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What is the appropriate level for diplomatic discussion on twitter?
Recently Elon Musk has been heavily criticised for an admittedly naïve proposal for a negotiated peace in the Russian-Ukrainian war. His proposal:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000
Now this isn't how politics actually works, twitter polls are not actually binding instruments of diplomacy. Nor is a UN administered vote terribly helpful given how it'd just turn into a vote-rigging contest between the pro and anti-Russian forces within the UN and the Ukrainian state obviously wouldn't let the territories leave given the amount of blood that's been shed. They've threatened 15 year jail sentences for those who did vote in the most recent Russian referenda. It's also very hard to see why the Ukrainian govt would bind itself to allowing a Russian Crimea water since they dammed it off even before this war.
You can see from the replies that the objections aren't really on the object level, they're more on the 'go fuck yourself', 'educate yourself', 'you're using Putin talking points', 'Crimea is Ukraine'. All of this is essentially the official line of the Ukrainian state, as summarized by their ambassador to Germany: "Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply"
This seems rather ungrateful to me, as well as undiplomatic. As Elon reasonably argues, he has made a significant effort to assist the Ukrainian armed forces with communications via his satellites, paid from out of his own pocket:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1577081450263769089
The fundamental power balance in this war is that Russia could obliterate the entirety of Ukraine in under an hour and still have plenty of nukes left to raze Europe and North America if they intervene. There are some people on this site who think that Russian nuclear forces probably don't work and so we can safely discount Russia's 2000 tactical nuclear weapons and 4000 strategic weapons. How they've come to that conclusion is beyond me, given that the technologies involved are fairly simple and old. The same people have been critiquing Russia for fighting a war with 1970s level technology - miniaturized thermonuclear weapons are 1970s technology! Yes, the tritium has a low half-life and needs to be replaced often. Yes, Russia doesn't have the best maintenance standards. But isn't it reasonable for them to prioritize their nuclear forces in terms of maintenance and development? Are we seriously prepared to risk tens if not hundreds of millions of our citizens dying in a full nuclear exchange if we are wrong about their nuclear preparedness? Their conventional tactical ballistic missiles work fine - doesn't it follow that their nuclear missiles work. This is the logic Musk is getting at. The penalty for emboldening dictators is not worse than the penalty for encouraging nuclear war, let alone losing a nuclear war by joining it.
I think this kind of hysterical diplomacy is dangerous and stupid, even from a Ukrainian-focused perspective. Why would you speak so rudely to a notoriously thin-skinned individual (remember when he called that diver 'pedo-guy') who has volunteered their services for your defence? One imagines Musk is seething with rage at his critics. The impression I get from Ukrainian media is that they are bent on getting back every scrap of territory and reparations to boot, won't suffer for anything less. This is the approach that is most likely to end with them getting nuked into submission.
Also, twitter should be for fun, not serious diplomacy.
These threads tend to be risk assessments, with some people thinking there is a serious risk of nuclear exchange, and some people seeming to discount that risk.
I'm curious about what kind of risk assessment people typically engage in.
Part of my job is identifying and defending against risks to the web service my company operates. It's impractical to defend against all possible risk, especially given our size, so we have to prioritize. This is somewhat done by gut feeling, but it's not merely defending against the most likely adverse events. Very unlikely events, but that if they happen would destroy everything, get more attention than the very-likely-but-not-existential-threat possibilities.
I guess that background informs my thoughts on this issue. Nuclear war is still a remote possibility, but it's Armageddon if it happens. Even if you survive, the world as we know it is over. I can't understand how anything can be worth increasing the chances of nuclear war. This is a giant existential risk. The web service equivalent of not backing up your database, or having an open backdoor hidden somewhere in leaked source code. It's not on fire right now, but if you wait until is, you're completely hosed. The only reason you shouldn't be working on those things immediately is if the site has already gone down.
In my opinion, one country suffering a terrible war is nowhere close to justifying the risk to the entire world that comes with prolonging that war and antagonizing the invader.
This is Pascal's Mugging.
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If the Russians are sieging the city you and all of your loved ones are in then the distance between nuclear armageddon and losing conventionally is quite small.
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I am also a professional risk manager, and trying to model what people are thinking, I think the big difference is not in our assessment of the existential risk from Russia going nuclear. It is in our assessment of the potential risk from conceding to Russian nuclear blackmail.
Given that Russia has chosen to wage a war of unprovoked aggression under the umbrella of nuclear blackmail, the civilised world has two fundamental options (I am deliberately oversimplifying here):
Call Russia's bluff by credibly threatening serious consequences if Russia tries to use nuclear weapons to win the war in Ukraine. This creates the existential risk that Russia is not in fact bluffing, that Russia treats the serious consequences as nuclear escalation leading to armageddon.
Fold, and tell Russia (and China and any other future barbarian nuclear powers) that they can use nuclear blackmail to get whatever they want (up to and including NATO's blessing to reinvade other countries they have just been driven out of after launching an unprovoked war of aggression and losing conventionally). As well as the immediate cost to Ukraine and Ukrainians, this aggravates two existential risks:
a) Loss of credibility Neville Chamberlain style leading to an increased risk of nuclear armageddon due to a future miscalculation.
b) Massive nuclear proliferation in a world where the ground rules no longer include "nuclear states do not invade their non-nuclear neighbours under the umbrella of nuclear blackmail" the way they did in the Cold War (remember that Truman sacked MacArthur for threatening nuclear escalation against North Korea). If Russia gets enough of Ukraine (and the four provinces they have just purported to annex counts) then acquiring nukes yesterday is a matter of basic survival for countries like Poland and Vietnam (and arguably Iran and Saudi Arabia). And if every medium sized country has nukes then the armageddon risks of both a Cuban Missile Crisis and a Stanislav Petrov event increase by orders of magnitude.
As far as I can see, we all agree that risk 1 is a low-probability high-impact risk we would prefer not to take. Some of us thing risk 2 is low-probability low-impact because Russia should make only reasonable demands on Ukraine and then go home. Others (including me) think that risk 2 is a high-probability high-impact risk because massive nuclear proliferation is a racing certainty if nuclear blackmail works. And some people seem to think that there is a low-probability high-impact risk that Russia is going to drive straight to the Rhine once we tell them that we won't resist if they say nuclear boo.
It's only a war of unprovoked aggression if you subscribe the current year narrative.
If you subscribe to the narrative that is current in ~2008 it looks more inevitable, given western politics, than unprovoked.
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html
If I say I will bomb your house if you post on the motte one more time, then you post and I follow through by bombing your house, wouldn’t it be fair to call my action “unprovoked aggression”? But hey, I warned you your motte posting was a red line and you did it! You brought this on yourself! As I see it, whether or not this is “unprovoked” hinges entirely on whether the demands/desires/red lines are reasonable or not, and I’m not passing judgment on that, just pointing out that it doesn’t matter what Russia said in 2008 unless it was reasonable
The house metaphor doesn't really work well for the situation because neither Ukraine nor Russia are atomic entities; if you really wanted to explain the situation through it, you would also have to add convoluted details such as that you have locked a cousin of mine into a long-term rental contract in your house and be harassing/threatening him all the time, and also have dug up the electric cable that goes to my house and was buried under your yard and be siphoning electricity from it at my expense (Ukraine's persistent stealing of gas from the westward pipelines that were passing through its territory). If in that case you then said that you are going to invite your ex-con gun nut dealer friend (the US) who has previously threatened to murder me to stay with you so I stop bothering you about the cousin and electricity, and I said I'll blow up your house if you do that, and then you did that and I followed through, would that still be quite "unprovoked"?
I mean, your metaphor is more than fair to the Kremlin perspective, but it still has Russia in the wrong. Even if I have your cousin in a long-term rental contract, and I harass him, and I siphon your electricity, and I'm about to invite my ex-con gun nut friend, you are still not justified in blowing up my house. Especially not if you are going to do it with me still inside it. If you decided to do so, it wouldn't be unprovoked in the strict sense, but you would still be acting wildly out of proportion to the actual offense.
While scary, the metaphorical neighborhood spat is not a situation that justifies violent self-defense. On the other hand, if I see you entering my property with the bomb on you back, I'm quite justified to shoot you in defense (at least according to Rittenhouse morals). And if I shoot you from inside the house as you bring your bomb with intent to blow both house and me to smithereens, it's a clear-cut case of self defense.
Instead, you could maybe spend a small percentage of the money you would spend on the bomb and use it to get your cousin out of the situation. You can also negotiate with all your other friendly neighbors for your electric cable, they all liked you and would be happy to host it (before you did the bomb plan, now they don't trust you for obvious reasons). The ex-con gun nut you can't stop, but he's already hanging out at all your other neighbors anyway. And he might actually be quite friendly once you get to know him. (Also maybe you guys could re-negotiate the deal you used to have* about not having the worst kinds of intermediate-range guns laying around?)
*until you broke it.
But it's all just metaphors.
I don't think the entire "house" class of metaphors really lends itself well to describing the situation at hand in a natural way, because the "cousin" was really subjected to rather more than mere harassment. What would you model this as? Torture? A "pizzagate" scenario? Having some fingers chopped off because "your house, your rules"?
That aside, I don't think it's particularly under dispute that the decision to invade was out of proportion to what Ukraine did before it. It's just that the back-and-forth preceding it was not exactly proportional either. How do you determine which party is in the right (if you have to, as the Western public does, side with one of them at all) in an escalatory spiral? Do you look at higher derivatives of response intensity?
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Reasonableness seems hard to come by presently.
It seems reasonable to me as intra-Ukraine conflict / civil war is anticipated with Russian intervention as a consequence of NATO expansion in 2008.
Another poster down thread makes a better analogy of Texas secession and alliance with China.
What if Texas kicks your butt? Spheres of influence are backed by power. Russia is not a peer to the US like China is, not even a peer to the EU. If the US claim to a sphere of influence that far from home doesn't resonate with you, europe has that claim by proximity and power.
As to predictable consequences, maidan started when yanukovich turned away from a EU treaty. Russia shouldn't have messed with the EU's interests in the region if they can’t back it with a functioning military, diplomatic influence and economic resilience. With the weaknesses now laid bare, they never should have pretended to a sphere of influence in the first place.
Yes the totally organic Maidan coup. Since then there's been no corruption and only democracy®.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/four-years-of-ukraine-and-the-myths-of-maidan/
Where did you get that idea? Not organic, it's all us, ukrainians have no agency, democracy is a charade, and sovereign states are not bound by morals. Didn't want a coup, shouldn't have torpedoed our trade agreement, action-reaction. Great game stuff. We out-coup'd them, out-fought them, so it's our colony, end of story.
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NATO did not expand and respected the rules of the game. Civilian Ukraine willingly wanted economic ties with the west. For the simple reason that we see now that Russia is not an economic development asset.
Except when the democratically elected leader of Ukraine wanted more time, a totally organic revolution not a western influenced coup, deposed the elected leader and formed a new government.
Agree an organic coup occurred in Ukraine so what’s your point. Ukranians have a right to self determination it’s not Natos fault the Russian backed leader was so incompetent it got couped. Maybe back better governments if you wanted Ukraine to be your ally.
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"NATO enlargement,
particularly to Ukraine, remains "an emotional and neuralgic"
issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also
underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and
Georgia."
Sheesh. 2008.
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Thank you; I also think the risk of bowing to nuclear blackmail is severe and underemphasized.
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I don't believe that the use of nuclear arms means the world is over. It can cause a lot of damage but the impact on it is overestimated. Even if one believes argameddon, we don't really know what increases the risk. People are just unnecessary panicking. We just witnessed the same happened with covid pandemic. It just led to a lot of unnecessary lockdowns, travel restrictions, useless but dehumanising vaccine mandates etc.
That said, I totally understand Elon Musk's arguments. His first poll was unreasonable because it included the condition of Ukraine remaining neutral naively believing that it was a real reason why Russia attacked. The second poll is more reasonable. Despite all the blood and everything ultimately if most people in those areas prefer to stay with Russia, then it is wrong to force them eternally. The question is only how this transition should happen? I cannot imagine that the referendum during the war is appropriate. But if given a reasonable time, like in five years when the cities are rebuilt and the scars of war are more or less healed, then people can make a choice. The poll doesn't say anything about these conditions but many people are reading it in the context of the first poll and in the context of current politics instead taking it at the face value.
But there has, at no point, been any particular reason to believe that most of the annexed areas would want to be separate from Ukraine. I could believe that there's a majority for remaining separate from Ukraine (ie. part of Russia or (quasi-)independent) in Crimea and the pre-February 2022 occupied zones in Donetsk and Luhansk; these areas generally had majorities identifying as Russian (as opposed to being Russophone Ukrainians), and I could also imagine that the 8 years of tit-for-tat shelling and general evaporative cooling through population exchanges would create a firmly pro-Russia majority in the areas occupied by DPR/LPR groups.
However, when it comes to Kherson, Zaporizhizhia and the previously unoccupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, there's no real pre-war (or during-the-war, for that matter) indication of separating from Ukraine at any point; not in elections, not in polling, not in having successful autonomy or separation movements (whatever anti-Maidan occupations there were were damp squibs), and it strains me to imagine the current wartime conditions would create any special love regarding Russia, either.
This is not really a situation where there's much room to give the claims underlying Russian annexation any credence, and even this supposedly neutral referendum proposal does that.
I agree with you about this. My point was more about the negative attitude towards Elon Musk where he proposes "solutions" to end the war in Ukraine. I don't believe that calling names etc. is productive. I hear many people now saying that they no longer like Musk and his cars etc. as if he had joined the dark side now. I simply see a person who is a little bit too trustful to the narrative that the Ukraine merely needed to stay away from NATO and Russia wouldn't have attacked. I see in him someone who is obstinate but open to the truth and maybe an idealist who thinks that he has found a solution. We just need to explain why this view is wrong. It is difficult because the idea of Russian supremacy is harder to understand, it doesn't have that logical dimension that ”Ukraine neutrality” proposers have. But by becoming antagonistic we only make this task much harder.
This twitter sneering culture seems so wrong. I prefer dispassionate evaluations, something like this: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1577120229942910978
Something similar happened with covid. Interesting fact that most vaccine mandates were introduced after it was definitely proven that current covid vaccines do not stop the spread of infection. I thought that it was slowness and failure of institutions to percolate this information to policy makers. But maybe it was more about unwillingness to recognise the defeat. It was the refusal to believe that covid was never going to disappear and desperately trying to maintain the illusion of control.
Most of the vaccine mandates were actually framed (and, I believe, sincerely intended by most) to be a tool for returning to normalcy. Ie. allow access to previously denied services to the most and boost vaccine compliance in hopes that there would be less hospitalizations. Of course, it then became a culture war and thus also quickly led to a discourse where it became essentially a means to punish wrongdoers - antivaxxers - and implicitly also lead to "Covid hawks" assigning individual blame to antivaxxers for the disease still spreading instead of governments, a popular target for many hardline zero-covidists.
Vaccines were hoped to be a tool for normalcy, not vaccine mandates. And vaccines had quite an effect, they were the best, I would even say, the only real intervention that worked and were cheap and least restricting. Before the introduction of the mandates, most elderly people were already vaccinated, mortality from covid among vaccinated elderly people were about 8 times less than for unvaccinated and that was the maximum what we could achieve. Omicron reduced the risks even further but it was unrelated to the measures we took.
The problem was that the vaccines didn't stop the spread and as the most common metric was case counts which still remained quite high, and some residual covid mortality remained many people were not satisfied and considered it to be a failure. Chasing the illusion of achieving nearly zero covid, different governments started vaccine mandates, reintroduced masking, in some cases even light lockdowns. In the UK Christmas 2021 events were really discouraged but other countries had even more restrictions. It was all in vain.
Interesting that the voices demanding surrender and neutrality of Ukraine are only becoming louder when Ukraine is starting to show some serious gains on battlefield. It is still not an ideal situation because fighting leaves many people dead and injured, the final resolution is no-where in sight and probably will happen only when Putin is gone which is hard to predict when it will happen. Instead of accepting the potential Ukrainian victory over Russia with NATO weapons and giving due lesson to the aggressor, they want perfect solution where people don't get killed anymore and where Putin is appeased. They don't want to accept that such a solution is impossible in real life.
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The current course of Western (and Eastern) democracies sponsoring Ukraine in absolutely humiliating Russia is the safe, nuclear-war-minimizing strategy:
If NATO directly (tanks-on-the-ground) intervenes on behalf of Ukraine, then it risks initiating a direct Russia-NATO conflict. This is much more fraught with nuclear risk than the current status quo.
If NATO does nothing (because of nuclear threats), then Ukraine loses the war. Russia is validated in its belief that forceful territorial expansion works, and is empowered to attempt further expansion. (Future Russian wars of expansion have the same risks of nuclear escalation as the Ukraine war). If, as Peter Zeihan argues, the geopolitical goal of Russia is to secure its borders in the face of declining population, then we can predict that Russia will keep pursuing wars of expansion until it can secure the Polish and the Bessoarabian Gaps. Thus the result of letting Ukraine lose the war is likely a direct Russia-NATO conflict, just delayed a few years. Again, the nuclear risk is higher than in a Russia-Ukraine war.
If Russia uses nuclear weapons, NATO does not have the option of non-retaliation. To do nothing would legitimize other nuclear powers in the use of their nuclear arsenals to secure territory: North Korea against South Korea, China against Taiwan, Israel against Iran, ...
However, if Russia, facing defeat, resorts to (tactical) nuclear weapons, there are non-nuclear retaliation options on the table. In particular, UN sanctions and trade embargoes become almost guaranteed. (I hear Putin and the Russian oligarchs envy the life of the Kims and their generals in Pyeongyang.) Russian shipping is very vulnerable to NATO submarines, etc...
The current status quo, with NATO selling arms to Ukraine, avoids all these risks, so long as Ukraine doesn't push toward Moscow. There is a long history of Russia and the US arming partisans in (proxy) war, and arms sales are nothing new. To skip over the relevant historical examples of the Korean, Vietnam, and Russia-Afghani conflicts, just a few years ago there was a Russian mercenary battalion which was decimated when attempting to assault a US outpost in Syria, and despite the conflict being much more direct, the situation didn't escalate.
Future Russian wars of expansion - where?
Into NATO countries like Romania or Estonia? Well they actually are under a nuclear umbrella and have Article 5. There's a key difference between NATO countries and non-NATO countries. That's the entire point of NATO. Furthermore, NATO countries have not been fighting a low-intensity war with a large Russian minority for several years now!
In the Caucasus, Georgia? Unlike nearly everyone else Georgia does have a vaguely Russian minority that they've been embroiled in a struggle with, in South Ossetia. But we've also established that the West does not care about Georgia enough to fight a proxy war there.
Into Central Asia? Well they already share Central Asia with China anyway.
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Where/how did you hear this, and why would they be envious? Haven't they, prior to the invasion, maintained more trade with the west than NK?
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To twist the analogy slightly, imagine getting an email from someone saying they have such a backdoor and want to be paid. Do you pay them? What if they just ask for more and more? Where's the SOAR playbook for that?
In practice, companies tend to pay these ransoms, and then afterwards work to try to prevent such a situation from happening again.
Refusing to pay the ransom is to invite the destruction of the company. It's humiliating, and there are externalities in rewarding the bad behavior, but it's better than the alternative.
Are you talking about the normal bug bounty market? It is a bit hyperbolic to call it "ransom" and I am having trouble thinking of times where it was an existential risk.
EDIT The point about ransomware is very good and what I should have thought of when given the word ransom.
I'm talking about extortion, typically via ransomware that will encrypt critical data and require payment to get the encryption key.
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So we set the precedent that threatening nuclear annihilation gets you any concessions you ask for? Sounds like a way to guarantee we get more frequent threats of nuclear annihilation. If it worked once why shouldn’t he keep doing it? Isn’t this where the “don’t negotiate with terrorists” adage comes from? I don’t see how this averts any threat, it just kicks the can down the road by virtually guaranteeing such threats become more common. Now maybe that makes sense if you have some reason to believe you’ll be better positioned to resist them in the future and you just need to buy time, but that isn’t obvious to me
I think this precedent has already been set, at least since the Cuban missile crisis. Nuclear powers avoid direct military confrontation with one another, though they do engage in proxy wars in distant lands. We have been completely unwilling to strike directly at any nuclear power. North Korea is the only member of the "axis of evil" declared by George W. Bush that hasn't been on the receiving end of a conventional strike.
Arming a country that is on a nuclear power's border and that is at war with the nuclear power is getting very close to direct confrontation. AFAIK the closest precedent is our arming of anti-Soviet guerilla fighters in Afghanistan, but there were a couple of big differences between that conflict and the current war.
For one, we sent small arms and man-portable anti-aircraft weapons. Those are unlikely to be of much use had the mujaheddin decided they wanted to hold land inside of Soviet territory. In Ukraine America itself is sending rocket batteries and artillery. Other NATO countries have sent man-portable anti-tank weapons, drones, and tanks. So far we've been careful about sending weapons capable of striking deep into Russia, which is a very good thing. At least someone is pushing for some restraint.
Second, Afghanistan is very far from Russia's population centers. You'd have needed to march 1000 miles through at least two Soviet republics before you'd even get to Russia proper. Ukraine borders a populous region of Russia, and it's only about 280 miles to Moscow from the closest part of the border. It's about the same as the distance between Boston and Philadelphia.
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