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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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What a peace looks like now is a good question, but here's my proposal:

First of all, what exactly does Ukraine get out of this plan? It looks like something you might sell to them if it looks like Russia is going to turn it into the Puppet Republic of Malorossia in not-too-distant future.

But more importantly, what's the point of this plan? If you're a good Christian, then saving human lives might be the answer, but if you're a godless power projection optimizer in the mold of Bismarck and Kissinger, then drip-feeding Ukraine various arms and armor as long as possible is by far the better option.

The only thing you lose as the US is some surplus military equipment. In return you get to test various cool stuff against an actual army, you keep Russia busy, the NATO reinvigorated, the EU divorced from Russia. Why stop right now? Let Russia and Ukraine exhaust each other as much as possible. Then you can hit two birds with one stone during the peace talks:

  • Ukrainian farmland and mines can be bought by American companies in exchange for foreign aid
  • You can paperclip Ukrainian UAV designers and other useful military personnel
  • Russia might actually be persuaded to backstab China in exchange for sanctions relief and convinced to reimburse the owners of all the companies it has nationalized

The only risk is that you might miss a black swan that causes Russia to implode before you can react. Ukraine cannot really implode like this because it's already on life support.

It looks like something you might sell to them if it looks like Russia is going to turn it into the Puppet Republic of Malorossia in not-too-distant future.

This is my functional model of the end result of this war if nothing gets negotiated first. So yes, the main thing Ukraine gets is it's territory integrity back to some degree, security through some military guarantee, and conditional entry into the European socio-economic sphere.

Seems a lot better than meat grinding the rest of your population for less.

But to answer you, what I'd want most out of peace is stability in Europe and normalized relationships between powers so further conflict is made unlikely first, and self determination second.