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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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That threat to Putin is oversold though.

First, it's not immediately clear extra military aid will be a decisive war-ending move, an extra thousand armored vehicles or guided missiles will help, sure, Ukraine will certainly welcome it, but currently the greatest challenge for the Ukrainian military is a manpower shortage, that the extra metal does not solve. Even with "lend-lease on steroids," I don't believe it to be likely that Ukraine will be able to push the Russians back to the 2022 borders, maybe it'll just be enough to stabilize the front lines.

Second, Trump has an electoral mandate to reduce aid to Ukraine, not increase it. That's what he ran on. Putin knows this. This makes Trump's threat of increasing Ukraine aid a lot less credible. He knows that if Trump follows through with this threat, the American electorate will become displeased that the aid dollars doubled and yet the war still has no end in sight.

On the first point, I don't think the requirement (from his academic view) is that it needs to be a decisive move or push the Russians back to the 2022 borders; it just needs to be enough of an increased threat of costs (on both sides) to overcome the bargaining friction that is keeping the war going. I've been kind of slow to take on this sort of mental shift after watching his videos for a while, but I'm finding the logic relatively more compelling over time.

On the second point, I don't really know. I don't pay attention to all the details of political campaigns. My non-hyper-focused read was that he just campaigned on, "The war is really bad and destructive; I'm going to end it; I'll do it immediately; don't ask me how." I don't know that he ever really committed to any sort of plan. It's worth pointing out here that this includes him not committing to this think tank plan... or even really ever acknowledging it at all, as far as I know. It's just an idea that's out there that seems interesting and has bounced around in my mind.

Yeah, besides a lot more Abrams and Bradleys and F-16s (which definitely aren't nothing, but aren't superweapons either) it's not really clear to me what the US has left to give at this point. We won't give them F-35s. We probably won't give them the other really wacky silver bullets we have.

Second, Trump has an electoral mandate to reduce aid to Ukraine, not increase it.

He also put Rubio in SecState. Rubio voted against Biden's Ukraine aid bill in April. So I think that signals where he's gonna go, although I don't consider Rubio a Russia dove or something.

I do think I kinda agree with @Dean above, though, that in a sense it's a gift to Trump. Gives him maximal leverage and, as Dean points out, since it's a lame duck call it's less likely that Putin will escalate (at least in the short term, until he susses out Trump's negotiation posture).

Yeah, besides a lot more Abrams and Bradleys and F-16s (which definitely aren't nothing, but aren't superweapons either) it's not really clear to me what the US has left to give at this point. We won't give them F-35s. We probably won't give them the other really wacky silver bullets we have.

More missile AA. Ukraine is generally good at counterbattery fire, but needs something to counter Russian precision-guided bombs. One Patriot per 50km of frontline will change a lot.

I suspect we're in a bad way on Patriot ammo, which matters a lot if we go up against China. We might be able to get the ones Israel recently retired.