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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36248 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I am once again asking why any Russian leader would believe the Americans might sacrifice Washington and New York for Kiev. If you read the literature the French seriously doubted whether the US would sacrifice New York for Paris during the Cold War, let alone Kiev. That's why they have a nuclear arsenal. Paris >>>>>> Kiev.

Why would any Russian leader base their evaluation of the Americans based on French literature, except to pursue confirmation bias?

Why do you think the US would decide to commit national suicide over Ukraine? It is irrational to make such a bluff. It wouldn't be believed. That's why the US didn't even make it.

Nor has Russia made a claim it would nuke Ukraine.

Working that parallel backwards, because Russia hasn't made the claim, it isn't being believed, and taking a bluff-that-wasn't-made seriously is being dismissed as irrational.

If they did, why wouldn't the US say this to the world? If you genuinely think that the US would do this, why wouldn't they say 'if you nuke Kiev we will nuke you'? What kind of madman would decide to sacrifice his country to defend another and not even make a single clear, public warning that he'd do such a thing?

I believe the American opposition party likes to accuse Biden of being senile in his old age. This certainly wasn't helped recently by the probably-not-staged asking why dead former politicians weren't speaking up on a topic, or the various statements on Taiwan, or challenging much younger constituents to push up contests, though whether these are real lapses of the mind or 4D chess usage of strategic ambiguity is for Putin to decide.

So, there's your answer. Old, grandfatherly, possibly senile Biden is Putin's potentially genuine madman in the game of nuclear posturing.

(By contrast, Putin's own history works against him as a madman actor.)

I'll tell you what's actually happening. The US makes vague threats of 'catastrophic consequences' if Russia uses nuclear weapons and says 'oh we told them privately'. That means they're not willing to use nuclear weapons, as is immediately obvious - Ukraine is not under the US nuclear umbrella. You don't put someone under a nuclear umbrella and then not tell anyone about it. That defeats the whole point.

This would be a competent argument if we also applied it to the Russians, who have also not made an explicit nuclear threat, or extended the nuclear umbrella to ward against conventional attacks or Russian defeats on claimed-annexed territory. Which, of course, is consistent with their doctrine, in which nuclear use is for matters of the survival of the state, of which defeat in the annexed territories isn't in a way that nuclear deterrence models works for.

Now, there are reasons for that- reasons equivalent to why the US wouldn't want to make a falsifiable nuclear guarantee that could be tested- but this is an argument of why Russian nuclear ambiguity shouldn't be taken seriously, as opposed to why it should. After all, strategic ambiguity defeats the whole point, and given that the Russians are currently facing multiple front failures in claimed territories but still aren't using- or even explicitly threatening to use- nukes, their nuclear criteria for eastern Ukraine is certainly ambiguous.

If we don't extend the argument to all strategically ambiguous actors, then it becomes an incompetent argument of isolated rigor.

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