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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32787 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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Missing a not, anyway this is just a made up principle. Annexation is beyond the pale but we can bomb various countries into anarchy, set up puppet governments in them, divide countries into smaller parts, place troops in countries without their permission?

Yes. Wars of annexation materially strengthen aggressors and incentivize further war, they are a sort of geopolitical positive feedback loop. In the modern era going to war makes you weaker and poorer, less capable of waging war rather than more. Sometimes countries are willing to do it anyway, and of course there is gaming of the boundaries, but keeping the feedback loop negative rather than positive helps stop this getting too out of hand. How harmful (or beneficial) the war is to the country being invaded isn't really relevant to that, the important thing is that it be harmful to the aggressor. For instance the invasion of Iraq imposed a cost rather than a benefit on the U.S. (as even most of its proponents knew it would) so it didn't result in a series of more U.S. invasions, but the Russian invasion of Crimea was sufficiently beneficial that it chain-reacted into the invasion of the rest of Ukraine.

Wars must have no winners, only losers, and to ensure this continues to remain the case countries are willing to take losses themselves so that attempted wars of annexation leave the aggressor indisputably worse-off. Complaining that countries are "irrationally" willing to harm themselves for the sake of deterrence is deeply silly, it's basic game-theory and central to the logic of modern war. If Russia thought countries wouldn't really be willing to harm themselves for no benefit besides vague principles of game-theoretic value, that's just another way that Russia's status as a low-trust society has made them weaker.

For instance the invasion of Iraq imposed a cost rather than a benefit on the U.S. (as even most of its proponents knew it would)

Did they know that? I remember that time well and I recall many, many hours of debate with advocates of the Iraq war who spent a great deal of time telling me about the many benefits of victory in the Iraq war.

Sometimes I wish I had kept in touch with some of the more passionate voices. I'd be interested in hearing their perspective now.

as even most of its proponents knew it would

But they weren't saying this. Nobody in the US was saying officially that the Iraq war was going to weaken America but that they should do it anyway. The opponents of the Iraq war were saying this would be a quagmire, cause all kinds of problems. The proponents were saying 'let's get rid of Saddam it'll be easy and stabilize the Middle East, spread democracy, make new allies...'. Now the proponents weren't exactly honest about their true goals and were not aligned with US national interests... But anyway, if you march into a country and turn it into a vassal, it's supposed to strengthen your alliance bloc since they then can contribute to further wars.

The proponents were saying 'let's get rid of Saddam it'll be easy and stabilize the Middle East, spread democracy, make new allies...'.

Helping Iraqis and the Middle East doesn't significantly materially strengthen the U.S., it's expending U.S. resources and power for the sake of charity. This is inherently self-limiting, the U.S. has resources to waste on things like this but in the end it is left with less capability to wage war than it started with. Having Iraq as an ally or vassal was never going to be valuable enough to be worth a war, even if it was as easy as proponents thought it would be, and proponents of the war instead justified the war in terms of humanitarian (Saddam, democracy) or threat-reduction (WMDs) concerns. And the U.S. didn't even really turn Iraq into a vassal, it's a democracy that has been at times vocally critical of the U.S. and there is no guarantee that U.S./Iraq relations won't worsen further in the future. It would have been far easier to turn it into an ally in some other way, like buddying up to Saddam or replacing him with some other dictator. Proponents of the Iraq war didn't say they would turn Iraq into a vassal, they said they would turn it into a democracy, and that is indeed what they did. It was the opponents of the Iraq war who said the U.S. would materially benefit, the "No blood for oil" people, but that was never remotely realistic and the proponents didn't say it was.

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