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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   1168 thread views

Transnational Thursday for June 20, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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North Korea

Putin visited Pyongyang this week for a summit with Kim Jong-Un, signing a mutual aid pact and securing a vital supply of munitions for the war in Ukraine. South Korea is considering responding with their own arms deal, because apparently Koreans are some of the only people in the world who still know how to make artillery shells.

The Philippines

China and the Philippines continued their naval game of chicken around Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, in a dispute that the Filipino government could at any moment drag the US into by invoking its mutual defense treaty.

Lebanon

Israel seems ready to launch a military offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which would likely lead to a dramatic escalation in violence throughout the region, with more missile and drone exchanges with Iran and even at first glance unrelated nations caught in the crossfire.

Saudi Arabia

Over a thousand pilgrims have died from extreme heat on the hajj. And here I was worrying about political violence this year instead.

Belgium

The EU plans to impose tariffs on the import of Chinese EV's, following America's lead. Time will tell whether this saves domestic manufacturing or if we in the west will end up like the Soviets with their Ladas looking enviously across the iron curtain at all the shiny new vehicles their government wouldn't let them have.

Israel wouldn't likely do anything in Lebanon unless Hezbollah does something spectacularly stupid - and they have repeatedly shown that they want to keep it low-key for now. Israel hates the low-key harassment campaign and wants to decisively put end to it - but if they choose when to start, doing it while having their forces occupied in Gaza seems pointless. However, the official "take control" part of Gaza plan seems to be coming to completion, and once that is done and it moves to the "periodic cleanups" phase, Lebanon could very well be the next step. So I'd say not yet right now, but very possibly pretty soon, unless some unexpected development happens.

Putin visited Pyongyang this week for a summit with Kim Jong-Un, signing a mutual aid pact and securing a vital supply of munitions for the war in Ukraine.

One wonders whether this obligates Russia to come in in the event that NK invades SK in solidarity with a Chinese attack on Taiwan and the West pushes back into NK.

Russia is in no shape to come in anywhere right now, they came to NK because they need all those shells NK has been stockpiling since forever, since the ones USSR has been stockpiling evidently are running out. They came to get, not to give - why would they want to mess with SK? Korea has never been in traditional Russian sphere of influence, so they'd feel zero obligation to do anything about it.

why would they want to mess with SK?

I mean, let's game this out. Assume you're Putin, and assume you think there's a reasonable likelihood that the balloon's going up in East Asia and that it goes Badly for the PRC and DPRK to the point that they're in danger of getting knocked over in spite of their own nuclear arsenals (e.g. because a false alarm led to nukes getting launched already, and their arsenals have been taken out by the Western nuclear retaliation).

Option 1: stay neutral. Upside: Russia gets to sit it out and laugh. Downside: in the aftermath, while Russia's own relative weight to throw around goes up quite a lot because the PRC and DPRK are wiped off the map and the West has had a few cities nuked, it's still probably going to be smaller than the West because the PRC doesn't really have enough nukes to wipe us off the map, and it won't have the PRC to prop it up against Western trade embargoes and such in the future.

Option 2: declare that Russia will launch All Of The Nukes (which is ~10x what the PRC has) if the West starts taking the fight into NK and China or starts methodically nuking Chinese cities to force surrender.

2a) This might work, as Mao's threat did in Vietnam, allowing a white peace and thus the continued power of the anti-West bloc.

2b) It might also not work, in which case Russia also gets wiped off the map and the West gets substantially more destroyed than in Option 1.

From Putin's point of view, clearly 2a > 1 > 2b. But depending on the exact utility he assigns to each and his opinion of 2a's vs. 2b's conditional probabilities, he may or may not think 1 > 2 as a whole.

1 is best for Russia. Even the limited nuking from what missiles China and NK has will be enough to lead to a huge economic crisis and political crisis of legitimacy in the US; isolationism will surge, Putin will be free to expand Russia’s influence in the relevant key regions (Middle East, Africa, Central Asia) and can restore Russian de facto control of countries near the border like Mongolia where Chinese influence is growing.

2a has all of that barring the Mongolia point; the basic idea of this scenario is that things have escalated far enough for the Chinese deterrent to not be enough to deter the West from forcing PRC and DPRK state extinction, which probably means that PLA/KPA nukes have burned cities. The difference between 1 and 2a is that when the West says "fuck this, we burn a city every hour until you unconditionally surrender and admit an occupying force" and/or simply invades NK en route to Manchuria and Hebei (probably the former, for exactly the same reason as in those clips; invading China would be a bloodbath worse than even Downfall would have been and it's not clear it would even succeed without a countervalue nuclear bombardment to soften them up), Russia says "no, white peace or you burn too" and this actually succeeds at deterring the West.

(To be clear, if I were Putin I'd pick 1. But I'm not Putin, and he's been putting out some signals hinting at 2. If we're unlucky, I guess we'll find out how genuine those signals are.)

I suppose 2a contains multiple possibilities, I was thinking more like “nobody gets nuked, Russia just signs guarantees with China/DPRK”. In 2a, if Russia threatens America into abandoning Taiwan and possibly SK, the PRC controls those new territories, and expands its influence in the South Pacific. But the US and allies aren’t necessarily going to abandon the regions that Russia cares more about at all. It depends on whether losing Taiwan actually causes a true crisis for American identity, and my feeling is it doesn’t. Most Americans don’t care, and a sizeable faction in the security state has been preparing to lose Taiwan since the 1970s; only TSMC temporarily complicated things.

It seems unlikely to me that Russia would honor any such obligation, if the recent situation with Armenia is at all representative of how Putin treats such partnerships.

Was the internationally recognized territory of Armenia invaded though?

No, but what you hope for in an ally is that they'll back your side when it comes to such disputes over territory. I'm not taking a position on whether Russia should or shouldn't have gotten more involved in Nagorno-Karabakh; I'm simply pointing out that the whole episode is unlikely to inspire much confidence that Russia is a particularly useful ally to have.

So what did the US get out of signing that mutual defense treaty with the Philippines?

Apart from a precommitment that could potentially dissuade CCP belligerence.

A set of naval bases from which to wage war against Communism in Southeast Asia and a guarantee that the Philippines would not fall into the enemy camp. It's just a shame they never developed like South Korea or Japan, or else they'd be a much more valuable trade partner and might be able to actually put up a fight against China in the event of a war instead of being a glorified aircraft carrier.

Oh right. Obvious in retrospect!

On the North Korea point, there have also been three small North Korean incursions into the DMZ, which led to shooting incidents. A few North Korean soldiers died or were injured, but it appears that was from a land mine they accidentally triggered and not South Korean fire.

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