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Anybody want to talk about World War I? This is culture war in the sense that the culture war led me here, and its application definitely seems to fall along tribal lines, even though this is all ancient history.
So on a recommendation on Twitter from MartyrMade, I've started reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War so I can figure out who the real villain was in WWII. But I guess we can't get there without discussing WWI, so that's where the book begins. A fundamental cause of the war, according to the author, is that Germany and England had conflicting views of security. In general, England's policy was to play European powers off each other, always supporting the second-strongest power against the strongest power to ensure that no one country would dominate the continent and thus be in a position to challenge Britain. In the early 1900s, that meant supporting France in opposition to Germany. Germany's idea of peace, on the other hand, was precisely to dominate and unify the continent under German rule, thus ensuring that they would have no problems on the continent.
As an uninformed person, I am struck by a similarity in current politices with America and Russia. It seems that America finds itself in the same position as Germany before WWI, seeking to unify as many countries as possible under NATO, effectively ensuring that America's vision dominates world politics. On the other hand, Russia's best available strategy is to weaken America wherever possible, by supporting America's most troublesome enemies, e.g. Iran.
The point of all this is I'm wondering whether there is any way to achieve Trump's goal in the Ukraine war, which is for "people to stop dying". America being dominant means they can't really allow Russia to challenge their world order by taking over Ukraine and stopping NATO expansion. But if Russia is going to be able to exert its will at all in the world, they can't really allow Ukraine to become just another part of the Western bloc.
Still, Trump says he'll solve the issue and the war will be over within 24 hours of becoming president. What do you think his plan is?
The plan doesn't really have to be complicated: call Putin and negotiate a cease fire and peace talks, maybe threaten to join in if he doesn't come talk, maybe concede Crimea, whatever sweetens the pot. Classic art of the deal.
There already were some accords before Boris Johnson was sent to blow them up. I'm sure you could actually get Putin to be reasonable in his demands if you treat Russia like a GP, which is ultimately what this war is about.
What a peace looks like now is a good question, but here's my proposal:
First of all, what exactly does Ukraine get out of this plan? It looks like something you might sell to them if it looks like Russia is going to turn it into the Puppet Republic of Malorossia in not-too-distant future.
But more importantly, what's the point of this plan? If you're a good Christian, then saving human lives might be the answer, but if you're a godless power projection optimizer in the mold of Bismarck and Kissinger, then drip-feeding Ukraine various arms and armor as long as possible is by far the better option.
The only thing you lose as the US is some surplus military equipment. In return you get to test various cool stuff against an actual army, you keep Russia busy, the NATO reinvigorated, the EU divorced from Russia. Why stop right now? Let Russia and Ukraine exhaust each other as much as possible. Then you can hit two birds with one stone during the peace talks:
The only risk is that you might miss a black swan that causes Russia to implode before you can react. Ukraine cannot really implode like this because it's already on life support.
This is my functional model of the end result of this war if nothing gets negotiated first. So yes, the main thing Ukraine gets is it's territory integrity back to some degree, security through some military guarantee, and conditional entry into the European socio-economic sphere.
Seems a lot better than meat grinding the rest of your population for less.
But to answer you, what I'd want most out of peace is stability in Europe and normalized relationships between powers so further conflict is made unlikely first, and self determination second.
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