Dean
21d ago
There's also the point that the US wasn't the biggest funder of the Afghan resistance- the Muslim world was. The US brought the state-of-the-art stingers that negated Russian aviation, but in terms of raw money to pay/feed/supply troops in aggregate, the US was a modest part.
The Nuland call is not inconsequential since it's evidence that EU should operate on its own and not just rely on the US, surely an important message to this day,
True, but perhaps not in the way many think.
Ironically, one of the back-channel complaints from the US in that time was a frustration with the Germans in particular for doing so much to set conditions for Euromaidan, but then dropping the ball and refusing to take any leadership role in negotiations on behalf of Europe despite being one of the key backers of the foundational infrastructure of Euromaidan politics (as in, the EU-funded networks that the US was also supporting). US policy in Ukraine before Euromaidan was basically supporting the European Union's association and social movement efforts, and the key driver and funder of that was the Germans, who had invested heavily in the Ukrainian media space and elsewhere in the decades leading up to it. For the Germans Ukraine was an economic interest and part of their post-Soviet soviet space influence links, and the US was supporting the European desire because why not.
There was a dynamic of that the US was frustrated not because the Europeans wouldn't align with the US, but that there wasn't a coherent European position for the US to align itself with, due to the Germans dropping their previous lead and distancing themselves from the Euromaidan architecture they'd set up. Between the German whip lash and the lack of European consensus, Nuland took steps in a relative void where the Germans had turned self-sabotaging and the Russians were attempting various spoiler efforts to keep the Ukrainians from associating with the EU.
Had the EU operated on its own- which is to say, had the EU actually operated on a consistent position and been willing to stand by its previous decade of messaging- Nuland would likely have been known as little more than a European backer.
Oh, hey, look who evaded acknowledging the inconvenient factor of Yanukovych granting himself the right to shoot people without legislative consent.
That it was orchestrated by the US? Yeah, that's long since been established. (1, 2)
Oddly, neither of your sources indicate that the pro-European protests were orchestrated by the US as opposed to the US supporting protests that would occur from organic pro-EU support following Yanukovych's backing out of a highly popular agreement with the European Union also suppored by EU advocates well implaced.
Typical hyperagency / hypoagency framework, but American fanatics are American fanatics even if they are haters.
Further, your conspiratorial framing is outdated. Everyone who wants to trace the money and media flows knows that the Ukrainians were primarily reading German-owned media, not American.
If your historical metaphors are on par with the propagandists you find running the narrative, I see no reason to not treat them as roughly equivalent.
Fortunately they are not, and I tend to avoid them unless there's an amusing parallel, such as who in the current day might be analogous to a warmongering expansionist imperialist power with dreams of establishing itself as a global power pole against western decadence.
Personally I don't think Ukraine meets that model, but such is life.
If there's a solid historical argument in there that doesn't evade the facts of what happened, I haven't seen it. Only an egotist's internal monologue.
Again, the self-reflection.
And it says quite a bit about the integrity of one side of the argument when they won't even fully and accurate represent what the position of the other side is.
Fortunately I am still willing to engage you as to why anti-globalization conspiracy theorist is not a full or accurate representation of what the US State Department position is.
I'm still waiting on the counterargument. If we're essentially at a standoff where either side at liberty to disregard an argument by calling it's proponent a moron, then expect the same kind of dismissive, low effort diatribe from me in return. Otherwise, I see no rebuttal to evaluate.
If you choose to call Chomsky a moron, that's on you. I call him a tribalist and a sophist, but fully recognize his intelligence in his field of competence- which is not geopolitics, but linguistics. (Though I have heard from others in the field that he devolved to non-falsifiables in defense of his fame-earning theories, so it's not particularly relevant.)
Let me try the same thing in kind.
"Lol. Sounds like some bullshit to me."
Good ma'am, clearly you've never had to deal with both French and Government officials in the same conference room presenting why their strategy is the better one.
They'd never be so crass as to swear, but the knives of politeness are all the sharper.
Evidently I did miss the satire. I figured your statements were worth taking seriously and not given in bad faith. I stand corrected.
See? There's the learned language issue. You're using the words, but not matching them to the right contexts and so create the unintended ironies. A more native speaker wouldn't make the prior mistake of making an accusation of not representing another's position after citing a conspiracy theorist deriding another's position.
You completely missed the point I was making.
No, I got the point you were making, it was just historically illiterate.
The Minsk II agreement was initially adopted by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015, and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council. It presupposed withdrawal of George W. Bush’s invitation to Ukraine to join NATO and was reaffirmed by Obama, then vetoed by France and Germany. It called for disarmament of the separatist Russia-oriented region (Donbass) and withdrawal of Russian forces and spelled out 3 mutually dependent parts: demilitarization; a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty that included control of the border with Russia and complete autonomy for the Donbass in the context of the decentralization of power in Ukraine as a whole. Which wasn't at all unlike the conditions the US imposed on Japan in the postwar period, by banning Japan from having an army, called for disarmament and economic integration with the western powers.
Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-
-this was not only significantly different from the US government design for Japan, which not only did not enshrine foreign proxy sub-states at a constitutional level, but the post-war Japanese occupation also was in no way a respectful recognition of Japanese sovereignty to negotiate, but a result of unconditional surrender. The American occupation system was imposed, not a result of amicable negotiation, and there was no pretense of Japanese sovereignty until a good deal after the US occupation forces left and Japanese elections were able to be held without American occupation shaping permissable conduct.
Nor, and this is also relevant, does the comparison acknowledge the context of the imposition: that Japan was denied sovereign rights and agency due to having just lost a war of regional conquest in which Japan was an imperialist aggressor against most of its neighbors including the US itself. Whereas the Russian justification is that Ukraine warrants a Japanese-style submission because... America bad, or the Ukrainians were killing fewer Russian-speaking civilians over a decade than the Russians did in a few months, or something equally heinious.
Again, as for reasons why the positions emerge, Russia in a future defeat and occupation to the US would be far more analogous to Japan occupation than Ukraine is to Russia.
It seems you don't even understand my position enough to coherently disagree with it, sadly.
Understanding your position doesn't mean it's a good position, sadly.
Miranda's ass tipping the domino that launched a chain reaction leding to the collapse of the skyscraper of game writing, makes absolutely no sense.
I know we disagree off and on, but may I commend you for making me laugh out loud at this visualization? The scaling alone...
Dean
28d ago
NATO wouldn't do nothing in that scenario - given that the Baltics are members, an abrogation by the US of their mutual defense obligation to fellow members pretty catastrophically undermines their credibility with allies and vassals the world over.
Okay, but this doesn't actually say it's not plausible. There is a non-trivial number of Americans who don't want the US to have mutual defense obligations or vassals the world over, and their preferred candidate is one precisely lothed, and reciprocates the feeling, with the Europeans. That candidate- arguably the leading candidate- took a position that he would 'encourage' Russia to attack countries not meeting defense spending cutlines- a line that applied to a majority of NATO countries.
While I would be the first to note that Trump's criteria specifically would not ignore an attack on the Baltic states, and I doubt reading his characteristic hyperbole is worth that much, this is not a man who would particularly care about the credibility he has with allies he has characterized as parasites.
This is without noting that multiple NATO governments are variously politically aligned with Russia as-is (Hungary), or are a very plausible election scenario from coming into governments significantly less interested in EU or NATO as a strategic policy.
This doesn't even take into account that the rest of the EU would absolutely respond to an attack on a fellow member. At the very least Sweden, Finland, Denmark would become directly involved. Once you've got a hot war involving wealthy member states on their own territory I don't see France, Germany, the UK etc. just sitting that one out either.
The issue isn't whether they'd sit out, the issue is that most of them are militarily irrelevant to a war in continental Europe, because decades of mismanagement and capability cuts have rendered them unable to mobilize units at scale or supply them with ammunition to sustain fires at the scale Russia has and is.
Further, one of the significant factors of the Balkan scenarios is that the wealthy member states would not be fighting a war on their own territory: rather, they would be presented a fait accompli in a rapid Russian occupation of the much smaller (and poorer) Balkan fringe, and then faced with the question of whether they really want to pay the high cost in blood and treasure to try and fight their way through the Russian forces there.
This returns to the question of credibility, where while the Americans face the doubt if they would show up, most of the Europeans face doubts of if they can show up in enough scale to matter.
Dean
26d ago
That would be the micro-aggressions that the woke-americans claim are being conducted, obviously.
I'll disagree, and maintain my criticism of your previous post.
On one level, the charge of hyperagency / hypoagency framework isn't a strawman as I'm not saying it's the argument being made, it's what I am characterizing the argument's form as in a meta-contextual description. And I made this point- and stand by it- because the characterization of reasonings for why Ukraine would continue fighting was because Borris Johnson screamed at them- a pejorative framing with connotations of aggression by the screamer and victimhood/submission by the target who acquiesces to it in an imposition of will- rather than multiple extremely more relevant factors. Like, say, Borris Johnson communicating the intend of the UK government to continue supporting Ukraine, and thus allowing the Ukrainians to make a more informed choice as to whether continuing to fight or submitting to the current terms offered by the Russians was better.
When the only relevant factor provided for a party's decision making is another party's verbal harassment, this is an agency framework that reserves true agency to the person who is the true decision maker, and subordinates agency of the other. Were the other relevant factors included and a less pejorative framing used, then the Ukrainians would have been presented as making a choice: the Ukrainians could consider what the Russians demanded (conditions following an unprovoked invasion that increasing risk of a follow on invasions with even worse terms should Russia choose to fight a fourth continuation war to complete the cassus belli war goals that this negotiation did not provide them), versus prospects of fighting on with external support. That would be a choice, even if someone disagrees that it was the better choice. But submitting to screaming is not a choice- it is an imposition of someone else's will.
Similarly, and equally relevant, is the movement of the onus of negotiation failure to the US and UK rather than Russia. The US and UK did not move to put the Ukrainians in a position where war seemed the better than Russian terms- the Russians did, multiple times. The Russians did so by launching an unprovoked invasion on false pretenses (the false-flag attempts of Ukrainian provocations that were leaked before they even occured, the false narratives on the Ukrainian suppression of the Russian-speaking minorities), the Russians also did so by conducting massacres like the Bucha massacre that demonstrated how they would treat the Ukrainians from a position of occupation, and the Russians did so by demanding terms that would directly facilitate the future occupation of Ukraine via demands that would cripple Ukraine's ability to resist occupation in exchange for a cease fire that did not meet Russia's stated or underlying goals when it initiated this war. Additionally, the Russians put Ukraine in this position because the current Ukraine War is no less than the third Russian intervention in Ukraine in less than a decade, and each one of those was a Russian choice.
Attributing the geopolitical context the Ukrainians found themselves in to the US and UK, rather than the Russians, is another form of the hyperagency/hypoagency paradigm that subordinates Russian agency- and thus responsibility for the situation- to the Americans and Brits. They are not responding to Russian agency to launch a second continuation war into Ukraine- rather, the Russian position and actions are treated as forces of natures that simply have to be dealt with pragmatically, and the US/UK actions are imposing an immoral choice on the Ukrainians instead. This is aligned with the previous choice of pejorative- Borris screaming- as the determinative factor, and that framework's issues with hyper- and hypo-agency.
Even framing the negotiations as 'the US and UK made war seem the best of all possible worlds' is a negation of the other parties agencies. The recent Afghan war quite nicely demonstrated that the US aid can't make people who don't want to fight actually fight- and thus it's not the agent as to why Ukrainians formed in the streets of Kyiv to make molotov cocktails in mass in the opening month rather than Ukrainians protesting against fighting the Russians like Putin thought would happen. Nor can the Americans dictate the other side of the table, the harms Russia could do in war. No one in the region is unfamiliar with what Grozny refers to, and the Russian treatment of temporarily occupied areas was already entering awareness. All the Americans could do is offer military support for the Ukrainians to fight if they already wanted to, they couldn't dictate the cost-perception of the Ukrainians continuing to fight.
But the Russians could- and did- both by the content of their negotiations and the conduct of their forces. I made a point a few years ago- I believe on the old site- that Bucha was a disaster for the Russians whose cost was nowhere near worth whatever benefit was perceived at the time, and this is why. Bucha was a demonstration of what the Russians were willing to do if in a position of military superiority, and Russian terms were to dismantle Ukraine's ability to resist a future incursion where it could be done again. The US did not put Ukraine in a position where future Buchas were an easily foreseeable consequence of avoiding the war at hand: Russia did. That Russia might continue to further areas by continuing this war did not change that Russia's alternatives were to set conditions for Russia to claim more more easily going forward. And the perception that Russia might fight a third continuation war in Ukraine, and thus diminishing the value of peace talks in this war that would make a fourth Russian intervention even easier, is solely a result of Russia's repeated choices.
Dean
28d ago
I commend you for recognizing a rare piece of insight that many don't realize. Both the premise that a leash can be tugged from both ends, and that military aid is as much a means to regulate as to enable violence.
An example of almost certainly-not-sanctioned Ukrainian resistance to Russia was the Nordstream pipeline explosion, which on further investigation was very likely- and plausibly- a Ukrainian operation of considerably sparse means of not much more than a rental boat, some divers, and far-from-impossible to procure explosions. As a result, the entire German economic strategy was derailed as the strategic premise of Nordstream blew apart, every resistance group around the world gained a sudden interest in scuba certification, and Russia lost its monopoly on under-seas infrastructure violence that it had been trying to leverage until then. Every power in the region had reason enough to cover it and pay it no further mind, not least because the people who would have wanted to take issue with Ukraine for doing so couldn't stop it from happening again, and there ceased to be an economic case for breaking with NATO in favor of Russia when any of the people between Germany and Russia could blow up the business case of Russian energy.
Giant geopolitical and global economic implications, teensy little boat. And not something particularly seen sense, despite impressively deep Ukrainian special forces intrusions to strike deep within Russia.
Sure, it's not trivial to disentangle. I've seen notions aired to the point that if only true free speech/press was reestablished for a year and then fair elections held then Putinism would stand no chance, and somebody like Navalny could win. This seems extremely naive and out-of-touch to me, I'm sure that Putin (or a better anti-Western demagogue) would win.
And again, I'd disagree with your conclusion and your framing. Fortunately the naive position is not my position, and on a historical point Putin's ascent did not base itself on anti-Western demogoguery, which was not particularly potent at the time, but far more of an anti-Russian-internal-factors. While the early 2000s Russian political moment was ending the chaos of the 90s, that chaos was primarily internal in nature and origin (corruption, oligarchic abuse, failures of governance), and Putin didn't run on any particularly anti-Western tenor. Anti-western political themes began in earnest in the later 2000s, well after Putin's ascent, consolidation, and transition to killing dissidents who'd threaten popularity.
Of course there are obvious selection effects too. Also, when the invasion began and hundreds of thousands of Russians most willing to flee did so, they found no particularly warm welcome anywhere they tried to go. Most of them have since returned, and even they grudgingly agree that there is something to the Russophobia that state propaganda doesn't shut up about, having personally experienced it.
You, uh, should probably re-check your migration data, because your impression is very likely to be a propaganda selection effect.
While unbiased sources are certainly hard to find, reporting from last year was generally around the 15% return rate. Even it the return rate was double that, it'd still be very far from most. While there is certainly a national interest / Russian propaganda narrative to create a consensus perception that Russians are returning in mass, to date this has been propaganda to normalize and encourage mass returns, not actually reflective of mass returns. The Russians are still several hundred million in the hole.
I meant before he consolidated power.
So did I. A significant part of Putin's consolidation of power was via his allies- which almost certainly included parts of the Intelligence apparatus if not also organized crime- going after rivals.
The thing is, after the collapse and botched reforms, Western-oriented political forces in Russia have been dead in the water, and the real question was what flavor of dictatorship would take over. The second most likely one was the Communist party back in power.
I disagree with your premise because where you start the look for alternatives is arbitrary.
Since we're discussing historical possibility, this is where it's simple to point out that there was nothing inevitable of the botched reforms and failure of Western-oriented political forces in Russia. We have multiple counter-examples of other Soviet economic and political systems implementing successful reforms and adopting pro-Western orientation. That the Russians did not is a result of a number of policy decisions- some bad decisions of incompetence/corruption, but also some deliberate ones. What these choices resulted in misses the point that these were choices in and of themselves, with alternative choices with alternative outcomes available.
To pick just one field with substantial impacts to Putin's claim to popularity: a significant part of Putin's early-2000s popularity was reigning in the Oligarchs, but the Oligarchs themselves only were able to arise and have the impact they did due to how the Russians chose to handle the de-Sovietization of the economy and management of the state-owned enterprises. Other Soviet-block countries mitigated / avoided the oligarchic problems due to how they approached it as a legal/policy question.
Thanks for providing an infodump. I'm somewhat new here, and I confess that I don't know your position on this whole mess, but you seem like a calm and reasonable person. So I'm going to ask a couple more questions on sensitive topics, in case you still feel like answering. If you don't want to, I completely understand.
Well, I'll let you keep your good opinion a little longer, but I do have my irritation points. But in the spirit of trying to good faith questions-
I've seen a few videos that appear to be of harmless Gazans being shot dead. I don't think they're fakes. What's up with that? And why aren't they viewed as more of a Abu-Ghraib-level scandal by Israelis and supporters of Israel?
One of the dominant trends of Arab/Muslim resistance movements over the last few decades has been a general commitment to blend-end strategies where rather than clearly identifiable uniforms insurgents will wear civilian clothes so they can pass for harmless civilians as soon as they ditch the weapons and adjust their clothes, and one of the trends of this conflict in particular is that Hamas has a strategy of maximizing civilian casualties by various forms. Hamas has a long habit of using human shield strategies in various ways, whether from launching rocket attacks from civilian residences while preventing the civilians from fleeing (so that Israel would be blamed for killing civilians in their homes if they counter-fire) to using civilians as couriers / carriers / observors supporting the armed members, and so on. The purpose of these types of strategies are exploit rules of engagement restricting fires in order to gain asymetric advantages, and to generate/exploit propaganda when the other side shoots back. To be clear- shooting people who appear to be harmless civilians is not actually against the laws of war if they are assisting a belligerant power, and there are tactics to deliberately conflate the categories.
There is no Abu-Ghraib-level scandal because this is a very well established, and not at all novel, tactic, and one which Hamas and the supporters of Hamas regularly acknowledge even as it obviously leads to more risk to civilians who might actually be honest neutrals. The Pro-Palestinian position is that the onus is on the Israelis to distinguish, even as the pro-Israeli position is that the onus is on the Palestinians to not deliberately obfusicate the differences. And given that the Hamas strategy as a whole is to run up the civilian casualty count in order to drive an international response against Israel, and that they will continue to do so, there's no real point to viewing it as a Abu-Ghraib scandal when no amount of Israel discretion will prevent the opportunity for video propaganda to be generated.
Further- and in a broader sense- if you accept that you need to stop a person with a bad practice, you have to be willing to endure the bad practice which the opponent will invoke in order to deter you. This is the classic 'if you are known to succumb to blackmail, your blackmailer will continue to blackmail you' except with civilian collateral. The casualties become scandals more in the contexts of mindsets where Israel is not accepted to have a need/right to stop Hamas that justies tolerating casualties (that Hamas will generate as a matter of strategy).
Note that this makes no claim on the veracity of any videos you may have seen, or whether they are/are not war crimes. However, video propaganda is very easy to generate since the presenter is the one who gets to present context and can remove it via editing or simply lack other perspectives needed for context on specific issues. A X minute video will rarely provide insight as to what happened Y minutes before the video.
I worry that Israeli society has fallen to the level that American society did shortly after Sep 11, where pretty much anything could be justified, and almost no one was willing to dissent. And that parts of the IDF are taking out their anger and frustration in ways that are more about personal vengeance than about any strategic purpose.
The answer to both is yes. This is what happens when major trauma shocks hit a national culture, and this was an expected and intended result of the Hamas attack planning, as the propaganda strategy of, during, and since has been tailored to incite Israeli retaliation.
It seems that factions in Israel supported the initial incarnation of Hamas, decades ago, in order to destabilize the PLO/Fatah. What's your take on that? To me, it seems like either a short-sighted plan that backfired (much like assassinating heads of state, in hopes that whatever replaces them is more controllable), or an extremely cynical ploy to eliminate compromise in favor of the preferred extreme solution. (None of which should be read as relieving Gazans of their ethical responsibility for their own actions.)
I find it unpersuasive.
It is a common refrain that moves agency to the Israelis rather than the Palestinians, a hyperagency versus hypoagency issue where the hyperagent's influence is treated as far more significant than local agent actions reducing them to the role of recipient. It's politically convenient and a sort of emotional cope for Israeli political opponents in the aftermath of a demonstrated lack of control to claim the current situation is actually the result of control by bad leaders, and it's also politically convenient and a form of morality laundering for opponents of Israel in general to claim that the Palestinian actions on 7OCT is really the responsibility of Israel leaders with agency. Agency arguments are a format by which moral responsibility is reduced from the hypoagent not on the basis of their individual morality, but subordinating it to structural paradigms that allocate moral responsibility for hypoagents who, by their nature, have the agency to act.
But the truth is nothing about what the Israels did in that theory dictated the results of 7OCT, or even that Hamas would win the Hamas-PLO power struggle by throwing PLO leaders off skyscrapers after a decisive electoral thumping when Gazan-Palestinians voted out a PLO broadly seen as corrupt and unpopular. There were many, many years of intervening choices, decisions, options, and failures by various actors that were required to reach the point. Selectively choosing to focus on one isn't particularly good analysis, even if it makes for good propaganda, because results and consequences are rarely so clear cut. (To be clear, they sometimes do- Osama Bin Laden directly changed his practices when a US Congressperson said on TV that the US was listening to his phone, which directly led to improved secrecy needed for 9-11, but these are much more often the exception than the norm in multi-agent problems.)
You are also using the much mis-used concept of blowback, which presents negative consequences in present times as a consequence of decisions in the past who are deemed bad because they resulted in negative consequences. However, blowback is banal when treated well, but can quickly become stupid when treated as something to avoid entirely because there is no such thing as major policies with no future costs. That framing of blowback is a bad decision analysis model, because it's retroactive rationalization that assumes clear causality (it judges people on how complex contexts turned out as if they should have known this would happen, when people don't actually make decisions with the benefit of knowing how all future things will unfold), because it negates the relevance of many other factors that contribute to a situation (Hamas was more popular than the PLO in the Gazan elections in part because running on a platform of genocide the jews is popular with the Gazan electorate, and in part because PLO was unpopular due to being corrupt, but not because Israel didn't target it as harshly decades ago- an alteranative genocide-the-jews party would still have had the conditions to succeed), and because it doesn't accept that even good / well justified strategies can deliver significant costs.
Just as a concept, think of strategy games with strategies which allow you to trade health / casualties / debuffs in exchange for potentially advantageous options: the costs and the benefits are both real, and inseparable, but the presence of costs doesn't mean it was an inferior option. You could expect to face equivalent of worse costs. However, pop-culture blowback analysis would be to fixate on the costs tied to the policy, and ignore / pretend that other costs wouldn't have happened if you chose the other options. To pick a video game trope, consider the habit of many players to not use their healing potions in RPGs because they might need it later in a tough boss fight. As a result, they either risk losing in a current fight for not using the resource, or they spend a lot of time grinding so they don't need the resource in the current fight when they could have spent the same time in a later area gaining more XP and better loot if they'd just pushed forward. Blowback analysis is the equivalent of critiquing the players who used the rare potion earlier because they did need one of those later, regardless of if they're in a better position or not (i.e. in an area where rare potions are easier to find with less grind).
To very much simplify how to evaluation policy decisions and strategies, the basis of merit of a choice isn't if bad results occur- it's whether more or worse bad results occur compared to the plausible alternative choices. Note that one of the points of a strategy for dividing the PLO would be so that no single Palestinian faction could cause a two-front war with a single call to uprising... and note that the current conflict is not a two front war. Would this have occurred if the nebulous organization of Hamas was defeated/absorbed into the PLO, creating a stronger for-war wing of the PLO? After the PLO was central Israeli in the first two Intifadas? You can't just assume that if the PLO had successfully absorbed the Hamas-minded parts of Palestinian society, it would have retained the same internal political balances that led to it's current status and avoided all the conflicts that Hamas wanted but it didn't.
To put it in different terms- is the current Gazan War an Israeli strategy failure, for there being a conflict, or a success, for a conflict being far smaller and more manageable than it would otherwise be?
And by similar alternatives: was the surprising success of Oct 7 and terribly delayed Iraeli response a Hamas strategic victory, for doing better than it expected, or was it in fact a strategic disaster, because it failed to ignite the regional conflict that they were aiming for in part due to the nature of the propaganda effect of doing better than expected?
Blowback analysis can't answer either of these, because it treats any blowback as proof of failure (or else it wouldn't be blowback), has no mechanism for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable costs, and no consistency for what it deems blowback to focus on.
Dean
20d ago
It wouldn't be an imposition to them, and in fact they'd probably be thrilled to let you know if they had anything else. Researcher groups like that often love when their research is noticed, and policy-support research in particular loves to know when research they provided can change an opinion. You questions / testimony and reasoning why (concern of male disposability) and what assauged your concern (awareness of Ukrainian views on the subject) would be the sort of thing that might tailor future questions and such.
Dean
21d ago
I've no doubt that people say that, but there's probably a considerable amount of category confusion (do Mujahideen trading Stingers with other Mujahideen count as trading away Stingers?) and self-serving narrative biases (various interests in downplaying the relevance of US military aid support in favor of other actors/other types of aid/denying US significance) and the point that there were only so many (the CIA reportedly only gave around 1000 total), and that once they did their primary role- making the Soviets cautious rather than aggressive with their use of gunships- there wasn't much use for them.
Some weapon systems are more about shifting the opponent's behavior rather than being prevalent. Stingers were an example of that.
Dean
21d ago
I don't know any statistics, but I do remember reading multiple articles to that effect during the Black Lives Matter protests of groups bringing in out-of-state protestors who were regularly playing the role of agitators.
There are absolutely career activist networks as well, generally parts of political machines whose job it is to organize protests using established channels. They're the sort of people who work with the people who do things like bus students to protests. The student isn't necessarily showing up for any given protest, but the network behind the mobilization is regularly being tapped and exercised.
Dean
26d ago
Among other things-
-Basically no one in the world has as artillery-centric an army as the Russians, and the implications of drones and precision munitions to throttle artillery at scale mean no one else is going to want to due to the logistical throttling they enable. Russia is using artillery in its current fashion to brute-force the offense because that's what it has on hand and can procure the ammo for, not because the artillery is doing more than alternative investments would have. Even Russia post-war is far more likely to focus on drone power expansion and precision munitions than restocking dumb rounds by the billions.
-Drone and aerial siege warfare is atypical because Russia has benefited from a political, not practical, barrier that wouldn't apply in NATO conflicts. The Russians have, for example, benefited greatly from having air-standoff superiority and both in terms of air-delivered munitions and for being able and willing to use drones to target civil infrastructure while their enemies wouldn't. The Russians would not have the former in a NATO conflict, and the later one-sided nature is due to the restrictions NATO countries impose on the Ukrainians, not restrictions NATO countries impose on themselves. A great deal of Russia's economic-destruction warfare siege alternatively would not work (heavy glide bombs) or would not be unilateral advantages in the economic struggle (infrastructure targetting), but it's the 'what worked' of the current generation.
-The current war has underscored the importance of small short wars rather than long large wars to advance the national interest. Russia is continuing the war primarily because Putin made a series of strategic mistakes most countries do not make, and then doubled down on personal reasons. However, even Putin had aimed and intended a small short war, and the contrast to the long, expensive war that has lost Russia a multitude of strategic assets (military and otherwise) will drive home a lesson to planners in Russia and abroad to limit the scope of future conflicts of choice. However, the operational experience of the Russians in Ukraine will be precisely the opposite, as the small-nimble BTGs were destroyed and grinding attritional slog is what was inefficient but effective.
-The nuclear deterrence modeling and level of economic depence between relevant parties is atypical in general. Most conflicts, and most of Russia's more likely conflicts, are not cases where a nuclear-umbrella power is backing a non-nuclear state being invaded by a nuclear power. Most countries also don't have the backers of one party be economically dependent on imports from the opposing belligerent. Both of these factors significantly shaped the Western support for Ukraine, but either of these factors could easily change in both general conflicts and for Russian conflicts in particular (not least because Europe chose a strategic break from the Russian economic dependence).
A more typical conflict with correct lessons would include... probably not doing this at all, but at the very least a more precision-munition dependent strategy, smaller scope and scale, an emphasis on rapid movement rather than trench warfare, and not relying on nuclear/economic deterence against external backers of the opponent.
Dean
28d ago
I offer you two choices.
On one hand, you can own it and start chanting variations of 'Germany Number 1!'
On the other hand, I invite you to Blame Canada.
Dean
28d ago
I do appreciate the disagreements, for what it's worth. You argue straight and clearly, and even if I remain stubborn, it tends to be the kind of disagreement that triggers some introspection.
I mean it as a compliment when I say the same in turn. You are among the posters here who I've bookmarked simply to see what you're commenting on, simply because even when I disagree I appreciate having to justify to myself why. (I do try not to argue with you on anything I spot from your page directly, though. That would be creepy!)
And in any case laughing at my jokes will always trump disagreement.
Lol!
The distance from Northern Ukraine to Moscow is significantly less than from the Baltics to Moscow, 460 km to 600 km which is relevant to a decapitation strike.
And note what the actual distinction is here, as there no significant range limiting factor at the 460-to-600km range in the modern era. Rather, it's time.
A nuclear decapitation in the modern age would be reliant on hypersonic weapons which- if not simply branding for old ballistic weapons- are traveling at a minimum of about mach 5, or 6, 173 km/hr. As the additionally 140 km is the distance to be traveled, this this simply adds time to the transit time, not a range limitation in itself.
An extra 140km at 6170 km/hr equates to an extra 80 seconds- again, at a slow hypersonic rate. Which, while not nothing- and I'm sure you will insist is very relevant- doesn't actually change the acceptableness of a nuclear first strike. If the goal of the decapitation strike is to kill a leader then the 80 second differential won't realistically make a difference in the target escaping the nuclear blast radius, and if the goal is to do a nuclear armegeddon first strike, this doesn't change that the success factor is being primarily driven by the ability to mitigate second strike capability, not the 80-extra seconds to alert / get release authorities for non-second strike.
Which returns to the question of who is unleashing nuclear holocaust on Russia in the first place in light of second strike capabilities. Which isn't the US, both because (a) the US has been deterred by much less capable nuclear risks for decades, and (b) the idea that the US is looking to nuclear genocide the russians is based in fever fantasy rather than any realistic understanding of American politics or its military-strategic community.
Which returns to the point that nuclear deterrence is still being waived away, because the argument premise is silly when Russia's own nuclear capabilities are brought into the picture.
Missile defence based in Ukraine would also complicate Russian nuclear strikes. They would have to defend thousands of kilometres of extra airspace in addition to the Belarus-St Petersburg area.
Missile defenses based in Ukraine would complicate Russian nuclear strikes on Ukraine or over the Black Sea. The nature of the curvature of the earth is such that the Russians don't need to fire over Ukraine to hit any other NATO nuclear member for the purposes of maintaining deterrence, and that they'd have to actively go out of their way to do so.
Now, if your argument will shift to that Russia really needs to be able to nuke non-nuclear members like Turkey, I will grant you that Ukraine would help defend Turkey... but now we are conceding that the Russians need to act based on threats not actually in Ukraine, and not nuclear-driven in the first place. And while Russia certain had war plans to nuke most non-nuclear states it could come into conflict with in NATO, that mentality was rather a significant part as to why they wanted to be in NATO under a nuclear umbrella.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet is not known for its excellence, they aren't in a position to to lose bases to NATO warships. Given the interest British and US warships seem to have in the Black Sea, it's likely there'd be many AEGIS-equipped ships in Crimea or the Sea of Azov. This obviously limits Russian power-projection abilities, their ability to support Syria or other allies.
Whether the Russian Black Sea fleet is known for excellence, they were the original impetus for the strategic value of the Crimean peninsula as a naval base, and this was considered a major key to support Russian power projection despite the Black Sea being cut off from Syria or other allies regardless of how many AEGIS-equipped systems are in the Black Sea by virtue that the Black Sea is controlled by the Turkish straight.
Ukraine provides no advantage for the Russians to expand power-projection abilities into the Middle East, unless you hand-waive Turkey out of the way. Crimea is a prestige port, not an enabling port for out-of-blacksea activities.
And what happens once Ukraine joins NATO? Everyone and their dog has been saying this will happen for years now.
Based on history to date, Putin publicly claims it doesn't change anything and Russia doesn't care anyway and continues not to attack a NATO power and the NATO powers continue not to attack Russia because no one involved- least of all the US- wants the expense or hassle of attacking Russia.
Peace, in other words.
You're not supposed to be able to join NATO with territorial disputes - yet NATO training and integration has continued through 2014, through 2022 and continues to this day despite this.
NATO training and integration leadup are not joining NATO, and there is no position that NATO cannot work with willing candidates in preparation for the time that they resolve the territorial disputes- the resolution of which was the official Russian of 2014 through 2022 and even now.
And, of course, this goes back to why this matters, which amounts to pretending that Russian nuclear deterrence doesn't exist and that 80 seconds of travel time is somehow what is preventing the US from unleashing a nuclear genocide opening against the Russians.
Suppose they amend the 'no territorial disputes' clause or strategically ignore it like Blinken does to bring in Ukraine and Ukraine moved on Donbass in a counter-factual where Russia didn't invade. Then Russia would be forced to choose between losing Donbass or war with NATO.
This would unironically be a net gain for the average Russian, and would have been a major strategic gain for the Russian defense interest had it been done years ago. The average Russian would no longer be on the hook for subsidizing a broke mafia statelet that has been responsible for tens of thousands of Russian deaths to date with more to come, and had it been abandoned years ago the Russians wouldn't have crippled their northern flank's very viable option for a significant military victory against the NATO alliance, it wouldn't have reinvigorated NATO at a time where the Americans and Europeans were openly discussing strategic divorce over the lack of a perceived shared security interests, and not only would tens of thousands of Russian military-aged men by alive and 10% of the Russian IT workforce still in the country, but hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment wouldn't have been lost in the sunk cost fallacy over a failed popular uprising that primarily had the effect of taking the pro-Russian demographic out of the Ukrainian electorate and accelerating Ukraine's political reorientation from wanting to to be a part of the European Union but militarily neutral to the most anti-Russian demographic this side of Poland.
NovaRussia was a Russian strategic blunder in the great power competition year before the Ukraine War turned the Russian military into a mid-cold war army and made the Russians synonymous with cope cages for years to come.
Furthermore, it's a basic strategic principle that great powers don't want their neighbours to be members of hostile alliance groups. Everyone knows that Russia was extremely unhappy with the idea of Ukraine being in NATO, Burns's 'nyet means nyet' cable shows this. We can identify efforts to prevent this in Russian strategy - debt relief and energy subsidies pre-2014 and increasingly intense economic and military pressure since the Special Diplomatic Operation you don't want to call a coup.
Furthermore furthermore, it's a basic known fact of history that great powers who repeatedly attack their neighbors drive their neighbors into alliance groups by their own hostility, and that if the goal is to not drive neighbors into hostile alliance groups, a great power should not result to repeated armed interventions. Russia was indeed extremely unhappy that its former subjects feared it like a battered wife might fear a drunken Husband, and yet Russia continued to attempt to coerce and threaten and hit its former subjects into compliance.
This is, in strategic lexicon, an 'own goal.'
Furthermore furthermore furthermore, it's an even more basic strategic principle that great powers who pick stupid wars get stupid prizes. The eras of empires of conquest ended years ago not merely because most of the Europeans realized it was morally abhorrent, but also because it was economically and militarily ruinous due to the technologies (that russian enabled and widely spread) for cost-effective resistance. The ability of minor powers to disproportionately hit back against an invader so long as they were willing to fight and had foreign support was the hallmark of many of the wars of the Cold War, and Russia's belief that they would be greeted as liberators was as stupid for them as it was for the Americans in Iraq.
Or perhaps even more stupid. The Americans were initially welcomed by the Shia, but then stuck around and tried to stop the follow-on civil war that was initially ignorring them. The Russians planned to have torture facilities and kill lists from the start.
Regardless, I return to a long-stood by claim that appeals to strategic principles are misaimed when it comes to Russia, because Putin has demonstrated his strategic incompetence for over a decade at this point.
since the Special Diplomatic Operation you don't want to call a coup.
Which I do not for the same reason that you don't want to admit the rather inconvenient but uncontested context of Yanukovych's departure: that he was not escorted out of the country by the military or security forces, but rather fled before he could be arrested and tried for crimes against the nation after the military and broader security forces refused orders to follow along in shooting civilians in the streets after he granted himself the power and began to do so without legislative consent while his government executed a sniper campaign to justify the crackdown.
No one in the 'it was a coup!' camp ever really addresses what the level of impeachable conduct is that might warrant a legislature moving against an executive without being a coup, but in other contexts they generally concede that the executive granting themselves the right to shoot their political opponents at foreign behest typically qualifies as a legitimate rather than illegal basis for removing a president.
Dean
28d ago
Finland and Sweden are both two of the biggest exceptions in Europe, and is part of why their decision to join NATO was such a strategic disaster for Russia's NATO-rationalizations for the war.
Did you even read the content of the article?
Yup. And I even noticed it wasn't by the American State Department, whose own words you were claiming to link to, and then tried to defend not referring to in favor of a detractor's take before taking issue for positions not being accurately reflected.
The article was less interesting than the irony, and not particularly relevant to the post the citation was meant to refute.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that one went right over your head...
A common mistake you make, I'm sure.
Lol. Okay.
Okay indeed.
Now, would you like to drop further points to a more defensible motte, or just try one more time for a last word? There aren't many more positions left for you to abandon in the face of challenge, but I doubt I'll see more than a downvote.
Dean
28d ago
I don't have anything approaching a retort, just a smile and appreciation.
Yes, I do value the trilogy structure and design more than the worldbuilding (in part because worldbuilding is easy to find, but good series are hard). I find that good story structure is indicative of good writing more than a good character dynamic, but that's because I've seen far too many movies or shows with an interesting premise fall apart for lack of planning after winging it. Good character writing can exist regardless, but good narrative design will elevate. (I will stand by that Mordin's Tuchanka arc was one of the best moments of the series, as it was simultaneously against part of his theme in ME2 but also a natural progression of his obvious guilt, and a natural integration into how to recruit allies into the war.)
I also agree that ME2 could have absolutely evaded the pitfalls ME1 set up for lack of planning. I personally view them as one and the same and that the onus is on ME1 to write for the sake of the sequel if it was designed as a trilogy to start, but the nature of that is that nothing required tethering the sequels to a trilogy character arc. Rather, a personal favorite proposal I once read was one that every ME game in the trilogy have a separate focus character: Commander Shepard in ME1 as the 'public face' of Humanity for what it does as a galactic hero, but then PC!Jacob Taylor could have been the ME2 player character for a 'what Humanity is in the dark' thematic contrast, while not!Vega in ME3 could have been the Rising War Hero for the Reaper War. Each player character an independent character with reflections observing differences rather than 'hey, remember me Shepard?!' cameos, and in each game the previous player character is their own character characterized by the key decisions of the previous game.
I don't disagree with your criticisms of Andromeda on a lore-technical level, but I just smile and wave vaguely to the deliberately campiness of what was, at heart, a sort of first contact story. When comedy is a deliberate goal, I can overlook a lot of functional-efficiency things, and I suppose I just accept that as part of the buy-in.
(If I wanted to pick at realism, the role of Spectre as a shooting-game protagonist also doesn't make sense as presented in the trilogy. Council Space doesn't need it when legal violence is so readily available, and non-Council space doesn't respect it. Spectre status Soldiers wouldn't be useful in a setting where legally-sanctioned blackops are everywhere and legal violence is so common- the real benefitors of Spectre status would be a Volus tax-accountant who can use the status to cut through bureaucratic red tape to unroot financial crimes threatening the galactic economy, and using that Spectre status to keep a band of mercenaries as his muscle.)
(Give me biotic god pencile pusher, doom of tax evaders and counterfeit e-zero smugglers!)
Given that Ukrainian opinions on European Union affiliation were a matter of public record, it certainly would be a far reach to deny that the EU was popular for the Ukrainians.
Just as the political controversy of Yanukovych granting himself the right to shoot protestors after public Russian pressure was also a well-apparent fact at the time. Just a mite consequential, when your own government is composed of people backed by those protestors.
But feel free to fluff up the American importance in things that weren't really about the Americans. I understand they feel insecure these days, and it makes both them and their haters feel better if they're the hyperagents in a Ukrainian political movement literally named after the Euro.
And yet you didn't articulate it directly.
Because it was historically illiterate for missing key relevant context that contradicts the desired framing. For example, this was additional historical context that you neglected-
Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-
-and this was your evasion of that context.
In 2019 Zelensky got elected on a peace platform to resolve the conflict between Eastern Ukraine and Russia. He began to move forward on it and tried to go to the Donbass. What it would have meant was a kind of federalization of Ukraine that gave a degree of autonomy for the Donbass, which is exactly what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium, but he was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort. If you're essentially telling me that the inhabitants of that part of Eastern Ukraine don't have a right to their own freedom and self-determination because it would mean their interests would play into the hands and service the objectives of Russia, that exposes the prejudice of your personal political views on the matter; but does little to address what the source of the conflict was actually about.
Note, audience, that he does not actually challenge the existence of the sovereignty-sabotaging clauses, or that it would give the autonomous region more autonomy than the central government as a whole. It does try to claim a new equivalence instead with other countries- but does not acknowledge that neither government has the sort of diplomatic veto and autonomy to enter into its own agreements that the Russian interpretation of Minsk insisted. Nor has he addressed the role of Russian military proxies as the in place, and to be still in place in the system due to the autonomy protections preventing the central government to allow free and fair elections that would empose on the 'self-determination' of the Russian supplied, and Russian-manned, proxies.
You're actually thinking Japan has this much autonomy and independence in its foreign policy establishment? It's widely accepted in most foreign policy circles that its own foreign policy conduct is ultimately subordinated and dependent upon continued American economic and military support.
You also widely deride the foreign policy establishment as inaccurate and untrue, yet now you appeal to them even as you'd be wiser not to. People who are unable to understand the difference between a choice of alignment and an inability to choose otherwise are poor foreign policy experts, and believing that the current warm US-Japanese relationship is a direct continuation of the American occupation-state is negligent of several decades of intervening history that saw the US and Japan reconsider their relationship multiple times.
The ultimate Russian justification against Ukraine is NATO's military expansion up to the borders of Russia.
This is not a justification against Ukraine, as Ukraine is not a part of NATO, was not close to becoming a part of NATO, and multiple NATO members had for nearly a decade been actively blocking Ukraine's ability to formally become a part of NATO. A successful conquest of Ukraine doesn't even reduce the NATO borders to Russia- it expands the NATO - de-facto-Russian border.
It is also completely unrelated to the reason for Japan's subjugation to American reconstruction, which was not planned to deny or destroy Japanese national identity.
You can appeal to undetectable, subliminal and nefarious ulterior motives all day, but short of having direct access to his mind, all you're left with in the end are Putin's own statements on the matter. And that fundamentally hasn't changed since he began talking about it.
Sure they have. Putin's Russia's position on NATO and Ukraine has evolved numerous times over the years, including when he wanted to be a part of NATO and when he explicitly avowed that he had no territorial designs on Ukraine.
Putin's posture on NATO shifts with the narrative wind. There's a reason that there was a multi-month pre-invasion buildup focusing on non-immeninet prospects of Ukraine in NATO, and virtually no significant reaction to the largest expansion of Russia-NATO borders as a third of Russia's naval forces found themselves in a NATO lake. In one context Russia was building a pretext for war that was already determined over a notional threat that wasn't a threat, and in the other it was also not a threat.
Ye are welcome.
There's always going to be different visions, but there's also a reason that Israeli politics over the last several years began to center around removing Netanyahu as an individual than on the security front. Even in that the Left is damaged goods in that while Netanyahu is almost certainly corrupt, there's nothing particularly partisan-unique about it. Olmert, the guy who was PM for 2006-2009 as sort of the last gasp of the Israeli left, was under corruption prosecution and convicted in a prolonged chain of events that lasted until 2017, making that a non-contrast per see.
Ultimately, the Israeli left's different vision on the security front has always been the importance of the Two State solution both as a matter of appropriateness, as an argued necessity for normalizing relations with the rest of the Arab world, and as key to maintaining relations with the West. However, there again history and the right did no favors: Oct 7 dissuades that a truly autonomous Palestinian polity wouldn't use said autonomy to attack, and one of the purposes of Oct 7 was to disrupt the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that Netanyahu was nearly achieving despite the dogma. Which leaves the claim of being necessary to maintain relations with the west, which is a fair bit more contentious and starts going into your perspective of the effectiveness of the Israel lobbying and Palestinian protest movements in the West especially since Oct 7.
Before or after 7 October?
Before 7 October, the argument was (and still is) that Netanyahu was preventing the two state solution from solving the issue, so the alternative was to re-commit to the two state solution process. This was just part of the host of the anti-Netanyahu coalition, which included the 'I'm strong on defense but not as corrupt' alternative, the 'Israel should be more secular' perspective, and so on. But no, there was no particular coherent alternative on, say, the West Bank issue, where the politics and the various military / strategic / ideological rationals for the settlements have their own mass and inertia in Israeli politics, but the left wasn't going to do a unilateral withdrawal after how the much smaller Gaza strip worked out.
After 7 October, the main differentiating question is what to do with the Gaza Strip after anti-Hamas operations conclude, which itself is going to depend on what specific context they conclude under. There is anything from outright military occupation, to turning it back over to the PLO eventually, to a multinational security force to keep the peace. There are downsides to all of these, but I also don't believe there's anything coherent enough to match a left/right divide, not least because it's still not clear what context the war will end in.
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