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Supporting nuclear proliferation to countries that a party is actively trying to prevent from having nuclear weapons and has active territorial disputes with is absolutely going out of your way to antagonize them.
Mearsheimer's books and journal articles are consistently framed in hyperagent and hypoagent paradigm. This is a meta-crticism, and it is a significant part of why much of his stuff is merely undergraduate-level, as the models don't actually reflect how coalitions of allies operate.
A laugh is competing with a yawn. The motte and bailey you were accused of was precisely because of the overreach of degree, and you yourself conceded the doctrinal definition did not apply, which itself undermined the earlier appeal to authority of the Atlantic Council for using the same term.
While I am glad to see you conceding that air superiority (and thus also less dominating degrees of aerial advantage, or whatever term you prefer to for that degree) alone is not decisive, this was rather the point you were being led to in the original contestation of your original framing, which also rested on other unreasonable points you long since abandoned (as befits the retreat to the motte).
Ah, yes, wikipedia. That infallible source of all the context we need to know on military readiness. Why if we go by wikipedia, the Germans have 270 Leopard 2 tanks of various sorts!
And if we look back to 2018, the Germans had 9 operational Leopard 2s available for a NATO task force expected to have 44. Which they also couldn't support in various other fills either- 3 of 14 Marauder infantry fighting vehicles, aircraft able to fly only 1/3rd of the year, and generally unable to compose a ready force of 5000 people despite a wiki-size of over 180,000 active personnel... and it wasn't even the only country sending to it. Wiki doesn't list the number of machine guns the German army has, but they certainly showed up to a NATO exercise in 2015 with broomsticks painted black due to a lack of working ones available.
This is sad- and mockable- but hardly unique. The tank donation effort in 2023 showed that countries that nominally had hundreds of tanks, like Spain, only had a few dozen in readiness or near-readiness states they could spend, with repairing 20 taking a year. When the propaganda of 'NATO is running out of key weapon systems!' is raised, the kernel of truth being exagerated is that some systems being donated- such as tanks- are running out because most can't run at all. They weren't meaningfully maintained for decades, to a degree that some countries had less than 10% in a condition to hand over to fight.
While I am pleased that you are including Turkey as European for the sake of the argument- it's one of the only reasons anyone does, and I'll admit I hadn't been when I was referred to the Europeans- there is a reason they and the third most tank-heavy force in NATO are aimed at eachother, and the readiness counter-point remains: the on-paper strength of the Europezns is not their real power level,. And this is without the many other obstacles to a coherent land force, ranging from expeditionary projection to political willingness to pursue. Recapitalizing, repairing, and restoring a capable European ground force will be long and expensive without being forced to fight while doing it.
By contrast, and returning to the basis of the earlier argument, the Ukrainians are already in the field, have already proven their ability to do significant damage ot the Russians if armed, and arming them avoids the European weaknesses while letting them plan (and bolster) their strengths.
No need. In the non-fantasy world, the Europeans have been neglecting their ground forces for decades to the degree that their actually available forces are not far larger, or far better.
It's not like this is traditional proliferation. A huge number of Soviet nuclear weapons ended up in Ukraine with messy questions of PALs and operational control, especially of bombers. There's a distinction between the US sponsoring Ukrainian nuclear weapons like with Britain and simply not pressuring them to denuclearize. The latter is much less aggressive. Furthermore, the US had more freedom to impose upon Russia in the mid-1990s than the late 2000s, for obvious reasons. Creating a favourable status quo in the 1990s but not continuing to prod the bear has advantages. Incorporating the militarily weak and hard to defend Baltics is much less reasonable, long-term costs for negligible gains. Then consider the frankly sadistic-in-retrospect policy of prodding Ukraine into denuclearizing, then wooing them towards the West (without actually promising to defend them), incentivizing Russia to maul the country and derail such efforts.
Likewise with Taiwanese nuclearization. The US quashed that twice. I imagine there's regret floating around in Washington over that decision, if the self-consciousness for regret exists.
I said Russia had air superiority for the 2023 counteroffensive and that they had extensively fortified and prepared for a Ukrainian attack in that area (it was telegraphed not merely via satellite imaging but also being the obvious route for any Ukrainian attack). Most people agree with this. This was in service to my broader point that the celebrated NATO generals who expected a successful counterattack were foolish, they seemed to expect the Russian army to disintegrate upon contact with NATO-supplied armour.
You said first that Russia didn't have air superiority, they were merely dropping glide bombs, using attack helicopters (where have the Ukrainian attack helicopters gone I wonder) and drones. You then said that I wasn't using the doctrinal term correctly when I pointed out how you were necessarily changing the goalposts by taking 'air superiority' well beyond the realms of common sense. Then you said I was motte-and-baileying regarding the distinction between air superiority and air supremacy.
Here's US doctrine: https://www.doctrine.af.mil/Portals/61/documents/doctrine_updates/du_17_01.pdf?ver=2017-09-17-113839-373
The Ukrainians received prohibitive interference from Russian airpower during their counteroffensive, from Ka-52s for instance. The Russian defence was not similarly pounded by Ukrainian airpower.
Here's another article saying the Russians had air superiority: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-07-31/ka-52-alligator-the-russian-helicopter-slowing-ukraines-counteroffensive-in-the-south.html
I can find more if you like!
Sure, the German army is weak. The Europeans don't have much ammunition relative to force size. I'll even say that the Ukrainian army might be the strongest army in Europe aside from Russia and maybe Turkey. But the combined power of all the European states is much much greater than Ukraine's! They actually have navies and even aircraft carriers. They have nuclear weapons. Yes, nuclear weapons are relevant to military power, they render the whole idea of a Russian invasion ridiculous. There is no plausible gain for a Russian invasion of Europe that outweighs the high risk of a nuclear exchange, even a nuclear exchange they 'win'.
You started off saying "Russia can have more military power than Europe, but not more than Ukraine with European support" then quickly shifted to 'land force power' and mass when I pointed out the vast difference in air power, naval power and nuclear power. Navies and air forces are relevant here. And just consider the military potential! Ukraine has 36 million at most. Europe has about 500 million. Please stop trying to twist your words around to justify these silly positions.
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