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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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The Russian army has barely managed to take the relatively small parts of Ukraine that it currently controls and simply does not have the strength to take on Poland's military in open combat while at the same time fighting Ukraine.

You're replying to something JJJ explicitly noted he wasn't saying.

I don't also expect Putin to invade Poland tomorrow (or this year, or anytime before Ukraine situation has resolved one way or another)

But yes, would be pretty stupid to invade a NATO country. Sure, there's the fig-leaf of Wagner/Belarus, but Article 5 still gets invoked, Wagner/Belarus get swatted like a fly (unlikely that they could beat Poland anyway, to be honest), and still no-win for Russia.

But yes, would be pretty stupid to invade a NATO country.

I think it’s fair to say any conventional war would quickly escalate to the nuclear option. Ukraine is a demonstration of that already.

It's possible, but it's not as likely as e.g. Taiwan going nuclear. As Zvi noted a while back:

Both sides now believe (correctly) that NATO has vastly superior conventional forces, and could easily repel a conventional Russian attack on NATO. At worst, Russia could make temporary gains in the Baltics. Thus, I put the chances of NATO dropping the first nuclear weapon at epsilon. NATO has no reason to open Pandora’s box when it can win a conventional war.

Russia also has much more secure second-strike than the PRC would (way more nukes, lots of deep-water ports for boomers, greater distance between the hot war and the ICBMs so alpha-strike is harder), which allows for less of a hair-trigger.

I more or less agree with this. There was an interesting book I read not too long ago, that takes apart the mythology of American military and economic supremacy. But I still prefer living in a context where these rational calculations seem far more distant than reality increasingly suggests they are.

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