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Notes -
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.
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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