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Not sure if this belongs here or in SQS, but it could either be a small question I don't understand or a discussion depending on whether or not people disagree about the answer.
Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did (at least in the U.S.), when typically one would expect it to go the other way. That is, the right is usually more pro-military, pro-military intervention, and patriotic defending of one's homeland. Even though the right tends to be more focused on domestic issues and oppose foreign aid, military support tends to be the exeption. Although there was bipartisan support of the Iraq war (at least in the aftermath of 9/11) the Republicans were more strongly in favor of it and stayed in favor of it for longer. If Russia had threatened to invade the U.S. the Republicans would have been not only gung-ho about repelling them but also about retaliating and obliterating them in revenge so that none would dare try ever again. So you would think they would sympathize with Ukrainians as similarly patriotic defenders of their home turf, while the left would be all peace and let's try to get along and diplomatically convince the invaders to stop without violence, or something like that.
But that's not what happened. Why?
Is it just because the left has been harping on about Putin for years so hopped on the anti-Russia train too quickly and the right felt compelled to instinctively oppose them? If China had invaded Ukraine (for some mysterious reason) would the right be pro-Ukraine and the left opposing intervention because they don't want to piss off China (and accusing Ukraine of being nazis as an excuse)? That is, is there something specific to Ukraine/Russia that caused this divide here specifically, or am I misunderstanding the position of each side regarding military intervention in general (or has it changed in the past few decades and my beliefs used to be accurate but no longer are)?
I think the Trump realignment is responsible for a lot of this. Bush-era Republicanism is still popular, but it now has a major competitor which has shown itself capable of winning elections. Part of Trump's appeal is that he's different from the establisment including the feeling that he's not in favour of pointless wars.
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I think support for Ukraine is more of a pro/anti-establishment issue than a left-right one. The anti-establishment left (Chomsky, Greenwald, Corbyn etc.) are at best lukewarm in their support for Ukraine and more normally both-sidesist. AOC got in trouble with her hard-left supporters for supporting Ukraine - arguably part of the process where here anti-establishment card is heading for early expiration. The small number of pro-establishment Republicans who are not afraid of a MAGA backlash (e.g. senators McConnell and Graham) and the various centre-right commentators who went NeverTrump in 2016 are fairly strongly pro-Ukraine.
As various people have pointed out in the thread, the pro vs anti establishment lineup on Ukraine is consistent with the pro vs anti establishment lineup on every other foreign policy issue going back to the New Deal era - the establishment supports US hegemony and the "rules-based international order", which in this case means that Putin must lose. The moderate anti-establishment view is that trying to maintain hegemony wastes resources which could be spent domestically and provokes unnecessary conflict. The rabid anti-establishment view is open support for America's rivals on enemy-of-my-enemy grounds.
The main reason it has become partisan because the anti-establishment right has crushed the pro-establishment in intra-right political battles since 2016, and the pro-establishment left has been dominant in intra-left battles since Biden won the primary in 2020. So pro-establishment vs anti-establishment can now look sufficiently like left vs right to trigger a Blue vs Red happy tribal death spiral - the same thing happened with COVID-19 vaccines despite Donald Trump's attempts to promote them as a Trump administration success story. The factions lined up the same way over the Iraq war (Bush/Clinton in favour, Buchanan/Chomsky against) but with the opposite partisan valance because the anti-establishment left had a megaphone and the anti-establishment right did not.
There are also moron-in-a-hurry culture war factors (Putin has been marketing Russia as white Christian country with strong gender roles and no queers for a long time) and dodgy domestic politics reasons (Russia helped Trump with opposition research in 2016, Ukraine refused to in 2019), but I think the pro vs anti establishment angle is a necessary and sufficient condition for support to Ukraine to be partisan in today's climate.
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The answer, to me, is obvious. Ukraine is a global hub for political corruption, influence peddling, and the like. As, one who is old enough would note, was also true of Russia for most of the Clinton and Bush II administrations. That means, that the well connected wet their beaks in Ukraine. Which is the party of the well connected? Yup Democrats. Dem support for Ukraine is very much top-down (lots of Democrat policy is like this now, although it wasn't always true), and Republican opposition is grassroots oriented (a party in flux where there is currently an elite-grassroots power struggle).
You might object and say, "Ukraine is peanuts, Arkansas has a bigger GDP." And that is probably true, its not worth even googling for this point. The point is that Alabama is orders of magnitude less corrupt than Ukraine, so it has no board positions for failsons, no $10 million consulting contracts for Paul Manafort types. Sure, a friendly politician can expect a spot at Wal Mart after they retire/are ousted, but that is both time delayed, and much less profitable than what is available in Ukraine and Ukraine-like countries.
Ukraine is peanuts. Biden (who has never been particularly greedy personally) made $15 million in "clean" money from speaking fees and book royalties in the 3 years between leaving office as VP and starting to work full-time on his presidential campaign. He never had the chance to fully monetize the favours he banked as Senator for MBNA, but based on other greedy ex-officials he could have got multiple family members $1 million a year sinecures - possibly more if James Biden went into private equity Jared Kushner style. I think the total Biden family take from US sources if the Bidens had been Clinton-tier greedy would be mid double figures.
The biggest sources of dodgy foreign money in US politics are China and the Gulf Arabs. Hunter Biden took about $5 million in Chinese money (House Republicans say over $8 million, but that includes Devon Archer's share) without trying very hard. As President, Biden has pursued anti-Chinese policies that would cause that flow of money to stop. The Biden family has (unlike the Trumps) made no serious attempt to go after Arab money, but we know from Kushner that a Presidential-tier bribe would run into hundreds of millions.
The House Republicans' estimate for the total Biden family take from Ukraine is $6.5 million. There is third-hand rumour that the real figure is around $10 million. If the Biden administration is for sale, it is more expensive than that.
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Some of the people replying here seem completely out of touch with the right wing. I have no idea where they are getting some of these ideas.
The right doesn't like the war in Ukraine because they don't feel like it serves the vital national security interests of The United States. They suspect that it is a handout to the defense industry. As far as why they don't support this when they did support the war in Iraq/etc.: they talk pretty extensively about how the Cheneys lied us into this war, and how Ruper Murdoch (and fox news) helped. They feel betrayed by this.
They talk about it all the time.
Tucker Carlson, who was previously one of the (if not the) most popular host on cable news talked about this extensively.
I don't think it's complicated.
I am not on the left, so can't comment on why they seem to support it so strongly. My suspicion is that 4 years martingaling[1] the claims about Russian interference in our elections have built Russia and Putin into something resembling a Marvel comic villain and/or the nazis.
[1]Martingale betting strategy is just that every time you lose, you double down. Eventually you win and you win big. This applies to compulsive lying in: every time you get caught in a lie, you just double down and make the claims even more fantastic. Conspiracy theorists do this. It's basically how you get qanon.
I'm not sure if any political tendency in the US is supporting the "war in Ukraine" that strongly, since they (apart from individual reps, probably most notoriously Adam Kinzinger, a Republican) don't actually support the US intervening directly in Ukraine, ie. starting an actual war with Russia. They at most support continuing sending military aid in amounts that are substantial for Ukraine but amount to peanuts vis-a-vis the American military budget, let alone budget in general.
It's only peanuts because youre comparing it to the world's most inflated and ridiculous military budget. 100 billion is more than any country other than China spends on defense. Also both the US and China are rather larger countries than Ukraine with more people to defend.
2023 population estimates for Ukraine are around 36million. The US alone has spent 113 billion according to cnn 6 days ago.
Per Ukrainian we're spending 3138 USD
2023 population estimates for the US is 332 million. Budget is 773 billion a year.
Per American we spend 2328 USD x 1.5 since the war has been more than a year. 3492. We're spending nearly as much per Ukrainian as we are per US citizen, and realistically most of that budget isn't defending us, it's supporting imperialist projects abroad.
They are also both rather notably not at war currently. It is entirely reasonable for the defense budget of a country currently in a total war to be on par with a much, much larger country.
Yea the US is not at war, weird how we still end up spending on this garbage. Why don't the people on this forum that are so concerned about Ukraine ship themselves there? They are taking foreign recruits.
Even if you could point to people on this forum who are "so concerned about Ukraine" - which I do not think you can; "more sympathetic to Ukraine than to Russia" does not mean one's heart bleeds for Ukraine - this kind of "why don't you ship yourself there and fight?" sneer is not an intelligent or civil rebuttal to any actual argument.
This place is beyond bleeding heart, 90% of the pro-ukraine "arguments" are just dressed up feelings with little to no reasoning.
Russia is going to invade Poland and Germany and eventually the US if we don't do something! -anxiety
We are destroying our great enemy for a pittance! -hate and phobia
Something Chamberlain yada yada appeasement. -anxiety
etc.
There is nothing to argue with, when people are being emotional you can only reach them with emotion. I find shaming them works well.
Edit: but I will take the hint and timeout myself from this topic. No more posting in this or the other thread on the same topic for me.
99% arguments against involvement in Ukraine that I've seen here are based on greed ("why my tax dollars?") and hate/phobia ("serves those GAE Europeans right"), so I'm afraid the pro-Ukrainians got you beat here.
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Sure, you can argue that funding Ukraine's war effort is not worth it for the US, but it seems spurious to argue it's an unreasonable amount on the basis of comparisons to defense budgets in countries that aren't at war.
I guess it wasn't clear but that first bit should be read with a /s. I'm making fun of the idea that the US isn't at war. The US is eternally at war. Which is why the "defense" budget is so much higher than everyone else's.
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Most charitable themotte.org explanation ever! It can't be that people on the left genuinely don't agree with the idea of a war to annex territory or conquer another sovereign nation, it must be that they have a childish and wrong view of Russia.
Only wars to impose a way of life/ideology? It's incredibly arbitrary. If Russia said 'oh no we're not conquering anything we're just conducting a regime-change operation to get rid of the Zelensky govt and install a puppet state' or would that be OK with the left? Obviously not. If you wage war to overthrow a govt and then integrate the new occupation govt into your economic/political institutions, exercising informal veto power over their activities then it's not significantly different to annexing. The Soviet Union didn't annex Poland in 1945 but that didn't make too much difference in the real world. We all know who was in charge.
Anyway, we have an easy test for this theory. Is the US (leftists or otherwise) leaping out of the bushes to shower democratic Armenia in arms, so they can defend Nagorno-Karabakh against authoritarian Azerbaijan? War of conquest - check. Grand battle between democracy and authoritarianism - check. In reality they do nothing, since it is not in US interests. Azerbaijan has close connections to Israel and Turkey plus they are an enemy of Iran. Azerbaijan has oil/gas and Armenia does not. Most importantly, the upper echelons of the left are not angry with Azerbaijan, they do not mobilize the media against Azerbaijan, they're happy to work with Azerbaijan to achieve shared goals.
This case is far more complex. For start Nagorno-Karabakh is part of internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan, Armenia controlling it is result of war of conquest they won some time ago and entire region has multisided ethic-based wars and pogroms for quite long time.
And there are many additional complexities.
This is another abstraction that is again, pretty arbitrary. International recognized borders are basically what was reached by 1945, plus whatever random border adjustments Soviet leaders decided to make in SSRs, plus some odds and ends. What are the 'internationally recognized' borders of Israel? Who knows! Annexing land (the Golan Heights for example) is absolutely fine since it's beneficial to US interests. The US certainly isn't going to complain about it in a meaningful way, like withholding some of the billions in aid they send over annually.
If China says 'oh only six or seven countries recognize Taiwan as an independent country, that means it's not internationally recognized and we can invade this rebellious province' that's not going to work. 'Internationally recognized borders' is another fig leaf.
Yes, nevertheless quite useful.
For better or worse, it is useful demarcation for various things.
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Sure, there's some incoherence when one is reacting practically to the world instead of having a fleshed-out theory of war. But I suspect most people on the left would agree that a war is only acceptable if it met Just Case.
Are we talking about left-wingers in power or left-wingers in general? Go and talk to left-wingers and tell me how many even know that those two countries are fighting in the first place.
Surprisingly, people don't act on things until they are aware of them.
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Well, you said it yourself, Armenia is a close ally of Iran and Russia. They made their bed and are now upset that Russia inevitably screwed them over. Also, Nagorno-Karabakh wasn’t within Armenia’s recognized borders, it was an occupied territory.
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For what it's worth, in 2008 Russia also waged a war to annex territory and conquer another sovereign nation, and there (although reactions on both sides were muted compared to now) the Republicans played the hawks and the Democrats the doves. Of course, reactions can change, and the emotions on both sides then and now were entirely genuine. But something happened in the intervening decade, and it's worth trying to explain what happened and why it swapped the sides.
A Democrat being president probably also helped.
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Yeah man it was meant to be a teeny bit tongue in cheek since, like I said, I’m not a leftist.
Here’s my actual opinion: most people don’t have a coherent political philosophy, and their support or lack of support for Zelenskys war isn’t based on anything except the latest headline they read.
Why do they need it? A great deal of philosophy gets ground into what Scott Alexander called crystalized heuristics. So the philosophical debates over just war and what not don't need to occupy every person's mind, you just condense that down into "It's immoral to invade a sovereign nation unless they are committing crimes against humanity like genocide and whatnot".
The debate isn’t wether it was unethical for Russia to invade, it is wether or not the United States has to pay for the war.
Do we pay for the defense of every country who wants to prolong their territorial disputes?
Of course we don’t.
We don't pay for those who are invaded because the invader meets Just Cause, no. Russia doesn't meet that requirement and the US has a moral, ideological, and strategic interest in making the Bear bleed.
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Sure, but it's a nice bonus we're wearing down an enemy, it's helpful to our larger geopolitical goals, and it's by actual standards, pretty cheap since most of our "spending" is writing off 1980's and 1990's military equipment.
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It actually can't be, because they observably didn't give a shit about any of this during the Obama years! This was unironically one of the things that disillusioned me a lot about the left at the time. Where was this principled objection when Libya was destroyed? While you could claim that the Libyan intervention wasn't technically a war to conquer or annex the country, that still leaves the left in the unfortunate position of supporting the bombing of a nation until it regresses to the point of having open air slave markets.
If the Libyan intervention had worked, it would have involved providing air support to one side in a civil war, such that nobody would have needed to invade Libya. The desired end-state was rapid consolidation of control by a local anti-Gadaffi faction that appeared to be pro-American but was actually lousy with jihadis.
The lesson the American pro-establishment left learned from Afghanistan (which still looked like a partial success at the time) and Iraq (aready fairly obviously a disaster) was that America should rely on proxies to control territory rather than invading countries with US troops. Libya was the first big test of this idea. It failed the test.
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I didn't say the left were avid geopolitics followers. I just said they didn't agree that nations could invade others without damn good reason.
My understanding of the Libyan intervention was that Gaddafi was attacking civilians, which is very much Not Okay under the morality and rules of war that have developed for a century now. If you want to claim the left was duped, that's one thing, but I think they would 100% agree that you can invade a nation if it is doing something like that.
Then, of course, there is the question of putting US personnel on the ground to handle post-intervention Libya, something people would probably be wary of given how long the US had been in the Middle East by that point.
Except they greenlit the Saudi invasion of Yemen too. My point is that they don't actually give a shit about nations invading others and are motivated by more local concerns, because otherwise their actions don't make sense. They aren't insisting that we invade China over their actions in Xinjiang, they aren't even proposing military action against France due to their active maintenance of a colonial empire in Africa (this includes multiple military interventions!). One of the reasons I became disillusioned with the left was their sudden reversal on the forever wars and overseas adventurism once Obama took power.
And what does Libya look like now? I'm not going to say that Gaddafi was a saint, but I feel very confident in saying that he was better than the open air slave markets and violent unrest that is still plaguing the region. Military intervention in Libya was a terrible idea and made the world a worse place, and I steadfastly disagree that something being "not okay" is enough to justify an invasion, especially when we can see the ruinous outcomes that actually resulted in the real world.
???
What's the source on the broad left doing that?
Xianjing may be a just cause, but a just cause doesn't compel people to go to war. War with China would have severe second-order effects and US or US + Allies victory isn't guaranteed either. Also, what is this French empire you're talking about?
That's a separate criticism. Failure to consider "and then what?" isn't the same as having a Marvel-esque view of heroes and villains as the original comment implied.
https://www.cfr.org/blog/obamas-war-choice-supporting-saudi-led-air-war-yemen
I haven't seen the left disavowing Barack Obama, and I treat them like adults who are responsible for the choices they make. The left wanted Obama, Obama supported a ten-fold increase in the number of drone strikes and greenlit support for the war in Yemen. If Obama has been repudiated by the broader left since then, I'll retract my claim - but this seems like the sort of thing I would have noticed.
It is my contention that the exact same principles apply to Ukraine - it might suck for the Ukrainians, but that just cause doesn't compel people to go to war. Furthermore, this war is going to have severe second-order effects to boot, and it isn't like the US victory is guaranteed either. Hell, from where I'm sitting, it looks like Ukraine is actually losing the conflict right now.
I am indeed talking about Françafrique. I highly recommend that you learn a bit about it - there are a lot of interesting stories coming out of that part of the world these days.
Even if it isn't an exact match, failure to consider "and then what?" is absolutely a sign of an underdeveloped and immature view of the world. "They don't view the world as a Marvel movie with heroes and villains, they just view it as a small child does, with no understanding of the fact that actions have consequences" is not exactly an amazing defence!
Hold on just one second. That's not the correct comparison. You would not use the events of 2014 to judge whether the left supported him for it in 2012. You would need to point to his foreign policy statements in the 2012 election or even the 2008 election.
Except the US isn't at war with Russia. We're donating equipment and training Ukranians. So I don't see what your point is. In fact, the vast majority of Americans don't support US forces acting militarily in Ukraine at all.
I am indeed ignorant of Francafrique. I suspect the broader "left" even moreso. Ignorance isn't hypocrisy.
It is, nonetheless, a defense. If you're going to criticize someone, you should at least be correct in what you're criticizing them for.
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Much of former French Colonial African is still de facto even if not de jure under French influence with the exception of the successful* "Coup Belt" countries. France is the poster child for the definition of neocolonialism.
You're talking about Francafrique? I don't know much about that, it seems like they're trying to reduce their footprint there. You got a source?
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The US pretty consistently urged restraint on Yemen, it was Saudi that went all-in because MBS (and, to be fair, the entire security establishment and royal family) got very mad that the Houthis were routinely droning parts of Saudi Arabia (which is a hard-to-defend territory at the best of times). Obviously Israel was also happy to help because creating a money pit for the IRGC in Yemen means less money for Hamas and Hezbollah.
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It's not that it can't be, but anyone observing politics long enough saw these supposed ideas flip depending on what's convenient at the time, so it's hard to take these at face value.
How did the left flip on these ideas? What invasion were they okay with?
North Korea, North Vietnam, Falkland Islands...
I need evidence on these things. Where are the people on the left saying these invasions were okay?
Regarding Falkland Islands, I suspect people defending the British in the Falklands War saw the islands at rightfully British. Not a war of expansion.
You never heard of the anti Vietnam-war protests?! And you're getting the Falkland invasion backwards, a fashy military dictatorship of Argentina was invading, and the UK was moving against the invasion. The left at the time was taking the piss about the whole thing, because they didn't like Thatcher.
A contemporary source on Korea might be harder for me to find, but a film and TV show like M*A*S*H* didn't write itself either.
Oh, you're not talking about the US decision to go to war, you're talking about NV's decision to invade SV. That is, you think the left was pro-invasion because it didn't support helping South Vietnam.
...You know what? Fair. I'll give this one to you.
Let's be clear about which "left" we're talking about. Liberals? Center-left individuals? Radical Leftists? Marxists/Socialists/Communists? Once we clarify that, we can talk about whether they were against the idea of the British sending an army to the Falklands.
MASH was produced towards the end of the Vietnam War and into the years after. You have to separate out Vietnam weariness and disapproval with what attitudes MASH actually captured of the Korean era.
That said, your ultimate point strikes me as misguided. I agree that there was a left which opposed US involvement in Vietnam for a variety of reasons. But there was a big ideological shift - the socialists and communists fell out of favor and continued losing power. The character of that left has changed.
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What kind of left supported Argentinian invasion of Falklands and North Korea invading South?
Tankies, who you’ll notice are now ok with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a few general nuts who have varied opinions.
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We're not talking about "supported", just "being ok with". Tatcher defending the Falklands was the butt end of many jokes, and maybe I'm mixing things up with Vietnam, but I thought the lefty consensus on Korea was also "what are we doing here anyway?"
After Truman relieved MacArthur (who among other things was advocating for invading China) his approval rating hit 23%. The lowest recorded by Gallup in their entire history of polling Presidential approval. The forgotten war was not particularly unpopular at the time.
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?
Foot supported the Falklands war, Attlee and Truman initiated their respective countries involvment in Korea and the discrepancy with Vietnam can simply be explained by specific differences; chiefly, there the US was propping up an unpopular authoritarian regime rather than a functioning and genuine, if flawed, democracy.
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The "Dissident Right" sees Ukraine as a puppet of their boogeyman, The New World Order, going back at least as far as the Maidan Revolution, which they think was a coup orchestrated by hated Neocons and Globalists (aka Satanic Pedophile Freemasons). Putin, meanwhile, is anti-LGBTQ++, so he's the based warrior holding out against the tide of Globohomo-ism. I know very intelligent people who believe this. To quote a friend of mine (who has two Masters degrees), when I asked him why he is so uncritical of Putin's Russia, "I know we [America/Western Civ] are evil. I don't know that about Putin."
I find it bitterly ironic that Twitter far right wingers who claim to be Nazis seeking americas demographic replacement by tradcaths because it is supposedly controlled by commies are now rooting for Russia to invade a country whose military is controlled by Nazis and in the process of demographic replacement by tradcaths which Russia will probably ethnically cleanse while justifying it with pro-commie rhetoric.
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I don't know about the New World Order but aren't the US pro-LGBTQ++? It seems to be an important aspect of US foreign policy to antagonize close allies/trade partners in regards to their LGBTQ++ policies, for example.
Is that an incorrect statement?
Why do you think that they are wrong?
They’re wrong because Russia isn’t ‘based and trad’ compared to Western civilization, as countless people including our own Russian regulars like Dase have noted many times. Russia has immense corruption, huge mass immigration from Islamic Central Asia, declining religiosity, bottom tier birthrates (certainly among, uh, Christians) and the same empty, vacuous popular culture as the west.
At least America is rich, Russia isn’t even that.
I was specifically asking about the LGBTQ++ angle. There is nothing wrong in thinking that the US are more pro-LGBTQ than Russia, or is there?
Once Russia is taken out by the usual spring-time CIA peaceful protest, who else seriously stands against the tide of Globohomo-ism? China?
Perhaps not trad but various Russian policies would qualify as 'based' by Internet right-wing standards. Moreover as the Russian progressives are drained out by current events and isolation from the West, Russia is actually becoming more based as time goes. The fact that more and more Russians come online to English-speaking websites to complain about Russia is a testament to this phenomenom.
Isn't corruption better when you're a wealthy dissident? I sure bet some of these Jan 6th political prisoners wished they could bribe themselves out of their current predicament.
Yes and causing nowhere near the issues London, Paris, Berlin or even some US cities have to deal with iirc. Russia is an example of globalism done right, if anything. Many on the right have been able to unironically cheer for the Taliban, so that's not necessarily an issue either.
Somewhat contradicting with mass islamic immigration? Or do you mean a decline in religiosity from its absolute height of attendance under state atheist USSR? If the government is at least pro-traditional religion then there is hope, unlike in the West.
Soviet-tier Christians. Real Christians will not go extinct but their day-to-day family lives are greatly improved when removed from a strictly anti-Christian society.
Wealth is a sin in itself, so not surprising that the apparent sum total of the Western people's morality in itself is greatly lower than that of the more humble Central Asian people.
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And as a bonus, modern Russian patriotism continues to have uncomfortable levels of attachment (just one example) to the old Bolshevik rule, which the based and trad conservative Western Russia simps choose to ignore time after time.
That's a state effort, not example of grass-roots patriotism. With which Kremlin is rather uncomfortable and has been suppressing as of late with arrests, official harrasment etc.
You should have rather posted the various guys flying Tzar / Bolshevik era flags side by side. (yes, really).
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many on the right support Ukraine war . it's not nearly as polarizing as George Floyd and the like.
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The Ukrainians have been deliberately skewing their media operations to appeal to progressives. They appointed a trans as their former military press official. They're moving to legalize gay marriage, which is highly unusual considering the anti-gay sentiment amongst the bulk of the operation. On social media, they've made appeals to Harry Potter and Star Wars as stories of resistance.
Furthermore, the right has had a shift against ill-conceived, strategically ridiculous military operations in recent years seeing as many neocons switched to the other side of politics. It makes no sense for the US to have had a Ukraine policy other than as a way to antagonize Russia. Trying to suppress and weaken Russia is not really coherent with a grand strategic goal of opposing China, it pushes them together. Well, it's decided now, China and Russia are closely aligned, with Iran moving in their direction as well.
I don't think the Ukrainians started doing this until they saw that the US domestic political situation meant deepening support within the Blue Tribe had a better chance of working than reaching out to the Red Tribe. Even now, the Ukrainians are waving a lot more EU flags than Pride flags.
Well yeah, because up until recently Poland was one of their biggest backers.
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Did it? How does what we see now differ from bog-standard American political polarization?
I'd be the first to note that the Republicans have a more vocal wing that's openly Ukraine-skeptic, but that wing notably isn't even charge of the Republican party, let alone 'the right' as a whole. It's also incredibly typical of American political party tradition of the party out of power flirting with more radical peace movements right up to the point they come back into power. Cindy Sheehan was a darling of the Democratic party up to the point the Democrats were in charge of Iraq and Cindy kept protesting the war. Republicans are an isolation party until they're in charge of foreign policy.
From my perspective, the American right is much more skeptical about how the US goes about supporting Ukraine, than about whether to. When things get tied to, say, anti-corruption measures, people who aren't just using corruption as an argument-soldier tend to be more accepting. When actually challenged to explain how, say, conventional arms delivery meaningfully risk nuclear war despite an entire cold war to the contrary, that doesn't seem to be a particular close-held belief when put into context by even casual inquiry. The closest thing is a consistent concern is cost... which is both a framing narrative but also one that the government can easily undercut at will by simply explaining how it chooses to frame costs.
These are far more indicative of 'I don't trust how the other party handles things' skepticism than actual opposition. If a Republican had been at the helm at the start, we'd have Republicans being the pro-support party and the Democrats warning how Trump was recklessly going towards nuclear war, etc. etc. etc.
Factions of the American right far more organized, far more coherent, and far larger lack the ability to meaningfully dominate the American right's perspective on policies far closer to the party base, let alone Trump's likely coalition. I hear far more from the opponents of the American right about how the right is against Ukraine than I hear any sort of chorus from the right against it.
The Cold War isn’t even close to analogous. Now because of advanced weapons, the US can give Ukraine weapons that easily and frequently do hit Russia’s territory (including Moscow). That never happened during the Cold War as far as I know.
In so much that the Cold War is an aggregate rather than singular thing, this would be true. In so much that the Cold War was filled with examples that serve as analogies for what does / does not trigger nuclear war, including direct conventional combat between nuclear states or conventional military support resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, this is false.
I also not that you fail to identify how conventional arms deliveries meaningful risk nuclear war, which was the subject of the risk comparison.
If you mean that the US or Russia never gave advanced weapons to allies or proxies against their superpower adversaries, this is false. Notable examples included the Soviets giving the Koreans entire armored divisions of equipment and then giving the Vietnamese state-of-the-art surface-to-air systems and various forms of rockets, and the Americans giving stinger missiles and other weapons to the Afghans, and major military packages to the Europeans and even the Iranians for use against the Russians.
If you mean that 'the US couldn't give weapons that could easily and frequently hit Russia's territory', this is also false. The entire point of many of the ballistic missile treaties in the cold war was precisely because the US could give weapons that could easily and frequently hit Russian territory, and US military aircraft and missile technology only stopped being unique in so much that it proliferated to the point that many nations had the ability. This doesn't even address dynamics of Russian/Soviet (and, most relevantly, allegedly Putin's) perspective of the power dynamic between the US and NATO countries, which diminished perceived relevant differences between the US military launching a missile from German territory and German forces launching a missile from German territory.
If you mean that weapons provided by the superpowers were never used to do so, this was because the superpowers never invaded their adjacent neighbors who were in range of their territory, not for a lack of willingness to do so. The willingness to do so was a rather significant part of NATO's architecture.
There are interpretations and angles you could have meant that would make your intended statement true, but none of them particularly validate the contested claim of how conventional weapons meaningfully risk nuclear war. Casual mechanisms are consistently lacking, or downright silly.
Would we really nuke Russia over some smallish number of mushroom clouds in Ukraine though?
I'd like to think not, as it seems fantastically self-defeating -- but guess I could imagine the pitch.
Maybe the democrats are playing a variant of the 'madman' strategy here -- if your opponent is so dumb that you can't predict whether he will blow off his head to spite his face, you need to be very cautious?
You are as equally unlikely to nuke Russia over Ukraine as Russia is unlikely to nuke Ukraine over Ukraine, or the Afghans over Afghanistan, or the Chechans over Chechnya. The Cold War, and the post cold war, has a number of examples of both powers accepting losses in wars of choice- even when internationally humiliating- rather than invoking nuclear weapons.
Common misconception of what Madman Strategy counter-play is. When someone is suspected of invoking madman theory, the equilibrium is to be less, not more, cautious.
Ultimately, there's only two general conditions when dealing with a nuclear madman: either they are faking it, in which case they are actually rational, or they are not faking it, in which they are not rational. This is binary, not spectrum- you can't be both simultaneously rational and irrational from a nuclear deterrence perspective, because deterrence itself is a binary. You are either deterred from an action, or your are not.
If they are rational, you don't make concessions in the name of caution, because doing so is unnecessary (they aren't actually mad), it incentivizes the rational-madman to continue to continue to fake madness (as a rational means to get further concessions), and it also obfuscates the ability to identify actual madmen. You continue to operate below assessed nuclear thresholds, you just do so based on your own analysis of what the actual thresholds are, not what the fake-madman claims (because he is a liar), based on common lines of assessment.
If they are not rational, you don't make concessions because if they responded rationally to concessions, they wouldn't be irrational, but faking irrationality. When dealing with truly irrational actors, the counterplay isn't rationality-based deterrence, but capability degradation that limits their ability to inflict harm, which cannot be assumed to be traditionally deterred. This means a lot of things, many of which harmful, but critically targeting the irrational-madman's rational support network whether that is domestic or abroad.
The common mistake people have with Putin and nukes in Ukraine is being bound up in a general narrative where Putin is simultaneously a rational actor and an irrational actor, and that nuclear actions will be done for simulateneously rational and irrational reasons.
Interesting points as always -- to be clear, I'm saying that if Biden is dumb enough that his response to Putin nuking some stuff in Ukraine might be 'full exchange' -- Rational Putin needs to be pretty cautious about what he nukes in Ukraine. "Nuclear Moron Strategy" if you will.
Not sure how this works if Biden is only pretending to be retarded; isn't the point of it that it's hard for Putin to be sure?
Of course if Biden is a moron and Putin is a madman none of it works all that well.
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Not a nuke, but an overwhelming NATO-backed (and probably OK'd on the down low by China) attack on basically of Russia's military capabilities? Probably.
Yeah I think so too -- although conventional WWIII doesn't necessarily seem like a great outcome either.
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This is nonsense. During the Cold War, neither the US nor the USSR gave weapons in proxy wars that resulted in incursions into the other sides’s territory let alone amped up the exchange.
Mentioning Korea is besides the obvious point — Korea wasnt LA. Mentioning ballistics is also obviously beyond the point. They weren’t actively being used.
The Cold War did not have anything close to the current situation.
Finally the causal mechanism is clear — weapons are provided that help Ukraine make serious inroads into say Crimea and Russia uses tactical nukes. NATO responds and the world ends.
Neither had the opportunity, as neither directly invaded an adjacent neighbor and started a sustained urban bombardment campaign.
In terms of preparation, the Russian position on NATO as a threat is that this is precisely what NATO has been from the start: a US proxy threatening incursions or worse into peaceful Russian territory. The Russian narrative, propaganda it may be, is as relevant to precedent for Russian nuclear deterrence posturing as anything else, or even more so, because one can take Russia's own words and actions for what both represents a threat but demonstratably does not represent a nuclear-retaliation trigger.
You seem to have missed the original point as much as the previous replier, so that's not a surprise.
The Cold War had numerous examples of both sides engaging in massive conventional arms shipments that resulted in tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties to the other in the other's wars of choice where losing would not threaten to trigger state collapse and existential risk thresholds that drive nuclear weapon use.
As the relevant comparison being invoked was nuclear risk, that is incredibly relevant, especially as the Cold War had multiple contexts were nuclear war was far closer than the current Ukraine war.
That is not a causal mechanism, as the threshold criteria has already been falsified in this very conflict.
If 'serious inroads into Russia' were the standard that would invoke nuke use, nuclear weapons would have been used last year, because the Ukrainians have already made 'serious inroads' into de jure Ukrainian territory that Russia annexed. This is just one of the reasons why Putin's annexation gambit of the eastern parts of Ukraine last year was panned as a strategic mistake- in his attempt to box himself and any would-be successor into continuing the conflict to victory, he demonstrated that Ukrainian military successes in internationally-recognized but Russian-annexed Ukrainian territory were NOT something Russia was going to go nuclear over, a dynamic that was furthered with the Kherson defeat and which is ongoing in the southern front in late 2023. The obvious rheotrical off-ramp- that these aren't 'serious' inroads- just undermines the central premise, because the Russians can always claim that a major defeat is not 'serious', which moves the nuclear retaliation from objective criteria to subjective criteria, which goes to rational or irrational actors, which drives back to what observable indicators there are of nuclear thresholds and if they've already been passed X number of times, why they should be believed to be nuclear on X+1 time.
A similar lack of credibility occurred with claims that any attack on Crimea might meet a nuclear response- there have been many, many, many attacks on Crimea since the war started. They have not made the war go nuclear. Attacking ships in port did not make the war go nuclear. Conducting operations from within Russian-claimed territory, and even internationally-recognized Russian territory, did not make the war go nuclear. There was never any particular reason to believe they would besides people claiming clear causal mechanisms, but like many, many other Russian red lines, these have not been nuclear. That the Russians claim Crimea is a part of Russia as any other is itself undercut by the other areas they claim is part of Russia, ie. the territories they claimed not only when they didn't already hold them, but also lost significant major portions of. The precedent is already set, because Crimea is only as indisputably Russian for nuclear deterrence purposes due to being annexed as the also-annexed Ukrainian east, which has not been basis for nuclear retaliation.
A third extension of this theme of undermining nuclear-threshold criteria is, of course, Russia's own attacks into the other's territory: Russia set precedent in the world that strikes into urban centers were an acceptable form of non-unacceptable activity, and when the Ukrainians reciprocated, the Russians demonstrated it was not, in fact, a nuclear threshold. These were, notably, established with Urkainian strikes not dependent on Western advanced munitions, but from Ukraine's own stocks of Soviet-derived (and in some cases Soviet-produced) munitions. The actions doable from non-American sources demonstrated the lack of threshold criteria in claimed thresholds, and so western-provided munitions have to have something more than a magical western aura to be nuclear-escalation risk. Maybe if Urkraine began some sort of population-targetting WMD campaign... but the Ukrainian bio-weapon labs have not exactly materialized.
Between strategic mismanagement and precedence, the Russians have demonstrated that Ukraine taking Russian-claimed cities, reciprocating strikes, and other forms of military engagement remain below the level of nuclear threshold criteria, which is typically only associated with the survival of the state or WMD retaliation. Throughout the war, the Ukrainians have not significantly impacted the Russian state's ability to maintain internal control of the population, or even the military, which might cause a threat to the continuity of government, which is also credible nuclear thresholds. The most relevant threat to the state's capacity to control in the last two years have been overwhelmingly self-inflicted internal politics, which would not- and did not- lead to a credible nuclear threat.
If the argument is that aid packages will eventually allow Ukraine to march on Moscow, which would threaten state survival, that's not an argument against current aid packages. That's an argument against hypothetical future packages well, well after the point of Ukraine taking its internationally recognized borders.
And this is aside from the assumption of the Western response, for which leading to MAD results from the typical muddling of whether actors are rational or irrational. Even setting aside the nature of assuming the NATO response would be nuclear, if the Russians are rational nuclear actions, and NATO nuking is a given, then the Russians would not conduct the nuking that leads to MAD, because they are rational and the use of the nuclear weapon would not be worth it. As the Russians have not used nuclear weapons to reverse battlefield setbacks even without the threat of NATO nuking, the non-Russian observer is going to have to justify why a particular Russian battlefield loss will precipitate nuclear use when it hasn't been rational to do so to date, but also why- if the argument twists to that the Russians are irrational- why the irrational Russians haven't done so to date.
Which goes down to the typical muddling of actors being simultaneously rational and irrational which tends to retreat for the motte when challenged.
That’s a lot of words undermined by your first sentence. My whole point is “this war is categorically different from what happened in cold war proxy wars” and you confirmed in the first paragraph that I am correct.
You can’t say on one hand the Cold War established when nuclear weapons would be used and we haven’t reached that point while on the other hand acknowledge this situation never occurred during the Cold War.
Finally, my scenario hasn’t been falsified. My position is that if Russia was seriously threatened in Crimea or Moscow, Russia May use nukes which creates a spiral. Since the only way Ukraine could possibly threaten Russia this way is with our support, you just have your causal mechanism.
Finally, one need not find this example compelling to be worried about an existential threat. Let’s say there is a 5% chance. That is clearly a valid concern when giving weapons to Ukraine
No, not really.
You may need to re-read it, and then read the second, and the subsequent paragraphs, because that is not the concession you are looking for. Especially in light of response paras 4 and 5, which actually do address what you think paragraph one addresses.
Of course you can. The application of category qualifications is a basic skill.
If you understand what makes something qualify for a category, you can look for whether a new thing has the prerequisite characteristics to qualify. If we know that, categorically, something has characteristics X, Y, and Z, then if something we don't know doesn't have X, Y, and Z, we may not know it well, but it's not the category. In this case, 'the Cold War established when nuclear weapons would be used' is a category- the category of what sort of things would lead to nuclear weapons being used, i.e. the thresholds, i.e. existential concerns.
As the category already exists, then for novel example (war nearby rather than a ways away) to qualify for the category, you need to establish it as meeting the criteria. When the criteria are existential risk, you need to establish existential risk. If it does not, you can absolutely judge that it doesn't meet the category of concern.
At the end of the day, new things don't simply fall into pre-defined categories they haven't qualified for.
Now, you could try to argue that a starting premise is wrong- that we don't know Russian thresholds- but that would undermine the argument that we shouldn't send weapons because it would cross nuclear thresholds. The argument presumes an understanding of thresholds. If you don't, then there's no basis to the claim. If you do, then it's just discussing where the threshold is- and so far you've retreated from examples of non-threshold advanced weapon use.
Your position fails to have a causal mechanism because there is no objective relationship between claimed components due to in-build subjectivity and assumptions.
You don't define what a 'serious' threat to these areas is which allows retroactive retraction of any standard. You don't provide a causal relationship dynamic to explain how Crimea substantially differ from other areas Russia claimed are categorically the same but didn't nuke over and which thus demonstrate that control loss alone is not a threshold. You didn't establish why NATO should be automatically assumed to nuke, or why Moscow would choose to do so on the understanding of that, or why Moscow would escalate to MAD if it was willing to be nuked on that understanding in the first place. The is the classic conflation of rational and irrational nuclear actors- Moscow is simultaneously rational enough to resort to MAD, but irrational enough to instigate MAD.
You even conflate Crimea and Moscow for the same opposition point, despite that the scale of resources to remove Russian control from one is of entirely different magnitudes than the other. The Moscow-based Russian Federation does not face existential risk if it loses Crimea- it does if a force is capable of taking Moscow. The two forces are not the same, and the aid shipments that have to date not even allowed Ukraine to capture its own territory are demonstratably not enough to capture Moscow.
This is not a causal mechanism- this is basic assuming the conclusion on handwavium, while throwing in non-falsifiables that wave off the counter-examples.
It's not clearly a valid concern at all, since you pulled 5% out of the same source that you assumed the conclusion, but didn't actually contrast it to the existential risks that follow from NOT providing weapons sufficient to defeat an invasion and annexation of territory against a country that actually did give up nuclear weapon potential in the past.
This is a classic example utility monster logic application, which struggles with infinities and resorts to smuggling in the framing while denying other fictional metrics that would counter the desired conclusion. You can say there is a 5% chance that conventional arms leads to a nuclear war, and someone else could say NOT sending enough arms to conventionally defeat Russia leads to a 5.00005% chance of nuclear proliferation by security-concerned countries that leads to nuclear war. Both are negative infinities.
If you want to say infinity is equally bad in either direction, it doesn't matter- negative infinity either way is still infinity. If you want to say a more likely infinity matters more, you need to actually justify why. Otherwise, there's nothing valid about it- it's just an arbitrary claim to relevance.
Dude. I don’t know what to say.
The basic point I was an am making is that the Cold War is no guide contra to what you said. You haven’t provided any evidence it is.
Seems like you are trying to use some weird “debate trick” as opposed to address the substance of the argument. I’m not making the claim that “we shouldn’t send weapons because it would cross nuclear thresholds.”
I’m saying that sending weapons may cross that threshold (likely depending on Ukraine success) and therefore I don’t judge it to be worth the risk.
As for everything else, again it seems to be a weird debate trick as opposed to substance. For example:
I don’t need to. Losing territory that was small and not part of Russia prior to the invasion is different from losing Crimea which has been Russian for most of the last hundred years, is of key strategic value, and has been de facto Russian since 2014. They are of different categories so I would make a reasonable assumption that Russia would react differently. This seems obvious and happy to try to explain the assumptions but it doesn’t feel like a conversation.
Indeed, most of your argument comes down to “your argument relies on assumptions and judgements.” Yes. So does the argument for providing weapons. The question is which one is reasonable. Trying to play this weird gotcha game isn’t really all that interesting.
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Yea the logic is clearly there for why Russia would nuke Ukraine. The whole point of nuclear deterrence is to keep other great powers from waging war on you directly. If a great power can wage a war by slow boiling how direct the conflict is until they're eventually providing everything from intelligence and guidance for your cruise missiles to the missiles themselves, everything short of the meat doing the fighting than nuclear deterrence isn't effective.
On top of that the repercussions just aren't there on the other side. In nuclear power vs nuclear power engagement neither side wants to use nukes as it means they both get wiped out. In a proxy vs proxy war there is no real point in using nukes as it's a massive escalation and a loss on either side isn't an existential threat to either nuclear power. With the proxy in direct conflict with a nuclear power situation that changes. The nuclear power directly engaged still has the incentive to make sure it wins, it's existence could be at stake depending on how the situation unfolds. The nuclear power backing the proxy doesn't have the same skin in the game. If their proxy is nuked they are still fine and escalating to a nuclear exchange brings us back to situation one, where both sides get wiped out.
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I agree with most of what was said below, but I think the education rift / credentialism as well was a big factor. Though that could really just fit under the same "political realignment" label that everyone else is commenting on.
Culture and race are big dividing lines that led to the realignment, but realistically so many americans are white (or see themselves as white like a lot of asians and hispanics) that dems couldn't realign purely around minority identity, not yet at least. A big portion of their new voting base are the upper class educated white people.
Globalism, outsourcing, low trade barriers etc. tends to be less of a threat to the more highly educated, as education and development levels are generally lower in foreign countries. So you're effectively increasing demand for high skill jobs by giving them access to a larger market where their skills are more in demand. On the other hand for low skill jobs things feel the opposite. Labor goes on strike and they just ship your job overseas. They can find plenty of people that can work in a factory in east asia. Or import them here from south of the border. They've effectively increased the supply of low skill labor.
I guess according to neolibs the low skill americans still benefited as overall the pie grew more, prices were lower, etc. Not sure if that mattered when their power relative to the upper class educated was reduced, their cultural power eroded, status was gone and professions like plumbers were the butt of every joke.
Can see why the urban and educated upper class would feel more positive towards globalism while the rural less educated lower class felt cheated by it. So they ended up in opposite camps politically and I think that has changed the calculus for leadership in both political camps as well. With dems no longer being protectionist towards labor and republicans doing a 180 on their earlier neolib econ ideas that kinda kicked off globalism. Though it's kind of wild to watch them try to fit this change in with their older communism vs capitalism vision of the world. Mass immigration is treated as a sort of welfare for the 3rd world by the left, even though it's hurting labor at home and brain draining foreign countries into permanent poverty. On the right people want to overthrow the elite! but not like those commies, in a cultural sense, not a material one. Basically just read the lyrics of 'rich men of north richmond' to get the picture.
This general attitude towards globalism has also influenced attitudes towards foreign policy, that's why anytime you go on a republican leaning subreddit it's spammed to death by people called RandomWord1234 that say, "We're getting a great deal! weakening our enemy for pennies on the dollar!"
A big focus is on how the elites are spending money on their foreign pet projects while people rot at home, so most of the commentary to try and influence conservative minds revolves around that.
"It's not things you could actually use to have a better life, it's old surplus military equipment that would've gotten thrown away anyways."
Though that one has dropped off now that it's become more apparent that we are spending a lot to keep their government and services afloat.
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Its a party in power thing. Party in power is always pro-war. In the last century there are only a few exceptions of presidents not initiating a conflict of some kind: https://historyguy.com/wars_by_president.htm Nixon is the only two-term president to get that honor.
In 2000 Bush ran on a "humble" foreign policy platform of no nation building. He planned to not continue pursuing the foolish wars and military interventions of the Clinton administration. If this sounds like parody to you, welcome to life in America with a long memory. This is maybe one of the first realignments that you are noticing.
If a republican wins the next election, within a year or so the democrats will be blaming the republicans for how they are handling the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Even if they basically handle it the exact same way.
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The biggest factor is that Joe Biden is president, and for a lot of bitter Trump supporters, that's all they need to hear. (The converse is also true).
The second biggest factor is that the paleocon/populist segment of the American Right is the new party establishment, and while they may favor a strong military as an expression of national virility, they are also generally isolationist. This is not new. What is new is their being in the drivers' seat for the GOP and especially for messaging.
Being for a strong military as an expression of national virility but also being isolationist seems like a strange combination to me. What should the military do then? Lots of drills and restricting yourself to monitoring the coasts certainly doesn't seem particularly glorious as a display of male capacity.
I think the part of the New Right that is big on the former realizes there's tension here, and so they've actually gone in for interventionism to square the circle, and want to separate themselves from the loser-y defeatist vibes of the libertarian non-interventionists.
Not liking libertarianism is really big with the new right, and being anti-war there is a trope. So that ends up being implicated in their disdain for free market liberals. But of course if you go too far this direction you end up right back in NeoConland.
Lock the borders down and start kicking out people who aren't supposed to be here.
ICE could already do that, it’s not like the government has no idea where the 14m illegal immigrants are.
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That guy's idea of just living a quiet life, notably, included serial killing.
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There was something something pressure and corruption and scandals and such, or possible two such incidents that I'm conflating (Burisma, Hunter Biden, corrupt prosecutors, military aid being blocked?), such that the left was generally "Ukraine establishment good" and the right was generally "Ukraine establishment corrupt". That and the fact that once Biden was Pro- arming them, the Right had to swing against him, and then the Left had to get in line.
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There are few principled peace-lovers on either side. Now that progressives are in charge, they push their wars and conservatives are for peace. When Republicans were dominant in the George W. Bush years, it was the opposite.
Many in the French Revolution were for abolishing the death penalty. It wasn't long before these same idealists were drowning priests in the Vendée. The Soviet congress actually did abolish the death penalty in 1917 before reversing course three months later.
The principled idealists are always in the minority against the bloodthirsty majority for whom there are no bad tactics, only bad targets.
But then the question becomes “why is this particular war Theirs?” A priori, I would expect the Cold Warriors and the Reaganites to be all pro-Ukraine. I think @Skibboleth has the right of it, and it crystallized around Biden’s stance. Once he signal-boosted the neoliberal stance, his opponents could score points by playing the opposite. Up until that point, either side could have adopted the war.
Things like this always make we wonder how much Republicans could drive policy by just adopting the opposite view of what they want as their stance. How many fewer dollars sent to Ukraine if the right demanded aid to Ukraine right at the start? Mostly just a silly thought, but the effect is so strong that sometimes I wonder.
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I generally like this line of reasoning. After all, Trump had first dibs on whether to make Covid right-coded or left-coded. He chose the wrong side, the Democrats went Covid-maximalist, and Trump lost the election as a result.
I don't think the same logic applies here. Republicans couldn't have owned the Ukraine issue. For one, a Democrat is commander in chief. But even more importantly, the Democrats have been making anti-Russia their thing ever since the bogus Russian election interference claims in 2016.
As the opposition party, it's tough to make headway by jumping on the bandwagon led by your opponents. Ukraine was always going to belong to the Democrats.
You could be right. I agree that once the Democrats were flagposting, there was next to no benefit for Republicans to play along. And Biden's position as CiC meant he got to make the decision.
But the anti-Russia messaging during the Trump presidency is exactly why I think it could have caught on. Especially because it was so underwhelming. Dems R the Real Russians--or, more tactfully, accusing them of being all bark and no bite. If that narrative got enough traction, helped along by the neocons who'd been blue-balled for the last four years, I could see the Democrats crystallizing against it, leading to an eventual Biden decision of non-intervention.
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No, the right tends to be pretty consistent in opposing the foreign policy moves of powerful democrats. Sometimes this takes the form of ‘roll in the bombs and boots on the ground’ but Russia is a nuclear armed near peer and that would be really unpopular anyways.
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Because during the 2016 Presidential debates, Trump called out the Neocon warmongers on stage, to thunderous boos from the audience, and thunderous applause in homes. After he won, all the unreformed Neocons joined the Democrats. It took 20 years for the Republican electorate to become thoroughly disillusioned with endless war. 20 years of feeding their sons to Afghanistan until recruitment dried up.
It also hasn't helped that Russiagate has permanently deranged the DC establishment. As far back as the initial claims have been walked, they still believe in their heart of hearts that Trump winning in 2016 was a Russian attack on our democracy. This is revenge for them.
So the interest of the military industrial complex cut off from corrupt Afghanistan contracts, and deranged Russiagaters bloodthirsty over imagined wronged converged.
Did it converge or was this a 4D chess move by the military industrial complex to stoke animosity for russia in the halls of power? During Trump's presidency talking heads were chomping at the bit to have a war with Russia itself, even before Trump gained power from the way Hillary was talking it gave the viewer the impression she's rather have a direct war with Russia instead of a proxy war and the only thing that spared us WW3 is her not winning.
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I think there’s an element of race and culture involved here, where it wasn’t for a country like Afghanistan. Republicans in America are online and they can see that Russia is (at least in appearances) a traditional white country that respects Christianity. Both Russia and Ukraine are white and culturally Christian. If you believe that the war is impossible to win for Ukraine, then the Republicans are left scratching their head at why we are killing white Christians for the geopolitical reach of America. And the geopolitical interests of America’s elite are increasingly at odds with the interests of many white Christians who can imagine themselves acculturating more readily to St Petersburg than San Francisco.
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Should be noted that at the very start of war (Mar 22), Republican supporters, when polled, were more likely to think that US is not providing enough aid to Ukraine than Democrats. One thing that seems to be constant in the graphs is that Dem supporters think that the amount of aid is about right, while Republicans have swung from thinking there's too little of aid to there being too much aid. This would indicate a sheer partisanship effect - though still, even in Jan 2023, slightly more Republicans would say that the amount of aid was about right or not enough than that it was too much (41-40).
It might be that Republicans were more willing to be pro-aid at the very start of the conflict when it still looked like Ukraine might collapse, still somewhat supportive when things were looking good for Ukrainian advance, but now more willing to consider cutting it back when it looks like it just goes into sustaining a frozen conflict, with very little movement on the battlelines. Democrats are just pro-administration and would probably continue to be so if the administration started pushing for a peace treaty.
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Russia has been something of a boogeyman for the Dems/lefties since 2015-2016, when there were claims of them assisting Trump in getting elected. And of course Trump did get elected and they suggested he was a Russian agent for his entire tenure.
So Russophobia was definitely left-coded in the years leading up to the invasion.
Of course when Romney suggested Russia was a possible threat to U.S. interests, back in 2012, Obama chuckled and suggested the Cold War was over., and there's the 'I'll have more flexibility after re-election' hot mic moment, so one could be forgiven for thinking Dems were okay with staying buddy-buddy with Russia.
The fact that almost nobody could have told you where Ukraine was on a map, nor even knew who Zelenskyy was prior to the invasion is the part that makes this all look extremely silly.
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For a variety of reasons, a large majority of Americans believed that even if Iraq was not directly responsible for 9/11, that they constituted a similar threat to U.S. security, and did not cooperate with lesser means of reducing that perception. That's entirely enough to explain the different reactions. It's just basic anti-interventionism: Russia does not appear to be a threat to U.S. security, so the U.S. has no stake in fighting. No casus, no belli. If they directly attack the U.S., reticence toward fighting them will flip as fast as isolationism disappeared after Pearl Harbor. I am wary that the U.S. administration may do everything they can to bait them into doing so, though.
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It never made sense for right wing voters to support neo conservatism.
Iraq ended up with a flood of migrants to the west. Afghanistan ended up with a heroin epidemic. Libya ended up with a massive migrant crisis and terrorism. Expanding the empire into Asia turned the American heartland into a rust belt with extreme supply chain vulnerabilities. Expanding the empire into Eastern Europe has caused millions of migrants to come into western Europe while it has depopulated Eastern Europe. Now we risk nuclear war over the council of foreign relations crowd wanting to expand their empire into Ukraine. The result is always the same, a massive failure, vast number of dead people and a migrant crisis. Vietnam ended with boat people, Afghanistan ended with planes exceeding their weight limit due to the migrants, and Ukraine has exported a mid-sized European country worth of migrants.
Also, I deeply disagree with the council of foreign relations mission. I don't want Taiwan to have the values of the NYC elite, I don't want western jobs shipped there, and I don't want an elite that I despise to control even more of the planet. I see blackrock, the council of foreign relations and the Washington elite as my enemy. I don't support the NSA, I don't support the financial system that blocks dissidents, I don't support elites that want the world ESG-rated.
Ukraine is the next nation building adventure disaster. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead and wounded and Ukraine is destroyed. Ukraine is ramming through LGBTQA+ stuff because it is now a colony of the US and it will be forced to adopt the values of its imperial master. Europe once again is flooded by migrants and we now have a country in absolute shambles that we are going to have to nation build. Ukraine's military is 1.5 times bigger than the French military, and building and equipping it with western equipment is going to cost tens of billions if not hundreds of billions every year for multiple decades to come. Defence contractors get their billions, you get lack of resources.
The elites are too focused on their global ambitions that they completely neglect their own country. They seem more interested in creating a global liberal hegemony with values that I despise than actually fixing their own country. Right wing voters have signed up to die for these attempts to spread liberalism across the world and got nothing in return. Thousands of republican voters were killed in these foreign fiascos. In return their neighborhood now has central American gangs who came when the US was going to defeat communism by letting wall street contol latin American economies and cause massive exoduses of migrants.
Why is the right going full neocon against China then? That will cost more blood and treasure than all America’s late-20th-century adventures put together, and for nothing.
Are they? I'm legitimately asking, I don't follow much common right wing people. I know they used to be, but I haven't seen it as much.
My father is more right wing (very pro-Trump) and seems more isolationist and pessimistic about taking on China, which he seems to have gotten from various blogs he reads.
I've personally seen more anti-China stuff from the left, though they've slowed down after Ukraine and Russia went to war. Of course selection effects by more often being around left/center people.
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I have never really understood why the right is so anti China. I understand bringing the jobs back but I can't why the right is so eager to defend LGBT on Taiwan.
I'm not sure why "the right" is - I'm not sure I even count as "rightist" - but here's at least a right-leaning explanation.
You don't like cancel culture? Then you don't want the PRC as hegemon. It started there and it's far more entrenched there than it is in the West. The Chinese version of financial institutions has cancellation explicitly built into it; if we cede hegemony to China then this is the mechanism the world will be working with.
You don't like censorship and political indoctrination? You extra super don't want the PRC as hegemon. The West has issues with these creeping in around the margins, but the setup in the PRC is far, far worse because it's pursued openly as policy - for all SJ's excesses, it does not literally round up all the conservatives and throw them in re-education camps. And in a world where the PRC is hegemon, those policies will be rammed down the West's throat - literally item 14 in the list of things the PRC wanted Australia to "fix" was that Australian media said "unfriendly" things about the PRC government, so we have proof positive that in a PRC-hegemon world, our freedom of speech will be demanded of us (Hollywood's also gotten into the habit of self-censoring due to the Chinese market).
You want to preserve your traditional way of life and not have your culture and fertility dismantled? Well, good thing you don't live in China, where there was a one-child policy for 35 years and where they're currently engaged in removing Uyghurs as an ethnicity by literally locking up all the men so the women can only breed with Han Chinese. Admittedly, they haven't shown interest in exporting this one, but holy shit.
If you're a libertarian, then as bad as the West has gotten of late with anti-terror laws and then the SJ movement getting its ten million tentacles around everything and squeezing, the PRC is so much worse. Putin's Russia you can make some argument out of it when comparing it to the non-US West (in much of which there are straight-up hate speech laws), but with the PRC it's a flat no.
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...do you really think that the entire US Taiwan policy can be summed up as "defending LGBT on Taiwan"?
It is about ensuring global liberal hegemony. A hegemony that comes with a globalized labour market, global homogeniety and Americanized values.
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I think Beinart was right in the Times that it’s a combination of residual Cold War “anti-Communism” (the GOP was fervently pro-Kuomintang rule until Nixon and many in the part were hostile to changing affiliation to Red China even then) and the fact that many 20th century Republicans were involved in the large American missionary movement in China (which Mao obviously put an end to), and that Chiang Kaishek was considered to be a civilized Christian, and residual Yellow Terror racial impulse, China is the first major non-white power since Japan to truly threaten the U.S., and even in WW2 the Japanese were the lesser partner to Germany once US war aims were clarified. (And even in the early 20th century before Pearl Harbor, US nativists were typically much more hostile to the Chinese than the Japanese migrants).
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I am not someone who likes excessive racialisation of politics, but I think some on the left may be correct in speculating that Russia being a conservative, white Christian country has a lot to do with it. Ukraine is very similar, but there is simply more respect to Russia since it resembles the USA in many ways (frontier culture, etc).
I also think a lot of right-wingers have this obsession against China for the same reason. It's an alien race, on top of actually being a real threat in a way that Russia is not. And to counter China, it'd be remarkably foolish if you were to push Russia and China together instead (which is what the US has done). I think Beinart wrote about these dynamics well a few weeks ago.
Ukraine is much more conservative and whiter than Russia. It’s being demographically replaced by conservative native Christian minorities and is, y’know, actually entirely in Europe. The difference is entirely about Russia being a major geopolitical adversary and republicans generally wanting to dial back on the empire.
The Ukranian people were, their government is doing everything it can to signal fealty to globohomo.
Wait, what happened to demographics are destiny?
Color revolutions have consequences.
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Also they may at least partially blame Russia for Trump getting elected which was of course a national nightmare for them.
So taking Russia down a peg could be seen in their mind as removing an actual threat to their power domestically.
At any rate, everyone loves having a boogeyman to fight, and having one that you don't actually have to risk your own life to fight is a nice bonus.
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This sounds like overthinking it. Progressives are the establishment now, so anyone opposed to them will gain some automatic sympathy from the domestic opposition. It's like when lefties low-key cheered for Ahmadinejad.
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My recollection of events was that Democrats were pretty loudly against the wars by 2008, but got very quiet on the subject during the Obama administration and didn't immediately pull out, in a few places even escalated with more drone strikes and such. People like Cindy Sheehan were propped up by the left during the latter Bush years and left to wither once Obama was in office. If anything, I take it as a statement on the ratio of partisans looking to hammer their outgroup to real honest-to-goodness peaceniks. The US seems to have more of the former.
As such, I'm inclined to think that the far right looking skeptically at weapons shipments is more a statement about who is in power than any consistent principle of kinetic international politics. You can even see that those on the far left are largely silenced on the matter: the DSA made a few anti-war statements early on that got some backlash, and seem to have gone mum since. IIRC even among Republican voters, a majority support aid to Ukraine.
If control was reversed I'd expect them to play the same games in the other direction: the folks in power are always trying to waste our precious resources and need additional oversight.
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Isolationist right goes way back and has been vying for power internally. Trump capitalized on the failures on the neocons and the hawkishness of Hillary Clinton to get the first electoral win for this faction in a long time, and with his substantial influence, convinced a lot of voters on the right that this was the way to go.
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The right isn't always the more interventionist side. During WWII, the left (with caveats) was more in favor of intervention on the side of the Allies than the right. The dynamic where the right always wants to go to war abroad and the left doesn't is mostly an artifact of the Cold War, where the enemy was the communist USSR, which obviously the right had specific reason to oppose. Isolationism can easily be justified on right-wing terms, i.e, not our problem, let's keep our own house in order.
Putin is also, ostensibly at least, the leader of a white, Christian, conservative country. This doesn't make most American right-wingers like him (most definitely don't), but a small fraction does. A couple years ago memes about based manly Putin vs weak sissy Obama were not entirely uncommon from conservative facebook boomer types.
It's worth noting that the pro-establishment left was just as committed to the Cold War as the right. Truman, JFK and LBJ all escalated the Cold War. The President who tried hardest to de-escalate it was Nixon. The thing that was different about the Cold War is that the anti-establishment right (the Birchers and McCarthyites) were in favour of it, unlike almost every other "foreign entanglement" (including WW2, the MidEast forever wars, and Ukraine).
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