Dean
11mo ago
In the Small-Scale Question threat, user @sickamore raised a question about Sudan. Given that it's more global news, but also tangential to culture war narratives, I figured I might raise it here. sickamore did ask for a good low down. Sadly, please accept a bad one because bad news is the easiest to quibble over, and sharing my newest reason to be depressed is supposed to be helpful or something.
Also, forgive the inconsistent citations, these are intended to be handy, not authoritative.
To start with sickamore's question:
The new conflict that broke out in Sudan - anyone have a good low down on what is happening there, and why? Is this truly a proxy-war between the US and Russia (Rapid Support Forces being Russian proxy, I guess? And Sudan Armed Forces would be US allies..?), or is there something else to this?
To start- this is not a bad question, but it is the wrong question, for a pretty basic reason: this is not about you. Or the US. Or Russia.
What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration that being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you. When I've raised in the past in other contexts that a certain sort of American cultural chauvenism that sees everything as an extension of American politics, this is what I refer to. The Sudan crisis has foreign actors and influences, yes, but it is fundamentally an internal political crisis driven by internal actors, with their own interests, their own agency... and their own lack of self-control, because you tend not to shoot at the French diplomatic convoy you already said you were willing to help leave if you have actually good control of your forces.
They don't, because this is Sudan, and Sudan is experiencing the sort of 'the government is the internationally recognized warlords, and the warlords are fighting again' conflict that bedevils foreign policy.
First, to set the context...
For the Americans and others who couldn't find Sudan on a map if they didn't know where to look: Sudan is in Northeast the country between Egypt and Ethiopia at the Horn of Africa, across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia. It's part of the not-great part of Africa.
Sudan has basically been a military junta in one form or another since the 90s, and not the western-backed sort, though over the last few years there's been a detente of sort since a new military junta came to power and more or less offered to help normalize relations.
Here's a wiki summary, but the super high level feel free to quibble is-
In 1989, the political system of Sudan was "rigorously restructured" following a military coup when Omar al-Bashir, then a brigadier in the Sudanese Army, led a group of officers and ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi. Under al-Bashir's leadership, the new military government suspended political parties and introduced an Islamic legal code on the national level.
In the 2000s and 2010s, there was a war in Darfur you might have heard about due to the various crimes against humanity and horrific humanitarian crisis and stuff. The militia that fought on the Sudanese government side are broadly grouped/affiliated with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and are accused of war crimes. 'Crimes against Humanity' war crimes.
What you might not have known is that there is gold in those killing fields, and naturally the side with the militia to control the gold gets to profit. The RSF starts to take off as a political force, and an economic force, due to control of the gold. It also branches off to other profitable ventures, like mercenary work. Anyone familiar with the international overlap of gold interests and mercenary work may recognize some similarities with certain Russian interest groups. Yes, there is a Russian connection. But back to history.
On April 11, 2019, al-Bashir and his government were overthrown in a military coup led by his first vice president and defense minister, who then established the now ruling military junta, led by Lt. General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan. The RSF under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, often known as Hemetti, supported Burhan in the coup and suppressing post-coup protests, including the Khartoum massacre.
After the 2019 coup, Sudan’s government was led by the Sovereign Council, a military-civilian body that is the highest power in the transitional government. Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok is the civilian leader of the cabinet. This means he is not actually the leader. The Chairman of the Sovereignty Council is General Abdel Fattah Burhan of the SAF, who is backed by Hemetti, leader of the RSF.
In October 2020, Sudan made an agreement to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, as part of the agreement the United States removed Sudan from the U.S. list of State Sponsors of Terrorism.
On 25 October 2021, the Sovereignty Council and the Sudanese government were immensely dissolved after being overthrown in the 2021 Sudan coup.
Surprise surprise, the leader to come out on top again is... General Burhan of the SAF, backed by Hemetti and the RSF.
Which brings us closer to present. As part of broader western normalization and diplomatic rehabilitation, the premise of Sudan politics is that it isn't an indefinite permanent military junta, but a transition government that will, eventually, place the military under civilian rule.
This will naturally be a long and arduous process, but western support actually does demand the military itself to be consolidated, so that things like the Darfure crisis and the humanitarian castrophe that supports mass migration not happen. Which means that the Sudan Armed Forces would need to reign in and control the paramilitary militia of the Rapid Support Forces, who have a nasty history of suppressing. Which means that the RSF, rather than being an autonomous power broker with great autonomy, would be controlled by the Sudanese military, and General Burhan. Who- if he controls the RSF- would also control what the RSF controls. Like, say, gold mines.
Naturally, RSF Commander Hemetti is a patriot and a self-admitted supporter of civilian government rule, which is why earlier this month he allegedly* attempted to coup General Burhan.
I say allegedly here, because Hemetti claimed it was really Burhan and the SAF who did dirty first, but I will note that the RSF took a couple hundred Egyptian soldiers prisoner in the first day(s) of the war, which tends not to be the sort of thing that you do on accident if you're just responding.
(It does, however, make quite a sense if you have pre-meditated intent to coup the close ally/partner of the regional military partner, and thus throw one of the few military powers capable of intervening against you into a decision paralysis that keeps them from intervening against you.).
Note that this is all very western centric, and doesn't include things like how Egypt and Sudan are oriented against the Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam, only mentioned the gold and russian connection when I went off script, and doesn't even touch the various arab world implications. This is just a really, really ugly history.
Here's the Dean Summary:
In 1989, there was a coup. The military junta styled itself in islamic theocracy.
In the 2000s/2010s, Sudan was a pariah state that made itself infamous in the Darfur conflict, where the RSF was a tool of suppression and humanitarian atrocities using paramilitary militia.
In the 2010s, the RSF got rich and powerful off of using its paramilitary militia to seize control of gold and other economic interests in Darfur.
In 2019, there was a new military coup led by General Burhan of the SAF, who was supported by Dagalo, leader of the paramilitary RSF. The new government ingratiates itself with the west by relaxing from the pariah policies.
In 2021, General Burhan of the SAF launches another coup, again with the support of Dagalo and the RSF. The new new government sustains western toleration/acceptance by going through negotiations of a transition to civilian government.
In 2022, western attention / negotiations for negotiation focus on consolidating the military under future civilian control. This includes consolidating the RSF under SAF control, which in turn means control of the gold and economic interests Hemetti had built up.
In April 2023, a week and a half ago, Hemetti and the RSF attempted a coup against General Burhan and the SAF with an attempted takeover of the capital of Khartoum. It failed to oust him, and the conflict looks ready to go into a sustained civil war with massive humanitarian implications.
That was an ugly history. I'll give an even worse response to the original question next.
Dean
4mo ago
On the American-Mexican border, this year the Biden administration implemented a policy intended to allow a stronger/politically-more-viable legal basis for ejecting migrants. In short, they created a remote-asylum application system as part of broader remote-immigration-permit systems. The nominal position is that migrants are to request the migration / asylum remotely from their own country, and then wait for the response of yay/nay. If they attempt to illegally immigrate before their application is complete, their digital-application can be rejected and they can be immediately deported as bad-faith applicants, and if they attempt to apply for asylum at the border without trying the app, they can be sent back to their countries and told to apply via the system.
The premise was somewhat undermined by various Biden exceptions to give various groups special permissions to stay, and the sheer numbers that kept coming after a temporary pause after the number of deportation flights was contrasted to the number of arrivals, and the sanctuary city migrant-bussing fiasco.
South of the American border, a number of different dynamics are taking place, centered primarily on spreading awareness via social media of safe-ish and commercially available migration services that have increased both awareness and perception of safety, sometimes with government facilitation.
Among other things-
-The Darian Gap, the link between Colombia and Panama, has seen functional guide services and entire social media channels and migration-facilitation industries between boats and forest guides and supply traders. The social media awareness of viable routes, legal strategies such as claiming asylum, and analysis/assessments of the US permissiveness of migrants once you reach there, are widespread. As with most businesses, as businesses scale, they compete and improve in pursuit of profit and client-share.
-Local governments in the Darian Gap, Panama, and Costa Rica, being overwhelmed if they try to stop or hinder the flow and at risk of criminal malingering if they just ignore it, have gradually adopted policies of functionally regulating migration flow independent of national level (let alone American) desires. A migrant you stop is your problem; a migrant you charge for a clean hotel room before moving on is a revenue source, and less likely to be working with the cartels against you. Local governments are in some places functionally legalizing/displacing the more harmful criminal types.
-Nicaragua in particular has started a racket of direct migrant shuttle flights from high-migration capitals to Nicaragua. In much the same way of the Belarusian migration crisis bringing Iraqis to the Polish border while the Belarusian government got the money for the 'tour packages,' Nicaragua basically relaxed visa-arrival restrictions and starting flying in planeloads of migrants from countries like Haiti and Cuba, and then gives the migrants a short amount of time to get out of the country starting from halfway up central america. Naturally Ortega makes his cuts, and while the US has pressured some airlines to stop, there's still plenty of money.
-Building on public awareness, the US domestic squabble of the Texas bussing of migrants to sanctuary cities was an international highlight on the, well, 'free reception' on hand if you did arrive in the US and reach a Sanctuary city. When internationally recognizable cities like New York complain that they can't continue to spend thousands of dollars a month per migrant providing food, housing, job permisions, and etc., that's not a problem- that's an advertisement to get it while you can.
-Finally, there has been increasing regional coordination between migration-transit countries on the subject. Some of this has been urged by the US, and some has been about, well, using migration as a way to urge changes in US policy that interest the coordinating powers. Not too long ago, there was a Mexican conference with many of the migration-sources, with one of the resolution points asserting a general right to migrate- implicitly obliging the US to not only accept migrants in general, but actively facilitate safe routes and legal avenues into the US. (Other points included removing the current US legal structure that gives greater asylum weight to people from repressive/anti-US countries, like Cuba.)
Put it together, and migration to the US has become hybrid government-private commercial business, with spreading awareness and perceptions of safety and reliability, with highly public 'win' conditions and regional governments sympathetic to further facilitating it.
As always whenever US military recruitment woes comes up, it's relevant to bring up that something like 80% of new recruits come from a family where someone else has served. The implication of this isn't that the US has a racial demographic recruitment option, but a familial one: that families that once would have encouraged children to join, are no longer doing so / encouraging them not to do so.
Failing to work around this issue makes many of the options presented pretentiously comedic rather than serious, because the audience that needs to be convinced isn't the recruits- it's the already-separated family members who are dissuading recruitment.
Behind a paywall, but one of the better breakdowns of the US recrutiment issues from the WSJ.
Dean
1yr ago
His argument has a few parts but the major thrust of it is that there is no better alternative--when everything is tallied up the MSM is far more truthful than competitors like Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Berenson, etc.
Yes? And? So what?
This is not an argument that the media is honest or good. This is an argument that the media is more honest and better, but without making the case that it's good enough. This matters, because in a great number of things 'better' is not 'good enough'- a runner with only one broken leg, only an ounce of sewage in a bottle of win, a teacher who usually wears a condom when tutoring a student one-on-one. These may all be things that are strictly preferable to alternatives, but that does not mean that a lack of alternatives means any are acceptable, or not worse than going without.
To quote the article-
The problem with taking a nihilistic posture towards the MSM is that there’s nothing to replace it with. If someone spends all their time complaining about capitalism without making the case for a realistic alternative, what they’re advocating for is chaos, or more likely, socialism, which is much worse. Likewise, simply trying to discredit the media when it’s in many ways the only means we have to acquire accurate information about the world should be understood as advocating for making society dumber.
To which one might as well respond- and where are you going to start describing what's the problem with nihilism?
Setting aside that the Hanania doesn't identify how society is actually being made smarter by the current media, he also doesn't identify what society being 'dumber' even means. He raises the spectre of nebulous chaos as bad not because chaos is bad, but because of what the effects of chaos can do to a healthy society... but if the society is already sick or insane- and Hanania pre-emptively concedes that the other side has 'lost their mind' on extremely fundamental issues on social composition- this doesn't actually mean it's getting worse. 'Not having any words left to describe Queer Studies or much of bioethics' is not a loss when the the superfulousness of words to describe them is already bringing about the bioethics of queer studies to the applause of the media that is being defended.
If the consequences of a dumber society with no common media environment are different than the consequences of the current media environment, that doesn't mean it's worse. Hanania presupposes that everyone accepts the current dynamics as good enough and that an alternative is worse. While this is a fundamentally status quo bias that's understandable for how Hanania himself has personally benefited, it makes no such appeal to those who have not, or who have been harmed, or who see their long-term interests of the trajectory as being threatened by the very institutions supporting positions Hanania himself calls crazy.
Yes, a lack of common shared vision of the world will create a low cohesive society. This is not the same as making the case for why people should commit to a cohesive society that disagrees with them on a fundamentally cultural level.
As with Scott's attempt awhile ago, this falls into the trap of 'we must have something common and good to all believe in.' Hanania frames it as a resistance to nihilism, but it's really not. This is just the rationalist tendency to want other people to support social cohesion for its common good effects, without grasping on how dynamics like social cohesion come about. People do not subscribe to common beliefs because social cohesion enables good things- social cohesion comes about when people subscribe to common beliefs, which define what good things are. Appealing to people to submit their view of what is good for the sake of maintaining the benefits of social cohesion is fundamentally missing the cause and the effect.
Hanania wants people to separate the insanity he admits is fully present in the system. The system is broadly comfortable and profitable for him. It is not broadly comfortable or profitable for others, who he makes no case are being well served by the current institutions that 'only lie a little', and the fact that the lack of a superior alternative will make the lack of a single information sphere less comfortable for a lot of people is not, in fact, a compelling reason for others to defer to the established institutions who see them as the problem.
Curious what you all think.
I think he's self-centered and blind to his own mediocrity. No one so self-flattering of their own IQ should be making so many basic mistakes of argument, history, or social cohesion.
Dean
1yr ago
The Big Serge has a good overview of the RU-UA war. The TL;DR is that Ukraine has burned through multiple iterations of armaments and is now reduced to begging for active NATO matériel, hence Germany's reticence to send Leopards.
...what?
Ukrainian ammo shortage has been the story of Ukrainian requests for aid since the very start of the war, when Zelensky memorably asked for ammo, not a ride. The entire early war Western response was focused on trying to get Warsaw Pact equipment and ammo to Ukraine in the near term to enable to keep fighting for the long-term effort of an eventual shift to NATO-produced material. These efforts were why Europe did 'ring swaps' of having various countries give their Warsaw Pact gear to Ukraine in exchange for getting NATO surplus. This also came with the obvious point that, because NATO does not produce Warsaw Pact material, would have to gradually train up the Ukrainians to western equipment in order to sustain a meaningful war effort.
This has been a very long-running item since the initial 'will the Ukrainians last another month' phase of the war passed. This is not new, nor have the Ukrainians been 'reduced to begging' for active NATO systems. Transitioning to NATO equipment has been the point for months now.
There's certainly plenty that could be said about Germany's reticence, but it's not because Ukraine is begging from a position of weakness. Germany is reluctant because Ukraine is asking from a position of strength, and if it got the tanks it was asking for the German government position is that it's afraid the German tanks would be enabling Ukraine to beat the Russians so badly the Russians might escalate. Take the German position with a graint of salt, but it's nowhere near a position that Ukraine has burned through everything, it's a fear of the Ukrainians doing even better.
As for this overview being 'good'...
A very cursory look at this account is that 'The Big Serge' was one of the 'there is no Russian panic' sort of accounts during the Kharkiv offensive last September, which is memorable for just how paniced the Russians were and how much war material they abandoned to the Ukrainians. On 9 September, this person was writing how Ukraine could not and would not make meaningful progress towards operational objectives towards Izyum. This was after the Ukrainian breakthrough had begun, and two days before the Russians announced a formal withdrawal from Kharkiv oblast.
This was after a six-month retrospective piece which characterized the Russians as fighting an 'intelligent' war, typical revisionism of the scope and objective of the Russian advance on Kyiv at the start of the war, right down to the 'it was a feint, bro' narrative, and of course the 'Europe's economy is going to crash this winter' predictions. These were accompanied by predictions that the 'rest' of the Ukrainian capabilities were in the process of being attrited to the point that static defense would no longer be possible, and Western support would dry up in the near future... as of half a year ago. Ukraine would have no hope of waging a successful offensive, and of course "Ukraine cannot achieve strategic objectives - all they can do is trade the lives of their men for temporary tactical successes that can be spun into wins by their propaganda arm."
This writer has not, shall we say, had a good run of analyzing the war so far, or for staying clear of the pro-Russian propaganda tropes in the course of resisting pro-Ukrainian ones.
Serge's prediction that Ukraine will lose the war "gradually, then suddenly" seems plausible given Russia's attrition strategy.
...what?
Serge's prediction has been that a Ukrainian attritional collapse would be happening any month now for over six months now, which is another way of saying that he's been saying it for over half the war now. Notably, Serge was claiming this before one of the largest Ukrainian resource infusions of the war at Kharkiv, as well as the successful Ukrainian attrition campaign at Kherson.
The Russian attrition strategy for months now hasn't been meaningfully based on attriting the Ukrainians at a military level, but the western support at an economic-warfare level. This was the crux of both the Ukranian power grid attacks- which, you might note, have decreased in effectiveness and frequency- but also the gamble on European winter energy. The gamble for some time has been that the Europeans would have to capitulate and seek concessions based on the winter energy crunch.
This has not, shall we say, turned out as the Russians or pro-Russians like Serge were predicting in the summer and fall. European energy is rough, and the long-term impacts will be considerable, but there's a reason that questions of aid focus more on whether Republicans will be sufficiently overwhelmingly supportive in general to avoid embarassing trips rather than the capacity of Europeans to keep funding.
I keep hearing hysterical rhetoric that the West must win this war or... something something bad. It reminds me of the flawed 'domino theory' that was used to justify the Vietnam intervention. While I don't think NATO will ever proceed towards direct intervention á la Vietnam, I can't help but think that too many of the West's elites have trapped themselves rhetorically where Ukraine's importance is overblown for political reasons (so as to overcome domestic opposition towards sending arms) and it has now become established canon in a way that is difficult to dislodge.
Appeals to the flawed domino theory tend not to address the fact that when Vietnam fell, there were successive communist successes in the region of SE Asia. Not just South Vietnam, but also Laos and Combodia did fall. If you want to analogize Russia and Ukraine to the Domino Theory historical results, it absolutely would imply that Russia keep going, and/or that other countries will seek nuclear breakout capability, whichever your historical metaphor target is.
Dean
1yr ago
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya.
Ukraine wasn't a disaster because of Zelensky. Ukraine was going to be a disaster because a critical mass of the Ukrainians were plainly and already primed towards an insurgency that was going to be a disaster where instead of stay-behind actors doing rear-area spotting for artillery strikes behind the front lines in a conventional conflict, the flood of MANPADs and ATGMs going into the region from NATO were going to make Iraq look quaint. The cause of this sentiment isn't because Zelensky is popular, but because Russia was already hated by so many, and only going to get hated more when they moved in and started executing their pre-planned targetting lists of anti-Russian/pro-western actors. The same sort of people who manned territorial defense units will to go out and launch attacks on Russian armored columns are also the sort of people who would be ambushing Russian counter-insurgency columns.
Zelensky isn't the guy who made it cool to oppose the Russians, he's the guy who kept the Ukrainian government together, keeping a conventional war going instead of an insurgency war. Cratering the Ukrainian government was a clear Russian intention, but Putin's initial invasion force wasn't any better set up to deal with an insurgency than it was serious conventional resistance. Remember, one of the 'war isn't going to happen' arguments pre-invasion was that Putin's buildup was too small to do a meaningful occupation of the country.
Putin's fundamental mistake is that he discounted the relevant of the Ukrainian public's views, not because he didn't foresee Slavic Churchuill. Not taking into account the viewpoints of the nation you are invading is kind of the opposite of a good basis for a gamble.
And how do you think running Venezuela into the ground by sanctioning them will impact migrant flows?
Why should anyone believe that US sanctions are 'running Venezuela into the ground' relative to the effect of the Venezuelan governance?
The Venezuelan government even 20 years ago was led by a clique who struggled with basic concepts like 'if you dictate that private businesses sell items at or below cost of procurement, private businesses will stop stocking items' or 'if you send people with guns to take over specialized businesses, the business people with specialized knowledge will leave.' It instituted a deliberate system of personality cult, attacks (literal and legal) on opposition actors and political opponents, and cultivating gangs as a national security strategy who then went on create a domestic security climate on par with Iraq. It routinely picked diplomatic and economic fights with its biggest trading partners while willfully and eagerly trying to align with countries less known for their quality of governance and far more known for their police states and party-empowering corruption. These were all chosen through the agency of Venezuela's own governmental leaders, for two arguably three political generations now. The same general clique of incompetents is still in power, and has been for long enough for an entire demographic cohort to have grown up under their management.
By contrast, you believe the relative impact of the US sanctions is...?
(This is a direct question, by the way.)
For all that you regularly like to cite US malfeasance as the cause of whatever cause of whatever blowback of the hour, I don't believe I've ever seen you actually provide a position of relative blame of US actions vis-a-vis other actors. Without any sense of relative allocation of input to output, this is just the cliche hyperagency/hypoagency paradigm that leaves agency with the US while everyone else is a passive recipient of their will, where even their own policy decisions are forced upon them by the US rather than, well, chosen both in response to and to shape US policy themselves.
While this is certainly flattering to US prowess in the same way that anti-semetic propaganda is empowering for the mythical Jew, it's not particularly well informed, and rather patronizing to the many invested and career anti-american politicians around the world who work hard to make their own policy disasters with hefty externalities but do so without American direction or demands. Give them their credit!
Dean
11mo ago
To revisit the question and break it apart-
The new conflict that broke out in Sudan - anyone have a good low down on what is happening there, and why? Is this truly a proxy-war between the US and Russia (Rapid Support Forces being Russian proxy, I guess? And Sudan Armed Forces would be US allies..?), or is there something else to this?
The new conflict that broke out in Sudan - anyone have a good low down on what is happening there, and why?
The proximal cause is a breakdown of negotiations over the integration of the paramilitary RSF under the SAF. The SAF wanted this in a short time frame, within years. The RSF wanted a longer time frame, like a decade, but practically never.
These negotiations have been western backed, and in a sense western pushed, since the 2019 but especially the 2021 coup, as a sort of condition for international legitimacy / foreign support. One of the key western interests / some background reasons for their role is the negotiation is the context of Darfur. On top of being a massive humanitarian tragedy in and of itself, it's humanitarian crisis like this that can drive regional instability to collapse governments and see migration flows from Africa towards Europe. Consolidating control of all the military forces under a single military, and that military under the civilian government, is a key point in reigning in warlordism that fuels these conflicts, where profit-maximizing warlords continue their wars without state backing.
In practice, however, Hemetti and the RSF are the warlord being reigned in, since the paramilitary militia are more of a threat to stability than the formal military, and the consolidation of the RSF under the SAF would have decisively subordinated control of his personal economic interests (the RSF-controlled gold and other things) under Burhan and the SAF.
This is the fundamental crux of the current coup / civil war: the RSF Warlord had his interests under threat. A coup attempt makes sense here, because if it succeeds, Hemetti gets even more power and wealth, and if it stalls, then in the negotiations that follow Hemetti can secure concessions that protect his interests.
IF you want to frame this as the west's fault, then having negotiations that put Hemetti's interests at risk is the western contribution to the crisis. The inevitable tankie framing will be that the US forced Hemetti's hand, and that the US drove the crisis, and that the crisis would end if the US used it's great power and influence to force a ceasefire for the good of the people, and only American/western greed and amorality prevents it.
This is generally where I tell people to stop being cultural chauvinists and thinking it's all about the West.
The West was not issuing ultimatums. The West does not control the military autocrat who couped the previous military junta who couped the previous military junta. All negotiations put people's interests at stake- that's what negotiatiosn are. But Hemetti and the RSF were not in a 'coup or die' situation. There was no ticking clock or irreversible end to negoations. Burhan was not, to my knowledge, actually about to militarily move against his Deputy. This is a conflict of choice between two men with their own motives and interests. There is an ambitious warlord who made his wealth and power inflicting great misery and suffering who wanted to not just protect, but expand, his personal power and wealth, in a conflict with another ambitious warlord who made his wealth and power inflicting great misery and suffering in the process of expanding his personal power and wealth.
Neither is an American puppet. They are their own men. And they are causing a mountain of misery in the foreseeable future, as they have supported in the past to varying degrees. They are both quite willing to inflict more for their own advantage, and the logic of the conflict- and factors in it to date- suggest a sustained civil war, not the ever-optimistic 'we can compel negotiations that will end the conflict in our favor' that the RSF seems to have been betting on.
I have, many times, said I have a dim view of any war strategy that rests on the premise of 'and then the enemy will lose the will to fight.' Nothing I see from the SAF suggests that Burhan intends to give up, or that other powers can make him. Multiple announced cease fires have failed, and each failure decreases the chance for the next.
The coup will likely continue into a civil war. There are factors that could limit it, and with the grace of god may they prevail, but if the SAF can retake the capital, the obvious next step for them is to take the gold mines and RSF economic interests, and those interests can pay for a lot of mercenaries and such to resist that. It will be bloody and expensive, but that's a cost both men are likely willing to pay, over American objection.
Is this truly a proxy-war between the US and Russia (Rapid Support Forces being Russian proxy, I guess?
The russian-gold connection, and reported Wagner ties, are not central / drivers of western policy in Sudan. That is a red herring.
There are certainly RSF-Russian ties that the US and the West does not like, but there are many things about the SAF and its ties that the West does not like. The SAF-junta is not a US-backed government in the sense that any alternative to it is a zero-sum loss of American interests. The SAF is a US-backed government in that it is the government, effectively, and in negotiations with the US and other international parties for international acceptance. The US is not Sudan's political/military/economic guarantor. If anything, Egypt is- and while Egypt is a US ally, it's not a Russian foe.
There are some definite RSF-Russian elements that are worth noting here- the RSF opening phase of the conflict has some obvious (though not exclusively) Russian strategic thinking influences, from the role of opening misinformation for information space disruption, the opening targetting/capture of Egyptian forces to create a decision paralysis to delay/disrupt/prevent external intervention, and the overarching strategy of a smaller military power trying to use first-mover advantage and a selective call for negotiations/cease fire from a position of advantage. The RSF timing, down to the point of the Eid Holiday at the end of the first week of fighting, when the pre-planned operations would climax, but the counter-attacks wouldn't have time to marshal, and the foreign diplomatic pressure and religious Eid holiday would increase chance for a natural compellence of cease fire, are all characteristic of how the Russians hybrid warfare theory suggest things should go, and the Wagner ties are absolutely a vector to support that.
But at this time, there's no real indication the Russians, or Wagner, or directly involved or orchestrating or anything else. Framing this as a Russia-US proxy war overestimates the relevance of both sides.
It also overstates the attachment other parties have to either side. If the SAF wins, the US continues relations with the military junta that launched a coup. If the RSF wins, the US would... likely continue relations with the military junta that launched a coup. The US, and western, interest isn't in who rules the country, it's what who rules the country does, and Hemetti would quite likely continue the charade of a military-backed transitionary government in indefinite negotiations for an eventual transition to civilian government that patriotic military leader would oh-so-happily lead.
Whether that person is Hemetti or Burhan really doesn't matter to the west, though Hemetti's personal ties to Russia might be an irritant, and the RSF is a bit more detestable to western sensitivities than the SAF due to the involvement in Darfur and the ill-discipline with how western diplomats have been treated. However, the west cares far more that Sudan doesn't generate a humanitarian crisis that causes regional instability and migration flows.
And Sudan Armed Forces would be US allies..?), or is there something else to this?
Sudan is generating a humanitarian crisis that will cause regional instability and migration flows.
The immediate Western and most foreign nation priorities priorities is getting diplomats and citizens out of what is rapidly becoming a humanitarian disaster zone. Fighters (allegedly, but not necessarily exclusively, from RSF) have been robbing diplomats or attacking refugee convoys as the leave the capital. Diplomatic evacuations have been in the scale of hundreds; thousands to tens of thousands of foreign nationals are in the country. Diplomatic evacuations are ongoing, but the risk to thousands of citizens is quite possibly going to generate calls for foreign intervention in some form.
And risk is real, because infrastructure is contested or failing. The Khartoum capital airport has been shut by fighting since the coup, and it's a 800km / 500 mile drive to the port, which means if you don't have the gas for that there's a good chance you're escaping the war-torn capital on foot. Internet is failing across the country, and foreign aid groups already in the country say they're not able to get humanitarian supplies in, which means there's both less to feed people AND less ability to coordinate it.
And, of course, there's that minor thing about the civil war, where one side was THE designated force for organizing militia to terrorize the country side and steal everything of value. Including, allegedly, robbing evacuating diplomats, kidnapping non-involved soldiers of foreign militaries, and other charming examples of care.
It's liable to be bad. Really, really bad. And I have no faith or confidence in the ability of the West to compel a ceasefire and return to negotiations, and every fear that failure to do so will see the SAF grind the RSF out of the capital and then go for the RSF's economic heart, even if it takes them years of humanitarian crisis to do so.
Dean
2mo ago
My take on this is that it has less to do about museums, and more a general decline in the US-American cultural/social reelvance of the Native American groups.
From an admittedly distant view, even as the sort of progressive/SJW criticisms of problematic Native American cultural references and caricatures increased in the 2000s/2010s, my sense is that rather than replace these with 'better' alternative symbols, there's been a broader trend of simply stripping Native American references entirely, with no indian cultural identifier left. Whether it's a butter company removing an iconic native american from branding, or the (American) football team Washington Redskins changing to the Washington Commanders following years of activist pressure, 'you can't have bad things- change it' isn't the same as 'do better things.'
Anyway has anything to say about it?
The alleged article or the sentiment behind it?
The report is very likely a fake, for reasons already mentioned. I will note that the use of roman numerals isn't discrediting in and of itself- RAND does use sometimes publish reports and use roman numerals for the agenda / methodology / executive summary portion before the main report itself- but rather the cover page itself is a red flag. The image claims this is a research report, but RAND Research Reports have a general style of presentation, include front-page opening images and color. You can peruse RAND Research Reports via a search of their website, as the pictures show.
https://www.rand.org/pubs.html?pub-date=20211210%3A&series=Research+Reports
Another formatting red flag is the mis-classification label. The first page graphic- which says this is 'Confidential' under 'January 25, 2022'- is mixing a few things. For one, RAND isn't an American government agency, and while it's a common belief in various circles that it's a distinction without a difference, classification (mis)labeling is one of those areas where it matters. 'Confidential' is an American classification labeling, and when reports are classified, the documents have various formatting requirements such as having the label on each page, and portion-marking individual paragraphs. This is so that the readers can reference various parts of the document at various levels or contexts. If the implicit argument is RAND is part/an extension of the American government, this would be a job-retraining failure. If the more defensible position is that this is something RAND wrote for the government, it would be customer abuse. A lot of companies/groups with regular engagement with governments will develop their own, internal control measures rather than mis-use the government's own classification system.
A third red flag is the front page distribution list. Aside from the placement on the page- above the Executive Summary, which is where the RAND logo is placed? Really?- I assume by WHCS they mean White House Chief of Staff, but that's not an office, and wouldn't be in the same context as three letter agencies. Also conspicuously absent from the distribution list is the Treasury Department- a kind of big omission of any report nominally on economic analysis. Instead, the list is primarily the big spooky externally known 3-letter agencies... when there isn't a need for that information to be on the Executive Summary Page in the first place. That's the sort of information you track on a cover sheet, so you don't need to re-publish a report every time some new office is involved.
Overall, the formatting has a lot of red flags, and most of the potential explanations- 'they didn't follow their usual practices because of the need for secrecy'- ask people to be dumb in different ways. 'This was made by someone who thinks this is how the Americans work' is much more likely...
...not least because the article really doesn't reflect how the American government national-security types think about this general topic, or Europe, and so the report reads like 'this was written by someone who thinks this is how the Americans think,' or even 'this is written by someone who wants other people to think this is how the Americans think.'
The Americans don't talk about the Europeans in terms of 'sovereignty.' The American establishment viewpoint is that the Europeans already have it- it's the anti-American/anti-American-empire-ists who would frame the European alliances as non-sovereign, not a quasi-government report. Nor is a Biden-administration solicited report going to talk about Europe in terms of 'if one day we abandon Europe,' when the opening year of the Biden administration was ABT, or Anything But Trump, with even the exceptions subject to rebranding for the 'we're back' theme. Nor would the US of Jan 2022 been talking about Ukraine causing a 'controlled economic crisis' to plan for the duration of 2022... because the Americans were planning for a relatively quick and short Russia-Ukraine War. The Americans were flowing insurgency-friendly weapons into Ukraine, but not heavier conventional equipment, because of the expectation that Russia would have a conventional victory in short order. Second and third order effects of that would be the expectation that- as happened repeatedly before- German and other European interests would press for normalization of Energy supplies (and even currently, with the gas price cap, set a price above what was generally being charged, ie. not actually capping prices or flow). Broader pushback against sanctions primarily has not happened because Ukraine remained in the fight... but Ukraine remaining in the fight was manifestly not something the Americans were planning on. If Ukraine's government had toppled in the first month, months 2-10 of the war, and all the sanctions discussions that occurred, would have gone very differently.
Meanwhile, the report doesn't identify various things the American national-security types would raise about if it WAS an American product. Like the description of the German economic pillars: that wouldn't be Russian gas and 'cheap French electrical power.' The other pillar would be something akin to 'exports to China,' because that's something the Americans care about far more than French electrical imports, and is relevant to the strategic-level topic. There would be mentions that the German military under-spending, because that's been a long, long on-going complaint from the American perspective that goes hand-in-hand with the Russian energy reliance- both are decades-long-issues that have been persistent issues in mind.
Add to this the plethora of pejorative framings and boo-light words almost specifically driven to incite German/European emotions ('trap,' 'lack of professionalism of current leaders,' 'thanks to our precise action,' the whole 'French dependent on AUKUS' framing)- which just so coincidentally predicted a political context almost a year later after multiple unpredicted inflection points in the Ukraine unforeseeable at the time, which is just so coincidentally being leaked at a time when those framing devices and predictions are most salient to ongoing contexts...
...while also embracing the framing that Ukraine was an American trap, and that Russia was 'provoked' so that it would be 'possible' to declare Russia the aggressor...
...in a report nominally authored in late January 22, when the Russians had already been moving their invasion hardware along the various invasion axis assembly areas in the clear logistical buildup that the American government was publicizing at the time, but that this report makes no reference to...
Obvious false-flag information effort, targeting people who are only vaguely familiar with the alleged participants or Ukrainian context, or stroking the biases of those vulnerable to agreeing by what Stephen Colbert once called the truthiness of it.
Dean
1yr ago
I don't think anyone has had a spotless record in this war. US intelligence got the invasion right but then publicly claimed that Kiev was in danger of falling 'within days'. How did that pan out?
Pretty well.
The US intelligence assessment that Kiev was in danger of falling led to Western policy changes that including flooding the Ukrainians with man-portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry that could be widely and rapidly distributed to both formal and informal forces with minimal training, and with far less risk of being intercepted/destroyed by local Russian air/artillery capabilities than conventional weapon systems. These asymmetric capabilities thus allowed Ukrainian irregulars to greatly slow and even stop Russian mechanized forces, allowing Ukrainian artillery to do decisive damage while mitigating key Russian strengths that- had there been a lack of anti-armor and anti-air capability- could have been far more successful.
This is a classic case of an intelligence assessment driving the policy changes that change the underlying assumptions that drive the intelligence assessment. That is the entire point of investing in intelligence as a national capability- not so that someone will tell you what will occur if you try policy X, but what will occur if you DON'T try to change a situation. And this doesn't even get to the dynamics of publicizing intelligence to drive public support for policy to achieve results supported by not-publicized intelligence.
But the facts speak their own language: if Ukraine was doing well, they wouldn't need to ask for NATO materiel when the same NATO countries no longer have "easy" choices available to them, such as mothbolled ex-Soviet stuff.
Why not? No one aside from you claimed at the time, before aid or during aid or after aid deliveries, that the amount of aid delivered was expected to be enough for Ukraine to wage the rest of the war successfully. Key categories of aid- especially munitions- being insufficient has been a reoccuring point of discussion since the start of the war.
Ukraine doing well due to receiving an influx of expendable resources establishes a correlation of doing well with getting expendable resources. Asking for [Type NATO] expendable resources as [Type Soviet] expendable resources is exactly what you would expect if doing well is a result of expendable resource delivery.
At any rate, trying to handicap the chances of UA victory wasn't the primary aim of my OP, but rather to question the assumption that victory in this conflict for the pro-NATO side is of such titantic importance that the media and the political class would have us believe. As I outlined in my OP, Russia is unlikely to be a long-term winner even in the event of battlefield victory and Ukraine's importance has also been grossly overstated.
You relied heavily upon a propaganda fluff piece author whose thesis has been claimed for most of the war despite all operational developments to the contrary, and you didn't even identify specific claims of gross overstatement.
You done goofed on the central and ancillary points of your argument. 'For the sake of argument, what if we assume the Russian propagandists are right' is not a particularly interesting or compelling argument when the reasons why the Russian propagandists are wrong is also applying to other areas of the discussion.
I'd go further that Kissenger violated a number of ideological tropes and expectations.
Kissinger was a Holocaust surviving Jew (by narrow evasion of the fascists) who became strongly aligned with the American political right rather than left, a European who became an ardent anti-communist rather than a social-democrat, and thus something of a ideological/race-traitor theme which akin the progressive reaction to prominent black conservatives. He also worked directly against a common preconception/trope of a successful diplomat being someone who is supposed to avoid war at all costs and speak in universalist rather than national-interest terms. More to the point, he was a flagrantly ambitious and a publicity hound at various points, and so rather than quietly exist within the state apparatus or quietly retire to obscurity, he made a good part of his later-life about trying to be an elder statesman and defending his legacy.
That made him an active proponent of an otherwise often faceless machine, but also means that people's desires to anthromorphize broader collectives had an easy target to pin collective actions and policies onto, which has the effect of re-allocating responsibility away from less subtle actors in more flattering ways. It becomes a singular personal issue (Kissinger and his cronies were the cause of State Department anticommunist policy) rather than a broader trend (Kissinger was just the most prominent of an extensive line of anti-communists in the State Department who would have attempted by and large the same things regardless).
While there's plenty to criticize, I do agree that a good deal of the motte-expansive criticism of him rests on hyper-agency/hypo-agency distinctions. Very few Cold War critics treat anti-communists as having their own agency to commit atrocities rather than as American dependents operating at the direction of the Americans (and thus who would not have acted/been successful in their crimes without it). (And, by extension, anti-communists have no agency and commit atrocities; pro-communists have agency in resisting the US/west, and their crimes are brushed over as able. Who, whom, and all that.)
Edited for clarity of the memtic nature of the point.
This is an odd post, because it's framed as a disagreement without an actual disputing of the higher level post premise (broader and family-recruitment), makes some odd claims of a political shift in recruitment not actually observed (there is a recruitment crisis because fewer people are joining, without evidence of a meaningful change in overall recruitment allocatio), and yet somehow still adopts that curious twixt of 'there's no problem happening, and if it is it's good and you deserve it.'
This is without the oddness like 'If they can send you to die in the middle of Ukraine possibly,' given that the US military... can't send combat forces to Ukraine at this time. Which not only undermines the metaphor to the jab, but ignores that the higher post explicitly acknowledged that the legal basis for enforcement wasn't disputed.
I dislike percentages as a means of numeric false certainty, but I'll make a few predictions.
I expect the war to continue into 2024, barring a Putin death scenario leading to a Russian withdrawal. As long as Putin lives and the Russian army is not comprehensively destroyed in the field, I do not see him withdrawing from Ukraine before a fall of Crimea, which I do not see in 2024 barring major Russian conventional defeats in eastern Ukraine.
I expect both a Russian and Ukrainian this spring after the mud-season, with Russia's prioritizing the Donbas. Ukraine's will be aimed at advancing a southern corridor to cut the land-bridge to Crimea, though it may be also/instead intended to cut at the Russian southern supply lines for the Donbas offensive.
I expect this year's Russian strategic goal to secure the administrative boundaries of the Donbas and other eastern regions, with some additional buffer as possible, before transitioning to a posture of strategic defense and trying to present fully-occupied province annexations as fait accompli and basis for armistice lines while trying to exhaust European support. I do not expect the Russians to seriously press for all the claimed annex territories, ie. reclaim Kherson, and I expect that the Russians will be unable to sustain broad-front operations despite mobilization due to attrition of precision fires and modern maneuver equipment.
I expect this year's Ukrainian strategy to cut the land-bridge to Crimea, and as possible start of a logistical siege of Crimea by the end of the year while forcing Russia to relocate forces from mid-eastern Ukraine to south-eastern. The Ukrainian goal will be to continue to attrit Russian maneuver warfare capabilities, especially in modernized mechanized and precision fires, while developing their own maneuver warfare capability.
I expect the Russians will at least temporarily cancel the agriculture shipping deal, and attempt to use the disruption to agricultural exports to pressure Europeans to reduce support for Ukraine / end Russian sanctions. I do not expect this to succeed, even as I do expect middle eastern instability as a result. The russian disruption will likely be most relevant in the context of preventing Ukrainian agriculture from being planted, even if it allows a resumption of the deal.
I expect Russian economic resiliance to sharply deteriorate by mid-year as European energy and insurance sanctions take sharper bites and the short-term Russian economic controls are extended indefinitely. I think it is possible, but not necessarily likely, that China starts subsidizing the Russian economy to allow it to sustain a long-term war footing, including monetary loans and sale of ammunition. I expect Putin to continue the war regardless of economic deterioration, or Chinese (and other) terms of sale.
I expect European willingness to continue to support Ukraine economically to continue. Opportunistic actors like Orban will leverage vetos on Ukrainian aid to enable their position, but current political dynamics continue to make it easier for European states to leverage that for moderating sanctions for compromises than to simply block Ukrainian support. In key European nations (Germany, Italy, and France), pro-Russian political interests will remain easy political targets for domestic political rivals, meaning that pro-Russian coalition politics will continue to be undermined or sold out on case-by-case benefits.
I expect NATO countries to consider expanding aircraft support in earnest this summer, based on the results of the Spring offensives. I expect pressures and war economics will support drones over manned air-superiority fighters. If a fighter is sent, it will likely be in the role of a missile-bus for long-range fires.
I expect that Zelensky will continue to remain in power in Ukraine, barring an assassination. I expect Zelensky to use the context of the war, western pressures, and European Union ascession criteria to justify counter-corruption purges of the Ukrainian government. These will likely catch genuinely corrupt officials, but also have secondary effects of functionally purging suspected pro-Russian oligarchs, and undermine the formation of a counter-Zelensky oligarch coalition party. Opposition parties in the 2024 election will most likely form behind other war leaders/heroes on an anti-Russian axis, not in a pro-Russian fifth columnist, and direct criticism of Zelensky (barring personal scandal) will be muted.
I expect Zelensky to run for re-election, and to be the leading candidate bar personal involvement in corruption scandals. I expect end-of-year strategic priorities (during the next winter/mud season) to be the increased defense of, or attempt to liberate, a 'major' urban area in order to include it in the March 2024 election process.
I expect NATO weapon shipments to hit a qualitative and quantitative critical mass by late 2023 that makes Ukraine favored/expected to launch an offensive, in the early 2024, barring escalating Chinese support for Russia in the form of material.
I do not expect any nuclear weapon use.
Dean
13d ago
Never the worst decision, but Paul Krugman in particular stopped being an economist and traded that for being a credentialed political attack dog... probably decades ago at this point. Certainly back in the 2000s he was serving the role of the Certified Economist to tell NYT readers how stupid his political opponents plans were, and how good the Democratic policy was as being based in Science and Facts.
Dean
1mo ago
The refusal to be alone in a room with a woman that wasn't his wife, yes. That it was on grounds he couldn't be trusted is the partisan strawman.
Dean
5mo ago
As always, it sometimes helps to review the text that media coverage gestures towards. Regarding the El Salvador Constitution, english translation linked here-
When media refer to the Constitution in a 'the Constitution prohibits re-election', they're generally referring to Article 152-
Article 152 [The following] shall not be candidates for the President of the Republic:
1st.—He who has filled the Presidency of the Republic for more than six months, consecutive or not, during the period immediately prior to or within the last six months prior to the beginning of the presidential period;
2nd. —The spouse and relatives within the fourth degree of consanguinity or second of affinity of any of the persons who have exercised the Presidency in the cases [included in] the preceding ordinal;
3rd.—He who has been President of the Legislative Assembly or President of the Supreme Court of Justice during the year prior to the day that initiates the presidential period;
4th.—He who has been Minister, Vice Minister of State, or President of any Official Autonomous Institution, and the General Director of the National Civil Police, within the last year of the immediately previous presidential term;[28]
5th.—Professional military persons (militares) who were in active service or who have been so within the three years prior to the day of the beginning of the presidential period;
6th.—The Vice President or the Designate who when legally called to exercise the Presidency in the immediately preceding period, refused to fill it without just cause, meaning that this exists when the Vice President or the Designate manifests his intention to be a candidate to the Presidency of the Republic within the six months prior to the beginning of the presidential period;
7th.—The persons included in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th ordinals of Article 123 of this Constitution.
Article 154 is really, explicitly clear that a President cannot spend more than their full term-
Article 154 The presidential period shall be of five years, and shall begin and end on the first of June, without the person who exercised the Presidency being able to continue in his functions one day more.
Article 131 adds an obligation in ordinal 16,
Article 131 16th.—To obligatorily disavow the President of the Republic or his substitute if, when his constitutional term has ended, he continues in the exercise of his post. In this case, if no person has been legally summoned for the exercise of the Presidency, a Provisional President shall be designated;
HOWEVER... there is a certain... trifling... Article 155
Article 155 In default of the President of the Republic, due to death, resignation, removal or other cause, the Vice President shall substitute him; lacking the latter, one of the Designates in the order of their nomination, and if all these are lacking for any legal cause, the Assembly shall designate the person who shall substitute him. If the cause that incapacitates the President for the exercise of his position endures for more than six months, the person who substitutes him in conformance with the preceding paragraph, shall complete the presidential period.
Some rules lawyers may be recognizing why that might be important. Rest assured, Article 156 is quick to spot one potential loophole-
Article 156 The positions of the President and Vice President of the Republic and of the Designates are only resignable for a duly substantiated grave cause that shall be approved by the Assembly.
And later on, it's very, very clear that that on the constitutional amendment front, the framers were very clear that the most relevant principle can not be amended.
Article 248 Reformation of this Constitution may be decided by the Legislative Assembly, with the vote of one-half plus one of the elected Deputies.
For this amendment to be decreed, it must be ratified by the following Legislative Assembly by a vote of two-thirds of the elected Deputies. Thus ratified, the corresponding decree shall be issued and shall be published in the Official Gazette. Amendments may only be proposed by elected Deputies, by a number no less than ten.
**Under no circumstances, may the articles of this Constitution, which refer to the form and system of government, to the territory of the Republic, and to the principle that a President cannot succeed himself (alternabilidad), be amended. **
---RECORD SCRATCH---
Did you catch that? One of the key points of discrepancy in the coverage? Something previously referenced, but kind of relevant?
The El Salvador Constitution doesn't prohibit the election of former presidents. The El Salvador Constitution prohibits self-succession.
To quote-
Article 88 The principle that a President cannot succeed himself (alternabilidad) is indispensable for the maintenance of the established form of government and political system. Violation of this norm makes insurrection an obligation.
This is where the Constitutional rules-lawyering begins, which has not, shall we say, been an area where the Western media has been particularly clear on positions or, or weaknesses of, those involved.
The Constitutional principle involved for arguments against re-election is not that not actually about re-electing a former president. There are a half-dozen restrictions on who can run for President, but being a former president- or even a future former president- isn't one of them. There is only time frame defined derives from Ordinal 1 of Article 152, which is where the prohibitions on self-succession defines as-
1st.—He who has filled the Presidency of the Republic for more than six months, consecutive or not, during the period immediately prior to or within the last six months prior to the beginning of the presidential period;
The core of the Constitutional argument against Bukele boils down to claiming that being President 7-12 months before the presidential period- but not 0-6 months before- constitutes 'the period immediately prior to the beginning of the presidential period.'
The weakness of those who want to take that position is without an actual ban on former Presidents running for election, trying to claim 'more than half a year ago' is 'immediate' and not long enough obligates a standard on how long out of office would be enough. And the issue here is that the only hard number the Constitution provides in this context is... the 6-month window.
Bukele's maneuverings- and his supporting Constitutional argument- is that he will resign from being president more than 6 months out. It will not be his Presidential Period anymore- it will be whoever actually ends up replacing him as the interim, who will complete the Presidential Period (Article 155).
Article 156 does stipulate that a Presidential resignation should be accepted for a 'duly substantiated grave clause'- but there is no definition of what that would be, and the power to accept that is explicitly left to the Assembly. 'Duly substantiated grave clause' is in the same undefined space as the American 'impeachment-worthy' category, which is to say- whatever the Legislature wants it to be. And, of course, whether they accept it is not really in question.
At which point, once resignation is accepted, some of the key constitutional objections give way.
Is Bukele succeeding himself, the criteria for which insurrection is obligatory? Clearly not- he will have resigned.
Will Bukele be succeeding someone for whom he is too closely related to be a candidate again? Also no- the constitutional barriers are on familial relationship, not political relations.
Will Bukele's succeeding president be unconstitutional? Not if the Bukele's resignation is accepted by the appropriate constitutional body.
Should the Bukele's resignation be accepted? I would agree they should not. However, the judgement falls to the Assembly.
Will the Assembly's acceptance of the resignation unconstitutional? This isn't the case being made- and there is no standard for what they can / cannot accept.
And this is where we get into the space that Americans will be more familiar with, the sort of open-ended 'what is an Impeachable offense' standard where a Legislature has the ability to choose, but no obligation or enforcement arm to have a standard. In the U.S. American political context, this has generally been recognized as 'let the voters reward or punish,' where the worthiness of an Impeachment is based on whether voters reward or punish at the ballot box.
It's very hard to emphasize enough the point that Bukele is truly, genuinely popular in El Salvador. He is not going to need to cheat to win the election. This is not a case of 'unpopular minority incumbent corruptly rigs courts to steal votes,' or even 'incumbants use state of emergency to change voting laws to favor themselves by improving partisan constituent turnout.' Bukele is a wildly popular incumbant who is popular because he made major, discernable changes in people's quality of life through addressing real threats. The unpopular minority parties in this context are the ones trying to prevent the most popular candidate from running.
None of this is intended to imply that Bukele's ambitions for another term are good or just or appropriate, or even that you need to accept his position's Constitutional framing. The principle of self-succession was adopted for many, many good reasons.
But rule of law implies rules by the laws as written, not the rules as you wanted them to be, and conflating the two simply undermines the claimed sanctity of the former. Bukele is a classic letter-of-the-law versus spirit-of-the-law dispute, where the spirit and the letter are not the same thing, and 'Bukele packed the courts' isn't the only reason he could win that argument.
The counter-argument/most relevant argument I'd make is that nations can die not only when they lose resources to sustain themselves, but also a desire to.
This really was the crux of the Soviet crack-up. Economically, the Soviet Union was a basketcase, but it was a basketcase that could have held itself together if it wanted to. The post-Soviet states of North Korea, Cuba, or even Russia itself in the causcuses show that a very poor, very dysfunctional state can still hold itself together. Ultimately, suppression is relatively cheap, and rebellion is hard, and barring outside intervention no insurgency in history has thrown out an occupying army without the assistance of another army nearby to assist.
But politically... the deathknell of the Soviet Union wasn't the economy, but the internal sense of political legitimacy. There's a saying that goes along the lines the Soviet leaders wished to be social reformers, thought they were social reformers, pretended to be social reformers, and then finally wished to be social reformers. The ideological justifications and pretenses of the Soviet communist system withered over time in the face of available alternatives, the cyncism of the elites and the populace grew, and over time fewer people were willing to die, or even kill, in the name of authorities viewed as unjust and corrupt and failing. The more the Soviet Union became less a transformational project and more just a corrupt empire of a state, and a state that couldn't even deliver good results, the closer it got to the point where it was unable and unwilling to hold itself together by force.
The issue not just with wokeism in particular, but polarization in general, is that it arguably creates the same dynamics of distrust, disunity, and de-legitimization in the US in what is essentially an ideological state bound by buy-in, not blood-and-soil or religion or other common identities.
Take your pick of post-modernist critiques, but if racism/sexism/-insert-ism is the worst sins of the day, but your political opposition- and by proxy the other half of the country in a two-party system- are the worst sinners of the day and the government is fundamentally build upon, with, and for the worse sins of the era... why continue it, if you can't control it to fix it? If fixing it is even possible, which various critques basically amount to an impossibility? Believe in the good of the commons requires believe that the commons are, in fact, good. But if the commons are not good- and in this case the commons can be shared institutions, norms, or whatever- defecting is rational, even if it comes with long-term penalties. And when defections start occuring, the commons start to crumble.
We already have seen this in various back and forths. The borking of Robert Bork began a practice of practice of blocking / slowwalking judge appointments into the Bush years, which led to the retaliation in the Obama years, which led to the Democrats removing the judicial filibuster, which led to the loss of it to the Supreme Court, where now the organs of the Democratic Party actively discuss and lobby for court-packing or defanging the Supreme Court. The politicization of consolidated national media, which ostensibly strived for neutrality at the start of the era of national news television like CNN but then created ideological conformity that gave first to Fox News for underserved markets, and then to the Trump Russia hoax affair, has not only cratered trust in media in general but driven the development of information silos for much of the American population. Campus free speech issues didn't remain limited to college campuses, but went both up the employment chain and down into primary education, where considerable fractions of both the voting and non-voting publics don't feel safe voicing their own political opinions. The religious right was happy to muster it's social pressure power into politics, and reaped the whirlwind of an equally evangelical zealotry by people who also saw other believers as a problem to be fixed. When everything is political, and you hate your political rivals, you either burn the shared space down to deny it, or you use it against your hated political rivals.
Yes, a state like this can go on for quite some time... but who is going to want to fight and die and kill for it, if it comes to it? Especially if any interested outside party decides to help things along in a material way? And why would they want to? The Soviet Union had plenty of resources to pay for people to kill the people who didn't want to be with them anymore. That wasn't the issue- a desire to was.
Woke theory is just one of the discrediting ideologies that undermines that desire for their to be a shared nation. And without that desire, the US can absolutely fall apart even if it still has resources. It's far from impossible to see something that makes Brexit look like a wise and just solution.
Now, for the record, I don't think it will actually go that far. I view a number of the issues in US politics right now as within the scope of past political disruptions that were survived. There are dynamics that make this unique- namely this is the first major American political realignment since the invention of social media, and things that previously wouldn't have been publicized are now prevalent- but my own view is that between demographic changes, internal migrations, and the cycling of the American elites as part of both, the system is in the process of changing rather than collapsing, and more to the point is doing so in the context where a lot of its major alternatives are going to do worse.
Dean
4mo ago
The modest version is that jewdefender presents as being against racial-supremacist arguments while making nominally anti-white supremacist posts that borrow heavily from white-supremacist tropes that are used to undermine the nominal 'we've got to resist these people' facelevel argument while adopting the conclusions. In this case, a 'why can't we have a honest conversation without disclaiming racial violence' and 'I get we need to be neutral and objective'- the defensible mottes- are surrounded by a laundry-list of 'non-white bad' and appeals for ethno-supremacist supremacist states which routinely use violence to enforce a dominant ethnic-identity paradigm.
Oversimplified, the persona's schtick is 'I'm totally against white supremacists, I'm just going to raise all these points they say they make framed for you to agree with their conclusions, but I'm totally not associated, really.'
A longer version includes that they're also suspected of being a repeated past troll who's just updated their posting style a bit.
Dean
8mo ago
In reference to Trump, they argued that the events on and surrounding January 6th intending to overturn the election would constitute "insurrection or rebellion" as understood at the time of the passing of the amendment.
Why?
The 14th amendment was, after all, passed after the Civil War, a conventional war in which field armies were marshalled to fight against the uncontestedly lawfully elected government. (The Confederates did not deny that Lincoln won the election, which is why they cited other casus belli.) The contemporary acts of insurrection included federal garrisons being overrun, cities sacked, massive civil destruction the likes had never been seen in North America since maybe the fall of the Aztecs, and millions dead directly or indirectly. In the drafters' own lifetime, non-insurrectionary violence in the capital included beating Congressional representatives with canes and honor-duels.
January 6, by contrast, wasn't even in the top 5 violent acts of political violence within a year of it happening.
I can't see this not being important,
Why not?
Trying to frame January 6 as an insurrection or rebellion has been an attempted narrative line since January 6, 2021, with generally only partisan effectiveness. It has been approximately 945 days and American public polling has consistently held viewing this along partisan lines. What, besides the appeal to Federalist society credentialism, is supposed to make it more significantly more persuasive after day 950?
To anyone who has discussed the issue with pro-Ukraine people.
Why do people support Ukraine fighting against Russia, with a strange militaristic fervor, instead of supporting surrendering / negotiating peace?
There's nothing strange about nations resisting invasion to anyone with a passing familiarity with history, and nothing odd about people supporting a victim of unjust aggression to anyone with a familiarity of social dynamics.
Anglin makes the points that:
-the war is severely impoverishing Europe due to high energy costs
Anglin is anticipating, not describing. Europe is not impoverished, and the past year has demonstrated that the energy doomers on both sides were significantly over-estimating the near-terms impacts of energy disruptions.
Germany is not going to have a great time, but that's because Germany's economic model relied on a number of assumptions of below-norm energy prices and globalism dynamics that increasingly no longer apply. However, Germany was also on the course for a major economic fundamentals shift this decade anyway due to German demographic shifts resulting from their top-heavy age distributed work force exiting the work force.
-the war is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)
Anglin is failing to attribute agency. 'The war' is a consequence, not the actor. The Russians are destroying Ukraine, and have demonstrated they will continue to do so even even in areas not part of the front in ways that do qualify as genocide under post-WW2 international law. Since a lot of people don't view the cultural genocide clauses and mass abduction of children to destroy ethnic groups as 'really' genocide, we can just go for 'crimes against humanity.'
-continuing the war increases the chances of a world war
Anglin is being amusing, and does not make a credible argument for who else in the world would be a meaningful participant on Russia's side, considering how limited (and mercurial) the support of even Russia's closest international allies has been.
Is it cheering for the possible destruction of Russia?
It probably would be cheered, but that's generally because of the recent invasion and crimes against humanity.
Something to do with the current leadership of Russia, anti-LGBTQ, pro-family policies?
The invasion and crimes against humanity are problems with the current leadership, yes, but not particularly pro-family.
Is it about the 1991 borders of Ukraine, issues with post-Soviet Union border disputes?
The invasion and crimes against humanity are problems since 1991, yes.
Notion that 'if we don't stop Putin now he will never stop no matter what'? Is it something about broadly standing up against aggression of one state vs another, supporting the 'underdog'?
The invasion and crimes against humanity have been self-justified by the Russians by historical revaunchism ideology in terms that applies to several other regional states, meaning no relevant ideological self-limiting factor to just Ukraine, yes.
The issue with that one which seems to be central to Alexander's March 22 post is that there isn't much that seems capable of stopping Russia.
This seems curious to raise now, since one of the obvious trends of the conflict has been the Russians were quite literally stopped in multiple respects in multiple axis, including an infamous 40-mile traffic jam that preceeded a total retreat from the most important front of the war's opening in under a month. Not only did the Russians strategically culminate in most fronts by the summer, but the consistent trend of the last 6 months has been the Russians not only being stopped, but actively reversed and losing territory.
Sending another 100k Ukrainians to the meatgrinder for that end seems a little bit harsh coming from people with very little skin in the game.
The West has sent 0 Ukrainians to the meat-grinder, and has no ability to send any more, because the West does not control the Ukrainian state, both of whose constituency maintains extremely high support to resist to the state whose maximalist goals would result in even more rampant crimes against humanity against the Ukrainian nation.
Just signaling what they are told is the correct opinion?
It's strange that the greatest Russian military catastrophe since 1941, surpassing even the Chechnya and Afghanistan embarrassments to the point that the Russians are turning to North Korea of all places for military procurement, would be confused for 'just signalling.'
Is it about saving face, sunk cost at this point?
Sunk cost implies that significant costs have been incurred for no meaningful gain, which assumes a conclusion.
Western military support for Ukraine has not been a significant cost to the states providing, and has directly resulted in clear effects on Russia's intended military-political goals in the conflict. Western economic costs have been higher than the military costs, but neither impoverishing or obviously not worth opposing an attempt to fundamentally change European security politics to re-introduce wars of conquest.
What would be the best case scenario for a Ukraine/State Department victory?
Russia immediately leaving Urkainian territory, returning the kidnapped Ukrainian children and other forcibly relocated persons, paying reparations to the victims corresponding to the costs of the war including the forced conscription in occupied territories, and begin a long series of internal accountability efforts bringing war criminals to justice in international forums, hopefully accompanied by internal political reforms dismantling the security state responsible for planning and executing the war.
To my understanding, Putin is not the most radical or dangerous politician in Russia, and an implosion into ethnicity-based sub-regions would cause similar problems to the 'Arab Spring'. Chechens for example would not appear very West-friendly once 'liberated' from Russia.
The Chechens, however, would not be capable of invading European states or attempting ethnic cleansing on the scale that the Russians are attempting to.
The problem of a Russian break out isn't that various successor states wouldn't be western friendly- this is functionally no change from the current macro state- but rather the issue of nuclear proliferation. Which is why the west isn't making efforts to destroy the Russian Federation as a polity, which would be reflected in efforts to target the internal security state aparatus.
Not only that, but economic crisis in Europe could generate additional security risks.
Security risks from economic crisis in Europe are considerably less concerning than the security risks of a revaunchist invader willing to attempt wars of national eradication when he thinks he can win it during a window of opportunity, but the poor sense to not know when that is not possible.
Dean
5mo ago
I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far.
How can it go way too far without any baseline-standard of how much distrust is appropriate?
You've not contested charges that various experts have lied, and lied for reasons of political and person self-interest. You've not countered the implications of the replication crisis which undermines the veracity of so much published research and the institutions behind it. You've only added examples of unreliability and bias undercutting grounds of deferrence, because if subject matter experts can't be rational in their chosen fields or are utterly unreliable in areas outside of them or compromised by ideology... it seems really, really significant that the dominant expert institutions have been heavily captured by ideological interests who select for ideological affiliation.
In other words, you've only provided more reasons to distrust Experts by default, factors that only further justify a starting position of distrust until veracity can be verified, without providing any standard of how much distrust is warranted as a starting point.
If there's no standard of 'this far is okay,' you lack the same standard to compare and say 'this much distrust goes way too far.'
Dean
10mo ago
I will always think of the places where liqour stores were essential business, but churches and religious services were not.
Dean
1yr ago
Overall, not impressed or compelled by the claims. People have already noted the singular anonymous source claiming, in an era where anonymous sourcing has been as disreputable as ever, but there are other elements that raise eyebrows.
-The claim it was done by the pure navy, as opposed to special forces, to avoid Congressional oversight really suggests someone who is not familiar with the other forms of oversight- and security vulnerabilities- of American military branches. There's a reason that the US black projects generally don't operate from the conventional forces, but in separate elements.
-The mind-reading/framing of motives is projection, or at least certainly not how the western military-security types would view items. I've yet to meet an American in a serious position of government responsibility who frames concerns over Nordstream in terms as abstract as 'threat to western dominance,' as opposed to the more concrete concerns of 'energy blackmail' or 'gas turnoffs.' This is arguing by connotation and pejorative rather than actual positions. If this is the author, that's on him, but if it's from the source, that's indicative.
-The discussion on the German political situation in May 21 is missing some rather significant context- such as the points that Merkel had just retired and there was a multi-month German political paralysis as the government formation negotiations were ongoing, the Russian military buildup adjacent to Ukraine had already started, the Belarusian migration crisis and Russian gas supply slowdown was already starting. The last three are generally now seen as pre-invasion shaping efforts by the Russian government before the invasion- which we know that the Biden administration was aware / observing in 2021. Instead of 'making a concession he knows will be invalidated', however, the author frames the motive as Biden's internal political floundering to war-criticisms.
-The 'planning' meeting that rests solely on the anonymous source is, ahem, silly. Just reverse the sentence order of the paragraph to see how so-
The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.” - The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely.
The proposed plans, as described, don't pass muster in the context of their own paragraph, let alone broader realism. For one, submarines don't "assault". That's the sort of language of someone larping military insight. Similarly, the airforce plan of 'bombs with delayed fuses' makes no sense. Aircraft are incredibly visible, so you'd be guaranteeing a record trail, and either the aircraft would have to bomb land-based targets- which is to say, where timed fuse bombs would be found by the Germans in Germany- or a sea target. Now, this may surprise, but dropping bombs from a bomber entails the bomb hitting with terminal velocity. When very small things hit very big bodies of water at very high speeds, they do not penetrate and then become precision submersibles, they go splat.
This is something deserving of /r/credibledefense, but not credibility inspiring.
-The argument about no longer being a covert option because of the Biden Administration's public statements on Nordstream are nonsense.
"According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”"
This is a red flag for credibility. Covert options aren't covert because you have a known capability, but rather the secrecy. When we read declassified / released examples of covert operations, they almost always involve known capabilities of the actors. It's the who/when/if they are actually doing it that's the secret item. This objection is just about the one part that wouldn't matter, precisely because the Navy diving programs are openly acknoweldged capabilities.
-The whole Norway angle is just comedic. The narrative flops between the need for operational and legal secrecy as needed, without actually explaining why informing the Norwegians is necessary to carry out the operation... except to tell the Americans, who have been reviewing the problem for months, where to hit the pipe. The operational simultaneously needs to be secret, but also incredibly expansive in people and organizations involved.
-The timeline is also all over the place. Biden is alleged to have committed to planning the attack on the pipeline as a result of domestic political pressure before the war, but with target selection only occuring in March after engagement with a foreign nation, with the exact timing being... one of the most observed military maneuverings in the region for the year. Except, now with an even later bomb-on-command requirement, late in the process... which indicates they didn't have a time intended to blow it up originally, even as they were engaging the Norwegians to place it.
And- despite all the effort in creating a command-detonated timing... no reason for the timing is apparent. The article tries to go with a citation to imply it had to be done eventually, but there's a roughly 3 month gap between the alleged emplacement and alleged trigger.
-The argument on Russian mine-detection technology is getting into the military spy-fiction, and not the good kind. Tom Clancy was at least good at not just hand-waving technology. You don't get to just allege that the Russians built an entire undersea surveillance network along the Nordstream pipeline to justify the Norwegians as the only people who can counteract it with their inherent anti-Russian traits.
-The regular appeals to the 1970s is less relevant and more argument by historical innuendo. This is a normal element of conspiracy building, to break down temporal relevance and start building connections between unconnected things while also obscuring temporal and contextual relevant information. This isn't the first part of the article to do this, but it's reocurring enough to note, especially since the 1970s Church hearings drove very significant changes in the American intelligence community... changes that are being implicitly covered over by the appeal to the 70s for narrative continuity.
-The air-dropped sonar bouy is yet another red flag. You could get a better engineer to discuss the dynamics of sound propagation through water, but the real item is the fixation on dropping it out of an aircraft.
There is literally no reason to use an aircraft to drop a sonar bouy if you're trying to have a secret signal. Aircraft are easily observable on a number of sensors or by regional naval traffic. Even if your broadcast device weren't detected by any/all systems in the broader area at the moment it signals- and remember the Norwegians are being involved on the basis of a Russian surveillance system for underwater threats, ie. sound-based detection- the aircraft flight for recote detoation would be easily observable...
...and unnecessary, because you could just sail a boat and drop it over the edge. Boats are far, far harder to monitor for unusual activity than aircraft.
I could go on, but that's kind of enough. There are a number of things in this story that are meant to sound vaguely informed and insightful, but with a pretty clear lack of understanding of the material or the alternatives. The way this is written, this is less written by someone who actually knows how governments work and reads far more like being written for the sort of people who don't.
Really, it's targeting ignorance with a hope of shaping your views without remembering how they were shaped. It hopes you don't remember that it's all based on a single anonymous source, that no motivation is provided for the source providing all this information, that you won't remember the argument by connotations in rhetorical lines not used by the people it claims to reflect the positions of, that you won't dwell on the communication role/purpose of the various time-skips in the narrative, or the omissions of 2021 and awkward time gaps, the mechanical alternative methods, and so on.
All told, I do not find it credible, and would lower my judgement of someone who found it compelling.
I didn't read the substack in question and don't have a particular opinion on it, but from personal discussions / observations / distant review, the issue is more the aging-out/retering cohort's effect on military families and communities.
While there is a core demographic argument, the demographic is more regional/cultural than demographic per see. South/MidWest/etc. have always been over-represented. The thing the OP's summary paragraph doesn't seem to address is that a lot of enlistment is from military families/communities, rather than blank regional. I forgot the statistics precisely, but in generally any country you go you're likely to see far more volunteers from people with parents/grandparents who were in the military than a random first-generation enlistment. There's a family, not just demographic, dynamic in play, which means if the family member advises against rather than for the enlistment... well, 'I'll join the military' isn't exactly social rebellion.
The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics. The 9-11 recruitment cohort is dead, dead, dead. If you look at age averages, the vast majority of US service members were born after 9-11. If you joined just after 9-11, you are that tiny minority of people who serve a full 20 (for a pension) or go beyond. That means people who joined during the Bush years, have gradually and progressively lost during the Obama years / saw the Trump years / are back in the Obama 2.0/Biden years. There's any number of things that could justify a feeling of disenchantment, from perceptions of futility of the wars, to the progression culture war aspects into military culture/life, and so on.
This is purely anecdoctal, but the straw that broke the back for some life-longers was how the Biden administration approached the Covid vaccine mandates. The US military, like many in the world, is legally allowed to employ experimental medicines / vaccines on the forces. US troops have been used not only for experimental medical treaments, but also as medical experiment test subjects in the past. When the Biden administration decided to make Covid vaccines mandatory for all forces no matter what, they weren't on particularly legally shakey ground.
What they did run aground on, however, was the disparity between culture war politics and needs-based buy-in. Whatever your competence-expectation for the average junior soldier, US career military professionals are career professionals. They are not only educated, but educated with an eye to practical implications and effects and cross-specialty coordination that many topic-focused specialists are not. And the politically inconvenient facts of COVID- such as that it was not a death plague for the young and the healthy (which most of the armed forces are) or the sort of politically-influenced media pressures were being used in a propagandaist fashion (which the military is above-average aware of as both a target and a perpetrator of) or active suppression of inconvenient medical dissent (which the more conservative-tuned military would be more aware of)- where thus part of the awareness environment even as the administration used brute force command-control precisions to not only demand, but overrule requests for exceptions despite cases of special forces personnel (a highly respect internal community) requesting exceptions for practical concerns, religious personnel requesting exceptions on religious grounds (which have variously been respected in the past), and so on. The evidence that the Covid vaccine wasn't even stopping transitions- and as such not making self-vaccination a breakwater to protect others- undermined a public good argument that the pandemic would end once everyone was vaccinated to stop transmissions. Instead, it was pure formal power demands on institutions of people who are explicitly trained on formal versus informal power dynamics as part of good-leadership training on the assumption that demands from compliance on basis of formal authority is bad leadership. Instead, people that people knew- people with long terms of service, unquestioned loyalty, generally high levels of competence, people who had put up with the worst of the military life and some of the worst strategic decisions of national leadership in a generation- were systematically kicked out for not bending to the political hysteria of the moment. People for whom loyalty was not an ironic thing, for whom a culture of reciprocal loyalty both up and down was both the formal instruction and often found informally, were kicked aside saying 'your services aren't needed anymore.'
What did anyone expect them to tell their families? Or for their friends who kept their heads down but also got out to tell theirs?
American military recruiting was always declining as the 9-11/War on Terror legitimacy faded, but Covid was an inflexion point in at least some US military family circles, where the military went from 'you can be safe and have a successful career as long as you keep your politics to yourself,' to 'you are not safe if you do not defer to the demands for conformity by politically-driven misinformation.' This would be unhelpful regardless, but is especially counter-productive if you (a) are drawing recruitment from the political opposition, and (b) embitter a core part of your informal recruitment advocates who shape the willingness of those most open to joining.
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