Dean
27d ago
I don't have anything approaching a retort, just a smile and appreciation.
Yes, I do value the trilogy structure and design more than the worldbuilding (in part because worldbuilding is easy to find, but good series are hard). I find that good story structure is indicative of good writing more than a good character dynamic, but that's because I've seen far too many movies or shows with an interesting premise fall apart for lack of planning after winging it. Good character writing can exist regardless, but good narrative design will elevate. (I will stand by that Mordin's Tuchanka arc was one of the best moments of the series, as it was simultaneously against part of his theme in ME2 but also a natural progression of his obvious guilt, and a natural integration into how to recruit allies into the war.)
I also agree that ME2 could have absolutely evaded the pitfalls ME1 set up for lack of planning. I personally view them as one and the same and that the onus is on ME1 to write for the sake of the sequel if it was designed as a trilogy to start, but the nature of that is that nothing required tethering the sequels to a trilogy character arc. Rather, a personal favorite proposal I once read was one that every ME game in the trilogy have a separate focus character: Commander Shepard in ME1 as the 'public face' of Humanity for what it does as a galactic hero, but then PC!Jacob Taylor could have been the ME2 player character for a 'what Humanity is in the dark' thematic contrast, while not!Vega in ME3 could have been the Rising War Hero for the Reaper War. Each player character an independent character with reflections observing differences rather than 'hey, remember me Shepard?!' cameos, and in each game the previous player character is their own character characterized by the key decisions of the previous game.
I don't disagree with your criticisms of Andromeda on a lore-technical level, but I just smile and wave vaguely to the deliberately campiness of what was, at heart, a sort of first contact story. When comedy is a deliberate goal, I can overlook a lot of functional-efficiency things, and I suppose I just accept that as part of the buy-in.
(If I wanted to pick at realism, the role of Spectre as a shooting-game protagonist also doesn't make sense as presented in the trilogy. Council Space doesn't need it when legal violence is so readily available, and non-Council space doesn't respect it. Spectre status Soldiers wouldn't be useful in a setting where legally-sanctioned blackops are everywhere and legal violence is so common- the real benefitors of Spectre status would be a Volus tax-accountant who can use the status to cut through bureaucratic red tape to unroot financial crimes threatening the galactic economy, and using that Spectre status to keep a band of mercenaries as his muscle.)
(Give me biotic god pencile pusher, doom of tax evaders and counterfeit e-zero smugglers!)
Given that Ukrainian opinions on European Union affiliation were a matter of public record, it certainly would be a far reach to deny that the EU was popular for the Ukrainians.
Just as the political controversy of Yanukovych granting himself the right to shoot protestors after public Russian pressure was also a well-apparent fact at the time. Just a mite consequential, when your own government is composed of people backed by those protestors.
But feel free to fluff up the American importance in things that weren't really about the Americans. I understand they feel insecure these days, and it makes both them and their haters feel better if they're the hyperagents in a Ukrainian political movement literally named after the Euro.
Dean
27d ago
I commend you for recognizing a rare piece of insight that many don't realize. Both the premise that a leash can be tugged from both ends, and that military aid is as much a means to regulate as to enable violence.
An example of almost certainly-not-sanctioned Ukrainian resistance to Russia was the Nordstream pipeline explosion, which on further investigation was very likely- and plausibly- a Ukrainian operation of considerably sparse means of not much more than a rental boat, some divers, and far-from-impossible to procure explosions. As a result, the entire German economic strategy was derailed as the strategic premise of Nordstream blew apart, every resistance group around the world gained a sudden interest in scuba certification, and Russia lost its monopoly on under-seas infrastructure violence that it had been trying to leverage until then. Every power in the region had reason enough to cover it and pay it no further mind, not least because the people who would have wanted to take issue with Ukraine for doing so couldn't stop it from happening again, and there ceased to be an economic case for breaking with NATO in favor of Russia when any of the people between Germany and Russia could blow up the business case of Russian energy.
Giant geopolitical and global economic implications, teensy little boat. And not something particularly seen sense, despite impressively deep Ukrainian special forces intrusions to strike deep within Russia.
Dean
27d ago
I'll just add that the media bouncing has also shifted over time. In the first six months of the war, the pro-peace-via-concession element was decisively in the European court, particularly Germany before the Nord Stream pipeline explosion scuttled attempts to keep the Russian gas flowing. In the last six months of the war, as the US aid holdup began, the more US-based conession voices have increased, but more belicose support from the European powers has increased due to evolving government perspectives on what Russia would do with its Cold War over-build if a peace were to emerge. At this point, the re-activated Russian stockpiles have themselves become a national security threat, as the current attrition rate has made them a use-them-or-lose-them asset for the Russians who can't credibly modernize them after a war, but could continue to use them for a near-term war if Ukraine were to capitulate shortly.
I'd go as far as to wager that even if Trump were to try and pressure Ukraine to make a deal, the Europeans would continue to back the Ukrainians and maintain the conflict, if only to give their own arms industries more time to mobilize and attrit more of the Russian stockpile. The US isn't the only party with an interest in depleting the Russian armored corps, and the strategic logic takes a life of its own with other EU-sovereignist interests are considered.
Dean
27d ago
And he tried exercising it to find more amicable solutions to the problem. That's what the Minsk Accords were.
The Minsk Accords were many things- including the functional erosion of national sovereignty by legislating an external power's veto by proxy- but an amicable solution they were not.
Why was the west encouraging Ukraine behind the scenes to give Russia a run around, while the west poured arms into the country to bolster its strength so the government could betray the terms of their agreement?
Why wouldn't the west encourage Ukraine not to submit to unreasonable Russian demands that the Russians knew were unreasonable and would not be accepted, while bolstering the ability to resist the military coercion that pushed the demands in the first place?
The demands were unreasonable, and were made at the end of a military intervention. Europeans, as with many other cultures, tend not to support those things against their neighbors lest it be applied to them.
Dean
3d ago
The unmeasurable concept of popularity is creating a self-referential loop here, which is what avoids the original question. Putin is as popular as he is because he runs personality cult -> Putin runs a personality cult because he was popular -> the propaganda of the personality cult is what creates / proves his popularity. It's not an answer to the earlier question of how popular Putin actually is independent of the suppression state in which anti-popularity factors are squashed.
(One insight would be the result of the Wagner Mutiny. No one joined in on the mutiny against Putin... but there was no mass popular uprising in his favor either. There was no equivalent to, say, Erdogan flooding the streets with his supporters during the failed Turkish coup.)
On the other hand, we could compare Putin's popularity with Russians outside the scope (and reach) of his personality cult. This is primarily Russians abroad, but they do exist as a counter-example of Russians, and Putin is not, shall we say, particularly popular amongst those who are not imbibing on the Russian state-influenced media apparatus. The tendency to murder high-profile dissidents does tend to keep people from wanting to be high-profile, but that's a suppression of dissent, not a popularity, unless the undefined standard of popularity is claiming that people keeping their heads down are actually a sign of popular support.
And it's not like there was much of a substantial alternative to him in particular. His biggest opponent was Primakov, another ex-KGB goon, not exactly someone to expect kindness to dissidents from.
Putin and his backers actively worked/conspired to undercut all substantial alternatives to them in general and him in particular. It's been one of his more consistent strategies over the decades, both domestically and externally.
This is not surprising on the Russian political front- the Security Services were the most capable and coherent survivors of the Cold War and had the best means of coordinating formally and informally for mutual benefit and a common understanding of a better vision that a critical mass could get behind- but this is and was a political consequence of policy decisions, not an inevitability or even a testament to popularity.
It turns out that a one-party state with no meaningful civil society does not have coherent political party groups to fall back on if the uni-party collapses.
Dean
19d ago
It wouldn't be an imposition to them, and in fact they'd probably be thrilled to let you know if they had anything else. Researcher groups like that often love when their research is noticed, and policy-support research in particular loves to know when research they provided can change an opinion. You questions / testimony and reasoning why (concern of male disposability) and what assauged your concern (awareness of Ukrainian views on the subject) would be the sort of thing that might tailor future questions and such.
Dean
20d ago
I've no doubt that people say that, but there's probably a considerable amount of category confusion (do Mujahideen trading Stingers with other Mujahideen count as trading away Stingers?) and self-serving narrative biases (various interests in downplaying the relevance of US military aid support in favor of other actors/other types of aid/denying US significance) and the point that there were only so many (the CIA reportedly only gave around 1000 total), and that once they did their primary role- making the Soviets cautious rather than aggressive with their use of gunships- there wasn't much use for them.
Some weapon systems are more about shifting the opponent's behavior rather than being prevalent. Stingers were an example of that.
I'll disagree, and maintain my criticism of your previous post.
On one level, the charge of hyperagency / hypoagency framework isn't a strawman as I'm not saying it's the argument being made, it's what I am characterizing the argument's form as in a meta-contextual description. And I made this point- and stand by it- because the characterization of reasonings for why Ukraine would continue fighting was because Borris Johnson screamed at them- a pejorative framing with connotations of aggression by the screamer and victimhood/submission by the target who acquiesces to it in an imposition of will- rather than multiple extremely more relevant factors. Like, say, Borris Johnson communicating the intend of the UK government to continue supporting Ukraine, and thus allowing the Ukrainians to make a more informed choice as to whether continuing to fight or submitting to the current terms offered by the Russians was better.
When the only relevant factor provided for a party's decision making is another party's verbal harassment, this is an agency framework that reserves true agency to the person who is the true decision maker, and subordinates agency of the other. Were the other relevant factors included and a less pejorative framing used, then the Ukrainians would have been presented as making a choice: the Ukrainians could consider what the Russians demanded (conditions following an unprovoked invasion that increasing risk of a follow on invasions with even worse terms should Russia choose to fight a fourth continuation war to complete the cassus belli war goals that this negotiation did not provide them), versus prospects of fighting on with external support. That would be a choice, even if someone disagrees that it was the better choice. But submitting to screaming is not a choice- it is an imposition of someone else's will.
Similarly, and equally relevant, is the movement of the onus of negotiation failure to the US and UK rather than Russia. The US and UK did not move to put the Ukrainians in a position where war seemed the better than Russian terms- the Russians did, multiple times. The Russians did so by launching an unprovoked invasion on false pretenses (the false-flag attempts of Ukrainian provocations that were leaked before they even occured, the false narratives on the Ukrainian suppression of the Russian-speaking minorities), the Russians also did so by conducting massacres like the Bucha massacre that demonstrated how they would treat the Ukrainians from a position of occupation, and the Russians did so by demanding terms that would directly facilitate the future occupation of Ukraine via demands that would cripple Ukraine's ability to resist occupation in exchange for a cease fire that did not meet Russia's stated or underlying goals when it initiated this war. Additionally, the Russians put Ukraine in this position because the current Ukraine War is no less than the third Russian intervention in Ukraine in less than a decade, and each one of those was a Russian choice.
Attributing the geopolitical context the Ukrainians found themselves in to the US and UK, rather than the Russians, is another form of the hyperagency/hypoagency paradigm that subordinates Russian agency- and thus responsibility for the situation- to the Americans and Brits. They are not responding to Russian agency to launch a second continuation war into Ukraine- rather, the Russian position and actions are treated as forces of natures that simply have to be dealt with pragmatically, and the US/UK actions are imposing an immoral choice on the Ukrainians instead. This is aligned with the previous choice of pejorative- Borris screaming- as the determinative factor, and that framework's issues with hyper- and hypo-agency.
Even framing the negotiations as 'the US and UK made war seem the best of all possible worlds' is a negation of the other parties agencies. The recent Afghan war quite nicely demonstrated that the US aid can't make people who don't want to fight actually fight- and thus it's not the agent as to why Ukrainians formed in the streets of Kyiv to make molotov cocktails in mass in the opening month rather than Ukrainians protesting against fighting the Russians like Putin thought would happen. Nor can the Americans dictate the other side of the table, the harms Russia could do in war. No one in the region is unfamiliar with what Grozny refers to, and the Russian treatment of temporarily occupied areas was already entering awareness. All the Americans could do is offer military support for the Ukrainians to fight if they already wanted to, they couldn't dictate the cost-perception of the Ukrainians continuing to fight.
But the Russians could- and did- both by the content of their negotiations and the conduct of their forces. I made a point a few years ago- I believe on the old site- that Bucha was a disaster for the Russians whose cost was nowhere near worth whatever benefit was perceived at the time, and this is why. Bucha was a demonstration of what the Russians were willing to do if in a position of military superiority, and Russian terms were to dismantle Ukraine's ability to resist a future incursion where it could be done again. The US did not put Ukraine in a position where future Buchas were an easily foreseeable consequence of avoiding the war at hand: Russia did. That Russia might continue to further areas by continuing this war did not change that Russia's alternatives were to set conditions for Russia to claim more more easily going forward. And the perception that Russia might fight a third continuation war in Ukraine, and thus diminishing the value of peace talks in this war that would make a fourth Russian intervention even easier, is solely a result of Russia's repeated choices.
The Nuland call is not inconsequential since it's evidence that EU should operate on its own and not just rely on the US, surely an important message to this day,
True, but perhaps not in the way many think.
Ironically, one of the back-channel complaints from the US in that time was a frustration with the Germans in particular for doing so much to set conditions for Euromaidan, but then dropping the ball and refusing to take any leadership role in negotiations on behalf of Europe despite being one of the key backers of the foundational infrastructure of Euromaidan politics (as in, the EU-funded networks that the US was also supporting). US policy in Ukraine before Euromaidan was basically supporting the European Union's association and social movement efforts, and the key driver and funder of that was the Germans, who had invested heavily in the Ukrainian media space and elsewhere in the decades leading up to it. For the Germans Ukraine was an economic interest and part of their post-Soviet soviet space influence links, and the US was supporting the European desire because why not.
There was a dynamic of that the US was frustrated not because the Europeans wouldn't align with the US, but that there wasn't a coherent European position for the US to align itself with, due to the Germans dropping their previous lead and distancing themselves from the Euromaidan architecture they'd set up. Between the German whip lash and the lack of European consensus, Nuland took steps in a relative void where the Germans had turned self-sabotaging and the Russians were attempting various spoiler efforts to keep the Ukrainians from associating with the EU.
Had the EU operated on its own- which is to say, had the EU actually operated on a consistent position and been willing to stand by its previous decade of messaging- Nuland would likely have been known as little more than a European backer.
Did you even read the content of the article?
Yup. And I even noticed it wasn't by the American State Department, whose own words you were claiming to link to, and then tried to defend not referring to in favor of a detractor's take before taking issue for positions not being accurately reflected.
The article was less interesting than the irony, and not particularly relevant to the post the citation was meant to refute.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that one went right over your head...
A common mistake you make, I'm sure.
Lol. Okay.
Okay indeed.
Now, would you like to drop further points to a more defensible motte, or just try one more time for a last word? There aren't many more positions left for you to abandon in the face of challenge, but I doubt I'll see more than a downvote.
Don't know why you're trying make a mess of history on the matter. Even the regime change wing of the State Department admits of their activities in Russia's backyard and the very thing I'm calling it out for.
I'm not sure why you believe Global Research .ca, an anti-globalization conspiracy website, represents the regime change wing of the State Department, but this would be both an incorrect citation and not a rebuttal to the post on hyper and hypo agency.
And as such, Russia's response is reasonable in turn to US' operations in their sphere of influence.
Similarly, you seem to have missed that point that he was making fun of the argument structure, and not actually making a position that your argeement with would advance your position.
Doesn't make for strange bedfellows when you understand the Minsk Accords mandated a similar relationship to Ukraine that the US imposed on Japan in the postwar period,
Which was not an amicable solution to negotiations, but a compulsory surrender punctuated by more than one nuclear weapon after years of unrestricted submarine warfare against an island that needed to import resources and firebombing of cities made of wood and paper... after the receiving country had launched a series of unprovoked invasions and a litany of warcrimes across the region.
The Minsk Accords were, again, many things, but the Pacific Campaign of WW2 they were not.
which remains today.
Alas, the Japanese-American alliance today does not remain an unconditional military occupation with overt censorship by the occupying authority.
Also, the Russians aren't interested in dismantling a warmongering oligarchy as much as installing one.
Dean
27d ago
I'd expect a lot of people don't want to fight regardless of conscription.
If you're asking if conscription as a policy indicates a lack of public support for a war, not really. No major war as a share of national population has been fought on a volunteer-only recruitment basis. At the same time, there have been many wars where support for continuing the war has remained high even as conscription numbers ran high.
Dean
27d ago
Is your position that Ukraine conscripts are 60% free and 40% slaves?
If not, what percent do you think are the slave-analogs here? 30%? 15%
Dean
27d ago
...?
By contrast, the power of Borris Johnson to coerce, compel, bewitch, or otherwise overturn the true desires of the Ukrainian political establishment was...?
Sure, it's not trivial to disentangle. I've seen notions aired to the point that if only true free speech/press was reestablished for a year and then fair elections held then Putinism would stand no chance, and somebody like Navalny could win. This seems extremely naive and out-of-touch to me, I'm sure that Putin (or a better anti-Western demagogue) would win.
And again, I'd disagree with your conclusion and your framing. Fortunately the naive position is not my position, and on a historical point Putin's ascent did not base itself on anti-Western demogoguery, which was not particularly potent at the time, but far more of an anti-Russian-internal-factors. While the early 2000s Russian political moment was ending the chaos of the 90s, that chaos was primarily internal in nature and origin (corruption, oligarchic abuse, failures of governance), and Putin didn't run on any particularly anti-Western tenor. Anti-western political themes began in earnest in the later 2000s, well after Putin's ascent, consolidation, and transition to killing dissidents who'd threaten popularity.
Of course there are obvious selection effects too. Also, when the invasion began and hundreds of thousands of Russians most willing to flee did so, they found no particularly warm welcome anywhere they tried to go. Most of them have since returned, and even they grudgingly agree that there is something to the Russophobia that state propaganda doesn't shut up about, having personally experienced it.
You, uh, should probably re-check your migration data, because your impression is very likely to be a propaganda selection effect.
While unbiased sources are certainly hard to find, reporting from last year was generally around the 15% return rate. Even it the return rate was double that, it'd still be very far from most. While there is certainly a national interest / Russian propaganda narrative to create a consensus perception that Russians are returning in mass, to date this has been propaganda to normalize and encourage mass returns, not actually reflective of mass returns. The Russians are still several hundred million in the hole.
I meant before he consolidated power.
So did I. A significant part of Putin's consolidation of power was via his allies- which almost certainly included parts of the Intelligence apparatus if not also organized crime- going after rivals.
The thing is, after the collapse and botched reforms, Western-oriented political forces in Russia have been dead in the water, and the real question was what flavor of dictatorship would take over. The second most likely one was the Communist party back in power.
I disagree with your premise because where you start the look for alternatives is arbitrary.
Since we're discussing historical possibility, this is where it's simple to point out that there was nothing inevitable of the botched reforms and failure of Western-oriented political forces in Russia. We have multiple counter-examples of other Soviet economic and political systems implementing successful reforms and adopting pro-Western orientation. That the Russians did not is a result of a number of policy decisions- some bad decisions of incompetence/corruption, but also some deliberate ones. What these choices resulted in misses the point that these were choices in and of themselves, with alternative choices with alternative outcomes available.
To pick just one field with substantial impacts to Putin's claim to popularity: a significant part of Putin's early-2000s popularity was reigning in the Oligarchs, but the Oligarchs themselves only were able to arise and have the impact they did due to how the Russians chose to handle the de-Sovietization of the economy and management of the state-owned enterprises. Other Soviet-block countries mitigated / avoided the oligarchic problems due to how they approached it as a legal/policy question.
Dean
5d ago
Well, the point is that Russia hasn't had any other context basically throughout the entire thousand years it existed,
Sure it has. It had so in living memory, even. The rise of the Putin personality cult and the decision to murder dissidents abroad was a policy decision, not a pre-existing or unavoidable fact of nature.
Dean
5d ago
I mean, a lack of meaningful reliable information doesn't help theory making in a society where it's literally against the law to impugn the good reputation of certain institutions.
What, specifically is Putin's popularity absent the cultural context where various public criticisms can lead one to defenestrate themselves?
Dean
27d ago
And where would you expect to see the other side that vested western interests have an interest in keeping suppressed? CNN? Fox? MSNBC?
Non-American or European media, to start. Al Jazeera has good production value if you're insistent on English language, but if you're willing to indulge in machine translation then there are entire other continents of geopolitical fans with viewpoints- and memories- outside of anglosphere cultural frameworks.
However, your citation wasn't to have someone on the other side of vested western interests- your citation was on a claim of what the vested western interests were themselves supposed to be admitting. Citing someone accusing them of stuff is not them admitting to... well, you were very vague and generic, to a degree it's not clear what was supposedly being confessed to (or not).
Which, admittedly, was probably the rhetorical technique intended, it was just an odd appeal to authority to neither cite the authority, or anyone with special insight into the authority's position, but then to immediately appeal to an outsider with no authority when the lack of authority was noted.
How about the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy? Or is he just a senile old man at this point?
Chomsky was a senile old man at heart decades ago, given that he's been an anti-american tribalist for longer than you've likely been alive with no particular moral creed to peg consistency to otherwise, and not a particularly impressive one unless you're awed by sophistry. If you think he's the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy, you have a very shuttered view of the world of American critics.
If you want intellectual heft, try the French foreign policy establishment and its advocates. Defiantly not-American enough not to buy into Anglophone tropes by default, but familiar enough with both western cultural contexts and a cultural inclination towards argument structure to be delightfully relevant, and with significant national patronage in order to define themselves against the US in their attempts to align Europe to their interests.
You're the one who obliged with the logic of that statement. Makes it difficult to argue against if you stand with it.
I suspect the difficulty is that you don't seem to recognize- or at least acknowledge- a satirical tone of non-agreement. Neither he nor I were standing with the position, and your continuing insistence that they were (and your word choice in the process) is suggestive that part of the reason why may be that English isn't your first language.
Seems like you're engaging in some pretty strenuous intellectual acrobatics to preserve a conclusion you wouldn't accept if another actor adopted a similar justification.
I accept your concession of your limited perception with good cheer.
Sure, you made a silly historical metaphor while trying to ignore the inconvenient parts that ruin it as a simile. History's hard. Fortunately, this is the motte, and asinine positions are for being flanked, spanked, and penetrated as a result.
Judged by the standards of moral idealism, maybe both Russia and the US fall short. Judged by the standards of the world's only superpower, Russia isn't doing anything the US wouldn't approve of in it's own defense.
Modern Russia is certainly doing things the modern US wouldn't approve of in its own defense, not least of which is invading adjacent countries in territorial expansionism on irredentalist grounds based in the past. American warmongers of the current generation, as everyone has familair examples of, invade far-away countries on ideological grounds driven far more by humanitarian considerations/rationals in the present.
Even if you wanted to appeal to the 1800s Americas, back when it was run by racist imperialist most Americans would be appalled by and oppose today if a mirror-US magically appeared, the expansionist era American imperialists didn't rely on claims historical conquest to justify their conquests. They just resorted to the sort of lovably mockable jingoism and manifest destiny that's parodied, and no one believes or particularly claims that the Mexican-American war was a defensive war.
The fact that you tried appeal to a war the better of a century ago- to a war that was declared against rather than by the US by the perpetrators rather than defendent of territorial aggression- to force some kind of equivalence between the modern US-Japan relationship and the ongoing attempt to subjugate Ukraine kind of shows you missed the mark on historical metaphors. The US-Japan relationship of 2020 isn't the relationship of 1950, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not aiming to establish a relationship of 2020 US-Japan.
Now, if you argument is instead that Japan is analogous to Russia, and that Russia should be nuked and forced into unconditional surrender in order to be occupied and forcibly reconstructed as Japan was, that might be an interesting historical parallel to make...
You want me to be more introspective, check your own actions at the door first.
I'd rather you devise a competent metaphor than be introspective. Naval gazing and whataboutism is easy, but not particularly impressive. Competence is hard.
Alas, the Japanese-American alliance today does not remain an unconditional military occupation with overt censorship by the occupying authority.
Which wasn't the point I was making. If you think history is important, I encourage you to read it. If not, then that tells me everything I need to understand your position.
I will submit that you likely think you are far more informed than you are, but that you also don't care when you make a bad historical claim with more relevant differences than similarities.
If you care to disagree with my position on historical differences mattering... let's hear it!
Dean
27d ago
NATO wouldn't do nothing in that scenario - given that the Baltics are members, an abrogation by the US of their mutual defense obligation to fellow members pretty catastrophically undermines their credibility with allies and vassals the world over.
Okay, but this doesn't actually say it's not plausible. There is a non-trivial number of Americans who don't want the US to have mutual defense obligations or vassals the world over, and their preferred candidate is one precisely lothed, and reciprocates the feeling, with the Europeans. That candidate- arguably the leading candidate- took a position that he would 'encourage' Russia to attack countries not meeting defense spending cutlines- a line that applied to a majority of NATO countries.
While I would be the first to note that Trump's criteria specifically would not ignore an attack on the Baltic states, and I doubt reading his characteristic hyperbole is worth that much, this is not a man who would particularly care about the credibility he has with allies he has characterized as parasites.
This is without noting that multiple NATO governments are variously politically aligned with Russia as-is (Hungary), or are a very plausible election scenario from coming into governments significantly less interested in EU or NATO as a strategic policy.
This doesn't even take into account that the rest of the EU would absolutely respond to an attack on a fellow member. At the very least Sweden, Finland, Denmark would become directly involved. Once you've got a hot war involving wealthy member states on their own territory I don't see France, Germany, the UK etc. just sitting that one out either.
The issue isn't whether they'd sit out, the issue is that most of them are militarily irrelevant to a war in continental Europe, because decades of mismanagement and capability cuts have rendered them unable to mobilize units at scale or supply them with ammunition to sustain fires at the scale Russia has and is.
Further, one of the significant factors of the Balkan scenarios is that the wealthy member states would not be fighting a war on their own territory: rather, they would be presented a fait accompli in a rapid Russian occupation of the much smaller (and poorer) Balkan fringe, and then faced with the question of whether they really want to pay the high cost in blood and treasure to try and fight their way through the Russian forces there.
This returns to the question of credibility, where while the Americans face the doubt if they would show up, most of the Europeans face doubts of if they can show up in enough scale to matter.
Dean
27d ago
Recently Ukraine changed their subscription doctrine that deployment to the front is one way ticket. You only come back dead or disabled. That both reeks of desperation
That's an odd perception, given how it's not only an incredibly common practice in any armed conflict of scale, but one the Russians adopted in the first year of the war.
The concept of stop-loss policies is a very basic policy common to volunteer and conscription militaries alike as manning demands increase. It's as much a sign of desperation as putting a water stop into a sink to soak dishes: militaries build up forces by increasing retention, not simply increase inflow, when numbers need to raise.
and will probably hurt Ukraine in the one area they had clear advantage over the Russians - their morale.
Setting aside that you and I remember the tenor of summer 2022 Russian offensive and spring 2023 rather differently, when the moral attrition of Ukrainian defenders outnumbered and outgunned was supposedly crashing moral, you don't consider the Western intelligence support for Ukraine a clear advantage?
So I guess the tonal shift is just regressing a bit to the reality on the ground.
Tone shifts in the war have been constant. Remember the swings that occurred during the Kharkiv offensive, which was a terrible disaster at least three or four times over the several months it occured?
For this year, as noted last year, the Russians are going to enjoy a relative period of maximum material advantage due to faster war industry mobilization, and they are demonstrating a higher casualty tolerance in the pursuit of territorial gains. This is also not surprising, and was predicted, as were the assessments that Russia's best chance to reduce foreign aid to Ukraine for the years to come is to shape perceptions this year in the leadup to the US election in hopes that presenting a strong showing would help the non-Biden (now Trump) candidate come to a conclusion to cut material support before the Ukrainians lost the willingness to fight.
Dean
27d ago
"The Ukrainians" would have no more to do with ratifying the peace than the average American has in constantly sending them weapons.
Hyperagent Americanism strikes again! Truly it was only because of them that the Ukrainian politicians decided to keep on fighting with over 80% popular support.
Finland and Sweden are both two of the biggest exceptions in Europe, and is part of why their decision to join NATO was such a strategic disaster for Russia's NATO-rationalizations for the war.
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