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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Trump has a lot of flexibility given his nothingburger answers so far.

The worst-case scenario (for someone like me, who is pro-Ukraine) is that Trump caves to the Tucker Carlson wing and "forces" the two sides to negotiate by unilaterally demanding Ukraine surrender to Russian terms or face a complete cutoff of US support, or even levying sanctions against them. Trump has the space to simply declare Ukraine to be "Biden's mess", claim it was always rightful Russian lebensraum, that surrendering it will bring peace in our time, and throw them to the wolves. There might be some token concessions ("Russia must agree to play nice") that Trump would claim as "balancing both sides", and largely ignore the situation as it deteriorates like what happened with North Korea during his first term.

But Trump's not naturally anywhere near as pacifist as his supporters make him out to be. He could also decide to just muddle along like he did with Afghanistan. He might make a few incendiary tweets, claim the Europeans need to do more, but he could change his mind back to supporting them when he gets a call from Lindsey Graham or some Polish politician.

The path he takes is very uncertain as Trump has always been a waffle, and it may literally come down to whoever talks to him last getting their way.

Conditional on Trump forcing a truce, my modal scenario is actually that in a year's time a stronger Ukraine steamrolls a weaker Russia

This would be a very unusual scenario. The war so far has been completely dominated by hard positional fighting akin to WW1. Unless there's some new innovation that's on par with the tank, I doubt either side would steamroll the other without some massive force-generation problems making one side particularly brittle.