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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1759 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 4, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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What is the general consensus about the war in Ukraine? I had a sense things were going very badly until I read Anders' post here:

https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/world-war-2-could-learn-something

The argument is that the situation was always awful, but if you compare what happened in Ukraine to the Nazi invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland, things went far better because of the semi-illegibility of everybody's strategy against Russia:

"For Ukraine it is of course a catastrophe to be invaded by Russia and an even worse catastrophe to capitulate after a long and ruinous defense. Just as it was an unmitigated disaster for Poland to be invaded and occupied by Germany in 1939.

But for the world the only thing that matters is that the aggressor loses more from military action than they gain. This is certainly true for the Ukraine War. The war might have been a disaster for Ukraine, but it is also a disaster for Russia. Even if the Russians eke out a win in the end they will be weaker at the war's end than at its start. Not only does this limit Russia's abilities to invade other countries, it also serves as a signal to other potential aggressors to think twice before they act.

This is undoubtedly a win for the international community."

... Anatoly Karlin tweeted "The war is substantially enabled by couch observers who fantasize about 10:1 ratios and believe the last pigger/orc is about to croak any any day now."

https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1742557887472316916#m what do you think about this? Looks like kill ratio is not far from 1:1

That Substack article’s conclusions are only valid if you assume Ukraine is going to basically get out of this with their country intact, and if you take the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense casualty statistics at face value. The causality statistics that haven’t moved or updated since June 2022. There’s a good chance the Ukrainian army is being bled white and will soon face a 1918 German style collapse that will allow Russia to take all the territory east of Dnieper river, and possibly more. What would happen if that occurs, I don’t know. It’s possible that Russia has also taken very heavy casualties and that the war will have sufficiently deterred them from taking further aggressive action against Poland or the Baltic states, but that’s not guaranteed. If Russia’s casualties are much lower than advertised we are probably in for a rough ride.

Things are still going very badly. What's "a win for the international community"? If the war ends with Russia exhausted and Ukraine [ruined](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin_(Ukrainian_history)), what will be the lesson other countries will draw from it? "Unless a smaller country is in a literal defensive pact with the hegemon, they will treat it as a disposable bear trap. This will deter rational aggressors, but won't deter batshit insane ones." More specifically, if you're a smaller country, it's better to surrender if the aggressor is acting batshit insane: the end result will be the same for you. If you're a large aggressive country, it's better to behave irrationally to convince everyone that you are ready and willing to march into the trap, sacrifice your economy, but win despite the heavy costs.

It's in a bit of a lull in terms of battlefield developments. In the first half of 2024 for Ukraine we are looking into how the aid situation develops with two 50 billion dollar aid packages being held up in both Europe and America respectively, and the effect of the arrival and deployment of F16 aircraft. Right now we are in a holding pattern with not much going on, but situationally Russia is at the advantage both in terms of resources and battlefield capacity for the time being.

Even if the Russians eke out a win in the end they will be weaker at the war's end than at its start.

There are a lot of bald statements in this article that he never really goes on to support; this one is also kind of contradicted by his discussion of Poland... in which Germany loses quite a number of troops (making them weaker, duh) but comes out with valuable territory and a more experienced army/MIC.

I'm not seeing the difference here, long-term -- other than that (unlike Hitler) Putin shows no actual sign of having plans to dominate Europe -- so that's a win for the international community I guess, but not one for which the West can take much credit.

Do you have an account at substack? I'd be interested to see how the author of that article would respond to what you're saying here.

I do, but I prefer to separate it from this one -- feel free to put the point to him, but my prediction is that any response one might receive will be a disappointment in terms of intellectual engagement.

The whole article boils down to cope, and (non-Ukrainian) people who care enough about Ukraine to be engaging in cope are highly unlikely to have thought matters through in any coherent way.

Wars tend to be quite bad from the perspective of the people who are actually taking part in them.

I don't really consider this to be a win for the international community either. What we've really done is expose ourselves to a lot of economic damage in service of having more dead Russians, which is not really something I care about.

Do you consider it worth the lesson to Putin and other belligerent world leaders that war is something you generally shouldn't start, because it leaves you weaker - in terms of your reputation among your own people, in terms of your economy, in terms of your population, relative to the value of the territories you gain - than you would have been had you just stayed home?

(I admit that I'm not just asking a rhetorical question, here. The US spent $7.7x10^10 on teaching a lesson to a handful of misbehaving despots that any grade school teacher will tell the same number of misbehaving kids for $4x10^5)

I guess it depends on how much other people will go "lol, Russians were totally incompetent unlike our glorious empire".

Though maybe there will be some learning from that? But I would not describe as worth having, at most it is better then Russia clearly wining and lesson being "you can invade country in Europe and nothing bad will happen for you".

If the Ukraine war is in fact, The Last War, I will concede the point. But more likely, people will simply reach the conclusion that the Russians are just not very competent. Just as the Iraq War, which left the US weaker for nebulous gain, did not teach the world that war was never acceptable.

*interestingly, I've read that the Chinese, great students of the Soviet collapse, were strongly influenced by the failure of the Soviets in Afghanistan. Which is why they're so peaceful today.

Maybe I'm not understanding you, but this feels like two contradictory ideas. I grant that onlookers may just see Russia as inept, but if the Chinese were influenced by the failure of the Soviets in Afghanistan, wouldn't various aggressive powers also tend to be influenced by the failure of Russia today?

I was being sarcastic about China being peaceful. They are currently plotting to invade Taiwan and have been for many years.

What is the counterfactual we are comparing to, though? The case is easier to make that 2024 Russia lost something compared to 2021 Russia (and even more so compared to 2013 Russia), though by no means clear cut; but the more interesting case is comparing 2024 Russia to a counterfactual 2024 Russia that stood by and did nothing, or even more interestingly the 2030 continuations of either scenario. If states only optimised their own absolute, or even relative to other states, power, we would observe a lot fewer wars in general.

I didn't write the article, so I'm only answering for myself, here. But the counterfactuals are:

  1. A history in which Ukraine's allies, particularly the US but also European countries, did basically nothing to help Ukraine, or even negotiated peace with Russia on favorable terms right as the war was starting.

  2. A history in which Ukraine's allies, particularly the US but also European countries, immediately declared war on Russia as the war was starting in Ukraine.

Under 1, if Russia could have eaten Ukraine with little effort, that would have given their war machine practice, it would have boosted rather than ground down Russian morale, and it would have given them the strategic and material advantages of their new territory without much in the way of costs. It would have basically taught Russia and everybody else that war works, thus encouraging more war in the future.

Under 2, if Russia had been opposed at the outset, Putin would have been virtually forced to retaliate with nuclear weapons, given the speech he made promising consequences like those the world had never seen. And (though this may seem like a trivial by-the-way) it would have given other belligerent powers across the world the green light to declare wars of their own if they had been thinking about it.

These counterfactuals seem worse, and far worse, than the actual history we're living in.

Note that Russia blustered before about consequences so in case (2) use of nuclear weapons is not guaranteed. Though "declare war on Russia" does not look like a good strategy to US and EU in this case.

Note that another option, with much wider and large scale support also was possible (and still is). Delivering long range missiles, starting to train Ukrainian pilots immediately after Ukraine turned out to not collapse. Shot down Russian missiles travelling through NATO airspace or in its direction.

That's not applying the counterfactual at the decision point that I thought we were looking at - surely to assess how bad or good the decision to go to war was for Russia, and by extension what this means for future nations deciding whether or not to go to war somewhere, we should be looking at counterfactuals where Russia decided to not go to war. If the verdict is that Russia was on track to be completely screwed and came out slightly less screwed by attacking Ukraine, then the signal is in favour of invasions, despite reality looking like Russia is getting screwed.

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