Russia is our biggest foreign military threat, and is the biggest threat to our allies as well.
This is only arguably true at all because they have a huge nuclear arsenal. China is much larger economically and their military is comparably sized (I don't think this would be true in a normal year but Russia's military is unusually large right now). China also has a very good territorial claim to Taiwan, which is (from what I can gather) viewed as a red line by our ally Japan. If China moves to take it, there's a very good chance they start with ballistic missile strikes on Japan. So I suspect China might actually be the bigger threat to us-and-our-allies here, in part because they hold the stronger hand, relative to Russia. (Or they seem to. I think we might live in a world where LRASM just works fantastically and we actually sink the entire Chinese fleet in a week and go home, which ironically would likely mean the Russians win their war, for a certain value of winning, and the Chinese lose theirs for any reasonable value of losing.)
Every day that the war continues is another day that the Russian military continues to deteriorate without any loss of American life?
This would be a better argument IMHO if Western generals didn't keep coming out and saying "well the Russian army is more capable now than before the invasion" which isn't startling if you know a thing or two about war: wars typically make militaries more capable, not less. Unless you lose decisively, or hit economic trouble. I'd say the calculus for giving arms to Ukraine really varies a lot on the ultimate outcome. If the West can win the war, or deal a very bad economic hit, it begins to look like a decent deal. If the West throws its own tanks into Ukraine for them to get ground up and Russia to come out stronger than ever before while European NATO is weaker than before, well, you've made yourself weaker and your enemy stronger and that seems less than ideal. I don't think Ukraine will win the war outright, but it does seem plausible there will still be bad economic consequences for Russia.
In World War I, Germany, with about the same population, lost close to 2 million war dead. Ukraine's population was similar at the beginning of World War II and they lost 1.6 million war dead, in addition to over 5 million civilians. In 3 years of fighting, Ukraine has lost about 100,000 soldiers and a few thousand more civilians. This war can continue for a very long time.
A quick Google suggests that the median age in Germany during World War one was likely about 28; the media age in Ukraine is about 42 now. I think this matters even if Ukraine can absorb the same number of causalities on paper.
Second, if you want to do this, don't talk about realism, and don't talk about how you personally don't give a fuck about whether Ukraine survives because you only care about America. These views simply aren't compatible.
At the risk of steelmanning a view that may diverge from my own, it seems to me that "America first" implicitly suggests other nations to count, just...second. Or third. Or fifteenth.
Shrike
5mo ago
If you had cut out the last bit you could have squeezed Saudi Arabia and maybe Turkey in there (Turkey invaded Syria, as I recall, although perhaps they managed to avoid blowing up hospitals and killing children? I hope so.)
Shrike
5mo ago
I'm pretty sympathetic to your position here, but there's some things I think need to be parsed out.
The only actual NATO offensive action was Yugoslavia, and even that was telegraphed far in advance, was explicitly humanitarian in an already-war situation, so I fail to see how it would ever serve as a template for Russia to be worried.
Can't all of this be said of the invasion of Ukraine? Russia surrounded Ukraine and sent ultimatums demanding that Ukraine be banned from NATO, and then when they were rebuffed it launched a military operation, claiming it was staging a humanitarian intervention in an already war-torn land...and I think it's pretty reasonable for Russia's neighbors to be worried, honestly! But by the same token I don't think handwaving Yugoslavia really assuages Russia's concerns about the potential for NATO to be turned against them and their allies, especially since intervening there was arguably a violation of the NATO charter and NATO did it regardless.
Similarly, missile defense systems being deployed in Poland, etc. are I think a little more understandable
Let's talk about this a bit. AEGIS Ashore (which was deployed in Romania) uses the SM-3 in a land-based VLS cell.
Guess what also uses VLS cells? The Tomahawk surface-to-surface cruise missile. That should have made AEGIS Ashore illegal under the INF treaty in my reading, but as I understand it, the US brushed off the concerns with "well we've made it so that it won't accept the Tomahawk" - I'm not really sure how the Russians are supposed to be able to verify this. At any rate, the US pulled out of the INF (which was the right thing to do) so it's a moot point now, but at the time I think the Russians were technically correct to find it fishy (of course they likely violated the INF themselves, so, even if it was "in response," they arguably lose the right to persuasively complain about it.)
Anyway, let's set aside the Tomahawk, guess what has a secondary surface attack mode? Any missile, in theory (the Russians engaged a number of surface targets with S-300 surface-to-air missiles during the ongoing war). So the Russians were possibly, based on what I've read, not just worried about the destabilizing nature of a missile shield in their backyard, they were also concerned that the Americans were putting a launcher under their nose to conduct a decapitation first strike. The Russians are touchy about that sort of thing (there allegedly was a touch-and-go Nuclear Suitcase moment under Yeltsin because the Scandinavians sent up a single civilian rocket that the Russians were unaware of, and the Russians thought it might be a first strike, since a single launch first strike was one of their scenarios.)
PERSONALLY I think that the Russians are overly neurotic about this stuff because we can probably put SSGNs just about wherever we want and fire Tomahawks anyway, but it's probably worth understanding that to the Russians "putting BMD in Romania" and "putting ballistic missiles in Romania" may trigger an "it's the same picture" response and I don't think the US going "nah trust me brah" is very persuasive.
Georgia 2008 absolutely must be mentioned
It might be worth mentioning that the EU's independent report determined Georgia started said war.
Shrike
5mo ago
Isn't it plausible that Trump said "stop laying tariffs on US goods" and Trudeau knows that is a political nonstarter? I don't know anything about Canada but I am given to understand y'all have very high tariffs to protect certain local industries.
Although, with that being said, I read the White House presser and it is laser-focused on drugs. I would not be shocked if the stated explanation is the real one, or at least a meaningful part of it.
Shrike
5mo ago
I would have not delivered weapons and intelligence to Ukraine in my first term in office. In fact, I would have worked with the President of Russia to either pressure Ukraine into acquiescing to neutrality and territorial concessions then or alternatively wrung my hands and done absolutely nothing while the Russia invaded Ukraine, because you would have to be retarded to want to invade your neighbor and not to it while your own guy is sitting in the Presidency of the only country that can effectively help them.
Shrike
5mo ago
Sorry for being a pedant, but the missing aircraft is an F/A-50, they'd don't operate Hornets.
Shrike
5mo ago
I think this is a fantastic idea...or was, fifteen years ago. Now? To counterbalance China? Over Taiwan?
Here's the truth. Putin went to Xi when things started getting dicy in Ukraine. Western backed aid has killed tens of thousands of Russians. If Xi launches his thousand ships against Taiwan, my guess is that Putin's aid is already locked in.
It might be possible that Putin (who I do think is a pro-Westerner by inclination) thinks he can get more of what he wants by being "reasonable" and ONCE AGAIN playing "reset" with the United States. And perhaps he has a preexisting understanding of sorts with Trump that he wants to honor. But I do not think the United States should make any compromises in the belief that it can neutralize Russia in the 2020s against China. Longer-term thinking, sure, that's fine, particularly with a consistent objective. But if China goes to war with Taiwan tomorrow, Russia probably has their back.
Shrike
5mo ago
I would argue that liberal democracies also have a big advantage in R&D
Not as big an advantage as you'd think, hearing Westerners talk about how backwards the USSR was during the Cold War (while in real life the Soviets, while behind in many areas, still repeatedly lapped the West in important defense technology).
and that in general technological progress is required for human thriving. In my world model, slavery and feudalism did not stop because people saw the light and decided that they were immoral, but because technological progress moved the equilibrium solution away from them.
This suggests that an optimal amount of technological progress is required for [greater] human thriving, not that continuing technological progress necessarily correlates to greater human thriving. It seems possible that, say, vaccines, clean water, electricity, fission power, fertilizer are all massive wins for human flourishing and that things we have discovered since either have diminishing or negative returns. And of course this would track what I believe we see in the West (or at least in the States), that happiness has leveled off or even decreased over the past fifty years.
I'm not sure this is true (if I had to guess, there is something of a pendulum effect overall, as we develop the means to mitigate the prior mistakes we made) but I don't think it's right that there is inevitably a direct and linear progression between human flourishing and access to technology.
While the USSR certainly made significant contributions to science, my general feeling is that Putin's Russia does not focus on selling high tech to the world, but rather natural resources.
Russia's military equipment, which they export relatively successfully, counts as high tech, I think.
It takes a special kind of person to run a successful tech company
Perhaps, but the Soviets seemed fairly good at recognizing talent (see a guy named Mikhail Kalashnikov) and channeling it in productive directions. I have no strong opinions about if Putin's Russia does this or if they are handicapped by the dynamics you mention. However, you seem to miss that, if you're an oligarch, you have no objections to a special kind of person running the tech company, you just want the profits. Which is really the same dynamic that happens in American capitalism (tech founders or leaders do not necessarily reap most of the profit from their own companies).
I realize that China is a counter-example: a country which performs cutting-edge research while also being totalitarian.
Well so far it seems like a lot of examples we have of totalitarian states were actually pretty good at scientific research. The Soviet Union held their own. Nazi Germany obviously is the ur-example (to an exaggerated degree) of a totalitarian country that was quite capable of scientific research, in many ways ahead of its peers. The Japanese lagged behind, and I think the Italians did too, but the Japanese started on the back foot and still managed some impressive accomplishments (and I do not think the Italians ever managed to be quite as totalitarian as the Nazis or of course the Soviets). You can even go back a little bit further to the Civil War and watch an agrarian confederacy with feudal characteristics out-innovate their industrial neighbor in naval warfare (despite, or perhaps because of, comparatively little inherited expertise in the matter).
You can chalk the North Koreans up as a pretty un-innovative totalitarian regime, I suppose.
I think perhaps it is worth considering if scientific gains flow from wealth and industrial or information power and that liberal democracies might have an advantage there (especially with wealth, Communists were notoriously good at literacy education but not so much at generating prosperity). You can map this pretty accurately into the past 100 years: the United States, British Empire, and Germany were probably the industrial front-runners in World War Two [with the Russians having lots of mass but not yet as much sophistication] and then with the Soviet Union and United States were the frontrunners and that's where all the progress was made and now China and the US seem to be the frontrunners because they are the wealthiest and most industrialized (and now) informationalized.
Shrike
5mo ago
Historically this did happen to Americans (in the Civil War) and they surrendered rather than be ground down or begin systematic partisan warfare.
Shrike
5mo ago
I think he might concede to a Kievan rump state being granted NATO admission if he was given maximalist territorial claims. For obvious reasons this probably is not a great deal for Kiev.
Shrike
5mo ago
I'm not sure this analysis can be complete without mentioning another possible motive:
- Greed. Zelenskyy ran on complaining about politicians who buried their wealth overseas – and then his name turned up in the Pandora papers.
Secondly, I would add that part of a desire to maintain power at this point might be out of a sense of self-preservation.
Now, people are generally complex, and I am not saying that greed is what motivates Zelensky, I don't claim to know his heart. I think it's quite possible that Zelenskyy disagrees with you, for instance, about what is best for Ukraine, and your analysis does not seem to give this possibility any of the weight it deserves. But whatever drives him, it's probably more than just one thing.
Shrike
5mo ago
Putin's system of government (with oligarch allies controlling key national industries) is much less conductive to human thriving than liberal democracy.
Hmm. I think I agree directionally, but I am not sure the gap between Russia and a sort of Average Homogenized Liberal Democracy (if you will) is staggeringly vast.
A look at a few indices, just by Googling around (so buyer beware, you place your mental model in the world in the hands of the Google algo here!)
- World Happiness Index – I seem to recall this is considered sort of unreliable but let's start with it: Russia does catastrophically here, although they still edge out a few countries that might be considered "more" democratic, including NATO members Montenegro, Bulgaria, (and Turkey), and places higher than Ukraine, which is rock bottom (at least on the list I found)
- Deaths of despair: Russia's suicide rate is also horrible, with nearly 22 deaths per 100,000, narrowly beating South Korea and only really doing better than a bunch of third world countries like South Africa (although Wikipedia's data is from 2019, so things could be different now.) If you count drug deaths, however, their opioid overdose rate is purportedly only 3 per 100,000, whereas the rate in the US is 15. This actually means the combined suicide+[opioid]drugs of the US at about 30 per 100,000 is higher than Russia's combined rate of about 25 per 100,000.
- GDP (PPP) per capita: Russia does surprisingly well here, competitive with Estonia and edging out Latvia, along with several other NATO members, but losing out to Western Europe handily.
- Willingness to defend their country: Only 32% of Russians signaled a clear willingness to fight for MOTHER RUSSIA (with nearly half saying don't know or not responding, apparently – maybe they didn't want to answer no!)...which somehow still beats out NATO states such as Germany (23%), Bulgaria (30%), Italy (14%), although, perhaps understandably under the circumstances, not Ukraine (62%). In the United States, the answer is 42%. All of these are below the global average of 52%, which I assume was elevated considerably by the hardliners in Armenia, Saudi Arabia and the like who answered upwards of 80% yes.
- Debt-to-GDP ratio. Russia does very well here, with a 20% debt-to-GDP ratio. In fact, it is doing better than the rest of NATO, and far outstripping most democracies (go Puerto Rico, which for some reason is measured separately, though!) Perhaps this isn't as relevant in the day-to-day, but it does provide a barometer for the fiscal foresight of a nation.
- TFR: arguably the ultimate "revealed preference" for human flourishing. Russia is doing poorly, with a TFR of 1.5...but so are a lot of liberal democracies. Russia is tied with Germany, ahead of lots of democratic countries such as Finland, Italy, Spain and Ukraine, and of course doing much better than Japan and South Korea. The United States does only marginally better at 1.7 TFR.
In short, it seems to me that Russia is behind, say, the United States in GDP per capita, but it seems fairly competitive with post-Soviet liberal democracies in GDP. It severely lags in happiness (although again perhaps that is a non-objective measure, but the suicides are not). Over the long term, however, their outlook is better than many (although perhaps not all) of their liberal democratic peers, with competitive birth rates, manageable debt, and at least some of their populace willing to engage in violence on behalf of their country. This data also suggests that liberal democracies can have a horrific failure mode in South Korea, where Happiness Index scores are nearly as low and suicides nearly as high as Russia, but the debt is higher and the TFR is cripplingly low.
I think, as an American, I would probably rather live in most any of these liberal democracies I've mentioned than Russia. If I had to choose where to be reincarnated a native, I might rank Russia above South Korea.
Shrike
5mo ago
A great tangent!
Yes, I think you're right. (It's also potentially interesting given the speculation that global warming will make northern climes much more arable, IIRC Russia in particular could benefit). And the more right you are, unfortunately, the more likely it is that Ukraine will suffer a worse outcome.
Ukraine also has, or had, a lot of Soviet-era technical and industrial capacity. I'm not optimistic much of this will survive the war intact and in Ukrainian hands, however.
Shrike
5mo ago
Ukraine has a lot of very fertile land, which has traditionally been a large part of their geopolitical importance as I understand it. I suppose it is probably true that if Putin plowed them all under with a new superweapon the United States could simply build more farms in Kansas but that still seems fairly important to me.
(Based on occasionally reading stuff along the lines of "Russians after heated four week long gunfight finally conquer the first room in the Razelgrazelsky Salt Mine, a hardened nuclear-proof underground facility constructed in 1984 with 100,000,000 tons of concrete to house the Soviet Union's Winter Soldier program" I believe there's also a fair amount of conventional mineral extraction potential, but I'm not sure how significant that is comparatively.)
Shrike
5mo ago
Why doesn't Europe give guarantees then?
I suspect that "Europe" (which could have given guarantees at any point since 2014, or 1991, or 2014) perhaps wants the United States to give guarantees. Or at least they don't want to give them unilaterally.
Shrike
5mo ago
Russians do not slaughter more civilians in Ukraine because they are not able to. That's how powerful Zelensky's defence is.
No offense, but this is just obviously wrong! If old Vlad's terminal goal was to kill civilians, he could crack open the silos and there's not much Zelenskyy could do to stop it.
But even setting that aside, Russia has been targeting military and dual-use infrastructure successfully. If they wanted to, they could shift all of those fire missions to hitting purely civilian targets like schools,* orphanages, museums, street vendors etc. Late last year, Russia demonstrated a conventional hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile with multiple reentry vehicles; they targeted it at a missile plant instead of downtown Kiev.
*ones that aren't be occupied by Ukrainian troops, that is. Relevant to this topic, Amnesty International went a-seeking for evidence that Russia was shelling civilian areas indiscriminately without justification (and they did find that) but while they were looking, they also found evidence that Russia was shelling civilian areas because Ukraine was staging military assets there.
Shrike
5mo ago
I think the most disturbing type of argument around Ukraine is the one that pretends to be doing it "for their own good".
Let's talk about this for a second.
On the one hand, if Ukrainians want to fight to the last man, that is their right. I will not suggest they don't have that.
On the other hand, guess what? Unless your opponent is going to systematically kill you all (and there are examples of this sort of thing), defensive wars are rarely justified in terms of a cost-benefit analysis of human life. For instance, England could almost certainly have saved a great many British lives by surrendering to Hitler during World War Two.
What defensive wars do (if they succeed, which they can do even if they are technically a loss - witness the Finnish Winter War) is enable a unique culture and people group to preserve and maintain that culture and the state sovereignty that protects it. And, sadly, Ukrainian culture was already on shaky ground before the Russian invasion. But the war really accelerated that development, between out-migration to Europe and the absolute meatgrinder in the trenches. The Ukrainians understand this (which is why their conscription law blocks recruitment of young men - prime fighting age - to preserve their demographics). Continuing the war means that the already severe Ukrainian demographic problems will continue, and they might have to dip into their "seed corn" of young men. This would be a tragedy.
Ukraine will never recover from this war. It is never getting Crimea back, and it is almost certainly never getting back the areas of Western Ukraine currently occupied by Russia. Its population is shredded, its infrastructure increasingly weakening and its considerable Soviet-era inheritance largely spent. There is a possibility that they are already at the point where their best-case outcome postwar even if they did regain territory back to 2022 lines was that of a vassal or client state, clinging to the EU for dear life and trading away its vast natural resources to foreign investment firms in exchange for an influx of cash and workers to help rebuild their infrastructure...and the worst case scenario is one where they actually become a failed state, possibly losing their sovereignty again, perhaps to the Russians, but perhaps to blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers sent in to Kiev to keep the peace...or just keep the lights on.
Every single Ukrainian who dies in the trenches pushes the country as a whole a little closer to this dark outcome. At a certain point, if you wish to preserve the Ukrainian heritage, you have to ask yourself "how is this goal best served."
I agree that ultimately this is a decision the Ukrainians have to make. But it is worth considering.
But those people spreading this idea that "they must want to be invaded and die so not helping them is actually the best help", I just find that really sickening.
Are people saying this, or are they irritated because the Ukrainians still seem hung up on getting Crimea back after a decade? (I understand the Ukrainians being hung up on Crimea, but it is probably a severe obstacle in negotiations if they really mean it.)
Shrike
5mo ago
Somehow didn't stop them from getting Virginia's permission to split in half! American democracy is truly incredible.
Shrike
5mo ago
Bingo. You create credibility concerns for yourself by failing to follow through on promises, not by failing to follow through on things you never promised. The US maintains a posture of ambiguity about things like Taiwan specifically (I think) so it has the flexibility to bail without losing credibility.
Frankly, yanking Ukraine around by teasing them with NATO membership was shameful, IMHO, although I am ready to be explained to as to why that was Necessary, Actually.
Shrike
5mo ago
Nowhere does the Budapest Memorandum suggest that the United States would intervene on Ukraine's behalf outside of complaining to the UN about it (which, I suppose, could in theory lead to US involvement – but of course guess who has veto power on the security council?)
Now, as you say, the US could manufacture a reason. They could invoke the Russian violation of the memorandum as a cause for war (although by that logic US violations of the memorandum would also be a valid casus belli for Russia to declare war on the United States). But I think Americans really do not want to go down to the mat for Ukraine because we would prefer not to see Rammstein nuked and thousands of Americans dead, even as a merely "plausible" outcome.
And, on that note, do you know who else would prefer not to see Rammstein nuked? Germany! Supposing the US went to the mat for Ukraine – we might not be able to get all of NATO onboard and could even see a situation where places like Germany deny the US overflight rights like France has in the past. Do you know how difficult it would be to support Ukraine if continental NATO balked? Without Turkey's participation our ships would be barred from the Black Sea, our land access would be cut off if Eastern European states decided not to play ball (to be fair, Poland seems one of the states most likely to cooperate in this scenario) and Denmark could probably also shut off US access to the Baltics.
I'm not sure what's exactly the most likely outcome here, but while Europe now is talking a big game about helping Zelensky, I remember when Germany had to be browbeaten to send Leopards. I'm not sure what the other NATO states would do if the US had decided to go to war in 2022, but I doubt they would all have lined up to join.
Shrike
5mo ago
due to a difference in understanding of how the world works (mistake theory) or a fundamental difference in values (conflict theory).
And, again, those seem to play into each other, I would suggest. Our understanding of how the world works and our values play into each other, each informing and shaping the other.
Yes, and in fact Zelensky suggested that "all the package decision of 1994 are in doubt" less than a week before Putin declared the "Special Military Operation," and the Russians claimed that Ukraine was looking to acquire them, one of their justifications for the 2022 invasion. Now, maybe Zelensky wasn't thinking of nuclear weapons when he gave that speech (although he hardly could be ignorant of the provisions of the Budapest Memorandum!), but he certainly is now.
ETA – I'm just going to post the full Zelensky quote from 2022 for a bit of extra context:
Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. Three times without success. Today Ukraine will do it for the fourth time. I, as President, will do this for the first time. But both Ukraine and I are doing this for the last time. I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was commissioned to convene them. If they do not happen again or their results do not guarantee security for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.
I misspoke, the current Ukrainian median age is about 42 now.
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