JTarrou
4hr ago
All weapons and tactics are a race to the bottom, war is a race to the bottom.
NBA players are often interested in the enforcement of foul rules. They are also interested in skirting those rules when possible to gain advantage in the game. Half the weaponry the US fields is built to skirt the Geneva Conventions in some way too technical or expensive for other people to duplicate.
But war has no actual rules, the other guys don't have to follow shit, that's why they're fighting you.
JTarrou
4hr ago
Yes, when the interests of a nation with a military powerful enough to enforce it on other nations aligns with the text of a treaty, it gets enforced. This has nothing to do with the value of the treaty and everything to do with the value of a military powerful enough to enforce it and the interests that power has (or thinks it has).
JTarrou
13hr ago
Some countries need landmines, and so will have them, one way or the other. Same thing with nuclear weapons (within technological capability).
International treaties are toilet paper. They can be ignored, unsigned or simply violated at will, because the only thing that enforces an international treaty is military force. Every bit of paper ever dedicated to a treaty draft in all of world history carries less force than I do going to Aldi for butter.
JTarrou
5d ago
Samuel Huntington wrote in the mid-90's about Ukraine, Russia and the Crimea during the period where the recent status quo was negotiated. He was saying back then that the natural opposition of civilizational forces was going to result in the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia, or else the amputation of the Crimea and the related areas which were heavily Russian ethnically. This is just another one of those colonial states that didn't get partitioned correctly when the empire pulled out.
This was always in the cards, as is the natural tendency for locally dominant military powers to seek to control/influence the countries that border them. The US has an interest in who is in charge of Canada and Mexico. If the government is objectionable (or impotent) enough, we send troops in.
None of this justifies Russia abrogating its treaty and invading their former colony. It reinforces the bad lessons we're teaching about nonproliferation. If Ukraine hadn't given up their nukes for a pinkie promise from the Russians and the US, they might have had more options. But we deal with the world as it is.
The best case scenario for Europe is that Ukraine and Russia hammer out an ugly peace, Trump takes the blame, Russia takes the eastern third of Ukraine, NATO pushes to the borders of Russia itself, completing the European wall and saddling Putin with a festering international relations problem about the annexed provinces. This is also IMO the most likely scenario.
This is a bad outcome for Ukraine and the US, but far from the worst. Ukraine will have to become a de-facto dictatorship and military speed bump for Russia's next try. Or it could just collapse internally and become a semi-failed state.
The real winner in the whole idiotic project is China, who isn't involved and is able to test all their new gadgets while getting Russian oil at pennies on the dollar and turning the Russian economy into a Chinese fief. The days when a rapproachment between the US and Russia could counterweight China in Asia are over, China has secured their only big land border with an indebted and politically isolated Russia.
Russia, to my mind, has won the most pyrrhic of victories. Yes, in a decade they've been able to detach a few provinces from a weak and hilariously corrupt Ukraine, provinces that were 75% Russian to start with. And in return, they're going to get Nato up on their borders, their natural resources are in hock to the Chinese, the Europeans are scared shitless and looking for someone to surrender to, and it's probably going to be Trump.
The US position is getting better in Europe and worse in asia/Africa. It is unlikely we can stop China from expanding their asian hegemony. But with this Ukraine gambit, a lighter version of the Iron Curtain will be re-established, this time not in central Germany, but right up to the Russian and Belorussian borders.
JTarrou
5d ago
Ok mate, if you don't want to make the connection, I'm not going to do it for you.
The answer to the question is easy, simple and very difficult to produce with laws or tax policy. Status.
Society has to value the production of productive children higher than it does whatever else the parents do. This can be influenced, but can't be forced by the government, or religion, or propaganda.
It's not really about economics or politics, although that plays in. It's about expectations and values.
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