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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   29556 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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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.

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