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There is already a thread on this, but I wanted to continue the discussion regarding the Lex/Zelenskyy interview. The other thread is mainly focused on Lex's language choice, and Lex's skills as an interviewer. I'm not very interested in this whole debate - it is pointless internet drama, and a modern form of celebrity worship. It's very disappointing that most people's takeaway "yay Lex" or "boo Lex" and not anything even slightly relevant to the actual war that is taking place.
My takeaway from the interview was that I think much less of Zelenskyy. This was his chance to explain the war from Ukraine's perspective, and the best he could come up with was a braindead "Putin = Hitler" take. People who rely on the "X = Hitler" argument are currently on a losing streak, and I am now more convinced than ever that Zelenskyy will continue that losing streak. I completely agree with Lex that if Zelenskyy believes that Putin is some mutant combination of Hitler and Stalin, yet somehow worse than both, compromise is not on the table. Zelenskyy dies or is forced into exile, or Putin dies or is forced into exile. In spite of biased media coverage in the West that only highlights Ukraine's successes and Russian setbacks, it's pretty clear at this point that if the status quo continues, Ukraine will lose a war of attrition first.
Zelenskyy could have tried to explain why Putin's narrative on the 2014 coup, or the ensuing War in Donbas, is incorrect. Instead, in 3 hours I don't remember him discussing Donbas even once. Maybe this is partially on Lex for not driving home the specifics. While Zelenskyy did not have time to address the core premise of the entire war, he did have time to engage in some psychotic rambling about how Putin would conquer all of Europe.
Maybe Zelenskyy is actually more reasonable in his private views, and he is simply running an outdated propaganda playbook that would have worked in the 1940's, or even the 2000's. But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you. If you are an intelligent person who doesn't really know much about the war, Zelenskyy offered nothing of substance. "Putin = Hitler" is not substance.
Maybe one possibility is that the two sides of the war are actually:
If these are the options, I'm afraid I have no choice but to take Russia's side. The coup and the War in Donbas, at minimum, happened and were upsetting to Russia, and it is not even remotely outside of the historical norm for such situations to eventually escalate into a full-blown war. On the other hand, 2 is a merely deflection of 1 - not a real argument, just a poor attempt at psychologizing why Putin's motivations aren't his stated motivations, which at least described by Putin are quite logical, but actually just that he is secretly Hitler for some reason. If there is an alternative version of 2, that actually addresses 1, I am certainly open to it.
This has been my experience with trying to talk to Ukraine supporters so far. It's basically how Zelenskyy talked to Lex as well. They do not seem to be able to form a coherent argument; instead they simply attempt to mock anybody who wants to hear someone address Russia's arguments directly from a pro-Ukraine perspective. Trying to shame people into supporting Ukraine, without actually addressing Russia's rationale for invading, is not going to work.
I believe that the reason Ukraine supporters refuse to address the history of the war is that the entire situation becomes more complex in a way that is unhelpful to their cause. Under certain ethical frames, even under Putin's assertions, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is still unquestionably wrong. However, to even make this observation, you admit that there is a question of ethical frame and values. Under some frames, Putin has some reasonable argument, assuming the facts are true. Some commentary has compared him to a "20th century statesman" in how he thinks about things. However, then you have a more difficult task of either refuting the facts or challenging the moral frame. Better then, to simply say "Putin = Hitler, anyone who doesn't agree with my ethical frame is a pyscho maniac murder," and avoid the conversation altogether. I understand this rationale, but I think it is the wrong approach for 2025, and it is certainly not any basis for negotiating an end to the war.
Trump wants to make peace, but it certainly appears that Zelenskyy is not open to it. He did talk about security guarantees - I think this is reasonable, depending on the specifics of the guarantees. Maybe even NATO membership. But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back. There is no universe in which the Putin regime stays and power and this happens, unless Ukraine achieves some military miracle. At an absolute minimum, the eastern Donbas is gone.
Where does this leave Trump? Obviously he is going to threaten Zelenskyy in various ways, such as threatening to completely ban the export of weapons to Ukraine, sanctions on Ukraine, sanctions on anyone who continues to support Ukraine until Zelenskyy is willing to come to the negotiating table, etc.. This is my prediction for how the war ends: Trump threatens Zelenskyy, Zelenskyy eventually gives in and negotiates, Russia gets some of the land, and Ukraine gets security guarantees backed by the US. The devil will be in the details, of course.
I am not, I am merely a casually observer who spends too much time online, and I am happy to hear your takes on XYZ. I'm not pro-Russia, I am just anti-terrible discourse, and the pro-Ukrainian discourse that I have observed has been horrendously poor. Disappointingly, Zelenskyy continued this. On the other hand, Putin's speeches were highly intellectual and several levels above any speech I have ever heard a Western leader give in terms of sophistication. I am also secure enough in myself that "well if you think that, it proves you're retarded" will not change my view. In the modern information environment, this argument is in fact less effective than ever.
This doesn't resolve the main issue: Russia's place in the world. Russia considers itself a major power that is entitled to its own sphere of influence. Think the US and the Americas or France and Françafrique. Until this question is resolved, trying to contain Russia will only result in more wars in the future.
In the most cursed timeline the will result in a global thermonuclear war.
In the somewhat less cursed timeline, this will be resolved when Canada or Denmark invoke Article 5 against the US and NATO implodes. Russia then violently carves out its preferred sphere of influence.
In the most blessed timeline, this will be resolved when Russia joins NATO in exchange for control over the stans (and Mongolia and Uyghuristan) and a ban on anti-Russian legislation and rhetoric in Eastern Europe.
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More interesting for me is Zelenskyys language skill:
https://x.com/RWApodcast/status/1876014982527434842
https://x.com/RWApodcast/status/1876016285550813559
RWAPodcast are Russian shills, but they have interesting take and provide a window into Russian thinking. If their diss here is accurate (or not!) I could judge how fair they are.
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I think the only thing which saves Ukraine as a generally independent political entity is a comprehensive treaty between the US and Russia dealing with all sorts of issues from trade, weapons cooperation/limitations, finance exchanges, territorial disagreements (and ones which will develop in the near future), technology exchange, and a long list of other things Putin has wanted for decades and has been unable to get thus far. In that discussion, Ukraine isn't even in the top 5 things which Russia wants. In that list, the US would be able to get some concessions in the Ukraine conflict which doesn't result in rump-state Ukraine with a puppet government.
Since the only thing I've heard so far from Trump&Co and the idiots briefing him on this conflict, is some goofball ceasefire with Euro troops enforcing a demilitarized zoned and/or NATO membership delay, we're not even in the zipcode of an agreement Russia would find palatable.
If the only topic is Ukraine, Russia will not agree to anything less than international recognition of the full territory of all oblasts it has already inducted into the Russian Federation, constitutionally guaranteed neutrality and disarmament with inspections, constitutional protections for Russian speakers, constitutional protections for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, some sort of "de-Nazification" program, and a removal of all or nearly all sanctions against Russia with some sort of guarantee going forward they won't be put back in place the moment it's convenient.
Otherwise, there isn't a strong enough reason for Russia to stop this war. They are clearly winning now and disarming Ukraine by destroying their armies (not to mention draining the armories and treasuries of Europe) on the battlefield and an alarming % of the able-bodied male population between the ages of 21-60. Their military is larger, better armed, and more capable now than they were 3 years ago. Russia has already spent the political and social capital to mobilize men and industry to seriously fight this conflict.
I've found this topic to be difficult to discuss on this forum because of the chasm between how I and others view the reality of this war on the ground. For, e.g., I would estimate there are over 600,000 Ukrainians killed with the total number of dead and seriously wounded to be over 1,000,000 men.
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This doesn't seem true to me. Political speeches have been decreasing in sophistication for nearly a century at this point, at least in Democracies where you can have the votes of every thinking person but, in the words of Adlai Stevenson, "still need a majority." If the voters demand something contradictory like "we want to give billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine but not pay more in taxes or suffer any material consequences" then all the smartest politicians will spend their days coming up with ways to trick the populace into thinking they can have their cake and eat it too, praying that they won't be the one left standing when the game of musical chairs ends.
As far as convincing the averge person in the west to support Ukraine, "Putin is like Hitler" will work a lot better than "the system of international norms that have prevented large-scale interstate conflict in Europe since 1945 are dependent on all nations renouncing territorial annexation as a means of resolving their disputes, and any violator of these norms must be swiftly and severely punished to prevent a return to the bloodshed that characterized the first half of the twentieth century", but the latter is there if you want it.
There is no way he or anyone close to him genuinely believes this, but it would be stupid to undermine his bargaining position before ever setting foot in the negotiating room. Such concessions need to be made privately to avoid public humiliation (or potential defenestration).
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Is this not a principled choice by Zelensky, though? There is a particular Western memeplex that is easily glossed as "weaponised end of history". In this narrative, it is the West that is always willing to look at the present, call out evil and fight for good; and its enemies consist of a freak show of backwards beta loser powers that always invoke historical grievances and cringey national myths, which no enlightened democratic Chad would give a rat's ass about, to rationalise their desire to do more evil. This way of thinking clearly appeals to a significant portion of the Western audience - general Western media reactions to Putin's occasional rambling history lessons seem to come from the same playbook as the Kamala campaign "weird" ad to much better reception, and a particularly common use of the "whataboutism" meme may be glossed as "don't derail our discussion about what you are doing now by talking about what I did in the past".
Zelensky doesn't obviously need the audience that is unwilling to subscribe to this worldview, because the alliance of devout history-enders and Machiavellians can easily remain at the levers in the West as long as the fence-sitters stay put. He has little to gain from bringing up historical context, because historical context on the balance would not be kind to him - between the mess that was 2014-2022, the now largely forgotten gas disputes in the decades before it (which one may summarise as Ukraine stealing gas and being like "what are you gonna do, stop using our territory for transit?" about it) and the awkwardness surrounding how inextricable the literal Nazis and collaborators are from Ukrainian national identity even while none of their modern backers are quite willing to take the plunge and officially rehabilitate them, legitimising the view that history matters at at all would only risk growing the elements of the Western public that are tired of the war and would rather see their tax money and attention tokens redirected to morally more black-and-white issues.
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If I can show you examples of Ukraine supporters who can form a coherent argument, who don’t rely on shame or vibes, is there any chance you’ll be convinced?
I’m open to arguments that Maidan was going to happen regardless of western involvement. I think the evidence points to the west being heavily involved, but I can have epistemic humility here.
But how can you argue that it wasn’t deposing a man who won a fair election, and that his supporters, who happen to be geographically concentrated, are right to be angry to the point of secession?
Speaking of Maidan, can anyone who knows Ukrainian peruse the court document from this article and check if it's accurate? The author claims that many of the protestors shot during Maidan were shot by far-right pro-Maidan groups, not the special police (Berkut), and that this has been confirmed by a recent trial verdict.
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/buried-trial-verdict-confirms-false-flag-maidan-massacre-in-ukraine-2024
The document in question: https://reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/114304164
And some sections translated with google:
https://www.academia.edu/109357708/Maidan_Massacre_Trial_Verdict_Selected_Excerpts_Confirming_False_Flag_Massacre_English_Google_Translation_
Video from a BBC reporter at the scene where he claims to have seen shooting from the Hotel Ukrainia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zQhuD4F1yJ0
I'll pass on a million words of Ukrainian legalese and government reporting, but I can speak a bit to Ivan Katchanovski.
Ivan Katchanovski as an author probably isn't your best bet for an objective take, since he's made his theory his career niche and he gets signal boosted as part of the general propaganda wars, partly because he deliberately conflates various elements to make a more reaching case than he has. (For example- the court found that sniper shots came from Hotel Ukraina- it did not identify by who, or how many people were victims of them. In absence of identification, the perpetrator's affiliation is assigned.)
Katchanovski's core claim is that only the Maidan groups could have operated from the Hotel Ukraina because it was used by the protestors, and thus the sniper reports as a whole were a Euromaidan false flag. This... really isn't a strong link, since there was no sort of real access control / accountability in Hotel Ukraina or the Euromaidan protest zones, where if you weren't clearly government you could generally move around. You need active control and screening to credibly argue that no one trying to do a false flag could walk in, go upstairs, and take shots before leaving in the confusion of people hearing shots and thinking they might be under attack, particularly since security services can penetrate protest movements as much as any other sort of agency.
(To be explicitly clear on alternative narratives: the dispute isn't that shots came from Hotel Ukraina, but one framing is that the police never opened fire unprovoked but were merely defending themselves from far-right Euromaidan provacateurs, and another is that Ukrainian attempted a false-flag provocation to justify / prompt a Ukrainian state crackdown. Part of the basis of the later theory is that it was a tactic used by Russia elsewhere, such as in Syria at the start of the syrian civil war, and Russian advisors were present with Ukrainian security services at the time (though the Ukrainian govt. position is that the actors were Ukrainian).)
You could argue the plausibility of either chain of events, but Katchanovski dismisses that with language asserting solid control, while using insinuating language to maximize culpability to Euromaidan ('many' Euromaidan shot by far-right snipers... but no proprotional allocation or acknoweldgement of state snipers) and minimize actions by the Yanukovich government ('no massacre order given'- itself a twist of phrase to obscure the lethal force authorization that Yanukovich's government announced, which of course was not a literal order to conduct a massacre). Katchanovski is fond of these sort of semantic framings, such as calling the Russian-instigated separatists a civil war. Katchanovski tries to play to his western audience, but he's not exactly subtle with his attempts to lead the audience.
Multi-lingual word games aren't fun, and the unsatisfying answer is that in the time between Maidan and the reorganization of the internal security services, there was evidence of substantial evidence destruction (such as destruction of weapons believed used in the shootings) and key witnesses- including the internal security service leader- defected to Russia and thus were not available for Ivan's investigation to, well, investigate. Some security service people who were later recognized as being of interest were even turned over in Russian prisoner swaps.
What made the post-Maidan investigation worse/more embarassing for the post-Maidan government is that the post-Maidan government did not actually have firm control of the government aparatus for some time, and even then Ukrainian institutions- including the judiciary- were notoriously corrupt. Pro-Russian corruption was notably present even years after the revolution- such as the significant successes in the Russian invasion itself.
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By noting that the secessionists were an astroturfed special operation, as demonstrated by the systemic lack of support where Russian green men were not on the ground to carry initial efforts and the Russian state relations (and even more controlled replacements) of separatist 'leaders,' and that the deposed man who won a fair election was also a man fled before he could be tried for actions that would merit deposition in civilized countries, including- but not limited to- attempting a purge of his own unity government by unilateral lethal force that made Soviet-era politicians blanche.
The NovaRussia campaign was Putin's attempt to instigate a popular uprising that he thought would sweep the country after Putin's attempt to instigate a purge of the opposition that had already been invited into a unity government backfired when he tried to treat an oligarchy as a party-dictatorship. The reason why the Russian military had to repeatedly intervene to prop up the popular revolution was because it was neither popular or a revolution.
By the same token, I don't think that the Kievan government would've spent February of 2022 distribing rifles and ammunition to anyone who asked if they expected those weapons to be turned against them.
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As far as I know, the war in Donbass began as the result of actions by individual Russians like Strelkov who crossed the border into Ukraine without their government's knowledge or sanction (though these individuals did believe they were instigating a popular uprising that would sweep the country), and only once their filibuster campaign was on the verge of collapse did Putin finally intervene to save them.
That's another version of events that would work against the 'eastern Ukrainians were just so upset with Euromaidan they decided to secede,' I suppose.
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I wonder about this...
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I’ve always been skeptical about the argumentum ad hitlerum style of Western discourse especially in the international arena. It’s really meant as a cognitive kill switch, something that is meant to completely disarm any opposition to whatever war or war aid positions that the elite are taking at the moment. And the result of this style of argument is that to put it bluntly, it takes none of our business off the table once it’s invoked.
The real impulse behind the hagiography of the White Knight Westerners defeating basically Satan incarnate is a sales pitch to unaligned countries— we’re the good guys who defeated a crazy genocidal madman. And, thus, the pitch goes, you should join our block because we’re going to protect you and other weak people or groups. The first part is true— the holocaust is obviously real and happened, and millions were killed by it. The problem is the second part. We never actually cared about tge genocide except as propaganda. The USA never expanded its immigration quotas from Europe or made it easier for European Jews to flee to our shores. And likewise we made no effort to stymie the ability of the Germans to ship people to camps. We basically didn’t care at all. Our reasons for being involved were mostly political and economic. Honestly we’d probably have gone to war with Hitler even if he’d never attempted a genocide.
The problem is obvious. Because we’ve set ourselves up as the Empire of Freedom, Theres very little to keep us from intervening in a conflict that has nothing to do with us. Often dictators exist for a reason especially in unstable countries— they don’t have enough social trust to be able to coexist with other ethnic groups, so either you get a strongman or you get lots of intertribal warfare. Removing Saddam almost certainly set back the people of Iraq even if he was a brute as the alternative turns out to be Sunni brute’s murdering Shia brutes and society coming apart as people attempt to live in the chaos. In other cases, it’s a bad idea because any war will cost millions in treasure and a good number of lives — men either killed or maimed on both sides, infrastructure destroyed leading to civilian deaths, etc. and quite often the gain we get for this is small. Not every war is worth it (unless of course you’re in the arms business), feasible, or a good idea. But because of the anti Hitler branding of NATO, there’s no easy way to make tge case that maybe there’s no good reason for us to get involved in a conflict.
The second problem is that the meme is so deep in the Western mind that in order to question the current situation, you have to “deconstruct” the hagiographic narrative of WW2. And that often ends up meaning that people blame the Jews for the narrative, and in order to create the case for the “X=Hitler, therefore bomb the crap out of X’s country either directly or indirectly,” being wrong, it’s almost necessary to rehabilitate the Axis.
I’m more or less a political realist. My thoughts on war are: it has to benefit us in some way, it has to be probable that us getting involved will mean achieving the results that benefit us. To me this is simply a saner way to think about going to war. If it’s not going to create stability in the region, it’s not going to get us a good trading position, or access to minerals or oil or things we need to build our economy, or securing vital industries away from rivals, it doesn’t make sense. Dictator = Hitler is not a reason. Bad images on TV are not a reason.
WW2 = good wasn't about the Holocaust at the time - we didn't know about the Holocaust at the time the key wartime propaganda was being made (Casablanca is still a great movie, but at a technical level so was Triumph of the Will). It was about Hitler being a madman bent on world domination through aggressive war. The Nuremberg verdict (at a time when we mostly did know about the Holocaust) explicitly said that the most serious charge against the Nazis was starting WW2. In terms of the human cost of Hitlerism, this was mindbendingly obvious to anyone who was around at the time - the Holocausted Jews::War Dead ratio is an order of magnitude, even before you consider the wounded and the economic cost of the war.
At some point towards the end of the 20th century the alliance between the US Jewish and Black lobbies convinced the English-speaking world that the main crime of Hitler was racism with aggressive war and mass murder as aggravating factors. Nobody who lived through WW2 thought this.
Putin = Hitler and, before that, Saddam = Hitler are a return to an older and more accurate version of the Mustache Man Bad narrative (You occasionally saw Galtieri = Hitler in the UK for the same reason around the time of the Falklands war) - that countries trying to expand their borders by wars of aggression are in effect hostis humani generis. This idea goes back to the aftermath of WW1 - modern warfare turns out to be so destructive that an uncontroversial part of the post-war settlement is an explicit agreement among the Great Powers to repudiate aggressive war as a tool of policy. The Senate Republicans object to the implementation of that principle through the League of Nations, but they don't object to the principle and the Coolidge administration pushes a separate treaty enshrining the principle in international law. Post-WW1 democratic Germany also enthusiastically embraces the idea. And Hitler proves it right by starting off invading Poland and going on to commit all the crimes. The USA didn't care about genocide in Eastern Europe. But the policy-making elites on both sides of the aisle did care about a grand-scale repudiation of the post-WW1 consensus against aggressive war. And, at least after the fact, the American electorate agreed.
Hitler, Saddam and Putin all waged aggressive wars with the primary purpose of territorial expansion, backed by vague claims of right that don't recognise a relevant limiting principle. This is the most serious possible destabilisation - it's total war with everything at stake. The last time a Great Power embraced aggressive war as a policy tool, it ended up with cities nuked. Putin is even more explicit than 1939-Hitler that his aims are genocidal (in the technical sense that he wants to erase the idea of Ukrainian nationhood, not that he necessarily wants to exterminate the pre-war population of Ukraine).
The claim that the USA has no stake in Ukraine is the claim that the USA has no stake in the post-WW2 international order continuing to exist. There are people in Trumpworld who do think this - if I take the rambling about Canada/Panama/Greenland seriously-but-not-literally, Trump is saying that the USA is better off in a law of the jungle world where you are free to use aggressive war or the threat thereof as a tool of policy in your sphere of influence and Putin is free to do the same in his. The fact that the movement advocating this calls itself "America First" and is bankrolled by an anti-semitic auto-industry billionaire is too chef's kiss for words.
The international rule of law and American, Israeli, warmongering, and hegemony is something quite different.
You cannot stretch the first to encompass the later. Toppling countries for the sake of dominating them or increasing your or Israel hegemony counts obviously as a violation of international rule of law. But also the USA gave the go ahead to Turkey and Israel to commit aggressive war in Syria and expand their territory.
The USA does not obey the international court of justice on its declaration of Israel's genocide and Netanyahou arrest warrant. It threatened it in regards to the Iraq war.
So it is disingenuous for your neocon take to be presented as a defense of international rule of law. The neocons are against the international rule of law but for using it as an excuse.
Moreover, obviously countless wars of aggression are started by painting the other side as aggressors, wannabee imperialists, oppressors of minorities, etc, etc. The rhetoric about everyone being Hitler is used to do just that.
The destruction of Syria, Libya, Iraq, the countless color revolutions, even the Ukraine episode that involved the shelling of Russian areas, is not. Color revolutions and subversion of countries through your intelligence services, is also a form of aggression, imperialism. Since you create puppets and expand your circles of influence and hegemony.
I actually wouldn't mind if the USA was a dissuading power against China and Russia from screwing over other countries. But the American conduct isn't to protect the weak and not intervene in other countries except to protect.
I actually like the idea of international rule of law in combination with some dose of realism which combines a general idea of such law and to be used by powers against others. So the norm is strong and powers have the ability to use it to dissuade each other. Then an understanding of red lines and trying to find a modus vivendi and compromise to the level that aggressive war is avoided.
For example, Ukraine should not have made moves against Russian language and been ruled in 2010s in a manner that was inclusive of Russian speakers. Just one example. Another reason to encourage compromise by various powers is to avoid escalation.
USA defying international rule of law while pretending otherwise, and allowing other countries to do as well, will lead to antagonistic countries to the USA that are powerful to do so likewise.
The general narrative about the good Israel and the good USA and bad never ending Hitlers and antisemites, is a narrative that tries to excuse enormous war crimes, aggressive conduct, and to ensure that in an orwelian manner International law is doubly violated. Both violated in practice, but while claiming to be fulfilled which is another violation.
Hitler wanted imperialist expansion but wasn't a madman who was bent on world domination and the USA and USSR also were motivated by imperialist expansion. Hitler was also motivated by crushing Bolshevism and Jewish influence to communism and the enormous threat of the soviet army. If you removed the German army from the picture in the 1930s, you would get Europe conquered by the soviets. Especially if there is no American intervention against the Soviets. The USA during WW2 also wasn't just motivated by geopolitical interests but also by the fact that its goverment was infiltrated by plenty of communist agents.
Which doesn't mean that Hitler wasn't an imperialist and even willing to do plenty of attrocities and treat the conquered peoples cruelly. The USA on the long term has shown an ideology that is very hostile to the survival of european peoples but on the short term its hegemony was of a less cruel nature. But you presented a caricature. You can present Hitler in a negative way without exaggeration.
Stalin too was an imperialist but not ONLY motivated by that, but also by a fear of the German army.
Both Hitler and Stalin made war in Europe for dominance over it inevitable. I would consider Stalin along with Hitler the two leaders most responsible for widespread destructive war in Europe during ww2. They are also blamewothy for cruel conduct. Howver much of the rhetoric here washes way too much American attrocities including complicity with soviet conduct. Anyway both Stalin and Hitler were definitely motivated not just by imperialist designs but by reasonable fear of each other power.
Stalin attacked various countries too before the invasion of the Soviet Union and planned his own invasion. That Hitler attacked the Soviet Union first does not mean that the Soviet Union isn't also significantly to blame for World War 2. The USA then also wanted world war 2, and was pretty firmly on the soviet side. But one can understand even such figures without making them complete caricatures.
Also, in regards the whole Jews and communist question. The Jews were very overepresented among political comisars and of course American communists and among some of the worst mass murderers of modernity have been Jewish communists who were active in the first half of 20th century. East Europeans who turned against Soviet Union during WW2 including some who fought along with Germans had experienced a genuine murderous oppression. Jews in the USSR had played a disproportionate role in oppressing them and in atrocities. Germans commited of course plenty of their own attrocities against east europeans and their has been an east european versus German violence too at end of ww2.
There has even been a mutual genocide between Polish and Ukrainians, which I also add here to provide some more nuance.
This is to say that WW2 does not fit into the narrative of the avenging oppressed Jew who is only oppressed and justifiably must do violence against his insane conspiracy theorist amalek evil ethnic group enemies that must be destroyed. But I wouldn't consider all ethnic groups as equally bad behaving neither. I see the Germans as more blameworthy during ww2 when they were on top and consider the morality that they adopted under Nazi Germany to be of a more ultranationalist character. I consider the Jews a group very willing to abuse their power to harm others when they are on top, and to have retained an extreme nationalist mentality, and not only something that came and passed. Although during the theater of WW2 were of course targeted for violence by the Nazis, were therefore more mistreated during this historical episode. Although they had their own share even during ww2 of violence as political comisars or as influence through their influence in the USA. And obviously prior and of course strongly pushing the ethnic destruction and replacement and minoritarization of european countries, and not just Germany after ww2. Including attacking the very legitimacy of european ethnic identities and their survival.
But WW2 is so focused because it provides helpful cherry picking, in combination of course with exaggerated un nuanced one sided narratives even regarding WW2. Since of course it is morally absurd to forget the enormous mass murders that happened prior to WW2 and the strong participation of Jewish figures as some of the biggest protagonists. Especially as part of Communist movement.
East Europeans I see as also not people who have unbloody hands (including as part of USSR, it doesn't make sense to pin all of its crimes on Jews or on Stalin as only central figure and everyone else as automatons, or on supposedly ethnic-less amorphous communists, especially since some of the Soviet conduct had an ethnic revenge angle towards the Germans. But the Soviet union also targeted various ethnic groups not just Germans, and it targeted Germans even before 1939 too) but I wouldn't treat them as equally cruel and sadistic as German mentality under Nazis or Jewish mentality. And they have been targeted more than they targeted. And less (but not entirely, it would one sided and caricature to say this is 100%) the ones who started at least in regards to certain scale of atrocities. So I sympathize more with them, even though to an extend it doesn't make sense to put different non Jewish east Europeans in the same category.
And the fact that I am willing to acknowledge the more predatory nature of others is not an endorsement of any atrocity. While some of the behavior and violence have been of a more imperialist, predatory form. Or particularly disproportionate, it would be erroneous understanding of WW2 to forego the elements of violence that follows previous violence (that sometimes follows previous violence). But also plenty of violence that isn't about any revenge but targeting a weaker group.
Since avoiding an end point where different ethnic groups trying to kill each other is one of the lessons to get from WW2 and you don't learn this lesson through the caricatured picture of ww2. Even the biased wikipedia has some examples of Soviet genocides after ww2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes.
And so, it isn't as clear case of good triumphing in WW2, now is it?
Some interesting blog posts in regards to some of the issues I mentioned:
https://jottopohl.substack.com/p/title
https://jottopohl.substack.com/p/a-short-statistical-view-of-jews
I will repeat once again that remove Wehrmacht and the bigger and more mobilized soviet army that was going to defeat the Germans if the Germans didn't attack first while it was within mobilization, was going to conquer whole of Europe (unless a nuclear USA was to stop them). And of course the Soviets stopped the Germans not only from conquering the Soviet Union but remaining in a much stronger position in other parts of Europe. This undermines the pro soviet narrative although only to a degree. Still you shouldn't thank people who are against your enemy who are also your enemy and oppressor. It is true that without soviet blood and army the Germans control Europe, unless the USA starts throwing nukes. But I wouldn't thank neither, and even the American "help" although helped against an immediate great oppressive evil, has come with an enormous price for Europe on the long term. And during WW2 although not as much as Germany or Soviet Union, the USA did have some of its own atrocities. (Morthenthau plan, its firebombings and more). Including in collaboration with the soviet union, deporting people who moved from the soviet union to the west, back to the Soviet Union to be mass murdered. This atrocity involved more than a million people IIRC.
Never in its history has the USA been on the level of morally good that fits the picture you are presenting here, including during WW2, of course the cold war, and in the 21st century it has probably been the power that caused most life loss both through war, sanctions, color revolutions, creating power vacuums, supporting Jihadist rebels, and giving the go ahead to other badly motivated powers (not sure how to apportion American responsibility for harm done by allies in conduct that it supports and collaborates and even supplies). Learning about things like Yinon plan and Israel's plan to increase hegemony through destabilization of neighboring Arab countries, provides better understanding of middle east policy than convenient false narrative about never ending Hitlers justifying such disastrous conduct.
This brings in mind a certain parable. There is a bad Samaritan who claims to be a good Samaritan who likes to go and find people who have been in motorcycle accidents and remove their helmet, in an attempt to help them, he always says. However this doesn't work and the people die. And he keeps doing it. At some point, one should question his great intentions even if he constantly claims to be a good Samaritan and that only bad people would ever insinuate otherwise.
If the people having such plans were doing so with the best intentions as if any foreign policy establishment has a goal to save the world from evil, then they will be pretty stupid to catastrophically bring immoral ends time and time again. They aren't that stupid but are willing to promote a fake moralistic narrative.
It would be preferable if the USA was to behave more in line with the international rule of law. Trump's bullying of Denmark, would of course also deviate from that.
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I think even here, I’m not completely sold on the notion that every single incursion into every country is a threat to international order. The results of this are not obviously better. We’ve replaced colonial rule with protectorates where the target country can sing a national anthem, compete in the Olympics, and design a flag. The country is still effectively controlled by forces outside itself, but it has to “choose” to do what we’ve decided is in the best interests of the RBIO (Rules Based International Order). Even internally, groups that for whatever reason don’t like RBIO or the results of that system are suppressed. And it still hasn’t lead to fewer wars, or us getting less involved in said wars. We’ve been involved in wars for most of the post WW2 era, and as many peace activists have pointed out, the road to “we’re about to bomb the shit out of someone” is always talk about two things: Human Rights, and Hitler.
To me this is the gift that keeps on giving (to arms dealers). Disputes will always happen, and a good number of them will be over territory. And some of them are legitimate concerns. But even if most of them aren’t, getting involved in every dispute just means more shooting.
I agree with you that there are corner cases, and that the US is the bad actor in enough of the corner cases than I will sometimes refer to it as a "rules-based" international order rather than a rules-based international order. In particular, GWB's invasion of Iraq very much was a threat to international order, and might have broken it if it hadn't turned into a self-punishing crime. But the existence of corner cases does not invalidate a rule. In any case, Putin's invasion of Ukraine is not a corner case - it is the most clear-cut case of international aggression since Saddam invaded Kuwait.
The key questions as I see them are "Does the so-called RBIO reduce the amount of violence in the world compared to law of the jungle?" and "Does the so-called RBIO reduce the risk of nuclear war?" The answer to the first question is clearly yes, given how violent law of the jungle can (and did, in the 1st half of the 20th century) get with access to modern conventional weapons. The answer to the second question seems to be yes to me, because a world where "Should Ukraine be invaded and genocided?" is a local matter between Ukraine and whoever has the power to invade them is a world where medium-sized countries like Canada, Poland and Vietnam need nuclear deterrents, a world where Canada needs a nuclear deterrent is a world where they build one, and a world with more nukes is a world where one is more likely to be let off in error.
I don't consider the USA to be a supporter of a rules based order. It isn't corner cases.
Sure, there might be circumstances where USA might oppose aggressive action of other powers that USA might be opposing something evil. But even in these circumstances the USA might be putting oil in fire and want a proxy war, or it be more complicated than USA stopping aggression.
Additionally to the extend USA can be an ideological power it is about an ideology that difers from rule based order like Communists were for communist ideology and not about avoiding subversion, invasions,totalitarianism.
In my view to have an international rules based order both the USA and others in general need to value international law over invasions for example, but some level of realism is also helpful. Because toppling other countries for the sake of hegemony and creating chaos or putting puppets in charge, obviously is both against international rules based order and the end point of hubris and inability to compromise with the existence, rights and interests.
The coexistence of some level of realism with valuing for their own right opposition to countries invading their neighbors. Trying to colonize other countries, is how you can get something closer to both. So I agree that a pure cynical our interests only, isn't sensible.
I agree that USA shouldn't be a pathologically altruist power however. In agreements for global warming there are plans for developed countries to pay for development of India, China. Or to stiffle their own future.
Self destruction is not the path for any sane way to behave and in our times it is a fashionable version of supposed "justice".
There are issues that I find Chinese behavior concerning like the mass use of fishing vessels as far as Argentina, and depleting fishing supplies.
What would make me have a more positive view is a USA that isn't the trouble maker or tries to dismember China but is against the Chinese and others starting trouble. Basically for a global American influence that helps preserve nations free, self determinant, and dissuades war and civil conflict. Instead of often doing the opposite. Do I think this is going to happen? No.
I guess on some level you can have more or less respect for a genuine International rules based order, which is different than people just using it as a phrase but actually doing the opposite. I do think it is possible to push to a degree things in one or another direction but utopia is impossible. Generally I like to argue towards what I consider good even if it is unlikely to bring significant good change.
Maybe there has been some small elements of that in the so called pax americana that gave some people false hope, or some influence of American media and propaganda. At the end of the day much as I wish it was different, the USA isn't a benevolent power. And the narrative that tries to promote this version and uses ww2 is just a distorted version of history.
Also relevant that the realist school has a point that much of warmongering isn't of the benefit of the Americans as a people.
I agree with the general sentiment but I don't interpret the Ukraine conflict as one of only Russian aggression but see Ukraine as also the outpost of American aggression against Russia. And also see the use of USA of countries like Ukraine, as also not necessarily to the benefit of said countries who become the battlefield for proxy war. I also don't buy into this idea of only Russian self defense. The Russians created their own breakaway in Georgia, in Moldova with Transnitria.
Not only with its own conflicts directly involved, but the USA has allowed Turkey, Israel and Azerbaijan (which to an extend is antagonistic to Iran), to expand territories and commit aggressive behavior.
Maybe zero American influence would lead to other powers undermining more the international rules based order but the typical policies of the American foreign policy establishment/deep state are themselves undermining any genuine International Rules Based Order that isn't just a slogan. Being maximally uncooperative and desiring of world hegemony it self leads to conflict. But sure being maximally tolerant of Chinese/Russian and others aggression against other countries will also lead to wars. So I do think there would be a positive value in a USA willing to dissuade that without engaging it self in those behavior or encouraging/allowing others to do so.
There is also the ideological angle of the kind of influence that are the result of color revolutions such as in Georgia, and the influence of CIA and NGOs, even of someone like George Soros and other types. Which I am 100% against the ideology imposed on countries by these people. And this it self is aggression that undermines any genuine international rules based order. The policies that come along of mass migration, and oppressing the native majority and treating them as illegitimate, and of course oppressing and excluding from influence patriots who oppose this, fits historically with the policy that tyrannical empires did throughout history to import foreigners and have them rule over a subject people.
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Minor note but obviously someone isn’t going to fold and throw away their entire negotiating hand in a war during a podcast.
The sophisticated version I’ve heard is simply that since the end of the big war, European nations have not attempted to conquer one another or to annex each other’s territory. Europe thus has a historical interest to make it as hard and consequential as possible for any nation which attempts to do this.
Meanwhile, Putin’s frame where historical claims of great civilizations and uniting the ethnicity through territorial annexation is important has historically resulted in horrific and likely unending bloodshed on the European continent.
For anyone on the western side to begin discussing the problem from within Putin’s frame is already to cede ground to his worldview.
Instead Zelensky has cast him as a naked assed barbarian who lives in a world of historical tribal claims rather than the modern world based on the principle of territorial sovereignty.
Zelensky did however lay out the historical context of Ukraine. The nation who gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees which were subsequently not respected. That has significance. He also in my opinion could have painted the broader historical picture for westerners of why Ukrainians have historical reasons to resist domination under Moscow. Something about one of the largest man made famines in human history? I’m not sure how big a part of the Ukrainian psychology that event is. He probably could have done a better job here.
But in the end as @TequilaMockingbird says, conquerors of territory often operate on some great historical mythos in their own head. However even so, there still may be reason to consider them naked assed barbarians whose concept of grandeur isn’t compatible with the interests or frame of the rest of the world. Simply having a grand theory of history doesn’t correlate well with being a force for good in the world. It’s quite often the opposite.
Yeah, a podcast is 100% the place to be doing PR aimed at the people who are going to listen to it (probably not Putin), it's definitely not the place to make concessions or to commit other own-goals (not speaking Russian seemed obvious to me, although I haven't listened to the podcast.)
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Is it really brain dead though? Zelenskyy is to all apperances correct that Putin's position in 2024 is analogous to Hitler's in 1938, complete with appeals to anschlaus and rightful dominion over all
GermanRussian Speaking peoples. Durring the lead up to and early stages of Russian pundits were talking openly about eliminating Ukrainian as a spoken language to dissuade any future notions of independence. Given the above I think it is reasonable for the Ukrainians to view this war as an existential one.As @The_Golem101 observes, Putin has already made and broken treaty commitments within the context of this conflict so some sort of guarantee from the US and/or EU to ensure that Putin doesn't just come back in a year after his forces have had an opportunity to rearm and regroup is going to be the bare minimum for any agreement.
I think this is a mixture of nutpicking (which is your fault) and weaponised nuts, as in the practice of keeping around extremists to send a message along the lines of "if you get rid of me you could get much worse" (which is Putin's fault). The reality seems to be that in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine Ukrainian is still offered as a first language at school at least as of last year (Russian MoE claims 43% chose it in Zaporizhia), while Ukraine started restricting books in Russian back in 2016 and has since 2023 also banned publishing in it. I would assume this entails no education in it, either (and if you speak it a friendly language inspector might just ask you if you got a loicense for that). This is not a matter of "well, it's Ukraine, so the correct percentage is 100% Ukrainian", either; many parts of modern Ukrainian territory historically never spoke the Ukrainian language. (Should India be allowed to stamp out non-Hindi speakers because the name of the language is related to the name of the country?)
I don't think there is much evidence of claimed dominion over all Russian-speaking peoples - there are large minorities in almost every country neighbouring Russia that they have not made any particular moves to claim dominion over, and conversely the Russian interest in Ukrainian alignment exists without the language/ethnicity component. Do Australian threats against the Solomon Islands to prevent a Chinese base in their backyard suggest a desire for dominion over all English-speaking peoples, because the Solomonese happen to speak English?
I feel like this just begs the questions; How high does someone have to be on the food chain before pointing out thier crazyness stops being "nut-picking"? and how many extremists does Putin get to endorse and support before it becomes "reasonable" to say that he supports and endorses extremism?
So what you're saying is that two years after Russia invaded Ukraine under the guise of "liberating Russian speakers" the Ukrainian government stopped teaching Russian in its schools, and a year after Russia invaded them for a second time under similar pretenses they banned publishing in Russian as well. Oh Dear, Anyway.
Putin (in his interview with Tucker Carlson), as well as several of the "weaponised nuts" he keeps around, IE Alexander Dugin, Timothy Sergetsev, and Moscow's Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have all made claims to this effect.
Again, how far up the food chain does somone have to be before citing them changes from "nut-picking" to "evidence"
I haven't seen much in the way of endorsement and support presented. In terms of talking heads that can be in some sense argued to be in good standing with the Russian state, approximately an infinite amount - what matters is policy, not talk.
So what you're saying is that eliminating a language to dissuade any future notions of independence can be acceptable, and we are just haggling over the price?
Comparable to holding Trump accountable for things that Alex Jones says, maybe. As far as I can tell Putin-Dugin connections are on the level of "someone claimed..." and supposed dogwhistles.
Literally who? I had to google him (your misspelling of the name didn't help), and it sounds like... he is someone who wrote an inflammatory thinkpiece that was published on RIAN? I'm sure you can find some crazy editorials in Western flagship media (like the WaPo's cheerleading for invading Iraq), and for actual government media on Ukraine, here's VoA echoing Ukrainian conspiracy theories that the Russians are bombing themselves. I doubt every opinion piece they publish is ordered from the top.
Can I one-up this with Rumsfeld's creepy Bible quotes for invading Iraq? That one's even from an actual official member of government.
All in all, I think you could make a similar and stronger case that the American elites of the time endorsed and supported the actual idea of launching an honest-to-god religious crusade into Iraq. As much as I like smearing neocons, I don't think this would be accurate either.
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I think it is a completely unreasonable position to say that if there is a border war between a larger state and smaller state, and the area under question contains people who have historical connections to the larger state, then the leader of the larger state = Hitler. This must have happened a million times across history, and almost every time the leader was somebody other than Hitler.
It's not a "border war" though. It only superficially resembles one because the Ukrainians have put up stiffer resistance than anyone expected them to. @Dean correctly points out that Russia's stated war goals basically amount the elimination of Ukraine as an independent entity, and that the Ukrainians have responded accordingly.
Likewise the Hitler / Putin comparisons are not about geography or facial hair (Hitler wins on the latter front if you ask me) as much as it is about both of them being grievance-mongering dictators who take a very "everything for the state, nothing outside the state" approach to politics, while waging wars of expansion against thier nieghbors under the guise of supporting identity politics.
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Is it fair to say that it’s a situation which often boils over to genocides?
Yugoslavia, Greece-Turkey, the Hutus and Tutsis, etc.
I probably lack full historical literacy of all the details but any time a country sends their military to another to protect their ethnicity as a minority there, or try to annex them into their own I feel like it tends to end up in horrible bloodshed.
I think the principle of sovereignty, respect for territorial boundaries, and relative freedom of movement has been a good salve for this recurring pattern of warfare.
Who follows that principle, though? Certainly the US (Kosovo, ...) and allies (Israel) don't.
I think a significant tension in these debates that is seldom discussed explicitly is between the position that it is going to be inevitable that the hegemon (US) gets to bend/violate the principles a little and we should feel blessed with a hegemon that has been doing it so sparingly and judiciously on one hand, and the position that after a world in which 0 parties get to violate the principle the next best one is one in which 2+ parties get to on the other. I'm firmly in the second camp for what I'd like to think is a good assortment of reasons, while the majority of nuanced political thinkers in the West tends to be in the former. (There are of course also louder, and less interesting, positions, amounting to "the US never violated any principle, NATO is a defensive alliance, go back to your bot farm" and "America fuck yeah, cry about it". There isn't really much to discuss with the latter, and the former is hard to get through to.)
The difference usually boils down to questions of how sparing and judicious US violations really are, how reassuring it is to hope that they will always remain as sparing and judicious as they are now, and whether game theory does or doesn't mean that the understanding that the US alone could go on an unrestrained spree of conquest and meddling with impunity lets them reap many of the boons of doing so without actually having to transgress, much like nuclear-armed states reap benefits without ever firing a single nuke in anger.
I also tend to think that as a lowly civilian, my rulers facing adversity and competition is almost always good - if they can stand unopposed, they don't need to do anything for me, but if they are locked in a knife's-edge struggle with a mortal enemy, they are incentivised to buy my support lest I throw my minuscule worth in for the other side and tip the balance. ("For any German politicians reading this: Do I sound like a Putin bot? Are you afraid of losing the upcoming election to Putin bot parties? We can discuss terms!")
Odd choice of examples if those are your examples.
Different entities may not follow the principle as you'd prefer to understand it, but that doesn't mean they don't follow it as they understand it. Being different entities naturally they would understand with their own differences, even as those entities are themselves composed of different people over time.
Kosovo is a trivial example of sovereignty-principle compliance- the American (and many others) concept of the principle sovereignty is that sovereignty is not absolute. There are decades of internal law theory and practice as to why this is not only not at odds with international law, but required by international law to not consider sovereignty absolute.
Complying with the principle of [X] as it interacts with other principles is not an abandonment of a principle just because you have your own geopolitical preferences.
Principles are only really worth anything if they meaningfully constrain behaviour, and if their application is sufficiently predictable that others can anticipate in what way behaviour will be constrained by them. As a hypothetical country opposing the US, are there behaviours I could actually confidently predict the US would or would not take, which would not be sufficiently predicted by a model in which the US always acts to maximise its own wealth and power?
Supreme Court rulings that can be completely predicted by knowing the political alignment of the judges and valence of the possible rulings still come with a text, which you could think of as a sort of parallel construction, presenting the illusion that law is created by application of legal principles. This undoubtedly helps the peace-keeping function of national law (as the belief that procedurally impartial justice is available saps the will to take matters into your own hands), and I'm sure that the way that "decades of international law theory" tend to turn up afterwards whenever the US does what it must serve a similar function for those under its wing that wish to remain at peace with a situation they can't do anything about anyway. However, in a situation like this, at least those of us outside of the US are not actually so completely powerless that the best course of action is to believe whatever will make us the happiest. We're facing decisions that have some real impact on things like whether our country remains aligned with US goals and whether we personally help or subvert those goals every day, and for that purpose it would be useful to have a correct model of how the US would act in different situations.
As a concrete example, if I as a German voter were to vote in the AfD or BSW and they seek business with Russia, should I expect more US attacks on our infrastructure? Suppose I would not vote for them if I knew that this would happen, but I fall for the "sovereignty principle" as naively understood by me (and there's no doubt the cheerleaders are perfectly happy with me having this naive understanding!), or believe that the professed principles of European solidarity and mutual security assistance mean that if such a thing were to happen the other EU countries would help uncover and oppose it. They get elected by a narrow margin, a great MR-two-point-oh rapprochement occurs, and then the pipelines and train lines start mysteriously blowing up. I have a pretty good hunch who did it, but all the Baltics stonewall us so I can't even coordinate a protest, and our economy is once again in shambles. Will the inevitable fifty-page treatise of international law theory that explains how this is actually fully in line with all professed principles be of any solace to me, after I made a decision based on a flawed world model and reaped a catastrophic outcome?
Criteria met.
Criteria also met.
Yup. There are many ways to describe the US policies of the last century or so, but 'always act to maximize its own wealth and power' isn't a competent characterization of it.
Given how simple this opening premise was, and how you didn't even try to argue about Kosovo, I think we can move on from the US to what you actually care about.
Nope. Not unless you want to insinuate AfD or BSW voters are morally obliged to subscribe to certain conspiracy theories.
Do you? I'm pretty open that I think it was plausibly Ukraine, and I've written to that multiple times over the years, but then there are holdouts and you did insinuate 'more' US attacks, so your position is not particularly clear.
I am also not convinced you cannot coordinate a protest so much as your protest is sufficiently unsympathetic enough to garner support you feel you are owed in the way you want it. In so much that our economy is in shambles, some of that seems unavoidable to any reasonable agency and some of that is a well-earned consequence of sovereign prerogative to make bad macroeconomic decisions and take macroeconomic risks that turn bad, even against the advice of partners and allies.
Does your solace or lack thereof serve any relevant form of proof or disproof to whether the professed principles were actually held and adhered to or not?
There was nothing to argue with there - you said a thing that on its own means nothing other than "the principle constrains US actions less than you think it does" (which can mean anything from "the principle means sovereignty is absolute in all cases that are not the US attacking Serbia" to "actually the principle means nothing") and pointed at "decades of international law theory", which it is hardly reasonable of you to expect me to go read up on for the sake of this thread.
I don't get the sense that you really addressed my points at all. Can you spell out exactly what are the constraints on US behaviour that you believe result from this principle of sovereignty (not absolute) that the US adheres to? I understand that you predict in concrete terms that it will not physically attack German infrastructure even in the event of German rapprochement with Russia (of course assuming no additional contingencies), but that alone could be equally predicted from self-interest (an open attack could cause enough negative sentiment to reduce German cooperation with other US endeavours). Do you think the US would...
...do it if they were assured that mainstream media in all involved countries will refuse to entertain the theory that the US did it?
...provide material support to non-US actors to do it?
...ignore and conceal (and instruct allies to do so) evidence they obtained that non-US actors would do it? (I think this represents a minimum of what they almost certainly did for NS2; even WaPo asserted the first part )
...engage in economic warfare with the purpose of preventing operation of another country's infrastructure? (They explicitly threatened this for NS2.)
...do any of the above with some other country, whose support may be less important for them than Germany's?
...engage in other acts that are commonly seen as violations of sovereignty: arming and equipping a coup, funding a coup, funding opposition parties?
...any of the above, for countries whose support is less important and/or can be sufficiently assured by the coup or opposition election succeeding? (If you say no here, I could bring such a wall of counterexamples that the discussion wouldn't really be worth having.)
And, is there some compact representation of what the actual principle is that I could apply to generate the same predictions myself without reference to "decades of international law theory"?
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People don't say Putin = Hitler because the nature of a border between a larger state and a smaller state with an ethnic dispute.
People make the Putin = Hitler comparison on the basis of historical revisionist warmongering based on fantasies of cultural identity and exaggerated grievance, plus systemic war crimes mixed with strategic incompetence born of arrogance and self-delusion.
This can still be a wrong basis for the comparison- the thing that makes Hitler historically distinct is the genocide camps rather than the warmongering or even the war crimes- but people are not making the comparison on the basis of the map.
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Russia tried for much more, it's only a boarder war because Russia's military sucks.
During the American Civil War, there were a number of European military observers who came, looked around, looked at the horrific loss of bloodshed and things like elaborate trench fortifications, and came to a conclusion: the Yanks didn't know how to fight. They went home satisfied with themselves and unprepared for 1914 because they did not realize they were witnessing a revolution in military affairs, as the lethality of fires increased without a corresponding revolution in maneuver.
A lot of Ukrainians and Russians are dying and since where I am we get the privilege of sitting this round out, I really, really hope that we're able to take away something from it besides "Russia's military sucks" this time.
What are you on about? You falsely said this was a border dispute. I was informing you if you were ignorant or calling out a lie.
I think you are confusing me with another poster. I am not the poster you replied to.
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1870 also probably didn't help the European impression that elan beats machine guns. Shows how easy it is to draw incorrect lessons from major events
The South is a prime example of this (analogizing their situation to the Revolutionary War, which proved to be misleading) but you're going to have to fill me in or at least jog my memory on what happened in 1870.
The Franco-prussian walkover, which reinforced the European belief that elite troops and violence of action would always trump artillery and fancy guns.
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"Drones suck."
I've made the point more at length before, but I view the advent of drones, as demonstrated in the Ukraine War, as both a military revolution and a revolution in military affairs. It's changed the nature of the civil-populace's relationship with war, as drones have been a democratization of airpower that almost anyone can both contribute to (via the affordability / ease of maintenance) or participate in (ease of piloting / utility).
This wouldn't have mattered as much as it has if the Russians didn't suck- there were severe and fundamental mistakes in the Russian strategy from planning assumptions to allocations of manpower- but the technological innovation of drones is the hard lesson learned.
I agree about drones.
I also agree that the Russians made very severe mistakes going in (contra some people, I tend to believe that after several years of war the Russian and Ukrainian armies are now arguably the most capable ground forces in the world man for man, simply because exposure to peer conflict tends to result in the swift development of military skill – even if it is not true, I think it is good to behave as if it were rather than making the opposite mistake I detail above. I do not believe this applies to their air or especially their naval arms, although I think the Russians in particular have learned a lot from the air war, a lot of it was lessons the US has known for twenty-forty years.)
I would add to this – personally – mines, mines mines. Not as big a revolution as drones, obviously, but it seems fairly likely to me, in hindsight, that NATO planners were unprepared for the volume of mines the Russians were prepared to field.
That would be an argument that assumes effective Darwinian processes. It really doesn't work that way in a force-generation contest like Ukraine.
While the Russian staff officer level is able to adjust and improve at a planning level, the quality of ground forces has degraded on both equipment and personnel quality levels. It started with the short-signed seed-corn strategy in 2022 when the Russians canibalized its training corps for front line forces for conscription, and the consumption of 'quality' with low-quality replacements has only increased. Russia continued to commit and recommit forces until their functional dissolution and necessary reconstitution.
Rather than build up combat-tested elite veterans, Russia has mostly expended its elites and replaced them with less and less capable replacements who are less trained, less equiped, and more prone to drugs and ill-discipline. The most capable elements of the ground forces are those that aren't exposed to fires, namely the EW, drone, and missile corps.
The war I am most familiar with is probably the American Civil War, which was at least in part a force-generation contest. The Union followed a similarly stupid pattern of force generation – unlike the South, which backfilled depleted units with fresh troops, the Union raised entire new fresh inexperienced companies and sent them into battle. You speak with a level of sophistication about such things that indicates to me that I do not need to explain why this is a terrible idea.
Nevertheless, I think it would be a mistake, based on anything I've read, to presume the U.S. Army was less competent or equally competent in 1864 compared to 1860. In fact, my impression is that they were considerably improved by the end of the war.
This doesn't get into the other elements you mention (EW, drone, missiles) where testing their technology against frontline NATO assets is only going to enhance their capabilities.
Now, it's possible that experiences from the American Civil War don't cross-apply here, and that I'm the proverbial drunk searching for his keys under a streetlight. But I suspect they hold at least partially.
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Particularly given the capture/kill lists that went on in occupied territories along with the systemic torture chambers, with criteria reportedly including things like 'spoke out against Russia' or 'served in the Ukrainian military post-Maidan.' The liquidation criteria has since been met by considerably larger proportions of the Ukrainian population.
The Ukrainian perspective has consistently considered not just the implications of this war, but what the peace terms imply for the prospects and survivability for the next war.
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I think you might have missed a bit of why the Lex interview focused on the question of Putin's reliability and goals - what is looming over the current game board is the upcoming negotiations for ceasefire conditions, that's why it consumed all the oxygen in the room. It does make sense in this context for Ukraine to lay out its position that Putin has made and broken treaty commitments before, and they need security guarantees to make sure that a ceasefire isn't just a way for Russia to sort out its force generation issues and have another go in a few months. That's their minimum position, and while they won't "concede" territory, they may well agree that they aren't getting all that they want there, and a deal will be thrashed out. It's very important for their security and therefore survival that they get this, and so they will raise it as a key talking point.
Meanwhile, Putin's position is crazy town, he still wants full war goals, which is a bit of a "lol, lmao" position for someone whose military position is as weak as it is currently (they are struggling to source any tanks and tubes for the first time over sections of the front, meaning that their fires superiority will have to come increasingly from an expansion of air, which seems impossible medium term) and whose country is starting to seriously suffer under the economic pressure. For example, "Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded to the initial reports of the Turkish peace proposal, stating that "freezing" the frontline is "a priori unacceptable" for the Kremlin and that Russian President Vladimir Putin's previously stated conditions for ending the war — which amounted to full Ukrainian capitulation — remain "fully relevant." - that includes Ukrainian disarmament and massive additional territorial transfers.
Zelensky laying out a solid but reasonable ceasefire position to Trump and make Putin seem crazy is 80% of his US facing work currently, and he's doing a reasonable job of it I would guess. Some evidence of that is that his official position is pretty close to what you predict as the end state, without throwing out all of his haggling chips before he even starts.
A better interviewer would have drawn out far more interesting quotes with far better questions of course, but we had the interviewer we had, who sadly was Lex. There have been a lot of people who have talked about the different positions on the war over the years, and Pro vs Anti Ukrainians have written books on the topic, it's certainly not under discussed. We could discuss it here if you're interested, I have some opinions - but Putin's positions on the topic are certainly curious. He genuinely believes that Ukraine is a historical fiction, there are plots everywhere to split them off from Russia and that they need to forcibly reunited and driven to a satellite status - that was his interview with Tucker (I'm less impressed by his choice to devote all his airtime to ahistorical ramblings on Vladislav the Wise than you there) and his really odd paper in 2021 (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181). The problem of discussing his position is that... it isn't internally consistent, though it's certainly a mistake. For example, even if it was true (rather than bad historical fiction) his invasion was the perfect way to create a national identity, I literally couldn't plan anything better as a creation myth for Ukraine.
However, would you like a summary of roughly what the Ukrainian positions are vs people like Strelkov? It won't be why Russia launched the invasion (Prigożyn was pretty clear on that, and I think he was telling the truth), but it would give a steelman for both sides.
Russian imperialists (so to speak) believe the Ukrainian nation doesn't exist (well, that at least one encompassing the Crimea and Novorossia in general certainly doesn't exist) in the same way American white liberals believe the white race doesn't exist or the way Zionists everywhere believe the Palestinian people don't exist, the way Hungarian nationalists believe that there has never been a Slovakian nation etc.
We don't have to pretend that this is a worldview utterly alien to normies in NATO states.
That's certainly part of people like Strelkov's views as per "85 Days in Slavyansk" - and I agree that denying your opponent nationhood/legitimacy is a useful tactic that many groups have made use of, no disagreement there.
I just don't think it makes much sense to argue historical word games around it when the fake people in question have sunk a good chunk of your Black Sea fleet, routed Guards divisions and your economy is in real trouble as your new BRICS buddies aren't buying any exports other than gas. Ukrainians certainly now feel like a people, and you're unlikely to argue them out of it with a new paper - he has to get his economy back on track and do something to sort out his horrible attrition ratios if he's going to apply his will to them by force.
Those are genuine beliefs, not tactics.
By tactics I meant that those beliefs could actually have utility under some circumstances. Again I'm sure that people believe that classes of their opponents are deluded or illegitimate, it just doesn't really help much and launching a war on the belief your opponent isn't a real country anyway doesn't stop them fighting back.
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Something about a brave agrarian yeomanry defending thier land in the War of Northern Agression perhaps?
And if Ukraine had sought independence for the sole purpose of continuing to keep human beings as property (and listed that as the reason in their declarations of secession), I might concede that the Kremlin had something approaching the general neighbourhood of a point.
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The wars always follow the same patterns and have since the 1800s. A long backstory is ignored, and instead the new boogeyman is launched. There is no reason why this boogeyman exists, he is just evil and wants to wreck the world. A great sense of urgency is instilled and we all have to act now or else Ho Chi Minh, Gadaffi, Castro or whoever else is going to come to your town and murder babies! They are purely evil and have no arguments whatsoever, they are just cartoon villains.
Then the war starts with a big hype, freedom fries, this next war is so high tech, cheap precise and so different from all the others! Don't ask any critical questions, a few special forces operators can take all of Afghanistan in a few weeks and win! There is complete hype, the media asks barely any critical questions, and the psyops are in overdrive.
Then the war drags on, the casualties and costs mount, the refugee crisis grows and "we will be in Berlin next week" attitude is replaced with cynicism. During this phase the debate doesn't get better because now it is a sensitive topic. The war ends and people still don't want to talk about it, hold anyone responsible and even talk about it. It becomes embarrassing for the "Saddam will nuke as all crowd" when they have to face their fiasco.
These things become public frenzies whipped up by the media that fall apart with critical questioning. This isn't too different from defunding the police in Detroit. Every linkedin user is supposed to cheer it on, and a critical question makes everyone in the room deeply uncomfortable.
The west is incredibly good at psy-ops and unfortunately the main target is western leaders. Western leaders genuinely thought Ukraine's summer 2023 offensive would be a success because they had been psy-oped into thinking Russians are orcs with WWII tech who will collapse at the sight of a modern tank. The support for Ukraine has been haphazard because western leaders have been utterly convinced Russia is going to collapse any moment and the battlefield is Legolas and Aragon turning beheading Uruk-Hai into a sport.
The fact that so many in the west were shocked when the war broke out points to the absolute lack of understanding of the situation and what a filter bubble westerners are stuck in. The reaction was to double down and isolate their filter bubble even further.
During the invasion of Iraq Baghdad Bob was on CNN and there were at least some journalists running around on the ground. Today the media is so focused on purity that we would never see a live interview with even a Ukrainian soldier.
The sad thing is people who think every previous war was a farce will join the hype for the next war.
No, they don’t. Do you know anything about American reluctance to enter the World Wars?
I’d like to see you apply any of these standards to Putin’s Russia. You have a remarkable blind spot for anything you think pisses off your domestic enemies.
Obviously they don't follow the pattern he lays out here (Americans didn't lose those wars) but doesn't American reluctance to enter those wars support the "psy-opping people to get them to go to war" theory? This seems particularly true in WW1 where England (in addition to stirring up a lot of anti-German propaganda) passed the Zimmerman Note (which was authentic) to the US to get them to join the war in such a way as to conceal the fact that they obtained it by tapping American diplomatic lines as part of a concerted strategy to draw the United States into the war. Wilson was reelected on his track record of not getting involved and then...
There was a similar effort by the Brits in WW2 but I can't remember any of the really striking narratives from it.
I'll say "not particularly." America got to the brink of war for several other reasons, most prominently American deaths at the hands of U-boats. The sending, interception, and release of the Zimmerman telegram all hinged on Germany's actions at sea.
In elementary school, they taught us about the Lusitania and the policy of "unrestricted submarine warfare" all as one line item. This elided all the important questions.
What exactly did Germany do?
"Unrestricted" warfare never made sense to me until I learned what restrictions they were abandoning. Dating back to the Age of Sail, noncombatant ships were entitled to significant warning before being sunk. It wasn't as if sailing ships had any chance at stealth, anyway. They would surrender to the (faster, larger) warship, provide their papers, and allow a search for contraband cargo. If they proved to be a legal target, then, the raider was required to let them abandon ship, possibly taking them onboard as prisoners, before firing a shot. Such restrictions, known as "prize" or "cruiser rules", were codified by international treaties.
This was reasonable to ask of a surface combatant, which could comfortably outgun any prey or outrun any reinforcements appearing on the horizon. To a submarine, though, it was a terrifying prospect. Lacking the armor, firepower, or speed of a surface ship, subs were extremely vulnerable while surfaced. Requiring such a boat to expose its belly for the sake of propriety was extremely unpopular amongst submarine captains--and amongst their advocates in the German chain of command.
Twice, the German Navy declared that it would suspend these rules within a specific region of sea. The first of these campaigns lasted about six months before outrage from neutral nations forced them to walk it back. The second got America into the war.
Why did they think this was a good idea?
Britain was a powerhouse keeping the Western Front stable and Germany isolated. It was also an island reliant on imported food. The Germans had no expectations of beating the Royal Navy in a straight fight, so they tried to find another way to strike at the British Isles.
Initially, they believed their undersea blockade could be justified to neutrals as tit-for-tat with the more conventional British one. The first campaign was carried out with some limitations, preferring to target unambiguously Allied vessels, in an effort to minimize the backlash. But the British blockade didn't generate American corpses. Ultimately, this first campaign solidified the American government's position against unrestricted submarine warfare.
By 1917, the Western Front had ossified again. Jutland had thrown the Royal Navy into disarray but confined the Germans to port. Civilians and soldiers alike were faced with the abysmal Turnip Winter thanks to continued blockade and manpower shortages stemming from continued conscription. Germany was getting desperate.
Its informal military junta went for one last gamble. If the U-boats could break Britain, Germany could secure its position and make American diplomacy a moot point. They sent the Zimmerman note as part of an attempt to further delay the U.S. Unfortunately for Germany, British control of the seas extended to undersea cables. The telegram was sent on Jan 16 and intercepted immediately. Between its release to the American government and our declaration of war, German submarines began hunting American vessels in earnest, sinking ten.
Did it really matter so much?
Yes, it did.
I'd be willing to assume my main source, a book I just read, was too generous--it sure is a tidy conclusion for a book about naval power. But the chapters concerning submarines and American war support are well-sourced with statistics, letters, and quotes from the countries involved, all of which speak to the importance of these sinkings. My personal standout has to be Teddy Roosevelt, never the most reserved man, in the spring of 1917:
The trickle of American deaths into the headlines brought most Americans into Teddy's camp. Meanwhile, Wilson had drawn his lines in the sand, and Germany had finally, knowingly crossed them. We were done making excuses; it was time to "make the world safe for democracy."
I would add a few things –
First, I don't disagree re: the effects of unrestricted submarine warfare. In fact, I would add that the United States has a (reasonable, imho) history of getting involved in naval warfare due to seizure of its maritime assets and to preserve free trade, so it is possible that they would have been drawn in even if Germany did not adopt unrestricted submarine warfare.
But it's also fair to say that Germany was painted as a villain in English propaganda (and Germany did commit some fairly horrific war crimes during the war, so arguably they earned it). But certainly the casting of Germans as "the Hun" speaks to an effort to psy-op Americans into the war, even if the United States would have entered anyway. (It's also worth noting that American public opinion swung strongly against entry into the war, pushing Democrats at the polls and swinging to large majorities of anti-war sentiment in the intervening years. In fact it's not clear to me that a majority of Americans actually supported entering the war when war was declared – I don't know about that one way or the other).
To me that at least superficially pattern-matches the "psyop everyone into war" pattern, but I'm seeing that you, me, and functor may all have a slightly different theory as to what is meant by that. To be clear, though, I do agree you have a point about the importance of unrestricted submarine warfare, which was not something dreamed up by British propaganda.
Secondly, what's interesting is that while things like the English blockade you mention didn't prevent the US from entering the war against Germany, Wilson did try to resist characterizing the United States as allied with England and France, preferring to frame it as being coincidentally on the same side (and of course all the war-to-end-all-wars League of Nations stuff).
Thirdly, you (and I, earlier) skipped the
funniestbest part of the Zimmerman note! The Germans sent it to Mexico using American undersea cables, because the British had cut theirs and the US had extended use of their cables as a diplomatic courtesy. The British could hardly acknowledge that they had tapped the American diplomatic telegraph cables, so after intercepting the message they had to run a covert operation to steal a copy from its destination in Mexico so they could present it to the United States. Absolute Get Smart stuff, I love it.More options
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Trying a little hard for that good quality contribution link, eh?
(But seriously- well written.)
Thanks.
And...maybe a little. Though that last paragraph was actually the most haphazard. I was getting pretty tired at that point, and I couldn't figure out how to incorporate the "Finis Germaniae" which concludes Massie's book.
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Only if you apply the pejorative selectively in one direction but not the other, i.e. that efforts to propagandize the Americans into neutrality are not a psy-op of its own but some sort of moral normal, whereas efforts to propagandize the Americans into picking a side is illegitimate because -reasons-.
I think one can draw a legible distinction between a foreign government running an espionage operation coupled with an untruthful propaganda campaign and the normal process of domestic consensus-making, but I take your point. Particularly in This Day And Age (anything after the telegraph) you've got to presume the possibility of hostile psyops in all directions.
I wish I had your optimism, but I don't think you can make a legible distinction when there are foreign governments running espionage operations in opposite directions at the same time.
When things are hard to measure- and few things are as hard to measure as the actual effects any amount of propaganda has- it's an easy rationalization to attribute unwanted decisions to the malign influence of outsiders while your favored directions are obviously enlightened objectivity of reasonable people.
I think you can make a legible distinction between foreign psy-ops (organized campaigns conducted at the behest of foreign powers) and organic domestic consensus in principle – in other words, there is a difference between the two – which is all that I meant. You can condemn the one and think that the other is all right. I agree that you can't necessarily turn back time and rerun history without the impact of a psy-op to see what effect it might have, and I further agree that psyops run in different directions, making the measurement of impact difficult. But that does not mean that a psy-op has zero effect, or an inestimable effect. (If this was true, it would arguably follow that there was no measurable or real harm in believing psyops or allowing your policy to be shaped by them, and I don't think that's correct.)
I'm not sure that it's necessarily true that you cannot measure the impact of propaganda. In fact I'm fairly confident that it isn't true today – maybe it was in 1921. But today you can actually quantify things like the impact the Internet Research Agency had on the 2020 election, not perfectly, but enough to get a measurement on it and talk about the impact it has.
But even if you grant that it is, it doesn't follow that it is good to run propaganda campaigns (and I would say especially ones that involve untruths, especially on your own people) or that it is bad for domestic governments to resist the influence of foreign government propaganda.
For instance, to talk about something I think it even more clear-cut than the psyops surrounding the world wars, I think the Nayirah testimony was
And I think this was an effort to propagandize Americans into involvement that was illegitimate (from the American point of view – obviously a Kuwaiti may have a different perspective) precisely because it was based on lies. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that the effectiveness of things like the Nayirah testimony generates callousness and suspicion towards actual atrocities.
The ability to distinguish which is which is what I am contesting. The ability to say normal is good and artificial is bad is the easy part of differentiation- the issue is actually being able to say what is 'normal' versus 'artificial.'
It's Russel conjugation all the way down. You psyop, I persuade, the people I agree with listen to reason, the people I disagree with are wrongfully misled.
Quiz question- do you know how researchers into Russian propaganda outfits like the IRA judge the effectiveness of Russian propaganda efforts like the IRA?
Answer - by reading the internal documentation of propaganda agencies citing western media coverage of them as proof that they are effective when justifying their budgets to paymasters.
Again, russel conjugation. You have to resist foreign government propaganda. Reasonable foreigners happen to agree with my authentic political positions.
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I think also because Western leaders have (potentially-legitimate) concerns about the chain of custody of their high-tech weapons, and their massed dumb munitions production has largely wilted to the point where it's taken time to be able to manufacture large numbers of dumb artillery shells in numbers not needed in probably two generations. We spent something like a trillion dollars getting the F-35 to active service, and remember what happened when a few B-29s landed in (Allied!) Soviet airfields: the Soviets quickly fielded the Tu-4 that looked just like it.
The last few decades haven't seen a need for Lend-Lease sorts of military support rather than direct conflict with supporting allies. Maybe giving Stingers to Afghan resistance? And as far as I can tell, some of the Western concern is also as you said (or early on, the reverse: arms to Ukraine are just going to end in Russian hands when they surrender). And also financial costs.
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Ukraine has security guarantees backed by the US right now. If the US is not willing to bleed for a healthy country with strong patriotic movement in 2022 whose security they have guaranteed in the 90s, chances that they will be willing for battered, divided, torn, lost half of the population and probably even bigger chunk of people with ability and fight in them, and in need of reconstruction are close to nil.
The historic norm so far is that when the US abandons artificially propped up ally - the other sides takes 100%.
Any deal that Putin will be willing to accept (while he is winning) will leave Ukraine completely demilitarized as a buffer between Russia and Poland. Which is non starter for Ukraine.
The Ukraine, on the other hand, also guaranteed its neutrality. It's supposedly an article in the treaty that established the Ukraine as an independent nation in 1991. Don't quote me on that though, I've only heard it from an acquaintance who claims to have read it.
Calling "Ukraine", the self-chosen English language name of a sovereign state "the Ukraine", an obsolete toponym for an ill-defined region of Tsarist Russia, is a tell. In this case it is also a factual error - "the Ukraine" has never been an independent state, and didn't become one in 1991. If you want to spread Kremlin talking points on a forum where the average IQ is north of 115 then you should, as they say round here, git gud.
It is also, of course, relevant that Ukraine had not actually violated its purported obligations of neutrality at the time Putin invaded.
There's something hilarious about simultaneously praising yourself by proxy, while simultaneously engaging in the intellectually laziest, literally an online meme style argument; "everyone I don't like is Putler!"
No, calling it "the Ukraine" isn't a fucking "tell," it's a mistake millions make, up to and including Presidents, and will likely continue to make. Hell, in all likelihood, if a week from now someone holds a gun to my head and demands to know if it's "Ukraine" or "the Ukraine," there's a 50/50 chance I'll have forgotten this thread and get it wrong.
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Watching people bristle at the word "the" is amusing enough that I sometimes do it out of contrarianism. I have no opinion whatsoever.
As far as I'm concerned, leaving your own country to retain the name 'borderland/periphery' is dumb as fuck, especially if you claim to be a staunch patriot. It literally means that you're defining your country according to its position from the perspective of neighbors whom you happen to mostly hate. (For centuries, the Poles and the Russians called the same region the Ukraine, because it was the borderland/periphery of both.) So I can understand the political motivation of Ukrainian nationalists to evict the name 'the Ukraine' from the vocabulary of international relations. Still, insisting that it's actually the 'the' that makes the difference is moronic. If you want to define your homeland as a proud nation unto itself and not as the appendage of the Russian imperial state, you might as well simply rename it.
Got any suggestions? They're not going to use Khazaria. They'd probably be best off calling the entire country something derived from Kiev or Kievan Rus, but the syllable Rus is probably out of consideration now as well. Kievia? "Geralt of Kievia" sounds plausible. Maybe "Kievan Republic" could work like Czechia/Czech Republic.
Edit: Nobody calls Basque Country Euskadi
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All calling that state "the Ukraine" means, for most, is that the speaker is old.
Right, even the drunken guy on Anderson Cooper's New Years show (which was terrible by the way), called it the Ukraine while very definitely being on their side. And back in the 90's we certainly called it the Ukraine as well. Even nowadays I'll go back and forth without (as far as I can tell) being impacted by Russian propaganda.
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Do you call the Netherlands the Netherlands or “Netherlands”?
Do you call a country “neutral” after its legislature specifically amended the national constitution for it to declare that national membership in NATO in the future is inexorable?
My favorite name for it is the French one; literally, "low country".
it's also worth noting that the language spoken there calls itself 'Nederlands'. It's kind of like how the Franks speak Frankish, and very much how the Deutsch speak Deutsch.
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I call it ‘the Netherland’ a literal translation of my grandfather’s ‘de Nederland’, for what it’s worth- most people call it holland.
But I imagine most Dutch don't call their country 'Holland' as it's not completely synonymous with the Netherlands in terms of geography and history, do they?
No, most Americans call it holland, I see no point in getting upset with them.
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The formal self-chosen English name of the sovereign state commonly known as "The Netherlands" is "Kingdom of the Netherlands" - in other words "the" is part of the name. TIL that the Dutch authorities use "Netherlands" without "the" to refer specifically to the core part of the Kingdom excluding partially self-governing overseas territories (which nevertheless includes the non-self-governing overseas territories, such that "Dutch Mainland" refers to yet another thing that is not "Netherlands" or "Kingdom of the Netherlands", also commonly known as "the Netherlands" by foreigners). But most foreigners talking about the Netherlands are not trying to make that kind of fine-grained distinction. I wouldn't complain about a foreigner not knowing the legal difference between "Great Britain" and "Britain" or "The British Isles" and "The British Islands".
On the other hand, calling the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland "England", calling the Kingdom of the Netherlands "Holland", or calling Ukraine "The Ukraine" is either culpably ignorant or malicious.
The equally malicious, ignorant, insensitive etc. naming would be 'Little Russia', 'Greater Novorossiya' or something similar.
Also, I'm sure that the reason foreigners use the name 'the Netherlands' is not that it's the shortening of the official name of the state by dropping the 'KIngdom' part, but to differentiate it from 'netherlands' as a geographic category.
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Eh, let's not go that far. We called the Netherlands Holland back in my day in the UK , so I sometimes use it even nowadays, same with the Ukraine. The Netherlands themselves only officially dropped support for using Holland in 2019.
There is no way that qualifies as being culpably ignorant. Likewise I have lost track of the number of people in the US who equate British with England (and indeed Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland). As Wikipedia itself says:
"Holland" is informally used in English and other languages, including sometimes the Dutch language itself, to mean the whole of the modern country of the Netherlands.[5] This example of pars pro toto or synecdoche is similar to the tendency to refer to the United Kingdom as "England",[9][10] and developed due to Holland's becoming the dominant province and thus having the majority of political and economic interactions with other countries.[11]
If the Dutch themselves sometimes still use Holland and only officially stopped using it with in the last 5 years, then I struggle to imagine that anyone outside of the country can be called culpably ignorant or malicious, for not keeping updated on that.
It's technically incorrect but it is entirely understandable in all of your examples. Especially for anyone over 30. And I am a Northern Irish Brit who quite often gets called either English or Irish depending. For most people outside of the UK, there just isn't any need to learn that that is technically incorrect. It has no impact on their lives at all.
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With such a strong patriotic movement, why does Ukraine have so many deserters and draft dodgers?
I don't think there's ever been a war without deserters and draft dodgers. A better question continues to be: if the idea of an Ukrainian nation is as fake as Russians and pro-Russians claim, why have there still been so many willing to fight for it? You can only get so far with "they are all forced to do so", you don't survive 2,5 years against a stronger enemy with just or even mainly a gun-in-your-backs army.
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They had quite a surge in volunteers in 2022. But when the war turned into meatgrinder, it is only sane to not go to the front. Taking a serious risk for my country is one thing, going to sure death with no chance of victory is different.
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If you want to see what a country without a strong patriotic movement looks like during an invasion, look at Afghanistan.
Afghanistan arguably had a pretty strong patriotic movement, it’s just that it was on the side opposing the ANA. Granted that side wanted to revert back to tribal/religious rule rather than have a strictly 20th century nation state, but it was very unified in its opposition to foreign involvement.
Correct. The Taliban were actually something like radical modernizers (compared to the status quo in Afghanistan) who wanted to replace old tribal customs with sharia law.
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Because it’s a shithole in Eastern Europe.
Ukraine is no shithole! UKRAINE IS STRONG
flips over risk board
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We have no way of knowing what Putin will or won't accept until we at least try.
This is what @sulla was talking about as the destructive "Putin = Hitler" myth. If we refuse to negotiate with Russia because they are maximally evil, the war can only end with the total capitulation of either Russia or Ukraine. That will mean the destruction of the Ukrainian state and hundreds of thousands more dead men.
Putin has agency of his own. He's had plenty of opportunity to offer actual peace terms (that aren't "give up all your weapons and we promise we won't invade you while you're in the perfect position to be invaded") and hasn't tried to this day.
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But they are going to try.
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I assume you are referring to the Budapest Memorandum, by which Ukraine surrendered all of its nuclear weapons. That Memorandum famously did not use the term “security guarantee”, but rather the utterly toothless “security assurance”.
The political reality on the ground after the USSR's dissolution was that as long as nuclear warheads and launchers remained on Ukrainian (and, for the record, Byelorussian and Kazakh) soil, there was a high chance of corrupt local officials (that is, pretty much all of them) selling at least some of them to the first North Korean / Libyan / Iranian / Iraqi / Jihadist / Pakistani / Algerian etc. agent that secretly lands in a private jet with bags of gold and cash.
The prevention of this was the most and probably only important consideration on the minds of those who came up with the idea of the Budapest Memorandum in the first place in Washington DC. Everything else about it is just irrelevant gibberish in comparison, and frankly anyone who brings up the Budapest Memorandum and yet keeps silent about this is a liar with an agenda.
On a sidenote, it were basically the same considerations that drove the construction of the ISS, which was in effect nothing but a make-work project designed to employ those post-Soviet scientists who'd otherwise have been recruited by Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan etc. in about 5 minutes to design missiles, rocket engines, nuclear weapons etc.
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It also notably was not binding on either the US or Russia (in the case of the US, such treaties have to be ratified by Congress). The concern at the time was that Ukraine didn't have the funds to even pay soldier wages let alone secure or maintain the Soviet weapons stockpiles, so this was a more of a "pat on the back, don't worry, here's some cash for your nukes" agreement.
It's also worth noting that both the US and Russia trot out this Budapest Memorandum line when convenient. Russian propaganda mentioned it several times back during the Maidan crisis in 2014 and it was just as silly then.
Sillier, actually; I don't recall any noise among the Western nations about biting off any territory from Ukraine.
Nope. But there was western discussion of who would be the leader of Ukraine
With which Russia had also previously interfered (2004, Viktor Yushchenko).
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Ukraine never had any nuclear weapons. They were all Moscow ones. It's like saying that Turkey will surrender its nuclear arsenal if/when the US brings them back home from Incirlik
I think this makes some questionable assumptions about the "rightful" structure of the Soviet empire. As far as I know, those were Soviet weapons, paid for and made by Soviet citizens, some of whom were Ukrainian, and the other SSRs. That permanent control would belong to the (former!) capital unreasonably privileges it over the other fragmenting client states.
I don't think it would be reasonable, for example, for the British to have demanded back all their military assets from newly-independent nations as their empire fragmented. "But those ships and guns belong to London!" seems an odd rallying cry for things in many cases the colonies themselves funded.
But in realpolitik terms, I suppose it did make sense at the time to limit the number of resulting nuclear states for proliferation reasons.
They have permissive action links though, nukes are unlike other weapons in that they don't 'just work'. Only decisionmakers in Moscow could fire them (otherwise any rogue commander could go and write Dr Strangelove fanfiction in the history books).
I think that's a valid concern in the short term, but I wouldn't expect access control features like permissive action links to prevent a nuclear-capable nation (Ukraine has nuclear plants and engineers) from repurposing weapons it its possession for an extended duration. I assume it's more like a password on a locked computer, but maybe it's more intrinsic than that (I doubt the details are public enough to know).
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The better analogy would be, suppose the US broke up and, say, Texas and California became independent states (in the international relations sense), with California internationally recognized as the “successor state” of the US.
Would formerly-US nuclear weapons, located in Texas for the purpose of deterring an invasion through Texas’s flat and quickly-traversible terrain, manufactured by personnel from all over the former-US (including California), but maintained and operated primarily by Texans, become rightfully Californian overnight? What about all other formerly-US military hardware/personnel in the former-US?
Anyway, back in the real world, the point remains that no signatory to the Budapest Memorandum ever provided Ukraine with any kind of “security guarantee”. Indeed, the Americans were well aware of the military obligations such wording would entail, and thus specifically insisted on the weaker “security assurance”.
In this hypothetical scenario, Texas would control the vast majority of the US nuclear arsenal due to the Pantex plant.
'Which states would have nuclear weapons if the US hypothetically balkanized' is an answered question.
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The California and Texas Republics had better not cross the Kingdom of North Dakota. It has the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal.
Yes, in this scenario it’s behind only Russia and Texas, while California has an extremely small arsenal.
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The US NATO nuclear umbrella is maintained by US troops stationed in those countries.
In contrast both the warheads and thier fuzing elements were in the custody of the UAF making them Moscow's in name only.
As per Wikipedia, Russia maintained control over the weapons in Ukraine. The situation was probably analogous, from what I can tell without having gotten into the weeds.
The hard-to-replace components (the fissile material and the polonium initiators) were physically in Ukraine and under Ukrainian control. The Russians controlled the codes needed to arm the nukes, and if the PALs worked as advertised this means that the Ukrainians couldn't arm or detonate the nukes.
Disassembling the nukes for components and building a Ukrainian bomb was probably beyond the capabilities of 1990's Ukraine, but would be well within the capabilities of a functioning middle-income country. The N-th country experiment suggested that building a working nuke with access to the required materials and 1960's technology was a "two smart guys in a garage" level project.
They definitely were in Ukraine, but I think, from my limited poking around, that it might be an overstatement to say they were under Ukrainian control. From what I understand, parts of the Russian and Ukrainian military didn't disaggregate until at least 1997 (when the Black Sea Fleet was split), and Ukraine agreed in 1991 that the nuclear weapons would be controlled from Moscow under the auspices of the CIS. Furthermore, the troops that physically controlled the Ukrainian nuclear weapons were...not necessarily loyal to Ukraine:
According to the DTRA report, Mikhytuk and most of his men refused to take an oath of loyalty to Ukraine in 1992.
The above is from a 2014 Defense Threat Reduction Agency report ("With Courage and Persistence") about US disarmament programs. It's also something I found by reading the Wikipedia page on the Budapest Memorandum – so this isn't something I know a lot about, and I'm certainly open to counter-points on the matter. This is all somewhat new to me – I had kinda thought the weapons were stranded in Ukraine with Russia holding onto the PAL codes until I noticed that Wikipedia insisted the weapons were never under Ukrainian operational control.
Agree on the ease of building atomic weapons.
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My understanding is that the US position is that the Budapest memorandum is not legally binding.
Foreigners and Americans alike always seem to forget that if it isn't ratified by the Senate then it isn't legally binding. By it I mean any treaties and international agreements.
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Frankly I’m not sure Putin is willing to accept any offer right now. The problem is geography. The Russians have spent three years attriting the Ukrainian army and slowly breaking through the massive network of fortifications, trench lines, and bunker complexes that were built up over ten years along the LPR/DPR border. Also most of Ukraine’s few hilly areas are in the east. Everything after Pokrovsk and Kramantorsk will likely be significantly easier. Russia has put in a large percentage of the effort, blood and money needed to conquer half or all of Ukraine, and they are being asked to walk away and leave that on the table. The time to make a deal would have been about six months into the war when the Russian army only had 180,000 men in theater and were being routed out of Kharkiv.
If he doesn't want a deal, because, as usual, since day one, total russian victory is just around the corner, that's fine. Ukraine, for its part, can accept trump's offer, gets increased aid, and continue the war. Westerners aren't exactly under pressure to end the war.
I much prefer to make the same deal (whatever it is) now rather than earlier (assuming it was even on the table). If you're going to make a deal with a mafioso, it's much better morally to have him pay for it in blood, rather than just handing it over. Losses on your side that result from this preference are par for the course & acceptable. This only seems heartless from a naively pacifistic view. The mafioso is of course far more heartless.
The mafioso isn’t the only one paying in blood thoughbeit. Even in a best case scenario Ukraine’s economy and demographics have been permanently ruined. A harsh sacrifice perhaps, but one that Reddit and the US State Department are more than willing to make.
yeah, I already said this, losses are acceptable.
I don't take the pro-russian right seriously when they say they care about ukraine, its economy and demography. For one thing, because they say they don't care about ukraine on the next argument (it's far away, strategically unimportant, we need the money for the people here, etc). For another thing, because it's an argument putin makes, a mafia-extortion argument ('pay the black hand and nothing will happen to your nice flower shop'). Like zelensky says: We never pay any-one Dane-geld, no matter how trifling the cost; for the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!
Yet Kipling is unfamiliar with his own country’s history. King Alfred literally paid the Danegeld. He used the time to establish his defenses and actually grew the Saxon power.
Part of the deal that people think is on the table is rump-Ukraine dismantling its defences and promising not to seek western help rebuilding them. So the opposite of the situation with King Alfred.
Yet that wasn’t the deal a month or so in. That is, sometimes paying the mafia can make sense.
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The Russian's limiting factor for breakthrough isn't terrain, but logistics. If the Russians wanted less rough terrain, there are and always have been significantly flatter areas in the northern and southern fronts they could have taken before they cracked their mechanized forces and downgraded to cold war kit even less capable of breakthroughs.
The Russian terms before and after the Kharkiv have included conditions like the Ukrainians disarming their tankforce to fewer tanks than the Ukrainians captured in the Kharkiv offensive.
Which is to say, the Russians weren't really interested in a credible deal that didn't leave the Russians in a superior position to invade after the deal than before the invasion.
If this sounds like a bad deal-making strategy on Putin's part... yes. Putin is not a good strategist, and regularly sabotages his own strategic goals while depending on westerners to sanewash Kremlin positions into rationalizations for compromise.
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Trying to steelman both sides, Ukraine's case is the opposition between two philosophies of international relations: spheres of influence vs self determination.
There is a compelling argument that Russia feels cornered, Putin has been consistently making it and is only really following from Yelstin there.
There is also a compelling argument that Ukraine is an independent country who doesn't want its destiny to be bound up in the games of Great Powers and wants to join the West because it likes its fruits better.
The rejoinder to this from the Russian side would be that if self-determination is the principle being used, the Russian parts of Ukraine ought to have it too, and they don't want to be part of Ukraine, whilst the Ukrainian side would argue that this separatism is being fueled by the Russians in bad faith to destabilize the country and further their geopolitical aims.
But as soon as the guns are speaking, rethoric becomes practically useless to do anything but justify direct action.
In an instrumental sense, asking people to do anything but laugh at the proposition that the people they are at war with aren't evil is absurd.
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