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Notes -
Another week, another Tucker interview, another transcription of a juicy part by yours truly. I promise, this is unusual, I haven't listened to two in a row, at all, ever.
This week is Jeffrey Sachs. The part below is just after 1:44.
That was the first mention of Israel, that I could recall, but the whole conversation is about Ukraine, Russia, Putin, and NATO. It's not exactly new to me, but it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA, and their puppet states involved in NATO.
And that was all before any discussion of COVID. tl;dl, it's obviously from a lab, we (USA) pretty clearly funded it, and Fauci has been running the germ warfare branch of the DoD for decades. Which lab, and how is unknown, but, in his own words:
Great interview, and I'm glad that Tucker has twitter dot com to host his stuff, rather than be consigned to the fringes of the internet.
Lost all credibility for me when he said that of there was a Palestinian state that the fighting would stop. "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" means the entire area of what is now israel will be "free" of Jews. And where are these Jews supposed to go? It says in hamas's 1988 charter where they are supposed to go (to their graves) and they have never changed their tune. When Fatah renounced terrorism, Hamas became the most popular party among the people of Gaza, and they won the 2006 Palestinian elections on a platform of terror and hatred. As Douglas Murray said, it there was a Palestinian state it would be a Nazi state.
...Where are the Palestinians supposed to go?
Exactly where they are. Besides some settlement building in the west bank, which no one in Gaza actually cares about, no one's making them go anywhere.
How are you responding if you've blocked me, genuinely curious
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Where were Nazis supposed to go after World War II?
You want to send Palestinians to Argentina?
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Ideally they would be welcome in a muslim country. They could go to Egypt. No wait Egypt has a fortified barrier with Gaza -- more heavily fortified than their border with Israel -- to keep them out of Egypt. They could immigrate to Lebanon. No wait they were kicked out of Lebanon for inciting terrorism. They could go to Jordan. No wait they were kicked out of Jordan for inciting terrorism. Maybe they could to Kuwait. No wait they were kicked out of Kuwait for inciting terrorism. I'd say they can go to hell but they would probably be kicked out of there too.
Speaking of going to hell, do you reject Christ?
What is the point of this question? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or weirdly evangelizing, but make your point clearly, if you have one.
Wasn't being sarcastic, or 'weirdly evangelizing' - my point was perfectly obvious as part of the public conscious. There is no way to the father but through Christ. If you actively reject Christ, you are going to hell.
This isn't the place for evangelizing.
If you consider that evangelizing, instead of bothering me, tell /u/NelsonRushton off for suggesting that Palestinians would probably be kicked out of hell. I wasn't the one to raise to topic
If one person is 'allowed' to bring up a topic (hell) other people are 'allowed' to participate
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I don't think it's accurate at all to suggest that the war in Ukraine is directly attributable to the US. Certainly, the actions of no country takes place in a vacuum - and US foreign policy has, I think, worked to encourage the start of the war and now works to extend it, and that the war is mostly to the benefit of the US and of no other country in the world. But the chief drivers of the war are Russia in choosing to attack and Ukraine in choosing to defend themselves. I think the idea that the war would just sputter out otherwise is absurd. Both nations clearly have strong interests at stake. I do not believe it is really possible for a hegemon, even the US, to create a war between others ex nihilo. The state of Ukraine, whatever it's merits, is clearly capable of inducing people to fight and die for it. That war might not last very long without NATO support, and we'd see more dying and less fighting, but it would happen.
I think there are parts of the war in Ukraine that are attributable to the US but they are far more near-term than the expansion of NATO. Russia was already de facto at war with Ukraine. That needs to be considered in any question, because Russia didn't start a new war in 2022, just massively escalate an existing one. Why did Russia choose that moment, instead of any other, to escalate? The most probable explanation to justify the timing is the spike in oil prices. It has since been weirdly memory-holed that the oil and gas price spike predates the escalation of the war in favour of the claim that the war triggered the spike. The cause for the spike was a long-term consequence of low investment in fossil fuel extraction due to environmental policies, and the medium-term consequence of the oil and gas glut that happened in 2020, which reduced production, slamming into the rise in consumption as economies got un-shuttered. The US, in part, is responsible for shuttering global economies in 2020. High oil and gas prices motivate Russia to make a move in two ways. First, by making sanctions more expensive to implement. Second, by providing the government a big budget surplus that might be put to use. However, judging by the initial invasion strategy (Russia basically trying to win in 3 days) that this was less intended to outright fund a war of attrition, and more intended to soothe over the costs of integrating captured territory into a victorious Russia while deterring sanctions long enough to make Russia's victory a fait accompli.
While it isn't quite fair to describe Russia as a Chinese client state, Putin starting a war without Xi's approval was likely to go badly. Xi didn't want the Beijing winter Olympics disrupted by a war. Putin announces that he is recognising the independence of the DPR/LPR the day after the closing ceremony and tanks cross the border three days after that.
Putin could have taken the decision to escalate at any time since Q4 2019, and between the pandemic and the need to keep China on side he ends up acting on that decision at the first opportunity. Personally, I think he took the decision shortly before publishing On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians in July 2021.
I go long stretches these days forgetting the olympics are still a thing, they really dropped the ball on that one this past decade
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There's about 8 years between the initial invasion and the escalation. The Winter Olympics would only be a factor for a small proportion of that period. And the main country responsible for disrupting them was China itself, with it's continued use of covid restrictions.
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The Ukraine war is a war of choice for Russia. I guess it’s a war of choice for Ukraine- they could in theory capitulate and the fighting would end, although no doubt the Russian army would sack a few cities and there’d be some terrorism. But the USA doesn’t control Russia or Ukraine. We can stop paying for Ukraine’s war effort, but there’s no indication it would get them to stop fighting as opposed to just going all Berlin, 1945 every few miles. And even with the Russian army’s apparent willingness to turn cities into Grozny, it’s going to take time to grind through that.
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Each time I encounter this argument, I ask why Russia gets a pass. If it’s a war of choice, isn’t there an obvious actor? But there’s no leverage on Putin, there’s no alpha in agreeing with your domestic opponents, so we see contortions to put the blame on anyone else.
Oh, except when it’s time to criticize U.S. industrial capacity. Any shortfalls in that department are taken as proof of incompetence and staggering corruption rather than reluctance. We like to start fights, not win them. Winning is for the other guys.
But that can’t reflect on the bioweapons department! They’ve got to be competent enough to concoct 2020’s headline, incompetent enough to lose control of it, and then recover their moxie in time to cover their asses. Except against FOIA, which couldn’t be subverted, since it provides the scant few points of evidence needed to damn everyone in the deep state. Other, perhaps, than the bold patriots serving said FOIA requests.
In short, it sounds like a long chain of isolated demands for rigor.
Well, more generally it's good advice to seek to change your own behaviour than the behaviour of others.
I can easily believe that bioweapons developers are capable of both competence and incompetence. That would make them just like every other human being.
"I am vast, I contain multitudes."
"No, wait, don't put me back in the quarantine--"
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Isn't this what a game of "chicken" looks like from the losing side? If we're unable or unwilling to escalate far enough to deter Putin (or Hamas), then we're stuck dealing with their actions. So naive people who "don't have a side" and "just want the killing to stop" have all their brains' capacity for rationalization being applied to finding reasons why the other side should give up. Which makes them indistinguishable from people who actively want the defeat of the other side, but who have enough social skills to lie about their motivations.
I would like to believe that the current escalation would have deterred Putin if he had all the information. It fits with my sense that Russia's leadership is dysfunctional in the boring, usual, human way: overpromising and underdelivering. A one-month war against unequipped, deserting Ukrainians would have neatly dodged almost all the consequences for Russia. I recognize that this is perhaps too tidy to be true!
Hamas...if there's a level of violence which will deter them, I don't think Israel has found it yet. It's an unsettling situation.
That's a good point, although I'm not sure how much to put on NATO's current escalation, and how much to put on the Russian military's surprising weakness. I'd been solidly in the "Putin won't invade, but if he does it would be over fast" camp, so that's two big things I was wrong about, which shows you how much I knew.
I think Hamas are religious fanatics, and have found a coordination mechanism that's strong enough to allow for suicide attacks, and which justifies "holding their own people hostage" as being in those people's long-term best interest (72 virgins for martyrs and all that). I'm still on the fence as to whether that attitude is a new category of "hostis humani generis", or whether "give me liberty or give me death" is a useful bulwark against oppression. It's hard to draw the line.
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Reading those links, I think you got some pretty good answers, but apparently you disagree.
...I wrote a more detailed point-by-point reply, but honestly, I don't think it'd be very productive to post it. You're replying to a quote that is extremely idiotic. You seem to be taking that idiocy, and then spinning it out to cover other people and discussions that are, I think, a lot less dumb, and then you're spinning it even further to concerns that I do not think you can rigorously argue are dumb at all. Maybe there's a long chain of isolated demands for rigor there, if you frame it exactly the way you have. Maybe there's even someone, somewhere who's actually regurgitated that whole chain of claims, exactly the way you've framed it. I don't recognize that chain in anything I've written, and I don't recognize it in anything I've read here either.
On the other hand, if this is genuinely how the world looks to you, that's both useful to know and depressing enough that there probably isn't much point in arguing about it.
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Could we not turn this thread into /r/Tucker?
More effort than this, please.
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I'm going to post things I find interesting, you're welcome to keep your thoughts to yourself if you don't like it.
Or you could just make your own themed thread for talking about Tucker. Meanwhile, I'm 'going to post things' I'm thinking
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God forbid a topical post on the CW issues of the day.
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I don't understand the objection to posting and discussing hours-long interviews posted by a major journalist. Argument to moderation? But it seems proportional to me to have a bias towards sources which are disseminating the most information. You could similarly point out that 100% of themotte.org content is discussed on the internet, why not have an in-person or telephone portion? Because that's the medium that works.
I'm just not crazy about it becoming a regular thing. If Tucker becomes an important part of the frame everything gets discussed in this thread, this place is going to go down hill, fast.
Personally, I don't mind the occasional post that's actually topical wedged between the endless word walls about San Francisco city council zoning proposals that occupy 80% of our timeline (which is not that busy these days anyway, just sayin)
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Downvote, collapse the thread and move on.
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Didn't we just have a bunch of complaints about the lack of movement and discussion in the main threads?
Yes, I was bitchin about it last week and made a big list of things nobody had talked about
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I don't get it is Sachs claiming he was first hand knowledge of this stuff or is he just talking his ass off like all of us here? It sounds like he is just talking his ass off like he has about every other geo-political event in his lifetime. You can always expect him to be against the USA and for whatever is popular among the far-left. So his support of Palestine and Russia is no more surprising than his support of China and Venezuela.
What's somewhat interesting is the fact that these far-left and far-right voices have converged on so much, but you also saw stuff like this in the run up to WW2.
I will take that as a compliment. Sachs, unlike me, is, uh, accomplished. He is not talking his ass off like all of us here, even if he's talking his ass off. At least, I think.
And does that follow for his discussion of distrust of the media, of Nature, of the institutions like the NIH? Does it follow for flippantly stating the CIA killed JFK and covered it up for sixty years? Sachs has been burned recently, and so I don't think he's changed his stripes but he's certainly informed by experiences in the last four years.
Unlike all of us here, he is also a relentless China shill, and concomitantly reflexively gives the official Chinese line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs#China_2
What can I say? His concerns are entirely selfish. He thinks the USG is putting his grandchildren at risk. That doesn't mean he's bemoaning the decline of These United States, it just means that he's a rat who has found himself on a sinking ship.
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Sure, this kind of hippie left think health authorities help the pharma companies cover up the “cure for cancer”, believe in chemtrails, have an extreme distrust for anything that comes out of a lab (including vaccines), and certainly believe in JFK and 911 conspiracies.
If you don't believe in chemtrails, you don't believe in reality. It's just the conspiracy parallax, where chemtrails make you insane, but cloud seeding is just known technology. Guess what, all those kooks talking about chemtrails are right: people really are spraying chemicals out of airplanes in order to seed clouds and alter the weather.
Extreme distrust is warranted when you are constantly lied to, especially in matters of public health. Those lies are obvious now, for at least one topic, and I see no reason to believe those same agencies on other matters when their credibility is thoroughly shredded. Yes, including vaccines.
You shouldn't trust pthalates or polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, both of which came out of a lab and are poisoning the environment. You shouldn't trust atrazine which is quite literally turning the frogs gay. You shouldn't trust neonicitinoid pesticides, either, or fire retardants in your furniture and on your baby's clothes.
I don't see why you are advocating for naive belief in labs.
If you believe the Warren Commission report, then you're just plain gullible. Dulles, Hoover, and Johnson, among others, conspired to hide the truth.
All you've done is boo the hippies, but to my mind they're right often enough, and more importantly, they make a different kind of error. The authorities are more likely to tell me something harmful is safe, the hippies are more likely to tell me something safe is harmful. Those two types of errors do not produce the same outcomes.
But really, the fact that you're directing your scorn towards a known true and proven fact (cloud seeding aka chemtrails) makes me think you should be more skeptical of authority, and less reflexively skeptical of the fringe.
Cloud seedling doesn’t prove chemtrail conspiracy theories, which almost all allege some kind of poison / mind control / chemical to keep people docile is being dropped from the aircraft. Benign cloud seeding for research purposes (almost universally disclosed precisely because it’s completely legal and there is little widespread opposition to it) isn’t it.
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Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. You can't just reverse the positions of your enemies and arrive at the truth.
His claim that their would be peace if Israel just acknowledged the Palestinian state is more than laughable. Hamas controls Gaza and is the mortal enemy of the PLO. They threw PLO members off the tops of buildings when they took control of Gaza. Acknowledging Palestinian statehood would do less than nothing to solve the current conflict. Hamas is going to fight to the death either way.
Sachs knows less about geopolitics than he does about economics, he's a laughing stock that gets trotted out for the public by credulous or ideologically motivated journalists like Tucker.
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You're correct: He's shitposting like anyone on this forum is, yet he has a PhD (in an unrelated discipline) so he gets to act like a public intellectual.
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It is definitely convenient to paint anyone who disagrees with American foreign policy establishment as an extremist. It is blatantly propagandistic however and just sheer boo outgroup demagoguery.
The reality, is you are dealing with people making valid arguements, and it is actually false that these arguements and perspectives are part of a far left or far right perpective, except that they are part of perspectives of both moderates, far left, far right, whatever people. And of course outside the USA, you will find again even more so people and majority of spectrum be critical of the many immoral and against international law actions of the foreign pollicy establishment.
Ironically, the current American establishment is far more far left extremist than Jeffrey Sachs and you got plenty of people who combine far left extremism with supporting imperialism. Sachs seem more like a more timid leftist than say Joe Biden.
Moreover, this also applied during the buildup of WW2. The majority of Americans opposed involvement and also had a negative opinion of both the nazis and Stalin. Really, it was more like opposition to Iraq, Vietnam which again the driving force was not far left american haters, and it would be to strawman and negatively exaggerate people like Sachs to paint them in such colors.
The American goverment highly subverted and full of communist agents didn't just support intervention to WW2 but was massively for Stalin and helped him above and beyond to take half of Europe, when they could have followed better policy that wasn't as pro communist. The great book Stalin's wars goes more into this, showing how even after the Soviets were winning, they were prioritised to get help over even American troops and many more examples of this policy direction.
Additionally, when it comes to supporters of WW2, which changed after pearl harbor, there were those who had pretty far right views and wanted to kill the Japanese and saw them as racial enemies, or supported destroying the Germans because they saw them as enemies and were pro warcrimes. It really is overly reductive and just conveniently propagandistic to try to frame the policies taken by the state department, often highly influenced by foreign lobbies, as a moderate position that only far leftists and far rightists could oppose. This is false, and you will find people whose perspective pattern matches to far left, or far right among supporters of such foreign policy. Today, it is especially far leftists who openly see the GAE as a empire for imposing their ideology.
Skepticism of American foreign policy is widely popular because it does plenty of immoral and wrong things. It is in fact quite popular among non americans of all persuassions. And to a lesser extend it is popular among Americans and promoted by the most popular host in Tucker, because the framing that it is all for Americas interest against foreign enemies, isn't accurate when it comes to Ukraine and Israel too. There is in fact a redistribution outwards and of course in favor of the weapon manufacturers that are some of the biggest donors of think tanks. There are also foreign lobbies like the israeli lobby which support wars for self serving non pro American reasons. The America first identification of movements skeptical of American foreign policy, including by Trump in part, is not accurately captured by labeling it as far right just cause you say it is. There is validity in their perspective that interests of American people are not put first.
Now, I wouldn't argue that we need to be maximally skeptical of American foreign policy establishment and maximally apologist of non American powers. There are those like Chomsky who went too far in that direction, but certainly skepticism and opposition to the current foreign policy uniparty has many humanitarian, real politic, and other grounds to stand upon, such as seeing it leading the world towards more world war paths and can't be dismissed by booing them as extremists.
All powers need to know there will be opposition when they violate certain norms. To avoid bad behavior you need to let them know those that behave badly, and would behave worse still, that there will be opposition and hostility and consequences. Hence, why those favoring totalitarianism where certain groups are beyond criticism, and poison the waters by slandering critics are promoting something incredibly dangerous.
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Sachs is making the same fundamental mistake the current administration has made and the next administration will likely make again, which is thinking that the US is in the driver's seat and all it needs to do is turn the wheel to get everyone going in the direction it wants. The war did not start on America's terms and unless it wants to intervene directly, it will not end on America's terms (a position Sachs is not advocating for, as I understand it).
NATO's enlargement was not, as Sachs seems to imagine, a result of an ever expanding American empire, but the manifesting of the strategic needs of the member states. Even if the US could wave it's magic wand and dissolve NATO tomorrow a new Euro-centric bloc would form as a symptom of the same strategic anxiety. Life in the Russkiy Mir is still within living memory of the majority of the former SSR and there is hurry to return to it. The Baltics are preparing for the worst and Poland's military buildup has gone into overdrive. Western Europe, which does not have the misfortune of sharing a border with Russia, has been slower to wake from its stupor.
Meanwhile at the Kremlin there appears to be no desire for a neutral Ukraine either. Putin et al shunned all offramps prior to Feb 2022 and have opined repeatedly that Ukraine is Russia. The Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have been legally incorporated into Russia. After the sanctions placed on it in response to its seizure of Crimea, Russia made great efforts to reduce its reliance on the west and built up great wealth (which it is now spending to fund the war). Does Mr Sachs imagine that if Biden were to ask nicely that Putin would just pack up and leave?
Sachs is right about one thing though, America does have the means to end the war. Through violence.
Russia is a nuclear power. Engaging in direct U.S. vs Russia conflict over Ukraine of all places is insane.
Should such a conflict occur, the mean expected deaths would number in the millions easily. The chance of a limited nuclear exchange becomes quite high, and a full nuclear exchange possible.
Scott shut this argument down. You can’t just play nuclear blackmail games. Maybe Ukraine is the right place to back down. Maybe it isn’t. That is a complicated question.
The solution to Russia has nukes is not back down anytime they want something. Then the whole world would be ruled by Russia. A thing worse than nuclear war.
The one big issue with not defending Ukraine is it raises a question of who really is under the umbrella of U.S. protection. Any country that thinks they might be outside of the security arrangement would be very interested in being a nuclear state. And as N Korea has proven just about any civilization can get nukes and a missile program. The reason even places like Taiwan do not have nukes despite real risks is because getting nukes would piss off the U.S. and they view security help from the west as more valuable than nukes.
Even places like Georgia would probably buy some nukes and launcher systems as soon as possible. And those type of states do have some political instability which means eventually some people you don’t like are nuclear.
The alternative is Russian Roulette. Maybe you’ll get lucky and the other guys won’t actually go through with it. But the thing is, you can’t ever misjudge in that game because if you do, the consequences, not just for your country and her allies, but for the entire world are absolutely catastrophic. Billions dead, mass extinction event, famine, radiation. And so the consequences should at least be weighed against the benefits with those consequences in mind. Is Ukraine worth it? I’m not sure. But what has always worried me about the NATO approach is that they’re playing chicken under the assumption that Putin never actually means it. And we honestly have no way to actually know this. We might guess, or assume, but we don’t know for sure that the next line we cross won’t be the one that Putin was serious about. The west in my view absolutely doesn’t take the nuclear threat seriously. They aren’t asking whether Putin would, and in fact they seem to be deluded into thinking that Putin is less likely to use them if he feels cornered. This simply defies common sense. If he loses in Ukraine his life is in danger because Russian coups tend to happen after Russia loses a war, and quite often the leader who lost gets executed. And so you have a cornered man whose only way out is the nukes, but that’s somehow something he’s going to care about. It’s nonsense, and dangerous nonsense.
You play Russian Roulette whether you fight in Ukraine or not. If you choose not to your just playing with a different gun.
Appeasement didn’t work in the ‘30’s. Looking weak today increases the risks China or Russia oversteps in the future. You even marginal raise the risks of a Russian/Chinese first strike if they think you are too soft to counter.
Playing brinkmanship is just part of the game. It can’t be removed.
Appeasement failed to contain the expanding ambitions of Nazi Germany. Right now, in Eastern Europe, it's NATO that has been expanding its borders while promising the Russians they would not. This metaphor can easily be read the other way!
This is a silly comparison.
A). No countries were militarily conquered
B). NATOs military has dramatically shrunk
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This analogy obfuscates much more than it clarifies, unless you're arguing that the methods of Nazi Germany and NATO are similar?
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"we need to fight this stupid war or we a pussy" this is the stupidest fucking argument in the world, it's responsible for so many deaths, and it's exactly why I don't trust the pro Ukraine people.
I did not say that.
Maybe not in so many words, but the line of logic of "we need to show the world that we are maximally willing to engage in war" can excuse literally any level of escalation, and used to reject any effort of diplomacy - which is what you're doing, here, with the by this point very predictable accusation of appeasement, since your history book ended at 1945.
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The point's less "we need to fight wars all the time", and more "if we give the impression that someone's under our protection, we need to actually back it up or people will think our word's worth nothing".
What word, exactly, did the US give that Ukraine was under their protection? When was this agreed? This is the problem. You people are constantly trying to push the scope of US responsibility, creep it out. And you're so eager for that expansion that you think you're not beholden to actually write those decisions down or make them legible to lesser nations. America can just swoop in on any war it feels like, or not, depending on what God told the President that day.
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We should fight this war because this is at least the third time Russia has annexed or "made independent" territory from another nation under Putin. If something works, why would you not do it again?
The fallacy I keep seeing in this and other similar conversations is the assumption that if Ukraine surrenders everything stops. I don't believe that option is even on the table unless Putin is made to regret committing to this. Hell, Putin's terms for Ukraine's surrender is to pretty much dismantle their military.
At Putin's current rate of expansion, it will take him like five hundred years to conquer Europe. I'm not that worried, despite the hysterical rhetoric about him being a second Hitler on the verge of sweeping all of Europe.
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Don't uncharitably reframe other people's arguments in a way they would not agree describes what they believe.
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Yup. Does the 2022 invasion happen if the West had a more serious response in and after 2014? Depending on what that is, it probably does not. A decade ago it was decided Ukraine was not worth too much. Things were messier then, sure, but only after Putin learns the West's level of commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty does the West decide it actually matters a bit more.
Perhaps Putin still invades thinking the thunder run will be successful before any shift in defense commitments. However, the calculation is very different. The West still does not think that Ukrainian territory and ideas of sovereignty are worth dying for. The West is just paying interest on missed payments in the past to deter further aggression.
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The question of who is under the US umbrella would be a lot less vexing if it weren't for the NATO expansionists and hawks such as yourself who are constantly trying to stretch it. The US and NATO has no security arrangement with Ukraine. They've never had one. And yet here you are, arguing that the umbrella should cover them, raising questions nobody was asking.
Let me guess, every day is 1938 and every enemy is Hitler and everyone who disagrees with you is Chamberlain.
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NATO forms a bright line that Russia knows it must never cross. Here is a map of NATO. Russia is encircled and powerless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#/media/File:NATO_32_Members.png
We shouldn't be willing to escalate maximally over every conflict. Quite simply, Russia cares about Ukraine more than the US does.
But take your opinion to its logical conclusion. You'd risk nuclear war to defend Ukraine. What about Georgia? Syria? Trade rights? Why aren't we invading China to stop the Uhygur genocide. Does our inaction prove that genocide is okay? Certainly the Uhygurs will get nukes if we can't protect them.
I enjoy living in a country that is peaceful and prosperous. And yet people are willing to risk nuclear war over a country on the other side of the world that has virtually no strategic value. Furthermore, we are willing to destroy that country in the process and kill a sizeable percentage of its male population. I maintain this is insane and I want no part in it.
NATO is just an arbitrary line you are drawing right now because it excludes Ukraine. The rest you are just asking questions.
I can just as easily say would you risks nuclear war over Estonia. Population 1.3 million? That’s stupid to cause millions to die in nuclear war.
There is of course no obvious line for brinkmanship.
You pick NATO. I point to The Budapest Memorandum. So yes we have treaty obligations with Ukraine.
Ukraine of course is white. Which does count for something in US discourse.
Ukraine also has strategic reasons it’s easier to defend than waiting for the brinkmanship to occur somewhere else.
The larger population means they have more meat to throw at the problem. Drawing the line at Ukraine would mean that the next line is probably something like the Baltics. Where you would need to put German and American soldiers at risks versus Ukrainians. And if you let Russia have Ukraine then you enlarge their army as Ukrainian meat becomes Russian meat to build their army.
So yes Ukraine has a lot of strategic reasons to pick Ukraine for brinkmanship versus waiting.
My opinion is that yes Ukraine is the right place to fight Russia. Russia would take all of Europe if they could. History tells us that.
My big issue is you act like these things are obvious. But they are not obvious. And if we let Ukraine fall in 2022 there is a strong chance a test in the Baltics would come. And my guess when that day comes you would make the same argument. Russia wants the Baltics more and we should have never let them into NATO.
Maybe we should take a step back. What, exactly, is your position?
Do you want U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine? That's what I am calling "insane".
For myself, I've been extremely consistent in calling for a negotiated peace with Russia. In exchange for peace, I am willing to concede to Russia the territory they have already captured.
What downsides are you willing to accept? What personal sacrifices are you willing to make? Would you die for Ukraine? Sorry for asking so many questions, but your position seems so vague I can't argue against or for it.
Strawman. Russia isn’t offering peace for the territory they have already captured.
You either need to surrender likely all of Ukraine and hope Russia doesn’t want more or you need to escalate to deescalate.
To do that you need better weapons for Ukraine. Allowing strikes on military targets in Russia (staging grounds etc). Potentially formalizing western advisers and logistics. I would consider Polish/French troops in defensive operations. Both have shown some willingness.
I think those steps are necessary to minimize an exchange of nuclear weapons. It asserts the borders don’t change rules of the post-war era. Which limits nations like Estonia, Taiwan, Poland, Saudis, even Iran from going nuclear.
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The USA is shelling Ukraine?
We are giving Ukraine enough arms to continue the fight instead of helping them negotiate a peace.
Every day, Ukrainian men are being conscripted and forced against their will to fight on the front lines. Many of these will die or be horribly maimed. Without U.S. involvement this would not be possible. This terrible conflict is being cheered on by people in the West who have no skin in the game.
Who's killing those men and are they really unable to stop?
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I genuinely don't understand this. What are you talking about? Russia has a border with a a couple of NATO countries. Where's the "encirclement"?
Russia sucks, West to blame
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I do not believe "encircled" means what you think it means. Without attacking NATO, Russia can move south through Georgia ("seeking" is not membership), Armenia, and Azerbaijan and keep going if it feels like getting into a conflict with Iran. And then there's that huge area of Russia not shown, which borders on other non-NATO countries. They could plow through the -stans to India, or go after Mongolia and China. No NATO there.
Where does this model of Russia even come from? The Ukrainian conflict has not exactly been a stunning success for Russia.
Now they're attacking India and China?
The whole Ukraine War rests on the faulty premise that Russia is so strong they'll invade
PolandIndia if we don't stop them, but so weak that one more round of funding to Ukraine will win the war.Personally, I don't really care as long as I'm not forced to participate. I'd especially appreciate it if more pro-war people actually volunteered for the Ukrainian military, or least the US one.
I believe the point is that it seems strange to call Russia "encircled" by NATO once you zoom the map out a bit.
With enough flexibility on a spherical planet, every region arguably encircles its inverse!
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Azerbaijan is a Turkish client state, and NATO didn't exactly complain about Turkey helping Azerbaijan invade Artsakh in violation of a ceasefire nominally enforced by Russian peacekeepers and ethnically cleanse the territory.
If I am a paranoid Russian, I consider Azerbaijan part of NATO's encirclement of Russia.
As the story goes, you can consider a tail a leg but that don't make it so. Russia invading Azerbaijan does not trigger Article 5.
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What on earth is the fear here? Are we seriously still entertaining the idea that the west wants to invade Russia? For what possible reason? NATO doesn't expand by rolling tanks into its neighbor's territory, it expands by offering protection from Russia which does appear fond of the whole rolling tanks in approach.
Most of the pro-Ukraine side believe that Putin is basically a second Hitler, and can only be stopped by military force. And these people set policy for the west. So yes, the west does want to invade Russia. The only reason they don't is because of nukes.
Until he started invading places caring about Russia was something that got you literally laughed at in US politics. And that some people hate him does not at all imply any kind of invasion. There is zero interest in the west to occupy Russia. Get rid of Putin so he stops fucking around in Geopolitics? Sure. But what is the upside to invading and occupying Russia? Why would anyone bother even if it were realistically possible?
Then why the constant talk about appeasement and Hitler, if not to get people psychologically ready for a war?
The United States does many things that are not rational. The invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. Both were unsuccessful in the long term and huge wastes of resources. But, nevertheless, the Americans reasoned themselves into doing these things. The rhetoric and rationale is very similar to what the pro Ukraine brigade says nowadays. The Taliban and Saddam are monsters, basically Hitler. America needs to project an image of strength. You can't negotiate with Hitlers. A message needs to be sent to potential state sponsors of terrorism/Hitler. What are you, a pussy?
Maybe it will happen, maybe not. Maybe it won't go as far as hot war, maybe it will. But, when I see so many people calling here and elsewhere for dramatic escalation, saying Putin is the next Hitler, calling any move for de-escalation "appeasement", drawing maps of a partitioned Russia, yes, I think the west wants war with Russia. Even knowing it would be stupid.
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The reason I bring up Russia's weakness is that it is farcical that they will attack Germany, Poland, Estonia, or other NATO countries.
This is why being anti-war is hard. Every time I bring up my anti-war stance, a bunch of people appear in my replies accusing me of being pro-Russia. I am not justifying Russia's reasons for fighting. Russia is wrong.
Russia is at fault for the Ukraine War
Russia does not present a compelling alternative to Western hegemony. The West is best.
Putin's justifications of the war are not valid
All of these are true, and yet the war should be ended immediately on practical grounds.
The passive voice here is the problem. If I am doing British politics (and I am, as a British citizen posting on a political forum during an election campaign) then "the war should be ended" is either irrelevant cant, or a way of saying "A coalition of civilized countries including the UK should end the war" while dodging the question of how. If NATO actually wanted to end the war without relying on Russia or Ukraine's willingness to act against their perceived self-interest to help us, the fastest way to do so would be to provide Ukraine with sufficient support to win it.
As far as I can see 90% of the people saying "the war should be ended" mean "the civilized world, led by the US, should jawbone Ukraine into surrendering to Russia*". The practical consequences of this probably include the enslavement, expulsion, or extermination of the Ukrainian people (which of these being largely down to the whims of a madman), so how the jawboning is supposed to work is left as an exercise to the reader. I would not wish to speculate how many of the people on the centre and left saying "the war should be ended" would still be willing to say so if they thought about what they were actually saying. I am reasonably comfortable that the pro-Putin right know exactly what they are doing.
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It's just not really reasonable to call people who support the defense of a nation "pro war". If someone attacks me after making it clear they want to kill me I am not pro-fighting when I defend myself. People who support me defending myself are not pro-fighting. It's unreasonable to demand I or the people supporting me should allow the person attacking me to merely severe a limb or two despite them at no point actually making any sign they'd stop after doing so. There is precisely one pro-war faction and it's the one that started the war and could end it at any time, attempting to frame it otherwise is an absurdity.
And yes, we do have some obligation here, Ukraine get rid of its nuclear capabilities under the promise that this would not be allowed to happen. Where Ukraine goes so does nuclear non-proliferation and frankly and kind of mantle of justice.
Victory at any cost is a pro-war position. Throwing out all cost/benefit calculations because Russia started it is unreasonable.
At least spell out what you wouldn't be willing to do to reclaim Ukrainian territory.
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Adding member states with a real axe to grind against Russia seems to increase the odds of conflict, no?
There's a good chance that Polish leaders would actually want to inflict some damage on Russia to settle old scores, or that they'd be maximally uncharitable in a way that increases the odds of military solutions.
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Simple answers should ring alarm bells. Opinions framed as The Truth(tm) should have them blaring. Sachs' Ukraine comments seems to live in same epistemic universe as John Mearsheimer - expressed in his 2015 talk here, which subsequently went incredibly viral during the full invasion. So it's definitely an opinion and not The Truth. It's hard to understate the popular appeal of Mearsheimer's message (its arguably the most rapidly and widely circulated wonky political lecture in human history). Mearsheimer could be correct. I think his arguments about NATO expansion are best rebutted by the archives here, this article here, with a quick overview here
For a great steelman of Mearsheimer POV I highly recommend the rapid and very accessible 2018 book by contemporary Stephen M Walt: "The Hell of Good Intentions". I found it largely persuasive on many accounts. (FWIW, with regard specifically to "not one inch east" I think it's 60% myth, 80% rhetoric, and 100% irrelevant because no binding paperwork was ever signed, let alone with an extant entity. NATO expansion in general is more contentions IMO).
I also think those the Palestinians are animated by more than mere terrestrial concerns. Sachs stating that all Israel needs to do is assure peace and statehood is outrageous. Asserting such a wild opinion is True only redounds to my incredulity. AFAIK the intractability of the Israel / Palestine conflict is well earned.
If Israel abandoned the settlements in the west bank and ceded a strip between there and gaza to make a contiguous polity, it would not stop 100% of the Palestinians who are pissed off that Israel exists at all, but it would surely take the wind out of their sails enough to make Jihad unfashionable
I desperately want to agree with you. My proposal for something fair looks nearly identical to yours. However, the impetus for jihadism (and the settlements) is not motivated by practical, worldly concerns. Jihadists (and settlers IME) frequently describe their motivations in religious terms. They claim certainty the creator of the universe, giver of eternal life, and sole reason for existing, would be pleased if they die for the cause of removing the Jews from Israel (provided the Jews don't pay the jizya).
The iraqi people were saying similar things, then we carpet bombed them with mcdonalds and porn, now you don't hear much about Iraq anymore
(I'm being cheeky but I really do think a good contiguous chunk of land would take all the wind out of the Palestinians' sails)
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Israel ceded all settlements in Gaza and exhumed Jews buried there before fully pulling out in 2005. The Gazans elected Hamas and nineteen years later, here we are.
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Jeffrey Sachs is an economist. Why should I regard his opinion on international relations or diplomacy? He doesn't even make much of an argument; he just sort of assumes, as many people do, that the US has the ability to dictate terms to people.
I can't help but feel like Russia might have had something to do with it.
It's always interesting to see how some of the people most critical of American hegemony believe in it the most. They take for granted that , if it so chose, it could rid itself of all its problems
The hawks at least believe they're going to have to crack a few skulls to make people obey because others have agency.
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Now, I am not a US interventionism fanboy. I believe that a lot of the military and CIA ops the US engaged in the cold war and the Bush II era were net negative from a thriving of humanity point of view.
But writing from what cynics would call a US client state but what I prefer to see as a minor member of the status-quo coalition (Germany), the USA makes a pretty decent hegemon (in Europe, at least). The values which they prefer (market economies, free trade, individual rights) seem to work out better than what other local hegemons have enforced in part of Germany before.
There is a reason why a lot of countries in the former Warsaw pact wanted to join NATO instead of forming a defense pact with Russia against NATO aggression -- they had just spent a few decades at the receiving end of such a defensive pact.
If you take the right to self-determination of peoples seriously, then there can not be a right to preemptively conquer weaker neighbors to prevent them from joining defensive pacts against you.
Also, who in their right mind would want to invade Russia? Europe tried it twice, with disastrous results. Invading a major nuclear power is not a decision anyone borderline sane would ever consider in earnest. What Russia is defending by invading Ukraine are not legitimate security interests, but their status as a local hegemon who can use force against weaker neighbors at their discretion.
The US is not to blame for all the evil in the world. There have been wars for millennia before the US was a thing.
And here I was reading and nodding along with your post.
A warm water port is a legitimate security interest. It has been a legitimate security interest since the age of sail. It will continue to be a legitimate security interest into the future, as long as boats can float.
A warm water port belonging to another sovereign nation, whose sovereignty you agreed to respect ~30 years ago? If you want to call this a "legitimate interest" for Russia that's fine, but then it seems like you're holding the US to one standard for actions, while holding Russia to a very different one.
Russia had a lease on the Sebastopol Navy base that Ukraine was threatening to undo in the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity.
What do you think America would do if Cuba moved on Guantamo Bay? Gitmo isn't even of that much strategic interest for us.
This might be convincing if what they were doing militarily was obviously and clearly narrowly tailored to enforcing the terms of the lease. I don't think you can reasonably make the case that their various incursions into Ukraine (especially the current one) fit that description.
And I seriously doubt America would fight an offensive war to reclaim indeterminate but very large parts of Cuba in response to Cuba, essentially, threatening to breach the contract for Guantanamo Bay. Fight back if attacked and point at the terms of the agreement? Sure.
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How is that a "legitimate security interest?" I understand "legitimate security interest" in the above post to mean something like "clear threat to the safety of Russia's citizens." I don't doubt that Russia would like to have a warm water port but I don't see how not having one poses a clear threat to Russia or its citizens.
An unfriendly nation on your borders is generally presumed to a clear threat to the safety of your citizens – this is the logic of NATO (and most other defensive alliances). Ukraine has also demonstrated its capability to harm Russian citizens inside Russia, so, yes – an unfriendly Ukraine constitutes a security threat to Russia.
Whether or not it's legitimate to INVADE a sovereign nation on your borders simply because it's unfriendly/a security threat is another question – but historically it's not unusual for nations to do it, regardless of the legitimacy. (Cuba and the United States comes to mind; see also the war between China and Vietnam.)
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I mean, there's most of the rest of the Black Sea coast, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Novorossiysk that doesn't get iced up. There are fully landlocked countries worldwide, they don't get to invade their way to the coast as a little treat. Now, moving the Black Sea fleet all there would involve expanding the port facilities, but that's not impossible (they already partly did it due to the constant Sevastapol attacks). Plus, they did already de facto have that warm water port and were in no position to lose it prior to their invasion.
Meanwhile, that warm water port is now being hit repeatedly by strikes, and the Ukrainians are working down the list of Black Sea fleet vessels one at a time, which are going to be a nightmare to replace. Fortifying its claims/access to Crimea were one of the aims of Russia's invasion for sure, it's just that it seems to have been totally counterproductive from a strategic point of view.
Possibly our difference here is that there's a different meaning to legitimate being used.
Firstly, it's probably obviously not legitimate for countries to just straight up steal strategic assets or resources from a neighbour, even if it's useful.
However, powerful countries cannot accept that their security would be at a partial or full veto from a small power, especially if they have the ability to stop it, so under this threshold some could argue Russia had a legitimate right to annex the port. Maybe the US response in the Cuban missile crisis was legitimate by that standard, and a similar case. However, my disagreement here is that Ukraine didn't have the ability to threaten Russia in any meaningful way as of 2022 or even 2014, other ports were available for the fleet, and Russia's navy is at best a very minor source of their overall security. It's hard to put this as a legitimate reason to launch a full scale war to annex territory and create a puppet state (their initial war goal at least), and in reality has been totally counterproductive, partly as Ukraine has a legitimate interest to fight back and sink most that fleet now, and NATO has a legitimate reason to help them. That's the issue with fuzzy or subjective legitimacy, both sides can seem to have it.
As a final spicy take to develop that prior point: their navy is kind of... crap? Pointless? Like, can it contest the waves versus a naval power equal or greater to Italy? What's it really for then? They can do expeditionary operations to friendly countries without it, they can't do expeditionary operations to hostile countries with it.
To be honest, 98% of all navies are crap. There's the USA, the UK, maybe the PRC and Japan, although neither has been battle-tested even against a weaker foe.
Russian navy is primarily an ICBM delivery mechanism, secondarily a delivery mechanism for other kinds of missiles and it's not very good at that. Navies are expensive, good navies are big, and big navies are extremely expensive.
France?
Couldn't even be trusted to sink Rainbow Warrior.
Wasn't that about France wanting deniability, so they used their spies instead of their military?
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Well, it looks to me like Russia has some 200km of undisputed waterfront on the Black Sea. Wikipedia lists two ice-free major ice-free ports: Novorossiysk and Taman. I am sure that for a fraction of the price of that special military operation, Putin could have gotten a top-grade port on his coastline.
Also, I am not really condemning Russia too much for sizing Crimea. That operation seems to have been accomplished with minimal bloodshed, at least. My main problem with Putin is his behavior since 2022, when he tried to take Kiev (ca. 250km from the Black Sea, not a great location for a port) in a surprise attack, and opted to fight a war of attrition when this initial attack failed.
Also, I think there can be some debate on in what cases the security interests (legitimate or otherwise) of big polities trump the right of sovereignty of smaller polities. On the one hand, if Lichtenstein entered a military pact with North Korea, I think that the rest of Europe would be correct in denying Lichtenstein the opportunity to station North Korean nuclear missiles in the middle of Europe. On the other hand, I don't think most US meddling in South America was in pursuit of legitimate security interests. Meddling in Panama, Mexico or Canada, as well as the Cuban missile crisis are somewhere in between.
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I don't understand how it's possible for you, or anyone, to believe this. Insofar as any conflict in Israel is a "war of choice," the people making that choice are, and have been, Muslim Arabs, whether inside or outside of Israel. For generations, now. If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel. The commitment of Hamas, its handlers abroad, and most of the people living under its rule is the eradication of Israel. They have never accepted any of the compromises offered to them for more than a handful of years, during which time they have always been sharpening their spears for their next attempt.
I understand that the United States is entangled in this, as it is entangled one way or another in most armed conflicts around the world. At minimum, the American government is a well-compensated arms dealer! And I understand that the Israeli government has made a variety of foolish, cruel, and otherwise objectionable decisions along the way. Nobody in that region has anything approaching clean hands. But exactly one side of the Israel conflict is ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription, and it's not the Israelis.
Ukraine, okay! There's a conflict where American (or at least NATO) interests have absolutely been downplayed in favor of spinning a Russophobic narrative. I still tend to see Russia as the bad actor there, because I am prejudiced against aggressors, but I can accept that the United States played at least an indirect role in poking that particular bear. The United States had nothing to do with the murder, mayhem, robbery, and rape perpetrated by the Palestinian stooges of Islamist governments on October 7, and Israel's response to that attack has been, if not obviously proportional, absolutely understandable. If a bunch of Canadians, at the urging of their government, snuck across the border to rape and murder a thousand innocent Americans, I would not be satisfied with a merely proportional response; as a matter of clear deterrence, I would definitely want to see an absolutely merciless escalation.
And if it kept happening, over and over again, over years and decades, well... at some point the only thing that makes sense is to reach for the metaphorical banhammer.
If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no independent Palestine either. Palestinians will become permanent second-rate residents of Israel in everything but name.
Why would that be so? Israel has no desire to create a class of welfare sucking Arabs.
Welfare-sucking? I am talking about permanent residents that work, pay taxes, but aren't allowed to vote or settle in specific locations.
Plenty of subpopulations are welfare sucking despite being allowed to work and pay taxes. Statistically, Arab Palestinians would be so in a unified state.
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This differs from the status quo exactly how? The lack of an intermediate step where Palestinians lose?
Palestinians basically say, "your solution is reasonable, but unfair. If we accept it, we no longer can demand our preferred unreasonable, but fair solution".
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Yeah, I suppose we can say they did it to themselves but the time when "no fighting" and "peace" in the way the world wants - 2SS - were the same clearly seems to have passed.
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This argument flies in the face of facts and history. There are several independent Muslim Arab states in the region; Israel is a tiny portion of the region, smaller than many American counties. "Independent Palestine" is a call for a Muslim Arab country specifically in Gaza and the West Bank, which was granted in the Two State Solution, and refused by the Palestinians. Palestinians still refuse it as a solution. Give them a two state solution, and within half a generation they will be raiding Israel from behind their "borders," calling yet again for the extermination of the Jews. How do we know this? Because they keep doing it.
Not only that, but a substantial percentage of Israeli nationals are Muslim Arabs, from when Israel tried to just allow Palestinians to choose to participate in a liberal democracy along with the rest of the developed world. Some took the offer, and are pretty universally better off for having done so. I have known a few Palestinian Israelis, and they were not "second-rate residents" in any sense but perhaps the fact that they lived in an officially Jewish nation--not unlike the Jews and Christians who are sometimes permitted to live in officially Muslim nations, except for the part where Jews and Christians are generally treated far worse in Muslim nations. Rural Americans in many states often have less political power or self-determination than Palestinian Israelis.
Attitudes like yours toward the conflict in Israel strike me as the most absurd exercise of both-sides-ism in modern history. Israel has taken every reasonable avenue, and perhaps some unreasonable ones, toward peace and coexistence. Every olive branch they have extended has been sharpened into a stake and used to murder their children. In some ways Israel may be the single most Christian nation ever to exist, so far has it extended forgiveness and amnesty to the descendants of the Muslim Arab colonists who live within their borders.
I've lived through this cycle so many times I've actually lost count, but it repeats like clockwork. Every time it looks like we're going to get "peace in the Middle East" at last, the Palestinians sabotage it (usually, with financing and support from other Muslim nations). "Independent Palestine" is a canard, code for "death to Israel," because coexistence is not on the menu, and as long as Muslims are religiously committed to reclaiming every inch of their holy lands, it never will be. Israel's Muslim neighbors wish to see it destroyed, and Palestinians are the stooges they have been using to pursue that goal for longer than most Mottizens have been alive. Nothing has changed, nothing is new. I feel bad for the Palestinians, they are being used harshly by bad actors. But they have had many opportunities to escape the cycle, and they have squandered them without hesitation.
I am sympathetic to arguments for independence and self-determination, but what Palestinians (and you) say in that regard does not match with their actions over the years. Talk is cheap. Peace is a choice they refuse to make.
"Why should there be another Muslim Arab country?" is a loaded question. It's like asking, "why should Panama exist when there are many other Latin American countries?"
Again, "granted" is a loaded word. From the viewpoint of the Palestinians, they weren't granted half of Palestine, half of Palestine was taken from them and awarded to Israel. Why should the UN decide that Palestine should be divided 50/50 just because Jews owned 6.6% percent of the land?
Palestinian Israelis are not second-rate residents (other than some humiliating restrictions like not being able to own their old homes), but West Bank and Gaza Palestinians aren't Palestinian Israelis, no one offered them this option. "Other countries treat their minorities worse, why shouldn't Israel be allowed to do this?" is a question that should be reversed, "why don't we apply the same rigorous standards and demand BDS against Saudi Arabia, Estonia and the PRC?"
Every reasonable avenue other than founding their nation somewhere where the natives were fine with it. Yes, they are much better stewards of this land than the Arabs, but that's saying you shouldn't complain that you woke up with a kidney missing just because Terence Tao was the recipient.
I find your responses uncharitable and probably disingenuous. You seem to simply be engaged in motivated reasoning toward a preferred outcome, rather than attempting to take a view of the whole situation.
No. The question is not whether Palestine should exist or not. The question is whether Palestinians should be empowered to exterminate Israel, and aided by the world in their mission to do so. The answer is "no." Your response was, "but what about independent Palestine" and my answer was, "I am sympathetic to arguments for independence and self-determination, but what Palestinians (and you) say in that regard does not match with their actions over the years. Talk is cheap. Peace is a choice they refuse to make."
I don't really care about their "viewpoint," especially when it is clearly ahistorical. But even if they weren't the literal and ideological descendants of colonists now complaining about being colonized, it wouldn't matter: Israel is there, now, and has been for a long time, and the actual options are (A) stop the Palestinians from occasionally murdering Israelis due to an ancient grudge or (B) allow the Palestinians to continue occasionally murdering Israelis due to an ancient grudge, and in turn get murdered right back. "Two peaceful states getting along peacefully" is a much better option! But it will never be on the table while the Palestinians and their useful idiots continue to chant "from the river to the sea, Palestine is for Muslim Arabs."
Except we're not dealing with a human being here, we're dealing with nation-states and identity groups. There are so many problems with nation-states, and identity groups are, if anything, worse. The original expulsions were horrible and shouldn't have happened, and under the standard of modern liberal democracies likely would not have happened. But the empires of yore worked differently. The Muslim Arabs in Palestine weren't sovereign, and had never been sovereign.
Again: insofar as they seek full freedom and self-determination, I'm pretty open to that. But it can't be on "by murdering everyone else in the region" terms, and they have repeatedly shown themselves unwilling or incapable of accepting those terms.
My honest and heartfelt position is "a pox on both their houses, what I think about this conflict doesn't matter a bit and the farther I stay away from it the better". But any attempt to take a view of the whole situation is impossible without trying to steelman the positions, and I was trying to do this with respect to the Palestinians.
Why not? After all, we're letting Israel do the same. Letting Israel control where the Palestinians are allowed to live, what they are allowed to do and so on is symmetrical to letting the Palestinians control where the Israelis are allowed to live, what they are allowed to do and so on. Why not push the Israelis that don't accept Palestinian supremacy into Jewish enclaves and watch them elect Otzma Yehudit and start bombing the Palestinians with improvised FPV drones? Yes, Palestine would be a much worse place to live in than Israel, but that's not a meaningful way to decide which side to support. After all, there are lots of mismanaged countries, but we no longer let the Netherlands take over and manage them.
I don't think it's a "steelman" to soften their actual beliefs, though. They want all the Jews to either leave Israel or die. They are quite explicit about this. They literally make children's shows teaching this. To steelman that view requires you to elaborate reasons why, all things considered, this is a reasonable view to hold. Your response appears to be something like "there's no meaningful difference between Israel's government and Hamas, so their positions are just equally bad." That's not a steelman, that's ignoring inconvenient facts in hopes of strengthening an objectively outrageous position.
Bullshit. In the first place, there never was a "Palestine" to exterminate. Furthermore, the Israelis have repeatedly demonstrated their ability, if they so chose, to militarily conquer not only Israel itself but much of the neighboring territory as well. Israel has treated the Palestinians with kid gloves for decades.
More bullshit. There's nothing symmetrical here; the Palestinians wish to kill all the Jews. Do you seriously not understand this? If Israel's goals were "symmetrical" to those of the Palestinians, all the Palestinians would already be dead. You are not steelmanning anything, you are literally making shit up.
How the fuck is that not meaningful? That is often, perhaps always how nations decide "which side" to support (though nations are also at times wrong about what will make something a "worse place," in the end).
But never mind that; we have an absolute laundry list of economic and political reasons to support a productive and educated first-world democracy over a couple of terrorist cells whose aspirations toward theocracy are often not only explicitly anti-Israel, but explicitly anti-American. To say nothing of the events of October 7, which are independently sufficient evidence that every civilized person everywhere should regard Palestine as, if it is a state at all, only a terrorist state.
Palestine is not a country in any particularly meaningful way, and it never has been. It is two separate terrorist groups living on the largess of other nations within the borders of Israel, actively oppressing their own supporters for theological reasons. Writing as though we were dealing with an oppressive colonial nation-state and its equal-but-opposite conquered territory demonstrates either ignorance, or willful ignorance.
And the IRA wanted Northern Ireland to be part of the Republic of Ireland. And this you may note has not happened. What the goal of an organization is and what they can be persuaded or forced to accept can be very different things.
Your pov would tend to indicate that a peace process would be pointless in NI because the stated objectives of each side were contrary. Well yes, that is why it has to be a negotiation!
What is probably true is that support for Hamas from within Palestine has to reduce. That was the problem the IRA faced, the slow removal of discrimination against Catholics, meant fewer and fewer of them had strong reason to support the IRA, rising living standards made them wealthier and then the IRA made a few clear mis-steps which crushed their support among their own demographic. That is why the IRA in 98 accepted a deal they had been offered and rejected 20 years earlier. The fact Hamas and the PA rejected a solution in the past does not mean it will never be acceptable to them.
The problem is of course, is that the UK had to dial back their aggression against the IRA and Catholics for that slow boil to subside. They had to do that BEFORE the IRA were willing to negotiate. Even when that meant the IRA was able to operate more freely. Internment was working to reduce the number of attacks, but it was also radicalizing more Catholics. The Peace process could never have gotten started with it still in place.
The playbook from Israel would probably have to include stopping or curtailing the various settler issues, lifting the various controls on who and what they allow into Palestine and to go hands off. To be clear that would almost certainly mean in the short term more attacks, more rockets, more Israeli deaths. And they would have to do this without retaliating beyond those that actually carried out said attacks, and not treating them as attacks from a nation but simple criminal cases where you arrest and prosecute the offenders. Turn it into a police action not a nation state one.
Then in about 20 years or so, time and a slow reduction from boil to a simmer, would have slowly reduced the hate and anger levels. Now the question would be, why should Israel be the one that would have to accept these risks for some uncertain reward of possible peace. And the answer is they don't. But unless they are either willing to genocide or be willing to sacrifice, then this situation is just going to repeat forever. And as the richer, more powerful state with vastly greater state capacity they are the only ones that stand a chance of doing it. The IRA were not capable of the unity that would be required for them to have played the British role in the peace process, as demonstrated where they immediately split into a multitude of fractured squabbling "Real", "True" IRA's.
Does Israel have to play that role? No. Are they morally required to? No. Are they the only ones who can? Yes.
Regardless of the moral situation, I really think the only long term solution is going to require Israel to be willing to absorb attacks, even though morally they are under no real requirement to do so. Probably it will pay off for them long term, but that is a very, very hard sell in the now. If Israel or the US can also put pressure (or outright bribe) Egypt to send in peacekeeper troops so that Muslim police can catch and punish Muslim perps then so much the better.