Dean
17hr ago
Kind of a similar category to Biden's campaign secretly hoping for Trump to say the n-word or something.
Dean
17hr ago
Michelle's comments were funny at the time, given that the contemporary Democratic/media strategy was to regularly accuse or insinuate opposition to the Obama administration was based on racism, even as the Obama administration employed political machine politics at the national level. It was very consistent with assuming a posture of moral superiority while simultaneously going low.
Dean
6d ago
I was under the impression you can respond to people blocking you, just that they don't see it.
No, Mearsheimer proposed competition with China and rapprochement with Russia and Iran, or at least not going out of our way to antagonize them.
Supporting nuclear proliferation to countries that a party is actively trying to prevent from having nuclear weapons and has active territorial disputes with is absolutely going out of your way to antagonize them.
Have you actually read Mearsheimer's books or journal articles? If so, you clearly haven't understood them. At no point does he say this. He has a structural model of international relations where the great powers act according to various motivations. This is pretty basic undergraduate-level stuff.
Mearsheimer's books and journal articles are consistently framed in hyperagent and hypoagent paradigm. This is a meta-crticism, and it is a significant part of why much of his stuff is merely undergraduate-level, as the models don't actually reflect how coalitions of allies operate.
I'm especially staggered that you spend a paragraph lambasting me for motte and bailey and then admit the Russians had the 'superior air position' through the whole war. You just invented a synonym for air superiority that perfectly undermines both your motte-and-bailey argument and your 'Russia didn't have air superiority' point. Wake up! You're defending positions so silly even the Atlantic Council has written them off.
A laugh is competing with a yawn. The motte and bailey you were accused of was precisely because of the overreach of degree, and you yourself conceded the doctrinal definition did not apply, which itself undermined the earlier appeal to authority of the Atlantic Council for using the same term.
While I am glad to see you conceding that air superiority (and thus also less dominating degrees of aerial advantage, or whatever term you prefer to for that degree) alone is not decisive, this was rather the point you were being led to in the original contestation of your original framing, which also rested on other unreasonable points you long since abandoned (as befits the retreat to the motte).
Yes, the Europeans, with their thousands of planes, lack the land force
No, they don't. Between Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and Turkey... they can muster a larger army than Ukraine with active troops alone, let alone reservists (or disabled draftees). They are much stronger than Ukraine. This isn't a debate, you're just wrong. Check wikipedia if you like, it's pretty obvious how much larger the European NATO armies are than Ukraine's.
Ah, yes, wikipedia. That infallible source of all the context we need to know on military readiness. Why if we go by wikipedia, the Germans have 270 Leopard 2 tanks of various sorts!
And if we look back to 2018, the Germans had 9 operational Leopard 2s available for a NATO task force expected to have 44. Which they also couldn't support in various other fills either- 3 of 14 Marauder infantry fighting vehicles, aircraft able to fly only 1/3rd of the year, and generally unable to compose a ready force of 5000 people despite a wiki-size of over 180,000 active personnel... and it wasn't even the only country sending to it. Wiki doesn't list the number of machine guns the German army has, but they certainly showed up to a NATO exercise in 2015 with broomsticks painted black due to a lack of working ones available.
This is sad- and mockable- but hardly unique. The tank donation effort in 2023 showed that countries that nominally had hundreds of tanks, like Spain, only had a few dozen in readiness or near-readiness states they could spend, with repairing 20 taking a year. When the propaganda of 'NATO is running out of key weapon systems!' is raised, the kernel of truth being exagerated is that some systems being donated- such as tanks- are running out because most can't run at all. They weren't meaningfully maintained for decades, to a degree that some countries had less than 10% in a condition to hand over to fight.
While I am pleased that you are including Turkey as European for the sake of the argument- it's one of the only reasons anyone does, and I'll admit I hadn't been when I was referred to the Europeans- there is a reason they and the third most tank-heavy force in NATO are aimed at eachother, and the readiness counter-point remains: the on-paper strength of the Europezns is not their real power level,. And this is without the many other obstacles to a coherent land force, ranging from expeditionary projection to political willingness to pursue. Recapitalizing, repairing, and restoring a capable European ground force will be long and expensive without being forced to fight while doing it.
By contrast, and returning to the basis of the earlier argument, the Ukrainians are already in the field, have already proven their ability to do significant damage ot the Russians if armed, and arming them avoids the European weaknesses while letting them plan (and bolster) their strengths.
Sounds pretty worn out to me. But I'm sure you can conjure up some elaborate meaning where worn-out means something totally different. And of course you can create some fantasy world where the face-tanked, unmodern (but not worn out!) Soviet stocks are capable of struggling with Ukraine but would beat Europe's far larger and better militaries.
No need. In the non-fantasy world, the Europeans have been neglecting their ground forces for decades to the degree that their actually available forces are not far larger, or far better.
Dean
7d ago
It would be odd if you posted such a link in response to a post that didn't make any arguments depending on dollar strength, but it might make a bit more sense in response to the OP.
Dean
7d ago
It also assumes that alien space bats don't replace north america, or that the Galactic Empire from long long ago and a galaxy far far away doesn't have a multi-generation death star show up and shoot down, and a lot of other ruinous things, yes.
I'll take my bets on this, for similar reasons that I don't bet that China will devolve into civil war in the next few decades, and some additional american contexts as well. This is not the first political realignment process the US has gone through, and it's not even the most turbulent period of political violence in the current leadership generation's experience, and while I am happy to note that This Time Is Different (because social media exists), I've never been convinced by arguments of civil war or equivalent options.
It would also be odd, since not only was the strength of currency not particularly relevant to the argument, but the strength of a currency and the strength of an economy are two separate items, and have been for many a century.
The weaponization of the dollar has been one of the worse policy decisions in the history of our country.
There's a joke to be made here about which historically terrible policy will be bumped out of the top 5/10/15/25, but there's too many to make it work well.
I see people mock dedollarization. That the process of getting off the USD will be so painful for these countries that they'll never do it. And I can't completely discount that. But it does stink of hubris, and countries may judge (correctly) that the pain of getting off the dollar is less than the pain of staying on it.
Part of the issue that leads to the mockery is framing it as 'getting off the dollar' in the first place. It treats the dollar as a mechanical instrument issue which will be resolved if your substitute the medium with something else, as opposed to a financial system issue which doesn't actually need a dollar currency to be exchanged to still work.
Dean
7d ago
I know you won't respond, but several of your justifications are humorous.
The dollar is a bad investment. How would you feel about holding a currency that is controlled by the government of a foreign country? You'd feel pretty bad if that country is $35 trillion in debt and will need to print trillions more every year to have any hope of even making the interest payments.
China is dumping U.S. treasuries and buying gold instead. It just makes financial sense.
U.S. treasuries are suffering their worst bear market possibly ever. Let's say you bought TLT (a long-term treasury ETF) at its peak in 2020. Today, you'd be down by more than 50% in real terms. What is supposed to be a "safe" investment becomes very unsafe in the presence of inflation.
The long-term picture isn't much better. Since the end of the gold standard in 1971, gold has outperformed U.S. treasuries. Simply buying and holding a lump of rock is better than holding the debt of the U.S. government. And the government was actually in good financial health for most of those years, unlike now.
Your long-term picture argument is what undermines the broader point. If gold has outperformed US treasures for nearly 50 years, and yet US treasuries have been a preferrable investment for nearly 50 years, that in and of itself is an indication that there are factors other than performance vis-a-vis gold (or other rocks) that are driving decisions of what makes something a good or bad investment. Some of these aren't mysteries- there are reasons that no one is trying to go back to a gold standard currency, let alone China.
Your next argument also undermines the specific supporting argument of China. China isn't dumping U.S. treasuries in favor of gold because gold is a better performer- again, your 1971 gold performance argument undermining the point- but because China is preparing itself financially for a conflict with the United States to mitigate sanctions risk, despite the demonstrated preference for the sanctions risk options instead of gold when the future sanctions risk was lower.
Ultimately, the value of an investment isn't in its own return, which your argument here focuses on, but in relation to the context and the alternatives. Even an investment that loses money can still be the preferable investment if the others would lose more. This is why the 35 trillion number of US debt is a big scary number used in isolation, but less so in relation to GDP (the nominal ability to pay), and even less so in like-to-like comparisons of total debt-to-GDP ratio comparisons with other prospective poles. It's not that it's a good metric- it's that while the US is in a league of its own in the ability to have debt, it's not in a league of it's own in managing debt, especially with peer economic poles. (The PRC debt-to-GDP ratio beyond government debt, for example- the whole property market financial crisis.)
The U.S. is not a trustworthy partner. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia held about $600 billion in currency and gold reserves. About half of those reserves, $300 billion, were held in the West. After the invasion, those reserves were frozen. Now, they are now likely to be given to Ukraine.
Because of this, there is no reason for a country like China (or any other country for that matter) to store their wealth in the West, or to hold U.S. dollar-denominated assets. It's all conditional on U.S. allegiance.
The counter-points to this is that the Americans and Europeans have been sanctioning state and non-state actors for decades now, and seizing assets of parties who declare themselves in general conflict for centuries. Anyone surprised by the Ukraine War seizures was not paying attention, either to contemporary geopolitical finances in conflict or to historical contexts.
There is nothing new about it, and just as the threat of seizure in the west for reasons of crossing Western government red lines never went away, the reasons why countries would keep wealth in the west vis-a-vis somewhere else remain the same as they did a year ago- which is to say, it's a better system to store in at scale, unless you foresee yourself coming into direct conflict with the Western countries.
Big surprise, don't park your funds with people you may go to war with, or with whom you are trying to economically blackmail with energy cutoffs. The question isn't whether the US or West would do this- they have and did- it's who you think won't do this on equivalent or even less grounds.
For most countries, trade with China is more valuable than trade with the U.S. China now dominates most of the world's industries, and the trend continues to point in that direction. Third world countries often have much stronger trade ties with China than they do the U.S. They export natural resources and import Chinese goods. Increasingly, they can do without U.S. goods and services. Do what we say or otherwise you can't have our, um, Microsoft Excel licenses...
As this process strengthens, China will be able to lean on these countries to do business in Yuan, or perhaps in some resource-demoninated currency.
Both of these China proposals ignore the limits of China's abilities.
For a resource-denominated currency, the core issue here is that if you have a resource-denominated currency, you need to be able to provide it in scale at demand, which is precisely what cracked the gold standard repeatedly and broke it in favor of fiat currencies. The global financial system is too large in scale for any reasonable value-resource to be actually stockpiled and providable on demand in case of bank runs, and China in particular is a demonstration of that if you look at the recent property crisis, and then consider what would have happened if the Chinese government was legally obligated to provide X-ounces of Whateveronium.
What they'd do- or rather, what they wouldn't do- goes into the other main challenge in Chinese currency, which is the lack of liquidity due to the capital controls. China tries to lean on other countries to do business in Yuan, it makes loans more favorable on the condition that their in Yuan, but the issue with Yuan is that China runs a marcantile trade policy and makes it very hard to move capital wealth outside of the country at scale vis-a-vis using it in China to buy something for export or to reinvest. That's fine and dandy for bilateral trade, but that's antithetical to a reserve currency, which serves as a medium for countries doing trade NOT with the reserve currency country, but to move it in and out and outside of it.
Okay, so the dollar is done. What comes next? Probably nothing major. I don't think that the Yuan will become the reserve currency, or that we'll move back to the gold standard (although global reserves will be held increasingly in gold). But the U.S. dollar will no longer be the uncontested reserve currency. The world will once again be multipolar, with the U.S. just one of multiple competing forces, and not necessarily the strongest one.
A transition to a more multipolar geopolitical order is precisely what will continue to bolster the power of the American Dollar's role in the global ecosystem as the main reserve currency, while crushing the viability of a gold standard reserve currency.
Trading currencies are at the most risk if they are engaged in conflict zones, as the countries backing them have their economic environments shaped by the risk perceptions not only of the country, but what it takes for the supply chains to reach the country. The more potential conflict zones there are to intercept those links, the less stable the supply chains, and the more the capital needs somewhere relatively stable to wait.
A more multipolar world order is not a more peaceful one, and the more the Eurasian rim is broken apart by pole-on-pole conflicts, like we saw with the Suez Canal route being decimated by the broader Israeli-Iran conflict, the more the capital looks for somewhere relatively more stable. There's only one integrated continental economy with minimal external resource dependencies in the world, and that's in the north-western hemisphere.
At the same time, however, the more conflict-engaged currency blocks will run into the costs of financing and funding more conflicts, which goes to the same issue that gold-backed countries had with the much smaller economies of a century ago. WW1 costs of war and related debts snapped the gold-standard currencies, and the US dropped a gold standard because of the costs that came with having to honor that conversion while being a reserve currency.
You can be a reserve currency, or a gold-standard currency, but you can't be both unless you can actually provide the gold on demand. The US at the height of its financial supremacy over the non-Soviet block couldn't afford that for long. A financial pole of the multipolar order who tries will quickly be drained until it's no longer a meaningful pole, or it drops the option.
Dean
9d ago
For reference, you can imbed links, including youtube, via [] () formatting.
[type the thing you want here]( put your url in here)
Have no space between the ]( , and it should work.
Dean
9d ago
The magic and charm of the pro-Russia blogosphere really died after the Wagner uprising. The Russians were already cracking down on the wrong forms of pro-Russian support, but it really cemented afterwards, even though it was the divergences between pro-MoD and pro-Wagern ultranationalists that provided the occasional illuminating insight. Then, both sides had an incentive to point out errors / flaws of the other's positions, which translated into some more sober assessments and concessions to reality. Now they're not much more than retreads of official talking points, lacking both the dynamism and the willingness to go off script.
No, Russia did not aim to conquer all of Ukraine with the thunder run to Kiev, fielding maybe 200-300,000 men in all theatres. They hoped the Ukrainian state would disintegrate and that they could install a new government.
Yes. This is the retreat to the semantic bailey that I noted before.
That the Russians thought they only needed 200-300,000 men in all theaters to overthrow the Ukrainian government, rearrange borders, and establish a compliant state that would implement the Russian kill-lists on pro-western influencer persons was incompetent, but that is what they thought they needed for what they tried to do. That the Russians were incompetent does not negate the intent, which is the Mearsheimer argument on basis of intent as indicated by size failed, and why his maintenance of the position has evolved into the semantic retreat that simultaneously tries to ignore intent and then quibble on the back end what conquest entails if it does succeed.
That's an interesting choice of words. The US has, in marked contrast to Mearsheimer's proposals, created a coalition of Russia, China and Iran!
This goes back to the point that it's not a contrast, but simply a non-falsifiable assertion that can politely ignore that Mearsheimer's proposals also created a basis for a coalition of Russia, China, and Iran, and the factors within the leadership of Russia, China, and Iran that would exist regardless (and because) of Mearsheimer's proposals.
It's also another example of Mearsheimer's tendency to slide into hyperagent / hypoagent faming bias, which is another of Mearsheimer's common failings in international affairs. The US creates conditions, other actors have conditions imposed by the US, their own leader's actions are a consequence of American agency, and so on.
Very sophmoric, and Mearsheimer's inexperience in international affairs and unfamiliarity with how other actors make decisions shows in this field.
Wilhelm was a strategic genius compared to what passes for American leadership.
This is another one of those claims where it's evident you aren't really party to the cultural touchpoint for the reference, and thus miss the metaphor.
I'll skip forward a bit because basically everything between is old hat at this point that's been hashed a dozen hundred times at this point, just to point to a thing I think makes the general point better for the audience.
If you use some niche definition of air superiority like 'controlling the airspace directly above the grey zone so much that your aircraft can fly at all altitudes unmolested by AA' then sure, I guess the Russians don't have air superiority. Though that definition sounds rather more like air dominance. In practical terms if you're being bombed by enemy aircraft much more than your aircraft are bombing the enemy, then you don't have air superiority. In practical terms, why would the Russians fly any closer than needed to an enemy with plentiful SAMs, Manpads and so on? Do they need to be firing their cannons before they have air superiority? The practical definition is the superior definition because it actually matters and is relevant to the substance on the ground. The Russians can use air power to bomb/ATGM the Ukrainians, not with impunity but with considerable effect. That's why normal people and even such revered institutions as the Atlantic Council agreed that Russia had air superiority.
What is the point of these perverse language games?
The point of perverse languages games is as you just demonstrated: to claim the connotations of a state of affairs described by a descriptive doctrinal ('niche') definition, when the conditions to meet that state aren't being met, by substituting a watered down ('practical') definition that can be retreated to if challenged but otherwise can be used to claim the authority / argumentative advantage of the stronger descriptive definition.
In other words, a banal motte-and-bailey argument.
The motte is that a Ukrainian offensive was obviously a non-starter idea because the Russians were [controlling the airspace directly above the grey zone so much that their aircraft can fly at all altitudes unmolested by AA], the bailey is that Russians could apply enough air power from a distance and didn't need to be closer to have effects, and the discrepancy is that the conditions implied by being able to fly over the enemy unmolested are not the same conditions if you refuse to fly over the enemy because they still have plentiful SAMs, MANPADs, and so on.
This discrepancy matters, because the difference between those two states is what determines the viability of limited offensives. After all, it's not like Russia suddenly or just recently in 2023 gained the superior air position, regardless of whether you call it air superiority or air dominance- there had been two separate major Ukrainian successes that occurred despite the same general match of airpower.
I'm lost for words. Europe, which contains two nuclear powers, is weaker than Ukraine with European support? Europe, with thousands of aircraft, is weaker than Ukraine which might get a few F-16s to supplement a handful of remaining Soviet aircraft?
Your loss of words is forgivable, given your evident lack of familiarity with the European capabilities, or the degree of European military support to Ukraine.
Yes, the Europeans, with their thousands of planes, lack the land force to match what Ukraine has fielded in a conflict which has demonstrated there is no substitute for land force volume. Much like Russia, the investment in their aircraft and nuclear weapons do not, in fact, automatically translate to land force capability, and unlike the Ukrainians the Europeans have not been investing for the better part of the last decade into how to generate a large standing ground army. Doing so now would be long, difficult, politically disruptive, economically expensive in the midst of major military recapitalization, and quite likely to be unfeasible in terms of scope and effectiveness in the near term.
As such, the Europeans could try to prioritize all resources into generating a large, cohesive, land force by the time the Russians finish the Ukraine War, or they could funnel resources to empower the already large, cohesive land force so the Russians can't finish the Ukraine War.
It doesn't matter whether E > U or U >E, but rather if E < R, and U < R, but E + U > R.
Didn't you just say the Russians were a worn-out husk?
I think we could both CTRL-F the previous arguments to find out if I did, or if you just attempted a perverse language game for a strawman that reverses a position in the previous post.
Mongolian tactics is the argument that a withdrawal is not a defeat, but a lure to pull an enemy into a position for a much greater counterattack than can envelop them, i.e. getting the fortifiers to leave their fortifications and come into the fields where the mongol cavalry destroy them.
In Kherson, it was one of the cope arguments that the Russians weren't in an untenable position, but that the Ukrainians were over-extending their offensive and the Russian counterattack would evicerate them.
(The Russians claimed to have stopped the Kherson offensive multiple times in the months leading up to its completion. It wasn't hard to find plenty of arguments that the Ukrainians were making a obvious and debilitating error by pursuing the offensive.)
The US already had nuclear weapons based in Germany and Japan in the Cold War and still has them based in Turkey. Nuclearization isn't a major change like NATO expansion eastwards towards Georgia and Ukraine, it only alters deterrence logic for those countries themselves.
Okay, I believe the Australian claim off this alone, definitely not a European-attuned perspective.
Mearsheimer did not say that a Russo-Ukrainian war wouldn't start, he described the conditions under which it would start if US/NATO foreign policy wasn't changed. He described the limitations of Russian power and the difficulties of occupying a whole country.
You can try to argue that Mearsheimer didn't deny a different war would start, but the war Mearsheimer argued against on grounds of Russian limitations- that Russia wouldn't try to conquer all of Ukraine- is precisely the kind of war Russia launched. It failed, Russia was incompetent, but it is an illustration of Mearsheimer not actually recognizing or acknowledging Russian divergences from his predictions, and the later retreat to semantics of what degree of invasion is / is not conquest of all of Ukraine.
Basic motte and bailey.
He even foresaw the war back in 1992, advocating that Ukraine should acquire nuclear weapons since the West was hardly likely to extend nuclear deterrence to Ukraine. He raises Crimea, mixed populations and nationalism on either side, control of the Black Sea Fleet, the fact that the Russians are always going to be stronger conventionally, historical antipathy... all factors we're dealing with decades later! He thought the Ukrainians would be less willing to bow to US pressure than they were, yet surely his predictive value is high.
Not really, and this goes back to the point of Mearsheimer's limitations outside of his field, in this part how the Europeans view nuclear proliferation.
Setting aside the contextual inaccuracy- Ukraine wasn't in a position to acquire nuclear weapons in 1992, it was in a position to negotiate away the nuclear weapons it had already inherited by 1996, this is ignoring what Russia wanted in this context, and why, and how such a policy pursued by Mearsheimer could be reflected in the current Putin-imperialist zeitgeist, as well as what doing such a policy would have naturally lead to in terms of American involvement with Ukraine.
Mearsheimer was not someone who was advocating foreign policy prescriptions that actually recognized and respected Russian security concerns for their own sake. Mearsheimer is someone who is selective in which security concerns he recognizes as valid, and treats them as transactional devices while downplaying or ignoring the relevance of security concerns he doesn't recognize the validity of. Nuclear proliferation is one of these blind spots.
Put another way, Mearsheimer is someone who believes in great powers dividing spheres of influence and horse-trading power blocks, without realizing he's less an Bismark and more of a Wilhelm at coalition building.
Meanwhile, what have all the talented NATO Ukraine hands and generals gotten us?
A Ukraine that continues to exist more than two years after nearly all observers thought the state would collapse in two weeks, a Russia that having destroyed its modernized force is in the process of face-tanking its reactivated Soviet stocks while humiliating its pre-war martial reputation, a NATO with a significantly stronger Baltic position and significantly greater available manpower and material capacity, European defense recapitalization as a policy consensus, and the strongest constituent member support for NATO in the last quarter century, and for the EU since before the 2009 Financial Crisis. This is without other things like the changes to the international arms market via displacing Russia, the value of discrediting territorial irridentalist wars of aggression, the confluence of the US and Europeans against China as a second-order effect of China's alignment with Russia, and so on.
I'm surprised you walked into that cluster.
Also, misuse of 'us', since you're not in NATO not part of the NATO constituency interests.
Hodges seemed to think the Ukrainian counteroffensive was a great idea and would succeed,
Come now, as a native English speaker, you know the difference between could and would.
Your source is a newsweek article where Hodges doesn't say he believes the Ukrainian counteroffensive was a great idea and would succeed. It says Hodges says a breakthrough could happen, after Hodges says he ('we' in a context including himself) didn't know the accurate situation to make a conclusion.
despite being a telegraphed attack into a fortified and well-prepared enemy who has air superiority. Petraeus was in the same camp! What were they thinking?
Probably, among other things, that the Russians didn't have air superiority, which their tactics over the last years have validated given their reliance to behind-the-lines glide bombing, and that there's no such thing in major wars as a non-telegraphed offensive thanks to the satellite imagery easily available of buildup. These words do not mean what you appear to think they mean.
Otherwise, the question doesn't really make sense unless you didn't mean it. The answer is directly in the article: an offensive gain southward that went far enough could expand direct fires coverage to the E-W routes of the Crimean land bridge, complicating the Russian position in Crimea substantially.
By your ! and ? and emotional tone, I suspect you feel this was obviously a bad idea. It's less clear what you think was actually the cost incurred, the chances of success, or what you'd concede were the benefits possible.
And then there's the whole 'Putin's Russia is so weak that we can head them off by giving Ukraine more arms but so strong that he'll invade NATO if he wins' camp that is so well-represented in think tanks and media output, especially ISW. Which is it?
E+U > R > E
Both. There's no contradiction unless you reject the Europeans a right to their own perspective of their relative power versus Russia.
Russia can have more military power than Europe, but not more than Ukraine with European support. If Russia were to compel / achieve a victory over Ukraine, then depending on the form it could take those forces locked down in Ukraine and move them to other potential areas. If a Russian victory meant that the Russians could move through Ukraine to the Balkans, a Russian intervention wouldn't even trigger NATO depending on the country.
I maintain that Mearsheimer has been far more useful on the course of this war than the credentialed experts who seem to be hyping Ukraine.
Okay, but it's a silly maintenance. The guy's a goober you'd be lambasting had he had his way based on your past history of other American impositions, which he is by no means opposed to, which makes the utility far more of a stopped clock dynamic than I think you recognize.
Mearsheimer is not a person who's a fan of restrained American conduct for its own sake. In another era, he'd be an overt American imperialist. Much of the media around him in the last years is basic university tenure politics of old professors protecting their original thesis that are the basis of their reputation.
Australian, we do show up for even the silliest US wars and will presumably be called in against China.
Depends on if you think that's a silly one. Mearsheimer doesn't, except in so much that his views of the Russian sphere of interest was transactional to get them on board for a land war in Asia.
It is a reach bordering on consensus building for you to use 'us' or 'we' to make common position with Americans or Europeans on things the Australians aren't immediate party to and which you do not share common views of, such as NATO, so I will be noting that more often going forward.
What is the point of AUKUS if not to tie our fates together?
The post-Brexit British capitalizing on Australian disgruntlement with the French military arms deal tendencies which were weakening Australia's ability to contribute/support a US-based anti-China coalition without French support despite increasing divergences in the French and Australian government perspectives on China, after the French spent several years having a shadow-feud with the British over the execution of Brexit.
Also, long-term technology transfer.
Dean
9d ago
As of right now, even RFERL does not seem to go beyond the claim that people in already-captured territories are incentivised to enlist voluntarily. An implicit claim that they are pretending and the mask will come off once/if we let them win is basically unfalsifiable.
I don't agree with the Zeihan-style argument of mass-conscripting the Ukrainians, but I will note the RFERL isn't making the more relevant point of volunteers in the occupied Donbas.
Namely, that conscription was already used significantly in the separatist statelets, to a degree that various pre-war analysis indicated they were functionally bled white in having already conscripted the most relevant males, and that was in a far more favorable environment than trying to mass-conscript the more recently occupied territories. 2022 was a major shock to the Russians on the Ukrainian mentality, and so while there's been relatively low-scale conscription / coerced labor (including of POWs), the bigger deterent is honestly political reliability / trust. If someone volunteers, they probably won't frag the officers, but conscription is risky in a different way. Even at their 'best', the separatist forces in 2022 summer offensive were notably less enthused / proactive when tasked to fronts outside of their immediate home turf. Political reliability of the forces is a significant thing on the Russian side in Ukraine.
The idea that Russia will attack Poland next seems like another just-so story, which just happens to be very convenient for the current American agenda ("Why should you pour money and participate in sanctions to defend this unrelated country? Because if you let Russia win, they will come for you next!"). Do you, or does Zeihan, have a persuasive argument as to why Russia would do that?
Persuasive is a load-bearing word here- basically a caveat that retreats to the motte of subjectivity, and most people wouldn't and didn't find the argument that Russia would invade Ukraine three years ago persuasive- but there is an argument for Russia continuing forward, which is that if it is in an ability to do so in the next two years, that is likely it's best chance to do anything in Europe vis-a-vis the next 20, and that if it wants to seriously overturn the European security architecture vis-a-vis NATO it's best chance is now.
The basic short version of why in ideological terms is that Russia's invasion in Ukraine wasn't cast in terms unique to Ukraine, but in framings / justifications that applied to much of the former Soviet Pact as well. In so much that the Russian position can be trusted to signal intent (the 'why'), the reasons Russia used for Ukraine are as valid for places like Estonia or Lithuania too. Oppressed russian minority narrative, former territories of the Russian empire improperly released by the Soviets, culturally divergent Russians, and so on. Russia was demanding a retraction of all post-Cold War NATO forces from eastern european members who joined after the Soviet Union, not just demands about Ukraine.
The short version in opportunity terms is that if Russia is in a position to make any move against NATO countries in the next two years, it's (a) because it somehow managed to beat Ukraine into some form of submission (or else the war would still go on), and (b) did so because it was able to do so before the European military-industrial recapitalization outproduced Russia on an economic level. Russia won't be able to economically compete with the European recapitalization in the longer term due to economies of scale, but in this hypothetical it will still have on hand the military mobilization that beat the immature European/NATO support in the immediate term, meaning there is a window of opportunity in which Russia can act with advantage. As Russia's mobilized 'victorious' army is dependent on cold-war reactivated systems, with extremely limited capabilities vis-a-vis potential European outputs, this period of advantage is limited, and thus a use-or-lose prospect.
The short version in the locational terms are the Baltics or the Balkans. In the Baltics, the old form is that the Russians could blitz the northern Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) due to them bordering Russia (direct mobilization) or Belarus (which let Russia use it for the Ukraine invasion), and seize them fast enough to force a fait accompli by threatening nuclear deterrence card and prevent a major NATO reinforcement/counter-attack. (This has gotten considerably harder with Finland and Sweden entering NATO, but it's not impossible).
Alternatively- and this would depend on a Russian victory over Ukraine that allows Russian forces to move through, which was a goal of the original Russian coup de main objective of the entire country- would be an incursion into the Balkans. If you get into western Ukraine, then you have the separatists in Moldova (which Russia tried to coup a few years ago), start setting conditions to intervene in Serbia, and otherwise have a variety of options to throw the Balkans into a messy chaos to distract NATO, especially if you can bribe/support/whatever Orban and Hungary for an even bigger wrench. Note here that a direct NATO-Russia conflict isn't even necessary, just a Russia-EU conflict, as the Balkans have a number of points where the Americans would not be treaty-obligated to get involved, and the Balkan-politics being what they are offer a lot of ways to ruin fragile EU consensus issues.
Ultimately, whether it's the Russian's own casus belli rationalizations for Ukraine, or ways for Putin to try and destabilize the NATO/European Union which he's viewed himself in conflict with, a victorious Russia in Ukraine would, by extension, have capabilities that have a limited viability lifespan, and they'd be at the behest of a generally aggressive Putin who will have just come off of a war he won with all the leader self-validation of opinion that brings.
Perun is partisan. He's fairly decent and but he is, nevertheless, partisan, perhaps to the same degree as say, RWA Podcast is. Might be worth revisiting their respective predictions.
For example, here's Perun in 2022 talking about the perspective of Russian economy.
You can give it a listen to check how it has aged.
Pretty well, given the generally consistent validation of his arguments.
As long as you don't extend them beyond the points he's actually making, they're pretty banal and uncontroversial, unless you consider things like 'major economic interventions come with a cost' controversial. If anything, it's critiqueable for being non-falsifiable by predicting long-term consequences that wouldn't be expected yet.
Just to go by its own TL;DR, the video is making a constrained set of points, with some topic-adjacent topics explicitly in other videos including an entire video later on how war economies don't suddenly collapse, that Russia has tools to patch short-term damage to the economy, but that Russia is likely to receive longer-term harms due to the tradeoffs it will have to do to continue fighting. He calls the pro-Ukrainian view that sanctions would grind the Russian war effort to a stop a dream, but also that they do harm, which has been generally observed in how the Russian economy's growth and metrics have changed over the years since 2022. He makes clear that the economic competition is dependent on how willing the West is to support Ukraine- and that he has questions on how the West would be willing to provide the significant levels of support needed, which is downright preescient given how the 2022 situation evolved before the Nord Stream explosion led to the general German shift on permitting major categories of support that were within the west's economic capacity to do.
From various other sections on the Russian economy- feel free to register what you think aged poorly-
-The war is not a closed-system war of just Russia vs Ukraine.
-The Russian economy will not have a near term collapse, and that Russia built up substantial pre-war preparations to mitigating economic disruption to the war production economy (and that he would talk more about that in a following video).
-The Russian indicators of economic health in the first months of the war relied on interventions that can provide short-term metric success but which disguise (and cause) longer-term issues. That Russia has resorted to more, not fewer, distortionary techniques- as well as obscuring data that could verify health if the economy were healthy- would also seem to validate.
-The Foreign Trade Reserves, despite the immediate drop in the early war, were a concern but that he specifically disagreed with a lot of the then-contemporary views and did NOT view it as a short or medium-term threat to Russia's ability to wage war due to options available to stabilize it. *For those less familiar with western government planning time frames, which is his background as a procurement specialist, 'short term' is often 0-to-2 years, and medium-term is often 2-to-10.
-On Russian energy exports, he makes the point that Europe was/is undergoing an expensive economic shift away from dependence to limit Russian ability to blackmail, which occurred, and that the Russians would progressively lose the Europeans as a dependent market, which has also been seen as Russian gas exports by pipelines have decreased far more than LNG gas exports have risen At no point does he argue that this means Russia is going to lose all their income and ability to sustain war in the coming years, and this is well before the European sanctions model (which was designed to let sea-based hydrocarbons continue onto global markets, but reduce Russian profits) was outlined, which itself is reflective of the Western political will.
Skipping ahead past the NATO economic figures to Russia on, the 'What Next' section is more predictive-
'What Can Russia Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options Russia could do to maintain the war economy, with the general theme of longer term costs, but continued ability to wage war into the medium term. A number of the options have been seen, including appropriations, interventions, inflation, and Chinese import substitution.
'What Can the West Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options the West could do to leverage their economic advantages. Many of these were not utilized in 2022, and we're seeing the implications of some of these delays this year with the current artillery ammo disparity- which is a validation of the analysis that the economic advantages depended on will and longer-term planning, which there was a lack of support for in 2022 and into 2023 is causing consequences in 2024, which remains well within his window of Russia's ability to continue fighting.
And so on and so on. As an analysis video, it continues to hold up- not because the facts are the same in May 2024 as they were in Apr 2022, but because they were true in 2022 and resulted in the sort of actions he predicted Russia could do to continue fighting the war over the period of time that has passed since the video. Russia has repeatedly intervened in its markets and taken more and more steps to sustain the economy, and these are the sort of interventions normally considered to cause longer-term damages and costs, and the need for such relatively drastic interventions is indicative of the economic mismatch at the heart of the comparison argument.
Dean
9d ago
When Putin dies/retires/becomes senile, there might also be a similar period of instability to the USSR in the 1980s, since there is no young, popular, and competent successor.
Funnily enough, the latest round of Kreminology of Putin's cabinet reshuffle last week was the point that a new generation of 'Princelings'- the children of Putin allies- are being brought up into the government, creating a younger future-leadership generation. Succession planning isn't in per see, but deepening the bench into the younger demographics appears to be occuring.
Now, whether they will be competent remains to be seen.
Unlike 'experts' like General Petraeus or Ben Hodges, Mearsheimer actually gets things right.
If you ignore the things Mearsheimer actually got wrong and ignore things that Petraeus or Hodges actually got right, this would indeed be a compelling line of argument. But if we don't, it's not, and little more than cherry picking.
The war's progression defied multiple of Mearsheimer's prognosis, starting from whether it would start, to how it would last. Other parts of Mearsheimer's prognosis that have been born out- like Ukraine being wrecked- were never contested in the first place. Even the tools of prognosis have repeatedly been exposed as lacking- the crux of Mearsheimer's analysis on inevitable attrition has rested on artillery advantage, even as the late/post-23 trends have demonstrated that the artillery was far more circumstantial, while he's regularly made arguments on capabilities (such as Russia eviscerating Ukrainian air defenses) that have been more than a little overreaching. There's a reason that Russia's turn to airpower has hinged on glide bombs from the ranges they have.
You like to appeal back to 2014 for Mearsheimer, but I see no reason not to go further to the 1990's- as early as 1992- when Mearsheimer was on record advocating for nuclear proliferation to the Germans and Japanese, aka historic Russian strategic rivals, which would have brought permanent nuclear presence to the border of the Russian sphere of influence that Mearsheimer called for respecting... which has been part of the nominal cassus belli for Russian intervention on grounds of proximate nuclear threat.
In other words, Mearsheimer has been advocating crossing contemporary Russian narratives of security red lines for about as long as the Soviet Union's been dead. He's just done it in different forms, but not forms that would escape a revanchist narrative of malign activity of western encroachment.
Mearsheimer is as deserving as the 'expert' title as anyone else, and unsurprisingly not any more impressive outside his field of actual expertise than anyone else. People just tend to forget his field of expertise is international relations theory as a political scientist, not international relations in action, or in policy, or anything particularly to do with the military in general, or as any kind of analyst of the countries he opines on.
And why should we
I tend not to ask, but what nationality are you for the 'we'?
For whatever reason- admittedly perhaps conflating you with someone else- I thought you presented yourself as a German in the past, or at least European, which wouldn't make sense in this more recent context unless the 'we' is rather expansive. And in the inverse, there are enough Europeans on this forum that 'we' would also be awkward in this context.
Perun IDK how this guy got so big but /r/credibledefense loves him and I like his powerpoints.
Short version is that Perun is both an actual subject-matter expert in how states plan/design/program military capabilities to meet their strategies, and he was able to succinctly cut through both a significant amount of early-war propaganda by looking at publicly available information and made a number of predictions extremely early in the war- particularly that the Russian military wasn't built to be as much as an overmatch as the early-war consensus was- that were vindicated with time. These created an early credibility bonus that over time allowed his military-industrial-policy expertise to show through.
More to the point, he was able to do so by distilling extremely complex subjects to more understandable points, and do so in a way that is explicit in acknowledging information limitations and yet still able to do so with strong references, both relatively undisputed (drawing implications from visual loss data) and from the utility of using extremely biased sources' own positions (using official Russian positions as a means of establishing numeric floors / ceilings for the purpose of establishing contexts of scale).
As Perun doesn't try to analyze the war as a horse race, but to use observed tactical/system evolutions as examples for a broader point on the capability/theme of the video which is often not strictly Ukraine-centric, he tends to avoid day-by-day catastrophizing of positions that retain relevance months or even years later. In so much that he does do 'state of the war' reviews, they tend to be retrospective, not contemporary, mitigating current-time bias, and when they are contemporary they tend to be very measured.
Dean
11d ago
I think there's a significant possibility of disagreement on that point. Wasn't Athena the goddess of war?
Athena was the goddess of war and wisdom, i.e. strategy. While she was portrayed with a helmet and a spear, she- and her following cities like Athens- weren't really known for mobilizing the women into formations. She is much more of an advisor / general archetype than a warrior.
Dean
11d ago
I don't think so?
I'm as much to slag on Odyssey as anyone for basically ignoring fem!MC's gender when it should have mattered in a notoriously sexist society, but AC has consistently to this point picked representatives from the culture of the setting as the primary MCs, and to varying degrees used their identity as part of the culture as a significant part of the storytelling. The Italian Renaissance wouldn't have worked as well without an Italian straight out of a noble revenge story, American Revolution utilized it's half-native-american quite deliberately to illustrate that the revolutionaries were the heroes of not necessarily everyone's story, gangster London is a class struggle of the undercrust. Odyssey is blatantly a Greek heroic epic by and of a greek, right down to the notorious fighting of family.
None of these would have worked nearly as well were the character a cultural outsider, as the protagonists aren't simply protagonists of their game, but of the culture rising above the socio-political moment the stories take place in. The Italian Assassin subverting the Church in the Renaissance is also the Italian culture taking that step towards subverting its dogmatic influence through reason and, well, the enlightenment. It's an Italian cultural victory, through an Italian cultural representative, in an Italian manner.
Yasuke the black samurai/ninja isn't going to be the most Japanese protagonist of one of the most culturally salient periods of Japanese identity, particularly when the reason for choosing him derives from American, not Japanese, identity politics.
Dean
13d ago
I thought we had enough previous interactions on other similar topics before that you'd know that I find the notion of "international law" to be somewhere in the class of Mohammad (PBUH) claiming that he received a revelation from God saying that Mohammad is his prophet and you must obey him, and so certainly whatever proportionality argument I make would not be intended as a reference to a "proportionality argument from international law".
Then your position makes less sense, and holds even less moral sway, as it becomes even more divorced from any coherent ethical system regarding conflicts.
Re: the other question, I think I responded to similar ones in parallel threads already. I leaned too far out of the window there and don't actually believe the Palestinians were de-escalating; I just don't think the Israelis were either.
Why do you think that a fraction of the air strikes in retaliation for the thousands of rocket attacks, as opposed to the ground incursions that have occurred both historically and in most other contexts where one side bombarded another, isn't a de-escalation?
No?
The original question is who the territory belonged to. The answer, in most legal contexts, is no one, because there isn't a formal Palestinian state. It would have belonged to Egypt and Jordan if they'd taken it back. That they didn't want it back doesn't mean their recognition of Palestine at different times for different reasons didn't create a de jure Palestinian state. It may be de facto Palestinian territory, and will likely be de jure Palestinian territory in any future negotiated system, but until there is an actual Palestinian state, it's in many respects just stateless territory. The difference between it and other de facto states is simply that no one really claims it, not that the people who actually live in de facto states are also real states too.
You thought it a silly comparison probably, but the Antarctica treaty isn't the worse comparison. Another are the spaces in the middle of the great oceans. While it is indeed extremely uncommon on land, if no recognized state exists in an area, it belongs to no state.
Obviously the circumstances of the Palestinian territories that trying to treat it as empty terrain would be considerably different, but the constraints on that are much more a matter of politics and humanitarian law than sovereign territory law.
Pretty much. Or at least, it's a very reasonable understanding. Your bounded distrust filter seems healthy.
All I'd additionally add is the reminder is that there are many, many forms (and reasons) of non-compliance/active subversion of a state, such that it can be anti-value to conflate groups and rationals too aggressively lest you start implying/believing that all groups conduct [worst act of subversion A] for [worst rational D] when really groups doing [subversion A] are doing so for [less malign rational C] and groups with [worst rational D] are reasonly only doing [marginal acts of subversion B]. If there's a reason to be hesitant about the NYT piece, it's in this conflation risk.
As for what you do about different groups, that depends on the groups and the nature of the subversion and the nature of your democratic checks and balances. Military groups in particular, however, can generally be cracked down on with military law, as a refusal to abide by lawful orders is anathema to the principles of civilian control of the military when said lawful orders are derived from civilian leadership-set policies. Others parts, however, may be prosecued on criminal lines, or may not be criminal at all- the ability to challenge the state is inherent to an actual democracy.
But ultimately, a lot of government is based on deference to the government from the bottom up, not top-down control. Non-compliance and apathy, let alone active disagreement or opposition, routinely subvert government attempts at policy implementation.
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