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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Another week, another Tucker interview, another transcription of a juicy part by yours truly. I promise, this is unusual, I haven't listened to two in a row, at all, ever.

This week is Jeffrey Sachs. The part below is just after 1:44.

JS: I also have a big measure of resentment: I don't like the risks we are being put under, Tucker.

TC:Yes, well I agree with that completely.

JS: I don't like it. This is not a game.

TC: Well, you've got children.

JS: I've got grandchildren, and I really care about this, and I don't like the games, and I want people to tell the truth. And if we told the truth, we could actually stop the wars, today. I don't mean, that sounds crazy, it's not crazy. If we told the truth about the Ukraine, if Biden called Putin and said, that NATO enlargement we've been trying for 30 years, it's off. We get it, you're right, it's not going to your border, Ukraine should be neutral. That war would stop today. Oh, there'd be lots of pieces to figure out, where exactly will the borders be, how will go, I don't say that there won't be issues, but the fighting would stop today.

JS: If the government of Israel either were told, or said, there will be a state of Palestine, and we will live peacefully side by side, the fighting would stop today. These are basic facts, basic matters of truth that if we actually spoke them, if we actually treated each other like grown-ups we would resolve to seem to be these insurmountable crises. They're not at all insurmountable, they just require a measure of truth.

That was the first mention of Israel, that I could recall, but the whole conversation is about Ukraine, Russia, Putin, and NATO. It's not exactly new to me, but it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA, and their puppet states involved in NATO.

And that was all before any discussion of COVID. tl;dl, it's obviously from a lab, we (USA) pretty clearly funded it, and Fauci has been running the germ warfare branch of the DoD for decades. Which lab, and how is unknown, but, in his own words:

JS: Our government has lied to us about every single moment of this from the start, hasn't told us anything about any of this, it's all whistleblowers or Freedom of Information Act. That's the only way we know any of what I'm describing to you right now. No one has told the truth at all.

Great interview, and I'm glad that Tucker has twitter dot com to host his stuff, rather than be consigned to the fringes of the internet.

Simple answers should ring alarm bells. Opinions framed as The Truth(tm) should have them blaring. Sachs' Ukraine comments seems to live in same epistemic universe as John Mearsheimer - expressed in his 2015 talk here, which subsequently went incredibly viral during the full invasion. So it's definitely an opinion and not The Truth. It's hard to understate the popular appeal of Mearsheimer's message (its arguably the most rapidly and widely circulated wonky political lecture in human history). Mearsheimer could be correct. I think his arguments about NATO expansion are best rebutted by the archives here, this article here, with a quick overview here

For a great steelman of Mearsheimer POV I highly recommend the rapid and very accessible 2018 book by contemporary Stephen M Walt: "The Hell of Good Intentions". I found it largely persuasive on many accounts. (FWIW, with regard specifically to "not one inch east" I think it's 60% myth, 80% rhetoric, and 100% irrelevant because no binding paperwork was ever signed, let alone with an extant entity. NATO expansion in general is more contentions IMO).

I also think those the Palestinians are animated by more than mere terrestrial concerns. Sachs stating that all Israel needs to do is assure peace and statehood is outrageous. Asserting such a wild opinion is True only redounds to my incredulity. AFAIK the intractability of the Israel / Palestine conflict is well earned.

Sachs stating that all Israel needs to do is assure peace and statehood is outrageous.

If Israel abandoned the settlements in the west bank and ceded a strip between there and gaza to make a contiguous polity, it would not stop 100% of the Palestinians who are pissed off that Israel exists at all, but it would surely take the wind out of their sails enough to make Jihad unfashionable

I desperately want to agree with you. My proposal for something fair looks nearly identical to yours. However, the impetus for jihadism (and the settlements) is not motivated by practical, worldly concerns. Jihadists (and settlers IME) frequently describe their motivations in religious terms. They claim certainty the creator of the universe, giver of eternal life, and sole reason for existing, would be pleased if they die for the cause of removing the Jews from Israel (provided the Jews don't pay the jizya).

The iraqi people were saying similar things, then we carpet bombed them with mcdonalds and porn, now you don't hear much about Iraq anymore

(I'm being cheeky but I really do think a good contiguous chunk of land would take all the wind out of the Palestinians' sails)

Israel ceded all settlements in Gaza and exhumed Jews buried there before fully pulling out in 2005. The Gazans elected Hamas and nineteen years later, here we are.

Lost all credibility for me when he said that of there was a Palestinian state that the fighting would stop. "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" means the entire area of what is now israel will be "free" of Jews. And where are these Jews supposed to go? It says in hamas's 1988 charter where they are supposed to go (to their graves) and they have never changed their tune. When Fatah renounced terrorism, Hamas became the most popular party among the people of Gaza, and they won the 2006 Palestinian elections on a platform of terror and hatred. As Douglas Murray said, it there was a Palestinian state it would be a Nazi state.

...Where are the Palestinians supposed to go?

Ideally they would be welcome in a muslim country. They could go to Egypt. No wait Egypt has a fortified barrier with Gaza -- more heavily fortified than their border with Israel -- to keep them out of Egypt. They could immigrate to Lebanon. No wait they were kicked out of Lebanon for inciting terrorism. They could go to Jordan. No wait they were kicked out of Jordan for inciting terrorism. Maybe they could to Kuwait. No wait they were kicked out of Kuwait for inciting terrorism. I'd say they can go to hell but they would probably be kicked out of there too.

Speaking of going to hell, do you reject Christ?

  • -10

What is the point of this question? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or weirdly evangelizing, but make your point clearly, if you have one.

I'd say they can go to hell but they would probably be kicked out of there too.

Wasn't being sarcastic, or 'weirdly evangelizing' - my point was perfectly obvious as part of the public conscious. There is no way to the father but through Christ. If you actively reject Christ, you are going to hell.

This isn't the place for evangelizing.

If you consider that evangelizing, instead of bothering me, tell /u/NelsonRushton off for suggesting that Palestinians would probably be kicked out of hell. I wasn't the one to raise to topic

If one person is 'allowed' to bring up a topic (hell) other people are 'allowed' to participate

More comments

Exactly where they are. Besides some settlement building in the west bank, which no one in Gaza actually cares about, no one's making them go anywhere.

How are you responding if you've blocked me, genuinely curious

Where were Nazis supposed to go after World War II?

You want to send Palestinians to Argentina?

And if we told the truth, we could actually stop the wars, today. I don't mean, that sounds crazy, it's not crazy.

...These are basic facts, basic matters of truth that if we actually spoke them, if we actually treated each other like grown-ups we would resolve to seem to be these insurmountable crises.

I'm not sure if he's full of shit and just saying what sounds like folksy ASMR to increase his brand value or he genuinely believes this. I'm also not sure which one is worse.

I want to think anyone with even a cursory understanding of international politics would not be so hopelessly, pitifully naïve. There are real, irreconcilable differences between groups that cannot be assuaged by arriving at common truth, even if we could agree on a common truth. If Biden told the truth, he wouldn't be President. If Putin believed Biden, he wouldn't be the President of Russia. If everyone in America believed what everyone else said, there would have been dozens of civil wars, not the one.

The hypocrisy and lies as much as we may dislike them are features, not bugs. If we actually did what we said and took action based on what we believed to be true, we might live in a better world. But we might not, and there'd be piles and piles of skulls on the way there.

I don't think it's accurate at all to suggest that the war in Ukraine is directly attributable to the US. Certainly, the actions of no country takes place in a vacuum - and US foreign policy has, I think, worked to encourage the start of the war and now works to extend it, and that the war is mostly to the benefit of the US and of no other country in the world. But the chief drivers of the war are Russia in choosing to attack and Ukraine in choosing to defend themselves. I think the idea that the war would just sputter out otherwise is absurd. Both nations clearly have strong interests at stake. I do not believe it is really possible for a hegemon, even the US, to create a war between others ex nihilo. The state of Ukraine, whatever it's merits, is clearly capable of inducing people to fight and die for it. That war might not last very long without NATO support, and we'd see more dying and less fighting, but it would happen.

I think there are parts of the war in Ukraine that are attributable to the US but they are far more near-term than the expansion of NATO. Russia was already de facto at war with Ukraine. That needs to be considered in any question, because Russia didn't start a new war in 2022, just massively escalate an existing one. Why did Russia choose that moment, instead of any other, to escalate? The most probable explanation to justify the timing is the spike in oil prices. It has since been weirdly memory-holed that the oil and gas price spike predates the escalation of the war in favour of the claim that the war triggered the spike. The cause for the spike was a long-term consequence of low investment in fossil fuel extraction due to environmental policies, and the medium-term consequence of the oil and gas glut that happened in 2020, which reduced production, slamming into the rise in consumption as economies got un-shuttered. The US, in part, is responsible for shuttering global economies in 2020. High oil and gas prices motivate Russia to make a move in two ways. First, by making sanctions more expensive to implement. Second, by providing the government a big budget surplus that might be put to use. However, judging by the initial invasion strategy (Russia basically trying to win in 3 days) that this was less intended to outright fund a war of attrition, and more intended to soothe over the costs of integrating captured territory into a victorious Russia while deterring sanctions long enough to make Russia's victory a fait accompli.

Why did Russia choose that moment, instead of any other, to escalate?

While it isn't quite fair to describe Russia as a Chinese client state, Putin starting a war without Xi's approval was likely to go badly. Xi didn't want the Beijing winter Olympics disrupted by a war. Putin announces that he is recognising the independence of the DPR/LPR the day after the closing ceremony and tanks cross the border three days after that.

Putin could have taken the decision to escalate at any time since Q4 2019, and between the pandemic and the need to keep China on side he ends up acting on that decision at the first opportunity. Personally, I think he took the decision shortly before publishing On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians in July 2021.

I go long stretches these days forgetting the olympics are still a thing, they really dropped the ball on that one this past decade

There's about 8 years between the initial invasion and the escalation. The Winter Olympics would only be a factor for a small proportion of that period. And the main country responsible for disrupting them was China itself, with it's continued use of covid restrictions.

Each time I encounter this argument, I ask why Russia gets a pass. If it’s a war of choice, isn’t there an obvious actor? But there’s no leverage on Putin, there’s no alpha in agreeing with your domestic opponents, so we see contortions to put the blame on anyone else.

Oh, except when it’s time to criticize U.S. industrial capacity. Any shortfalls in that department are taken as proof of incompetence and staggering corruption rather than reluctance. We like to start fights, not win them. Winning is for the other guys.

But that can’t reflect on the bioweapons department! They’ve got to be competent enough to concoct 2020’s headline, incompetent enough to lose control of it, and then recover their moxie in time to cover their asses. Except against FOIA, which couldn’t be subverted, since it provides the scant few points of evidence needed to damn everyone in the deep state. Other, perhaps, than the bold patriots serving said FOIA requests.

In short, it sounds like a long chain of isolated demands for rigor.

Each time I encounter this argument, I ask why Russia gets a pass.

Reading those links, I think you got some pretty good answers, but apparently you disagree.

...I wrote a more detailed point-by-point reply, but honestly, I don't think it'd be very productive to post it. You're replying to a quote that is extremely idiotic. You seem to be taking that idiocy, and then spinning it out to cover other people and discussions that are, I think, a lot less dumb, and then you're spinning it even further to concerns that I do not think you can rigorously argue are dumb at all. Maybe there's a long chain of isolated demands for rigor there, if you frame it exactly the way you have. Maybe there's even someone, somewhere who's actually regurgitated that whole chain of claims, exactly the way you've framed it. I don't recognize that chain in anything I've written, and I don't recognize it in anything I've read here either.

On the other hand, if this is genuinely how the world looks to you, that's both useful to know and depressing enough that there probably isn't much point in arguing about it.

Isn't this what a game of "chicken" looks like from the losing side? If we're unable or unwilling to escalate far enough to deter Putin (or Hamas), then we're stuck dealing with their actions. So naive people who "don't have a side" and "just want the killing to stop" have all their brains' capacity for rationalization being applied to finding reasons why the other side should give up. Which makes them indistinguishable from people who actively want the defeat of the other side, but who have enough social skills to lie about their motivations.

I would like to believe that the current escalation would have deterred Putin if he had all the information. It fits with my sense that Russia's leadership is dysfunctional in the boring, usual, human way: overpromising and underdelivering. A one-month war against unequipped, deserting Ukrainians would have neatly dodged almost all the consequences for Russia. I recognize that this is perhaps too tidy to be true!

Hamas...if there's a level of violence which will deter them, I don't think Israel has found it yet. It's an unsettling situation.

That's a good point, although I'm not sure how much to put on NATO's current escalation, and how much to put on the Russian military's surprising weakness. I'd been solidly in the "Putin won't invade, but if he does it would be over fast" camp, so that's two big things I was wrong about, which shows you how much I knew.

I think Hamas are religious fanatics, and have found a coordination mechanism that's strong enough to allow for suicide attacks, and which justifies "holding their own people hostage" as being in those people's long-term best interest (72 virgins for martyrs and all that). I'm still on the fence as to whether that attitude is a new category of "hostis humani generis", or whether "give me liberty or give me death" is a useful bulwark against oppression. It's hard to draw the line.

Well, more generally it's good advice to seek to change your own behaviour than the behaviour of others.

I can easily believe that bioweapons developers are capable of both competence and incompetence. That would make them just like every other human being.

"I am vast, I contain multitudes."

"No, wait, don't put me back in the quarantine--"

That was the first mention of Israel, that I could recall, but the whole conversation is about Ukraine, Russia, Putin, and NATO. It's not exactly new to me, but it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA, and their puppet states involved in NATO.

I don't understand how it's possible for you, or anyone, to believe this. Insofar as any conflict in Israel is a "war of choice," the people making that choice are, and have been, Muslim Arabs, whether inside or outside of Israel. For generations, now. If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel. The commitment of Hamas, its handlers abroad, and most of the people living under its rule is the eradication of Israel. They have never accepted any of the compromises offered to them for more than a handful of years, during which time they have always been sharpening their spears for their next attempt.

I understand that the United States is entangled in this, as it is entangled one way or another in most armed conflicts around the world. At minimum, the American government is a well-compensated arms dealer! And I understand that the Israeli government has made a variety of foolish, cruel, and otherwise objectionable decisions along the way. Nobody in that region has anything approaching clean hands. But exactly one side of the Israel conflict is ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription, and it's not the Israelis.

Ukraine, okay! There's a conflict where American (or at least NATO) interests have absolutely been downplayed in favor of spinning a Russophobic narrative. I still tend to see Russia as the bad actor there, because I am prejudiced against aggressors, but I can accept that the United States played at least an indirect role in poking that particular bear. The United States had nothing to do with the murder, mayhem, robbery, and rape perpetrated by the Palestinian stooges of Islamist governments on October 7, and Israel's response to that attack has been, if not obviously proportional, absolutely understandable. If a bunch of Canadians, at the urging of their government, snuck across the border to rape and murder a thousand innocent Americans, I would not be satisfied with a merely proportional response; as a matter of clear deterrence, I would definitely want to see an absolutely merciless escalation.

And if it kept happening, over and over again, over years and decades, well... at some point the only thing that makes sense is to reach for the metaphorical banhammer.

If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel.

But exactly one side of the Israel conflict is ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription, and it's not the Israelis.

I know you genuinely believe these two things, but I don't think I'll ever get used to how tunnel visioned people can make themselves.

If the Israelis had never invaded Mandatory Palestine in the first place, there'd be no Israel, and there'd be no fighting. That is to say, you started this, no?

and

The Israeli prime minister is making speeches in the Knesset about how you're waging a holy war of eradication against the Biblical Amalekites. Does that not classify as 'ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription'?

If the Israelis had never invaded Mandatory Palestine in the first place, there'd be no Israel, and there'd be no fighting.

Er... no? Mandatory Palestine begins in, what, 1920? After the Roman expulsion and the slaughter of the Crusades, Jews began to re-establish their homeland again no later than the 13th century. The Mizrahim migrated back in the 18th century, and no small number of Ashkenazim in the 19th. These were as involved in the fight against the Ottomans as the Muslim Arabs; both groups were angling for political control of the area, which partly informs the establishment of Mandatory Palestine in the first place.

That is to say, you started this, no?

The idea that any single group "started this" is absurd. The Jews, Alexander, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Muslims, the Crusaders, if I believed a particular plot of land could be cursed I would certainly wonder about Israel. Who is tunnel visioned, exactly?

The Israeli prime minister is making speeches in the Knesset about how you're waging a holy war of eradication against the Biblical Amalekites. Does that not classify as 'ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription'?

This assertion genuinely surprised me, and it is something I would want to condemn if it were true. But it isn't, unless one is being deliberately and maximally uncharitable for whatever reason, so... no, that particular comment does not appear to classify, despite your perplexing and pointless effort to tart it up.

I admire your chutzpah and obvious ability to pretend to miss the point. Your assertion that Jews 'began to re-establish their homeland no later than the 13th century' (~1250 years after the post-Titian expulsion) is as true as it is irrelevant.

How many Jews were in 'Israel' in, say, 1930?

If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel.

If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no independent Palestine either. Palestinians will become permanent second-rate residents of Israel in everything but name.

Why would that be so? Israel has no desire to create a class of welfare sucking Arabs.

Welfare-sucking? I am talking about permanent residents that work, pay taxes, but aren't allowed to vote or settle in specific locations.

Plenty of subpopulations are welfare sucking despite being allowed to work and pay taxes. Statistically, Arab Palestinians would be so in a unified state.

If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no independent Palestine either. Palestinians will become permanent second-rate residents of Israel in everything but name.

This argument flies in the face of facts and history. There are several independent Muslim Arab states in the region; Israel is a tiny portion of the region, smaller than many American counties. "Independent Palestine" is a call for a Muslim Arab country specifically in Gaza and the West Bank, which was granted in the Two State Solution, and refused by the Palestinians. Palestinians still refuse it as a solution. Give them a two state solution, and within half a generation they will be raiding Israel from behind their "borders," calling yet again for the extermination of the Jews. How do we know this? Because they keep doing it.

Not only that, but a substantial percentage of Israeli nationals are Muslim Arabs, from when Israel tried to just allow Palestinians to choose to participate in a liberal democracy along with the rest of the developed world. Some took the offer, and are pretty universally better off for having done so. I have known a few Palestinian Israelis, and they were not "second-rate residents" in any sense but perhaps the fact that they lived in an officially Jewish nation--not unlike the Jews and Christians who are sometimes permitted to live in officially Muslim nations, except for the part where Jews and Christians are generally treated far worse in Muslim nations. Rural Americans in many states often have less political power or self-determination than Palestinian Israelis.

Attitudes like yours toward the conflict in Israel strike me as the most absurd exercise of both-sides-ism in modern history. Israel has taken every reasonable avenue, and perhaps some unreasonable ones, toward peace and coexistence. Every olive branch they have extended has been sharpened into a stake and used to murder their children. In some ways Israel may be the single most Christian nation ever to exist, so far has it extended forgiveness and amnesty to the descendants of the Muslim Arab colonists who live within their borders.

I've lived through this cycle so many times I've actually lost count, but it repeats like clockwork. Every time it looks like we're going to get "peace in the Middle East" at last, the Palestinians sabotage it (usually, with financing and support from other Muslim nations). "Independent Palestine" is a canard, code for "death to Israel," because coexistence is not on the menu, and as long as Muslims are religiously committed to reclaiming every inch of their holy lands, it never will be. Israel's Muslim neighbors wish to see it destroyed, and Palestinians are the stooges they have been using to pursue that goal for longer than most Mottizens have been alive. Nothing has changed, nothing is new. I feel bad for the Palestinians, they are being used harshly by bad actors. But they have had many opportunities to escape the cycle, and they have squandered them without hesitation.

I am sympathetic to arguments for independence and self-determination, but what Palestinians (and you) say in that regard does not match with their actions over the years. Talk is cheap. Peace is a choice they refuse to make.

This argument flies in the face of facts and history. There are several independent Muslim Arab states in the region; Israel is a tiny portion of the region, smaller than many American counties.

"Why should there be another Muslim Arab country?" is a loaded question. It's like asking, "why should Panama exist when there are many other Latin American countries?"

"Independent Palestine" is a call for a Muslim Arab country specifically in Gaza and the West Bank, which was granted in the Two State Solution, and refused by the Palestinians. Palestinians still refuse it as a solution. Give them a two state solution, and within half a generation they will be raiding Israel from behind their "borders," calling yet again for the extermination of the Jews. How do we know this? Because they keep doing it.

Again, "granted" is a loaded word. From the viewpoint of the Palestinians, they weren't granted half of Palestine, half of Palestine was taken from them and awarded to Israel. Why should the UN decide that Palestine should be divided 50/50 just because Jews owned 6.6% percent of the land?

Not only that, but a substantial percentage of Israeli nationals are Muslim Arabs, from when Israel tried to just allow Palestinians to choose to participate in a liberal democracy along with the rest of the developed world. Some took the offer, and are pretty universally better off for having done so. I have known a few Palestinian Israelis, and they were not "second-rate residents" in any sense but perhaps the fact that they lived in an officially Jewish nation--not unlike the Jews and Christians who are sometimes permitted to live in officially Muslim nations, except for the part where Jews and Christians are generally treated far worse in Muslim nations. Rural Americans in many states often have less political power or self-determination than Palestinian Israelis.

Palestinian Israelis are not second-rate residents (other than some humiliating restrictions like not being able to own their old homes), but West Bank and Gaza Palestinians aren't Palestinian Israelis, no one offered them this option. "Other countries treat their minorities worse, why shouldn't Israel be allowed to do this?" is a question that should be reversed, "why don't we apply the same rigorous standards and demand BDS against Saudi Arabia, Estonia and the PRC?"

Attitudes like yours toward the conflict in Israel strike me as the most absurd exercise of both-sides-ism in modern history. Israel has taken every reasonable avenue, and perhaps some unreasonable ones, toward peace and coexistence. Every olive branch they have extended has been sharpened into a stake and used to murder their children. In some ways Israel may be the single most Christian nation ever to exist, so far has it extended forgiveness and amnesty to the descendants of the Muslim Arab colonists who live within their borders.

Every reasonable avenue other than founding their nation somewhere where the natives were fine with it. Yes, they are much better stewards of this land than the Arabs, but that's saying you shouldn't complain that you woke up with a kidney missing just because Terence Tao was the recipient.

I find your responses uncharitable and probably disingenuous. You seem to simply be engaged in motivated reasoning toward a preferred outcome, rather than attempting to take a view of the whole situation.

"Why should there be another Muslim Arab country?" is a loaded question. It's like asking, "why should Panama exist when there are many other Latin American countries?"

No. The question is not whether Palestine should exist or not. The question is whether Palestinians should be empowered to exterminate Israel, and aided by the world in their mission to do so. The answer is "no." Your response was, "but what about independent Palestine" and my answer was, "I am sympathetic to arguments for independence and self-determination, but what Palestinians (and you) say in that regard does not match with their actions over the years. Talk is cheap. Peace is a choice they refuse to make."

From the viewpoint of the Palestinians, they weren't granted half of Palestine, half of Palestine was taken from them and awarded to Israel.

I don't really care about their "viewpoint," especially when it is clearly ahistorical. But even if they weren't the literal and ideological descendants of colonists now complaining about being colonized, it wouldn't matter: Israel is there, now, and has been for a long time, and the actual options are (A) stop the Palestinians from occasionally murdering Israelis due to an ancient grudge or (B) allow the Palestinians to continue occasionally murdering Israelis due to an ancient grudge, and in turn get murdered right back. "Two peaceful states getting along peacefully" is a much better option! But it will never be on the table while the Palestinians and their useful idiots continue to chant "from the river to the sea, Palestine is for Muslim Arabs."

Yes, they are much better stewards of this land than the Arabs, but that's saying you shouldn't complain that you woke up with a kidney missing just because Terence Tao was the recipient.

Except we're not dealing with a human being here, we're dealing with nation-states and identity groups. There are so many problems with nation-states, and identity groups are, if anything, worse. The original expulsions were horrible and shouldn't have happened, and under the standard of modern liberal democracies likely would not have happened. But the empires of yore worked differently. The Muslim Arabs in Palestine weren't sovereign, and had never been sovereign.

Again: insofar as they seek full freedom and self-determination, I'm pretty open to that. But it can't be on "by murdering everyone else in the region" terms, and they have repeatedly shown themselves unwilling or incapable of accepting those terms.

I find your responses uncharitable and probably disingenuous. You seem to simply be engaged in motivated reasoning toward a preferred outcome, rather than attempting to take a view of the whole situation.

My honest and heartfelt position is "a pox on both their houses, what I think about this conflict doesn't matter a bit and the farther I stay away from it the better". But any attempt to take a view of the whole situation is impossible without trying to steelman the positions, and I was trying to do this with respect to the Palestinians.

The question is whether Palestinians should be empowered to exterminate Israel, and aided by the world in their mission to do so. The answer is "no."

Why not? After all, we're letting Israel do the same. Letting Israel control where the Palestinians are allowed to live, what they are allowed to do and so on is symmetrical to letting the Palestinians control where the Israelis are allowed to live, what they are allowed to do and so on. Why not push the Israelis that don't accept Palestinian supremacy into Jewish enclaves and watch them elect Otzma Yehudit and start bombing the Palestinians with improvised FPV drones? Yes, Palestine would be a much worse place to live in than Israel, but that's not a meaningful way to decide which side to support. After all, there are lots of mismanaged countries, but we no longer let the Netherlands take over and manage them.

But any attempt to take a view of the whole situation is impossible without trying to steelman the positions, and I was trying to do this with respect to the Palestinians.

I don't think it's a "steelman" to soften their actual beliefs, though. They want all the Jews to either leave Israel or die. They are quite explicit about this. They literally make children's shows teaching this. To steelman that view requires you to elaborate reasons why, all things considered, this is a reasonable view to hold. Your response appears to be something like "there's no meaningful difference between Israel's government and Hamas, so their positions are just equally bad." That's not a steelman, that's ignoring inconvenient facts in hopes of strengthening an objectively outrageous position.

The question is whether Palestinians should be empowered to exterminate Israel, and aided by the world in their mission to do so. The answer is "no."

Why not? After all, we're letting Israel do the same.

Bullshit. In the first place, there never was a "Palestine" to exterminate. Furthermore, the Israelis have repeatedly demonstrated their ability, if they so chose, to militarily conquer not only Israel itself but much of the neighboring territory as well. Israel has treated the Palestinians with kid gloves for decades.

Letting Israel control where the Palestinians are allowed to live, what they are allowed to do and so on is symmetrical to letting the Palestinians control where the Israelis are allowed to live, what they are allowed to do and so on.

More bullshit. There's nothing symmetrical here; the Palestinians wish to kill all the Jews. Do you seriously not understand this? If Israel's goals were "symmetrical" to those of the Palestinians, all the Palestinians would already be dead. You are not steelmanning anything, you are literally making shit up.

Yes, Palestine would be a much worse place to live in than Israel, but that's not a meaningful way to decide which side to support.

How the fuck is that not meaningful? That is often, perhaps always how nations decide "which side" to support (though nations are also at times wrong about what will make something a "worse place," in the end).

But never mind that; we have an absolute laundry list of economic and political reasons to support a productive and educated first-world democracy over a couple of terrorist cells whose aspirations toward theocracy are often not only explicitly anti-Israel, but explicitly anti-American. To say nothing of the events of October 7, which are independently sufficient evidence that every civilized person everywhere should regard Palestine as, if it is a state at all, only a terrorist state.

After all, there are lots of mismanaged countries, but we no longer let the Netherlands take over and manage them.

Palestine is not a country in any particularly meaningful way, and it never has been. It is two separate terrorist groups living on the largess of other nations within the borders of Israel, actively oppressing their own supporters for theological reasons. Writing as though we were dealing with an oppressive colonial nation-state and its equal-but-opposite conquered territory demonstrates either ignorance, or willful ignorance.

They want all the Jews to either leave Israel or die. They are quite explicit about this.

And the IRA wanted Northern Ireland to be part of the Republic of Ireland. And this you may note has not happened. What the goal of an organization is and what they can be persuaded or forced to accept can be very different things.

Your pov would tend to indicate that a peace process would be pointless in NI because the stated objectives of each side were contrary. Well yes, that is why it has to be a negotiation!

What is probably true is that support for Hamas from within Palestine has to reduce. That was the problem the IRA faced, the slow removal of discrimination against Catholics, meant fewer and fewer of them had strong reason to support the IRA, rising living standards made them wealthier and then the IRA made a few clear mis-steps which crushed their support among their own demographic. That is why the IRA in 98 accepted a deal they had been offered and rejected 20 years earlier. The fact Hamas and the PA rejected a solution in the past does not mean it will never be acceptable to them.

The problem is of course, is that the UK had to dial back their aggression against the IRA and Catholics for that slow boil to subside. They had to do that BEFORE the IRA were willing to negotiate. Even when that meant the IRA was able to operate more freely. Internment was working to reduce the number of attacks, but it was also radicalizing more Catholics. The Peace process could never have gotten started with it still in place.

The playbook from Israel would probably have to include stopping or curtailing the various settler issues, lifting the various controls on who and what they allow into Palestine and to go hands off. To be clear that would almost certainly mean in the short term more attacks, more rockets, more Israeli deaths. And they would have to do this without retaliating beyond those that actually carried out said attacks, and not treating them as attacks from a nation but simple criminal cases where you arrest and prosecute the offenders. Turn it into a police action not a nation state one.

Then in about 20 years or so, time and a slow reduction from boil to a simmer, would have slowly reduced the hate and anger levels. Now the question would be, why should Israel be the one that would have to accept these risks for some uncertain reward of possible peace. And the answer is they don't. But unless they are either willing to genocide or be willing to sacrifice, then this situation is just going to repeat forever. And as the richer, more powerful state with vastly greater state capacity they are the only ones that stand a chance of doing it. The IRA were not capable of the unity that would be required for them to have played the British role in the peace process, as demonstrated where they immediately split into a multitude of fractured squabbling "Real", "True" IRA's.

Does Israel have to play that role? No. Are they morally required to? No. Are they the only ones who can? Yes.

Regardless of the moral situation, I really think the only long term solution is going to require Israel to be willing to absorb attacks, even though morally they are under no real requirement to do so. Probably it will pay off for them long term, but that is a very, very hard sell in the now. If Israel or the US can also put pressure (or outright bribe) Egypt to send in peacekeeper troops so that Muslim police can catch and punish Muslim perps then so much the better.

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To steelman that view requires you to elaborate reasons why, all things considered, this is a reasonable view to hold. Your response appears to be something like "there's no meaningful difference between Israel's government and Hamas, so their positions are just equally bad." That's not a steelman, that's ignoring inconvenient facts in hopes of strengthening an objectively outrageous position.

No, the steelman is, they were there first, so their impolite request that those who arrived later leave or die is more reasonable than "we believe our ancestors lived here 2000 years ago, so move over, you Arabs are all the same anyway". If some Seminole terrorists start blowing up retirees in Florida, my reaction will not be 100% "what fucking savages", but "they kinda have a point" as well.

Bullshit. In the first place, there never was a "Palestine" to exterminate.

Just because they didn't have a flag doesn't mean it didn't exist.

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Palestinians are uniquely unsympathetic to me because they have not only spitefully rejected every overture of peace extended to them, but also actively harmed literally every ally they have ever had.

Its one thing to hate Israel and its supporters so much that you pledge eternal uncompromising war and employ every single dirty trick ever (hiding weapons in civilian areas, exploiting lawfare, abducting civilians, saying one thing in english and another in arabic, THE LIST GOES ON FOREVER) to maximize sympathy for yourself. Fine. Fight, play dirty, still lose, reee, repeat. Your funeral.

But the Palestinians actively fucked or tried to fuck everyone that tried to help them. Black September in Jordan, Palestinians in Kuwait supporting Saddams invasion, Palestinians aiding the Sinai militias against Egypt, fomenting the Lebanese Civil War... the only place Palestinians haven't fucked up in the region is Syria, and thats because it is hard to differentiate Palestinian caused chaos amidst the maelstrom of fuckery there.

This isn't even including the list of international terrorist attacks where Palestinians have attacked non-Israeli (geographic or ethnic) targets. Islamist terrorism is already shitty enough for being an exported political ideology, but Palestinian specific terrorism is the only instance of a domestic issue extending violence far beyond its borders. Palestinian people in Palestinian organizations have engaged in cross border murder of non-Israelis. Killing RFK, bombing of various civilian jets, etc etc etc etc. The list is long and infuriating and all for naught, so its just violence for the sake of violence. FARC hasn't attacked outside Colombia, Shining Path didn't kill random Europeans, Naxalites are unknown outside of India, IRA didn't bomb Germany, even the Cartels restrict their international violence to others In The Game. Palestinian (and broadly speaking Muslim) terrorists are the only ones that regularly kill noninvolved externals, with the (not very good) justification that everyone who is attacked is actually a zionist sympathiser who deserved to be killed.

Most sympathy for Palestinians arises from an overabundance of empathy: well if I were such a dickhead it MUST be because I was so massively aggrieved, therefore the Palestinians must be uniquely special in their suffering. The presumption that Palestinians want peace works backwards from this overempathetic viewpoint: if I had peace I won't be a dickhead, so the Palsatinians just need peace to not be dicks.

This is a reversal of causality. Palestinians don't have peace, BECAUSE they are irredentist incompetent dickheads. Fatah-Hamas war kicked off 10 seconds before the elections were concluded and both sides hate each other to this day. If the Palestinians are dicks to themselves, are dicks to their allies, dicks to uninvolved externals and incompetent dicks to their enemies, perhaps it is best if the prophylactic of sympathy stops being lavished on them so they can finally stop trying to shoot their load.

IRA didn't bomb Germany,

It doesn't affect your overall argument, but the IRA did bomb British military bases in Germany and, occasionally, British embassies in continental Europe. The most successful attack was the Rheindahlen bombing which injured 27 Germans who were visiting a British military base, and would have killed most of them if the IRA had been more competent in placing the bomb. The only non-Brit killed was a locally recruited servant who shot accidentally when the IRA assassinated the British ambassador to the Netherlands in 1979.

TIL

Most sympathy for Palestinians arises from an overabundance of empathy:

Most people claiming to be sympathetic to Palestinians don't care particularly about Palestinian lives, rather they passionately hate Jews/Israel or are virtue signalling. If it were actual empathy you'd hear at least some of them call for Hamas to release the hostages, or stop storing explosives in hospitals, or any number of other things that would mean fewer Palestinians would die. They don't though, because damaging Israel is more important in their eyes (to the sense they accept Palestinian infants dying as a core part of this strategy) or because they're more interested in loudly showing their support for The Right Side for social purposes.

This differs from the status quo exactly how? The lack of an intermediate step where Palestinians lose?

Palestinians basically say, "your solution is reasonable, but unfair. If we accept it, we no longer can demand our preferred unreasonable, but fair solution".

Yeah, I suppose we can say they did it to themselves but the time when "no fighting" and "peace" in the way the world wants - 2SS - were the same clearly seems to have passed.

I don't understand how it's possible for you, or anyone, to believe this. Insofar as any conflict in Israel is a "war of choice," the people making that choice are, and have been, Muslim Arabs, whether inside or outside of Israel. For generations, now. If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel. The commitment of Hamas, its handlers abroad, and most of the people living under its rule is the eradication of Israel. They have never accepted any of the compromises offered to them for more than a handful of years, during which time they have always been sharpening their spears for their next attempt.

Agreed, There seems to be some kind of narcissism shared by both the left and right anti-israel contingent that if America withdrew support that Israel would need to come to some kind of agreement with the Palestinians. This is as strange a belief as that any of the other massacres in the region couldn't have happened without American involvement. Israel won wars before American involvement and would win them afterward, more brutally and with more casualties but they'd win them.

Palestine wouldn’t exists without US support now. Assuming someone is willing to sell the Israeli’s guns does anyone think they couldn’t go out and find $40 billion to give a willing seller?

They probably would be a little short on pure mass of arms so would need to buy.

Israel is a net arms exporter, exporting 12.5bn of weapons in 2022, while importing a really tiny amount of arms. US 'aid' is valued at 38bn over a 10-year period from 2016, and Germany increased arms exports 10fold from 2022 to 2023... to 330m. Israel is an arms exporter and has the best defense industry in the region (Turkey is doing pretty alright too), and just because Israel focuses on high tech shit doesn't mean their bullet and bandage industry is nonexistent. The Israeli feelers are merely looking to backstop inventory shortages, although it should be noted that Israeli maximal doctrine is 'sustained four front war without support'. Between their domestic arms industry and their strong economy, and whatever jew money/mind control conspiracies we wish to add on, the Israelis do not need external support to continue prosecuting their war aims. Whether this is a good dollar value versus opponents lobbing shitbottle rockets and digging up tunnels GLA style is another question for another time.

US 'aid' is valued at 38bn over a 10-year period from 2016

This really isn't a trivial amount in the scheme of US foreign aid, even if it is a trivial receipt for Israel. I tend to ascribe to the Matt Yglesias view that the situation would be improved for Israel if we turned off the foreign aid but continued to allow US military contractors to sell them weapons. It would make it more difficult to argue that Israel is a US client state -- an argument that isn't correct, but is enabled by the unnecessary payments.

The Ukraine war is a war of choice for Russia. I guess it’s a war of choice for Ukraine- they could in theory capitulate and the fighting would end, although no doubt the Russian army would sack a few cities and there’d be some terrorism. But the USA doesn’t control Russia or Ukraine. We can stop paying for Ukraine’s war effort, but there’s no indication it would get them to stop fighting as opposed to just going all Berlin, 1945 every few miles. And even with the Russian army’s apparent willingness to turn cities into Grozny, it’s going to take time to grind through that.

Now, I am not a US interventionism fanboy. I believe that a lot of the military and CIA ops the US engaged in the cold war and the Bush II era were net negative from a thriving of humanity point of view.

But writing from what cynics would call a US client state but what I prefer to see as a minor member of the status-quo coalition (Germany), the USA makes a pretty decent hegemon (in Europe, at least). The values which they prefer (market economies, free trade, individual rights) seem to work out better than what other local hegemons have enforced in part of Germany before.

There is a reason why a lot of countries in the former Warsaw pact wanted to join NATO instead of forming a defense pact with Russia against NATO aggression -- they had just spent a few decades at the receiving end of such a defensive pact.

If you take the right to self-determination of peoples seriously, then there can not be a right to preemptively conquer weaker neighbors to prevent them from joining defensive pacts against you.

Also, who in their right mind would want to invade Russia? Europe tried it twice, with disastrous results. Invading a major nuclear power is not a decision anyone borderline sane would ever consider in earnest. What Russia is defending by invading Ukraine are not legitimate security interests, but their status as a local hegemon who can use force against weaker neighbors at their discretion.

The US is not to blame for all the evil in the world. There have been wars for millennia before the US was a thing.

What Russia is defending by invading Ukraine are not legitimate security interests,

And here I was reading and nodding along with your post.

A warm water port is a legitimate security interest. It has been a legitimate security interest since the age of sail. It will continue to be a legitimate security interest into the future, as long as boats can float.

Well, it looks to me like Russia has some 200km of undisputed waterfront on the Black Sea. Wikipedia lists two ice-free major ice-free ports: Novorossiysk and Taman. I am sure that for a fraction of the price of that special military operation, Putin could have gotten a top-grade port on his coastline.

Also, I am not really condemning Russia too much for sizing Crimea. That operation seems to have been accomplished with minimal bloodshed, at least. My main problem with Putin is his behavior since 2022, when he tried to take Kiev (ca. 250km from the Black Sea, not a great location for a port) in a surprise attack, and opted to fight a war of attrition when this initial attack failed.

Also, I think there can be some debate on in what cases the security interests (legitimate or otherwise) of big polities trump the right of sovereignty of smaller polities. On the one hand, if Lichtenstein entered a military pact with North Korea, I think that the rest of Europe would be correct in denying Lichtenstein the opportunity to station North Korean nuclear missiles in the middle of Europe. On the other hand, I don't think most US meddling in South America was in pursuit of legitimate security interests. Meddling in Panama, Mexico or Canada, as well as the Cuban missile crisis are somewhere in between.

How is that a "legitimate security interest?" I understand "legitimate security interest" in the above post to mean something like "clear threat to the safety of Russia's citizens." I don't doubt that Russia would like to have a warm water port but I don't see how not having one poses a clear threat to Russia or its citizens.

An unfriendly nation on your borders is generally presumed to a clear threat to the safety of your citizens – this is the logic of NATO (and most other defensive alliances). Ukraine has also demonstrated its capability to harm Russian citizens inside Russia, so, yes – an unfriendly Ukraine constitutes a security threat to Russia.

Whether or not it's legitimate to INVADE a sovereign nation on your borders simply because it's unfriendly/a security threat is another question – but historically it's not unusual for nations to do it, regardless of the legitimacy. (Cuba and the United States comes to mind; see also the war between China and Vietnam.)

A warm water port is a legitimate security interest. It has been a legitimate security interest since the age of sail. It will continue to be a legitimate security interest into the future, as long as boats can float.

A warm water port belonging to another sovereign nation, whose sovereignty you agreed to respect ~30 years ago? If you want to call this a "legitimate interest" for Russia that's fine, but then it seems like you're holding the US to one standard for actions, while holding Russia to a very different one.

Russia had a lease on the Sebastopol Navy base that Ukraine was threatening to undo in the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity.

What do you think America would do if Cuba moved on Guantamo Bay? Gitmo isn't even of that much strategic interest for us.

This might be convincing if what they were doing militarily was obviously and clearly narrowly tailored to enforcing the terms of the lease. I don't think you can reasonably make the case that their various incursions into Ukraine (especially the current one) fit that description.

And I seriously doubt America would fight an offensive war to reclaim indeterminate but very large parts of Cuba in response to Cuba, essentially, threatening to breach the contract for Guantanamo Bay. Fight back if attacked and point at the terms of the agreement? Sure.

I mean, there's most of the rest of the Black Sea coast, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Novorossiysk that doesn't get iced up. There are fully landlocked countries worldwide, they don't get to invade their way to the coast as a little treat. Now, moving the Black Sea fleet all there would involve expanding the port facilities, but that's not impossible (they already partly did it due to the constant Sevastapol attacks). Plus, they did already de facto have that warm water port and were in no position to lose it prior to their invasion.

Meanwhile, that warm water port is now being hit repeatedly by strikes, and the Ukrainians are working down the list of Black Sea fleet vessels one at a time, which are going to be a nightmare to replace. Fortifying its claims/access to Crimea were one of the aims of Russia's invasion for sure, it's just that it seems to have been totally counterproductive from a strategic point of view.

Possibly our difference here is that there's a different meaning to legitimate being used.

Firstly, it's probably obviously not legitimate for countries to just straight up steal strategic assets or resources from a neighbour, even if it's useful.

However, powerful countries cannot accept that their security would be at a partial or full veto from a small power, especially if they have the ability to stop it, so under this threshold some could argue Russia had a legitimate right to annex the port. Maybe the US response in the Cuban missile crisis was legitimate by that standard, and a similar case. However, my disagreement here is that Ukraine didn't have the ability to threaten Russia in any meaningful way as of 2022 or even 2014, other ports were available for the fleet, and Russia's navy is at best a very minor source of their overall security. It's hard to put this as a legitimate reason to launch a full scale war to annex territory and create a puppet state (their initial war goal at least), and in reality has been totally counterproductive, partly as Ukraine has a legitimate interest to fight back and sink most that fleet now, and NATO has a legitimate reason to help them. That's the issue with fuzzy or subjective legitimacy, both sides can seem to have it.

As a final spicy take to develop that prior point: their navy is kind of... crap? Pointless? Like, can it contest the waves versus a naval power equal or greater to Italy? What's it really for then? They can do expeditionary operations to friendly countries without it, they can't do expeditionary operations to hostile countries with it.

To be honest, 98% of all navies are crap. There's the USA, the UK, maybe the PRC and Japan, although neither has been battle-tested even against a weaker foe.

Russian navy is primarily an ICBM delivery mechanism, secondarily a delivery mechanism for other kinds of missiles and it's not very good at that. Navies are expensive, good navies are big, and big navies are extremely expensive.

France?

Couldn't even be trusted to sink Rainbow Warrior.

Wasn't that about France wanting deniability, so they used their spies instead of their military?

Sachs is making the same fundamental mistake the current administration has made and the next administration will likely make again, which is thinking that the US is in the driver's seat and all it needs to do is turn the wheel to get everyone going in the direction it wants. The war did not start on America's terms and unless it wants to intervene directly, it will not end on America's terms (a position Sachs is not advocating for, as I understand it).

NATO's enlargement was not, as Sachs seems to imagine, a result of an ever expanding American empire, but the manifesting of the strategic needs of the member states. Even if the US could wave it's magic wand and dissolve NATO tomorrow a new Euro-centric bloc would form as a symptom of the same strategic anxiety. Life in the Russkiy Mir is still within living memory of the majority of the former SSR and there is hurry to return to it. The Baltics are preparing for the worst and Poland's military buildup has gone into overdrive. Western Europe, which does not have the misfortune of sharing a border with Russia, has been slower to wake from its stupor.

Meanwhile at the Kremlin there appears to be no desire for a neutral Ukraine either. Putin et al shunned all offramps prior to Feb 2022 and have opined repeatedly that Ukraine is Russia. The Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have been legally incorporated into Russia. After the sanctions placed on it in response to its seizure of Crimea, Russia made great efforts to reduce its reliance on the west and built up great wealth (which it is now spending to fund the war). Does Mr Sachs imagine that if Biden were to ask nicely that Putin would just pack up and leave?

Sachs is right about one thing though, America does have the means to end the war. Through violence.

Adding member states with a real axe to grind against Russia seems to increase the odds of conflict, no?

There's a good chance that Polish leaders would actually want to inflict some damage on Russia to settle old scores, or that they'd be maximally uncharitable in a way that increases the odds of military solutions.

Sachs is right about one thing though, America does have the means to end the war. Through violence.

Russia is a nuclear power. Engaging in direct U.S. vs Russia conflict over Ukraine of all places is insane.

Should such a conflict occur, the mean expected deaths would number in the millions easily. The chance of a limited nuclear exchange becomes quite high, and a full nuclear exchange possible.

Scott shut this argument down. You can’t just play nuclear blackmail games. Maybe Ukraine is the right place to back down. Maybe it isn’t. That is a complicated question.

The solution to Russia has nukes is not back down anytime they want something. Then the whole world would be ruled by Russia. A thing worse than nuclear war.

The one big issue with not defending Ukraine is it raises a question of who really is under the umbrella of U.S. protection. Any country that thinks they might be outside of the security arrangement would be very interested in being a nuclear state. And as N Korea has proven just about any civilization can get nukes and a missile program. The reason even places like Taiwan do not have nukes despite real risks is because getting nukes would piss off the U.S. and they view security help from the west as more valuable than nukes.

Even places like Georgia would probably buy some nukes and launcher systems as soon as possible. And those type of states do have some political instability which means eventually some people you don’t like are nuclear.

The question of who is under the US umbrella would be a lot less vexing if it weren't for the NATO expansionists and hawks such as yourself who are constantly trying to stretch it. The US and NATO has no security arrangement with Ukraine. They've never had one. And yet here you are, arguing that the umbrella should cover them, raising questions nobody was asking.

Let me guess, every day is 1938 and every enemy is Hitler and everyone who disagrees with you is Chamberlain.

The alternative is Russian Roulette. Maybe you’ll get lucky and the other guys won’t actually go through with it. But the thing is, you can’t ever misjudge in that game because if you do, the consequences, not just for your country and her allies, but for the entire world are absolutely catastrophic. Billions dead, mass extinction event, famine, radiation. And so the consequences should at least be weighed against the benefits with those consequences in mind. Is Ukraine worth it? I’m not sure. But what has always worried me about the NATO approach is that they’re playing chicken under the assumption that Putin never actually means it. And we honestly have no way to actually know this. We might guess, or assume, but we don’t know for sure that the next line we cross won’t be the one that Putin was serious about. The west in my view absolutely doesn’t take the nuclear threat seriously. They aren’t asking whether Putin would, and in fact they seem to be deluded into thinking that Putin is less likely to use them if he feels cornered. This simply defies common sense. If he loses in Ukraine his life is in danger because Russian coups tend to happen after Russia loses a war, and quite often the leader who lost gets executed. And so you have a cornered man whose only way out is the nukes, but that’s somehow something he’s going to care about. It’s nonsense, and dangerous nonsense.

You play Russian Roulette whether you fight in Ukraine or not. If you choose not to your just playing with a different gun.

Appeasement didn’t work in the ‘30’s. Looking weak today increases the risks China or Russia oversteps in the future. You even marginal raise the risks of a Russian/Chinese first strike if they think you are too soft to counter.

Playing brinkmanship is just part of the game. It can’t be removed.

"we need to fight this stupid war or we a pussy" this is the stupidest fucking argument in the world, it's responsible for so many deaths, and it's exactly why I don't trust the pro Ukraine people.

Don't uncharitably reframe other people's arguments in a way they would not agree describes what they believe.

The point's less "we need to fight wars all the time", and more "if we give the impression that someone's under our protection, we need to actually back it up or people will think our word's worth nothing".

What word, exactly, did the US give that Ukraine was under their protection? When was this agreed? This is the problem. You people are constantly trying to push the scope of US responsibility, creep it out. And you're so eager for that expansion that you think you're not beholden to actually write those decisions down or make them legible to lesser nations. America can just swoop in on any war it feels like, or not, depending on what God told the President that day.

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We should fight this war because this is at least the third time Russia has annexed or "made independent" territory from another nation under Putin. If something works, why would you not do it again?

The fallacy I keep seeing in this and other similar conversations is the assumption that if Ukraine surrenders everything stops. I don't believe that option is even on the table unless Putin is made to regret committing to this. Hell, Putin's terms for Ukraine's surrender is to pretty much dismantle their military.

At Putin's current rate of expansion, it will take him like five hundred years to conquer Europe. I'm not that worried, despite the hysterical rhetoric about him being a second Hitler on the verge of sweeping all of Europe.

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I did not say that.

Maybe not in so many words, but the line of logic of "we need to show the world that we are maximally willing to engage in war" can excuse literally any level of escalation, and used to reject any effort of diplomacy - which is what you're doing, here, with the by this point very predictable accusation of appeasement, since your history book ended at 1945.

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Appeasement didn’t work in the ‘30’s. Looking weak today increases the risks China or Russia oversteps in the future. You even marginal raise the risks of a Russian/Chinese first strike if they think you are too soft to counter.

Yup. Does the 2022 invasion happen if the West had a more serious response in and after 2014? Depending on what that is, it probably does not. A decade ago it was decided Ukraine was not worth too much. Things were messier then, sure, but only after Putin learns the West's level of commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty does the West decide it actually matters a bit more.

Perhaps Putin still invades thinking the thunder run will be successful before any shift in defense commitments. However, the calculation is very different. The West still does not think that Ukrainian territory and ideas of sovereignty are worth dying for. The West is just paying interest on missed payments in the past to deter further aggression.

Appeasement failed to contain the expanding ambitions of Nazi Germany. Right now, in Eastern Europe, it's NATO that has been expanding its borders while promising the Russians they would not. This metaphor can easily be read the other way!

This is a silly comparison.

A). No countries were militarily conquered

B). NATOs military has dramatically shrunk

This analogy obfuscates much more than it clarifies, unless you're arguing that the methods of Nazi Germany and NATO are similar?

The solution to Russia has nukes is not back down anytime they want something. Then the whole world would be ruled by Russia. A thing worse than nuclear war.

NATO forms a bright line that Russia knows it must never cross. Here is a map of NATO. Russia is encircled and powerless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#/media/File:NATO_32_Members.png

We shouldn't be willing to escalate maximally over every conflict. Quite simply, Russia cares about Ukraine more than the US does.

But take your opinion to its logical conclusion. You'd risk nuclear war to defend Ukraine. What about Georgia? Syria? Trade rights? Why aren't we invading China to stop the Uhygur genocide. Does our inaction prove that genocide is okay? Certainly the Uhygurs will get nukes if we can't protect them.

I enjoy living in a country that is peaceful and prosperous. And yet people are willing to risk nuclear war over a country on the other side of the world that has virtually no strategic value. Furthermore, we are willing to destroy that country in the process and kill a sizeable percentage of its male population. I maintain this is insane and I want no part in it.

Furthermore, we are willing to destroy that country in the process and kill a sizeable percentage of its male population.

The USA is shelling Ukraine?

We are giving Ukraine enough arms to continue the fight instead of helping them negotiate a peace.

Every day, Ukrainian men are being conscripted and forced against their will to fight on the front lines. Many of these will die or be horribly maimed. Without U.S. involvement this would not be possible. This terrible conflict is being cheered on by people in the West who have no skin in the game.

Who's killing those men and are they really unable to stop?

Russia is encircled

I genuinely don't understand this. What are you talking about? Russia has a border with a a couple of NATO countries. Where's the "encirclement"?

and powerless

Russia sucks, West to blame

NATO forms a bright line that Russia knows it must never cross. Here is a map of NATO. Russia is encircled and powerless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#/media/File:NATO_32_Members.png

What on earth is the fear here? Are we seriously still entertaining the idea that the west wants to invade Russia? For what possible reason? NATO doesn't expand by rolling tanks into its neighbor's territory, it expands by offering protection from Russia which does appear fond of the whole rolling tanks in approach.

Most of the pro-Ukraine side believe that Putin is basically a second Hitler, and can only be stopped by military force. And these people set policy for the west. So yes, the west does want to invade Russia. The only reason they don't is because of nukes.

Until he started invading places caring about Russia was something that got you literally laughed at in US politics. And that some people hate him does not at all imply any kind of invasion. There is zero interest in the west to occupy Russia. Get rid of Putin so he stops fucking around in Geopolitics? Sure. But what is the upside to invading and occupying Russia? Why would anyone bother even if it were realistically possible?

Then why the constant talk about appeasement and Hitler, if not to get people psychologically ready for a war?

The United States does many things that are not rational. The invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. Both were unsuccessful in the long term and huge wastes of resources. But, nevertheless, the Americans reasoned themselves into doing these things. The rhetoric and rationale is very similar to what the pro Ukraine brigade says nowadays. The Taliban and Saddam are monsters, basically Hitler. America needs to project an image of strength. You can't negotiate with Hitlers. A message needs to be sent to potential state sponsors of terrorism/Hitler. What are you, a pussy?

Maybe it will happen, maybe not. Maybe it won't go as far as hot war, maybe it will. But, when I see so many people calling here and elsewhere for dramatic escalation, saying Putin is the next Hitler, calling any move for de-escalation "appeasement", drawing maps of a partitioned Russia, yes, I think the west wants war with Russia. Even knowing it would be stupid.

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The reason I bring up Russia's weakness is that it is farcical that they will attack Germany, Poland, Estonia, or other NATO countries.

This is why being anti-war is hard. Every time I bring up my anti-war stance, a bunch of people appear in my replies accusing me of being pro-Russia. I am not justifying Russia's reasons for fighting. Russia is wrong.

  1. Russia is at fault for the Ukraine War

  2. Russia does not present a compelling alternative to Western hegemony. The West is best.

  3. Putin's justifications of the war are not valid

All of these are true, and yet the war should be ended immediately on practical grounds.

yet the war should be ended

The passive voice here is the problem. If I am doing British politics (and I am, as a British citizen posting on a political forum during an election campaign) then "the war should be ended" is either irrelevant cant, or a way of saying "A coalition of civilized countries including the UK should end the war" while dodging the question of how. If NATO actually wanted to end the war without relying on Russia or Ukraine's willingness to act against their perceived self-interest to help us, the fastest way to do so would be to provide Ukraine with sufficient support to win it.

As far as I can see 90% of the people saying "the war should be ended" mean "the civilized world, led by the US, should jawbone Ukraine into surrendering to Russia*". The practical consequences of this probably include the enslavement, expulsion, or extermination of the Ukrainian people (which of these being largely down to the whims of a madman), so how the jawboning is supposed to work is left as an exercise to the reader. I would not wish to speculate how many of the people on the centre and left saying "the war should be ended" would still be willing to say so if they thought about what they were actually saying. I am reasonably comfortable that the pro-Putin right know exactly what they are doing.

  • A negotiated peace which leaves Ukraine less defensible than it was in 2022 is unconditional surrender by salami slicing, given Russia's disinclination to abide be previous negotiated agreements to respect Ukrainian sovereignty. There seems to be a broad agreement that "Ukrainian neutrality" - i.e. a ban on the kind of security co-operation with the civilized world that made Ukraine defensible in 2022 - will be a necessary part of any negotiated peace that Russia could accept.

It's just not really reasonable to call people who support the defense of a nation "pro war". If someone attacks me after making it clear they want to kill me I am not pro-fighting when I defend myself. People who support me defending myself are not pro-fighting. It's unreasonable to demand I or the people supporting me should allow the person attacking me to merely severe a limb or two despite them at no point actually making any sign they'd stop after doing so. There is precisely one pro-war faction and it's the one that started the war and could end it at any time, attempting to frame it otherwise is an absurdity.

And yes, we do have some obligation here, Ukraine get rid of its nuclear capabilities under the promise that this would not be allowed to happen. Where Ukraine goes so does nuclear non-proliferation and frankly and kind of mantle of justice.

Victory at any cost is a pro-war position. Throwing out all cost/benefit calculations because Russia started it is unreasonable.

At least spell out what you wouldn't be willing to do to reclaim Ukrainian territory.

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NATO is just an arbitrary line you are drawing right now because it excludes Ukraine. The rest you are just asking questions.

I can just as easily say would you risks nuclear war over Estonia. Population 1.3 million? That’s stupid to cause millions to die in nuclear war.

There is of course no obvious line for brinkmanship.

You pick NATO. I point to The Budapest Memorandum. So yes we have treaty obligations with Ukraine.

Ukraine of course is white. Which does count for something in US discourse.

Ukraine also has strategic reasons it’s easier to defend than waiting for the brinkmanship to occur somewhere else.

The larger population means they have more meat to throw at the problem. Drawing the line at Ukraine would mean that the next line is probably something like the Baltics. Where you would need to put German and American soldiers at risks versus Ukrainians. And if you let Russia have Ukraine then you enlarge their army as Ukrainian meat becomes Russian meat to build their army.

So yes Ukraine has a lot of strategic reasons to pick Ukraine for brinkmanship versus waiting.

My opinion is that yes Ukraine is the right place to fight Russia. Russia would take all of Europe if they could. History tells us that.

My big issue is you act like these things are obvious. But they are not obvious. And if we let Ukraine fall in 2022 there is a strong chance a test in the Baltics would come. And my guess when that day comes you would make the same argument. Russia wants the Baltics more and we should have never let them into NATO.

Maybe we should take a step back. What, exactly, is your position?

Do you want U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine? That's what I am calling "insane".

For myself, I've been extremely consistent in calling for a negotiated peace with Russia. In exchange for peace, I am willing to concede to Russia the territory they have already captured.

What downsides are you willing to accept? What personal sacrifices are you willing to make? Would you die for Ukraine? Sorry for asking so many questions, but your position seems so vague I can't argue against or for it.

Strawman. Russia isn’t offering peace for the territory they have already captured.

You either need to surrender likely all of Ukraine and hope Russia doesn’t want more or you need to escalate to deescalate.

To do that you need better weapons for Ukraine. Allowing strikes on military targets in Russia (staging grounds etc). Potentially formalizing western advisers and logistics. I would consider Polish/French troops in defensive operations. Both have shown some willingness.

I think those steps are necessary to minimize an exchange of nuclear weapons. It asserts the borders don’t change rules of the post-war era. Which limits nations like Estonia, Taiwan, Poland, Saudis, even Iran from going nuclear.

NATO forms a bright line that Russia knows it must never cross. Here is a map of NATO. Russia is encircled and powerless

I do not believe "encircled" means what you think it means. Without attacking NATO, Russia can move south through Georgia ("seeking" is not membership), Armenia, and Azerbaijan and keep going if it feels like getting into a conflict with Iran. And then there's that huge area of Russia not shown, which borders on other non-NATO countries. They could plow through the -stans to India, or go after Mongolia and China. No NATO there.

Azerbaijan is a Turkish client state, and NATO didn't exactly complain about Turkey helping Azerbaijan invade Artsakh in violation of a ceasefire nominally enforced by Russian peacekeepers and ethnically cleanse the territory.

If I am a paranoid Russian, I consider Azerbaijan part of NATO's encirclement of Russia.

If I am a paranoid Russian, I consider Azerbaijan part of NATO's encirclement of Russia.

As the story goes, you can consider a tail a leg but that don't make it so. Russia invading Azerbaijan does not trigger Article 5.

Where does this model of Russia even come from? The Ukrainian conflict has not exactly been a stunning success for Russia.

Now they're attacking India and China?

The whole Ukraine War rests on the faulty premise that Russia is so strong they'll invade Poland India if we don't stop them, but so weak that one more round of funding to Ukraine will win the war.

Personally, I don't really care as long as I'm not forced to participate. I'd especially appreciate it if more pro-war people actually volunteered for the Ukrainian military, or least the US one.

I believe the point is that it seems strange to call Russia "encircled" by NATO once you zoom the map out a bit.

With enough flexibility on a spherical planet, every region arguably encircles its inverse!

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If the government of Israel either were told, or said, there will be a state of Palestine, and we will live peacefully side by side, the fighting would stop today. These are basic facts, basic matters of truth that if we actually spoke them, if we actually treated each other like grown-ups we would resolve to seem to be these insurmountable crises. They're not at all insurmountable, they just require a measure of truth.

Yeah, the fighting would stop today, but then resume as soon as the newly empower Hamas government rebuilt its capacity to lob rockets into Israel. I enjoy listening to Sachs on podcasts, but the consistency with which he believes that shithole countries and murderous Islamists just need a nice little nudge in the right direction is absurd and fails to predict much of anything about the world. Yeah, fighting an endless holy war sucks for Israel and is a suboptimal outcome, but the alternative is not actually just recognizing a nice Palestinian neighbor.

Are there any major issues where Sachs basic position isn't the US sucks and should stop being such meanies? I did a cursory search and these are what I find:

  • China should gain power and dismantle US hegemony. Also, everyone should stop being such jerks to them about the Uyghurs.
  • The US shouldn't intervene in Syria.
  • Venezuela sucks because of American sanctions.
  • Covid was a US government conspiracy.
  • The US is pretty much solely to blame for Ukraine.

I even partially agree with some of these, but when someone's solution to everything is anti-American, it might be best to just consider them anti-American and respond accordingly.

The simple fact is that this guy is a soup-to-nuts career academic.

Which means he's basically been an anon posting on a very expensive board for years and has sat in the stew of his own filth echo chamber without interruption.

Although N.N. Taleb is increasingly crazy, his concept about Skin In The Game is a good one. Career academics who never ventured outside of those ivory towers should be treated with great suspicion. They live in a land of make believe ideas.

Some policies are so pollyannaish I can hardly believe people considered them. When I remember that, despite huge increases, only so many people have a college degree it makes more sense.

Yeah, if you could just slice off the bottom half of the population in terms of agreeableness and so on I'm sure plenty of ideas like "don't punish criminals" and "unilaterally disarm and hope for the best" might work better.

Sacks is a VC, not an academic.

Never mind, the positions and the last name had me thinking of David Sacks.

JS: If the government of Israel either were told, or said, there will be a state of Palestine, and we will live peacefully side by side, the fighting would stop today. These are basic facts, basic matters of truth that if we actually spoke them, if we actually treated each other like grown-ups we would resolve to seem to be these insurmountable crises. They're not at all insurmountable, they just require a measure of truth.

Secular liberals have to believe this sort of thing. Because they, correctly, believe that the most likely solution that people will reach if they decide there's irreconcilable differences is ethnic cleansing.

That in no way makes it true though.

I have long believed that there is no two-state solution, there's only a one-state solution, and actually two different one-state solutions depending on which sides gets to expel the other.

Because they, correctly, believe that the most likely solution that people will reach if they decide there's irreconcilable differences is ethnic cleansing.

No, it's worse than this. They genuinely don't believe in irreconcilable differences. They honestly believe it's all mistake theory, and that they are right and everyone will eventually work their way around to their way of thinking. Whig history is a hell of a drug.

Question:

Did Protestants and Catholics have irreconcilable differences in Europe?

Yes. Obviously.

Europeans massacred each other endlessly due to those irreconcilable differences for 120+ years, huge proportions of the Europe perished in the wars of religion. A fucking third of Germany died during the thirty years war, a conflict wholly centered around these irreconcilable religious differences.

They just got tired of killing each other and in a fit of exhaustion threw together a kludge called “liberalism” which has gone from being thrown together slapdashedly to being a relatively solid institutional social technology and is now currently being held together by duct tape and saliva.

Yes. They didn't kill each other for sport.

Well, considering Catholics did stop selling indulgences, I'd say at least some of their differences were reconciled. Of course, the major difference, who should be in charge, was not.

I just don’t see either war actually stopping just because we said so. Most especially with Israel. Israel is much more likely to ramp up attacks on Palestinians if a state is announced because they understand that this is their last chance to do something about the issue before the rest of the world decides whether or not to defend Palestine. They know a state means weapons pointing at them and they won’t have it. TBH if think the bombings if Rafa are about European states recognizing Palestine as a show of resolve— if Palestine is recognized then we have to neutralize it.

Israel is much more likely to ramp up attacks on Palestinians if a state is announced because they understand that this is their last chance to do something about the issue before the rest of the world decides whether or not to defend Palestine. They know a state means weapons pointing at them and they won’t have it

I think you're not completely wrong, but "statehood" is a whole gamut that manifests in a variety of ways in different circumstances. To some, I'm sure statehood means internationally-defined borders, but this isn't universally given: to use that standard, neither Taiwan nor South Korea have statehood. Others might suggest it means the right to raise its own military to defend those borders, but there are plenty of non-militarized small states (how many legions does Monaco wield?). Or the right to engage in international trade, but there are plenty of sanctions and de-facto blockades across the world, and no shortage of fortified walls and fences. Or some degree of popular sovereignty, but there is no global shortage of despots.

To me, at least, the notion of statehood also comes with responsibility both to one's people and in the scope of international relations. It means preserving a monopoly on the use of force -- if unsanctioned militias in Texas started shelling Ciudad Juárez, we'd expect the US government to respond with force, not shrug and tell Mexico to deal with it. It means providing for one's people -- international aid is acceptable in the short term, but is expected to be a stepping stone to economic independence, not an inter-generational affair. It means not invading one's neighbors (with some caveats for "just war"), and following the laws of war when violence is truly necessary.

It seems that, to a large extent separably, Gaza (and to a slightly lesser degree, the West Bank) have de facto statehood: there are borders. There is some degree of law enforcement. To be clear, that statehood is often failed statehood: there doesn't seem to be a monopoly on violence, especially across its borders. And to a large extent, it seems to me that the broader international community, largely in the name of "aid" props up this failed state and makes things palatable enough for its residents to maintain the status quo. It seems to me (perhaps as I've gotten older) that indefinite carrots often just enable bad behavior, and that long-term gain may require some amount of shorter-term pain: high unemployment (I've generally seen numbers close to 50% pre-war) seems like a fertile breeding ground for fanaticism in ways that might be less appealing when there's a sense that there really is something to lose -- and my observation there isn't unique to Palestine, either.

Now, I'm hardly in a place to dictate Israel's foreign policy, but I think it would at least be interesting to consider a unilateral recognition of a state of Palestine as an open-ended starting point for peace negotiations. Sure, it gives something to Palestinians (most directly, it would probably require defined borders in the West Bank), but it also gives them a platform to expect things in return: they could feasibly dictate that such a state would be non-militarized in exchange for security guarantees, demand that firing weapons across its borders be treated as a criminal action (extradition?), and provide a roadmap to gradually removing blockades in exchange for extended periods of peace. I'm not sure that would actually improve the situation given the religious fanaticism at play, but it seems like it would provide something to point to as a reasonable defined goal to point to, although I'd expect at least some criticism along the lines of "Bantustan."

Gaza and West Bank to my mind are not states in any greater sense than native reservations in the USA are. And for me the three things I think would work definitively to define a state are things like a security force of some sort for defense purposes (which Israel will never allow) a border that it controls, and it’s own diplomatic and trade policies. By my estimate it has none of this and is thus really a Palestinian reservation with no more nationhood than the Lakota reservations that are making a big show of banning Noem from their lands. If it came down to it, a few Lakota police could not hope to actually keep her from entering, walking around anywhere she pleases and piss on the chief’s house.

Cuba during the Cuba missile crisis lacked 2/3 of your things that define a state. Did Cuba lack statehood?

Indeed, most states at war end up losing those things when they start losing the war. Which is what Gaza is doing. Its a state that is losing a war where it was the initial aggressor.

Gaza and West Bank to my mind are not states in any greater sense than native reservations in the USA are.

Native Americans are American citizens who can live anywhere in the US and vote in federal elections. There are no more boomers and sooners that are taking over their lands. I'd say their current status is better than that of Palestinians.

Imagine that the US started giving more local authority to reservations and then the reservations started bombing the US. What do you think would be the reaction by the US?

We all know what the US reaction was: ethnic cleansing, genocide and finally, when the threat has been permanently pacified, land acknowledgment statements.

They were shunted onto largely shitty land and democracy is irrelevant since at 2% of the population they don’t have any real power. Palestinians were able to travel freely into Israel until they started killing large number of civilians in terror attacks.

Indians can, and routinely do, engage with the broader U.S. economy. They’re certainly poorer than average, but I’m not sure they’re poorer than typical deep-rural whites. There are Indians living in New York, LA, DC, working with no special permit.

And for me the three things I think would work definitively to define a state are things like a security force of some sort for defense purposes (which Israel will never allow), a border that it controls, and its own diplomatic and trade policies.

Are Panama and Costa Rica not states? They have abolished their respective militaries.

According to Wikipedia, the UN's definition is:

The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications:

  • a permanent population;

  • a defined territory;

  • government; and

  • capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

Jeffrey Sachs is an economist. Why should I regard his opinion on international relations or diplomacy? He doesn't even make much of an argument; he just sort of assumes, as many people do, that the US has the ability to dictate terms to people.

it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA

I can't help but feel like Russia might have had something to do with it.

he just sort of assumes, as many people do, that the US has the ability to dictate terms to people.

It's always interesting to see how some of the people most critical of American hegemony believe in it the most. They take for granted that , if it so chose, it could rid itself of all its problems

The hawks at least believe they're going to have to crack a few skulls to make people obey because others have agency.

Could we not turn this thread into /r/Tucker?

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More effort than this, please.

God forbid a topical post on the CW issues of the day.

I don't understand the objection to posting and discussing hours-long interviews posted by a major journalist. Argument to moderation? But it seems proportional to me to have a bias towards sources which are disseminating the most information. You could similarly point out that 100% of themotte.org content is discussed on the internet, why not have an in-person or telephone portion? Because that's the medium that works.

I'm just not crazy about it becoming a regular thing. If Tucker becomes an important part of the frame everything gets discussed in this thread, this place is going to go down hill, fast.

Personally, I don't mind the occasional post that's actually topical wedged between the endless word walls about San Francisco city council zoning proposals that occupy 80% of our timeline (which is not that busy these days anyway, just sayin)

I'm going to post things I find interesting, you're welcome to keep your thoughts to yourself if you don't like it.

Or you could just make your own themed thread for talking about Tucker. Meanwhile, I'm 'going to post things' I'm thinking

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Downvote, collapse the thread and move on.

Didn't we just have a bunch of complaints about the lack of movement and discussion in the main threads?

Yes, I was bitchin about it last week and made a big list of things nobody had talked about

I agree with Sachs general sentiment that the US government has deceived the people far too much with disastrous consequences.

I'm not sure I buy Sach's argument that if we "told the truth" about Ukraine or Israel there would be no war. Maybe less US intervention or involvement. Based on my limited knowledge and understanding maybe Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine to try to create proxy barrier, but Israel I doubt there could ever be a peaceful 2 state solution. Pretty sure Israel has tried multiple times throughout it's history to do exactly that and each time it was rejected by the Palestinians.

There is a question to be considered about if a government should actually tell the citizens 100% of the truth. It's easy to say we should always be truthful as a matter of principle, but there is a good reason lying exists. Most people lie, or at least only tell the partial truth, to people close to them all the time, and sometimes that lying is done with good intentions. But you know what they say about good intentions.

Government deception of recent times have done a tremendous net negative to the population, but is that because they didn't tell the truth or because they didn't tell the truth about the wrong things? Could there exist information where lying about it or not releasing it would be to the benefit of the people of the country? One example could be that a nation is engaging in conflict with another nation and lies to its own citizens to prevent crucial information from being passed on to its adversaries. Is lying to the population acceptable in times of war or conflict? And the follow-up question, is a nation as powerful as the US ever not in conflict with a nation like China which holds radically different political and cultural views? Should the US allow China to grow even stronger and bigger, or should it engage in economic and political battles to check its growth?

Edit: Edited to replace "lying" with "deception" when appropriate.

I agree with Sachs general sentiment that the US government has lied to the people far too much with disastrous consequences.

When has the US government lied about foreign policy in the last decade or so? The last major incident I can think of was the runup to the Iraq war, but that was an exception that proves the rule.

Are you just using "lying" here as a stand-in for "position I disagree with" or "unrealistically rosy assessment"?

I'm going to use the definition from John Mearsheimer's 'Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics'

There are actual technical lies, where a person makes a statement they know is false while hoping others believe it to be true. But there are also situations where you disingenuously arrange facts to tell a fictitious story to imply something is true when you know the implied conclusion is not true. He also points out spinning, where "a person telling a story emphasizes certain facts and links them together in ways that play to his advantage, while, at the same time, downplaying or ignoring inconvenient facts" and concealment, "which involves withholding information that might undermine or weaken one’s position."

What's related about all three is that the goal is deception - essentially the goal is to prevent the other party from knowing the full truth. Spinning and concealment are far more common, but the end of goal of deception is the same.

Historically speaking, the US government has used lies in matters of foreign policy. Well-known historical examples:

  1. Iraq, as you point out
  2. WWII - Greer incident
  3. Vietnam - Gulf of Tonkin
  4. Iran-Contra

In more recent times, you can find no shortage of critics arguing the presidents have lied about matters of foreign policy:

The more recent the event in question, the less likely we are to know if there was a lie or not. Whether these specific examples are actually lies or fabrications from critics I'm not really going to dive into. But it's easy to find critics arguing there have been lies.

Mearsheimer also points out that he had difficulty finding examples of international lying between states compared to governments lying to their own people. He argues that governments are more likely to lie to their own citizens than to other states on matters of foreign policy. It is difficult for countries to lie to one another because there is not a lot of trust between them, especially when it is in regard to security. It's far easier to lie to your own citizens because there is more trust between governments and their citizens than between governments that are enemies of each other.

In his own words:

Furthermore, leaders appear to be more likely to lie to their own people about foreign policy issues than to other countries. That certainly seems to be true for democracies that pursue ambitious foreign policies and are inclined to initiate wars of choice, i.e., when there is not a clear and imminent danger to a country’s vital interests that can only be dealt with by force. Of course, that description fits the United States over the past seventy years, and, not surprisingly, American presidents have told their fellow citizens a number of important lies about foreign policy matters over those seven decades.

So when it comes to evaluating recent US actions on matters of foreign, we really have to ask ourselves and analyze what the intention was. Were they in the interest of the American people, or was it something else, like drumming up support for an election, or selfish monetary interests, or appeasing just a specific lobby group? I don't see governments ever giving up the option to lie to their citizens especially on matters of foreign policy, because of its strategic utility. It seems public reaction to these lies depends on the end result. If the outcome of telling the lie is good, the leader gets a free pass with little to no consequence. That's why Vietnam is heavily criticized while WWII is seen in a positive light. My current perception is that the outcome of recent foreign policy actions of the US government has largely been negative with little benefit for the American people, and those have largely been justified via lies and deception.

This is a pretty long, thought out comment. Thank you for engaging.

I'm familiar with Mearsheimer's work. I've argued against the man's perception of "Russia invading Ukraine is entirely the USA's fault" and was exposed by proxy to his stuff on lying.

Conflating "lying" with "spinning" is a big old motte and bailey. When you accuse someone (or an institution) of lying, that's a quite aggressive claim of something that's clearly wrong. Like 1984's "we've always been at war with Eastasia" sort of thing. Bush and Powell lying about Iraqi WMD's was a good example here, as it became clear after the fact that they were pulling stuff out of their asses, and it served as a major part of plunging us into a pointless war. Spinning, by contrast, is something that everyone does all the time. You can accuse the government of spinning facts all you want, and you'd be 100% correct, but you didn't do that, likely because you knew it lacked the same punch as an accusation of "lying".

Your examples given in the last two decades amount to very little. The link on Biden came in the runup to the Ukraine war, when a lot of people thought the US was needlessly saber-rattling by saying Russia would invade. Of course, Russia did invade a few weeks after that article was published. Other than that, it gives an example of a US strike in Afghanistan which it claimed was legitimate until the NYT wrote some articles, and then it said "oh, maybe not". The examples on Trump are likewise lacking. Yeah, he presented himself as a peace president while actively throwing a bit of gasoline on some international fires, but again that's pretty mild. The stuff on Obama is just some spinning of the benefits of the Iran Nuclear Deal. Again, calling it "spin" is fine, but I wouldn't call any of those "lies".

The more recent the event in question, the less likely we are to know if there was a lie or not.

Mearsheimer's work came out in 2011 and he sticks mostly to examples that took decades to find the truth of the matter because it's a bad look for a government to be caught lying in the technical definition of a lie. Iraq is his most recent prominent example in his book and that's because that was such a tremendous fuck up. Do you think the government is going to release information that sheds light on recent events anytime soon unless it helps them push an agenda or policy and is so far removed from the party in power to resolve them of any legitimate criticism that would follow?

And furthermore, governments are now more sophisticated in how they propagate information to the population. Proving someone told a lie is extremely difficult because the defendant in question can always claim they thought they were telling the truth and just had the wrong facts. You'd need to be a certain level of incompetence to have a documented recording of you admitting you know something was a lie.

You can accuse the government of spinning facts all you want, and you'd be 100% correct, but you didn't do that, likely because you knew it lacked the same punch as an accusation of "lying".

No, I didn't. After reading your comment I'll acknowledge I just had poor logic and was not using the word "lying" in a strict, legal-lawyer-like definition. In my head I went the opposite of truth is lies. The government is not telling the truth, therefore they are lying. I'll concede this is a technical got-ya that I'm not ready to defend because I'm mixing a lot of sentiments in that statement I made. In recent years I think the government lied about Covid, they're lying about the state of the economy to the people by saying it's better than it is with tactics such as redefining how inflation is measured, they perpetuate lies such as commemorating George Floyd and playing defense for the BLM movement, they lied about the Trump Russia collusion. You asked specifically for foreign policy examples and I don't consider myself particularly knowledgeable on matters of foreign policy.

Your examples given in the last two decades amount to very little.

That was me literally searching on Google and just copy-pasting the 1st example I got for each president. You asked for examples of lies in regard to policy, I did provide and then you dismiss some of them as just saying those are "mild". Are you looking specifically for a fully exhaustive list of other examples that was as disastrous as Iraq? The government is never going to fuck up on a level of Iraq ever again if they have half a brain. As much as people like to fling shit about our politicians as being incompetent idiots they're not actual literal idiots and most of them have higher IQ than the average population. They're also skilled with words and framing which is why many people find politicians to be slimy weasels.

Look, I appreciate you helping me better refine my position with more accurate words, but at this point we are just talking about technical definitions and I'm not really interested in having that conversation any further, especially since you reframed it specifically in the context of foreign policy and then dismiss some examples of actual lies as "mild". I'll edit my comment to say "deception" instead of lies. Happy? I don't think it substantially changes the core of my argument one way or the other. I'm still going to choose to believe the government is lying to the people and that we won't know the truth on many of these topics until decades later.

Bush and Powell weren’t lying about WMDs. They honestly believed they were there.

Was there a bunch of motivated reasoning and shoddy analysis of poor evidence that got them (and many others) to hold those beliefs? Yes.

The US intel community failed to resist “spin” on various reports and assessments, but it was basically taken for granted that Saddam had had a WMD program before and still was pursuing one in 2003. There wasn’t definitive evidence that he didn’t, and there was crappy evidence that he did. Motivated reasoning and the emotional environment after 9/11 did the rest.

Just offhand, government officials bragged publicly about lying to Trump in order to get away with disobeying his lawful orders regarding troop deployments. Does that count?

how much work is "within the last decade" doing here? We're currently discussing how government agents routinely break the law with impunity, illegally concealing their actions and deliberations from federal record-keeping, and have been for decades. To the extent that these deliberate attempts to keep the public in the dark fail, they usually take years to fail, and more years for the failures to become general knowledge. It's entirely possible that so long as you maintain a "within the last decade" standard, you can ignore an entirely arbitrary amount of malfeasance indefinitely. In fact, that conversation is itself about an example of the government lying to the public about an extremely important matter, in order to cover up their own involvement!

How do you disambiguate "unrealistically rosy assessment" from "lie"? Take Afghanistan, which started about two and a half decades ago. Were the twenty years of official pronouncements about that conflict "a lie", or were they "unrealistically rosy assessments"? Take the pullout specifically, which was less than a decade ago; no one has actually explained how such a clusterfuck occurred, or who was actually responsible for it. We have every reason to believe that particular disaster was the fault of specific actions taken by specific people, and those actions and people should be readily identifiable through the reams of paperwork the commands in question generate. And yet, nothing. It's just a thing that sorta happened, no idea why, no idea who, pay no attention, move along. Is the claim that the pullout wasn't really anyone's fault a lie? If not, why not?

Is Fauci and his underlings covering up the evidence of a lab leak a lie? If not, why not? Is the claim that six feet of separation or mask mandates or the safety and efficacy of vaccines being a matter of settled science a lie? If not, why not?

And this isn't even getting into lies laundered through private entities with the tacit support of the government, which in my view are still government lies. Does none of this register to you?

Trump's underlings lying to him to avoid implementing orders they didn't like is a clear example of insubordination, but the comment I quoted was specifically about the US government lying to the American people.

We can go to two decades if you like, but I don't think it changes much. It became clear within a few years that Bush's claims of Iraqi WMDs were BS. Nothing since really comes close to that.

I'm not sure what parts of the Afghan pullout would be classified as lies. It was handled about as well is it could have been, with 2 exceptions: 1) the Pentagon predicted it would take months for the Afghan government to fall instead of days, and 2) that one suicide bombing that occurred. #1 was pretty clearly not a lie since it's quite hard to gauge peoples' willingness to fight. The Pentagon overestimated it Afghanistan, and then underestimated it in Ukraine a few months later. Putin also misjudged it in that case. It's a tough thing to get right. Importantly, nothing about the big picture in Afghanistan was ever really hidden from the public. Some officials or generals would come out from time to time and make statements claiming "it's getting better, trust us", but anyone could look at the evidence and see it clearly wasn't. The NYT and other news organizations had a slow but steady drumbeat explaining how bad things were.

Most government lies are laundered through various black boxes of plausible deniability. I believe the biggest problem the government is facing right now is that trust in institutions has (rightfully) fallen so low that wary citizens are starting to look at any government accounting as plausibly deniable bullshit.

Could there exist information where lying about it or not releasing it would be to the benefit of the people of the country?

Lying and not releasing it are very different things.

Yes, but the end goal is deception. Lies in regard to foreign policy seem to be held to a different level of standard than lies on domestic policy or lies in general.

I'm not sure I buy Sach's argument that if we "told the truth" about Ukraine or Israel there would be no war. Maybe less US intervention or involvement. Based on my limited knowledge and understanding maybe Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine to try to create proxy barrier, but Israel I doubt there could ever be a peaceful 2 state solution.

This is my take as well. I was surprised he mentioned Israel, because the conversation had been elsewhere. Some partition of Ukraine seems inevitable now, but Israel will fight to the last.

There is a question to be considered about if a government should actually tell the citizens 100% of the truth. It's easy to say we should always be truthful as a matter of principle, but there is a good reason lying exists.

Sachs' version of tell the truth isn't reveal all secrets, but to be honest about our past dealings and future intentions. In this he bemoans the obvious duplicity of western promises to the Soviet Union. Furthermore it's about public health, too. If you're going to tell me there's a good reason lying exists when it comes to the government telling me about public health, then I don't want to hear it. Honestly I barely read the rest of your post because it's the same arguments that got us here.

Less lying. A whole lot less lying. From everyone, especially if you think it's for the common good, I don't believe you and don't want to hear it.

As for China, the worst thing Nixon did was open China. The worst thing Clinton did was let them in WTO. Now we can't build ships for our navy any more than we can clothe ourselves, or furnish our homes, and everything is imported from elsewhere. But I'm not going to let the specter of the Orient let the lying fedgov off the hook for their lying ways.

On the matter of public health there aren't any strong arguments I've seen in support that those lies that benefited the public on the matters of public health. Maybe someone could steelman their position because I can't think of any. I was thinking more in terms of geopolitical conflicts between nations.

Sachs' version of tell the truth isn't reveal all secrets, but to be honest about our past dealings and future intentions.

This better clarifies his position and I am in general agreement with that approach.

Honestly I barely read the rest of your post because it's the same arguments that got us here.

Honestly you don't have to mention this. I'm just asking questions to facilitate discussion and to better understand why governments behave the way they do, and if there is actually any value in doing so. You might not want to hear the reason, but I do, and I'm sure others do as well. Isn't that the point of this forum? To shed light and try to understand the opposition? Maybe there actually is some value in what they have to say. If not, then it better equips you (or anybody else reading) being able to point out the flaws in their reasoning.

I get your frustration, I really do. The government's fearmongering of and lies regarding Covid was an absolute disaster and I still feel the ramifications today. I feel like it robbed me of 4 years of my life, and that my life is worse today than it was at the start of 2020. But I still want to understand the line of reasoning and support of government lies (not necessarily of the response to Covid, but in general).

To fool your enemies, you must first fool your friends - this is a proverb for a reason. Now you may personally disagree with this as a matter of principle and refuse to engage with such an idea, but you cannot deny the utility it has. I think one could make a strong argument in support of such tactics in times of war. If one agrees with the argument, then it goes to reason there is some line where the cost to benefit justifies or denies it's usage. I don't think refusing to acknowledge its utility just because it can then lead to a discussion of where and when its justified is appropriate because most of the world is not black and white and most behavior of people isn't black and white.

Less lying. A whole lot less lying. From everyone, especially if you think it's for the common good, I don't believe you and don't want to hear it.

I'm trying to recall who said it but the general idea is that the most dangerous type of people who believe they are doing something for the good of humanity. I think there are people who would vote for or be in support of governments lying to the population if they believed it was for the common good. We see people defending the government's response to Covid to this day. Getting mad at these people won't get them to change their minds. The ones that do are just as susceptible to shifting their feelings back with an equally emotional response from the other side. I seek to hone my arguments so that I can at least convince those who are willing to listen.

But I'm not going to let the specter of the Orient let the lying fedgov off the hook for their lying ways.

Sure, let's hold the government accountable for their past actions. But we live in the reality we live in. What would be the best approach to China now? Personally, I think the US could benefit from not playing world police for a decade and just focusing on solving our internal problems. But what are the potential consequences of that?

My belief is that the world can only be mostly peaceful if there is a significantly powerful force that is so powerful that it makes it not worth it for a foreign nation to cause war. In that case, I'd rather that force be the US and not China. The reason we don't have wide-scale World War 1 and 2 style conflicts anymore is because of mutually assured destruction and the fact that most of the world is now aligned with US and US interests and values. But if human history teaches us anything, it's that if someone can bully someone else out of their resources, they will do that. On a micro-scale, the only reason we don't have large portions of the population stealing from each other is because society (with the use of physical force such as police) keeps us in check. As soon as we started defunding police crime went up. I believe the same applies to larger scales. Remove the US-aligned hegemony and we will start to see more international conflicts. This is a belief I haven't really honed, so I'm open to criticism and a better alternative theory regarding minimizing international conflicts.

I'm trying to recall who said it but the general idea is that the most dangerous type of people who believe they are doing something for the good of humanity.

C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

What are you going to do about international conflicts on which the USA plays a role at causing? Surely, you would want USA to dissuade other countries from causing trouble but be critical when USA itself causes trouble?

Do you think, we should see all the warmongering USA is responsible both in wars and including coups, funding extremist rebels as in Syria, as something that shouldn't be challenged and an acceptable sacrifice for the greater good? Because this way of thinking is exploitable and will lead to more bad behavior by the warmongering, CIA coups parts of USA.

Including those who deliberately might want conflict with other great powers so that they can be defeated and there would be American hegemony over them. If MAD is part of world peace, then that MAD includes the existence of rival powers too. Now, I don't think the way is to turn a blind eye to China, etc, but neither is to treat the American foreign policy establishment as the good guys.

I think in your model of world peace, you should not neglect to consider how American imperialist deeds, which include funding their own color revolutions/rebels should be restrained, because they actually have been the more warmongering active player around the globe.

Of course, it is also legitimate to treat the warmongering and threat of more, by non American powers as a problem.

Some part of the previous peace, relates to a different more friendly attitute of American foreign policy towards countries like Russia and China. And moreover, the fact that China was weaker, growing and not perceived as a threat while China it self also became more brazen. The Ukraine issue has been constantly debated, but certainly the Russians did have their own aggressive moves in Ukraine, in addition to the oust of their guy there from a western backed coup (with people like McCain openly supporting it). It seems to me that both the USA and the Chinese and Russians became more aggressive.

An aggressive American world dominance hegemonist perspective that seeks to dismember rival powers like Russia and China and seeks their submission as countries is itself war causing, and possibly ww3 causing. If there weren't nukes, it might have lead us there already. But international peace would require a general deescalation, not just from the USA, of course.

Sure, these are good points you bring up to criticize America, but what is the better alternative? When we consider long periods of peace, it's accomplished under a hegemony of powerful nations aligned in goals/culture or a singular empire.

I'm not defending US in all of its actions and agree there is plenty to criticize in what they have done on the global scale. But I don't think any of these things really addresses the core of my argument. The mutually assured destruction is an alternative to relative peace without needing global hegemony and even then plenty of conflict was done via proxies AKA the Cold War. It prevented full-scale war between the US and the Soviet Union. Personally, I think peace achieved via MAD is worse than peace achieved via a global hegemony. For all the wars that have existed from 1945 to today, in comparison to eras throughout human history, we exist in a relatively peaceful era.

Indeed, we should strive to be vigilant and not use this line of argument to just absolve the USA of what it has done, especially when it has negative outcomes. At the same time, it doesn't mean we shouldn't aim to preserve a powerful global presence. The best argument against focusing on that currently is that America has enough domestic problems to deal with. But it doesn't mean we should abandon our position either.

When we look at US-caused international conflicts, we have to consider, whether the primary purpose is to maintain and grow the American hegemony in service of maintaining global peace, or if that is being used as an excuse with some other primary motive in mind (fund the military-industrial complex, drum up support for an upcoming election, etc.). If the former, I think that would warrant a legitimate criticism about the pitfalls of relative peace achieved through this method and find ways to account for it. But if the latter, that's not really a criticism of the model. People will always use existing values and models to justify whatever they want to do, but it doesn't mean that it's wrong.

What do you think would be a better path to a more peaceful world, and what can be done to maintain it?

Edit: Not a response to you directly, more of my thoughts concerning people who say the US spends too much on the military and then act like we would have world peace if America just drastically cut its military budget. I think there is legitimate criticism to be had of the military-industrial complex to take into consideration, but I also feel like many people with that sentiment take this era of relative peace for granted. Do they not read history? Do they not consider human nature?

Yes, America has instigated wars with little to no benefit and should be rightly criticized. But this does not mean the military is useless or that having a military presence globally is a strictly negative thing. I acknowledge that if I wasn't an American and a foreigner, I would have reason to want to break the American-led global hegemony, especially if I was for example Chinese. But I'm an American, and I am more favorable to a world under American values than a world under Russian values or a world under Chinese values. I'm not so naive to believe that you can have hundreds of relatively equally powerful countries acting independently peacefully. What would stop one country from just using force to take the resources of another? Sanctions? Their "image"? Propaganda on the citizens to make them not want to fight? You only need a few people to maintain an army that can suppress people. These things have to be backed up by military force otherwise it's futile.

I am for maximizing human potential and development, and the countries that aligned with American values post-WWII saw tremendous economic growth and development. Now one could make arguments about how countries that didn't had their growth artificially restricted by American policies against its adversaries or how the growth of America and its allies came by extracting value unfairly from its adversaries, but for the person that is born under a richer country, does that really matter? Countries that aligned with the US and adopted positions favorable to the US are far, far better off than those that didn't. Just look at North Korea versus South Korea. If I were born in a foreign nation, I would be extremely grateful if my country chose to lick the boots of the American imperialist ambitions some 50-60 years ago and benefited greatly from it, than if they didn't and my country ended up in poverty instead.

What use is my country's culture and tradition if the average GDP per capita is $1,000 and I have to live as a farmer when it could've had a GDP per capita of $30,000 and my quality of life is vastly superior? Why do so many people leave their countries to try to come to the US if culture should matter more than economic growth and prosperity? I don't particularly care for preserving the culture of every other people in the world, especially when said culture is an active detriment to the growth and development of those people. This doesn't mean I think we should just make all of the world America, just that we shouldn't go out of our way to preserve existing cultures. And just for good measure, I'm going to repeat myself that this doesn't mean America is absolved of all its wrongdoings, or that we should be careful in adopting this perspective without criticism, but I don't see a better alternative that would realistically work without fundamentally changing human nature. I'm going to make this claim - that the world today for the average person is far better due to America taking a global position than it would have been if America chose to stay neutral during WWII and take a far more isolationist approach.

The more America has tried to police the world as the hegemon the weaker America has become. I think prudence is a better path to ensure Pax Americana.

Yes, it seems America has dipped its toes in too many different things that had little benefit, how much of that was really due to the pursuit of expanding/maintaining the American Hegemon versus the selfish interests of actors with different goals?

America currently has enough domestic problems to deal with to be playing world police currently and could likely benefit from taking a step back from the world stage. But in terms of maintaining the Pax Americana, it leaves the question of how long and how likely a foreign bloc could form to dismantle it. I think at this point I made clear my stance is that large-scale conflict is more likely when there is no dominant force than when there is. Maybe some history buff could provide examples otherwise?

I challenged you directly if you think you should excuse blatantly immoral and destructive conduct under the idea that US hegemony is good. It seems to me that you want to do that and are just trying to promote it based on arguing that US hegemony is good actually. But you also say you accept restraint and criticism. And it doesn't seem that you really do in a substantial manner. How should current policy change if it means you accept that there are areas it has acted wrongly.

There are a few problems with this. Which is that destroying other countries and causing civil wars to cause more US hegemony will result in far more devastation.

And part of the peace has been because of existence of other powers and not adopting fully culturally marxist agenda. When Japan open its borders and follows more the cultural marxist agenda the result wouldn't be good for the Japanese but worse. Moreover, the existence of an other, helps restrain predation by Americans against their allies, and now seems less so.

Anyway, a USA that is against the immoral conduct of other countries, and restraints it self from instigating more trouble, will work better. Part of my solution includes a push for general deescalation that includes non Americans also doing that through negotiations and attempts to diplomacy being part of the process. I am not suggesting that the USA should stop having a military, but I do think that the neocons being highly representative of what I am critical of a criminal conduct, as a faction are removed from any influence.

When people like Bret Stephens arguing to replace the white working, this isn't good because higher GDP, because this agenda also comes along with massive redistribution, and quotas at expense of targeted group. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-30/how-corporate-america-kept-its-diversity-promise-a-week-of-big-take

The package offered by the modern GAE is also unattractive to many African countries because it comes with prioritising submission to cultural far leftist agenda. Chinese investment with less lecturing is more attractive. So, one of my alternatives is to abadon that and ideology of woke/neocon types to be abadoned. However, I don't think ideology should be absent from global politics. There is a value in certain human rights, and want those genuine rights to be protected. But the general cultural marxist conception of rights should be thrown to the garbage. And we don't need people trying indirect justifications due to GDP. It is both bad in its own right, but also alienates people who would be otherwise more positive towards USA influence.

Oh, and having a modern economy, and not aligning with American warmongering are different things. I don't want a world that doesn't trade with the USA, but one that doesn't support belligerence. Some of your rhetoric leads us to a more reductive path and makes it harder to face specific issues. Moves us away from clarity and conflates things that shouldn't be conflated. And it is anachronistic, not taking into account the massive amounts of investment that a more pro chinese aligned block is seeing.

European countries benefited much more when they traded and had more positive relations with Russia, China and USA. Being overly aligned with a neocon aggressive, arrogant USA is not a move for better economy but one were you suffer consequences at your expense. Although some protectionism is also reasonable to protect their own industries, so I am not free trade but pro trade against against trying to strongly suppress and stop trade and enact new cold wars.

In regards to American interests, there is an issue of interests of foreign lobbies, of weapon manufacturers, and of people with ideological obsessions that don't fulfill even American interests. There is also an issue of higher cost than they are worth. Much of American warmongering, has reduced American prestige, and USA can be a more credible pusher for world peace, by avoiding doing such actions, and retaining influence as the most powerful member of an actual alliance, where America treats other countries part of its alliance as allies and respects their rights. So, I genuinely think that people whose agenda is ethnically destructive are immoral on their own rights, and ironically help damage Pax Americana. They are incentivizing non Americans to correctly resist on grounds of their human rights to exist and self determination So, I would suggest you compromise and abadon trying to excuse such agendas. The cultural marxist agendas are irredeemably extreme and destructive.

This idea that with rhetoric and excuses, anything will be tolerated and people are going to accept any and all arrangements that are destructive against them, is simply not true. Hubris doesn't solve decline but accelerates it. So, a pax americana is going to rightfully end for good, or as you think for ill, if modern USA is a cultural marxist very arrogant country that has moved to a much more radical path than its previous conduct towards its allies were it was willing to compromise with the existence of nation state democracies. Indeed peace, becomes impossible under such an extreme USSA, because it promotes aggressive policy.

So, to summarize:

There is nothing wrong with an influential USA in a pro USA alliance, provided this USA avoids its substantial own bad behavior, and respects the rights of its allies which includes not trying to impose ethnically destructive and other social agendas.

There is plenty of wrong with much of American warmongering which has been destructive both economically and otherwise and it is of a different nature than countries being part of NATO or having some ties with the USA.

There is something wrong with an attempt by the USA to make the entire world aligned with it, and to succeed in destroying rival powers, will come with enormous blood and destruction.

It is better to have a multipolar world that collaborates and tries to some extend to share some principles on issues of opposing say invasions. Where good faith behavior makes it easier for principles to be taken seriously and there is more win-win entanglement. A connected world order in such ways. Trade, negotiation are key aspects of this, and there is probably a value in different blocs aligning to oppose the worst deeds of other blocs and restraining each other. So, I am not arguing here in favor of the disapperance of USA as an influential player.

Although its modern moral decline and rising extremism, is an enormous problem that needs to be corrected and not something to just dismiss. It is a massive elephant to the room of how USA became a much more radical power with its embassies promoting very extreme and destructive agenda. Although I also don't think that Russia and China with their own third world nationalist elements are an adequate solution. Cultural marxist ideology is a gigantic problem, and not part of a healthy alliance and the only solution is to be suppressed, and those elements with such ideology to not be allowed to have influence. Including outside the USA, GAE being about more than just USA. Indeed, ironically cultural marxism with its own antiwestern, anti the peoples of the alliance propaganda, helps promote Russia and China and non western countries as alternatives. Why should people support self hating west over nonwestern blocks, if they buy into this ideology? Including those outside the west? The contradictions can't be sustained by just the same tired propaganda of ww2, pretending opposition are far left, far right, promoting only the threat of Russia, and China, or claiming it is economically superior path. My conclusion, in addition to suggesting that it would be a good path for our world and the USA too, to abandon this ideology, is to note an inability for the cultural marxist GAE types to compromise. This ideological purity spiral would serve them as poorly as it served other very ideological empires which refused to compromise.

I challenged you directly if you think you should excuse blatantly immoral and destructive conduct under the idea that US hegemony is good.

No, you didn't. That's like asking someone if abortion is bad and then saying "I challenged you directly if you think murder is bad". You can't just assume that abortion is murder, even if you're going to argue it.

I challenged you directly if you think you should excuse blatantly immoral and destructive conduct under the idea that US hegemony is good. It seems to me that you want to do that and are just trying to promote it based on arguing that US hegemony is good actually. But you also accept restraint and criticism. And it doesn't seem that you really do in a substantial manner.

I edited this in later so you may have missed it but I believe it addresses your point:

When we look at US-caused international conflicts, we have to consider, whether the primary purpose is to maintain and grow the American hegemony in service of maintaining global peace, or if that is being used as an excuse with some other primary motive in mind (fund the military-industrial complex, drum up support for an upcoming election, etc.). If the former, I think that would warrant a legitimate criticism about the pitfalls of relative peace achieved through this method and find ways to account for it. But if the latter, that's not really a criticism of the model. People will always use existing values and models to justify whatever they want to do, but it doesn't mean that it's wrong.

I don't believe I am excusing "blatantly immoral and destructive conduct under the idea that US hegemony is good". Are these international conflicts strictly the result of pursuing a US hegemony, or are there some other factors at play? I'm going to say that you can have US hegemony without needing to instigate wars left and right. Or are you saying hegemony is achieved solely through military might? If I gave off the impression that is my belief then I should've been more clear and that is my fault.

You hold the people who made those decisions accountable. The mechanics of how it's done is irrelevant for this conversation. I did not say we pardon our leaders for what they have done because it was in service of the US hegemony. Your challenge was not something that I really thought important to address when you initially posted it because my question was in regards to how global peace can be achieved and maintained and you didn't really provide any alternative solutions. You later expanded your post and provided more information, which I'm grateful for. I am now challenging you that these immoral and destructive conducts is not an inevitable outcome of a pursuit of a global hegemony and that the idea of the US hegemony is being used as an excuse for other purposes.

There are a few problems with this. Which is that destroying other countries and causing civil wars to cause more US hegemony will result in far more devastation.

US-based hegemony does not necessarily have to be achieved strictly through military might, although it has to be enforced by its existence. Most of Europe did not become allies of the US because USA subjugated it via force.

It feels like a big part of your argument is that the US-based support is no longer attractive due to the prevalence of the condition that it involves adopting leftist cultural marxist values. I will acknowledge I wasn't considering this and thinking more in terms of concepts such as capitalism and democracy. Yes, if US support comes at the cost of having to adopt DIE woke style culture then I am against it, because I am against those ideas within America as well. Propositioning US support would be better accomplished without that baggage tied to it. At the same time, it doesn't mean America just gives away money for free with no strings attached. Why should America provide charity to the world with no benefits? Otherwise just invest that money domestically.

Anyway, a USA that is against the immoral conduct of other countries, and restraints it self from instigating more trouble, will work better.

How does the USA enforce punishment regarding the immoral conduct of other countries without itself maintaining a dominant position relative to that other country? A dominant position maintained by superior military and economic might? Words alone mean nothing unless there is credible threat of action behind those words. What happens when negotiations and communication fails? Or if the other side refuses to de-escalate?

and restraints it self from instigating more trouble, will work better.

Do you think the only way to grow the US hegemony or bring more countries under the US sphere of influence is done by instigating "trouble"? Because I don't think that.

It honestly doesn't sound like you're against the idea of a US hegemony, just against how it is currently being accomplished, which I think we are both in agreement with? So what's the dispute here? Okay it looks like you provided more context with the additional text, which I address below.

Edit: Since you added much more to your post after what I responded to, I think my general points above still stand. I think your greatest argument against the current US Hegemony is that the US currently is suffering from being ideologically possessed by leftist cultural marxist ideas, and because of this the US hegemony itself is no longer good or has serious issues. That's why in my earlier post I suggested perhaps the US take some time to work on its issues domestically for a decade or so. Realistically it'll take longer than that, which is why I asked what are the consequences of doing that? I think the biggest cause of the difference of opinion is I'm thinking more of a direct Post-WWII American set of ideals on capitalism and democracy and you point out I did not factor in the cultural Marxist element of America today playing a part in having an alliance with the US. How much of American support is actually dependent on adopting cultural-Marxist woke ideology though? I'm just taking your word for it here.

Frankly speaking, I don't believe significantly different cultures can exist peacefully for long periods of time especially when those cultures play into system of government that run the nation. Most countries are democracies now but these democracies just so happen to mostly align in the US sphere of influence. Are most countries better off or worse off with a democratic government? How likely are the undemocratic countries to serve as a threat to democratic ones? As you add more and more different types of values into the mix, it becomes increasingly more difficult for all of these values to exist peacefully.

The reason I can say US hegemony has resulted in a era of relative peace is because we literally live in an era of peace relative to human history, with actual war occurring in much smaller scales (proportionally) than they used to. Perhaps we are seeing the cracks of such a system today with Ukraine and other conflicts.

I still believe that a long era of world peace can most likely be achieved under a global hegemony with 1 dominant culture. It doesn't have to be the US, but it is currently the US most poised to maintain that. The League of Nations post WW1 had a pathetic ability to accomplish anything and the United Nations today similarly has very little influence (although much more successful than the LoN ever was).

I think you saying I am just excusing its behavior is an extremely uncharitable take on my position. If you still believe I am doing that then I don't know what else to say and will have to end the conversation here. I still appreciate your perspective and for giving some good points for me to consider.

I won't be able to fully address everything here. I do appreciate that your response wasn't as heated as it could had been.

I would like to focus on a minor point which is that those countries that are part of a western alliance, to remain in that isn't a bad thing necessarily if USA fixes its ideological issues and doesn't push destructive demands. Indeed, what I advocate still allows room for a saner than today USA as the strongest power. Chinese and Russian ambitions can also be destructive towards other countries, like their neighbors.

An attempt by the USA for worldwide full spectrum dominance or expanding spheres of influence has had too much a destructive path already, and will continue to do so in the future. So, when I argue for multipolarism is a different thing than when the Russians or Chinese do, for in their advocation includes them having a license to expand their sphere of influence.

When for me, is about trying to retain a status quo that avoids invasions, and avoids trying to coup and dismember countries like China, and Russia, or pushing too much propaganda about them being illegitimate regimes. There is a situation where such powers try to trade and seek more win-win diplomatic paths, and one where they try to undermine each other and prepare for hotter conflict.

Anyway, while you might believe that one country dominating will lead to global peace, the position of Europe since this conflict has been a worsening one, precisely as they became more dependent to USA. The reality is any power dominating gives it more opportunity for abuse. Including promoting extreme ideologies. Although, abuse of bigger powers in alliances or even among expected protectorates does result in them seeking to disentangle themselves. UK arrests far more people for their speech than Russia does, which matters when evaluating the current trajectory of western demcoracies. Most importantly, for USA to get global hegemony and the desirable peace, and to humiliate and keep down its rivals, far more war and conflict will have to ensue, including as in Syria possible civil war within Russia and China. I don't buy that an agenda that raises risk of WW3 and nuclear war is a good way to achieve peace. Nor did the conflicts that USA was involved in the middle east, did any good of the people there. It is in fact likely, that rather than peace, the attempt for worldwide hegemony will lead to similiar misfortune for those affected, and even not succeed at providing American hegemony, but waste blood and treasure. So avoiding both expanding moves like that, and what we already saw such as with the Iraq war, Syrian war and funding the rebels, etc, etc.

The arrangement of trying to deescalate tensions where the onus isn't just on the USA and the Chinese and Russians also have their own responsibility, seems like a much better bet.

Of course in practice, global powers are going to do their proxy conflicts, and part of that will include both influences of lobbies and the struggle relating to expanding spheres of influence, and at best this can be mitigated and reduced, but too idealsitic to expect it to stop. I do think that things have escalated and things can be put in a healthier equilibrium. And it really is completely unrealistic and putting lipstick to a process of great power competition, to talk of peace and the morality of continuous hegemony. It is a bit like the communists promoted this idea that it would be the defeat of capitalism, imperialism and great if they took over the world. Like colonialism had its white man's burden, we also now had in the case of pro american imperialism, narratives promising peace. Prior to the soviet utopian dream, the Russians promoted this idea of them as protectors of Christians against the Ottomans to jsutify expanding, and both Russia and USSR promoted this idea of them as protectors of slavs. Narratives are going always to exist to defend moves in the great chess game, which on the meantime can destabilize countries and can lead to the harm even of the involved great powers through conflict, and not just the destruction of the region that is fought.

I don't get it is Sachs claiming he was first hand knowledge of this stuff or is he just talking his ass off like all of us here? It sounds like he is just talking his ass off like he has about every other geo-political event in his lifetime. You can always expect him to be against the USA and for whatever is popular among the far-left. So his support of Palestine and Russia is no more surprising than his support of China and Venezuela.

What's somewhat interesting is the fact that these far-left and far-right voices have converged on so much, but you also saw stuff like this in the run up to WW2.

I don't get it is Sachs claiming he was first hand knowledge of this stuff or is he just talking his ass off like all of us here?

You're correct: He's shitposting like anyone on this forum is, yet he has a PhD (in an unrelated discipline) so he gets to act like a public intellectual.

It is definitely convenient to paint anyone who disagrees with American foreign policy establishment as an extremist. It is blatantly propagandistic however and just sheer boo outgroup demagoguery.

The reality, is you are dealing with people making valid arguements, and it is actually false that these arguements and perspectives are part of a far left or far right perpective, except that they are part of perspectives of both moderates, far left, far right, whatever people. And of course outside the USA, you will find again even more so people and majority of spectrum be critical of the many immoral and against international law actions of the foreign pollicy establishment.

Ironically, the current American establishment is far more far left extremist than Jeffrey Sachs and you got plenty of people who combine far left extremism with supporting imperialism. Sachs seem more like a more timid leftist than say Joe Biden.

Moreover, this also applied during the buildup of WW2. The majority of Americans opposed involvement and also had a negative opinion of both the nazis and Stalin. Really, it was more like opposition to Iraq, Vietnam which again the driving force was not far left american haters, and it would be to strawman and negatively exaggerate people like Sachs to paint them in such colors.

The American goverment highly subverted and full of communist agents didn't just support intervention to WW2 but was massively for Stalin and helped him above and beyond to take half of Europe, when they could have followed better policy that wasn't as pro communist. The great book Stalin's wars goes more into this, showing how even after the Soviets were winning, they were prioritised to get help over even American troops and many more examples of this policy direction.

Additionally, when it comes to supporters of WW2, which changed after pearl harbor, there were those who had pretty far right views and wanted to kill the Japanese and saw them as racial enemies, or supported destroying the Germans because they saw them as enemies and were pro warcrimes. It really is overly reductive and just conveniently propagandistic to try to frame the policies taken by the state department, often highly influenced by foreign lobbies, as a moderate position that only far leftists and far rightists could oppose. This is false, and you will find people whose perspective pattern matches to far left, or far right among supporters of such foreign policy. Today, it is especially far leftists who openly see the GAE as a empire for imposing their ideology.

Skepticism of American foreign policy is widely popular because it does plenty of immoral and wrong things. It is in fact quite popular among non americans of all persuassions. And to a lesser extend it is popular among Americans and promoted by the most popular host in Tucker, because the framing that it is all for Americas interest against foreign enemies, isn't accurate when it comes to Ukraine and Israel too. There is in fact a redistribution outwards and of course in favor of the weapon manufacturers that are some of the biggest donors of think tanks. There are also foreign lobbies like the israeli lobby which support wars for self serving non pro American reasons. The America first identification of movements skeptical of American foreign policy, including by Trump in part, is not accurately captured by labeling it as far right just cause you say it is. There is validity in their perspective that interests of American people are not put first.

Now, I wouldn't argue that we need to be maximally skeptical of American foreign policy establishment and maximally apologist of non American powers. There are those like Chomsky who went too far in that direction, but certainly skepticism and opposition to the current foreign policy uniparty has many humanitarian, real politic, and other grounds to stand upon, such as seeing it leading the world towards more world war paths and can't be dismissed by booing them as extremists.

All powers need to know there will be opposition when they violate certain norms. To avoid bad behavior you need to let them know those that behave badly, and would behave worse still, that there will be opposition and hostility and consequences. Hence, why those favoring totalitarianism where certain groups are beyond criticism, and poison the waters by slandering critics are promoting something incredibly dangerous.

I don't get it is Sachs claiming he was first hand knowledge of this stuff or is he just talking his ass off like all of us here?

I will take that as a compliment. Sachs, unlike me, is, uh, accomplished. He is not talking his ass off like all of us here, even if he's talking his ass off. At least, I think.

You can always expect him to be against the USA and for whatever is popular among the far-left.

And does that follow for his discussion of distrust of the media, of Nature, of the institutions like the NIH? Does it follow for flippantly stating the CIA killed JFK and covered it up for sixty years? Sachs has been burned recently, and so I don't think he's changed his stripes but he's certainly informed by experiences in the last four years.

I will take that as a compliment. Sachs, unlike me, is, uh, accomplished. He is not talking his ass off like all of us here, even if he's talking his ass off. At least, I think.

Unlike all of us here, he is also a relentless China shill, and concomitantly reflexively gives the official Chinese line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs#China_2

What can I say? His concerns are entirely selfish. He thinks the USG is putting his grandchildren at risk. That doesn't mean he's bemoaning the decline of These United States, it just means that he's a rat who has found himself on a sinking ship.

And does that follow for his discussion of distrust of the media, of Nature, of the institutions like the NIH? Does it follow for flippantly stating the CIA killed JFK and covered it up for sixty years? Sachs has been burned recently, and so I don't think he's changed his stripes but he's certainly informed by experiences in the last four years.

Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. You can't just reverse the positions of your enemies and arrive at the truth.

His claim that their would be peace if Israel just acknowledged the Palestinian state is more than laughable. Hamas controls Gaza and is the mortal enemy of the PLO. They threw PLO members off the tops of buildings when they took control of Gaza. Acknowledging Palestinian statehood would do less than nothing to solve the current conflict. Hamas is going to fight to the death either way.

Sachs knows less about geopolitics than he does about economics, he's a laughing stock that gets trotted out for the public by credulous or ideologically motivated journalists like Tucker.

And does that follow for his discussion of distrust of the media, of Nature, of the institutions like the NIH? Does it follow for flippantly stating the CIA killed JFK and covered it up for sixty years?

Sure, this kind of hippie left think health authorities help the pharma companies cover up the “cure for cancer”, believe in chemtrails, have an extreme distrust for anything that comes out of a lab (including vaccines), and certainly believe in JFK and 911 conspiracies.

believe in chemtrails

If you don't believe in chemtrails, you don't believe in reality. It's just the conspiracy parallax, where chemtrails make you insane, but cloud seeding is just known technology. Guess what, all those kooks talking about chemtrails are right: people really are spraying chemicals out of airplanes in order to seed clouds and alter the weather.

have an extreme distrust for anything that comes out of a lab (including vaccines)

Extreme distrust is warranted when you are constantly lied to, especially in matters of public health. Those lies are obvious now, for at least one topic, and I see no reason to believe those same agencies on other matters when their credibility is thoroughly shredded. Yes, including vaccines.

You shouldn't trust pthalates or polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, both of which came out of a lab and are poisoning the environment. You shouldn't trust atrazine which is quite literally turning the frogs gay. You shouldn't trust neonicitinoid pesticides, either, or fire retardants in your furniture and on your baby's clothes.

I don't see why you are advocating for naive belief in labs.

and certainly believe in JFK and 911 conspiracies.

If you believe the Warren Commission report, then you're just plain gullible. Dulles, Hoover, and Johnson, among others, conspired to hide the truth.

All you've done is boo the hippies, but to my mind they're right often enough, and more importantly, they make a different kind of error. The authorities are more likely to tell me something harmful is safe, the hippies are more likely to tell me something safe is harmful. Those two types of errors do not produce the same outcomes.

But really, the fact that you're directing your scorn towards a known true and proven fact (cloud seeding aka chemtrails) makes me think you should be more skeptical of authority, and less reflexively skeptical of the fringe.

Cloud seedling doesn’t prove chemtrail conspiracy theories, which almost all allege some kind of poison / mind control / chemical to keep people docile is being dropped from the aircraft. Benign cloud seeding for research purposes (almost universally disclosed precisely because it’s completely legal and there is little widespread opposition to it) isn’t it.

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