Dean
2mo ago
I think this is a strong perspective, especially in light of previous perspectives going into earlier communication technology revolutions. One of the early motives / aspirations of the printing press, for example, was framed not in terms of 'think of what it could do for newspapers' but 'think of how many more Bibles the world could had.' An early advocacy group for radio were, again, religious interests thinking in terms of spreading the message / sermons / hymns to wider audiences.
The point here isn't about the susceptibility of religious types (though the parallels between ideologues who substitute ideology for religion is interesting), but rather that the 'current' dominant ideological consensus types often imagine new communication technologies as a way to spread their consensus, rather than challenge it. Twitter and Social Media would inspire pro-western/democratic/progressive/etc. movements. Telegraphs would allow power centers to better assert their control over distant parts of their countries, rather than help new power centers arise. International communism/socialism would allow the Soviets to lead the global revolution, rather than splintering and schisming as local communist leaders usurped the foreign advisor factions that often helped them rise to power. Etc. etc. etc.
Your 'born on third, believes they hit a triple' aligns to that historical parallel, as does the contemporary pushback on uncontrolled information parallels the historical examples. Once expanded, once-unquestionably dominant factions try to re-assert their authority by regulation / reconsolidation / attempts to reassert exclusive authority.
Dean
2mo ago
Haiti was more a slave revolt, not an insurgency, which quickly formed a large (if not well equipped) army and established exclusive territorial control. While the war had it's shifts in relative power, particularly the suppression in 1802 with the capture of Toussaint which coincided with the defeat/defection of much of the initial Haitian army. However, the polish defection later in 1802 helped re-form the rebel army, and so the majority of the war was by organized forces rather than through insurgency.
(This does bring up the distinction between guerilla warfare- where organized forces exist but seek to avoid direct engagements against superior forces- and insurgencies- where there is no real organized field force- but in the case of Haiti the balance was away from insurgency.)
Whether Hezbollah is state or non-state seems fairly irrelevant to me, as they surely must enjoy broad popular support to function. (Something like 90% among Shiites, who are a majority in the parts adjacent to Israel) For all means and purposes, I think they can be modelled as a shadow government prosecuting a continuing low-key war against Israel on behalf of their people.
If Hezbollah is a government prosecuting a war against Israel, then that makes the claim that Israel is attacking Lebanon weaker, since you've now abandoned the Motte that Israel bombing Lebanon violates Lebanese sovereignty since Hezbollah is not the government, and chosen a position (and historical examples) in which the government of Lebanon attacked Israel first.
Which, as a matter of customary and formal international law, absolutely entitles Israel to self-defense. Of which characterizing it as an attack is gaslighting over who started the conflict in question.
This brings us back to the original question - why do Arabs not get accorded this right?
For the same reason the Americans are not accorded the right to invade Cuba on the grounds it was once a close part of their sphere of influence, and the Russians are not accorded the right to conquer their neighbors on grounds of the Russian Empire, and the Chinese are not accorded the right to dictate sea borders on the grounds of alleged naval trade influence, the Turks are not entitled to Syria, the Venezuelans are not accorded the right to Guayana, and countless other examples.
There is no general right to historical revanchism. The Arabs who seek such are not uniquely denied.
However, its supporters can't seem to be able to stop to make their argument on the "slave morality" basis, saying that Israel deserves our support because they have been unfairly oppressed, undeservedly attacked and we owe them a moral debt (...to help them steal from and slaughter a third party?). I don't see how the latter can be done without trickery.
Possibly because you are someone who unironically uses terms like master and slave morality.
This is not an insult, but a point that your subscribed frameworks blind you to the foundations and implicit understandings of other people's positions and renders you unable to communicate yours to others in terms and framings they would recognize and accept. Instead you argue by a awkward jury rigging of trying to invoke their belief systems (framing Israel as an attacker with the negative connotations that brings as implying an aggressor), but without respecting the importance of associated aspects of their systems (that someone who was attacked and retaliates is a defender, not the aggressor, and that different models and moral judgements apply).
By rejecting widely-held and generally understood frameworks (like the fundamentals of post-WW2 international law on conflicts between states), and substituting niche frameworks instead that are often niche because of the limitations or past discreditations of them (Nietsch is a historical mess, particularly as a foreign policy paradigm), it's natural you would not only not understand other's positions, but regularly find yourself confused by them- especially when you distil large and diverse groups of actors and interests into oversimplified units of analysis, which necessarily requires dropping contexts such as differing views and contradictory motivations in even 'shared' group positions.
There is no trickery if person A from Group Z has a different motivation from person B of Group Z. They are different people. This is part of the fallacy of composition, of assuming what is true of part of a group (views on israel) is true for the whole group.
(...but all that being said, I now remember that we have basically opposite value systems and preferences regarding anything to do with international politics, and so it is probably not particularly productive for us to continue this discussion as we will both just get upset with no resulting shift in beliefs. Ceasefire?)
In the spirit of it being an appropriate metaphor for the Hezbollah role in the current conflict, feel free to stop shooting at any time. You initiated this exchange, and you can leave without the last shot at any time.
What if they just get grey-zoned down?
Then the dismissal of the historical comparison to the Crusader States would be validated, as the Crusader States were not grey-zoned down, they were conquered by invading armies.
I recall you dismissing the power of nuclear weapons when we were discussing Russia-Ukraine/Europe, in the context of full-scale war. Yet the Russian and even European nuclear arsenals are much more capable than Israel's and conditions for use are a lot more straightforward.
And the reason why I dismiss the relevance of Russian nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war is the same point made below on other examples of nuclear powers losing wars: the wars in question are not existential threats to the nuclear state posed by invading armies.
Being bombed surely counts as being under attack.
Depends- was this an initiation of hostilities, or a retaliation of a non-state group conducting military activities from Lebanese territory, which the state is alternatively unable/unwilling to stop, but the incapacity of a state to maintain a monopoly on organized violence does not negate the sovereign right of other states to retaliate against belligerents?
Or are we going to conflate 'attack' between the contextual of 'who started it and bears moral onus' and tactical 'a retaliation is an attack'? I enjoy a good motte and bailey as much as anyone, but I will fully acknoweldge starting in the motte on this semantic dispute, as I am and was using the former sense of instigation rather than later. We can restart from that if you'd like.
Why does the case for Israel's cause always have to be made by way of gaslighting?
Given your choice reubtal to Lebanon not being under attack was a conflict not started by Israel but from actors within Lebanon nearly two decades ago, I would propose that accusation of gaslighting would be a demonstration of gaslighting.
Dean
2mo ago
No, the acronym was created by the British to describe explosive-rigged boobytraps like suitcases created by the IRA.
Unfortunately for the British, they stopped particularly penetrating the American public consciousness well before then, and so the American political understanding formed in the 21st century is the framework 21st century modern audiences understand.
This is obviously an IED, why not just admit it?
Because it is not an improvised device, and insisting on calling it such for moral opprobrium makes you sound sillier than usual.
The Iraq insurgency is the other most notable case of this being used in warfare, but now Mossad has adopted it as well.
The Iraqi insurgency largely did not use their IEDs as utility-device boobytraps, but as victim or trigger-activated mines. This was echoed by the IEDs of Afghanistan, where quality and mechanical improvision for construction was even more commonly known, and subtle disguising even less present, as well as the IEDs in Syria and Yemen and other modern conflicts. Which is why the connotation of IED in the 2020s is of an improvised explosive jury-rigged into a function it was not intended for, as opposed to a purpose-built explosive sneakily hidden to look like a common-use item. The boobytraps of the Iraq War cultural understanding is things like dead animals on the sides of roads, which is the same thing that would have been applied to purpose-made military explosives, further driving a distinction between a boobytrap as a method and an IED as a device.
Disguising lethal measures as common-use items is a recognized form of western spycraft, ranging from murder-umbrellas to lipstick pistols. Heck, you can literally read a CIA history piece on disguising bombs as coal dating to the American Civil War.
The term came into existence to describe the bombs made by the IRA, which was based on a preference of presentation.
The term as an acronym came into modern parlance to describe the American experience in Iraq, where repurposed artillery shells and similar munitions were turned were used as makeshift mines along roads rather than to sabotaging utility items. This occured because the Americans love their acronyms and their media and cultural connotations are what set the standard for modern Americanized audiences, most of whom have no clue about IRA boobytrapping slang beyond reverse-applying the Americanized concept backwards.
This isn't just a wordplay either- the US and CIA haven't done anything like this.
I believe the technical term is 'lol.'
The purpose of an IED is to deceive people into thinking a bomb is an ordinary object.
No, the purpose of an IED is to have an explosive device, hence the majority of the name.
Improvision is because of a limitation of parts, not a preference. Hence why IED-utilizers prefer to use military-grade explosives when they have access to them rather than make their own explosive mixtures, and why belligerants per to use non-improved EDs when they have access to those.
The purpose of boobytraps is to conceal danger in seemingly harmless things. But boobytraps and IEDs are different things, and when given an option most boobytraps will use non-improvised explosive devices to get the booby. Boobytrapping is the method of employment, not the thing being employed, just as IED refers to the thing, not the method of employment.
If you want to condemn the Israelis for boobytrapping Hezbollah gear, sure, go ahead. But they didn't use an IED to do it.
Dean
2mo ago
Yeah with the phone hacking it’s plausible that they can always find another exploit, but with this kind of physical modification it doesn’t actually invalidate the pagers as a method of communication at all.
Depends what you mean by 'invalidate.' A system generally isn't validated when everything fails all the time, but when a critical mass of things fails enough that the reliability isn't high enough to keep doing. In some systems you only need one part to not work for the whole system to fail.
In this case I'd agree that pagers will probably still be used- I imagine they'd be used to prompt agents to go look at more secure means of communication- but if the psychological effect of the operation is that people don't trust the system enough to use it, you're going to the reliability issue alluded to.
Dean
2mo ago
I don't mind or quibble with your broader point about internal threats or other forms of state failure. There are interesting discussions to be had on what can cause state failure, and also how resilient states can be when they choose to be, but my position here is on the non-applicability of the historical metaphor.
If the Israelis fall for other internal reasons, it will still be a bad metaphor. The Crusader States did not fall to Saladin because of internal political identity/ideological shifts- the Crusader States fell because external armies marched on and overwhelmed them. Anything short of Israel being conquered by conventional armies would not be a meaningful historical reoccurence.
There is a separate point to be made that no insurgency has actually overthrown a state per see. The closest historical example of this was the Chinese communist takeover of China- a success the hinged on external armies (Japanese) devastating the Nationalists, even as the Communists formed (and were supported in forming) forces to wage a conventional war as opposed to an insurgency. Otherwise, insurgencies may drive a state to leave, or a state's leaders to concede as a political decision, but the actual ability to remove them from the field if they are willing to continue cracking down is basically nill. States may remove state armies... but States are precisely what nuclear deterrence works against, as states are- by necessity- centralized and static.
And yet the Lebanese are neither occupied nor under attack. Whether they militarize against Israel is irrelevant to that, and if they initated a round of conflict as Hezbollah did it would even further invalidate claims of the later.
The Boer who have lived there for 400 years are effectively second class citizens.
And yet still exist, and were not facing existential risk from invading armies.
They lost a part of France with a million ethnic French people that had been French for over a century.
And yet still exist, and were not facing existential risk from invading armies.
There won't be any, it will be death by a thousand cuts.
States don't face existential threat from a thousand cuts.
When overwhelming damage approaches existential threats, the polities responsible remain vulnerable to nuclear weapons.
There was no vast army of tanks that rolled into Rhodesia. Rhodesia fell because it was being hit constantly by endless insurgency.
Supported by states that would have been vulnerable to nuclear weapons.
Over two million Palestinian citizens.
The ethnic Arab citizens of Israel are neither Palestinians in the political sense of the Palestinian movement, nor are they an occupied or suppressed majority population.
Also much of Israel is within range of being engaged by Palestine. Even Houthis have hit Israel twice from 2000 km away. Thinking that Israel can just ignore a large group of people 10s of km away is naive.
Being 10s of kms outside the state is still outside the state, which continues to invalidate your attempted analogies to African majority-suppression states contexts.
West bank to the sea is 20+ km. That is minimal strategic depth.
Minimal is not a rebuttal of sufficient.
Israel isn't going to nuclearly destroy the west bank.
Why not, if the alternative is existential end? What's the punishment supposed to be- death?
Nor does that change that the Crusades were not a MAD context.
Dean
2mo ago
The Lebanese are neither occupied nor under attack. A non-state group has been conducting military activities from Lebanese territory, which the state is alternatively unable/unwilling to stop, but the incapacity of a state to maintain a monopoly on organized violence does not negate the sovereign right of other states to retaliate against belligerents.
Dean
2mo ago
South Africa's nukes didn't help much.
South Africa was not facing existential threat from invading armies.
France lost Algeria despite having been there longer than israel has existed despite France having nukes.
France was not facing existential threat from invading armies.
Turns out nukes aren't that great at subjugating a population, especially when your country is tiny and the people you subjugate are your neighbours.
Israel doesn't need (or use) nukes to subjugate a population. It can use nukes to mitigate existential threat from invading armies.
The Palestinians don't have to defeat Israel in a big war, they just have to put Israel in the same position as Rhodesians were in.
Unlike Rhodesia, the Israelis have nukes that can be used to mitigate existential threats from invading armies.
There aren't even six million non ultra orthodox Israeli jews. Populationwise Israel is roughly equal to Slovakia.
Unlike Slovakia, Israel has nukes that can be used to mitigate existential threats from invading armies.
In terms of land, they are smaller than Belize.
Unlike Belize, Israel has nukes that can be used to mitigate existential threats from invading armies.
The Palestinian population is now a quarter of the size of the population of Iraq when the US, Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands invaded. They left because it turned into a hopeless quagmire. Palestinians are more united against an enemy than the Iraqis were.
None of which mitigates them from being nuked if they pose an existential threat as an invading army.
If the refrain seems repetitive, it's because every argument you are making is a matter of the power of other states to create invading armies, or the risk to a small state from invading armies. Despite the claim, Israel is not an apartheid state in which a minority is attempting to rule over a much larger majority that dominates the demographics of the interior of the state. It has coherent borders and sufficient strategic depth that a military sufficient to overwhelm it will also give it time to use it's capabilities to prepare a nuclear retaliation.
Now, if you want to argue that doesn't matter because the Palestinians / Arabs / choose your protagonist here are willing to get nuked anyway, we can work with that... but now we are stepping decisively away from any Crusader State metaphors, which were not MAD contexts.
Nukes may always be the trump card of course, but
But what? You leave off without saying what nuclear weapons mean to the Crusader metaphor, almost like it was inconvenient and should be ignored rather than acknowledged.
Why does a change of heart in the west spell the doom of Israel, when Israel doesn't need the west to have or maintain nuclear weapons?
Why would unity among the Arabs spell its doom, when unity among the Arabs doesn't remove Israel's nuclear weapons?
Why would a united Arab state commit to a war mutually assured destruction by invading a state with nuclear weapons?
Why does a population of 7.5 million versus 149 million matter when relative population numbers actually increase the value of nuclear weapons?
Why would Israel's survival depend on a war of attrition when Israel has nuclear weapons?
Moreover, your historical analogies don't really address how history would have differed without, and let's say it together, nuclear weapons.
Why would Saladin have been able to retake Jerusalem in 10 years if the holders of Jerusalem in 1177 had nuclear weapons?
Why would anyone in 1210 have had reason to hear of the Mongols had the Mongols targets had resort to nuclear weapons?
The unexpected nature of history makes me think we should do a lot more geopolitical risk management than we do.
And that is why some states invest in nuclear weapons, and other states don't try to mass armies and overrun states with nuclear weapons.
Dean
2mo ago
Always!
... ] Now back to geeking out about long-dead men.
This is the sort of enthusiasm that keeps me here with a smile at times like now.
If you mean directly, the last time I recall was some media interview or townhall in 2023 I believe, or otherwise early in the campaign season, in which Trump was making one of his claims that he'd get talks and get both sides to agree to [generic good term] deal. The interviewer/moderator asked what he'd do if Putin didn't agree, and the immediate response that Ukraine would get more aid.
That was generally unremarked at the time, and has long since been buried in the sea of media articles by Trump opponents (and some supporters) that try to insinuate / claim he's threatening to cut off aid.
If you mean indirectly, as in by proxy associated with him, the latest notable version that was used in international media to claim a Trump intent to cut off because of reportedly favorable reception was in June 2024, when former Trump National Security Council advisors Kellogg and Fleitz briefed Trump on a strategy to bring about cease fire talks. This was formally rejected by the Trump campaign as unofficial/unauthorized/not to be considered authoritative, but this proposal is what most 2024 media reporting alludes to when they claim Trump is considering cutting off aid to force a cease fire.
This is the document, which is hosted on the America First Institute.
While typically characterized as the 'peace at any cost' / 'force Ukraine into a ceasefire' plan, what the report actually says is pretty mild.
Specifically, it would mean a formal U.S. policy to seek a cease-fire and negotiated settlement of the Ukraine conflict. The United States would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement. Future American military aid, however, will require Ukraine to participate in peace talks with Russia.
To convince Putin to join peace talks, President Biden and other NATO leaders should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees. In their April 2023 Foreign Affairs article, Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan proposed that in exchange for abiding by a cease-fire, a demilitarized zone, and participating in peace talks, Russia could be offered some limited sanctions relief. Ukraine would not be asked to relinquish the goal of regaining all its territory, but it would agree to use diplomacy, not force, with the understanding that this would require a future diplomatic breakthrough which probably will not occur before Putin leaves office. Until that happens, the United States and its allies would pledge to only fully lift sanctions against Russia and normalize relations after it signs a peace agreement acceptable to Ukraine. We also call for placing levies on Russian energy sales to pay for Ukrainian reconstruction.
In short- by the standards of 'the Trump Plan' (as detractors and advocates characterize it, even though Trump has never formally endorsed/agreed to it), the Trump plan is to give Ukraine more aid. Ukraine aid is conditional to participating to peace talks with Russia, no peace deal required, but concessions to russia such as NATO denial and verifiable security deal guarantees are dependent on Russia accepting a peace deal. Full Russian sanction relief is separately conditional on a deal acceptable to Ukraine, but aid to Ukraine is continuous so long as it participates in talks.
The claim that Trump's plan is to cut off aid to Ukraine until it agrees to a ceasefire is dependent on reading coverage of the plan, not the plan itself, or anything Trump has said (which in 2024 has been strategic ambiguity).
Dean
2mo ago
Do Russian diplomats really read this forum? News to me.
Do Russian diplomats need to read this forum for your proposals to be unworkable because of poor modeling of the interests and concerns of participants?
In any case your model of the motivations of the belligerents is not the same as mine so I don't really think we can reconcile the reasoning for any of this.
Sure we can. We can work to justify the models based on key actor behavior, contexts that the proposed models will work within, and past iterations.
For example, you made a concession that if Putin is interested in clay instead of all his declared war goals, then peace is a non-starter. I noted that it is impossible for Putin to achieve all of his declared war goals, and that in lieu of those he has significant interest in the clay in order to declare victory. You have not disputed these points on all of Putin's war goals. If Putin has many interests in the conflicts, and many/most have fallen away, then the reason to continue the conflict remains the rest- which includes the clay.
This is a synthesis, not a refutation of your model, and thus allows the conversation to reach your own conclusion. Putin cares about the clay, and thus peace is hopeless.
From this point, we can discuss what that means for reasonable peace talks (which have a purpose even when an adversary has no interest in fulfilling them), assumptions of terms they can be approached with, and so on.
I will say however that taking the current declared terms from both sides as immutable gospel as you do here is absurd. Diplomacy never works like that.
Fortunately I am not arguing on the immutable gospel of declared terms, but rather past iterations, interests, and incentives... which is how diplomacy routinely works, absurd as that may seem to you.
Moreover, you seem to be trying for a flawed reasoning of what is or is not considered subject for negotiation. Just because initial declared terms are 'never' final terms doesn't mean all parts of initial terms are subject to concession. Plenty of terms are not subject to trading way short of total capitulation- which is not the context Russia is faced with in the timeframe being alluded to. As such, the basis by which currently held Russian territory would be traded away with requires justification rather than going without saying, particular in light of past Russian policies in regards to frozen conflicts and relevant historical analogs to broad-front indefinite cease fires.
Trump has also said that if Russia did not agree to his terms he would give more assistance to Ukraine, so the presumption would not only be unfounded, but false.
And Monzer's point remains the same: Wilson wasn't a first-tier player who had the agency to overturn the preferences of the rest, and many of the factors that led to the nature of the end of WW1 (such as breakup of empires into smaller nation-states, but with ethnic mixing) were already baked in.
Dean
2mo ago
I hadn't heard of the "Cult of the Offensive" before.
I would strongly (and warmly) recommend reading up on it. More than a specific historical context, the Cult of the Offensive is a mindset that can be observed across periods of time, and is an example of a strategic paradigm that can simultaneously be logical (because premise can be true and valid) and illogical (because the consequences of adopting the paradigm include negative externalities that make it illogical to embrace).
Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous. But maybe it makes sense for our morals to change in this way, as we adapt to the reality that defense is easier than offense.
Rather than scandalous, the more relevant point is 'too expensive to be profitable.'
The British and American formal empires fell because of scandal. The sense of self of what it meant to be 'civilized' precluded arbitrary and extreme uses of force, and political-ideological senses of legitimacy and democracy asserted self-limitations that, eventually, led them to no longer want to militarily enforce rule and so negotiate exits.
That negotiation- and the experience of other conquerors- was in the context that insurgencies were increasingly cheap and bloodily effective and incurring huge costs. Starting with post-WW2 military surpluses, but then expanding with the Cold War military-industrial complexes, advanced and effective and relatively portable weapons made armed resistance a real and feasible thing. The AK-47 is perhaps the hallmark of a cheap and effective peasant-usable weapon, and further advances in explosives and communications and plenty of safe support zones made supplying insurgencies very easy for anyone who either sympathized with a target, or wanted to counter an aggressor. These costs could be economically ruinous and politically disruptive.
Dean
2mo ago
Peace requires concessions on both sides,
So far your concessions are largely unilateral in light of how Russia has approached or poison-pilled various equivalent standards before.
and I think a European guarantee is enough of a deterrent.
A peace treaty doesn't depend on what you think is enough of a deterrent, it depends on what others think is enough of a deterrent. The typical-minding of other actors perspectives and interests to your own is why your proposals will not be credible to the actors that matter.
Both sides' declared conditions are mutually exclusive, I tried to cleave from both of them somewhat fairly.
Are you trying for fairness, or functionality?
If you are trying for functionality, your sense of fairness has neglected the functional failures that already occurred as a result of equivalent terms in the past, failures which you are expecting previous victims of to subscribe to again.
Formal borders sans Crimea restored and an end to military occupation seems like it goes without saying,
It not only requires saying, but categorial opposition to this has been the starting position for the Russian position for over two years now, with no provided reason for why they would drop the position and un-annex regions now given that a cease fire or frozen conflict- a BATNA to a treaty- would let them retain territory well beyond formal borders sans Crimea.
formal schedules for returning Ukraine to normal administration are left as exercise to the reader.
And as one of the readers is the Russians, this turns any formal schedule into a frozen conflict scenario. Which is the same scenario that led to the 2022 invasion as Russia deemed a frozen conflict with no viable path to NATO membership insufficient to meet its desires vis-a-vis another continuation war.
If Putin is interested in clay instead of all of his declared war goals, peace is a non starter, but I believe him when he says his concerns are related to security of Russia and Russians more than rote imperialism.
Putin is interested in the clay because many of his claimed war goals were false or lost already.
The Russophone regional populations were not categorically endangered until Russia created and enforced a separatist conflict with external interventions, NATO expansion was accelerated instead of countered, the Ukrainians were not a false nation seeking Russian liberation, and the Ukrainian government was never a Nazi regime.
The clay is what allows Putin to justify to himself, his partisan supporters, and his historian that he 'won' in some meaningful sense.
Dean
2mo ago
If you have time, can you elaborate on what Germany was doing to destabilize the continent and/or prevent its re-stabilization?
Among other things, the formation of modern Germany started with provoking a territorial conflict with established major power neighbors like France for a Prussian-centric state, instigating a major naval arms buildup despite the lack of naval relevance to its primary competitors (and thus really only being usable against Britain), alignment with the Austrian-Hungarians who were already cracking under the efforts to repression national identities (and thus getting involved in messes observable to Bismark), attempts to interfere in the overseas sphere's interests of its continental neighbors (demands for access to Africa and China, attempts to build influence in Latin America), the role of treaties as a co-belligerancy rather than defensive arrangement (thus getting Germany into wars of others choosing), and the previously mentioned adoption of the cult of the offensive.
This doesn't include such things like the flavors of ethno-supremacy of the era, the reputation for diplomatic brinksmanship, prussian militarism, monarchism, and so on in the post-victorian age.
This is, again, not to say that Germany was worse than its neighbors, but that it was not better, and the same flaws that saw its neighbors unable to provide pax Europa applied to Germany as well: greed, pride, and jingoism were all there, and such things do not work well for a peace and stability or abroad. The German empire felt it was entitled to territorial and colonial expansion at others expense, and the limits it faced were those of consequence of opposition, not self-limitation.
In the book Buchanan claims that Germany would have been largely content with a tranquil European continent but minimal colonial presence, so their only real goal was a navy large enough that England would fear getting involved in a conflict with Germany and Germany wouldn't be cut off via English control of its sea routes to the wider world.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Pat Buchanan is writing as a moralist ideologue, not a historian.
Buchanan is an ideological paleoconservative, and part of that is an ideological alignment with American isolationism vis-a-vis Europe. He is writing with that conclusion in mind and working backwards via historical metaphors to try and convince the audience of the moral preferability of American isolationism/innocence by contrasting it to morally bad involvement in undeniably bad conflicts. However, doing so requires the metaphor fit and provide the narrative elements, such as to have a villain (the selfish/evil politician who links the alegorical Americana to Europe) drag the innocent (the US / US-analog England) into sin (needless European wars). When actual history gets in the way, it needs to be glossed over or ignored to fit the narrative.
As part of that, Buchanan needs to downplay the moral agency and responsibility of the opposing side, because if the conflict would come or occur regardless because the opponent was unreasonable it undercuts the moral argument for isolationism, since isolationism wouldn't avoid the conflict as much as delay it to a potentially worse position. Therefore, Kaiser Germany's naval buildup was 'just' a deterrence, despite torpedo boats being more than enough to keep battleships away from shores, and not a way for Germany to try and force its way into overseas territories to form a colonial empire that would lead to competition over colonies. Hitler's demands for a Polish corridor are not unreasonable demands as part of a publicized design to control Poland and treat eastern europe as living space, but a genuine attempt to build a German-Polish alliance. And back to WW1 again, Germany is a passive recipient to being forced into a war by the Russians, rather than the Russians being forced into the war by Austria-Hungary's attack on Serbia, or rather than a supporter of Austria-Hungary's response. It's classic hyperagent / hypoagent morality framing.
Likewise, Buchanan needs to elevate the sins of the tempters, the politicians who bring Americana into European issues. Hence the scale of the Holocaust is a consequence of Churchill's choice not to accept a peace in 1940, as opposed to an ideological fixation of Hitler's antisemetic party that was pursued despite and even against military utility. And in the context of WW1, Prussian militarism needs to be a myth invented by irrationally afraid British leaders to bring Britain into the war.
Buchanan isn't approaching history from a perspective of truth-seeking, but allegory. It relies on the audience not knowing enough about the subject to find the conclusion plausible, and the conclusion is to agree with Buchanan's politics of appropriate US foreign affairs regarding Europe.
Dean
2mo ago
And yet, duty bound or not you didn't rebut the point of what had already failed.
*The accords you claim already existed were non-viable due to Russian demands even before the Bucha Massacre was recognized, and conditional on Russian demands for Ukrainian disarmament to levels below what Ukraine has already since lost in the war- i.e. an inability to defend itself- while demanding a Russian veto on external security assistance by non-Russian providers- i.e. that other actors like the EU would not be able to act in a crisis.
*The end of sanctions on Russia will not occur because the sanctions are themselves a mechanism of European transition away from Russian energy imports on grounds of national security following Russia's attempted energy blackmail.
*Russia has no credibility has a military guarantor of Ukraine's security as it is currently on the third continuation war of violating Ukraine's neutrality.
*Russia has already rejected the applicability of neutral administration of the Russophone oblasts both in the form of annexation and in its previous positions during Minsk agreements positions of previous agreed upon neutral parties.
*As there is no reason to believe there would turnover of territory, by consequence the destination of most reconstruction aid would be in the areas most heavily damaged- the areas Russia holds- amounting to a subsidy / reimbursement to Russia of the costs of Russian conquest. If there was no cross-control spending, the provision would have no role as both powers would simply spend on reconstruction of their own areas regardless.
*Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine was already conducted when Ukraine was on a much less involved level of EU association despite existing treaties.
Your terms of peace are non-credible because they rest on provisions that Russia has already broken or insisted on poison pill sub-provisions that lead to this conflict.
I'd go a bit further, and say that they often touch on a nerve of insecurity about why others would conflict with them.
One of the bugs/features of irredeemable villains and mind-control alike is that it poses no moral conflict or tension with the protagonist's moral position. When adversaries literally can't be reasoned with, it means there's no morality challenge the protagonist needs to do with their fundamental position. This is true regardless of whether the adversary is a monster or a mind-controlled victim- the main heroic struggle is how to handle and overcome the adversary (and moral quandries about killing, or mercy, or endangering many to save one), not whether the adversary should be overcome.
This dynamic does not exist if the people who are opposing you are reasonable, moral people, with whom you are in a conflict with due to choice rather than necessity. While sometimes (often) you can easily come into conflict with reasonable people for reasons beyond your control (such as if they are conscripts in a foreign army- a metaphorical analogy to the mind-control), you can also come int oconflict with reasonable people if you, yourself, are the less reasonable one.
This is an issue for fiction, and especially power-fantasy fiction like RPG games, because one of the narrative elements of player-centric fiction is agency. You play the game/indulge in the media in the first place to feel powerful, to escape the limitations of your real life, to live vicariously through a character-avatar that can do what you want to do.
But what a lot of people want to do is be the nice and popular person. A reoccuring trend of most moral choice system RPGs is that an overwhelming ratio of people play... conventionally morality heroic paragons of virtue. Paragons of Mass Effect as opposed to racist Renegades, Lawful-Good Paladins rather than sociopathic chaotic-evil liches, and so on. Even 'neutral' characters almost always end up 'doing the right thing' in the end / extreme circumstances. People like being popular, and being nice.
You don't get to feel that if your avatar of agency is the unreasonable person picking fights with people who never harmed you, and wouldn't be fighting you if you didn't take the fight to them. The character's agency, and the player's desires, come into tension if the opponent is someone who'd give you shelter as a guest and hide you from the Evil Empire, but would also risk death (and almost certainly die) standing up to you for pursuing some vendetta that endangers others. If the character would stand up to the bad guys, but also stand up to you, wouldn't that mean... you might be the bad guy?
There are certainly series that would double-down on 'yes' and relish this. Grand Theft Auto makes no mistake that you're a crook. But in heroic-fantasy stories, this conclusion often needs to be avoided to avoid player moral incongruity. Therefore, the possibility needs to be removed.
For the player to feel good about themselves no matter what they do, good people should never oppose them. Therefore, the only reasons to oppose the player that leave their moral superiority unchallenged are those without agency (who satisfy the moral power fantasy by freeing them) or those who aren't good at all (who satisfy the moral power fantasy by being overcome).
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