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They've basically halved the size of the Ukrainian territory held in Kursk and it's beginning to look rather more like a salient than an offensive (queue the calendar stretching back to 1943 meme): https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/83a2f24901c941d581c0c523ecd2619b
People on this forum are very confused about what realism means in terms of international relations which is fair since very few actually studied IR. Realism is about modelling world affairs through a framework of rational, power-maximizing states competing for power. Realism has no moral stance, no more than a wildlife photographer has a moral stance about the territorial struggle of two wolf packs.
You can use realism to advance moral ends or immoral ends. It's like a physics model, morally neutral.
The alternative to realism is liberalism and constructivism, which do have a moral stance. The liberals and constructivists believe in crusading for democracy, they won't rest until the whole world shares their ideology, the constructivists think that the struggle for power is just a social construct that can be undone with nagging, sanctions and judicious use of force. They didn't really believe that Russia was using a realist model since they didn't really believe in realism, they don't believe in an anarchic world, they believe in a world policeman suppressing all the baddy countries and enforcing the law.
There are serious downsides to this lack of realism. We now live in a world where Russia and China are closely aligned, undoing the US's most underappreciated masterstroke of the Cold War, splitting China away from Russia. Considerable quantities of munitions have been expended. Air defences that could be useful in Asia have been diverted to Europe. China is getting even stronger in relative terms.
This is what Trump and his people (Colby in particular) are worried about. While the liberals have been starting and losing stupid wars in the Middle East, China has been building industry. While the liberals were bitching about Russian spying or taking towns nobody's ever heard of in Donbass, China has been building ships, missiles and planes. They produce more manufactured goods than the next ten countries combined. Now they're getting ready to go in on places that matter (chip producers, high-tech economies, sea lanes that dominate world trade) and the liberals want to prioritize helping Ukraine keep the maximum number of towns nobody's ever heard of in Donbass? Over the fate of the entire world, the decisive final battle for dominance?
Who cares this much about Eastern Europe besides the Eastern Europeans themselves? Why did anyone ever think that this was a hill worth spending extraordinary efforts on, let alone dying on? And yes, NATO instructors are dying in Ukraine in small numbers, dying nonetheless. What was the point of it all, saying Ukraine will one day be in NATO when a realist could tell you 'never going to happen'? The realists are right as usual, like they were about Iraq and Vietnam.
Of course this is how realists would like to see reality, but critics might counter that it’s very suspicious that all their harsh, amoral, apolitical, non-ideological analysis happens to support a relatively standard ideological position (a combination of gunboat diplomacy and soft isolationism, except when it comes to the western hemisphere).
There's nothing wrong with preferring easy wars to hard wars ceteris paribus. The costs have to be proportionate to the gains.
There's nothing wrong with focusing on primary threats, as opposed to secondary ones.
There's nothing wrong with seeing a conflict overseas and doing nothing about it since it's not relevant to your interests. Plus it usually causes all kinds of flow-on problems if you do intervene.
Colby is no isolationist, if you read his book 'strategy of denial' he says that the US goal should be to back up frontline allies in Asia to prevent Chinese hegemony over this very valuable and important region. He judges that Russia is not powerful enough to threaten hegemony over Europe, the Chinese are the primary threat to US power and so there needs to be a substantial US presence in Asia, he wants to maintain alliances. It's a judicious, strategically justified rationale.
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Reminded me of this Skyrim gem.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231110051836/https://www.escapistmagazine.com/skyrim-tales/
Though of course non-combat skills actually out scale combat skills in Skyrim quite significantly. With alchemy and smithing alone (even setting aside the infinite loop trick) you can loop to create weapons that will kill even a max levelled Draugr in 1 or 2 hits even on Legendary difficulty, and boost your combat skills with alchemy if you wanted to. Not to mention you'll be rolling in gold to pay for training in combat skills if you want.
The equivalent to AI in the real world perhaps? The self-improving loop leaving behind the basics of ships and planes.
The question is whether you're training a Smithing (exceedingly powerful applications to combat) or a Lockpicking (slight improvements to things you could already do just fine).
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Those things are not mutually exclusive. Aid to Ukraine has been a drop in the bucket as far as US military spending and budget is concerned. There is nothing in that spending that has stopped US from preparing for your so called vision of a decisive final battle for dominance with China. The reason why you have a big hole in the budget is not because of military spending, it is because of Social Security and Medicare. However, to be frank, if US was actually interested in mobilizing the will for standing up to China, you would actually fix all of that by raising taxes.
Dislodging Russian and Chinese co-operation on current terms is frankly delusional. As a Russian or Chinese leader, you would have to be frankly stupid to allow US to create a wedge between the two only because seemingly US has now warmed up to Russia.
What current situation has created is that for Europeans it is indeed better to be much more autonomous (and I have always agreed with that as an European), but furthermore, it is now better to build pragmatic ties with China rather than just follow whatever US dictates. Don't see how that benefits US if US is actually interested in taking on China.
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Actually existing constructivists are batshit, which is too bad, because the first-principles logic of realism really is fake, and in the MAD world it was created to explain its more fake than ever. Theres no reason why something like e.g. current front lines should matter to a settlement between nuclear powers, beyond historical ones. And yet it does matter, and you cant unilaterally do away with it either.
Front lines are surely relevant in terms of bluffing and prestige. It would be rather obnoxious for the US to suddenly demand that Russia give up its gains in Eastern Ukraine under threat of nuclear exchange, those were hard-won gains. Putin would be a massive cuck if he didn't call that bluff. He who is not willing to send out his tanks for victory is surely not willing to burn his cities for victory.
That's hilarious.
I agreed that theyre relevant, the question is why theyre relevant, and I think the reason for that is in large part "thems the rules".
Thats true, in the world where actually sending out tanks gains you things. If it didnt, youd just be smart not to send them. So this explains why the rule of respecting conventional gains persists - thats different from explaining why its there in the first place, which is because thats how it worked historically.
Of course, because that would be against the rules. As I said, you cant just change those "because I said so". The "constructed" reasons Im talking about are not something that adds on top of or conflicts with game theory - they show up directly in your judgements of whats reasonable and credible. These judgements cant be derived purely from military capability.
But sending out tanks does gain you things? The Russians have secured a swathe of territory in Donbass, they took Mariupol.
We're agreed that the rules can't be unilaterally changed but I think there must be some concrete reason why all the powers invest so much into conventional forces. Nukes are very powerful but not appropriate for all conditions.
Even in the Cold War everyone was stacking up huge columns of troops in Europe, along with masses of nukes. Nukes held the line for the Western bloc up till about 1978 when they started to gain a conventional advantage. But people were still interested in conventional weapons.
Yes, but in the hypothetical different nuclear equilibrium, they wouldnt get to keep it.
The purely nuclear equilibria have very sharp rules. If theres a situation where neither party is allowed to nuke, its a free win for whoever invested in conventional forces. It cant actually, realistically happen outside a toy example world set up with it. In the cold war, I think neither party would have been willing to nuke over losing individual european satellites that somehow happen without a general attack.
I think youre just not confident enough because this mechanism is new to you. Start out small in using it. My example was chosen for illustrating what sort of thing I mean, not for being convincing. Something more realistic might be e.g. the discussions early in this war whether Russia could get away with a "tactical" nuke - they propably cant, but there may well have been a world where they could.
They could get away with a tactical nuke, it's just that doing so would incur various costs. It's just a matter of calculation about risk and reward. If somehow the whole Russian army got encircled in Mariupol, they might well start nuking intensively rather than lose the war. The US considered nukes in Korea and Vietnam but concluded the costs weren't worth the gains.
These weapons aren't unthinkable, that's just a social construct that the US likes to propagate.
Russia has been confident of conventional victory the whole time and doesn't want to irradiate land it wants to conquer, a country they want to vassalize or annex.
In the Cold War the Soviets demonstrated what they'd do if they lost a European satellite - send in the tanks!
Yeah I was to vague about this. Of course they wouldnt be strategically nuked back. What I meant is that it might have been viewed a lot more like doing the same thing with conventional explosives (modulo radiation).
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Which liberals? George W Bush? Dick Cheney?
Neoconservatism is an ideology of liberal imperialism. This is uncontroversial.
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Yes, they are, in fact, liberals. Aside from Cheney's daughter, or Bill Kristol, now being besties with the Dems, the Overton Window in all Western democracies is about as wide as that joint's from the Blue's Brother's.
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