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I'm sure this is based on a well founded history of posting despite my being on the opposite advocacy side of pretty much every neocon-endorsed war of the last 25 years, and not at all trying to smuggle in pejoratives because of my long-established contempt of Putin and regular disagreements with the Russian apologists or tankie types on matters of historical objectivity or international dynamic characterization.
What makes this funny is that the very last person to reference me did so for... my media reviews at the old site, which were far more forthcoming because the Reddit-motte did more culture-media talk in the main forum, and because Reddit was where I already was more often for my other hobbies, and where I still spend most of my time.
'Just read their posting history' is a basic information input error, because if you read the posting history I still have from the Reddit, you'll see I'm often not here because of time I spend instead on video games. Reading this forum post history wouldn't indicate that, nor would it indicate the job changes or other life actions. Nor would it reflect how the discussion of the Motte has changed since the migration, with an increase of topics (especially chatGPT and AI) that I have never expressed particular interest in. Nor would it reflect my own attempts to change how much time I spend on this forum for other reasons, which in turn would drive changes in what material I spend time on. Nor would it various real-life reasons I have been offline in general for the last few months.
Yes, I find international politics more interesting than chatGPT or AI recursion. I find the conflicts between actually different cultures the most part of a culture-discussion forum with an international spread of participants. I also have more experience on inter-cultural, as opposed to intra-cultural conflicts, and especially those related to military-government relations, than most. I find these subjects interesting, and when the topic comes up I'll chime in if someone asks a question or says something I think obfusicates more than informs. On topics like AI which I find less interesting, I've expressed my views in the past, and moved on to let more passionate people continue with the things they find.
The distinction is that cultural chauvinists are self-centered to a degree that they act or believe that their interests and influence are what dominate other people's conflicts. They do this in a variety of ways, such as characterizing domestic power grabs between warlords as foreign proxy wars which remove agency outside of the local actors and reframe conflicts so that local actors are of secondary importance and can be generalized and brushed away.
I have a long pattern of viewing this sort of framing as analytical malpractice.
Then I would posit you should probably learn what a goose is, because that's not a duck.
This is where I refer back to my point about the sort of cultural chauvenism that tries to make other people's conflicts about the US. Syria was indeed a proxy war... but not between the US and Russia. Syria was an excellent example of the practical implications of the Obama-era policy of trying to off-shore the middle east and lead-from-behind so that the US would have a less direct role, which in turn led to the Turks and the Arabs and the Iranians all taking the lead and setting conditions that the US then reacted to. Syria pre-ISIS was an excellent case study in how minor and middle powers compete to shape the action, or inaction, of a larger outside power, with various parties trying to draw in the US, and others to keep it out, and how varying degrees of support and sympathy can be elicited or hindered. The formal American intervention in Syria was not because of, in response to, or a result of Russia- it was a result of local actors, specifically ISIS, who themselves were not a result of Russia or the cause of Russia's own intervention.
If someone wanted to raise Syria as a proxy war between Russia and Turkey or Saudi Arabia for control of the Mediterranean port, that would be a defensible line of argument. Unlike the US, which infamously backed down from Obama's own red line and was in fits over what sort of aid it could give anyone, the Turks actually tried to overthrow the Assad regime. They provided far more significant military aid to those they judged most directly supporting, they provided operational safe havens, and they repeatedly considered- and actually did- directly intervene to keep their proxies in the fight. The Arabs attempted similar, and it was precisely their favored groups that got the most resistance from within the US government. The Americans puttered rather than come to a policy decision of what goals to pursue, and ultimately let the Arabs and the Turks take the lead until ISIS overran north-western Iraq.
A framing that tries to fit Syria into a broader US-Russia competition makes sense from a Russian perspective, because the Russians are fixated on the US like that, but it doesn't actually reflect the actors of relative import on the ground, or even the American perspective. To Russia, something like the the battle of Khasham may occur because it is in a proxy war with the US and the US has it out to get them. To the United States, something like the battle of Khasham can occur because, to quote Mattis, "The Russian high command in Syria assured us it was not their people, and my direction to the chairman was for the force, then, to be annihilated. And it was."
Notably, Khasham is about as far from the Syrian coast as you can be. An American attempt to drive the Russians off the sea board it was not.
This is an example of combining banalities with conspiratorial lack of analysis. The Red Sea is indeed very important- but a naval base is not a 'turn off all trade for a year' button, the horn of Africa is a region where the Americans have supported other militaries developing a naval presence to deal with piracy such as the Somali pirate surge years ago, and the Djibouti dynamics are so different from the Sudan dynamics in international affairs terms that this is an heavy-handed motte and bailey.
Moreover, it supports no claim, or counter-claim, in Sudan. 'The US has an incentive to manipulate' is not a substitute for 'the US was manipulating things from behind the scenes,' particularly when ongoing US 'manipulation' was open, overt, and internationally coordinated negotiations... which have been derailed by the recent coup.
This is pejorative in search of an accusation, which I condemn on grounds of obscuring actual truth-seeking, and more to the point its pejorative style that fixates on the US to the eclipsing of other equally or even more relevant actors, like the Europeans- who have reorganized their Africa policy on migrant flow terms- or the Saudis- who were one of the few groups close to the pre-2019 coup government which supported them in Yemen- and others.
I find this bad foreign policy analysis. I don't object to it on neocon grounds- I object to it because I find the arguments sophomoric.
Formal has a lot of meaning resting on it. The CIA was funnelling weapons and funds to Syrian rebels before ISIS was even a thing, back in 2012 and (it is argued) 2011. They exploited the collapse of Libya (another US operation) to send arms from Libyan caches to Syria.
Christopher Phillips, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East, (Yale University Press, 2016), 139, 143
The goal was to topple Assad from day 1. The US was egging the Turks on, helping the inept Saudis administrate their own proxy war. Besides, who stands behind Qatar and Saudi Arabia anyway, who supplies the arms they sent on? Qatar is not known for its flourishing domestic arms industry.
Furthermore, there's a long history of US involvement in Sudan, they've been bombing and sanctioning and harassing and providing aid to Sudan for decades. It's not so much that the US has an incentive in manipulating, it's that the US has been, is and will continue to manipulate and mess with Sudan.
Leaving small countries on the other side of the world to their own devices - impossible challenge for America!
Qatar and Saudi are, however, known for having a lot of money to spend on arms, and pursuing their own regional interests. This goes back to eclipsing other party's agencies by attributing their agency to the US as a puppet-master, as opposed to alignment of interests.
Few, if anyone, in the US were going to sympathisize with Assad. But no one in the US government had the institutional consensus to actually determine a goal. 'Topple Assad' is not an end-goal in US policy terms, it is a means to the end, but that lack of clear end-state is what kept the Americans indecisive even as the Turks and the Saudis actually funeled what they could as they could. If 'topple Assad' was the goal, the US military could have acted, the US aid could have centered to specific groups, the US support for Saudi or Ankara could have expanded rather than throttled over islamic extremist concerns.
Note the transfer of the subject of what is actually being discussed. Gone is discussion of the specific conflict in Sudan, going on right now- now this is a general 'the US is present and has an influence,' and more than that a conflation of all sorts of measures of interaction as a commonality rather than a series of different relationship states and reasons. The US having a presence and an influence was never disputed, however- rather, the relevance of presence to this specific conflict was the argument, which is not actually addressed or challenged by conflating decades of history.
This goes back to the cultural chauvenism of it not all being about the Americans. Lots of people have long history with Sudan. The Americans are not the most relevant part of Sudan. The Americans are not the most relevant party to understand what is going on now. Stop inviting the Americans to live in your headspace free of charge. Other people in other parts of the world are quite capable of making their own bad decisions without it being driven by American influence.
By the standards you set, everyone with any sort of positive and/or negative interaction with Sudan is a form of interference. It's a meaningless jab when you set the bar so low.
It did act - just in an indecisive and ineffectual way and against stronger than expected opposition. There are still US troops in Syria today, doing their best to prevent any complete resolution of the conflict now that Assad has won. US sanctions are preventing most reconstruction work. US aid did eventually settle on the Kurds, who are hated by nearly all their neighbours. This is a perfect example of why interfering in these places is such a bad idea. The more interference you do, the fewer friends you make.
It is not unreasonable to predict that, since the US has been interfering and influencing Sudan for decades, it will continue to do so and use the current crisis (and the arrival of US troops) to increase its interference. Sure, it's appropriate to use troops to get your embassy personnel out but how long are those troops going to stay there?
Yes - it's a small, poor country very far from the US. There is no good reason to be so interested in what happens there. These small, poor and irrelevant countries should be left to their own devices. And the US has been aggressively sanctioning parts of the Al-Burhan government, including the police. They've been trying to undermine it for some time - the US bears some responsibility for the conflict.
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I got through two pages of your post history with every single post (on here, reddit is dead) being a post defending US foreign policy. I have a life man, I can't be expected to spend all of it reading effort posts, and if you want to be seen as not a neocon you really should maybe try and not do everything in your power to appear as a neocon? Sometimes it can be hard to square the image we project to the public with our interior views of ourselves I guess. What label do you prefer? US imperialist? Atlanticist? Someone Russia touched in a no-no spot?
I mean someone in the small scale question thread asks if Sudan is a proxy war, something that could be answered by a simple, "There is a lot of incentive foreign powers could be involved but we can't for sure say this it is or isn't." Instead you write up a 5 page rebuttal on how there is no way the US could possibly be involved in another proxy war after it's history of endless proxy wars, when there are actors involved that are already in proxy wars by info dumping a Wikipedia article on recent Sudanese history.
The problem with this sort of argument and a problem that persists with motte style arguments, is that the information that is most valuable in international relations, is also the information you are least likely to have. Long ass effort post write ups summarizing easily available facts are almost always worthless and the endless gaslighting by the "experts" to trust the bare facts and ignore your "conspiratorial" instincts is obnoxious. Which is why it's terribly misleading to just rattle off a bunch of known facts about recent Sudanese history without pointing out the very obvious incentives foreign actors would have to be involved. Are foreign countries perfectly capable of fucking themselves? Yeah. Do foreign actors often give them a push when it's in their interests? Yeah. In the interconnectedness of the modern world and the power certain states have within it, it's almost impossible for any war to not have at least some hint of proxy war to it. That isn't chauvinism, that's just how power works.
Also, how is Obama letting the middle east handle (offshoring) it's proxy wars not just some inception tier proxy warring?
Bemused at you, mostly.
The last two pages of my posting history are this subject of Sudan, a series of exchanges regarding the Seymour Hersh accusation that the US sabotaged Nord Stream, and a pittance of comments on China. They also go out only two months.
If you consider three conversations across two months enough, okay, but that's being silly, not an argument about being a neocon.
This is an example of you missing the point, and the argument.
No, this is the cultural chauvinism I refer to. Dismissing history that many people don't actually know to propagate a framing that isn't supported by facts on the ground that inflates the importance of external actors certainly makes the Americans seem important to the situation, and their opponents important by contrast for standing up to the mighty foe, but it doesn't, in fact, make the Americans important to the situation.
Agency, and who controls conflicts for what purpose. If you indirectly force or empower someone to wage a conflict they could not, or would not, do without your support, that's a proxy war. If someone wages a conflict they they would want to as long as you were not outright stopping them, that is not a proxy war- that is their own war.
By that definition there has never been and can never be a proxy war, as no one has zero agency, all groups the US has employed in its proxy wars had a choice to say no. Convenient for someone that is such a US foreign policy apologist.
Hm.
It's almost like what was written didn't base it's distinction on zero agency, and you made up a strawman to dismiss instead of addressing arguments actually made about the agency of others to focus on the Americans instead. Imagine that.
As for apologist, yawn. Clearly you've never paid attention to my opinions on various American ventures. Do better.
Because what was written doesn't make sense
If you indirectly force or empower someone to wage a conflict they could not, or would not, do without your support, that's a proxy war.
Let's pick out parts of this by excluding some of the not relevant or's.
If you empower someone to wage a conflict they could not do (wage) without your support, that's a proxy war.
If someone wages a conflict that they would want to as long as you were not outright stopping them, that is not a proxy war.
These statements contradict, the second is too broad. If you're enabling them or encouraging them but they want to do it anyways it's both not a proxy war and a proxy war.
Reduces to basically any conflict in which a powerful foreign country influences the conflict, while w/e party within the state they're enabling wants to wage a conflict, not being a proxy war. So nothing can be a proxy war as long as you can find some faction within a country that doesn't like current leadership.
Because you don't think it makes sense that countries that are allied with the US can have agency and act outside of being a proxy of the United States. This is a common American-centric myopia, particularly those who buy into oppressor/oppressed frameworks of the western left that the Americans culturally dominate, but it is still a myopia.
There is no contradiction, you simply ignored the identified category which you cut off- that the party being supported in the war they would already be doing is waging their own war.
That's all it needs to be- the party who would wage war for their own interests can be the responsible agent, and not demoted to the proxy of those that back them. They do not become subordinate merely because they are supported, even if it serves the interest of those supporting them to support them. The contradiction only comes if you demand people who are supported be framed in subordinate terms to those who support them.
This is not only a false requirement, but support-without-proxy is a common state in international relations, where partners / allies will provide various levels of support to eachother simply because the relationship entails an expectation of mutual support as long as the other partner's interests do not conflict with your own. Germany will support France in various European trade disputes regarding French interests not because Germany is using France to wage proxy economic war against the other side, but because maintaining the relationship is itself a beneficial arrangement and they have an expectation of the favor being returned in the future. The Arabs will frequently vote as a block in the UN in favor of not just collective interests, but in solidarity of a fellow member, unless there are specific interest differences. The archetypical cold war alliance was that someone with a UN veto will veto the resolutions condemning their partner, and in return the partner would support the patron's UN priorities to a general extent.
The same dynamics can, and do, apply to military aid and support. Some people struggle to make sense of a difference between vassals and partners, but it does exist, and those who can't make sense of it will forever struggle as long as they default to pejoratives as 'proxy' or 'manipulation' to describe relationships in ways that not only dismiss the agency, but even the leadership, that supported parties can have in even unequal relationships.
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