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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   29557 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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If NATO directly entered the war with large numbers of its own combat forces, it would defeat Russia's military and drive it out of Ukraine. Russia's only way of stopping NATO from doing that is to make NATO think that if driven far enough into a corner, Russia might actually escalate to using nuclear weapons. This works because, some extreme hawks aside, the vast majority of people who are well informed about the risks probably do not think that ensuring the Kiev government's ability to control Ukraine would be worth, say, a 10% increase in the chance of total nuclear war that would lead to the destruction of every major NATO and Russian city. On the other hand, they might think that it would be worth a 1% increase in that chance. Of course I am making up these specific percentages, but my point is that there is some threshold of the risk of nuclear war above which NATO does not think that helping Kiev with direct military intervention is worth that risk. The Russian government's task is to do whatever it can to make that threshold as low as possible. Hence Russia benefits from behaving in its rhetoric like an increasingly angry man being driven into a corner. Allowing NATO to think that the chance of nuclear war is zero would with very high probability lead to Russian defeat, since Russia is not strong enough to militarily defeat a direct large-scale NATO intervention. On the other hand, Russia of course does not actually want nuclear war any more than NATO does. Russia's proper strategy is thus to act like NATO is driving it closer and closer to the nuclear button with every NATO escalation.

Presumably and I hope, the people who actually make NATO's decisions have studied history and realize that just because NATO has broken multiple Russian red lines without major retaliation, it does not mean that every red line is meaningless. An example from history would be Germany breaking England and France's red lines before World War 2. Germany remilitarized the Ruhr, expanded the size of the Wehrmacht in violation of treaty agreements, united with Austria, and occupied Czechoslovakia all without provoking a large-scale war, but when it invaded Poland then England and France declared war - that had been a red line too far.

If NATO directly entered the war with large numbers of its own combat forces, it would defeat Russia's military and drive it out of Ukraine.

That was my assumption as well back in 2022. But then the Russia sanctions did nothing, Ukraine made some good advances and then got bogged down, and the West started running out of ammo. That last part is what got me. Because that's how the West won WWII against Germany (& Japan) and then the Cold War against Russia. We outproduced them until they couldn't afford it anymore.

Right now, the situation is reversed. It's Russia that enjoys a comfortable margin in artillery, tanks, and men. The West is giving Ukraine everything that isn't nailed down and it still isn't enough. Maybe the problem is a bloated inefficient military sector? Maybe the problem is political will? Maybe the problem is that we don't care enough about Ukraine? But those are all structural factors that are unlikely to change anytime soon. My current thinking is that the West can't challenge Russia in most of Europe and Russia can't challenge us in America proper. Africa is up for grabs and China will get the rest.

The Ukraine war has proven NATO to be a paper tiger.

If NATO directly entered the war with large numbers of its own combat forces, it would defeat Russia's military and drive it out of Ukraine. Russia's only way of stopping NATO from doing that is to make NATO think that if driven far enough into a corner, Russia might actually escalate to using nuclear weapons.

I think you underestimate the reluctance of NATO to become directly involved in a war with Russia, which would easily spill outside of Ukraine.

The logic of the cold war was to prevent any direct conflict between two blocks. If the US gets involved in Vietnam, then the USSR does not ship their troops there to directly fire on US soldiers. Instead, it provides weapons to the Vietcong. Likewise, if the USSR invades Afghanistan, the US will simply provide weapons to their local opponents (Bin Laden and the Taliban, as it turned out) to fight the USSR.

This logic is still very much in play even today. NATO is totally playing by these rules, we arm the Ukraine (with non-nuclear weapons) and let them fight and die for their country as long as they wish to.

Quite frankly, Ukraine is not worth a direct conflict between Russia and NATO. Even if the conflict was initially restricted to Ukrainian soil, these things have a tendency to escalate. Say air defense stationed in Poland becomes involved, then Russia bombs it, then Poland declares that an attack on their soil and invokes article five.

If NATO directly entered the war with large numbers of its own combat forces, it would defeat Russia's military and drive it out of Ukraine.

Assuming it's actually prepared for war - which a peacetime army never is - if it paid the prices of thousands of dead and adapted and the public endured the thousands of KIAs etc and started winning before running out of expensive ammo ..it'd just get tactically nuclearly striked after getting onto rightful Russian clay and then run away, wisely, because a blood soaked piece of mostly useless land is not worth ending the world over.

A huge difference is that being wrong about a nuclear red line quite simply means a pretty serious blow to civilization period. And this makes every “crossing of the Rubicon” an all-in bet that Putin will not use nuclear weapons over whatever this new thing is. And I think honestly it’s pretty obvious that the man has a Rubicon and if we continue to cross false Rubicons we eventually cross the real one, especially if the Rubicon crossed would create a serious threat to Russia as a world power or Putin as leader.

I personally have little confidence in the leadership of NATO to handle this kind of thing. I just find nothing that makes me think that they have thought strategically about anything in the war. The arguments for continuing seem to be nothing more than moral preening. Saying Russia is bad and thus we will fight them and they will lose because bad guys always lose is not the kind of hard nosed strategic thinking I’m looking for in the leadership of NATO. Further, they’ve already been wrong about the state of Russia. It was supposed to collapse in the first months because we disconnected them from the central banks. It turns out they were not economic paper tigers and were more or less fine. They thought once Ukraine got this or that weapon system, that Russian military units would fail and the invasion would end. Turns out the best we can do is hold them in place. If the leaders of NATO can be wrong about the state of Russian and Ukrainian forces, and the Russian economy, I just don’t think they can be able to gage which Red Line is one Red Line too far.

Your comment reminded me of an article that I read previously which explores one of the points you're making in great detail, specifically about the "bad guys always lose" kind of thinking that seems so prevalent in NATO. https://www.ecosophia.net/the-three-stigmata-of-j-r-r-tolkien/

The first of these habits of thought may as well be called the Orc Fallacy. Orcs? Those are the foot soldiers of the Dark Lord Sauron in Tolkien’s trilogy. They’re bad. They’re so bad they’re a caricature of badness. Not only that, they don’t even pretend to believe in the rightness of their own cause; they know they’re on the wrong side, and glory in it. In Tolkien’s world, no orc anywhere ever had a generous thought or did a kindly action. The closest they get to loyalty is a kind of malicious team spirit, coupled with stark terror of what their bosses will do to them if they don’t follow orders. The closest they get to courage is bloodlust coupled with a clear sense of what everyone else in Middle-earth will do to them given half a chance. When they’re winning, they swagger; when they’re losing, they panic and run. For all their apparent strength, in other words, they’re lousy soldiers, and their main function in the trilogy consists of showing up in vast numbers and then being slaughtered en masse by their outnumbered enemies.

As a literary device this sort of gimmick has its problems. As a basic assumption about reality, shaping the way that liberal politicians and bureacrats in the Western world think about the people they hate, it has much greater problems. There are plenty of examples, but the one that comes first to mind just at the moment is the fate of last summer’s Ukrainian counteroffensive.

According to recent news reports, the counteroffensive was planned out in detail by NATO generals. They’re the ones who insisted that the Ukrainian forces should drive south across Zaporhizhia province to the gates of Crimea, and their countries provided the Ukrainian army with the tanks and other equipment that would supposedly guarantee victory. They wargamed out the offensive in repeated exercises, always with the same results. At the heart of their plan, however, was the conviction that Sauron’s hosts would panic and run once the heroic defenders of the West came charging onto the scene. Since “orcs” is a standard slang term for Russians in Ukraine these days, it probably sounded like a slam-dunk.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, nobody seems to have made sure the Russian soldiers in Zaporhizhia agreed with this. As a result, those soldiers went on believing that they were the heroes of the piece, fighting to defend Mother Russia against neo-Nazis at their gates. Instead of milling around aimlessly while the Ukrainians got ready to attack, and then fleeing in terror and dying like flies once the assault began, the Russian forces dug themselves in, built three hardened defensive lines behind the line of contact, and then fought like tigers once the battle got going, mauling one elite Ukrainian armored brigade after another. By the time the counteroffensive ended this autumn, 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died uselessly, billions of dollars of NATO armored vehicles had been blown to smithereens, and the Russian Army still held firm.

Don't even have to go that far back in history to find an example. Russia said in 2008 that Ukraine joining NATO was a red line. They invaded in 2022 after the west started pumping the country full of weapons and refused to back off its NATO talks. Now half a million Ukrainians are dead and 6 million fled, it's industry and economy are in ruins and it's demographics with those 6 million being mostly women means it's pretty much done as an independent state even if the war ends tomorrow.

Russia clearly has red lines. I don't know why the imperialist faction of western political groups is so intent on finding out where its nuclear one is.

I don't know why the imperialist faction of western political groups is so intent on finding out where its nuclear one is.

Is that a rhetorical question? It is very useful for an imperialist faction to know where the nuclear line of their enemy actually is, rather than where they say it is.

I suppose, but when we decide to find out how far a drop is before it's lethal, which is of course useful information. I propose that we throw you and the other neocons off for the test. Not random Americans or Ukrainians.

Too antagonistic. Don't get personal.

Your conduct in other threads right now is, while not quite as bad, not good.

You've been warned about this before. A lot. Ever since your first ban, where you claimed you were taking your ball and going home because this place sucks so much, and yet you keep coming back.

You've collected an impressive eight warnings since then, but no bans. And contrary to what some people think, I don't look forward to banning people (it's clearly a failure to steer people towards better participation, but some people are unwilling to change). I can only conclude you've interpreted our forbearance as tolerance and weakness.

One week ban.

It is also very useful for a nonimperialist faction to know where the nuclear line of their enemy is.

In fact, it's particularly useful to know if/when the enemy is imperialist towards them.

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