This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Have they, or anyone, done it before on the soil of a country that is friendly to the leader and has sufficient state capacity of its own that there isn't some sort of "we're just doing policing for you that you would be doing yourself if your country functioned" narrative that lets everyone save some measure of face? Israel assassinated some Iranian scientists before, but that seemed like a lower-ranked target than the leader of an allied military (and anyway was shut down by US pressure about a decade ago). This seems akin to if Russia went from having that Chechen militiaman shot in Berlin to blowing up Zelenskiy (or at least Syrskiy?) during one of his visits to the West, which surely would be seen as an escalation - or Ukraine going from merely blowing up Russian milbloggers to setting a bomb in Russia for Kim Jong Un.
Why does an enemy nation that launched a multiple-front war on us via proxy get to keep its “sovereignty”? Why even after launching ballistic missiles from its own territory? The only thing keeping them safe is the limited capacity of the IDF to wage any kind of real war on them, but that’s not a moral argument.
More options
Context Copy link
Hezbollah isn’t a nation, it’s a paramilitary force designated a terrorist group by the US and allies and the GCC.
Israel assassinated the leader of Hamas, not Hezbollah.
Ah, I was confused as to what the poster was referring to. Israel isn’t going to kill Nasrallah because he’s widely seen as more conservative about a full war against Israel than his likely successors.
Does "the poster" here refer to me? I was just referring to the incident the parent I was responding to brought up (though then I went along with Hezbollah after you said that without even noticing the substitution).
It was almost certainly my mistake
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why does the way that the US designates it matter? Whether it's an escalation or not surely depends on the perception of those affected by the measure, as understood by those who took it - if I know that you will consider some step a greater infringement of your interests than anything I have done before and yet I take it, then I am escalating. Russia considering Zelenskiy and/or the state of Ukraine illegitimate would not have any bearing on how escalatory an assassination of him would be either - or are you implying that this is different because the US is the one that thinks Hezbollah is illegitimate?
Has Russia not tried to assassinate Zelensky many times? AFAIK he is only being kept alive because Western intelligence is in charge of his movements.
If they have (and, well, what do we know if there is no success and no public record of claimed attempts?), they surely haven't tried to do so on the soil of a Western country?
I've got no idea if it's true, but why would you assume that they wouldn't? They've carried out assassinations in western nations before.
The difference gets to the meat of this whole discussion - Russia assassinating a Russian dissident on Western soil is less of an affront than Russia assassinating a Western-aligned militiaman from a third country (as with that Chechen-Georgian they got in Germany), which in turn is much less of an affront than assassinating a leader of a Western-aligned nation or NGO. Going from left to right on this scale is what one would call escalation. Maybe they would, but then they would be escalating; it seems like they haven't, and the most likely reason for that is that it would be an escalation that they did not want to go for.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why does that matter in the context of violating Iran's sovereignty over its territory?
More options
Context Copy link
Honestly it's becoming a sort of Iranian strategic devolution at this point.
Most of the point of a proxy war is that the proxy is distant enough from the state so as to minimize the costs of engaging in a conflict. 'Plausible deniability' works as a mutual fiction, as it lets the person being attacked focus on fighting the proxy instead of you, but it also lets you not get exposed if the proxy starts to lose. Just like offensive-alliances are a strategically untenable idea since it drags parties into other people's wars they don't want to contribute to, a proxy relationship is not a defense treaty.
Treating an attack on a proxy as the same as an attack on one's self is losing the plot, and actively bringing the proxy into your political center is blurring the identification lines that make the proxy, well, a proxy. If the Iranian government wanted to launch a multi-day attack on Israel by Iranian forces, it could do so without the proxy. If Iran feels obliged to because Israel attacked the proxy, then it's no longer a proxy, but a vassal-ally to whom state-deterrence applies. But if you're applying state-deterrence theory in protection of a proxy, that in turn applies state-deterrence on what the proxy does... which is the whole historical mess of empires getting dragged into conflicts their vassal-allies drag them into.
This is an understandable mess given how the Iranian theocracy has cultivated the IRGC into a deep-state, and the IRGC has very personal relationships with the axis of resistance members, but it's still a mess of bad strategy. Iran has wanted and gotten used to the benefits of plausible-deniable proxy warfare over the last decades, but stopped putting in the work- or the mental discipline- to keep the distance between itself and its proxies enough for the distinction to be relevant.
There are ways to manage a proxy relationship so that they are active but the backer remains safe. You could look at how the Ukraine coalition has managed to support Ukraine, but you could also look at how Pakistan approached the Pashtun-Taliban against the US, or the Chinese in the Korean war, and so on. There are ways... but Iran's breaking some basic principles, and we're seeing the results.
I don't understand how all of this reasoning (apart from the value judgements regarding Iran, the IRGC etc., which seem orthogonal to any determinations about the proper way to treat proxy wars) wouldn't apply to Ukraine and NATO. Do you see the same binary choice between "the backers should just attack (Russia/Israel) themselves" and "the backers must keep a sanitary cordon around the proxy that entails not inviting its representatives into own territory, and if they do it anyway they can't complain if the proxy's representatives get attacked on their soil" in that case? If not, what is different?
I could imagine someone as on board with the official US line as you would have the reflex to say that Ukraine/Russia is not a proxy war because Ukraine decided to fight out of its own volition, but I have not seen a case being made that Hezbollah does not have the will (nor have I seen the suggestion that in a proxy war the proxy must be unwilling). If you wanted to say that it's all different because Ukraine is a real country blessed by the US while Hezbollah is a terrorist militia and therefore doesn't get agency, then it seems like you would just be taking roundabout steps to Russell-conjugate "proxy war" so that the bad-sounding word does not apply when your side does it.
The nature of the relationship with the proxies, the nature of the threat the proxies pose to the opponent, the nature of the ways to provide both off-ramps to the target to stop the proxy war, and the relative difference in escalation risk of attacking proxies in the backer's countries as a contrast to the status quo.
(Or- in other words- Russia is not already in a conventional military conflict with NATO, and both does not face existential risk from the proxy and can end the proxy war by a return to conduct that respects Russia's existence. Iran's coalition instigated the framing conflict, is already in the attempted Intifada, is already executing a sustained bombardment campaign, is already disrupting maritime shipping- Iran can't really leverage threats it is already executing as deterence against an Israeli escalation.)
In case you were reading a moral judgement, don't. This was a utility-viewpoint assessment.
If you missed the argument, I suppose, but even that wouldn't mean that the distinction between being a country and not being a country isn't rightfully a dominant distinction, or even the only distinction that needs to be defended.
The international system revolves around the premise of state sovereignty. States are owed / entitled / accorded certain privileges and presumptions that non-state actors, hence why Russia spent it's pre-war justification narrative trying to discredit that there was a Ukrainian nation to have an independent state. While Iran and its axis of resistance have also rejected the right of an Israeli state to defend itself, Israel is indeed a state, and states do have a right to defend themselves against other states who perpetrate attacks against them.
Iran's mistake in disregarding the plausible deniability / gap between proxy and state backer is that this gap is what is required to try and exploit an advantage of unilateral aggression between states, even as Iran set up a weak paradigm that decreased it's deterrence against being called out. Israel pre-attack was already in the midst of an Iranian-backed attempted Intifada, major artillery campaign, maritime disruption campaign, and global anti-jewish terrorism efforts... and these all were instigated / arranged while competition with Iran was at a much, much lower level. Iran doesn't get deterrence value out of threats it is already executing- it's the threat of retaliation that drives deterence, and pre-emptively executing it just leads to targets accepting it as a sunk cost and retaliating.
More options
Context Copy link
I would argue that both you and @Dean are right. It is a bad strategic mistake, and it’s one that both Iran and the United States are making.
More options
Context Copy link
NATO didn’t react to the war on Ukraine the way it would react to an invasion of a member state, though. That’s the entire reason the Ukrainians want into NATO.
Even if the Ukrainian Defense minister was assassinated on say, German soil it is still unlikely that the US would send American soldiers to fight the Ukraine War, or that we’d bomb Moscow. So again, the situation isn’t really the same as Hezbollah/Iran.
I actually think that German boots on the ground in Ukraine would be a fairly likely response in that event (and American ones if the assassination happened in the US) - and, well, Iran hasn't sent physical soldiers to attack Israel yet, and we are seeing American and German hardware raining down on Russia every day. I'm sure Iran would have been happy to let its rocket volley be launched by Hezbollah or Hamas rather than sending it directly, too, if they had had the logistical possibilities to move the launchers there, as the Western alliance has with Ukraine.
It would be incredibly unlikely. NATO members absolutely do not want to get into an actual shooting match with russians.
Some of them seemed to be quite open to the idea (though they were probably also hoping that the troops would act as a shield and the Russians, themselves not wanting a shooting match with NATO members, would essentially avoid striking anywhere near them). My sense from German media is also that there is a general drive to warm up the populace to the idea; either way, everyone involved probably understands that Russia in its present state would in fact be too risk-averse to seriously retaliate outside of the Ukrainian theatre or even target the troops unless they show up at the front.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link