Dean
8mo ago
There are innocent contexts, but the problem for Biden is that he is associated with repeated, consistent, and public denials that he was involved in any for Hunter Biden's business deals. Any emails to that will be another albatross to Biden among non-Democratic voters, in much the same way that Hillary had her own email scandal that just sapped over time.
If Biden has said from the start that he did personal business with Hunter, the Republicans would have pounced but voters wouldn't have cared as much unless there's something actually disreputable. The bigger issue is the contrast in insisting there was no business overlap, and now even the more sympathetic media are acknowledging that family and business mix, even as they avoid directly addressing questions about Hunter. It's probably meant to mitigate, but it's a context where the innuendo (false deniale, followed by non-denials) are damaging in their own right.
Dean
9mo ago
I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country.
...and did they counter-argue the pretty obvious selection bias given your context and who you were working with specifically, i.e. the surviving winners and those who had monetary incentives to put you at ease?
I don't think your argument supports what you think it does. The point of 'the collective hates [X]' isn't that every member of the collective shares the same vibe of the group, an objection which itself would be a form of fallacy, but that the group effects is dominated by those who do. Most ordinary Germans may well not have hated Jews in 1939, but they were also onboard with a regime that absolutely did, hence why so much of German post-war political identity had to confront the 'I wasn't directly involved, and thus not my issue' collective identify in order to rehabilite a collective German political identity.
Likewise, the successful surviving white business men you met who were willing to work amiably with you may not have had significant expeirences with those who shared a regime stance... but the white businessmen were, by definition, the survivors who made accommodations and allies and friendships with/within the regime to protect themselves. The ones who didn't- the ones who would have been dispossesed out of spite- wouldn't still be in business for you to deal with.
That Wagner is unlikely to succeed in a coup is not the same thing as not producing any consequences (doing anything). The threat of Prigozhin's rebellion isn't in the likely doomed attempt- it's in the second and third order effects of the purges to follow not just against Wagner, but Wagner's allies, and the apathetic sorts of bystanders who didn't oppose them with fervency.
Prigozhin and Wagner aren't politically significant in the sense that 'Prigozhin thought he was a real boss.' Prigozhin is well aware, hence why he went on his antics for publicity, and targetting his feud of the MOD bosses, and the instigation event being Shugoi's alleged attempts to both administratively dismantle Wagner's independence (Soldier contract demands) and potential bombing. Prigozhin likely isn't under delusions that he's 'a real boss'- he's likely under very clear understanding that he was targetted and doomed, and is deciding to go down fighting.
Prigozhin and Wagner are politically significant in that they are representative/rallying points for a key contingent of what you might call 'the non-state nationalism.' Wagner is... I hate to use vague terms live 'Avatar' or 'totem,' but symbollic of the idea of a Russian strength that's not simply the state. Signalling support for Wagner was a way to show your support for Russia as a good nationalist even if you opposed/detested/thought Shugoi and the MOD were incompetent/wrong/ruinous. Being pro-Wagner was a form of acceptable criticism of the regime by people who were fellow travelers. It was a nexus through which anti-Shugoi factions could persist and loosely coordinate.
When Shugoi wins- and I agree that he's likely to win this- he is not going to stop at just Wagner leaders. He's going to go after their allies, which includes not only other disaffected oligarchs (it's own risk to the system if/when a class of greedy opportunists opportunistically move against eachother to take eachother's stuff), but their support networks as well, which includes their media/social presence spheres. And in that, what was previously swarths of officially tolerated opinions- and criticisms- will no longer be tolerated, but officially suppressible.
What this will mean is up for debate, but the reason Wagner was a totem of alternative nationalists was that they didn't want to support the existing national symbol of strength- the MOD-military- in the first place. Removing the alternative doesn't mean people will transfer their favor to the persons/institutions that did so... and is likely to be suppressing them either actively or with open suspicion. Dismantling parts of the oligarchy doesn't mean that only the traitorous parts are subject to being targetted- or that only the traitors will resist and fly back.
This is an event that, even in failure, will change how the war-supporting base view the government fighting the war, and how the oligarchs move against eachother. Either would be significant on their own, and this is before Putin's typical insecurities drive further responses against either group.
Dean
10mo ago
I keep seeing this take in a lot of social media and I really don't think that it has any relation to reality. It isn't a "fairly moderate chunk of the US military budget" but a massive economic imposition and cost upon the rest of the west. Aside from the direct costs of sending money and arms to one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, the indirect costs from rising energy prices, economic disruption, inflation, sanctions, refugees and the like have made this entire affair incredibly expensive.
This conflates a few different topics of wildly different scopes, so I'll focus on the point of energy prices. The energy price rising isn't the consequence of the war, it's the consequence of the Europeans- namely the Germans- refusing energy blackmail. The war was the context of the blackmail, but the capacity for the blackmail was baked into the status quo ante as a result of deliberate central and western European policy choices over the objections / concerns / warnings of US and Eastern European countries. The Russians were always very blatant that they were prioritizing political goals over economic profit with their use of gazprom, and that the German industrial base getting functionally subsidized energy was a means to an end.
The energy costs Europe is experience are the cost of a much delayed structural shift away from a nigh monopoly supplier to more resilient import network infrastructure. This is the epitome of a good cost, and will drastically increase European economic safety over the long term.
For any sort of advocate of European strategic autonomy, this is perhaps the best cost of the entire conflict, and exceptionally well timed as it occurred when there was the US-alliance network to fall back on for sourcing for LNG imports.
If the de-dollarisation that the sanctions regime has spurred continues it could ultimately prove to be one of the most expensive mistakes in US history.
Laconic 'If' applies. De-dollarization has been a thing for literal decades, and continues to be a thing, and will continue to be a thing. The reason it always seems to never happen is epitomized by the Russia-India experience in the rupee trade debacle- the other person has to want your currency, and to want your currency at scale it needs to be a a stable and fungible store of value. It's not enough to offer your own money as loans to buy stuff back from you, as is common with the Chinese yuan projects- the currency has to have value with others.
I am happy to concede that China may yet get some value out of the Yuan as a way to facilitate corruption outside of dollar monitoring systems (which is how, say, Lulu got caught for corruption in Brazil)- but this is independent of the war.
Even then, the cost in materiel matters as well. Western supply chains and reserves have been tapped out to funnel that equipment to Ukraine, and those stocks have been considerably depleted (at least among EU member state militaries).
They are depleted because they were incredibly thin beforehand, due to decades of neglect and under-resourcing and frankly falling behind the tech curve. Again, this is a good cost to pay if you are any sort of advocate for a strategically resilient and autonomous Europe, as the cost was going to come regardless.
With unavoidable costs, timing is key to relative preference, and the Ukraine crisis is about as ideal a time to restock / modernize, as political support is high, support from the current American establishment is high to subsidize modernization costs, and the political costs of emptying out the outdated cold war stock to free up budget / admin capacity for modernization is practically negative.
While that's bad by itself, it becomes even worse when you remember who Russia's biggest ally is - China. The Chinese government is, presumably, sitting back and rubbing their hands together with glee as they watch the west burn vast amounts of military equipment on a pyre. Every bit of kit that gets blown up in the Ukraine or sold onto the black market by some unscrupulous oligarch is a piece of kit that is not going to be used in any prospective defence of Taiwan
...but it was never going to be used in any prospective defense of Taiwan regardless, because water is a thing other than the color blue on a map.
This has been a thing since last year, but it bears repeating: Taiwan is an island. It's not in need of tank columns to drive across the strait. No one is building trench lines in the water. Many of the weapon systems that are very useful in the Ukraine conflict are practically irrelevant in a Taiwan conflict, because even if they were on the island they wouldnt' reach far enough off the island to matter in what really matters in a Taiwan conflict- the ability of the Chinese to maintain a blockade of the island against the US Navy.
In a Taiwan conflict, there will be no Ukraine-style aid packages to fight a major ground war. Only the equipment already on the ground has any relevance, and even then only in so much that it extends the time the Chinese need to maintain a blockade. As long as there is any blockade, no aid package would get through. If there is no blockade, it's because the Americans have beaten back the Chinese navy, and if the Chinese navy isn't there, it's not landing forces.
The Taiwan conflict isn't about ground-force kit, it's about naval assets. Which, notably, have not been sent to Ukraine.
if the US is getting a pretty great deal, you're gonna run out of superlatives when you try to describe the one China is getting.
A white elephant.
The Ukrainian crisis demonstrated that several of the assumptions that might have supported a Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan in the near term were extremely suspect. This included the power of offense versus defense, assumptions of acceptance by the targeted population, the unwillingness of the Europeans to assume costs to diplomatically resist pressure, and inability of the US to do things, and of course the ability of the Russians as allies.
Dean
1yr ago
Ukraine has little value from an economic standpoint. When you look at the amount that Ukraine produces, you'll see it's very little. Wheat for example: 20 million tons at $300/ton or just $6 billion/year. That's about 3% of the world supply or about 1% of the yearly revenue of Wal-Mart. If Ukraine production in all categories went to zero overnight, the market would barely even notice.
...what?
Ukraine produces about 33 million tons of wheat, which is a bit over 4% of global production, but it exports about 19million tons, which is 9% of global exports. Taking nearly 10% of wheat exports off the global market is not 'market would barely even notice,' it's 'arab spring food riots,' because most of the most volatile countries in the world are not food self-sufficient.
Similar deal with other crops. Ukraine only produces about 3.5% of global corn, but what it does produce is 12% of the global export market. You're looking at even larger fractions of other items- 17% barley, 20% rapeseed, and around 50% of global export share of sunflower meal and oil. These are non-trivial shared of the global food market.
https://www.fas.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2022-04/Ukraine-Factsheet-April2022.pdf
This gets even worse when one considers the Pakistan flooding, which has wiped off a considerable share of the global export rice market off the market for this year.
Dean
1yr ago
What's TheMotte's opinion on the legitimacy of protecting individuals from inadvertent value drift? Or in other words: is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will? Is it liberating to just not let them? It seems to me like answers explain one of the core differences in conservative versus liberal schools of thought. This is rather low-effort, apologies.
What's the saying? Enlightenment is hard, which is why so few people will ever reach it, and none can be forced?
My position is that self-discipline is is a good thing, but that enforcing discipline others is to be avoided as possible outside of broadly agreed upon contexts because of it's propensity to abuse by people without self-discipline. There is no system of evaluation or screening that ensures only self-disciplined will have power for pretty much the same reasons there's no way to ensure that only Good Kings will reign- not only is it not reliable for the (wo)man at the top, but it's the system from top to bottom that matters. Insert the ever-useful insight about self-righteous tormenters, the people who would censor information, the rationalization of self-interest by those who see themselves as enlightened, etc. It's all old hat, and if you weren't convinced before, you won't start now.
Value drift occurs. It's a part of life in all directions and connotations. You yourself refer to your own with what you call an overly frantic escape from Russia. This is a characterization / connotation that can only exist due to value drift brought on by perspective- at the time, while you were certainly in a maniac-depressive state, your values were different. In the coming months/years, there is liable to be future developments and worsenings in Russia that may make your escape seem wise and insightful in a way you don't credit it now. As the fable goes, this too shall pass. There is never a point in your life where you will have the 'correct' value perspective and insight to be qualified to decide it for others.
Instead of top-down impositions, lasting changes to individuals come from the bottom-up, from affecting the common culture of shared beliefs and values. But culture is shared beliefs and values, not the values you compel someone to state. Nearly all deliberate social engineering efforts struggle with this, as the values they claim to espouse are not the things actually motivating behavior or being shared- hence the common refrain of the those being loudest about their selflessness are really most out for themselves, and that's the values being taken. You can ask for someone's consideration of your values, you can share your values, but you can't force it on the unwilling.
There's an old internet poem, probably not actually adopted from a Christian monk but with plenty of regional/cultural variations, that's long stuck with me that seem relevant to this topic.
“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.
I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.
When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.
Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”
In this comparison, you are the man-who-is-not-yet-old. I note in your piece, while you spend considerable words on how he has so much less to say, you make only a passing note on that you have talked with him increasingly less over the years. I do not know what you have talked about, if/how you have raised concerns with him directly, but per your own mutability as seen over just the last year, you still have the opportunities to change yourself, and thus impact your family and friends, and through them, more.
It's a lot less heady and gratifying than ambitious reform, but it's there.
Dean
1yr ago
I didn't trust them long before this. They have given me no reason to trust them. The media's credibility has nosedived since 2015 when Trump became a threat , but even before it was bad.
My own personal... awakening? endarkening?- to American political media was a period in the early 2000s where CNN and such has a partisan distinction in how they reported political scandals on the talking head segment headers and intros. Generally, if a politician scandal was about a Republican, it would front-end 'Republican' or Name(R), where the party was obvious and in the framing. If it was a Democrat, however, the party affiliation was often buried into the body and not on the TV text, so things like 'Congressman in scandal' or 'Senator Name'.
There was also a (less consistent) trend of order of affiliation when bipartisan good or bad news occurred. If it was good news, Democrats and Republicans. Bad news was more often Republicans and Democrats. Democrats offered reforms, Republicans cuts or changes, etc.
I think this is the rationale.
It's not, as there is no single rational.
There are a multitude of competing interests and desires, and trying to consolidate them into a single position is going to
It doesn't seem to be working. The sanctions have failed. Utterly.
They really haven't, unless you misunderstood various purposes of the various differing sanctions.
It turns out that China, not the West, is the key trade partner of any commodity producer. Russian oil and commodities freely trade on the world market, and the West is actually afraid to sanction Russia more strongly because it hurts them more than Russia. Sanction Russian metals? Great, welcome to higher prices and China will scoop up all Russian production for cheap.
These, for example, were not the goals.
In order- the Chinese have not substituted for the Europeans in Russian energy export volumes, the sanctions on Russian energy exports were about profit margins rather than keeping them out of the world market, the Western sanctions have been about driving the economic separation of the European economic system from the Russian system despite Russian attempts at triggering economic devastation via abrupt cutoffs, and keeping Russian metals off the global market was never the goal as much as to break the European supply line dependencies.
Saying 'you're failing because you're paying more to not be addicted' rather misses the point of an economic policy to break addiction to cheap commodities that were kept cheap via policies to encourage dependence that could- and was attempted to be used as- geopolitical blackmail. China's gain to Europe's pain is not a counter-argument to this, as China paying more at the cost of Europe staying dependent is not a success of a policy to economically disentangle Europe from Russia. This is simply trying to smuggle a bilateral zero-sum argument in a three-party arrangement to claim that Russia and China both have to lose simultaneously for the other parties to win. (Rather than, say, noting that China exploiting Russia and taking over European market share and more at the expense of Russian autonomy from Chinese interests is not a Russian strategic victory.)
The bigger issue is that the Russian army is 15% larger than before the war and apparently Russia is outproducing the West in key armaments by large margins.
The Russian army is 15% larger by size, not capability- which is to say, they have conscripted a lot of infantry after losing most of their professional officer corps, and their armament level devolved from late cold war technology hardware to mid- and early-cold war vehicles pulled out of storage with minimal modernization. The key armaments Russia is outproducing the West in are artillery ammunition and middle-Cold War vehicle reactivations, which- while relevant- are neither indefinite nor enduring production advantages.
Surprise surprise, it turns out that if you start war economy mobilization first, first-mover advantage allows you to have more industry mobilized than people who spent more of the first year hoping they wouldn't have to mobilize.
There are separate other assets that the Russians are utilizing to good effect- like Drones and airpower- but saying that Russia is outproducing the West in airpower assets or drones would both be quite bad takes.
But even if this strategy was effective, killing 1 million people to "weaken" an adversary is just incredibly evil.
That is indeed why the Russian government is incredibly evil, since they are indeed killing to the adversary they have identified in a way that war crimes have become practically a point unto themselves as proof of their power via untouchability or recourse.
Fortunately, the people assisting the Ukrainians are not killing the Ukrainians, but instead helping them resist the evil people who have been quite open on their desire to erase the Ukrainian nation in the third continuation war in a decade.
Dean
5mo ago
The irony is that the reason Iran is reluctant to get involved, and the reason they were reluctant to attempt a bigger retaliatory move after the Soleimani assassination, is because they're winning. Sure, they could tell their allies to press harder against US forces in Syria and Iraq, but nothing makes Americans angrier than American soldiers being killed. And the thing is that (and I'm interested in @Dean's view on this) a small number of US forces holed up in bases in Syria and Iraq doesn't threaten most Iranian interests in the region. They still increasingly control most of Iraq, Assad is relatively firmly in power in Syria. It's an insult to them, perhaps, they may consider it offensive, but the Americans aren't going to end shiite control of Iraq or overthrow Assad with their current presence.
Well, since asked... I suppose my view on your assessment is that it depends on if one thinks Iran was actually uninvolved/unaware of the October attack.
If Iran was unaware/uninvolved, then it's not an illogical position. The conflict is an unexpected opportunity for Iran's foes to weaken themselves militarily/politically, disrupt the alignment against Iran by more regional actors, provide new opportunities, etc. etc.
But, as the laconics say, 'If.'
My personal view is that what we're seeing is a failed effort to start a broader conflagration, since being walked back and limited for damage control. An analogy might be the Russian-sponsored NovaRussia uprising in eastern Ukraine that consolidated around the 'separatist republics'- a 'success' on one hand in achieve an operational victory, but a failure for an intention for a much broader result that didn't materialize, leaving the instigating party a 'good hand' for a context they didn't actually want to be in, because they were aiming for something substantially different.
Very non-laconic thoughts below.
From my viewpoint watching various regional actors, the initial post-attack propaganda narratives, and so on, Hamas's goal wasn't isolated to a Gaza-specific event to be resolved with a hostage standoff, but to try to be the instigating event of a wider intifada with broad regional support from Iran's proxy groups. Key goals likely included a broader consolidation of Gaza support into breaking the barrier, instigating a West Bank uprising that would paralyze the 80% of the IDF there, and major external support from Iranian proxies- especially in Lebanon and Syria- to conduct major rocket attacks and limited ground incursions to surround and further paralyze the IDF. This would have only been possible in coordination with Iran, and in turn Iran would have attempted to use the regional chaos to try and expel the remaining U.S. presence from south-eastern Syria and from Iraq, removing US influence from a region where the US presence prevents consolidation of Iranian influence (via US-aligned partners in Syria, and the political impacts of both US presence and critical US funding in the Iraqi government which can and has been used to play off the Iranian-aligned actors). In an 'Iran was involved' perspective, Iran would be relying on its proxies rather than direct involvement, adhering to the principle of plausible deniability.
The 'issue' is that the Hamas attack did not instigate a wider intifada, and the Iranians were confronted that their denials wouldn't be considered plausible by actors who mattered most if the rest of their influence network actually joined in force. Hence the anti-climatic climbdown by Hezbollah from was being built up as a natural call to arms, the token-level support by groups like the Houthis in Yemen that even the Saudis have shot down without meaningful propaganda criticism, and how the Hamas strategy has resorted to increasingly blatant appeals for truce by steadily increasing the number of hostages it would turn over for relief.
The Hamas failure to spark a wider intifada, which has been a real concern in regional security circles over the last few years, can probably be attributed to a few various factors. A lack of coordination outside of the Iranian network meaning other Palestinian groups weren't ready to join in immediately, the shock value of their atrocity-propaganda having a detering rather than galvanizing effect as actual local groups distanced themselves due to the immeninet Israeli retaliation rather than join in, the effectiveness of the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank to prevent anyone from mobilizing a force that would make them seem like participants., what have you. In fact, even the Gaza public support has seemed to be... well, acceptance is not the same as endorsement, but the Hamas ability to defend in Gaza has been surprisingly underwhelming, which would be characteristic of a force that thought it would be receiving a lot more support than it actually is. Gaza is not Kyiv in 2022, where the citizenry was mixing molotovs in the streets to fight the invaders. An urban area held by truly hostile local populace is a notoriously rough fight, and one that hasn't manifested in the fighting so far, but was probably expected given the parallels to the Israeli incursion into Lebananon against Hezbollah awhile ago, where Israeli ran into exceptional difficulty on the ground.
Which leads to what I think is the most relevant point- and the one that matters from the Iranian perspective- which was a misjudgement of regional views and perceptions. Plenty of people around and abroad were happy to cheer for Hamas, but no one wanted to join in fighting alongside Hamas- and as it became very quickly clear that the other people weren't joining in, the Iranian-aligned networks could either join in in the Israeli background, or back out.
By and large, they've backed out, even at the cost of regional prestige/leader-of-the-resistance standing. No one has taken more than a token involvement in the Israeli front. The more relevant activity increase has been entirely geographically/politically separate, which is the anti-US attacks in the Syria-Iraq zone. This is relevant for the Iranians- the US presence in Iraq particularly significantly limits Iran's ability to consolidate it's advantages by giving a counter-balance option to local politicians- and it serves a number of purposes in the strategic competition, but the most relevant is trying to re-establish leverage (you need to negotiate, lest we escalate- which is to say, the same position before October) rather than actively trying to overwhelm, which- to me- seemed to be the goal of the opening October efforts.
This is all based on a paradigm and a viewpoint I fully acknowledge others might not share, and that's fine. But from that paradigm comes a significant distinction as to why Iran is doing what it is doing at the level it is- whether this is a situation Iran found itself in that it doesn't need to do anything because escalation could tip the apple cart that it already enjoys, or whether this is a situation Iran found itself in because it tried to turn over the apple cart, but failed, and is now trying to present that it wasn't trying to do that (but could still yet do so if pressed, so better not press it).
To turn back to the start, to the question of if Iran is 'winning' and the analogy of the NovaRussia uprising- this is where I'd make a point that operational successes are not the same as strategic wins, and that sometimes the consequences of a partial success have different, less foreseen, implications. The Ukrainian NovaRussia uprising was a 'win' for Russia in that it successfully inserted itself into Ukrainian politics in a way that froze western integration and allowed Russia to play a key diplomatic role even as it was a de facto belligerant. But the NovaRussia efforts are also what functionally froze the NordStream pipeline project to Germany, cutting off a major economic-influence vector before it could be manifested, and thus greatly reducing influence that would have mattered much more down the line, when the early Russian strategy in Ukraine centered around pressing Germany to accept it and thus undercut a European pillar of support. Had NordStream been activated years earlier, it may well have worked, even as the years of warfare over NovaRussia empowered the Ukrainian army and national identity to resist the Russian invasion.
Iran is probably not going to have as much of a blowback, but then again no one would have predicted the Ukraine War's consequences for the Russians in the first few months of NovaRussia either. What does seem clear to me is that while Iran has likely achieved a short/medium-term disruption of Israeli-Saudi normalization due to the sacrifice of Hamas/Gaza, they do have some key elements of power being undercut as well. For one, the paradigm I reflect- the one where Iran has been deterred from maximal proxy usage- is a fundamental failure of one of the key points of proxy warfare, the 'plausible deniability.' If you wouldn't use a plausible-deniable proxy for fear of retaliation, it's no longer plausibly-deniable, and you're just returning to conventional deterrence. For another, Hamas and the Gaza Strip were most relevant to the Iranian posture as a force-in-being- the idea that Israel was surrounded on three fronts by forces that could at any time launch an uprising, and as a consequence Israel was in a weak position and needed to make concessions that Iran could take credit for leading. Except the West Bank didn't rise up, which changes expectations of what it might do going forward, and whatever happens to Gaza after this war, it's probably not going to be a serious contender for a mass popular uprising either. When the Israeli-Palestinian conflict returned, the anti-Israeli palestinians had to shoot the Palestinians to keep them from running away from the Israelis. Bar Hamas somehow remaining in power- and it seems very unlikely that will be the result of the Gaza war- whoever remains left is much, much less likely to be willing to be a quasi-Iranian proxy after seeing what the Iranian axis did for Hamas.
Is it a 'good' position to be in? Kind of. Is it a 'better' position than they had before the Hamas attack? Questionable.
But all this derives from some first-order assumptions of the nature of the conflict, which I suspect you and I diverge on.
Hope that answers the question.
Dean
5mo ago
The bar for blowing hospital and it not being a war crime is quite high.
The bar is extremely low, as low as 'is it being used as a military position.'
War crime law is not that legitimate military targets (military positions, command posts, munition stores) are made ineligible by the presence of protected classes (i.e. hospitals), but rather than protected classes are made eligible by the presence of legitimate military targets. There are no protected classes of military sites where someone can fire at you, but you can't fire back.
The proportionality principle, which is what limits collateral damage that could kill civilians, is proportionality relative to what is needed to destroy the legitimate military target compared to other means that would achieve the same military effect, not the proportion of military-to-civilian casualties. There are no convention requirements to take military casualties in the process of storming military objectives in order to minimize civilian casualties.
Dean
1yr ago
Why would EU want the poorest European country after Moldova, with the highest corruption and similar to Georgia problems(that of course could be theoretically solved in the near future but this is beside the point)?
Global food stability, advanced chip making, strategic depth, sentiment, internal European power struggles over the political center of gravity take your pick. The question is not 'why', but rather 'why are not you aware of the following?'
To start, being poor is not the issue for Ukraine. A poor GDP per capita in the European context is a cheap work force, which is a significant part of corporate viability in the European model. This is absolutely a mixed bag, but also kind of the point for the european economic model of the internal market and internal migration from east to west. Nor is the monumental costs of rebuilding Ukraine the objection- this is, after all, money that will be spent by European countries on their European companies to do business in Ukraine, in the name of integration. Different stakeholders have different interests, but no one expects Ukraine to circle a drain of constant recession and de-investment, which means there is profit to be made.
First, global food stability under European influence. Ukraine is poor in many things, but very, very rich in food, and had roughly a global share of nearly 9% global wheat, 10% barley, and 16% corn. This is 'regional famine prevention' levels of food production, and having it under European auspices- and not under Russian, where the food pressure has been used already for macroeconomic blackmail attempts- is a major global asset in the expected decades to come of global demographics. When the third rail fear of European politics is mass migration, having the food stability of the middle east not under Russian influence is rather important.
Second, Ukraine was responsible for 50% of global production of neon gas, which was a byproduct of industrial plants specifically built for it during the Soviet Union. This is relevant because industrial-grade neon is a key resource in high-value chipmaking. Any polity wanting to play for the advanced technology spheres needs a good source of neon, and while the war has degraded/destroyed a lot of Ukraine's, it's still a strategic interest to have regardless of corruption.
Third, strategic depth between Europe and Russia doesn't just go in Russia's favor. One of the key shocks to the European public was the realization that war was literally only a long day's car drive from Berlin, and the prospects of a Russian-dominated Ukraine on the border of Poland is a significant concern to countries like Poland. Among other things, Ukraine is a buffer, and like Finland a demonstrably capable buffer able between Russia and others.
Fourth, sentiment is not to be overlooked. European governments are broadly accountable to their voters, and the pursuit of re-election does mean that things that are popular with the voters will effect decision maker cost-benefits. This is most obvious in leading power Germany, where the government's obvious resistance to aiding Ukraine- from the helmet fiasco to stated fears of escalation- have been regularly overpowered by not just external pressure, but internal pressure. A German government whose voters supported neutrality would be much more resistant to pressure- a German government whose own voters want it to deliver arms finds itself backtracking its prior concerns. The same applies to corruption- corruption of Ukraine is not the most significant emotional concern European voters have about it, and corruption is only an obstacle in so much as people are otherwise neutral.
Fifth and finally, internal EU politics. There are two key nexus of interests that have an interest in resisting Ukrainian entry regardless of corruption- EuroFederalists, who fear a new nation will be too emotional to defer to the EUropean nationalism intended to replace nation-based nationalism, and the French-German axis, whose power within the EU frays as more members join, to the point that the French-German alignment is no longer the 'motor' of European policy in the way it once was. To those groups, any entry of a state of 40+ million people (half of Germany) would be a major barrier to the centralization of European Union power over European states, or the ability of France and Germany to jointly dominate that power over the other European states. To other countries, this isn't a bug, it's a feature, and expansion-of-the-EU-to-weaken-it has been a core policy of much of the European Expansion advocates, which has included powerful countries (UK, previously), weaker countries (who want to keep the EU loose instead of centralized), and especially the Eastern countries (who doubt Germany/France having their interests at heart vis-a-vis russia policy). Regardless of any level of corruption in Ukraine, people who want to move the political center of gravity eastward, or at least away from France and Germany, and who are not on board with a European unitary state will have an interest in Ukrainian ascession. Notably both parties are flexible on this as part of the give-and-take of European politics- the French and Germans have raised the prospects of watering down the veto as a precondition to allowing entry, others have used the Ukrainian issue to leverage the French and Germans into Russia policies that both were inclined to resist until dragged across the line.
There are plenty of reasons, and whether you find them compelling or not, you should at least be aware of other people's perspectives.
EU had enough of one Hungary with Orban stealing economic aid with his cronies, it doesn't need a second one. These internal problems will have to be corrected on their own, before, and not after, entry.
The EU's problem with Hungary and Orban isn't 'stealing economic aid,' it's that he uses the patronage network funding for non-pro-EU patronage networks. He's a fly in the ointment, but the ointment has always been largess to build patronage influence.
All in all, my position is you radically misunderstand the corruption dynamics involved in both Ukraine and in the EU itself, and are over-fixating on this issue. Corruption isn't why Ukraine will be barred entry by the likes of Germany or France- corruption will be the pretext used to facilitate, further, and defend their own interests within the European Union, that a Ukrainian entry might disrupt. The Europeans engage in their own corruption a plenty, and are quite willing to turn a blind eye when it suits them- what matters more is not that there is corruption, but the sort, and the tradeoffs.
Dean
1yr ago
A paragraph of questions is generally not one actually looking for them to be engaged, but I'll take a stab.
War that will make patriots out of corrupt oligarchs? It started in 2014.
And has had multiple decisive impacts against Russian intentions since 2013.
Multiple Russian efforts failed due to various sorts of nationalism by oligarchs refusing to cooperate with Russian pressure efforts. This started with the elite split over the Russian pressure on Yanukovych's corrupt reversal on the European Union association agreement in favor of the Eurasian Union in 2013, and dramatically escalated when many of the oligarchs in Yanukovych's own power base refused to support his Russian-pressured effort to start shooting protestors during Euromaidan, and then the major flop of the NovaRussia uprising in Eastern Ukraine where oligarchs generally supported post-Maidan Kyiv rather than join the Russian effort to astroturf a grassroots popular revolt. This doesn't even touch on the 2022 government cohesion in face of Russian invasion.
It's not that war has made patriots out of corrupt oligarchs. There is a war because a surprising number of corrupt oligarchs were already nationalists even before 2014.
A new president who promises to fix everything and fix corruption? It's happened so many times it's not funny anymore.
The relevant consideration for Ukrainian corruption considerations isn't because there's a new president, but that the war has created a new legal contexts and oversight measures with Ukraianian political support. This has not happened so many times before.
First, let's just be clear on something. The primary donor of economic aid, the states of the European Union, are not out to 'fix everything and fix corruption.' This is a false standard.
It also misses a key point of the European Union, which uses what others might call obvious corruption via patronage networks as a standard cohesion mechanism. The European Union is absolutely involved in the patronage system, and the way that even internal EU aid works is that governments taking aid are expected to use it broadly in the categories intended (agriculture subsidies on agriculture, not yachts), but who, exactly, gets the funds and how are left to the governments. It's a basic pro-European incentive scheme to build pro-EU interest groups who really like getting money and so are positively inclined to European influence in order to keeping it coming. This sort of pork is not what the Europeans consider unacceptable corruption, and patronage network of government elites building pro-government business elite networks is not the problem.
Since the war has started, Ukraine has gotten not only increased aid, but increased attention and various oversight mechanisms. Western donors, after all, have strong interests in seeing where their increase goes, and that it's having the desired strategic effect. The Ukrainian government, which is dependent on them in a way it was not under previous presidents, is in little position to refuse access, and has actually had an interest in granting access to its own information systems just to underscore how desperate the situation is. What has resulted is various access and tracking systems to western backers, which both gives institutions like the IMF insight on what is needed economically, and the Americans access militarily, but also also establish mechanisms. While some level of fraud is unavoidable- just look to the various western corruption issues around COVID monies- the war has brought new access into systems were the unacceptable corruptions rely on being opaque.
The war has also changed the political dimensions for western-pressured reforms. The Europeans have absolutely used the leverage of aid and Ukrainian desires/desperate to join the European community to pressure the Ukrainian government to make legal and administrative changes to improve on corruption. One of these results- something no previous president did- was dissolve the Kyiv Administrative District Court, one of the most notoriously corrupt court systems in the countries.
Between a confluence of crisis letting the government act, unique access and leverage by westerners pressing reforms, and domestic political support for the both, Ukraine has been undergoing major legal and structural shakeups no previous president of the last decades has matched.
Additional grants/loans/Marshall Plan 2.0? Didn't billions of dollars and euros already have go one way into Ukraine? Where did they go?
To the front, to salaries, to infrastructure and item purchases, and many other things needed in a war.
This is what I mean by question streams not actually being asked with the intent of receiving answers. The first is not a question or even referring to a specific thing (or, in the case of Marshal Plan 2.0, a thing that has happened), the second conflates the value/cost all forms of assistance, and the third presumes corruption for unanswered questions, even when the question doesn't even make sense.
Where does aid go? It depends on what the aid is, and when, and how one calculates. Since Ukraine is in a war, let's just take a single example: a single vehicle donation to the Ukrainian military.
Let's take a BMP-1. A BMP-1 is an early Soviet-era armored personnel carrier. It's not particularly good, but it serves a purpose. A google search says a single one costs roughly 1 million USD. But what is the cost? Not, actually, 1 million USD. BMP-1s are old, the cost of production was already consumed long ago, and in many cases are just legacy hard ware not intended for current use by their own militaries, and were slated for eventual replacement by more modern kit. Giving 30 BMP-1s is not equivalent to taxing your citizens $30,000,000 and then handing it over to the Ukrainian government for them to turn into yachts.
The answer to all unknown expenditures is not 'it was all wasted due to corruption.'
It has been talked about since the 90s and European leaders are now talking about "the long road ahead for Ukraine", the status of a candidate is not at all a guarantee of an early entry, ask Turkey, Serbia and Montenegro.
Appealing to the 90s, when Ukraine's elite and public were very indifferent about European association (and the European Union did not exist), and not 2014, when a major seminal moment saw the Ukrainian body politic actively affirm a desire for European association, is willfully ignoring quite a bit of context. Euromaidan wasn't a pro-European fanclub protesting, it was a result of long-established European-supported engagement structures successfully connecting with both publics and key elite interests to such a degree that a Russian-pressured lethal force crackdown was rejected by key members of the ruling coalition. The pro-EU political base in Ukraine has not been fair-weather or transient, enduring almost a decade of war now and demonstrating both enduring strength and conviction in a way that many of your examples have not, divided as they were for internal reasons.
Turkey is an interesting argument if you want to make it, but I'd argue Turkey was more interested in joining in the 90s/early 2000s than the EU was in letting them in... but this is due to factors not relatable to Ukraine, such as being a large muslim country and UK internal politics. The Ukrainians are not seen as outsiders in the way Turkey was, nor are they an election or two away from a conservative muslim government.
MTF for character limit.
Dean
1yr ago
Most people won't take it as anything other than light entertainment. Some people may believe it's true, however. And I guess some of those might believe in some ur-Aryan white master race nonsense, but I can't be bothered to get het-up about that.
I'm reminded of when Paradox Interactive, a Swedish gaming studio who does historical strategy games like Crusader Kings (about the dynasties of the middle-ages) and the Victorian eras, started getting tarred for having too many white supremacist fans.
I have long been convinced that such complainers miss a rather critical point. If you believe someone is a awful white supremacist, what would you expect them to be doing if they weren't dumping hundreds to thousands of hours into video games?
Dean
3mo ago
guesswho is a long-term progressive cultural warrior, and this level of evidence is extremely typical of him.
Dean
10mo ago
Nobody seems to talk about the RU-UA war here anymore. I guess it's because we're saturated with it everywhere else.
I'd suspect it's less saturation and more that there wasn't much to talk about that wasn't already obvious here. The Russian offensive culmination was largely evident last summer, and the mobilization as it occurred demonstrated it was about defensive padding rather than offensive capability generation. The fate of the Russian winter offensive just kind of underscored that to a degree that even the pro-Russians of the internet couldn't credibly claim a 'Ukrainine is imminently doomed' narrative based on Russia Stronk memes.
The people for whom the expected Russia victory would have been some sort of validation of their world view instead got their noses rubbed in Russian strategic and moral failures, and generally withdrew.
First, it is immediately clear that the Russians are much more prepared this time. The area that Ukraine took back in autumn was barely defended by a rag-tag group of volunteer militias. That was a big lapse by the Russian general command, which also led to the big mobilisation drive. This time is different.
You're either conflating two very different offensives, or ignoring one entirely. Kharkiv was the unexpected success brought about by undermanning. It was undermanned precisely because the majority of Russia's forces were moved to the Kherson region, which was a two-and-a-half month offensive, which was in no way a dynamic of 'rag-tag group of volunteer militias' on the Russian part.
Even pro-UA accounts like Julian Röpcke are conceding that Ukraine is losing lots of armored vehicles with very marginal gains. Western officials like the CIA chief or the US foreign secretary have all pointed out that the aftermath of the offensive will shape upcoming negotiations. Given that Ukraine has little to show for their offensive thus far, this inevitably casts a dark shadow on any prospects for large territorial compromises. Why would the Russians give the Ukrainians something at the negotiating table which they cannot gain on the battlefield?
There are a few points here.
One, you're assuming that the negotiations the offensive will be meaningfully shaping are territorial negotiations. This is very unlikely- Putin's political interests are such that the Russians aren't going to give the Ukrainians territory at the engotiating table which they cannot gain on the battlefield regardless. The negotiations that occur will be for other dynamics on the extension of the war, including Russian blockade or not of food exports, prisoner swaps, investigation access into the dams, repatriation of Ukrainians in Russian territory, and so on.
Two, you're framing this offensive as if it demonstrates the Ukrainian capacity for offense. That's... really not the case, as the Ukrainian capacity is about western backing for capability, and that is still largely in the 'what we have on hand to spare' levels of output. The estimates last year were that it'd take two-to-three years for various forms of industrial spinup to occur, even as the US has only started scratching it's own strategic storage stockpile. The success (or not) of an offensive in the present really has nothing about the capacity for offensive to work in the future, and far more to do with affecting how Ukraine's western backers shape their plans to back Ukraine (and the potential opportunities for those opposed to that to argue that they shouldn't).
Third and final, you're making far too early a judgement on far too little information. The Ukrainian offensive has been underway for about a week. The Kherson offensive, which again is the 'not a rag-tag group of volunteer militia' comparison, was a two-and-a-half-month offensive. I have no reason to doubt your characterization of Julian Ropcke, but I am not clear why you think they are in any sort of authoritative position to make a considered judgement of the current offensive.
Ultimately, the measure of success of this offensive isn't whether armored vehicles are being lost. That's expected regardless, and the reason 'the tanks are burning, the war is lost!' is its own meme. Success will be whether the offensive does enough that Ukraine's backers consider it enough progress to continue backing rather than compelling surrender, which won't be determined for months.
To my mind, the best that Ukraine can hope for now is a stalemate. This war has shown that in the era of ubiquitous ISR capabilities, trying to surprise your enemy is much harder if he's on his toes (which the Russians weren't in the autumn, but they are now). Consequently, offensives are simply far costlier and harder. The Russians had the same problems, which is why capturing Bakhmut took such an absurdly long time.
The nature of the Russian and Ukrainian problems are significantly different. The Russian issue was that they entered the war with the greatest advantage in material capacity they'd have for the entire war, but squandered it out of strategic incompetence and and with it their capacity to conduct meaningful offensives. The Ukrainian issue was that they started the war with the least material and logistic capacity they're liable to have, and are dependent on western backing in scale to generate these capabilities.
The prevalence of ISR aviation really hasn't changed these dynamics. NATO ISR certainly helped the Ukrainians massively, but it would have amounted to just having the finest view to watch the Russian invasion succeed if the Russians had planned the war's opening as a military invasion and not as a military support to an intelligence coup. Meanwhile, rather than use their surveillance capabilities to hit actual tactical or operational targets, the Russians squandered their strategic stockpiles and is now getting hosed by Iran for drones to use as cruise missiles against... still not tactical or operational targets.
For those of us who would want to see a negotiated settlement, the reality is that neither side is running out of money or arms. Russia is spending a moderate amount of money
This is underselling it by more than a little. It is true Russia isn't going to run out of money in the near term, but whether you want to consider direct expenditures or losses in income or opportunity costs or GDP shift or the impacts to Russian industries, the Russians are spending very significant amounts of blood and treasure and much of their cold war inheritance of Soviet stockpiles.
The only way this war ends is if the West tells Ukraine to give in and accept large territorial losses in return for a settlement and possibly security guarantees. Such an outcome would be nearly impossible to sell to Ukraine's domestic public and would almost certainly end the career of whoever was leading the country, including Zelensky. Whatever comes out of this war, I'm not optimistic about Ukraine's long-term prospects.
These seems like a lack of imagination. Other ways the war can end are that the West continues to help Ukraine generate offensive strength for future even more effective offensives in the future. You may think that's unreasonable/impossible, but the success of such a strategy doesn't rest on your concurrence.
Other ways the war could be brought to something other than a diplomatic capitulation to Russian stronk is that the war continues long enough with enough Western aid to Ukraine that the Russian economic-military capacity to meaningfully resist degrades, that Putin passes away and is replaced by someone not as beholden to Putin's legacy-interests, that the Russians do something really stupid that leads to NATO direct intervention, and other variations.
'Russian military defeat is impossible- better to negotiate now while you still have your army for leverage!' has been a theme since the war started. Nothing in the last six months has provided it any more traction than in the first six month. The war will continue, Ukrainian military capabilities will increase, Russian capabilities will decrease, the Western military-industrial expansions will continue, and the Russian national economic base will continue to retract.
Dean
1yr ago
Germany isn't reticent to send Leopards because the Ukrainians are losing, they're reluctant to send them because they don't have very many and their politics is incredibly fucked up around military matters, for understandable historical reasons.
I'm nor particularly persuaded by German appeals to history on this. It hasn't stopped the large-scale export of German arms in general, or the export of other German arms to Ukraine, or the historical point that one of the biggest victims of German aggression in WW2 was the Ukrainians themselves. Appealing to history is more often a pretext to some other interest, the question being what.
The three that come to mind for me are Scholz seeking domestic/western concessions, maintaining Russian energy imports as long as possible as a way to gain time before a total energy cutoff, or a desire to keep the Americans from benefiting from a general European military-recapitalization in tanks, which would happen if everyone's German tanks were sent to Ukraine. No one of these has to be dominant, as all are mutually reinforcing.
For the first, seeking a concession, there is something to be said that Scholz is in a poor position internally and approving arms exports is a tool in his tool kit for internal political compromises. The better part of a year later, it's clear that the much-vaunted German turning point has been mostly wasted and wanting for the last year. The Defense Minister was uninterested in military reform, it's not clear the Ministry is capable of it, and it remains to be seen if the new Defense Minister wants to do it as well, or if he'll go through the motions but happily slow-walk while making the right noises. What people do miss is that slow-walking can serve multiple purposes- it can be a way to frustrate things you don't want to happen, or to solicit concessions in exchange for speeding up. If Scholz approves tank transfers in general, he's unable to gain concessions- domestic or external- in exchange for doing so going forward. Call this the 'is seeking a bribe' option- and what the 'bribe' is could be anything, from American concessions on the Inflation Reduction Act industrial subsidies that Germany can't match, to coalition partner concessions improving Scholz's internal political stability.
For the second, for all the media hub-up of sanctions on Russia, it's very easy to miss that Europe continues to import quite a bit of energy from Russia, and that Germany's expenses with the winter energy crunch could still get much, much worse. In this framing, Germany is blocking tanks in order to keep Russian energy exports coming to Germany / Europe, rather than a more severe restriction. On one hand this is a concession to energy blackmail, but in another this is a time-buying strategy in order to continue to establish alternative energy export infrastructure. The longer the final Russian cutoff can be prevented, the better, and a German perspective could well be that tanks are unnecessary to more or less sustain the current position, which is preferable to a swing towards Ukraine that cuts into German energy before all/more infrastructure import infrastructure comes online.
Finally, the third is a military industrial complex interest objection. Basically, military budgets are rarely consistent across years, but come in waves as militaries inject new capital into their armies via new purchases/modifications, or entire re-capitalizations of existing forces. These recapitalizations are really lucrative if you can sell to it due to the nearly guaranteed follow-on contracts for decades after. This was more or less achieved by Germany during the cold war / post cold war, selling the Leopard tank to Europe. To a lesser degree it's also a benefit of the 'ring swap' agreements, where Germany agreed to send German vehicles to Eastern European countries to backfill the Warsaw Pact surplus they sent to Ukraine. The Germans would be getting new service/maintenance contract customers over the long haul... unless, of course, these are in turn sent to Ukraine, leaving the donor states truly empty and needing recapitalization to get new tanks.
The issue for German arms industry is that they're not in a place to support an expansion of tank production and arms sales to compete for major tank recapitalization. The German industry isn't enough to maintain Germany's own tank fleets, let alone replace everyone else's. If everyone were to give up their Leopards, Germany would both lose the current Leopard support contracts, and lose out on the replacement contracts. In the short term, the only credible immediate replacement for Europe would be Abrams tanks from stockpiles, and the Americans have already been sweeping the European air force recapitalization efforts with the F-35. If the Americans brought out Abrams from stockpiles not for Ukraine, but to back-fill the Europeans who give their Leopards to Ukraine, that would be a long-term loss of German contracts and defense-industry influence.
In this final reading, Scholz's reluctance to send tanks is a more French-style nativist industrial self-interest of 'buy (German) European.' The reason for Germany to not only not send it's own tanks, but not signal that it will approve other people sending their German tanks, is to ensure that German tanks remain on the books in European inventories. If the German tanks disappear in Ukraine, there's a very strong chance that many established German tank partners will not replace them with German kit, but with American surplus Abrams, which could be procured cheaper and faster from American refurbishment than entirely new German tanks at a time when Germany's own tank force needs recapitalization. And if the Americans get in the European tank market, then it will be very, very hard to get them out, as the Abrams themselves could be updated for who knows how long, and political dynamics of Ukraine have made American defense ties stronger than the pre-war appeals of Strategic Autonomy => Buy French/German European kit.
This view would also partly explain the reported German demand that the Americans send Abrams into Ukraine in exchange for the German permission for others to send Leopards. The point is less the Abrams effectiveness, but rather to keep the American refurbishment committed to supplying Ukraine, rather than displacing Leopards in European countries, giving the German arms industry and government time to try and preserve more of the European tank market market share.
Finally finally, there's also the black-comedy take that Scholz is actually a secretly brilliant and cold-blooded manipulator who wants to extend the war, seeking to both maximize the damage to Russia and use the European energy crisis to disrupt less stable/subsidized economies in Europe, increasing Germany's relevant power within the union. In this read, Scholz is the most ruthless pro-American prime minister in ages, deliberatly sabotaging the political viability of the German pro-Russia/anti-American movement, and otherwise trying to get the American more and even over-committed to helping Ukraine, so as to prevent the Americans from working too hard against China as Germany tries to use the opportunity to make favorable engagements with China to maximize the German position further.
This one is a bit silly, but it would explain a number of German slow-walkings, as a form of perpetuating the war and driving other actors, including the US, Poland, and Russia, to over-commit resources to German relative advantage.
Dean
1yr ago
In one year they;
Destroyed every possible reconciliation between Europe and Russia
Now now, give Russia some credit. Putin worked quite hard to discredit every alternative-seeking Europeans.
Became a next exporter of natural resources and the ones from who a lot of allies depend
That one was already in effect. US has long been a food exporter, and has been edging natural gas exports for some time.
They basically sent a fuck off to Germany, and the Germans not only are not complaining, but are applauding
I think this reaches a bit too far. After all, one of Biden's earlier moves in office in July 21 was to drop the opposition to the Nordstream 2 pipeline as a gift/favor/trade with Merkel, in favor of the German government making promises to take national level action, including sanctions and energy cutoffs, should Russia attack Ukraine.
"Should Russia attempt to use energy as a weapon or commit further aggressive acts against Ukraine, Germany will take action at the national level and press for effective measures at the European level, including sanctions, to limit Russian export capabilities to Europe in the energy sector, including gas, and/or in other economically relevant sectors," it said.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-us-strike-nord-stream-2-compromise-deal/a-58575935
In so much that the Germans are complaining, it's complaining that the German-American deal is being upheld when the Germans were betting it wouldn't need to be. While this is consistent with the last few decades of German national strategy regarding Russia, the very German parties that committed to the agreement a year and some change ago are still the parties of government now, plus the greens.
Now, you could make a case that this is an American flex in a different way- that the US made the concession to Germany already knowing that Putin was likely to escalate the conflict with Ukraine, thus making a concession they knew they wouldn't have to leave for long in order to secure future compliance by Germany with sanctions it had already agreed in principle to on the belief that it wouldn't have to follow through- but this is a bit of a reach, and denies the Germans the agency to have been paying attention to Ukraine.
They strongly limited the military of power of Russia with few money.
This is true, relatively.
China is slowing her growth, and they created a ring of allies in the Pacific
This is also true, though not recently, since the US has been treaty allies with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia for decades.
The cultural grip on the West is becoming stronger, and the US successfully fused Neoliberalism and Leftism in a zombie ideology who is, against all odds, successfully working
This is not so true, because it conflates a lot of things. The cultural grip of 'the West' doesn't exist, since the Europeans aren't the cultural center and two of the main pillars that have tried to claim more cultural/soft-power independence from the US- France and Germany- were discredited in their regions of desired influence over failures in advance/response to Ukraine.
That neoliberalism 'works' to some extent isn't exactly surprising, as the discreditation of it after the financial crisis was a puncture to infalibility, not to inherent tendency to failure.
The pro-Atlantist view have never been so strong.
This one is true, if only because the European Atlanticists are using this conflict as an opportunity to clean house and settle political scores for their domestic political needs. It's never been easier to defang an opposition party- or coalition rival- who was ambivalent about Russia than it is now.
Dean
6mo ago
WTF would you even attack a music festival?
They probably didn't know it was one. It was just there and easy to hit as a soft target.
The Hamas objective appears to have been to kill as many civilians as possible, to maximize the initial terror and perception of Israeli impotence. This, in turn, is likely for the strategic purpose of derailing Saudi-Israeli normalization, which has been in the works for some time. It may have also had a tertiary goal of trying to draw out an assessed increase of Palestinian support in various (particularly European) countries to demonstrate/lead to Israeli diplomatic isolation in the response.
For this purpose, a music festival meets the nominal purpose of the objective. It will probably turn out that the music festival was the single biggest source of deaths during the night, as you have a combination of large numbers of people, density, poorly defended, and isolated from response or natural strongpoints to rally a defense.
However, I doubt it was chosen per see. The time-day timing of the attack was almost certainly done for historical, not contemporary, purposes, while the rave was for a weekend because they were expecting to need time to sober up / get over the drug use before the weekend.
Further, the rave almost certainly wouldn't have been targetted deliberately had the multinational nature been known. The night without the raid was a disaster for Israel, but the prominent multinational victims- most notably the German girl- killed and worse internationalized the impact to a much broader audience in a way not-good for the likely intended 'we think this is bad, but you shouldn't retaliate too much' goal Hamas was likely going for.
How is demolishing mosques, spitting on Christians, urinating on dead Palestinians and bombing entire apartment buildings less gruesome?
Body gore prominence seems like an obvious one. Self-congratulatory spectacle presentation of the corpses is another. Israelis typically aren't doing their misdeed to chants of how great their god is over the bodies of the victims, and that's without their established roof-knock technique.
I would be curious which mosque demolishment or Christian spitting or urination incident you felt was more gruesome than, say, the Palestinians' self-advertised raid shelter results. One category is boorish, and the other might as well have come out of Daesh propaganda.
Dean
7mo ago
Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did (at least in the U.S.), when typically one would expect it to go the other way.
Did it? How does what we see now differ from bog-standard American political polarization?
I'd be the first to note that the Republicans have a more vocal wing that's openly Ukraine-skeptic, but that wing notably isn't even charge of the Republican party, let alone 'the right' as a whole. It's also incredibly typical of American political party tradition of the party out of power flirting with more radical peace movements right up to the point they come back into power. Cindy Sheehan was a darling of the Democratic party up to the point the Democrats were in charge of Iraq and Cindy kept protesting the war. Republicans are an isolation party until they're in charge of foreign policy.
From my perspective, the American right is much more skeptical about how the US goes about supporting Ukraine, than about whether to. When things get tied to, say, anti-corruption measures, people who aren't just using corruption as an argument-soldier tend to be more accepting. When actually challenged to explain how, say, conventional arms delivery meaningfully risk nuclear war despite an entire cold war to the contrary, that doesn't seem to be a particular close-held belief when put into context by even casual inquiry. The closest thing is a consistent concern is cost... which is both a framing narrative but also one that the government can easily undercut at will by simply explaining how it chooses to frame costs.
These are far more indicative of 'I don't trust how the other party handles things' skepticism than actual opposition. If a Republican had been at the helm at the start, we'd have Republicans being the pro-support party and the Democrats warning how Trump was recklessly going towards nuclear war, etc. etc. etc.
Factions of the American right far more organized, far more coherent, and far larger lack the ability to meaningfully dominate the American right's perspective on policies far closer to the party base, let alone Trump's likely coalition. I hear far more from the opponents of the American right about how the right is against Ukraine than I hear any sort of chorus from the right against it.
Dean
1yr ago
No, but the Dean who has worked with Americans before can be.
I don't have much to say- someone leaks a trove of American classified documents every decade or so, and has been since the Vietnam war, and even earlier. The modern size and scale is an expected and established consequence of the post-9-11 reforms to increase the flow of classified information within the US government. I suppose the evidence that the information continues to flow does put to rest Julian Assange's theory of government by conspiracy that could be paralyzed into incapacity by leaking. At this point, you don't give the Americans something you're not willing to have stolen and leaked in global media... but that's not actually that many things, really, and the benefits of trading intel with the Americans are often enough that things like this are the cost of doing business. Governments will pretend to be shocked, shocked they tell you, that the Americans have an intelligence aparatus that reports on them.
The Nybbler has the right of it for the most important things, and a lot of the leaked material is boring precisely because most intelligence is things that already are known from unclassified sources, but just with a stamp of authenticity / endorsement / credibility boosting. (Sometimes.) I'm not really surprised by anything I've heard come up, but then again I was admittedly surprised that anyone was surprised by the Snowden leaks, which was overwhelmingly in the 'well, obviously you could be doing that' to anyone with a computer-related degree.
What interests me more is the role that mental health seems to play in the alleged leaker. Once upon a time there were a shorthand for why people betrayed their countries that went by MICE- Money, Ideology, Conscience, Ego- with most motives/rationals for defections/leaking falling into one or the other. This one... 'Ego' might be closest, but that's usually about someone being incredibly Proud and retaliating for an offense given, or trying to prove themselves right and be validated. Here, the validation seems to have been of the sort of a lonely, likely isolated socially and politically, young adult just coming through the Pandemic and whose social hangout was an obscure discord server. We'll see what rational they provide, if any, but the fact that this was allegedly circulating for some time, rather than raced to the presses, and yet they were still in their position / in country, suggests their motivation wasn't based on expecting release.
A final point, and why I didn't raise this topic last week, is I'm not clear on how much misinformation has been slipped in, and not just by Russia but possibly others. Obvious casualty edits being obvious doesn't mean that other documents without obvious edits aren't edited- and as a trick to draw attention away from other things, that would be an obvious technique if agencies are involved. It's also quite possible that other sources of misinformation may come up- by the sounds of it the documents were circulating for some time, meaning there's a window where someone could make a call that a leak was likely iminent, but suppression impossible, but adding things into the intel-ball might have been possible to spotlight and use later. Who knows, we'll see, or probably won't.
Does that answer your interest?
Dean
1yr ago
I've made jokes in the past that Black Panther was a love-letter to American supremacy. For all it was supposed to be Strong African Country, the plot is basically that a small central-african country gets couped and counter-couped by the American government twice in about a week... as an accident. First as a rogue former agent, but second by a isolated agent cut off from the state. So great is the power of the CIA that it's agents on their own overthrow the most powerful African Country in the world, twice, before really knowing it exists, and so great is the power of America that Wakandan royalty defects from their civilizational mission of isolation and starts giving aid to that most needy African population there is... American citizens.
Black Panther (the film) always had its own unfortunate implications- steotyping 'authentic' africans as shoe-less tribals with animal motiffs, much use of the noble savage trope, but at it's heart it was also a personal story of a man coming to grips between the tension of the virtues and flaws of something he loves, but knows needs to change for the better. The set dressing is set dressing, because the core story is emotional conflict of ideology and overcoming flaws, and if that's enough to get people to give a pass to the Unfortuante Implications, who am I to say nay?
I don't get that feeling from Wakanda Forever.
As a story protagonist, Shuri works as a 'working through grief' story, but she doesn't actually address or grappel with any really character flaws. Shuri's flaw is that she is grieving, and her grieving is corrupting her otherwise unimpeachable nature, but this isn't an actual character flaw, or anything but the most blameless of guilts. Shuri feels bad for not being able to cure an incurable disease... not, say, refusing to be at her brother's side as a man on his deathbed, denying him a final request. Not for getting a bunch of American police killed in the midst of a coerced kidnapping attempt. Nor for anything else she did, but only for what she couldn't- and couldn't be expected to do- achieve.
This is closer to the suffering-Sue stereotype than an actual character challenge for her to overcome, and the same extends to Wakanda as a whole. T'Challa struggles with the fact that the father he loves is a hypocrite and his people need to change, that his nation's policy is fundamentally flawed, and that Wakanda isn't as good as it tells itself it is. T'Challa loves his people and his friends, but the 'we follow the throne, not you' dynamic is explicit and a major point of divergence where T'Challa, the warrior-king, has to give way to T'Challa, the hero, to save his people from themselves.
Shuri... does not address that her mother broke treaties and promises to share technology and resources, is returning to isolationism, and that the Wakandan foreign policy is being governed again by xenophobic distrust of the outside and secrecy that is threatening to turn the world against them. They can't tell the truth that they are in danger because... Wakanda is in danger? This would be an excellent context for Shuri to break the mold- to reach out for help, and going against her mother's well-meaning strength-in-isolationism- but no. The writing doesn't tie the hero's growth the nation's improvement, because there is no real growth here. There is a reversion to the unquestioned norm, and as an extension the state of Wakanda isn't changing either.
Wakanda, as a character, isn't exactly asserting itself either. No one expresses any opinions on the state of the monarchy's foreign policy, of the direction of the nation is going until it's an actual war council. The people of Wakanda are presented as generally conformist- not even the spark of rebelliousness that faced T'Challa in the challenge for the throne. The advisors are inconsequential early on, and literally dismissed later. Decisions are made for them more than by them as a people. Peasants are going by wooden boat while the royalty flies above them in tech-future spaceships. T'Challa is grieved by the people of Wakanda, but the people of Wakanda fleet their only real city after the first raid in modern memory which takes the queen. Wakanda is no longer an unquestioned superpower, the fundamentals of their assumed superiority dashed by an open an unequivicable defeat on their own home soil and then the deaths of many in a losing battle their princess took them to... but no one has any issues of the new losses, because Princess Shuri didn't let her grief drive revenge?
There are a lot of interesting things you could do here from a writing point. Wakanda is implicitly an incredibly stratified society. It's gone through a seminal moment of it's unquestioned supremacy not only being questioned, but overturned. They lost the battles, they lost their queen, and they've just lost the royal dynasty. It's isolated, and keeping the secrets that have murdered innocent citizens of other countries. You can make interesting stories with this.
But they won't, since that wasn't the goal here, and won't be the goal when the superhero teamup needs to happen.
...did you forget a negative and mean to say 'if Trump wins'?
A significant part of the drama of the last decade of American politics centers around the modern Democratic party's collusion with various state and non-state actors to perpetrate a series of conspiracies and smear campaigns to a degree not seen in political generations for the purpose of making Trump lose no matter what. Russia-gate wasn't simply an election-year smear, but a sustained multi-year conspiracy that was on national television so often that the Democratic party convinced a plurality of itself that it was true. Well-established precedents in various legal subjects were tossed or ignored in the name of lawfare against policies, nullification theory was directly resurrected in the name of resistance, and entirely new and novel legal theories were embraced in the name of prosecution and attempted disqualification. There are a whole host of tactics and escalations that have been unleashed on Trump that are not even close to matched when he was in a position of actual power.
If Trump is destroyed, the message is not clear or firmly set that 'heads I win tails you lose' election will result in the person doing it's total annihilation, because the Democratic coalition has been doing that for most of the last decade would not have been annihilated. Trump's defeat would be a validation, not a discreditation, to that style of politics.
Dean
2mo ago
The identitarian wing most relevant here isn't the Arab-American community, but the faction within the democrats which tries to mantle the Arab-American community more broadly in the Progressive-Democratic spaces- specifically The Squad members Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American (per her wiki) who's power center is in Michigan, and who is closely associated with Representative Ilhan Omar, who is from Minnesotta as a Somali-American. Both women are openly muslim part of their taglines (the first two muslim women to serve in the US Congress), and both align/slot themselves as the Arab-American representatives in the Democratic progressive stack.
I wouldn't call this a power play per see- there is plenty of genuine dismay at the war- but it's less anti-war and more anti-side-Biden-supports. And the purpose is not to actually harm Biden- there is no meaningful harm from 'uncommitted' voters in a primary he wins- but rather as a warning shot to bolster political leverage. The implicit (and, by proxies, explicit) threat is that if Biden doesn't compromise to them and work to compel the Israelis to end the conflict, then they won't support him in the election against Trump. In effect, it's attempting to coerce a bribe for support. This flows from the principle that their support is needed for Biden to get the votes to win, and also that Biden meeting their terms won't lose him more votes in the process.
The issue for Biden is, of course, that where the votes are will matter. It's not a national-level issue, it's an issue of what matters in the electoral swing states. Michigan is one of those swing states- which increases the viability of the threat- but Minnesota is not- decreasing the national level argument.
As for whether Gaza will be a live issue by the time of the summer election season- probably not. I'd argue it's not even a live national issue now- it's a Democratic internal issue, and one that is in the process of being smothered by party-institutional power and connections. While things still come up about it- like this article wave related to a largely irrelevant pro forma primary- the institutional wing has largely asserted itself over the Squad-wing, both because of who runs the party (Biden's wing, where Biden is very pro-Israel) and in the name of not driving off the Jewish wing (which includes some key party influencers who were shook hard by progressive-wing acceptance/support for Hamas after Oct 7).
In culture war-ish political shifts from Eastern Europe, Poland's opposition looks to have overcome the PIS, meaning that the sometimes notorious Euro-skeptic right-wing government will likely be replaced by a more EU-phile coalition.
While the PIS won the most votes of any single party, with around 36.6% of the vote, this was less than the last election's 43.6%, and there seems to be a lack of coalition partners to reach the 50%. This was a fatal slide, which while having many contributing factors followed a major scandal in which corruption in selling Visas greatly undermined one of the PIS's key policy points- immigration- while validating accusations of corruption. While there will be some pro-forma opportunities for PIS to try and form a government, in practice leaves the likely next government to be an opposition-left coalition, which will likely be led by former prime minister (and former European Council president) Donald Tusk, who leadership in Poland was what paved the road for PIS to rise to power about 8 years ago.
Such a result will likely be greeted as a relief and good news for the European Union elites, and especially for Germany and Merkel, who Tusk was a reliable partner for. Tusk is about as much a Eurocrat as one can have, and has long been a leading voice in European circles shaping anti-PIS narratives as he tried to get back into Polish politics in the name of countering democratic-backsliding.
With a EU-phile government in Warsaw, this means some policies are likely to change. However, the nature of changes are likely to fall short of a 'the opposite of anything PIS did,' due to dynamics of PIS both doing some genuinely popular things which required 50-stalins criticisms, and for the nature of changing paradigms. Some of the dynamics that led to PIS criticism- such as the nationalization of hyper-majority German-owned Polish majority- aren't as likely to be reversed and re-sold once to the same companies once a shakey three-party coalition mostly united by being anti-PIS. Some things will be reversed, some will be kept, and some things will just be paralyzed due to coalition politics. That said, the European power centers- especially Brussels and Germany- can likely expect a more compliant Polish government for the next few years while Germany and France make a major push for power centralization in exchange for EU enlargement.
Various policy changes to look for movements on might include-
EU-centralization: This is one area where EU policy changes may see or enable significant shifts. One of the PIS's claims to notoriety was its functional political partnership with Hungary to block EU-level efforts to punish/exclude/potentially even suspend voting rights of recaltrant states. While condemned as part of anti-democratic badness, this had a major functional effect of blocking attempts at EU centralization that could sideline and selectively punish bad, or just unpopular, states. Tusk, as a EUrocrat, is almost certainly to step back from watering down issues targeting Hungary, but whether this will translate into a broader centralization momentum is less clear. The Germans and French have shifted from a current-EU-model of centralization (where individual states would be able to punished and lose veto rights- something Tusk might have gone along with) to now proposing a multi-speed-Europe model in exchange for expansion, which has far more serious implications, and which Tusk has opposed in the past (for potential reasons to broad for here).
Judiciary: This will likely be the quickest / easiest reversal, to EU applomb. The Polish judiciary followed a judges-select-the-next-judges, not appointment by the elected party akin to the German or US, and attempts to change that was strongly condemned by the EU (for whom the Polish Judiciary was seen as reliably deferential, despite corrupt origins from the post-communist transition). PIS paid regular political costs, and Tusk will drop that at the first chance while likely trying to prune if not purge the influence of PIS-associated judges (which will not be subject to significant EU-level criticsm)
LGBTQ+WE: This is one where the government line will likely align with the EU consensus of embracing the rhetoric and enabling/encouraging advocacy groups to set up social networks in Poland that were previously resisted. While over action will likely be less than full-throated supported, this was a PIS culture war point that the anti-PIS coalition will likely reverse for internal and external support reasons, though it will easily be a function that plays more to elite interests and foreign legitimization from EU allies than widespread domestic support.
Ukraine: There's very likely to be little substantive change on this. The biggest change is likely to be if there's a change in the distribution of arms vs other aid, which will reflect the military-industrial and rearmament policy more than a desire to aid Ukraine itself. While PIS did have election-rheotric and some disputes with Ukraine, I wouldn't expect the new coalition to substantially different on the conflict points (no Ukraine food dumping on politically significant farmers), and some of the criticisms of PIS on the Ukraine front came as much from a 50-Stalins direction as anything else.
Rearmament: Since Ukraine started, the PIS went on a major armament buying spree to modernize and bulk up the Polish military. Part of this was to free up older platforms to pass on to Ukrainians, while others were about establishing Poland as a military leader in Europe. Pre-election criticism focused on cost, and so reigning in would be natural (which could in turn mean less direct arms transfers in the future). The real interest will be what is cancelled versus what is changed, as various EU-power centers were more opposed that Poland was buying from outside the EU- especially US and US-alllied suppliers- rather than rearming itself. This will likely be a more case-by-case basis as PIS already had the ability to start some contracts that may have clauses making it less feasible to back out and transfer. It would be a major surprise, and reversal, if new-Poland renenges on the Korea tank contracts and goes for a German option.
Military-Industrial Policy: An outset of the Ukraine and Rearmament policies, PIS was establishing relationships and efforts to make Poland an autonomous arms center who could compete with French and German armament industries both inside the EU market and without. This had a dynamic of countering the EU strategic autonomy efforts (which are largely synonymous with French and German led arms projects), so there may be EU-advocated efforts to reign in the potential competition as a part of the rearmament restraint and Ukraine aid reallocation. Look for if South Korea's tank deal is radically restructured, as that was not only a rearmament program but also a lead-in to joint R&D for Polish military production capacity.
Media: One of PIS's condemned policies was its functional de-Germanification of Polish media. During the post-Cold War period and the early 2000s, part of Germany state-encouraged economic policy was the expansion of German economic interests, especially media interests, in the post-Soviet east. This led to a major centralization of Polish media by German corporations, who weren't adverse to leveraging corporate influence for political influence and themes, including shaping editorial lines on Polish politics. Tusk was a beneficiary of this as part of his German political alliances, given the nature of German government-corporate media relations which can be characterized at times as 'cozy,' but when the PIS took power they compelled foreign-owned media concentrations to sell, which is how the PIS gained outsized media influence that the opposition decried as state propaganda. Despite PIS now losing hold of that, I suspect that there will be no explicit German re-sell/reversal: rather, the Polish media landscape will likely be re-coopted by the new ruling coalition, just with different political interests in charge, or the new government will attempt to compel re-sell, but with an eye for more pro-EU rather than German-specific interests, to try and re-establish a dominant pro-EU media sphere but do so in a way a future-PIS government can't reverse as easily.
Immigration: This is likely to be one area where PIS broke the EU-phile paradigm, and Tusk and the anti-PIS quietly maintain continuity as a whole. While Tusk was a committed EU-phile and ally of Merkel, PIS made extremely good political hay from its anti-immigration stance, even getting the grudging German acquiesence when it was used in the 2021 Belarusian-instigated refugee crisis, where PIS preventing migrants from requesting asylum served as one of the only shields preventing an otherwise easy movement from Belarus-thru-Poland-to-Germany during the German government formation process. Given the EU-wide changes to immigration, and especially Germany's, while Tusk may entertain some token-level redistribution support, this will be a topic they step very gingerly around, not least because letting in immigrants corruptly was a key point of what brought PIS down, and could easily do them in again in turn.
There's more to be guessed at, of course, and I don't claim any special insight, but overall I'd expect by next year Poland-EU relationships to be on a fundamentally different tenor, but not at all what they were before PIS took control. Expect a lot of whom and who sort of 'it was really bad when PIS did it, not so much an issue now' tenor as conflicts occur, but one where Tusk and his EU allies try to make longer-term systemic efforts to prevent PIS from returning and cement a pro-EU coalition for as long as possible, but doing so knowing there's very shakey footing that could see them quickly fall and a PIS-coalition return.
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