weapons, which is probably unrealistic, but they should get something that helps guarantee the deal will be preserved.
It's hard to see what kind of assurance Russia could give that would make a difference to Ukraine, given their history of lying and breaking past deals.
Formal acquiescence to Ukraine joining NATO would work.
And, as Aristides said, handing over a hundred working nukes would work (nb: one of the big reasons Ukraine handed the nukes over in the first place was that they were locked with codes the Ukrainians didn't have).
It was asked what kind of assurance Russia could give that Ukraine would accept. I'm pretty sure Ukraine would accept either of those as being genuine insofar as Russia would be putting a gun to its own head in case of betrayal.
It's not going to *happen*, but it satisfies the condition asked for.
Put a UN force in along a demilitarised zone. Any invasion would then authorise fully sanctioned war against Russia. Then Ukraine agrees to not join NATO.
Russia did not withdraw their heavy weapons, so Ukraine could not implement Minsk-2. We've all now seen what happens when Russia agrees to "humanitarian corridors" so I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on anything.
Pull-out of all heavy weapons *by both sides* to equal distance with the aim of creation of a security zone on minimum 50 kilometres (31 mi) apart for artillery of 100mm calibre or more, and a security zone of 70 kilometres (43 mi) for multiple rocket launchers (MRLS) and 140 kilometres (87 mi) for MLRS Tornado-S, Uragan, Smerch, and Tochka U tactical missile systems:
*for Ukrainian troops*, from actual line of contact;
*for armed formations of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine*, from the contact line in accordance with the Minsk Memorandum as of 19 September 2014
The pullout of the above-mentioned heavy weapons must start no later than the second day after the start of the ceasefire and finish within 14 days.
This process will be assisted by OSCE with the support of the Trilateral Contact Group.
It doesn't actually obligate Russia to do anything.
The Donetsk and Luhansk separatist forces are supported by Russia, directed by Russia, and to some extent _are_ Russia (they've had at least special ops forces In there for years)
What was the problem with point 11 of Minsk-2? Why Ukraine couldn’t implement it?
Quoting from Wikipedia:
11. Constitutional reform in Ukraine, with a new constitution to come into effect by the end of 2015, the key element of which is decentralisation (taking into account peculiarities of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, agreed with representatives of these districts), and also approval of permanent legislation on the special status of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in accordance with the measures spelt out in the attached footnote, by the end of 2015.
My understanding is that current Ukraine elites didn’t (and don’t) want any Russian influence, and so they sabotaged any political guarantees to separatists / Russian proxies, and Russia in turn was wary to withdraw heavy weapons - since without them, Donetsk / Luhansk (population 3.5m) would be very vulnerable to military action from Ukraine (population 40m, army trained and armed by NATO).
They chose not to implement it because Russia refused to implement their side of the agreement. If Russia is not even going to honor the ceasefire, why the heck would they go forward with constitutional reform? How could they sell that to their electorate? "We got nothing, and in return we made huge constitutional changes". OK. They only agreed to it in return for a ceasefire that didn't happen. Traditionally when the other party is in breach of a contract, you are released from your obligation to perform your side of the agreement.
Well, the contention is that Russia _did_ implement a ceasefire (and then got nothing in return).
Both Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 were signed after Ukraine military suffered major (some say - catastrophic) defeats, and there was a very real risk of Russian forces advancing to Kiev.
"My understanding is that current Ukraine elites didn’t (and don’t) want any Russian influence"
Your understanding is weak.
NO Ukrainian wants any Russian influence in Ukraine.
Look up Holodomor if you don't understand why
Look at the current fighting if you're unclear on exactly how much Ukrainians don't want to be dominated by Putin, or Russia.
But my previous statement really wasn't strong enough:
No sane person wants to be under Russian influence. Russia is a land for whose entire existence it's been a cesspool of political and economic corruption. Until that changes, it needs to be kept locked up in the smallest possible place
Exactly this kind of statements I cite when people ask me why Russia could be afraid of NATO/USA.
It is quite easy to portray someone as paranoid, when you first threaten him, and than only look at his reaction.
I do not know a single thing Russia has done in the last 30 years, NATO/USA has not done worse before in this period. This does not give Russia the right to do so, but this does take the right from any Westerner to point to Russia as a evil.
*I* didn't violate anything, and the United States had long claimed that the Budapest Memorandum was not binding when it sought to sanction Byelorus in violation of that Memorandum.
Meanwhile, if you want bad faith, look to the promises that NATO would not expand to the East.
Amazing that Putin managed to offer that Ukraine almost completely capitulates, while spreading news that he'd offered to walk away with almost nothing. This seems typical of Russia's negotiation style (see also: repeatedly agreeing to temporary ceasefires so that civilians can evacuate, and then breaking the ceasefires when civilians attempt to evacuate every time). I'll be similarly skeptical next time Russia says anything about their war policy.
I think "completely capitulates" would involve reinstalling Yanukovych or equivalent as president and disbanding their armed forces. These demands aren't anything close to that.
One possible compromise would be for Ukraine to agree to accept the results of a referendum, run by a neutral party, in Crimea and the secessionist areas. Russia wins in the Crimea, probably in the parts of eastern Ukraine they have long controlled, perhaps not if their claim is for all of Donbas. At the point when that agreement was made both sides could claim it as a victory for them, and they are just respecting democracy.
Ukraine yes, but I don't think Russia would accept elections where it doesn't count the votes.
I was talking with friends about this, and Germany would have been the best neutral party. We joked that if China is organizing, they'll also be winning the elections even if they're not on the ballot.
But yes, that would really be the just decision in this case. Unfortunately I doubt it's going to happen.
What about the Ukraine being split in half? Basically Russia gaining the eastern half, and Ukraine keeping the Western half? I guess the Ukrainians would never agree to this, but still...
Keep in mind Russia has practiced ethnic cleansing in the occupied areas of Luhansk/Donetsk. The people there now are not the same people who were there 8 years ago. Should Israel conduct a referendum in the settlements and then decide whether to annex the settlement areas based on that referendum?
I would argue that most of it was due to the ongoing conflict, and general lack of rule if law (and not ethnicity). A lot of people prefer not to live in a war zone, if they have an alternative...
"In the statelets, secret police and “loyal” residents monitor every word, phone call and text message.
Dissidents or businessmen who refuse to “donate” their assets to the “needs of the People’s Republic” have been thrown in “cellars”, or dozens of makeshift concentration camps, without trial.
“It looks like the 1930s in the Soviet Union, a classic gulag,” Stanislav Aseyev, a publicist who was kidnapped in 2017 in Donetsk and was sentenced by a separatist “court” to 15 years in jail for “espionage”, told Al Jazeera.
For almost two years, he was incarcerated and tortured in these “cellars” until separatists swapped him and dozens of other prisoners in 2017.
Thousands of others were tortured and abused in the “cellars”, according to rights groups and witnesses.
“The cellars where prisoners are held in Donetsk, and the widespread use of torture, are among the most obvious human rights issues,” said Ivar Dale, a senior policy adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a human rights watchdog group.
These tendencies have gone hand in hand with economic degradation.
The living standards are “many times, if not dozens of times worse than in pre-war 2013”
...
Thousands of Russian volunteers flocked to Donetsk and Luhansk to aid separatist militias.
“Putin will come and restore order here,” one of their supporters, a rotund minibus driver named Valerii, told this reporter in April 2014 in Donetsk.
But four months later, after the separatists tried to confiscate his minibus, he locked his apartment, loaded the bus with his most valuable belongings, and left for Kyiv."
I read the entire article. Forcing 2-3 million ethnic Ukrainians (out of a population of 6-7 million) to flee by torturing them and confiscating their stuff is ethnic cleansing
A good solution might be for Zelensky to go to "prison" as Risto Ryti did for Finnland. Putin gets to claim domestIcally that he removed the Jewish drugy nazi and Zelensky gets the full Pablo Escobar treatment, with plenty of furloughs, gets his chosen successor elected with a discrete hint or two, and no risk to fuck up in everyday politics.
I think the peace agreement needs to be a formal, tripartite agreement between NATO, Ukraine, and Russia. Ukraine is formally declared as neutral and not eligible for NATO as well as being a nuclear weapons free zone, Russia agrees to allow the residents of the Donetsk/Luhansk to have an internationally supervised referendum on being independent/joining Russia/staying in Ukraine and to not send in any troops into Ukraine to back any government, etc.
And yeah, we really need to not do the idiotic No Fly Zone idea. Thankfully, Russia made it clear recently that they'd consider it an act of war by any country that did it. I'm not worried that Biden is going to cave on that - the guy held firm on Afghanistan withdrawal even with a big chunk of the national security press and "Blob" railing against him over it, and so far the US has done exactly what we threatened to do before Russia invaded (sanctions, arms to the Ukrainians, etc).
I have a hard time seeing how the Ukrainians will ever trust Russia to abide to a promise not to invade again. I think any peace agreement would have to involve trustworthy allies, and be effectively something like NATO in all but name. (i.e. troop tripwires, like South Korea.)
I've been listening to residents in Odessa on Twitter spaces and telegrams. Even the political groups and factions that were built around being pro Russia are now building sandbags in the streets. They feel betrayed. Burning with anger at Russia.
If it would be like NATO in all but name, then it would be recognized as such, and would mean that Russia lost the war (by definition - stated objective for the war was not achieved). But then the question of trust would be moot - there will be military guarantees instead.
The question of trust comes up only if Ukraine is losing - and then it is a balancing act between more fighting (and deaths) and giving up something…
My worry is all this does is postpone the invasion for 5 years. Right now Ukraine has international support and is causing Russia to suffer major loses. If Russia ever sees am opening where one of those is not true, why wouldn't they just do it again. At a minimum, they will get more of Ukraine.
To take Scott's metaphor, Crimea was the Alusian Islands, now they are asking for Alaska, what will they ask for next? It is better to not surrender unless something changes that make it substantially less likely this will happen again. Transfer of Russian military assets? I'm not sure what, it will take, but Ukraine might be better off in an Afghanistan like 20 year conflict that they win instead of becoming puppet state slowly over repeated attacks with peace agreements in the middle.
Give Ukraine part of Russia's nuclear arsenal. Ukraine gave its nukes to Russia back in the early 90's, in exchange for a pledge to respect its borders. Now Russia has violated that pledge, so Ukraine should get the nukes back in exchange.
Of course. Perhaps someone else, like the United States or France, could loan Ukraine some nukes in exchange for their right to compensation from the Russian arsenal...
... though that's also a nonstarter, for almost as obvious reasons.
Even setting up the parameters of a referendum like that is rather complicated in the wake of a war like this. Some towns in the Ukrainian-controlled parts of Donbas simply don't exist anymore; should the separatists win because of self-determination if everyone who would have opposed them is already dead?
The same concerns apply to Crimea in a way, although it's farther in the past -- Crimea is so very Russian because the Soviets deported the Crimean Tatars in 1944 and settled Russians in their place. We shouldn't want ethnic cleansing to be a way to weaponize self-determination.
I don't have any solutions here, just pointing out problems upon problems.
I mean he, like any invader, obviously does, because he needs at least some people and factions onside. That's why he has provided multiple. That's why no country ever doesn't. Wars that are openly about conquest, wealth etc. simply do not happen any more.
Right. And an important faction to have onside is the military itself, which will have morale problems very shortly if it doesn't believe in the cause.
I'm also trying to think, even when wars of conquest were common, how often they were ever presented purely as wars of conquest: "We want that land so we're going to take it." Maybe the Mongols did this?
As opposed to "I am the rightful ruler of this place, as is well-known according to all the best sources, not the imposter who currently holds sway here, and I'm merely reclaiming what has been robbed from me."
Or "[ENEMY NATION] has engaged in repeated abuses and injustices, and we have waged a war to rightfully punish them, and now to compensate us for our trouble (and perhaps to discourage it from ever happening again) we ask for nothing more than a few measly pieces of land. Or perhaps we'll subjugate them entirely, but purely as an act of self-defense."
Yeah, but there's a lot more flavor to it than that. You don't really get the sense that Homer thinks Paris was a scoundrel; Philip of Makedon seems to have named his famous son after him.
There was a (long) period of time when a successful war was very clearly an advantageous adventure. Take over some foreign land and tax them. You didn't need much to sell that.
Unfortunately (or I guess fortunately) that isn't true any more.
The Romans did basically this in Europe (less so in Asia and Africa since there were peer opponents there). "Veni, Vidi, Vici", and all.
Colonialists did this in parts of what became their empires (not everywhere - there were provocations of a sort for a lot of the wars, and obviously the Aztecs provided all sorts of moral imperatives - but parts).
I'm not that far into the history of Rome podcast, but thus far at least, most Roman conquest in Italy was rationalized as being in response to a threat posed to allied cities by the Etruscans or the Latins or Samnites, etc. I was surprised actually, given their reputation as ruthless conquerers, the pains Roman politicians took to convince themselves that they weren't the aggressors.
Yes. The same is true in Caesar's conquest of Gaul. In practice it was a very aggressive war and we're left with little doubt as to his true intentions, but he nonetheless waited for a casus belli in order to present it as essentially a series of defensive actions on behalf of allied Gallic tribes.
You don't have to go that far back: The Nazis in Germany did exactly that, they basically sayed: "We need more space to the east, to give to our settlers and feed our great homeland. The slavic hordes that live there now are anyway not using it properly."
It's true that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf and that the pursuit of Lebensraum was both a popular idea in Nazi circles and official Nazi policy in the form of Generalplan Ost, but it wasn't given as a reason for the war, on the occasion of either Fall Weiss or Barbarossa. Those speeches of Hitler's are available and well worth reading.
When it came to public consumption, I think the Nazis normally referenced Lebensraum obliquely, and almost never as a primary motive for the war. Aside from Mein Kampf itself, I'm not aware of any Nazi propaganda where something like Generalplan Ost was laid out for broad popular consumption as a laudable goal.
Even Hitler made one up: the Nazis were nominally "protecting ethnic Germans in Poland." Apparently literally no one thinks "because I feel like it" is an acceptable reason for war anymore.
Super duper quick note on the university that banned Dostoevsky: 1) it was a lecture series, not a class, 2) the official notice said it was postponed, not outright banned, 3) they've since reversed the decision.
I'd seen a lot of stuff around the internet about a university supposedly banning the books, which I didn't think captured the situation properly once I looked into it. If there's reason to be angry at something, it should be based on accurate information.
I think your lecture series/class criticism is fair. They are pretty similar. In my defense, I was pretty tired when I wrote this comment. :p
However, I think comparing me saying the series was postponed to rounding up Jewish people inflates the issue. There's a big difference what the Nazis did and not teaching a class on a writer because he was Russian. On the other hand, I can understand your line of thought that this could be a test before they move to larger things.
Saying a University "banned the study of Author X" implies that a decision was made with the *purpose* of *prohibiting* *all* study of X. If, in reality, a class about X was temporarily postponed, that does not require, nor even imply, any intent to limit the study of X- I had classes canceled/rescheduled simply because of scheduling conflicts, classes I was *required* to take to graduate- a postponment of a lecture series, class, whatever, does not imply that anyone in the University find the *content* of the class objectionable. So it's a huge difference between what happened and the claim that "studying Dostoevsky was banned"
Absolutely unnecessary comparison to the holocaust. You otherwise make reasonable points, but making a slippery slope argument does not require equating the holocaust to removing a single book from a single lecture series.
Related to the jingoism section: lots of western businesses have taken action against Russia beyond what government sanctions called for. So western unity against Russia has gone beyond "being very pro-Ukraine on Reddit"!
A lot of business transactions are based on mutual trust. Someone needs to either ship the goods or pay first. And when Russia starts doing the whole invasion thing, its far less likely that you'll be able to count on the Russian government guaranteeing contract provisions. So at the very least you need to account for the additional risk. And that's before you have to worry about the human cost of having business assets in Russia who might be harmed.
Also when your bank and the computer network it uses for wire transfers are placing economic sanctions against Russia and Russian companies in a way that changes day by day.
Got to note that any company trying to fully exit Russia right now will have their properties seized through fast-track bankruptcy procedure; that's why many companies close their business venues but still pay salaries of their workers which avoids this particular outcome.
"Is it imprudent? It’s a risk, but at least it was taken in the defense of real principles, which is better than most of the imprudent things we do."
1. Sure the argument that this is in defence of real principles is better than normal, but on the other side of the ledger the risk of blowing up the world is much higher than normal. As has been pointed out now, when critics as diverse as Kissinger, Chomsky & Mearsheimer are all saying "this might blow up the world", it's probably genuinely dangerous. Prior to all this happening, there appeared to be something of an intellectual consensus around the idea that NATO expansion eastwards is dangerous -by intellectuals left, right and centre- *among everyone except the people who actually got to make the decision*.
To turn the rhetoric around, we had the option to say "too bad, too sad, but great power politics mean that Ukraine is Putin's toy". We've done much, much more ruthless things than that, and this one would have been for a brilliant cause- in the service of not blowing up the world, as opposed to many of the ruthless things we do, which are in the service of enriching very wealthy people.
2. Also, to mutilate a phrase from law "one who appeals to principles must have clean hands". The argument the west is justified in some kind of deontic sense is limited by the fact that, as best I can tell, the west funded and encouraged literal Nazis knowingly at several points during this process, including during the "Revolution of Dignity".
On the topic of the culture war elements in this new cold war, I really think we need to clamp down on this frame [Based Russia versus Woke West]- it's both ridiculous and dangerous. I discussed it a little here:
Apparently even Trump now makes jokes at Russia's expense. You can't be based if you're too weak, and wokeism evidently hasn't yet caused the West to collapse. Would be interesting to see which anti-woke symbol would be adopted next.
I don't think that "decadence" is a good model for the concern about "wokeness".
The historical model for "wokeness" is one in which a multi-ethnic society living at peace is gradually riven apart by hate-mongers from the less privileged group. That's a pattern which has been repeated quite a few times in history.
I would agree with that. In harder times we worry about getting enough food, or invading foreign armies, and don't have time to worry about even major systemic discrimination, let alone "microaggressions."
I agree that if you look at it from the right angle wokeness is a kind of decadence. Why should that be relevant to the question "what effects will wokeness have on our economy and political institutions"?
What properties of decadence cause it to never precipitate societal collapse? Does wokeness have those properties? Does calling it "emotional decadence" interact with any of those properties?
I think a better model is the Cultural Revolution, in which the currently dominant faction of the elites weaponizes the masses with hate against other factions, thus consolidating their power by eliminating threats to it, but also resulting in atrocities by one faction of the masses against other factions.
Of course, at that level of abstraction, it merely sounds like warfare, and in the later stages the Cultural Revolution often was merely warfare; but there are other crucial similarities, like the demonization of privilege (converting envy from a mortal sin into a moral virtue and senseless suffering into the virtue of martyrs), the demonization of knowledge, symbolic mob violence (for example against statues), preference falsification spirals, mass censorship, and paranoia about treason taken to absurd heights.
This pattern is somewhat similar to underprivileged hatemongers exploiting ethnic fault lines, but not the same. I agree that it is completely unlike the martial decadence discussed in the Fremen Mirage.
I can, in fact, quote him *back at you* on this one. He never joins the dots *because that is not in his interest*, but try this on for size (italics replaced with asterisks):
>And we should note that nearly all of the blows which brought this system down were self-inflicted *by the Romans* who for their part never seem to have understood the marvelous thing they had created. The Crisis of the Third Century shattered the political unity of that market and disrupted the limited degree of public peace that created it. Rival emperors both before the crisis but increasingly in it also devalued the currency and extracted supplies directly in kind rather than in cash, leading to weakness in the currency system and a progressive *demonitization*(sic) of the economy. This free-fall was to a degree arrested in the fourth century by Diocletian and Constantine, but the top-heavy, bureaucratic administration they created was probably itself a drag on the economy; Diocletian’s currency meddling and price fixing were disasters and Constantine’s efforts to *actively reduce* labor mobility to aid in collecting taxes couldn’t have helped. That leads to the lower-but-still-elevated fourth century plateau: elevated by the continued existence of semi-unified market and the fact that at least the wars of rival emperors tended to be geographically limited and less destructive than the pre-Roman (or post-Roman) norm of endemic warfare. Finally, there is something to the notion that the state-run systems of extraction and redistribution – taxing the farmers in grain to be shipped to the soldiers – may have continued to encourage a degree of specialization and trade; the “crude but vigorous pump” *worked* to a degree to elevate living standards over the pre-modern agricultural norm.
>But that very cycle of usurpers and civil wars – and the decision of those rival emperors to (in Peter Brown’s phrasing, which I love), “bus in” ‘barbarian’ armies to fight each other – led to the slow but steady disintegration of that united political order, the shift to more and more endemic violence and the final collapse both of that semi-unified market and the “crude but vigorous pump” that had in part replaced it. Living standards thus declined back down to the pre-Roman Iron Age norm while at the same time the carrying capacity of the empire also declined down to that norm, leading to what must have been decades of brutal misery as food ran short, malnourished infants died before their time, cities shrank and the world grew poor.
[...]
>Instead, I think the stronger point here (and one Peter Brown – lest anyone think I think his work is without merit, which is far from the truth – and also many others make well) is that the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West – while it *was* a catastrophe for those people living at the time – was less a product of ‘hordes of barbarians’ coming over the frontier (who again, were mostly invited in by Roman leaders looking for advantage in their endless struggles with each other) and instead a product of actors *within* the political system, *within* the empire, tearing it apart out of the pursuit of their own interests, deceived by the assumption that something so old could never simply vanish…until it did. The consequences of their decisions and of their failure to recognize the fragility of the clockwork machine that suspended them above the poverty to come (and that it was already damaged) were great and terrible.
I'm not saying "don't read ACOUP". ACOUP covers a lot of ground interestingly and as far as I can tell Bret doesn't lie. But I read him with a careful eye and a critical mind, because he doesn't just write ACOUP to show off or to make money; he is - by his own admission - trying to manipulate public opinion.
Everyone does manipulation occasionally, but usually subconsciously and/or in limited/predictable domains (nobody's especially trustworthy when taking the stand at his own murder trial, etc.). "I write my blog in a way explicitly calculated to be enjoyable and maximise public respect for me so I can more effectively promote my politics" is a step beyond "everyone does it"; most politicians and cult leaders go that far, but people read them with heightened scrutiny too.
It hasn't caused military collapse because non-woke straight white men have technologically advanced our military so far. If America's defense depended on something akin to Ukraine and only liberals were available, things would be very different.
I was annoyed at everyone interpreting Trump's saying that Putin is smart as implying that he approved of the invasion. Now I'm waiting for Trump to announce that actually he was wrong — on the evidence of how the invasion is going, Putin was not smart.
...the problem with this is that Trump uses "smart" as an equivalent term for "is doing something I agree with" and "dumb" for "doing something I disagree with."
Except he literally says that the invasion is bad almost immediately after calling putin smart, the ACTUAL problem is that this is either all that got reported, or it got reported correctly but trump critics only saw the headlines and reacted to it.
"Apparently even Trump now makes jokes at Russia's expense. ". Apparent to whom? Trump made some comments which could be read as snark about Putin, but equally as snark about the weakness of the people he doesn't like in the West.
Applebaum, Frum, and others have long argued that the "blame it on NATO" idea is silly. NATO expansion eastward has been driven, from the start, by these countries asking for it in response to Russian bellicosity. I reject the notion that there was some kind of intellectual consensus here.
In any case, there is a very big difference between agreeing not to expand NATO eastward and agreeing that "Ukraine is Putin's toy." In fact, attempts to appease Putin have gone much the same way as attempts to appease Hitler: telling strongmen they can do as they like makes them feel empowered to do more. I would argue that what provoked Putin most was not NATO's eastward expansion, but rather the West's failure to punish Putin sufficiently in response to his actions in Georgia and Syria.
NATO expansion didn't actually pose much threat to Russia. NATO can launch nukes from subs in the ocean with or without countries in NATO, unlike during the cuban missile crisis (edit: sorry, they were invented in 1959, but I'm assuming — and open to being corrected — that they were not yet a major nuke carrier), and NATO had, at one time, 0 tanks in Europe. In Poland, they had a few hundred troops. It was not a major army amassing at Russia's borders. What Putin didn't like was Ukraine turning West economically and politically. The idea that it might theoretically one day join NATO is little more than a pretext.
Edit: epistemic status: political science PhD candidate, but really I am largely giving voice to Applebaum's objections here.
It's both, of course. Russia's neighbors (except Lukashenkostan) want to be in NATO, and the US wants to let them join. They're good as NATO members since they actually exceed the 2% GDP defense spending target: Ukraine is said to have spent over 4% of GDP on defense[1], Latvia 2.3%[2], Estonia 2.3%[3] and Lithuania 2.12%[4]. Gee I wonder why....
Georgia was basically the same case as Ukraine: First a massive influx of money from the US and EU promoting 'democracy', than a 'revolution' backed by the US/EU than the wish to join NATO almost put in their mouth.
Have a look at the Documentary 'Ukraine on Fire' from Oliver Stone. If you look from this angle, I can fully understand that Putin is afraid of NATO and of being next. The West did nothing to counter this concerns apart of saying Putin would be paranoid and crazy and NATO is only for defense. This last claim would be much easier to believe if someone could wipe my memory of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. Who tells that NATO doesn't suddenly have to protect the Russians from Putin?
For me looking from outside seeing the US and NATO very selectively policing the World is very unsettling or even disgusting.
Err... US operations are not the same as NATO operations. Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded by the US and "partners", not NATO. I think Russia had more military operations in Syria than the US did. Not familiar with Libya.
A nice, safe, status-quo point of view, very sensible. Reminds me of any number of thoughtful "detente" essays I read in the 70s arguing a policy of indefinite accommodation.
But I personally find it a a little too Neville Chamberlain for my tastes, and I prefer Reagan's reformulation of the problem, id est, no we don't *have* to accept paying the Danegeld indefinitely. We can win, and they can lose, and that should be our priority goal.
The US and Europe combined easily have the economic might to drive Russia into ruin -- I'll note in passing that Germany alone has twice the GDP of Russia, and even Poland has 25% of it. And the Ukrainians want a lot more than mere honor at this point -- not with dead children lying on the road. They want to kick Putin's teeth in and see blood. I'm perfectly comfortable with helping them do that, and I think it can be done -- just as it was done in the 80s to the USSR -- without resorting to an exchange of ICBMs. But you do need to keep your eye on the ball, and you need to not start rationalizing horrible things as just some kind of existential tax bill that it's prudent to fork out indefinitely. It's OK as a temporary strategy, but as an end goal in itself -- nah.
Reagan's approach only worked because the USSR was on the brink of collapse at the time and couldn't call his bluff. Even then, it nearly led to a full-blown nuclear war on a number of occasions, as the Soviets struggled to tell "normal" levels of US bellicosity from pretexts for invasion/attach. Reagan basically Alzheimered his way into gambling with the entire planet, and only lucked out thanks to the prudence and carefulness of his enemy (as well as the bravery and stoicism of a few lower-downs like Petrov). That is not a model to emulate when the fate of millions of people is on the line.
Additionally; the approach that the US took to Russia after the collapse of the USSR (ie: treating it like a conquered enemy) was a huge part of why Putin got into power in the first place, and a big reason why there's a revanchist movement to "restore" a national pride that got bruised.
A strategy which treats another country as an eternal enemy creates an eternal enemy, which then creates the pretext for treating them as impossible to reason or compromise with. Your approach is a guarantee that, at some point, someone will push the button and end civilization.
Yeah none of that matches my memory at all, and (1) I lived through it as an adult, and (2) I paid very close attention, since the Cold War and the threat of nuclear fire dominated my childhood. Inasmuch as you have not adduced any specific detail to illustrate your assertions, I think a simple statement of 180 degree disagreement is sufficient response.
Your memory as a person who has lived in the US all your life? Or in a country in the West? Or in a third-world (in the original sense) country? As some sort of globe trotting ubermensch? Or as someone who spend part of their childhood in the USSR?
Because from your response I'm guessing the former, and that makes me think you're a goldfish disagreeing on life outside the bowl (full disclosure: we're all goldfish, our bowls are just different).
There are many more recent takes on the history of the Cold War and the Soviet Union that you could refer to if you wanted to try to get some of that perspective, almost none of which support a rah-rah version of Reagan singlehandedly winning it by being more aggressive and daring than the weak-kneed leaders who came before him.
In fact I have lived both in the United States and in my youth in a Warsaw Pact nation[1], which I mention just to confound your assumptions, even though I think it is entirely irrelevant to the point. I don't need to have personally been to the Moon to thoroughly understand the Apollo program.
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[1] Too long ago to remember more than curse word or two in Russian, however.
That's fair enough - my assumptions are now confounded. In the spirit of reciprocation: I'm an ex-third-worlder, so my governing mode of analysis is "a pox on both your houses".
You'll note I said I paid close attention. I'm well aware of the close calls. That happens when you play for high stakes and for keeps. Nothing is without risk, but winning is winning.
Which would be a good reason not to play for high stages and for keeps. The fact that you accept the risk of mutual destruction as 'just what happens' as a consequence of your approach immediately disqualifies it from consideration.
Allowing a return to the status quo ante could reduce the chance of the most imminent nuclear war without being the path that maximally reduces the risk of all future nuclear wars.
If we can perpetually make that arbitrage, then that is actually fine, just run from one crisis to the next. I can see the intuitive appeal of wanting to escape the local minimum though.
EDIT: I should have first stressed that I agree with you we should prioritize immediate paths to peace. It's a view that is both powerfully true and yet gets insufficient real estate.
Moscow seems to be iterating a similar strategy though, and I'm mostly exasperated at how we might best disrupt these cycles. If you see that exasperation and conclude that I am just not very nuclear risk avoidant, then I just want to very gently suggest that there might be a better way to model my views. (Also some people may just be highly nuclear risk tolerant, ok, probably so, maybe I'm protesting too much on that group's behalf.)
I'm gonna say something that's turbo heretical as a liberal. What percent nuclear risk is worth to you, to push Russia so far that it *completely* collapses and we can just take their nukes away?
I would have previously said that leaving Russia with nukes was net safer, but Putin has done a lot to change this decision, and, I mean, Russia allowed Putin, so. That time that my country allowed a mass murderer, our country got split in two for forty years and we permanently gave up any right to build nuclear weapons. Putin is not Hitler, but with a finite chance of nuclear war times the population of the world, it is not difficult to beat the deaths of WW2.
I think a lot of the unity of the EU against Putin is that we were pretty comfortable for thirty years not having to worry about being nuked, and if we can fuck Putin up enough that he really really remembers to not try this again, we can hopefully go back to that. I think that's why I'm less worried about being nuked - not having to worry about being nuked is itself my red line.
Come. Military people are not stupid, even if they have a mindset that is foreign to you. They have generally and genuinely worked very hard to ensure that one head injury or one case of dementia -- or one mechanical failure -- can't cause disaster. As far as stewardship goes, all the militaries of the nuclear powers -- and I include the Russians as well as the Americans, French, and British -- have done a really superb job these past 75 years making sure there have been and can be no horrible accidents.
Given the major screw-ups we see elsewhere in our technological society -- everything from Bhopal to the lastest zero-day hack on Windows -- they really deserve major honor for this achievement, especially considering it stands in inherent tension with their mandate to be able to use nuclear weapons at a moment's notice, and the fact that civilians only pay intermiitent attention to the problem at all.
My apologies for assuming otherwise. And yes, individuals are fallible. That's why you build in checks and balances, right? You can build a very, very reliable system out of individual parts that have much lower levels of reliability.
Carl: I normally love what you write in the comments. I haven't super liked the Reaganite stuff in this thread. But this comment... hear hear! The militaries of the world deserve credit beyond credit for holding the reigns on nuclear war and doing a great job making it unlikely.
The problem is "it only takes one head injury or one case of dementia to change the whole game" is fully general. No matter how you structure the nuclear weapons policy, or the nuclear weapons considerations, or the nuclear weapons relationships, or the nuclear weapons control, at the extreme *it might only take one defector* to use the nuclear weapons.
Per what Carl said, given this fact, it's extremely laudable that someone has ensured no such defector for 75 years.
That seems very unlikely. The USSR collapsed in 91, and the structures of the military didn't completely collapse along with it; their strategic nuclear weapons didn't go away or become US possessions. Is there a good reason to think things would be different now?
The reality of the 1991 Russian military situation was that only a direct invasion by a powerful enemy (US or NATO or both) would be cause to use nuclear weapons. Because none of these countries wanted to invade Russia, it was a complete non-issue. Adding to that the inability of Russia to offensively use their military (and thereby hold nukes in reserve to deter other nuclear powers from interfering) and it made very little to no difference whether they had nukes or not.
With Putin being willing to use his military offensively, there is now reason to be concerned that they have nukes, which did not exist then.
Through various treaties and attrition, the Russian nuclear stockpile has come down considerably since 1991, from ~30,000 to ~4000 warheads. It's still quite a lot of megatonnage, of course.
Would it be possible to hack the codes and thus prevent a nuclear launch? I mean, the systems for launching the nukes have to be connected to the net somehow, right?...
Almost certainly not. "The nuclear codes" are confirmation codes given to people so they know the orders are coming from someone authorized to give them, they aren't something that has to be input on the physical missiles/bombs before they can be used. (Think about it this way, if they had to be input on a piece of electronics, that safeguard could be bypassed by a sufficiently technically sophisticated attacker with plenty of time).
PALs are a thing actually. You don't just need plenty of time, you need plenty of warheads before you successfully disarm one. You also need plenty of technically sophisticated soldiers, because the ones who make the unsuccessful attempts all die in the process.
*Disarming* a nuke that you have in your possession is easy with or without the PAL; PALs are designed so they can't be removed without breaking the weapon, but if you want to disarm it then that's a success.
Systems like this are airgapped - that is, they're not connected to anything. This means that hacking them requires a physical connection.
Stuxnet, for instance (the US's cyberattack on Iranian enrichment centrifuges, which broke them by spinning them too fast) wasn't an Internet-based attack; a CIA agent physically went into their enrichment plants and stuck a USB key with the malware into the computers running the centrifuges.
If you have agents inside all enemy nuclear silos and all enemy ballistic-missile submarines, then certainly you can prevent your enemy from launching nuclear missiles (you barely even need the cyberattack at that point). However, "nuclear silo operator" and "nuclear submarine crew" are subject to the strictest background checks known - both because a hostile agent could degrade nuclear deterrence, but also because a couple of lunatics could start WWIII on their own (I say "a couple" because most nuclear launch systems require two people to operate).
Yeah, Stuxnet infected every USB flash drive it could find that looked like it was going anywhere near Iran, in hopes that eventually someone would use the same flash drive to store his music playlist and the software patch for the microcontrollers that he had to download off his home internet because the boss was paranoid about airgapping everything.
It is emphatically not liberal to think your country is the one with the right to allow or disallow nuclear weapons. It is illiberal to the point that you should consider whether you have in general been a liberal *in principle* or just in service of some issues.
The point is not equality at all. The point is believing that that kind of superiority has blowback far in excess of whatever problems you think you're solving.
See also: classical liberals' problem with woke stuff. At a certain point it's throwing around so much out of touch power that it causes a generation of backlash.
We're in this mess in great part *because* the west acted like it had the right to control post Soviet Eastern Europe instead of inviting anything like equal partnership and genuinely beneficial support for Russia to become a healthy post Communist state.
> west acted like it had the right to control post Soviet Eastern Europe
It didn't. No Western nation pressured any former Soviet vassal to join the EU or NATO – quite the opposite, they all came of their own volition. Also, I must have missed the part where NATO urged Ukraine to join them, and Ukraine had to push back against their unwanted advances.
> instead of inviting anything like equal partnership and genuinely beneficial support for Russia to become a healthy post Communist state
But we did. Russia is/was an important trading partner to the EU, and to Germany in particular. The hope was always that this partnership would be so beneficial and dear to Russia that it would suppress its imperalistic ambitions, and look at where it got us.
>The point is not equality at all. The point is believing that that kind of superiority has blowback far in excess of whatever problems you think you're solving.
What blowback could possibly be worse than nuclear war, exactly?
>See also: classical liberals' problem with woke stuff. At a certain point it's throwing around so much out of touch power that it causes a generation of backlash.
Who are these non-nuclear powers making us deal with blowback that we can't handle it? None of what's happening in Russia is an example because Russia has nukes. Same with China. The two countries with pose us with the greatest problems are nuclear powers and have been for 60 years or more. Iran? Well, Iran with nukes is a hell of a lot scarier than Iran now. Countries are either managable now and would be unmanageable if/when they got nukes, or they're causing problems but already have nukes.
Again, what on earth is this blowback that's worse than a nuclear attack?
>We're in this mess in great part *because* the west acted like it had the right to control post Soviet Eastern Europe
What on EARTH are you talking about? We don't control anything. Eastern Europeans are in NATO....because they WANT to be in NATO, because they never want to live under oppressive Russian rule ever again.
We're in this mess because Putin is an irredentist, and he knew that NATO membership for neighboring states means he doesn't get to invade them or otherwise bully and intimidate them.
Like, how the HELL are you trying to defend liberalism while claiming that it is rightful to launch of bloody war of aggression to claim territory based on the idea that these countries....wanted to become liberal and be integrated with liberal Europe?
Ja. I'm emphasizing how far away from liberalism that that feels to me. Less "heretical christian" and more "you might be a Satanist"
(Clarification: I do not mean your position is as bad as Christianity paints Satanism to be. Far from it. Just that it's much further down the line from orthodoxy than mere heresy)
It's possibly defensible? I think if I go full liberal, then the fact that Russia converted from a democracy to an illiberal autocracy with a captive media implies that this is the wish of (some fraction of) the Russian people, and if we are to hold that wish as valid, destroying Russia and taking its nukes may be a necessary part of the implementation of this wish. Something like "okay, Germany, you can have fascism and all the Hitler you want, we're just gonna make sure you don't build concentration camps and start invading Poland." It's, like all political debates, GPL vs BSD - do we behave liberally or do we maximize liberalism, even with illiberal means? To behave liberally is to say "well, Russia is invading Ukraine. That sucks. Nothing we can do about it though." To attempt to maximize liberalism is to invade Iraq to bring democracy - or, in this case, destroy Russia because Putin has WMDs. (Being nuked tends to be against people's values.) It certainly seems antithetical to liberalism-as-practiced, at least, but even a country-scale liberalism, like what Scott proposed here, has to deal with the fact that if the Russians can choose Putin, the Ukrainians ought to be able to choose Zelensky. One of them will inevitably have their preferences violated, and inaction is not obviously preferable.
My actual take is that the measures taken so far, supporting and arming Ukraine and cutting off all trade with Russia and isolating it, are far short of the line that Russia itself has crossed, and if in implementing these means we can get Russia to collapse, or at least destroy its ability to make war entirely - so much the better? Red lines are based on actions, not outcomes.
The Russians are no more acting offensively as a nuclear power than the US in Iraq. The US didn’t use nukes there. If Putin was cornered however, if armies marched on Russia then he would be happy to blow the world up.
Like a lot of Europeans (including in my country which is supposedly neutral) there’s a lot of gung ho people who won’t fight and who will never fight but want a world war. All you Germans can do is what exactly? No militarisation for decades and now “we” are going to take out Russia.
Putin iaht going anywhere. He would win a free election in Russia now.
Are you implying that the answer is "zero" ? How is that different from saying "Russia can have anything it wants (except maybe for New York and such)" ?
If we're talking about relative to the current situation, we might have a much higher risk budget than expected.
People keep talking about nuclear war as if it's Total War. US had _atomic artillery_ at some point. Very low yield, very small. Nukes can be used in tactical contexts, and right now that's by far the most likely scenario.
Putin's utility function is not to cause the greatest harm possible. That's a cartoon villain. The real function is pretty complex, but definitely correlated with "getting out of Ukraine a winner". If things go badly for him in a conventional war, one option he always has is using tactical nukes to flatten UA military in half a day, then come out and say that he did it to end the war fast and save civilian lives. After all, that's exactly what Americans used nukes for.
All done very civilized, calling the NATO counterparts a few hours before to warn them that it's going to be a very local use of nuclear weapons.
He may risk being a pariah, but he'll be a winning pariah. Again, complex utility function.
Having underestimated the Ukrainian resistance and the Western response, he might not want to go for the trifecta in assuming that a limited breaking of the 76 year nuclear taboo definitely won't escalate.
We already have people generally considered sober and responsible calling for NATO shooting at Russian planes. I'm guessing that's nothing to the breadth of both voters and leaders demanding to do *something* in response to Putin nuking Ukraine, both out of moral outrage and to deter that becoming the norm.
And then we have the question of whether whatever NATO decides is a proportionate response is seen by Putin as a new offense, rinse and repeat, till everyone climbs down or we do World War III.
I don't know that the Ukrainian forces present any good targets for tactical nukes. Generally you use those against massed armor, an airbase, missile installation, et cetera. Something big and slow moving. My impression is that the Ukrainians are using small-unit and ambush tactics, so not presenting very useful targets for battlefield nukes.
Strategic nuclear weapons are another story, of course. He could always nuke Kiev as sort of a "we really mean it" kind of thing. I don't actually think the US would open a general nuclear war in response, but on the other hand, it's hard to see Russia not being World Enemy #1 from that point on, for decades. Even the Chinese would back away, I think.
Yeah, that's exactly my point. Strategic weapons, no matter the target, are a cartoon villain reaction. And so far everything is consistent with the Russians really caring about collateral damage.
My point was just to avoid making the mistake of nuclear weapons = strategic weapons = very unlikely. This gives a 0.1% chance of them being used.
There is also tactical weapons, which are used in a very different scenario, which is also low probability but probably over 1%. That's what I mean by the risk being actually significantly higher than expected.
If Russia will be allowed to conquer Ukraine on the basis that is too risky to escalate (due to nukes), the next step will be for every country that feels threatened by nuclear power (start with South Korea and Taiwan) and.... every country being governed by a potential or actual dictator (start with Turkey, Mjanma), will put a lot of effort into acquiring nuclear weapons. That will lead to proliferation, opening a Pandora Box that will increase the risk of nuclear war immensely. That is the crucial risk here.
My take on Iran has always been that of course they're trying to acquire nuclear weapons, as they'd have to be stupid not to. As things are going, that impression will only be reinforced.
I mean, yes, but that's been in motion for a long time already - see North Korea, Iran. The US's response to the first attack on Ukraine in 2014, the treatment of Gaddafi (who notably surrendered his WMDs some years prior - would the US have risked attacking him if he hadn't?), and various other events have shown promises to be worth very little, and threat of mass destruction to be a sure-fire defence.
So long as Putin's in power he's always going to be saying to the west "do what I want or nukes", which is the sort of thing that starts a nuclear exchange. It's also the sort of thing that would make mid-tier states decide they want nukes for their own security (countries such as Poland, Iran, Taiwan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc), and more nuclear-armed states means nuclear war is more likely.
So if we want to reduce the risk of nuclear war we also ought to want to remove Putin from power. This can best be done by economic and military pressure on Russia and making it known that anyone who removes him thereby gets automatic immunity to any war crimes trials that may happen.
Putin, if he stays in power, is likely to turn Russia into a larger version of North Korea, a regime that has survived 2 changes of leader. Thus, a Putinist Russia could easily survive Putin by decades, and all that time it will be making nuclear war more likely.
So I don't think that economic pressure on the Russian economy necessarily makes nuclear war more likely; if it gets rid of Putin (as it well might), it does the opposite.
We Putin is even more popular with Russians, so it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere. Nor is Russia going to surrender its bombs. Nor will there ever be another pro western leader like Yeltsin. Last time that happened the place was looted.
Maybe there won't be another pro-Western leader in Russia. I think there probably will, you disagree.
But so long as Russia is run by Putin (or someone like him) the West is very likely to be united, determined and vigilant against him, with high defence spending, and serious economic sanctions against Russia.
Have You listened to any of his speeches? I heard quite some and before 2022 there was no hint in this direction. Can you show me any example prior to 2022?
Putin was even thinking about joining NATO in the beginning.
The main thing he clear about from the beginning is, that he is not ready to surrender and subordinate Russia to the USA. This i totally can understand. If this is an offense to you, you are the classical villain who is obsessed with ruling the world.
Well, it seems like a guy who doesn't even let his closest advisors get within 10 meters of him, because he's afraid of COVID and/or he's afraid for his physical safety, isn't someone who's likely to pull the nuclear trigger. Putin said he has put his nuclear forces on highest alert, but US Intelligence hasn't seen any sign of this. We're only at Defcon 4 right now. So, yes, I'd be in favor of pushing the envelop a little further.
I think Scott's formulation about lines in the sand is pretty much exactly right. And *given that*, the West should be able to unambiguously "win" this conflict, without crossing such lines. For example, even if Ukraine's government falls, setting up a government in exile and a persistent insurgency seems likely to result in a Russian retreat in some number of years, followed by a big PR victory. If, in the meantime, a bunch of nearby countries join NATO, and Russia's economy is in shambles, and they remain an international pariah... That'd count as a win, in my book. I.e., it would firmly establish to the world that the age of territorial expansion wars is over.
Maybe this increases the chance of nuclear war slightly, despite the lack of line-crossing. And maybe I'm being a bad rationalist by not multiplying that increased chance by the resulting human suffering and saying "nope, too high a price, let Russia keep their pride". But at an emotional level, it feels really important to send the message: territorial expansion wars are not tolerated in the modern age. If you try it, your country will suffer, and you will not get to keep your pride.
You can love Reagan or hate him, that's a separate issue; but we have several historical examples when "peace in our time" spectacularly failed to work. So, yes, appeasement is unlikely to work on Putin, either (although admittedly it can delay him a little).
From many quarters, there's such a strong assumption that he's going to make unlimited territory grabs. That's the old WW2 hangover talking, and hasn't proved demonstrably true of basically anyone since Hitler. In particular, Putin has a very open and well defined series of ideal territory objectives (basically the USSR minus the stans, and maybe small chunks of the Warsaw Pact), we have a very open and well defined Don't Fuck With It line (literally NATO), the intersection is the Baltics, probably off Putin's list in his own lifetime, or last priority, and there isn't *evidence* to think his goals will cross our line, or reason to think we gain anything by taking forward steps before it happens.
Chamberlain was right (delayed a war he couldn't win and that had no public support anyway, while rearming and preparing to win the actual war when it did come). Reagan was mostly wrong (USSR fell apart due to internal reasons that pretty much nothing to do with him).
Why would you care though? Why not see this as a conflict on the other side of the world of little relevance to the US. The USSR was a peer threat, Russia is - by your own argument - not. It’s not a military threat to Europe. It proves that everyday it can’t take Kyiv or fly it’s planes.
China will be a threat in the future. So even if you believe in American supremacy why would this regional conflict the US is not involved in, be something that you want not just to end but to outright win?. The Ukraine isn’t in NATO, and thus for someone in Texas this isn’t some kind of existential crisis at all, no more than 19C Russian imperialism was. I doubt if it was even noticed (although of course the British got very Jingoistic about it - literally - but they were an Empire).
I don't care about it THAT much -- I'm not planning on enlisting in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion -- and to some extent yes I do regard it as somebody else's problem. I'm deeply unimpressed that the Russians started a war they couldn't quickly win, and are resorting to huffing and puffing about their strategic nuclear weapons -- although the laughable performance of the VVS so far is making me wonder if any of those weapons actually still work right, and whether if Putin pushes The Big Red Button they wouldn't just go splort in the silos -- and I doubt I'm the only one wondering that, I bet the Chinese are wondering it also.
I'm also unimpressed that the Ukrainians managed to convey by their actions up to this point to the Russians that a war might work. It's not like they don't have a very long history with Russia, and the nature of Russia is some big mystery to them. Why they couldn't figure out some combination of accommodation and making themselves obviously militarily indigestible, and are now reduced to begging for rescue from strangers, I cannot fathom. Both countries strike me as suffering from incompetent leadership in the recent past.
That's why I would not favor outright war, or anything approaching it. A no-fly zone is a no-go option for me. But am I OK with using some economic power to beat the hell out of Putin for being an asshole and making the price of gas rise 20% on me, not to mention hurting a bunch of perfectly innocent little girls in Ukraine? Absolutely. I'm sorry that this will hurt Russian people, who are smart and reasonable folks so far as I can tell, but at some time or other they (the Russians) *do* need to get their shit together and realize they *can* be held responsible for what crazy Uncle Vlad does on the world stage, and is this the guy they really want leading them? Stop shrugging your shoulders and saying Shit Happens, go change things. Use the present Ukrainians as an inspiring example.
I'm not necessarily impressed with the future Chinese threat. They have some serious problems turning potential into actual, mostly that they're run by communists, who are kleptocratic morons and destroy everything they touch. I'm not sure even the ingenuity and workaholic habits of the Chinese everyman can compensate for that. My impression is that if the US is to fall to second behind the Chinese, it will only be because we (the US) cut our own throats by losing those aspects of liberty, clear-sightedness, and entrepreneurship that made us #1 in the first place. It could happen. When you look at all this bullshit about people's feelings and saddling the competent with the costs of making the incompetent more comfortable, one worries. But we'll see. Heretofore, as Churchill (I think) said, the Americans have always ended up doing the right thing, if only after trying every possible alternative first.
Sure, but Putin is the reason for the sanctions, so I blame him as the first mover here. I will definitely concede that the Biden Administration is praising God for Vladimir Putin, as providing the Democrats with a first-class squirrel on which to blame inflation this November, and that I also hold against Putin.
I am unconvinced by any argument that Socialism With A Human Face, or even a Confucian Face, works better than a straight-up dictatorship of the proletariat. The core of the problem isn't ideology, or wickedness, or power corrupting, but just insufficient information for *any* centralized authority to run an economy efficiently. You have to be an intellectual, or a Marxist ideologue, to not understand that by the year AD 2022.
Yes, I agree we (Americans) have a problem with our capitalists. I take this quite seriously, and if I have to vote for Trump 2024 to do something about it, I will grit my teeth and do so. I'm hopeful that greed and disgust with the aims of the currently dominant intellectual aristocracy might take that chalice away from me, but we'll see.
>Why [Ukraine] couldn't figure out some combination of accommodation and making themselves obviously militarily indigestible, and are now reduced to begging for rescue from strangers, I cannot fathom.
This costs money that Ukraine didn’t have and the West wouldn’t have provided.
Also Putin’s yes-men would still have not communicated the indigestibility to him. The state of the Russian army _on paper_ exceeded anything Ukraine could ever amass, and nobody wanted to be the one to admit most of the military budget had in fact been embezzled.
In short, because a west that includes Ukraine is bigger (and therefore stronger) than one that doesn't, and the West needs to be strong because otherwise China might end up ruling the world (and turning it into a big concentration camp).
I'm too sleepy to write out better thoughts. I just want to say I find it utterly unbelievable that if Ukraine had announced "We promise not join NATO" Russia would have done anything different here, beyond tweaking language. And I'm surprised that this seems to be a semi consensus.
I'm wondering why the NATO excuse has any traction at all for Russia. It's my understanding (and if I'm wrong, fill me in), that the Soviet Union was one of the main reasons for NATO existing. Since the Soviet Union no longer exists, why should Putin be afraid of NATO, unless he has designs on NATO territory? Have any NATO members done or said anything that could remotely be interpreted as aggressive intentions towards post-Soviet Russia?
To be honest, I think it's an excuse by Russia. It's almost commendable how deceptive it is, that's how well the agitprop is done.
You see, that assurance, "NATO will not move one inch to the east" revolved around Germany before their reunification and when the Soviet Union actually existed. Western powers coaxed a cash strapped Soviet Union that East Germany would not have any US military bases (or any for that matter) on it when they pulled their military out of there. To this very day, you can look at a map and see that former East Germany still has no military bases on it.
Russia lied. It's not true the United States and NATO stabbed them in the back.
Ah, I see what you're saying. At the time the USSR and Warsaw Pact existed. They were already bordering NATO. There literally was no 'east' the quote can refer to except East Germany.
But yeah, there was never a formal agreement against NATO expansion, and the idea that NATO must honor a verbal backroom "understanding" from 30 years ago is ... just a way to distract everyone from the fact that Ukraine wasn't about to join NATO anyway.
I do want to apologize, I didn't mean to misinform. After rereading in greater detail the New Yorker article on Russia's NATO assurance, it's a lot more nuanced than the way I depicted it. Apparently the assurances went beyond just Germany.
Still, I think the United States' actions contributed a VERY miniscule part towards the Ukraine invasion in contrast to Russia's hurt national pride, stoaked by their leaders, that played a much larger role. In my interpretation of the assurances offered, there was an implict understanding that it was dependent on the Soviet Union as an entity existing. Because it does not, the United States has no moral obligation (with the exception of realpoltik considerations) to abide by their assurances.
In the universe where the USSR falls, and the new Russia wasn't invading or Belarus-ify-ing neighboring countries, NATO would probably be considered obsolete, without a real purpose, yeah.
If Putin is deposed, the west shouldn't make the same mistakes we made in 1991. Instead we should seek to turn Russia from being an enemy into being a friend -- a new Marshall Plan, and possible future membership of EU and NATO.
This would also have the advantage of making it extremely unlikely that China would try anything with Taiwan.
It would be nice to see Russia become a happier country. But the main obstacle to that is Russia itself.
The main reason for poverty (outside of Moscow and a few more big cities) is that most of the country's wealth is concentrated in hands of a few oligarchs; Putin being the first among them. Whatever financial help you would give to Russia, most of it would end up in Putin's pockets. And then Putin would blame you for not giving enough. Because Putin always blames someone else.
The main reason for unpopularity is that Russia just fucking can't give up on the idea of having colonies; and all countries around are well aware of it. Great Britain doesn't have colonies anymore. Neither does France. People complain about European Union, but when UK decides to leave, everyone is like "yeah, whatever, don't let the door hit you on your way out". But Russia must fight to keep Chechens in (what is the point? other than "because we can"), and occupy parts of the surrounding countries under the pretext of "some Russian speaking people live here, therefore it's ours". Why are so many countries next to Russia trying to join NATO, and the luckier ones already did? -- Did Canada also try so hard to be allowed to join Warsaw Pact? No, it didn't have a reason to do so. Somehow USA is okay with Canada just existing. How many countries that have a border with Russia can say the same thing?
(inb4 "but Americans also...", yeah, sure, true. But there are at least *some* countries that can coexist with USA peacefully. Can any of the former Warsaw Pact countries say the same about Russia?)
And why does Russia need to have *more* nukes than USA? After already having enough to destroy the entire planet, isn't it just a completely unnecessary burden on your economy to produce more?
All that I said above, is Russia's own fault. USA didn't tell Putin to put half of Russia's money into his own pockets. USA didn't tell Putin to spend the other half on building useless nukes. USA didn't tell Putin to keep fighting everyone around *unless* they join NATO.
I try to imagine a happier universe, where Russia is something like maybe France, only poorer. An ancient country basking in its former glory, but mostly ignored by everyone else; but also left in peace. Able to give up its former colonies; able to stop fighting its neighbors. Having a healthy economy where the corruption does not keep ruining the entire country. Having nukes, but never mentioning them, because there is no reason to. A reasonable level of democracy.
I would be happy to live in such universe. So would probably be most Russians. However, one guy in Russia would be really unhappy for that to happen, because it would mean that he can't have a personal empire anymore. Sadly, it is his opinion that decides what actually happens to Russia.
> The main reason for poverty (outside of Moscow and a few more big cities) is that most of the country's wealth is concentrated in hands of a few oligarchs
True. (Of course similar things could be said about the USA)
> Whatever financial help you would give to Russia, most of it would end up in Putin's pockets.
No. I'm imagining a scenario where Putin is dead or on trial at the ICC. He has no power.
>The main reason for unpopularity is that Russia just fucking can't give up on the idea of having colonies; and all countries around are well aware of it.
Putin might want colonies; but does the average Moscovite?
> Did Canada also try so hard to be allowed to join Warsaw Pact? No, it didn't have a reason to do so. Somehow USA is okay with Canada just existing. How many countries that have a border with Russia can say the same thing?
Exactly.
> one guy in Russia would be really unhappy for that to happen
That one guy needs a bullet in the head. Then things will be better.
>Putin might want colonies; but does the average Moscovite?
Absolutely. Being told all your life that you live in the greatest country ever, which used to be even greatester before “the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, does that to you.
> I'm imagining a scenario where Putin is dead or on trial at the ICC.
Then, the next oligarch in the line.
Looking at Germany and Japan (after WW2) as success stories, it seems to me that an inevitable part of transition to a western democracy is... well, occupation... at least until you establish some democratic institutions and make them work; then you can leave.
Otherwise, the old institutions will create something similar to the old situation. The people who created the original problems, they still have they jobs, they know each other, they keep their habits.
But you cannot do the same thing to Russia. So, I don't see it optimistically. Whoever is the most powerful person in FSB will probably take over after Putin's death, accept some foreign help, do something democratic for a while... until one day it will seem certain that he would lose the next election, and then he will likely prioritize his political survival over the country's future.
Perhaps our only hope is that *all* people in FSB are incompetent, because Putin already eliminated all the competent ones, as potential threats to himself?
Besides inviting all those former Warsaw Pact members into the club? By not dissolving the second the USSR fell? Perhaps by not letting Russia into NATO (although accounts vary on how genuine that attempt was)? Or by meddling in what the Russians see as their own back yard by sponsoring the colour revolutions? Or by directly meddling in (the former) Yugoslavia?
If I was a Russian statesman, the situation after the fall of the USSR would seem a lot like doing something impossibly magnanimous (peacefully dissolving an empire built on the back of what you consider to be endless war by foreign powers) only to be isolated, punished, belittled and encircled by my 'former' opponents for decades in response. The period from the 1990s to the early 2000s was an unprecedented time in history to bring the traditional outside power of Europe into the fold, and instead the Western powers simply reverted to treating them like the Russian Empire instead of the Soviet one.
This is not, I should emphasise, to say that their position is the correct one or that other countries should have uncritically treated the Russians with kid gloves or something. Just that their own history and experiences coloured things in a way that makes their own logic and rhetoric seem impenetrable.
I do not dispute that Russian officials see, at least in their public pronouncements, dissolution of the Soviet Union as an act of impossible Russian magnanimity, but it is important to point out that that is not, in fact, why was Soviet Union dissolved. In the end of the 80s, USSR was totally bankrupt both financially and intellectually, and facing rebellions left and right.
Its dissolution was forced, not granted by the Russian government as some selfless gift to the world.
Oh absolutely - again, I'm not saying that what people think is the objective truth. Just that this is the sort of mindset and logic which then justifies all that follows in their own eyes.
Frankly, I think that this particular justification is mainly a piece of Russian propaganda, aimed at both Western audiences and domestic Russian audience, not something Putin truly believes. He was there, he knows what happened.
I agree with you re: US sponsoring color revolutions, though. That is what really terrifies Russian regime.
The Warsaw Pact members *wanted* to join NATO because they wanted to ensure that they would never be under the control of Moscow again. The Warsaw Pact wasn't voluntary in the first place.
No it wasn't, and I imagine that Poland et al were only too happy to remove themselves from the clutches of the evil empire (even if that meant effectively becoming a buffer state for Western NATO nations instead).
Exactly. Which just shows that US and Western European culture is superior to the one promoted by Russia, despite all talks of "Slavic Brotherhood" ...
The whole "pan-Slavism" idea is just an euphemism for being Russia's vassals. I haven't seen a single proponent of this idea saying that we should e.g. help Ukrainian refugees because they are fellow Slavs. It is always about how other Slavic nations should support and serve Russians.
(If I wanted to be a racist, technically, Ukrainians are more pure-blooded Slavs than Russians. Not that I care either way. I am just pointing out the obvious hypocrisy.)
I don't know...I thought the Czechs started it in the 19th century? Wasn't it during the Habsburg empire, when the Czechs felt subjugated, and thus Pan-Slavism evolved form that?
44 y. living in Russia, last time I heard a word about "Slavic Brotherhood" was 1999, Serbia high time. Its totally irrelevant to current political agendas and cultural narratives.
Yep, irrelevant in Russia. Meanwhile in Slovakia, Russian propaganda never stops talking about it. I guess, thanks for confirmation that this brotherhood is supposed to be completely one-sided.
As an example, in the recently compiled list of Russian propaganda sources in Slovakia, here are the ones with the keyword "Slavic" (or "brotherhood") --- "Televízia Slovan", "BRAT za BRATA", "Slovanské noviny", "Slavica – slovanský spolok", "Jednota Slovanov", "Tajné dejiny Slovienov - Slovanov a Arijcov, našich slávnych predkov", "Slovanské bratstvo", "Slovanská duše - Славянская душа", "Bratia Slovania", "Slovanské ženy - matky proti vojne", "Slovanska unia", "Somslovan .sk", "Sloviensko", "Большая Славия, Sláva Rodu Slovanskému", "Spoločnosť pre rozvoj slovanskej vzájomnosti", "Slovanský svet - Славянский мир - Slovenski svet - Słowiański świat".
NATO were in a position to treat Russia vastly worse than they actually did. The fact that they didn't should be evidence to everyone that fears of NATO using ukraine to launch an invasion of Russia are totally absurd.
Well why was the US afraid of communism to the extent that it warred with other countries? Like the Cold War, this seems to be mainly about protecting and projecting opposing spheres of influence. They see the Western sphere as increasingly knocking on their door. And it does seem reasonable to wonder why we were knocking on their door so much in the first place (although of course it becomes more reasonable the more aggressive they get, in an apparent vicious cycle).
Er...because of what happened to Eastern Europe at the close of the Second World War? It may be cold ancient history these days, but in 1945 people were pretty dang outraged that after spilling oceans of blood to lift the Nazi boot off the neck of Poland, say, we just let the Soviet boot take its place -- to no great improvement. Not to mention the Berlin Crises of 1948 and 1961, Hungary 1956, the Prague Spring, and so on. It did not take a *great* deal of imagination to think that Western Europe -- at the very least the remainder of Germany -- was in quite serious jeopardy from Stalin's intentions circa 1950. It's certainly possible the Americans could have shrugged their shoulders anyway and said "hey, not my problem" -- but AFTER fighting all the way from Omaha Beach to Berlin? That would've been quite an about-face.
Is that how they teach history in Poland? "Войско польско Берлин брало, а радяньско помогало". Somehow it happened to be Soviet blood spilled the most to free the Eastern Europe from Nazis.
I suggest (1) that had more to do with a lack of equipment and Stalin's indifference to the suffering of his own people, and (2) it was certainly not for the purpose of liberating Eastern Europe, but of dismantling the German state. You have only to look at the ravagement of East Germany afterward. And shall we just mention Katyn? The Poles were (and are) under no illusions about the purpose of the Red Army when it swept from east to west across them. Nor were the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Romanians, et cetera.
Of course Eastern European countries should be thankful that the common Soviet man freed them from the Nazi's. But c'mon, you're saying Poles are distorting history by teaching that they also suffered tremendously under the Soviets? You do realize that literally all other Eastern European countries have these exact same grievances: Czechoslovakia, Baltics, Romania, Hungary, etc? You can be assured it's not some grand conspiracy by talking to practically any non-Russian Eastern European. The Soviets presided over immense poverty and authoritarianism in those countries. Poland used to be half the GDP per capita that Russia had in 1990, and now Poles make 50% more GDP per capita than Russians. This is really what Ukraine wants. To break free from this crazy 20th century KGB-Kleptocratic apparatus so that they can prosper economically like the rest of the world.
Oh, GDP per capita, my favorite matter. Lets have an example:
Belarus 2000 - 1200$ 2010 - 6033$ 2020 - 6434$
Ukraine 2000 - 658$ 2010 - 3078$ 2020 - 3724$
Doesn't look like Ukraine prospers.
on "authoritarianism"
You should read "Everything was forever, until it was no more : the last Soviet generation" by Yurchak, Alexei, because i believe you have very little idea what are you talking about.
The USSR first allied with the Nazis to conquer Poland, fought the Nazis only after the Nazis double crossed them and invaded. They stopped their military outside of Warsaw and waited until the Nazis had destroyed the Warsaw rising — and refused to allow airdrops of weapons to the Poles. They then massacred large number of Poles in Katyn forest.
Almost accurate, except that Katyń massacre (and other similar ones, like Miednoje where my great-grandfather was murdered) took part earlier. Though other similar massacres were happening also after war and during later parts of the war.
Resulting in a really weird situation of Nazi Germany discovering, publicizing and complaining about human rights violation.
(They reached and discovered massacre sites after invading their ally, USSR)
Bullshit. Warsaw uprising was half-baked hasty operation launched by government in exile, totally uncoordinated with Soviets, who have hard times breaking German resistance in Poland.
> Somehow it happened to be Soviet blood spilled the most to free the Eastern Europe from Nazis.
What happened? Incompetent leadership that started the entire thing by cooperating with Nazis to start the war to spread its murderous regime. And then ignored human costs through entire war.
And communist oppression was a bit better than nazi one, though still included genocide, mass murder and thorough oppression.
Also, red army looted, raped, oppressed and murdered through Poland, and communist regime installed itself so benefits from regime change (not going to call it "liberation") were not very high.
> s that how they teach history in Poland? "Войско польско Берлин брало, а радяньско помогало"
Fortunately, Russian is now longer mandatory. Google translate gives
> The Polish army took Berlin, and the Radians helped
what is really confusing so I am unable to comment on it.
Though I assure you that noone claims that Berlin was conquered primarily by Polish army.
I occasionally say that, if you want to compare the Soviets to the Nazis, remember that there are still Germans in what used to be East Germany. The Soviets bled and died on an enormous scale to push back a revanchist Germany (that they themselves had a hand in propping up in the beginning, but that's another story), and presumably were not massively enthusiastic about simply repeating the feat a few decades later when the capitalist powers of the world had another go at stamping the worker's paradise out (for reference, see: Civil War, Russian). Hence the Warsaw Pact, buffer zones, a race to get the bomb, outrage over US missiles in Turkey, Cuban missile crisis et al. That they treated the places they rolled over to create these buffer zones like occupiers and conquerors is pretty historically par for the course (not that that excuses anything to our modern sensibilities). It was what the US did with its former enemies that was fantastically ahistorical, and a model that I'm ashamed to say very few (including the US itself) have followed since. It's something that would have helped the Russians themselves immensely in the 90s.
That's not a very convincing defense. The majority of previously German regions east of the Elbe is actually devoid of Germans precisely because the Soviets expelled or killed the Germans who remained there after the war, or exiled them to Kazhakstan.
Right, but we aren't talking about 1950. We are talking about today. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, and no one is in jeopardy from Stalin's intentions.
So, again: why were we knocking on Russia's door so much?
One of the funniest takes (which IIRC, forms the historical foundation that "Red Plenty" then historical fictions all over) is that a lot of concern about Communism was because it looked like it might actually work. Socialism, after all, seemed to have built rich, productive, peaceful societies in Europe. So what if the masses threw off their shackles, ate the rich, embraced being a global proletarian dictatorship, and were then even more rich and productive than capitalist nations? You kind of had to strangle the concept at the source, lest it spread and eventually play out in your own home. And damn if the post-soviet era hasn't been a relentless crusade to stamp out even the memory that the USSR accomplished anything other than hunger and gulags.
Of course, realistic hindsight still shows that the real USSR was more or less a polite fiction maintained by enormous waste and suffering - capable of impressive feats but increasingly tottering, creaky, dysfunctional and hypocritical as the years went on. But then, the above critics might content, that that's also looking very true of our present global, free-trade oligarcho-capitalist moment as well...
Most Soviet republics like Ukraine, Russia, what was then Byelorussia, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, and so on, were poor compared to rich countries like the US and the prewar UK, but they were much richer materially during the height of the USSR (the 01950s to 01970s) than they had been pre-USSR, and also much richer than they would be for many years after the Soviet collapse. It's not that Communism is a good system; it's just not literally the worst system ever invented, usually. Both Tsarist autocracy via secret police and the utterly corrupt kleptocracy that replaced Communism in most countries were worse, both in terms of material scarcity and in terms of misery and oppression.
Some of these countries, like Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, still have not recovered to their pre-collapse state, and this war has likely ensured that they will not do so for decades.
I was under the impression Ukraine (and a few other SSRs) economically benefitted from being in the Soviet Union because they were essentially protected from outside competition (at the expense of the the rest of the USSR), rather than because communism worked for them. Also, I doubt that the Tsarist regime was worse than the Soviets. This commonly cited paper makes the case formally: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19425. I readily admit, it gets a bit technical and I'm not sure I understand all of it myself.
I interpreted that line as relying heavily on the "seemed" - regardless of reality, the Soviets were good at putting out propaganda *saying* that they were rich and productive and peaceful, and there were huge swathes of the West that believed them.
Fun fact. Eastern Europe did better under post war communism than western societies under neoliberalism. Dating neoliberalism to about 1980 and “doing better” to wages and not just GDP. However of course the post war solution in the West was even better.
If you're genuinely comparing what happens under communism to what's happening in present day countries under capitalism, I have to conclude that you don't know what you're talking about. Please make some comparison grounded in facts to make your point
He’s talking economically. Can we compare growth in east Germany 1950-1970 (the peak) favourably to western capitalism? Yes. It trounces western economic growth right now.
But you can't compare the two at all. It's like trying to see if a teenager who started taking meth feels better than a 45 year old mid career professional.
> And damn if the post-soviet era hasn't been a relentless crusade to stamp out even the memory that the USSR accomplished anything other than hunger and gulags.
For example?
The thing is, the few technological successes the USSR could muster came at the expense of even basic personal conveniences (allegedly, they built their first toilet paper factory in 1968 – though I can't find a reliable source for this right now). Their early lead in the space race vanished after a couple of years, because they weren't able to spend the vast amount of resources needed to keep up with the US.
Praising the accomplishments of the USSR is a bit like praising North Korea for being able to develop probably-nuclear almost-ICBMs, while Germany seemingly hasn't been able to do so in the past 70 years.
Broadly, because all Communist (technically socialist, but we'll stick with the terminology sold to the rubes) governments inherently destroy people. The US is built on the idea of individual equality and self-determination, and this permeates the ethos of the nation. Communist governments can only exist by force in single-party states. The fear of the spread is that they would continue to use military power until they conquered the world.
Cynically, because US investors can't buy mining concessions, buy land to turn it into a banana plantation, or set up a McDonalds in a Communist country; Communism insists that the means of production be owned by "the people", which is to say, the state, and to this end expropriates foreign investors' holdings without compensation, as Germany and France have recently done with the yachts of Russian citizens.
More charitably, because leaders of not-yet-Communist countries, including the US and its allies, didn't want to end up like King Zog I or, especially, Louis XVI, Victoriano Huerta, and Tsar Nicholas; and elites in not-yet-Communist countries didn't want to end up like the Cuban exiles or the Russian kulaks.
Moreover, Communism, like Liberalism, is explicitly a worldwide movement; it proposes universally applicable remedies for universal ills, and explicitly urges international cooperation to put them in place. My Communist stepgrandmother in the US had posters of Trotsky and Zapata up in her house and traveled to other countries for political purposes, and it is of course well known that Soviet and Maoist groups sent extensive support to their comrades abroad, including in the US. The idea of a Communist revolution in the US seems absurd only in retrospect.
I've always felt that communist regime's paranoia brought the facade down ever time.
A capitalist equivalent of an apparatchik who lived in the USSR publicly evangelizing for capitalism and protesting the establishment, say also traveling to nearby communist-aligned countries and supporting clandestine efforts there against the communists, well that person would not be a free man/woman very long.
For some reason these workers' paradises were always terrified that the words of those who disagreed with them would ruin the paradise. Which makes no sense. If I'm living in heaven, why I am I afraid of someone telling me the grass is greener over here?
I was wondering this myself. A really profound answer is found in a document called the Long Telegram, which was written by a US foreign service guy named Kennan when the Cold War started. Read the whole thing, as it's short and goes into a ton of other stuff I never learned in school either:
TL;DR Communism was always known to be a "red" herring (hahaha) for the paranoid imperialism of the Russian leadership, which goes back hundreds of years. Ie, Communist leaders knew on some level that their implementation of it was unworkable (or not True Communism, or however you want to argue it), but they used this as an excuse to continue to expand Russian borders.
When looked at in this slightly abstract way, what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine today makes sense, as does the thrust of Russian empire-building and imperial repression since Ivan the Terrible.
I like this way of looking at things because it creates a very powerful mental defense against the bad kind of Russian "whataboutism" of many kinds.
Kennan also critiques the US in several very constructive ways. Go ahead, read the whole thing, you'll see :)
I think it's rational for Putin to be afraid of NATO. It does have a history of bombing dictators out of their homes and into rebels arms that did not pose an obvious threat. See Libya. But I also agree that is not the main reason for the war. They wanted Ukraine to be Belarus 2, and thought it would be simple
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, another reason might be the industrial capacity of Ukraine? But overall, it seems to be about protecting Russia's sphere of influence...
I watched that video of the Mearsheimer lecture that people posted elsewhere in this thread, and his argument, as I recall, is that NATO is a US ventriloquist dummy, and US foreign policy these days is driven by democracy promotion. Needless to say, if you're an autocrat like Putin, whose hold on power might be more tenuous than commonly believed, you have reason not to want western democracy-promotion pushing further eastward, because if Ukrainians get used to democratic elections, sooner or later average Russians are going to think that they're entitled to democratic elections, too, and you could wind up like Muammar Gaddafi or Hosni Mubarak.
I come here with a simple request: If anyone can cast doubt that my assertions are wrong. In my world view, I view the United States as a flawed power, but never annexed (at least within recent memory) a country unlike what Russia has done to Ukraine. I'm a critic of the United States flouting international law, I think the Iraq and Afghanistan war as it currently transpired shouldn't have happened, that America should have gotten approval by the UN security council instead of running roughshod of them, but still believe the United States' motivations weren't primarily driven by imperial conquest or done out of material interests such as oil. (Instead I believe it was a result of foreign policy democracy promotion gone awry from neocons and converging interests by businesses/the military.)
Am I wrong? That Russia's invasion of Ukraine isn't comparable to the United States (still very wrong) invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan? And is Russia being punished unequivocally for something America themselves did?
> What is the difference between annexation, and invading, then installing a puppet government, then leaving? Morally there's almost no difference, that's for sure.
In all the wars I can remember the US doesn't install a puppet government, it makes a good-faith attempt to get a proper democracy up and running. That's the difference.
Probably the most obvious counter-example would be the US backing the coup against Diem in South Vietnam. Who wasn't exactly democratic, but he was much less of a puppet than the endless string of weaker military leaders who followed him.
But while I'm ordinarily prepared to spend all day criticizing the powers that rule the US, I'm not going to equate the US with Russia here. I do think there's an important moral difference, which is that:
1. The Iraq invasion was provoked (by Saddam's non-compliance on WMD inspections), which the world broadly acknowledged, even if it didn't agree with the solution.
and
2. The US put forth a strong effort to rally global support for its invasion.
I've listened to what Russians say about this war, and my biggest gripe is that even if everything they are saying is legitimate, that Ukraine basically terrorized the Donbas, Putin should have tried to justify his actions before the world. He should have gone before the UN. He should have issued an ultimatum. This seems like not just good moral sense, but good political sense. Instead he lied until the final moment and then invaded suddenly.
The introduction to the US Declaration of Independence contains the words "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation". And what I see here is that Putin, in his actions, did not show a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.
I think thread OP is thinking of the past 30 years and isn't thinking of things like deposing the Shah in Iran.
But maybe the past 30 years is a good place to start from since that's the end of the Cold War? I can get why Russia wouldn't want to start from that point in time, though.
A valid point, though the problem is I can't think of anyone else besides the US making a serious attempt to replace a sovereign government after the end of the Cold War, until perhaps now. But I guess that's the point.
I do think it makes sense to distinguish between helping bankroll a coup without troops present (a la Iran) and outright puppeting a country you have either invaded or been invited into (or in the case of the Warsaw Pact, "liberated" and never left). Which is to say, it's less objectionable to persuade someone by bribing him than by holding a gun to his head, and you have more control over the details in the latter situation.
Supporting coups exists along a spectrum, from doing all the legwork and paying all the bills, to just signaling to the coup plotters that you'll recognize them and send aid dollars their way if they succeed. From that point of view, there's little doubt the US contributed to Euromaidan somewhere along that spectrum. But that doesn't make invasion a proportionate response.
But even if it were, this would merely be a continuation of the status quo: Saddam Hussein wasn't exactly in office thanks to free and fair elections, nor were the Taliban.
>That means they literally force a country to have a president no one voted for.
They didn't vote for the previous leader either. But the intention was precisely that they would be able to have stuff like elections at all after regime change had occurred. And pro-western puppets are a hell of a lot different than pro-Russian puppets. Being a pro-western "puppet" is mostly stuff like don't fund terrorists, don't commit genocide etc. Pro-russian puppets are basically ruling their country for the benefit of Russia, like using the country as a launch pad for a war of aggression aimed at annexing a neighbor.
In my view the US may be considered to be one of the less hateful and oppressive hegemonic powers in history, but that's also a really low bar to clear.
The US spent the 90s up until the present completely unconstrained in the exercise of power, or their ability to justify it to themselves, and it seems to have warped the view of people inside the country to a remarkable degree. Remember: in an era where it had effectively won the war to be the sole power on earth, the United States never drew down its arms or restrained its ambitions. Instead it indulged in wars of choice across the planet that it would have excoriated others for making.
For instance; it's fascinating to me that the justification for invading a country that had literally nothing to do with the ostensible casus belli of the time (Iraq) was then justified on the basis of "well Saddam was a bad dude and we brought democracy to the Middle East so the world should really be thanking us for the suffering of our veterans". That's frankly insane, and would rightly be considered so if anyone else did it. Can you imagine if China invaded Israel and justified it on the basis of "well they weren't communist, so the real tragedy is that so many of our precious sons died to bring them into the light of socialist revolution."
Can you imagine any other power killing something like 1-3% of the population of a randomly-chosen country (by their own count, not that of an unbiased third party or the country that they attacked) and then walking away thinking they did them a favour? And then having most of the important bits of the world shrug their shoulders and mumble a bit because that country is too big and important to even tell off about it? We see even an inkling of that in other nations (cough Uyghurs cough) and rightfully become furious at the injustice of it all.
So yeah, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine is absolutely comparable to that of the US invading Iraq, and in a just world the US would have been punished in some way for it (let alone been allowed to walk away and consider itself the victim).
But international politics isn't the study of a just world, it's a study of power and (mostly unintended) consequences. And right now the US (and the West in general) has the power to punish Russia for something that should absolutely be punished in a peaceful, liberal, rules-based international order (your views may vary on how important any of the aforegoing are). Let's just hope that that power is used carefully, as events like this have a habit of leading to new conflicts later down the line.
Part of the reason this mattered to me, is I wanted to think of Russian sanctions as unequivocally good. After reading what you wrote, I think I was mistaken in believing democracy as an unalloyed good, that the means to achieve it change its overall ethics.
Firstly, is democracy a 'perfect' or 'least flawed' form of government? I think debatable. China's government has always been 'undemocratic' and they've been able to lift more people out of poverty than any other government in the history of humanity (albeit having inflicted upon the population many horrors before they got their act together in the '80s). Secondly, was that the actual intention for the invasion of Iraq - to introduce democracy - because there are plenty of other nondemocratic states out there? Thirdly and most importantly, does it matter if the intention was good if the strategy and execution was so flawed, and the results so horrendous? You know the saying, hell is paved with good intentions.
"Democracy" is no single thing. At best, it's an abstraction that approximately maps onto "uniformly devolved power". There are countless number of ways to devolve power, but most people seem to assume that elections are the only legitimate mechanism for devolution and therefore that democracy *can* be reduced to a single thing: the presence of ("free" and "fair") elections. Only in this distorted and oversimplified framework can you even pose the question "is democracy [i.e., elections] the 'least flawed' form of government?"--for the same reason that you can't rank order the complex numbers, namely, because the problem has too many dimensions to fit on a number line.
Here's a better definition of democracy that dodges all this semantic quibbling: democracy is whatever happens when ALL the people inside some border are armed to the teeth (with weapons that exist in the Squared Regime of Lanchester's Laws, i.e., with guns). Because physical, violent power increases quadratically with coalition size within such a border, it is impossible for a majority to be stably exploited (although it remains possible for the majority to stably exploit some minority population). I am aware of no other "system" that can even match such a guarantee.
The success of the Chinese regime is unstable. They are still coasting on the magnanimity and wisdom of their Philosopher King, Deng Shou Ping (and Xi is no Deng).
And the invasion of Iraq did not even try to "introduce democracy", at least in the way I have defined democracy. So that entire line of questioning is ill-posed.
I do agree that China's government is very effective and possibly even efficient at accomplishing their goals, which for the moment align pretty well with those of Chinese citizens, but do they really deserve credit for lifting the masses out of poverty when they essentially emerged from agrarianism (some might call it self imposed agrarianism), fresh faced and flush with laborers, into a world starving for cheap labor and ready to utilize them? In other words, "communist" China bootstrapped its success from the largess of the already existing capitalists. Not that capitalizing on the situation isn't deserving of praise.
I think you can believe in democracy as an unalloyed good, but if so then the US has a fairly terrible track record on that front as well.
I personally think that sanctions are ironically much better at propping up autocratic regimes than toppling them, as the pressure centralises economic power and makes the public angry at an outside force "ruining" their country rather than getting them to see their leaders as the problem.
On the other hand; if you want to topple a regime, the best way (traditionally, anyway) is to find the discontented elite wannabes that are sitting just under the upmost rungs of power and start feeding them resources. Unfortunately, this too tends to result in... well... unintended consequences.
Really, the best play for the West if they want to hurt the Russians (for some reason) would be to keep doing what they're doing now: feeding intel, money and arms into Ukraine and making financial life hard for Russian elites. Even better, they should be fast-tracking ways to wean themselves off of Russian gas.
Nuclear power might be a good way to — particularly for Germany — to extricate themselves from Russian oil dependency.
And yeah, sanctions don't have the most sterling track records (they have a tendency to fail).
Ultimately I just don't want to see Russia undermine the ideals of international law, to embolden other countries to follow suit. As bad as the United States actions were, it'd be even more catastrophic to see a cresendo effect occur and invading countries is normalized.
Thankfully, I think the strong condemnation the world over might have forestalled that possibility. (At least I hope so.) Still I wish we were in a better position to criticize and practiced what we preached.
If it's any consolation, the moment of uni-polar madness seems to be fading, and the US is again closer to being a first power among equals. I just wish that it could have gotten there on the back of a peaceful overseeing of world trade, and a well-earned transition away from a permanent war footing, instead of the role it did historically take.
Goodness knows that it did less in the way of imperial horror than Europe did in it's time - but again, that's a bar so low that it's scraping the bottom of the sea floor.
Well...imagine if Germany actually had nuclear weapons. Maybe the German foreign policy would be quite a bit more assertive then...on the other hand, France isn't that assertive either...
> I think you can believe in democracy as an unalloyed good, but if so then the US has a fairly terrible track record on that front as well
I don't think that's fair. In the time that the US has existed, the world has gone from three-ish democracies to about a hundred, and the US played a role in pushing a lot of those down that pathway in one way or another.
I agree that sanctions historically are a poor means of toppling autocratic regimes. However, the aim here does not appear to be "overthrow Putin" but "make it increasingly difficult to continue the war effort in Ukraine"
I dont know that we have a lot of models for how well sanctions work for that purpose.
Given the Russian army has clearly underperformed relative to expectations and has suffered from logistical issues, it may turn out sanctions will indeed hinder its operational efficiency.
Like, in theory, Putin could raly and mobilize even more military force against Ukraine. When your economic system is barely functioing, that kind f mobilization and force projection may become much more difficult.
Democracy is an unalloyed good the way a hammer is. It may be the best tool for the job, but the goal is rarely to use a hammer, it's to get the *job done*.
A democratic republic was set up in the US, not because of its inherent Goodness, but as a way to ensure liberty. And much as was warned of in-advance, the people would rather vote for Bread and Circuses than maintain liberty.
That wasn't actually the reason we went to war with Iraq in the 2000s, which was, more properly considered, something like "Iraq was violating the terms of the cease-fire we had negotiated through the UN, and France, which was buying oil at under-market-prices in violation of UN trade agreements from Iraq, was using its security veto to prevent the UN from enforcing any stricter international responses against Iraq for violating the ceasefire".
Well, certainly it is much better to be a neighbour country of the US than of Russia (and probably China)…I mean, Canada didn't join the Iraq War, but the US didn't invade Canada or anything...
> Remember: in an era where it had effectively won the war to be the sole power on earth, the United States never drew down its arms or restrained its ambitions. Instead it indulged in wars of choice across the planet that it would have excoriated others for making
Okay, and in a time of such power that they could have annexed virtually any sq metre of earth that they wanted, they didn't. Would ANY meaningful non-western power have done the same
>"well Saddam was a bad dude and we brought democracy to the Middle East so the world should really be thanking us for the suffering of our veterans"
That wasn't the justification at all. Are you really this ignorant or are you being dishonest?
First of all, we need to stop using past wrongs (especially wrongs between unrelated parties) to in any way, shape , or form, attempt to diminish the wrongs of the present.
If you want to haul Bush Jr to the Hague you can hold that position and still universally denounce Putin and his war.
In fact, to hold that position and not want to do everything possible to stop Putin seems incredibly hypocritical.
An honest compare and contrast of Iraq II vs Ukraine can be had, but only after the starting point of unequivocal condemnation and demand for cessation of all violence today in Ukraine.
Not within living memory, no, but the US annexed a big chunk of Mexico in 1848, Hawaii in 1898, the Phillipines in 1899, and the creation of the Canal Zone in 1903 was pretty shady from a pure respect of sovereignty point of view.
But I suspect from Putin's point of view, the direct comparison would be to the American Civil War: Eleven states seceded by all appearances fair and square from the Union, and unmistakably strongly and sincerely (given e.g. the 11,000 boys in gray who fed the carrion birds at Shiloh) wished to form an independent country, and yet the (remaining) United States did not let them -- indeed, invaded their newborn country, burned its buildings to the ground, and slaughtered several hundred thousand very sincere enthusiasts for Confederate independence.
What would President Lincoln have thought if the Powers of Europe in 1861 had decided that he was being a rat bastard for not allowing the South to peacefully leave? If the Royal Navy, for example, had imposed a "no sail" zone off the coast of the southern States to nix any Union blockade of Southern ports? I would guess that's how Putin sees it, because he seems to genuinely feel like Ukraine is inherently part of a Union as "indissoluble" as the North decided our Union was in 1861.
I'm actually not sure how much anyone outside of the US thinks about the US Civil War. Where I come from it's seen as this weird American obsession (in much the same way that we have our own weird historical obsessions), but nobody uses it as a point of reference for anything.
Has Putin mentioned historical parallels there? I'd be genuinely interested in if/how the Russians incorporate the US Civil War into their own understanding of history.
How many people nowadays remember/know that the US actually deployed troops to support the "white" Russians during the Russian civil war between the whites and the Bolsheviks?
Not many. I daresay many Americans don't even learn there *was* a Russian Civil War, or that the Bolsheviks did not *begin* the Revolution. Russia just kind of jumps from Tsarist to Communist in October of 1917 without any kind of important transitional events.
I mean...unless you were a big fan of "Doctor Zhivago" (either the book or the justifiably famous David Lean film).
Really? That's...odd. I don't think you can understand the United States without understanding the Civil War. It would be like trying to understand France without understanding the French Revolution, or Germany without understanding the Thirty Years War. It's a pivotal moment, where we switch from Jeffersonian agrarian republic to superpower-in-waiting.
It's also the most important exception to the American principle of self-determination: we're all for it, except...under some circumstances, and that "except" has been a major challenge for anyone else trying to understand American foreign policy since 1890 or so. If the Germans had understood it better at Paris Peace Conference in 1919, or Ho Chi Minh had understood it better after Dien Bien Phu, history might've been at least a bit different. Oddly enough, I get the feeling that the Taiwanese understand it very well, and have been very skilled at keeping on the right side of it.
I have no idea if Putin has mentioned any such historical parallel. I'd be a little surprised, reaching all the way back to 19th century history to make arguments is sort of a nerdy thing to do, and isn't his self-image more cowboy than nerd?
Nobody understands the United States, or France, or Germany. Hell, I don't understand the block I live on; half the people that live on it are people I wouldn't even recognize, much less be able to tell you what their marital conflicts are.
Somehow US isn't a symbolic center of Russian Thought Empire. You might be surprised but there is no such thing as American Revolution in Russian school curriculum, only American Struggle for Independence.
Note- Actually, South Carolina seceded. It wasn't until Federal troops refused to abandon Fort Sumter, which lead to direct combat between the South Carolina Militia and the US armed forces, that the other states seceeded. Granted those states didnt recognize the election of Lincoln, but they didnt all secede simultaneously- it was the action at Fort Sumter which showed them the US would not acknowledge the right of succession which lead to them actually seceeding.
> never annexed (at least within recent memory) a country
Iraq and Afghanistan technically may not be annexations, but I do not really see a point in such distinctions.
> And is Russia being punished unequivocally for something America themselves did?
Even if it is - so what? It is nice to start somewhere and keep raising our standards.
Slavery is not officially allowed anywhere (or at least everyone pretends that it is not slavery), would be nice to do the same with invasions that are blatant power grabs.
that "pretends" distinction seems moot at times, i.e. the uighurs for example, who everyone realizes are being used as an industrial slave labor force- those that havent been outright killed
You are making assumptions: USA invaded Iraq clearly for its oil, and because Saddam Hussein threatened to sell its oil in euros, which undermines the firm grip USA has in the petrodollar system.
What USA did is worse, Hussein allowed inspectors to check that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so he gave absolutely no excuse for USA to invade, and they did it anyway. Zelenskyy didn't give anything to Russia, so he gave all the excuses.
I personally only got about 100 bbl or so, so I feel totally ripped off. Plus the stuff is a real pain to store, and I worry about the fire hazard a little.
Yes, that's true. Certainly in its "neighbourhood", the US did not...I mean, even Cuba has not been annexed by the US, though I am sure if the US had overthrown the regime in the 90s there, the Russians or Chinese would not have intervened.
Why bother? All the Cubans we want have already moved to Florida.
That's actually the US secret, honestly. We just get all the best people from elsewhere to move here and become Americans, and then we don't need to annex anything.
Cheaper cigars and beachfront property. More widely available Cuban cuisine. Godfather Part II has a somewhat more realistic ending. The benefits are innumerable, really.
I mean, any 2 things can be compared, but I'd argue more justification for US v. Iraq and US v. Afghanistan than there is for RU v. Ukraine (though to be clear, Afghanistan is the only one I'd argue was actually justified - my issue with that one is execution, not the decision to go in).
If you're looking for more on US imperial history, I'd recommend "How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States." I'd still say that as great powers go we rate better than most in terms of conquests from a historic perspective, but we also do have our skeletons (the West, Puerto Rico, the Phillipines, Cuba, etc). It's also true that by the time we really hit great power status, the *methods* of global dominance had changed a lot, so its hard (and... kinda pointless?) to try to apples-to-apples our "sins" with those of others.
This war is much more personal for me. Not personally involved but people all around me who have lost property in Ukraine, who are trying to get out their relatives from war zones etc.
I understand Scott's concern about WW3 but he also doesn't realize how the world has changed since then. Russia is not the same as the USSR (speaking about favours). Ukraine is as much a former USSR than Russia. This war is really not about NATO but about racism (this should be the correct term) at the highest level. Putin simply hates Ukrainians for introducing impurities to his Russian world.
I don't think that Putin needs to save a face. I read Russians on vk.com, some of them people who are my good acquaintances I have known for years are now completely brainwashed by accepting everything that Putin tells them. They will not dishonour him even if loses the war. It may only increase their conviction that the west and not Putin is evil.
I'm not sure what change you think is relevant. Russia still has nukes; a war between Russia and NATO could escalate into nuclear war.
Putin talks about race to his base and about NATO expansionism to the rest of the world; I don't know if one is the reality and the other is propaganda, or if they both contribute to his worldview.
NATO is a defensive treaty. Its not credible that NATO expansion threatens Russia. Unless Russia's goals are to expand and incorporate territories around them.
Are you suggesting a conspiracy underlying NATO that means that when one country chooses to attack, all countries must attack? If a true conspiracy was underfoot - why announce any sort of alliance at all?
It doesn't work this way. NATO is existential threat to Russia, and this is how it works since first wave of extention. Read or listen to John Mearsheimer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U87J7I7Om_4
I don't see how anyone could think NATO is an existential threat to Russia. Nobody is the least bit interested in actually invading Russia.
Do Russians honestly think that the West is champing at the bit to invade their cold dreary wasteland? I think we'd all much rather go back to ignoring the fact that it exists, like Mongolia or Kazakhstan.
Well, they better hurry up then. NATO was formed in 1949. That's 73 years and counting of being an existential "threat" without ever a single soldier setting foot on Russian soil, nor a bullet being fired eastward. What in heck are they *waiting* for, do you suppose?
So… I listened to the video you posted here, and the thing it is totally devoid of is any explanation of *why* expansion of NATO is “an existential threat to Russia.” He just quotes that the Russians have been *saying* that they view NATO as an existential threat and taking that assertion at face value. And I don’t think that assertion holds up to scrutiny.
Let’s take a parallel hypothetical – a mutual defense alliance between China and Mexico where each agrees to defend the other if attacked. Hell, let's even say that China starts providing non-nuclear arms to Mexico and training its military in their use.
Is the US global position made less secure by that? Absolutely.
Would the US object to such an arrangement? Of course. Economic sanctions probably already in the mail.
But is the *very existence* of the United States in danger because of that arrangement? That sounds more like a bellicose diplomatic hyperbole. I mean, I'm sure we'd *say* it, but I don't believe it one bit as an accurate threat appraisal.
And does the mere threat of such an alliance justify invading Mexico to annex parts of it, create satellite states, and/or initiate a regime change at gun point? Come on now.
It seems like (a) great powers want spheres of influence and are wont to hyperbolize the "threat" to themselves in order to recast aggressive responses to people in that sphere of influence behaving in ways contrary to the great powers' interest, and (b) certain people are just taking the Russian exaggeration on expansion of NATO as an "existential threat" at face value - which is useful for Russia but doesn't seem to me to be accurate to the actual threat level.
I mean, what number would you really put the delta on the chances of Russia *ceasing to exist* between (a) a fact pattern where Ukraine is in NATO, and (b) a fact pattern where Ukraine is not in NATO?
What do you think the change would be in the actual percent chance that NATO countries would invade Russia, risking a nuclear holocaust, through a NATO-member Ukraine?
I'm sure that delta is nonzero, but I'd hardly even call it measurable. If Russian doesn't want countries to join NATO, maybe it should stop making its neighbors feel threatened enough to want to join NATO.
It's only existential because that's the narrative the Russian regime wants to believe in...if Russia agreed to get rid of its Nukes, then NATO would not have to be so belligerent towards Russia...
1. "Threat" refers to capability, not intent, and NATO's capabilities are considerable.
2. Contextually, it matters less what NATO's real intentions are, vs what Putin and/or other Russian leadership believe they are, or might be. If the Cold War was still going strong and somehow Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact, would it be unreasonable for the US to get nervous even if it was "only a defensive alliance"?
3. Even assuming a defense-only treaty, that still leaves the possibility of an (even accidental) conflict unexpectedly escalating from a single member state to all of NATO. Isn't that sort of thing how World War I started?
If you accept that 3 point framework, though, it can justify pretty much any act of aggression, in response to pretty much any interstate cooperation not involving you.
“Threat refers to capability, and US/Canada/Mexico capabilities are considerable”
“Contextually, it matters less what their real intensions are, vs what the CCCP believes them to be”
“Even assuming an economic-only treaty, that still leaves open the possibility of an (even accidental) conflict unexpectedly escalating from a single member state to pull in all 3 nations given their aligned interests”
“And that’s why the US/Canada/Mexico should have known better then to form NAFTA. The Chinese invasion of Tijuana really should have been expected.”
It’s basically the worst interpretation of “stand your ground” laws, only applied to state actors with standing armies and atomic arsenals. The international community can and should expect it’s members to react *proportionally* to the *reasonable* perception of the threats they face, not just take vague invocations of grave danger at face value. And when nations overreact I think it’s cause for their peers to reprimand and sanction them, not to buy into some gaslighting “you made me do this” view of the universe the aggressor may spout.
And I think part of applying that analysis to the Ukraine situation is asking the reasonable question “just how threatened, actually, is Russia if Ukraine were to join NATO? What are the actual odds that NATO attacks Russia, and how much do they increase if Ukraine joins?”
It seems to me that if you consider that question, the answers fall somewhere between zero and exceedingly little. I mean, what are the odds that the US or another NATO member would *want* dance with nuclear fire by attacking Russia? And then even if they did what are the odds that other members of the alliance would want to go along with it? And with the US nuclear capabilities being what they are, how much incrementally worse does Ukraine make things?
I think if you consider how small all those numbers are, it makes it clear that this isn't about Russia defending itself against any kind of existential threat posed by NATO or Ukraine in NATO. Russia doesn't have to go along with that analysis, but it doesn't mean we have to just agree that they're acting reasonably here or that "NATO made them do it."
Thank you. The people saying "lol it's only defensive therefore your argument is invalid" were being way too trite, but you put in the work to show it.
It is absolutely credible that Putin (and many other Russians) believe that NATO expansion threatens Russia. And if the ICBMs start flying, "but the people who launched them were *objectively wrong about facts*!" is not going to matter one bit. If you want to convince people with ICBMs not to launch them, you have to address their perceptions, not some underlying reality they mistakenly disbelieve.
I dare call it "NPC problem". Westerners tend to believe they are the only Player Characters on Earth, while others are Non Player Characters, driven by underlying game rules.
I know where are you coming and I totally agree with you on the possible dangers. I also think that NATO instead of providing no-fly zone, tries to provide tools for Ukrainians to eliminate Russian air superiority.
The issue I see here is that no one can see Ukraine clearly winning and it will lead to prolonged resistance which will cause more and more destruction and deaths both civilian and military. We see that accepting Russian terms as satisfactory outcome.
Unfortunately it is not so. Ukraine is a very poor and failed post-Soviet country that has not been able to make much progress over many years. Remaining neutral as it is will only make its situation worse. Will make it even more vulnerable to further Russian provocations. From Russia's point of view Belarus is a neutral country and they want to see Ukraine in the same status. The war from Ukraine's point of view is exactly about not becoming like Belarus. Putin asking them to remain neutral actually means for Ukraine to capitulate. I don't believe they will ever agree to this and entertaining this idea actually means boosting Putin.
We need to prove Putin wrong. Cut off the gas to Europe if necessary economically. It will be terrible but at least it won't be a kinetic war because Putin himself threatened to do the same (or rather intimidated or called the west bluff).
I am afraid that there is a limit on discomfort that Americans and Western Europeans are willing to endure for Ukraine, and it is much much lower than "going to war with Russia". If there are sufficiently severe economic disruptions, calls will grow to throw Ukraine under the bus and agree with Belarus-like solution.
So I agree with Scott - best course for action for Ukrainian leadership seems to me to pursue similar status as Austria (imho better analogy than oft cited Finland and definitely not Belarus). No foreign troops on their territory, internationally guaranteed neutrality, not in NATO, but in EU.
US already announced that they will stop buying oil from Russia (it was a single digit percentage anyway). For the EU it is harder but nevertheless there are plans to greatly reduce its dependence on Russia's gas. (e.g., https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/08/energy/gas-russia-europe/index.html, Germany entertains the idea to keep old nuclear power stations operative etc.)
Many said that the west will never cut off Russia from SWIFT and they did. Not fully because of necessity to buy gas but with less dependence on Russian gas, even full ban is not out of cards later.
Ukraine cannot be Austria because Austria is already in Europe – culturally, geographically, economically. Ukraine needs to develop first.
In fact, key Russian institutions like Sberbank are still in SWIFT, although perhaps they will be cut off later.
But my main point is that if sanctions will prove visibly economically disruptive for the West, it will be difficult to sustain them after the initial shock will wear off. And prices of gasoline in EU right know are spiking, although there is no EU oil embargo (yet?), very visible reminder of the costs of sanctions policy to voters.
Re Austria, it was granted neutrality in 1955. I think that it was still quite poor country at that time, somewhat like Ukraine now. But I have not looked at any statistics, so perhaps that is wrong.
If the war does not end soon, the shock will be long lasting. For Eastern Europe Ukraine is not some country on the other side of the globe, it is right there with Ukrainian refugees arriving and constant reminder that it could be us.
The only difficult country is Germany. We will see what happens but Germany politicians supporting Russia is a disgrace.
> No foreign troops on their territory, internationally guaranteed neutrality, not in NATO, but in EU.
That matches my total-amateur thoughts. Basic goal is that Ukraine is safe from future Russian invasion (EU is also a defensive pact) but can't support NATO action against Russia. Russia can save face by claiming this is all they really wanted anyway.
So the line in the sand you're implying is "Russia cannot attack a NATO member". What about the rest? Putin has showed he's willing to conquer basically anything he deems conquerable, so we'll just do the same (and we gave him no reason to believe otherwise) when he'll invade Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan? And after all that, he or his successor, aggrandized by all his successes, won't he be reinforced in his belief that NATO is easily scared by nuclear threat, and so try his hand at some ex-russian possession?
You're left hoping Russia will lose or decline enough in the meantime.
Even if you think nuclear war is such a big concern that suppresses everything else, the only right question isn't just asking what is p(nuclear war | NATO in Ukraine), but comparing it to p(nuclear war | NOT NATO in Ukraine), and at least to me it's not obvious at all how the calculation resolves.
Russia cannot attack a NATO member, without going to war with NATO. Russia cannot attack anyone *else*, without NATO (or at least the US) providing arms and intelligence to whoever they are attacking. And vice versa, mostly. These rules have been long established and understood, and we can be reasonably confident that Russia isn't planning to go to war with NATO just because NATO sends arms to Ukraine.
And, yes, predictably he'll go to war with Moldova, Georgia, etc, etc, if he thinks it to his advantage. If we want to stop that, we need to either invite those countries to join NATO, or we need to convince Russia that it can at best win bloody expensive pyrrhic victories against countries that are being armed by NATO. The Ukrainians seem quite willing to help us out with Plan B.
Agree with everything. Just wanted to note a couple of things.
If Russia attacks a (non-nuclear) NATO member, some members may defect, but basically the only important thing is that US doesn't, to which I give very low probability.
In this invasion Russia miscalculated badly the level of resistance Ukrainians would oppose, so they invested accordingly a relatively weak force. They may adapt. It may look counter-intuitive, but your reasoning (with which I agree) implies that the worse Ukraine loses, the better a direct intervention becomes.
Ukraine is a much harder bone to chew then other countries Russia may decide to invade.
If you think its a lie, quote the parts you disagree with and provide counter evidence. Don't just assert another user is a liar. I don't know if NoPie is correct or not, but sneering and name calling makes me think you don't have any facts or data to bring to the table.
>>This war is really not about NATO but about racism (this should be the correct term) at the highest level. Putin simply hates Ukrainians for introducing impurities to his Russian world.
You know, this is a kind of "Jews kill Christian infants to make matzo" nonsence, so inconsievable that I can't even think for the counter-argument, except "No, Putin doesn't hate Ukrainians at all"
If you're going to persist in sneering at him, I'm not sure why you're doing it as a reply to me.
I'm letting you know I would prefer you have a conversation with him instead of just assuming everyone agrees with you. I'm not sure if there is a racism component in the Russian invasion, and would have been interested in seeing it refuted with evidence instead of scoffing. If you can't think of a counter argument, I would have preferred you let me forgotten about you rather than continue to reply with the thing I'd like to see less of.
Look. I reported your comment for moderation, which is my responsibility as a community member. I probably won't reply to you further unless your future comments add more value than they have so far.
Russian armies will leave Ukraine, but Putin will tell his subjects that he actually won the war, and the rest of the world promises not to contradict him publicly. Everyone wins!
In fact, it is the UN usage and most precise to describe generally when one group of people hate another group for some trivial difference, such as skin colour or ethnicity.
A good tactical summary and analysis of the first few days of the invasion, and the assumptions Russia seemed to have. I'm linking to 24 minutes in when Michael Kofman begins speaking:
1- Ukraine signed an agreement with Russia, USA and (I think) UK back in the day that says in exchange for indefinite respect to their borders and sovereignty they give up their nukes that carried over from USSR. Back then they were like 3rd biggest nuclear power. Russia’s not honoring that and West’s not defending that by not putting boots on the ground shows to all middle powers that are anxious about their sovereignty to Just Go For Nukes. It shows how correct it is for Iran and North Korea to try to obtain nukes and it shows it’s their rightful right. Also if some other countries like South Korea, Australia, Turkey, Poland should obtain them as well. Basically if you can afford it and there’s a real threat to your sovereignty nukes are the most cost effective way of protecting yourself since when you’re the one with nukes everybody suddenly starts to walk on eggshells around you.
2- The peace proposal Russia made (if I’m not mistaken) includes the demilitarization of Ukraine which means they’ll just annex it altogether in a couple of years. That’s unacceptable.
3- Russia will not and cannot counter a if you fly we’ll shoot down zone with strategic nukes because it’s a losing game for them. West isn’t afraid of that but using it as an excuse so they don’t fight against a real Air Force. West hasn’t once fought against a serious country with a serious Air Force since WW2. I’m not saying they’re afraid of losing because they’ll handily win. I’m saying they’re afraid of seemingly being invincible. This airplane shot down 100 without getting shot down once, and this other one 200 with getting shot down only twice or whatever. Well it was against Serbia and Iraq and Yemen and Syria and whatnot. West is afraid of tarnishing their invincible reputation. Turkey is the only NATO country to have fired a shot in anger against a Russian airplane. I would’ve liked to see USA to have a go at it but the risk of some expensive programs losing some face is more important to them than showing to everyone going non-nuclear / not going nuclear is a viable thing to do. One doesn’t need to base squadrons in Ukraine to achieve this, range from bases in Poland etc is enough. Shoot BVR missiles from afar. Fly AWACS planes on NATO soil they’ll see far enough to give radar support. Do other stuff that me as a civilian cannot think of. But it’s all risking the reputation of very expensive programs that made a lot of people Very Important so they cannot do it. Turkey is the only NATO member have fired a shot in anger against a Russian airplane. I would’ve liked to see USA to have a go at it but the risk of some expensive programs losing some face is more important to them than showing to everyone going non-nuclear / not going nuclear is a viable thing to do. One doesn’t need to base squadrons in Ukraine to achieve this, range from bases in Poland etc is enough. Shoot BVR missiles from afar. Fly AWACS planes on NATO soil they’ll see far enough to give radar support. Do other stuff that me as a civilian cannot think of. But it’s all risking the reputation of very expensive programs that made a lot of people Very Important so they cannot do it.
Unless I am mistaken you have left out part of the story on the Ukraine Russia deal. In particular, Ukraine made a bunch of additional promises in that deal which they have arguably not honoured. My understanding is that they promised to steer clear of NATO. Thus Russia will argue their promise not to invade is void.
The promise Ukraine made was to ratify START and join the NPT, and give up their nuclear weapons, which they did. The text of the Budapest Memorandum is available here:
For what it's worth, Wikipedia asserts that Putin's point of view is that in view of the 2014 Maidan Revolution, the "Ukraine" of the Budapent Memorandum ceased to exist, and a brand new "Ukraine" was born -- one with which Russia had signed no agreements.
Okay, I stand very much corrected, my memory must have been faulty. I had thought Putin's pretexts here were a little stronger than that, but this does seem pretty close to a straight forward breach of the agreement with only a paper thin defence.
I might know the agreement wrongly, or misunderstand recent developments but Ukraine didn’t apply or get invited to NATO to void that, a Finland-like arrangement should’ve worked but Putin/Russian-Collective-Unconscious sees Russia as the patron of all East Slavs if not all Slavs.
So your numbering system is... esoteric and redundant, and makes it hard to comment on your points. Regardless:
1-1 and 2-1: The US already taught the world this lesson via Libya and North Korea. I don't think that proving the rule by glassing most of Europe and big chunks of North America is going to un-teach them.
1-2 and 2-2: Agreed, but that's bargaining for you. Presumably it's intended to get watered down to "Ukraine can have an army so long as it's not a strategic threat and no NATO/UN boots touch the ground".
1-3 and 2-3: NATO is already doing the AWACS trick, which is part of the reason that the Ukrainians have been doing as well as they have. They're already bending the rules as far as it is possible to bend them without just saying "fuck it" and putting aircraft or SAMs up. Which, again, the Russians can only respond to by trying to spike NATO assets or bomb NATO bases. This is a paved path to "limited", "tactical" thermonuclear war.
Possible quibble (hard to quickly find definitive clarification): I doubt the Russian tactical nukes are fusion based, so they'd be "merely" nuclear, not thermonuclear.
They're very likely fusion-boosted. You get a lot more bang for the mass, which is pretty important for a small warhead. Plus by dialing in how much D/T gas you inject, you can alter the yield in the field, which is quite handy -- although I do not know if the Russians are interested in such frills.
From memory the Soviets put about as much work into miniaturising boosted fission devices as the US did, and has a similarly gnarly arsenal of nuclear surprises in that regard (including backpack nukes, dial-a-yield bombs, nuclear artillery, tactical rockets and so on). Russia, like the US, also has a doctrine which allows for "limited" tactical nuclear warfare - although goodness knows if they've trained for it recently.
Oh my god I’m sorry I wrote the comment in between sleeps and edited on my phone so I must’ve copied double or so. I think I corrected it now.
1- There still needs to be a line in the sand to make a case to countries that are nuclear or want to go nuclear. Or they should stop getting angry to Iran, NK or hypothetical others that want to be sure they’re not the next Ukraine or Libya.
2- I agree if Russia agrees but I feel like they just offered something unacceptable so they go on with invasion but claim they sued for peace and west is the aggressor.
3- that’s a good thing if we’re already doing that but I’m not sure if that’ll be enough. My point was, even if there’s no escalation and NATO manages a no fly zone, albeit with an expected amount of lost aircraft USAF/NATO/Military-Industrial-Complex will consider itself lost. The air of invincibility of the material and the organization will be irreversibly lost. I believe this is why USA/NATO decides against a no fly zone rather than risk of escalation.
1 - Again, too late. The Iraqis getting smart-bombed even as they protested the ridiculous yellow-cake allegations should have been a warning. The Iranians still getting bombed every now and then (and their generals getting droned) was incentive. And Gaddafi getting sat on a bayonet was proof. The US let this cat out of the bag, and trying to slap Russia over broken promises to Ukraine won't put it back in. If I was in charge of a country, I would at least be looking at my options for setting up a 5-year run to nuclear capability almost regardless of my relationship with the rest of the world.
2- That's definitely part of it. The unfulfillable ultimatum has a long and proud history of allowing cads to start wars (especially world wars).
3 - I disagree, in as much as "our equipment = the best" didn't prevent the US (and about 100 other countries) from selling all their best stuff to the Saudis, who then piss it away on failing to bomb their neighbour into submission.
On another note, I think that AWACs shenanigans and information sharing from NATO intelligence assets do highlight just how awful the Russians and Chinese are as allies. I mean, if NATO can do all of this for the Ukrainians, then why hell can't Iran get advance warning and untouchable radar support the next time Israel decides to zap one of their facilities or conduct a pre-emptive decapitation strike?
The Russians and Chinese have proven themselves to be the worst, most transactional sort of countries to deal with, and as a result I think a lot of other nations are souring on them as strategic partners even where their interests would otherwise align.
1- You have a point there, and the last sentence is exactly my sentiments. Maybe even less than 5 years, more like Japan "being one screwdriver's turn" from the bomb.
3- I partly agree, I think nobody in their right minds look at Saudis and say oh those F15s are crap, they say Saudi Air Force as an organization is crap. Israeli Air Force or USAF has that air of invincibility to them.
About the other note, I agree. My great-grandmother who had to flee from Crimea from Russians a century or so ago used to say in Tatar "Game of Rus is egregious, if they fart that lances your skull". Transactional to deal with and ruthless.
> Russia’s not honoring that and West’s not defending that by not putting boots on the ground shows to all middle powers that are anxious about their sovereignty to Just Go For Nukes.
While I agree with the indirect consequences, there is a caveat here that people keep getting wrong about this. The Budapest Memorandum was about respecting Ukraine's sovereignty and not invading/annexing it, which the west followed and Russia did not. The west was never agreeing to put its own troops to defend Ukraine from whatever threat like a NATO agreement would, it was about not invading it.
My point was about the indirect consequences, the agreement doesn't put any responsibility on West to protect Ukraine, but not doing so gives a wrong message to future countries that could've signed a similar agreement.
Re: 1. You are referring to the Budapest Memorandum, which, among other things, included provisions that the US would not sanction Ukraine or Byelorus after they gave up the nuclear weapons on their territory.
The US had long claimed the memorandum to be non-binding whent hey wanted to sanction Byelorus.
There's the principle of proportional reaction or something, Russia could've sanctioned Ukraine all they wanted but they instead started an invasion it's not comparable. Being a nuclear country or not isn't a factor in getting sanctioned but it's a factor in getting invaded.
It's one of the things fascinating me about this. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the fact Zelenskyy knows how to handle Narrative is why his country is not currently Belarus 2.
You might add to your definition of 'Pax Americana': Print a few billion dollars as an indirect tax on all Americans; Resettle the victims to Arkansas.
I'm really shocked that you are still promoting Anatoly Karlin on this blog. He has consistently shown that he believes Russian state media which for one, is denying that there is clearly a war going on, alongside a bunch of other easily verifiable lies. I think that as a popular blogger, you have a little bit more of an obligation than saying that something may be Russian propaganda, but it is funny nonetheless. Is there anything really funny about what Russia is doing in Ukraine? I would hope not, based on my judgement of your character from reading the blog. I really think you should not promote him in the future.
On his blog, he also actively supports rhetoric that the war is the West's fault and that "All the blood is on their hands." NATO is a defensive treaty. Russia's claims that Ukraine joining would result in a security threat for them is not credible. I'm not for active censorship - but there is also a point where a source becomes untrustworthy, and the responsible thing to do is to not promote that source. I think Anatoly has crossed that line.
Is the tweet linked important in any way to "understanding how the enemy is thinking"? Does it identify key thought processes that authority figures on the other side may be having that help us outmaneuver them (or hopefully beat them)? I don't see how this tweet does that. And in the previous post Anatoly was promoted as getting a "B-" in predictions. That may lead to people to believe - "hey, this guy is kinda smart, I wonder what else he has to say." More generally, when I say "promoting" - I also mean signal boosting. Which just a neutral mention is enough to do that.
Also, I don't believe Karlin believes Russian state media. It would be mere ignorance. Much worse: I believe he is an opportunist who chooses which Russian TV media claims are useful to propagate.
True, its hard to read his true intentions. He tweeted that he believed the Russian claims of casualties (which is transparently ridiculously since they admitted no casualties the first few days). I think that he is a source/analyst that should be given no consideration (despite how he put predictions in % form)
I recall the free speech maximalist defense fielded during the NYT debacle was like this: to debate possibly uncouth opinions that might have some truth in them, one must be able the present the opposing view and engage with people who defend such opinions.
Which is all fine and reasonable.
So (1) where exactly is this debate about Karlin's views found on this blog? (2) And why won't we then debate Karlin's views? I observe only one party willing to present arguments about Karlin's opinion and just pushback against presenting such arguments: "giving us a Russian Nationalist's pointy of view" (Jack Wlson), " New York Times to come out against Slate Star Codex" (you).
This isn't about (de)platforming Karlin. His platforms for speech seem to be mainly Twitter and Substack. Note that I am not advocating that he be removed from either of those. That is what deplatforming would be, and in general I am not a fan of it. (probably only in favor when it would present a clear and present danger etc etc. Usual free speech stuff). But just because I agree its important for everyone has the ability to shout their thoughts into the internet, does not mean that it is important for everyone to engage.
Would the opinion be the same if the source was a notable anti-vaxxer that predicted some aspect of corona, was given a B- and then their anti-vaxxer meme was shared with the same disclaimer: "probably anti-vaxxer propaganda, but funny anyway"?
I would not be upset if Scott was talking about Anatoly with some sort of criticism. But in fact, he is getting mentioned with neutral-positive sentiment. First as a credible predictor, and second as a funny guy.
But perhaps the above is not relevant to your comment. My main point is that this is not about (de)platforming, which has to do with removing or providing platforms on which opinions can be shared. Not mentioning someone is not deplatforming them. And mentioning someone is not platforming them.
It's funny that on nearly every article Scott posts there are these commenters who claim to be shocked when Scott laughs at something the NYT set says is Not Funny or cites a source the NYT set says is Not Credible or condemns the latest cancellation campaign. I can't think of any other blog where this is the case. Many have commenters who disagree with the blogger, but they don't do this "OMG I'm shocked you don't share my worldview" thing.
What is the NYT set? Do you mean people that read the New York Times? I don't often read it, but I'm thinking you are implying something culturally. What that is, I'm not sure because you also seem to throw in terms like "Not Funny" and "Not Credible" that are also undefined - but I assume they have a meaning to you.
I plenty of times have read something that Scott writes that I don't agree with. We certainly don't have the same exact worldview, but I find good insights in his writing reliably - which is why I read it.
I find this particular instance to cause me to question whether or not Scott and I would disagree on something more fundamental. Or if the source is not being vetted as heavily as I would believe. If you are going to disagree with me, then fine. But if you want to discuss it you can address what I actually said, rather than some attempt to lump me in with a "NYT set" (which I can't really argue against because its a term you made up). You suggest that you can interpolate all of my other views (such as being in favor of cancellation campaigns) and therefore condemn me on that. In fact, I don't agree with many cancellations that have occurred, and am not trying to cancel anyone here.
I am not part of a hivemind. And I don't appreciate you ignoring my argument in this specific case in favor of insinuating that. If you actually don't value honest freedom of discussion and disagreement then why engage at all?
As to whether the West should sanction Russia, I'm undecided. I strongly suspect that come the 2022 elections all the realistic candidates I'll have the chance to vote for will be saying the same thing.
Sigh - this response isn't really worth my time but here we go:
1) The argument is not about whether it is funny or not, and if you think it is, then you have rather missed my main point.
2) Fantastic analysis here, really excellent. You really go above and beyond to contribute to the discussion here.
3) I never claimed that he repeats the Kremlin lines in all cases.
I have no interest in continuing a discussion with someone who isn't sure whether bombing civilians and committing war crimes is worth sanctioning a country for in order to show disapproval.
God forbid. This calls for nerves of steel, and regardless of any other qualities unfortunately Trump is a bit of a flake, can't keep his eye on the ball for very long before he spots a squirrel. Must be all that reality TV, you only need to focus for a maximum of 13 minutes between commercial breaks.
I have no idea who to recommend, though, I might have said Mitt Romney, who at least is intelligent, has a clear-eyed view, and steady nerves, but the man *cannot* connect with people to save his life, and that's a sine qua non. Nobody else on the American political stage seems to have very much bottom when it comes to war 'n' peace. We could hire Bibi Netanyahu as a consultant, maybe.
John Kerry, perhaps. Similar issues to Romney, but can probably connect to the people who matter. International diplomacy isn't the same as winning a presidential election.
Ugh no. Kerry has a pleasant enough demeanor, and endless patience, but he's stupid. I mean, genuinely low IQ. I remember him well when he embarassed Massachusetts by replacing the actually pretty darn smart Paul Tsongas. God knows where he'd be now without the Heinz money -- I'd give 2:1 odds Teresa runs that house anyway.
Trust me, you don't want Bibi. Guy's an empty fearmonger, basically an actually smart version of Trump - but just as much of a nerveless flake at the end of the day. I'd take Bennet as a strictly better version of him, and Benet's already on this (to whatever degree of good it might do, which I suspect isn't much since I don't see Putin backing down for anything).
I don't know...maybe Schroeder wouldn't be so bad after all...he has Putin's ear, and was a chancellor of Germany...of course, it would be better if the German Media had not declared him Persona non Grata...or what about Berlusconi? Similar to Schroeder, he was quite close to Putin, but doesn't seem as tainted...?
"December 2011: Trump praised Putin's "intelligence" and "no-nonsense way" in his book "Time to Get Tough."
"Putin has big plans for Russia. He wants to edge out its neighbors so that Russia can dominate oil supplies to all of Europe," Trump said. "I respect Putin and Russians but cannot believe our leader (Obama) allows them to get away with so much...Hats off to the Russians.""
Note how the only hint of condemnation of Russia, and it is a hint, is secondary to condemning the democrats.
Something very similar happenned in the 23 Feb interview
"by the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened."
You have to infer condemnation of the invasion from the self-praise.
He's using this as an opportunity to bash the democrats. Not because he's freindly with Putin, but because it serves his interests to blame his actions on [Trump's] political opponents. The political opportunism explains it perfectly, no conspiracy between Trump and Putin is explanatorily necessary.
>You have to infer condemnation of the invasion from the self-praise.
Now you're simply lying
“The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night. “It’s an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur.
"As far as I understand it, the offer is: Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home."
I don't think this is the Russia's current demand, unless it has changed.
More importantly, it certainly was not the extent of Russia's demands before invasion. Their initial demands of Ukraine included ban of some offensive weapons (I don't recall the details, not sure if they ever provided them) and full implementation of Minsk II (a bit tall order when the Russian backed separatists were not eager to hold the ceasefire, and the Minsk II is extremely unfavorable to Ukraine). Before the invasion, as Putin amassed troops on the border, Putin escalated his demands. The final round included complete demilitarization, complete denazification (whatever Putin means by it -- common interpretation is "purge of Ukrainian leadership"), stop an alleged genocide in Donetsk (very difficult to implement, because Western observers have not witnessed any), and bunch of other demands from EU and NATO.
You have to read between lines. They demand neutrality from Ukraine which in practice means to keep it subjugated under Russia. That's really all what Russia wants but it is not what Ukrainians want. They clearly see that their only chance of development is becoming the EU member. The process will demand dealing with corruption, reorganization of their institutions. For Scott not seeing this and doubting that they can become the EU member country is frustrating.
Something I've not seen mentioned enough is that this is also a war for long term Russian influence. Putin wins = directly subordinated or annexed Ukraine, but also a more solid grip on Belarus, likely regime change in Moldova, extra influence in Romanian politics, and continued mingling in European politics.
Putin loses - their politics will turn internal for a while, and they'll have to reorient efforts to keep the Russian Federation in one piece, work hard not to lose client states and work hard to destabilize Ukraine and sabotage its entering EU. Not much resources left for stuff beyond that, which means Europe gets a decade of peace from Russian interference. Plus a better integrated Ukraine as a bonus.
This being a sliding scale, of course. And the peace terms are what puts the pointer on the scale.
I think this is more true of the PR and economic wars than the war for territory, and that these are only tangentially linked (with the first two looking very good for the West, and the last still up in the air). I don't think that whether or not Ukraine eg recognizes Russia's right to Crimea will have much effect on the influence war, given how badly the PR and economic wars are going for them.
I'll admit I don't have first hand knowledge here, it's just something which "everybody knows" in the countries in the region: Russia also plays on a field which is none of PR, economic or territorial. Let's call it "people in their pocket". The modern and vastly expanded version of a criminal organization. That's the kind of limited resources I'm talking about.
As an example, there were political changes in the past half year in Romania which made no sense whatsoever (the president abruptly supported a wide coalition that included the party he loudly vilified for years), but now make a lot of sense if you consider them part of cleaning house in preparation for nearby war with Russia. The deal was likely some form of: you get to be part of the government and control easy-to-steal funds, but you park or exclude the people known to be under Moscow's influence.
You listed "Georgia" in the list of the "next time"places that people want to invade, but won't because of the pax americana's enforcement actions against Russia "this time".
...except that Russia already invaded Georgia in 2008, and got exactly what they wanted from that action. Georgia had been actively courting western powers and pushing for NATO membership. Russia ensured that in response it It lost territory, lost lives, and received a warning that if it didn't stop trying to join NATO the next thing it lost would be its existence as an independent state. Georgia got the message, and so did NATO members. While they have continued economic and military cooperation on a more limited scale the talk of actively pursuing membership dropped. Of course, now that Ukraine has demonstrated to Georgia that they're in danger anyway, they are asking for EU and NATO membership again because they believe they have nothing to lose.
Either way, it seems odd to put a country that in fact DID get attacked on your list of countries that are protected. Even odder when you consider that it was the Russian success (from their perspective) in Georgia that led to them planning and executing the grab of Crimea and backing separatist movements in Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine.
Perhaps "this time" the response will be strong enough to deter a "next time". But this will be the third time in the past 15 years, so I am not particularly hopeful unless sanctions extend rather longer and are more severe than I expect. If Russia IS deterred, I think it will be by the bloody nose they get from the Ukrainians being far more willing to fight than they had counted on, and the weaknesses revealed in their military, not by the western response.
It's not clear to me that "providing fighter aircraft", as long as they're piloted by Ukrainian pilots, is the same sort of escalation or proxy war norm violation as the others described. As far as I know the North Koreans and North Vietnamese flew Soviet-supplied planes.
(In Korea there were even Soviet pilots, though they at least made a vague attempt to keep that fact a secret at the time.)
So supplying Ukraine with Polish MiGs (if it can be negotiated) seems as cricket as other arms supplies. Not risk free, but not in the same class as shooting down Russians ourselves.
The zone gets a little grayer if some officially Ukrainian pilots turn out to be volunteers from NATO countries, or if the donations go from planes Ukrainians could plausibly be flying with existing experience to, say, their suddenly being able to handle F-16s.
(I'm not sure where providing that sort of training falls if the war lasts long enough. There were certainly opponents in our 20th century proxy wars who'd studied in Moscow.)
The question of how to get the planes from Poland into Ukraine is an interesting one, though. If they fly them over and then transfer ownership then it means you've got Polish fighters entering the war zone, which is an escalation. But if you transfer ownership and then fly them over then you've got Ukranian fighters operating out of Poland, which is an escalation.
I think it was this sort of logic which led to a weird arrangement in WW2 prior to US joining the war; American planes were manufactured, flown to the Canadian border, landed, pushed across the border, then transferred to the RAF and flown to Britain.
You fly them to Romania and load them onto a barge, tow it out into the Black Sea, then have helicopters evacuate the entire crew from an outbreak of COVID, since they weren't wearing masks, the dummies. Moments later a squadron of Ukrainian pilots enjoying one final boat ride before returning from leave stumble across the abandoned barge and *steal* it, the ratfinks. Very regrettable. An award of $50,000 is solemnly posted for information leading to their arrest.
Soviet-aligned powers presumably got their MiGs without similar issues proving insurmountable, though I don't know enough details to know if it presented a problem requiring a comparable fig leaf.
While we haven't had to dust it off for a while, there probably is an unavoidable element of brinksmanship. But supplying weapons across borders is such a time-honored element of superpower proxy wars that it's hard to see it being impossible to find a way to work it.
Do the same thing they did with the Ukrainian plane which landed abroad: strip it of weapons and then fly it back to Ukraine where it can be rearmed. An unarmed plane can't be launching attacks.
Ferry flights of military aircraft are generally not considered a belligerent attack. Though I have heard of cases where the airplanes were towed across an international border just to be extra-safe. If we have to do that, there seem to be some flat grassy areas of the Polish-Ukrainian border, and the MiG-29 has grass-field capability. Also some highways that would make useful runways, but they're probably clogged with refugees.
Yep, on moral grounds Putin is just his usual lying hypocritical weasel self. Plenty of Americans pilots died in the sights of Soviet aircraft. But this isn't really a moral issue, the line is kind of measured by how hysterical the party drawing it seems to be getting. The Americans were never going to consider Soviet hardware in Vietnam an existential threat, because losing in Vietnam was just never that big a deal, LBJ's fever dreams notwithstanding (and with due acknowledgement of the shamefully supreme price paid by 58,220 souls for nothing much). But it *looks* like for Putin having NATO planes over Ukraine *is* that big a deal, something he sees as existential, and that's how the line is negotiated, more or less. I dunno why it *is* that big a deal -- the comparison to the Cuban Missile Crisis is inapt, it's not any easier to fly a nuclear-capable F-16 to Moscow from Kiev than it is from Warsaw -- but that seems to be how he sees it.
Ha ha that's smart. And it totally serves that idiot Blinken right for his embarrassing babble about the hypothetical transfer of fighters from Poland to the Ukraine. How I wish we (meaning the United States) had a less incompetent Secretary of State. But I salute the Poles for an excellent piece of diplomatic judo there.
Well, yeah, it's surprisingly harsh for the Poles. But we (the US) totally deserved it, after failing to coordinate *with them* before the initial idiotic speculation by Blinken.
Seriously, if we had a President who was on top of things, Blinken's ass would be grass for that. It's a major fuckup, and extremely easy to avoid. I don't know what his (Blinken's) problem is, his history certainly doesn't suggest idiocy. Maybe he had a stroke or something.
That was a sensible thing since the official Syrian government wanted the Russian air force and not the Western ones. Here the official Ukrainian government doesn’t wants the Russian Air Force. It’s the complete opposite.
I'm on board with almost all of this so don't have much to add. Except this part struck me -
"Russia has miscalculated, they know they’ve miscalculated, and the best ending for everyone is for them to leave in a way that sort of preserves what’s left of their honor"
One of the glaring features of this fiasco for me is the fact that Vladimir Putin is responsible for it. The miscalculation wasn't by 'Russia' or the Russian people, it was by a single individual, however common it is to anthropomorphise a country or a government or a people.
My point is more general than saying let's blame that very bad man Mr Putin. It is to observe that when one individual gains ultimate power, it's always a very real possibility that he'll be driven mad by it (if he wasn't already) and enormous catastrophes will ensue.
Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao etc etc. None of them could have caused the deaths and destruction that they did if they hadn't achieved megalomaniac power.
I could be wrong of course. The Swiss could have one of their periodic referendums and vote to start bombing Lichtenstein. But I think the odds are against it.
There are many lessons here that Scott has ably described. But for me the most instructive is the picture of Putin at one end of a table with the nearest other human being 40 feet away. That's the problem right there. Not even Putin the individual, just the structure that permits, if not encourages, all that follows. Power has the very real potential to poison.
I think Tolkein wrote a longish book making just this point.
"Other times it was almost incomprehensible: we’ll debate what happened with Iraq II forever."
It's not incomprehensible if you stick to realpolitik instead of rhetoric.
1) Iraq I was because it was in pretty much nobody's interest to to let Saddam Hussein control the less-expensive-to-extract half of the world's proven oil reserves. Whether Kuwait was inside or outside Iraq really wasn't a matter of intense interest to the US or anybody else; rather, the US and pretty much everybody else wanted an outcome where Hussein could not use military force to control the oil of the whole Arabian Peninsula.
2) In the end, the ground phase of Desert Storm was a failure, because Saddam Hussein and his regime survived (against the expectations of the Bush I administration that it would be shattered by a civil war), complete with the chance to rebuild his military to threaten the Arabian Peninsula again. The US had to, in practice, indefinitely extend Desert Shield and the air phase of Desert Storm (garrisoning Saudi Arabia and enforcing the no-fly zones) to indefinitely contain Hussein.
3) Containing Hussein became untenable because the US presence in Saudi Arabia provoked an escalating series of terrorist attacks by Arab Muslims who saw it as a desecration. The Khobar Towers, the US embassies in Africa, and the USS Cole culminated in 9/11. Remaining in Saudi Arabia would continue to provoke similar attacks, because plenty of Arab Muslims agreed with Osama bin Laden about that desecration enough to do something about it. A US withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, would end the ongoing offense.
4) But simply pulling out would end the containment. The logical move for the US accordingly seemed to be to repeat the Desert Storm ground invasion, and this time not stop until the Hussein regime was indisputably destroyed. WMD programs and democracy were advanced as excuses in public for the same reason Iraq being an aggressor was advanced to justify the first invasion of Iraq; because US and world public opinion won't tolerate a simple explanation of "The invasion is in our interest, so we're launching one".
(4a - The huge difference in international support between Iraq I and Iraq II is that many countries that saw it in their interest to not let Hussein dominate the Arabian Peninsula didn't have any particular interest in taking domestic PR hits in the interest of easing US efforts to resolve its Saudi garrison difficulty by invading Iraq.)
5) The US invaded Iraq, disbanded the Iraqi government and army, and went ahead and declared "Mission Accomplished". Unfortunately, it couldn't immediately go home (leaving just a few advisors in Baghdad), because Hussein himself managed to hide in a spider hole. There was an ongoing risk that if the US withdrew, he'd manage to wind up on top again, and the whole problem would start over.
6) Between when the US wanted to withdraw and when Saddam Hussein would up in custody (December), the civil war that was an entirely expected result of shattering the Hussein regime (even desired, since it would put off the date a stable regime in Iraq could threaten the Arabian Peninsula) broke out. With fighting going on before US troops left, there was no way compatible with American public opinion to simply declare victory and go home, like would have happened Hussein been killed in the same fight his sons died in. This public opinion is why the major Democratic candidates for President talked about a Pottery Barn rule.
7) Every hour the US was in Iraq from the point of Hussein's capture onward, including Obama sending troops back in after he withdrew them, accordingly was the US administration of the day trying to figure out how to leave without the American people perceiving it as a defeat and punishing the party of whomever was President.
Very well put. I hadn't been able to make the connection why Iraq was related to 9/11 response. Sure, I understand (but don't condone) lashing out after you've been attacked like that, but why at Iraq when they didn't have anything to do with it?
If someone else could find anything wrong with this I'd be much obliged. It seems to make sense from the hidden geopolitical perspective, and only barely more justified to me. (still doesn't warrant an invasion, even when you couldn't foresee the chaos and death that would ensue, that we know of now)
Counterpoint: after 9/11, Bush wanted to "end Islamic Terrorism". Part of the way you do that is by showing that you are a superior force. Part of the way you do that is be showing people that there is an alternative to that way of life, and part of the way you do that is militarily crushing them.
All of these points suggest an Iraq invasion.
In this hypothetical world, Saddam is toppled and the US sets up a democratic Iraqi government. This stops the (indirect) support for Palestinian terrorists and the substantially-wrong but honestly-believed nuclear program. It also serves as a shining city on a hill model of what a modern democratic Arab/Islamic state can look like. And the limited military action required, both against Saddam as well as possible terrorists flocking to kill Americans, occurs on about the best-possible terrain for the US military to operate. Oh, and Iraq has significant oil, meaning that the newly-formed non-corrupt government would be able to generate sufficient hard cash to pay for the resources it would need to build new institutions.
In the end, it all worked out, albeit very messily and expensively. Islamic terrorism has been (touch wood) basically defeated.
The "flypaper strategy" worked. Young dumb Muslims with an interest in jihad wound up flocking to shoot at American tanks in Mosul rather than shopping malls in Omaha. When they killed people they mostly just killed other Muslims.
At this point the terrorist recruitment pipeline has dried up, because it's no longer possible to convince a dumb young potential jihadi that one more terrorist attack will actually achieve anything.
This is totally wrong and totally immoral. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and yet you are supporting a fly paper strategy, that is that the Iraqis should deal with the consequences of mass terrorism so you don’t.
This is a incredible cruel and inhumane logic. And it is far from the reality how people work.
1) Being able to build up a working civil society after a invasion is a illusion. What civil society needs most is trust and people feeling save. A population traumatized by a war is basically the opposite.
2) Even if you have this illusion, contaminating the territory with depleted uranium projectiles and bombing cities is not a good basis for founding a new state, especially without the real plan to clean up the mess afterwards.
3) Imagine you are a young Muslim, thinking that the US is desecrating your holy lands and threatening your brothers in faith. Than you see this power invading another Muslim country for no reason. Dos this hold you from joining a terrorist group, because they are a enemy too strong? Or does this show you that the preachers of terror are right, that this power is pure evil and has to be fought with all means even if this means sacrificing your live?
4) Even if it worked, is an invasion that definitely kills many thousand people worth it to prevent a few potential terrorist attacks? If you think this, you are a racist that doesn't count all lives equal.
5) had 'carpet-bombing' them made anything better?
To bring this to a personal level people usually understand better:
Imaging i think you are are thread to my friends but I'm tired of being on guard to protect them and they are being annoyed of me guarding them. So decide to beat you up to solve this problem. What you're just saying is, i should have shot you right away because you still don't like me and didn't turn into the nice guy i wished you to be.
>4) Even if it worked, is an invasion that definitely kills many thousand people worth it to prevent a few potential terrorist attacks? If you think this, you are a racist that doesn't count all lives equal.
Oh give me a break. This literally describes the overwhelming majority of people on earth other than white liberals. If you don't see this, then you're probably a liberal who is high on their own supply.
I'm not even defending it, but acting like valuing one's countrymen over foreigners is some kind of abberation points to an incredible level of obliviousness.
I know that most people would value the own countrymen over foreigners. This is human as you would protect your family over the lives of others. I don't want to judge anybody about thinking so in the small scale or at the kitchen table.
But this is different:
- this is not about some almost equal numbers, but the invasion killed 10000 to 30000. Any military official should be able to estimate this especially as there was a the same scenario before with similar numbers.
- This decision was taken by political and military experts. They shout know what they are doing and keep a cool head, not act by vague feelings.
- This is the West that always fights for human rights, freedom and democracy. They should do better than what you expect from 'human nature'
- This discussion is on a forum of rational people seriosly talking about altruism. Reading here somebody saying "We should have just carpet-bombed them." Just blew my mind. I had expected this from some right wing military fan, but not here.
He probably isn't serious about carpet-bombing, but juxtaposing the hopeful projections against the bleak reality that unfolded, wryly implying the outcome to have been so bad that "we [might as well have] just carpet-bombed them" because the amount of damage and suffering caused wouldn't have been worse, while having the advantage of speed.
> 4a - The huge difference in international support between Iraq I and Iraq II is that many countries that saw it in their interest to not let Hussein dominate the Arabian Peninsula didn't have any particular interest in taking domestic PR hits in the interest of easing US efforts to resolve its Saudi garrison difficulty by invading Iraq.
There was no huge difference. Iraq War 2 had more coalition partners who contributed a larger share of the total deployed soldiers than 1. What there was was a highly publicized campaign of opposition by france (who was sanction busting) and germany (whose chancellor was on the take from russia) that in the end accomplished relatively little.
I'm confused as to why Iraq posed such a threat. Was it really any stronger than Saudi Arabia or Iran or Syria or Israel or Pakistan? Or was it just more militarized?
Perhaps the west knew how dangerous he is because they built him up and armed him, or perhaps they knew that they would face mo relevant resistance and can show off tow great their military is. I don't know, but i just can't think of any legit reason to invade any country far away, that is not even remotely threatening you.
I'm not a foreign affairs maven, so take this with a grain of salt. But I don't think Iraq was less of a threat than Iran. On the contrary, I suspect that if Iraq's military had been stronger, if it had *actually* had nuclear weapons that could have hit the United States, say, that the US would have been more cautious to act, not less.
When making a reasonably short comment on a complex issue, there's a lot of need for simplification for both rhetorical and practical reasons. The pure-realpolitik perspective I used above is never the full truth about anything in public affairs, but used as a model for analysis it can illuminate things that would otherwise remain obscure (while, of course, obscuring other things).
Public choice theory is also a model. The argument in that link is that it is more explanatory and makes fewer errors in the same amount of space.
There's no department of realpolitik, and the US doesn't know what it wants. There are analysts and diplomats and military officers and politicians who all specialize in different things related to threat or democratization or human rights or economics and each tug in slightly different directions.
Economic analysts are generally not kleptocratic or zero sum. Military analysts are not expansionists or intolerant of any slight. Democracy advocates know that imposing it through force is a contradiction and lowers its chance of success.
Everyone looking for the cause is going to be disappointed, because there are eighteen ways to avoid intervention and if you are being invaded you have somehow created a very interdisciplinary posse of enemies across the foreign policy establishment.
If you want to reduce the system to a single thing--you should not--it was that Saddam was effectively lobbying the international community to end sanctions while still being a total psychopath. Gulf II was much more about the failure of the policy toolkit in the 90s than anything that happened later, and the best evidence for this is the bipartisan political support for regime change taking root well before the year 2000, well before the NIE.
I'm not really sure about this. The US still has lots of military deployed in the Middle East and yet not in Iraq, instead it was shifted to Kuwait (army), Bahrain (navy), and, most significantly, Qatar (air force), with approximately 10,000 troops in each country. This shift from Saudi Arabia to Qatar started happening in the late 90s after Qatar paid a billion dollars to construct a major new air base to tempt the Americans there. The move was completed shortly after the invasion of Iraq.
Therefore I believe the primary consideration was cost savings (Qatar subsidises the base to this day) while avoiding provoking attacks was only secondary. (Side note: Trump based some troops in Saudi Arabia, albeit only a few air defence units; Biden has since recalled them.)
The real (primary) reason for invading Iraq? I think it's still fairly close to what you put forward: they wanted to make Iraq a friendly country where they could centrally locate US military forces to more effectively control and react to the security situation of the Mid East.
The problem was they drank their own kool-aid and thought toppling a brutal dictator and instituting democracy would actually achieve this. Since then they have learnt their lesson and now primarily base troops in friendly dictatorships (in the Mid East theatre).
I'm not sure I follow 4a. If Saddam was not a threat to SA then why do you need garrison positions? If he was, why didn't you get the old coalition back together?
The implication I read from the post is "he was, but the French and Germans defected in order to free-ride on the US dealing with Hussein, and they had greater room to do this compared to Gulf War 1 because the US was already committed to Desert Shield and was the one suffering reprisals".
(Not saying I necessarily believe this, but that's what I read from that post.)
Would love to read your analysis of US troops stationed in the EU and what happens when EU-nato is forced to increase spending on defense and perhaps provide the room for the US to leave.
Let's stipulate, for the sake of discussion, that this is an accurate description of the realpolitik factors that went into the second invasion of Iraq.
The description simply presupposes that it was a proper goal for the U.S. to determine control of the the world's proven oil reserves and to undertake the large-scale invasion of a foreign country to enforce that determination.
I mean "proper" here in a strategic sense, not a moral one. In other words, even if we bracket morality and stick to realpolitik, the above account fails to show that the second invasion of Iraq actually "made sense" in serving U.S. interests.
I think you bring up some very interesting points regarding the prosecution of the conflict in Iraq II and the importance of Hussein avoiding capture / death in the initial phases. I have long subscribed to the theory that the Saudi basing issue was a critical contributor to the decision to invade. However, I think that your thesis could be strengthened through consideration / incorporation of a few points:
1. You seem to attribute the decision to end the ongoing no fly zones / address Saudi basing issues to a US strategy to mitigate risks of future terrorist attacks. Have you considered what role the Saudi government played in that decision? I think there is a reasonably strong case to be made that after 9/11, the Saudi's saw that basing Operation Desert Shield in SA along with the optics of helping enforce sanctions against a fellow Arab nation were becoming untenable for them politically. I think it is reasonably likely that, post 9/11, the Saudi's essentially told the US that their support for desert shield was ending, and that, rather than US assessment of the risk of terrorist attacks was the precipitating factor.
2. Logistically, it would have been difficult to maintain the northern no fly zone without access to Saudi bases and most other nations in the region would have been hesitant to host US forces maintaining the northern NFZ for reasons analogous to the Saudi's.
3. The northern NFZ was put in place due to protect the Kurds after the US tried to foment the Civil War you alluded to and then left them out to dry. If the northern no fly zone collapses, Hussein slaughters the Kurds and Bush II is stained with the same (or worse) betrayal of the Kurds that his father was.
4. Bin Laden's stated goal for his terror attacks was to get the US out of Saudi. If the US withdraws from SA(even if it is at the behest of the Saudi government and they try and reconfigure the NFZ from some other bases), then OBL declares victory and the US has major reputational issues on multiple fronts (Kurd betrayal, Hussein wins / US looks like a weak horse, US susceptible to terror demands). The US could not be seen to "give in" to the demands of terrorists and let an Arab strong man outlast them. Apropos of your points about the importance of Hussein avoiding capture, if OBL is captured / killed early on in Afghanistan, then the calculus for the US and Saudi Arabia are likely quite different with regards to Iraq.
As a non American I have to question the idea that Afghanistan was understandable. Granted I formed this opinion at the ages of about 10-14 but my impression was that the connection between the people who did 9/11 and Afghanistan was fairly tennuous, and that America's invasion looked a lot like a bully punching someone who happned to be there when were angry.
Or kill them all themselves and send us the heads as proof. That would've worked for me, and would've saved on the cost of guards, transport, food for the prisoners, et cetera.
Nah, the invasion was pretty justified. America demanded from Taliban to give up Al-Qaeda, Taliban said no. However, staying there for 20 years for quarter-hearted "nation-building" was pure hubris, terrible for pretty much everyone. Just a pure retaliatory "shock and awe" response would've ended up being much more humane, and made America's point clearer too.
This is easy to say with the benefit of hindsight.
At the time we genuinely thought that we could go in (to both Iraq and Afghanistan), take out the existing (terrible) government, hold an election, have someone sensible elected, and that would be that. It worked in Germany, it worked in Japan. But for various reasons it didn't work in Afghanistan. (It seems to have eventually worked okay for now in Iraq, but it took a lot more work than expected.)
I'm not sure that intelligence and those who had access to it really thought that, but such a package was surely easier to sell to the electorate. Also, ISIS was about as direct a consequence of Iraq II as consequences get, and glossing over it as "eventually okay" seems a bit much.
As for Germany and Japan, my impression is that America fully committed there, mainly due to Cold War considerations. If it had extended anything close to a similar committment to Russia after the collapse of USSR, the word would've likely looked much different today. But of course, with the Evil Empire defeated, the history was over, and who gives a fuck about the losers.
The US tried to help mold Russia into its own image in the 1990s, but it turned out so poorly that it was indistinguishable from sabotage.
Last I studied this topic, the consensus on economic development aid is that it barely ever helps, but an exception probably exists for the Marshall Plan, when you have human capital and institutions in place and the issue is just that your infrastructure and capital goods have been destroyed. But this was not the situation in 1990s Russia: the biggest problem was with precisely those human factors, and throwing money at it wouldn't make the problem go away.
This is not about morality, it's about economic organization. The German economy was doing fine except for the part where the factories got bombed, and providing the means to build new factories put the economy well on the path to recovery. The Soviet economy was a basket case due to failures of central planning and corruption, and providing new factories to mismanage and embezzle didn't help at all.
I don't think you need the benefit of post-2001 hindsight to know that was a risky proposition. The decision was made not to occupy Iraq proper during Desert Storm in 1991 because wiser men could foresee that the benefits of occupation didn't exceed the costs.
And Afghanistan very much didn't start, and wasn't presented to the public, as a nation-building project, and on that basis it had extremely broad support. We thought we could just go into Afghanistan, destroy Al Qaeda and kill/capture Bin Laden, more or less hand the country to the Northern Alliance (which at least had the nucleus of a functioning government and army), and get out. Remember that it wasn't a large-scale invasion like Iraq -- the build-up was very quick, the US provided air power but it had fewer troops on the ground than those defending Kabul Airport in the last days of the 2021 withdrawal.
Iraq was very different, it was always about nation-building, entirely disposing of Saddam's regime and invoking a total revolution in Iraqi society. There were no local allies on the ground to speak of. It was a very large invasion, the build-up took a long time, while that was happening the whole matter was debated extensively within the US and internationally, with lots of dissent, some of it ill-informed, but some of it making the exact same points that had been made at the time of Desert Storm about why it was a bad idea.
I also remember the decision to leave Hussein in place, because it would've "fractured the coalition." I'm not sure that was really accurate, but it was the argument.
There was also the promise offered to the rebels inside to support them, which led to them being wiped out when they believed us.
My memory is the US wanted to signal that it would be supportive of a palace coup that cleanly replaced Saddam with a regular Arab despot (back to my point on coups), but it was too subtle and the Kurds and Shiites thought it meant the US would provide them with material support for an armed revolution.
The fact is, at least some people who were responsible for it just didn't want it to work, because a perpetual war was simply more beneficial to them. Perhaps it started with a few bad apples, but by the end of the 20 year debacle, pretty much everyone in positions of power in Afghanistan, local government and occupying forces alike, was either irredeemably corrupt or frustrated to the point of having given up trying to fix anything. Iraq at least had oil wells worth defending, demanding some sort of actual order on the ground, Afghanistan's economy was essentially designed around the continued existence of Taliban and the money that could be funneled to "fight" them.
You are probably thinking of Iraq, which never had any discernable connection to 9/11 aside from cheering it. The connection to Afghanistan from 9/11 was crystal clear: the Taliban had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda after they were ejected from Saudi Arabia and Sudan. After 9/11 the US asked the Taliban to extradite Osama bin Laden, and they refused.
Of course, hanging around for another 20 years trying to build a modern nation in Afghanistan was, to be as charitable as possible, exceedingly misguided.
I’m definitely not thinking of Iraq, I’m remembering arguments like “Osama is Saudi not an Afghan” which obviously doesn’t seem too persuasive now, but I’m trying to talk about how people view American military adventures rather than whether they were justified. Certainly I can say that New Zealand teenagers of my acquaintance tended to take a fairly dim view of invading Afghanistan from the outset.
I can’t really remember which war my memories of the media environment refer to, but they lean towards America being seen as crazy though I definitely could be thinking of Iraq there.
The original of that line, "if you are not an X before you are twenty, you have no heart, if you are an X after you are thirty, you have no head," with a number of variants, apparently originated in France in the 19th century, with X, I think, Republican.
Good lines in the U.K. get attributed to Churchill, in the U.S., if not obviously impossible, to Lincoln.
Yeah I know, but to explain why it *isn't* actually Churchill where it starts requires a tedious amount of footnoting and I just decided to punt. Normally on the Internet you can count on someone coming along to "well actually" for you if it turns out to be important :)
Osama was a Saudi citizen by birth, but one who wanted to bring down both the Saudi and American governments(*) and had been chased out of Saudi Arabia for his troubles.
If someone finds out that e.g. Edward Snowden has been running an international terrorist conspiracy against Canada and Australia the past few years, I'd hope the Canucks and Aussies wouldn't think it appropriate to bomb the United States. That's about what we're talking about here.
* Not clear that bringing down the American government was a terminal goal, but lethally inconveniencing it was at least a critical instrumental goal on the way to getting rid of the House of Saud.
For Ukraine to formally accept that Crimea and the Eastern region that Russia controlled pre-war are no longer part of Ukraine isn't a concession in name only. It's a massive concession, for reasons connected to the importance of rules that you discuss elsewhere.
If Ukraine formally accepts that they're gone, it's much more likely that they won't ever be part of Ukraine again. That's bad for Ukraine, but it's also bad for everyone, because it means that Russia has arguably succeeded in getting what it wants by invading a peaceful neighbour.
The decision on what peace terms to accept is one for Ukraine to make. They're not part of NATO, we're not going to fight alongside them. But we shouldn't be encouraging them to accept terms that strengthen Putin and make it more likely that something like this happens again.
1. Would you please elaborate how "that's bad for Ukraine"?
2. Lets imagine you are right, then why Ukrainians shelled and bombed this particular part of Donbass for eight years? Ukraine is peaceful for neighbors but not for its own citizens, who's only crime is being hostages to separatists?
The answer to your question is that there is a militant faction that took up arms in defiance of their government, to secede. In the liberal rules based order, we rightly acknowledge that matters of sovereignty and where we draw the lines of polity need to be handled diplomatically and peacefully, because redrawing borders is one of the hottest beds of burgeoning conflict and destruction there is. Some people in Donetsk and Luhansk didn't do this, they simply got weapons and were egged on by Russia (for their own geopolitical goals) to cease being under the Ukrainian government. Ukraine is trying have sovereignty over their entire land. The same thing would happen if US states tried to secede, as we saw in the American Civil War.
Actually Russia have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khasavyurt_Accord when the first Chechen war went hairy. After the second one Chechens loose Chechia but got entire Russia. Now they are the most privileged region enjoying de-facto autonomy and gazillions of federal money.
It's actually worse than that. The war in Donbass was started by Igor Strelkov/Girkin (a Russian, from Russia, i.e. not from Donbass) and his 40-strong squad. He was also the head of DNR's military from April to August 2014. He's also quoted as saying "If our squad did not cross the border, at the end all would have been finished as in Kharkiv or Odessa. Practically, the flywheel of war which lasts until now was launched by our squad." The "Prime minister" of DNR for the same time period was Alexander Borodai, a friend of Strelkov, and also a Russian, from Russia. That war was not started by locals.
Agree, but strekovs just pushed a body that was already falling. There was none of his kind in Kharkov when the first blood were spilled around cityhall and lenin's monument.
I'm not sure what you mean. "The body" didn't fail in any other Ukrainian city. He himself said that the unrest would have died out if it wasn't for his squad. "The body" wasn't feeling particularly well, sure. But there's no evidence that it would have failed on its own if it wasn't for Strelkov/Borodai and the military support from Russia that they brought.
That might be true if they simply agree to cede the territory, but I think not if they agree to accept the results of a neutrally conducted referendum. Putin can't expect to win such a referendum in most of the places he might want to annex.
He can win a lot of those referenda if a large part of the population flees when he seizes the territory a few years before the referendum. In Crimea I don't think this was a big factor, but in Donetsk and Luhansk it seems to have been.
re: 3 3: A strong response right now isn’t just about Ukraine, it’s also about the next time.
"This is about Taiwan, Georgia, Iran, and all the other places that great powers want to invade but don’t."
Taiwan is under the protection of the US. The Ukraine never was. Georgia is too complicated for me to grasp quickly, but I'm unsure if Russia actually wants more than what they already have with South Ossetia? And as far as I understand, the threat to Iran would come from the United States itself? Did that not happen, because Russia threatened nuclear war? Pretty sure, this was just a lack of will on the American part. If the US wants to invade a country in the Middle East, they do it. Don't see why that would change either.
re 4: International norms may be annoying, but they’re all that stands between US and nuclear war, so we had better respect them
"No sane person thinks it’s worth risking nuclear war just to protect something as minor as the Aleutian Islands. But then the US gives Russia the Aleutians, and next year they ask for all of Alaska. And even Alaska isn’t really worth risking nuclear war over, so you give it to them, and then the next year…"
That's US territory. National Souvereignity is not an international norm. It's what a nation will always defend or it'll cease to exist. Maybe the Aleutian Islands could be traded away, but if Alaska is worth going to war for. This nebuluous concept of "international norms" is absolutely not "all what stands between us and nuclear war". That's just stupid. It is explicit defense treaties like NATO, that keep the peace. Or more implicit ones like the US has with Taiwan. And generally the threat of MAD. So far, I have not seen a convincing "it's about the next time"-argument.
Nor how protecting the Ukraine or sanctioning Russia is even of strategic benefit to the West.
Can someone make better arguments please or strengthen them?
Taiwan isn't under the protection of the US (see: Strategic Ambiguity). Russia has de facto control of Georgia.
It would be a significant escalation for Putin to attack a NATO country (probably, with their large Russian minorities, one of the Baltic States). But it was a series of significant escalations for him to invade part of Georgia, and then part of Ukraine, and then Ukraine. He seems increasingly unhinged. It isn't necessarily the case that the US would launch a nuclear war to protect the Baltic States, and Putin knows that. NATO isn't magic. Would Trump be prepared to use nuclear weapons if Putin annexed a small part of Lithuania? It seems unlikely. But possible. That uncertainty is a very dangerous thing in the context of nuclear war.
If Putin were to succeed in Ukraine, the chances of him annexing Russian speaking regions of the Baltic States would increase. That would increase the chances of nuclear war. Whether by more than they are increased by Western countries supplying the Ukrainian army, I don't know.
What's interesting is that when it comes to the possibility of fighting Russia, the US throws its hands up and says "nope, couldn't possibly risk all-out war between two nuclear superpowers, strict proxy war here".
But when it comes to Taiwan, the US says "yep, we totally _might_ intervene there".
Why the inconsistency? Firstly, fighting a proxy war over Taiwan is probably impossible because Taiwan is an island; the war will be fought and won with very large and very obvious warships and fighter jets, not with surreptitiously smuggled RPGs. Secondly, China is a nuclear power but not a very big nuclear power compared to Russia, with a couple of hundred nukes compared to five thousand.
Of course at this point, the Chinese will be noting this inconsistency and saying "well shit, how quickly can we build another five thousand nukes?"
China does have MIRVs, so they could actually destroy most major US metropolitan areas. Pretty sure, they have deterrent enough. An invasion of Taiwan would have fighting on the island and it could potentially be a very long slog.
China doesn't have enough MIRVs to destroy most major US metropolitan areas, and their strategic forces are somewhat vulnerable to counterforce attack. Their deterrence is adequate to protect against an unprovoked US attack, and probably adequate to protect against the US saying "leave Taiwan alone or we'll nuke you", but it's marginal at best for anything beyond that.
They can't count on rattling the nuclear saber to prevent the US from offering a conventional defense of Taiwan, because it's too likely that we would either call that bluff or raise them a preemptive counterforce attack against their strategic nuclear forces.
I guess, you could make the assumption that a US preemptive strike against their capabilities might be a viable option. At first glance for me though, you'd have to stack a lot optimistic assumptions to make this worthwhile. But I admit, I don't know too much about the topic or have a good overview of who has which kilo- and megatonnage available where and what each weapon can and cannot do. I will update from your presumed expertise against my underinformed intuition.
Out of curiosity:
How would you actually nuke a lot China's capability at once, without scaring Russia into firing theirs, thinking they're targeted? Call ahead and saying "trust me, bro", when they detect missile launches? Use stealth bombers to take out for every silo at once? Do you assume that it's possible to sink their submarines, before they can launch or do you just eat those shots (which would probably mean losing Washington, New York and [insert lots of important US cities])?
Meh. China hasn't even finished building those silos yet, they've only started, and it will be some time before they are ready. Even when they are, 400 silos aren't especially difficult to take out. Two or three 300kt warheads each, given modern CEP, and you're all set. It could readly be done by SLBMs alone and leave plenty of firepower in reserve.
So far as I know, the Chinese do not yet have intercontinental capacity on the few strategic subs they do have. And besides that, the USN is very *very* good at knowing where enemy ballistic subs are all the time, so I would expect they will never get a chance to fire one anyway before being sunk.
So yeah if the US *wanted* to do a first strike on China, it would work just fine. Be a rather miserable world afterward, though.
A Chinese silo carrying 6 to 10 warheads is only good for blowing great big craters in Inner Mongolia or wherever. They'd need actual missiles to destroy American cities with those warheads, and they don't have nor will they soon have 350-400 DF-41 missiles.
The number of missile silos the Chinese have, is not determined by the number of missiles China has. It is determined by the number of missiles the *US* has. Which is more than 350-400, but not by so comfortable a margin that we could easily destroy 400 Chinese silos to be sure of getting the ones that have Chinese missiles.
Well for one thing Taiwan is much more important economically. Taiwan is #8 in trade volume with the US at $115 billion, only a bit behind the UK (#7) and well ahead of the rest of the Eurozone excepting Germany (#5).
Taiwan is the single most important geostrategic location in the world because of its control on microelectronics. Far more important than Saudi Arabia.
I suspect Xi knows this but no other head of state does, not even Tsai. There's probably a nascent insurgency or two somewhere in the world that also knows it.
That said, while it's plausible none of these entities can take it (except Tsai, of course) any one of them can annihilate TSMC's fabs, thus denying them to their competition.
I think the Taiwanese are perfectly aware. If they weren't, the Covid supply-chain crisis must have by now.
I'm convinced Morris Chang (founder and former CEO of TSMC) is a Taiwanese patriot and TSMC's willful failure to diversify by building significant factories outside Taiwan (a small island vulnerable to earthquakes and typhoons, not just geopolitical risk) is motivated by the desire to make Taiwan too strategic to be abandoned by the US the way Afghanistan was.
I'd agree with its economic importance. I also think there's the fact that Taiwan has been in the US orbit for a long time now, dating back to a period before China had nuclear weapons, and the US has matched China's saber-rattling on it before, repeatedly sending the US Navy to the Taiwan Strait as far back as 1950. And there's also the fact Taiwan hasn't been part of a unified China since 1895.
Meanwhile, back when the US and USSR initially came to an understanding regarding MAD, Ukraine was joined to Russia, and this fact ended within living memory, with a tacit understanding that Ukraine belonged to Russia's "sphere of influence", without really ever hammering out what precisely that means.
From 01911 until 01979 the US formally recognized the ROC government as "China", and it held China's permanent seat in the UN Security Council until 01971; this despite the fact that the ROC government has exercised effective control over only Taiwan since 01949. Withdrawing diplomatic recognition from Taiwan (ROC) and extending it to PRC in 01979 is a significant diference in US-Taiwan relations between 01950 and today.
Yeah we called that one right. That, "strategic ambiguity," ANZUS and being best buddies with Korea and Japan have kept the peace in the Pacific for a very long time. For a bunch of ignorant roundeyes, we've done pretty well.
Not an expert on Georgia, but they are currently speeding up their EU application. That does not sound like "under de facto control of Russia" to me. Unless you mean "South Ossetia" specifically. Then sure, but whatever.
Ok, the Baltic states. Estonia has a Russian population of 5%. Not sure there is a meaningful cluster of them. I'll need a map... and a microscope. Latvia and Lithuania are at 25% Russians. Are they unhappy Russians, that want to secede and are they clustered? I don't really know. But whereas the Ukraine is a corrupt kleptocracy with weak institutions, those three countries are richer, better developed and EU members. So I doubt, there is a secessionist core of collaborators.
Ukraine is huge and Ukrainians can already understand Russian. Russian and Ukrainian are pretty similar. The Baltic languages are not, so they could not easily be integrated into a larger Russia. Ukraine is a pretty compelling target for Russia. It has an area four times and a population eight times of all the Baltic states combined. That population is culturally much more Russian. And whether even they can be as beautifully integrated as Putin imagines, is entirely doubtful.
All the Baltic states are part of NATO and the EU. I agree, that NATO isn't magic. But it's not "America's little precious darlings" either. The United Kingdom alone is perfectly capable of destroying every major Russian population center. France also has nuclear weapons. Not to mention that every member has some conventional army they could send. Unclear to me, why this would have to go nuclear immediately. US presidents might be all kinds of crazy, but I think you underestimate them, if you assume they'd panic-press shiny red buttons.
If the Russian model stands, all neighboring states with a Russian population need to forcibly evict that Russian population, or it will always be grounds for the Russian government to invade and annex.
Not addressing the bulk of the comments, but a quick note: Ukraine proved that smaller countries _can_ fight a defensive war against a larger opponent. They haven't proven they can win, but it may be enough. Until now if you weren't under somebody's protection you were considered a soft target, and there's little point in increasing defense's share of GDP other than meet treaty quotas.
But apparently it's significantly easier to fight a defensive war if well prepared, which means now it's different, now countries will start building their defense strategies To Win, and not to check a box in a list or to distribute some pork. This is a big change, and can make the world look differently.
I think we thought that small countries were pushovers because we've seen so many US wars in countries that were not only small but also decades behind in military technology and centuries behind in military doctrine.
Russia and Ukraine are basically peers, they're armed with largely the same weapons and seem to have a similar level of discipline and sophistication.
What occurs to me is that if you can actually get your military to fight, you can accomplish a lot. It seems that in a country like Iraq, the vast conscript army only offered token resistance at best, with only a few elite sections of it like the Republican Guard putting up a real fight.
Meanwhile it seems the bulk of Ukraine's military is fighting, and even though it's outgunned, it's not really outnumbered within its borders: its nominal strength was 245,000 active duty at the start of this.
Under the current state of affairs, modern armies are much smaller than those in the mid-20th century. So if you can actually get people to fight, it's not that difficult to outnumber an attacker within your own borders, even if their population is 5x yours, or more.
I think the Sino-Vietnamese War is probably also an interesting illustration, though both sides claimed victory. But it was at least a bloody and costly affair for China, despite its population outnumbering Vietnam's by almost 20x at that time.
> Russia and Ukraine are basically peers, they're armed with largely the same weapons
1) Russia has nukes
2) as far as air force dominating Ukrainian one (though performance here is so far an amusing shitshow, hopefully it will remain this way)
3) very significant dominance in artillery
4) better tanks
Overall Russia has clear advantage, though at least part of it existed only on paper. In communist Poland it was typical for army to have many "inventory units"[1], for example vehicles unable to drive or completely broken machine guns that were kept to boost reported inventory. I guess that tradition remains.
[1] "wyposażenie na sztukę" = "equipment for piece"
Agree with your list, and also find it interesting that Russia is holding back most of its advantages: no nukes, only a tiny part of its air force, much less artillery than expected. And tanks can be countered by modern RPGs.
All of these military advantages can be leveraged only with a substantial collateral damage. So far, it looks like the ratio of Ukrainian civillian to military casualties in this conflict is remarkably low. According to the UN, there were under 500 civillian deaths so far (as of 8th of March), and at least 1500 Ukrainian military. For comparison, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia in 1999, it took pride in "amazingly light" civilian casualties of 1500 vs under 1000 Serbian military casualties. On UN estimates, 69% of killed in Israel Gaza incursion in 2014 were civilians (52% on Israeli estimates.)
Of course, it does not mean that the concern for civilian casualties is what limits the use of bombers and artillery, but it is consistent with the stated goals.
True. Sometimes, when it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it really is a duck. Even if it's an enemy duck. They probably just avoid casualties.
Russia and Ukraine are playing in the same league. Russia's (on paper) equipment and power are significantly stronger than Ukraine's, but it's a matter of degrees. The US advantage in military technology compared to Iraq or Afghanistan is functionally a difference in kind. It's not just a matter of US tanks having thicker armor or US planes being faster.
The technology gap is vast enough that US can do things entirely impossible for Iraq to do. By comparison, other than Nukes, Russia's advantage is just that their machines are incrementally better at the same tasks. That's what it means to be technology peers in this respect.
Russia and the Ukraine have basically the same tanks, T-64s and T-72s including the ones where incremental upgrades were called "T-80", "T-84", and "T-90" to make it seem like they had something really new. I'm not seeing anything that would suggest the Russian variants are significantly better than the Ukrainian ones.
As for artillery, my sources say that as of 2019, Russia had 4,340 pieces of >100mm, compared to 1,770 for Ukraine, not counting warehoused reserves on both sides. A 2.5:1 advantage might count as "significant dominance", but the Russians can't afford to put their *entire* army into Ukraine.
> I don’t know what the visa situation is like now and it might be terrible.
It was terrible before COVID (e.g. if you're invited to a conference, you have to fly across the whole country to a single consulate that maybe has a chance of giving you a visa within less than a year), then there were admittedly mutual vaccine-related problems, now it's just impossible (e.g. many Green Card lottery winners from more than a year ago still can't get their visas). Maybe one could go to a USA consulate in a neighbouring country (Poland? Georgia?) and ask for a visa there, except, well, not right now.
My colleagues had submitted abstracts to a US conference. They now estimate their chances of getting a visa as <1%.
The "Stability-Instability Paradox": the notion that mutual vulnerability ("MAD") at the strategic nuclear level can actually make conflict more likely at lower rungs of the escalation ladder. Twitter Thread:
Haven’t tweet much on Ukraine crisis for multiple reasons. But developments in the last 24 hours are heartbreaking and a preview of great brutality I fear is coming. A few observations here on the nuclear & conventional dimensions. 1/
Putin’s pointed, not-veiled nuclear threats are really remarkable, signaling a willingness to turn to the country’s arsenal if the West interferes with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. /2
This is about the clearest evidence I have ever seen for the Stability-Instability Paradox: the notion that mutual vulnerability ("MAD") at the strategic nuclear level can actually make conflict more likely at lower rungs of the escalation ladder. /3
Deterrence theorists associated with the Nuclear Revolution often dismiss this idea, arguing that nuclear stalemate means both sides will avoid crises and conflicts out of the fear they could escalate. The result should be peace, stability, and less military competition. /4
Yet Putin’s behavior suggests that revisionist actors are not so inhibited and may instead use their strategic nuclear forces as a shield behind which they can pursue conventional aggression, knowing their nuclear threats may deter outside intervention. /5
Now of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, nor a U.S. treaty ally. But then neither is Taiwan. So if you think nuclear stalemate is going to keep the peace in the Strait, you would need to do some hard thinking about why it hasn’t kept the peace in Eastern Europe. /6
China, in fact, is developing the same types of forces that Putin references in his remarks: not only a survivable second-strike capability, but also theater nuclear forces suited for limited strikes for coercive escalation. Not a coincidence.
More broadly, as a student of military operations and foreign policy, it’s hard for me to see the Russian end game here either operationally or strategically, for reasons @jeffaedmonds and @KofmanMichael and others have identified.
Yes, at a tactical level Russia can steamroll Ukrainian regular forces, though I expect Ukraine can make this more costly than Russia has anticipated. Urban warfare is unkind to invaders, even strong ones. 8/ https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/1595.pdf
But beyond that, what is military endgame? Regime change and then puppet government? Difficulties of indefinitely occupying a nation of 41 million should be apparent after Soviet experiences with Warsaw Pact & Afghanistan, among others @dmedelstein
Russian invasion likely to provoke higher European defense spending, tighter NATO, deployment of NATO forces east, hostility with West. Ukraine was not headed for NATO membership any time soon, so a destabilizing invasion wasn’t necessary to forestall that perceived danger. 10/
At the strategic level, Russian invasion gives off big Schlieffen Plan energy. It is like committing suicide for fear of death, bringing about the very problems it is supposed to solve, and generating new ones like risks of inadvertent escalation. 11/11
I just watched some videos on russia subreddit and one video about Russian police arresting unruly protesters caught my eye. The commentary was that if western protesters had been so aggressive they would have been already shot by police. It's obviously propaganda because they wouldn't but I remember seeing police dealing with Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa and it is clear that Canadian police is much more professional and capable than Russian one. It is just a pity that its potential is used to support completely irrelevant and even harmful vaccine mandates. If all this energy was used for real issues we could have world peace in no time.
But it also means that we clearly overestimate Russia's military capabilities. Maybe the truth is that they are indeed as bad as they look like due to corruption and self-deceit?
*That* is the $50,000 question here. I can't even imagine the ways things will subtly (or maybe not so subtly) shift in the coming decades if the Russians have their asses totally handed to them militarily by the Ukrainians. *Everybody* up and down their border, from the Poles to the Romanians and the Kazakhs out east, is going to frown and say hmmm and start thinking.
Over the last few days I've been helping some of my friends to leave Russia. Fleeing to the US is a no-go, I don't know how to even begin there. Much more realistic is moving to Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Turkey and other neutral Asian countries that don't require visa from Russian citizens. You can settle there for a couple of months while applying a digital nomad visa to some European country.
A very important part of the process is opening a bank account outside of Russia. Reportedly you can easily do it at least in Georgia and Kazakhstan. I heard that in Georgia you need to sign a paper stating that you don't support the Russian invasion. This theoretically makes you criminally liable back in Russia under the recent laws, but it's unlikely that Georgia will share these declarations with Russia, so you are probably fine.
Once you have a bank account outside of Russia, you can still transfer some of your money from Russian bank accounts, as long as your bank is not disconnected from SWIFT. This transfer is limited to 5000 USD though. (You can also cross the borders with up to 10k in cash.) Visa & Mastercard are about to stop working tomorrow, so don't rely on them. You can probably use a UnionPay card if you have one.
I've used this list of digital nomad accepting countries: https://nomadgirl.co/countries-with-digital-nomad-visas/. Based on it, the easiest countries to immigrate to are Czech Republic and Portugal. Czech Republic requires a proof of ~6000 EUR in assets, Protugal requires a proof of ~700 EUR of stable income or ~17000 EUR in assets. It goes without saying, but you'll need to double-check the actual requirements in the official sources for any particular country that you want to move to.
If you are still in Russia, try getting apostille on your birth and marriage certificates and get a memo that you don't have criminal record. These documents are impossible to get outside of Russia and are required for getting long term visas or residence permits in many countries.
If you have questions or need any help (tickets, booking a place to stay etc.), reach out to me on Telegram at @eterevsky or email at oleg@eterevsky.com. Feel free to also reach out if you are a Ukrainian fleeing to Europe (the logistics there is completely different obviously).
Brain-drain might be the single most effective strategy long-term to nip future Russian aggression in the bud. Germany has stated it needs 400,000 workers to make up for soon to retire ones, it's a Western country with a high standard of living and relatively cheap real estate, specially in the East.
More details about immigrating to Czech Republic: https://citizenremote.com/visas/czech-republic/. Apparently you'll need to separately apply for a trade license and a long-term business visa.
Yes. Also other paperwork. I am not clear on details, but Russians should have competitive advantage, since our foreigners related bureaucracy is pretty Soviet in character.
Is India a reasonable alternative? I have the sense that programmers might be able to make a better living in India than in Georgia or Kazakhstan, and Russians might be subject to less racism in India than in China.
Are there countries where Bitcoin is a plausible alternative to SWIFT, Visa, and Mastercard?
India is definitely an option. I heard it's relatively easy to get a business visa there. At least one of my friends is considering doing this.
A lot of IT work nowadays is remote, so the actual place you will be staying is not that important. Georgia and Kazakhstan make sense at least as the first stops because Russian citizens don't need any kind of visa for a long-term stay. Also if your spouse or parent is moving with you and doesn't speak good English, they are easier since everyone speaks Russian.
I wouldn't consider China. It requires a visa for entry and you need to speak Chinese.
The problem with crypto is buying it in Russia. I don't know of any crypto exchanges located in Russia, so as a first step of buying bitcoins, you'll need to transfer money to an exchange outside of Russia, which makes it pointless.
On the peace deal Russia has offered: I think there's a good chance it's NOT just 'give up Crimea/Donetsk/Luhansk and don't join EU/Nato'. It also included 'Zelensky remains president, but Russia chooses a prime minister'.
Could be something the Russians will negotiate on, and maybe walk back from as time goes on, but I think if this is true it changes the flavour of the deal considerably. Russia isn't asking to slink away with a few bits of land; they want to permanently and powerfully influence Ukrainian politics so they can continue with their project of turning it back into a satellite state. It seems way less reasonable for Ukraine to agree to that.
I think it's pretty silly for those of us who aren't actually part of any negotiations to opine on what hypothetical deals the Ukranians should or should not be willing to make, especially given that Putin is known to be a bad-faith negotiator.
That's the major problem - where are the collaborators come from? I personally dont see the possibilities to buy out or coherse ukrainian bureaucracy into collaboration. There are some pro-Russian poilitcal figures in exile, but in the corrupt and toxic sludge of Ukrainian deep state just swallows them without a trace.
I’ve read some comments about Putin’s “long term strategy.” He’ll turn 70 in a few months. What would you say if you heard someone 70 talking about their long term career goals?
With a median life expectancy of 73 for men in Russia presumably Putin knows a lot of men his age who are already dead. How do folks think that plays into his planning and decision making?
I think this plays into the concept of "legacy". Which is absolutely something that ambitious men regularly turn to in their old age. What is he bequeathing to those who come after him? How will he be remembered, by Russians, in a few decades' time?
Right. My point is when Putin thinks about legacy, I don't think he cares one whit how he is remembered by the rest of the world -- only how he is remembered by the majority of Russians.
I don't read Putin's mind, i can only guess, judging his words and actions he enjoys the thought of being remembered a strong leader who led the nation through the perilous waters into a safe haven of "energy superpower"
That's the life expectancy at birth. I don't know where to find actuarial tables for Russia but in the US https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html male life expectancy at birth is 76 years but male life expectancy at age 70 is 15 more years, not 6. That's because at age 70 27% of men are already dead, pulling down the average, but if you're 70 and not dead yet, you're not one of them. Your chance of dying by 76 is only 16% if you're already 70, but 38% if you've just been born a boy.
(Relevant caveat in this case that these numbers are computed from current death rates, but how long you actually live will be determined by future death rates. If Putin launches a global thermonuclear war you can expect life expectancy to drop precipitously, especially in Russia, the US, and its allies. Inversely, if you live long enough to start backing up your connectome regularly, you might live millions or trillions of years. These figures do not take the probability of such events into account.)
My point was more that when you’re 70 a significant portion of your age cohort is already dead. That tends to focus the mind on how little useful time you have left.
What's your source for 73 years for men? That seems really high. Wikipedia has it at 68.2 in 2020, which seems more likely. (The same article says life expectancy for men at 60 is 16.8.)
Take alcohol, smoking, random crime, traffic accidents, and really bad healthcare out of equation, and he can expect to live a lot longer than the median, unless he is already sick with something very bad.
In any case, whatever we think about planning and decision making of someone who just started a bloody war against a non-aggressive country of 44 million is likely to have nothing to do with reality.
73 is for the average Russian man: poor, drinks lot of alcohol, got a hefty chance of using drugs, smoking and god knows what else.
As far as I remember, Putin barely drinks, don't smoke, exercise a lot, and is rather well off (not to mention being head of state, so it's not just him having a good doctor, but the state apparatus that tries to monitor him).
The Russian troops don't seem really all that into martial valor, at least not yet. Phrased more positively, they appear to be relatively humane and un-bloodthirsty. Further, the Russian domestic media strategy appears to be to spin Mr. Putin's war to the Russian public as a nearly bloodless "special military operation," showing little of the type of exciting combat footage we've seen from the Ukrainian side.
In general, Russians other than Putin don't seem all that interested in an old fashioned ground war in Europe. Perhaps human beings really are getting less warlike, as Steven Pinker suggested a decade ago?
Russian domestic media mostly showing Ukrainian artillery hiding in the residential area, or Ukrainian trooper hiding live grenade in a playground, or thousands of AKs distributed among random civilians, or para-Nazi militias shooting at cars with refugees.
But not much Call of Duty-style tank on tank action?
The Russian people don't seem very bellicose (at present). This seems mostly like Putin's whim and Russians are uneasy that his luck might have finally run out.
Well, I haven't seen any, but I only have a few minutes to watch TV at work, official
- read all - channels are mostly airing unspeakable horrors "Ukro-Nazis" doing to their own fellow citizens (they really do, I have reports from people in East Ukraine I know second-hand).
You made a really good guess - at least I'am feeling this way. Putinism has a long history of shitting owns pants.
Even if Putin thinks he has enough WMDs to not fear another Nuremberg, and even if Russia stops recognizing all international laws, preparing and waging aggressive wars is still explicitly banned by the Russia's own criminal code. (Which is why everyone expected the war, if it was to happen, to begin with a staged attack by the Ukrainians. Still not sure why it didn't happen.)
It didn't happen because US intelligence agencies publicized most of the information that they had regarding it; no point in making a huge deal about it when everyone already knows what you're trying to stage.
Ad donations, I suggest to consider giving money to People in Need, Czech humanitarian NGO with considerable experience in war situations (they were in Chechnya, Syria and similar places). Their english page for help to Ukraine is here: https://www.peopleinneed.net/people-in-need-continues-support-ukraine-8586gp.
The intro omits the single deadliest war, the one everyone forgets: the Second Congo War of 1998–2003, which killed 40,000 people *a month* for a total of 5.4 million if you include the victims of starvation and disease. I am as guilty as anyone, I consider myself well-informed on world affairs but while aware of the free-for-all conflict, I was oblivious to the scale of the carnage. Of course, those were black lives and it's now well-established those do not matter, even less than brown lives.
Oof. Yeah, that war was pretty horrific, and so is the indifference to it.
So far this war has been going on for 12 days (?) and has killed about 25000 people, working out to 63000 people per month. Hopefully the rate will slow down rather than accelerating.
“ Russia has miscalculated, they know they’ve miscalculated”
If metaculus is any guide, Russia is not the only one who miscalculated (see the odds of Russia taking Kyiv by April plummet). In fact, we don’t know for sure what Putin was thinking, so we may be projecting our own failure on him.
The take away is just to remember that “no plan survives contact with the enemy”. We should have similar concerns as far as our ability to even enforce a no fly zone.
I don't know that I agree with "EU has previously allowed members to join its economic community without joining the EU proper, and this would probably provide most of the relevant benefits to Ukraine without angering Russia." Having skimmed Putin's big essay on Ukraine, I think that having Ukraine tie its economy to the EU rather than Russia would be something he would very much have a beef with.
I guess the question is how much each is an excuse versus how much each is a reason. My sense is that the military threat is mostly an excuse and partially a reason while the economic integration is a more important reason but not something that can be used as an excuse.
Likely. The Ukrainian revolution (which angered Putin into invading parts of Ukraine in 2014) started when, in 2013, Yanukovich decided not to sign the EU Association Agreement (not EU membership proper).
Agree with much of this, especially regarding the no-fly-zone nonsense. Couple things which came to mind:
1) ‘liberal redditors getting mad on Twitter’ feels like an uncharitable illustration which downplays the remarkable display of unity and (dare I say) strength by liberal democracies.
2) I am not sure this conflict supports the concept of meaningfully superior ‘martial’ cultures. Russia seems to take pride in their macho outlook, but we may find out that boring nerdy planning and accountable power structures are more decisive war-winners than selecting Invincible Macho VdVs and right-clicking Kiev.
The people I know who fought in wars seem to emphasize the importance of initiative, leadership, coordination and intelligence, and they tend to get annoyed at the notion of inherently (genetically or culturally) superior soldiers. This is far outside my own expertise, admittedly.
Yes. Mood affiliation once again...I mean, the neo-reactionaries are funny...they want accelerationism, but also "traditional masculinity" and "traditional values"...maybe they don't go together so well?
It seems to me, with the change in military technology towards cyberwarfare and UAVs, the "nerds" will do better than the "jocks" in terms of being militarily successful...
>"This is what it looks like when a civilization that’s got strong and well-functioning norms against aggressive wars encounters one and launches an immune response."
I'm sorry what? The Iraq invasion, the Afghan invasion, the Libyan bombing and the Yugoslav bombing would seem to indicate otherwise. Not to mention the fact that countries have been financing the Saudi war machine and Israeli war machine for decades. I'm sorry Scott but you need to step outside your neoliberal foreign policy bubble.
> In this spirit, I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer.
> As far as I understand it, the offer is: Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home.
The problem is that Russia has negative credibility.
In case of signing that Russia would renege on it and break it. Either they would never leave or attack again within 10 years. I would give 85% probability to that.
And at this point, sadly, "Russia promises to not invade" and similar should not be treated as serious in long term, and encouraging others to treat it seriously is a bad idea.
I am willing to bet money on that, as long as it is not requiring use of cryptocurrencies. I can also bet funny Manifold points, I got some from that broken Trump market.
I am also expecting that this relatively reasonably proposal is not what they proposed: I expect that they demanded at least one of following:
(1) purge of Ukrainian leadership
(2) installing their puppet(s) as rulers
(3) destruction of Ukrainian military
(4) stopping improvements to Ukrainian military
(5) forcing Ukrainian government to lie about what happened
Overall, I expect that Ukraine considered it but it was as fucked up and unreasonable as their previous public offers.
If anyone declares interest I can create Manifold markets for that (though I expect resolving that as N/A as Ukraine government is not dumb enough to fall for that, and Russia government would not offer such terms anyway)
Putin is oft compared to Hitler, but there is a better analogy:
But Gandalf said: ‘This is much to demand for the delivery of one servant: that your Master should receive in exchange what he must else fight many a war to gain! Or has the field of Gondor destroyed his hope in war, so that he falls to haggling? And if indeed we rated this prisoner so high, what surety have we that Sauron, the Base Master of Treachery, will keep his part? Where is this prisoner? Let him be brought forth and yielded to us, and then we will consider these demands.
It seemed then to Gandalf, intent, watching him as a man engaged in fencing with a deadly foe, that for the taking of a breath the Messenger was at a loss; yet swiftly he laughed again.
‘Do not bandy words in your insolence with the Mouth of Sauron!’ he cried. ‘Surety you crave! Sauron gives none. If you sue for his clemency you must first do his bidding. These are his terms. Take them or leave them!
(from Tolkien, "The Return of the King", chapter 10, "The Black Gate Opens".
(1) If I understand Fukuyama's position correctly, he was not saying that there would be no more wars. He was saying that the dominant ideology of 'liberal democracy + capitalism with a safety net' would never again face another ideology that could compete with it on a global scale. Once this ideology converts everyone, then there won't be any more wars. The 'Dictator Book Club' is a more effective argument against Fukuyama than this war.
(2) I agree that nuclear war is a much bigger issue than conventional war in Ukraine. But I'm surprised that you didn't address the question of whether you think that Ukraine can continue to hold out and whether the sanctions help then with this.
(3) A no fly zone would probably also requires destroying Russia air defenses so we can fly our planes there. Russia's surface-to-air capabilities are mostly located in Russia. The problem isn't just that we would be shooting down Russian aircraft (like Turkey has done once in Syria): we would also be shooting targets located on Russian soil.
(4) I have a different take on Russia's peace offer. They do seem to want all of the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. So it sounds to me like: please abandon your strong defensive positions in eastern Ukraine (which have mostly held so far), and give us a few months to fix our logistical problems.
(5) If you want to help victims of war in the most effective way possible, you should probably focus on the wars that nobody cares about instead of the wars that everybody cares about.
(3) is a great point that I have only seen a few people make. It drives me crazy that people are acting like we can declare a no-fly zone like Michael Scott declares bankruptcy (to borrow a phrase from Michael Kofman). You can say "we're not declaring war, we're just declaring a no-fly zone!" all you want, but if your policy predictably involves blowing up Russian soldiers on Russian territory...well, that's closer to a mustard seed than a fig leaf.
My real concern is that if we did that, and Putin kept it conventional, the Russian air force would lose badly and in relatively short order. So that creates an enormous incentive to escalate, e.g. "if you start enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, I'm going to start dropping tactical nukes on NATO airbases within X # kilometers of the border." If he's not going to give up, that would be a totally rational move to make.
“Fine, you can invade if the country is literally the Nazis, committing the literal Holocaust” - and then Putin says Ukraine is run by Nazis and genociding its people.
I have no good solution to this problem...
Why not just litigate the cases as they come up, and accept that there will be hard cases, and gradually work to push your failures out another std deviation?
I mean this in all good faith - this is indeed a very real problem. Also, this is genuinely one naive solution to this problem. Roll up our sleeves and just try. Is the flaw in the naive solution that, we are just really bad at this sort of thing, and adversaries are too good at finding loopholes to try to confront them? If this works 99.9% of the time, but is occasionally exploited, is it still that bad of a solution?
That was a surprising response! My model of your views here was off, sorry.
I thought you were saying solutions with some small error rate are not good solutions, that only perfect solutions are good solutions. But in hindsight that doesn't sound like you at all...
Maybe you're saying every case is a hard case, and per Quine or Gettier, we're always just one revelation away from realizing Zelenskyy is a secret Nazi, and after that, still just one revelation away from realizing we were lied to by the last piece of evidence, and he's actually the most anti-Nazi person among us all, iterated to radical skepticism?
That feels like a very poor model of you too. I'm very much publicly failing here in the hopes my error will be transparent and easily corrected.
To strawman Scott, I would say:
It's hard to perfectly define a weed, but that ontological quirk has not posed much of an issue during my actual gardening.
One can believe truth is a much harder problem than most people realize, acknowledge we will face edge cases, but then shrug and pick up your trowel.
(The alternative is to not pick up your trowel we have found this is not a dominant gardening strategy.)
That would be fun. But you are not strawman Scott!
Maybe this is ivermectin again, and the point is that hard cases dominate. (Do they? Or is availability heuristic pranking those of us who most like thinking about hard problems? Is this answerable, "ratio of cases that are hard," because what would even go in the denominator...)
I'll think more about your views here. I'd love any clarification, but you have a billion comments here, I already imposed, so I'll ruminate.
With reference to the "Bright Line" argument: Would it be useful to set up a prediction market for determining whether an invasion is "good" or not? Perhaps all countries in the UN could vote on whether the majority would vote "Yes" for annexation or "No". Unless there is universal consensus/collusion, the best strategy would be to vote for the "morally good" option, which humans are pretty good at figuring out unless they are motivated by personal gain.
“I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer.”
Last time Western countries encouraged Czechoslovakia to accept a similar offer it did not work so well. What is the reason to think this time would be different?
An even will quickly make up for everybody, Putin will be pleased to take the Russian part of Ukraine as his failed blitzkrieg isn’t something to brag about. Transnistria & Gagauzia (yes, these are autonomous regions in Moldova) could get recognised by Russia while Moldova join the EU as it has strengthened ties with the west in the last years.
Nato would gain the western part of Ukraine and might draw new borders pushing further east.
At least some people argue it wasn't a plan of blitzkrieg because Putin thought that Ukraine could be taken without any serious resistance, and that that explains the early failures. When that didn't happen it turned into an attempted blitzkrieg without the needed logistic resources.
1. If Putin is irrational to the point of starting a nuclear war, and we don't want a nuclear war, we have to give him anything he asks by whatever pretext he gives. The details about NATO, Iraq, history etc are irrelevant, they could as easily have been aliens and spirits. And we're doomed anyway.
2. Putin could also be some sort of rational. What sort?
From what we know, he's not a religious fanatic, not an addict or esoteric fan.
He is a long-time KGB officer, and their modus operandi is well-known since
1930s, when they've given up the global permanent revolution and exploited the
same framework again and again.
The framework is:
- find a relatively weak/unstable/isolated democratic country
- create some underground spy network
- create a list of talking points to polarize/split the public and push those through diplomacy and local media
- if the convenient dictator wins, use him in your favor
- if not:
- do a false flag operation
- invade
- if it goes ok, install a puppet government
- if it fails, annex some territory, put it in gray zone and use to destabilize the rest of the country
- if this also fails, incorporate gray zone into your territory
Since then it was exploited in Finland, Bessarabia, Baltic countries, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Georgia, etc.
And we can see that's exactly what happens here and we're being the public fed Putin's talking points, no?
Only if (we believe that) Putin is irrational to the point of starting a nuclear war over any little thing he might be denied, do we have to give him anything he asks. We don't believe he is that irrational, only that he might be irrational to start a nuclear war over a few particularly important issues.
So no, we don't have to give him anything he asks, which seems to undermine your logic here. But we should probably lean towards accepting his demands on the e.g. "hey please don't invade or bomb Russia" front, and similarly "don't send your armies into battle against my armies",
Perhaps I am being nitpicky, but there is one thing I would like to point out: NATO didn't ''expand''. It admitted Central European countries which seeked protection, because they correctly predicted that Russia would try to reestabilish it's sphere of influence over them once it regains strength to do so. We wanted to join Western institutions, we wanted it badly. For instance: only about 2% of Poles want Poland to leave NATO(poll from 2019).
Former Eastern European satellites with democratic histories flocked to NATO. The Central Asian republics run like autocracies joined CSTO to preserve their autocracies, as shown in Kazakhstan. The odd one out is Mongolia, which is both Asian and democratic despite being in a bad neighborhood squeezed between Russia and China (and with much of their historic territory annexed by China which is waging cultural genocide against Mongols there).
> Everyone can sanction Russia as much as they want, and it can win anyway.
Lol, no. It's already losing because of logistics, it's going to lose because of logistics harder, and at some point you end up with a 1984-esque war economy where your citizens have nothing because the resources go to a war that won't be resolved.
If they take Kiev they'll get killed by a regular army coordinated from Lviv. If they take Lviv they'll get killed by guerillas and IEDs.
I don't even know if there is a "next time". The current situation has a realistic chance of causing a regime change in Russia, at which point the sanctions would be lifted. The West is close to using every metaphorical nuclear option and leaving just the literal one.
I estimate "Ukraine will be occupied by Russia and everyone will get over it by next year" (to a similar extent everyone was over Chechnya) as ~20% likely, at most, so yes. The degree of the occupation failing and/or everyone not getting over it, is up for debate.
Regime change, what next? Demilitarizaion, giving up nukes, splitting into large amount of states where the largest state is 2-3 times smaller than Ukraine?
“in ‘62, it was the Russians who agreed to back down to prevent nuclear war. We owe them one, so this time it’s on us.”
In 1956 and 1968, when the Hungarian and Czech governments attempted to get some measure of independence from the USSR, the latter responded with full scale military invasion and arresting or executing local political leaders. The western countries decided not to interfere in the Soviet sphere of influence.
In 1962, the situation was reverse - Castro decided to ally with the USSR and turned Cuba into a communist dictatorship. The US and USSR compromised by letting Castro stay and in return for withdrawing the soviet missiles from Cuba the US withdrew its missile form Turkey and Italy.
Is “Russians who agreed to back down” a fair description of what happened?
It is not, no. It was a fair exchange. Khruschev specifically decided to base missiles in Cuba because of the Jupiter decision, and so in *fact* Khruschev got pretty much what he wanted, with the Kennedy Administration agreeing to remove the Jupiters and Khruschev agreeing to go no further with Cuba. I doubt K was thrilled about trusting the Cubans anyway.
What Khruschev *didn't* understand was the tremendous PR spin that would be put on it, that would make Kennedy out into some kind of hero who stared down the Soviets. (It probably helped the myth along that Kennedy got himself martyred the next year, instead of living to be covered in mud by Vietnam.) My impression is that even the Soviets themselves kind of bought the PR and this helped bring him down at home.
> Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home.
Putin wants to _demilitarize_ Ukraine. How do you think further negotiations with a bully who declared he's out for your blood will go, once you handed him your weapons? Ceding anything to Putin at this point is being terrible at game theory, even if it's a trivial thing.
Also, everyone, especially Ukrainians, knows Ukraine is a corrupt shithole because it's an ex-USSR republic. This is what being in Russia's orbit does to countries, this is not a matter of opinion, this is settled. They correctly reason that their only chance for a modern country is joining the Western bloc - that's what Soviet satellite states did and it worked magnificently. "Keep Ukraine neutral" is code for "keep Ukraine like Belarus with an extra dose of military vulnerability".
I rarely comment, but in this instance I MUST, because THIS quote left my jaw on the floor:
"Also, the last time this happened, in ‘62, it was the Russians who agreed to back down to prevent nuclear war. We owe them one, so this time it’s on us."
This leads me to ask, in all sincerity, "WHAT, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the F***???"
I can't even see the context into which this statement is hooked. It looks like a throwaway comment, but one possessed of the most staggering blitheness, which is not at all your usual MO, Scott.
My impression was the Cuban Missile Crisis ended when the Russians agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba to prevent nuclear war; am I getting something wrong?
Yeah, you're forgetting that the Kennedy Administration agreed to remove the Jupiter IRBMs from Turkey in exchange. Since that removal was pretty much Khruschev's entire goal in threatening to build missile sites in Cuba in the first place, a better overall assessment is that it was an equal exchange, with nobody doing anybody favors.
NATO agreed in 2008 that Ukraine "WILL become members of NATO" (emphasis mine). This is about as explicit a contradiction of the claim that NATO has no signs of interest in Ukraine joining as possible. They have continued to reaffirm this and still say it on their website
Biden reassured Zelenskiy 3 months ago, when he already knew invasion was an increasing probability, that the right to join NATO remained "in Ukraine's hands".
It is more than clear that the US and UK both wanted Ukraine in NATO even if other NATO members might have taken some persuading. NATO and Ukraine have both *explicitly* reaffirmed, over and over again, their desire to join together. The fact that there are obstacles does not mean that there is no serious chance it could have happened, or that there are "no" signs of willingness. Quite the opposite.
The most serious of the obstacles you allude to are Ukraine's border disputes in Crimea and Donbas. There was never any serious possibility of resolving these issues, so NATO is only willing to accept Ukraine as a member under conditions which cannot be fulfilled. It's accurate to say they've shown no signs of being willing to accept Ukraine.
I'm not sure. Maybe refusing to acknowledge how serious an obstacle the border dispute is is NATO's way of posturing that they support Ukraine's territorial integrity, even though it doesn't actually help Ukraine regain its territorial integrity. But whatever the reason, it is what they appear to have been doing.
I think the situation between NATO and Ukraine is pretty straightforward, but people are constantly getting it wrong, so let me try to explain what I think is most salient about it.
Joining NATO requires consensus of all member states, but de facto it is pretty implausible that if every NATO member except Luxembourg would want someone to join, Luxembourg would withstand diplomatic pressure to cave. If there are no objections from most important members of the alliance, application to NATO is likely to be approved.
Bush adminitstration wanted Ukraine (and Georgia) in NATO, and since US is the single most important member of the alliance, they succeeded in pressing their partners into including the promise that Ukraine and Georgia will became members of NATO into a declaration of Bucharest NATO summit in 2008. That was imho really bad idea, but I digress.
It is not like there is some physical barrier preventing NATO from accepting Ukraine as a member, and Ukraine clearly wants to be in NATO continuously since at least 2014. As you rightly note, they have this goal enshrined in Ukrainian constitution. Ergo the reason why Ukraine is still not a member of NATO has to be that NATO does not want to admit them, at least for now.
Neither Obama, Trump or Biden administration attempted to push NATO membership of Ukraine (or Georgia).
But this situation might change in the future, just like it changed between 2008 and 2014. NATO is, at least for now, unwilling to say that it will NEVER admit Ukraine. It likes to keep its options open, and also it would mean broken promise from Bucharest, which looks bad and hurts its credibility.
10.g: The simplest explanation for what's going on in this video is that it was filmed in Russia. It's kind of hard to imagine this happening in Ukraine, and not just because it's hard to imagine a Russian military convoy politely letting Ukrainian civilian traffic pass; it's also hard to imagine that Ukrainian civilian traffic would attempt to nonchalantly pass through a Russian military convoy. But to get from Russia to Ukraine, a Russian military convoy first has to pass through more Russia, and Russian civilian traffic would have no reason to act differently than usual, so it's almost guaranteed that scenes like the one shown would occur in Russia.
At least in initial days Russians were relatively friendly toward Ukrainians (see various recording of people making fun of Russians and NOT getting shot, or tanks stopping to avoid running over civilians).
It is far less genocidal than USSR/Nazi Germany during WW II. Not high bar, but always something.
>9. In this spirit, I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer.
The problem with this approach is that Ukraine and Russia already have a security treaty, the Budapest memorandum, whereby Russia agreed to, among things, respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty, not use force against Ukraine, and seek Security Council assistance should Ukraine be involved in a potentially nuclear conflict.
In the past few weeks, as well as other instances since Budapest was signed, Russia has flagrantly disrespected Ukrainian independence and sovereignty, use extreme force against Ukrainian armed forces and civilians, and may or may not currently be bringing nuclear missiles into Ukraine via train.
Why on earth would Zelenskyy sign any deal with Russia where Russia re-commits to the same security and recognition standards it just violated?
Because the part he can verify is that Russia withdraws its troops from Ukraine. After that he can continue buying or being given military equipment, training Ukrainians to use it, making another try at conquest even less likely to succeed.
Why would Russia successfully gain in territory via a negotiated settlement make them think that conquest won't work? The proposed """""peace deal" "" "" makes it work
>EU has previously allowed members to join its economic community without joining the EU proper, and this would probably provide most of the relevant benefits to Ukraine without angering Russia.
I *highly* doubt that Russia wouldn't mind Ukraine joining the Single Market. Such an action requires that you accept very close links to the EU.
One case of creeping lines in the sand (aka created Schelling points) is the issue of Poland transferring jets to Ukraine. Putin seems to be claiming that as escalation but NATO countries have already been transferring lots of other military supplies to Ukraine so it's just more of the same. That looks like an attempt by Putin to shift the perceived line in his favor.
Transferring the jets to the US would make sense from Poland's point of view. Let the US be the one to take the risk of transferring them to Ukraine.
While Putin might think he can get away with a retaliatory strike on a Polish airbase if jets enter Ukraine from there, he's not going to think he can get away with striking Ramstein AFB, which in any case is much further away and presumably much better defended.
Appreciate the thoughtful post, thanks. The logic behind #9 doesn't quite make sense to me, though - seems like it would send the message "invasion is a good way to get what you want when negotiation isn't succeeding", which does not seem ideal. Also pretty sure that more or less anything could be deemed a "violation of neutrality" if Russian nationalists wanted another justification of war in the future.
I agree that's a risk, which is why I think this is better now (after the Russians have already lost so much international esteem, men, supplies, etc that this war will be a net negative for them even if they get a few meaningless concessions) than before the war when the process could have ended up net positive for them.
I agree that now would be a better time than before to accede to Russian demands. I think the question of whether it leads to an overall better or worse outcome than continuing the conflict partly depends on the narrative around the outcome. I have a lot of uncertainty about whether other countries (or the Russian nationalist hardline) would take away the message "it'll cost more than you're willing to pay" or "you can get what you want through invasion". Giving Putin the ability to claim a win internally might be fine. But if it's perceived as a win internationally I suspect that would shift the balance more toward war in future cases. Don't really have the expertise in geopolitics to justify that though, so it's more a vague unease.
Wasn't item j a fake? I suspect Ukraine heroism stories are amplified by 100x while their not-so-heroic stories are muted. If the population were so deeply valiant, why is it illegal for fighting-age males to leave the country?
AFAIK (j) is was partially true? So reply actually happened but initial claims about everyone dying were not true, also commonly shown version was at least without pause in the middle?
> If the population were so deeply valiant, why is it illegal for fighting-age males to leave the country?
I guess there are many people who prefer to fight Russians over fighting Ukrainian border guard, but would prefer to just leave.
Also, useful coordination method "no adult male is leaving" over "well, why I need to stay"?
It appears to be working, many families reached border and planned to leave, but on being told that males are supposed to stay they grumbled and stayed in Ukraine.
I would count (j) as an example of people getting played by social-media fakery. The initial claims of people dying for their cause are what made that clip viral.
A place is being made for that man if he is forced to leave temporarily. He clearly doesn't want to and may well die there. (If he does, his legacy will live.)
FWIW, from what I've been reading it seems like that Reply of the Cossacks photo (item f) may be of the Azov Battalion back during the 2014 conflict, not the current one.
> The rare exceptions tend to be genuinely bad dudes - however unjust the Iraq War was, nobody wants to defend Saddam.
Yeah so this is just plain ignorant. Just because no-one in the US wants to defend Saddam, or because in the US Saddam is seen as a "genuinely bad dude" does not excuse the US invasion of Iraq. According to the Russians, Ukraine is similary ruled by "bad dudes"; regardless of the Russian rhetoric the Ukrainians certainly have their fair share of faults.
The correct take here is not "Russia is uniquely worse than the US", but "the US being bad does not excuse Russia being bad".
You write "Part of me wants to say we’re different from the Russians", I pointed out that the examples where you are supposedly "different" are not particularly good. If you're going to discuss a failure mode where there's "at least one rule they followed which the other villains didn’t", it doesn't make sense to pick an example without such a rule. A more accurate description of the failure mode in this case is that each villian thinks their rule-breaking of the same rule is ok because their heart is in the right place unlike the heinous other villian committing war crimes.
The US did to other countries (let's take a crystal clear example: Vietnam) things as horrible, and as poorly justified, as what Russia is doing to the Ukraine now. There may be points where the US and Russia are different, but it is not in that the US only goes after "genuinely bad dudes" on "rare exceptions".
>I think I specifically avoided saying it did excuse the US invasion of Iraq, and framed the entire paragraph to emphasize that.
Really? You never really refute the argument that the US is "different"; the next sentences (ex. the last sentence, which I do like) are all in the abstrac tense - and it is - at least in my reading - left open whether they apply to this concrete case. This comment I'm replying to also does not say whether the US invasion of Iraq is excused by this, I assume you're being precise in what you write and do not want to make an object-level statement on the Iraq war.
I think Scott made some really great points here about social norms - as relates to foreign policy. I wonder what the community would think about normalizing the assassination of foreign leaders? It seems to me that it should be normalized for a few reasons:
1) In an authoritarian nation where the leader doesn't care about the well-being of their people, sanctions hurt the people rather than the leader. I know that CIA ideology states that causing more unhappiness within a particular country increases the chance of an uprising, but with the development of the modern surveillance state, I don't think that rule necessarily holds true anymore.
2) When a foreign leader has "skin in the game" they are more likely to make decisions that are not wildly antisocial.
3) To a certain extent, assassination is ALREADY normalized - most leaders have a certain expectation that crazy randos may try to kill them and already take precautions against it. So normalizing the assassination of foreign leaders as a tool of foreign policy may change the risk/benefit calculations of foreign leaders, but it's not like something radically new or different.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting this to resolve the Ukraine conflict. Putin is already REALLY well guarded against assassination - he not only has geolocation spoofing which stops people from tracking his own location through the cell phone towers he connects to, but he ALSO has his own personal ice cream maker. I'm just talking about a more general change in foreign policy that might work better than the system which we've currently got.
Well, if the vast majority of society AGREES that they're bad... would that be a problem? Obviously I know that determining who's bad and who's good is tricky, but that doesn't mean that bad people and good people are exactly the same or have the same right to exist.
1. "The vast majority of society" doesn't decide morality. Almost every ethical system recognizes that morality isn't democratic and most people are not particularly virtuous (and thus can't be trusted with setting moral bounds).
2. But even if we accepted this premise: in the US, at least, a narrow majority of people are opposed to killing even the most heinous people- the death penalty is outlawed in 23 states and 3 more have put a moratorium on executions. Of the remaining 24, only 1 allows for the issuance of the death penalty on anything short of a unanimous jury decision (which is rarely seen on the kinds of cases where the death penalty is available). So I would say that any assertion that the vast majority of people are fine with a "kill all the baddies" philosophy is bunk.
3. What makes someone a "bad person" that's so bad that they lose their right to exist, in your eyes? Mass murder? Murder? Graft? Theft? Petty theft? Being generally unpleasant? The mob howling for your head, aka Death By Cancellation? Given your talk about "the vast majority of people agreeing", I'd guess you'd fall more on the end of the last one.
4. Given that murder, even for somewhat-justified ends, is seen as bad, how do you square that circle? Do you expect your heroic baddie-killers to end their missions by turning the gun on themselves like the heroes of a jidaigeki revenge story?
Jesus H. Christ, no. I'm sorry, but this is a terrible, terrible idea.
Don't get me wrong; Putin is evil, and I shall read his obituary with great pleasure. But the major problem with your idea is: OK, say we've assassinated the (evil) leader of a nuclear-armed country. Now what? A power vacuum, that's what. How do you know that whoever seizes power in the aftermath will be any better (more rational/humane) that the one who's just been assassinated?
For more on this topic, I recommend Ken Follett's new novel "Never," which describes a hypothetical future world on the brink of nuclear war.
Also, here's the Chesterton's Fence argument: once we break the rule against assassinating foreign leaders, what's to stop dictators from saying, "If it's OK for the U.S. to assassinate Putin, why isn't it OK for us to take out [Biden][Macron][Scholz][fill in your favorite Western leader]?" You can't just say "well obviously Putin is evil in a way the other leader isn't," not without everyone laughing at you.
I mean isn't the chance of losing Biden/Macron/Scholz worth saving a million Ukranian (or [insert other ethnicity here]) lives? A worldwide game of assassins seems somewhat less likely to result in nuclear apocalypse than brinkmanship, and much less likely to result in the death of thousands of or millions of innocents (including, for the most part, the soldiers on both sides) in the process.
The risk, I suppose, is misalignment of incentives between government and the population, but I'd counter that that misalignment exists presently in a different direction anyway.
I'll also point out that Russia sent 3 teams of assassins to kill Zelenskyy. To be cheeky, turnabout is fair play. More technically, the norm has been violated already, by Russia.
"A worldwide game of assassins seems somewhat less likely to result in nuclear apocalypse than brinkmanship, and much less likely to result in the death of thousands of or millions of innocents (including, for the most part, the soldiers on both sides) in the process."
Citation VERY MUCH NEEDED.
To me, it seems that a world in which heads of state are constantly getting assassinated would be hideously unstable, making nuclear conflict more, not less, likely!
"turnabout is fair play"
No, it isn't, unless you want to say "The Russians shelled some apartment buildings in Kyiv, so it's okay for other countries to bomb some apartment buildings in Moscow."
One doesn't send 3 groups of mercenaries to kill a pawn, so that's pretty clearly just empty propaganda. Some options: Russia believes Zelenskyy is inspiring the Ukrainians to fight harder, and his death will break their morale; that ambiguities in the Ukrainian constitution around succession would allow Russia a fig leaf to claim the end of the Ukrainian state if enough of the government was killed and then annex the country; alternatively, to declare the state after the revolution of dignity nonexistent and "reverted" to the one in which Yanukovich was the last elected president; that he's an inspiring enough orator on the international stage that he's garnering more international support that would fall away with his death.
Or more likely - they classified random group of Russian soldiers as assassins. Or a bit less likely: random captured group of Russian soldiers boasted about trying to kill him.
At a slight tangent, C.J. Cherryh's very good _Foreigner_ series is set in a society where assassination, heavily regulated by the assassin's guild, is a legal institution and warfare almost never occurs.
> How do you know that whoever seizes power in the aftermath will be any better (more rational/humane) that the one who's just been assassinated?
It's impossible to know that for certain, just like it's impossible to know lots of things in politics for certain. But the probability is that the new leader will be an improvement.
In general I'm against a norm of assassinating leaders. But in Putin's case, I'd make an exception. The world will very likely be a better place with him gone.
> "If it's OK for the U.S. to assassinate Putin, why isn't it OK for us to take out [Biden][Macron][Scholz][fill in your favorite Western leader]?"
It's already totally OK, and in fact evil governments already try to do that, which is the reason that these leaders have constant bodyguards and protection. So the real question is, why are we protecting evil authoritarian leaders from assassination when they have no scruples about assassinating our own leaders? We should be willing to play the game every bit as dirty as they do.
In fact, "evil governments" very rarely try to assassinate foreign leaders, and almost never the leaders of major democratic powers. The bodyguards are mostly to protect them from their own citizens.
"Evil governments frequently try to assassinate Western leaders" is absurd on its face, not in the least because 1. You're conjuring the ghost of Whig history from its grave to divide governments into "goodies" and "baddies", and 2. You expect us to take someone talking about normalizing endless coups across the world as a good assessor of right and wrong.
Please provide examples of these "evil governments" that constantly try to assassinate US heads of state, with examples of said constant plots- I'd say one scheme per 4 years is a generous lower bound. Maybe then I can buy this as something beyond a bit.
Just looking at incentives: leaders of states broadly decide on what's normal in the context of international relations. Why would they as a group want to shift to a norm that places them in more personal jeopardy?
I also am skeptical that having world leaders more often thinking "the leader of opposing country X tried to kill me last year but failed" would result in less armed conflict. I view it as more likely that it would intensify the role of personal grudges and desire for revenge as drivers of armed conflict.
> leaders of states broadly decide on what's normal in the context of international relations. Why would they as a group want to shift to a norm that places them in more personal jeopardy?
Why do leaders EVER do anything that limits their power? Because the rest of us will kill them if they don't. Do you think the kings of old ever stepped down voluntarily? They did it because they feared the executioner's axe if they didn't comply with the will of the people.
Ok, so let's say that Russia conquers Ukraine and installs a puppet dictatorship (as they're likely to do). The next day, they say, "ok, we're taking Finland now, stay out or suffer terrible consequences". What's our move ? Do we say, "damn, it's a hard break, but no one wants to start a nuclear war over Finland" ? Ok, so they take Finland. Then it's Sweden. Then it's the Aleutian Islands. Then they say, "hey, we know Lithuania is part of NATO, but guess what, we're taking it now, stay out or it's WWIII". Is Lithuania worth a nuclear war ? Probably not, right ? And then, they ask for Alaska...
My point is, mutually assured destruction only works when it's *mutually assured*. If we have a pre-commitment to never even risking nuclear war, then it's the same as announcing that any dictator can have anything he wants, no strings attached.
We have a precommitment to war if a NATO member is attacked via Article 4, up to and including nuclear war. And given the poor performance in Ukraine, I sincerely doubt Russia could continue westward.
First of all, this line in the sand implies giving up Finland and Sweden to Russia; are we prepared to do that ? Second of all, Scott's stance -- "no nuclear war at any cost" -- implies that abandoning NATO members is on the table. For example, what if Putin publishes a video where Lithuanian-looking soldiers seemingly set a bus full of nuns on fire ? Is this our excuse to kick Lithuania out of NATO ? I mean, yes, the video is probably fake, but we can't risk WWIII, better safe than sorry... right ?
Scott's stance is not "no nuclear war at any cost". He spent a whole section talking about this:
"No sane person thinks it’s worth risking nuclear war just to protect something as minor as the Aleutian Islands. But then the US gives Russia the Aleutians, and next year they ask for all of Alaska. And even Alaska isn’t really worth risking nuclear war over, so you give it to them, and then the next year…
So people who don’t want to be exploited occasionally set lines in the sand, where they refuse to make trivial concessions even to prevent global apocalypse. This is good, insofar as it prevents them from being exploited, but bad, insofar as sometimes it causes global apocalypse. So far the solution everyone has settled on are lots of very finicky rules about which lines you’re allowed to draw and which ones you aren’t."
1. Precommitments only work when you precommit to them. If the US says "oh, don't worry, we won't defend Ukraine", and then Russia invades Ukraine, and then we say we'll nuke them, Russia is going to view this as a violation and humiliation and might go with the nuclear exchange. What we want is a bright line where we say ahead of time "IF you invade these people, we'll go full WWIII", and then Russia won't invade.
2. But I don't think we should necessarily be maximalists about this, because if we say something like "if you ever invade any country, or do sketchy espionage stuff, or look at us funny, we'll start WWIII over it", then eventually Russia is going to feel like it's being taken advantage of and start WWIII rather than have its freedom curtailed that much (for comparison, imagine if Russia said to US "if you ever invade or interfere in any other country, we'll start WWIII" - would we stop having bases? Would we stop destabilizing random Central Americans?
3. I think the expected solution to this is to have a few open-and-shut cases where we say "definitely don't cross this line or WWIII", and some weaker cases where we say "we're not committing to WWIII here, but we might make your life annoying", and so on. Two countries with a core of WWIII-provocations and a periphery of lesser-commitments might occasionally brush up against each other in a way where their lesser commitments get violated and have to sanction each other or something, but are less likely to get to WWIII territory.
4. I think this is what we're doing right now - NATO is our bright-line "we will definitely start WWIII over this" core, surrounded by a periphery of countries like Ukraine and FInland where neither Russia nor the US will start WWIII over them but we're allowed to have strong opinions and place sanctions and so on. It might be that we've drawn those lines in the wrong place - this is the "Finland should join NATO" debate - but I don't think it's sustainable to not have those lines and say that everything is WWIII material.
First, The CIA secretly gives Stinger missiles to everyone involved, then one of them attacks their neighbor, then come the sanctions and the public attention.
It's as good a time to say it as any - people in rationalist spaces talk a lot about various kinds of X-risk, but actually very little about the primary X-risk the world is faced with. As far as I can tell, there is no reasonable model where (e.g.) bioweapons or unaligned AI present a higher risk than nuclear weapons; in the case of nukes and nukes alone, development is done, the equipment for deployment is built, and geopolitical paths towards their use aren't considered far-fetched. Overall the risk of an apocalyptic nuclear exchange has been estimated, conservatively speaking, as being somewhere between 0.5% and 0.1% per year; look at how this level of risk compounds over time [0] and you can see that this is on level with forecasts for AI risk. And yet most discussion of X-risk centers around AI, while nuclear risk is mostly ignored.
Is nuclear X-risk not talked about simply because no one has any ideas? Or because there's no points of leverage on the problem? Neither of these seem likely- we have a lot of very smart people in these circles, and also a lot of people with significant resources are at least influenced by what rationalists have to say (see e.g. the money sloshing around AI alignment circles now.) To be sure, the U.S. and Russia are very large, high-inertia institutions, even relative to the resources available in the rationalist and rat-adjacent community. But it doesn't follow that in the vast space of things we could potentially do, *none* of them would help address the issue; if we think we have leverage on climate change, which involves planetary-scale atmospheric physics, or AI risk, which involves entities we essentially model presently as gods, nuclear risk should sound entirely tractable by comparison.
We're reasonably fortunate that the Ukrainian crisis occurred in a time where we have relatively skilled and cautious Western leadership, where other geopolitical events that could interfere are relatively contained, etc. It's all too clear how this could fail to be the case next time. Hopefully this situation will serve as a wake-up call that we've been tiptoeing around an elephant in the room for a long time.
Could part of the explanation be about perceived skills? Climate change and AI x-risk seem like problems for engineers, but nuclear war seems like it's about aggression, trust, and credibility among high-level decision-makers.
(That is too neat a distinction. With AI, there's also the issue of Russian and Chinese engineers taking risks that rationalist-influenced American engineers might avoid. With climate change, there's the risk of substantial emissions cheating undercutting international treaties. And nuclear weapons procedures could presumably get some command-and-control improvements.)
If rationalists want to try solving international political problems, why not start with an obscure, non-militarized dispute (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_areas_disputed_by_Canada_and_the_United_States) and work slowly towards more substantial disputes? Maybe some border disputes can be resolved with crowdfunded payoffs to interest groups who lose out on resources in the settlement. But I think it is very unlikely that this would reduce the risk of nuclear war. First, pride is at stake, not just quantifiable things. Second, major disputes tend to involve not just the territory or alliance at stake, but also who has an advantage heading into the next dispute/war.
Nuclear X-risk isn't talked about because it isn't an X-risk. Nuclear war does not result in human extinction. If the current crisis escalates to World War III, the historians of 3,000 AD, and 30,000 AD and 3,000,000 AD, will talk about it in about the same way they and we talk about the Bronze Age Collapse.
Lots of people don't consider anyone farther into the future than their own grandchildren to really "count", but rationalists mostly do. And from that perspective, risks that might result in literal human extinction are categorically different than risks that set back the development of civilization by a century or two and kill a tiny fraction of all the humans that ever lived or (barring extinction) will live.
No, global fallout wouldn't kill everyone. Neither would nuclear winter. We've talked about this many times before.
There are a lot of rationalists and EAs who have tried pretty hard to figure out a place to push on nuclear weapons. But there aren't a lot of good leverage points: MAD is a hard strategy to beat, and I don't think unilateral nuclear disarmament is a good option. And once you're not unilaterally disarming, the main goal is to not first-strike, which everyone always says they're not going to do anyway.
The main things I know in this cause area are:
- trying to figure out ways to prevent nukes from going off by accident. I think this is limited by countries not letting random people inspect their nukes.
- trying to make nuclear war more survivable, by eg fallout shelters and radioactivity-proof strains of plants. I think there are some people working on this.
- sending me emails saying "PLEASE WRITE A POST SAYING NO-FLY ZONES ARE DUMB"
I agree that it would be great if more people could work on this.
It seems to me that the best way to prevent nuclear war would be for all important countries to be liberal democracies. Unfortunately the ruling classes of China and Russia don't seem to want that.
Agreed. Nuclear weapons are the biggest reason I don't think it's alright to just say "well they can just run their countries as they please". Which is not to say we ought to invade them or anything silly, just that it's justified in being a liberal democracy universalist because of the damage that nuclear war would cause.
I certainly appreciate the argument that this is a big political issue with a lot of entrenched interests that are hard to budge. And political solutions are made even harder by the fact that unilateral disarmament is probably bad on balance (although I wonder if we would really lose all that much if the US did partially disarm, and there's potential gain from that as well, at least if we do it before Russia and China are vying for parity between each other.)
But I think that to some degree this is an argument we've grown too comfortable with rather than looking for points of leverage that play better to our strengths. Nuclear weapons aren't a psychological or philosophical problem or anything like that; they're a kind of machine that has had negative effects in the context of our current global milieu. In that sense they're on the same playing field as coal-fired power plants or Facebook. In the case of those two, its uncontroversial that purely technical advances (green power, or self-imposed-website-restriction browser plugins, respectively) can ameliorate or solve the problem. Do we assume the outlook for nukes is any different?
No, I myself don't have any ideas for technical solutions to pull out of my hat. But as a point of comparison, consider chemical weapons. The world has mostly stopped using them (well, knock on wood.) This was not because we got every horrible dictator on the planet to agree that humaneness was more important than military power; it was instead mostly due to changes in how wars were fought, which rendered chemical weapons more-or-less obsolete. (Source and details: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ ) War will change again, someday; perhaps it can change in a way that makes planet-killing weapons equally obsolete. The questions involved there are almost exclusively technical ones, of some kind or another.
(Also yes, thank you Scott for emphasizing the stupidity of the no-fly zone position. We should be taking note of who is speaking out in favor of no-fly zones currently; it's not every day that so many dumb public figures outright announce themselves as such.)
> I wonder if we would really lose all that much if the US did partially disarm, and there's potential gain from that as well, at least if we do it before Russia and China are vying for parity between each other.
What is the potential gain from unilateral partial US disarmament, other than saving money? I tend to think of reductions as best saved for negotiations on bilateral (eventually trilateral?) reductions, and I would like to know what the alternative perspective is.
To be clear, I'm sort of spitballing there. Unilateral (partial) disarmament seems like the sort of thing traditional analysts have gone over enough that the fact we haven't done this is good evidence that it's not actually a good idea. But the potential benefits that come to mind:
1) There would be fewer nukes in the world, putting a lower cap on the amount of nuclear destruction that could happen in general.
2) Phasing out effective "first-strike" capability is a good way of committing to a no-first-use doctrine. This should tend to lower nuclear tension overall.
3) Russia (and/or China) would have less incentive to maintain their own armaments if it didn't have to maintain parity with ours (e.g., didn't have to maintain so many ICBMs to have a chance of knocking out all our ICBMs in a "counterforce strike.") Maintaining their nuclear stockpile costs them money too, so they may follow suit in downsizing.
4) (Even more speculatively) The main argument against strategic missile defense systems is that they risk shifting the strategic balance far enough in favor of the defended party that it could destabilize MAD. If the balance is already tiled against us because we have fewer nukes, perhaps an effective missile defense system would simply restore strategic balance to a more stable state. And defenses (together with disarmament) would lead to fewer warheads going off if the worst happens.
I know you don't actually believe this, given your opening statement, but your point #3 is kind of...ludicrous.
The cat is out of the bag and it's not going back in. Whether you believe Putin or Xi is evil enough to hold on to their nukes so they can rule the world, someone will come along who is. MAD is an important balancing act in the world.
Don't mistake this for me being against limiting nuclear proliferation - this Russia episode is a clear example of why minimizing the number of nuclear states is critical for minimizing worldwide aggression....
People like Scott will let you kill anyone you want as long as you don't nuke them. Its not even acceptable to challenge them (defensive only no fly zone). Apparently shooting down missiles they are launching at another non-aggressor country's civilians is too offensive to a nuclear armed leader....
> - trying to figure out ways to prevent nukes from going off by accident. I think this is limited by countries not letting random people inspect their nukes.
One cause might be advocating for mutual safety audits. The goal would be each nuclear-armed country agreeing to periodically audit the safety procedures of one or more trusted nuclear-armed allies. Image-conscious politicians might value the opportunity to portray themselves as responsible custodians of the weapons.
However, not all nuclear-armed countries have a trusted, nuclear-armed ally. The process would also sit awkwardly with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which includes five and excludes four (soon five?) nuclear-armed countries.
By the way, did you know John von Neumann said that he supported a US first strike, back before the USSR would have been able to launch a second strike?
>By the way, did you know John von Neumann said that he supported a US first strike, back before the USSR would have been able to launch a second strike?
I think this was a reasonable thing to support, however horrific it might sound. Not because its worth it to defeat communism or something, but simply to avoid having the USSR use nukes against us or our allies. We of course know now this didn't end up happening, but it was a lot closer than people realize, and we know for a fact that the USSR developed war plans for the invasion and rapid defeat of western europe using nuclear weapons if necessary. Again, they obviously didn't do this, but early cold-war observers turned out to be exactly right for believing that the USSR were willing to do this.
Of course, you can say that the USSR would be right to nuke NATO if NATO were the type of countries to be okay with a nuclear first strike on the USSR, but this is not relevant for the judgements from the NATO perspective (and the soviet invasion/bombing of western europe would ultimately have been expansionism, not a defensive war).
Germany also believed in 1914 that it was being rational in deciding to risk war there and then rather than waiting until after Russia would have become too strong. But of course this ultimately ended up very poorly for Germany, with Germany losing one World War and then losing another World War even harder once it aimed for a rematch.
So, it made sense for US policymakers in the 1950s to look back at 1914 Germany and not to repeat their mistakes.
"By the way, did you know John von Neumann said that he supported a US first strike, back before the USSR would have been able to launch a second strike?"
Similar to how Germany supported preventative war against Russia in 1914 before Russia became too strong? And yet look at how well that turned out for Germany. It lost one World War, then tried again for a repeat and lost even harder the second time around. Though I suppose that Germany could take comfort in the fact that Russia has suffered much more than it itself has during the 20th century. Mission accomplished, I guess?
>As far as I can tell, there is no reasonable model where (e.g.) bioweapons or unaligned AI present a higher risk than nuclear weapons
Totally disagree. At the very least, bioweapons pose an orders of magnitude larger x-risk than nuclear weapons, and I would go so far as to say they may be the single greatest x-risk facing humanity, at least as long as superintelligence machines don't exist.
-Most nuclear states don't want to use nuclear weapons because the retaliation would wipe them out, so the risk of state vs state nuclear war is low (but not zero), and it's not clear this would necessarily lead to x-risk. Terrorists cannot easily create nuclear weapons due to difficulty in producing fissile material and the technical aspects of bomb creation, and they can't make ballistic missiles so they somehow have to deliver this bomb without getting caught. And even if they detonate a fission bomb in midtown manhattan, this isn't close to posing an x-risk and there will be nobody to retaliate against with ICBMs.
-Bioweapons on the other hand are absolutely capable of being produced by terrorists, if not now then in the very near future. It is becoming trivially easy to edit the DNA of viruses, and within a few decades at most, undergraduate biology students will have the know-how and technology to manipulate a virus to increase its virality and lethality, which means educated terrorists will be able to too. Even a anti-society lone wolf with the right education will eventually be able to pull it off and attempt to destroy humanity out of spite (or maybe to protect the environment etc). And unlike nuclear weapons, these really could pose an x-risk. Imagine covid that was say, fives times as contagious and ten times as deadly. It could be introduced into the population extremely simply (compared with smuggling in a nuclear bomb) and once its out, there's basically no stopping it, and society will basically collapse (because who on earth would leave their homes with such a deadly virus tearing through society?) and nobody will be capable of making or distributing a vaccine. And then of course, there's gain of function research in which researchers have literally created such viruses already, and if this is allowed to continue, the cumulative probability of even the most secure labs having an inadvertent leak continues to grow. And then of course there's the US government's bone headed idea of publishing the genomes of deadly viruses online.
I think you're grossly underestimating the decline in barriers to the creation of bioweapons that are occurring with each passing year and the hazards they could pose.
"They’ve seen American conservatives say nice things about enemy dictators because at least they’re not American liberals"
More that American conservatives have started questioning whether dictators designated by the national security state as "enemy" are really <I>their</I> enemies. What beef does Bashar al-Assad have with me? This is hardly exclusive to them, it's common when populations feel their governments are dominated by the outgroup. An increasingly smaller proportion of the population identifies with the national security state and feels like its enemies are their enemies.
That's not to say one needs patriotism to motivate people to fight. I'm sure plenty would do it for money if enough was on offer.
I'm an American conservative, and I agree with this sentiment. What beef does Putin have with me? Sure, he's a brutal war-monger killing thousands of innocent Ukrainians, but I'm not Ukrainian, and there are plenty of brutal dictators in the world that the US props up. Whether Biden or Trump wins the election, or whether wokists win or lose the culture war, has a lot more to do with my future well-being than the relative power of the US vs. Russia in eastern Europe.
Ok. But that is a very egoistic worldview...now, not surprisingly, since "(North) American Conservatism" seems to be about egoism (mostly) from what I can tell...anyway, if there could be a nuclear war, that seems to be much more important than wokism doesn't it...
There's the smuggled assumption that interventionism would reduce the chance of a nuclear war, which I'm decidedly unsure of.
I see it less as North American conservatives being unusual than as them regressing to the common norm. "Isolationism" seems unusual for Americans but perfectly ordinary for Peruvians or Sri Lankans. Would you condemn them as Egoists? Or Muhammad Ali, who famously said that "I ain't got nothing against no Viet Cong; no Viet Cong never called me nigger."
> "Isolationism" seems unusual for Americans but perfectly ordinary for Peruvians or Sri Lankans. Would you condemn them as Egoists?
No, they would be sensible. It makes sense for small countries to not to try to make big changes in the world mas they probably won't be successful. it's a lot easier for big countries to make big changes as they have more resources.
Yes I agree. This is why left-wing nationalism tends to arise in smaller countries (thus "oppressed" peoples), and right-wing nationalism - which is close to fascism IMO - in larger countries, as they are a display of dominance and superiority,
So in this thread we've simultaneously agreed that "conservatives" are isolationist while also right wing nationals to display dominance and superiority. Which is it?
I am so tired of these tribal sweeping statements. They don't even make sense.
Aggressive redistribution is a fascist policy, yet no one accuses Liz Warren of being a fascist when she calls for a wealth tax. Literally she wants to *seize your property, by force if you're not willing, and give it to someone else*.
So no, I don't accept a-priori that people who are on the right wing spectrum are more fascist than the left. The most fascist governments in history have all paraded as left wing governments! The Nazis were socialists.
You can call Trump a fascist if you believe he is promoting fascist policies. I'm interested in which ones those are. Individuals sure, but these broad statements are not helpful.
Well, I meant that North American conservatives seem as their "basic principle" (if they have one, because most of their ideas seems to be just against what the left does) is that nothing should stop individual freedoms, at least when it it's a negative freedom (thus North American conservatives supported the Trucker Convoy, but were against the railways blockades by indigenous people in Canada...one was an individualistic negative freedoms-based "resistance", while the other was communitarian, and more in line with positive freedoms). European conservatives seem to be more concerned both about positive and negative freedoms, at least that's the impression I get as an European who has lived both in Europe (Germany) and North America (Canada and a few years in the US).
Yes, it is a egoistic worldview. Your own worldview is also egoistic. Do you care just as much about Syria or Ethiopia, which both have ongoing civil wars, as you do about your own home? Would you be indifferent about whether a bomb dropped on top of Aleppo or on top of your own head? Of course not. It is not practically possible to be non-egoistic toward every human being. Instead, we pick and choose who deserves each marginal unit of our attention, money, and time. One person might choose their children; another might choose Ukrainian civilians; a third might choose the local homeless shelter. Choosing the first or third option is not obviously more egoistic than picking the second.
As for a nuclear war, which moral system do you think is more likely to result in a nuclear war: 1) the one that says the US is the world police and must intervene to avenge every bad thing ever done by our geopolitical enemies (while shielding our allies who do the same bad things, e.g. Saudi Arabia in Yemen), or 2) my moral system, which says the US should stop playing geopolitical games in eastern Europe and stay out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict because I don't want us to get nuked?
The 2nd is more likely to result in nuclear war, because letting Putin get away with it make it more likely he'll try it again, each time telling the west "go along with this or nukes". And sooner or later he'll miscalculate.
Furthermore, standing up to Putin may well result in him being couped, which reduces risk of nuclear wart because the new leader will probably be less reckless.
Maybe. It depends on the amount of control and power Putin has over the Russian government/military apparatus. SO I am neutral on 1. or 2 by Dionysus...
Yes, I am egoistic. I will admit it. For example, I have residences in both Canada and Germany, and if things get dicey in Europe, I will go back to Canada...
Anyway, I think it is about differentiating between individual and society-wide egoism. E.g. I can be egoistic about myself and other people close to me, but on a societal level, I still can support my country/countries to do what I consider to be right - from a moral perspective (based either on utilitarian or deontological ethics) - regardless if it is negative for me personally. Or maybe I am a hypocrite? I guess everyone is, though, to some extent...
> Sure, he's a brutal war-monger killing thousands of innocent Ukrainians, but I'm not Ukrainian
USA is connected to the rest of the world. The West is currently at the start of a long term conflict with Russia and China. The bigger the West is the more likely it is to win. Therefore if the west includes Ukraine it is more likely to win. The same argument applies to Taiwan.
If someone is coming at the question from anti-woke point of view, then the argument could be made that if Ukraine wins, then Ukraine and possibly Russia join EU. This pushes the center of gravity of EU eastwards. Since Ukraine and Russia (like other eastern European countries) aren't woke, this makes the EU an non-woke or even anti-woke economic bloc that's at least as liberal, democratic and big as the USA.
What exactly has Orban done wrong? He's no liberal democrat, but neither are the leaders of many countries that liberals aren't hostile towards. I think it's kind of weird to single him out as especially awful. At the very least, I think it's not unreasonable to think his anti-democratic moves are less damaging than the immigration policies of a number of western european countries.
Literally, in several western european countries white europeans are projected to becomes minorities in their own countries *this century*. What's the point of having a strong democracy if your political equity is diluted to nothing through immigration (not to mention your standard of living being greatly harmed through the enormous fiscal burden, crime and anti-social behavior)? Hungary is a much poorer country than western european countries, but it was like that before Orban and would most likely have remained that way if a democrat were in power.
Your suggestions would have been reasonable if Putin could be trusted to keep his promises. Even with a "saved face" he is unlikely to just stop meddling in Ukrainian affairs, even outside Donetsk/Luhansk/Crimea. Casualties and economic losses mean nothing to him (and never meant anything to any Soviet or Russian leader, not that the US is very much different in that respect), so a formal recognition of a Russian claim in exchange for "peace" would be a win for him and a loss for Ukraine (and the West).
Good alternatives are non-existent...
A no-fly zone (shooting down Russian planes) would definitely be calling Putin's nuke bluff (or not a bluff), and a few percent chance of a nuclear escalation is more than the West can stomach. It would still not assure Ukrainian victory, since presumably Turkish drones would be off limits, as well.
Russia eventually taking Kiyv would result in underground resistance for years, openly supported and armed by the West, with the sanctions lasting indefinitely long and ordinary Russians paying the price.
Russia retreating to the Eastern Ukraine breakaway zones borders seems a bit better, but still result in the continued border issues as well as sanctions.
Putin going away one way or another would probably be the least bad outcome for everyone, but it can spark a lot of internal unrest in Russia proper, as well as resentment against the West due to the internal recognition of Russia as a has-been, whose power needs to be restored. Any punitive damages Versailles-style going toward restoration of Ukraine would make it even worse.
Basically, it looks like a train wreck no matter how you slice it.
I agree Putin won't keep his promises. If I were Ukraine (and now we're getting into total fantasy, but just to respond) I would pass a law saying that Crimea etc were ceded to Russia as soon as all Russian troops leave Ukraine. I don't think Putin would immediately bring his troops back in, given that he needs time to rebuild. I think he would wait another five years or so, by which time Ukraine would be in a better relative position.
So is your position that Putin's statements surrounding Ukraine's right to exist as an independent nation, etc, are just posturing? I presume you've read at least his most recent long statement on the subject. I suggest you also look into some of the long form essays he's produced.
The consensus from Ukrainian scholars I've read is that his intention is very clear and the existence of Ukraine as an identity is not among those intentions.
I think they have decided they'd rather die then live under the Russian yoke. Having visited the country in 2019 and having friends there, I get.
As my good friend living in Kyiv told me when I asked her "what happens if the government falls?": "Then my brother, father, and boyfriend are dead. And I flee".
The idea that American planes shooting down Russian planes in a proxy conflict as some red line seems strange to me. That happened during the Cold War with "volunteer" pilots who somehow "volunteered" their equipment and its replacement/refueling. In Korea and Vietnam at least. I'm not sure if it's a good idea for other reasons. But the specific line of argument seems strange to me. I guess it's an argument against specifically making a no fly zone. But the plausibly deniable volunteer/"Ukrainian air force" intervention doesn't seem meaningfully different and has been done several times. Likewise giving them bases in surrounding countries to attack from which we keep under our umbrella of protection.
Have the rules changed? Maybe they have. But it wasn't the actual rule during the Cold War. And if they have, then Russia shouldn't have buzzed our planes or tried to ram our ships. This all instead looks like the west collectively deciding to be asymmetrically restrained. Which might be the right move: Russia is worth keeping some dry powder for because they're just not that big anymore.
I think it worked at the time due to plausible deniability. New MiGs would show up with North Korean/North Vietnamese markings, blending in with other MiGs of the same model, and it wasn't until you shot one down (which you didn't all that often because they were much better than the local pilots) and managed to capture the pilot that you figured out he looked suspiciously blond. And over time you figure out there's rather a lot of these "volunteers".
Whereas if F-16s or Typhoons suddenly show up in Ukranian skies painted with blue and yellow then the game is immediately up. There's no plausible deniability, nobody in Ukraine knows how to fly a Western fighter jet.
I mean, I don't think it was that deniable to begin with. The famous example was a reporter seeing a shipment of aircraft and pilots at the bar and being told, "I see nothing! And you see nothing too!"
Shipping aircraft doesn't need to be denied; that's perfectly legal. Shipping pilots isn't illegal if all those pilots do is deliver the aircraft and maybe act as flight instructor, so that doesn't need to be denied either.
The only thing that needs to be denied, is that the "nonbelligerent" pilots are flying combat missions. And that *is* deniable, at least so long as the enemy doesn't capture any. Since any Russian pilots in Vietnam were flying mostly defensive air intercept missions over North Vietnam, I don't think that ever happened.
But, as Melvin notes, that stops working if your "nonbelligerent" pilots are flying planes your belligerent ally doesn't have. Or if you fly combat missions out of bases in a "nonbelligerent" country.
Yeah, and then fought for about three weeks. The United States, which wanted its pilots to actually survive the war, took six months to train the pilots first. And their airplanes were much simpler.
If you're talking about Ukrainian pilots who already know how to fly some sort of jet fighter and want to train them specifically on F-16s or Typhoons or whatever, that's probably about two months - maybe a bit shorter if you have a high-intensity training syllabus already prepared, but I doubt we do.
If aircraft losses have already left the Ukrainian Air Force with a significant pilot surplus, it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to quietly bring a few of them to Nevada and start training them on F-16s, but it *probably* wouldn't pay off in time to make any real difference.
The vehicles in front are stopped, too, so it's not like they were yielding right-of-way. Although they didn't just block the intersection, which is something.
Russia has miscalculated? How do you know that? By assuming that Western propaganda is true? The beginning of a war is called the fog of war for a reason. I don't see any mention of the clear information war that is going on. Of course Ukraine is going to say that Russia miscalculated.
Turn that rhetorical question around, though. If you dispute the sentence "Russia has miscalculated," does that mean you think Russia hasn't miscalculated, and this is all going according to plan?
It's fair, of course, to say that nobody outside of the Kremlin *knows for sure*, but based on what you've read, would you consider a claim that "Russia has miscalculated" to be (a) more likely true than not, or (b) more likely false than not?
I'd rate it more likely than not that Russia planned on this being easier than it has turned out to be. They hit Kyiv on Feb 25 and still have failed to encircle it. They still don't have air superiority. Western response has been more unified than the West expected it to be - not sure why we would credit Russia with having expected more unity than we ourselves did. And nobody could have predicted how effective a former comedian turned president would be in an information war.
As far as sources go I've found the Institute for the Study of War to be pretty solid and comprehensive, but if you have one you think is better I'm definitely interested. https://www.understandingwar.org/
That isn't how logic works. If I say "there is no reason to believe this bowl has an even number of gumballs", that doesn't mean "there is reason to believe this bowl has an odd number of gumballs".
The default position is: we don't know.
A true skeptic is confortable being uncertain. There's absolutely no need to make a claim one way or the other.
I don't identify as a "skeptic," but it seems to me that while a skeptic is comfortable with uncertainty, that doesn’t mean he ignores the data he has access to. And while it is certainly imperfectly sourced, we have a *lot* of available data on the state of the Russian advance into Ukraine.
In the spirit of making my own bed too, I’d say that I think it’s substantially more likely than not that Russia did not expect this level of resistance from Ukraine, response from the international community, or failures on the part of its own military, prior to commencing the invasion. North of 75% that we are outside the bell curve they thought they were on when they pulled the trigger.
So again, I’m curious where your own estimate would fall on whether Russia is getting what it expected here. And I totally understand that “impossible to even estimate” is a valid response to these kinds of questions, but if that’s really where you fall I have to wonder what your reading, and I’d ask you to consider whether you are really being a neutral and reasonable observer, or just ignoring the evidence you yourself have on hand.
10 fakes stories don't make 1 true story. We have a lot of data, but it's *all* unreliable. A rational person would ignore all unreliable data.
You say "this level of resistance", but you have no idea what the actual level of resistance actually is. Your only sources of information are biased, and even they don't have the full picture. Even if they tried to give you an objective picture (which they aren't), they can't.
So far I haven't seen anything that suggests that Russia wouldn't be able to get its primary objectives.
It seems like you are demanding perfect information unnecessarily. 10 fake stories don’t make 1 true story, but 10 consistent stories can have evidentiary value even if received from imperfect sources.
You don’t approach trying to answer a complex question by splitting your evidence into one bucket of “unreliable” data (which you totally ignore), and another (empty) bucket of “reliable” data that meet some platonic standard of knowable truth (which you wait for). That’s not a recipe for an accurate decision, it’s a formula for waiting forever and never deciding anything at all. Or for slipping on your analysis and just letting yourself drop facts you don’t like into the “unreliable” bucket.
So you evaluate based on the data you have, and assign credibility based on source. Otherwise you’re just left disbelieving everything – intentionally ignorant in an ocean of knowledge.
I'm not going to belabor your life or mine by compiling a mountain of links to everything I've ever read on the invasion and asking you to read it - I've already provided you my primary source, and while I don't think it's gospel, I've seen it quoted from the BBC to Al Jazeera. So while I won't assign it "platonic truth" level value, neither will I assign it (or the other things I've read) a value of zero.
If you have something to add to that analysis I'm happy to consider it, but if all you're going to do is jump around and throw the words "bias" and "propaganda" at everything, then I'm going to view this argument the same way I do when someone tells me no one has *really proven* that vaccines don't cause autism, that Barak Obama was born in the United States, or that the moon landing is real.
>So far I haven't seen anything that suggests that Russia wouldn't be able to get its primary objectives.
Let's say that Russia eventually completes it's primary objectives several months from now. This is NOT mutually exclusive with Putin having miscalculated. He may have invaded Ukraine on the basis that it would take very little time and would involve minimal loss of Russian life. If this turns out to be untrue, then he miscalculated. The fact that he endeavours to complete the objectives eventually anyway is irrelevant to this. Perhaps, if he knew that it was going to be as costly as it so far has been and likely will be, he may not have invaded, but now that he has invaded he feels its worth completing his primary objectives.
Say I plan to break into somebody's house to steal their laptop and I choose a particular time to do it because I expect the person will be out of the house at that time, meaning I won't risk a violent confrontation/having the police called. If when I break in they in fact are home and I nonetheless violently subdue them and steal their laptop, and am seriously injured in the process, the fact that I ended up with the laptop does not mean I didn't make a miscalculation in choosing when to break in, and had I known they would be home I wouldn't have broken in.
The miscalculation is not that Russia are likely to lose to Ukraine, it's that defeating Ukraine will be vastly more costly for Russia than anticipated.
Because they have already written in advance self-congratulatory articles on their easy victory in Ukraine... and accidentally published them. (Then deleted them, but internet remembers.)
It doesn't mention any kind of easy victory though; it was likely pulled because it went a bit too far on "We're taking over, deal with it" while talks were still ongoing and there were hopes that Ukraine might fold.
Author liked his piece and reposted it elsewhere anyway, which implies he doesn't necessarily goes in lock-step with current propaganda position.
Some leaked Russian documents (which I believe are real, though you can think otherwise) expressed a strategy based on Ukrainian resistance folding within the first 3 days (Anatoly Karlin, who's a good Putin oracle, predicted the same). Given that the prediction markets are now saying they'll hold out a month or more, I think it's fair to describe this as a miscalculation. They could still win, but not in a way that's "according to plan".
First, I do not make assumptions. If some documents say X, that only proves that some documents say X. The documents very well could be false, especially since USA had been trying to sell the notion that Russia would invade for months. They could be true, sure, but it isn't rational to *assume* so.
Second, even if the documents are real and a strategy is expressed in which Ukrainian forces fold within the first 3 days, that doesn't mean it was the *only* strategy. For every battle there's multiple scenarios considered, and even then most experienced generals know that something unexpected could happen, and they need to prepare for that as well.
Third, software development is more predictable than war, and even then if I think a task will take me a week, it's custom to double the prediction just to be safe. If it turns out it takes me four weeks, I wouldn't say I "miscalculated" because I never actually had much faith in finishing in one week.
A prediction is worthless without assigning any probability. If I say this task will take me 3 days, but I assign 55% probability, that isn't much of a prediction.
It's accurate to say Russia *might* have miscalculated, not imply that they definitely did.
> The documents very well could be false, especially since USA had been trying to sell the notion that Russia would invade for months
What does this mean? Russia did invade. So you think that their claims of having intelligence this would happen were false, and the fact that it happened makes America's claims, what, a coincidence or something? Because if you're arguing that the US have literally been fabricating documents to try and convince people of something which they didn't have good evidence for, you're necessarily claiming that their intelligence claims were false and it was in fact a coincidence that Russia invaded after all.
I do not claim the intelligence was false, I'm claiming the intelligence wasn't necessarily true, which isn't the same thing.
If I bet everyone in a bar that Peter wants to hit me, and then I get in front of Peter and start bothering him saying "you want to hit me, right?", "you are a hot head", "you can't control yourself, huh?", "you are a moron who knows nothing but violence", and then I get hit, would you characterize that as an accurate "prediction"?
That is not the only possibility. Another possibility is that their claims *provoked* the attack. Another possibility is that other actions provoked the attack, and they knew they were going to do those other actions.
Sorry, are you suggesting that Putin wouldn't have invaded if the US hadn't said he was going to invade? That he amassed troops and vehicles and weapons around Ukraine's border with no intention of invading, but then decided to invade, to start a WAR with a country, which they otherwise wouldn't have?
This is just kooky levels of Russia apologetics. It's simply absurd to claim that Russia weren't going to invade until the US goaded them into it, and if you are going to claim that, you somehow think a rash decision to invade was also not a miscalculation, as if it were all aprt of the grand leader's plan all along. Simply contradictory nonsense.
That is not the only option. Another option is that Ukraine was planning an attack on Donbas, USA knew that, eventually Russia learned about that changed their plans and decided to invade Ukraine, even if they originally did not intend to.
Are you going to admit that you're wrong yet? You're going to need increasingly byzantine mental gymnastics to claim the war is going as planned for Russia. Do you imagine that it was the plan all along to have their soldiers without food and their tanks without fuel?
"Install a Russia-friendly regime? 'Demilitarize and Denazify' the Ukrainian government? Where'd you crazy westerners get that idea? The objective all along was just to liberate Donbass, which the Russians are achieving, and the campaign is therefore (obviously) an unqualified success."
To be clear, this is actually good - anything that can open the door for Putin to claim victory and go home increases the probability of the conflict ending, which *is* pretty much an unalloyed good. But we shouldn't hold our breath for anything that looks like admitting a leadership screw-up, from this regime or its various supporters. Even if that reckoning is forced, it'll be bent as hard as possible to keep the accountability as low on the tree as possible. The advisors can be pilloried but every effort must be made to protect the Czar.
In other news of things going "exactly as planned" for Putin, Russia just announced it is going to "drastically reduce" its military presence around Kyiv.
Some might call that a retreat from a failed objective, but I'm sure this is all still perfectly in line with how Moscow expected the war would go before they started it.
1) Providing fighter aircraft is perfectly customary, the Soviet Union provided such aircraft for both North Korea and North Vietnam, during relevant wars.
2) Putin clearly stated that he wants full territory of D&L, hence broader than controlled before.
3) The United States was not into annexing any territory since the 1898 year, all further conflicts that were fought were never linked to annexation of territory.
> My understanding is that Russia operationalizes neutrality as “don’t join NATO or EU” [...] Ukraine was not in either of these organizations before the war, and not being in them afterwards changes nothing.
I do not understand this argument. If I limit your options, it changes a lot of things. If you dream about joining The World Rationalist Alliance and I prohibit you from following that dream, would you say that because you are not a member currently, it changes nothing?
I grew up in a small country occupied by Russians. Sometimes I think that people from big countries like the US cannot imagine how if feels to have your options limited because some other country decided so. But this is the core of that freedom Americans so love talking about, isn't it?
Also, this neutrality would be completely one-sided, I suppose. That is, Ukraine would never be allowed to join NATO or EU, but the "Belarus 2" scenario would remain a possibility, as long as it would not involve literal invasion of the Russian army.
That means, for local people their politics would become a one-way ratchet, where moving closer towards Russia is allowed, but moving away from it is forbidden. It doesn't matter how many anti-Russia politicians you elect; if you later make a mistake once and a bad guy gets elected... I suppose he could even invite the Russian army to help him, because that probably would not count as an invasion if they were literally invited by a democratically elected guy. And then, no anti-Russia politician will get elected ever, because all candidates for such role will be in prison.
Well, that's true, but then "countries" are artificial entities...so maybe it is wiser to join a larger country, and give up some sovereignty if it means having free speech and material well-being (e.g. the Visegrad countries should drop their opposition to the EU, and Germany (and France) in particular, since Germany is preferable to Russia...?
Interesting thoughts for sure. I also have a few thoughts (and questions) about what could develop out of this conflict going forwards, so here they are:
1. Will this conflict cause the public in Western Europe move more towards a "survive mindset" (as per Scott Alexander; https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ ) or will they stay in their "thrive mindset"? Obviously, Western Europe is (or at least seems to be to me) the most "thrive" region in the World, especially if compared to the US. The reason for that is not obvious to me, since the US has more natural resources and a higher GDP per Capita. Maybe this is because Western Europe has such a strong social safety net, and because the US has provided defense to Western Europe since 70+ years now? Anyway, this might change a bit, with Germany now investing more in its military, and possibly supporting non-renewable energy (though I guess the biggest proof of Germany moving to a more "survive" mindset would be if the Nuclear Reactors were to be kept operational longer).
2. I think that the war shows that Eurasia is a rather unstable continent, particularly in the central part (so anywhere from Eastern Europe to South-Central Asia). The longitudinal ends - East Asia and Western Europe - look to be stable, as they have been since WW 2. Still, the Geopolitical advantage of North America is once again evident. Geopolitical scholars like Peter Zeihan and George Friedman have long ago written about this, but it wasn't evident as Europe looked to be "better" for many people than North America. As an European, I know that many other Europeans don't want to hear this, because a lot of the modern EU's identity is grounded in a background belief of superiority over the US and to a lesser extent the other "Anglo-Saxons", but Geopolitical Reality is what it is, and the US has all the advantages in terms of Geopolitics, while Europe has little, so (we) Europeans should continue to be on good terms with the US as much as possible.
3. So, obviously the US has many geopolitical advantages. This makes me more bullish on the claim (which George Friedman already put into writing more than 10 years ago) that the US will continue to be the most powerful nation in the World. The only real competitor is China, but then China has many geopolitical disadvantages, and is dependent on trade (unlike the US, which is basically self-sufficient, especially in conjunction with NAFTA). Also, the Russian army looks really weak - I am not saying that the US would necessarily be better at invading a large like Ukraine, but the "mood affiliation" by many alt-righters has given them a rather rosy view of the Russian Army, and the nation overall. Russia has a weak economy, and it's not an attractive place to emigrate to, so obviously the US and Western Europe have the economic and cultural superiority over Russia. Russia's only advantage are it's natural resources and military, and that only over the EU (and to some extent China), since the US (together with Canada and Mexico) is basically self-sufficient and militarily superior. Thus, the US should try to get more concessions from the EU, simply from a Game Theory perspective.
4. From a financial/investing perspective, the US (and other countries connecting to its economy like Canada, Mexico etc.) should do relatively well over the next decade. Western Europe, on the other hand, will most likely have (another) bad decade economically. This will probably shift capital flows towards NAFTA from the EU. China will also do ok probably, though it has to tread carefully so as not to become too isolated from the West. Overall, this decade will probably reaffirm US superiority in terms of Global superpower status. The Europeans might become resentful of the US again though, but I think many in Europe have a more realistic view now - the US is simply superior over Europe in most areas, and the Europeans better try to move more into a "survive" mindset, since this will lead to future prosperity, at least until there is a post-scarcity society.
Completely crazy idea (sort of related to this post): To get a better understanding of Putin, someone could fine tune a model like GPT-3 or Jurassic to Putin speeches, conversations, etc., of Putin. Then one might have simulated conversations with Putin about his motivations, the war, and so on. Of course, this will not produce reliable information at all, but might still be a little bit insightful.
All GPT-3 does is learn to predict text. I bet there are a bunch of Russians who could come up with good continuations for the first paragraph of Putin speeches. Interrogating them might provide some useful information, but I'm not sure how much, and I'm not sure interrogating GPT-3 would be any better.
9. I do not think that Zelensky has the popular support to concede on any of the current Russian demands, let alone all of them. And even if he tried to, I do not think that the current Ukrainian elites would let him to. In fact, the current negotiations are so unpopular that he struggled to put together a competent negotiating team. A good indication of these difficulties and of the general attitude towards the negotiations is that out of 6 Ukrainian negotiators at the first round, by the third round one (Kireev) was killed by Ukrainian security services while "resisting arrest" for high treason.
"Killed while working as a spy for us" and "killed because he was a spy for the other side" are not mutually exclusive, if he was a double agent, but it is funny that they can't agree on the official record.
He was present in photos and videos taken at the negotiations. There is already a joke: "How do Ukrainians figured out Kireev is a spy? Easy, he was the only man at the meeting who wore a suit"
Re: jingoism, I suppose nothing promotes social cohesion better than real, bona fide external threats with big bombs and guns. Suddenly, Ibram Kendi's complaints start to seem a bit like first world problems when there are Russian tanks rolling into Kiev. Go figure.
Still, as I wrote elsewhere on the subject of Reddit-style jingoism: I remember during the whole Bari Weiss debacle at the NYT, she said "Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor." I worry that this is becoming true more generally: that private organizations and public institutions (including the federal government) are increasingly susceptible to the influence of Twitter or Reddit mobs, as if it were representative of public opinion. This is not good, because Twitter does not reward nuance, complexity, or even complete sentences. It rewards the opposite, really: indignation, us vs them thinking, stridency, snark, stupidity, etc. Ditto for Reddit.
> These are concessions in name only. Russia already has de facto control of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, and has for years (I’m assuming Putin means the areas he already controls; if he means “Donetsk” and “Luhansk” in a broader sense, that’s a harder sell). Ukraine ceding them does nothing except take away Russia’s casus belli for future wars.
First, as others have pointed out, no, Putin wants both oblasts in their entirety -- not as currently controlled by Russia -- and as part of Russia, not as independent states, even if that's the current offer on the table (and it seems people in Putin's security council knew that already, before the invasion). Second, that this would remove any future casus belli seems wrong, as the stated casus belli was the need to demilitarize and "denazify" Ukraine, with a whole lot of questioning if Ukraine should even exist as a country (and there's plenty of evidence that Putin is, or at least closely hews to the ideas of, a Soviet irredentist at heart (see: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2015-09-20/putins-philosopher)). Ceding these territories in no way removes that nominal casus belli. The "special military operation" will still have failed, and Ukraine will still be a country that the "nazis" control, with an operational military. It's questionable whether the nominal casus belli is even strictly nominal and this really is about Donbas and Crimea. That the situation in both places was stable enough, was sufficient to keep NATO out indefinitely, and kept movement towards the EU at a glacial pace, seems like pretty good evidence that Putin's real aim is exactly what it sounded like: destroying the Ukrainian military and state, annexing it if he could find a good pretext (like the government fleeing into exile), installing a puppet regime if not. Unless Putin's rhetoric starts being primarily about Donbas and Crimea, and not "nazis" and the very existence of the Ukrainian state, he's going to have trouble backing down from the current posture over the long term. Those Russian people steeped almost entirely in state media won't stand for it (which is just how Putin wants it), so there will be a repeat invasion in a few years.
Even if it did, Russia has a very poor track record of abiding by its agreements with Ukraine. Who in Ukraine would believe it? Agreeing to the current Russian proposal would be political (if not literal indirect) suicide for Zelenskyy. That said, I do agree that western leaders should be pushing it.
I don't think anything more favorable to Russia than immediate implementation of Minsk II (but internationally run -- not just supervised) + an internationally run referendum in Crimea + Zelenskyy publicly resigning or agreeing not to run for President again, in exchange for no further blocks to NATO and EU membership, will provide Ukraine sufficient security guarantees for them to stop fighting back. I think that's why Russia is shelling civilians, to try to force an end to the war before Ukraine is in a sufficiently strong bargaining position to get those guarantees. Fortunately for the Ukrainian state, their patriotic fervor (jingoism, if you like) the population seems to be willing to sacrifice to prevent that from happening.
> Sometimes its reasoning was noble: preventing genocide in Kosovo. Sometimes it was at least understandable: get vengeance for 9-11. Other times it was almost incomprehensible.
> The rare exceptions tend to be genuinely bad dudes
This does seem to ignore 1971, when the US strongly supported Pakistan in their genocide of the Bangladeshi people. (IMO, sending nuclear submarines for intimidation should be considered proper support)
The US has only ever had 2 real attacks on its shore. Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and we all know how they reacted to both situations.
> jingoism
I am mixed on the use of this word. When the unifying jingoistic identity consists entirely of white people and christians, you can't skirt around the race/religion question.
It is hard to find a good hypothetical. But, would the world have reacted in the same manner if the Philippines were under a similar invasion ? It is a Christian nation with strong cultural roots in Spain and the US. Clearly war in Liberia has never been much of a concern for the USA, despite being the only explicitly USA-inspired nation.
I can't believe that I am saying this.... But, could this be a fair instance of 'internalized racism' ?
> It is hard to find a good hypothetical. But, would the world have reacted in the same manner if the Philippines were under a similar invasion ?
Isn't it quite easy to find good hypotheticals of Asian countries getting invaded and how the US would respond? Like, say, Taiwan?
Or failing that, how about South Korea or South Vietnam?
Or in a slightly different part of the world, Kuwait. I'm not old enough to remember the Korean or Vietnam wars but I'm just old enough to remember Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, and the mood then felt pretty similar to the mood now.
Africa, of course, is a bottomless pit of suffering that we can't really bring ourselves to care about. We do care more about countries that are more similar to our own.
Russia not only expects Ukraine declares “neutrality” (as Switzerland) but that it makes a binding promise not to join any blocs. Not only military such as NATO, but also economic such as European Union. Basically Kremlin’s offer boils down to:
* Accept that 20% of your territory has been taken away, half of it annexed by Russia, another half turned into legal and economic blackhole used for organised crime, as other Russian quasi-republics.
* Promise not to join an economic alliance where 2 million of your citizens are already working and living, thus guaranteeing that your country remains at its income current level that is 3x less than Poland or Russia.
* Of course you won’t get any reparations for massive damage caused by Russian invasion.
* Accept the fact that Russia can and will inevitably invade once again, because neither a military alliance nor your own army (low income) will be able to protect you (Switzerland can afford being neutral because it has very powerful military force).
Remember, Ukraine already has been in "Russian zone of influence" 1991-2014. People actually know what it's worth in terms of life and death, not armchair geopolitics of "peace is a nice thing to have".
Crimea, neutrality - something can be done there. Is it okay being neutral if powers are treaty-bound to defend you? And Crimea was a gift from Kruschev, after all. Even a token bit of denazification can be done by standing down the Azov Battalion. The Donbas are not so easy. The Russians control only a fraction, and Ukraine was starting to win the war. Only Ukraine can decide whether this is an option.
NATO signing a treaty saying they're obligated to defend a country is functionally the same thing as joining NATO. NATO is basically just a treaty saying "we are all obligated to defend each other" plus some structures to make it easier to do that.
>Crimea, neutrality - something can be done there. Is it okay being neutral if powers are treaty-bound to defend you?
What's the difference between that and being a NATO member? That Ukraine has no such obligations? I don't think Ukraine being obligated to defend NATO countries is what Putin's unhappy about in regards to Ukraine joining Ukraine.
Can somebody explain why the cat thing is notable, unless you're misunderstanding it as banning Russian breeds or something? The actual article quotes the org as saying:
"No cat belonging to exhibitors living in Russia may be entered at any FIFe show outside Russia, regardless of which organization these exhibitors hold their membership in,"
This doesn't seem that different from all the other private-sector BDS actions, and if anything seems less insane than the ones cutting off consumers, like Netflix.
Ah OK, I've seen at least one otherwise smart and intellectually honest person tweet it as an especially ridiculous example of a boycott, but perhaps that's not the spirit that Scott intended it in.
Well, isn't it? Do you expect such things to actually accomplish anything? Will Putin lose sleep over international cat shows not being open to Russians? You can't even make the case that this will help turn the Russian populace against Putin, because virtually nobody enteres cat shows.
FYI – I saw this post in my feed reader but didn't receive an email for it. I contacted Substack and they replied that you didn't designate the post to send an email (or something like that).
Worth mentioning that no-fly zone doesn't just mean "shoot down enemy planes" it also means "blow up anti-aircraft weapons on the ground so it's safe for your planes to fly."
I was confused by the "da dempre" part at the end of the Italian tweet defending cancelling Dostoevsky. (Google Translate said "from dempre", which didn't make any sense.)
Then I realized that it's a typo ("d" and "s" being adjacent on the keyboard) for "da sempre". So, it's something like
> Public figures also have this kind of responsibility. Forever.
or
> Public figures also have this kind of responsibility. Always have.
I thought I'd mention this in case anyone else was also puzzled about that.
There's a tricky question involving international norms, and drawing lines in the sane, that I'd like to throw out for ideas.
We know that, despite agreements to respect Ukraine's borders, NATO & its components have never made a formal commitment to defend Ukraine. But the real reason, everyone knows, is the risk of starting WW3 with a nuclear-armed Russia, because lack of formal treaties has never stopped us before when WW3 wasn't at stake.
So the question is, what if Putin's next step is to go after the Baltic states? Those -are- part of NATO, we have a formal treaty to defend them. But fighting off Russia would carry just as much a risk of setting off WW3 as it would in Ukraine.
So what's the difference? Are we counting on the formal commitment to the Baltics to scare off Putin? But Putin seems to think of the West as weak, in part because of its worry over what defending Ukraine could lead to, so what if he calls our bluff and attacks the Baltics? Would/should we actually go ahead and fight, with all the same risks that we're now avoiding by not doing it in Ukraine? Or would we shy away from the risk, in which case the international norm has become "nuclear-armed dictators can do whatever they want," which I fear is too close to the new norm already.
*Not* fighting Russia over the Baltic states, would carry a much greater *cost* than not defending Ukraine. That's the whole point of NATO - to make the cost of not fighting in defense of NATO, intolerably high. And *visibly* intolerably high, so that people know better than to try it.
I see. If only I could read that without detecting the foul smell dating from arguments like that and their equivalents being presented as the reasons we simply could not withdraw from Vietnam.
I don't know if you remember this, but the US acted as if we had. Defenders of the war spoke of a strong moral obligation to South Vietnam, mostly on the grounds that, having undertaken to defend it, we couldn't justify walking away. As for "like an attack on America," the infamous Domino Theory required that assumption. Rhetoric at the time was that, if we didn't stop the Commies in Vietnam, they'd be knocking on the doors of Hawaii and San Francisco next (yes, people talked that way).
Anti-war rhetoric did not, as I recall, attempt to rebut these points directly, just saying that the Domino Theory was overblown and that the South Vietnamese government was too corrupt to be worth defending. Mostly the anti-war argument was that the harm caused by the war outweighed any considerations in its favor.
>In this spirit, I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer.
>As far as I understand it, the offer is: Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home.
I haven't been through the full lineup of comments yet to see if someone else has already made the same point, but this strikes me personally as a bad take.
As I see it, one of the main reasons the Western world has so much coordination behind Ukraine right now is that Russia has spent years playing the plausible deniability game, and finally overplayed their hand. Russia backed separatists in Ukraine in order to have an excuse to gradually subsume Ukraine. People have been arguing for years about whether they were *really* doing this, and they would obviously never admit to it up front, so so far there was never enough coordination to decisively punish them the way the international community as a whole would if they just openly tried to invade and annex another country. But the current situation has essentially left egg on the faces of all the actors who would have contended that Russia *wasn't* making deliberate arrangements to carve up other countries and annex them, and lying about it to maintain plausible deniability. Essentially everyone now can line up behind the position of "your claims not to be doing this have all proven to be consistent lies, and you have shown every intention to keep doing it."
If the rest of the world agreed to let Russia take Donetsk and Luhansk, it would essentially mean that they'd agreed to let Russia continue playing the annexation and plausible deniability game, and they wouldn't be able to achieve the same coordination again to punish the next infraction.
> The Pax Americana playbook for international norm violations is: the US slaps sanctions on the offender. The EU expresses “concern”. The UN proposes a resolution condemning it, which gets vetoed by whichever Security Council member is most complicit. And the CIA secretly gives Stinger missiles to everyone involved.
For a Russian who hasn't travelled outside the country very recently, it's currently impossible to get a US visa due to COVID vaccination requirements.
"5: Really, I can’t emphasize this enough, a no-fly zone means shooting down Russian planes."
What needs to be emphasized is that a no-fly zone means bombing Russia, killing Russians in Russia.
Every "no-fly zone" the US or NATO has ever done, has included bombing surface-to-air missile sites from day one, lest those SAM sites shoot down the planes enforcing the no-fly zone. In the very hypothetical case where we tried to implement a pure no-fly-but-bomb-nobody zone, we'd switch to bombing as soon as we started losing planes and pilots to enemy ground fire. And really, we're not going to give them free kills, we're going to bomb the air defenses first.
Russian surface-to-air missiles have the range to shoot down American planes almost anywhere in Ukraine, from sites safely in Russia, Belarus, and Crimea. So, we're not just going to be shooting down Russian planes over Ukraine if it comes to that, we're going to be bombing Russians in Russia. It's a "bomb Russians in Russia zone" dressed up in fancy dishonest words.
Which, if we're going to do that to them, they're going to do something very like that to us in return. OK, not bombing Americans in America, but they've got plenty of Iskander and Kinzhal and Kaliber ballistic/hypersonic/cruise missiles and we've got plenty of nicely mapped and visible airbases in Poland and Romania and whatnot from which we'd hypothetically be staging the no-fly patrols. That's a kind of warfare the Russians are probably pretty good at, and we've hypothetically just shown them that bombarding the adversary's homelands is fair game in this Don't You Dare Call It War thing.
So that's the obvious escalation from a "no-fly zone". One that's perfectly legal under the traditional laws of war, which are unlocked when NATO fighters are ordered to shoot down Russian planes no matter what pretty words we use. It's the next step in that escalation that is unclear, and thus worrisome.
So, a bit of a tangent (as I 100% agree that no-fly zones are bad):
> Russian surface-to-air missiles have the range to shoot down American planes almost anywhere in Ukraine, from sites safely in Russia, Belarus, and Crimea.
My impression is that Russia's surface-to-air missiles have been as ineffective as the rest of their air force so far. The information I get on the war is pretty one-sided, but unless I'm mistaken, Ukrainian planes are still flying, and are probably suffering less losses than the Russians. If we look at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_losses_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War) , most of their losses have been grounded planes on bombed airfields. I can't find any confirmed kills from the ground.
So is it fair to say that Russian air defenses aren't much of a threat, in Ukrainian skies? Or is there anything I'm missing?
Well, first, if the Russians shoot down a Ukrainian jet, you're probably not going to get "confirmation". The Ukrainians are playing defense, so their fallen planes will fall on their own territory, and that's not something they are going to brag about.
Second, the Ukrainians almost certainly aren't flying 24/7 patrols of Ukrainian airspace. Much more likely they're launching specific intercept missions when there are known Russian targets to engage. Which gives the Russians a much narrower window of opportunity to use their SAMs, and it likely means that when the opportunity to shoot down a Ukrainian MiG-29 does arise, it comes when there are also Russian MiG-29s in the area and the Russian surface-to-air missile batteries will be told to stay out of it.
A Russian S-300 SAM might have only a 5-10% chance of hitting a NATO 5th-generation fighter, but if we park our planes over Ukraine and give them unlimited free shots, they'll eventually hit. And note that a clever Serb named Zoltan Dani figured out how to shoot down American stealth fighters with an antique S-125 designed in the 1950s, even though NATO was very energetically trying to bomb him into oblivion the whole time and he could only turn his radar on for forty seconds every few hours. Here, we're talking about giving the Russian equivalent about thirty years of improvement in missile technology, and all the time in the world to get it right.
Or, we're bombing the crap out of Russian missile batteries. In Russia.
Fukuyama moved past that mode into an “order vs disorder” mode where the only vulnerability to established liberal democracies is their own decay over time. What we are seeing through the lens of Fukuyama is the engagement of two poorly ordered states except that one is trending towards liberal democracy and the other is not. The question is now of how order engages with disorder.
2: If the Pax Americana is dead, we need to try something different; but if it’s still alive, we should stick with what works.
Pax Americana never covered the spheres of other states. No one declared Pax Americana dead when Russia fought the two Chechen wars, established two breakaway states in Georgia or invaded Crimea and the Donbass. Why is what we’re seeing now a threat to Pax Americana where the others weren’t? The distinctions don’t seem very meaningful and a more appropriate explanation is that Pax Americana never applied if you had a border with Russia.
3: A strong response right now isn’t just about Ukraine, it’s also about the next time.
Sure, but I’ll hold you to this later.
4: International norms may be annoying, but they’re all that stands between us and nuclear war, so we had better respect them
The only international norm that stands between us and nuclear war is the norm of “don’t nuke other people, otherwise you’ll be nuked”. All of the other ones are peripheral to this question although much of your reasoning here seems to apply more directly to measuring response.
5: Really, I can’t emphasize this enough, a no-fly zone means shooting down Russian planes.
I’m amazed that more people don’t realise that establishing a no-fly zone is an act of war.
6: Huh, I guess we’re still capable of jingoism
This deserves a full post by you.
7: The Obligatory Acknowledgment That We Are Also Bad (1)
It seems like the solution you’re grasping around for here is a way of creating a hierarchy of rules that can be used to define which wars are more or less moral. Just War Theory has undergone thousands of years of development to try to do that for you and I think you should at least reference it if you’re going to dismiss it. I don’t mean to be snarky in saying this; I really think you should. What you’re doing is the international relations equivalent of doing a write up on a promising new antibiotic while dismissing the existence of germ theory.
8: The Obligatory Acknowledgment That We Are Also Bad (2)
I have trouble reconciling this with what I’ve always thought of as something like “the law of proximate cause” which intuitively seems to govern both morality and causality in cases like we’re describing. In the example you give “(in case the distinction isn’t clear, a woman wearing skimpy clothing might be causally responsible for her being sexually harassed, but doesn’t make her blameworthy)” very clearly the woman is not causally responsible for her harassment because the proximate cause of her harassment is not how she dressed but the decision by her harasser to harass her (a nice tongue twister). A similar question arises in every homicide case where self defence is raised – there is no question that the cause of death was the intentional shooting of the victim by the accused, the only question is whether the shooting was legally (the codified version of our moral judgements on the same questions) justified by imminent fear of death etc. What we’re doing in these cases is not saying that the shooter wasn’t legally or morally responsible for taking the life, we’re simply weighing if the alternative rights trade-offs were acceptable vs the homicide.
This lets me get to the first point of the whole post. The thing that’s missing here from your analysis is how one country joining an alliance can provide justification for their invasion. The proximate cause can’t be the far future intention to join an alliance since it’s not imminent or threatening. This seems like the self defence equivalent of going to someone’s house and murdering them because they said that in ten years’ time they aspired to be part of a neighbourhood watch that would shoot you if you came to their house to murder them.
Your own intuition on this arises from the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think that’s an awful place to start thinking about what’s happening in the Ukraine for three reasons. Firstly the Ukraine maybe thinking about possibly joining NATO down the track has no equivalence to Cuba hosting nuclear weapons next week; the small-state intentions are not equivalent, the immediacy is not equivalent, so the proximate causality cannot be equivalent. Secondly, even if it were, your intuition relies on the Cuban Missile Crisis being an acceptable model for state engagement with states outside what they consider to be their sphere of influence doing things inside their sphere, which I think requires proving beyond what you’ve done here.
Thirdly, even if the other two weren’t true, your understanding of the Cuban Missile Crisis is flawed in ways that will undermine your thesis here later. The USSR was not stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba because Cuba wanted them, it was stationing nuclear weapons in Cuba because NATO stationed nuclear missiles in Turkey. Thus the goal of the USSR putting nukes in Cuba was to achieve IRBM disposition parity (important for nuclear war since early warning assumptions for MAD are not necessarily true if IRBMs are in play at this point in the war, since SSBNs and assured second strike don’t really exist yet) either by having nuclear missiles in Cuba or by using the threat of nuclear missiles in Cuba as a bargaining chip to have the missiles in Turkey removed. The second one happened.
The problem this has for the questions your ask as a thesis is that Russia has nothing to trade the west here so the Cuban Missile Crisis really can’t be used as an appropriate surrogate to understand how Ukraine ought to be resolved. The Cuban Missile Crisis would be an appropriate analogue if instead of the Bay of Pigs invasion the US military invaded Cuba when they started thinking about joining the communist bloc with the entire USMC and half of the US Army with massive air and naval support.
So, here’s the second thing I really strongly disagree with. The bit where your solution to Russia doing what they’re doing is to give them everything they want. There are a number of problems with this.
The first one is that “everything they want” includes territory that Russia never controlled (the entire oblasts which contain the LPR and DNR, not simply the separatist regions themselves). The extent to which Russia controlled even Luhansk and Donestk was limited; what really happened was that neither the Russian nor Ukrainian government controlled most of this area – ie it was contested. The areas that Russia wants, however, were never even partially under their control.
The second is that the areas you suggest should be ceded are under defacto Russian control because Russia invaded them. No one doing anything about this in 2014 is why we’re having this war in 2021. This is where the chickens you lay out in 3. come in to roost. If this war is about next time then rejecting the annexation of territories acquired by the same means in 2014 is also about next time. If the peace terms are “legitimise Russia’s last invasion” then you’ve just incentivised Russia doing a small invasion and running an FID insurgency with their special forces then doing a big invasion a few years later so that everyone will say they’re OK with the first one. For someone who is normally quite a deep and broad thinker, this seems like a fairly monumental oversight.
Third, why would the Ukraine accept this peace? In short, they wouldn’t. You could level every building in Kiev, have a Russian tank on every corner of their country and this wouldn’t be an acceptable peace to them. Even if Russia likes the peace terms you’re offering it won’t achieve peace because it’s unacceptable to Ukrainians who will retain the ability to fight conventionally as a result of the deal an unconventionally even if they’re demilitarised. At best you will be freezing the conflict just like the 2014 conflict froze, but far more likely you will be locking the two sides in an unstable armed struggle that will last generations. Nuclear weapons will remain on the table the entire side, but this time Russia might really have casus belli since there will be hard treaty breaches.
Fourth, how does this prevent Russia from doing future invasions of places they considered desirable? We discussed above that the peace you propose incentivises Russian invasions, but how does the peace you propose affect Russia’s ability to invade countries? Well, it gives them breathing room to fix the deficiencies in their armed forces that have made this invasion hard. Russia won’t accept any peace deal that limits their ability to build up their armed forces, so there’s no diplomatic option to take this reality off the table. This peace deal just ensures that Russia will have greater means to invade the Ukrainian rump state that the deal creates when they later choose to.
After all this what do I think the solution is? Well, absolutely no one should do anything that legitimises any Russian actions in the Ukraine post 2014. We should avoid escalation through direct NATO involvement but make it clear that any use of theatre nuclear weapons will result in a strategic exchange. We should pour arms into the Ukraine to wage conventional war against Russia indefinitely, including allowing Ukrainian forces to base from NATO countries. If Russia does destroy the government of the Ukraine and control all Ukrainian territory then we should facilitate insurgency. Why is this preferable? By your own three measures: It minimises the chance of nuclear war through the only means known to work – deterrence. Second, it actually makes the Russian experience miserable rather than giving them everything they want after 2 weeks. Third, it helps the Ukrainian people do something they believe in very strongly which is defend their sovereignty; since they appear to be very willing to fight ensuring they have the means is ultimately in accordance with their wishes, so even if it will cause more deaths it will cause less suffering if we reasonably assume that they’re rational actors.
Two further asides on "rewarding bad Russian behaviour" that relate to demography:
1. The demography of Donbass and Crimea is the result of Russian actions. Most evidence shows that neither region was actually pro-Russian annexation although both regions were more pro-annexation than other parts of the Ukraine. The fact that they were more pro-annexation is reflective of Russian policies which populated the regions with Russians and forcibly "removed" natives across periods going back decades. This is to say that legitimising Russian rule of Donbass and Crimea doesn't just legitimise the 2014 or 2021 actions of Russia, it also legitimises historical acts like the deportation of Crimean Tartars and Holodomor - it says "if you kill off the locals and repopulate with your own people then down the track you can annex the territory without anyone minding too much".
2. The subtext of this entire conflict is how the world will react to China trying to annex states that have Han-majority populations in their region. People look to places like Singapore and areas of Malaysia and the Philippines and worry that China might try to use Russia's Novorussian playbook, much as they tried to do during the Malayan Emergency. These also interrelate with SCS claims, Xinjiang, Tibet and Himalayan border disputes. The stakes for going too soft on this don't really play out in Central Europe, they play out in East and South-East Asia.
Final addendum: A clarification to the IRBM-Cuba-Turkey thing. First: Russia got what it wanted out of the Cuba Crisis. Kennedy agreed to remove IRBMs from Turkey (and Italy) in return for the removal of IRBMs from Cuba. Second: This outcome was achieved by nuclear deterrence, not by concession - ie the example does not support your thesis in the next section, being that we should just give Russia what they want simply because they possess nukes, rather it supports the opposite, being that our own nuclear weapons have to play a part in achieving an acceptable outcome.
No-fly-zones - 3 or so longer points: 1. "Lines in sand" are not that clear cut as "red lines". And there are no good precedents to be sure what a US/Nato-NFZ over Ukraine would mean in theory. In practice it would mean: a) no one flies, but our planes, just to check no one flies b) if one shoots at our planes, we shot/bomb back c) if one threats he will shoot at us, we will attack his defense first - yeah, I admit, all this sounds like: WAR.
2. But modify and things get fuzzy:
a) one small step below a US-NFZ could be this scenario (by my former colleague Dr. Dr. A. Umland*) :
you lend/lease Ukraine "decommissioned" fighter-planes F14-F18 WITH trained pilots (US/UK/...) who will get an Ukrainian passport (as China's "national" Ice-hockey-team). You paint the UA-flag on the plane, land them on a save airfield in Ukraine's South-west and: up in the sky and make those convoys burn! Andreas loves Russia and hates Putin even stronger than me, he does.
b) The actual plan of (not only) ex-Gen. Petraeus is: you get MIGs from Poland and a few other countries that have some, give them to Ukraine (they have some pilots who can fly those machines), and: Up you go! - This should be ok, the CCCP gave warplanes to the Vietnamese. Breaking news: Poland ready to fly them to Ramstein (huge US-base in Germany), the US-admin not decided yet.
c) Drones: Essentially "reusable Javelin-carriers", thus a much smaller step up.
+ less/no need of big airfields, thus less vulnerable to Russian missile attacks
+ more deniability: no one will ever know who was on the controls; might have been even the XYZ-trainer flying, the Ukrainian just pressing the "fire"-button. (Imagine instead a caught F18-pilot on Russian TV speaking English only. )
+ Ukraine already bought and employs some TB2 Bayraktar Drones. So give them more TB2 and then some much more capable Bayraktar Drones, too - training is much faster and I see a "smooth line of escalation" up to the Predator-drone (Burn, convoy, burn!)
+ Drones are the better weapon - and the Russian forces seem not really ready to defend against those. If they shoot down some, so what? If they hit an F-18 with an US-pilot inside: different story.
d) We continue sharing hundreds of Javelin/Stinger et al. . Putin until now too proud to really complain. Seems to work nice enough to defend the big cities for now - but not the houses, not the people. If you want to stop the invasion in its track: convoy-attack. Hungry soldiers make bad fighters, tanks need huge amounts of petrol, weapons need ammunition "tactic is for amateurs, pros talk logistics".
e) "revolutionary warfare": offer their soldiers asylum and green-cards, same to all their degree-holders. Obviously another crazy Caplan-idea: https://betonit.blog/2022/03/02/make-desertion-fast/ see me in the small comment section - When West-Germany did that to the East, the commies only defense was to build a really loooong wall, quickly. They called it "anti-faschistischer Schutz-Wall" - and Mexico did not pay. I am fine with Putin behind a wall - or four - and soon rather alone.
* Andreas Umland is THE expert for post-soviet "neo-nationalist historiography". And a much bigger expert than most on Russia and Ukraine. Worked for a think-tank in Kiev, last time we met. Said for many years Putin's nightmare is a a democratic Ukraine that succeeds (thus the Kremlin worked hard for Ukraine to fail. Remember Viktor Yushchenko? ). And Andreas went all in to help make Putin's nightmare come true.
What probability would you assign to West rather then Russia miscalculating?
It looks like Europe went from "We don't consider SWIFT ban, too much risk" to "We go all-in with SWIFT and CBR sanctions" overnight without sufficient preparations to fallout of such decision.
Even potential for banning Russian oil, gas, and other materials - from either Western or Russian side - is already sending prices to all-time highs.
Sure, West can always issue more debt and try to buy even at inflated prices - but that doesn't release constraints on supply side. There will be bidding war between Western and Asian countries for remaining resources - war that West isn't certain to win.
Bringing new sources and logistic chains online will take years to decades even in accelerated timeframe.
Once Ukrainian military is down - wherever it takes weeks or months - how much incentive there will really be to keep pain on Western side of equation?
SWIFT ban isn't even up yet (as far as i remember it was going to happen on 12th) but everyone already acts like it is.
Same with commodities - not all of them are banned but everyone acts like they are certain to be banned later. Even if Europe keeps repeating they aren't going to do it they did the same with SWIFT, so market doesn't trust them - and Biden coming out with "actually we'll ban Russian oil even though we said we wouldn't a week ago" doesn't help.
Neither Russian oil nor Russian gas are "replaceable" in world markets in short term (-> years ) - because production and consumption are largely balanced, and OPEC+ were already struggling to hit _planned_ production increases.
In case of pipeline gas it cannot even enter markets as LNG as there are neither interconnectors to Russian LNG hubs nor enough capacity to process it; entire European LNG capacity cannot cover shortfall, and it wasn't previously standing entirely idle either.
And for Germany "alternative" coal is also 50% sourced from Russia (and also climbing rapidly in price)...
Is such price shock - energy prices going x3-4 _in a week_, and events showing that it might be just the beginning - actually survivable by modern economies?
The invasion of Yugoslavia was a formative experience for me. I mean, I get that a world superpower can invade any place it likes. It sucks, but that's how the world is. But I will never get over how it can invade a multiethnic country, turn it into an ethnically clean nation state fueled by a toxic nationalist ideology, claim it was done to PREVENT genocide, and have absolutely nobody call them out on their bullshit while gentle left-of-center peaceniks nod solemnly and admit that some wars are indeed just and unavoidable. (Bonus: while also demonstrating the ability to quickly and forcefully stop the exact same ethnic conflict right across the border, by essentially doing the exact opposite of what they did in their "peace" mission in Kosovo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_insurgency_in_Macedonia .)
Of all NATO war crimes, Yugoslavia is also the most impactful. It essentially showed the way forward for imperialist wars in the next few decades. Russia's invasions of Georgia and Ukraine (earlier on) are basically xerocopies of the pattern established by it. There is, however, a silver lining corollary to this - it appears a successful territorial gain requires support from a significant percentage of local population nowadays. Ethnic tensions are great to exploit, but they can only be exploited or ignited in select places, and without them, you need a clear PR advantage over local authorities (kinda hard when you're literally murdering people for territorial gain), otherwise you end up like Russia now did in Ukraine - stranded in a foreign land, surrounded by hostile population, unable to control anything but the nearest surroundings of your army forces.
But the ability of the whole world to essentially pretend a pile of shit smells like roses (except for Serbians, who seem intent to cling to their country's territorial integrity even when it seemingly makes no practical sense anymore - except, well, it starts making one when you think of the problem in terms of a line in the sand drawn at NOT BEING FUCKING GENOCIDED OUT OF YOUR HOMELAND) will never cease to amaze, disgust and scare me. I'll take a million successful anti-vaxx movements over the climate of conformity that allows for that to happen.
There's also a lot off about comparing Ukraine to Belarus. For starters, for a majority of the last 30 years, Ukraine would have very much loved to become a Belarus 2. Belarus was a regional success story, a peaceful, stable country successfully weathering economic turbulences while Ukraine's democracy was switching between several leaders, alternatively Russia- and west-aligned, all invariably incompetent and corrupt. Until the latter finally decided to just give up on its political class and elect the first complete and total outsider they could coordinate around. (A correct decision, it would appear.)
If Lukashenko is an abhorrent dictator now, was he a respectable dictator earlier on? No, all this time, the problem was him being a dictator. Dictators are not some kind of inhuman demons optimizing for maximum evil, they'd all very much prefer to be loved by their subjects for running a rich, successful country, and sometimes are better at achieving it than their democratically-elected peers. What distinguishes them from democratic leaders is that they can just refuse to leave when being asked to. (And that's it, democratic leaders are certainly not above brutally suppressing popular unrest. If they don't proceed with it, it's only because they have to worry about consequences at a subsequent poll.)
What does the 1991 ethnic conflict in Bosnia have to do with 1999 invasion of Serbia?
Other than, of course, the former being used by war propaganda to justify the latter, despite the fact that the people involved had nothing to do with each other other than their ethnicity. Did the two events somehow meld into one in your mind? Or do you genuinely believe that the hundreds of thousands displaced from Kosovo or the thousands killed in airstrikes on Serbia's cities deserved it for being Serbs? (It's not like all of them were Serbs, of course, but that's not the point here.)
Those are not rhetorical questions, I want you to answer. Partly to force you to get some introspection, partly to get some insight on what motivates people to just ignore and justify a war crime happening in plain view on their TV screens.
I'm registering this as "yes" to the first question and a refusal to answer the second.
I would still encourage you to actually answer it, but allow me to pose a third one: Can you, logically, look a the end result of the invasion, an ethnically cleansed Kosovo, and claim it has successfully achieved the goal it was nominally claimed to be motivated by?
I do realise when reading this kind of thing that people in the US don’t know their own history. US invasions of other countries, direct or indirect, are a dime a dozen. At least one or two a decade. Proxy wars today include Syria and Yemen. In neither side of those wars is the US on the side of democracy or liberalism, in the former the US has supported sectarian Salafist insurgents, in the latter it’s siding with Saudi Arabia - one of the least liberal regimes in history. Medieval Europe had more rights for women and homosexuals.
Then there’s Afghanistan, and Iraq. Neither authorised by the UN. Libya was partially authorised but not to the extent of the actual bombing campaign which overthrew Gaddafi, destabilising North Africa and Europe and bringing back slave camps.
(Prior to all that there’s Vietnam, the Philippines, and the expansion into what is now the US in general.)
I haven’t included Korea, Kosovo, or Iraq which were in fact authorized).
I’d like the UN to step in here. Some neutral country like Brazil or India, or both, gets to be in peacekeeping in Ukraine for a while - if the Russians leave.
Our predecessors made decisions in the past we disagree with, therefore we should let Putin slaughter and enslave a nation of 44 million people? 44 million people who so don't want to be enslaved that the citizens are taking up arms and standing in front of tanks?
If you hate America for what it's done you should be one of the strongest and firmest critics of what Putin is doing.
There’s one thing which I don’t see talked a lot about, and I feel that this is an oversight. Many corporations pulling out of Russia seem to be NOT doing that as a direct result of western governments-imposed sanctions.
If not that, then what incentive structure is it? Do their CEOs and shareholders believe pulling out of Russia is a good thing because of moral reasons? Is it the response to (expected?) shareholder fears about next-quarter profit? (fears of Russian government going full soviet and nationalizing corporate property?) Is it, perhaps, that the western governments have tanked the rouble and that would make sales of anything imported into Russia unsustainable? (that last bit might explain retailers pulling out, but what about Visa and MasterCard? what about Maersk?)
I have a feeling that this is one of the more impactful things to watch for here, because whether corporations, in the end, have more power to fuck you over than state actors is a relevant thing to consider for the whole world going forward, not just Russia right now.
Note that just because these companies haven't been compelled by congress to pull out, doesn't meant they haven't been told to pull out by the USG behind closed doors, especially the payment providers.
Companies are made of people. People are watching the news, seeing Russia bomb civilians, and getting angry. That's the incentive. CEOs and shareholders care much more about the bottom-line that most but they aren't robots with no other concerns or emotions.
they leased planes to Russian companies that are now likely to refuse giving them back (or be unable to give them back due to fly bans and/or being taken over by Russian government).
This would explain Maersk that would prefer to not deal with its ships being stolen in Russia or by having ship filled with cargo that they cannot unload or other weird case.
Charitably, Hillary Clinton *didn't* start a no-fly zone over Syria, because she (and Obama, and Biden) had competent staff with relevant expertise and trusted their judgement. Trump, started off by alienating the community that would have provided him with competent staff, and too frequently substituted his own mercurial whims for the expertise of the staff he did have. So there's a case to be made that Hillary would have been the lower-risk option.
Also, a no-fly zone over Syria would at least have had the advantage of not bombing Russia, "just" Russians fighting abroad.
But, it's definitely cause to be at least a little bit worried about President Hillary, because she should have listened to her staff and clammed up before even talking about "no-fly zones", and it probably is something Scott should consider.
From my outsider's perspective, here's what seems like potentially a workable peace agreement
1) Ukraine official adopts military neutrality, i.e. not joining NATO. I think I saw somewhere that Zelenesky signaled this would be acceptable. **The sticking point: how do you credibly guarantee this?**
2) Russia drops any opposition to Ukraine joining the EU. I think I also saw somewhere that Russia signaled this would be acceptable, since the EU is an economic organization.
3) Ukraine cedes Crimea, but both sides agree to some sort of roadmap that eventually minimizes border checkpoints to facilitate travel to/from Ukraine. Maybe Russia agrees to provide some resettlement assistance to people who want to leave.
4) Both sides agree to respect the results of new referenda for Donetsk/Luhansk, to be jointly administered and observed by some combination of Ukraine, Russia, the EU, and the UN. Maybe the choices could be a) be a part of Ukraine like any other oblast/region; b) be a part of Ukraine but with some sort of special semi-autonomous status; c) become totally independent. Not sure how to capture all those options in one referendum (don't referenda usually offer a binary choice?) so maybe it requires two stages or something. Maybe Ukraine agrees to provide some resettlement assistance to people who want to leave if the choice is a) or b), and Russia agrees to the same if the choice is c).
5) Both sides agree to a UN peacekeeping mission in Donetsk/Luhansk.
I'm curious what people who are more knowledgeable about Ukrainian and Russian politics and history think of this? Does any of it seem viable?
The EU is not only an economic union, it has political and military side. Those sides have progressed much slower, but it's very likely to change soon: UK leaving removed one of the big brake, and the second big brake ( Eastern Europe countries) was vaporized by Poutine invading Ukraine. I don't know how the Ukraine crisis will end, but one thing is sure: Europe will change a lot after, a European defense and more political integration are almost garanteed. In fact, it's likely that the EU itself will become a NATO member more or less directly
Section 9 sounds like what Finland got out of the winter war with the Soviet Union: fight heroically against a much bigger neighbour, then give up some territory and declare neutrality in exchange for peace. That sort of worked, but did lead to the foreign policy term Finlandization being invented (and someone has already added a reference to Russia-Ukraine to said wikipedia page).
>"I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer ... Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home."
I wonder whether it could be accepted, and what would happen, if Ukraine offered a concession of holding new referenda (with international oversight and proper secret ballots etc.) in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk: whether Russia would agree, and how citizens there would vote now.
I just don't see how this is at all workable. The way I understand it, it's not membership in NATO or the EU per se; it's the existence of a little anti Russian state which says and does things which offend its larger neighbour, like jailing oligarchs, or voting for a different president, or not jailing people who protest or insult Putin. Accepting the offer of 'neutrality' simply means abrogating any important political decisions to Russia and becoming a vassal state.
This is the core of the problem - the Russian ruling class can't have a lived example of a more democratic and accountable ruling class right next door, especially one which ends up with a higher standard of living.
(FYI - there's a Norwegian show called Occupied which walks its way through this very problem. It's fiction, but it's a nice worked example that seems very relevant here.)
Don't take an action against a nuclear power, unless everyone believes that if they said 'stop taking that action or we'll nuke you', you'd call their bluff.
I had not properly internalised that. Sanctions fall into that category. Going to shoot down Russian planes does not. You've convinced me that it's a bad idea, previously I was all for it.
I think Russia (or more specifically, Putin) has recognised that better than anymore, and has been deliberately trying to limit the actions the Western world can take that fall into that category.
Yeah, that's a very good way to phrase it. Some things, if Russia (or China or whomever) says "stop that or we'll nuke you", they're obviously bluffing. And some things, a very few things, are so important that you'd call and see their hand even if you expected it to be a full house, ICBMs over bombers. But that still leaves an ugly middle ground, and you've nicely spelled out the critical point.
Does Eastern Europe get a say? Poland and the Baltic states came willingly to NATO and Ukraine wanted in too. NATO did not expand via conquest. Should Russia get to dictate who its neighbors turn to for defensive and economic partnerships? Does it matter that part of the reason those countries are interested NATO is that they have already experienced decades (or centuries!) of Russian hegemony?
Like he said, causation is different to blame. They could be perfectly right to want to join NATO, but the question is whether their decision to join/seek NATO membership is the proximate cause of Russian behavior.
Right, and just like we live in a world where we demand that women can wear what they want and not get raped we live in a world where we believe in national sovereignty and the rights of countries to make their own decisions.
"But there’s a failure mode where every villain can come up with at least one rule they followed which the other villains didn’t, then guiltlessly condemn the other villains for their villainy. Putin says that invading Ukraine is okay, because they’re Nazis; maybe he even believes it."
You're making the opposite point of the one you're trying to make. If Putin needs to fabricate information (claiming the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis) to claim moral high ground, that suggests he *can't* come up with a reasonable rule that he actually followed.
"Prevent NATO expanding", "Ukraine is not a real country", "Save russian people from Nazis".
All these assumptions have one thing in common. A dictator who has been selling out Russian oil(gas, metals) for the last 20+ years does not care about them at all.
A main concern which affects all decisions of Putin and his oligarch friends is to stay in power and to keep multi billion dollar fortunes.
So what current situation gives them from this point of view:
* Gives an excuse to ignore international corruption investigations.
* Pass more laws to push down on any attempts to grow opposition.
* Makes it harder for the Russian opposition to get support from the West.
* Consolidate his accomplices by making them unwelcome in the West.
* Blame the situation in the economy on a war and international sanctions.
* Give boost to patriotic propaganda.
* More control over the internet and mass media.
* More control over the finance system.
* An excuse to ignore the MH17 investigation.
* Have regions of instability instead of economic growth in neighbouring countries so they are not being an alternative for russians.
And all this is achievable independent of how his venture went.
Why move in a direction of locking down the county?
They already have quite a huge amount of money so staying in control becomes more important than making more. And selling gas and oil is gonna stop being profitable in the not so far future. So it makes focusing on getting more money even less justified.
Legalizing their fortunes in the West is not an option. As no western government will give a promise to protect these fortunes.
Building a strong Russia is not an option either. As it requires creating a good set of laws, independent courts system, integrating in the world community, separation of branches of government etc. And this new system will be incompatible with keeping corrupt money.
As a bonus some conspiracy points:
* international community happy to have a scapegoat for economic crisis.
* and changing the news focus from post covid issues.
* oil selling countries happy to return to $100/barral times
* China loves to exploit opportunities while Russia is locked from the West.
On the information side of a war.
Putin's strategy for information warfare is not to focus on pushing his agenda. But an overflowing information field with so many different conflicting points to prevent creating a consistent picture of what is going on.
From my perspective, it looks like Ukraine shouldn't accept Russia's offer at this point. And if any offer were to be accepted, the international community would still need to keep heavy sanctions in place at least as long as Putin is running the show. Otherwise Russia (and worse, their whole strategy) win.
Above all, I don't think a NATO membership ban should even be on the table. To the contrary, I think a concrete plan to *join* NATO should be a non-negotiable demand by Ukraine. What Russia's done by invading like this is demonstrate in the clearest possible terms that NATO membership continues to be a invaluable goal for Ukraine's future territorial integrity. Without that guarantee, they have every reason to believe a peace deal would only be temporary in Russia's eyes. The idea that NATO is or ever was a threat to the security of a peaceful, non-expansionist Russia remains as preposterous as ever, and it shouldn't be legitimized. It's just a(n unconvincing) lie told by Russia to make their plans for expansion be less hindered by the West. NATO membership is the ultimate roadblock to that expansion. If Ukraine had somehow already been a NATO member, the invasion wouldn't have happened, plain and simple. Neither would the Crimean annexation.
Russia will not accept that unless they have to. And if they have to accept even that, I don't know what they could be getting from the agreement because it would mean they've got no leverage any more.
Re:" every villain can come up with a rule they followed to distinguish their behavior"
Maybe, but "Ukraine are Nazis" would be a terrible candidate for Putin's rule to disinguish from American behavior in Iraq even if it were true. Saddam's Baath party was LITERALLY a National Socialist party. Openly. It was founded in the '30s by Arabs residing in France and running in fascist intellectual circles, it grew in the early '40s as those people (successfully) lobbied the Vichy occupation government they were living under to get the Germans to sponsor resistance to British colonial authorities back in their home countries, and it became a dominant political force in Syria and Iraq as British authority gradually fell apart and the party's role in having resisted such authority (and its long-established habit of having been complaining about the Jews before Israel was a thing) gave it credibility with the local masses.
> This is about Taiwan, Georgia, Iran, and all the other places that great powers want to invade but don’t.
What great power wants to invade Iran? The US? Or did you mean Iran acting as a big country here, e.g. in Lebanon or Yemen? (Probably true, but also true for some other regional powers)
Declaring a no-fly zone is a bluff that would likely be called, directly leading to aerial combat between NATO and Russia. To make matters worse, chances are great that it would not, in fact, stay plane-vs-plane only. I am not a military expert, but it is my understanding that there are ground based anti-aircraft weapons stationed in both NATO countries and Russia, which would likely be involved in aerial combat. The standard strategy to deal with annoying enemy AA would be to bomb it. Voila, you now have a ground attack with dead soldiers on the sovereign territory of a nuclear defended state.
I really wish I could accuse Scott of attacking this absurd straw-man of a no-fly zone, but actually some people were seriously discussing it.
Morally speaking, any particular countries are just accidents of history and unlike humans do not have any intrinsic rights. Recognizing the sovereignty of a country per default is just a pragmatic way to avoid the horrors of industrialized warfare. Of course, to the degree that a countries government represent the will of their population, taking actions against that government is clearly an asshole move. Also pragmatically, outcomes of military interventions are often terrible from a human rights perspective. That being said, if a country is running Treblinka or trying to waken Azathoth, by all means invade.
A few weeks back, a snarky remark to the effect that the West would defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian soldier made the rounds. I still think there is some truth to it: when big countries think about geostrategy, the wellfare of smaller countries is not their top concern. For NATO, tying up Russia in a protracted conflict for decades could be considered desirable. For the Ukrainians, not so much.
"Neutrality" is more agreeable than Putins previous the previous goal of regime change and demilitarization. Still, I can't help being reminded of the Stalin-Note, where Stalin proposed to create a neutral unified Germany in 1952. Neutrality works great if you are Swizerland: armed to the teeth and in a terrain which bound to become a nightmare for any invader. It probably would not have served Germany well in 1952, and it will hardly be ideal if you have a big belligerent neighbor with a cavalier approach to respecting your souvereignity or even nationhood.
Still, there is something to be said for not fighting tomorrows possible war today.
I think sanctions are great. If you behave like North Korea, you get treated like North Korea. Still, it seems that the EU values not having a great depression because of natural gas shortages more than Ukrainian independence.
Also, I *really* can't stomach all the cheap signalling wrt the Ukraine conflict any more. If I turn on the local radio, I either hear about local industries affected in some minor way by the war or even nearby municipalities heroically flying the blue-yellow flag or even suspending twin township agreements with Russian towns. That will show Putin. By all means, suspend away, but please realize that this is neither newsworthy nor a Valuable Contribution to the War Effort.
America has invaded a lot of countries, even within my lifetime.
Sometimes its reasoning was noble: preventing genocide in Kosovo. Sometimes it was at least understandable: get vengeance for 9-11. Other times it was almost incomprehensible: we’ll debate what happened with Iraq II forever.
My bright line rule: you don't get to start the war. You do get to join in once a war was going
1: Kosovo: Serbia was at war with the other parts of the former Yugoslavia, slaughtering lots of people because they managed to grab most of the heavy weapons when the country broke up.
We didn't start the war, but we helped to end it
2: Afghanistan: An act of war (the 9-11) attacks was launched against America by a group operating in Afghanistan.
We politely asked the Taliban to turn over to us the malefactors.
The Taliban chose to side with the malefactors. This put them at war with the US.
So we returned the favor, and engaged in acts of war against them
3: Iraq II. Iraq I di NOT end with a peace treaty. It ended with a truce, and a truce agreement.
The truce agreement required Saddam to give up all WMD, and not try to get them ever again
Saddam's threats to use WMD against attackers were a statement that he was in violation of the truce agreement. As such, the war was back on, and the US was free to invade
4: Iraq I: Iraq invaded a neighboring country. We went to war to reverse that illegitimate act of aggression / war.
No, we're not "bad". We're following a consistent set of rules.
Ukraine did not invade Russia. Ukraine was not hosting terrorists who were attacking Russia
Russia's sole grounds for objecting to Ukraine joining NATO was that it would make it harder for Russia to bully / invade Ukraine.
Now the situation is different. Russia has miscalculated, they know they’ve miscalculated, and the best ending for everyone is for them to leave in a way that sort of preserves what’s left of their honor - one that doesn’t humiliate them any more than they’re humiliated already.
No.
The best solution is for Putin to get assassinated by one of his guards.
The only really acceptable outcome is for Russia to be completely kicked out of Ukraine, including Crimea and Donetsk/Luhansk. It must be clear that "overplaying your hand" is an extremely expensive thing to do.
How to do this? No surrender. I f Russia "conquers" Ukraine then NATO / EU / America keep the sanctions going. And NATO funds Ukrainian partisans, arming them with Javelins and Stingers and appropriate small arms, giving them training in Poland, then sending them back across to kill Russians, and keep on killing Russians and any local supporters until Russia is forced to leave.
Note: Russia/USSR funded and supported North Vietnam when they were at war with the US. So Putin / Russia has no kick when the US returns the favor, and funds the Ukraine resistance until they manage to drive out the Russians.
2015. TV coverage of looting in "liberated" Donbass.
ammo and grenades in the socks, but the most funny part is the announcement in the Post office "Please, drain water from the washing machines before sending"
> I am not an international relations expert. But every international relations expert whose commentary I have read claims that the extent of Russia’s recent infraction does not give the West the right to declare a no-fly zone in Ukraine.
I'm no expert either, but as far as I understand, under international law, strictly speaking, Western countries have every right to ally with Ukraine, and defend it from Russian aggression. However, doing so (in certain ways, such as shooting down Russian warplanes) would create a state of war between Russia and the Western countries in question, which we want to avoid.
Does "neutrality" just mean NATO, or does it mean Ukrainians get to work in Polish nursing homes and Italian ports and send money home to their families? Can they as individuals, businesses and a state do business with whomever they'd choose with relatively fair courts, or must all offers be those you can't refuse? Euromaidan was over a trade deal and migrant work visas. I can't speak for Ukrainian calculation what sort of life and horizons are worth taking what risks over, but I suspect we'll run into these crises with more frequency and severity if we don't stand with them.
I will make one quibble. The story of 2014 is a lot more complicated than "Russia invaded". Ukraine is a deeply divided country. Something like 90% of people in Donbass and Crimea voted for the guy that was overthrown in the coup (a coup the west supported openly). The Ukrainian government has passed laws and taken actions that persecute Russians, they have mistreated Donbass and Crimea, and Russians that protested the coup were killed (burned alive in Odessa).
If Trump had overturned the election on Jan 6th and California announced its independence and the army came in to forcibly re-integrate them and people that protested this were arrested or killed that would be a pretty messy narrative for us too.
Of course I can make a whole list of all the bad things the Russian side did too, but there are lots of people who are going to do that for me.
Ukraine is a somewhat artificial country. The far east and far west have little in common. They've had eight years to reconcile these differences since 2014 and they are still issues. Maybe a partial break up just makes sense for everyone.
Seems like a very American point of view. From here in Europe it feels unintuitive that providing military assurance to a neighbor being invaded would be outside the norms of of interational relations while targeting the civilian population by e.g. freezing central bank assets is perfectly normal. I'm not sure how capable European air forces are of fighting in a large war away from their home countries and without US participation but if the Russians advance further west in Ukraine I have a feeling it will be on the table, at least as a threat.
Not very. The European soldiers are highly trained, to be sure, but there are not many of them and their equipment has very limited depth. For example, the Luftwaffe has about ~200 fighters total, none 5th generation, and only a handful of transport aircraft. By contrast the USAF flies about 5,000 airplanes, including a wide variety of fighters (including ~200 F-22s and ~800 F-35s, both 5th gen), plus large numbers of close air support planes, EWACs, transport and tanker planes, and so forth. The USAF can support a massive logistic tail, and has plenty of experience doing so in recent conflicts.
I mean, if you wanted to have had a real say in what Vladimir Putin does in Eastern Europe, you probably should have spent a great deal more money and attention on building warfighting capabilities over the past 20 years. It's not like Europe didn't (or doesn't) have the money. But Europe has outsourced its defense to the United States for 75 years now, or maybe imagined that war was just obsolete, I dunno, but either way that is why what happens in Ukraine now is pretty much entirely up to Putin and the United States.
Thanks, and you're right of course we shouldn't have trusted other countries with our security or imagined we don't need to project power. But I remember some YouTube video about a hypothetical war between a European alliance and Russia and it was claimed the air forces would still be decisively in our favor looking at the numbers and quality of aircraft. But I imagine
quickly bringing these forces to Eastern Europe and operating together deep inside Ukraine without leadership from the US would be a challenge.
I am from Poland and live near the ukrainian border. Yesterday, Russian rockets fell close enough to the Polish side that window panes shook. My neighborhood is full of refugees that many people are helping as if Poland was attacked too. I and other Poles, including those with the most pro-Western mindset, believe that NATO guarantees do not guarantee our safety. There will be some kind of reaction from the alliance countries, but I suspect that the argument about not causing World War III will be what matters when the Americans are considering whether or not to do a no-fly zone over Poland. We probably won't be fighting alone, because people from the Baltic countries, as well as the Slovaks and the Czechs will show solidarity. Probably there will also be some limited reaction from the western countries. But this is what is interesting - people think of the NATO alliance in absolute terms. To consider what the reaction would be to an attack on Lithuania or Poland would put it somewhere between "Full US war on Russia" and "US delivers stingers near Polish border" or, which is also possible though unlikely, "we defend on our own". In considering the likelihood of Western intervention in our favor, I personally also take into account cultural factors. The West starts in Germany, not here. As one weepy reporter from Ukraine put it, "people here are almost European." Slavs will remain Slavs to their great civilized brethren - while the attitudes of many French, Americans, Germans, and so on contradict this, as they go to fight in Ukraine and help refugees in Poland, the societies of the West may be affected by such thinking sufficiently to influence their response to possible Russian aggression. So my guess is that the first non-fly zone will be over the rooftops of Paris, or over the Brandenburg Gate. This is how the world works, and frankly speaking, why should a guy born in Nevada or some other Alabama die for Dorohusk or Lublin, or even Chełm? But those are different issues. To me, the degree and shape of the NATO response is a taboo of forecasting.
I'm just a guy on the internet, but I hope I can reassure you somewhat. I grew up in the relatively pacifistic blue state part of the US, but even here there is no question that a Russian invasion of Poland (or any other NATO country) would require War (at the very least, conventional). The red states are even more bloodthirsty. Anything less would be political suicide for a sitting president.
The folks currently in charge of the US government grew up in the cold war, and have literally been preparing for this most of their lives. Nobody wants to risk nuclear war, but in terms of tribal identification, Poland is unquestionably part of "us". I'd also argue that Finland and Sweden are de-facto parts of NATO already, and an invasion would trigger NATO involvement even without the paperwork.
Why is Ukraine different? Historical legacy. It isn't part of NATO and wasn't going to be anytime soon, so until a few weeks ago they weren't seen as "us". That perception is changing fast, especially with Zelenskyy as the public face of Ukranians.
> Also, the last time this happened, in ‘62, it was the Russians who agreed to back down to prevent nuclear war. We owe them one, so this time it’s on us.
Are you sure about this? Because what happened in '62 is that Russians got exactly what they wanted - US removing missiles from Turkey and Italy. Only they let the Americans claim they "won" on Cuba issue, and not mention the whole Cuba issue was a pressure tactic to make US back down on Turkey and it worked. So they let Kennedy pose as Tough Warrior That Stared Down The Commies, while achieving 100% of their objectives. I feel like describing this as "Russians agreed to back down" does not give justice to what actually happened. It's more like "US agreed to back down but Russia agreed to make it look good for the US". It can be seen maybe as a personal sacrifice of Khrushev to Mother Russia - because while he did win on the ground, he also allowed himself to look weak, and maybe that contributed to him to be removed later - the only one of the Soviet leaders until Gorbachev not to die on his post.
> As far as I understand it, the offer is: Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home.
Oh no, this is wildly incorrect. Besides that, the offer also includes demand for Ukraine to "denazify" - which basically means surrendering their public discourse to Russian control and suppress any nationalistic movements and anybody opposing Russia, but by the hands of Ukrainian government themselves; and "demilitarize" - i.e. ensure next time Russia tries to take over there wouldn't be anybody to resist. This is not a peace offer, it's an offer to surrender unconditionally, with Russian takeover delayed until they can fix their tanks up and change their troop's uniforms to a parade ones to look good on CNN, and maybe set up some "genuine Ukrainians" that would cheer incoming Russian tanks (those were already supposed to be there, but looks like Russian FSB officers responsible for it just stole the money instead of hiring the collaborators).
It'd be terminally stupid (for head Ukrainians, in a very literal sense, nunless they flee the country immediately) to accept such a "deal".
> Maybe Russian propaganda, but still pretty funny:
It could have happened. But what also happened is Russian troops murdering multiple civilians in cold blood, including running their cars over with tanks, shooting their vehicles with tank weapons, shelling and machine-gunning humanitarian convoys in pre-agreed humanitarian corridors, and just murdering random civilians that happened to be around because they... well, because they can I guess.
Here's a witness report of a person spending 10 days under Russian troops and witnessing some of the murders himself (in Russian):
NYT of course hastened to clarify this person no longer works for them, because of course that's the most important thing to say about this.
tSo no, Russian troops aren't "polite people" letting civilians go by unharmed. They are very brutal and murderous occupants. And yes, of course Anatoly Karlin, a Russian propagandist, is publishing Russian propaganda. Other people should know better than to disseminate it, though. If you were in the US in 1941, and there were Instagram and videos, would you publish a "funny video" about a Nazi soldier letting a Jewish girl go by and giving her a candy?
>Also, the last time this happened, in ‘62, it was the Russians who agreed to back down to prevent nuclear war. We owe them one, so this time it’s on us.
Wrong. They backed down because they got what they wanted from us - removing nukes from Turkey. They didn't back down out of respect or because they wanted to maintain peace. They put missiles there to get us to remove ours (and used the bay of big invasion as a justification).
"That’s because the Westernized Afghans were the kind of people who cared about trigger warnings and misgendering, and the Taliban was Traditional Masculine Warrior Types. The Taliban could say “kill the infidels!” and the Westerners would argue over whether considering the Taliban an “enemy” was racist."
Just because you see leftists in the USA who say things like that does not mean you should project that behavior onto westernized people in random 3rd world countries. It suggests a very warped sense of reality to suddenly throw these depictions of "newly westernized" people out as if they are based in fact rather than your mind's bizarre yin-yang-esque(a grossly exaggerrated, simplified assumption that all things fall into two groups of attributes, and allowing any vague similarities to immediately pull something into being assumed to be just like one of two sides) transmutation of US culture wars' sides.
"Theres some liberals who do X in the USA" is not a grounds to automatically assume that westernized people in other countries do the same thing in any significant number, and there are obviously an enormous number of steps in between "westernized" and "USA liberals circa 2021 or whatever".
RE: No fly zone: What if we just shot down missiles and not planes (not sure how feasible/effective this could be). I guess one could say we're already doing this by providing some AA equipment, but we can do more there.
RE: Lines in the sand
1. If Russia drops a tactical nuke on Kyiv does that warrant our involvement?
2. What if they gas the remaining defenders of Mariupol?
3. Is there a number of cities we allow him to level before we got involved?
My feeling is the answer is #1 we get involved #2 - #3 we will stay the course.
The only thing that I think is really lacking from the Biden administration is rhetorical. We are folding our hand every time - perhaps if we played a couple hands of poker we could gather better intel on when Putin would fold.
Are you under the impression that Russia doesn't do the same thing?
Then surely Russia ought to expect the same back
Are you under the impression that these peripheral countries aren't asking to join western organizations, but are instead coerced or brainwashed into doing so?
Or are you subscribing to the view point that national sovereignty should only exist for the Great Powers and everyone else should just get in line?
I've spent a lot of time in the former Soviet countries. I play sports over there so I talk with folks after games, meet families, etc.
They live in a world of fear. That fear is not of NATO.
I agree with most of this, and I really want to highlight that the 'no-fly zone' concept is something that can only come from a great power fighting a smaller power. A no-fly zone is, 'we're at war with you but we're so much more powerful that we're going to do it at minimal risk and there's nothing you can do about it.' The US can do that with Iraq and Libya and Kosovo and any number of small countries. I would have thought Russia could do it with Ukraine until last week. But for two major powers there's no such thing as a no-fly zone...there's just war. The internationally accepted step down from war is proxy war or armament, which is what we're doing. Maybe Russia is so weak it would adhere to the polite fiction of a 'no-fly zone', but I doubt it.
I think the phrase has rather morphed over the years. The original meaning (so far as my memory goes) stems for Bill Clinton's idea about how to prevent Serbia from assisting the Bosnian Serbs tear apart Bosnia and Herzegovnia in 1993 or so. It was his answer to the twin queries (1) What are you going to do about all this ethnic cleansing? and (2) Don't the Bosnians have the right to work out a civil war however they want, without interference?
Clinton was a born split-the-difference guy, of course, probably loved threesomes on Jeff's island paradise, so he came up with the idea that the justifiable thing to do was prevent Serbia from assisting the Bosnian Serbs through air power, and the deal he offered them was "You can keep your air force -- so long as you keep it within your borders, and don't fly it over Bosnia." A very different thing from just going in and blasting the hell out of Serbian air forces.
And this doesn't really seem relevant to Ukraine, except perhaps in the separatist regions, where you could argue there is a domestic civil war going on -- but even then, the separatists are *not* being assisted by the VVS anyway, so what's the point?
But yeah if you're just talking about suppressing somebody's aerial offensive and defensive assets, this is just 'establishing air superiority' and the phrase "no fly zone" seems weirdly inapt. Could be Zelensky's trying to suggest a form of Clintonian hair-splitting that would allow NATO to get directly involved while pretending to just be "allowing" Ukraine and Russia to work it out "fairly" using just ground assets. Or something like that, who knows? Why he thinks the lack of a solid *rationalization* is the big barrier to this happening is a mystery. Or maybe he's playing to a world audience, thinking the Europeans or Americans will be embarrassed at "not even" being willing to interdict Russian aerial bombardment. Although again who would be naive enough to uncritically accept that framing I dunno.
The original No Fly Zone was over Iraq in 1991 immediately after the first Gulf War. The term was dusted off again in 1993 for Bosnia.
Oh yeah I remember that now. I think I got my Gulf Wars mixed up, I was thinking the Iraq version came after the Yugoslav.
I don't think Zelensky really thinks NATO is going to impose a No Fly zone, but it's his job to investigate every possible avenue of support for his country. And a large part of the value of his entreaties is not the (minuscule) chance of actually getting NATO to take a huge jump up the escalation ladder, but the propaganda / information-warfare value, casting Ukraine further in the light of noble victimhood, drumming up public support, etc.
"maybe he's playing to a world audience, thinking the Europeans or Americans will be embarrassed at "not even" being willing to interdict Russian aerial bombardment. Although again who would be naive enough to uncritically accept that framing I dunno."
From this article https://nevalleynews.org/16269/news/polls-show-many-americans-in-favor-of-no-fly-zone-but-most-do-not-fully-understand-the-ramifications-of-imposing-this-order/:
"WASHINGTON, March 4 (Reuters) - A broad bipartisan majority of Americans think the United States should stop buying Russian oil and gas and work with NATO to set up "no-fly zones" to protect Ukraine from Russian air strikes, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Friday."
Later in the same article:
"It was not clear if respondents who supported a no-fly zone were fully aware of the risk of conflict, and majorities opposed the idea of sending American troops to Ukraine or conducting air strikes to support the Ukrainian army."
Having interacted with a number of civilians about this, it seems they genuinely do not understand that a no fly zone means shooting down planes and air-war. They seem to think of it as some kind of abstract international law instrument which somehow-magically- stops people from flying. I think the most charitable explanation is that they haven't thought that hard about it.
Yes, it almost sounds like it's an ICAO policy that one could somehow invoke that would cause air travel, including hostile military aviation, to be suspended in a region, or to become clearly recognized as a war crime, or something something something.
Good branding for the 1990s ones, I guess!
Quite right. One of the drawbacks of the professionalization of the military is that far fewer people than at any point in history have any direct experience informing their opinion about military operations.
> Although again who would be naive enough to uncritically accept that framing I dunno.
Been avoiding Twitter this last month? ;)
I have seen far too many people, some of whom I used to respect the mental prowess of, speaking positively of the idea of a US NFZ over Ukraine. And who will. Just. Not. Listen.
"Imposing a No Fly Zone" is kinda like fighting a little kid by keeping your palm on their forehead and them at arms length while they flail at you. Harder to do with an adult bear.
>Two persons close to the Russia-Ukraine negotiations (including back channel talks) tell me Russia proposed (1) Zelensky remains pro forma president but Russia appoints Boiko as PM, (2) Ukraine recognizes L/DNR and Crimea, (3) No NATO. Ze told them emphatically no.
Boyko was the Putin proxy candidate in the last election, getting 11% of the vote in 2019. Though I suspect that number would be vastly lower now.
(https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/the-real-russian-candidate-in-ukraine-s-presidential-race/)
https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500812687009267712
The latter two might work even if they're painful, but the former would never fly and Ukraine would be nuts to take that deal.
Yeap, I often see 2 and 3 mentioned as a reasonable compromise, but they also asked to change Ukraine's constitution to specifically nerf Zelensky.
Also to note that negotiations are complicated by a complete lack of trust in Russia - they broke both the recent Minsk accords, and also the treaty they signed when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, which says very clearly they'll respect Ukraine's borders at the time. Hard to get more untrustworthy than that.
I saw a claim elsewhere that another part of the demands was that Ukraine reduce its military to 60k people max. Which would be extremely foolish to agree to since Russia is demonstrably untrustworthy and would doubtless attack again when the situation is more in his favor. If either of these secret side conditions is true, it would be stupid for Ukraine the deal since it amounts to surrender to conquest.
That was a day one demand, that as far as I can tell, was taken off the table when it was clearly a non starter. I'm also 90% sure Putin wants the entirety of the Donbas region independent, not just the part that Putin had before the war.
I think Ukraine should only take the deal if they get back something that can be an assurance that this is unlikely to happen again. My first thought was the return of their nuclear weapons, which is probably unrealistic, but they should get something that helps guarantee the deal will be preserved.
It's hard to see what kind of assurance Russia could give that would make a difference to Ukraine, given their history of lying and breaking past deals.
DMZ inside Russian territory.
You mean, inside Donbass? Presumably not inside actual Russia, because then Donetsk and Luhansk would be on the Ukraine side of the DMZ.
Formal acquiescence to Ukraine joining NATO would work.
And, as Aristides said, handing over a hundred working nukes would work (nb: one of the big reasons Ukraine handed the nukes over in the first place was that they were locked with codes the Ukrainians didn't have).
No that would end the world, silly boy.
It was asked what kind of assurance Russia could give that Ukraine would accept. I'm pretty sure Ukraine would accept either of those as being genuine insofar as Russia would be putting a gun to its own head in case of betrayal.
It's not going to *happen*, but it satisfies the condition asked for.
Put a UN force in along a demilitarised zone. Any invasion would then authorise fully sanctioned war against Russia. Then Ukraine agrees to not join NATO.
Keep in mind that Ukraine had eight years to implement Minsk-2.
And we are ones to talk about being "demonstrably untrustworthy".
Russia did not withdraw their heavy weapons, so Ukraine could not implement Minsk-2. We've all now seen what happens when Russia agrees to "humanitarian corridors" so I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on anything.
The text reads as follows (emphases mine):
Pull-out of all heavy weapons *by both sides* to equal distance with the aim of creation of a security zone on minimum 50 kilometres (31 mi) apart for artillery of 100mm calibre or more, and a security zone of 70 kilometres (43 mi) for multiple rocket launchers (MRLS) and 140 kilometres (87 mi) for MLRS Tornado-S, Uragan, Smerch, and Tochka U tactical missile systems:
*for Ukrainian troops*, from actual line of contact;
*for armed formations of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine*, from the contact line in accordance with the Minsk Memorandum as of 19 September 2014
The pullout of the above-mentioned heavy weapons must start no later than the second day after the start of the ceasefire and finish within 14 days.
This process will be assisted by OSCE with the support of the Trilateral Contact Group.
It doesn't actually obligate Russia to do anything.
Very funny? If we're playing the "Donetsk and Luhansk separatists aren't controlled by Russia" game then we have nothing to talk about.
The Donetsk and Luhansk separatist forces are supported by Russia, directed by Russia, and to some extent _are_ Russia (they've had at least special ops forces In there for years)
> It doesn't actually obligate Russia to do anything.
If you are claiming that Russia is not controlling/influencing/supporting "armed formations of" then you really should educate itself about situation.
(and that assumes that they should not be treated to be simply part of russian army)
I lived eight years in Ukraine. I know personally plenty of people from Donbass. They never saw a Russian soldier.
That said, if Minsk-2 meant to say "Russia" or impose obligations on Russia then they should have said so.
What was the problem with point 11 of Minsk-2? Why Ukraine couldn’t implement it?
Quoting from Wikipedia:
11. Constitutional reform in Ukraine, with a new constitution to come into effect by the end of 2015, the key element of which is decentralisation (taking into account peculiarities of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, agreed with representatives of these districts), and also approval of permanent legislation on the special status of particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in accordance with the measures spelt out in the attached footnote, by the end of 2015.
My understanding is that current Ukraine elites didn’t (and don’t) want any Russian influence, and so they sabotaged any political guarantees to separatists / Russian proxies, and Russia in turn was wary to withdraw heavy weapons - since without them, Donetsk / Luhansk (population 3.5m) would be very vulnerable to military action from Ukraine (population 40m, army trained and armed by NATO).
They chose not to implement it because Russia refused to implement their side of the agreement. If Russia is not even going to honor the ceasefire, why the heck would they go forward with constitutional reform? How could they sell that to their electorate? "We got nothing, and in return we made huge constitutional changes". OK. They only agreed to it in return for a ceasefire that didn't happen. Traditionally when the other party is in breach of a contract, you are released from your obligation to perform your side of the agreement.
Well, the contention is that Russia _did_ implement a ceasefire (and then got nothing in return).
Both Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 were signed after Ukraine military suffered major (some say - catastrophic) defeats, and there was a very real risk of Russian forces advancing to Kiev.
"My understanding is that current Ukraine elites didn’t (and don’t) want any Russian influence"
Your understanding is weak.
NO Ukrainian wants any Russian influence in Ukraine.
Look up Holodomor if you don't understand why
Look at the current fighting if you're unclear on exactly how much Ukrainians don't want to be dominated by Putin, or Russia.
But my previous statement really wasn't strong enough:
No sane person wants to be under Russian influence. Russia is a land for whose entire existence it's been a cesspool of political and economic corruption. Until that changes, it needs to be kept locked up in the smallest possible place
Exactly this kind of statements I cite when people ask me why Russia could be afraid of NATO/USA.
It is quite easy to portray someone as paranoid, when you first threaten him, and than only look at his reaction.
I do not know a single thing Russia has done in the last 30 years, NATO/USA has not done worse before in this period. This does not give Russia the right to do so, but this does take the right from any Westerner to point to Russia as a evil.
"NO Ukrainian wants any Russian influence in Ukraine."
Do you mean that people who lived and still living in Crimea and Donbas are not Ukrainians then?
Also, if 'no influence' - why Ukraine didn't pay market prices for the natural gas starting 1991 or 2004 or 2010?
I've read on Holodomor, thank you.
You also seem to equate Russia with Putin, and call for the harshest possible collective punishment of entire population - am I getting it right?
Weird. All those years living in Ukraine and I met so many people who don't fit your generalization regarding "all Ukrainian people."
No true Ukrainian, is it?
You violated the 1994 agreement that caused Ukraine to give up their nukes when you invaded Crimea, Donbass, etc.
No one can ever be reasonable expected to honor ANY agreement with you, when you're currently in violation of an agreement you signed with them.
Sorry, but until Russia leaves every bit of 1994 Ukraine territory, there can be no "bad faith" on the Ukraine side, only on the Russian one
*I* didn't violate anything, and the United States had long claimed that the Budapest Memorandum was not binding when it sought to sanction Byelorus in violation of that Memorandum.
Meanwhile, if you want bad faith, look to the promises that NATO would not expand to the East.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
Oh, well, that's easy.
"Misha there is in the Army on Monday, Dima is in the Army on Tuesday, Aleksi is in the Army on Wednesday, Zhenya is in the army on Thursday..."
Amazing that Putin managed to offer that Ukraine almost completely capitulates, while spreading news that he'd offered to walk away with almost nothing. This seems typical of Russia's negotiation style (see also: repeatedly agreeing to temporary ceasefires so that civilians can evacuate, and then breaking the ceasefires when civilians attempt to evacuate every time). I'll be similarly skeptical next time Russia says anything about their war policy.
I think "completely capitulates" would involve reinstalling Yanukovych or equivalent as president and disbanding their armed forces. These demands aren't anything close to that.
They requested that Zelensky become a figurehead only and a Russian-selected person becomes the executive.
That would indeed be a fairly complete capitulation.
One possible compromise would be for Ukraine to agree to accept the results of a referendum, run by a neutral party, in Crimea and the secessionist areas. Russia wins in the Crimea, probably in the parts of eastern Ukraine they have long controlled, perhaps not if their claim is for all of Donbas. At the point when that agreement was made both sides could claim it as a victory for them, and they are just respecting democracy.
Ukraine yes, but I don't think Russia would accept elections where it doesn't count the votes.
I was talking with friends about this, and Germany would have been the best neutral party. We joked that if China is organizing, they'll also be winning the elections even if they're not on the ballot.
But yes, that would really be the just decision in this case. Unfortunately I doubt it's going to happen.
What about the Ukraine being split in half? Basically Russia gaining the eastern half, and Ukraine keeping the Western half? I guess the Ukrainians would never agree to this, but still...
If things had gone Russia's way, perhaps we'd be thinking about that. But they haven't.
Yeah but Putin wants to escalate...so idk, maybe as a last resort before he goes completely nuclear...
If you reward terrorism, you get more terrorism.
The response to "Putin wants to escalate" is "Dear Russia, if you want very single one of your cities nuked, let Putin escalate. If not, don't."
Nobody would believe that for a second.
Keep in mind Russia has practiced ethnic cleansing in the occupied areas of Luhansk/Donetsk. The people there now are not the same people who were there 8 years ago. Should Israel conduct a referendum in the settlements and then decide whether to annex the settlement areas based on that referendum?
Actually, that sounds a bit unsubstantiated...maybe provide some reliable sources for this claim?
Plenty of proof out there if you care to look at all:
https://www.dw.com/en/donetsk-and-luhansk-in-ukraine-a-creeping-process-of-occupation/a-60878068
"Since the conflict broke out, millions of people have left the separatist areas."
I would argue that most of it was due to the ongoing conflict, and general lack of rule if law (and not ethnicity). A lot of people prefer not to live in a war zone, if they have an alternative...
Care to bring any evidence, or its the common wisdom again?
Another nice piece: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/22/what-are-donetsk-and-luhansk-ukraines-separatist-statelets
"In the statelets, secret police and “loyal” residents monitor every word, phone call and text message.
Dissidents or businessmen who refuse to “donate” their assets to the “needs of the People’s Republic” have been thrown in “cellars”, or dozens of makeshift concentration camps, without trial.
“It looks like the 1930s in the Soviet Union, a classic gulag,” Stanislav Aseyev, a publicist who was kidnapped in 2017 in Donetsk and was sentenced by a separatist “court” to 15 years in jail for “espionage”, told Al Jazeera.
For almost two years, he was incarcerated and tortured in these “cellars” until separatists swapped him and dozens of other prisoners in 2017.
Thousands of others were tortured and abused in the “cellars”, according to rights groups and witnesses.
“The cellars where prisoners are held in Donetsk, and the widespread use of torture, are among the most obvious human rights issues,” said Ivar Dale, a senior policy adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a human rights watchdog group.
These tendencies have gone hand in hand with economic degradation.
The living standards are “many times, if not dozens of times worse than in pre-war 2013”
...
Thousands of Russian volunteers flocked to Donetsk and Luhansk to aid separatist militias.
“Putin will come and restore order here,” one of their supporters, a rotund minibus driver named Valerii, told this reporter in April 2014 in Donetsk.
But four months later, after the separatists tried to confiscate his minibus, he locked his apartment, loaded the bus with his most valuable belongings, and left for Kyiv."
I believe you haven't read the article yourself, because it contains nothing like "ethnic cleansing"
Are you claiming you don't understand what "ethnic cleansing" is?
Because "making it miserable for people of a certain ethnicity until they leave" is pretty much the Platonic ideal of "ethnic cleansing"
I read the entire article. Forcing 2-3 million ethnic Ukrainians (out of a population of 6-7 million) to flee by torturing them and confiscating their stuff is ethnic cleansing
A good solution might be for Zelensky to go to "prison" as Risto Ryti did for Finnland. Putin gets to claim domestIcally that he removed the Jewish drugy nazi and Zelensky gets the full Pablo Escobar treatment, with plenty of furloughs, gets his chosen successor elected with a discrete hint or two, and no risk to fuck up in everyday politics.
I think the peace agreement needs to be a formal, tripartite agreement between NATO, Ukraine, and Russia. Ukraine is formally declared as neutral and not eligible for NATO as well as being a nuclear weapons free zone, Russia agrees to allow the residents of the Donetsk/Luhansk to have an internationally supervised referendum on being independent/joining Russia/staying in Ukraine and to not send in any troops into Ukraine to back any government, etc.
And yeah, we really need to not do the idiotic No Fly Zone idea. Thankfully, Russia made it clear recently that they'd consider it an act of war by any country that did it. I'm not worried that Biden is going to cave on that - the guy held firm on Afghanistan withdrawal even with a big chunk of the national security press and "Blob" railing against him over it, and so far the US has done exactly what we threatened to do before Russia invaded (sanctions, arms to the Ukrainians, etc).
I have a hard time seeing how the Ukrainians will ever trust Russia to abide to a promise not to invade again. I think any peace agreement would have to involve trustworthy allies, and be effectively something like NATO in all but name. (i.e. troop tripwires, like South Korea.)
I've been listening to residents in Odessa on Twitter spaces and telegrams. Even the political groups and factions that were built around being pro Russia are now building sandbags in the streets. They feel betrayed. Burning with anger at Russia.
If it would be like NATO in all but name, then it would be recognized as such, and would mean that Russia lost the war (by definition - stated objective for the war was not achieved). But then the question of trust would be moot - there will be military guarantees instead.
The question of trust comes up only if Ukraine is losing - and then it is a balancing act between more fighting (and deaths) and giving up something…
My worry is all this does is postpone the invasion for 5 years. Right now Ukraine has international support and is causing Russia to suffer major loses. If Russia ever sees am opening where one of those is not true, why wouldn't they just do it again. At a minimum, they will get more of Ukraine.
To take Scott's metaphor, Crimea was the Alusian Islands, now they are asking for Alaska, what will they ask for next? It is better to not surrender unless something changes that make it substantially less likely this will happen again. Transfer of Russian military assets? I'm not sure what, it will take, but Ukraine might be better off in an Afghanistan like 20 year conflict that they win instead of becoming puppet state slowly over repeated attacks with peace agreements in the middle.
Give Ukraine part of Russia's nuclear arsenal. Ukraine gave its nukes to Russia back in the early 90's, in exchange for a pledge to respect its borders. Now Russia has violated that pledge, so Ukraine should get the nukes back in exchange.
Though that is an obvious nonstarter for obvious reasons.
Of course. Perhaps someone else, like the United States or France, could loan Ukraine some nukes in exchange for their right to compensation from the Russian arsenal...
... though that's also a nonstarter, for almost as obvious reasons.
They could do it secretly...like Israel which is not "officially" an atomic power, but obviously "unofficially" it's a different reality...
We didn't give the Israelis nukes. They're just smart and resourceful enough to build them on their own.
Even setting up the parameters of a referendum like that is rather complicated in the wake of a war like this. Some towns in the Ukrainian-controlled parts of Donbas simply don't exist anymore; should the separatists win because of self-determination if everyone who would have opposed them is already dead?
The same concerns apply to Crimea in a way, although it's farther in the past -- Crimea is so very Russian because the Soviets deported the Crimean Tatars in 1944 and settled Russians in their place. We shouldn't want ethnic cleansing to be a way to weaponize self-determination.
I don't have any solutions here, just pointing out problems upon problems.
No
"Ukraine is formally declared as neutral and not eligible for NATO as well as being a nuclear weapons free zone"
Ukraine pretty much did that in 1994, and the result was Russia invaded 20 years later.
NATO is absolutely no threat to Russia, UNLES Russia is planning on invading Ukraine.
So "joining NATO can not be allowed" is pretty much saying "Russia will eventually invade"
I've got a better deal:
Russia gets completely out of Ukraine, Ukraine gets to join NATO and EU, and the sanctions against Russia get ended
> Ukraine ceding them does nothing except take away Russia’s casus belli for future wars.
During the big state address teh casus belli was 'we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.'
Why anyone thinks Vladimir Putin *needs* a casus belli is beyond me.
I mean he, like any invader, obviously does, because he needs at least some people and factions onside. That's why he has provided multiple. That's why no country ever doesn't. Wars that are openly about conquest, wealth etc. simply do not happen any more.
Right. And an important faction to have onside is the military itself, which will have morale problems very shortly if it doesn't believe in the cause.
I'm also trying to think, even when wars of conquest were common, how often they were ever presented purely as wars of conquest: "We want that land so we're going to take it." Maybe the Mongols did this?
As opposed to "I am the rightful ruler of this place, as is well-known according to all the best sources, not the imposter who currently holds sway here, and I'm merely reclaiming what has been robbed from me."
Or "[ENEMY NATION] has engaged in repeated abuses and injustices, and we have waged a war to rightfully punish them, and now to compensate us for our trouble (and perhaps to discourage it from ever happening again) we ask for nothing more than a few measly pieces of land. Or perhaps we'll subjugate them entirely, but purely as an act of self-defense."
Maybe read the Iliad.
Falls under my second casus belli: punitive expedition against a wife-stealing scoundrel and those harboring him.
Yeah, but there's a lot more flavor to it than that. You don't really get the sense that Homer thinks Paris was a scoundrel; Philip of Makedon seems to have named his famous son after him.
There was a (long) period of time when a successful war was very clearly an advantageous adventure. Take over some foreign land and tax them. You didn't need much to sell that.
Unfortunately (or I guess fortunately) that isn't true any more.
The Romans did basically this in Europe (less so in Asia and Africa since there were peer opponents there). "Veni, Vidi, Vici", and all.
Colonialists did this in parts of what became their empires (not everywhere - there were provocations of a sort for a lot of the wars, and obviously the Aztecs provided all sorts of moral imperatives - but parts).
I'm not that far into the history of Rome podcast, but thus far at least, most Roman conquest in Italy was rationalized as being in response to a threat posed to allied cities by the Etruscans or the Latins or Samnites, etc. I was surprised actually, given their reputation as ruthless conquerers, the pains Roman politicians took to convince themselves that they weren't the aggressors.
Yes. The same is true in Caesar's conquest of Gaul. In practice it was a very aggressive war and we're left with little doubt as to his true intentions, but he nonetheless waited for a casus belli in order to present it as essentially a series of defensive actions on behalf of allied Gallic tribes.
" We want that land so we're going to take it."
You don't have to go that far back: The Nazis in Germany did exactly that, they basically sayed: "We need more space to the east, to give to our settlers and feed our great homeland. The slavic hordes that live there now are anyway not using it properly."
It's true that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf and that the pursuit of Lebensraum was both a popular idea in Nazi circles and official Nazi policy in the form of Generalplan Ost, but it wasn't given as a reason for the war, on the occasion of either Fall Weiss or Barbarossa. Those speeches of Hitler's are available and well worth reading.
When it came to public consumption, I think the Nazis normally referenced Lebensraum obliquely, and almost never as a primary motive for the war. Aside from Mein Kampf itself, I'm not aware of any Nazi propaganda where something like Generalplan Ost was laid out for broad popular consumption as a laudable goal.
Even Hitler made one up: the Nazis were nominally "protecting ethnic Germans in Poland." Apparently literally no one thinks "because I feel like it" is an acceptable reason for war anymore.
Super duper quick note on the university that banned Dostoevsky: 1) it was a lecture series, not a class, 2) the official notice said it was postponed, not outright banned, 3) they've since reversed the decision.
"it was a lecture series, not a class"
so?
"the official notice said it was postponed, not outright banned"
we weren't killing the jews (yet), we're just checking public opinion by throwing them in ghettos
"they've since reversed the decision"
I hope the professor declines and holds it publicly instead.
I'd seen a lot of stuff around the internet about a university supposedly banning the books, which I didn't think captured the situation properly once I looked into it. If there's reason to be angry at something, it should be based on accurate information.
I think your lecture series/class criticism is fair. They are pretty similar. In my defense, I was pretty tired when I wrote this comment. :p
However, I think comparing me saying the series was postponed to rounding up Jewish people inflates the issue. There's a big difference what the Nazis did and not teaching a class on a writer because he was Russian. On the other hand, I can understand your line of thought that this could be a test before they move to larger things.
Obviously I'm being *massively* hyperbolic in order to show a point.
Corrections for factual accuracy should not be attacked. Helping everyone operate from the same facts is a public good.
Agreed but I think the comment should also take into account that a sort of 'testing of the waters' exists.
Saying a University "banned the study of Author X" implies that a decision was made with the *purpose* of *prohibiting* *all* study of X. If, in reality, a class about X was temporarily postponed, that does not require, nor even imply, any intent to limit the study of X- I had classes canceled/rescheduled simply because of scheduling conflicts, classes I was *required* to take to graduate- a postponment of a lecture series, class, whatever, does not imply that anyone in the University find the *content* of the class objectionable. So it's a huge difference between what happened and the claim that "studying Dostoevsky was banned"
Do you understand the difference?
Absolutely unnecessary comparison to the holocaust. You otherwise make reasonable points, but making a slippery slope argument does not require equating the holocaust to removing a single book from a single lecture series.
Yeah I'm being *massively* hyperbolic.
Related to the jingoism section: lots of western businesses have taken action against Russia beyond what government sanctions called for. So western unity against Russia has gone beyond "being very pro-Ukraine on Reddit"!
A lot of business transactions are based on mutual trust. Someone needs to either ship the goods or pay first. And when Russia starts doing the whole invasion thing, its far less likely that you'll be able to count on the Russian government guaranteeing contract provisions. So at the very least you need to account for the additional risk. And that's before you have to worry about the human cost of having business assets in Russia who might be harmed.
Also when your bank and the computer network it uses for wire transfers are placing economic sanctions against Russia and Russian companies in a way that changes day by day.
A lot of western military veterans have also traveled to Ukraine to fight in their International Legion.
Got to note that any company trying to fully exit Russia right now will have their properties seized through fast-track bankruptcy procedure; that's why many companies close their business venues but still pay salaries of their workers which avoids this particular outcome.
"Is it imprudent? It’s a risk, but at least it was taken in the defense of real principles, which is better than most of the imprudent things we do."
1. Sure the argument that this is in defence of real principles is better than normal, but on the other side of the ledger the risk of blowing up the world is much higher than normal. As has been pointed out now, when critics as diverse as Kissinger, Chomsky & Mearsheimer are all saying "this might blow up the world", it's probably genuinely dangerous. Prior to all this happening, there appeared to be something of an intellectual consensus around the idea that NATO expansion eastwards is dangerous -by intellectuals left, right and centre- *among everyone except the people who actually got to make the decision*.
To turn the rhetoric around, we had the option to say "too bad, too sad, but great power politics mean that Ukraine is Putin's toy". We've done much, much more ruthless things than that, and this one would have been for a brilliant cause- in the service of not blowing up the world, as opposed to many of the ruthless things we do, which are in the service of enriching very wealthy people.
2. Also, to mutilate a phrase from law "one who appeals to principles must have clean hands". The argument the west is justified in some kind of deontic sense is limited by the fact that, as best I can tell, the west funded and encouraged literal Nazis knowingly at several points during this process, including during the "Revolution of Dignity".
On the topic of the culture war elements in this new cold war, I really think we need to clamp down on this frame [Based Russia versus Woke West]- it's both ridiculous and dangerous. I discussed it a little here:
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/dont-be-deceived-this-is-not-world?s=w
Mostly just to plant my flag in the ground as someone who really hates this framing.
Apparently even Trump now makes jokes at Russia's expense. You can't be based if you're too weak, and wokeism evidently hasn't yet caused the West to collapse. Would be interesting to see which anti-woke symbol would be adopted next.
> wokeism evidently hasn't yet caused the West to collapse
Yet.
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ gives a scathing rebuke-in-four-and-a-half-parts to the notion of decadence (which I think “wokeness” can be correctly read as) being the cause of economic and military collapse.
I don't think that "decadence" is a good model for the concern about "wokeness".
The historical model for "wokeness" is one in which a multi-ethnic society living at peace is gradually riven apart by hate-mongers from the less privileged group. That's a pattern which has been repeated quite a few times in history.
I think at least part of wokeness can be considered emotional decadence.
I would agree with that. In harder times we worry about getting enough food, or invading foreign armies, and don't have time to worry about even major systemic discrimination, let alone "microaggressions."
This is semantics.
I agree that if you look at it from the right angle wokeness is a kind of decadence. Why should that be relevant to the question "what effects will wokeness have on our economy and political institutions"?
What properties of decadence cause it to never precipitate societal collapse? Does wokeness have those properties? Does calling it "emotional decadence" interact with any of those properties?
I think a better model is the Cultural Revolution, in which the currently dominant faction of the elites weaponizes the masses with hate against other factions, thus consolidating their power by eliminating threats to it, but also resulting in atrocities by one faction of the masses against other factions.
Of course, at that level of abstraction, it merely sounds like warfare, and in the later stages the Cultural Revolution often was merely warfare; but there are other crucial similarities, like the demonization of privilege (converting envy from a mortal sin into a moral virtue and senseless suffering into the virtue of martyrs), the demonization of knowledge, symbolic mob violence (for example against statues), preference falsification spirals, mass censorship, and paranoia about treason taken to absurd heights.
This pattern is somewhat similar to underprivileged hatemongers exploiting ethnic fault lines, but not the same. I agree that it is completely unlike the martial decadence discussed in the Fremen Mirage.
https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Cultural-Revolution
Bret Devereaux is useful to read, but you must keep in mind the fact that he has an agenda, because he never forgets it for an instant (https://acoup.blog/2022/01/21/fireside-friday-january-21-2022-on-public-scholarship/).
I can, in fact, quote him *back at you* on this one. He never joins the dots *because that is not in his interest*, but try this on for size (italics replaced with asterisks):
>And we should note that nearly all of the blows which brought this system down were self-inflicted *by the Romans* who for their part never seem to have understood the marvelous thing they had created. The Crisis of the Third Century shattered the political unity of that market and disrupted the limited degree of public peace that created it. Rival emperors both before the crisis but increasingly in it also devalued the currency and extracted supplies directly in kind rather than in cash, leading to weakness in the currency system and a progressive *demonitization*(sic) of the economy. This free-fall was to a degree arrested in the fourth century by Diocletian and Constantine, but the top-heavy, bureaucratic administration they created was probably itself a drag on the economy; Diocletian’s currency meddling and price fixing were disasters and Constantine’s efforts to *actively reduce* labor mobility to aid in collecting taxes couldn’t have helped. That leads to the lower-but-still-elevated fourth century plateau: elevated by the continued existence of semi-unified market and the fact that at least the wars of rival emperors tended to be geographically limited and less destructive than the pre-Roman (or post-Roman) norm of endemic warfare. Finally, there is something to the notion that the state-run systems of extraction and redistribution – taxing the farmers in grain to be shipped to the soldiers – may have continued to encourage a degree of specialization and trade; the “crude but vigorous pump” *worked* to a degree to elevate living standards over the pre-modern agricultural norm.
>But that very cycle of usurpers and civil wars – and the decision of those rival emperors to (in Peter Brown’s phrasing, which I love), “bus in” ‘barbarian’ armies to fight each other – led to the slow but steady disintegration of that united political order, the shift to more and more endemic violence and the final collapse both of that semi-unified market and the “crude but vigorous pump” that had in part replaced it. Living standards thus declined back down to the pre-Roman Iron Age norm while at the same time the carrying capacity of the empire also declined down to that norm, leading to what must have been decades of brutal misery as food ran short, malnourished infants died before their time, cities shrank and the world grew poor.
[...]
>Instead, I think the stronger point here (and one Peter Brown – lest anyone think I think his work is without merit, which is far from the truth – and also many others make well) is that the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West – while it *was* a catastrophe for those people living at the time – was less a product of ‘hordes of barbarians’ coming over the frontier (who again, were mostly invited in by Roman leaders looking for advantage in their endless struggles with each other) and instead a product of actors *within* the political system, *within* the empire, tearing it apart out of the pursuit of their own interests, deceived by the assumption that something so old could never simply vanish…until it did. The consequences of their decisions and of their failure to recognize the fragility of the clockwork machine that suspended them above the poverty to come (and that it was already damaged) were great and terrible.
Source: https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/
"Getting so comfortable with the harvest you've reaped that you piss it away and burn the societal commons in labyrinthine internal power struggles" is not a completely-absurd notion of "decadence", and in many respects fits the objections to the "woke" paradigm much better. Using Scott posts as a handy example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ (particularly the sections "The Other Chinese Room Experiment", "On Second Thought, Keep Your Tired And Poor To Yourself", and "Plays Well In Groups"), and https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/.
I'm not saying "don't read ACOUP". ACOUP covers a lot of ground interestingly and as far as I can tell Bret doesn't lie. But I read him with a careful eye and a critical mind, because he doesn't just write ACOUP to show off or to make money; he is - by his own admission - trying to manipulate public opinion.
Re your last para, that applies to everyone ever, doesn't it?
Everyone does manipulation occasionally, but usually subconsciously and/or in limited/predictable domains (nobody's especially trustworthy when taking the stand at his own murder trial, etc.). "I write my blog in a way explicitly calculated to be enjoyable and maximise public respect for me so I can more effectively promote my politics" is a step beyond "everyone does it"; most politicians and cult leaders go that far, but people read them with heightened scrutiny too.
It hasn't caused military collapse because non-woke straight white men have technologically advanced our military so far. If America's defense depended on something akin to Ukraine and only liberals were available, things would be very different.
I was annoyed at everyone interpreting Trump's saying that Putin is smart as implying that he approved of the invasion. Now I'm waiting for Trump to announce that actually he was wrong — on the evidence of how the invasion is going, Putin was not smart.
But I'm not holding my breath.
...the problem with this is that Trump uses "smart" as an equivalent term for "is doing something I agree with" and "dumb" for "doing something I disagree with."
Except he literally says that the invasion is bad almost immediately after calling putin smart, the ACTUAL problem is that this is either all that got reported, or it got reported correctly but trump critics only saw the headlines and reacted to it.
The “smart” part was clearly intended to be “got the better of Sleepy Joe Biden” not “the invasion was a good thing I approve of”.
"Apparently even Trump now makes jokes at Russia's expense. ". Apparent to whom? Trump made some comments which could be read as snark about Putin, but equally as snark about the weakness of the people he doesn't like in the West.
Applebaum, Frum, and others have long argued that the "blame it on NATO" idea is silly. NATO expansion eastward has been driven, from the start, by these countries asking for it in response to Russian bellicosity. I reject the notion that there was some kind of intellectual consensus here.
In any case, there is a very big difference between agreeing not to expand NATO eastward and agreeing that "Ukraine is Putin's toy." In fact, attempts to appease Putin have gone much the same way as attempts to appease Hitler: telling strongmen they can do as they like makes them feel empowered to do more. I would argue that what provoked Putin most was not NATO's eastward expansion, but rather the West's failure to punish Putin sufficiently in response to his actions in Georgia and Syria.
NATO expansion didn't actually pose much threat to Russia. NATO can launch nukes from subs in the ocean with or without countries in NATO, unlike during the cuban missile crisis (edit: sorry, they were invented in 1959, but I'm assuming — and open to being corrected — that they were not yet a major nuke carrier), and NATO had, at one time, 0 tanks in Europe. In Poland, they had a few hundred troops. It was not a major army amassing at Russia's borders. What Putin didn't like was Ukraine turning West economically and politically. The idea that it might theoretically one day join NATO is little more than a pretext.
Edit: epistemic status: political science PhD candidate, but really I am largely giving voice to Applebaum's objections here.
It's both, of course. Russia's neighbors (except Lukashenkostan) want to be in NATO, and the US wants to let them join. They're good as NATO members since they actually exceed the 2% GDP defense spending target: Ukraine is said to have spent over 4% of GDP on defense[1], Latvia 2.3%[2], Estonia 2.3%[3] and Lithuania 2.12%[4]. Gee I wonder why....
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=UA
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/latvia/military-expenditure-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html
[3] https://finabel.org/a-historical-record-estonias-2022-defence-budget-increases-to-2-3-of-the-gdp/
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/810481/ratio-of-military-expenditure-to-gross-domestic-product-gdp-lithuania/
Georgia was basically the same case as Ukraine: First a massive influx of money from the US and EU promoting 'democracy', than a 'revolution' backed by the US/EU than the wish to join NATO almost put in their mouth.
Have a look at the Documentary 'Ukraine on Fire' from Oliver Stone. If you look from this angle, I can fully understand that Putin is afraid of NATO and of being next. The West did nothing to counter this concerns apart of saying Putin would be paranoid and crazy and NATO is only for defense. This last claim would be much easier to believe if someone could wipe my memory of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. Who tells that NATO doesn't suddenly have to protect the Russians from Putin?
For me looking from outside seeing the US and NATO very selectively policing the World is very unsettling or even disgusting.
Err... US operations are not the same as NATO operations. Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded by the US and "partners", not NATO. I think Russia had more military operations in Syria than the US did. Not familiar with Libya.
A nice, safe, status-quo point of view, very sensible. Reminds me of any number of thoughtful "detente" essays I read in the 70s arguing a policy of indefinite accommodation.
But I personally find it a a little too Neville Chamberlain for my tastes, and I prefer Reagan's reformulation of the problem, id est, no we don't *have* to accept paying the Danegeld indefinitely. We can win, and they can lose, and that should be our priority goal.
The US and Europe combined easily have the economic might to drive Russia into ruin -- I'll note in passing that Germany alone has twice the GDP of Russia, and even Poland has 25% of it. And the Ukrainians want a lot more than mere honor at this point -- not with dead children lying on the road. They want to kick Putin's teeth in and see blood. I'm perfectly comfortable with helping them do that, and I think it can be done -- just as it was done in the 80s to the USSR -- without resorting to an exchange of ICBMs. But you do need to keep your eye on the ball, and you need to not start rationalizing horrible things as just some kind of existential tax bill that it's prudent to fork out indefinitely. It's OK as a temporary strategy, but as an end goal in itself -- nah.
Reagan's approach only worked because the USSR was on the brink of collapse at the time and couldn't call his bluff. Even then, it nearly led to a full-blown nuclear war on a number of occasions, as the Soviets struggled to tell "normal" levels of US bellicosity from pretexts for invasion/attach. Reagan basically Alzheimered his way into gambling with the entire planet, and only lucked out thanks to the prudence and carefulness of his enemy (as well as the bravery and stoicism of a few lower-downs like Petrov). That is not a model to emulate when the fate of millions of people is on the line.
Additionally; the approach that the US took to Russia after the collapse of the USSR (ie: treating it like a conquered enemy) was a huge part of why Putin got into power in the first place, and a big reason why there's a revanchist movement to "restore" a national pride that got bruised.
A strategy which treats another country as an eternal enemy creates an eternal enemy, which then creates the pretext for treating them as impossible to reason or compromise with. Your approach is a guarantee that, at some point, someone will push the button and end civilization.
Yeah none of that matches my memory at all, and (1) I lived through it as an adult, and (2) I paid very close attention, since the Cold War and the threat of nuclear fire dominated my childhood. Inasmuch as you have not adduced any specific detail to illustrate your assertions, I think a simple statement of 180 degree disagreement is sufficient response.
Your memory as a person who has lived in the US all your life? Or in a country in the West? Or in a third-world (in the original sense) country? As some sort of globe trotting ubermensch? Or as someone who spend part of their childhood in the USSR?
Because from your response I'm guessing the former, and that makes me think you're a goldfish disagreeing on life outside the bowl (full disclosure: we're all goldfish, our bowls are just different).
There are many more recent takes on the history of the Cold War and the Soviet Union that you could refer to if you wanted to try to get some of that perspective, almost none of which support a rah-rah version of Reagan singlehandedly winning it by being more aggressive and daring than the weak-kneed leaders who came before him.
In fact I have lived both in the United States and in my youth in a Warsaw Pact nation[1], which I mention just to confound your assumptions, even though I think it is entirely irrelevant to the point. I don't need to have personally been to the Moon to thoroughly understand the Apollo program.
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[1] Too long ago to remember more than curse word or two in Russian, however.
That's fair enough - my assumptions are now confounded. In the spirit of reciprocation: I'm an ex-third-worlder, so my governing mode of analysis is "a pox on both your houses".
Ha ha fair enough, I don't blame you one bit.
But your memory isn’t exactly all of what happened. There were close calls, rarely advertised.
You'll note I said I paid close attention. I'm well aware of the close calls. That happens when you play for high stakes and for keeps. Nothing is without risk, but winning is winning.
Which would be a good reason not to play for high stages and for keeps. The fact that you accept the risk of mutual destruction as 'just what happens' as a consequence of your approach immediately disqualifies it from consideration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ
Russia is already having a really bad time. I understand that with a bit more pushing the envelope, we could change that to "horrendously bad time".
What percent risk of nuclear war do you think that would be worth?
0.0067% per year, compounded semiannually.
Allowing a return to the status quo ante could reduce the chance of the most imminent nuclear war without being the path that maximally reduces the risk of all future nuclear wars.
If we can perpetually make that arbitrage, then that is actually fine, just run from one crisis to the next. I can see the intuitive appeal of wanting to escape the local minimum though.
EDIT: I should have first stressed that I agree with you we should prioritize immediate paths to peace. It's a view that is both powerfully true and yet gets insufficient real estate.
Moscow seems to be iterating a similar strategy though, and I'm mostly exasperated at how we might best disrupt these cycles. If you see that exasperation and conclude that I am just not very nuclear risk avoidant, then I just want to very gently suggest that there might be a better way to model my views. (Also some people may just be highly nuclear risk tolerant, ok, probably so, maybe I'm protesting too much on that group's behalf.)
What happens if I *want* nuclear war?
Then I stare in shock and ask you why?
long on gold perhaps
I'm gonna say something that's turbo heretical as a liberal. What percent nuclear risk is worth to you, to push Russia so far that it *completely* collapses and we can just take their nukes away?
I would have previously said that leaving Russia with nukes was net safer, but Putin has done a lot to change this decision, and, I mean, Russia allowed Putin, so. That time that my country allowed a mass murderer, our country got split in two for forty years and we permanently gave up any right to build nuclear weapons. Putin is not Hitler, but with a finite chance of nuclear war times the population of the world, it is not difficult to beat the deaths of WW2.
I think a lot of the unity of the EU against Putin is that we were pretty comfortable for thirty years not having to worry about being nuked, and if we can fuck Putin up enough that he really really remembers to not try this again, we can hopefully go back to that. I think that's why I'm less worried about being nuked - not having to worry about being nuked is itself my red line.
Come. Military people are not stupid, even if they have a mindset that is foreign to you. They have generally and genuinely worked very hard to ensure that one head injury or one case of dementia -- or one mechanical failure -- can't cause disaster. As far as stewardship goes, all the militaries of the nuclear powers -- and I include the Russians as well as the Americans, French, and British -- have done a really superb job these past 75 years making sure there have been and can be no horrible accidents.
Given the major screw-ups we see elsewhere in our technological society -- everything from Bhopal to the lastest zero-day hack on Windows -- they really deserve major honor for this achievement, especially considering it stands in inherent tension with their mandate to be able to use nuclear weapons at a moment's notice, and the fact that civilians only pay intermiitent attention to the problem at all.
My apologies for assuming otherwise. And yes, individuals are fallible. That's why you build in checks and balances, right? You can build a very, very reliable system out of individual parts that have much lower levels of reliability.
Carl: I normally love what you write in the comments. I haven't super liked the Reaganite stuff in this thread. But this comment... hear hear! The militaries of the world deserve credit beyond credit for holding the reigns on nuclear war and doing a great job making it unlikely.
The problem is "it only takes one head injury or one case of dementia to change the whole game" is fully general. No matter how you structure the nuclear weapons policy, or the nuclear weapons considerations, or the nuclear weapons relationships, or the nuclear weapons control, at the extreme *it might only take one defector* to use the nuclear weapons.
Per what Carl said, given this fact, it's extremely laudable that someone has ensured no such defector for 75 years.
That seems very unlikely. The USSR collapsed in 91, and the structures of the military didn't completely collapse along with it; their strategic nuclear weapons didn't go away or become US possessions. Is there a good reason to think things would be different now?
The reality of the 1991 Russian military situation was that only a direct invasion by a powerful enemy (US or NATO or both) would be cause to use nuclear weapons. Because none of these countries wanted to invade Russia, it was a complete non-issue. Adding to that the inability of Russia to offensively use their military (and thereby hold nukes in reserve to deter other nuclear powers from interfering) and it made very little to no difference whether they had nukes or not.
With Putin being willing to use his military offensively, there is now reason to be concerned that they have nukes, which did not exist then.
Through various treaties and attrition, the Russian nuclear stockpile has come down considerably since 1991, from ~30,000 to ~4000 warheads. It's still quite a lot of megatonnage, of course.
Would it be possible to hack the codes and thus prevent a nuclear launch? I mean, the systems for launching the nukes have to be connected to the net somehow, right?...
In case that you are serious: no. (probably it is joke, but I encountered really weird takes on nukes...)
Almost certainly not. "The nuclear codes" are confirmation codes given to people so they know the orders are coming from someone authorized to give them, they aren't something that has to be input on the physical missiles/bombs before they can be used. (Think about it this way, if they had to be input on a piece of electronics, that safeguard could be bypassed by a sufficiently technically sophisticated attacker with plenty of time).
PALs are a thing actually. You don't just need plenty of time, you need plenty of warheads before you successfully disarm one. You also need plenty of technically sophisticated soldiers, because the ones who make the unsuccessful attempts all die in the process.
PALs? Not sure what you mean by that...?
Do we have any idea of what the current generation Russian PALS like? Or are they still using the old Soviet manually keyed systems?
Do you mean "successfully *arm* one"?
*Disarming* a nuke that you have in your possession is easy with or without the PAL; PALs are designed so they can't be removed without breaking the weapon, but if you want to disarm it then that's a success.
Systems like this are airgapped - that is, they're not connected to anything. This means that hacking them requires a physical connection.
Stuxnet, for instance (the US's cyberattack on Iranian enrichment centrifuges, which broke them by spinning them too fast) wasn't an Internet-based attack; a CIA agent physically went into their enrichment plants and stuck a USB key with the malware into the computers running the centrifuges.
If you have agents inside all enemy nuclear silos and all enemy ballistic-missile submarines, then certainly you can prevent your enemy from launching nuclear missiles (you barely even need the cyberattack at that point). However, "nuclear silo operator" and "nuclear submarine crew" are subject to the strictest background checks known - both because a hostile agent could degrade nuclear deterrence, but also because a couple of lunatics could start WWIII on their own (I say "a couple" because most nuclear launch systems require two people to operate).
From what I remember Stuxnet was smarter: it infected devices which were carried/used by people who were not CIA agents.
(that may be an outdated info - and maybe that was smokescreen to hide outright agents)
Yeah, Stuxnet infected every USB flash drive it could find that looked like it was going anywhere near Iran, in hopes that eventually someone would use the same flash drive to store his music playlist and the software patch for the microcontrollers that he had to download off his home internet because the boss was paranoid about airgapping everything.
It is emphatically not liberal to think your country is the one with the right to allow or disallow nuclear weapons. It is illiberal to the point that you should consider whether you have in general been a liberal *in principle* or just in service of some issues.
If that is illiberal than it is profoundly stupid to be a liberal. Let's risk annihilation for the sake of equality or something.
The point is not equality at all. The point is believing that that kind of superiority has blowback far in excess of whatever problems you think you're solving.
See also: classical liberals' problem with woke stuff. At a certain point it's throwing around so much out of touch power that it causes a generation of backlash.
We're in this mess in great part *because* the west acted like it had the right to control post Soviet Eastern Europe instead of inviting anything like equal partnership and genuinely beneficial support for Russia to become a healthy post Communist state.
> west acted like it had the right to control post Soviet Eastern Europe
It didn't. No Western nation pressured any former Soviet vassal to join the EU or NATO – quite the opposite, they all came of their own volition. Also, I must have missed the part where NATO urged Ukraine to join them, and Ukraine had to push back against their unwanted advances.
> instead of inviting anything like equal partnership and genuinely beneficial support for Russia to become a healthy post Communist state
But we did. Russia is/was an important trading partner to the EU, and to Germany in particular. The hope was always that this partnership would be so beneficial and dear to Russia that it would suppress its imperalistic ambitions, and look at where it got us.
>The point is not equality at all. The point is believing that that kind of superiority has blowback far in excess of whatever problems you think you're solving.
What blowback could possibly be worse than nuclear war, exactly?
>See also: classical liberals' problem with woke stuff. At a certain point it's throwing around so much out of touch power that it causes a generation of backlash.
Who are these non-nuclear powers making us deal with blowback that we can't handle it? None of what's happening in Russia is an example because Russia has nukes. Same with China. The two countries with pose us with the greatest problems are nuclear powers and have been for 60 years or more. Iran? Well, Iran with nukes is a hell of a lot scarier than Iran now. Countries are either managable now and would be unmanageable if/when they got nukes, or they're causing problems but already have nukes.
Again, what on earth is this blowback that's worse than a nuclear attack?
>We're in this mess in great part *because* the west acted like it had the right to control post Soviet Eastern Europe
What on EARTH are you talking about? We don't control anything. Eastern Europeans are in NATO....because they WANT to be in NATO, because they never want to live under oppressive Russian rule ever again.
We're in this mess because Putin is an irredentist, and he knew that NATO membership for neighboring states means he doesn't get to invade them or otherwise bully and intimidate them.
Like, how the HELL are you trying to defend liberalism while claiming that it is rightful to launch of bloody war of aggression to claim territory based on the idea that these countries....wanted to become liberal and be integrated with liberal Europe?
Hence, "heretical as a liberal".
Ja. I'm emphasizing how far away from liberalism that that feels to me. Less "heretical christian" and more "you might be a Satanist"
(Clarification: I do not mean your position is as bad as Christianity paints Satanism to be. Far from it. Just that it's much further down the line from orthodoxy than mere heresy)
It's possibly defensible? I think if I go full liberal, then the fact that Russia converted from a democracy to an illiberal autocracy with a captive media implies that this is the wish of (some fraction of) the Russian people, and if we are to hold that wish as valid, destroying Russia and taking its nukes may be a necessary part of the implementation of this wish. Something like "okay, Germany, you can have fascism and all the Hitler you want, we're just gonna make sure you don't build concentration camps and start invading Poland." It's, like all political debates, GPL vs BSD - do we behave liberally or do we maximize liberalism, even with illiberal means? To behave liberally is to say "well, Russia is invading Ukraine. That sucks. Nothing we can do about it though." To attempt to maximize liberalism is to invade Iraq to bring democracy - or, in this case, destroy Russia because Putin has WMDs. (Being nuked tends to be against people's values.) It certainly seems antithetical to liberalism-as-practiced, at least, but even a country-scale liberalism, like what Scott proposed here, has to deal with the fact that if the Russians can choose Putin, the Ukrainians ought to be able to choose Zelensky. One of them will inevitably have their preferences violated, and inaction is not obviously preferable.
My actual take is that the measures taken so far, supporting and arming Ukraine and cutting off all trade with Russia and isolating it, are far short of the line that Russia itself has crossed, and if in implementing these means we can get Russia to collapse, or at least destroy its ability to make war entirely - so much the better? Red lines are based on actions, not outcomes.
The Russians are no more acting offensively as a nuclear power than the US in Iraq. The US didn’t use nukes there. If Putin was cornered however, if armies marched on Russia then he would be happy to blow the world up.
Like a lot of Europeans (including in my country which is supposedly neutral) there’s a lot of gung ho people who won’t fight and who will never fight but want a world war. All you Germans can do is what exactly? No militarisation for decades and now “we” are going to take out Russia.
Putin iaht going anywhere. He would win a free election in Russia now.
Are you implying that the answer is "zero" ? How is that different from saying "Russia can have anything it wants (except maybe for New York and such)" ?
If we're talking about relative to the current situation, we might have a much higher risk budget than expected.
People keep talking about nuclear war as if it's Total War. US had _atomic artillery_ at some point. Very low yield, very small. Nukes can be used in tactical contexts, and right now that's by far the most likely scenario.
Putin's utility function is not to cause the greatest harm possible. That's a cartoon villain. The real function is pretty complex, but definitely correlated with "getting out of Ukraine a winner". If things go badly for him in a conventional war, one option he always has is using tactical nukes to flatten UA military in half a day, then come out and say that he did it to end the war fast and save civilian lives. After all, that's exactly what Americans used nukes for.
All done very civilized, calling the NATO counterparts a few hours before to warn them that it's going to be a very local use of nuclear weapons.
He may risk being a pariah, but he'll be a winning pariah. Again, complex utility function.
Having underestimated the Ukrainian resistance and the Western response, he might not want to go for the trifecta in assuming that a limited breaking of the 76 year nuclear taboo definitely won't escalate.
We already have people generally considered sober and responsible calling for NATO shooting at Russian planes. I'm guessing that's nothing to the breadth of both voters and leaders demanding to do *something* in response to Putin nuking Ukraine, both out of moral outrage and to deter that becoming the norm.
And then we have the question of whether whatever NATO decides is a proportionate response is seen by Putin as a new offense, rinse and repeat, till everyone climbs down or we do World War III.
I don't know that the Ukrainian forces present any good targets for tactical nukes. Generally you use those against massed armor, an airbase, missile installation, et cetera. Something big and slow moving. My impression is that the Ukrainians are using small-unit and ambush tactics, so not presenting very useful targets for battlefield nukes.
Strategic nuclear weapons are another story, of course. He could always nuke Kiev as sort of a "we really mean it" kind of thing. I don't actually think the US would open a general nuclear war in response, but on the other hand, it's hard to see Russia not being World Enemy #1 from that point on, for decades. Even the Chinese would back away, I think.
Yeah, that's exactly my point. Strategic weapons, no matter the target, are a cartoon villain reaction. And so far everything is consistent with the Russians really caring about collateral damage.
My point was just to avoid making the mistake of nuclear weapons = strategic weapons = very unlikely. This gives a 0.1% chance of them being used.
There is also tactical weapons, which are used in a very different scenario, which is also low probability but probably over 1%. That's what I mean by the risk being actually significantly higher than expected.
I think the argument misses a bigger picture.
If Russia will be allowed to conquer Ukraine on the basis that is too risky to escalate (due to nukes), the next step will be for every country that feels threatened by nuclear power (start with South Korea and Taiwan) and.... every country being governed by a potential or actual dictator (start with Turkey, Mjanma), will put a lot of effort into acquiring nuclear weapons. That will lead to proliferation, opening a Pandora Box that will increase the risk of nuclear war immensely. That is the crucial risk here.
My take on Iran has always been that of course they're trying to acquire nuclear weapons, as they'd have to be stupid not to. As things are going, that impression will only be reinforced.
I mean, yes, but that's been in motion for a long time already - see North Korea, Iran. The US's response to the first attack on Ukraine in 2014, the treatment of Gaddafi (who notably surrendered his WMDs some years prior - would the US have risked attacking him if he hadn't?), and various other events have shown promises to be worth very little, and threat of mass destruction to be a sure-fire defence.
So long as Putin's in power he's always going to be saying to the west "do what I want or nukes", which is the sort of thing that starts a nuclear exchange. It's also the sort of thing that would make mid-tier states decide they want nukes for their own security (countries such as Poland, Iran, Taiwan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc), and more nuclear-armed states means nuclear war is more likely.
So if we want to reduce the risk of nuclear war we also ought to want to remove Putin from power. This can best be done by economic and military pressure on Russia and making it known that anyone who removes him thereby gets automatic immunity to any war crimes trials that may happen.
Putin, if he stays in power, is likely to turn Russia into a larger version of North Korea, a regime that has survived 2 changes of leader. Thus, a Putinist Russia could easily survive Putin by decades, and all that time it will be making nuclear war more likely.
So I don't think that economic pressure on the Russian economy necessarily makes nuclear war more likely; if it gets rid of Putin (as it well might), it does the opposite.
We Putin is even more popular with Russians, so it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere. Nor is Russia going to surrender its bombs. Nor will there ever be another pro western leader like Yeltsin. Last time that happened the place was looted.
Maybe there won't be another pro-Western leader in Russia. I think there probably will, you disagree.
But so long as Russia is run by Putin (or someone like him) the West is very likely to be united, determined and vigilant against him, with high defence spending, and serious economic sanctions against Russia.
Have You listened to any of his speeches? I heard quite some and before 2022 there was no hint in this direction. Can you show me any example prior to 2022?
Putin was even thinking about joining NATO in the beginning.
The main thing he clear about from the beginning is, that he is not ready to surrender and subordinate Russia to the USA. This i totally can understand. If this is an offense to you, you are the classical villain who is obsessed with ruling the world.
Well, it seems like a guy who doesn't even let his closest advisors get within 10 meters of him, because he's afraid of COVID and/or he's afraid for his physical safety, isn't someone who's likely to pull the nuclear trigger. Putin said he has put his nuclear forces on highest alert, but US Intelligence hasn't seen any sign of this. We're only at Defcon 4 right now. So, yes, I'd be in favor of pushing the envelop a little further.
This is somewhat my point of view as well.
I think Scott's formulation about lines in the sand is pretty much exactly right. And *given that*, the West should be able to unambiguously "win" this conflict, without crossing such lines. For example, even if Ukraine's government falls, setting up a government in exile and a persistent insurgency seems likely to result in a Russian retreat in some number of years, followed by a big PR victory. If, in the meantime, a bunch of nearby countries join NATO, and Russia's economy is in shambles, and they remain an international pariah... That'd count as a win, in my book. I.e., it would firmly establish to the world that the age of territorial expansion wars is over.
Maybe this increases the chance of nuclear war slightly, despite the lack of line-crossing. And maybe I'm being a bad rationalist by not multiplying that increased chance by the resulting human suffering and saying "nope, too high a price, let Russia keep their pride". But at an emotional level, it feels really important to send the message: territorial expansion wars are not tolerated in the modern age. If you try it, your country will suffer, and you will not get to keep your pride.
You can love Reagan or hate him, that's a separate issue; but we have several historical examples when "peace in our time" spectacularly failed to work. So, yes, appeasement is unlikely to work on Putin, either (although admittedly it can delay him a little).
From many quarters, there's such a strong assumption that he's going to make unlimited territory grabs. That's the old WW2 hangover talking, and hasn't proved demonstrably true of basically anyone since Hitler. In particular, Putin has a very open and well defined series of ideal territory objectives (basically the USSR minus the stans, and maybe small chunks of the Warsaw Pact), we have a very open and well defined Don't Fuck With It line (literally NATO), the intersection is the Baltics, probably off Putin's list in his own lifetime, or last priority, and there isn't *evidence* to think his goals will cross our line, or reason to think we gain anything by taking forward steps before it happens.
Chamberlain was right (delayed a war he couldn't win and that had no public support anyway, while rearming and preparing to win the actual war when it did come). Reagan was mostly wrong (USSR fell apart due to internal reasons that pretty much nothing to do with him).
I somewhat agree with the first, and completely disagree with the second.
Why would you care though? Why not see this as a conflict on the other side of the world of little relevance to the US. The USSR was a peer threat, Russia is - by your own argument - not. It’s not a military threat to Europe. It proves that everyday it can’t take Kyiv or fly it’s planes.
China will be a threat in the future. So even if you believe in American supremacy why would this regional conflict the US is not involved in, be something that you want not just to end but to outright win?. The Ukraine isn’t in NATO, and thus for someone in Texas this isn’t some kind of existential crisis at all, no more than 19C Russian imperialism was. I doubt if it was even noticed (although of course the British got very Jingoistic about it - literally - but they were an Empire).
I don't care about it THAT much -- I'm not planning on enlisting in the Ukrainian Foreign Legion -- and to some extent yes I do regard it as somebody else's problem. I'm deeply unimpressed that the Russians started a war they couldn't quickly win, and are resorting to huffing and puffing about their strategic nuclear weapons -- although the laughable performance of the VVS so far is making me wonder if any of those weapons actually still work right, and whether if Putin pushes The Big Red Button they wouldn't just go splort in the silos -- and I doubt I'm the only one wondering that, I bet the Chinese are wondering it also.
I'm also unimpressed that the Ukrainians managed to convey by their actions up to this point to the Russians that a war might work. It's not like they don't have a very long history with Russia, and the nature of Russia is some big mystery to them. Why they couldn't figure out some combination of accommodation and making themselves obviously militarily indigestible, and are now reduced to begging for rescue from strangers, I cannot fathom. Both countries strike me as suffering from incompetent leadership in the recent past.
That's why I would not favor outright war, or anything approaching it. A no-fly zone is a no-go option for me. But am I OK with using some economic power to beat the hell out of Putin for being an asshole and making the price of gas rise 20% on me, not to mention hurting a bunch of perfectly innocent little girls in Ukraine? Absolutely. I'm sorry that this will hurt Russian people, who are smart and reasonable folks so far as I can tell, but at some time or other they (the Russians) *do* need to get their shit together and realize they *can* be held responsible for what crazy Uncle Vlad does on the world stage, and is this the guy they really want leading them? Stop shrugging your shoulders and saying Shit Happens, go change things. Use the present Ukrainians as an inspiring example.
I'm not necessarily impressed with the future Chinese threat. They have some serious problems turning potential into actual, mostly that they're run by communists, who are kleptocratic morons and destroy everything they touch. I'm not sure even the ingenuity and workaholic habits of the Chinese everyman can compensate for that. My impression is that if the US is to fall to second behind the Chinese, it will only be because we (the US) cut our own throats by losing those aspects of liberty, clear-sightedness, and entrepreneurship that made us #1 in the first place. It could happen. When you look at all this bullshit about people's feelings and saddling the competent with the costs of making the incompetent more comfortable, one worries. But we'll see. Heretofore, as Churchill (I think) said, the Americans have always ended up doing the right thing, if only after trying every possible alternative first.
Three quick replies here. You gas has gone up because of sanctions. Food will also go up.
The Chinese communists are not your grand father’s communists. China is basically resurrecting Confucius.
American capitalists are not your grandfather’s capitalists either. Talking about Kleptocracy..
Sure, but Putin is the reason for the sanctions, so I blame him as the first mover here. I will definitely concede that the Biden Administration is praising God for Vladimir Putin, as providing the Democrats with a first-class squirrel on which to blame inflation this November, and that I also hold against Putin.
I am unconvinced by any argument that Socialism With A Human Face, or even a Confucian Face, works better than a straight-up dictatorship of the proletariat. The core of the problem isn't ideology, or wickedness, or power corrupting, but just insufficient information for *any* centralized authority to run an economy efficiently. You have to be an intellectual, or a Marxist ideologue, to not understand that by the year AD 2022.
Yes, I agree we (Americans) have a problem with our capitalists. I take this quite seriously, and if I have to vote for Trump 2024 to do something about it, I will grit my teeth and do so. I'm hopeful that greed and disgust with the aims of the currently dominant intellectual aristocracy might take that chalice away from me, but we'll see.
>Why [Ukraine] couldn't figure out some combination of accommodation and making themselves obviously militarily indigestible, and are now reduced to begging for rescue from strangers, I cannot fathom.
This costs money that Ukraine didn’t have and the West wouldn’t have provided.
Also Putin’s yes-men would still have not communicated the indigestibility to him. The state of the Russian army _on paper_ exceeded anything Ukraine could ever amass, and nobody wanted to be the one to admit most of the military budget had in fact been embezzled.
The USSR was a threat to the US, Russia is not besides their nuclear weapons. Why should we care nearly as much?
I've answered that here: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-on-russiaukraine
In short, because a west that includes Ukraine is bigger (and therefore stronger) than one that doesn't, and the West needs to be strong because otherwise China might end up ruling the world (and turning it into a big concentration camp).
I'm too sleepy to write out better thoughts. I just want to say I find it utterly unbelievable that if Ukraine had announced "We promise not join NATO" Russia would have done anything different here, beyond tweaking language. And I'm surprised that this seems to be a semi consensus.
I'm wondering why the NATO excuse has any traction at all for Russia. It's my understanding (and if I'm wrong, fill me in), that the Soviet Union was one of the main reasons for NATO existing. Since the Soviet Union no longer exists, why should Putin be afraid of NATO, unless he has designs on NATO territory? Have any NATO members done or said anything that could remotely be interpreted as aggressive intentions towards post-Soviet Russia?
To be honest, I think it's an excuse by Russia. It's almost commendable how deceptive it is, that's how well the agitprop is done.
You see, that assurance, "NATO will not move one inch to the east" revolved around Germany before their reunification and when the Soviet Union actually existed. Western powers coaxed a cash strapped Soviet Union that East Germany would not have any US military bases (or any for that matter) on it when they pulled their military out of there. To this very day, you can look at a map and see that former East Germany still has no military bases on it.
Russia lied. It's not true the United States and NATO stabbed them in the back.
Ah, I see what you're saying. At the time the USSR and Warsaw Pact existed. They were already bordering NATO. There literally was no 'east' the quote can refer to except East Germany.
Pretty much everybody agrees that the verbal agreements were for NATO to not move east. And Germany is one country now, entirely in NATO.
That's not what I heard. (paywalled)
https://nebula.app/videos/tldrnewseu-is-putin-right-about-natos-eastward-expansion
But yeah, there was never a formal agreement against NATO expansion, and the idea that NATO must honor a verbal backroom "understanding" from 30 years ago is ... just a way to distract everyone from the fact that Ukraine wasn't about to join NATO anyway.
I do want to apologize, I didn't mean to misinform. After rereading in greater detail the New Yorker article on Russia's NATO assurance, it's a lot more nuanced than the way I depicted it. Apparently the assurances went beyond just Germany.
Still, I think the United States' actions contributed a VERY miniscule part towards the Ukraine invasion in contrast to Russia's hurt national pride, stoaked by their leaders, that played a much larger role. In my interpretation of the assurances offered, there was an implict understanding that it was dependent on the Soviet Union as an entity existing. Because it does not, the United States has no moral obligation (with the exception of realpoltik considerations) to abide by their assurances.
In the universe where the USSR falls, and the new Russia wasn't invading or Belarus-ify-ing neighboring countries, NATO would probably be considered obsolete, without a real purpose, yeah.
At least the countries in Eastern Europe would not be in such hurry to join while they still can.
If Putin is deposed, the west shouldn't make the same mistakes we made in 1991. Instead we should seek to turn Russia from being an enemy into being a friend -- a new Marshall Plan, and possible future membership of EU and NATO.
This would also have the advantage of making it extremely unlikely that China would try anything with Taiwan.
It would be nice to see Russia become a happier country. But the main obstacle to that is Russia itself.
The main reason for poverty (outside of Moscow and a few more big cities) is that most of the country's wealth is concentrated in hands of a few oligarchs; Putin being the first among them. Whatever financial help you would give to Russia, most of it would end up in Putin's pockets. And then Putin would blame you for not giving enough. Because Putin always blames someone else.
The main reason for unpopularity is that Russia just fucking can't give up on the idea of having colonies; and all countries around are well aware of it. Great Britain doesn't have colonies anymore. Neither does France. People complain about European Union, but when UK decides to leave, everyone is like "yeah, whatever, don't let the door hit you on your way out". But Russia must fight to keep Chechens in (what is the point? other than "because we can"), and occupy parts of the surrounding countries under the pretext of "some Russian speaking people live here, therefore it's ours". Why are so many countries next to Russia trying to join NATO, and the luckier ones already did? -- Did Canada also try so hard to be allowed to join Warsaw Pact? No, it didn't have a reason to do so. Somehow USA is okay with Canada just existing. How many countries that have a border with Russia can say the same thing?
(inb4 "but Americans also...", yeah, sure, true. But there are at least *some* countries that can coexist with USA peacefully. Can any of the former Warsaw Pact countries say the same about Russia?)
And why does Russia need to have *more* nukes than USA? After already having enough to destroy the entire planet, isn't it just a completely unnecessary burden on your economy to produce more?
All that I said above, is Russia's own fault. USA didn't tell Putin to put half of Russia's money into his own pockets. USA didn't tell Putin to spend the other half on building useless nukes. USA didn't tell Putin to keep fighting everyone around *unless* they join NATO.
I try to imagine a happier universe, where Russia is something like maybe France, only poorer. An ancient country basking in its former glory, but mostly ignored by everyone else; but also left in peace. Able to give up its former colonies; able to stop fighting its neighbors. Having a healthy economy where the corruption does not keep ruining the entire country. Having nukes, but never mentioning them, because there is no reason to. A reasonable level of democracy.
I would be happy to live in such universe. So would probably be most Russians. However, one guy in Russia would be really unhappy for that to happen, because it would mean that he can't have a personal empire anymore. Sadly, it is his opinion that decides what actually happens to Russia.
> The main reason for poverty (outside of Moscow and a few more big cities) is that most of the country's wealth is concentrated in hands of a few oligarchs
True. (Of course similar things could be said about the USA)
> Whatever financial help you would give to Russia, most of it would end up in Putin's pockets.
No. I'm imagining a scenario where Putin is dead or on trial at the ICC. He has no power.
>The main reason for unpopularity is that Russia just fucking can't give up on the idea of having colonies; and all countries around are well aware of it.
Putin might want colonies; but does the average Moscovite?
> Did Canada also try so hard to be allowed to join Warsaw Pact? No, it didn't have a reason to do so. Somehow USA is okay with Canada just existing. How many countries that have a border with Russia can say the same thing?
Exactly.
> one guy in Russia would be really unhappy for that to happen
That one guy needs a bullet in the head. Then things will be better.
>Putin might want colonies; but does the average Moscovite?
Absolutely. Being told all your life that you live in the greatest country ever, which used to be even greatester before “the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, does that to you.
> I'm imagining a scenario where Putin is dead or on trial at the ICC.
Then, the next oligarch in the line.
Looking at Germany and Japan (after WW2) as success stories, it seems to me that an inevitable part of transition to a western democracy is... well, occupation... at least until you establish some democratic institutions and make them work; then you can leave.
Otherwise, the old institutions will create something similar to the old situation. The people who created the original problems, they still have they jobs, they know each other, they keep their habits.
But you cannot do the same thing to Russia. So, I don't see it optimistically. Whoever is the most powerful person in FSB will probably take over after Putin's death, accept some foreign help, do something democratic for a while... until one day it will seem certain that he would lose the next election, and then he will likely prioritize his political survival over the country's future.
Perhaps our only hope is that *all* people in FSB are incompetent, because Putin already eliminated all the competent ones, as potential threats to himself?
Besides inviting all those former Warsaw Pact members into the club? By not dissolving the second the USSR fell? Perhaps by not letting Russia into NATO (although accounts vary on how genuine that attempt was)? Or by meddling in what the Russians see as their own back yard by sponsoring the colour revolutions? Or by directly meddling in (the former) Yugoslavia?
If I was a Russian statesman, the situation after the fall of the USSR would seem a lot like doing something impossibly magnanimous (peacefully dissolving an empire built on the back of what you consider to be endless war by foreign powers) only to be isolated, punished, belittled and encircled by my 'former' opponents for decades in response. The period from the 1990s to the early 2000s was an unprecedented time in history to bring the traditional outside power of Europe into the fold, and instead the Western powers simply reverted to treating them like the Russian Empire instead of the Soviet one.
This is not, I should emphasise, to say that their position is the correct one or that other countries should have uncritically treated the Russians with kid gloves or something. Just that their own history and experiences coloured things in a way that makes their own logic and rhetoric seem impenetrable.
I do not dispute that Russian officials see, at least in their public pronouncements, dissolution of the Soviet Union as an act of impossible Russian magnanimity, but it is important to point out that that is not, in fact, why was Soviet Union dissolved. In the end of the 80s, USSR was totally bankrupt both financially and intellectually, and facing rebellions left and right.
Its dissolution was forced, not granted by the Russian government as some selfless gift to the world.
Oh absolutely - again, I'm not saying that what people think is the objective truth. Just that this is the sort of mindset and logic which then justifies all that follows in their own eyes.
Frankly, I think that this particular justification is mainly a piece of Russian propaganda, aimed at both Western audiences and domestic Russian audience, not something Putin truly believes. He was there, he knows what happened.
I agree with you re: US sponsoring color revolutions, though. That is what really terrifies Russian regime.
The Warsaw Pact members *wanted* to join NATO because they wanted to ensure that they would never be under the control of Moscow again. The Warsaw Pact wasn't voluntary in the first place.
No it wasn't, and I imagine that Poland et al were only too happy to remove themselves from the clutches of the evil empire (even if that meant effectively becoming a buffer state for Western NATO nations instead).
Exactly. Which just shows that US and Western European culture is superior to the one promoted by Russia, despite all talks of "Slavic Brotherhood" ...
The whole "pan-Slavism" idea is just an euphemism for being Russia's vassals. I haven't seen a single proponent of this idea saying that we should e.g. help Ukrainian refugees because they are fellow Slavs. It is always about how other Slavic nations should support and serve Russians.
(If I wanted to be a racist, technically, Ukrainians are more pure-blooded Slavs than Russians. Not that I care either way. I am just pointing out the obvious hypocrisy.)
I don't know...I thought the Czechs started it in the 19th century? Wasn't it during the Habsburg empire, when the Czechs felt subjugated, and thus Pan-Slavism evolved form that?
44 y. living in Russia, last time I heard a word about "Slavic Brotherhood" was 1999, Serbia high time. Its totally irrelevant to current political agendas and cultural narratives.
Yep, irrelevant in Russia. Meanwhile in Slovakia, Russian propaganda never stops talking about it. I guess, thanks for confirmation that this brotherhood is supposed to be completely one-sided.
As an example, in the recently compiled list of Russian propaganda sources in Slovakia, here are the ones with the keyword "Slavic" (or "brotherhood") --- "Televízia Slovan", "BRAT za BRATA", "Slovanské noviny", "Slavica – slovanský spolok", "Jednota Slovanov", "Tajné dejiny Slovienov - Slovanov a Arijcov, našich slávnych predkov", "Slovanské bratstvo", "Slovanská duše - Славянская душа", "Bratia Slovania", "Slovanské ženy - matky proti vojne", "Slovanska unia", "Somslovan .sk", "Sloviensko", "Большая Славия, Sláva Rodu Slovanskému", "Spoločnosť pre rozvoj slovanskej vzájomnosti", "Slovanský svet - Славянский мир - Slovenski svet - Słowiański świat".
Source: https://blog.gerulata.com/russian-propaganda-network-in-slovakia/
NATO were in a position to treat Russia vastly worse than they actually did. The fact that they didn't should be evidence to everyone that fears of NATO using ukraine to launch an invasion of Russia are totally absurd.
Well why was the US afraid of communism to the extent that it warred with other countries? Like the Cold War, this seems to be mainly about protecting and projecting opposing spheres of influence. They see the Western sphere as increasingly knocking on their door. And it does seem reasonable to wonder why we were knocking on their door so much in the first place (although of course it becomes more reasonable the more aggressive they get, in an apparent vicious cycle).
Er...because of what happened to Eastern Europe at the close of the Second World War? It may be cold ancient history these days, but in 1945 people were pretty dang outraged that after spilling oceans of blood to lift the Nazi boot off the neck of Poland, say, we just let the Soviet boot take its place -- to no great improvement. Not to mention the Berlin Crises of 1948 and 1961, Hungary 1956, the Prague Spring, and so on. It did not take a *great* deal of imagination to think that Western Europe -- at the very least the remainder of Germany -- was in quite serious jeopardy from Stalin's intentions circa 1950. It's certainly possible the Americans could have shrugged their shoulders anyway and said "hey, not my problem" -- but AFTER fighting all the way from Omaha Beach to Berlin? That would've been quite an about-face.
Is that how they teach history in Poland? "Войско польско Берлин брало, а радяньско помогало". Somehow it happened to be Soviet blood spilled the most to free the Eastern Europe from Nazis.
I'm not sure about the use of the word "free" here.
Iam sure you understand the phrase and context.
I suggest (1) that had more to do with a lack of equipment and Stalin's indifference to the suffering of his own people, and (2) it was certainly not for the purpose of liberating Eastern Europe, but of dismantling the German state. You have only to look at the ravagement of East Germany afterward. And shall we just mention Katyn? The Poles were (and are) under no illusions about the purpose of the Red Army when it swept from east to west across them. Nor were the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Romanians, et cetera.
OK, I agree with your major point.
Of course Eastern European countries should be thankful that the common Soviet man freed them from the Nazi's. But c'mon, you're saying Poles are distorting history by teaching that they also suffered tremendously under the Soviets? You do realize that literally all other Eastern European countries have these exact same grievances: Czechoslovakia, Baltics, Romania, Hungary, etc? You can be assured it's not some grand conspiracy by talking to practically any non-Russian Eastern European. The Soviets presided over immense poverty and authoritarianism in those countries. Poland used to be half the GDP per capita that Russia had in 1990, and now Poles make 50% more GDP per capita than Russians. This is really what Ukraine wants. To break free from this crazy 20th century KGB-Kleptocratic apparatus so that they can prosper economically like the rest of the world.
Oh, GDP per capita, my favorite matter. Lets have an example:
Belarus 2000 - 1200$ 2010 - 6033$ 2020 - 6434$
Ukraine 2000 - 658$ 2010 - 3078$ 2020 - 3724$
Doesn't look like Ukraine prospers.
on "authoritarianism"
You should read "Everything was forever, until it was no more : the last Soviet generation" by Yurchak, Alexei, because i believe you have very little idea what are you talking about.
The USSR first allied with the Nazis to conquer Poland, fought the Nazis only after the Nazis double crossed them and invaded. They stopped their military outside of Warsaw and waited until the Nazis had destroyed the Warsaw rising — and refused to allow airdrops of weapons to the Poles. They then massacred large number of Poles in Katyn forest.
Almost accurate, except that Katyń massacre (and other similar ones, like Miednoje where my great-grandfather was murdered) took part earlier. Though other similar massacres were happening also after war and during later parts of the war.
Resulting in a really weird situation of Nazi Germany discovering, publicizing and complaining about human rights violation.
(They reached and discovered massacre sites after invading their ally, USSR)
Bullshit. Warsaw uprising was half-baked hasty operation launched by government in exile, totally uncoordinated with Soviets, who have hard times breaking German resistance in Poland.
> Somehow it happened to be Soviet blood spilled the most to free the Eastern Europe from Nazis.
What happened? Incompetent leadership that started the entire thing by cooperating with Nazis to start the war to spread its murderous regime. And then ignored human costs through entire war.
And communist oppression was a bit better than nazi one, though still included genocide, mass murder and thorough oppression.
Also, red army looted, raped, oppressed and murdered through Poland, and communist regime installed itself so benefits from regime change (not going to call it "liberation") were not very high.
> s that how they teach history in Poland? "Войско польско Берлин брало, а радяньско помогало"
Fortunately, Russian is now longer mandatory. Google translate gives
> The Polish army took Berlin, and the Radians helped
what is really confusing so I am unable to comment on it.
Though I assure you that noone claims that Berlin was conquered primarily by Polish army.
I see that history lessons are no longer mandatory also.
"радянско" means Soviet, an old joke I hoped someone could understand.
Would you please bring the evidence of post-war "genocide" in Poland?
I occasionally say that, if you want to compare the Soviets to the Nazis, remember that there are still Germans in what used to be East Germany. The Soviets bled and died on an enormous scale to push back a revanchist Germany (that they themselves had a hand in propping up in the beginning, but that's another story), and presumably were not massively enthusiastic about simply repeating the feat a few decades later when the capitalist powers of the world had another go at stamping the worker's paradise out (for reference, see: Civil War, Russian). Hence the Warsaw Pact, buffer zones, a race to get the bomb, outrage over US missiles in Turkey, Cuban missile crisis et al. That they treated the places they rolled over to create these buffer zones like occupiers and conquerors is pretty historically par for the course (not that that excuses anything to our modern sensibilities). It was what the US did with its former enemies that was fantastically ahistorical, and a model that I'm ashamed to say very few (including the US itself) have followed since. It's something that would have helped the Russians themselves immensely in the 90s.
> if you want to compare the Soviets to the Nazis, remember that there are still Germans in what used to be East Germany
I am not sure what you meant by this. There are still Russians south from former Leningrad, so... I guess neither side was completely genocidal?
The Nazis were genocidal towards Russians. However they lost.
That's not a very convincing defense. The majority of previously German regions east of the Elbe is actually devoid of Germans precisely because the Soviets expelled or killed the Germans who remained there after the war, or exiled them to Kazhakstan.
Right, but we aren't talking about 1950. We are talking about today. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, and no one is in jeopardy from Stalin's intentions.
So, again: why were we knocking on Russia's door so much?
Shouldn't you also ask the question: Why are people begging to get in to our door?
One of the funniest takes (which IIRC, forms the historical foundation that "Red Plenty" then historical fictions all over) is that a lot of concern about Communism was because it looked like it might actually work. Socialism, after all, seemed to have built rich, productive, peaceful societies in Europe. So what if the masses threw off their shackles, ate the rich, embraced being a global proletarian dictatorship, and were then even more rich and productive than capitalist nations? You kind of had to strangle the concept at the source, lest it spread and eventually play out in your own home. And damn if the post-soviet era hasn't been a relentless crusade to stamp out even the memory that the USSR accomplished anything other than hunger and gulags.
Of course, realistic hindsight still shows that the real USSR was more or less a polite fiction maintained by enormous waste and suffering - capable of impressive feats but increasingly tottering, creaky, dysfunctional and hypocritical as the years went on. But then, the above critics might content, that that's also looking very true of our present global, free-trade oligarcho-capitalist moment as well...
> Socialism, after all, seemed to have built rich, productive, peaceful societies in Europe.
Could you please provide a list of those former rich socialist countries in Europe?
Most Soviet republics like Ukraine, Russia, what was then Byelorussia, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, and so on, were poor compared to rich countries like the US and the prewar UK, but they were much richer materially during the height of the USSR (the 01950s to 01970s) than they had been pre-USSR, and also much richer than they would be for many years after the Soviet collapse. It's not that Communism is a good system; it's just not literally the worst system ever invented, usually. Both Tsarist autocracy via secret police and the utterly corrupt kleptocracy that replaced Communism in most countries were worse, both in terms of material scarcity and in terms of misery and oppression.
Some of these countries, like Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, still have not recovered to their pre-collapse state, and this war has likely ensured that they will not do so for decades.
I was under the impression Ukraine (and a few other SSRs) economically benefitted from being in the Soviet Union because they were essentially protected from outside competition (at the expense of the the rest of the USSR), rather than because communism worked for them. Also, I doubt that the Tsarist regime was worse than the Soviets. This commonly cited paper makes the case formally: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19425. I readily admit, it gets a bit technical and I'm not sure I understand all of it myself.
I interpreted that line as relying heavily on the "seemed" - regardless of reality, the Soviets were good at putting out propaganda *saying* that they were rich and productive and peaceful, and there were huge swathes of the West that believed them.
Fun fact. Eastern Europe did better under post war communism than western societies under neoliberalism. Dating neoliberalism to about 1980 and “doing better” to wages and not just GDP. However of course the post war solution in the West was even better.
I guess he means the Scandinavian countries, which according to many Americans, especially but not only on the left, are "Socialist" economies...
If you're genuinely comparing what happens under communism to what's happening in present day countries under capitalism, I have to conclude that you don't know what you're talking about. Please make some comparison grounded in facts to make your point
He’s talking economically. Can we compare growth in east Germany 1950-1970 (the peak) favourably to western capitalism? Yes. It trounces western economic growth right now.
But you can't compare the two at all. It's like trying to see if a teenager who started taking meth feels better than a 45 year old mid career professional.
> And damn if the post-soviet era hasn't been a relentless crusade to stamp out even the memory that the USSR accomplished anything other than hunger and gulags.
For example?
The thing is, the few technological successes the USSR could muster came at the expense of even basic personal conveniences (allegedly, they built their first toilet paper factory in 1968 – though I can't find a reliable source for this right now). Their early lead in the space race vanished after a couple of years, because they weren't able to spend the vast amount of resources needed to keep up with the US.
Praising the accomplishments of the USSR is a bit like praising North Korea for being able to develop probably-nuclear almost-ICBMs, while Germany seemingly hasn't been able to do so in the past 70 years.
Broadly, because all Communist (technically socialist, but we'll stick with the terminology sold to the rubes) governments inherently destroy people. The US is built on the idea of individual equality and self-determination, and this permeates the ethos of the nation. Communist governments can only exist by force in single-party states. The fear of the spread is that they would continue to use military power until they conquered the world.
Cynically, because US investors can't buy mining concessions, buy land to turn it into a banana plantation, or set up a McDonalds in a Communist country; Communism insists that the means of production be owned by "the people", which is to say, the state, and to this end expropriates foreign investors' holdings without compensation, as Germany and France have recently done with the yachts of Russian citizens.
More charitably, because leaders of not-yet-Communist countries, including the US and its allies, didn't want to end up like King Zog I or, especially, Louis XVI, Victoriano Huerta, and Tsar Nicholas; and elites in not-yet-Communist countries didn't want to end up like the Cuban exiles or the Russian kulaks.
Moreover, Communism, like Liberalism, is explicitly a worldwide movement; it proposes universally applicable remedies for universal ills, and explicitly urges international cooperation to put them in place. My Communist stepgrandmother in the US had posters of Trotsky and Zapata up in her house and traveled to other countries for political purposes, and it is of course well known that Soviet and Maoist groups sent extensive support to their comrades abroad, including in the US. The idea of a Communist revolution in the US seems absurd only in retrospect.
I've always felt that communist regime's paranoia brought the facade down ever time.
A capitalist equivalent of an apparatchik who lived in the USSR publicly evangelizing for capitalism and protesting the establishment, say also traveling to nearby communist-aligned countries and supporting clandestine efforts there against the communists, well that person would not be a free man/woman very long.
For some reason these workers' paradises were always terrified that the words of those who disagreed with them would ruin the paradise. Which makes no sense. If I'm living in heaven, why I am I afraid of someone telling me the grass is greener over here?
I was wondering this myself. A really profound answer is found in a document called the Long Telegram, which was written by a US foreign service guy named Kennan when the Cold War started. Read the whole thing, as it's short and goes into a ton of other stuff I never learned in school either:
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm
TL;DR Communism was always known to be a "red" herring (hahaha) for the paranoid imperialism of the Russian leadership, which goes back hundreds of years. Ie, Communist leaders knew on some level that their implementation of it was unworkable (or not True Communism, or however you want to argue it), but they used this as an excuse to continue to expand Russian borders.
When looked at in this slightly abstract way, what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine today makes sense, as does the thrust of Russian empire-building and imperial repression since Ivan the Terrible.
I like this way of looking at things because it creates a very powerful mental defense against the bad kind of Russian "whataboutism" of many kinds.
Kennan also critiques the US in several very constructive ways. Go ahead, read the whole thing, you'll see :)
Read or listen to John Merasheimer, he unwraps the "mistery" in the best possible way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U87J7I7Om_4
I think it's rational for Putin to be afraid of NATO. It does have a history of bombing dictators out of their homes and into rebels arms that did not pose an obvious threat. See Libya. But I also agree that is not the main reason for the war. They wanted Ukraine to be Belarus 2, and thought it would be simple
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, another reason might be the industrial capacity of Ukraine? But overall, it seems to be about protecting Russia's sphere of influence...
I watched that video of the Mearsheimer lecture that people posted elsewhere in this thread, and his argument, as I recall, is that NATO is a US ventriloquist dummy, and US foreign policy these days is driven by democracy promotion. Needless to say, if you're an autocrat like Putin, whose hold on power might be more tenuous than commonly believed, you have reason not to want western democracy-promotion pushing further eastward, because if Ukrainians get used to democratic elections, sooner or later average Russians are going to think that they're entitled to democratic elections, too, and you could wind up like Muammar Gaddafi or Hosni Mubarak.
With the Soviet Union gone, why was NATO still there?
The dysfunction of the Russian military has made the invasion look panicked and unplanned, which seems to indicate Russia was planning not to invade.
I come here with a simple request: If anyone can cast doubt that my assertions are wrong. In my world view, I view the United States as a flawed power, but never annexed (at least within recent memory) a country unlike what Russia has done to Ukraine. I'm a critic of the United States flouting international law, I think the Iraq and Afghanistan war as it currently transpired shouldn't have happened, that America should have gotten approval by the UN security council instead of running roughshod of them, but still believe the United States' motivations weren't primarily driven by imperial conquest or done out of material interests such as oil. (Instead I believe it was a result of foreign policy democracy promotion gone awry from neocons and converging interests by businesses/the military.)
Am I wrong? That Russia's invasion of Ukraine isn't comparable to the United States (still very wrong) invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan? And is Russia being punished unequivocally for something America themselves did?
> What is the difference between annexation, and invading, then installing a puppet government, then leaving? Morally there's almost no difference, that's for sure.
In all the wars I can remember the US doesn't install a puppet government, it makes a good-faith attempt to get a proper democracy up and running. That's the difference.
Probably the most obvious counter-example would be the US backing the coup against Diem in South Vietnam. Who wasn't exactly democratic, but he was much less of a puppet than the endless string of weaker military leaders who followed him.
But while I'm ordinarily prepared to spend all day criticizing the powers that rule the US, I'm not going to equate the US with Russia here. I do think there's an important moral difference, which is that:
1. The Iraq invasion was provoked (by Saddam's non-compliance on WMD inspections), which the world broadly acknowledged, even if it didn't agree with the solution.
and
2. The US put forth a strong effort to rally global support for its invasion.
I've listened to what Russians say about this war, and my biggest gripe is that even if everything they are saying is legitimate, that Ukraine basically terrorized the Donbas, Putin should have tried to justify his actions before the world. He should have gone before the UN. He should have issued an ultimatum. This seems like not just good moral sense, but good political sense. Instead he lied until the final moment and then invaded suddenly.
The introduction to the US Declaration of Independence contains the words "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation". And what I see here is that Putin, in his actions, did not show a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.
I think thread OP is thinking of the past 30 years and isn't thinking of things like deposing the Shah in Iran.
But maybe the past 30 years is a good place to start from since that's the end of the Cold War? I can get why Russia wouldn't want to start from that point in time, though.
A valid point, though the problem is I can't think of anyone else besides the US making a serious attempt to replace a sovereign government after the end of the Cold War, until perhaps now. But I guess that's the point.
I do think it makes sense to distinguish between helping bankroll a coup without troops present (a la Iran) and outright puppeting a country you have either invaded or been invited into (or in the case of the Warsaw Pact, "liberated" and never left). Which is to say, it's less objectionable to persuade someone by bribing him than by holding a gun to his head, and you have more control over the details in the latter situation.
Supporting coups exists along a spectrum, from doing all the legwork and paying all the bills, to just signaling to the coup plotters that you'll recognize them and send aid dollars their way if they succeed. From that point of view, there's little doubt the US contributed to Euromaidan somewhere along that spectrum. But that doesn't make invasion a proportionate response.
> anyone else besides the US making a serious attempt to replace a sovereign government after the end of the Cold War
Hussein in Kuwait.
"That means they literally force a country to have a president no one voted for."
Not true, of course. Iraq had parliamentary elections in 2005, less than two years after the US invasion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Iraq
Afghanistan held elections three years after the US invasion in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Afghanistan#Islamic_Republic_of_Afghanistan_(2003-2021)
But even if it were, this would merely be a continuation of the status quo: Saddam Hussein wasn't exactly in office thanks to free and fair elections, nor were the Taliban.
Why is something from centuries ago relevant? Are we to hold modern Russia accountable for all the horrors of the soviet union?
>That means they literally force a country to have a president no one voted for.
They didn't vote for the previous leader either. But the intention was precisely that they would be able to have stuff like elections at all after regime change had occurred. And pro-western puppets are a hell of a lot different than pro-Russian puppets. Being a pro-western "puppet" is mostly stuff like don't fund terrorists, don't commit genocide etc. Pro-russian puppets are basically ruling their country for the benefit of Russia, like using the country as a launch pad for a war of aggression aimed at annexing a neighbor.
In my view the US may be considered to be one of the less hateful and oppressive hegemonic powers in history, but that's also a really low bar to clear.
The US spent the 90s up until the present completely unconstrained in the exercise of power, or their ability to justify it to themselves, and it seems to have warped the view of people inside the country to a remarkable degree. Remember: in an era where it had effectively won the war to be the sole power on earth, the United States never drew down its arms or restrained its ambitions. Instead it indulged in wars of choice across the planet that it would have excoriated others for making.
For instance; it's fascinating to me that the justification for invading a country that had literally nothing to do with the ostensible casus belli of the time (Iraq) was then justified on the basis of "well Saddam was a bad dude and we brought democracy to the Middle East so the world should really be thanking us for the suffering of our veterans". That's frankly insane, and would rightly be considered so if anyone else did it. Can you imagine if China invaded Israel and justified it on the basis of "well they weren't communist, so the real tragedy is that so many of our precious sons died to bring them into the light of socialist revolution."
Can you imagine any other power killing something like 1-3% of the population of a randomly-chosen country (by their own count, not that of an unbiased third party or the country that they attacked) and then walking away thinking they did them a favour? And then having most of the important bits of the world shrug their shoulders and mumble a bit because that country is too big and important to even tell off about it? We see even an inkling of that in other nations (cough Uyghurs cough) and rightfully become furious at the injustice of it all.
So yeah, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine is absolutely comparable to that of the US invading Iraq, and in a just world the US would have been punished in some way for it (let alone been allowed to walk away and consider itself the victim).
But international politics isn't the study of a just world, it's a study of power and (mostly unintended) consequences. And right now the US (and the West in general) has the power to punish Russia for something that should absolutely be punished in a peaceful, liberal, rules-based international order (your views may vary on how important any of the aforegoing are). Let's just hope that that power is used carefully, as events like this have a habit of leading to new conflicts later down the line.
Part of the reason this mattered to me, is I wanted to think of Russian sanctions as unequivocally good. After reading what you wrote, I think I was mistaken in believing democracy as an unalloyed good, that the means to achieve it change its overall ethics.
Firstly, is democracy a 'perfect' or 'least flawed' form of government? I think debatable. China's government has always been 'undemocratic' and they've been able to lift more people out of poverty than any other government in the history of humanity (albeit having inflicted upon the population many horrors before they got their act together in the '80s). Secondly, was that the actual intention for the invasion of Iraq - to introduce democracy - because there are plenty of other nondemocratic states out there? Thirdly and most importantly, does it matter if the intention was good if the strategy and execution was so flawed, and the results so horrendous? You know the saying, hell is paved with good intentions.
"Democracy" is no single thing. At best, it's an abstraction that approximately maps onto "uniformly devolved power". There are countless number of ways to devolve power, but most people seem to assume that elections are the only legitimate mechanism for devolution and therefore that democracy *can* be reduced to a single thing: the presence of ("free" and "fair") elections. Only in this distorted and oversimplified framework can you even pose the question "is democracy [i.e., elections] the 'least flawed' form of government?"--for the same reason that you can't rank order the complex numbers, namely, because the problem has too many dimensions to fit on a number line.
Here's a better definition of democracy that dodges all this semantic quibbling: democracy is whatever happens when ALL the people inside some border are armed to the teeth (with weapons that exist in the Squared Regime of Lanchester's Laws, i.e., with guns). Because physical, violent power increases quadratically with coalition size within such a border, it is impossible for a majority to be stably exploited (although it remains possible for the majority to stably exploit some minority population). I am aware of no other "system" that can even match such a guarantee.
The success of the Chinese regime is unstable. They are still coasting on the magnanimity and wisdom of their Philosopher King, Deng Shou Ping (and Xi is no Deng).
And the invasion of Iraq did not even try to "introduce democracy", at least in the way I have defined democracy. So that entire line of questioning is ill-posed.
I do agree that China's government is very effective and possibly even efficient at accomplishing their goals, which for the moment align pretty well with those of Chinese citizens, but do they really deserve credit for lifting the masses out of poverty when they essentially emerged from agrarianism (some might call it self imposed agrarianism), fresh faced and flush with laborers, into a world starving for cheap labor and ready to utilize them? In other words, "communist" China bootstrapped its success from the largess of the already existing capitalists. Not that capitalizing on the situation isn't deserving of praise.
I think you can believe in democracy as an unalloyed good, but if so then the US has a fairly terrible track record on that front as well.
I personally think that sanctions are ironically much better at propping up autocratic regimes than toppling them, as the pressure centralises economic power and makes the public angry at an outside force "ruining" their country rather than getting them to see their leaders as the problem.
On the other hand; if you want to topple a regime, the best way (traditionally, anyway) is to find the discontented elite wannabes that are sitting just under the upmost rungs of power and start feeding them resources. Unfortunately, this too tends to result in... well... unintended consequences.
Really, the best play for the West if they want to hurt the Russians (for some reason) would be to keep doing what they're doing now: feeding intel, money and arms into Ukraine and making financial life hard for Russian elites. Even better, they should be fast-tracking ways to wean themselves off of Russian gas.
Nuclear power might be a good way to — particularly for Germany — to extricate themselves from Russian oil dependency.
And yeah, sanctions don't have the most sterling track records (they have a tendency to fail).
Ultimately I just don't want to see Russia undermine the ideals of international law, to embolden other countries to follow suit. As bad as the United States actions were, it'd be even more catastrophic to see a cresendo effect occur and invading countries is normalized.
Thankfully, I think the strong condemnation the world over might have forestalled that possibility. (At least I hope so.) Still I wish we were in a better position to criticize and practiced what we preached.
I'm very concerned about all this.
If it's any consolation, the moment of uni-polar madness seems to be fading, and the US is again closer to being a first power among equals. I just wish that it could have gotten there on the back of a peaceful overseeing of world trade, and a well-earned transition away from a permanent war footing, instead of the role it did historically take.
Goodness knows that it did less in the way of imperial horror than Europe did in it's time - but again, that's a bar so low that it's scraping the bottom of the sea floor.
I think its worth noting, for all the wrongs of US hegemony, I would expect CCP hegemony to be much worse for the world.
Well...imagine if Germany actually had nuclear weapons. Maybe the German foreign policy would be quite a bit more assertive then...on the other hand, France isn't that assertive either...
> I think you can believe in democracy as an unalloyed good, but if so then the US has a fairly terrible track record on that front as well
I don't think that's fair. In the time that the US has existed, the world has gone from three-ish democracies to about a hundred, and the US played a role in pushing a lot of those down that pathway in one way or another.
I agree that sanctions historically are a poor means of toppling autocratic regimes. However, the aim here does not appear to be "overthrow Putin" but "make it increasingly difficult to continue the war effort in Ukraine"
I dont know that we have a lot of models for how well sanctions work for that purpose.
Given the Russian army has clearly underperformed relative to expectations and has suffered from logistical issues, it may turn out sanctions will indeed hinder its operational efficiency.
Like, in theory, Putin could raly and mobilize even more military force against Ukraine. When your economic system is barely functioing, that kind f mobilization and force projection may become much more difficult.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/how-are-the-big-sanctions-hurting?s=r
Democracy is an unalloyed good the way a hammer is. It may be the best tool for the job, but the goal is rarely to use a hammer, it's to get the *job done*.
A democratic republic was set up in the US, not because of its inherent Goodness, but as a way to ensure liberty. And much as was warned of in-advance, the people would rather vote for Bread and Circuses than maintain liberty.
That wasn't actually the reason we went to war with Iraq in the 2000s, which was, more properly considered, something like "Iraq was violating the terms of the cease-fire we had negotiated through the UN, and France, which was buying oil at under-market-prices in violation of UN trade agreements from Iraq, was using its security veto to prevent the UN from enforcing any stricter international responses against Iraq for violating the ceasefire".
Well, certainly it is much better to be a neighbour country of the US than of Russia (and probably China)…I mean, Canada didn't join the Iraq War, but the US didn't invade Canada or anything...
> Remember: in an era where it had effectively won the war to be the sole power on earth, the United States never drew down its arms or restrained its ambitions. Instead it indulged in wars of choice across the planet that it would have excoriated others for making
Okay, and in a time of such power that they could have annexed virtually any sq metre of earth that they wanted, they didn't. Would ANY meaningful non-western power have done the same
>"well Saddam was a bad dude and we brought democracy to the Middle East so the world should really be thanking us for the suffering of our veterans"
That wasn't the justification at all. Are you really this ignorant or are you being dishonest?
I think this is a mistaken line of thinking.
First of all, we need to stop using past wrongs (especially wrongs between unrelated parties) to in any way, shape , or form, attempt to diminish the wrongs of the present.
If you want to haul Bush Jr to the Hague you can hold that position and still universally denounce Putin and his war.
In fact, to hold that position and not want to do everything possible to stop Putin seems incredibly hypocritical.
An honest compare and contrast of Iraq II vs Ukraine can be had, but only after the starting point of unequivocal condemnation and demand for cessation of all violence today in Ukraine.
Not within living memory, no, but the US annexed a big chunk of Mexico in 1848, Hawaii in 1898, the Phillipines in 1899, and the creation of the Canal Zone in 1903 was pretty shady from a pure respect of sovereignty point of view.
But I suspect from Putin's point of view, the direct comparison would be to the American Civil War: Eleven states seceded by all appearances fair and square from the Union, and unmistakably strongly and sincerely (given e.g. the 11,000 boys in gray who fed the carrion birds at Shiloh) wished to form an independent country, and yet the (remaining) United States did not let them -- indeed, invaded their newborn country, burned its buildings to the ground, and slaughtered several hundred thousand very sincere enthusiasts for Confederate independence.
What would President Lincoln have thought if the Powers of Europe in 1861 had decided that he was being a rat bastard for not allowing the South to peacefully leave? If the Royal Navy, for example, had imposed a "no sail" zone off the coast of the southern States to nix any Union blockade of Southern ports? I would guess that's how Putin sees it, because he seems to genuinely feel like Ukraine is inherently part of a Union as "indissoluble" as the North decided our Union was in 1861.
I'm actually not sure how much anyone outside of the US thinks about the US Civil War. Where I come from it's seen as this weird American obsession (in much the same way that we have our own weird historical obsessions), but nobody uses it as a point of reference for anything.
Has Putin mentioned historical parallels there? I'd be genuinely interested in if/how the Russians incorporate the US Civil War into their own understanding of history.
No, US Civil War is for nerds only, many Russians don't even heard of it.
How many people nowadays remember/know that the US actually deployed troops to support the "white" Russians during the Russian civil war between the whites and the Bolsheviks?
Not many. I daresay many Americans don't even learn there *was* a Russian Civil War, or that the Bolsheviks did not *begin* the Revolution. Russia just kind of jumps from Tsarist to Communist in October of 1917 without any kind of important transitional events.
I mean...unless you were a big fan of "Doctor Zhivago" (either the book or the justifiably famous David Lean film).
Really? That's...odd. I don't think you can understand the United States without understanding the Civil War. It would be like trying to understand France without understanding the French Revolution, or Germany without understanding the Thirty Years War. It's a pivotal moment, where we switch from Jeffersonian agrarian republic to superpower-in-waiting.
It's also the most important exception to the American principle of self-determination: we're all for it, except...under some circumstances, and that "except" has been a major challenge for anyone else trying to understand American foreign policy since 1890 or so. If the Germans had understood it better at Paris Peace Conference in 1919, or Ho Chi Minh had understood it better after Dien Bien Phu, history might've been at least a bit different. Oddly enough, I get the feeling that the Taiwanese understand it very well, and have been very skilled at keeping on the right side of it.
I have no idea if Putin has mentioned any such historical parallel. I'd be a little surprised, reaching all the way back to 19th century history to make arguments is sort of a nerdy thing to do, and isn't his self-image more cowboy than nerd?
Nobody understands the United States, or France, or Germany. Hell, I don't understand the block I live on; half the people that live on it are people I wouldn't even recognize, much less be able to tell you what their marital conflicts are.
Somehow US isn't a symbolic center of Russian Thought Empire. You might be surprised but there is no such thing as American Revolution in Russian school curriculum, only American Struggle for Independence.
Note- Actually, South Carolina seceded. It wasn't until Federal troops refused to abandon Fort Sumter, which lead to direct combat between the South Carolina Militia and the US armed forces, that the other states seceeded. Granted those states didnt recognize the election of Lincoln, but they didnt all secede simultaneously- it was the action at Fort Sumter which showed them the US would not acknowledge the right of succession which lead to them actually seceeding.
Are you implying that Ukraine is a part of Russia?
Ukraine has never been a part of Russia.
Ukraine was a republic within the USSR, and Russia together with Ukraine voted to dissolve that Union.
This is not an accurate comparison.
this was listed in my activity as a direct response to my comment which it doesnt seem to be
> never annexed (at least within recent memory) a country
Iraq and Afghanistan technically may not be annexations, but I do not really see a point in such distinctions.
> And is Russia being punished unequivocally for something America themselves did?
Even if it is - so what? It is nice to start somewhere and keep raising our standards.
Slavery is not officially allowed anywhere (or at least everyone pretends that it is not slavery), would be nice to do the same with invasions that are blatant power grabs.
that "pretends" distinction seems moot at times, i.e. the uighurs for example, who everyone realizes are being used as an industrial slave labor force- those that havent been outright killed
You are making assumptions: USA invaded Iraq clearly for its oil, and because Saddam Hussein threatened to sell its oil in euros, which undermines the firm grip USA has in the petrodollar system.
What USA did is worse, Hussein allowed inspectors to check that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so he gave absolutely no excuse for USA to invade, and they did it anyway. Zelenskyy didn't give anything to Russia, so he gave all the excuses.
I personally only got about 100 bbl or so, so I feel totally ripped off. Plus the stuff is a real pain to store, and I worry about the fire hazard a little.
Yes, that's true. Certainly in its "neighbourhood", the US did not...I mean, even Cuba has not been annexed by the US, though I am sure if the US had overthrown the regime in the 90s there, the Russians or Chinese would not have intervened.
We shoulda just kept it after the Spanish American War!
Why bother? All the Cubans we want have already moved to Florida.
That's actually the US secret, honestly. We just get all the best people from elsewhere to move here and become Americans, and then we don't need to annex anything.
Cheaper cigars and beachfront property. More widely available Cuban cuisine. Godfather Part II has a somewhat more realistic ending. The benefits are innumerable, really.
Good point. Although maybe now we can just ask Elon Musk to buy it and donate it to the University of Florida as a sociological study area.
I like the concept, but I'm a little uncomfortable with such a large and generous gift to an SEC caliber school. Big Ten or ACC, at least, please.
Doesn't Cuban cuisine have a rather bad reputation? Not sure if that would be such a good selling point...:D
Yes. So why are that many Americans against immigration, even high-skilled immigration? I mean, it's less than in many other countries, but still...
I mean, any 2 things can be compared, but I'd argue more justification for US v. Iraq and US v. Afghanistan than there is for RU v. Ukraine (though to be clear, Afghanistan is the only one I'd argue was actually justified - my issue with that one is execution, not the decision to go in).
If you're looking for more on US imperial history, I'd recommend "How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States." I'd still say that as great powers go we rate better than most in terms of conquests from a historic perspective, but we also do have our skeletons (the West, Puerto Rico, the Phillipines, Cuba, etc). It's also true that by the time we really hit great power status, the *methods* of global dominance had changed a lot, so its hard (and... kinda pointless?) to try to apples-to-apples our "sins" with those of others.
This war is much more personal for me. Not personally involved but people all around me who have lost property in Ukraine, who are trying to get out their relatives from war zones etc.
I understand Scott's concern about WW3 but he also doesn't realize how the world has changed since then. Russia is not the same as the USSR (speaking about favours). Ukraine is as much a former USSR than Russia. This war is really not about NATO but about racism (this should be the correct term) at the highest level. Putin simply hates Ukrainians for introducing impurities to his Russian world.
I don't think that Putin needs to save a face. I read Russians on vk.com, some of them people who are my good acquaintances I have known for years are now completely brainwashed by accepting everything that Putin tells them. They will not dishonour him even if loses the war. It may only increase their conviction that the west and not Putin is evil.
I'm not sure what change you think is relevant. Russia still has nukes; a war between Russia and NATO could escalate into nuclear war.
Putin talks about race to his base and about NATO expansionism to the rest of the world; I don't know if one is the reality and the other is propaganda, or if they both contribute to his worldview.
NATO is a defensive treaty. Its not credible that NATO expansion threatens Russia. Unless Russia's goals are to expand and incorporate territories around them.
Nato claims they are a defensive treaty. You must be either naive or stupid to take them at face value.
Are you suggesting a conspiracy underlying NATO that means that when one country chooses to attack, all countries must attack? If a true conspiracy was underfoot - why announce any sort of alliance at all?
It doesn't work this way. NATO is existential threat to Russia, and this is how it works since first wave of extention. Read or listen to John Mearsheimer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U87J7I7Om_4
I don't see how anyone could think NATO is an existential threat to Russia. Nobody is the least bit interested in actually invading Russia.
Do Russians honestly think that the West is champing at the bit to invade their cold dreary wasteland? I think we'd all much rather go back to ignoring the fact that it exists, like Mongolia or Kazakhstan.
Well, they better hurry up then. NATO was formed in 1949. That's 73 years and counting of being an existential "threat" without ever a single soldier setting foot on Russian soil, nor a bullet being fired eastward. What in heck are they *waiting* for, do you suppose?
So… I listened to the video you posted here, and the thing it is totally devoid of is any explanation of *why* expansion of NATO is “an existential threat to Russia.” He just quotes that the Russians have been *saying* that they view NATO as an existential threat and taking that assertion at face value. And I don’t think that assertion holds up to scrutiny.
Let’s take a parallel hypothetical – a mutual defense alliance between China and Mexico where each agrees to defend the other if attacked. Hell, let's even say that China starts providing non-nuclear arms to Mexico and training its military in their use.
Is the US global position made less secure by that? Absolutely.
Would the US object to such an arrangement? Of course. Economic sanctions probably already in the mail.
But is the *very existence* of the United States in danger because of that arrangement? That sounds more like a bellicose diplomatic hyperbole. I mean, I'm sure we'd *say* it, but I don't believe it one bit as an accurate threat appraisal.
And does the mere threat of such an alliance justify invading Mexico to annex parts of it, create satellite states, and/or initiate a regime change at gun point? Come on now.
It seems like (a) great powers want spheres of influence and are wont to hyperbolize the "threat" to themselves in order to recast aggressive responses to people in that sphere of influence behaving in ways contrary to the great powers' interest, and (b) certain people are just taking the Russian exaggeration on expansion of NATO as an "existential threat" at face value - which is useful for Russia but doesn't seem to me to be accurate to the actual threat level.
I mean, what number would you really put the delta on the chances of Russia *ceasing to exist* between (a) a fact pattern where Ukraine is in NATO, and (b) a fact pattern where Ukraine is not in NATO?
What do you think the change would be in the actual percent chance that NATO countries would invade Russia, risking a nuclear holocaust, through a NATO-member Ukraine?
I'm sure that delta is nonzero, but I'd hardly even call it measurable. If Russian doesn't want countries to join NATO, maybe it should stop making its neighbors feel threatened enough to want to join NATO.
It's only existential because that's the narrative the Russian regime wants to believe in...if Russia agreed to get rid of its Nukes, then NATO would not have to be so belligerent towards Russia...
Less of this, please.
Tell that to Yugoslavia.
1. "Threat" refers to capability, not intent, and NATO's capabilities are considerable.
2. Contextually, it matters less what NATO's real intentions are, vs what Putin and/or other Russian leadership believe they are, or might be. If the Cold War was still going strong and somehow Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact, would it be unreasonable for the US to get nervous even if it was "only a defensive alliance"?
3. Even assuming a defense-only treaty, that still leaves the possibility of an (even accidental) conflict unexpectedly escalating from a single member state to all of NATO. Isn't that sort of thing how World War I started?
If you accept that 3 point framework, though, it can justify pretty much any act of aggression, in response to pretty much any interstate cooperation not involving you.
“Threat refers to capability, and US/Canada/Mexico capabilities are considerable”
“Contextually, it matters less what their real intensions are, vs what the CCCP believes them to be”
“Even assuming an economic-only treaty, that still leaves open the possibility of an (even accidental) conflict unexpectedly escalating from a single member state to pull in all 3 nations given their aligned interests”
“And that’s why the US/Canada/Mexico should have known better then to form NAFTA. The Chinese invasion of Tijuana really should have been expected.”
It’s basically the worst interpretation of “stand your ground” laws, only applied to state actors with standing armies and atomic arsenals. The international community can and should expect it’s members to react *proportionally* to the *reasonable* perception of the threats they face, not just take vague invocations of grave danger at face value. And when nations overreact I think it’s cause for their peers to reprimand and sanction them, not to buy into some gaslighting “you made me do this” view of the universe the aggressor may spout.
And I think part of applying that analysis to the Ukraine situation is asking the reasonable question “just how threatened, actually, is Russia if Ukraine were to join NATO? What are the actual odds that NATO attacks Russia, and how much do they increase if Ukraine joins?”
It seems to me that if you consider that question, the answers fall somewhere between zero and exceedingly little. I mean, what are the odds that the US or another NATO member would *want* dance with nuclear fire by attacking Russia? And then even if they did what are the odds that other members of the alliance would want to go along with it? And with the US nuclear capabilities being what they are, how much incrementally worse does Ukraine make things?
I think if you consider how small all those numbers are, it makes it clear that this isn't about Russia defending itself against any kind of existential threat posed by NATO or Ukraine in NATO. Russia doesn't have to go along with that analysis, but it doesn't mean we have to just agree that they're acting reasonably here or that "NATO made them do it."
Thank you. The people saying "lol it's only defensive therefore your argument is invalid" were being way too trite, but you put in the work to show it.
It is absolutely credible that Putin (and many other Russians) believe that NATO expansion threatens Russia. And if the ICBMs start flying, "but the people who launched them were *objectively wrong about facts*!" is not going to matter one bit. If you want to convince people with ICBMs not to launch them, you have to address their perceptions, not some underlying reality they mistakenly disbelieve.
I dare call it "NPC problem". Westerners tend to believe they are the only Player Characters on Earth, while others are Non Player Characters, driven by underlying game rules.
I know where are you coming and I totally agree with you on the possible dangers. I also think that NATO instead of providing no-fly zone, tries to provide tools for Ukrainians to eliminate Russian air superiority.
The issue I see here is that no one can see Ukraine clearly winning and it will lead to prolonged resistance which will cause more and more destruction and deaths both civilian and military. We see that accepting Russian terms as satisfactory outcome.
Unfortunately it is not so. Ukraine is a very poor and failed post-Soviet country that has not been able to make much progress over many years. Remaining neutral as it is will only make its situation worse. Will make it even more vulnerable to further Russian provocations. From Russia's point of view Belarus is a neutral country and they want to see Ukraine in the same status. The war from Ukraine's point of view is exactly about not becoming like Belarus. Putin asking them to remain neutral actually means for Ukraine to capitulate. I don't believe they will ever agree to this and entertaining this idea actually means boosting Putin.
We need to prove Putin wrong. Cut off the gas to Europe if necessary economically. It will be terrible but at least it won't be a kinetic war because Putin himself threatened to do the same (or rather intimidated or called the west bluff).
I am afraid that there is a limit on discomfort that Americans and Western Europeans are willing to endure for Ukraine, and it is much much lower than "going to war with Russia". If there are sufficiently severe economic disruptions, calls will grow to throw Ukraine under the bus and agree with Belarus-like solution.
So I agree with Scott - best course for action for Ukrainian leadership seems to me to pursue similar status as Austria (imho better analogy than oft cited Finland and definitely not Belarus). No foreign troops on their territory, internationally guaranteed neutrality, not in NATO, but in EU.
US already announced that they will stop buying oil from Russia (it was a single digit percentage anyway). For the EU it is harder but nevertheless there are plans to greatly reduce its dependence on Russia's gas. (e.g., https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/08/energy/gas-russia-europe/index.html, Germany entertains the idea to keep old nuclear power stations operative etc.)
Many said that the west will never cut off Russia from SWIFT and they did. Not fully because of necessity to buy gas but with less dependence on Russian gas, even full ban is not out of cards later.
Ukraine cannot be Austria because Austria is already in Europe – culturally, geographically, economically. Ukraine needs to develop first.
In fact, key Russian institutions like Sberbank are still in SWIFT, although perhaps they will be cut off later.
But my main point is that if sanctions will prove visibly economically disruptive for the West, it will be difficult to sustain them after the initial shock will wear off. And prices of gasoline in EU right know are spiking, although there is no EU oil embargo (yet?), very visible reminder of the costs of sanctions policy to voters.
Re Austria, it was granted neutrality in 1955. I think that it was still quite poor country at that time, somewhat like Ukraine now. But I have not looked at any statistics, so perhaps that is wrong.
If the war does not end soon, the shock will be long lasting. For Eastern Europe Ukraine is not some country on the other side of the globe, it is right there with Ukrainian refugees arriving and constant reminder that it could be us.
The only difficult country is Germany. We will see what happens but Germany politicians supporting Russia is a disgrace.
> No foreign troops on their territory, internationally guaranteed neutrality, not in NATO, but in EU.
That matches my total-amateur thoughts. Basic goal is that Ukraine is safe from future Russian invasion (EU is also a defensive pact) but can't support NATO action against Russia. Russia can save face by claiming this is all they really wanted anyway.
So the line in the sand you're implying is "Russia cannot attack a NATO member". What about the rest? Putin has showed he's willing to conquer basically anything he deems conquerable, so we'll just do the same (and we gave him no reason to believe otherwise) when he'll invade Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan? And after all that, he or his successor, aggrandized by all his successes, won't he be reinforced in his belief that NATO is easily scared by nuclear threat, and so try his hand at some ex-russian possession?
You're left hoping Russia will lose or decline enough in the meantime.
Even if you think nuclear war is such a big concern that suppresses everything else, the only right question isn't just asking what is p(nuclear war | NATO in Ukraine), but comparing it to p(nuclear war | NOT NATO in Ukraine), and at least to me it's not obvious at all how the calculation resolves.
Russia cannot attack a NATO member, without going to war with NATO. Russia cannot attack anyone *else*, without NATO (or at least the US) providing arms and intelligence to whoever they are attacking. And vice versa, mostly. These rules have been long established and understood, and we can be reasonably confident that Russia isn't planning to go to war with NATO just because NATO sends arms to Ukraine.
And, yes, predictably he'll go to war with Moldova, Georgia, etc, etc, if he thinks it to his advantage. If we want to stop that, we need to either invite those countries to join NATO, or we need to convince Russia that it can at best win bloody expensive pyrrhic victories against countries that are being armed by NATO. The Ukrainians seem quite willing to help us out with Plan B.
Agree with everything. Just wanted to note a couple of things.
If Russia attacks a (non-nuclear) NATO member, some members may defect, but basically the only important thing is that US doesn't, to which I give very low probability.
In this invasion Russia miscalculated badly the level of resistance Ukrainians would oppose, so they invested accordingly a relatively weak force. They may adapt. It may look counter-intuitive, but your reasoning (with which I agree) implies that the worse Ukraine loses, the better a direct intervention becomes.
Ukraine is a much harder bone to chew then other countries Russia may decide to invade.
Utter, weirdiest nonsence I've ever heard.
Less of this please. This comment has 0 communicative content. its just sneering
Ok, you absolutely right. NoPie's comment is a blunt lie the doesn't correspond to any part of reality.
Less of this too. Please.
If you think its a lie, quote the parts you disagree with and provide counter evidence. Don't just assert another user is a liar. I don't know if NoPie is correct or not, but sneering and name calling makes me think you don't have any facts or data to bring to the table.
OK, lo and behold, here comes the nonsence:
>>This war is really not about NATO but about racism (this should be the correct term) at the highest level. Putin simply hates Ukrainians for introducing impurities to his Russian world.
You know, this is a kind of "Jews kill Christian infants to make matzo" nonsence, so inconsievable that I can't even think for the counter-argument, except "No, Putin doesn't hate Ukrainians at all"
If you're going to persist in sneering at him, I'm not sure why you're doing it as a reply to me.
I'm letting you know I would prefer you have a conversation with him instead of just assuming everyone agrees with you. I'm not sure if there is a racism component in the Russian invasion, and would have been interested in seeing it refuted with evidence instead of scoffing. If you can't think of a counter argument, I would have preferred you let me forgotten about you rather than continue to reply with the thing I'd like to see less of.
Look. I reported your comment for moderation, which is my responsibility as a community member. I probably won't reply to you further unless your future comments add more value than they have so far.
***MODERATION*** This comment received a light warning.
Ok, how about this:
Russian armies will leave Ukraine, but Putin will tell his subjects that he actually won the war, and the rest of the world promises not to contradict him publicly. Everyone wins!
Racism? Loose usage conquers new heights.
In fact, it is the UN usage and most precise to describe generally when one group of people hate another group for some trivial difference, such as skin colour or ethnicity.
Also, this is my first time being here! I admit sometimes I lurk around here on occasion
A good tactical summary and analysis of the first few days of the invasion, and the assumptions Russia seemed to have. I'm linking to 24 minutes in when Michael Kofman begins speaking:
https://youtu.be/zXEvbVoDiU0?list=TLPQMDgwMzIwMjL94cIjiDzQsQ&t=1475
Thankyou, just what I was looking for.
Some thoughts:
1- Ukraine signed an agreement with Russia, USA and (I think) UK back in the day that says in exchange for indefinite respect to their borders and sovereignty they give up their nukes that carried over from USSR. Back then they were like 3rd biggest nuclear power. Russia’s not honoring that and West’s not defending that by not putting boots on the ground shows to all middle powers that are anxious about their sovereignty to Just Go For Nukes. It shows how correct it is for Iran and North Korea to try to obtain nukes and it shows it’s their rightful right. Also if some other countries like South Korea, Australia, Turkey, Poland should obtain them as well. Basically if you can afford it and there’s a real threat to your sovereignty nukes are the most cost effective way of protecting yourself since when you’re the one with nukes everybody suddenly starts to walk on eggshells around you.
2- The peace proposal Russia made (if I’m not mistaken) includes the demilitarization of Ukraine which means they’ll just annex it altogether in a couple of years. That’s unacceptable.
3- Russia will not and cannot counter a if you fly we’ll shoot down zone with strategic nukes because it’s a losing game for them. West isn’t afraid of that but using it as an excuse so they don’t fight against a real Air Force. West hasn’t once fought against a serious country with a serious Air Force since WW2. I’m not saying they’re afraid of losing because they’ll handily win. I’m saying they’re afraid of seemingly being invincible. This airplane shot down 100 without getting shot down once, and this other one 200 with getting shot down only twice or whatever. Well it was against Serbia and Iraq and Yemen and Syria and whatnot. West is afraid of tarnishing their invincible reputation. Turkey is the only NATO country to have fired a shot in anger against a Russian airplane. I would’ve liked to see USA to have a go at it but the risk of some expensive programs losing some face is more important to them than showing to everyone going non-nuclear / not going nuclear is a viable thing to do. One doesn’t need to base squadrons in Ukraine to achieve this, range from bases in Poland etc is enough. Shoot BVR missiles from afar. Fly AWACS planes on NATO soil they’ll see far enough to give radar support. Do other stuff that me as a civilian cannot think of. But it’s all risking the reputation of very expensive programs that made a lot of people Very Important so they cannot do it. Turkey is the only NATO member have fired a shot in anger against a Russian airplane. I would’ve liked to see USA to have a go at it but the risk of some expensive programs losing some face is more important to them than showing to everyone going non-nuclear / not going nuclear is a viable thing to do. One doesn’t need to base squadrons in Ukraine to achieve this, range from bases in Poland etc is enough. Shoot BVR missiles from afar. Fly AWACS planes on NATO soil they’ll see far enough to give radar support. Do other stuff that me as a civilian cannot think of. But it’s all risking the reputation of very expensive programs that made a lot of people Very Important so they cannot do it.
Unless I am mistaken you have left out part of the story on the Ukraine Russia deal. In particular, Ukraine made a bunch of additional promises in that deal which they have arguably not honoured. My understanding is that they promised to steer clear of NATO. Thus Russia will argue their promise not to invade is void.
The promise Ukraine made was to ratify START and join the NPT, and give up their nuclear weapons, which they did. The text of the Budapest Memorandum is available here:
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/Part/volume-3007-I-52241.pdf (PDF)
For what it's worth, Wikipedia asserts that Putin's point of view is that in view of the 2014 Maidan Revolution, the "Ukraine" of the Budapent Memorandum ceased to exist, and a brand new "Ukraine" was born -- one with which Russia had signed no agreements.
Okay, I stand very much corrected, my memory must have been faulty. I had thought Putin's pretexts here were a little stronger than that, but this does seem pretty close to a straight forward breach of the agreement with only a paper thin defence.
I might know the agreement wrongly, or misunderstand recent developments but Ukraine didn’t apply or get invited to NATO to void that, a Finland-like arrangement should’ve worked but Putin/Russian-Collective-Unconscious sees Russia as the patron of all East Slavs if not all Slavs.
So your numbering system is... esoteric and redundant, and makes it hard to comment on your points. Regardless:
1-1 and 2-1: The US already taught the world this lesson via Libya and North Korea. I don't think that proving the rule by glassing most of Europe and big chunks of North America is going to un-teach them.
1-2 and 2-2: Agreed, but that's bargaining for you. Presumably it's intended to get watered down to "Ukraine can have an army so long as it's not a strategic threat and no NATO/UN boots touch the ground".
1-3 and 2-3: NATO is already doing the AWACS trick, which is part of the reason that the Ukrainians have been doing as well as they have. They're already bending the rules as far as it is possible to bend them without just saying "fuck it" and putting aircraft or SAMs up. Which, again, the Russians can only respond to by trying to spike NATO assets or bomb NATO bases. This is a paved path to "limited", "tactical" thermonuclear war.
Possible quibble (hard to quickly find definitive clarification): I doubt the Russian tactical nukes are fusion based, so they'd be "merely" nuclear, not thermonuclear.
"Boosted nuclear fission war" just doesn't have the same ring to it...
They're very likely fusion-boosted. You get a lot more bang for the mass, which is pretty important for a small warhead. Plus by dialing in how much D/T gas you inject, you can alter the yield in the field, which is quite handy -- although I do not know if the Russians are interested in such frills.
From memory the Soviets put about as much work into miniaturising boosted fission devices as the US did, and has a similarly gnarly arsenal of nuclear surprises in that regard (including backpack nukes, dial-a-yield bombs, nuclear artillery, tactical rockets and so on). Russia, like the US, also has a doctrine which allows for "limited" tactical nuclear warfare - although goodness knows if they've trained for it recently.
Oh my god I’m sorry I wrote the comment in between sleeps and edited on my phone so I must’ve copied double or so. I think I corrected it now.
1- There still needs to be a line in the sand to make a case to countries that are nuclear or want to go nuclear. Or they should stop getting angry to Iran, NK or hypothetical others that want to be sure they’re not the next Ukraine or Libya.
2- I agree if Russia agrees but I feel like they just offered something unacceptable so they go on with invasion but claim they sued for peace and west is the aggressor.
3- that’s a good thing if we’re already doing that but I’m not sure if that’ll be enough. My point was, even if there’s no escalation and NATO manages a no fly zone, albeit with an expected amount of lost aircraft USAF/NATO/Military-Industrial-Complex will consider itself lost. The air of invincibility of the material and the organization will be irreversibly lost. I believe this is why USA/NATO decides against a no fly zone rather than risk of escalation.
1 - Again, too late. The Iraqis getting smart-bombed even as they protested the ridiculous yellow-cake allegations should have been a warning. The Iranians still getting bombed every now and then (and their generals getting droned) was incentive. And Gaddafi getting sat on a bayonet was proof. The US let this cat out of the bag, and trying to slap Russia over broken promises to Ukraine won't put it back in. If I was in charge of a country, I would at least be looking at my options for setting up a 5-year run to nuclear capability almost regardless of my relationship with the rest of the world.
2- That's definitely part of it. The unfulfillable ultimatum has a long and proud history of allowing cads to start wars (especially world wars).
3 - I disagree, in as much as "our equipment = the best" didn't prevent the US (and about 100 other countries) from selling all their best stuff to the Saudis, who then piss it away on failing to bomb their neighbour into submission.
On another note, I think that AWACs shenanigans and information sharing from NATO intelligence assets do highlight just how awful the Russians and Chinese are as allies. I mean, if NATO can do all of this for the Ukrainians, then why hell can't Iran get advance warning and untouchable radar support the next time Israel decides to zap one of their facilities or conduct a pre-emptive decapitation strike?
The Russians and Chinese have proven themselves to be the worst, most transactional sort of countries to deal with, and as a result I think a lot of other nations are souring on them as strategic partners even where their interests would otherwise align.
1- You have a point there, and the last sentence is exactly my sentiments. Maybe even less than 5 years, more like Japan "being one screwdriver's turn" from the bomb.
3- I partly agree, I think nobody in their right minds look at Saudis and say oh those F15s are crap, they say Saudi Air Force as an organization is crap. Israeli Air Force or USAF has that air of invincibility to them.
About the other note, I agree. My great-grandmother who had to flee from Crimea from Russians a century or so ago used to say in Tatar "Game of Rus is egregious, if they fart that lances your skull". Transactional to deal with and ruthless.
> Russia’s not honoring that and West’s not defending that by not putting boots on the ground shows to all middle powers that are anxious about their sovereignty to Just Go For Nukes.
While I agree with the indirect consequences, there is a caveat here that people keep getting wrong about this. The Budapest Memorandum was about respecting Ukraine's sovereignty and not invading/annexing it, which the west followed and Russia did not. The west was never agreeing to put its own troops to defend Ukraine from whatever threat like a NATO agreement would, it was about not invading it.
My point was about the indirect consequences, the agreement doesn't put any responsibility on West to protect Ukraine, but not doing so gives a wrong message to future countries that could've signed a similar agreement.
Re: 1. You are referring to the Budapest Memorandum, which, among other things, included provisions that the US would not sanction Ukraine or Byelorus after they gave up the nuclear weapons on their territory.
The US had long claimed the memorandum to be non-binding whent hey wanted to sanction Byelorus.
There's the principle of proportional reaction or something, Russia could've sanctioned Ukraine all they wanted but they instead started an invasion it's not comparable. Being a nuclear country or not isn't a factor in getting sanctioned but it's a factor in getting invaded.
I didn't say that the invasion was justified, just that the US deemed that Budapest Memorandum non-binding.
There's a really good Vox piece on Zelenskyy's narrativomancy, so to speak, of the sort discussed in the second-to-last link:
https://www.vox.com/world/22955262/zelenskyy-videos-ukraine-russia-war
It's one of the things fascinating me about this. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the fact Zelenskyy knows how to handle Narrative is why his country is not currently Belarus 2.
You might add to your definition of 'Pax Americana': Print a few billion dollars as an indirect tax on all Americans; Resettle the victims to Arkansas.
I'm really shocked that you are still promoting Anatoly Karlin on this blog. He has consistently shown that he believes Russian state media which for one, is denying that there is clearly a war going on, alongside a bunch of other easily verifiable lies. I think that as a popular blogger, you have a little bit more of an obligation than saying that something may be Russian propaganda, but it is funny nonetheless. Is there anything really funny about what Russia is doing in Ukraine? I would hope not, based on my judgement of your character from reading the blog. I really think you should not promote him in the future.
On his blog, he also actively supports rhetoric that the war is the West's fault and that "All the blood is on their hands." NATO is a defensive treaty. Russia's claims that Ukraine joining would result in a security threat for them is not credible. I'm not for active censorship - but there is also a point where a source becomes untrustworthy, and the responsible thing to do is to not promote that source. I think Anatoly has crossed that line.
I don't believe that giving us a Russian Nationalist's pointy of view counts as "promoting". I want to know what the enemy is thinking.
Is the tweet linked important in any way to "understanding how the enemy is thinking"? Does it identify key thought processes that authority figures on the other side may be having that help us outmaneuver them (or hopefully beat them)? I don't see how this tweet does that. And in the previous post Anatoly was promoted as getting a "B-" in predictions. That may lead to people to believe - "hey, this guy is kinda smart, I wonder what else he has to say." More generally, when I say "promoting" - I also mean signal boosting. Which just a neutral mention is enough to do that.
And share their funny propaganda memes?
Also, I don't believe Karlin believes Russian state media. It would be mere ignorance. Much worse: I believe he is an opportunist who chooses which Russian TV media claims are useful to propagate.
True, its hard to read his true intentions. He tweeted that he believed the Russian claims of casualties (which is transparently ridiculously since they admitted no casualties the first few days). I think that he is a source/analyst that should be given no consideration (despite how he put predictions in % form)
Maybe we should ask the New York Times to come out against Slate Star Codex oh sorry Astral Codex Ten dangerously platforming Anatoly Karlin
I recall the free speech maximalist defense fielded during the NYT debacle was like this: to debate possibly uncouth opinions that might have some truth in them, one must be able the present the opposing view and engage with people who defend such opinions.
Which is all fine and reasonable.
So (1) where exactly is this debate about Karlin's views found on this blog? (2) And why won't we then debate Karlin's views? I observe only one party willing to present arguments about Karlin's opinion and just pushback against presenting such arguments: "giving us a Russian Nationalist's pointy of view" (Jack Wlson), " New York Times to come out against Slate Star Codex" (you).
This isn't about (de)platforming Karlin. His platforms for speech seem to be mainly Twitter and Substack. Note that I am not advocating that he be removed from either of those. That is what deplatforming would be, and in general I am not a fan of it. (probably only in favor when it would present a clear and present danger etc etc. Usual free speech stuff). But just because I agree its important for everyone has the ability to shout their thoughts into the internet, does not mean that it is important for everyone to engage.
Would the opinion be the same if the source was a notable anti-vaxxer that predicted some aspect of corona, was given a B- and then their anti-vaxxer meme was shared with the same disclaimer: "probably anti-vaxxer propaganda, but funny anyway"?
I would not be upset if Scott was talking about Anatoly with some sort of criticism. But in fact, he is getting mentioned with neutral-positive sentiment. First as a credible predictor, and second as a funny guy.
But perhaps the above is not relevant to your comment. My main point is that this is not about (de)platforming, which has to do with removing or providing platforms on which opinions can be shared. Not mentioning someone is not deplatforming them. And mentioning someone is not platforming them.
It's funny that on nearly every article Scott posts there are these commenters who claim to be shocked when Scott laughs at something the NYT set says is Not Funny or cites a source the NYT set says is Not Credible or condemns the latest cancellation campaign. I can't think of any other blog where this is the case. Many have commenters who disagree with the blogger, but they don't do this "OMG I'm shocked you don't share my worldview" thing.
What is the NYT set? Do you mean people that read the New York Times? I don't often read it, but I'm thinking you are implying something culturally. What that is, I'm not sure because you also seem to throw in terms like "Not Funny" and "Not Credible" that are also undefined - but I assume they have a meaning to you.
I plenty of times have read something that Scott writes that I don't agree with. We certainly don't have the same exact worldview, but I find good insights in his writing reliably - which is why I read it.
I find this particular instance to cause me to question whether or not Scott and I would disagree on something more fundamental. Or if the source is not being vetted as heavily as I would believe. If you are going to disagree with me, then fine. But if you want to discuss it you can address what I actually said, rather than some attempt to lump me in with a "NYT set" (which I can't really argue against because its a term you made up). You suggest that you can interpolate all of my other views (such as being in favor of cancellation campaigns) and therefore condemn me on that. In fact, I don't agree with many cancellations that have occurred, and am not trying to cancel anyone here.
I am not part of a hivemind. And I don't appreciate you ignoring my argument in this specific case in favor of insinuating that. If you actually don't value honest freedom of discussion and disagreement then why engage at all?
I did ignore your argument in favor of addressing a larger mystery. To your point:
1. I thought it was funny.
2. Defensive alliances have a way of turning into offensive alliances.
3. Karlin doesn't always repeat the Kremlin line, as in his claim the negotiations are a 'charade:' https://twitter.com/akarlin0/status/1499521806893568002
As to whether the West should sanction Russia, I'm undecided. I strongly suspect that come the 2022 elections all the realistic candidates I'll have the chance to vote for will be saying the same thing.
Sigh - this response isn't really worth my time but here we go:
1) The argument is not about whether it is funny or not, and if you think it is, then you have rather missed my main point.
2) Fantastic analysis here, really excellent. You really go above and beyond to contribute to the discussion here.
3) I never claimed that he repeats the Kremlin lines in all cases.
I have no interest in continuing a discussion with someone who isn't sure whether bombing civilians and committing war crimes is worth sanctioning a country for in order to show disapproval.
So do we get Trump in 2024 as the peacemaker since he is the one who most speaks Putin's language?
God forbid. This calls for nerves of steel, and regardless of any other qualities unfortunately Trump is a bit of a flake, can't keep his eye on the ball for very long before he spots a squirrel. Must be all that reality TV, you only need to focus for a maximum of 13 minutes between commercial breaks.
I have no idea who to recommend, though, I might have said Mitt Romney, who at least is intelligent, has a clear-eyed view, and steady nerves, but the man *cannot* connect with people to save his life, and that's a sine qua non. Nobody else on the American political stage seems to have very much bottom when it comes to war 'n' peace. We could hire Bibi Netanyahu as a consultant, maybe.
John Kerry, perhaps. Similar issues to Romney, but can probably connect to the people who matter. International diplomacy isn't the same as winning a presidential election.
Ugh no. Kerry has a pleasant enough demeanor, and endless patience, but he's stupid. I mean, genuinely low IQ. I remember him well when he embarassed Massachusetts by replacing the actually pretty darn smart Paul Tsongas. God knows where he'd be now without the Heinz money -- I'd give 2:1 odds Teresa runs that house anyway.
Trust me, you don't want Bibi. Guy's an empty fearmonger, basically an actually smart version of Trump - but just as much of a nerveless flake at the end of the day. I'd take Bennet as a strictly better version of him, and Benet's already on this (to whatever degree of good it might do, which I suspect isn't much since I don't see Putin backing down for anything).
Well, he's getting old. I'm mostly thinking of the 80s and 90s Bibi. He may be losing his edge now. Don't we all, alas.
I don't know...maybe Schroeder wouldn't be so bad after all...he has Putin's ear, and was a chancellor of Germany...of course, it would be better if the German Media had not declared him Persona non Grata...or what about Berlusconi? Similar to Schroeder, he was quite close to Putin, but doesn't seem as tainted...?
Given how friendly he is with Putin, and bow much everyone hates Putin, I would have thought his chances were scuppered.
>Given how friendly he is with Putin
So, not that friendly?
History didn't start two weeks ago.
"December 2011: Trump praised Putin's "intelligence" and "no-nonsense way" in his book "Time to Get Tough."
"Putin has big plans for Russia. He wants to edge out its neighbors so that Russia can dominate oil supplies to all of Europe," Trump said. "I respect Putin and Russians but cannot believe our leader (Obama) allows them to get away with so much...Hats off to the Russians.""
Note how the only hint of condemnation of Russia, and it is a hint, is secondary to condemning the democrats.
Something very similar happenned in the 23 Feb interview
"by the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened."
You have to infer condemnation of the invasion from the self-praise.
He's using this as an opportunity to bash the democrats. Not because he's freindly with Putin, but because it serves his interests to blame his actions on [Trump's] political opponents. The political opportunism explains it perfectly, no conspiracy between Trump and Putin is explanatorily necessary.
>You have to infer condemnation of the invasion from the self-praise.
Now you're simply lying
“The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night. “It’s an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur.
"As far as I understand it, the offer is: Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home."
I don't think this is the Russia's current demand, unless it has changed.
More importantly, it certainly was not the extent of Russia's demands before invasion. Their initial demands of Ukraine included ban of some offensive weapons (I don't recall the details, not sure if they ever provided them) and full implementation of Minsk II (a bit tall order when the Russian backed separatists were not eager to hold the ceasefire, and the Minsk II is extremely unfavorable to Ukraine). Before the invasion, as Putin amassed troops on the border, Putin escalated his demands. The final round included complete demilitarization, complete denazification (whatever Putin means by it -- common interpretation is "purge of Ukrainian leadership"), stop an alleged genocide in Donetsk (very difficult to implement, because Western observers have not witnessed any), and bunch of other demands from EU and NATO.
You have to read between lines. They demand neutrality from Ukraine which in practice means to keep it subjugated under Russia. That's really all what Russia wants but it is not what Ukrainians want. They clearly see that their only chance of development is becoming the EU member. The process will demand dealing with corruption, reorganization of their institutions. For Scott not seeing this and doubting that they can become the EU member country is frustrating.
>More importantly, it certainly was not the extent of Russia's demands before invasion.
Ha, come on. Demilitarization is MORE of a demand than the thing you quoted, because it basically means Ukraine is permanently as Russia's mercy.
Something I've not seen mentioned enough is that this is also a war for long term Russian influence. Putin wins = directly subordinated or annexed Ukraine, but also a more solid grip on Belarus, likely regime change in Moldova, extra influence in Romanian politics, and continued mingling in European politics.
Putin loses - their politics will turn internal for a while, and they'll have to reorient efforts to keep the Russian Federation in one piece, work hard not to lose client states and work hard to destabilize Ukraine and sabotage its entering EU. Not much resources left for stuff beyond that, which means Europe gets a decade of peace from Russian interference. Plus a better integrated Ukraine as a bonus.
This being a sliding scale, of course. And the peace terms are what puts the pointer on the scale.
I think this is more true of the PR and economic wars than the war for territory, and that these are only tangentially linked (with the first two looking very good for the West, and the last still up in the air). I don't think that whether or not Ukraine eg recognizes Russia's right to Crimea will have much effect on the influence war, given how badly the PR and economic wars are going for them.
I'll admit I don't have first hand knowledge here, it's just something which "everybody knows" in the countries in the region: Russia also plays on a field which is none of PR, economic or territorial. Let's call it "people in their pocket". The modern and vastly expanded version of a criminal organization. That's the kind of limited resources I'm talking about.
As an example, there were political changes in the past half year in Romania which made no sense whatsoever (the president abruptly supported a wide coalition that included the party he loudly vilified for years), but now make a lot of sense if you consider them part of cleaning house in preparation for nearby war with Russia. The deal was likely some form of: you get to be part of the government and control easy-to-steal funds, but you park or exclude the people known to be under Moscow's influence.
A point:
You listed "Georgia" in the list of the "next time"places that people want to invade, but won't because of the pax americana's enforcement actions against Russia "this time".
...except that Russia already invaded Georgia in 2008, and got exactly what they wanted from that action. Georgia had been actively courting western powers and pushing for NATO membership. Russia ensured that in response it It lost territory, lost lives, and received a warning that if it didn't stop trying to join NATO the next thing it lost would be its existence as an independent state. Georgia got the message, and so did NATO members. While they have continued economic and military cooperation on a more limited scale the talk of actively pursuing membership dropped. Of course, now that Ukraine has demonstrated to Georgia that they're in danger anyway, they are asking for EU and NATO membership again because they believe they have nothing to lose.
Either way, it seems odd to put a country that in fact DID get attacked on your list of countries that are protected. Even odder when you consider that it was the Russian success (from their perspective) in Georgia that led to them planning and executing the grab of Crimea and backing separatist movements in Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine.
Perhaps "this time" the response will be strong enough to deter a "next time". But this will be the third time in the past 15 years, so I am not particularly hopeful unless sanctions extend rather longer and are more severe than I expect. If Russia IS deterred, I think it will be by the bloody nose they get from the Ukrainians being far more willing to fight than they had counted on, and the weaknesses revealed in their military, not by the western response.
It's not clear to me that "providing fighter aircraft", as long as they're piloted by Ukrainian pilots, is the same sort of escalation or proxy war norm violation as the others described. As far as I know the North Koreans and North Vietnamese flew Soviet-supplied planes.
(In Korea there were even Soviet pilots, though they at least made a vague attempt to keep that fact a secret at the time.)
So supplying Ukraine with Polish MiGs (if it can be negotiated) seems as cricket as other arms supplies. Not risk free, but not in the same class as shooting down Russians ourselves.
The zone gets a little grayer if some officially Ukrainian pilots turn out to be volunteers from NATO countries, or if the donations go from planes Ukrainians could plausibly be flying with existing experience to, say, their suddenly being able to handle F-16s.
(I'm not sure where providing that sort of training falls if the war lasts long enough. There were certainly opponents in our 20th century proxy wars who'd studied in Moscow.)
The question of how to get the planes from Poland into Ukraine is an interesting one, though. If they fly them over and then transfer ownership then it means you've got Polish fighters entering the war zone, which is an escalation. But if you transfer ownership and then fly them over then you've got Ukranian fighters operating out of Poland, which is an escalation.
I think it was this sort of logic which led to a weird arrangement in WW2 prior to US joining the war; American planes were manufactured, flown to the Canadian border, landed, pushed across the border, then transferred to the RAF and flown to Britain.
You fly them to Romania and load them onto a barge, tow it out into the Black Sea, then have helicopters evacuate the entire crew from an outbreak of COVID, since they weren't wearing masks, the dummies. Moments later a squadron of Ukrainian pilots enjoying one final boat ride before returning from leave stumble across the abandoned barge and *steal* it, the ratfinks. Very regrettable. An award of $50,000 is solemnly posted for information leading to their arrest.
Soviet-aligned powers presumably got their MiGs without similar issues proving insurmountable, though I don't know enough details to know if it presented a problem requiring a comparable fig leaf.
While we haven't had to dust it off for a while, there probably is an unavoidable element of brinksmanship. But supplying weapons across borders is such a time-honored element of superpower proxy wars that it's hard to see it being impossible to find a way to work it.
I think at the time there was no AWACS and no satellite imaging, so you could move fighter jets around without it being super obvious.
Do the same thing they did with the Ukrainian plane which landed abroad: strip it of weapons and then fly it back to Ukraine where it can be rearmed. An unarmed plane can't be launching attacks.
Ferry flights of military aircraft are generally not considered a belligerent attack. Though I have heard of cases where the airplanes were towed across an international border just to be extra-safe. If we have to do that, there seem to be some flat grassy areas of the Polish-Ukrainian border, and the MiG-29 has grass-field capability. Also some highways that would make useful runways, but they're probably clogged with refugees.
Yep, on moral grounds Putin is just his usual lying hypocritical weasel self. Plenty of Americans pilots died in the sights of Soviet aircraft. But this isn't really a moral issue, the line is kind of measured by how hysterical the party drawing it seems to be getting. The Americans were never going to consider Soviet hardware in Vietnam an existential threat, because losing in Vietnam was just never that big a deal, LBJ's fever dreams notwithstanding (and with due acknowledgement of the shamefully supreme price paid by 58,220 souls for nothing much). But it *looks* like for Putin having NATO planes over Ukraine *is* that big a deal, something he sees as existential, and that's how the line is negotiated, more or less. I dunno why it *is* that big a deal -- the comparison to the Cuban Missile Crisis is inapt, it's not any easier to fly a nuclear-capable F-16 to Moscow from Kiev than it is from Warsaw -- but that seems to be how he sees it.
I guess we'll find out how he responds to it, for MiGs if not F-16s.
https://www.gov.pl/web/diplomacy/statement-of-the-minister-of-foreign-affairs-of-the-republic-of-poland-in-connection-with-the-statement-by-the-us-secretary-of-state-on-providing-airplanes-to-ukraine
oo, interesting wrinkle: Poland gives them to USA, not to Ukraine. I wonder how exactly they will be flown into Ukraine.
This has an obvious potential to escalate, though I like idea of Russia having smaller air force and overall it seems worth doing.
Ha ha that's smart. And it totally serves that idiot Blinken right for his embarrassing babble about the hypothetical transfer of fighters from Poland to the Ukraine. How I wish we (meaning the United States) had a less incompetent Secretary of State. But I salute the Poles for an excellent piece of diplomatic judo there.
Until I saw the US response, it honestly didn't occur to me that the Poles hadn't coordinated with us before making that announcement.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-surprised-polands-decision-give-it-fighter-jets-ukraine-2022-03-08/
Well, yeah, it's surprisingly harsh for the Poles. But we (the US) totally deserved it, after failing to coordinate *with them* before the initial idiotic speculation by Blinken.
Seriously, if we had a President who was on top of things, Blinken's ass would be grass for that. It's a major fuckup, and extremely easy to avoid. I don't know what his (Blinken's) problem is, his history certainly doesn't suggest idiocy. Maybe he had a stroke or something.
Does anyone know how long it would take to train Ukrainians to fly F-16s (or other modern aircraft), if they were doing it in a hurry?
It's worth noting that most Presidential candidates (including Clinton as well as most of the Republicans apart from Trump and Paul) in 2016 supported enforcing a No Fly Zone against Russian planes in Syria, which would have been just as dumb an idea then as it is now: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/19/us/elections/presidential-candidates-on-syria-no-fly-zone.html
Agree.
When did you change your mind?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/01/he-kept-us-out-of-war/
That was a sensible thing since the official Syrian government wanted the Russian air force and not the Western ones. Here the official Ukrainian government doesn’t wants the Russian Air Force. It’s the complete opposite.
I'm on board with almost all of this so don't have much to add. Except this part struck me -
"Russia has miscalculated, they know they’ve miscalculated, and the best ending for everyone is for them to leave in a way that sort of preserves what’s left of their honor"
One of the glaring features of this fiasco for me is the fact that Vladimir Putin is responsible for it. The miscalculation wasn't by 'Russia' or the Russian people, it was by a single individual, however common it is to anthropomorphise a country or a government or a people.
My point is more general than saying let's blame that very bad man Mr Putin. It is to observe that when one individual gains ultimate power, it's always a very real possibility that he'll be driven mad by it (if he wasn't already) and enormous catastrophes will ensue.
Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao etc etc. None of them could have caused the deaths and destruction that they did if they hadn't achieved megalomaniac power.
I could be wrong of course. The Swiss could have one of their periodic referendums and vote to start bombing Lichtenstein. But I think the odds are against it.
There are many lessons here that Scott has ably described. But for me the most instructive is the picture of Putin at one end of a table with the nearest other human being 40 feet away. That's the problem right there. Not even Putin the individual, just the structure that permits, if not encourages, all that follows. Power has the very real potential to poison.
I think Tolkein wrote a longish book making just this point.
Obviously tangential, but the demonym for Chechnya is "Chechen", not "Chechnyan"
"Other times it was almost incomprehensible: we’ll debate what happened with Iraq II forever."
It's not incomprehensible if you stick to realpolitik instead of rhetoric.
1) Iraq I was because it was in pretty much nobody's interest to to let Saddam Hussein control the less-expensive-to-extract half of the world's proven oil reserves. Whether Kuwait was inside or outside Iraq really wasn't a matter of intense interest to the US or anybody else; rather, the US and pretty much everybody else wanted an outcome where Hussein could not use military force to control the oil of the whole Arabian Peninsula.
2) In the end, the ground phase of Desert Storm was a failure, because Saddam Hussein and his regime survived (against the expectations of the Bush I administration that it would be shattered by a civil war), complete with the chance to rebuild his military to threaten the Arabian Peninsula again. The US had to, in practice, indefinitely extend Desert Shield and the air phase of Desert Storm (garrisoning Saudi Arabia and enforcing the no-fly zones) to indefinitely contain Hussein.
3) Containing Hussein became untenable because the US presence in Saudi Arabia provoked an escalating series of terrorist attacks by Arab Muslims who saw it as a desecration. The Khobar Towers, the US embassies in Africa, and the USS Cole culminated in 9/11. Remaining in Saudi Arabia would continue to provoke similar attacks, because plenty of Arab Muslims agreed with Osama bin Laden about that desecration enough to do something about it. A US withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, would end the ongoing offense.
4) But simply pulling out would end the containment. The logical move for the US accordingly seemed to be to repeat the Desert Storm ground invasion, and this time not stop until the Hussein regime was indisputably destroyed. WMD programs and democracy were advanced as excuses in public for the same reason Iraq being an aggressor was advanced to justify the first invasion of Iraq; because US and world public opinion won't tolerate a simple explanation of "The invasion is in our interest, so we're launching one".
(4a - The huge difference in international support between Iraq I and Iraq II is that many countries that saw it in their interest to not let Hussein dominate the Arabian Peninsula didn't have any particular interest in taking domestic PR hits in the interest of easing US efforts to resolve its Saudi garrison difficulty by invading Iraq.)
5) The US invaded Iraq, disbanded the Iraqi government and army, and went ahead and declared "Mission Accomplished". Unfortunately, it couldn't immediately go home (leaving just a few advisors in Baghdad), because Hussein himself managed to hide in a spider hole. There was an ongoing risk that if the US withdrew, he'd manage to wind up on top again, and the whole problem would start over.
6) Between when the US wanted to withdraw and when Saddam Hussein would up in custody (December), the civil war that was an entirely expected result of shattering the Hussein regime (even desired, since it would put off the date a stable regime in Iraq could threaten the Arabian Peninsula) broke out. With fighting going on before US troops left, there was no way compatible with American public opinion to simply declare victory and go home, like would have happened Hussein been killed in the same fight his sons died in. This public opinion is why the major Democratic candidates for President talked about a Pottery Barn rule.
7) Every hour the US was in Iraq from the point of Hussein's capture onward, including Obama sending troops back in after he withdrew them, accordingly was the US administration of the day trying to figure out how to leave without the American people perceiving it as a defeat and punishing the party of whomever was President.
Very well put. I hadn't been able to make the connection why Iraq was related to 9/11 response. Sure, I understand (but don't condone) lashing out after you've been attacked like that, but why at Iraq when they didn't have anything to do with it?
If someone else could find anything wrong with this I'd be much obliged. It seems to make sense from the hidden geopolitical perspective, and only barely more justified to me. (still doesn't warrant an invasion, even when you couldn't foresee the chaos and death that would ensue, that we know of now)
Counterpoint: after 9/11, Bush wanted to "end Islamic Terrorism". Part of the way you do that is by showing that you are a superior force. Part of the way you do that is be showing people that there is an alternative to that way of life, and part of the way you do that is militarily crushing them.
All of these points suggest an Iraq invasion.
In this hypothetical world, Saddam is toppled and the US sets up a democratic Iraqi government. This stops the (indirect) support for Palestinian terrorists and the substantially-wrong but honestly-believed nuclear program. It also serves as a shining city on a hill model of what a modern democratic Arab/Islamic state can look like. And the limited military action required, both against Saddam as well as possible terrorists flocking to kill Americans, occurs on about the best-possible terrain for the US military to operate. Oh, and Iraq has significant oil, meaning that the newly-formed non-corrupt government would be able to generate sufficient hard cash to pay for the resources it would need to build new institutions.
Instead, you got what you got.
We should have just carpet-bombed them.
In the end, it all worked out, albeit very messily and expensively. Islamic terrorism has been (touch wood) basically defeated.
The "flypaper strategy" worked. Young dumb Muslims with an interest in jihad wound up flocking to shoot at American tanks in Mosul rather than shopping malls in Omaha. When they killed people they mostly just killed other Muslims.
At this point the terrorist recruitment pipeline has dried up, because it's no longer possible to convince a dumb young potential jihadi that one more terrorist attack will actually achieve anything.
Are you sure this is still the case after our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the embarrassing speed with which the Taliban took over?
This is totally wrong and totally immoral. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and yet you are supporting a fly paper strategy, that is that the Iraqis should deal with the consequences of mass terrorism so you don’t.
This is a incredible cruel and inhumane logic. And it is far from the reality how people work.
1) Being able to build up a working civil society after a invasion is a illusion. What civil society needs most is trust and people feeling save. A population traumatized by a war is basically the opposite.
2) Even if you have this illusion, contaminating the territory with depleted uranium projectiles and bombing cities is not a good basis for founding a new state, especially without the real plan to clean up the mess afterwards.
3) Imagine you are a young Muslim, thinking that the US is desecrating your holy lands and threatening your brothers in faith. Than you see this power invading another Muslim country for no reason. Dos this hold you from joining a terrorist group, because they are a enemy too strong? Or does this show you that the preachers of terror are right, that this power is pure evil and has to be fought with all means even if this means sacrificing your live?
4) Even if it worked, is an invasion that definitely kills many thousand people worth it to prevent a few potential terrorist attacks? If you think this, you are a racist that doesn't count all lives equal.
5) had 'carpet-bombing' them made anything better?
To bring this to a personal level people usually understand better:
Imaging i think you are are thread to my friends but I'm tired of being on guard to protect them and they are being annoyed of me guarding them. So decide to beat you up to solve this problem. What you're just saying is, i should have shot you right away because you still don't like me and didn't turn into the nice guy i wished you to be.
>4) Even if it worked, is an invasion that definitely kills many thousand people worth it to prevent a few potential terrorist attacks? If you think this, you are a racist that doesn't count all lives equal.
Oh give me a break. This literally describes the overwhelming majority of people on earth other than white liberals. If you don't see this, then you're probably a liberal who is high on their own supply.
I'm not even defending it, but acting like valuing one's countrymen over foreigners is some kind of abberation points to an incredible level of obliviousness.
I know that most people would value the own countrymen over foreigners. This is human as you would protect your family over the lives of others. I don't want to judge anybody about thinking so in the small scale or at the kitchen table.
But this is different:
- this is not about some almost equal numbers, but the invasion killed 10000 to 30000. Any military official should be able to estimate this especially as there was a the same scenario before with similar numbers.
- This decision was taken by political and military experts. They shout know what they are doing and keep a cool head, not act by vague feelings.
- This is the West that always fights for human rights, freedom and democracy. They should do better than what you expect from 'human nature'
- This discussion is on a forum of rational people seriosly talking about altruism. Reading here somebody saying "We should have just carpet-bombed them." Just blew my mind. I had expected this from some right wing military fan, but not here.
He probably isn't serious about carpet-bombing, but juxtaposing the hopeful projections against the bleak reality that unfolded, wryly implying the outcome to have been so bad that "we [might as well have] just carpet-bombed them" because the amount of damage and suffering caused wouldn't have been worse, while having the advantage of speed.
> 4a - The huge difference in international support between Iraq I and Iraq II is that many countries that saw it in their interest to not let Hussein dominate the Arabian Peninsula didn't have any particular interest in taking domestic PR hits in the interest of easing US efforts to resolve its Saudi garrison difficulty by invading Iraq.
There was no huge difference. Iraq War 2 had more coalition partners who contributed a larger share of the total deployed soldiers than 1. What there was was a highly publicized campaign of opposition by france (who was sanction busting) and germany (whose chancellor was on the take from russia) that in the end accomplished relatively little.
https://www.rfi.fr/en/20181121-14-french-companies-back-trial-oil-food-scandal
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/13/russia.germany
Most of the world’s population was opposed to the war. Only the French and German governments represented this in Europe.
that and an empty sack is worth the sack...
I'm confused as to why Iraq posed such a threat. Was it really any stronger than Saudi Arabia or Iran or Syria or Israel or Pakistan? Or was it just more militarized?
Iraq was definitely not stronger than Iran, Saddam tried and lost even with massive support from the west (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Iraq_War)
Perhaps the west knew how dangerous he is because they built him up and armed him, or perhaps they knew that they would face mo relevant resistance and can show off tow great their military is. I don't know, but i just can't think of any legit reason to invade any country far away, that is not even remotely threatening you.
I'm not a foreign affairs maven, so take this with a grain of salt. But I don't think Iraq was less of a threat than Iran. On the contrary, I suspect that if Iraq's military had been stronger, if it had *actually* had nuclear weapons that could have hit the United States, say, that the US would have been more cautious to act, not less.
I think you should check out Hanania's "Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy".
https://www.econlib.org/hanania-highlights-i/
Tanner Greer of Scholar's Stage has been going through other books written by insiders about the invasion.
As for WMDs, the CIA really believed they were there:
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1493023439942144000
When making a reasonably short comment on a complex issue, there's a lot of need for simplification for both rhetorical and practical reasons. The pure-realpolitik perspective I used above is never the full truth about anything in public affairs, but used as a model for analysis it can illuminate things that would otherwise remain obscure (while, of course, obscuring other things).
Public choice theory is also a model. The argument in that link is that it is more explanatory and makes fewer errors in the same amount of space.
There's no department of realpolitik, and the US doesn't know what it wants. There are analysts and diplomats and military officers and politicians who all specialize in different things related to threat or democratization or human rights or economics and each tug in slightly different directions.
Economic analysts are generally not kleptocratic or zero sum. Military analysts are not expansionists or intolerant of any slight. Democracy advocates know that imposing it through force is a contradiction and lowers its chance of success.
Everyone looking for the cause is going to be disappointed, because there are eighteen ways to avoid intervention and if you are being invaded you have somehow created a very interdisciplinary posse of enemies across the foreign policy establishment.
If you want to reduce the system to a single thing--you should not--it was that Saddam was effectively lobbying the international community to end sanctions while still being a total psychopath. Gulf II was much more about the failure of the policy toolkit in the 90s than anything that happened later, and the best evidence for this is the bipartisan political support for regime change taking root well before the year 2000, well before the NIE.
I'm not really sure about this. The US still has lots of military deployed in the Middle East and yet not in Iraq, instead it was shifted to Kuwait (army), Bahrain (navy), and, most significantly, Qatar (air force), with approximately 10,000 troops in each country. This shift from Saudi Arabia to Qatar started happening in the late 90s after Qatar paid a billion dollars to construct a major new air base to tempt the Americans there. The move was completed shortly after the invasion of Iraq.
Therefore I believe the primary consideration was cost savings (Qatar subsidises the base to this day) while avoiding provoking attacks was only secondary. (Side note: Trump based some troops in Saudi Arabia, albeit only a few air defence units; Biden has since recalled them.)
The real (primary) reason for invading Iraq? I think it's still fairly close to what you put forward: they wanted to make Iraq a friendly country where they could centrally locate US military forces to more effectively control and react to the security situation of the Mid East.
The problem was they drank their own kool-aid and thought toppling a brutal dictator and instituting democracy would actually achieve this. Since then they have learnt their lesson and now primarily base troops in friendly dictatorships (in the Mid East theatre).
I'm not sure I follow 4a. If Saddam was not a threat to SA then why do you need garrison positions? If he was, why didn't you get the old coalition back together?
The implication I read from the post is "he was, but the French and Germans defected in order to free-ride on the US dealing with Hussein, and they had greater room to do this compared to Gulf War 1 because the US was already committed to Desert Shield and was the one suffering reprisals".
(Not saying I necessarily believe this, but that's what I read from that post.)
Would love to read your analysis of US troops stationed in the EU and what happens when EU-nato is forced to increase spending on defense and perhaps provide the room for the US to leave.
For those of us who live through it this is absolutely right.
Let's stipulate, for the sake of discussion, that this is an accurate description of the realpolitik factors that went into the second invasion of Iraq.
The description simply presupposes that it was a proper goal for the U.S. to determine control of the the world's proven oil reserves and to undertake the large-scale invasion of a foreign country to enforce that determination.
I mean "proper" here in a strategic sense, not a moral one. In other words, even if we bracket morality and stick to realpolitik, the above account fails to show that the second invasion of Iraq actually "made sense" in serving U.S. interests.
I think you bring up some very interesting points regarding the prosecution of the conflict in Iraq II and the importance of Hussein avoiding capture / death in the initial phases. I have long subscribed to the theory that the Saudi basing issue was a critical contributor to the decision to invade. However, I think that your thesis could be strengthened through consideration / incorporation of a few points:
1. You seem to attribute the decision to end the ongoing no fly zones / address Saudi basing issues to a US strategy to mitigate risks of future terrorist attacks. Have you considered what role the Saudi government played in that decision? I think there is a reasonably strong case to be made that after 9/11, the Saudi's saw that basing Operation Desert Shield in SA along with the optics of helping enforce sanctions against a fellow Arab nation were becoming untenable for them politically. I think it is reasonably likely that, post 9/11, the Saudi's essentially told the US that their support for desert shield was ending, and that, rather than US assessment of the risk of terrorist attacks was the precipitating factor.
2. Logistically, it would have been difficult to maintain the northern no fly zone without access to Saudi bases and most other nations in the region would have been hesitant to host US forces maintaining the northern NFZ for reasons analogous to the Saudi's.
3. The northern NFZ was put in place due to protect the Kurds after the US tried to foment the Civil War you alluded to and then left them out to dry. If the northern no fly zone collapses, Hussein slaughters the Kurds and Bush II is stained with the same (or worse) betrayal of the Kurds that his father was.
4. Bin Laden's stated goal for his terror attacks was to get the US out of Saudi. If the US withdraws from SA(even if it is at the behest of the Saudi government and they try and reconfigure the NFZ from some other bases), then OBL declares victory and the US has major reputational issues on multiple fronts (Kurd betrayal, Hussein wins / US looks like a weak horse, US susceptible to terror demands). The US could not be seen to "give in" to the demands of terrorists and let an Arab strong man outlast them. Apropos of your points about the importance of Hussein avoiding capture, if OBL is captured / killed early on in Afghanistan, then the calculus for the US and Saudi Arabia are likely quite different with regards to Iraq.
Thanks for the thought provoking comment.
As a non American I have to question the idea that Afghanistan was understandable. Granted I formed this opinion at the ages of about 10-14 but my impression was that the connection between the people who did 9/11 and Afghanistan was fairly tennuous, and that America's invasion looked a lot like a bully punching someone who happned to be there when were angry.
Or kill them all themselves and send us the heads as proof. That would've worked for me, and would've saved on the cost of guards, transport, food for the prisoners, et cetera.
Nah, the invasion was pretty justified. America demanded from Taliban to give up Al-Qaeda, Taliban said no. However, staying there for 20 years for quarter-hearted "nation-building" was pure hubris, terrible for pretty much everyone. Just a pure retaliatory "shock and awe" response would've ended up being much more humane, and made America's point clearer too.
This is easy to say with the benefit of hindsight.
At the time we genuinely thought that we could go in (to both Iraq and Afghanistan), take out the existing (terrible) government, hold an election, have someone sensible elected, and that would be that. It worked in Germany, it worked in Japan. But for various reasons it didn't work in Afghanistan. (It seems to have eventually worked okay for now in Iraq, but it took a lot more work than expected.)
I'm not sure that intelligence and those who had access to it really thought that, but such a package was surely easier to sell to the electorate. Also, ISIS was about as direct a consequence of Iraq II as consequences get, and glossing over it as "eventually okay" seems a bit much.
As for Germany and Japan, my impression is that America fully committed there, mainly due to Cold War considerations. If it had extended anything close to a similar committment to Russia after the collapse of USSR, the word would've likely looked much different today. But of course, with the Evil Empire defeated, the history was over, and who gives a fuck about the losers.
The US tried to help mold Russia into its own image in the 1990s, but it turned out so poorly that it was indistinguishable from sabotage.
Last I studied this topic, the consensus on economic development aid is that it barely ever helps, but an exception probably exists for the Marshall Plan, when you have human capital and institutions in place and the issue is just that your infrastructure and capital goods have been destroyed. But this was not the situation in 1990s Russia: the biggest problem was with precisely those human factors, and throwing money at it wouldn't make the problem go away.
Are you saying that the Russians were even more irredeemable than literal Nazis?
This is not about morality, it's about economic organization. The German economy was doing fine except for the part where the factories got bombed, and providing the means to build new factories put the economy well on the path to recovery. The Soviet economy was a basket case due to failures of central planning and corruption, and providing new factories to mismanage and embezzle didn't help at all.
I don't think you need the benefit of post-2001 hindsight to know that was a risky proposition. The decision was made not to occupy Iraq proper during Desert Storm in 1991 because wiser men could foresee that the benefits of occupation didn't exceed the costs.
And Afghanistan very much didn't start, and wasn't presented to the public, as a nation-building project, and on that basis it had extremely broad support. We thought we could just go into Afghanistan, destroy Al Qaeda and kill/capture Bin Laden, more or less hand the country to the Northern Alliance (which at least had the nucleus of a functioning government and army), and get out. Remember that it wasn't a large-scale invasion like Iraq -- the build-up was very quick, the US provided air power but it had fewer troops on the ground than those defending Kabul Airport in the last days of the 2021 withdrawal.
Iraq was very different, it was always about nation-building, entirely disposing of Saddam's regime and invoking a total revolution in Iraqi society. There were no local allies on the ground to speak of. It was a very large invasion, the build-up took a long time, while that was happening the whole matter was debated extensively within the US and internationally, with lots of dissent, some of it ill-informed, but some of it making the exact same points that had been made at the time of Desert Storm about why it was a bad idea.
I also remember the decision to leave Hussein in place, because it would've "fractured the coalition." I'm not sure that was really accurate, but it was the argument.
There was also the promise offered to the rebels inside to support them, which led to them being wiped out when they believed us.
My memory is the US wanted to signal that it would be supportive of a palace coup that cleanly replaced Saddam with a regular Arab despot (back to my point on coups), but it was too subtle and the Kurds and Shiites thought it meant the US would provide them with material support for an armed revolution.
The fact is, at least some people who were responsible for it just didn't want it to work, because a perpetual war was simply more beneficial to them. Perhaps it started with a few bad apples, but by the end of the 20 year debacle, pretty much everyone in positions of power in Afghanistan, local government and occupying forces alike, was either irredeemably corrupt or frustrated to the point of having given up trying to fix anything. Iraq at least had oil wells worth defending, demanding some sort of actual order on the ground, Afghanistan's economy was essentially designed around the continued existence of Taliban and the money that could be funneled to "fight" them.
I don’t think it’s justified when Al Qaeda is something you created yourself
This is sort of like Putin saying "Ukraine is collaborating and supporting Nazis [Azov Battalion etc] therefore we have a right to invade"
You are probably thinking of Iraq, which never had any discernable connection to 9/11 aside from cheering it. The connection to Afghanistan from 9/11 was crystal clear: the Taliban had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda after they were ejected from Saudi Arabia and Sudan. After 9/11 the US asked the Taliban to extradite Osama bin Laden, and they refused.
Of course, hanging around for another 20 years trying to build a modern nation in Afghanistan was, to be as charitable as possible, exceedingly misguided.
I’m definitely not thinking of Iraq, I’m remembering arguments like “Osama is Saudi not an Afghan” which obviously doesn’t seem too persuasive now, but I’m trying to talk about how people view American military adventures rather than whether they were justified. Certainly I can say that New Zealand teenagers of my acquaintance tended to take a fairly dim view of invading Afghanistan from the outset.
I can’t really remember which war my memories of the media environment refer to, but they lean towards America being seen as crazy though I definitely could be thinking of Iraq there.
Oh, well, teenagers. You know what Churchill said, if you're not a wild-eyed liberal when young, eager to take down The Man, then you have no heart.
Well presumably he thought 30 was "young." He did live to be 90. Come to think of it, *I* kind of thing of age 30 as youngish, at least.
I used not, but I do now.
The original of that line, "if you are not an X before you are twenty, you have no heart, if you are an X after you are thirty, you have no head," with a number of variants, apparently originated in France in the 19th century, with X, I think, Republican.
Good lines in the U.K. get attributed to Churchill, in the U.S., if not obviously impossible, to Lincoln.
Yeah I know, but to explain why it *isn't* actually Churchill where it starts requires a tedious amount of footnoting and I just decided to punt. Normally on the Internet you can count on someone coming along to "well actually" for you if it turns out to be important :)
Osama was a Saudi citizen by birth, but one who wanted to bring down both the Saudi and American governments(*) and had been chased out of Saudi Arabia for his troubles.
If someone finds out that e.g. Edward Snowden has been running an international terrorist conspiracy against Canada and Australia the past few years, I'd hope the Canucks and Aussies wouldn't think it appropriate to bomb the United States. That's about what we're talking about here.
* Not clear that bringing down the American government was a terminal goal, but lethally inconveniencing it was at least a critical instrumental goal on the way to getting rid of the House of Saud.
The connections between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were deep and extensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#Refuge_in_Afghanistan
For Ukraine to formally accept that Crimea and the Eastern region that Russia controlled pre-war are no longer part of Ukraine isn't a concession in name only. It's a massive concession, for reasons connected to the importance of rules that you discuss elsewhere.
If Ukraine formally accepts that they're gone, it's much more likely that they won't ever be part of Ukraine again. That's bad for Ukraine, but it's also bad for everyone, because it means that Russia has arguably succeeded in getting what it wants by invading a peaceful neighbour.
The decision on what peace terms to accept is one for Ukraine to make. They're not part of NATO, we're not going to fight alongside them. But we shouldn't be encouraging them to accept terms that strengthen Putin and make it more likely that something like this happens again.
two points:
1. Would you please elaborate how "that's bad for Ukraine"?
2. Lets imagine you are right, then why Ukrainians shelled and bombed this particular part of Donbass for eight years? Ukraine is peaceful for neighbors but not for its own citizens, who's only crime is being hostages to separatists?
2. Why did Russia shell and bomb Chechnya twice?
The answer to your question is that there is a militant faction that took up arms in defiance of their government, to secede. In the liberal rules based order, we rightly acknowledge that matters of sovereignty and where we draw the lines of polity need to be handled diplomatically and peacefully, because redrawing borders is one of the hottest beds of burgeoning conflict and destruction there is. Some people in Donetsk and Luhansk didn't do this, they simply got weapons and were egged on by Russia (for their own geopolitical goals) to cease being under the Ukrainian government. Ukraine is trying have sovereignty over their entire land. The same thing would happen if US states tried to secede, as we saw in the American Civil War.
Actually Russia have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khasavyurt_Accord when the first Chechen war went hairy. After the second one Chechens loose Chechia but got entire Russia. Now they are the most privileged region enjoying de-facto autonomy and gazillions of federal money.
> and gazillions of federal money.
Yes I'm sure you have a sensible and well-reasoned view here
It's actually worse than that. The war in Donbass was started by Igor Strelkov/Girkin (a Russian, from Russia, i.e. not from Donbass) and his 40-strong squad. He was also the head of DNR's military from April to August 2014. He's also quoted as saying "If our squad did not cross the border, at the end all would have been finished as in Kharkiv or Odessa. Practically, the flywheel of war which lasts until now was launched by our squad." The "Prime minister" of DNR for the same time period was Alexander Borodai, a friend of Strelkov, and also a Russian, from Russia. That war was not started by locals.
Agree, but strekovs just pushed a body that was already falling. There was none of his kind in Kharkov when the first blood were spilled around cityhall and lenin's monument.
I'm not sure what you mean. "The body" didn't fail in any other Ukrainian city. He himself said that the unrest would have died out if it wasn't for his squad. "The body" wasn't feeling particularly well, sure. But there's no evidence that it would have failed on its own if it wasn't for Strelkov/Borodai and the military support from Russia that they brought.
Strelkov is self-important jerk, he likes to brag about, but he wasn't the one and only successful warlord in Donbass.
> because it means that Russia has arguably succeeded in getting what it wants by invading a peaceful neighbour.
But, that *is* what happened. I don't like it one bit, but Russia has it already.
Maybe we could've stopped this in 2014, but we didn't.
That might be true if they simply agree to cede the territory, but I think not if they agree to accept the results of a neutrally conducted referendum. Putin can't expect to win such a referendum in most of the places he might want to annex.
He can win a lot of those referenda if a large part of the population flees when he seizes the territory a few years before the referendum. In Crimea I don't think this was a big factor, but in Donetsk and Luhansk it seems to have been.
re: 3 3: A strong response right now isn’t just about Ukraine, it’s also about the next time.
"This is about Taiwan, Georgia, Iran, and all the other places that great powers want to invade but don’t."
Taiwan is under the protection of the US. The Ukraine never was. Georgia is too complicated for me to grasp quickly, but I'm unsure if Russia actually wants more than what they already have with South Ossetia? And as far as I understand, the threat to Iran would come from the United States itself? Did that not happen, because Russia threatened nuclear war? Pretty sure, this was just a lack of will on the American part. If the US wants to invade a country in the Middle East, they do it. Don't see why that would change either.
re 4: International norms may be annoying, but they’re all that stands between US and nuclear war, so we had better respect them
"No sane person thinks it’s worth risking nuclear war just to protect something as minor as the Aleutian Islands. But then the US gives Russia the Aleutians, and next year they ask for all of Alaska. And even Alaska isn’t really worth risking nuclear war over, so you give it to them, and then the next year…"
That's US territory. National Souvereignity is not an international norm. It's what a nation will always defend or it'll cease to exist. Maybe the Aleutian Islands could be traded away, but if Alaska is worth going to war for. This nebuluous concept of "international norms" is absolutely not "all what stands between us and nuclear war". That's just stupid. It is explicit defense treaties like NATO, that keep the peace. Or more implicit ones like the US has with Taiwan. And generally the threat of MAD. So far, I have not seen a convincing "it's about the next time"-argument.
Nor how protecting the Ukraine or sanctioning Russia is even of strategic benefit to the West.
Can someone make better arguments please or strengthen them?
Taiwan isn't under the protection of the US (see: Strategic Ambiguity). Russia has de facto control of Georgia.
It would be a significant escalation for Putin to attack a NATO country (probably, with their large Russian minorities, one of the Baltic States). But it was a series of significant escalations for him to invade part of Georgia, and then part of Ukraine, and then Ukraine. He seems increasingly unhinged. It isn't necessarily the case that the US would launch a nuclear war to protect the Baltic States, and Putin knows that. NATO isn't magic. Would Trump be prepared to use nuclear weapons if Putin annexed a small part of Lithuania? It seems unlikely. But possible. That uncertainty is a very dangerous thing in the context of nuclear war.
If Putin were to succeed in Ukraine, the chances of him annexing Russian speaking regions of the Baltic States would increase. That would increase the chances of nuclear war. Whether by more than they are increased by Western countries supplying the Ukrainian army, I don't know.
What's interesting is that when it comes to the possibility of fighting Russia, the US throws its hands up and says "nope, couldn't possibly risk all-out war between two nuclear superpowers, strict proxy war here".
But when it comes to Taiwan, the US says "yep, we totally _might_ intervene there".
Why the inconsistency? Firstly, fighting a proxy war over Taiwan is probably impossible because Taiwan is an island; the war will be fought and won with very large and very obvious warships and fighter jets, not with surreptitiously smuggled RPGs. Secondly, China is a nuclear power but not a very big nuclear power compared to Russia, with a couple of hundred nukes compared to five thousand.
Of course at this point, the Chinese will be noting this inconsistency and saying "well shit, how quickly can we build another five thousand nukes?"
China does have MIRVs, so they could actually destroy most major US metropolitan areas. Pretty sure, they have deterrent enough. An invasion of Taiwan would have fighting on the island and it could potentially be a very long slog.
China doesn't have enough MIRVs to destroy most major US metropolitan areas, and their strategic forces are somewhat vulnerable to counterforce attack. Their deterrence is adequate to protect against an unprovoked US attack, and probably adequate to protect against the US saying "leave Taiwan alone or we'll nuke you", but it's marginal at best for anything beyond that.
They can't count on rattling the nuclear saber to prevent the US from offering a conventional defense of Taiwan, because it's too likely that we would either call that bluff or raise them a preemptive counterforce attack against their strategic nuclear forces.
They started building 350 to 400 silos for the DF-41 in 2021. Each one can carry 6 to 10 warheads?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-41#Silo-based_versions
I guess, you could make the assumption that a US preemptive strike against their capabilities might be a viable option. At first glance for me though, you'd have to stack a lot optimistic assumptions to make this worthwhile. But I admit, I don't know too much about the topic or have a good overview of who has which kilo- and megatonnage available where and what each weapon can and cannot do. I will update from your presumed expertise against my underinformed intuition.
Out of curiosity:
How would you actually nuke a lot China's capability at once, without scaring Russia into firing theirs, thinking they're targeted? Call ahead and saying "trust me, bro", when they detect missile launches? Use stealth bombers to take out for every silo at once? Do you assume that it's possible to sink their submarines, before they can launch or do you just eat those shots (which would probably mean losing Washington, New York and [insert lots of important US cities])?
Meh. China hasn't even finished building those silos yet, they've only started, and it will be some time before they are ready. Even when they are, 400 silos aren't especially difficult to take out. Two or three 300kt warheads each, given modern CEP, and you're all set. It could readly be done by SLBMs alone and leave plenty of firepower in reserve.
So far as I know, the Chinese do not yet have intercontinental capacity on the few strategic subs they do have. And besides that, the USN is very *very* good at knowing where enemy ballistic subs are all the time, so I would expect they will never get a chance to fire one anyway before being sunk.
So yeah if the US *wanted* to do a first strike on China, it would work just fine. Be a rather miserable world afterward, though.
A Chinese silo carrying 6 to 10 warheads is only good for blowing great big craters in Inner Mongolia or wherever. They'd need actual missiles to destroy American cities with those warheads, and they don't have nor will they soon have 350-400 DF-41 missiles.
The number of missile silos the Chinese have, is not determined by the number of missiles China has. It is determined by the number of missiles the *US* has. Which is more than 350-400, but not by so comfortable a margin that we could easily destroy 400 Chinese silos to be sure of getting the ones that have Chinese missiles.
Well for one thing Taiwan is much more important economically. Taiwan is #8 in trade volume with the US at $115 billion, only a bit behind the UK (#7) and well ahead of the rest of the Eurozone excepting Germany (#5).
Taiwan is the single most important geostrategic location in the world because of its control on microelectronics. Far more important than Saudi Arabia.
I suspect Xi knows this but no other head of state does, not even Tsai. There's probably a nascent insurgency or two somewhere in the world that also knows it.
That said, while it's plausible none of these entities can take it (except Tsai, of course) any one of them can annihilate TSMC's fabs, thus denying them to their competition.
I think the Taiwanese are perfectly aware. If they weren't, the Covid supply-chain crisis must have by now.
I'm convinced Morris Chang (founder and former CEO of TSMC) is a Taiwanese patriot and TSMC's willful failure to diversify by building significant factories outside Taiwan (a small island vulnerable to earthquakes and typhoons, not just geopolitical risk) is motivated by the desire to make Taiwan too strategic to be abandoned by the US the way Afghanistan was.
I'd agree with its economic importance. I also think there's the fact that Taiwan has been in the US orbit for a long time now, dating back to a period before China had nuclear weapons, and the US has matched China's saber-rattling on it before, repeatedly sending the US Navy to the Taiwan Strait as far back as 1950. And there's also the fact Taiwan hasn't been part of a unified China since 1895.
Meanwhile, back when the US and USSR initially came to an understanding regarding MAD, Ukraine was joined to Russia, and this fact ended within living memory, with a tacit understanding that Ukraine belonged to Russia's "sphere of influence", without really ever hammering out what precisely that means.
From 01911 until 01979 the US formally recognized the ROC government as "China", and it held China's permanent seat in the UN Security Council until 01971; this despite the fact that the ROC government has exercised effective control over only Taiwan since 01949. Withdrawing diplomatic recognition from Taiwan (ROC) and extending it to PRC in 01979 is a significant diference in US-Taiwan relations between 01950 and today.
Yeah we called that one right. That, "strategic ambiguity," ANZUS and being best buddies with Korea and Japan have kept the peace in the Pacific for a very long time. For a bunch of ignorant roundeyes, we've done pretty well.
Sorry, OT question: why leading zeros in years?
Not an expert on Georgia, but they are currently speeding up their EU application. That does not sound like "under de facto control of Russia" to me. Unless you mean "South Ossetia" specifically. Then sure, but whatever.
Ok, the Baltic states. Estonia has a Russian population of 5%. Not sure there is a meaningful cluster of them. I'll need a map... and a microscope. Latvia and Lithuania are at 25% Russians. Are they unhappy Russians, that want to secede and are they clustered? I don't really know. But whereas the Ukraine is a corrupt kleptocracy with weak institutions, those three countries are richer, better developed and EU members. So I doubt, there is a secessionist core of collaborators.
Ukraine is huge and Ukrainians can already understand Russian. Russian and Ukrainian are pretty similar. The Baltic languages are not, so they could not easily be integrated into a larger Russia. Ukraine is a pretty compelling target for Russia. It has an area four times and a population eight times of all the Baltic states combined. That population is culturally much more Russian. And whether even they can be as beautifully integrated as Putin imagines, is entirely doubtful.
All the Baltic states are part of NATO and the EU. I agree, that NATO isn't magic. But it's not "America's little precious darlings" either. The United Kingdom alone is perfectly capable of destroying every major Russian population center. France also has nuclear weapons. Not to mention that every member has some conventional army they could send. Unclear to me, why this would have to go nuclear immediately. US presidents might be all kinds of crazy, but I think you underestimate them, if you assume they'd panic-press shiny red buttons.
If the Russian model stands, all neighboring states with a Russian population need to forcibly evict that Russian population, or it will always be grounds for the Russian government to invade and annex.
Not addressing the bulk of the comments, but a quick note: Ukraine proved that smaller countries _can_ fight a defensive war against a larger opponent. They haven't proven they can win, but it may be enough. Until now if you weren't under somebody's protection you were considered a soft target, and there's little point in increasing defense's share of GDP other than meet treaty quotas.
But apparently it's significantly easier to fight a defensive war if well prepared, which means now it's different, now countries will start building their defense strategies To Win, and not to check a box in a list or to distribute some pork. This is a big change, and can make the world look differently.
I think we thought that small countries were pushovers because we've seen so many US wars in countries that were not only small but also decades behind in military technology and centuries behind in military doctrine.
Russia and Ukraine are basically peers, they're armed with largely the same weapons and seem to have a similar level of discipline and sophistication.
What occurs to me is that if you can actually get your military to fight, you can accomplish a lot. It seems that in a country like Iraq, the vast conscript army only offered token resistance at best, with only a few elite sections of it like the Republican Guard putting up a real fight.
Meanwhile it seems the bulk of Ukraine's military is fighting, and even though it's outgunned, it's not really outnumbered within its borders: its nominal strength was 245,000 active duty at the start of this.
Under the current state of affairs, modern armies are much smaller than those in the mid-20th century. So if you can actually get people to fight, it's not that difficult to outnumber an attacker within your own borders, even if their population is 5x yours, or more.
I think the Sino-Vietnamese War is probably also an interesting illustration, though both sides claimed victory. But it was at least a bloody and costly affair for China, despite its population outnumbering Vietnam's by almost 20x at that time.
> Russia and Ukraine are basically peers, they're armed with largely the same weapons
1) Russia has nukes
2) as far as air force dominating Ukrainian one (though performance here is so far an amusing shitshow, hopefully it will remain this way)
3) very significant dominance in artillery
4) better tanks
Overall Russia has clear advantage, though at least part of it existed only on paper. In communist Poland it was typical for army to have many "inventory units"[1], for example vehicles unable to drive or completely broken machine guns that were kept to boost reported inventory. I guess that tradition remains.
[1] "wyposażenie na sztukę" = "equipment for piece"
Agree with your list, and also find it interesting that Russia is holding back most of its advantages: no nukes, only a tiny part of its air force, much less artillery than expected. And tanks can be countered by modern RPGs.
Are they trying to lose?
There is a theory that air force part is raging incompetence.
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations is one of better takes on that (beware my incompetence here)
For stronger takes that may be wishful thinking is that large part of reported air force is not actually existing.
Certainly they seems to be running out of guided ammunition.
All of these military advantages can be leveraged only with a substantial collateral damage. So far, it looks like the ratio of Ukrainian civillian to military casualties in this conflict is remarkably low. According to the UN, there were under 500 civillian deaths so far (as of 8th of March), and at least 1500 Ukrainian military. For comparison, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia in 1999, it took pride in "amazingly light" civilian casualties of 1500 vs under 1000 Serbian military casualties. On UN estimates, 69% of killed in Israel Gaza incursion in 2014 were civilians (52% on Israeli estimates.)
Of course, it does not mean that the concern for civilian casualties is what limits the use of bombers and artillery, but it is consistent with the stated goals.
True. Sometimes, when it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it really is a duck. Even if it's an enemy duck. They probably just avoid casualties.
Russia and Ukraine are playing in the same league. Russia's (on paper) equipment and power are significantly stronger than Ukraine's, but it's a matter of degrees. The US advantage in military technology compared to Iraq or Afghanistan is functionally a difference in kind. It's not just a matter of US tanks having thicker armor or US planes being faster.
The technology gap is vast enough that US can do things entirely impossible for Iraq to do. By comparison, other than Nukes, Russia's advantage is just that their machines are incrementally better at the same tasks. That's what it means to be technology peers in this respect.
Russia and the Ukraine have basically the same tanks, T-64s and T-72s including the ones where incremental upgrades were called "T-80", "T-84", and "T-90" to make it seem like they had something really new. I'm not seeing anything that would suggest the Russian variants are significantly better than the Ukrainian ones.
As for artillery, my sources say that as of 2019, Russia had 4,340 pieces of >100mm, compared to 1,770 for Ukraine, not counting warehoused reserves on both sides. A 2.5:1 advantage might count as "significant dominance", but the Russians can't afford to put their *entire* army into Ukraine.
They certainly weren't peers when Russia took Crimea in 02014.
> I don’t know what the visa situation is like now and it might be terrible.
It was terrible before COVID (e.g. if you're invited to a conference, you have to fly across the whole country to a single consulate that maybe has a chance of giving you a visa within less than a year), then there were admittedly mutual vaccine-related problems, now it's just impossible (e.g. many Green Card lottery winners from more than a year ago still can't get their visas). Maybe one could go to a USA consulate in a neighbouring country (Poland? Georgia?) and ask for a visa there, except, well, not right now.
My colleagues had submitted abstracts to a US conference. They now estimate their chances of getting a visa as <1%.
If your purpose is to flee Russia, you don't need to go to the USA...
The "Stability-Instability Paradox": the notion that mutual vulnerability ("MAD") at the strategic nuclear level can actually make conflict more likely at lower rungs of the escalation ladder. Twitter Thread:
Haven’t tweet much on Ukraine crisis for multiple reasons. But developments in the last 24 hours are heartbreaking and a preview of great brutality I fear is coming. A few observations here on the nuclear & conventional dimensions. 1/
Putin’s pointed, not-veiled nuclear threats are really remarkable, signaling a willingness to turn to the country’s arsenal if the West interferes with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. /2
This is about the clearest evidence I have ever seen for the Stability-Instability Paradox: the notion that mutual vulnerability ("MAD") at the strategic nuclear level can actually make conflict more likely at lower rungs of the escalation ladder. /3
Deterrence theorists associated with the Nuclear Revolution often dismiss this idea, arguing that nuclear stalemate means both sides will avoid crises and conflicts out of the fear they could escalate. The result should be peace, stability, and less military competition. /4
Yet Putin’s behavior suggests that revisionist actors are not so inhibited and may instead use their strategic nuclear forces as a shield behind which they can pursue conventional aggression, knowing their nuclear threats may deter outside intervention. /5
Now of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, nor a U.S. treaty ally. But then neither is Taiwan. So if you think nuclear stalemate is going to keep the peace in the Strait, you would need to do some hard thinking about why it hasn’t kept the peace in Eastern Europe. /6
China, in fact, is developing the same types of forces that Putin references in his remarks: not only a survivable second-strike capability, but also theater nuclear forces suited for limited strikes for coercive escalation. Not a coincidence.
More broadly, as a student of military operations and foreign policy, it’s hard for me to see the Russian end game here either operationally or strategically, for reasons @jeffaedmonds and @KofmanMichael and others have identified.
Yes, at a tactical level Russia can steamroll Ukrainian regular forces, though I expect Ukraine can make this more costly than Russia has anticipated. Urban warfare is unkind to invaders, even strong ones. 8/ https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/1595.pdf
But beyond that, what is military endgame? Regime change and then puppet government? Difficulties of indefinitely occupying a nation of 41 million should be apparent after Soviet experiences with Warsaw Pact & Afghanistan, among others @dmedelstein
Russian invasion likely to provoke higher European defense spending, tighter NATO, deployment of NATO forces east, hostility with West. Ukraine was not headed for NATO membership any time soon, so a destabilizing invasion wasn’t necessary to forestall that perceived danger. 10/
At the strategic level, Russian invasion gives off big Schlieffen Plan energy. It is like committing suicide for fear of death, bringing about the very problems it is supposed to solve, and generating new ones like risks of inadvertent escalation. 11/11
https://twitter.com/ProfTalmadge/status/1496837475901362180
I just watched some videos on russia subreddit and one video about Russian police arresting unruly protesters caught my eye. The commentary was that if western protesters had been so aggressive they would have been already shot by police. It's obviously propaganda because they wouldn't but I remember seeing police dealing with Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa and it is clear that Canadian police is much more professional and capable than Russian one. It is just a pity that its potential is used to support completely irrelevant and even harmful vaccine mandates. If all this energy was used for real issues we could have world peace in no time.
But it also means that we clearly overestimate Russia's military capabilities. Maybe the truth is that they are indeed as bad as they look like due to corruption and self-deceit?
*That* is the $50,000 question here. I can't even imagine the ways things will subtly (or maybe not so subtly) shift in the coming decades if the Russians have their asses totally handed to them militarily by the Ukrainians. *Everybody* up and down their border, from the Poles to the Romanians and the Kazakhs out east, is going to frown and say hmmm and start thinking.
reminds me about old joke "year 2045, situation remains calm on China-Poland border"
I wonder if anyone in Poland or Lithuania is drawing up plans to "liberate" Kaliningrad?
Come on, there MUST be Germany. after all.
Over the last few days I've been helping some of my friends to leave Russia. Fleeing to the US is a no-go, I don't know how to even begin there. Much more realistic is moving to Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Turkey and other neutral Asian countries that don't require visa from Russian citizens. You can settle there for a couple of months while applying a digital nomad visa to some European country.
A very important part of the process is opening a bank account outside of Russia. Reportedly you can easily do it at least in Georgia and Kazakhstan. I heard that in Georgia you need to sign a paper stating that you don't support the Russian invasion. This theoretically makes you criminally liable back in Russia under the recent laws, but it's unlikely that Georgia will share these declarations with Russia, so you are probably fine.
Once you have a bank account outside of Russia, you can still transfer some of your money from Russian bank accounts, as long as your bank is not disconnected from SWIFT. This transfer is limited to 5000 USD though. (You can also cross the borders with up to 10k in cash.) Visa & Mastercard are about to stop working tomorrow, so don't rely on them. You can probably use a UnionPay card if you have one.
I've used this list of digital nomad accepting countries: https://nomadgirl.co/countries-with-digital-nomad-visas/. Based on it, the easiest countries to immigrate to are Czech Republic and Portugal. Czech Republic requires a proof of ~6000 EUR in assets, Protugal requires a proof of ~700 EUR of stable income or ~17000 EUR in assets. It goes without saying, but you'll need to double-check the actual requirements in the official sources for any particular country that you want to move to.
If you are still in Russia, try getting apostille on your birth and marriage certificates and get a memo that you don't have criminal record. These documents are impossible to get outside of Russia and are required for getting long term visas or residence permits in many countries.
If you have questions or need any help (tickets, booking a place to stay etc.), reach out to me on Telegram at @eterevsky or email at oleg@eterevsky.com. Feel free to also reach out if you are a Ukrainian fleeing to Europe (the logistics there is completely different obviously).
Brain-drain might be the single most effective strategy long-term to nip future Russian aggression in the bud. Germany has stated it needs 400,000 workers to make up for soon to retire ones, it's a Western country with a high standard of living and relatively cheap real estate, specially in the East.
Here is an English page of the Czech Ministry of Interior on long-term visas (be aware that there is currently a lot of anti-Russian xenophobia in Czechia): https://www.mvcr.cz/mvcren/article/a-visa-for-a-stay-of-over-90-days-long-term.aspx?q=Y2hudW09MQ%3d%3d
More details about immigrating to Czech Republic: https://citizenremote.com/visas/czech-republic/. Apparently you'll need to separately apply for a trade license and a long-term business visa.
Yes. Also other paperwork. I am not clear on details, but Russians should have competitive advantage, since our foreigners related bureaucracy is pretty Soviet in character.
Is India a reasonable alternative? I have the sense that programmers might be able to make a better living in India than in Georgia or Kazakhstan, and Russians might be subject to less racism in India than in China.
Are there countries where Bitcoin is a plausible alternative to SWIFT, Visa, and Mastercard?
India is definitely an option. I heard it's relatively easy to get a business visa there. At least one of my friends is considering doing this.
A lot of IT work nowadays is remote, so the actual place you will be staying is not that important. Georgia and Kazakhstan make sense at least as the first stops because Russian citizens don't need any kind of visa for a long-term stay. Also if your spouse or parent is moving with you and doesn't speak good English, they are easier since everyone speaks Russian.
I wouldn't consider China. It requires a visa for entry and you need to speak Chinese.
The problem with crypto is buying it in Russia. I don't know of any crypto exchanges located in Russia, so as a first step of buying bitcoins, you'll need to transfer money to an exchange outside of Russia, which makes it pointless.
Thank you! I hope your friends are doing well. Last night's forex shutdown is going to be an extra barrier.
On the peace deal Russia has offered: I think there's a good chance it's NOT just 'give up Crimea/Donetsk/Luhansk and don't join EU/Nato'. It also included 'Zelensky remains president, but Russia chooses a prime minister'.
https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500812687009267712
Could be something the Russians will negotiate on, and maybe walk back from as time goes on, but I think if this is true it changes the flavour of the deal considerably. Russia isn't asking to slink away with a few bits of land; they want to permanently and powerfully influence Ukrainian politics so they can continue with their project of turning it back into a satellite state. It seems way less reasonable for Ukraine to agree to that.
I think it's pretty silly for those of us who aren't actually part of any negotiations to opine on what hypothetical deals the Ukranians should or should not be willing to make, especially given that Putin is known to be a bad-faith negotiator.
That's the major problem - where are the collaborators come from? I personally dont see the possibilities to buy out or coherse ukrainian bureaucracy into collaboration. There are some pro-Russian poilitcal figures in exile, but in the corrupt and toxic sludge of Ukrainian deep state just swallows them without a trace.
I’ve read some comments about Putin’s “long term strategy.” He’ll turn 70 in a few months. What would you say if you heard someone 70 talking about their long term career goals?
With a median life expectancy of 73 for men in Russia presumably Putin knows a lot of men his age who are already dead. How do folks think that plays into his planning and decision making?
Trump - 75 y.o.
Biden - 79 y.o.
I think this plays into the concept of "legacy". Which is absolutely something that ambitious men regularly turn to in their old age. What is he bequeathing to those who come after him? How will he be remembered, by Russians, in a few decades' time?
Elaborate what Russians. Russians are not the hivemind, and Putin is multivalent/
Presumably whatever Russians Putin imagines as remembering him a few decades hence.
Right. My point is when Putin thinks about legacy, I don't think he cares one whit how he is remembered by the rest of the world -- only how he is remembered by the majority of Russians.
I don't read Putin's mind, i can only guess, judging his words and actions he enjoys the thought of being remembered a strong leader who led the nation through the perilous waters into a safe haven of "energy superpower"
That's the life expectancy at birth. I don't know where to find actuarial tables for Russia but in the US https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html male life expectancy at birth is 76 years but male life expectancy at age 70 is 15 more years, not 6. That's because at age 70 27% of men are already dead, pulling down the average, but if you're 70 and not dead yet, you're not one of them. Your chance of dying by 76 is only 16% if you're already 70, but 38% if you've just been born a boy.
(Relevant caveat in this case that these numbers are computed from current death rates, but how long you actually live will be determined by future death rates. If Putin launches a global thermonuclear war you can expect life expectancy to drop precipitously, especially in Russia, the US, and its allies. Inversely, if you live long enough to start backing up your connectome regularly, you might live millions or trillions of years. These figures do not take the probability of such events into account.)
My point was more that when you’re 70 a significant portion of your age cohort is already dead. That tends to focus the mind on how little useful time you have left.
Agreed.
What's your source for 73 years for men? That seems really high. Wikipedia has it at 68.2 in 2020, which seems more likely. (The same article says life expectancy for men at 60 is 16.8.)
Take alcohol, smoking, random crime, traffic accidents, and really bad healthcare out of equation, and he can expect to live a lot longer than the median, unless he is already sick with something very bad.
In any case, whatever we think about planning and decision making of someone who just started a bloody war against a non-aggressive country of 44 million is likely to have nothing to do with reality.
73 is for the average Russian man: poor, drinks lot of alcohol, got a hefty chance of using drugs, smoking and god knows what else.
As far as I remember, Putin barely drinks, don't smoke, exercise a lot, and is rather well off (not to mention being head of state, so it's not just him having a good doctor, but the state apparatus that tries to monitor him).
Count on him to live to 90 or to die violently.
Maybe he's into Transhumanism? So who knows, maybe he has his scientists working on life-extending tech already?...
Clinically immortal Putin..hm, when do they say God-Emperor of Mankind was born?
The Russian troops don't seem really all that into martial valor, at least not yet. Phrased more positively, they appear to be relatively humane and un-bloodthirsty. Further, the Russian domestic media strategy appears to be to spin Mr. Putin's war to the Russian public as a nearly bloodless "special military operation," showing little of the type of exciting combat footage we've seen from the Ukrainian side.
In general, Russians other than Putin don't seem all that interested in an old fashioned ground war in Europe. Perhaps human beings really are getting less warlike, as Steven Pinker suggested a decade ago?
Russian domestic media mostly showing Ukrainian artillery hiding in the residential area, or Ukrainian trooper hiding live grenade in a playground, or thousands of AKs distributed among random civilians, or para-Nazi militias shooting at cars with refugees.
But not much Call of Duty-style tank on tank action?
The Russian people don't seem very bellicose (at present). This seems mostly like Putin's whim and Russians are uneasy that his luck might have finally run out.
Well, I haven't seen any, but I only have a few minutes to watch TV at work, official
- read all - channels are mostly airing unspeakable horrors "Ukro-Nazis" doing to their own fellow citizens (they really do, I have reports from people in East Ukraine I know second-hand).
You made a really good guess - at least I'am feeling this way. Putinism has a long history of shitting owns pants.
Even if Putin thinks he has enough WMDs to not fear another Nuremberg, and even if Russia stops recognizing all international laws, preparing and waging aggressive wars is still explicitly banned by the Russia's own criminal code. (Which is why everyone expected the war, if it was to happen, to begin with a staged attack by the Ukrainians. Still not sure why it didn't happen.)
It didn't happen because US intelligence agencies publicized most of the information that they had regarding it; no point in making a huge deal about it when everyone already knows what you're trying to stage.
Ad donations, I suggest to consider giving money to People in Need, Czech humanitarian NGO with considerable experience in war situations (they were in Chechnya, Syria and similar places). Their english page for help to Ukraine is here: https://www.peopleinneed.net/people-in-need-continues-support-ukraine-8586gp.
The intro omits the single deadliest war, the one everyone forgets: the Second Congo War of 1998–2003, which killed 40,000 people *a month* for a total of 5.4 million if you include the victims of starvation and disease. I am as guilty as anyone, I consider myself well-informed on world affairs but while aware of the free-for-all conflict, I was oblivious to the scale of the carnage. Of course, those were black lives and it's now well-established those do not matter, even less than brown lives.
Oof. Yeah, that war was pretty horrific, and so is the indifference to it.
So far this war has been going on for 12 days (?) and has killed about 25000 people, working out to 63000 people per month. Hopefully the rate will slow down rather than accelerating.
"Carnage" is misleading. There were 350,000 violent deaths in the war. The 5 million comes from deaths of starvation and disease caused by the chaos.
“ Russia has miscalculated, they know they’ve miscalculated”
If metaculus is any guide, Russia is not the only one who miscalculated (see the odds of Russia taking Kyiv by April plummet). In fact, we don’t know for sure what Putin was thinking, so we may be projecting our own failure on him.
The take away is just to remember that “no plan survives contact with the enemy”. We should have similar concerns as far as our ability to even enforce a no fly zone.
One thing came to my mind when you wrote "to call its bluff": Americans play poker, but russians play chess.
I don't know that I agree with "EU has previously allowed members to join its economic community without joining the EU proper, and this would probably provide most of the relevant benefits to Ukraine without angering Russia." Having skimmed Putin's big essay on Ukraine, I think that having Ukraine tie its economy to the EU rather than Russia would be something he would very much have a beef with.
Yes, but it takes away his argument about a military threat.
I guess the question is how much each is an excuse versus how much each is a reason. My sense is that the military threat is mostly an excuse and partially a reason while the economic integration is a more important reason but not something that can be used as an excuse.
Likely. The Ukrainian revolution (which angered Putin into invading parts of Ukraine in 2014) started when, in 2013, Yanukovich decided not to sign the EU Association Agreement (not EU membership proper).
Agree with much of this, especially regarding the no-fly-zone nonsense. Couple things which came to mind:
1) ‘liberal redditors getting mad on Twitter’ feels like an uncharitable illustration which downplays the remarkable display of unity and (dare I say) strength by liberal democracies.
2) I am not sure this conflict supports the concept of meaningfully superior ‘martial’ cultures. Russia seems to take pride in their macho outlook, but we may find out that boring nerdy planning and accountable power structures are more decisive war-winners than selecting Invincible Macho VdVs and right-clicking Kiev.
The people I know who fought in wars seem to emphasize the importance of initiative, leadership, coordination and intelligence, and they tend to get annoyed at the notion of inherently (genetically or culturally) superior soldiers. This is far outside my own expertise, admittedly.
Yes. Mood affiliation once again...I mean, the neo-reactionaries are funny...they want accelerationism, but also "traditional masculinity" and "traditional values"...maybe they don't go together so well?
It seems to me, with the change in military technology towards cyberwarfare and UAVs, the "nerds" will do better than the "jocks" in terms of being militarily successful...
>"This is what it looks like when a civilization that’s got strong and well-functioning norms against aggressive wars encounters one and launches an immune response."
I'm sorry what? The Iraq invasion, the Afghan invasion, the Libyan bombing and the Yugoslav bombing would seem to indicate otherwise. Not to mention the fact that countries have been financing the Saudi war machine and Israeli war machine for decades. I'm sorry Scott but you need to step outside your neoliberal foreign policy bubble.
Scott, I'd change the skimpy clothing example to something like 'holing up in your apartment all the time' vs getting pick pocketed?
That way you avoid any culture war distractions?
> In this spirit, I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer.
> As far as I understand it, the offer is: Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home.
The problem is that Russia has negative credibility.
In case of signing that Russia would renege on it and break it. Either they would never leave or attack again within 10 years. I would give 85% probability to that.
And at this point, sadly, "Russia promises to not invade" and similar should not be treated as serious in long term, and encouraging others to treat it seriously is a bad idea.
I am willing to bet money on that, as long as it is not requiring use of cryptocurrencies. I can also bet funny Manifold points, I got some from that broken Trump market.
I am also expecting that this relatively reasonably proposal is not what they proposed: I expect that they demanded at least one of following:
(1) purge of Ukrainian leadership
(2) installing their puppet(s) as rulers
(3) destruction of Ukrainian military
(4) stopping improvements to Ukrainian military
(5) forcing Ukrainian government to lie about what happened
Overall, I expect that Ukraine considered it but it was as fucked up and unreasonable as their previous public offers.
If anyone declares interest I can create Manifold markets for that (though I expect resolving that as N/A as Ukraine government is not dumb enough to fall for that, and Russia government would not offer such terms anyway)
Someone else created https://manifold.markets/ArieArie/if-ukraine-accepts-the-peace-deal-r already "If Ukraine accepts the peace deal Russia offers, will Russia keep it for at least 30 years?"
Putin is oft compared to Hitler, but there is a better analogy:
But Gandalf said: ‘This is much to demand for the delivery of one servant: that your Master should receive in exchange what he must else fight many a war to gain! Or has the field of Gondor destroyed his hope in war, so that he falls to haggling? And if indeed we rated this prisoner so high, what surety have we that Sauron, the Base Master of Treachery, will keep his part? Where is this prisoner? Let him be brought forth and yielded to us, and then we will consider these demands.
It seemed then to Gandalf, intent, watching him as a man engaged in fencing with a deadly foe, that for the taking of a breath the Messenger was at a loss; yet swiftly he laughed again.
‘Do not bandy words in your insolence with the Mouth of Sauron!’ he cried. ‘Surety you crave! Sauron gives none. If you sue for his clemency you must first do his bidding. These are his terms. Take them or leave them!
(from Tolkien, "The Return of the King", chapter 10, "The Black Gate Opens".
(1) If I understand Fukuyama's position correctly, he was not saying that there would be no more wars. He was saying that the dominant ideology of 'liberal democracy + capitalism with a safety net' would never again face another ideology that could compete with it on a global scale. Once this ideology converts everyone, then there won't be any more wars. The 'Dictator Book Club' is a more effective argument against Fukuyama than this war.
(2) I agree that nuclear war is a much bigger issue than conventional war in Ukraine. But I'm surprised that you didn't address the question of whether you think that Ukraine can continue to hold out and whether the sanctions help then with this.
(3) A no fly zone would probably also requires destroying Russia air defenses so we can fly our planes there. Russia's surface-to-air capabilities are mostly located in Russia. The problem isn't just that we would be shooting down Russian aircraft (like Turkey has done once in Syria): we would also be shooting targets located on Russian soil.
(4) I have a different take on Russia's peace offer. They do seem to want all of the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. So it sounds to me like: please abandon your strong defensive positions in eastern Ukraine (which have mostly held so far), and give us a few months to fix our logistical problems.
(5) If you want to help victims of war in the most effective way possible, you should probably focus on the wars that nobody cares about instead of the wars that everybody cares about.
(3) is a great point that I have only seen a few people make. It drives me crazy that people are acting like we can declare a no-fly zone like Michael Scott declares bankruptcy (to borrow a phrase from Michael Kofman). You can say "we're not declaring war, we're just declaring a no-fly zone!" all you want, but if your policy predictably involves blowing up Russian soldiers on Russian territory...well, that's closer to a mustard seed than a fig leaf.
My real concern is that if we did that, and Putin kept it conventional, the Russian air force would lose badly and in relatively short order. So that creates an enormous incentive to escalate, e.g. "if you start enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, I'm going to start dropping tactical nukes on NATO airbases within X # kilometers of the border." If he's not going to give up, that would be a totally rational move to make.
I was surprised to see Scott not mention your item #3.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, Scott, on the odds of nuclear war (or just the odds of nuclear deployment) in the next couple months
“Fine, you can invade if the country is literally the Nazis, committing the literal Holocaust” - and then Putin says Ukraine is run by Nazis and genociding its people.
I have no good solution to this problem...
Why not just litigate the cases as they come up, and accept that there will be hard cases, and gradually work to push your failures out another std deviation?
I mean this in all good faith - this is indeed a very real problem. Also, this is genuinely one naive solution to this problem. Roll up our sleeves and just try. Is the flaw in the naive solution that, we are just really bad at this sort of thing, and adversaries are too good at finding loopholes to try to confront them? If this works 99.9% of the time, but is occasionally exploited, is it still that bad of a solution?
I think that's what "no good solution" means.
That was a surprising response! My model of your views here was off, sorry.
I thought you were saying solutions with some small error rate are not good solutions, that only perfect solutions are good solutions. But in hindsight that doesn't sound like you at all...
Maybe you're saying every case is a hard case, and per Quine or Gettier, we're always just one revelation away from realizing Zelenskyy is a secret Nazi, and after that, still just one revelation away from realizing we were lied to by the last piece of evidence, and he's actually the most anti-Nazi person among us all, iterated to radical skepticism?
That feels like a very poor model of you too. I'm very much publicly failing here in the hopes my error will be transparent and easily corrected.
To strawman Scott, I would say:
It's hard to perfectly define a weed, but that ontological quirk has not posed much of an issue during my actual gardening.
One can believe truth is a much harder problem than most people realize, acknowledge we will face edge cases, but then shrug and pick up your trowel.
(The alternative is to not pick up your trowel we have found this is not a dominant gardening strategy.)
That would be fun. But you are not strawman Scott!
Maybe this is ivermectin again, and the point is that hard cases dominate. (Do they? Or is availability heuristic pranking those of us who most like thinking about hard problems? Is this answerable, "ratio of cases that are hard," because what would even go in the denominator...)
I'll think more about your views here. I'd love any clarification, but you have a billion comments here, I already imposed, so I'll ruminate.
Thank you for your time.
Just from curiosity, which parts seem chauvinist? It even included naive proposal to treat Russian promises as worth something!
Manichean nonsense is filled throughout the article.
Banning this account for a week for unproductive criticism; after reading this I don't even know what you think I got wrong.
With reference to the "Bright Line" argument: Would it be useful to set up a prediction market for determining whether an invasion is "good" or not? Perhaps all countries in the UN could vote on whether the majority would vote "Yes" for annexation or "No". Unless there is universal consensus/collusion, the best strategy would be to vote for the "morally good" option, which humans are pretty good at figuring out unless they are motivated by personal gain.
“I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer.”
Last time Western countries encouraged Czechoslovakia to accept a similar offer it did not work so well. What is the reason to think this time would be different?
An even will quickly make up for everybody, Putin will be pleased to take the Russian part of Ukraine as his failed blitzkrieg isn’t something to brag about. Transnistria & Gagauzia (yes, these are autonomous regions in Moldova) could get recognised by Russia while Moldova join the EU as it has strengthened ties with the west in the last years.
Nato would gain the western part of Ukraine and might draw new borders pushing further east.
https://antarctica.substack.com/p/ukraine-war-predictions-day-10?s=w
You have to bring evidence there was a plan of blitzkrieg in the first place.
Oh fine, Blitzspecialmilitaryoperation
At least some people argue it wasn't a plan of blitzkrieg because Putin thought that Ukraine could be taken without any serious resistance, and that that explains the early failures. When that didn't happen it turned into an attempted blitzkrieg without the needed logistic resources.
1. If Putin is irrational to the point of starting a nuclear war, and we don't want a nuclear war, we have to give him anything he asks by whatever pretext he gives. The details about NATO, Iraq, history etc are irrelevant, they could as easily have been aliens and spirits. And we're doomed anyway.
2. Putin could also be some sort of rational. What sort?
From what we know, he's not a religious fanatic, not an addict or esoteric fan.
He is a long-time KGB officer, and their modus operandi is well-known since
1930s, when they've given up the global permanent revolution and exploited the
same framework again and again.
The framework is:
- find a relatively weak/unstable/isolated democratic country
- create some underground spy network
- create a list of talking points to polarize/split the public and push those through diplomacy and local media
- if the convenient dictator wins, use him in your favor
- if not:
- do a false flag operation
- invade
- if it goes ok, install a puppet government
- if it fails, annex some territory, put it in gray zone and use to destabilize the rest of the country
- if this also fails, incorporate gray zone into your territory
Since then it was exploited in Finland, Bessarabia, Baltic countries, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Georgia, etc.
And we can see that's exactly what happens here and we're being the public fed Putin's talking points, no?
Only if (we believe that) Putin is irrational to the point of starting a nuclear war over any little thing he might be denied, do we have to give him anything he asks. We don't believe he is that irrational, only that he might be irrational to start a nuclear war over a few particularly important issues.
So no, we don't have to give him anything he asks, which seems to undermine your logic here. But we should probably lean towards accepting his demands on the e.g. "hey please don't invade or bomb Russia" front, and similarly "don't send your armies into battle against my armies",
Perhaps I am being nitpicky, but there is one thing I would like to point out: NATO didn't ''expand''. It admitted Central European countries which seeked protection, because they correctly predicted that Russia would try to reestabilish it's sphere of influence over them once it regains strength to do so. We wanted to join Western institutions, we wanted it badly. For instance: only about 2% of Poles want Poland to leave NATO(poll from 2019).
Former Eastern European satellites with democratic histories flocked to NATO. The Central Asian republics run like autocracies joined CSTO to preserve their autocracies, as shown in Kazakhstan. The odd one out is Mongolia, which is both Asian and democratic despite being in a bad neighborhood squeezed between Russia and China (and with much of their historic territory annexed by China which is waging cultural genocide against Mongols there).
> Everyone can sanction Russia as much as they want, and it can win anyway.
Lol, no. It's already losing because of logistics, it's going to lose because of logistics harder, and at some point you end up with a 1984-esque war economy where your citizens have nothing because the resources go to a war that won't be resolved.
If they take Kiev they'll get killed by a regular army coordinated from Lviv. If they take Lviv they'll get killed by guerillas and IEDs.
I don't even know if there is a "next time". The current situation has a realistic chance of causing a regime change in Russia, at which point the sanctions would be lifted. The West is close to using every metaphorical nuclear option and leaving just the literal one.
Will you bet money on any of these statements?
I estimate "Ukraine will be occupied by Russia and everyone will get over it by next year" (to a similar extent everyone was over Chechnya) as ~20% likely, at most, so yes. The degree of the occupation failing and/or everyone not getting over it, is up for debate.
Regime change, what next? Demilitarizaion, giving up nukes, splitting into large amount of states where the largest state is 2-3 times smaller than Ukraine?
To be fair "regime change" probably means "another oligarch seizes power", but as long as he's reasonable in negotiations I suppose it'll work.
“in ‘62, it was the Russians who agreed to back down to prevent nuclear war. We owe them one, so this time it’s on us.”
In 1956 and 1968, when the Hungarian and Czech governments attempted to get some measure of independence from the USSR, the latter responded with full scale military invasion and arresting or executing local political leaders. The western countries decided not to interfere in the Soviet sphere of influence.
In 1962, the situation was reverse - Castro decided to ally with the USSR and turned Cuba into a communist dictatorship. The US and USSR compromised by letting Castro stay and in return for withdrawing the soviet missiles from Cuba the US withdrew its missile form Turkey and Italy.
Is “Russians who agreed to back down” a fair description of what happened?
It is not, no. It was a fair exchange. Khruschev specifically decided to base missiles in Cuba because of the Jupiter decision, and so in *fact* Khruschev got pretty much what he wanted, with the Kennedy Administration agreeing to remove the Jupiters and Khruschev agreeing to go no further with Cuba. I doubt K was thrilled about trusting the Cubans anyway.
What Khruschev *didn't* understand was the tremendous PR spin that would be put on it, that would make Kennedy out into some kind of hero who stared down the Soviets. (It probably helped the myth along that Kennedy got himself martyred the next year, instead of living to be covered in mud by Vietnam.) My impression is that even the Soviets themselves kind of bought the PR and this helped bring him down at home.
> Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home.
Putin wants to _demilitarize_ Ukraine. How do you think further negotiations with a bully who declared he's out for your blood will go, once you handed him your weapons? Ceding anything to Putin at this point is being terrible at game theory, even if it's a trivial thing.
Also, everyone, especially Ukrainians, knows Ukraine is a corrupt shithole because it's an ex-USSR republic. This is what being in Russia's orbit does to countries, this is not a matter of opinion, this is settled. They correctly reason that their only chance for a modern country is joining the Western bloc - that's what Soviet satellite states did and it worked magnificently. "Keep Ukraine neutral" is code for "keep Ukraine like Belarus with an extra dose of military vulnerability".
As usual, I agree with most all of this.
I rarely comment, but in this instance I MUST, because THIS quote left my jaw on the floor:
"Also, the last time this happened, in ‘62, it was the Russians who agreed to back down to prevent nuclear war. We owe them one, so this time it’s on us."
This leads me to ask, in all sincerity, "WHAT, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the F***???"
I can't even see the context into which this statement is hooked. It looks like a throwaway comment, but one possessed of the most staggering blitheness, which is not at all your usual MO, Scott.
This seems to be a reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis).
My impression was the Cuban Missile Crisis ended when the Russians agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba to prevent nuclear war; am I getting something wrong?
Yeah, you're forgetting that the Kennedy Administration agreed to remove the Jupiter IRBMs from Turkey in exchange. Since that removal was pretty much Khruschev's entire goal in threatening to build missile sites in Cuba in the first place, a better overall assessment is that it was an equal exchange, with nobody doing anybody favors.
"NATO has shown no signs of being willing to accept Ukraine as a member anyway"
This is an incredibly inaccurate statement.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm
NATO agreed in 2008 that Ukraine "WILL become members of NATO" (emphasis mine). This is about as explicit a contradiction of the claim that NATO has no signs of interest in Ukraine joining as possible. They have continued to reaffirm this and still say it on their website
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_49212.htm
The goal of joining NATO is enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/15/explainer-nato-and-the-ukraine-russia-crisis
Biden reassured Zelenskiy 3 months ago, when he already knew invasion was an increasing probability, that the right to join NATO remained "in Ukraine's hands".
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zelenskiy-holding-talks-with-biden-adviser-says-2021-12-09/
It is more than clear that the US and UK both wanted Ukraine in NATO even if other NATO members might have taken some persuading. NATO and Ukraine have both *explicitly* reaffirmed, over and over again, their desire to join together. The fact that there are obstacles does not mean that there is no serious chance it could have happened, or that there are "no" signs of willingness. Quite the opposite.
The most serious of the obstacles you allude to are Ukraine's border disputes in Crimea and Donbas. There was never any serious possibility of resolving these issues, so NATO is only willing to accept Ukraine as a member under conditions which cannot be fulfilled. It's accurate to say they've shown no signs of being willing to accept Ukraine.
Bizarre to constantly reaffirm your intention to do something that you know you will not actually ever accomplish. What would be the point of that?
I'm not sure. Maybe refusing to acknowledge how serious an obstacle the border dispute is is NATO's way of posturing that they support Ukraine's territorial integrity, even though it doesn't actually help Ukraine regain its territorial integrity. But whatever the reason, it is what they appear to have been doing.
Basically no one wanted to say "Fuck you Ukraine, go away" and they preferred to dangle a carrot, as there was benefit for both sides.
It is mix of the following:
- partial benefits being already available (training, cooperation, selling weaponry etc which actually seems to be successful)
- people wanting Ukraine to be able to join NATO (in the same way as they wanted also peace in Middle East I guess)
- people seeing benefit in at least progressing toward it
- symbolic effects (negative and positive)
- delusional expectations that it will happen
- spinelessness and inability to say that NATO membership is not going to happen
- pushing Ukraine away from Russia
- conflict between official/actual ethical view (self-determination) and actual situation (Russia is going to russia)
- preferring to have war with Russia in Ukraine rather than Poland/baltics/Finland if Russia really wants a war
See also Turkey negotiations concerning EU membership where carrot has rotten away and noone had benefits anymore, so people stopped pretending.
I think the situation between NATO and Ukraine is pretty straightforward, but people are constantly getting it wrong, so let me try to explain what I think is most salient about it.
Joining NATO requires consensus of all member states, but de facto it is pretty implausible that if every NATO member except Luxembourg would want someone to join, Luxembourg would withstand diplomatic pressure to cave. If there are no objections from most important members of the alliance, application to NATO is likely to be approved.
Bush adminitstration wanted Ukraine (and Georgia) in NATO, and since US is the single most important member of the alliance, they succeeded in pressing their partners into including the promise that Ukraine and Georgia will became members of NATO into a declaration of Bucharest NATO summit in 2008. That was imho really bad idea, but I digress.
It is not like there is some physical barrier preventing NATO from accepting Ukraine as a member, and Ukraine clearly wants to be in NATO continuously since at least 2014. As you rightly note, they have this goal enshrined in Ukrainian constitution. Ergo the reason why Ukraine is still not a member of NATO has to be that NATO does not want to admit them, at least for now.
Neither Obama, Trump or Biden administration attempted to push NATO membership of Ukraine (or Georgia).
But this situation might change in the future, just like it changed between 2008 and 2014. NATO is, at least for now, unwilling to say that it will NEVER admit Ukraine. It likes to keep its options open, and also it would mean broken promise from Bucharest, which looks bad and hurts its credibility.
10.g: The simplest explanation for what's going on in this video is that it was filmed in Russia. It's kind of hard to imagine this happening in Ukraine, and not just because it's hard to imagine a Russian military convoy politely letting Ukrainian civilian traffic pass; it's also hard to imagine that Ukrainian civilian traffic would attempt to nonchalantly pass through a Russian military convoy. But to get from Russia to Ukraine, a Russian military convoy first has to pass through more Russia, and Russian civilian traffic would have no reason to act differently than usual, so it's almost guaranteed that scenes like the one shown would occur in Russia.
At least in initial days Russians were relatively friendly toward Ukrainians (see various recording of people making fun of Russians and NOT getting shot, or tanks stopping to avoid running over civilians).
It is far less genocidal than USSR/Nazi Germany during WW II. Not high bar, but always something.
I'm pretty sure Putin is demanding that Ukraine recognize the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblast as independent.
>9. In this spirit, I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer.
The problem with this approach is that Ukraine and Russia already have a security treaty, the Budapest memorandum, whereby Russia agreed to, among things, respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty, not use force against Ukraine, and seek Security Council assistance should Ukraine be involved in a potentially nuclear conflict.
In the past few weeks, as well as other instances since Budapest was signed, Russia has flagrantly disrespected Ukrainian independence and sovereignty, use extreme force against Ukrainian armed forces and civilians, and may or may not currently be bringing nuclear missiles into Ukraine via train.
Why on earth would Zelenskyy sign any deal with Russia where Russia re-commits to the same security and recognition standards it just violated?
Because the part he can verify is that Russia withdraws its troops from Ukraine. After that he can continue buying or being given military equipment, training Ukrainians to use it, making another try at conquest even less likely to succeed.
Why would Russia successfully gain in territory via a negotiated settlement make them think that conquest won't work? The proposed """""peace deal" "" "" makes it work
>EU has previously allowed members to join its economic community without joining the EU proper, and this would probably provide most of the relevant benefits to Ukraine without angering Russia.
I *highly* doubt that Russia wouldn't mind Ukraine joining the Single Market. Such an action requires that you accept very close links to the EU.
One case of creeping lines in the sand (aka created Schelling points) is the issue of Poland transferring jets to Ukraine. Putin seems to be claiming that as escalation but NATO countries have already been transferring lots of other military supplies to Ukraine so it's just more of the same. That looks like an attempt by Putin to shift the perceived line in his favor.
Transferring the jets to the US would make sense from Poland's point of view. Let the US be the one to take the risk of transferring them to Ukraine.
While Putin might think he can get away with a retaliatory strike on a Polish airbase if jets enter Ukraine from there, he's not going to think he can get away with striking Ramstein AFB, which in any case is much further away and presumably much better defended.
My point was not about Poland's view but about Putin's. I believe he has made statements implying that he would regard it as an escalation.
It looks at the moment as though Poland is willing but the U.S., which earlier floated the idea, now is not.
Appreciate the thoughtful post, thanks. The logic behind #9 doesn't quite make sense to me, though - seems like it would send the message "invasion is a good way to get what you want when negotiation isn't succeeding", which does not seem ideal. Also pretty sure that more or less anything could be deemed a "violation of neutrality" if Russian nationalists wanted another justification of war in the future.
I agree that's a risk, which is why I think this is better now (after the Russians have already lost so much international esteem, men, supplies, etc that this war will be a net negative for them even if they get a few meaningless concessions) than before the war when the process could have ended up net positive for them.
I agree that now would be a better time than before to accede to Russian demands. I think the question of whether it leads to an overall better or worse outcome than continuing the conflict partly depends on the narrative around the outcome. I have a lot of uncertainty about whether other countries (or the Russian nationalist hardline) would take away the message "it'll cost more than you're willing to pay" or "you can get what you want through invasion". Giving Putin the ability to claim a win internally might be fine. But if it's perceived as a win internationally I suspect that would shift the balance more toward war in future cases. Don't really have the expertise in geopolitics to justify that though, so it's more a vague unease.
Wasn't item j a fake? I suspect Ukraine heroism stories are amplified by 100x while their not-so-heroic stories are muted. If the population were so deeply valiant, why is it illegal for fighting-age males to leave the country?
AFAIK (j) is was partially true? So reply actually happened but initial claims about everyone dying were not true, also commonly shown version was at least without pause in the middle?
> If the population were so deeply valiant, why is it illegal for fighting-age males to leave the country?
I guess there are many people who prefer to fight Russians over fighting Ukrainian border guard, but would prefer to just leave.
Also, useful coordination method "no adult male is leaving" over "well, why I need to stay"?
It appears to be working, many families reached border and planned to leave, but on being told that males are supposed to stay they grumbled and stayed in Ukraine.
I would count (j) as an example of people getting played by social-media fakery. The initial claims of people dying for their cause are what made that clip viral.
At least one military-age male is getting ready to high-tail it out of the Ukraine though. Probably he has a special waiver. https://money.yahoo.com/us-allies-discussing-potential-ukraine-231237005.html
> At least one military-age male is getting ready to high-tail it out of the Ukraine though.
You seem to be pasting wrong article or failing basing understanding of its text.
And post vague insults about Zelensky.
AKA you sound like a Russian troll.
> The initial claims of people dying for their cause are what made that clip viral.
Eh, I think that response itself was main attraction.
"Washington is the place where nobody believes a rumor until it has been officially denied."
A place is being made for that man if he is forced to leave temporarily. He clearly doesn't want to and may well die there. (If he does, his legacy will live.)
Clear as mud. Zelensky was a movie actor before he was a politician. What role is he playing now?
Same as his last one, actually, but for higher stakes and with no script. And he's hitting it out of the park.
Also, pianist.
Your quote neither says nor implies that Zelinsky is getting ready to leave the Ukraine, rather the contrary.
FWIW, from what I've been reading it seems like that Reply of the Cossacks photo (item f) may be of the Azov Battalion back during the 2014 conflict, not the current one.
ref:
https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1500120618972418057
https://twitter.com/TsunamixEDM/status/1500010540365721602
> The rare exceptions tend to be genuinely bad dudes - however unjust the Iraq War was, nobody wants to defend Saddam.
Yeah so this is just plain ignorant. Just because no-one in the US wants to defend Saddam, or because in the US Saddam is seen as a "genuinely bad dude" does not excuse the US invasion of Iraq. According to the Russians, Ukraine is similary ruled by "bad dudes"; regardless of the Russian rhetoric the Ukrainians certainly have their fair share of faults.
The correct take here is not "Russia is uniquely worse than the US", but "the US being bad does not excuse Russia being bad".
How about the correct take being that morality is a function of time and location, and we can only really judge our own behavior?
I think I specifically avoided saying it did excuse the US invasion of Iraq, and framed the entire paragraph to emphasize that.
You write "Part of me wants to say we’re different from the Russians", I pointed out that the examples where you are supposedly "different" are not particularly good. If you're going to discuss a failure mode where there's "at least one rule they followed which the other villains didn’t", it doesn't make sense to pick an example without such a rule. A more accurate description of the failure mode in this case is that each villian thinks their rule-breaking of the same rule is ok because their heart is in the right place unlike the heinous other villian committing war crimes.
The US did to other countries (let's take a crystal clear example: Vietnam) things as horrible, and as poorly justified, as what Russia is doing to the Ukraine now. There may be points where the US and Russia are different, but it is not in that the US only goes after "genuinely bad dudes" on "rare exceptions".
>I think I specifically avoided saying it did excuse the US invasion of Iraq, and framed the entire paragraph to emphasize that.
Really? You never really refute the argument that the US is "different"; the next sentences (ex. the last sentence, which I do like) are all in the abstrac tense - and it is - at least in my reading - left open whether they apply to this concrete case. This comment I'm replying to also does not say whether the US invasion of Iraq is excused by this, I assume you're being precise in what you write and do not want to make an object-level statement on the Iraq war.
I think Scott made some really great points here about social norms - as relates to foreign policy. I wonder what the community would think about normalizing the assassination of foreign leaders? It seems to me that it should be normalized for a few reasons:
1) In an authoritarian nation where the leader doesn't care about the well-being of their people, sanctions hurt the people rather than the leader. I know that CIA ideology states that causing more unhappiness within a particular country increases the chance of an uprising, but with the development of the modern surveillance state, I don't think that rule necessarily holds true anymore.
2) When a foreign leader has "skin in the game" they are more likely to make decisions that are not wildly antisocial.
3) To a certain extent, assassination is ALREADY normalized - most leaders have a certain expectation that crazy randos may try to kill them and already take precautions against it. So normalizing the assassination of foreign leaders as a tool of foreign policy may change the risk/benefit calculations of foreign leaders, but it's not like something radically new or different.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting this to resolve the Ukraine conflict. Putin is already REALLY well guarded against assassination - he not only has geolocation spoofing which stops people from tracking his own location through the cell phone towers he connects to, but he ALSO has his own personal ice cream maker. I'm just talking about a more general change in foreign policy that might work better than the system which we've currently got.
Great idea! Assasination of the entire ruling classes is even greater! Just kill all the bad people and good people will sort things for themselves.
Well, if the vast majority of society AGREES that they're bad... would that be a problem? Obviously I know that determining who's bad and who's good is tricky, but that doesn't mean that bad people and good people are exactly the same or have the same right to exist.
1. "The vast majority of society" doesn't decide morality. Almost every ethical system recognizes that morality isn't democratic and most people are not particularly virtuous (and thus can't be trusted with setting moral bounds).
2. But even if we accepted this premise: in the US, at least, a narrow majority of people are opposed to killing even the most heinous people- the death penalty is outlawed in 23 states and 3 more have put a moratorium on executions. Of the remaining 24, only 1 allows for the issuance of the death penalty on anything short of a unanimous jury decision (which is rarely seen on the kinds of cases where the death penalty is available). So I would say that any assertion that the vast majority of people are fine with a "kill all the baddies" philosophy is bunk.
3. What makes someone a "bad person" that's so bad that they lose their right to exist, in your eyes? Mass murder? Murder? Graft? Theft? Petty theft? Being generally unpleasant? The mob howling for your head, aka Death By Cancellation? Given your talk about "the vast majority of people agreeing", I'd guess you'd fall more on the end of the last one.
4. Given that murder, even for somewhat-justified ends, is seen as bad, how do you square that circle? Do you expect your heroic baddie-killers to end their missions by turning the gun on themselves like the heroes of a jidaigeki revenge story?
Jesus H. Christ, no. I'm sorry, but this is a terrible, terrible idea.
Don't get me wrong; Putin is evil, and I shall read his obituary with great pleasure. But the major problem with your idea is: OK, say we've assassinated the (evil) leader of a nuclear-armed country. Now what? A power vacuum, that's what. How do you know that whoever seizes power in the aftermath will be any better (more rational/humane) that the one who's just been assassinated?
For more on this topic, I recommend Ken Follett's new novel "Never," which describes a hypothetical future world on the brink of nuclear war.
Also, here's the Chesterton's Fence argument: once we break the rule against assassinating foreign leaders, what's to stop dictators from saying, "If it's OK for the U.S. to assassinate Putin, why isn't it OK for us to take out [Biden][Macron][Scholz][fill in your favorite Western leader]?" You can't just say "well obviously Putin is evil in a way the other leader isn't," not without everyone laughing at you.
I mean isn't the chance of losing Biden/Macron/Scholz worth saving a million Ukranian (or [insert other ethnicity here]) lives? A worldwide game of assassins seems somewhat less likely to result in nuclear apocalypse than brinkmanship, and much less likely to result in the death of thousands of or millions of innocents (including, for the most part, the soldiers on both sides) in the process.
The risk, I suppose, is misalignment of incentives between government and the population, but I'd counter that that misalignment exists presently in a different direction anyway.
I'll also point out that Russia sent 3 teams of assassins to kill Zelenskyy. To be cheeky, turnabout is fair play. More technically, the norm has been violated already, by Russia.
"A worldwide game of assassins seems somewhat less likely to result in nuclear apocalypse than brinkmanship, and much less likely to result in the death of thousands of or millions of innocents (including, for the most part, the soldiers on both sides) in the process."
Citation VERY MUCH NEEDED.
To me, it seems that a world in which heads of state are constantly getting assassinated would be hideously unstable, making nuclear conflict more, not less, likely!
"turnabout is fair play"
No, it isn't, unless you want to say "The Russians shelled some apartment buildings in Kyiv, so it's okay for other countries to bomb some apartment buildings in Moscow."
What's the reason behind killing Zelenski? Here in Russia its mostly agreed upon he is just a American pawn and has no agency of his own.
One doesn't send 3 groups of mercenaries to kill a pawn, so that's pretty clearly just empty propaganda. Some options: Russia believes Zelenskyy is inspiring the Ukrainians to fight harder, and his death will break their morale; that ambiguities in the Ukrainian constitution around succession would allow Russia a fig leaf to claim the end of the Ukrainian state if enough of the government was killed and then annex the country; alternatively, to declare the state after the revolution of dignity nonexistent and "reverted" to the one in which Yanukovich was the last elected president; that he's an inspiring enough orator on the international stage that he's garnering more international support that would fall away with his death.
Or some combination of any/all of the above.
Are there any good "evidence of 3 groups of mercenaries to kill a pawn" or its just another communique from Ukrainian Ministry of Truth?
Or more likely - they classified random group of Russian soldiers as assassins. Or a bit less likely: random captured group of Russian soldiers boasted about trying to kill him.
You're Russian- surely you realize that what the government SAYS and what they THINK are often very different.
At a slight tangent, C.J. Cherryh's very good _Foreigner_ series is set in a society where assassination, heavily regulated by the assassin's guild, is a legal institution and warfare almost never occurs.
Thanks for the book recommendation! I'll check it out.
> How do you know that whoever seizes power in the aftermath will be any better (more rational/humane) that the one who's just been assassinated?
It's impossible to know that for certain, just like it's impossible to know lots of things in politics for certain. But the probability is that the new leader will be an improvement.
In general I'm against a norm of assassinating leaders. But in Putin's case, I'd make an exception. The world will very likely be a better place with him gone.
> "If it's OK for the U.S. to assassinate Putin, why isn't it OK for us to take out [Biden][Macron][Scholz][fill in your favorite Western leader]?"
It's already totally OK, and in fact evil governments already try to do that, which is the reason that these leaders have constant bodyguards and protection. So the real question is, why are we protecting evil authoritarian leaders from assassination when they have no scruples about assassinating our own leaders? We should be willing to play the game every bit as dirty as they do.
In fact, "evil governments" very rarely try to assassinate foreign leaders, and almost never the leaders of major democratic powers. The bodyguards are mostly to protect them from their own citizens.
"Evil governments frequently try to assassinate Western leaders" is absurd on its face, not in the least because 1. You're conjuring the ghost of Whig history from its grave to divide governments into "goodies" and "baddies", and 2. You expect us to take someone talking about normalizing endless coups across the world as a good assessor of right and wrong.
Please provide examples of these "evil governments" that constantly try to assassinate US heads of state, with examples of said constant plots- I'd say one scheme per 4 years is a generous lower bound. Maybe then I can buy this as something beyond a bit.
Just looking at incentives: leaders of states broadly decide on what's normal in the context of international relations. Why would they as a group want to shift to a norm that places them in more personal jeopardy?
I also am skeptical that having world leaders more often thinking "the leader of opposing country X tried to kill me last year but failed" would result in less armed conflict. I view it as more likely that it would intensify the role of personal grudges and desire for revenge as drivers of armed conflict.
> leaders of states broadly decide on what's normal in the context of international relations. Why would they as a group want to shift to a norm that places them in more personal jeopardy?
Why do leaders EVER do anything that limits their power? Because the rest of us will kill them if they don't. Do you think the kings of old ever stepped down voluntarily? They did it because they feared the executioner's axe if they didn't comply with the will of the people.
And what exactly is your plan to coordinate the populace of every major country to push the plot of the Hitman games as the new international norm?
Ok, so let's say that Russia conquers Ukraine and installs a puppet dictatorship (as they're likely to do). The next day, they say, "ok, we're taking Finland now, stay out or suffer terrible consequences". What's our move ? Do we say, "damn, it's a hard break, but no one wants to start a nuclear war over Finland" ? Ok, so they take Finland. Then it's Sweden. Then it's the Aleutian Islands. Then they say, "hey, we know Lithuania is part of NATO, but guess what, we're taking it now, stay out or it's WWIII". Is Lithuania worth a nuclear war ? Probably not, right ? And then, they ask for Alaska...
My point is, mutually assured destruction only works when it's *mutually assured*. If we have a pre-commitment to never even risking nuclear war, then it's the same as announcing that any dictator can have anything he wants, no strings attached.
We have a precommitment to war if a NATO member is attacked via Article 4, up to and including nuclear war. And given the poor performance in Ukraine, I sincerely doubt Russia could continue westward.
First of all, this line in the sand implies giving up Finland and Sweden to Russia; are we prepared to do that ? Second of all, Scott's stance -- "no nuclear war at any cost" -- implies that abandoning NATO members is on the table. For example, what if Putin publishes a video where Lithuanian-looking soldiers seemingly set a bus full of nuns on fire ? Is this our excuse to kick Lithuania out of NATO ? I mean, yes, the video is probably fake, but we can't risk WWIII, better safe than sorry... right ?
Scott's stance is not "no nuclear war at any cost". He spent a whole section talking about this:
"No sane person thinks it’s worth risking nuclear war just to protect something as minor as the Aleutian Islands. But then the US gives Russia the Aleutians, and next year they ask for all of Alaska. And even Alaska isn’t really worth risking nuclear war over, so you give it to them, and then the next year…
So people who don’t want to be exploited occasionally set lines in the sand, where they refuse to make trivial concessions even to prevent global apocalypse. This is good, insofar as it prevents them from being exploited, but bad, insofar as sometimes it causes global apocalypse. So far the solution everyone has settled on are lots of very finicky rules about which lines you’re allowed to draw and which ones you aren’t."
1. Precommitments only work when you precommit to them. If the US says "oh, don't worry, we won't defend Ukraine", and then Russia invades Ukraine, and then we say we'll nuke them, Russia is going to view this as a violation and humiliation and might go with the nuclear exchange. What we want is a bright line where we say ahead of time "IF you invade these people, we'll go full WWIII", and then Russia won't invade.
2. But I don't think we should necessarily be maximalists about this, because if we say something like "if you ever invade any country, or do sketchy espionage stuff, or look at us funny, we'll start WWIII over it", then eventually Russia is going to feel like it's being taken advantage of and start WWIII rather than have its freedom curtailed that much (for comparison, imagine if Russia said to US "if you ever invade or interfere in any other country, we'll start WWIII" - would we stop having bases? Would we stop destabilizing random Central Americans?
3. I think the expected solution to this is to have a few open-and-shut cases where we say "definitely don't cross this line or WWIII", and some weaker cases where we say "we're not committing to WWIII here, but we might make your life annoying", and so on. Two countries with a core of WWIII-provocations and a periphery of lesser-commitments might occasionally brush up against each other in a way where their lesser commitments get violated and have to sanction each other or something, but are less likely to get to WWIII territory.
4. I think this is what we're doing right now - NATO is our bright-line "we will definitely start WWIII over this" core, surrounded by a periphery of countries like Ukraine and FInland where neither Russia nor the US will start WWIII over them but we're allowed to have strong opinions and place sanctions and so on. It might be that we've drawn those lines in the wrong place - this is the "Finland should join NATO" debate - but I don't think it's sustainable to not have those lines and say that everything is WWIII material.
You've got the order just a little mixed up
First, The CIA secretly gives Stinger missiles to everyone involved, then one of them attacks their neighbor, then come the sanctions and the public attention.
It's as good a time to say it as any - people in rationalist spaces talk a lot about various kinds of X-risk, but actually very little about the primary X-risk the world is faced with. As far as I can tell, there is no reasonable model where (e.g.) bioweapons or unaligned AI present a higher risk than nuclear weapons; in the case of nukes and nukes alone, development is done, the equipment for deployment is built, and geopolitical paths towards their use aren't considered far-fetched. Overall the risk of an apocalyptic nuclear exchange has been estimated, conservatively speaking, as being somewhere between 0.5% and 0.1% per year; look at how this level of risk compounds over time [0] and you can see that this is on level with forecasts for AI risk. And yet most discussion of X-risk centers around AI, while nuclear risk is mostly ignored.
Is nuclear X-risk not talked about simply because no one has any ideas? Or because there's no points of leverage on the problem? Neither of these seem likely- we have a lot of very smart people in these circles, and also a lot of people with significant resources are at least influenced by what rationalists have to say (see e.g. the money sloshing around AI alignment circles now.) To be sure, the U.S. and Russia are very large, high-inertia institutions, even relative to the resources available in the rationalist and rat-adjacent community. But it doesn't follow that in the vast space of things we could potentially do, *none* of them would help address the issue; if we think we have leverage on climate change, which involves planetary-scale atmospheric physics, or AI risk, which involves entities we essentially model presently as gods, nuclear risk should sound entirely tractable by comparison.
We're reasonably fortunate that the Ukrainian crisis occurred in a time where we have relatively skilled and cautious Western leadership, where other geopolitical events that could interfere are relatively contained, etc. It's all too clear how this could fail to be the case next time. Hopefully this situation will serve as a wake-up call that we've been tiptoeing around an elephant in the room for a long time.
[0] See e.g. https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1498945370935767040
Could part of the explanation be about perceived skills? Climate change and AI x-risk seem like problems for engineers, but nuclear war seems like it's about aggression, trust, and credibility among high-level decision-makers.
(That is too neat a distinction. With AI, there's also the issue of Russian and Chinese engineers taking risks that rationalist-influenced American engineers might avoid. With climate change, there's the risk of substantial emissions cheating undercutting international treaties. And nuclear weapons procedures could presumably get some command-and-control improvements.)
If rationalists want to try solving international political problems, why not start with an obscure, non-militarized dispute (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_areas_disputed_by_Canada_and_the_United_States) and work slowly towards more substantial disputes? Maybe some border disputes can be resolved with crowdfunded payoffs to interest groups who lose out on resources in the settlement. But I think it is very unlikely that this would reduce the risk of nuclear war. First, pride is at stake, not just quantifiable things. Second, major disputes tend to involve not just the territory or alliance at stake, but also who has an advantage heading into the next dispute/war.
Nuclear X-risk isn't talked about because it isn't an X-risk. Nuclear war does not result in human extinction. If the current crisis escalates to World War III, the historians of 3,000 AD, and 30,000 AD and 3,000,000 AD, will talk about it in about the same way they and we talk about the Bronze Age Collapse.
Lots of people don't consider anyone farther into the future than their own grandchildren to really "count", but rationalists mostly do. And from that perspective, risks that might result in literal human extinction are categorically different than risks that set back the development of civilization by a century or two and kill a tiny fraction of all the humans that ever lived or (barring extinction) will live.
No, global fallout wouldn't kill everyone. Neither would nuclear winter. We've talked about this many times before.
There are a lot of rationalists and EAs who have tried pretty hard to figure out a place to push on nuclear weapons. But there aren't a lot of good leverage points: MAD is a hard strategy to beat, and I don't think unilateral nuclear disarmament is a good option. And once you're not unilaterally disarming, the main goal is to not first-strike, which everyone always says they're not going to do anyway.
The main things I know in this cause area are:
- trying to figure out ways to prevent nukes from going off by accident. I think this is limited by countries not letting random people inspect their nukes.
- trying to make nuclear war more survivable, by eg fallout shelters and radioactivity-proof strains of plants. I think there are some people working on this.
- sending me emails saying "PLEASE WRITE A POST SAYING NO-FLY ZONES ARE DUMB"
I agree that it would be great if more people could work on this.
> trying to make nuclear war more survivable
That seems to be increasing risk of nuclear war happening (while decreasing cost of it)
It seems to me that the best way to prevent nuclear war would be for all important countries to be liberal democracies. Unfortunately the ruling classes of China and Russia don't seem to want that.
Agreed. Nuclear weapons are the biggest reason I don't think it's alright to just say "well they can just run their countries as they please". Which is not to say we ought to invade them or anything silly, just that it's justified in being a liberal democracy universalist because of the damage that nuclear war would cause.
I certainly appreciate the argument that this is a big political issue with a lot of entrenched interests that are hard to budge. And political solutions are made even harder by the fact that unilateral disarmament is probably bad on balance (although I wonder if we would really lose all that much if the US did partially disarm, and there's potential gain from that as well, at least if we do it before Russia and China are vying for parity between each other.)
But I think that to some degree this is an argument we've grown too comfortable with rather than looking for points of leverage that play better to our strengths. Nuclear weapons aren't a psychological or philosophical problem or anything like that; they're a kind of machine that has had negative effects in the context of our current global milieu. In that sense they're on the same playing field as coal-fired power plants or Facebook. In the case of those two, its uncontroversial that purely technical advances (green power, or self-imposed-website-restriction browser plugins, respectively) can ameliorate or solve the problem. Do we assume the outlook for nukes is any different?
No, I myself don't have any ideas for technical solutions to pull out of my hat. But as a point of comparison, consider chemical weapons. The world has mostly stopped using them (well, knock on wood.) This was not because we got every horrible dictator on the planet to agree that humaneness was more important than military power; it was instead mostly due to changes in how wars were fought, which rendered chemical weapons more-or-less obsolete. (Source and details: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ ) War will change again, someday; perhaps it can change in a way that makes planet-killing weapons equally obsolete. The questions involved there are almost exclusively technical ones, of some kind or another.
(Also yes, thank you Scott for emphasizing the stupidity of the no-fly zone position. We should be taking note of who is speaking out in favor of no-fly zones currently; it's not every day that so many dumb public figures outright announce themselves as such.)
> I wonder if we would really lose all that much if the US did partially disarm, and there's potential gain from that as well, at least if we do it before Russia and China are vying for parity between each other.
What is the potential gain from unilateral partial US disarmament, other than saving money? I tend to think of reductions as best saved for negotiations on bilateral (eventually trilateral?) reductions, and I would like to know what the alternative perspective is.
To be clear, I'm sort of spitballing there. Unilateral (partial) disarmament seems like the sort of thing traditional analysts have gone over enough that the fact we haven't done this is good evidence that it's not actually a good idea. But the potential benefits that come to mind:
1) There would be fewer nukes in the world, putting a lower cap on the amount of nuclear destruction that could happen in general.
2) Phasing out effective "first-strike" capability is a good way of committing to a no-first-use doctrine. This should tend to lower nuclear tension overall.
3) Russia (and/or China) would have less incentive to maintain their own armaments if it didn't have to maintain parity with ours (e.g., didn't have to maintain so many ICBMs to have a chance of knocking out all our ICBMs in a "counterforce strike.") Maintaining their nuclear stockpile costs them money too, so they may follow suit in downsizing.
4) (Even more speculatively) The main argument against strategic missile defense systems is that they risk shifting the strategic balance far enough in favor of the defended party that it could destabilize MAD. If the balance is already tiled against us because we have fewer nukes, perhaps an effective missile defense system would simply restore strategic balance to a more stable state. And defenses (together with disarmament) would lead to fewer warheads going off if the worst happens.
I know you don't actually believe this, given your opening statement, but your point #3 is kind of...ludicrous.
The cat is out of the bag and it's not going back in. Whether you believe Putin or Xi is evil enough to hold on to their nukes so they can rule the world, someone will come along who is. MAD is an important balancing act in the world.
Don't mistake this for me being against limiting nuclear proliferation - this Russia episode is a clear example of why minimizing the number of nuclear states is critical for minimizing worldwide aggression....
People like Scott will let you kill anyone you want as long as you don't nuke them. Its not even acceptable to challenge them (defensive only no fly zone). Apparently shooting down missiles they are launching at another non-aggressor country's civilians is too offensive to a nuclear armed leader....
> - trying to figure out ways to prevent nukes from going off by accident. I think this is limited by countries not letting random people inspect their nukes.
One cause might be advocating for mutual safety audits. The goal would be each nuclear-armed country agreeing to periodically audit the safety procedures of one or more trusted nuclear-armed allies. Image-conscious politicians might value the opportunity to portray themselves as responsible custodians of the weapons.
However, not all nuclear-armed countries have a trusted, nuclear-armed ally. The process would also sit awkwardly with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which includes five and excludes four (soon five?) nuclear-armed countries.
By the way, did you know John von Neumann said that he supported a US first strike, back before the USSR would have been able to launch a second strike?
>By the way, did you know John von Neumann said that he supported a US first strike, back before the USSR would have been able to launch a second strike?
I think this was a reasonable thing to support, however horrific it might sound. Not because its worth it to defeat communism or something, but simply to avoid having the USSR use nukes against us or our allies. We of course know now this didn't end up happening, but it was a lot closer than people realize, and we know for a fact that the USSR developed war plans for the invasion and rapid defeat of western europe using nuclear weapons if necessary. Again, they obviously didn't do this, but early cold-war observers turned out to be exactly right for believing that the USSR were willing to do this.
Of course, you can say that the USSR would be right to nuke NATO if NATO were the type of countries to be okay with a nuclear first strike on the USSR, but this is not relevant for the judgements from the NATO perspective (and the soviet invasion/bombing of western europe would ultimately have been expansionism, not a defensive war).
Germany also believed in 1914 that it was being rational in deciding to risk war there and then rather than waiting until after Russia would have become too strong. But of course this ultimately ended up very poorly for Germany, with Germany losing one World War and then losing another World War even harder once it aimed for a rematch.
So, it made sense for US policymakers in the 1950s to look back at 1914 Germany and not to repeat their mistakes.
"By the way, did you know John von Neumann said that he supported a US first strike, back before the USSR would have been able to launch a second strike?"
Similar to how Germany supported preventative war against Russia in 1914 before Russia became too strong? And yet look at how well that turned out for Germany. It lost one World War, then tried again for a repeat and lost even harder the second time around. Though I suppose that Germany could take comfort in the fact that Russia has suffered much more than it itself has during the 20th century. Mission accomplished, I guess?
>As far as I can tell, there is no reasonable model where (e.g.) bioweapons or unaligned AI present a higher risk than nuclear weapons
Totally disagree. At the very least, bioweapons pose an orders of magnitude larger x-risk than nuclear weapons, and I would go so far as to say they may be the single greatest x-risk facing humanity, at least as long as superintelligence machines don't exist.
-Most nuclear states don't want to use nuclear weapons because the retaliation would wipe them out, so the risk of state vs state nuclear war is low (but not zero), and it's not clear this would necessarily lead to x-risk. Terrorists cannot easily create nuclear weapons due to difficulty in producing fissile material and the technical aspects of bomb creation, and they can't make ballistic missiles so they somehow have to deliver this bomb without getting caught. And even if they detonate a fission bomb in midtown manhattan, this isn't close to posing an x-risk and there will be nobody to retaliate against with ICBMs.
-Bioweapons on the other hand are absolutely capable of being produced by terrorists, if not now then in the very near future. It is becoming trivially easy to edit the DNA of viruses, and within a few decades at most, undergraduate biology students will have the know-how and technology to manipulate a virus to increase its virality and lethality, which means educated terrorists will be able to too. Even a anti-society lone wolf with the right education will eventually be able to pull it off and attempt to destroy humanity out of spite (or maybe to protect the environment etc). And unlike nuclear weapons, these really could pose an x-risk. Imagine covid that was say, fives times as contagious and ten times as deadly. It could be introduced into the population extremely simply (compared with smuggling in a nuclear bomb) and once its out, there's basically no stopping it, and society will basically collapse (because who on earth would leave their homes with such a deadly virus tearing through society?) and nobody will be capable of making or distributing a vaccine. And then of course, there's gain of function research in which researchers have literally created such viruses already, and if this is allowed to continue, the cumulative probability of even the most secure labs having an inadvertent leak continues to grow. And then of course there's the US government's bone headed idea of publishing the genomes of deadly viruses online.
I think you're grossly underestimating the decline in barriers to the creation of bioweapons that are occurring with each passing year and the hazards they could pose.
If you've got the time, this is well worth a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaRfbJE1qZ4
"They’ve seen American conservatives say nice things about enemy dictators because at least they’re not American liberals"
More that American conservatives have started questioning whether dictators designated by the national security state as "enemy" are really <I>their</I> enemies. What beef does Bashar al-Assad have with me? This is hardly exclusive to them, it's common when populations feel their governments are dominated by the outgroup. An increasingly smaller proportion of the population identifies with the national security state and feels like its enemies are their enemies.
That's not to say one needs patriotism to motivate people to fight. I'm sure plenty would do it for money if enough was on offer.
I'm an American conservative, and I agree with this sentiment. What beef does Putin have with me? Sure, he's a brutal war-monger killing thousands of innocent Ukrainians, but I'm not Ukrainian, and there are plenty of brutal dictators in the world that the US props up. Whether Biden or Trump wins the election, or whether wokists win or lose the culture war, has a lot more to do with my future well-being than the relative power of the US vs. Russia in eastern Europe.
Ok. But that is a very egoistic worldview...now, not surprisingly, since "(North) American Conservatism" seems to be about egoism (mostly) from what I can tell...anyway, if there could be a nuclear war, that seems to be much more important than wokism doesn't it...
There's the smuggled assumption that interventionism would reduce the chance of a nuclear war, which I'm decidedly unsure of.
I see it less as North American conservatives being unusual than as them regressing to the common norm. "Isolationism" seems unusual for Americans but perfectly ordinary for Peruvians or Sri Lankans. Would you condemn them as Egoists? Or Muhammad Ali, who famously said that "I ain't got nothing against no Viet Cong; no Viet Cong never called me nigger."
> "Isolationism" seems unusual for Americans but perfectly ordinary for Peruvians or Sri Lankans. Would you condemn them as Egoists?
No, they would be sensible. It makes sense for small countries to not to try to make big changes in the world mas they probably won't be successful. it's a lot easier for big countries to make big changes as they have more resources.
Yes I agree. This is why left-wing nationalism tends to arise in smaller countries (thus "oppressed" peoples), and right-wing nationalism - which is close to fascism IMO - in larger countries, as they are a display of dominance and superiority,
So in this thread we've simultaneously agreed that "conservatives" are isolationist while also right wing nationals to display dominance and superiority. Which is it?
I am so tired of these tribal sweeping statements. They don't even make sense.
Aggressive redistribution is a fascist policy, yet no one accuses Liz Warren of being a fascist when she calls for a wealth tax. Literally she wants to *seize your property, by force if you're not willing, and give it to someone else*.
So no, I don't accept a-priori that people who are on the right wing spectrum are more fascist than the left. The most fascist governments in history have all paraded as left wing governments! The Nazis were socialists.
You can call Trump a fascist if you believe he is promoting fascist policies. I'm interested in which ones those are. Individuals sure, but these broad statements are not helpful.
Well, I meant that North American conservatives seem as their "basic principle" (if they have one, because most of their ideas seems to be just against what the left does) is that nothing should stop individual freedoms, at least when it it's a negative freedom (thus North American conservatives supported the Trucker Convoy, but were against the railways blockades by indigenous people in Canada...one was an individualistic negative freedoms-based "resistance", while the other was communitarian, and more in line with positive freedoms). European conservatives seem to be more concerned both about positive and negative freedoms, at least that's the impression I get as an European who has lived both in Europe (Germany) and North America (Canada and a few years in the US).
Yes, it is a egoistic worldview. Your own worldview is also egoistic. Do you care just as much about Syria or Ethiopia, which both have ongoing civil wars, as you do about your own home? Would you be indifferent about whether a bomb dropped on top of Aleppo or on top of your own head? Of course not. It is not practically possible to be non-egoistic toward every human being. Instead, we pick and choose who deserves each marginal unit of our attention, money, and time. One person might choose their children; another might choose Ukrainian civilians; a third might choose the local homeless shelter. Choosing the first or third option is not obviously more egoistic than picking the second.
As for a nuclear war, which moral system do you think is more likely to result in a nuclear war: 1) the one that says the US is the world police and must intervene to avenge every bad thing ever done by our geopolitical enemies (while shielding our allies who do the same bad things, e.g. Saudi Arabia in Yemen), or 2) my moral system, which says the US should stop playing geopolitical games in eastern Europe and stay out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict because I don't want us to get nuked?
The 2nd is more likely to result in nuclear war, because letting Putin get away with it make it more likely he'll try it again, each time telling the west "go along with this or nukes". And sooner or later he'll miscalculate.
Furthermore, standing up to Putin may well result in him being couped, which reduces risk of nuclear wart because the new leader will probably be less reckless.
Maybe. It depends on the amount of control and power Putin has over the Russian government/military apparatus. SO I am neutral on 1. or 2 by Dionysus...
Yes, I am egoistic. I will admit it. For example, I have residences in both Canada and Germany, and if things get dicey in Europe, I will go back to Canada...
Anyway, I think it is about differentiating between individual and society-wide egoism. E.g. I can be egoistic about myself and other people close to me, but on a societal level, I still can support my country/countries to do what I consider to be right - from a moral perspective (based either on utilitarian or deontological ethics) - regardless if it is negative for me personally. Or maybe I am a hypocrite? I guess everyone is, though, to some extent...
> Sure, he's a brutal war-monger killing thousands of innocent Ukrainians, but I'm not Ukrainian
USA is connected to the rest of the world. The West is currently at the start of a long term conflict with Russia and China. The bigger the West is the more likely it is to win. Therefore if the west includes Ukraine it is more likely to win. The same argument applies to Taiwan.
Explained in more detail here: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-on-russiaukraine
> whether wokists win or lose the culture war
If someone is coming at the question from anti-woke point of view, then the argument could be made that if Ukraine wins, then Ukraine and possibly Russia join EU. This pushes the center of gravity of EU eastwards. Since Ukraine and Russia (like other eastern European countries) aren't woke, this makes the EU an non-woke or even anti-woke economic bloc that's at least as liberal, democratic and big as the USA.
I think that's true of Assad, but I've seen people express positive feelings towards Orban and (less often) Putin.
What exactly has Orban done wrong? He's no liberal democrat, but neither are the leaders of many countries that liberals aren't hostile towards. I think it's kind of weird to single him out as especially awful. At the very least, I think it's not unreasonable to think his anti-democratic moves are less damaging than the immigration policies of a number of western european countries.
Literally, in several western european countries white europeans are projected to becomes minorities in their own countries *this century*. What's the point of having a strong democracy if your political equity is diluted to nothing through immigration (not to mention your standard of living being greatly harmed through the enormous fiscal burden, crime and anti-social behavior)? Hungary is a much poorer country than western european countries, but it was like that before Orban and would most likely have remained that way if a democrat were in power.
Your suggestions would have been reasonable if Putin could be trusted to keep his promises. Even with a "saved face" he is unlikely to just stop meddling in Ukrainian affairs, even outside Donetsk/Luhansk/Crimea. Casualties and economic losses mean nothing to him (and never meant anything to any Soviet or Russian leader, not that the US is very much different in that respect), so a formal recognition of a Russian claim in exchange for "peace" would be a win for him and a loss for Ukraine (and the West).
Good alternatives are non-existent...
A no-fly zone (shooting down Russian planes) would definitely be calling Putin's nuke bluff (or not a bluff), and a few percent chance of a nuclear escalation is more than the West can stomach. It would still not assure Ukrainian victory, since presumably Turkish drones would be off limits, as well.
Russia eventually taking Kiyv would result in underground resistance for years, openly supported and armed by the West, with the sanctions lasting indefinitely long and ordinary Russians paying the price.
Russia retreating to the Eastern Ukraine breakaway zones borders seems a bit better, but still result in the continued border issues as well as sanctions.
Putin going away one way or another would probably be the least bad outcome for everyone, but it can spark a lot of internal unrest in Russia proper, as well as resentment against the West due to the internal recognition of Russia as a has-been, whose power needs to be restored. Any punitive damages Versailles-style going toward restoration of Ukraine would make it even worse.
Basically, it looks like a train wreck no matter how you slice it.
I agree Putin won't keep his promises. If I were Ukraine (and now we're getting into total fantasy, but just to respond) I would pass a law saying that Crimea etc were ceded to Russia as soon as all Russian troops leave Ukraine. I don't think Putin would immediately bring his troops back in, given that he needs time to rebuild. I think he would wait another five years or so, by which time Ukraine would be in a better relative position.
> I would pass a law saying that Crimea etc were ceded to Russia as soon as all Russian troops leave Ukraine
Putin would announce that troops left Ukraine and Crimea is his, despite troops not leaving.
In the same way as he lied about Russian army presence when Crimea was invaded and later eastern Ukraine.
So is your position that Putin's statements surrounding Ukraine's right to exist as an independent nation, etc, are just posturing? I presume you've read at least his most recent long statement on the subject. I suggest you also look into some of the long form essays he's produced.
The consensus from Ukrainian scholars I've read is that his intention is very clear and the existence of Ukraine as an identity is not among those intentions.
I think they have decided they'd rather die then live under the Russian yoke. Having visited the country in 2019 and having friends there, I get.
As my good friend living in Kyiv told me when I asked her "what happens if the government falls?": "Then my brother, father, and boyfriend are dead. And I flee".
The idea that American planes shooting down Russian planes in a proxy conflict as some red line seems strange to me. That happened during the Cold War with "volunteer" pilots who somehow "volunteered" their equipment and its replacement/refueling. In Korea and Vietnam at least. I'm not sure if it's a good idea for other reasons. But the specific line of argument seems strange to me. I guess it's an argument against specifically making a no fly zone. But the plausibly deniable volunteer/"Ukrainian air force" intervention doesn't seem meaningfully different and has been done several times. Likewise giving them bases in surrounding countries to attack from which we keep under our umbrella of protection.
Have the rules changed? Maybe they have. But it wasn't the actual rule during the Cold War. And if they have, then Russia shouldn't have buzzed our planes or tried to ram our ships. This all instead looks like the west collectively deciding to be asymmetrically restrained. Which might be the right move: Russia is worth keeping some dry powder for because they're just not that big anymore.
I think it worked at the time due to plausible deniability. New MiGs would show up with North Korean/North Vietnamese markings, blending in with other MiGs of the same model, and it wasn't until you shot one down (which you didn't all that often because they were much better than the local pilots) and managed to capture the pilot that you figured out he looked suspiciously blond. And over time you figure out there's rather a lot of these "volunteers".
Whereas if F-16s or Typhoons suddenly show up in Ukranian skies painted with blue and yellow then the game is immediately up. There's no plausible deniability, nobody in Ukraine knows how to fly a Western fighter jet.
I mean, I don't think it was that deniable to begin with. The famous example was a reporter seeing a shipment of aircraft and pilots at the bar and being told, "I see nothing! And you see nothing too!"
Shipping aircraft doesn't need to be denied; that's perfectly legal. Shipping pilots isn't illegal if all those pilots do is deliver the aircraft and maybe act as flight instructor, so that doesn't need to be denied either.
The only thing that needs to be denied, is that the "nonbelligerent" pilots are flying combat missions. And that *is* deniable, at least so long as the enemy doesn't capture any. Since any Russian pilots in Vietnam were flying mostly defensive air intercept missions over North Vietnam, I don't think that ever happened.
But, as Melvin notes, that stops working if your "nonbelligerent" pilots are flying planes your belligerent ally doesn't have. Or if you fly combat missions out of bases in a "nonbelligerent" country.
> nobody in Ukraine knows how to fly a Western fighter jet.
How long would it take them to learn? Assuming they did it as quickly as possible. In WW2 fighter pilots were trained in 3 months, IIRC.
Yeah, and then fought for about three weeks. The United States, which wanted its pilots to actually survive the war, took six months to train the pilots first. And their airplanes were much simpler.
If you're talking about Ukrainian pilots who already know how to fly some sort of jet fighter and want to train them specifically on F-16s or Typhoons or whatever, that's probably about two months - maybe a bit shorter if you have a high-intensity training syllabus already prepared, but I doubt we do.
If aircraft losses have already left the Ukrainian Air Force with a significant pilot surplus, it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to quietly bring a few of them to Nevada and start training them on F-16s, but it *probably* wouldn't pay off in time to make any real difference.
10.g. Russians stopping for Ukrainian traffic:
The vehicles in front are stopped, too, so it's not like they were yielding right-of-way. Although they didn't just block the intersection, which is something.
Russia has miscalculated? How do you know that? By assuming that Western propaganda is true? The beginning of a war is called the fog of war for a reason. I don't see any mention of the clear information war that is going on. Of course Ukraine is going to say that Russia miscalculated.
I don't really care how many sources repeat a fake claim. One million sources saying the same thing doesn't make it true.
What level of evidence is necessary for you to believe Ukrainian claims are true?
I am talking about the only claim I'm talking about.
Turn that rhetorical question around, though. If you dispute the sentence "Russia has miscalculated," does that mean you think Russia hasn't miscalculated, and this is all going according to plan?
It's fair, of course, to say that nobody outside of the Kremlin *knows for sure*, but based on what you've read, would you consider a claim that "Russia has miscalculated" to be (a) more likely true than not, or (b) more likely false than not?
I'd rate it more likely than not that Russia planned on this being easier than it has turned out to be. They hit Kyiv on Feb 25 and still have failed to encircle it. They still don't have air superiority. Western response has been more unified than the West expected it to be - not sure why we would credit Russia with having expected more unity than we ourselves did. And nobody could have predicted how effective a former comedian turned president would be in an information war.
As far as sources go I've found the Institute for the Study of War to be pretty solid and comprehensive, but if you have one you think is better I'm definitely interested. https://www.understandingwar.org/
If Russia's war is going to plan, it was a pretty terrible (in the sense of 'bad') plan
That isn't how logic works. If I say "there is no reason to believe this bowl has an even number of gumballs", that doesn't mean "there is reason to believe this bowl has an odd number of gumballs".
The default position is: we don't know.
A true skeptic is confortable being uncertain. There's absolutely no need to make a claim one way or the other.
I don't identify as a "skeptic," but it seems to me that while a skeptic is comfortable with uncertainty, that doesn’t mean he ignores the data he has access to. And while it is certainly imperfectly sourced, we have a *lot* of available data on the state of the Russian advance into Ukraine.
In the spirit of making my own bed too, I’d say that I think it’s substantially more likely than not that Russia did not expect this level of resistance from Ukraine, response from the international community, or failures on the part of its own military, prior to commencing the invasion. North of 75% that we are outside the bell curve they thought they were on when they pulled the trigger.
So again, I’m curious where your own estimate would fall on whether Russia is getting what it expected here. And I totally understand that “impossible to even estimate” is a valid response to these kinds of questions, but if that’s really where you fall I have to wonder what your reading, and I’d ask you to consider whether you are really being a neutral and reasonable observer, or just ignoring the evidence you yourself have on hand.
10 fakes stories don't make 1 true story. We have a lot of data, but it's *all* unreliable. A rational person would ignore all unreliable data.
You say "this level of resistance", but you have no idea what the actual level of resistance actually is. Your only sources of information are biased, and even they don't have the full picture. Even if they tried to give you an objective picture (which they aren't), they can't.
So far I haven't seen anything that suggests that Russia wouldn't be able to get its primary objectives.
It seems like you are demanding perfect information unnecessarily. 10 fake stories don’t make 1 true story, but 10 consistent stories can have evidentiary value even if received from imperfect sources.
You don’t approach trying to answer a complex question by splitting your evidence into one bucket of “unreliable” data (which you totally ignore), and another (empty) bucket of “reliable” data that meet some platonic standard of knowable truth (which you wait for). That’s not a recipe for an accurate decision, it’s a formula for waiting forever and never deciding anything at all. Or for slipping on your analysis and just letting yourself drop facts you don’t like into the “unreliable” bucket.
So you evaluate based on the data you have, and assign credibility based on source. Otherwise you’re just left disbelieving everything – intentionally ignorant in an ocean of knowledge.
I'm not going to belabor your life or mine by compiling a mountain of links to everything I've ever read on the invasion and asking you to read it - I've already provided you my primary source, and while I don't think it's gospel, I've seen it quoted from the BBC to Al Jazeera. So while I won't assign it "platonic truth" level value, neither will I assign it (or the other things I've read) a value of zero.
If you have something to add to that analysis I'm happy to consider it, but if all you're going to do is jump around and throw the words "bias" and "propaganda" at everything, then I'm going to view this argument the same way I do when someone tells me no one has *really proven* that vaccines don't cause autism, that Barak Obama was born in the United States, or that the moon landing is real.
If you have to make a decision, let's say "sit on this chair", then you will ultimately do it on partial information.
But this is completely different. I don't have to make a decision, so until I have compelling evidence, I won't.
>So far I haven't seen anything that suggests that Russia wouldn't be able to get its primary objectives.
Let's say that Russia eventually completes it's primary objectives several months from now. This is NOT mutually exclusive with Putin having miscalculated. He may have invaded Ukraine on the basis that it would take very little time and would involve minimal loss of Russian life. If this turns out to be untrue, then he miscalculated. The fact that he endeavours to complete the objectives eventually anyway is irrelevant to this. Perhaps, if he knew that it was going to be as costly as it so far has been and likely will be, he may not have invaded, but now that he has invaded he feels its worth completing his primary objectives.
Say I plan to break into somebody's house to steal their laptop and I choose a particular time to do it because I expect the person will be out of the house at that time, meaning I won't risk a violent confrontation/having the police called. If when I break in they in fact are home and I nonetheless violently subdue them and steal their laptop, and am seriously injured in the process, the fact that I ended up with the laptop does not mean I didn't make a miscalculation in choosing when to break in, and had I known they would be home I wouldn't have broken in.
The miscalculation is not that Russia are likely to lose to Ukraine, it's that defeating Ukraine will be vastly more costly for Russia than anticipated.
In order to make that claim, you need to **know** what Russia anticipated, which you can't.
> Russia has miscalculated? How do you know that?
Because they have already written in advance self-congratulatory articles on their easy victory in Ukraine... and accidentally published them. (Then deleted them, but internet remembers.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html
It isn't "self-congratulating" article, it is just usual musing about "new world order" that could come from current events.
It doesn't even say anything about "easy victory".
Scheduled posting time indicates that it was intended to be posted after "easy victory".
(though it assumes that it was published on schedule rather due other error)
It doesn't mention any kind of easy victory though; it was likely pulled because it went a bit too far on "We're taking over, deal with it" while talks were still ongoing and there were hopes that Ukraine might fold.
Author liked his piece and reposted it elsewhere anyway, which implies he doesn't necessarily goes in lock-step with current propaganda position.
Now imagine this bullshit is aired non-stop EVERYWHERE, its kinda tiring.
Fog of war is the general problem of poor information during the course of a war. It has nothing in particular to do with the beginning.
I'm not talking about the fog of war from the Russian army's point of view, I'm taking about Scott's point of view.
I don't think anyone of us is in a position to know much about this war at this point.
Some leaked Russian documents (which I believe are real, though you can think otherwise) expressed a strategy based on Ukrainian resistance folding within the first 3 days (Anatoly Karlin, who's a good Putin oracle, predicted the same). Given that the prediction markets are now saying they'll hold out a month or more, I think it's fair to describe this as a miscalculation. They could still win, but not in a way that's "according to plan".
First, I do not make assumptions. If some documents say X, that only proves that some documents say X. The documents very well could be false, especially since USA had been trying to sell the notion that Russia would invade for months. They could be true, sure, but it isn't rational to *assume* so.
Second, even if the documents are real and a strategy is expressed in which Ukrainian forces fold within the first 3 days, that doesn't mean it was the *only* strategy. For every battle there's multiple scenarios considered, and even then most experienced generals know that something unexpected could happen, and they need to prepare for that as well.
Third, software development is more predictable than war, and even then if I think a task will take me a week, it's custom to double the prediction just to be safe. If it turns out it takes me four weeks, I wouldn't say I "miscalculated" because I never actually had much faith in finishing in one week.
A prediction is worthless without assigning any probability. If I say this task will take me 3 days, but I assign 55% probability, that isn't much of a prediction.
It's accurate to say Russia *might* have miscalculated, not imply that they definitely did.
> The documents very well could be false, especially since USA had been trying to sell the notion that Russia would invade for months
What does this mean? Russia did invade. So you think that their claims of having intelligence this would happen were false, and the fact that it happened makes America's claims, what, a coincidence or something? Because if you're arguing that the US have literally been fabricating documents to try and convince people of something which they didn't have good evidence for, you're necessarily claiming that their intelligence claims were false and it was in fact a coincidence that Russia invaded after all.
I do not claim the intelligence was false, I'm claiming the intelligence wasn't necessarily true, which isn't the same thing.
If I bet everyone in a bar that Peter wants to hit me, and then I get in front of Peter and start bothering him saying "you want to hit me, right?", "you are a hot head", "you can't control yourself, huh?", "you are a moron who knows nothing but violence", and then I get hit, would you characterize that as an accurate "prediction"?
You really are a true skeptic if you believe the Americans just got blind lucky with their claims......
That is not the only possibility. Another possibility is that their claims *provoked* the attack. Another possibility is that other actions provoked the attack, and they knew they were going to do those other actions.
Sorry, are you suggesting that Putin wouldn't have invaded if the US hadn't said he was going to invade? That he amassed troops and vehicles and weapons around Ukraine's border with no intention of invading, but then decided to invade, to start a WAR with a country, which they otherwise wouldn't have?
This is just kooky levels of Russia apologetics. It's simply absurd to claim that Russia weren't going to invade until the US goaded them into it, and if you are going to claim that, you somehow think a rash decision to invade was also not a miscalculation, as if it were all aprt of the grand leader's plan all along. Simply contradictory nonsense.
That is not the only option. Another option is that Ukraine was planning an attack on Donbas, USA knew that, eventually Russia learned about that changed their plans and decided to invade Ukraine, even if they originally did not intend to.
Weren't people like yourself calling it "western propaganda" when Biden was correctly claiming a Russian invasion was imminent?
Are you going to admit that you're wrong yet? You're going to need increasingly byzantine mental gymnastics to claim the war is going as planned for Russia. Do you imagine that it was the plan all along to have their soldiers without food and their tanks without fuel?
He's actually a little behind schedule. The Kremlin has already signaled it might be moving the goalposts for itself.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-first-phase-ukraine-operation-mostly-complete-focus-now-donbass-2022-03-25/
So the new line will be something like:
"Install a Russia-friendly regime? 'Demilitarize and Denazify' the Ukrainian government? Where'd you crazy westerners get that idea? The objective all along was just to liberate Donbass, which the Russians are achieving, and the campaign is therefore (obviously) an unqualified success."
To be clear, this is actually good - anything that can open the door for Putin to claim victory and go home increases the probability of the conflict ending, which *is* pretty much an unalloyed good. But we shouldn't hold our breath for anything that looks like admitting a leadership screw-up, from this regime or its various supporters. Even if that reckoning is forced, it'll be bent as hard as possible to keep the accountability as low on the tree as possible. The advisors can be pilloried but every effort must be made to protect the Czar.
In other news of things going "exactly as planned" for Putin, Russia just announced it is going to "drastically reduce" its military presence around Kyiv.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/29/europe/russia-reduce-assault-kyiv-plan-intl/index.html
Some might call that a retreat from a failed objective, but I'm sure this is all still perfectly in line with how Moscow expected the war would go before they started it.
Who says the soldiers don't have food and the tanks don't have fuel?
Western propaganda?
Three corrections, all in the area of facts:
1) Providing fighter aircraft is perfectly customary, the Soviet Union provided such aircraft for both North Korea and North Vietnam, during relevant wars.
2) Putin clearly stated that he wants full territory of D&L, hence broader than controlled before.
3) The United States was not into annexing any territory since the 1898 year, all further conflicts that were fought were never linked to annexation of territory.
> My understanding is that Russia operationalizes neutrality as “don’t join NATO or EU” [...] Ukraine was not in either of these organizations before the war, and not being in them afterwards changes nothing.
I do not understand this argument. If I limit your options, it changes a lot of things. If you dream about joining The World Rationalist Alliance and I prohibit you from following that dream, would you say that because you are not a member currently, it changes nothing?
I grew up in a small country occupied by Russians. Sometimes I think that people from big countries like the US cannot imagine how if feels to have your options limited because some other country decided so. But this is the core of that freedom Americans so love talking about, isn't it?
Also, this neutrality would be completely one-sided, I suppose. That is, Ukraine would never be allowed to join NATO or EU, but the "Belarus 2" scenario would remain a possibility, as long as it would not involve literal invasion of the Russian army.
That means, for local people their politics would become a one-way ratchet, where moving closer towards Russia is allowed, but moving away from it is forbidden. It doesn't matter how many anti-Russia politicians you elect; if you later make a mistake once and a bad guy gets elected... I suppose he could even invite the Russian army to help him, because that probably would not count as an invasion if they were literally invited by a democratically elected guy. And then, no anti-Russia politician will get elected ever, because all candidates for such role will be in prison.
Well, that's true, but then "countries" are artificial entities...so maybe it is wiser to join a larger country, and give up some sovereignty if it means having free speech and material well-being (e.g. the Visegrad countries should drop their opposition to the EU, and Germany (and France) in particular, since Germany is preferable to Russia...?
Interesting thoughts for sure. I also have a few thoughts (and questions) about what could develop out of this conflict going forwards, so here they are:
1. Will this conflict cause the public in Western Europe move more towards a "survive mindset" (as per Scott Alexander; https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ ) or will they stay in their "thrive mindset"? Obviously, Western Europe is (or at least seems to be to me) the most "thrive" region in the World, especially if compared to the US. The reason for that is not obvious to me, since the US has more natural resources and a higher GDP per Capita. Maybe this is because Western Europe has such a strong social safety net, and because the US has provided defense to Western Europe since 70+ years now? Anyway, this might change a bit, with Germany now investing more in its military, and possibly supporting non-renewable energy (though I guess the biggest proof of Germany moving to a more "survive" mindset would be if the Nuclear Reactors were to be kept operational longer).
2. I think that the war shows that Eurasia is a rather unstable continent, particularly in the central part (so anywhere from Eastern Europe to South-Central Asia). The longitudinal ends - East Asia and Western Europe - look to be stable, as they have been since WW 2. Still, the Geopolitical advantage of North America is once again evident. Geopolitical scholars like Peter Zeihan and George Friedman have long ago written about this, but it wasn't evident as Europe looked to be "better" for many people than North America. As an European, I know that many other Europeans don't want to hear this, because a lot of the modern EU's identity is grounded in a background belief of superiority over the US and to a lesser extent the other "Anglo-Saxons", but Geopolitical Reality is what it is, and the US has all the advantages in terms of Geopolitics, while Europe has little, so (we) Europeans should continue to be on good terms with the US as much as possible.
3. So, obviously the US has many geopolitical advantages. This makes me more bullish on the claim (which George Friedman already put into writing more than 10 years ago) that the US will continue to be the most powerful nation in the World. The only real competitor is China, but then China has many geopolitical disadvantages, and is dependent on trade (unlike the US, which is basically self-sufficient, especially in conjunction with NAFTA). Also, the Russian army looks really weak - I am not saying that the US would necessarily be better at invading a large like Ukraine, but the "mood affiliation" by many alt-righters has given them a rather rosy view of the Russian Army, and the nation overall. Russia has a weak economy, and it's not an attractive place to emigrate to, so obviously the US and Western Europe have the economic and cultural superiority over Russia. Russia's only advantage are it's natural resources and military, and that only over the EU (and to some extent China), since the US (together with Canada and Mexico) is basically self-sufficient and militarily superior. Thus, the US should try to get more concessions from the EU, simply from a Game Theory perspective.
4. From a financial/investing perspective, the US (and other countries connecting to its economy like Canada, Mexico etc.) should do relatively well over the next decade. Western Europe, on the other hand, will most likely have (another) bad decade economically. This will probably shift capital flows towards NAFTA from the EU. China will also do ok probably, though it has to tread carefully so as not to become too isolated from the West. Overall, this decade will probably reaffirm US superiority in terms of Global superpower status. The Europeans might become resentful of the US again though, but I think many in Europe have a more realistic view now - the US is simply superior over Europe in most areas, and the Europeans better try to move more into a "survive" mindset, since this will lead to future prosperity, at least until there is a post-scarcity society.
Completely crazy idea (sort of related to this post): To get a better understanding of Putin, someone could fine tune a model like GPT-3 or Jurassic to Putin speeches, conversations, etc., of Putin. Then one might have simulated conversations with Putin about his motivations, the war, and so on. Of course, this will not produce reliable information at all, but might still be a little bit insightful.
Yeah that sounds good...not sure if it's possible with current technology though...?
All GPT-3 does is learn to predict text. I bet there are a bunch of Russians who could come up with good continuations for the first paragraph of Putin speeches. Interrogating them might provide some useful information, but I'm not sure how much, and I'm not sure interrogating GPT-3 would be any better.
Thanks for answering my comment!
9. I do not think that Zelensky has the popular support to concede on any of the current Russian demands, let alone all of them. And even if he tried to, I do not think that the current Ukrainian elites would let him to. In fact, the current negotiations are so unpopular that he struggled to put together a competent negotiating team. A good indication of these difficulties and of the general attitude towards the negotiations is that out of 6 Ukrainian negotiators at the first round, by the third round one (Kireev) was killed by Ukrainian security services while "resisting arrest" for high treason.
The more hilarious part of it: Ukrainian Chief Directorate of Intelligence claims Kireev is a hero died serving Motherland.
https://frontnews.eu/en/news/details/21625
"Killed while working as a spy for us" and "killed because he was a spy for the other side" are not mutually exclusive, if he was a double agent, but it is funny that they can't agree on the official record.
There seem to be two different accounts of his death, one from media, one official. How do you know which is true?
Also, the story sapient fungus links to below says that he was not officially one of the negotiators although a witness claims he was present.
He was present in photos and videos taken at the negotiations. There is already a joke: "How do Ukrainians figured out Kireev is a spy? Easy, he was the only man at the meeting who wore a suit"
Re: jingoism, I suppose nothing promotes social cohesion better than real, bona fide external threats with big bombs and guns. Suddenly, Ibram Kendi's complaints start to seem a bit like first world problems when there are Russian tanks rolling into Kiev. Go figure.
Still, as I wrote elsewhere on the subject of Reddit-style jingoism: I remember during the whole Bari Weiss debacle at the NYT, she said "Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor." I worry that this is becoming true more generally: that private organizations and public institutions (including the federal government) are increasingly susceptible to the influence of Twitter or Reddit mobs, as if it were representative of public opinion. This is not good, because Twitter does not reward nuance, complexity, or even complete sentences. It rewards the opposite, really: indignation, us vs them thinking, stridency, snark, stupidity, etc. Ditto for Reddit.
Edit: forgot to add that Arnold Kling had a really good post on the subject, also. https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/twitter-mob-diplomacy-33?s=r
> These are concessions in name only. Russia already has de facto control of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, and has for years (I’m assuming Putin means the areas he already controls; if he means “Donetsk” and “Luhansk” in a broader sense, that’s a harder sell). Ukraine ceding them does nothing except take away Russia’s casus belli for future wars.
First, as others have pointed out, no, Putin wants both oblasts in their entirety -- not as currently controlled by Russia -- and as part of Russia, not as independent states, even if that's the current offer on the table (and it seems people in Putin's security council knew that already, before the invasion). Second, that this would remove any future casus belli seems wrong, as the stated casus belli was the need to demilitarize and "denazify" Ukraine, with a whole lot of questioning if Ukraine should even exist as a country (and there's plenty of evidence that Putin is, or at least closely hews to the ideas of, a Soviet irredentist at heart (see: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2015-09-20/putins-philosopher)). Ceding these territories in no way removes that nominal casus belli. The "special military operation" will still have failed, and Ukraine will still be a country that the "nazis" control, with an operational military. It's questionable whether the nominal casus belli is even strictly nominal and this really is about Donbas and Crimea. That the situation in both places was stable enough, was sufficient to keep NATO out indefinitely, and kept movement towards the EU at a glacial pace, seems like pretty good evidence that Putin's real aim is exactly what it sounded like: destroying the Ukrainian military and state, annexing it if he could find a good pretext (like the government fleeing into exile), installing a puppet regime if not. Unless Putin's rhetoric starts being primarily about Donbas and Crimea, and not "nazis" and the very existence of the Ukrainian state, he's going to have trouble backing down from the current posture over the long term. Those Russian people steeped almost entirely in state media won't stand for it (which is just how Putin wants it), so there will be a repeat invasion in a few years.
Even if it did, Russia has a very poor track record of abiding by its agreements with Ukraine. Who in Ukraine would believe it? Agreeing to the current Russian proposal would be political (if not literal indirect) suicide for Zelenskyy. That said, I do agree that western leaders should be pushing it.
I don't think anything more favorable to Russia than immediate implementation of Minsk II (but internationally run -- not just supervised) + an internationally run referendum in Crimea + Zelenskyy publicly resigning or agreeing not to run for President again, in exchange for no further blocks to NATO and EU membership, will provide Ukraine sufficient security guarantees for them to stop fighting back. I think that's why Russia is shelling civilians, to try to force an end to the war before Ukraine is in a sufficiently strong bargaining position to get those guarantees. Fortunately for the Ukrainian state, their patriotic fervor (jingoism, if you like) the population seems to be willing to sacrifice to prevent that from happening.
> Sometimes its reasoning was noble: preventing genocide in Kosovo. Sometimes it was at least understandable: get vengeance for 9-11. Other times it was almost incomprehensible.
> The rare exceptions tend to be genuinely bad dudes
This does seem to ignore 1971, when the US strongly supported Pakistan in their genocide of the Bangladeshi people. (IMO, sending nuclear submarines for intimidation should be considered proper support)
The US has only ever had 2 real attacks on its shore. Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and we all know how they reacted to both situations.
> jingoism
I am mixed on the use of this word. When the unifying jingoistic identity consists entirely of white people and christians, you can't skirt around the race/religion question.
It is hard to find a good hypothetical. But, would the world have reacted in the same manner if the Philippines were under a similar invasion ? It is a Christian nation with strong cultural roots in Spain and the US. Clearly war in Liberia has never been much of a concern for the USA, despite being the only explicitly USA-inspired nation.
I can't believe that I am saying this.... But, could this be a fair instance of 'internalized racism' ?
> It is hard to find a good hypothetical. But, would the world have reacted in the same manner if the Philippines were under a similar invasion ?
Isn't it quite easy to find good hypotheticals of Asian countries getting invaded and how the US would respond? Like, say, Taiwan?
Or failing that, how about South Korea or South Vietnam?
Or in a slightly different part of the world, Kuwait. I'm not old enough to remember the Korean or Vietnam wars but I'm just old enough to remember Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, and the mood then felt pretty similar to the mood now.
Africa, of course, is a bottomless pit of suffering that we can't really bring ourselves to care about. We do care more about countries that are more similar to our own.
Russia not only expects Ukraine declares “neutrality” (as Switzerland) but that it makes a binding promise not to join any blocs. Not only military such as NATO, but also economic such as European Union. Basically Kremlin’s offer boils down to:
* Accept that 20% of your territory has been taken away, half of it annexed by Russia, another half turned into legal and economic blackhole used for organised crime, as other Russian quasi-republics.
* Promise not to join an economic alliance where 2 million of your citizens are already working and living, thus guaranteeing that your country remains at its income current level that is 3x less than Poland or Russia.
* Of course you won’t get any reparations for massive damage caused by Russian invasion.
* Accept the fact that Russia can and will inevitably invade once again, because neither a military alliance nor your own army (low income) will be able to protect you (Switzerland can afford being neutral because it has very powerful military force).
Remember, Ukraine already has been in "Russian zone of influence" 1991-2014. People actually know what it's worth in terms of life and death, not armchair geopolitics of "peace is a nice thing to have".
I wonder if 'blocs' includes relations with Russia? Or the promise of neutrality just a one way blocker?
When Putin says "neutrality", he means "Russia owns you by indirect means." See the "neutral country" Belarus.
Crimea, neutrality - something can be done there. Is it okay being neutral if powers are treaty-bound to defend you? And Crimea was a gift from Kruschev, after all. Even a token bit of denazification can be done by standing down the Azov Battalion. The Donbas are not so easy. The Russians control only a fraction, and Ukraine was starting to win the war. Only Ukraine can decide whether this is an option.
NATO signing a treaty saying they're obligated to defend a country is functionally the same thing as joining NATO. NATO is basically just a treaty saying "we are all obligated to defend each other" plus some structures to make it easier to do that.
>Crimea, neutrality - something can be done there. Is it okay being neutral if powers are treaty-bound to defend you?
What's the difference between that and being a NATO member? That Ukraine has no such obligations? I don't think Ukraine being obligated to defend NATO countries is what Putin's unhappy about in regards to Ukraine joining Ukraine.
Can somebody explain why the cat thing is notable, unless you're misunderstanding it as banning Russian breeds or something? The actual article quotes the org as saying:
"No cat belonging to exhibitors living in Russia may be entered at any FIFe show outside Russia, regardless of which organization these exhibitors hold their membership in,"
This doesn't seem that different from all the other private-sector BDS actions, and if anything seems less insane than the ones cutting off consumers, like Netflix.
People found it very memeworthy because it involved cats, that's why people are talking about it so much as far as I can tell.
Ah OK, I've seen at least one otherwise smart and intellectually honest person tweet it as an especially ridiculous example of a boycott, but perhaps that's not the spirit that Scott intended it in.
Well, isn't it? Do you expect such things to actually accomplish anything? Will Putin lose sleep over international cat shows not being open to Russians? You can't even make the case that this will help turn the Russian populace against Putin, because virtually nobody enteres cat shows.
This sanction seems 100% symbolic, affecting only narrow group of people, most people were not even aware that it exists and sounds funny.
Also, it is example of everyone piling on Russia.
FYI – I saw this post in my feed reader but didn't receive an email for it. I contacted Substack and they replied that you didn't designate the post to send an email (or something like that).
Me too! Very much worth sending out!
I also just discovered this post and that I didn't get an email for it.
Worth mentioning that no-fly zone doesn't just mean "shoot down enemy planes" it also means "blow up anti-aircraft weapons on the ground so it's safe for your planes to fly."
I was confused by the "da dempre" part at the end of the Italian tweet defending cancelling Dostoevsky. (Google Translate said "from dempre", which didn't make any sense.)
Then I realized that it's a typo ("d" and "s" being adjacent on the keyboard) for "da sempre". So, it's something like
> Public figures also have this kind of responsibility. Forever.
or
> Public figures also have this kind of responsibility. Always have.
I thought I'd mention this in case anyone else was also puzzled about that.
There's a tricky question involving international norms, and drawing lines in the sane, that I'd like to throw out for ideas.
We know that, despite agreements to respect Ukraine's borders, NATO & its components have never made a formal commitment to defend Ukraine. But the real reason, everyone knows, is the risk of starting WW3 with a nuclear-armed Russia, because lack of formal treaties has never stopped us before when WW3 wasn't at stake.
So the question is, what if Putin's next step is to go after the Baltic states? Those -are- part of NATO, we have a formal treaty to defend them. But fighting off Russia would carry just as much a risk of setting off WW3 as it would in Ukraine.
So what's the difference? Are we counting on the formal commitment to the Baltics to scare off Putin? But Putin seems to think of the West as weak, in part because of its worry over what defending Ukraine could lead to, so what if he calls our bluff and attacks the Baltics? Would/should we actually go ahead and fight, with all the same risks that we're now avoiding by not doing it in Ukraine? Or would we shy away from the risk, in which case the international norm has become "nuclear-armed dictators can do whatever they want," which I fear is too close to the new norm already.
*Not* fighting Russia over the Baltic states, would carry a much greater *cost* than not defending Ukraine. That's the whole point of NATO - to make the cost of not fighting in defense of NATO, intolerably high. And *visibly* intolerably high, so that people know better than to try it.
What is the "cost" you are referring to, unless it is the prospect of whatever Putin would do after that if not stopped?
immediate: NATO collapses, USA loses nearly all credibility. Anyone worried about USA intervening is far less worried.
future: Russia invades later again (likely Poland), North Korea is more likely to invade, China takes Taiwan.
I see. If only I could read that without detecting the foul smell dating from arguments like that and their equivalents being presented as the reasons we simply could not withdraw from Vietnam.
We didn't sign a treaty saying that we would defend Vietnam and treat attacks on the Vietnamese like an attack on America, did we?
I don't know if you remember this, but the US acted as if we had. Defenders of the war spoke of a strong moral obligation to South Vietnam, mostly on the grounds that, having undertaken to defend it, we couldn't justify walking away. As for "like an attack on America," the infamous Domino Theory required that assumption. Rhetoric at the time was that, if we didn't stop the Commies in Vietnam, they'd be knocking on the doors of Hawaii and San Francisco next (yes, people talked that way).
Anti-war rhetoric did not, as I recall, attempt to rebut these points directly, just saying that the Domino Theory was overblown and that the South Vietnamese government was too corrupt to be worth defending. Mostly the anti-war argument was that the harm caused by the war outweighed any considerations in its favor.
>In this spirit, I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer.
>As far as I understand it, the offer is: Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home.
I haven't been through the full lineup of comments yet to see if someone else has already made the same point, but this strikes me personally as a bad take.
As I see it, one of the main reasons the Western world has so much coordination behind Ukraine right now is that Russia has spent years playing the plausible deniability game, and finally overplayed their hand. Russia backed separatists in Ukraine in order to have an excuse to gradually subsume Ukraine. People have been arguing for years about whether they were *really* doing this, and they would obviously never admit to it up front, so so far there was never enough coordination to decisively punish them the way the international community as a whole would if they just openly tried to invade and annex another country. But the current situation has essentially left egg on the faces of all the actors who would have contended that Russia *wasn't* making deliberate arrangements to carve up other countries and annex them, and lying about it to maintain plausible deniability. Essentially everyone now can line up behind the position of "your claims not to be doing this have all proven to be consistent lies, and you have shown every intention to keep doing it."
If the rest of the world agreed to let Russia take Donetsk and Luhansk, it would essentially mean that they'd agreed to let Russia continue playing the annexation and plausible deniability game, and they wouldn't be able to achieve the same coordination again to punish the next infraction.
> The Pax Americana playbook for international norm violations is: the US slaps sanctions on the offender. The EU expresses “concern”. The UN proposes a resolution condemning it, which gets vetoed by whichever Security Council member is most complicit. And the CIA secretly gives Stinger missiles to everyone involved.
I laughed out loud at this.
For a Russian who hasn't travelled outside the country very recently, it's currently impossible to get a US visa due to COVID vaccination requirements.
None of the vaccines available in Russia are accepted as proof of vaccination for a US visa. (Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/proof-of-vaccination.html , https://covid19.trackvaccines.org/country/russian-federation/ .)
(un)fortunately there is plenty of other countries with situation superior to Russia.
"5: Really, I can’t emphasize this enough, a no-fly zone means shooting down Russian planes."
What needs to be emphasized is that a no-fly zone means bombing Russia, killing Russians in Russia.
Every "no-fly zone" the US or NATO has ever done, has included bombing surface-to-air missile sites from day one, lest those SAM sites shoot down the planes enforcing the no-fly zone. In the very hypothetical case where we tried to implement a pure no-fly-but-bomb-nobody zone, we'd switch to bombing as soon as we started losing planes and pilots to enemy ground fire. And really, we're not going to give them free kills, we're going to bomb the air defenses first.
Russian surface-to-air missiles have the range to shoot down American planes almost anywhere in Ukraine, from sites safely in Russia, Belarus, and Crimea. So, we're not just going to be shooting down Russian planes over Ukraine if it comes to that, we're going to be bombing Russians in Russia. It's a "bomb Russians in Russia zone" dressed up in fancy dishonest words.
Which, if we're going to do that to them, they're going to do something very like that to us in return. OK, not bombing Americans in America, but they've got plenty of Iskander and Kinzhal and Kaliber ballistic/hypersonic/cruise missiles and we've got plenty of nicely mapped and visible airbases in Poland and Romania and whatnot from which we'd hypothetically be staging the no-fly patrols. That's a kind of warfare the Russians are probably pretty good at, and we've hypothetically just shown them that bombarding the adversary's homelands is fair game in this Don't You Dare Call It War thing.
So that's the obvious escalation from a "no-fly zone". One that's perfectly legal under the traditional laws of war, which are unlocked when NATO fighters are ordered to shoot down Russian planes no matter what pretty words we use. It's the next step in that escalation that is unclear, and thus worrisome.
So, a bit of a tangent (as I 100% agree that no-fly zones are bad):
> Russian surface-to-air missiles have the range to shoot down American planes almost anywhere in Ukraine, from sites safely in Russia, Belarus, and Crimea.
My impression is that Russia's surface-to-air missiles have been as ineffective as the rest of their air force so far. The information I get on the war is pretty one-sided, but unless I'm mistaken, Ukrainian planes are still flying, and are probably suffering less losses than the Russians. If we look at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_losses_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War) , most of their losses have been grounded planes on bombed airfields. I can't find any confirmed kills from the ground.
So is it fair to say that Russian air defenses aren't much of a threat, in Ukrainian skies? Or is there anything I'm missing?
Well, first, if the Russians shoot down a Ukrainian jet, you're probably not going to get "confirmation". The Ukrainians are playing defense, so their fallen planes will fall on their own territory, and that's not something they are going to brag about.
Second, the Ukrainians almost certainly aren't flying 24/7 patrols of Ukrainian airspace. Much more likely they're launching specific intercept missions when there are known Russian targets to engage. Which gives the Russians a much narrower window of opportunity to use their SAMs, and it likely means that when the opportunity to shoot down a Ukrainian MiG-29 does arise, it comes when there are also Russian MiG-29s in the area and the Russian surface-to-air missile batteries will be told to stay out of it.
A Russian S-300 SAM might have only a 5-10% chance of hitting a NATO 5th-generation fighter, but if we park our planes over Ukraine and give them unlimited free shots, they'll eventually hit. And note that a clever Serb named Zoltan Dani figured out how to shoot down American stealth fighters with an antique S-125 designed in the 1950s, even though NATO was very energetically trying to bomb him into oblivion the whole time and he could only turn his radar on for forty seconds every few hours. Here, we're talking about giving the Russian equivalent about thirty years of improvement in missile technology, and all the time in the world to get it right.
Or, we're bombing the crap out of Russian missile batteries. In Russia.
Thank you, that makes sense.
Why can't you have a no fly zone enforced entirely by surface to air missiles? Do our missiles have less range than theirs?
1: This isn’t “history restarting” . . . yet
Fukuyama moved past that mode into an “order vs disorder” mode where the only vulnerability to established liberal democracies is their own decay over time. What we are seeing through the lens of Fukuyama is the engagement of two poorly ordered states except that one is trending towards liberal democracy and the other is not. The question is now of how order engages with disorder.
2: If the Pax Americana is dead, we need to try something different; but if it’s still alive, we should stick with what works.
Pax Americana never covered the spheres of other states. No one declared Pax Americana dead when Russia fought the two Chechen wars, established two breakaway states in Georgia or invaded Crimea and the Donbass. Why is what we’re seeing now a threat to Pax Americana where the others weren’t? The distinctions don’t seem very meaningful and a more appropriate explanation is that Pax Americana never applied if you had a border with Russia.
3: A strong response right now isn’t just about Ukraine, it’s also about the next time.
Sure, but I’ll hold you to this later.
4: International norms may be annoying, but they’re all that stands between us and nuclear war, so we had better respect them
The only international norm that stands between us and nuclear war is the norm of “don’t nuke other people, otherwise you’ll be nuked”. All of the other ones are peripheral to this question although much of your reasoning here seems to apply more directly to measuring response.
5: Really, I can’t emphasize this enough, a no-fly zone means shooting down Russian planes.
I’m amazed that more people don’t realise that establishing a no-fly zone is an act of war.
6: Huh, I guess we’re still capable of jingoism
This deserves a full post by you.
7: The Obligatory Acknowledgment That We Are Also Bad (1)
It seems like the solution you’re grasping around for here is a way of creating a hierarchy of rules that can be used to define which wars are more or less moral. Just War Theory has undergone thousands of years of development to try to do that for you and I think you should at least reference it if you’re going to dismiss it. I don’t mean to be snarky in saying this; I really think you should. What you’re doing is the international relations equivalent of doing a write up on a promising new antibiotic while dismissing the existence of germ theory.
8: The Obligatory Acknowledgment That We Are Also Bad (2)
I have trouble reconciling this with what I’ve always thought of as something like “the law of proximate cause” which intuitively seems to govern both morality and causality in cases like we’re describing. In the example you give “(in case the distinction isn’t clear, a woman wearing skimpy clothing might be causally responsible for her being sexually harassed, but doesn’t make her blameworthy)” very clearly the woman is not causally responsible for her harassment because the proximate cause of her harassment is not how she dressed but the decision by her harasser to harass her (a nice tongue twister). A similar question arises in every homicide case where self defence is raised – there is no question that the cause of death was the intentional shooting of the victim by the accused, the only question is whether the shooting was legally (the codified version of our moral judgements on the same questions) justified by imminent fear of death etc. What we’re doing in these cases is not saying that the shooter wasn’t legally or morally responsible for taking the life, we’re simply weighing if the alternative rights trade-offs were acceptable vs the homicide.
This lets me get to the first point of the whole post. The thing that’s missing here from your analysis is how one country joining an alliance can provide justification for their invasion. The proximate cause can’t be the far future intention to join an alliance since it’s not imminent or threatening. This seems like the self defence equivalent of going to someone’s house and murdering them because they said that in ten years’ time they aspired to be part of a neighbourhood watch that would shoot you if you came to their house to murder them.
Your own intuition on this arises from the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think that’s an awful place to start thinking about what’s happening in the Ukraine for three reasons. Firstly the Ukraine maybe thinking about possibly joining NATO down the track has no equivalence to Cuba hosting nuclear weapons next week; the small-state intentions are not equivalent, the immediacy is not equivalent, so the proximate causality cannot be equivalent. Secondly, even if it were, your intuition relies on the Cuban Missile Crisis being an acceptable model for state engagement with states outside what they consider to be their sphere of influence doing things inside their sphere, which I think requires proving beyond what you’ve done here.
Thirdly, even if the other two weren’t true, your understanding of the Cuban Missile Crisis is flawed in ways that will undermine your thesis here later. The USSR was not stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba because Cuba wanted them, it was stationing nuclear weapons in Cuba because NATO stationed nuclear missiles in Turkey. Thus the goal of the USSR putting nukes in Cuba was to achieve IRBM disposition parity (important for nuclear war since early warning assumptions for MAD are not necessarily true if IRBMs are in play at this point in the war, since SSBNs and assured second strike don’t really exist yet) either by having nuclear missiles in Cuba or by using the threat of nuclear missiles in Cuba as a bargaining chip to have the missiles in Turkey removed. The second one happened.
The problem this has for the questions your ask as a thesis is that Russia has nothing to trade the west here so the Cuban Missile Crisis really can’t be used as an appropriate surrogate to understand how Ukraine ought to be resolved. The Cuban Missile Crisis would be an appropriate analogue if instead of the Bay of Pigs invasion the US military invaded Cuba when they started thinking about joining the communist bloc with the entire USMC and half of the US Army with massive air and naval support.
9: Peace is still the goal
So, here’s the second thing I really strongly disagree with. The bit where your solution to Russia doing what they’re doing is to give them everything they want. There are a number of problems with this.
The first one is that “everything they want” includes territory that Russia never controlled (the entire oblasts which contain the LPR and DNR, not simply the separatist regions themselves). The extent to which Russia controlled even Luhansk and Donestk was limited; what really happened was that neither the Russian nor Ukrainian government controlled most of this area – ie it was contested. The areas that Russia wants, however, were never even partially under their control.
The second is that the areas you suggest should be ceded are under defacto Russian control because Russia invaded them. No one doing anything about this in 2014 is why we’re having this war in 2021. This is where the chickens you lay out in 3. come in to roost. If this war is about next time then rejecting the annexation of territories acquired by the same means in 2014 is also about next time. If the peace terms are “legitimise Russia’s last invasion” then you’ve just incentivised Russia doing a small invasion and running an FID insurgency with their special forces then doing a big invasion a few years later so that everyone will say they’re OK with the first one. For someone who is normally quite a deep and broad thinker, this seems like a fairly monumental oversight.
Third, why would the Ukraine accept this peace? In short, they wouldn’t. You could level every building in Kiev, have a Russian tank on every corner of their country and this wouldn’t be an acceptable peace to them. Even if Russia likes the peace terms you’re offering it won’t achieve peace because it’s unacceptable to Ukrainians who will retain the ability to fight conventionally as a result of the deal an unconventionally even if they’re demilitarised. At best you will be freezing the conflict just like the 2014 conflict froze, but far more likely you will be locking the two sides in an unstable armed struggle that will last generations. Nuclear weapons will remain on the table the entire side, but this time Russia might really have casus belli since there will be hard treaty breaches.
Fourth, how does this prevent Russia from doing future invasions of places they considered desirable? We discussed above that the peace you propose incentivises Russian invasions, but how does the peace you propose affect Russia’s ability to invade countries? Well, it gives them breathing room to fix the deficiencies in their armed forces that have made this invasion hard. Russia won’t accept any peace deal that limits their ability to build up their armed forces, so there’s no diplomatic option to take this reality off the table. This peace deal just ensures that Russia will have greater means to invade the Ukrainian rump state that the deal creates when they later choose to.
After all this what do I think the solution is? Well, absolutely no one should do anything that legitimises any Russian actions in the Ukraine post 2014. We should avoid escalation through direct NATO involvement but make it clear that any use of theatre nuclear weapons will result in a strategic exchange. We should pour arms into the Ukraine to wage conventional war against Russia indefinitely, including allowing Ukrainian forces to base from NATO countries. If Russia does destroy the government of the Ukraine and control all Ukrainian territory then we should facilitate insurgency. Why is this preferable? By your own three measures: It minimises the chance of nuclear war through the only means known to work – deterrence. Second, it actually makes the Russian experience miserable rather than giving them everything they want after 2 weeks. Third, it helps the Ukrainian people do something they believe in very strongly which is defend their sovereignty; since they appear to be very willing to fight ensuring they have the means is ultimately in accordance with their wishes, so even if it will cause more deaths it will cause less suffering if we reasonably assume that they’re rational actors.
Two further asides on "rewarding bad Russian behaviour" that relate to demography:
1. The demography of Donbass and Crimea is the result of Russian actions. Most evidence shows that neither region was actually pro-Russian annexation although both regions were more pro-annexation than other parts of the Ukraine. The fact that they were more pro-annexation is reflective of Russian policies which populated the regions with Russians and forcibly "removed" natives across periods going back decades. This is to say that legitimising Russian rule of Donbass and Crimea doesn't just legitimise the 2014 or 2021 actions of Russia, it also legitimises historical acts like the deportation of Crimean Tartars and Holodomor - it says "if you kill off the locals and repopulate with your own people then down the track you can annex the territory without anyone minding too much".
2. The subtext of this entire conflict is how the world will react to China trying to annex states that have Han-majority populations in their region. People look to places like Singapore and areas of Malaysia and the Philippines and worry that China might try to use Russia's Novorussian playbook, much as they tried to do during the Malayan Emergency. These also interrelate with SCS claims, Xinjiang, Tibet and Himalayan border disputes. The stakes for going too soft on this don't really play out in Central Europe, they play out in East and South-East Asia.
Final addendum: A clarification to the IRBM-Cuba-Turkey thing. First: Russia got what it wanted out of the Cuba Crisis. Kennedy agreed to remove IRBMs from Turkey (and Italy) in return for the removal of IRBMs from Cuba. Second: This outcome was achieved by nuclear deterrence, not by concession - ie the example does not support your thesis in the next section, being that we should just give Russia what they want simply because they possess nukes, rather it supports the opposite, being that our own nuclear weapons have to play a part in achieving an acceptable outcome.
No-fly-zones - 3 or so longer points: 1. "Lines in sand" are not that clear cut as "red lines". And there are no good precedents to be sure what a US/Nato-NFZ over Ukraine would mean in theory. In practice it would mean: a) no one flies, but our planes, just to check no one flies b) if one shoots at our planes, we shot/bomb back c) if one threats he will shoot at us, we will attack his defense first - yeah, I admit, all this sounds like: WAR.
2. But modify and things get fuzzy:
a) one small step below a US-NFZ could be this scenario (by my former colleague Dr. Dr. A. Umland*) :
you lend/lease Ukraine "decommissioned" fighter-planes F14-F18 WITH trained pilots (US/UK/...) who will get an Ukrainian passport (as China's "national" Ice-hockey-team). You paint the UA-flag on the plane, land them on a save airfield in Ukraine's South-west and: up in the sky and make those convoys burn! Andreas loves Russia and hates Putin even stronger than me, he does.
https://empr.media/news/ukraine/how-to-create-a-non-nato-non-fly-zone-over-ukraine/
b) The actual plan of (not only) ex-Gen. Petraeus is: you get MIGs from Poland and a few other countries that have some, give them to Ukraine (they have some pilots who can fly those machines), and: Up you go! - This should be ok, the CCCP gave warplanes to the Vietnamese. Breaking news: Poland ready to fly them to Ramstein (huge US-base in Germany), the US-admin not decided yet.
c) Drones: Essentially "reusable Javelin-carriers", thus a much smaller step up.
+ less/no need of big airfields, thus less vulnerable to Russian missile attacks
+ more deniability: no one will ever know who was on the controls; might have been even the XYZ-trainer flying, the Ukrainian just pressing the "fire"-button. (Imagine instead a caught F18-pilot on Russian TV speaking English only. )
+ Ukraine already bought and employs some TB2 Bayraktar Drones. So give them more TB2 and then some much more capable Bayraktar Drones, too - training is much faster and I see a "smooth line of escalation" up to the Predator-drone (Burn, convoy, burn!)
+ Drones are the better weapon - and the Russian forces seem not really ready to defend against those. If they shoot down some, so what? If they hit an F-18 with an US-pilot inside: different story.
No minus? Must be my plan. But on similar lines a pro: https://taskandpurpose.com/analysis/russia-ukraine-resistance-support/
d) We continue sharing hundreds of Javelin/Stinger et al. . Putin until now too proud to really complain. Seems to work nice enough to defend the big cities for now - but not the houses, not the people. If you want to stop the invasion in its track: convoy-attack. Hungry soldiers make bad fighters, tanks need huge amounts of petrol, weapons need ammunition "tactic is for amateurs, pros talk logistics".
e) "revolutionary warfare": offer their soldiers asylum and green-cards, same to all their degree-holders. Obviously another crazy Caplan-idea: https://betonit.blog/2022/03/02/make-desertion-fast/ see me in the small comment section - When West-Germany did that to the East, the commies only defense was to build a really loooong wall, quickly. They called it "anti-faschistischer Schutz-Wall" - and Mexico did not pay. I am fine with Putin behind a wall - or four - and soon rather alone.
* Andreas Umland is THE expert for post-soviet "neo-nationalist historiography". And a much bigger expert than most on Russia and Ukraine. Worked for a think-tank in Kiev, last time we met. Said for many years Putin's nightmare is a a democratic Ukraine that succeeds (thus the Kremlin worked hard for Ukraine to fail. Remember Viktor Yushchenko? ). And Andreas went all in to help make Putin's nightmare come true.
What probability would you assign to West rather then Russia miscalculating?
It looks like Europe went from "We don't consider SWIFT ban, too much risk" to "We go all-in with SWIFT and CBR sanctions" overnight without sufficient preparations to fallout of such decision.
Even potential for banning Russian oil, gas, and other materials - from either Western or Russian side - is already sending prices to all-time highs.
Sure, West can always issue more debt and try to buy even at inflated prices - but that doesn't release constraints on supply side. There will be bidding war between Western and Asian countries for remaining resources - war that West isn't certain to win.
Bringing new sources and logistic chains online will take years to decades even in accelerated timeframe.
Once Ukrainian military is down - wherever it takes weeks or months - how much incentive there will really be to keep pain on Western side of equation?
Quibble: EU didn't go all in on the SWIFT ban (yet?). If I understand it correctly (perhaps not) they banned only 7 banks out of hundreds. See here: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/03/02/these-are-the-7-russian-banks-banned-from-swift-and-the-two-exempted
SWIFT ban isn't even up yet (as far as i remember it was going to happen on 12th) but everyone already acts like it is.
Same with commodities - not all of them are banned but everyone acts like they are certain to be banned later. Even if Europe keeps repeating they aren't going to do it they did the same with SWIFT, so market doesn't trust them - and Biden coming out with "actually we'll ban Russian oil even though we said we wouldn't a week ago" doesn't help.
Neither Russian oil nor Russian gas are "replaceable" in world markets in short term (-> years ) - because production and consumption are largely balanced, and OPEC+ were already struggling to hit _planned_ production increases.
In case of pipeline gas it cannot even enter markets as LNG as there are neither interconnectors to Russian LNG hubs nor enough capacity to process it; entire European LNG capacity cannot cover shortfall, and it wasn't previously standing entirely idle either.
And for Germany "alternative" coal is also 50% sourced from Russia (and also climbing rapidly in price)...
Is such price shock - energy prices going x3-4 _in a week_, and events showing that it might be just the beginning - actually survivable by modern economies?
End sanctions on Venezuela and Iran, get them to pump more oil.
Just to be clear, the CBR sanctions are of much greater significance than SWIFT ban
How is it a miscalculation? Do you imagine that they didn't anticipate higher oil prices?
The invasion of Yugoslavia was a formative experience for me. I mean, I get that a world superpower can invade any place it likes. It sucks, but that's how the world is. But I will never get over how it can invade a multiethnic country, turn it into an ethnically clean nation state fueled by a toxic nationalist ideology, claim it was done to PREVENT genocide, and have absolutely nobody call them out on their bullshit while gentle left-of-center peaceniks nod solemnly and admit that some wars are indeed just and unavoidable. (Bonus: while also demonstrating the ability to quickly and forcefully stop the exact same ethnic conflict right across the border, by essentially doing the exact opposite of what they did in their "peace" mission in Kosovo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_insurgency_in_Macedonia .)
Of all NATO war crimes, Yugoslavia is also the most impactful. It essentially showed the way forward for imperialist wars in the next few decades. Russia's invasions of Georgia and Ukraine (earlier on) are basically xerocopies of the pattern established by it. There is, however, a silver lining corollary to this - it appears a successful territorial gain requires support from a significant percentage of local population nowadays. Ethnic tensions are great to exploit, but they can only be exploited or ignited in select places, and without them, you need a clear PR advantage over local authorities (kinda hard when you're literally murdering people for territorial gain), otherwise you end up like Russia now did in Ukraine - stranded in a foreign land, surrounded by hostile population, unable to control anything but the nearest surroundings of your army forces.
But the ability of the whole world to essentially pretend a pile of shit smells like roses (except for Serbians, who seem intent to cling to their country's territorial integrity even when it seemingly makes no practical sense anymore - except, well, it starts making one when you think of the problem in terms of a line in the sand drawn at NOT BEING FUCKING GENOCIDED OUT OF YOUR HOMELAND) will never cease to amaze, disgust and scare me. I'll take a million successful anti-vaxx movements over the climate of conformity that allows for that to happen.
There's also a lot off about comparing Ukraine to Belarus. For starters, for a majority of the last 30 years, Ukraine would have very much loved to become a Belarus 2. Belarus was a regional success story, a peaceful, stable country successfully weathering economic turbulences while Ukraine's democracy was switching between several leaders, alternatively Russia- and west-aligned, all invariably incompetent and corrupt. Until the latter finally decided to just give up on its political class and elect the first complete and total outsider they could coordinate around. (A correct decision, it would appear.)
If Lukashenko is an abhorrent dictator now, was he a respectable dictator earlier on? No, all this time, the problem was him being a dictator. Dictators are not some kind of inhuman demons optimizing for maximum evil, they'd all very much prefer to be loved by their subjects for running a rich, successful country, and sometimes are better at achieving it than their democratically-elected peers. What distinguishes them from democratic leaders is that they can just refuse to leave when being asked to. (And that's it, democratic leaders are certainly not above brutally suppressing popular unrest. If they don't proceed with it, it's only because they have to worry about consequences at a subsequent poll.)
What does the 1991 ethnic conflict in Bosnia have to do with 1999 invasion of Serbia?
Other than, of course, the former being used by war propaganda to justify the latter, despite the fact that the people involved had nothing to do with each other other than their ethnicity. Did the two events somehow meld into one in your mind? Or do you genuinely believe that the hundreds of thousands displaced from Kosovo or the thousands killed in airstrikes on Serbia's cities deserved it for being Serbs? (It's not like all of them were Serbs, of course, but that's not the point here.)
Those are not rhetorical questions, I want you to answer. Partly to force you to get some introspection, partly to get some insight on what motivates people to just ignore and justify a war crime happening in plain view on their TV screens.
I'm registering this as "yes" to the first question and a refusal to answer the second.
I would still encourage you to actually answer it, but allow me to pose a third one: Can you, logically, look a the end result of the invasion, an ethnically cleansed Kosovo, and claim it has successfully achieved the goal it was nominally claimed to be motivated by?
I do realise when reading this kind of thing that people in the US don’t know their own history. US invasions of other countries, direct or indirect, are a dime a dozen. At least one or two a decade. Proxy wars today include Syria and Yemen. In neither side of those wars is the US on the side of democracy or liberalism, in the former the US has supported sectarian Salafist insurgents, in the latter it’s siding with Saudi Arabia - one of the least liberal regimes in history. Medieval Europe had more rights for women and homosexuals.
Then there’s Afghanistan, and Iraq. Neither authorised by the UN. Libya was partially authorised but not to the extent of the actual bombing campaign which overthrew Gaddafi, destabilising North Africa and Europe and bringing back slave camps.
And of course South and Central America.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America
(Prior to all that there’s Vietnam, the Philippines, and the expansion into what is now the US in general.)
I haven’t included Korea, Kosovo, or Iraq which were in fact authorized).
I’d like the UN to step in here. Some neutral country like Brazil or India, or both, gets to be in peacekeeping in Ukraine for a while - if the Russians leave.
Vietnam and Korea were not invasions
What's your point?
Our predecessors made decisions in the past we disagree with, therefore we should let Putin slaughter and enslave a nation of 44 million people? 44 million people who so don't want to be enslaved that the citizens are taking up arms and standing in front of tanks?
If you hate America for what it's done you should be one of the strongest and firmest critics of what Putin is doing.
There’s one thing which I don’t see talked a lot about, and I feel that this is an oversight. Many corporations pulling out of Russia seem to be NOT doing that as a direct result of western governments-imposed sanctions.
(see e.g. https://fortune.com/2022/03/07/these-companies-exiting-russia-have-been-going-well-beyond-whats-required-by-sanctions-ceo-daily/)
If not that, then what incentive structure is it? Do their CEOs and shareholders believe pulling out of Russia is a good thing because of moral reasons? Is it the response to (expected?) shareholder fears about next-quarter profit? (fears of Russian government going full soviet and nationalizing corporate property?) Is it, perhaps, that the western governments have tanked the rouble and that would make sales of anything imported into Russia unsustainable? (that last bit might explain retailers pulling out, but what about Visa and MasterCard? what about Maersk?)
I have a feeling that this is one of the more impactful things to watch for here, because whether corporations, in the end, have more power to fuck you over than state actors is a relevant thing to consider for the whole world going forward, not just Russia right now.
Note that just because these companies haven't been compelled by congress to pull out, doesn't meant they haven't been told to pull out by the USG behind closed doors, especially the payment providers.
Companies are made of people. People are watching the news, seeing Russia bomb civilians, and getting angry. That's the incentive. CEOs and shareholders care much more about the bottom-line that most but they aren't robots with no other concerns or emotions.
Note situation of companies leasing planes:
they leased planes to Russian companies that are now likely to refuse giving them back (or be unable to give them back due to fly bans and/or being taken over by Russian government).
This would explain Maersk that would prefer to not deal with its ships being stolen in Russia or by having ship filled with cargo that they cannot unload or other weird case.
There is also one more effect: they may want to prevent/defuse Toyota pickup issues ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Hilux#Use_by_militant_groups ).
Thor and Vermora also give good explanations.
>(fears of Russian government going full soviet and nationalizing corporate property?)
A lot of these companies are going to have their property nationalized by virtue of leaving Russia anyway, so it seems an unlikely explanation.
Michael Kofman is another Russia expert who predicted the war. https://mobile.twitter.com/KofmanMichael
Ok, I'm going to be an attack dog for a moment:
Hillary Clinton wanted to start a No Fly Zone over Syria.
Lots of people in the vaguely right-sphere were *absolutely terrified* of this.
In your original endorsement of Hillary for President - you didn't spend any time on this at all.
Is this just because the idea of a shooting war with Russia is now just much more salient to you? Did that information not reach your typical circles?
Charitably, Hillary Clinton *didn't* start a no-fly zone over Syria, because she (and Obama, and Biden) had competent staff with relevant expertise and trusted their judgement. Trump, started off by alienating the community that would have provided him with competent staff, and too frequently substituted his own mercurial whims for the expertise of the staff he did have. So there's a case to be made that Hillary would have been the lower-risk option.
Also, a no-fly zone over Syria would at least have had the advantage of not bombing Russia, "just" Russians fighting abroad.
But, it's definitely cause to be at least a little bit worried about President Hillary, because she should have listened to her staff and clammed up before even talking about "no-fly zones", and it probably is something Scott should consider.
From my outsider's perspective, here's what seems like potentially a workable peace agreement
1) Ukraine official adopts military neutrality, i.e. not joining NATO. I think I saw somewhere that Zelenesky signaled this would be acceptable. **The sticking point: how do you credibly guarantee this?**
2) Russia drops any opposition to Ukraine joining the EU. I think I also saw somewhere that Russia signaled this would be acceptable, since the EU is an economic organization.
3) Ukraine cedes Crimea, but both sides agree to some sort of roadmap that eventually minimizes border checkpoints to facilitate travel to/from Ukraine. Maybe Russia agrees to provide some resettlement assistance to people who want to leave.
4) Both sides agree to respect the results of new referenda for Donetsk/Luhansk, to be jointly administered and observed by some combination of Ukraine, Russia, the EU, and the UN. Maybe the choices could be a) be a part of Ukraine like any other oblast/region; b) be a part of Ukraine but with some sort of special semi-autonomous status; c) become totally independent. Not sure how to capture all those options in one referendum (don't referenda usually offer a binary choice?) so maybe it requires two stages or something. Maybe Ukraine agrees to provide some resettlement assistance to people who want to leave if the choice is a) or b), and Russia agrees to the same if the choice is c).
5) Both sides agree to a UN peacekeeping mission in Donetsk/Luhansk.
I'm curious what people who are more knowledgeable about Ukrainian and Russian politics and history think of this? Does any of it seem viable?
The EU is not only an economic union, it has political and military side. Those sides have progressed much slower, but it's very likely to change soon: UK leaving removed one of the big brake, and the second big brake ( Eastern Europe countries) was vaporized by Poutine invading Ukraine. I don't know how the Ukraine crisis will end, but one thing is sure: Europe will change a lot after, a European defense and more political integration are almost garanteed. In fact, it's likely that the EU itself will become a NATO member more or less directly
That's less then Russia wants, and more then Ukraine would agree at this moment, provided that Ukraine has agency of its own. (unlikely)
There should be a join Russia option in the Donbass referendum, either with or without autonomy. So, two join Russia options.
And what about Russian reparations to Ukraine?
Section 9 sounds like what Finland got out of the winter war with the Soviet Union: fight heroically against a much bigger neighbour, then give up some territory and declare neutrality in exchange for peace. That sort of worked, but did lead to the foreign policy term Finlandization being invented (and someone has already added a reference to Russia-Ukraine to said wikipedia page).
>"I hope they encourage Ukraine to consider Russia’s recent peace offer ... Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home."
I wonder whether it could be accepted, and what would happen, if Ukraine offered a concession of holding new referenda (with international oversight and proper secret ballots etc.) in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk: whether Russia would agree, and how citizens there would vote now.
I just don't see how this is at all workable. The way I understand it, it's not membership in NATO or the EU per se; it's the existence of a little anti Russian state which says and does things which offend its larger neighbour, like jailing oligarchs, or voting for a different president, or not jailing people who protest or insult Putin. Accepting the offer of 'neutrality' simply means abrogating any important political decisions to Russia and becoming a vassal state.
This is the core of the problem - the Russian ruling class can't have a lived example of a more democratic and accountable ruling class right next door, especially one which ends up with a higher standard of living.
(FYI - there's a Norwegian show called Occupied which walks its way through this very problem. It's fiction, but it's a nice worked example that seems very relevant here.)
Charles Stross blogs a letter from Ukrainian artists, with bank data to donate:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/03/a-letter-from-ukrainian-artist.html
Don't take an action against a nuclear power, unless everyone believes that if they said 'stop taking that action or we'll nuke you', you'd call their bluff.
I had not properly internalised that. Sanctions fall into that category. Going to shoot down Russian planes does not. You've convinced me that it's a bad idea, previously I was all for it.
I think Russia (or more specifically, Putin) has recognised that better than anymore, and has been deliberately trying to limit the actions the Western world can take that fall into that category.
Yeah, that's a very good way to phrase it. Some things, if Russia (or China or whomever) says "stop that or we'll nuke you", they're obviously bluffing. And some things, a very few things, are so important that you'd call and see their hand even if you expected it to be a full house, ICBMs over bombers. But that still leaves an ugly middle ground, and you've nicely spelled out the critical point.
“ did the West cause the war by expanding NATO?”
Does Eastern Europe get a say? Poland and the Baltic states came willingly to NATO and Ukraine wanted in too. NATO did not expand via conquest. Should Russia get to dictate who its neighbors turn to for defensive and economic partnerships? Does it matter that part of the reason those countries are interested NATO is that they have already experienced decades (or centuries!) of Russian hegemony?
Like he said, causation is different to blame. They could be perfectly right to want to join NATO, but the question is whether their decision to join/seek NATO membership is the proximate cause of Russian behavior.
Right, and just like we live in a world where we demand that women can wear what they want and not get raped we live in a world where we believe in national sovereignty and the rights of countries to make their own decisions.
"But there’s a failure mode where every villain can come up with at least one rule they followed which the other villains didn’t, then guiltlessly condemn the other villains for their villainy. Putin says that invading Ukraine is okay, because they’re Nazis; maybe he even believes it."
You're making the opposite point of the one you're trying to make. If Putin needs to fabricate information (claiming the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis) to claim moral high ground, that suggests he *can't* come up with a reasonable rule that he actually followed.
"Prevent NATO expanding", "Ukraine is not a real country", "Save russian people from Nazis".
All these assumptions have one thing in common. A dictator who has been selling out Russian oil(gas, metals) for the last 20+ years does not care about them at all.
A main concern which affects all decisions of Putin and his oligarch friends is to stay in power and to keep multi billion dollar fortunes.
So what current situation gives them from this point of view:
* Gives an excuse to ignore international corruption investigations.
* Pass more laws to push down on any attempts to grow opposition.
* Makes it harder for the Russian opposition to get support from the West.
* Consolidate his accomplices by making them unwelcome in the West.
* Blame the situation in the economy on a war and international sanctions.
* Give boost to patriotic propaganda.
* More control over the internet and mass media.
* More control over the finance system.
* An excuse to ignore the MH17 investigation.
* Have regions of instability instead of economic growth in neighbouring countries so they are not being an alternative for russians.
And all this is achievable independent of how his venture went.
Why move in a direction of locking down the county?
They already have quite a huge amount of money so staying in control becomes more important than making more. And selling gas and oil is gonna stop being profitable in the not so far future. So it makes focusing on getting more money even less justified.
Legalizing their fortunes in the West is not an option. As no western government will give a promise to protect these fortunes.
Building a strong Russia is not an option either. As it requires creating a good set of laws, independent courts system, integrating in the world community, separation of branches of government etc. And this new system will be incompatible with keeping corrupt money.
As a bonus some conspiracy points:
* international community happy to have a scapegoat for economic crisis.
* and changing the news focus from post covid issues.
* oil selling countries happy to return to $100/barral times
* China loves to exploit opportunities while Russia is locked from the West.
On the information side of a war.
Putin's strategy for information warfare is not to focus on pushing his agenda. But an overflowing information field with so many different conflicting points to prevent creating a consistent picture of what is going on.
From my perspective, it looks like Ukraine shouldn't accept Russia's offer at this point. And if any offer were to be accepted, the international community would still need to keep heavy sanctions in place at least as long as Putin is running the show. Otherwise Russia (and worse, their whole strategy) win.
Above all, I don't think a NATO membership ban should even be on the table. To the contrary, I think a concrete plan to *join* NATO should be a non-negotiable demand by Ukraine. What Russia's done by invading like this is demonstrate in the clearest possible terms that NATO membership continues to be a invaluable goal for Ukraine's future territorial integrity. Without that guarantee, they have every reason to believe a peace deal would only be temporary in Russia's eyes. The idea that NATO is or ever was a threat to the security of a peaceful, non-expansionist Russia remains as preposterous as ever, and it shouldn't be legitimized. It's just a(n unconvincing) lie told by Russia to make their plans for expansion be less hindered by the West. NATO membership is the ultimate roadblock to that expansion. If Ukraine had somehow already been a NATO member, the invasion wouldn't have happened, plain and simple. Neither would the Crimean annexation.
Russia will not accept that unless they have to. And if they have to accept even that, I don't know what they could be getting from the agreement because it would mean they've got no leverage any more.
Re:" every villain can come up with a rule they followed to distinguish their behavior"
Maybe, but "Ukraine are Nazis" would be a terrible candidate for Putin's rule to disinguish from American behavior in Iraq even if it were true. Saddam's Baath party was LITERALLY a National Socialist party. Openly. It was founded in the '30s by Arabs residing in France and running in fascist intellectual circles, it grew in the early '40s as those people (successfully) lobbied the Vichy occupation government they were living under to get the Germans to sponsor resistance to British colonial authorities back in their home countries, and it became a dominant political force in Syria and Iraq as British authority gradually fell apart and the party's role in having resisted such authority (and its long-established habit of having been complaining about the Jews before Israel was a thing) gave it credibility with the local masses.
> This is about Taiwan, Georgia, Iran, and all the other places that great powers want to invade but don’t.
What great power wants to invade Iran? The US? Or did you mean Iran acting as a big country here, e.g. in Lebanon or Yemen? (Probably true, but also true for some other regional powers)
Declaring a no-fly zone is a bluff that would likely be called, directly leading to aerial combat between NATO and Russia. To make matters worse, chances are great that it would not, in fact, stay plane-vs-plane only. I am not a military expert, but it is my understanding that there are ground based anti-aircraft weapons stationed in both NATO countries and Russia, which would likely be involved in aerial combat. The standard strategy to deal with annoying enemy AA would be to bomb it. Voila, you now have a ground attack with dead soldiers on the sovereign territory of a nuclear defended state.
I really wish I could accuse Scott of attacking this absurd straw-man of a no-fly zone, but actually some people were seriously discussing it.
The idea that primitive, macho cultures makes hardcore warriors which will then defeat the soft, decadent civilised people is thoroughly deconstructed by Dr. Devereaux here: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ .
Morally speaking, any particular countries are just accidents of history and unlike humans do not have any intrinsic rights. Recognizing the sovereignty of a country per default is just a pragmatic way to avoid the horrors of industrialized warfare. Of course, to the degree that a countries government represent the will of their population, taking actions against that government is clearly an asshole move. Also pragmatically, outcomes of military interventions are often terrible from a human rights perspective. That being said, if a country is running Treblinka or trying to waken Azathoth, by all means invade.
Bret Devereaux has recently published an article on protracted war -- the way a weaker enemy can win by avoiding a quick decisive battle. https://acoup.blog/2022/03/03/collections-how-the-weak-can-win-a-primer-on-protracted-war/ Spoiler: it's terrible.
A few weeks back, a snarky remark to the effect that the West would defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian soldier made the rounds. I still think there is some truth to it: when big countries think about geostrategy, the wellfare of smaller countries is not their top concern. For NATO, tying up Russia in a protracted conflict for decades could be considered desirable. For the Ukrainians, not so much.
"Neutrality" is more agreeable than Putins previous the previous goal of regime change and demilitarization. Still, I can't help being reminded of the Stalin-Note, where Stalin proposed to create a neutral unified Germany in 1952. Neutrality works great if you are Swizerland: armed to the teeth and in a terrain which bound to become a nightmare for any invader. It probably would not have served Germany well in 1952, and it will hardly be ideal if you have a big belligerent neighbor with a cavalier approach to respecting your souvereignity or even nationhood.
Still, there is something to be said for not fighting tomorrows possible war today.
I think sanctions are great. If you behave like North Korea, you get treated like North Korea. Still, it seems that the EU values not having a great depression because of natural gas shortages more than Ukrainian independence.
Also, I *really* can't stomach all the cheap signalling wrt the Ukraine conflict any more. If I turn on the local radio, I either hear about local industries affected in some minor way by the war or even nearby municipalities heroically flying the blue-yellow flag or even suspending twin township agreements with Russian towns. That will show Putin. By all means, suspend away, but please realize that this is neither newsworthy nor a Valuable Contribution to the War Effort.
You wrote:
America has invaded a lot of countries, even within my lifetime.
Sometimes its reasoning was noble: preventing genocide in Kosovo. Sometimes it was at least understandable: get vengeance for 9-11. Other times it was almost incomprehensible: we’ll debate what happened with Iraq II forever.
My bright line rule: you don't get to start the war. You do get to join in once a war was going
1: Kosovo: Serbia was at war with the other parts of the former Yugoslavia, slaughtering lots of people because they managed to grab most of the heavy weapons when the country broke up.
We didn't start the war, but we helped to end it
2: Afghanistan: An act of war (the 9-11) attacks was launched against America by a group operating in Afghanistan.
We politely asked the Taliban to turn over to us the malefactors.
The Taliban chose to side with the malefactors. This put them at war with the US.
So we returned the favor, and engaged in acts of war against them
3: Iraq II. Iraq I di NOT end with a peace treaty. It ended with a truce, and a truce agreement.
The truce agreement required Saddam to give up all WMD, and not try to get them ever again
Saddam's threats to use WMD against attackers were a statement that he was in violation of the truce agreement. As such, the war was back on, and the US was free to invade
4: Iraq I: Iraq invaded a neighboring country. We went to war to reverse that illegitimate act of aggression / war.
No, we're not "bad". We're following a consistent set of rules.
Ukraine did not invade Russia. Ukraine was not hosting terrorists who were attacking Russia
Russia's sole grounds for objecting to Ukraine joining NATO was that it would make it harder for Russia to bully / invade Ukraine.
These are not legitimate grounds.
Russia is bad.
You wrote:
Now the situation is different. Russia has miscalculated, they know they’ve miscalculated, and the best ending for everyone is for them to leave in a way that sort of preserves what’s left of their honor - one that doesn’t humiliate them any more than they’re humiliated already.
No.
The best solution is for Putin to get assassinated by one of his guards.
The only really acceptable outcome is for Russia to be completely kicked out of Ukraine, including Crimea and Donetsk/Luhansk. It must be clear that "overplaying your hand" is an extremely expensive thing to do.
How to do this? No surrender. I f Russia "conquers" Ukraine then NATO / EU / America keep the sanctions going. And NATO funds Ukrainian partisans, arming them with Javelins and Stingers and appropriate small arms, giving them training in Poland, then sending them back across to kill Russians, and keep on killing Russians and any local supporters until Russia is forced to leave.
That is how you protect Taiwan and Georgia
Note: Russia/USSR funded and supported North Vietnam when they were at war with the US. So Putin / Russia has no kick when the US returns the favor, and funds the Ukraine resistance until they manage to drive out the Russians.
Grenades via mail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2WcBglPjCg
2015. TV coverage of looting in "liberated" Donbass.
ammo and grenades in the socks, but the most funny part is the announcement in the Post office "Please, drain water from the washing machines before sending"
Clarification. Ukrainian troops and volunteers looting homes of their fellow compatriots whom they "liberated from separatists"
> I am not an international relations expert. But every international relations expert whose commentary I have read claims that the extent of Russia’s recent infraction does not give the West the right to declare a no-fly zone in Ukraine.
I'm no expert either, but as far as I understand, under international law, strictly speaking, Western countries have every right to ally with Ukraine, and defend it from Russian aggression. However, doing so (in certain ways, such as shooting down Russian warplanes) would create a state of war between Russia and the Western countries in question, which we want to avoid.
Does "neutrality" just mean NATO, or does it mean Ukrainians get to work in Polish nursing homes and Italian ports and send money home to their families? Can they as individuals, businesses and a state do business with whomever they'd choose with relatively fair courts, or must all offers be those you can't refuse? Euromaidan was over a trade deal and migrant work visas. I can't speak for Ukrainian calculation what sort of life and horizons are worth taking what risks over, but I suspect we'll run into these crises with more frequency and severity if we don't stand with them.
Agree with everything.
I will make one quibble. The story of 2014 is a lot more complicated than "Russia invaded". Ukraine is a deeply divided country. Something like 90% of people in Donbass and Crimea voted for the guy that was overthrown in the coup (a coup the west supported openly). The Ukrainian government has passed laws and taken actions that persecute Russians, they have mistreated Donbass and Crimea, and Russians that protested the coup were killed (burned alive in Odessa).
If Trump had overturned the election on Jan 6th and California announced its independence and the army came in to forcibly re-integrate them and people that protested this were arrested or killed that would be a pretty messy narrative for us too.
Of course I can make a whole list of all the bad things the Russian side did too, but there are lots of people who are going to do that for me.
Ukraine is a somewhat artificial country. The far east and far west have little in common. They've had eight years to reconcile these differences since 2014 and they are still issues. Maybe a partial break up just makes sense for everyone.
How do you expect Russia would react to Ukraine arming rebels in Russia to declare independence from the Russian Federation?
>Maybe a partial break up just makes sense for everyone
Sure. Shelling civilians in the west doesn't seem like the next logical step in achieving that from where we were several months ago.
Seems like a very American point of view. From here in Europe it feels unintuitive that providing military assurance to a neighbor being invaded would be outside the norms of of interational relations while targeting the civilian population by e.g. freezing central bank assets is perfectly normal. I'm not sure how capable European air forces are of fighting in a large war away from their home countries and without US participation but if the Russians advance further west in Ukraine I have a feeling it will be on the table, at least as a threat.
Not very. The European soldiers are highly trained, to be sure, but there are not many of them and their equipment has very limited depth. For example, the Luftwaffe has about ~200 fighters total, none 5th generation, and only a handful of transport aircraft. By contrast the USAF flies about 5,000 airplanes, including a wide variety of fighters (including ~200 F-22s and ~800 F-35s, both 5th gen), plus large numbers of close air support planes, EWACs, transport and tanker planes, and so forth. The USAF can support a massive logistic tail, and has plenty of experience doing so in recent conflicts.
I mean, if you wanted to have had a real say in what Vladimir Putin does in Eastern Europe, you probably should have spent a great deal more money and attention on building warfighting capabilities over the past 20 years. It's not like Europe didn't (or doesn't) have the money. But Europe has outsourced its defense to the United States for 75 years now, or maybe imagined that war was just obsolete, I dunno, but either way that is why what happens in Ukraine now is pretty much entirely up to Putin and the United States.
Thanks, and you're right of course we shouldn't have trusted other countries with our security or imagined we don't need to project power. But I remember some YouTube video about a hypothetical war between a European alliance and Russia and it was claimed the air forces would still be decisively in our favor looking at the numbers and quality of aircraft. But I imagine
quickly bringing these forces to Eastern Europe and operating together deep inside Ukraine without leadership from the US would be a challenge.
I am from Poland and live near the ukrainian border. Yesterday, Russian rockets fell close enough to the Polish side that window panes shook. My neighborhood is full of refugees that many people are helping as if Poland was attacked too. I and other Poles, including those with the most pro-Western mindset, believe that NATO guarantees do not guarantee our safety. There will be some kind of reaction from the alliance countries, but I suspect that the argument about not causing World War III will be what matters when the Americans are considering whether or not to do a no-fly zone over Poland. We probably won't be fighting alone, because people from the Baltic countries, as well as the Slovaks and the Czechs will show solidarity. Probably there will also be some limited reaction from the western countries. But this is what is interesting - people think of the NATO alliance in absolute terms. To consider what the reaction would be to an attack on Lithuania or Poland would put it somewhere between "Full US war on Russia" and "US delivers stingers near Polish border" or, which is also possible though unlikely, "we defend on our own". In considering the likelihood of Western intervention in our favor, I personally also take into account cultural factors. The West starts in Germany, not here. As one weepy reporter from Ukraine put it, "people here are almost European." Slavs will remain Slavs to their great civilized brethren - while the attitudes of many French, Americans, Germans, and so on contradict this, as they go to fight in Ukraine and help refugees in Poland, the societies of the West may be affected by such thinking sufficiently to influence their response to possible Russian aggression. So my guess is that the first non-fly zone will be over the rooftops of Paris, or over the Brandenburg Gate. This is how the world works, and frankly speaking, why should a guy born in Nevada or some other Alabama die for Dorohusk or Lublin, or even Chełm? But those are different issues. To me, the degree and shape of the NATO response is a taboo of forecasting.
I'm just a guy on the internet, but I hope I can reassure you somewhat. I grew up in the relatively pacifistic blue state part of the US, but even here there is no question that a Russian invasion of Poland (or any other NATO country) would require War (at the very least, conventional). The red states are even more bloodthirsty. Anything less would be political suicide for a sitting president.
The folks currently in charge of the US government grew up in the cold war, and have literally been preparing for this most of their lives. Nobody wants to risk nuclear war, but in terms of tribal identification, Poland is unquestionably part of "us". I'd also argue that Finland and Sweden are de-facto parts of NATO already, and an invasion would trigger NATO involvement even without the paperwork.
Why is Ukraine different? Historical legacy. It isn't part of NATO and wasn't going to be anytime soon, so until a few weeks ago they weren't seen as "us". That perception is changing fast, especially with Zelenskyy as the public face of Ukranians.
> Also, the last time this happened, in ‘62, it was the Russians who agreed to back down to prevent nuclear war. We owe them one, so this time it’s on us.
Are you sure about this? Because what happened in '62 is that Russians got exactly what they wanted - US removing missiles from Turkey and Italy. Only they let the Americans claim they "won" on Cuba issue, and not mention the whole Cuba issue was a pressure tactic to make US back down on Turkey and it worked. So they let Kennedy pose as Tough Warrior That Stared Down The Commies, while achieving 100% of their objectives. I feel like describing this as "Russians agreed to back down" does not give justice to what actually happened. It's more like "US agreed to back down but Russia agreed to make it look good for the US". It can be seen maybe as a personal sacrifice of Khrushev to Mother Russia - because while he did win on the ground, he also allowed himself to look weak, and maybe that contributed to him to be removed later - the only one of the Soviet leaders until Gorbachev not to die on his post.
> As far as I understand it, the offer is: Ukraine declares neutrality, and recognizes Crimea as Russian and Donetsk/Luhansk as independent. Russia gives up and goes home.
Oh no, this is wildly incorrect. Besides that, the offer also includes demand for Ukraine to "denazify" - which basically means surrendering their public discourse to Russian control and suppress any nationalistic movements and anybody opposing Russia, but by the hands of Ukrainian government themselves; and "demilitarize" - i.e. ensure next time Russia tries to take over there wouldn't be anybody to resist. This is not a peace offer, it's an offer to surrender unconditionally, with Russian takeover delayed until they can fix their tanks up and change their troop's uniforms to a parade ones to look good on CNN, and maybe set up some "genuine Ukrainians" that would cheer incoming Russian tanks (those were already supposed to be there, but looks like Russian FSB officers responsible for it just stole the money instead of hiring the collaborators).
It'd be terminally stupid (for head Ukrainians, in a very literal sense, nunless they flee the country immediately) to accept such a "deal".
> Maybe Russian propaganda, but still pretty funny:
It could have happened. But what also happened is Russian troops murdering multiple civilians in cold blood, including running their cars over with tanks, shooting their vehicles with tank weapons, shelling and machine-gunning humanitarian convoys in pre-agreed humanitarian corridors, and just murdering random civilians that happened to be around because they... well, because they can I guess.
Here's a witness report of a person spending 10 days under Russian troops and witnessing some of the murders himself (in Russian):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhvEV8vXgpM
Here's a journalist just recently murdered by Russian troops:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/ukraine-russia-war-nyt-contributor-killed-journalists-wounded-kyiv
NYT of course hastened to clarify this person no longer works for them, because of course that's the most important thing to say about this.
tSo no, Russian troops aren't "polite people" letting civilians go by unharmed. They are very brutal and murderous occupants. And yes, of course Anatoly Karlin, a Russian propagandist, is publishing Russian propaganda. Other people should know better than to disseminate it, though. If you were in the US in 1941, and there were Instagram and videos, would you publish a "funny video" about a Nazi soldier letting a Jewish girl go by and giving her a candy?
>Also, the last time this happened, in ‘62, it was the Russians who agreed to back down to prevent nuclear war. We owe them one, so this time it’s on us.
Wrong. They backed down because they got what they wanted from us - removing nukes from Turkey. They didn't back down out of respect or because they wanted to maintain peace. They put missiles there to get us to remove ours (and used the bay of big invasion as a justification).
Why didn't I get an email notification of this post? How many others have I missed :/
Same! Worth figuring out why as I really would have loved responding/reading in real time
"That’s because the Westernized Afghans were the kind of people who cared about trigger warnings and misgendering, and the Taliban was Traditional Masculine Warrior Types. The Taliban could say “kill the infidels!” and the Westerners would argue over whether considering the Taliban an “enemy” was racist."
Just because you see leftists in the USA who say things like that does not mean you should project that behavior onto westernized people in random 3rd world countries. It suggests a very warped sense of reality to suddenly throw these depictions of "newly westernized" people out as if they are based in fact rather than your mind's bizarre yin-yang-esque(a grossly exaggerrated, simplified assumption that all things fall into two groups of attributes, and allowing any vague similarities to immediately pull something into being assumed to be just like one of two sides) transmutation of US culture wars' sides.
"Theres some liberals who do X in the USA" is not a grounds to automatically assume that westernized people in other countries do the same thing in any significant number, and there are obviously an enormous number of steps in between "westernized" and "USA liberals circa 2021 or whatever".
RE: No fly zone: What if we just shot down missiles and not planes (not sure how feasible/effective this could be). I guess one could say we're already doing this by providing some AA equipment, but we can do more there.
RE: Lines in the sand
1. If Russia drops a tactical nuke on Kyiv does that warrant our involvement?
2. What if they gas the remaining defenders of Mariupol?
3. Is there a number of cities we allow him to level before we got involved?
My feeling is the answer is #1 we get involved #2 - #3 we will stay the course.
The only thing that I think is really lacking from the Biden administration is rhetorical. We are folding our hand every time - perhaps if we played a couple hands of poker we could gather better intel on when Putin would fold.