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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27992 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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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.

There's an argument that we shouldn't have made noises about Ukraine joining NATO. Once those noises were made, though, the idea of leaving them high and dry got significantly less tenable.

I do agree that the USA should drop the ambiguity over Taiwan; it's not helping matters.

I would appreciate it if you didn't impute random unrelated opinions to me.

This seems like a very bad deal that allows interventionists like yourself to ratchet up international obligations when in power just by making noises, and doesn't ever allow for those obligations to be abandoned.

Is there some reason for this immediate assumption that I am your enemy?

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.

Does someone have to operate on the scale of Hitler to be be compared to Hitler?

More importantly, buried in that statement is the implication that you don't really care if Putin repeats his behavior so long as it's under a certain threshold. Do I have that right?

How about the part where the ostensible reason to surrender is to cut losses and return to peace. If Putin reneges on that and attacks again then there was no reason to surrender in the first place. Ukraine is back in the exact same position but worse since Russia will have rebuilt and put in terms of surrender conditions that would prevent them from doing the same. The U.S. is in the same position where their goal of nuclear de-escalation is threatened because a dictator has proven that if you have nukes you can do whatever you want, and the only defense is having your own nukes. Putin would have every incentive to repeat this, since he was already inclined to so and previously rewarded for it.

No. And you don't need to operate on the scale of Donald Rumsfeld for me to point out that this is the exact same tactic he used to bully people into supporting the Iraq War.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-aug-30-na-legion30-story.html

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.

This is not my position. You are mis characterizing my position and not correctly summarizing it.

I am in favor of a peace deal if Russia offered terms.

If you are in favour of a peace deal, why the constant bringing up of appeasement, Hitler, 1938, and so on? Are you just bringing them up cynically to win this argument, or do you genuinely believe that this situation is like 1938? And if it is, why do you now say you support a peace deal?

I would sign a peace deal tomorrow with Russia if they offered one.

Russia is not offering peace.

The only deal Russia seems to be offering is peace if you do it by force.

Again, I am asking - whither the comparison to the 1930s? If Putin is like Hitler, why accept a peace deal with him?

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They didn't offer terms exactly, but I am very confident that Russia would have accepted 'breakaway republics + Crimea + no NATO in Ukraine' prior to the invasion -- now they have all of that plus a bunch more, so any terms they might accept will be significantly worse for Ukraine.

'War is diplomacy by other means', so if you want to do diplomacy the time for it is before war. (assuming that you don't want war, which I'm pretty sure is not the case WRT the US State department and this particular war)

Let me get this straight. You think Russia went to war for what was already the status quo?

NATO for all intents and purposes no longer existed before the war. All the European land armies had been nearly completely disbanded. Hypothetically maybe Ukraine enters NATO in 20 years. Russia certainly could have asked for no on that, but it’s basically meaningless because NATO as a military force in Europe was disbanding.

Anyone who tries to claim the west is warmongering just makes these in my opinion wild assumptions that Russia had any interest in peace. It’s based on nothing.

I think that Russia did not particularly want to go to war, and would have been quite easily persuaded not to with concessions/guarantees (eg. recognition of their possession of Crimea/Donbass) that would not have been overly painful to anyone.

Nobody was prepared to facilitate this (particularly not the State Dept, probably because they kind of didwant Russia to go to war), and now the situation has changed such that Russia would probably require significantly more serious concessions to stop doing what they are doing.

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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?

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