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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36104 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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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?

There were a few more powers involved in WWI than Germany and Britain.

And they all had overlapping war goals that got varied levels of success.

Hell, the Ottomans almost sided with the Entente, Germany brokered a separate peace that secured a lot of the eastern lands they wanted and Russia, well, had a revolution.

WW1 is not exactly a simple affair, but I do think the comparison with Ukraine is relevant because it was mostly about interlocking spheres of influence and nations being afraid of each other in a way that seemed to require escalation.

There is a good argument that can be made for both being failures of diplomacy even if you think that Europe was due a bloody conflict.

To the extent that all conflicts can be described as about 'overlapping war goals', yes, and all war is a failure of diplomacy.

The whole exercise just seems to be about embedding the same old Russian gripe about NATO expansion in more respectable, historiographical context. Learned and wise. Except anything is analogous to anything at a high enough level of vague generality.

Honestly my impression as I start to learn about this topic is the opposite of this. It it looking like Britain (today Russia) really screwed things up. I get why they did it and saw it as their interest to oppose Germany, but everybody would have been better off just letting Germany (today America) win to establish pax Germana on the European continent.

But yeah, I guess I am trying to look for something deeper than "Putin is an insane tyrant" as the reason for Russia's current behavior. Do you really oppose even that minimal amount of respect and context applied to the current conflict?

This assumes Germany would have established a pax Germana on the European continent. 'Everyone would be better off just accept the despot's peace' tend to miss the despot is a despot because he already forewent the social and political systems that facilitate peace, and is actively preventing their re-assertion in order to remain the despot, and as such will be replaced in time with another despot whose own interests do not align with institutional peace.

And this is without Wilhelm or the era's German self-perception as a global power deserving colonies and privileged interests abroad. Imperial Germany may have been no worse than other colonial Empires, but it was also no better while still being a colonial empire whose colonial interests were at odds with others.

Very interesting. If you have time, can you elaborate on what Germany was doing to destabilize the continent and/or prevent its re-stabilization? In the book Buchanan claims that Germany would have been largely content with a tranquil European continent but minimal colonial presence, so their only real goal was a navy large enough that England would fear getting involved in a conflict with Germany and Germany wouldn't be cut off via English control of its sea routes to the wider world.

If you have time, can you elaborate on what Germany was doing to destabilize the continent and/or prevent its re-stabilization?

Among other things, the formation of modern Germany started with provoking a territorial conflict with established major power neighbors like France for a Prussian-centric state, instigating a major naval arms buildup despite the lack of naval relevance to its primary competitors (and thus really only being usable against Britain), alignment with the Austrian-Hungarians who were already cracking under the efforts to repression national identities (and thus getting involved in messes observable to Bismark), attempts to interfere in the overseas sphere's interests of its continental neighbors (demands for access to Africa and China, attempts to build influence in Latin America), the role of treaties as a co-belligerancy rather than defensive arrangement (thus getting Germany into wars of others choosing), and the previously mentioned adoption of the cult of the offensive.

This doesn't include such things like the flavors of ethno-supremacy of the era, the reputation for diplomatic brinksmanship, prussian militarism, monarchism, and so on in the post-victorian age.

This is, again, not to say that Germany was worse than its neighbors, but that it was not better, and the same flaws that saw its neighbors unable to provide pax Europa applied to Germany as well: greed, pride, and jingoism were all there, and such things do not work well for a peace and stability or abroad. The German empire felt it was entitled to territorial and colonial expansion at others expense, and the limits it faced were those of consequence of opposition, not self-limitation.

In the book Buchanan claims that Germany would have been largely content with a tranquil European continent but minimal colonial presence, so their only real goal was a navy large enough that England would fear getting involved in a conflict with Germany and Germany wouldn't be cut off via English control of its sea routes to the wider world.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Pat Buchanan is writing as a moralist ideologue, not a historian.

Buchanan is an ideological paleoconservative, and part of that is an ideological alignment with American isolationism vis-a-vis Europe. He is writing with that conclusion in mind and working backwards via historical metaphors to try and convince the audience of the moral preferability of American isolationism/innocence by contrasting it to morally bad involvement in undeniably bad conflicts. However, doing so requires the metaphor fit and provide the narrative elements, such as to have a villain (the selfish/evil politician who links the alegorical Americana to Europe) drag the innocent (the US / US-analog England) into sin (needless European wars). When actual history gets in the way, it needs to be glossed over or ignored to fit the narrative.

As part of that, Buchanan needs to downplay the moral agency and responsibility of the opposing side, because if the conflict would come or occur regardless because the opponent was unreasonable it undercuts the moral argument for isolationism, since isolationism wouldn't avoid the conflict as much as delay it to a potentially worse position. Therefore, Kaiser Germany's naval buildup was 'just' a deterrence, despite torpedo boats being more than enough to keep battleships away from shores, and not a way for Germany to try and force its way into overseas territories to form a colonial empire that would lead to competition over colonies. Hitler's demands for a Polish corridor are not unreasonable demands as part of a publicized design to control Poland and treat eastern europe as living space, but a genuine attempt to build a German-Polish alliance. And back to WW1 again, Germany is a passive recipient to being forced into a war by the Russians, rather than the Russians being forced into the war by Austria-Hungary's attack on Serbia, or rather than a supporter of Austria-Hungary's response. It's classic hyperagent / hypoagent morality framing.

Likewise, Buchanan needs to elevate the sins of the tempters, the politicians who bring Americana into European issues. Hence the scale of the Holocaust is a consequence of Churchill's choice not to accept a peace in 1940, as opposed to an ideological fixation of Hitler's antisemetic party that was pursued despite and even against military utility. And in the context of WW1, Prussian militarism needs to be a myth invented by irrationally afraid British leaders to bring Britain into the war.

Buchanan isn't approaching history from a perspective of truth-seeking, but allegory. It relies on the audience not knowing enough about the subject to find the conclusion plausible, and the conclusion is to agree with Buchanan's politics of appropriate US foreign affairs regarding Europe.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Pat Buchanan is writing as a moralist ideologue, not a historian.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. You're definitely correct that he downplays the role of German aggression or treats it as a background inevitability in his narrative of the leadup to WW1.

Austria-Hungary.

Germany gave lots of very aggressive assurances to the country, which would otherwise not have dared to provoke Russia. And not just realpolitik tactful deterrence—things like “Germany stands ready to draw the sword!” The “blank check” is the most famous, but sentiment was very much in favor of brawling. If the Schlieffen plan had paid off, if they’d stayed out of Belgium, if France had cold feet about aiding Russia, if if if…there were ways it could have panned out favorably. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, and Germany had a lot of enemies.

Wilhelm II more generally bought into the militaristic romanticism which had served Prussia and early Germany so well. He collected honorary military ranks and was quite optimistic about the indomitable German spirit. But it wasn’t 1871 anymore, and a British/French/Russian coalition was a lot more likely. He exacerbated the problem by poking at French and occasionally British colonies.

Also, he loved his boats. Thought they were the most important symbol of national prestige. Built a ton of them, directly challenging Britain for naval power. Not great support for the continental hegemon thesis. I mention this mostly to argue against the hypothetical where he’d give up the fleet to keep Britain out of war. Not a chance.

I’m going off what I’ve been reading in Massie’s Castles of Steel. If that’s out of date or revisionist, trust @Dean over me. But from what I’ve seen it holds up.

Ill second Castles of Steel as an excellent read.

Well, it would be more productive if you could explain what you think are the relevant ways in which the analogy fails, unless you don't actually want to contribute to understanding whether or not it has merit. You seem to primarily just want to ridicule the Russian position ("same old gripe", implication of not being "respectable", the "learned and wise" snark), which could either be a knee-jerk response (in which case, please don't) or because you think you have a moral imperative to help lower the enemy's status. But in the latter case, does doing that on a niche forum with bounded readership really help your cause? There are few normies here that could be converted or made to pick up subtle status signals, while the ability to maintain niche forums with nuanced discussion is actually one of the bigger status advantages that the West has over Russia, which has been organically and artificially stamping out its nuanced voices. Thus you might just be giving ammo to fence-sitters to point at you and say "see, both sides are exactly the same". (On top of that, we have a sufficiently high contrarian population that going too hard for your side might even just wind up generating sympathy for the other side directly.)

Well, it would be more productive if you could explain what you think are the relevant ways in which the analogy fails

I did, right at the beginning: there were many more powers involved in the international politics of WWI than there are in the Ukraine war.

On top of that, we have a sufficiently high contrarian population that going too hard for your side might even just wind up generating sympathy for the other side directly.

They don't need me for that. Western contrarians have decided Russia is Really The Good Guy all on their own (well, mostly).

Fun exercise: try to figure who, if anyone, the following statement refers to:

I am a Self Aware Individual, aware of and thus immune to the lies spread by propagandizers. Anyone who disagrees with me is a captured entity, and their failure to acknowledge the validity of my rational position reflects the depth of propaganda capture. What more, they believe THEY are the ones in the right, and that I am propagandized!

Hopefully people don't actually put self worth into internet points. Man, what a tragedy that would be if internet words actually mattered to us and we acted on it!

Hopefully people don't actually put self worth into internet points.

I have bad news about the modern world.

Based on what I'm reading in the book, Britain was the early power with the largest degree of choice about whether to get involved. They weren't directly threatened by Germany, but decided that opposing Germany would put them in a better strategic position with respect to dominating the seas and maintaining their empire. So British involvement was responsible for prolonging the conflict and turning it into a "World War". So I think Britain's position as a key figure pursuing its long-term strategy makes it a fair comparison to Russia of today.

Well, no, the power with the largest degree of choice was Austria: Serbian politics were determined by terrorism and nationalism, so no individual politician had any real ability to stop radicals from doing radical things. But Conrad really was an individual driving force behind the 'Preventive War' against Serbia. While he had allies and supporters, if he had been able to show restraint the war would not have happened when it did. And, if the war did not happen when it did, the window on the German General Staff's plan for avoiding unwinnable two front war was closing as the Russian Army modernized.

You likely would have seen, then, an 18th century style Diplomatic Revolution and return of a waltz of powers as Russia became the clearer threat to the balance of power and Germany lost confidence in its ability to win even a swift two front war.

Of course, the actual best outcome for everyone would have been Frederich William accepting the Crown from the Gutter and a unified Germany coming into existence with responsible government from the start, without the Prussian military apparatus as an independent political power within the state, and with the conservative Junker class on a socio-political backfoot. Or, alternatively, the sequence of events leading to Mayerling never goes off and Franz Josef bumps his head a little hard sometimes in the 1890s, replacing the old reactionary with a young, liberal King-Emperor. Or the first Alexander was a bit more prudent on that cold winter day and the iron hand of the second (and the inept hand of his son) never got near the Autocracy.

Alternative historical speculation is hard and uncertain.

Thucydides Trap historical metaphors tend to fall into the trap of ignoring relevant actors, the issues of when national advantages get conflated with national strategies, and incompetent leaders.

The Thucydides Trap paradigm is a way of modeling behavior between two potential hegemons, but by the nature of the historical allusion (where ancient Sparta and Athens were by far the regional leading leaders of coalitions with limited agency) and general proposer propensities (the Thucydides Trap is most often raised in realist schools of theory, which are currently framed in bipolar conflicts), it's really, really bad at recognizing or accounting for other relevant actors. These actors not only have their own agency (France was a major military power in its own right, and there's a reason France-British rapproachment coincided with the rise of torpedo speed boats that the Royal Navy couldn't have stopped from throttling channel trade), but their presence and potential drives decision making of the key actors (Germany's WW1 strategy prioritizing a westward rush due to expectations of Russian mobilization; modern Eastern European lobbying to expand NATO in the post Cold War).

This matters to your Russia-American metaphor because the roles in the current era really aren't analogous to either WW1 or Thucydides Trap due to the relevance of other actors. The US is not the actor who felt a need to pre-empt a specific threat (the German allusion to WW1), nor was it trying to displace a hegemon / at risk of being displaced as a hegemon by Russia in Ukraine.

The model also struggles to recognize how doctrine and strategy interact, and yet don't substitute for eachother, and how a doctrine predicated on a form of offense can lead to bad strategy and unwise conflict. In WW1, Germany was caught up in what was sometimes referred to as the cult of the offense- the idea that with elan and alacrity and modern military planning you could blitz the enemy to submission much faster and cheaply than a methodical campaign. This, in turn, would let you fight greater opposing forces, since you could knock out some (say France and thus Britain) early enough to focus on the rest (Russia). There was reason to believe this was possible- German offensives had beaten the French before, and would again nearly 30 years later- but this is a tactic that became a strategy by necessity. This was because the Kaiser German military context kept getting worse and worse, because the willingness to aggressively push personal interests at the expense of others created coalitions that wouldn't have formed had other actors felt at risk. The greater the potential coalitions became, the greater the appeal of the cult of the offense to negate that disadvantage. By WW1, German planners largely thought Russia was a massive threat that would take their full focus and thus couldn't be faced with France at the same time... hence the intent to knock out France first. But doing so required going through Belgium, which is what got Britain into the war that it otherwise would have likely sat out on. The Germans took a calculated risk, but boy were they were bad at math because not even they recognized the implications of the technologies available, and that their own strategy built on past success was putting them in a bad strategic context.

This matters to your modern example because Russia was/is in the thrall of its own version of the cult of the offense. Call it the cult of the asymmetric spook. Putin had enough success with small-scale unconventional / special operations that it not only became a Russian advantage, but the entire Russian strategy for Ukraine. The reason so many people publicly doubted the pre-invasion American warnings was because it would be monumentally stupid to go up with a force like that with what Russia had assembled. But Putin was convinced his special military operation successes in the past would work again, and lo and behold when it didn't the strategy crashed and burned.

By contrast, the American comparison to this metaphor isn't Germany in WW1, but far closer to... America in WW1, where the American center of power was never at meaningful threat, and potential threat-rivals devastated themselves while the American political debate was how much favoritism to show the generally favored side without actually entering the war.

Which goes to the final point, leader competence.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but WW1's Kaiser Wilhelm was a certain kind of an idiot- an aggressive idiot. Aggressive foreign policy got him results he otherwise wouldn't have had he been more passive, but who also created the foundations for the coalition that would encircle him, and the willingness of everyone to not only fight back but to help others keep beating his forces up well after the initial bloody nose. Wilhelm's incompetence wasn't just in choosing a bad war, but in the choices that led to Germany's isolation in Europe leading up to this, and the strategic options available to him as a result of his shaping of the local international environment to a point where allies were mercurial at best.

From this position- where the military facts were against him, and the coalitions surrounding him, and victory hinged on a trump card succeeding without issue- Wilhelm then doubled down on a weak hand.

This matters to your example because, again, the historical analog here isn't the US to Germany, or even the US to Britain, but Russia to the worst aspects of WW1 Germany.

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?

That people will take him seriously, not literally. And/or pay attention to other things that he's said in the past, such as his conditional willingness to further supply Ukraine if Russia doesn't agree to reasonable terms, various formulations of which Russia has to date rejected as unreasonable.

Thanks a lot for this detailed reply! I am only vaguely aware of any of this stuff. Can you recommend a good book on WW1 to learn more?

Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984; by Jack Snyder. Here is a summary

The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War; by Stephen Van Evera. Here's a link to a summary... and of some other military history education sources.

Here is a thesis from an American Airforce officer on the Cult of the Offense as it applies to airpower.

I hadn't heard of the "Cult of the Offensive" before. Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous. But maybe it makes sense for our morals to change in this way, as we adapt to the reality that defense is easier than offense.

Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous.

American hegemony. While the particular details of a Wilsonian internationalism weren't carried forward entirely intact, the system of global diplomacy supported by the American foreign policy Establishment in the aftermath of WWII was premised on the idea of sovereign nation states participating peacefully in international institutions that respected human rights understood in an American sort of way (sort of).

That, combined with nuclear weapons, made territorial conquest Problematic. It actually still happens and countries even mostly get away with it from time to time, but it rests less easily on the global consciousness than it did in 1780 or even 1880.

countries even mostly get away with it from time to time

Since WWII, who’s gotten away with land grabs via military invasion? I’m only aware of Russia in Crimea, and even that was more of a coup than a traditional military invasion and occupation like the War of 1870.

Off the top of my head there’s the 1951 Chinese annexation of Tibet, the various land grabs between Israel and its neighbours, the 1961 annexation of Goa by India, and the 1975 Indonesia annexation of East Timor. Depending how you frame it the Vietnam war ended either with North Vietnam annexing South Vietnam or the reunification of a single nation split by civil war.

There’s also been failed annexation attempts post ww2, like the 1950 North Korean invasion of South Korea and the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Great list, thanks. I suppose Tibetan independence after the collapse of the Qing was never internationally recognized, so legally that’s more of an internal matter than an international annexation.

Nationalism. There's a belief that there exists a set of people who are Germans/Czechs/Poles/Frenchmen/etc. And that the goal of international policy is, where reasonable and within constraints, to draw a circle around each group of people and allow them to form a nation state. This is a myth, the circle can't exist absent state violence, and indeed the people mostly don't exist without state violence.

The idea of conquest in an age of nationalism means either genocide or slavery. In an age of monarchy it merely means adding subjects.

I hadn't heard of the "Cult of the Offensive" before.

I would strongly (and warmly) recommend reading up on it. More than a specific historical context, the Cult of the Offensive is a mindset that can be observed across periods of time, and is an example of a strategic paradigm that can simultaneously be logical (because premise can be true and valid) and illogical (because the consequences of adopting the paradigm include negative externalities that make it illogical to embrace).

Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous. But maybe it makes sense for our morals to change in this way, as we adapt to the reality that defense is easier than offense.

Rather than scandalous, the more relevant point is 'too expensive to be profitable.'

The British and American formal empires fell because of scandal. The sense of self of what it meant to be 'civilized' precluded arbitrary and extreme uses of force, and political-ideological senses of legitimacy and democracy asserted self-limitations that, eventually, led them to no longer want to militarily enforce rule and so negotiate exits.

That negotiation- and the experience of other conquerors- was in the context that insurgencies were increasingly cheap and bloodily effective and incurring huge costs. Starting with post-WW2 military surpluses, but then expanding with the Cold War military-industrial complexes, advanced and effective and relatively portable weapons made armed resistance a real and feasible thing. The AK-47 is perhaps the hallmark of a cheap and effective peasant-usable weapon, and further advances in explosives and communications and plenty of safe support zones made supplying insurgencies very easy for anyone who either sympathized with a target, or wanted to counter an aggressor. These costs could be economically ruinous and politically disruptive.

To follow on @Dean's point on wars of conquest being too expensive to be profitable, there was also increasing traction among politicians and economists that the costs of holding foreign territory started outweighing the trade/taxes accrued from said territory. I don't have the specific literature, but Adam Smiths economic treatises regularly castigated colonial adventures as foolish, with no economic case for them due to the high frictional costs of maintaining economically leaky endeavors.

As technology improved and accessibility to said technology extended beyond European borders, the strength of relative threats diminished the European technological advantages severely. There is no point keeping a garrison in Hong Kong if the Chinese can attack strongpoints with artillery instead of swords. There is no point in keeping a Kabul FOB if the Taliban can overrun adjacent ANA positions with a text message and plink potshots eternally at US troops without consequence, etc etc.

The last major power to engage in a colonialist land grab (outside of Putin) was funny moustache man, and all his lebensraum would have lain fallow if he did not have a cooperative population working it maximally for his advantage The Russians slow worked under an ostensibly beneficial communist system simply because the communist system had unworkable incentives, theres no way they would have functioned as a slave people to faraway teutons.

Thanks, this seems like an important insight. You could say that the economic value of land just isn't as high relative to labor as it was before, say, 1800. The American "empire" receives economic value from favorable laws in foreign countries: Apple can set up factories in China, the Gap can have its factories in Bangladesh, without the government of the United States actually needing to be in charge of the day-to-day business of government in those countries. And as the economy has become more complicated, it does seem like "workers + incentives" is a cheaper and ultimately more profitable technique than "slaves + force" for extracting value from labor. This seems like a new development, so I'm surprised to hear that it was already in Adam Smith. I guess the modern economy is older than I thought.

Historian Bret Devereaux on his blog wrote about the status quo coalition which is a somewhat related idea; he has a similar bit about how returns from development outpace returns from conquest in the modern era, making modern wars of conquest not economically worthwhile.

Historically the value of land and borders would have been tied to the people within the land that could be taxed, or chokepoints (ports, passes, bridges) that would keep the people or goods within a boundary to be taxed. A shitload of fertile plains is useless if peasants cannot work it, a shitload of peasants are useless if there is no land for them to work on. People are taxable, land is not. The Congo slavers sold captured slaves because their shitty land was unsuitable for agriculture in the short term, and these captives could be traded for horses guns and shinies that the congolese valued more than the ransoms of inland captures.

We also have to recognize that modern economic concepts like gross domestic product or national output is also a reflection of modernized sociopolitical advancements that allow quantification and tracking of inputs and outputs. A theoretical value of captured land has no real value if the local taxman and the taxpayer all collude to deprive the faraway sovereign of their dues.

In modern terms, the pre-Smith British view of Mercantilist economic victory was 'everyone buys my stuff', which reflects producer superiority and is the focus of trade wars. Smith and later Ricardo explored the theories of trade and comparative advantage to obtain maximal utility (US makes soybeans cheaply, so it should sell them to the Chinese who make plastic crap cheaply for mutual benefit), and this combined with the realization that colonies really were exercises in impoverishment to diminish the appeal of colonization or indeed other proximate wars.

The USA may have actually entered a hitherto unseen economic victory condition, where 'everyone wants to sell to me'. By being the buyer of highest priority, outsiders comport their own supply chains and production processes to the buyers preferences even without the buyer explicating as such. Japanese clothing giants commission Bangladeshi muslims to sew pride flags onto blue eyed blonde barbie dolls because the USA is the buyer they all aim to satisfy, not their impoverished kin or insignificant neighbours.

I think the critical point is that imperialism doesn't pay if you have to pay your own troops first-world wages. Kipling in Arithmetic on the Frontier is already suggesting that the British Empire on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border was money-losing for this reason in 1886. The situation gets worse, to the point where (even with the oil) the cost to the US taxpayer of being in Iraq was of the same order of magnitude as the total GDP of Iraq.

Profitable small-scale imperialism (called "warlordism") is still going on in the parts of sub-Saharan Africa where child soldiers cost a dollar a day.

If you want to compare historical wars with the present situation in Ukraine, I would suggest the Mexican-American war as a better template. Mapped over to historical events…

The United States —> Russia Mexico —> Ukraine Texas —> Crimea/DPR/LPR

I’m a bit short on time, but try to read the Wikipedia page and draw the comparisons. To me at least there are many similarities.

The annexation of Texas was largely downstream of first Spain, then newly-independent Mexico encouraging Americans to colonize the mostly-unoccupied-except-Native-Americans region (land grants happened elsewhere in the American West as well). For reasons involving language/culture barriers, a proto-fascist dictatorship, and, yes, slavery, Texas declared and won it's independence from Mexico, puttered along as a recognized independent state for a decade before US annexation, and the actual Mexican American war kicked off over the exact borders of Texas.

I don't see that many parallels here. Did Ukraine encourage Russian settlement in Crimea/Donetsk? I don't think the Spanish Empire fits in the place of the USSR here. And the US was actually pretty reluctant to annex Texas at the time because it would change the antebellum balance of slave and free states. Texas had formal relations with other major powers, and there was some discussion with the British about border guarantees as an alternative to American annexation, although IMO the close ties there probably made that a non-starter.

I see a little bit of what you are suggesting, but I think it plays almost equally well in reverse: with independence from Spain the fall of the Iron Curtain, Western ideals were invited into the region, setting up an inevitable conflict with caudillo Santa Anna Putin in ways that lost Mexico the Russian sphere of influence huge swaths of territory and riches in ways that might have been salvageable. Was Texas independence, or the broader Mexican Cession, truly inevitable? Maybe, but Santa Anna didn't seem particularly interested in keeping them (edit: except by force), and Texas wasn't even the only rebellious Mexican province in 1835.

Did Ukraine encourage Russian settlement in Crimea/Donetsk?

In a way? How far are we willing to go back here?

The whole comparison with Mexico kinda breaks down as soon as you figure in the fact both Russia and Ukraine are broken pieces of the Soviet Union modeled after its internal politics.

If we introduce temporality into this discussion then it actually crippled the Texas=D/LNR and Mexico=Ukraine, and it becomes Texas=Ukraine and Mexico=Russia. The proximate relevance of 2022 Ukraines relationship with Russia is the 2014 Crimea and Novorossiya adventure, not the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union or the slavification of the Pale Of Settlement from god knows when to god knows when. 1991 Ukraine did not exhibit the same hostility to its parent patron as much as the Texans did the Mexicans back in 1991, but it certainly does since 2014. The animating force of hostility against Russia is the disregard for the internal motivations of the Ukrainian polity, and that fuckup is Russias own doing. Sticking with a Belarus model of relationship cultivation is yielding dividends in Hungary and maybe Romania in this year of 2024, and nothing indicates 2014 Ukrainians were especially lured to the liberal pieties of the West. Texas would not have seceded from Mexico without the change in political status quo, and in fact it brought in plenty of Anglos specifically seeking to escape the US diktats. Perhaps if Putin didn't fuck up his Ukraine adventure we would see Carlsonstan set up as an antiliberal tradcon utopia.

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:

  • Crimea annexed by Russia and end of sanctions.
  • Ukraine swears to not join NATO in perpetuity but gets its independence and neutrality guaranteed by the EU and Russia
  • Autonomy for the Russophone oblasts as part of Ukraine with a plan for plebicites to join Russia or Ukraine at a set date administered by a neutral body
  • Joint Russo-europeean investment in reconstruction
  • Criminalization of national socialism
  • Ukraine entered in process to join the EU on the proviso that the provisions of the peace treaty take precedence

Ukraine... gets its independence and neutrality guaranteed by ... Russia

Ukraine already has that. What else you got?

I am duty bound to inform you that you are allowed to read the rest of the sentence, or indeed, the rest of the post.

I find my question unchanged.

Are you under the impression that the EU is or ever has been guaranteeing the independence of Ukraine militarily?

They get transitive Article 5 NATO protection under my plan, they just don't get to trigger it themselves or host NATO bases and are bound to formal neutrality as part of the deal.

No, just that such a guarantee isn't worth very much.

What the hell more do you want than dual GP protection? Nuclear weapons?

Acknowledgement of reality. A peace deal now without hard guarantees is just a pause, a frozen conflict so more can be taken in the future.

More comments

And yet, duty bound or not you didn't rebut the point of what had already failed.

*The accords you claim already existed were non-viable due to Russian demands even before the Bucha Massacre was recognized, and conditional on Russian demands for Ukrainian disarmament to levels below what Ukraine has already since lost in the war- i.e. an inability to defend itself- while demanding a Russian veto on external security assistance by non-Russian providers- i.e. that other actors like the EU would not be able to act in a crisis.

*The end of sanctions on Russia will not occur because the sanctions are themselves a mechanism of European transition away from Russian energy imports on grounds of national security following Russia's attempted energy blackmail.

*Russia has no credibility has a military guarantor of Ukraine's security as it is currently on the third continuation war of violating Ukraine's neutrality.

*Russia has already rejected the applicability of neutral administration of the Russophone oblasts both in the form of annexation and in its previous positions during Minsk agreements positions of previous agreed upon neutral parties.

*As there is no reason to believe there would turnover of territory, by consequence the destination of most reconstruction aid would be in the areas most heavily damaged- the areas Russia holds- amounting to a subsidy / reimbursement to Russia of the costs of Russian conquest. If there was no cross-control spending, the provision would have no role as both powers would simply spend on reconstruction of their own areas regardless.

*Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine was already conducted when Ukraine was on a much less involved level of EU association despite existing treaties.

Your terms of peace are non-credible because they rest on provisions that Russia has already broken or insisted on poison pill sub-provisions that lead to this conflict.

Peace requires concessions on both sides, and I think a European guarantee is enough of a deterrent.

Both sides' declared conditions are mutually exclusive, I tried to cleave from both of them somewhat fairly.

there is no reason to believe there would turnover of territory

Formal borders sans Crimea restored and an end to military occupation seems like it goes without saying, formal schedules for returning Ukraine to normal administration are left as exercise to the reader.

If Putin is interested in clay instead of all of his declared war goals, peace is a non starter, but I believe him when he says his concerns are related to security of Russia and Russians more than rote imperialism.

Peace requires concessions on both sides,

So far your concessions are largely unilateral in light of how Russia has approached or poison-pilled various equivalent standards before.

and I think a European guarantee is enough of a deterrent.

A peace treaty doesn't depend on what you think is enough of a deterrent, it depends on what others think is enough of a deterrent. The typical-minding of other actors perspectives and interests to your own is why your proposals will not be credible to the actors that matter.

Both sides' declared conditions are mutually exclusive, I tried to cleave from both of them somewhat fairly.

Are you trying for fairness, or functionality?

If you are trying for functionality, your sense of fairness has neglected the functional failures that already occurred as a result of equivalent terms in the past, failures which you are expecting previous victims of to subscribe to again.

Formal borders sans Crimea restored and an end to military occupation seems like it goes without saying,

It not only requires saying, but categorial opposition to this has been the starting position for the Russian position for over two years now, with no provided reason for why they would drop the position and un-annex regions now given that a cease fire or frozen conflict- a BATNA to a treaty- would let them retain territory well beyond formal borders sans Crimea.

formal schedules for returning Ukraine to normal administration are left as exercise to the reader.

And as one of the readers is the Russians, this turns any formal schedule into a frozen conflict scenario. Which is the same scenario that led to the 2022 invasion as Russia deemed a frozen conflict with no viable path to NATO membership insufficient to meet its desires vis-a-vis another continuation war.

If Putin is interested in clay instead of all of his declared war goals, peace is a non starter, but I believe him when he says his concerns are related to security of Russia and Russians more than rote imperialism.

Putin is interested in the clay because many of his claimed war goals were false or lost already.

The Russophone regional populations were not categorically endangered until Russia created and enforced a separatist conflict with external interventions, NATO expansion was accelerated instead of countered, the Ukrainians were not a false nation seeking Russian liberation, and the Ukrainian government was never a Nazi regime.

The clay is what allows Putin to justify to himself, his partisan supporters, and his historian that he 'won' in some meaningful sense.

Do Russian diplomats really read this forum? News to me.

In any case your model of the motivations of the belligerents is not the same as mine so I don't really think we can reconcile the reasoning for any of this.

I will say however that taking the current declared terms from both sides as immutable gospel as you do here is absurd. Diplomacy never works like that.

Do Russian diplomats really read this forum? News to me.

Do Russian diplomats need to read this forum for your proposals to be unworkable because of poor modeling of the interests and concerns of participants?

In any case your model of the motivations of the belligerents is not the same as mine so I don't really think we can reconcile the reasoning for any of this.

Sure we can. We can work to justify the models based on key actor behavior, contexts that the proposed models will work within, and past iterations.

For example, you made a concession that if Putin is interested in clay instead of all his declared war goals, then peace is a non-starter. I noted that it is impossible for Putin to achieve all of his declared war goals, and that in lieu of those he has significant interest in the clay in order to declare victory. You have not disputed these points on all of Putin's war goals. If Putin has many interests in the conflicts, and many/most have fallen away, then the reason to continue the conflict remains the rest- which includes the clay.

This is a synthesis, not a refutation of your model, and thus allows the conversation to reach your own conclusion. Putin cares about the clay, and thus peace is hopeless.

From this point, we can discuss what that means for reasonable peace talks (which have a purpose even when an adversary has no interest in fulfilling them), assumptions of terms they can be approached with, and so on.

I will say however that taking the current declared terms from both sides as immutable gospel as you do here is absurd. Diplomacy never works like that.

Fortunately I am not arguing on the immutable gospel of declared terms, but rather past iterations, interests, and incentives... which is how diplomacy routinely works, absurd as that may seem to you.

Moreover, you seem to be trying for a flawed reasoning of what is or is not considered subject for negotiation. Just because initial declared terms are 'never' final terms doesn't mean all parts of initial terms are subject to concession. Plenty of terms are not subject to trading way short of total capitulation- which is not the context Russia is faced with in the timeframe being alluded to. As such, the basis by which currently held Russian territory would be traded away with requires justification rather than going without saying, particular in light of past Russian policies in regards to frozen conflicts and relevant historical analogs to broad-front indefinite cease fires.

maybe concede Crimea

Crimea has been under Russian occupation since 2014. I doubt that Putin has been losing sleep over the possibility of a counter-invasion by Ukraine which would not be contrary to international law, but would be so after Ukraine formally conceded Crimea.

Putin may be an autocrat, but I think it is very possible that his position of power is strong enough that he can de facto surrender in Ukraine without losing his job and possibly his head. That might have an option after his Blitzkrieg had failed in 2022, but to tell the mothers of dead Russian soldiers that their sons have died so that Russia can keep Crimea seems like political suicide.

(And who knows how plebiscites in the oblasts might turn out, once the people who fled Russian occupation are allowed back. Both sides have incentives to engage in ballot-stuffing by sending their citizens to stay there long enough to vote, and the records of who was living there in 2013 could have been tampered with by either side.

independence and neutrality guaranteed by the EU and Russia

Guarantees are not the deterrence you think they are, historically. Also, they are just a precommitment to start a war in certain cases.

Say you are Estonia. If someone invades Poland, that means that under Article 5 you are obliged to go to war (along the US and most of the West) to defend your fellow NATO member.

This might seem like a bad deal for Estonia, and indeed it is not clear how many NATO countries would honor the obligation. But with NATO membership, they get something in return: If they are invaded, Poland is also obliged to come to their aid.

The EU guaranteeing Ukraine would leave Estonia in the same position of having to fight if Ukraine gets invaded, but without (a) any reverse obligation to Ukraine (b) support from the US or the UK, who happen to have the largest nuclear stockpiles in NATO.

Now, I like Ukrainian independence, and support sending them weapons for as long as they care to fight and die for it, but absent mutual obligations (e.g. NATO), I am opposed to starting WW3 lite (between EU and Russia, without US/UK) over it.

--

So, neither the EU (which would have to vote unanimously) nor Putin would agree to your plan. A more realistic peace proposal would concede most of the occupied territory to Russia and see Ukraine (which will then not be in an active conflict) join NATO so Putin can't come for the next slice in a few years. Of course, neither Ukraine nor Russia would likely agree to that.

Or perhaps start with a ceasefire, where both sides can dig in, making future conquests more costly. (Obviously swap the occupied part of Kursk for a piece of occupied Ukraine.) Then again, a frozen conflict a la Korea might be hard to accomplish because both belligerents are very unevenly matched here.

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:

  • Ukrainian farmland and mines can be bought by American companies in exchange for foreign aid
  • You can paperclip Ukrainian UAV designers and other useful military personnel
  • Russia might actually be persuaded to backstab China in exchange for sanctions relief and convinced to reimburse the owners of all the companies it has nationalized

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.

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.

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.

The bad guy in WWI was Woodrow Wilson. Stupid and incompetent all the way. When you are dealing with a power that needs to be contained after a flare you have two options - first bloody them and then offer them generous peace and allow them to save face or beat them up really badly and punish them with harsh punitive peace.

Due to Woodrow Wilson's influence - he was so stupid that thought that league of nations is a good and viable idea the winning powers took the worst of the two approaches - punitive peace with no real enforcement mechanism, a german state that was not weakened enough to not subvert them, leaving sizable German minorities in their neighboring countries, a huge internal vacuum because of the revolution and a huge vacuum in the east due to the collapse of the russian empire. It was a recipe for disaster.

The bad guy in WWI was Woodrow Wilson.

You are projecting post-1945 American hegemony back into the past.

We can argue about whether or not Woodrow Wilson was bad, but he definitely wasn't "the" bad guy because he wasn't a first-tier player. The European Great Powers went to war with each other without taking American policy into account, because they thought the most likely scenario was a short war of maneuver and there was nothing the US could do to affect the results of one. Even had they expected a long war, they would have (correctly) assumed US neutrality absent an exceptionally stupid provocation by the Central Powers.

The first meaningful opportunity for the US to meddle in WW1 (apart from selling materiel to the Allies on normal commercial terms) is when Bethmann Hollweg asks Woodrow Wilson to convene an international peace conference on the basis of status quo ante in December 1916. By this point the bloodiest battles of WW1 (Verdun and the Somme) had already been fought. And Wilson doesn't take the bait at this point - he correctly realises that neither side wanted a status quo ante peace in 1916. (Bethmann Hollweg was trying to maneuver out of situation where German domestic politics would force the adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which he opposed on the mostly-correct basis that if it worked it would bring the US in).

The first time the US actually meddles in WW1 is the publication of the Fourteen Points, which happens after the February Revolution in Russia, at which point the messy collapse of Tsarist Russia is already priced and can be added to the "harms of WW1 definitely not Wilson's fault" pile.

OP wasn't addressing what Wilson did before he decided the US needs to enter the war, he was addressing what he did after the war ended.

And Monzer's point remains the same: Wilson wasn't a first-tier player who had the agency to overturn the preferences of the rest, and many of the factors that led to the nature of the end of WW1 (such as breakup of empires into smaller nation-states, but with ethnic mixing) were already baked in.

Wilson was The first tier player and he overrode his allies desires for more realpolitik based solution.

A good summary can be found in the The New Face of Diplomacy: Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles chapter in the Kissinger's Diplomacy

the publication of the Fourteen Points

I always like Clemenceau's (possibly fake) quip about Wilson's laundry list - "four more than God."

I so want it to be true. ;-)

first bloody them and then offer them generous peace and allow them to save face or beat them up really badly and punish them with harsh punitive peace

..

the worst of the two approaches - punitive peace with no real enforcement mechanism

You're correct that 'peace without victory' was an utterly unworkable ambition, but compounding this sin the US then largely acted to undermine attempts to enforce German debts at the same time it called in the debts owed to the US by its allies. Part of this was buying too much into Keynes' doomsaying book, and part was early cold war posturing and power balancing, but at the end of the day Versailles was hardly excessive or vindictive and it was eminently reasonable that France should seek reparations having borne all the destruction while the war's loser got off comparatively lightly. It was modest compared to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk Germany had enforced on Russia the year prior (german gains in land and population here far outstripped what they lost in Versailles) , and should be seen partly in reaction to the 3B franc indemnity imposed by Germany on France in 1871. Per Stephen Shuker, it's likely Germany ended up paying no net reparations at all, having paid its immediate bills with American loans that were subsequently defaulted on in the Great Recession. Contra Keynes, who believed that Germany could not afford the ~2B marks per year for 30 years, Mantoux estimated German rearmament spending as exceeding that seven times over for each each year between 1933 and 1939.

Sally Marks' Myths of Reparations identifies two main failures in the allied prosecution of Versailles. The first was enforcement as you mention, but the second was the failure to make it clear to the German people (who again, had lost a colossal war escaping most of the destruction) the psychological reality of their defeat: “An Allied march down the Unter den Linden would have humiliated Germany briefly, but in retrospect that might have been a small price to pay”.

This analysis, of course, leaves out the context that Russia is, specifically in Eastern Europe but to a lesser extent in the Middle East, also an expansionist power seeking to unify various countries into a Russia-headed power block. Russian intervention in Syria wasn’t driven by concern about Syrian independence, it was driven by Syria accepting Russia as a hegemon. And Russian intervention in Ukraine has also, largely, been driven by trying to force Kiev to take orders from Moscow.

Russia and Syria have been allies for decades, the Russians have a naval base there and a lot of Syrian officers were trained in Moscow.

If the Philippines asked the US for help combatting terrorists, Islamists, rebels and various foreign-backed proxies, that would be perfectly reasonable and acceptable, given their longstanding ties and the US's pre-existing bases there.

I seem to recommend a lot of history podcasts here, but I'll plug When Diplomacy Fails's current series on the July Crisis. Covers a lot that popular accounts don't, including the historiography around the run-up to war.

Having had a British education, I mostly found it surprising how much British diplomacy appears to have been done by a small cabal acting behind the backs of the public, who intended to manipulate the country into a largely unnecessary rivalry with Germany. However, this seems to have been a general trend - the high diplomats of many of the Great Powers were effectively off the leash and playing all kinds of too-clever-by-half schemes which then blew up in their faces (and Germany was particularly guilty of letting Austria-Hungary do this).

My historical understanding is stronger on colonial politics than internal European diplomacy, but I will point out that the continuity of England's balance-of-power politics is generally overplayed (because her balance-of-power diplomacy in 1914 looks superficially similar to 1815). In reality, much of the century before Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 was based on colonial rivalries, in particular with Russia in Asia and France in Africa - it was only when Russia was revealed as a paper tiger that British policymakers began to look around and realize that Britain's worldwide imperial politics may have been coming at the cost of security in her backyard. My reading is that the British mistakenly believed that aligning with France and Russia would provide a stable balance of power instead of creating two evenly matched blocs ready for war, and totally missed that, in trading off imperial security for European security, she would lose both to long-term rising powers on the periphery (the US and a revitalized Russia). The breakdown of the Dreikaiserbund/Reinsurance Treaty was also a symptom of myopia, with the Great Powers focusing on short-term concerns rather than the greater long-term dangers of revolution and irredentist nationalism.

So, I guess the takeaway is that policymakers have to think long-term. Which, uh, good luck.

Germany was particularly guilty of letting Austria-Hungary do this

Strudlhofs Gone Wild!

The image of the hilariously-named Hotzendorf and Bechtold von und zu Ungarschitz, Frättling und Püllütz just absolutely HOUSING pastries and getting flaky crumbs all over the draft ultimatum to Serbia is sadly ahistorical. It doesn't stop me giggling over it, though.

Always!

Color me skeptical, though, that you’re going to find anything revelatory on Twitter. It’s not a trove of forbidden knowledge. It’s entertainment, and edgy contrarianism is a costume like any other.

Now back to geeking out about long-dead men.

Wilhelm II’s Germany was well-armed, proud, and above all, young. He desperately wanted to move it from a second-tier power, beset by rivals on land and sea, to a hegemon. That meant colonial purchases, a massive naval buildup, and the quest for a reliable neighbor. He did alright on the first and really well on the second. Unfortunately, he ended up with Austria-Hungary.

I don’t know how you can look at that and think “America.” NATO stands in the UK position of sea dominance, commercial dominance, but limited appetite for intervention. It’s not in the German position of encirclement, and it doesn’t burn with the need for “a day in the sun.”

Conversely, American geopolitics is compatible with leaving Ukraine to Russia. That doesn’t generate a threat to the homeland, and it doesn’t violate any actual treaty. We haven’t done so because 1) we’re getting a decent return on investment and 2) we’ve got a bit of a complex about letting the bully get what he wants. That’s our job.

As I understand it, Trump could cut all weapons sales to Ukraine by revoking their ITAR license. I wouldn’t expect that to supersede any Congressional allocation of aid, but I don’t know what the proportions look like. Do I think he’d actually do this? No. Probably not. Well, it is Trump, and long-term consequences have never been his strong suit. The point is, he’s got leverage over our industrial contributions to the war.

Always!

... ] Now back to geeking out about long-dead men.

This is the sort of enthusiasm that keeps me here with a smile at times like now.

I don’t know how you can look at that and think “America.”

Because I think America/NATO actually achieved what Germany (according to its modern defenders) was trying to achieve, peace through unquestioned dominance on the continent of Europe. America doesn't view itself as aggressively expansionist, even as NATO expands, because its military actually is so dominant that it seems only natural that other countries should want to join our military alliance. So America is definitely not like Germany if the comparison is "young upstart power with something to prove", but America does seem similar to Germany in its view of a peaceful world order, i.e. everyone should just do what we want.

But hey, I'm just getting into this stuff for the first time, my curiosity having been sparked by the much-maligned Twitter. Maybe there is no analogy to be made, but I appreciate getting informed pushback from people who know a lot more about this than I do!

Unfortunately, he ended up with Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary was not particularly an albatross around Germany’s neck except of its own making; absent the German blank check, it’s unlikely Austria would have full-on invaded Serbia as opposed to making demands which would have been considered reasonable upon review by the Russians. It was nowhere near as militaristic as Germany and while Franz Joseph was and old, out of touch emperor, he died in 1916 and was succeeded by Karl I, who likely would have given the needed reforms to keep the Slavs happy(Franz Ferdinand would have done the same thing).

Austria as a powder keg is foreseeable mostly in hindsight; a reasonable observer would have expected Franz Joseph’s successor to calm tensions.

I don’t disagree.

To be clear, I’m blaming reckless German policy, such as giving a blank check. There’s a quote from the German ambassador to A-H along the lines of “there is no way we actually benefit from this relationship.” But the other options all sucked, so Germany really doubled down on a weak hand. They’d have been much better off continuing Bismarck-style defensive politics like everyone else.

Everyone goes on and on about the German blank cheque and completely ignores that the French did the exact same thing about a year before. They told Russia explicitly that they were prepared to back up Russia in a general war over a future Balkan crisis (one happening every few years at this point). What is that if not a blank cheque?

The French had decided they didn't particularly mind war, Germany hardly deserves more blame than France.

Im fascinated by the transition period around the turn century as it is simultaneously remote and foriegn and yet at the same time immediately accessible in the sense that primary sourses are widely available and the seeds of our modern world for all its good and ill are immediately visible.

Mine is hardly a unique take (better historians than I have already written whole books on the subject) but i think that WWI was an inflection point, and the seminal tragedy of the 20th century. I say tragedy specifically because it is so hard to pick out any one cause or villian. Sure some might point to Gavrillo Princep, but he was less the cause and more the careless spark that finally lit the pile of oily rags. That the situation was allowed to progress to the point where a single idiot could plunge all of Europe into war for want of a sandwich was the real problem. It almost feels fated in a way. Everyone involved seems to have been making reasonable decisions and assumptions for the information they had available the problem (if one can call it that) was that the world is messy and complex and a lot of their information wad either incomplete or just plane wrong.

In contrast the opening of WWII might as well be a Saturday morning cartoon in its simplicity.

Sure there is the argument to be made that Britain could have avoided both wars simply by reneging on previous agreements with Belgium and Poland and renouncing the RN's role as guaranteurs of maritime trade/safety but I don't see how anyone remotely familiar with early 20th century British politics and culture would see that as a realistic option. In alternate history terms that is pretty close to an "alien space bats" type scenario.

Regarding Cooper in particular i find it interesting that his complaints about Churchill seem to mirror a lot of the longstanding complaints about him from the far left. IE that his stubbornness and devotion to outmoded/obsolete ways of thinking prevented him from meeting the socialists and anti-colonialists half-way and subsequently brought ruin to the nation. Of course the classical rejoinder from the trad-right is that it is precisely this stubbornness and devotion to "outmoded ways of thinking" that made him the man for the job.

A "reasonable man" would not have been able to credibly deliver a line like "we shall fight on the landing grounds".

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.

I would not say that this was the major cause of the conflict. There are much more fundamental reasons. Let's go through some of them:

  1. Demographics: after unification of Germany in 1871 it had population of 41 million people. By 1913 the population increased by 65% to 68 million. Population of France was 36,1 million in 1871 without Alsace-Moselle they ceded in the war, and in 1911 it increased only marginally to 39 million. French were scared of rapidly industrializing and growing Germany. But in turn Germany was scared of Russian Empire which increased from around 85 million in 1870 to around 160 million in 1910, and it also industrialized very rapidly.

  2. The change in foreign policy of Russia and it's turn from the principle of Holy Alliance since 1815, where three Emperors of Russia, Austria and Prussia formed a coalition on monarchic principle against revolutionaries and other threats. This alliance got steadily weakened despite Russia supporting Austria in 1848 against Hungarian rebels only to be betrayed during Crimean War in 1853. Then with unification of Germany this soured further until Russia formed Franco-Russian Alliance in 1894.

  3. Britain was in a bit of a pickle. You are right that they wanted to play continental powers one against another, but at the same time they were terrified of Russian expansionism. They had valid fears of Russia influencing Central Asia in so called Great Game - the primary concern was Russia expanding into India via Afghanistan, but also establishing Warm water port in East Asia. Brits viewed Russia with suspicion.

  4. One of the key moments where situation changed was when Russia lost war in 1905 to Japan, which turned its focus more on to the west in Balkans while negotiating alliance with Great Britain in 1907. This put Russia more directly onto collision course against Austria which also wanted influence in Balkans. There were some precursors such as Russia supporting Serbia in Balkan Wars at the expense of Austria. This solidified two competing blocks in Europe.

  5. There were some crisis situations also concerning Germany, France and UK such as Agadir Affair. The conflict was brewing for some time.

I of course omitted many other things such as German naval rearmament, which however stalled before WW1 with Germans focusing more on the army, and thus it was not a direct cause of it, but it contributed to tensions. I still think WW1 was not inevitable. The collision course was there, but with a little bit more luck and/or more diplomatic skill or at least not outright incompetence during the July crisis, the world could have survived this period of tensions.

I don't think that WW1 is a good analogy for anything going on in modern international relations. The fundamental fact about the international situation immediately before and (to a lesser extent) during WW1, which was well-understood by contemporaries, is the existence of multiple (between five and nine depending on how you count) Great Powers each of which was capable (both in terms of military power and institutional decision-making capacity) of acting independently in pursuit of its own interests, including forming and breaking alliances based on mutual interest. The only constraint on the of a Great Power is the possible opposition of other Great Powers.

@georgioz provides a long list of Great Power conflicts in the period between 1815 (the last great International Peace Conference where the then-existing Great Powers redrew the map of Europe and agreed ground rules among themselves) and 1914 - and critically not all of them are Allies vs Central Powers. You can argue about who much the UK/France/Russia vs Germany/Austria line-up results from choices made by statesmen vs. unavoidable strategic logic vs. shared values/culture, but we can see Italy and the Ottoman Empire choosing sides based on a (possibly wrong, but genuinely attempted) calculation of strategic advantage, as well as a (somewhat dysfunctional) decision-making process where the UK decides whether or not to honour the alliance with France and the guarantee to Belgium and join the war based on a calculation of its perceived advantage.

There is a reason why board games simulating pre-1914 real-world conflict tend to be multiplayer, but board games simulating post-1914 politics tend to be two player.

After Pearl Harbour, we see two models of the world, neither of which feature Great Powers. The "US hegemony" paradigm sees all states as either US clients or as rogue states. US diplomacy is more like managing troublesome vassals in Crusader Kings than, well, Diplomacy. The "United Nations vs Axis of Evil" paradigm sees the goodies as a grand alliance held together by shared values (NOT mutual interest) and where goodie countries nominally commit to not acting unilaterally in pursuit of their own selfish interests. The Axis of Evil tends to be treated as a single unified "them" even when it isn't. (Incidentally, this model provides an easy explanation of what went wrong with W's foreign policy - W thought that he was facing an Axis of Evil when in fact Iran, Iraq and al-Quaeda were different rogue states which happened to be annoying him at the same time).

Who are the plausible Great Powers nowadays? The US is still something more than one Great Power among others. China counts. Russia looks like a Great Power, but their ineptitude in Ukraine strongly suggests that they are a fake and gay Great Power. The UK and France probably still have the military power to be Great Powers (the Falklands war was the last time this was put to the test), but American hegemony is sufficiently real that (since Suez) the British and French elites think that they can't act without American permission, and accordingly neither country has the institutional capacity. (One of the reasons why British national-greatness conservatives supported Brexit was because they thought that this loss of capacity was caused by EU membership, but in fact the UK only joined the EU after we had realised that we had already lost Great Power status). India might be a latent Great Power but doesn't act like one. Germany and Japan have intentionally eschewed Great Power status. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are strategically irrelevant - the B and S in BRICS are there by diplomatic courtesy. The only other candidate as I see it is Turkey.

Nobody thinks Diplomacy is being played in Ukraine. The Biden administration think they are trying to talk sense into a nuclear toddler. The Europeans are passively choosing whether to contribute the the American strategy or not - it turns out that the British and French can't even give the Ukrainians missiles without American permission. The Russians think they are playing Twilight Struggle like the old times, but they are actually playing Panzer General, badly.

I'm currently having a debate with my dad.He asserts that voting is a civic duty, and that if you don't vote you can't complain about outcomes.

I disagree with both halves:

  • voting is commendable, but supererogatory, and in practice futile compared to lobbying and coalition-building

    • If it's a duty, why don't they arrest you for not following through? Failure to comply with taxes and selective service both get people very angry.
    • If it's a duty, why is it made practically harder than the intrinsic difficulty of developing an informed opinion? There is no Voting Day or Weekend, there is no guarantee of no reprisal for taking time off to do it.
      • Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting? Why is the single fundamental operation of ensuring political legitimacy treated so unseriously? You have to show up in person? And you're authenticated by showing a $15 license-like thing at best? Scribbling on a register? Scribbling on a mailed-in slip?
    • If I'm honest with myself there's an element of go-to-hell rebellion. Duty is meaningless if you didn't sign up for it with full comprehension, and you can take your cultural-indoctrination-by-bullying and shove it. I'd happily trade my federal suffrage for my federal tax burden.
    • An individual vote isn't much power at all. In an age where a junior senator can be bought for $10K, you properly 'vote' by organizing a Fun Run and starting a war chest, or finding a way to enhance or steer an existing one. Voting by voting is a loser's game.

  • it's obviously viable to hold an opinion on how a leader you didn't vote for is acting. Flippantly, it's like atheism: you didn't vote for every other pol, why is the one in power different somehow? Practically, we don't say you can't hold an opinion about your driver falling asleep if you're a passenger.

    • Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest. Especially in the US federal system, where there is no "none of the above" option.
      • He assures me that spoiling your vote in protest implements this, so long as you Do the Voting Ritual. I don't trust the opaque interpretation of unknown officials, and these days don't trust that it won't be used in some vote hack.
    • You don't vote for high leadership's direct actions, you can't predict what decisions they'll take for reference situations, there is no standard expression of personal style. You're already an ignorant passive passenger once the vote is cast, why is intelligently and deliberately refusing to vote somehow special?

There's mutual incomprehension, here, and frankly he doesn't seem sophisticated in his thinking; it's just repeating a slogan with the vehemence of a moral axiom, pure meme replication, pure social force on force. Can someone steelman his side for me? Mind read if you need to. Can someone steelman my side for me?

To his side: I don't buy that duty === illegal not to. I think that's a weak counter from you.

I also don't think his perspective necessarily means everyone should have to vote. I think it can just as easily be used to say: "The people who ought not be voting, ought not be complaining".

I think you can make a strong argument that a healthy community involves conscientious involvement and any political movement requires coordinated civic action; thus not voting is defecting.

I don't necessarily buy this argument, but I don't think it's remotely as vapid or axiomatic as you are claiming.

No, see, this is exactly what I was hoping to elicit, and thank you: a composite version of my dad with similar ideology that can make the non-vapid arguments that he can't. I don't think he's even heard of game theory, or knows why defecting is bad, or finds results using it as an argument compelling. I'm sure that stronger arguments for his position exist, and I've got a couple sketched in my back pocket that I'm withholding to avoid bias, I'm just trying to get them from a wider audience than my own head.

I'm sure this meta-argument is not original to me, but I'd say that morality is just how humans are wired, so if you want to achieve an outcome that involves getting a lot of people to do something (e.g. vote), it makes sense to appeal to their moral intuitions. Since I want to achieve libertarian outcomes, I'd rather libertarians spend time and energy convincing each other that they should vote, "because voting is the right thing to do," rather than engaging in these kinds of exercises about how voting is a waste of time.

The standard libertarian rejoinder to "well, what if everyone thought that way?" is that your voting doesn't cause anyone else to vote, so why bother? But that's not really true, since humans are social animals, and when all your friends and the people you admire are doing something, you naturally want to do it as well. If all the cool kids are voting, you want to vote like them! You could do cost/benefit analysis to figure out whether voting is really worth it, but you're never going to win an election by doing that.

Less flippantly, if no leaders on offer will implement policies or styles/frameworks that you'd prefer, then participation at all indicates a mandate, and refusing participation expresses protest.

As someone who has run elections I can tell you not voting is not seen as expression of protest. How could it be? We can't tell if you don't vote because you are protesting politicians being terrible, or just too lazy, or dead in a ditch just before election day, or were on a drunken bender in Vegas. And frankly, we don't really care. A spoiled vote, we at least have to record although generally, we don't count up why it was spoiled. So if you write "None of the Above" in general it just gets recorded as spoiled, and goes in with those who were spoiled by accident. So your dad is also wrong here I think, though at least we in theory we could count those spoiled on purpose if it were written clearly, and anyone cared enough to do it, so he is perhaps slightly less wrong than you here.

You've run elections as part of the implementation of the electoral process, or as a consumer of the data and metadata resulting from the electoral process? I have to imagine campaign staffs would want to know the breakdown of motives of non-voters between Vegas, dead, protesting, and lazy, that would turn out for them but for some factor, so they can correct that factor - or, offensively, make them worse for the opposition.

Both actually, I started out in local government then transitioned into the Civil Service and then into working as a political operative directly for parties as a contractor.

As campaign staff the information might be useful. But they are not the ones paying for the counts. The government departments (depending on locale) that runs elections doesn't care why people spoiled ballots and diagnosing each one would cost additional time and money (was the person who scrawled "Wilson across their ballot, trying to vote for someone called Wilson, or are they referencing a Tom Hanks movie?) a resource starved area. So it generally does not get done. Its simply not valuable to the election machinery itself. Generally we didn't even announce how many spoiled ballots there were. Just how many actual votes for each candidate.

As campaign staff if you want to find why x is not voting y you'll commission internal polls or focus groups, or contact community groups in the relevant community. But on its own a non vote communicates very little information.

I imagine 3rd party is a more effective protest?

I'd say so because those votes have to be counted and reported on. Though again, are you an RFK supporter or protesting against Harris/ Trump/ the system. How could someone tell the difference?

Something like the Monster Raving Loony party perhaps is a bit more clear cut.

A flippant response to your flippant critiques: Have you ever actually engaged in real political coalition building or donated five figures to a candidate? Unless you have a viewership in the tens of thousands at minimum, all the ink you'll ever spill on politics is utterly worthless compared to a single vote. Voting, and being polled about their voting intent, is the only degree to which the average citizen ever actually influences politics. Disgust about wokeness matters little if it's not enough to make you vote against the democrats. A protest non-vote only matters insofar as polling suggests to candidates a way in which they can win your vote. The hardcore pro-life share of America is well under 40%, but they got an overturn of nationwide law that was broadly popular and largely considered settled because in large part of the fact that so many of them are single issue voters means they cannot be ignored.

Sure, you can complain without voting. But guess what, it's not just your dad who won't take you seriously. It's also anyone who matters. Because people who don't vote are not a constituency anyone serious about winning cares about.

In my weak defense, I do actually try to correct myths and encourage more comfortable bellyfeel about nuclear power policy, when the opportunity presents naturally. Actually mobilizing someone to vote, or trying to convert someone to my candidate, no, though.

That makes it sound a bit like you’re not simply not voting, you’re not really “participating” at all.

I’m also grappling with whether or not to vote at all, so I’m asking myself as I’m asking you—are you actually doing anything other than complaining? And complaining in the most ineffective way to the least degree possible?

To the second question you asked, an attempt at a steelman would be to imagine you’re in a room with a bunch of people and dinner plans come up and you say nothing. The choice is narrowed to two restaurants and you say nothing. A vote is taken and you think it’s pointless so you leave during the vote and come back.

It seems to me even if you’re the only one who wants Mediterranean and there’s no hope of swaying enough to your side, you still come off badly if you can’t even be bothered to say that.

Like I said though….grappling with it myself. Not sure what I’ll do.

Two factors that I find repel me from voting are

  • the effort needed to develop a ranking over the candidates
    • sub-problem: develop and keep current opinions on the decisions I expect them to make
      • ex: What are my opinions on The Wall, what will Trump likely do?
      • ex: Do I even need to have an opinion on whether tips should be taxed, or is it fluff?
    • sub-problem: identify issues in the world to have a preference on that aren't in the discourse
      • ex: What are the odds of John Bolton's opinions on Iran getting into Trump's cabinet? Do I like them or not?
      • ex: Jake Sullivan's conservatism about escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war? Do I like them or not?
      • (I don't know actually know Harris' cabinet rumors well enough to have thoughts about them.)
    • sub-problem: for each issue, develop a score for each candidate for/against on that issue.
  • the ugh field around the actual physical implementation of the act of voting, executive dysfunction, and the difficulty of bootstrapping into knowing how to accomplish it.
    • App idea: a checklist manager for taking part in the polls you want to. You need to register to vote? Here's the form and the types of evidence to gather, press a button to have a copy and a stamped envelope mailed to you, paid half-and-half by each party. Daily reminders and follow-ups on the tasks and sub-tasks. It's two weeks before voting day, did you arrange the morning off? Probably this is already a thing; I hope it is. Maybe I should make it if not.

Between perfectionism, procrastination with a fun and infinite problem, and a multi-month process requiring advance planning and grit on the day of to wait in an hour-long line to poke a cranky ATM, it's very easy to round 1/3E8 of the cost/benefit from a given federal outcome to 0 and not bother. This is effectively charity to a process that's worked more-or-less well enough so far, all outcomes are within bounds, going with the flow is entirely tolerable.

For the first problem, various interest and political groups usually put out voting guides. You could delegate the decision to a group whose priorities you generally agree with (assuming there is one) and use their voting guide.

If forming any of those opinions seems so odious that you’re willing to claim you don’t care, why put up a fight? Concede you couldn’t be bothered to form an opinion in advance so complaining afterwards is unearned.

Is aimlessly complaining about whatever while making no effort to help or improve things or even understand what’s happening so important to you?

These problems and sub problems were invented by you, they aren’t requirements by any stretch of the imagination.

It seems to me even if you’re the only one who wants Mediterranean and there’s no hope of swaying enough to your side, you still come off badly if you can’t even be bothered to say that.

Interesting, that doesn't match my intuition at all. If my party mostly wants pizza or tacos and I know they are not interested in sushi like I am, bringing up sushi at all only impedes collective decision making and may come across as whining. If I am truly indifferent between pizza and tacos, my input is useless at best.

Surely you agree though that bringing it up only after the decision is made is worse than before or both though right?

donated five figures to a candidate

The election budget is 14G$. There are ~161M voters. This means that 86$ are spent per voter.

Of course, the effectiveness of campaign spending is debatable. It could well be that the money required to mobilize the marginal voter is 1000$, but donors keep spending because they have trillions riding on the outcome of the election. But your claim that you need 100,000$ to flip a single vote seems unlikely.

As a donor, it's not just about flipping votes. That's the candidate's concern. If you actually want the candidate or his staff to speak with you about the issues and maybe even remember your opinions, 10k is probably about the minimum you'll need to be spending. Sure, donating 100 bucks is probably worth more than your vote, but your vote is free and a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. Plus that's only any good if the candidate already lines up very well with your beliefs.

I tend to think the opposite. Most of the trouble in modern politics is too many people are invested in and care about politics, especially people who know very little about the topics at hand. People weigh in on things like AI and have no idea how it actually works. Or policing. You don’t understand crime you really shouldn’t be telling experts how to deal with crime. If anything, I think the government and political systems work much better when people are fat and happy and could care less about what’s going on in Washington.

It's a mix! I partly agree with you (there are a lot of places where elites will understand the subject matter better than the majority), but not entirely (DC votes over 90% blue, maybe we shouldn't leave them with all the decisions).

Voting isn’t just throwing your opinion into the aether. It is a form of acausal trade between you and everyone else in the country who thinks like you. By not voting, you are defecting against your own allies, which is by definition antisocial and Molochian.

To be fair, this assumes that you have a horse in the race. If you are legitimately indifferent between Trump and Harris and not enthusiastic about third party candidates either (this is technically known as a Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich dilemma), then skipping a vote with a write-in of 'None of the above' and staying home instead does not seem like a defection against the other people dissatisfied with the options.

Also, if you have reason to believe that you are less informed with regard to the polled issue than the average voter, it might be fair to say 'I don't have a few hours to research the key arguments, and I don't want to vote based on whose name is funnier, so I will skip that item'.

Disagree. Assuming there is a write-in or minor party option, “I am willing to vote but these guys all suck,” is a coalition that you would be defecting against by staying home. Simply showing up demonstrates latent potential.

Write-in votes are not counted in many states unless the candidate written in registers beforehand, so a third-party candidate is often a better protest.

If you personally are unsure in elections with national relevance, I'd be happy to argue for the Republican.

While agree that not voting can be reasonable downballot, to modify the last portion of it, if you don't have time, vote no on the ballot measures, rather than skipping.

I don't live in a swing state or a Congressional district capable of electing a Republican. There's nothing I bring to the table by voting. I'm going to do it, but in a performative unproductive sort of way.

why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?

As an industry professional, this is a terrible idea. We can’t even reliably secure private systems where the consequences of failure can be ruinous to their owners. These systems are too complex and the incentives are too great to find holes to exploit.

Even if we could somehow guarantee that the servers were bulletproof, attackers would still have a vast exploitable surface in the clients.

I think people drastically overestimate the competence of software developers. There is far, far, far greater demand for software development than there are competent developers able to meet it. And even the best of the best devs make security fuckups periodically, so if the median dev is below basic competence then the enterprise dev fuckwads and/or criminally incompetent offshore Pajeets that would be tasked with writing an online voting system would make orders of magnitude more security mistakes.

Software development is weird because you start running into the inherent limitations of how much logic the human brain can even process in a way human beings haven't quite figured out how to surpass (amphetamines can help, but not that much) outside of just trying to build better tooling (and we haven't actually attempted to do that in a long time).

This kind of job is actually really hard, and it continually amazes me that software in general works as well as it does. And it doesn't even work that well.

AI code completion is a new tool that works great

For a rather questionable definition of "works" and "great".

Most code I've asked it for (that I couldn't otherwise have written myself) has been wrong. It still can't make a functional regex statement.

Again with the random epithets. Stop it. Have some decorum.

Would you have the same complaints if I referred to Russians collectively as Ivans, or Brits collectively as Nigel, etc.?

Probably not? Maybe?

I mean, if you try hard enough, you can make anything sound insulting. You don’t have to try very hard with “pajeet.”

Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting? Why is the single fundamental operation of ensuring political legitimacy treated so unseriously? You have to show up in person? And you're authenticated by showing a $15 license-like thing at best? Scribbling on a register? Scribbling on a mailed-in slip?

Because neither party is interested in that. Both parties know how to nudge the existing process and put the right spin on their loss, but neither party is sure they will manage to do the same with e-voting.

  • as a Republican, you won't be able to accuse the illegals of voting for the Democrats, but what if the new online voting empowers all these minimum wage workers to vote instead?
  • as a Democrat, you won't be able to accuse the Republicans of closing down polling places to suppress turnout, but what if the new app empowers shy Republican voters?

There's also the fact that elections aren't federalized.

I have a two-fold argument that single-mindedly sticking to unsophisticated meme replication like "voting is a civic duty" is a great thing and major reason why the civilization keeps working.

First, let us consider the probability of your act of voting mattering. It is minuscule. Only person affected by the decision is ... you yourself, and perhaps handful of other people in your immediate vicinity. (Like, you get to argue about voting or not voting with your dad.) Voting often feels pretty stupid when I look at the results: my decision to vote has never had any consequence.

On the other hand, the above is true for any action most of people take, nearly all of the time. Anything I do barely matters in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, sure, my daily actions have consequences that affect my life outcomes and my family and my work, but all of them would be lost to rounding errors in national statistics. Yet the aggregate sum of barely noticeable actions of millions of other people results in what people call, everyday experience.

For me, this kind of naive everyman existentialism makes voting feel less special kind of stupid. It is equal kind of stupid as everything else in my life: practically nobody cares, except me and those near me. Suppose I quit my job and go live as a hermit in the woods. Personal tragedy, statistically indistinguishable from a rounding error.

This brings us to the second part of the argument: The only way the aggregate can do anything organized is by adopting mental frameworks that strongly encourage keep going in the face of absurdity that your actions barely matter.

Let's talk about something not related to elections. Why have we not dissolved to total anarchy of constant thievery and villainy? Perhaps because the people who disregard the duty "not to steal and mug" get arrested? A laughable notion: the police and judicial system just barely manage to arrest and punish some of the most egregious criminals. The system can project up some deterrent and remove the most constantly nasty part of the population to prisons, but that is of concern only to marginally criminally inclined. I presume you're in the US: According to BJS statistics, estimate rate of violent crime victmization is 22.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons in the US. To pick another statistic, about 1,087,000 arrests for simple or aggravated assault were reported to SRS and NIBRS. That is about 5.5 per 1,000 persons. 4:1 ratio. (The other arrests for violent crimes won't really affect the rate.) Rate of convictions I can't easily find, it is probably smaller. It is a very crude calculation, but it suggests that majority of violent crime won't result in an arrest.

If a significant part of the population decided to embrace the thug lifestyle and loot shops and mug people for living starting next Tuesday (and be any determined about it), all the combined law enforcement in the country would have extreme difficulties in keeping up. (In average 20th century civil war, actual fighting was done by approximately 5% to 10% of the population.)

How do you avoid 10% of the population descending into scum and villainy just because they realize they can? Everyone rationally computes the utilitarian calculus and/or studies ethical philosophy and concludes, "bad idea"? Not a behavior observed in the real world. Far more commonly observed successful strategy: average Joe single-mindedly sticks to principles like, "I will not steal or rob because it is wrong" that are based on not-so-deep ethical framework they probably misunderstand and would fall apart in a scholarly argument. Which brings us near to the conclusion of my essay.

In a modern society, barely anything that each individual does, matters. To successfully do anything that matters, individuals must coordinate their actions. Thus, they need to convince themselves that doing it is worth it despite it barely mattering. You don't convince most people to do irrational things with rational arguments, but instilling irrationally strong principles that do not budge. If the "voting is a civic duty" party is large enough, in aggregate they may decide an election. When they do not, just by existing they at least force the candidates to hold a campaign, which matters less but isn't fully inconsequential.

The low probability of your vote being decisive is obviously balanced by the enormous (world-historical) impact in the case that your vote is decisive. Besides, you aren't the only player of this game, and a party losing an election by 20 points has obvious implications for that party's assessment of it's positioning and strategy in the next election, that a loss by 2 points does not, even if the electoral outcome is nominally the same.

Voting often feels pretty stupid when I look at the results: my decision to vote has never had any consequence.

Besides deciding who wins the state, votes may also have more subtle influences. Kang winning by 48% or by 80% of the popular vote might not change which drooling alien gets to sit in the White House, but it will drastically change how the Kodos party reacts to the defeat. In the former case, they might decide that they need to mobilize their people in key battleground states more, in the other case they might decide to completely reinvent themselves, perhaps become more like the Kang party.

Of course, in countries with proportional representation, you can signal more than a single bit.

I think the error here is comparing yourself to an entire nation. If you are making an argument like "Sure it only affects my family and friends," then you're rationality is poorly calibrated.

Voting does particularly stress this because you're personal affect really is so small, and in presidential elections the electoral college schemes to reduce it even further in most cases. In this case I think it is worth finding some other process than number crunching to justify the effort because it does break down if everyone stops doing it.

The probability of your vote mattering is tiny, but if it does matter it matters for hundreds of millions of people, which makes up for the small probability of it mattering.

There's also the question of how you count whether a vote "matters" *which amounts to the same thing phrased differently). If someone wins by 1000 votes, nobody's vote mattered in the sense that their vote alone would have changed the result. But 1000 people's votes mattered in the sense that as a group it would have changed the result, and each of the 1000 people should get credit for 1/1000 of a result mattering. And it's arbitrary in what order you count the votes--you could just as well say that the first 1000 votes mattered as you could say that the last one did.

RE: tangential rant, the optimum amount of fraud is not zero. Every measure you add makes it ever-so-slightly more difficult for a legitimate voter. For example, mail voting started out as a way to let deployed troops vote. Is it an extra attack surface? Yes. Is it worth it? I’d say so.

Here are the Texan measures, which I have no reason to believe are unusual. They sound pretty reasonable, right? That means we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit, and further security is going to be more expensive.

It probably also wouldn’t buy much trust. Despite the many measures we’ve implemented to audit results, we’ve historically found very little fraud. Despite the lack of evidence, though, fraud remains a very politically charged topic. There is no cryptography on the planet that could convince the Republican Party—which has complaining about federal overreach as one of its planks—to trust a centralized security measure.

But Election Day totally should be a federal holiday.

But Election Day totally should be a federal holiday.

So bank tellers and government employees are more likely to vote?

seeing voting as a general public duty of all citizens also helps sidestep some of the cynical and destructive framing that the ideal voting system is one that permits votes from those sympathetic to you and prevents votes from those who are not

besides simple access, voting day holidays also help enshrine the importance of the vote and strengthen the sense of community beyond politics. Also on a more pragmatic level it solves the polling location issue because you can use public schools

seeing voting as a general public duty of all citizens also helps sidestep some of the cynical and destructive framing that the ideal voting system is one that permits votes from those sympathetic to you and prevents votes from those who are not

I find this framing neither cynical nor destructive. I think it is a useful meditation on the question of the purpose of governance.

besides simple access, voting day holidays also help enshrine the importance of the vote and strengthen the sense of community beyond politics. Also on a more pragmatic level it solves the polling location issue because you can use public schools

The first half of this gives me the yuckies. The 2nd half doesnt make sense because I've never encountered a polling location issue, whatever this supposedly is. And I've voted in a public school on more than one occasion.

So everyone is more likely to vote.

But mostly for the civic religion of it. Here on the Internet, it's easy to forget that lots of Americans actually like patriotic rituals. I want to reward those people.

Declaring something a federal holiday does not automatically mean any workers except government employees get the day off. For example, I am required to work on Juneteenth day and MLK day and a number of other federal holidays, and many service sector workers must work on other more widely observed holidays so that people can still buy groceries and have electricity and report fires.

A better option would be to treat it like jury duty and require employers to permit up to 4 hours of unpaid leave on voting day during polling hours, and allow some nominal nonrefundable amount like $100 to be deducted from taxable income for anyone with hourly wages recorded as having voted.

You are in a rich person's bubble if you think $100 is unimportant enough that someone would give it up in order to vote.

I think they meant "give normal working people a $100 tax break for voting."

But Everyone doesn't get holidays off. Bank tellers and government employees get holidays off. Heck even our most important government employees: soldiers, police, firefighters, air traffic controllers, dont get them off. Nurses and doctors dont get holidays off, train conductors and truck drivers dont, service workers generally do not. People in high end professions might, but its generally irrelevant as they could just take a day anytime so long as they plan.

But Election Day totally should be a federal holiday.

Concur, as an insufficient start.

I believe voting is a duty and I'm happy it is compulsory in Australia. The simplest argument is that:

  1. The legitimacy of the government is a public good, from which other public goods (safety, unity, prosperity) flow
  2. Democratically elected governments are legitimated through democratic participation and definite mandates across actual majorities in the population
  3. You have a general duty to further the public good in scenarios where one can do so at little cost to oneself
  4. You have a duty to vote

Broader majorities are also better for political operation and discourse. The unactivated voter is less interested in ideological marginalia and more interested in simple material concerns: jobs, crime, schools, security in retirement and so on. Political messaging in high turnout environments must convince the median citizen that his interests are best served by voting in one way or another. A politics of low turnouts is a politics where messaging seeks not to convince the unaligned, but to drive turnout among those nominally on your side already, which means escalating the perceived stakes beyond reason, deference to single-issue groups with GOTV infra, ballooning campaign budgets, and the time spent fundraising to feed them.

On whether voting is a duty, I would first ask: does a sovereign have a duty to his nation? It seems yes, he has a duty to rule well.

I would ask second: who is sovereign in the United State of America? The answer to this is well known: the people are. "We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

So then, as one of the United States of America's many sovereigns, do I have a duty to rule well? Yes; and in this country the sovereigns rule by voting.

Therefore, voting is a duty.

does a sovereign have a duty to his nation?

I'd say the way that some of our modern elites behave — particularly those in the UK — at least some of them believe the answer is "no." That they can freely "dissolve the people and elect another," to quote Bertold Brecht.

The answer to this is well known: the people are.

It's the well-known "official" textbook answer, but I'd say it's wrong. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is absolute. "The people" are not sovereign, have never been sovereign, and will never be sovereign. The United States, and modern democracy as a whole, are built upon falsehoods.

Tangential rant: why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?

To expand a bit on @netstack's comment, I believe that it is not enough that the voting process is fair, it also should be recognizable as fair to the average citizen.

With paper ballots, anyone can observe how many people cast their vote at your polling station, the fact that they are not in the position to prove to anyone how they voted and thus could not be bribed or coerced, and compare how many votes are counted after that, and that they are counted correctly. Passing elementary school basically gives you the ability to verify that.

As soon as the vote count is kept digital, that ability goes out of the window in a heartbeat. You could have a PhD in computer security and still would be highly unlikely that the hardware says what the specification says or that the software which is running on the machine you cast your vote is actually compiled from the unadulterated github sources, and that the formal verification tool which guarantees the vote integrity is itself sound.

In practice, people in IT security tend to be the voices most opposed to computerized voting, because they are the least likely to trust computer systems.

Of course, if you allow people to vote online from their own devices, it is not enough that the server infrastructure is sound (which will be completely impossible to verify, and even the people who build it would likely not bet their lives on it), you also have to trust the endpoint.

Most Americans are woefully unprepared to compute the crypto primitives used by TLS in their head, so they would have to trust the device in front of them. That device likely runs an operating system for which the vendor has stopped shipping security fixes five years ago, with the user having installed "free_legit_photoshop.exe" or the like. Even if you could solve the problem of identifying the user in front of the screen, a compromised device can just intercept your vote for Kang, change it to a vote for Kodos and change the confirmation message to read 'Vote for Kang confirmed'.

There is a reason why any serious bank has their customers use TAN generators, which are separate and very simple devices with a much reduced attack surface have a small shitty display which will show the user the numbers of the transaction they are making, so they can double-check in case their online banking device is compromised and was requesting a TAN for sending all of their balance to Nigeria instead. You could roll out similar devices for voting, which will display KANG before generating the transaction number, but even then you will have the problem that the integrity of the vote is likely not assured by the process and certainly can't be checked by the median voter.

Here in Germany, voting generally happens on Sundays, where most employees are not allowed to work. Within towns, polling sites are often within 500m, and the average time I had to wait in line to cast my paper ballot is perhaps five minutes. Yes, it takes a while for the votes to be counted, but typically we have the tally by Monday morning, which is good enough for me.

There is a reason why any serious bank has their customers use TAN generators, which are separate and very simple devices with a much reduced attack surface have a small shitty display which will show the user the numbers of the transaction they are making, so they can double-check in case their online banking device is compromised and was requesting a TAN for sending all of their balance to Nigeria instead. You could roll out similar devices for voting, which will display KANG before generating the transaction number, but even then you will have the problem that the integrity of the vote is likely not assured by the process and certainly can't be checked by the median voter.

You're honestly quite close to the core question. Generally, when people talk about digital elections, there are a couple camps. First, there are the academics who work on describing some properties that we might want from a voting system and checking to see if they can make the math work. Then there are the people who imagine the most theoretical of possible attacks (and believe me, I've seen a lot of theoretical attacks on systems, some of which have actually grown up to be real) and simply declare the problem impossible from first principles. Folks in this latter camp should properly say that message security is impossible, because there are endpoint security problems, and besides, the median user can't do the math that would be used in their head. Secure over-the-air updates are impossible, because then Apple or whoever has a valuable secret that will surely be compromised. Certainly, secure cloud storage is impossible; I can imagine quite the conspiracy happening, and besides, is the median user going to understand it? Well, maybe someone can figure out storage, but private cloud compute? Impossible. Do you know how many vectors of attack there could be?!?!

You speak of banks, and that is good. Did everyone just forget to tell banks that what they wanted to do was impossible? They can't possibly just let people log into their account from anywhere. They might be running an operating system for which the vendor has stopped shipping security fixes five years ago, with the user having installed "free_legit_photoshop.exe" or the like. They can't possibly just let a little piece of plastic and some numbers be a form of payment accepted across the world. I have theoretical attacks!

I'm well aware of a variety of specific problems for digital voting, but my main position is that one must discuss actual specifics in this domain, because there are a wide variety of possible specific conceptions. A lot depends on 'how much you want to prove', so to speak. Most people want to immediately jump all the way to 'proving the most', thinking that if you can't solve every problem in a way that lets me vote from my couch while wearing underwear, using just a web form, and question marks for authentication (because racism, probably), then any form of digital anything in elections is completely impossible. But honestly, one can easily propose digital components for elections that retain the same basic form, such that the digital component actually restricts behavior. For example, suppose for now that you still had to show up in person to vote, but instead of a weird, flimsy piece of paper being all that you have for your voter registration, you were instead issued a smart card or other hardware token that you needed to bring with you. That hardware token can be used in combination with those fancy maths that I linked to in order to quickly and accurately provide guarantees of eligibility to vote, no double-voting, etc. Hopefully, one of those fancy maths works can even allow for neat paper backups that manage to satisfy receipt-freeness while maintaining a significant level of auditability. I think some of them are getting close, but we'd have to dig into specifics.

Sure, there might be other political concerns that make such a proposal difficult (honestly, simple secrecy in voting concerns should be enough of a political difficulty to rule out a large swath of the most expansive proposals rather than even getting to technology considerations), but that's pretty irrelevant when what I'm generally hearing is a weird set of first principles-style claims that literally anything digital and related to elections is flatly impossible due to vague theoretical concerns.

The same banks massively bungle their software upgrades, locking people out of their accounts, logging them into other people's accounts, losing their transactions, etc.

E-voting is feasible. You can probably come up with a system that:

  • proves that your vote has been counted correctly without disclosing it
  • proves that all other votes have come from verified voters without disclosing their identities or their choices
  • doesn't disclose intermediate tallies
  • somehow solves the tyrant problem that voting by mail introduces

But why would someone implement it? Banks earn money by making their services easier to use. Governments don't earn anything from e-voting. Political parties don't earn anything from e-voting

The same banks massively bungle their software upgrades, locking people out of their accounts, logging them into other people's accounts, losing their transactions, etc.

Yep. They've realized that the optimal amount of problems is not zero, and consumers are still plenty happy to use their products over other banks who could say, "We're not offering that stuff, because we're more committed to your security." There are parallels here to elections. The optimal amount of election problems (even things like someone not being able to vote because of an edge case, tech-related or otherwise; who remembers the tempest in a teapot I think in 2016 when a video went viral on social media of a group of would-be voters showing up late to a polling station and getting pissed?) is probably not zero either, and one of the most major considerations for designing an election system is to ensure that it is viewed as legitimate by the electorate (within that margin of error for the optimal amount of imperfections being nonzero).

But why would someone implement it? Banks earn money by making their services easier to use. Governments don't earn anything from e-voting. Political parties don't earn anything from e-voting

This is a much more real concern in my mind. I haven't followed politics enough in countries who have adopted whatever version they have adopted in order to have a sense for what political dynamics incentivized them to do so. I'd super love an explainer from anyone who does. But I would note that this is completely in the bucket of "political problems", not "tech problems".

The way it works is people will claim

  1. If you don't vote, you've implicitly accepted the majority decision and can't complain about outcomes.

  2. If you do vote, and lose, then by voting you've accepted the legitimacy of the system and can't complain about outcomes.

I’ve never seen 2 in real life in my entire life.

I’ve never seen 2 in real life in my entire life.

I, for one, have encountered this view in personal discussions, from multiple people.

That’s wild. So they’re not fans of criticizing sitting presidents or something? I guess I did have an ex-air force friend at one time who wouldn’t criticize the sitting president, but didn’t mind if I did.

If you do vote, and lose, then by voting you've accepted the legitimacy of the system and can't complain about outcomes.

I've seen this claim, and it is bullshit. First of all, it conflates two statements about the system:

  • the voting is legitimate
  • the governance is legitimate

And these are two different things. I can't think of an example where someone agrees with the latter and not with the former, but the reverse is all too common. Even if the voting is fair at all stages (ballot access, casting the votes, counting the votes) you can still end up with a party that got only a plurality of the vote, yet rules like a sovereign. Yes, "I wish my party ruled like this" is not a legitimate complaint, but it's not the only complaint.

But what if the voting itself is illegitimate? Why engage with it at all? I have just realized this question is "why haven't you started killing abortion doctors?" in a different disguise, and the answer is more or less the same. Direct action should not be abandoned, but relying on direct action alone turns the normies against you. You need a pyramid of support, from the normiest normies at the bottom that will only go and cast their vote for your preferred candidate, to more active ones that can support the nomination of your candidate, to even more active ones that will volunteer for the candidate, to those that will agree to run as a candidate. And those people totally unrelated to the pyramid that will throw acid onto the teacher that was threatened into ballot stuffing, of course, but you have to be able to point at the pyramid and sigh that this attack was easily preventable by doing the right thing and letting all parties, all candidates participate fairly.

You should vote because it is a holy ritual that strengthens your household and girds your soul. You are not voting just for yourself, but you are linking the fire of American democracy, from your father to his father unto infinitum. As the Romans would say, it is a matter of religion, not politics. All the votes are rigged anyway, the candidates pre-selected, but that doesn't change the necessity of the act. So as long as you vote, the sacred institutions of the republic are preserved.

So as long as you vote, the sacred institutions of the republic are preserved.

But at this point, are they really still "sacred," or have they been profaned beyond recovery; and should they be preserved at all?

Let me make an analogy.

One prays to God, not out of a naive desire for divine intervention to manifest one's wishes, but as an affirmative call to one's own virtuous goals. Whether or not it comes to good or ill is divided into two parts: the mortal - which is in our control - and in the divine - which is ineffable.

Which is to say, go vote, because it is good for the soul, and then do the necessary things in your community anyway.

Atheist materialist here. There is only "the mortal." There is no ineffable, no soul. So I don't see how to apply this analogy.

And if there were a soul, voting would be bad for it. Voting is bad. "Democracy" is a sham, "democracy" is evil, "democracy" must be destroyed!

You don't need to believe in democracy, only give sacrifice to the civic gods. The Roman analogy is apt. I'm not asking you to sacrifice a fatted calf or a firstborn child: I'm asking you to stand in a line for two hours in some public place. It doesn't matter what you believe or what you think is true, only that the proper forms are observed.

It doesn't matter what you believe or what you think is true, only that the proper forms are observed.

Why does "observing the proper forms" matter, then?

I mean I can do that, but some other lunk who is casting a vote because Taylor Swift said to can cast theirs and entirely cancel out the effect of mine.

Hard to be enthusiastic about the "institutions of the republic" under those conditions.

The contrary of that is that it’s designed to psychologically convince you to accept the legitimacy of the system. Democracy is at least partially a pacification mechanism— it convinces people that because they and everyone else voted for the government that’s doing this or that bad thing, or that preselects candidates that it must be legitimate. And really, it works quite well. No matter what actually happens, most people barely bother to complain, let alone protest no matter what.

Well, of course it is.

But your non-participation only entitles and empowers a potential Caesar, who similarly believes that the systems and institutions are a corrupt sham and shell. And when you go to hide behind said institutions, suddenly made aware of its values, it will collapse upon itself. You will be left naked and trembling before a new, populist God.

Unless, of course, that is your desired end goal.

This is too much of a defense, IMO. I'd rather argue that, while voting is generally important, there are definite issues. We are supposed to be rationalist, and while principles are important, it is still valid and good to have doubts, to be forced into alertness by those doubts, and to begin asking questions. I won't go as far as Capital_Room, I won't proclaim that the scales have fallen from my eyes or that I can see through the Matrix here, but I think the OP is doing something important with their question and getting all these arguments in defense.

On your side:

Your vote, in all likelihood, will not matter. (If it does, it's far more likely to downballot, where people care less anyway.) If it does, it might be a big benefit, but the expected value of voting is probably quite low.

Voting well takes effort, as you point out. It has an opportunity cost.

Accordingly, voting is a net negative, and you should not do it.

On the other side, which I would prefer you followed:

Your vote may not matter much individually, but the vote of your people as a block does. You not voting is a defection against those most aligned with you—you really don't want to establish the norm that 50% of your side votes and 75% of your opponents do. People who agree with you are disproportionately going to follow the same reasoning and do the same.

I think these represent different decision theories, to some extent. The first is more like causal decision theory, the second is more like eternal decision theory.

Are you in a state where your vote will matter (especially presidential or senatorially)?

If you have a specific race or concerns, I could attempt to give thoughts.

Florida, which in latest polling is a weak Trump advantage; I don't know if the senators Matter. My interpretation is that a flip is more than possible by November, so it's higher-impact this year.

Somewhat—I think Florida's the closest R-leaning seat to being a democrat, besides Montana.

A Democrat trifecta would be bad.

A lot of your initial complaints seem to have more to do with implementation.

Here in Australia voting is compulsory. Well, showing up at a polling station and getting your name ticked off is compulsory; nothing is stopping you from submitting a spoilt ballot.

The Australian Electoral Commission has tried to design the system so that, aside from illness and misadventure, there is virtually no reason for someone to be unable to vote. Our elections are always held on Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with pre-polling stations opening a week in advance. Federal and state elections allow absentee voting, and postal voting is available as an option of last resort.

Yes, it is easy to steelman it from the standpoint of virtue ethics, which puts a lot of weight onto acting virtuously. In fact it is your duty to be virtuous, even if there is nobody to observe it or if it may seem futile, virtuous act has its own value independent on direct or observable result. From this standpoint things like "human rights" or prosperous society is not some accident or some result of Machiavellian planning of philosopher kings. It is result of ordinary citizens accepting their duties and acting virtuously.

Voting is a Prisoner’s Dilemma, where if everyone cooperates (by voting) the politics are sane and geared after the medal voter. But one’s vote is so insignificant, it is more beneficial to not waste one’s time and defect by not voting. However, if too many people defect, the parties polarize and scare the median voters away from the pools, and polity goes bouncing from extreme to the other. Compulsory voting, as in Australia, solves the PD.

Median in terms of polarization? I like your comment but you didn't do a lot of work to actually describe the particular outcomes that would be better if the median voter had more say.

Do you expect higher quality decisions from the median voter? Or is this just about avoiding outcomes such as wokism/far right?

The Median Voter Theorem states that a majority rule electoral system will elect the candidate preferred by the median voter. However, if the middle drops out and doesn’t vote, the candidates can easily be more extreme than preferred by the broader populace.

I understood that part, but I still don't understand the broader implications. In particular, you seem to be implying that electing a candidate preferred by the median voter is better than the alternative, and I asked about the reason why. I can come up with some reasons, e.g. you don't get policies such as reparations or bloody deportations because those are preferred only by the extremes. But what about broader policy questions, or those unrelated to polarization or culture war?

I’m not asserting a link between turnout and quality, though there may be one. Indeed, Public Choice Theory suggests that for certain policies democracy and majority voting is no guarantee of quality.

Public Choice Theory suggests that for certain policies democracy and majority voting is no guarantee of quality

Is there a salient example for this?

Usually it’s with policies with concentrated benefits for a few and diffuse costs for the rest, like rent control, occupational licensing, NIMBY, the list goes on.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why would "the middle drop out"?

I assume that most people who believe that voting is a waste of time also believe that the major candidates don't reflect their preferred policies. This makes these "drop outs" by definition very far from median.

Dropping out should only matter if the two extremes do them at different rates. If dropouts are uniformly distributed or distributed at the extremes, then there's no change in the stability of the results.

The middle drops when the parties rely on negative campaigning to energize their (more extreme) base at the expense of the middle, who are usually already annoyed by politics. Negative campaigning affects partisans differently than non-partisans. When the middle drops out, the party that is marginally more effective at turning out their base win.

My intuition is that the opposite happens because there's more people in the middle, and so pandering to the middle is more useful. At least in swing states where pandering actually matters.

Is there any actual evidence of moderates voting less than extremists?

Pew research shows consistent voting is a U-shaped curve.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/

That link is super interesting, thanks for sharing.

Two comments:

  1. The U-shaped graph about the "political activism graph" directly speaks to the idea that the "middle is dropped out". What this graph doesn't show is that this phenomenon is getting worse (i.e. that the middle today are voting less than they voted 20 years ago). I interpreted your previous points as the middle is dropping out even more than it used to, and I don't see evidence of that.

  2. What there is evidence for in your link is that the middle is getting smaller and the tails of the distribution are growing larger. This is different than "dropping out" (which I interpret to mean not voting but continuing to have the same beliefs and staying in the middle). It seems to me that the actual polarization of beliefs is what's causing the polarization of discourse/policy and not the fact that the middle has stopped participating as much.

For what it's worth I feel like there's a common thread in @xablor's post on voting and some of the replies to @zataomm's post on WWI that really ought to be broken out and examined on its own that being how exactly do we ascribe agency and responsibility.

It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight. It's trivially true that World War 2 may have avoided or postponed if the Poles had acquiesced to being partitioned between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis instead of choosing to fight, or if the British Empire had valued Germanic notions of racial brotherhood over their own self-conception as World Hegemon/police or desire to adhere to previously made agreements.

But that's just the thing, they didn't, and the arguments that they ought to have seem to be relying on a lot of legwork that is not in evidence.

I recently read a book of CS Lewis' letters and essays including the full version of The Abolition of Man over the course of a cross-country flight, and it struck me as surprisingly relevant/contemporary for something that was written over 80 years ago now. It also reminded me of an argument between Habryka (or maybe Hlinka?) and some long-standing DR aligned poster from back in the day. I don't recall whether it was on LessWrong or in the CW thread on SlateStar codex but it was prior to the move to reddit and in anycase I can't seem to find it now. The jist of it was that it was impossible for an actor to be both moral and rational because having "moral principals" was effectively a precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances. IE While I know that I could easily get away with lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise "hitting the defect button" and that it might even be in my personal interest do so, I won't do that because to do so would be wrong and right/wrong is something that trancends rational self interest.

For example I'd like to think we could all recognize that killing 77 men over a puppy and a car is wholy disproportionate and perhapse even a bit extreme but at the same time I would also like to believe that all but the most autistic of contrarians would agree that a world of men like Neo is preferable to one of men like Theon Greyjoy

I feel like this is something that Lewis saw clearly that a lot of otherwise intelligent commentators today do not. Namely, that it is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight that the British were idiots to abide by this agreement or that, but this must be whieghed against the question of what value does any agreement with the empire have once you've set the precident of reneging on any agreement the moment it looks like the bill might come due? After all, the thing that makes a debt a debt is the obligation to pay.

I feel like we see something similar in a lot of the rhetoric around voting and other forms civic duties. There seems to be this widely held belief that voting doesn't matter unless your specific vote gets to be the deciding vote but how dumb is that? how many elections are decided by one vote? and how do you decide which specific vote for candidate A or policy B out of however many is the deciding vote. It seems to me that the sanest, if not neccesarily most rational, approach is to stop asking dumb questions. Voting, even when your vote isn't neccesarily the deciding vote, has value for the same reason honoring your agreements has value. Doing so (or otherwise not doing so) tells the rest of the world something true about you.

...

Two high profile senators talking, on camera, about "taking the fight to the Russians" and that US will give them all they need is pretty unequivocal in my book.

What does this refer to? Googling "taking the fight to the Russians" just brings up statements that have been made after February 2022.

When it comes to statements made before the invasion, Biden - a figure of considerably more importance regarding US Ukraine policy than "two senators" - was quite clear in December 2021 that US is not going to send in the troops. When it comes to other aid, US and West have offered Ukraine more of it and taken bigger risks than just about anyone would have predicted before Feb 2022.

...

To be rational is to rationally extend ones moral principles rationally. Why would it be irrational to behave in line with ones moral principles?

If we're talking about LessWrong Rationalists, then the whole idea behind learning to be rational is that "Rationalists Should Win."

They should achieve their instrumental goals at minimal cost and end up with more utility points than when they started.

But having rigid 'moral principles' implies there are personal rules that you simply will not break. And if another rational actor knows you have rules you won't break, they can exploit those rules to reliably defeat you in any given contest. Here "defeat" just means "increase their own utility even at the expense of your utility."

One particularly silly example is if you had the moral rule "Never physically hurt women." Then your opponent could just pay a woman to come around and beat you up and take your stuff whenever they wanted, knowing you probably won't fight back.

If you have certain rules governing your behavior that you NEVER will alter, you're precommitting to certain actions that can lead to you 'losing,' which means you're making a 'precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances' and thus not being fully 'rational' since, as above, "Rationalists should win."

That's an odd reading of yud there. Rats pull heavily from game theory and a (perhaps the) prototypical game theory question is how to avoid losing the prisoner's dilemma. Continually hitting the defect button is losing. You are flushing utils down the toilet. If a rationalist should win here, they should find ways to obtain credible pre-commitments and not ferret around for a way to get one over down the line.

Continually hitting the defect button is losing.

Ah, but that's only if you're actually in an iterated game.

Some people might correctly model an interaction as a one-shot game with a new stranger every single time, with no mutual knowledge or expectations established beforehand. In that case, hitting 'defect' will let you win in cases where the other side magnanimously chooses cooperate.

If you go into an interaction knowing you're pitted against person who will choose 'cooperate' on principle, and you don't expect to have repeated interactions with that person, you can 'win' by defecting because you 'know' you're escaping scott-free in that case.

Indeed, I don't know of any prisoner's dilemma tournaments where the 'cooperate every time' strategy wins.

With all that said, I'm agreeing that if you take it up one level, being the 'sort of person' who cooperates when faced with such a dilemma creates a much better world, and thus will likely create more utility for you, and for all other players, which can certainly compound over time.

So adopting the moral principle that loses you individual games can still make you the overall winner.

You have it almost exactly backwards. The whole point of the "Rationalists should win" blog post you linked is that in some circumstances it can be rational to act in ways that are 100% guaranteed to have worse consequences, such as by cooperating in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma (cooperating has a worse result both if the other prisoner has cooperated and if the other prisoner has defected) or paying in Parfit's Hitchhiker. This is because, while the action itself has purely worse consequences, being the sort of agent who will take that action has good consequences. "Rationalists should win" is not at all "the whole idea behind learning to be rational", it is a contrast with the mainstream view among decision theorists in regards to Newcomb's Problem that one-boxers get better results, and they could easily choose to one-box if they wanted, but that the "rational" course of action is to two-box and then complain that the "irrational" choice was the one that won.

When applied to morality this will most obviously apply to situations where agents have a choice between abiding with a general principle and choosing the action that is better in the moment, where in some circumstances being the sort of agent that will abide by the general principle has good results even if the action itself doesn't. This is more likely to be relevant when the agent is a country, as discussed in my other comment, since countries are worse at deception. And obviously in iterated games, at which point you don't need any exotic decision-theory to justify it. (Of course, another way it relates to morality is that it's probably part of how we evolved moral instincts in the first place.)

Oh is this going to be one of those arguments.

This is because, while the action itself has purely worse consequences, being the sort of agent who will take that action has good consequences.

Yeah, now its just a question of how recursive you want to get. Defecting makes sense in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma when you have no way of judging that the other party might be willing to cooperate. Iterated games, if they're of indefinite length present different strategic options.

I wasn't even agreeing with the premise of "moral principles force you to act in an irrational way." Just pointing out the potential contradiction if you want to 'win' you might have to bend or break certain moral principles, which was the gist of the original question.

Indeed, I think the whole point of invoking morals as principles rather than as 'mere' variables in a utility function, some principles exist because they DO create better outcomes in a systemic way, even if it leads to 'losing' a few local contests. As you say, 'being the sort of person' who does the Good thing even at personal cost will probably create many more utils over the long run.

But there are indeed some moral principles which can be systemically exploited and if your principles cause you to repeatedly lose, you're not being 'rational' on your own terms.

But then we're back to the question: what do you value and is it easier to maximize your utility by following certain moral guiding principles even when it leads to 'losing' a few isolated games, or by being completely unprincipled other than trying to maximize your own utility in every single game you encounter and adapt your strategy accordingly.

I think he's talking about stuff like acting in accordance with game-theory precommitments (even without the actual precommitment), which isn't irrational according to LessWrong people (depending on the specific circumstance) but might be called that by some subsets of groups like decision-theorists.

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/superrationality

Superrationality is a concept invented by Douglas Hofstadter. He thought that agents should cooperate in Prisoner's Dilemma, but the primary notion of "rationality" which had been deeply developed by economists, decision-theorists, and game-theorists disagreed. Rather than fighting over the definition of rational, Douglas Hofstadter coined the term superrational for the kind of rationality he was interested in.

Eliezer Yudkowsky shared the same core intuition with Douglas Hofstadter, but took the path of trying to reclaim the word rational for what he meant, in Functional Decision Theory. As a result, LessWrong does not consistently use superrational/superrationality.

I think the relevance to morality he's implying is that some moral commitments are to do things that actually just make the world worse for everyone (at least in terms of immediate impact), but that are nonetheless moral. Not because you've abandoned consequentialism, but because being the sort of agent willing to make the world worse for everyone can have better outcomes than not being that sort of agent. E.g. for countries, lets say peace with another country is 0 utils, that country seizing a small amount of your territory without a major war is -1000 utils, and actually having a drawn-out war is -100,000 utils. A shortsighted version of consequentialist morality might say it's better to give up territory in exchange for peace, but if you're the sort of country that would do that it actually greatly increases the risk of war. And it's hard to convince other countries that you're willing to go to war without actually being the sort of country willing to go to war. For one, because foreign relations is an iterated game. For another, because the whole nature of countries makes it very hard for them to be systematically deceptive about something like this, the enemy is listening to your politician's speeches and public debates and potentially even spying on your secret plans. The more reliably they can predict how you'll act, the more the situation potentially resembles Parfit's Hitchhiker or Newcomb's Problem where it can be better to choose the "worse" option because being the sort of agent that will choose that option has better results. Of course it's usually also an iterated decision, making it fully compatible with even causal decision theory.

Just speaking for myself, I’m in favor of real politik. The most important axioms: ought implies can, and policies exist to serve the nation.

The first is pretty simple. If you’re not in a position to honor the treaty without serious damage to yourself, then don’t do it. If the enemy is stronger than you are, the only thing you get for entering a war is the death of your own people. You aren’t even going to really stand up for the treaty, and will prove to everyone else that you can’t.

The second is just a principle for political survival. If you’re constantly getting involved in conflicts because of morals you’re wasting the resources of your country and getting little for it. Your military doesn’t get stronger because of your morals. People can’t eat morals. And wars by nature have a real cost that will be carried by your nation. As such, I think it’s rather important to have a good strategic reason for a war. It could be materials access, or the ability to project power, it could be to shore up an important ally, or access to markets, but it has to be a reason that you can articulate and that serves the good of the nation you’re leading.

Do rationalists believe that there are moral commitments that are more rational than others? My assumption would be that rationalists would consider moral commitments to be axioms and therefore a requirement to even discuss morality, and that to be morally rational would be to derive positions from your moral axioms in a consistent way.

Rationalists subscribe to utilitarianism, which in and of itself is incoherent moral philosophy. It has two main problems:

  1. Inability to define utils. Utils are mired with inconsistencies, it is hard to put against each other suffering vs pleasure. Many rationalists evade this as principle of minimizing suffering, but even then there is a problem of comparison: is sand grain in an eye of 1,000 people worse than broken arm of one person?

  2. Time inconsistency of utils. Actions that decrease utils today may increase them tomorrow. Existential comics has a good example for trolley problem in that vein.

To be rational is to rationally extend ones moral principles rationally. Why would it be irrational to behave in line with ones moral principles?

The word "rationally" does a lot of heavy lifting here, as it assumes utilitarianism. Let's say I subscribe to virtue ethics, which says that I cannot commit murder. But then a rationalist comes and says "hey, if you kill Hitler in his crib, you will prevent countless murders in the future". Wrong, this is not going rationally about my moral assumptions, it is assuming completely different moral system.

A bit of a tangent, but I can't really read existential comics anymore after seeing his twitter.

Ok, then I am incorrectly interpreting the term rationalism.

You are not the first one to point this out, rationalism is a terrible name for the movement. Mostly because rationalism already exists as a philosophical system, partially defined as opposition to empiricism. This form of rationalism is the belief, that the basis of all eternal truth comes from reason alone. Hence Descartes argument of cogito ergo sum which comes from total critique of validity of senses. Which is exactly the opposite to what Yud/Alexander "rationalists" espouse. Rationalists are really empiricists in this way.

Not as I intended to use it. I was using the term "rationally" to mean logically extended from your moral principles - whatever those are.

First, this is silly. Rationalists were not the first ones to invent logic, this is too broad a definition. On practical level famoust rationalists are obsessed with movements like Effective Altruism, which is rabidly utilitarian. Scott Alexander described himself as consequentialist utilitarian. Alexander described also Robin Hanson as total utilitaian. Yudkowsky is not very clear writer on this, he often espouses consequentialist and utilitarian thinking, but he complicates stuff. I find this short tweet as a very good summary:

Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god.

So 2 and a half or two and three quarters for three are team utilitarianism. So I do not think I misjudged that.

There are times when fighting against the odds is wise and times where it is unwise. Let's examine the death toll for WW2 amongst various powers:

Denmark lost 0.16% of its population, barely a scratch. Surrendering quickly to Germany served them well. The US lost 0.3%. The UK, Belgium, France and Italy suffered around 1%. Czechoslovakia suffered around 2-3%, mostly Holocaust deaths as opposed to military deaths. Romania - 3%. Japan 3-4%. Hungary, 5-9% (a large number of Holocaust deaths plus they did a fair bit of fighting, like Romania).

Yugoslavia, 6-10%. Germany, 8%. Greece, 7-11%. The Soviet Union: 14%. But by far the hardest hit was Poland at 17%. Of course, all these countries faced widely different threats, some were luckier in their position than others, some took on much greater challenges.

However, nobody lost more than the Poles in WW2, nobody left that war in a worse position than Poland. Germany was partitioned but at least some got to escape communism. The Poles ended up being pushed westward, losing a fair few cities and enormous numbers of people. And they had to suffer another 45 years of communism.

Polish late interwar leaders faced a clear and unpleasant choice - Germany or Russia. They chose neither and got demolished by both. This was a terrible decision. Moral principles dealt them a crushing blow that the country has scarcely recovered from today. How many millions of people is standing up for freedom and independence worth? My country escaped lightly with 0.58%, yet 0.58% is still an enormous death toll! That was 60 COVIDs for us, targeting the young rather than the old. We in the Anglosphere suffered very little in the last 200 years, we were nearly always the strongest and won the most important wars. Yet we have a vast apparatus of war memorials and reverence for those sacrificed in war. Can we even imagine the sacrifices that others have made?

I have more sympathy for the Czech leaders who escaped total disaster than the Poles who plunged their country into catastrophe. Sometimes surrendering is the best course of action. We can only imagine the internal feelings of those who proudly chose death before dishonour, only to receive double portions of both.

Respect for agreements, obligation and one's reputation are secondary to the core health of the nation.

Polish late interwar leaders faced a clear and unpleasant choice - Germany or Russia. They chose neither and got demolished by both. This was a terrible decision.

That's certainly... a take. What exactly were they supposed to do? Their country had only recently been created- until recently their land was part of Russia and Germany, so it's natural that both of those countries wanted it back. Is there some alternative universe where they voluntarily surrender to the USSR and then Germany just leaves them alone?

Ally with Germany against Russia or ally with Russia against Germany. At least then the balance of power wouldn't be totally against them. They would have at least one vaguely friendly power nearby, rather than two enemies.

Either one necessitates sacrifices. Both countries wanted land back. But what did Poland's policy of equidistance between Germany and Russia get them, other than megadeaths? They got the worst possible outcome, Russia and Germany allying against them.

Ally with a power whose leader considers your people to be 'life unworthy of life' and brags about how he's going to conquer your lands, kill everyone and move his own people in? Seems unwise.

Of course, we know with hindsight that the Soviet Union would also end up conducting genocides on its subject peoples (like the Holodomor and similar genocides that Stalin carried out).

I can't say I blame them for choosing none of the above.

considers your people to be 'life unworthy of life'

Ahistorical. He had never said such a thing about the Poles/Slavs.

brags about how he's going to conquer your lands, kill everyone and move his own people in

Even more ahistorical. Nowhere in Mein Kampf or in any of his private or public remarks does he hint at a plan to subjugate Poland. Not that there were no reasons for Beck to be suspicious of Hitler's apparently moderate stance -- obviously he would not have allowed Poland to remain an equal partner forever even under the best circumstances. But up to this time, Germany's re-expansion had been accomplished without bloodshed and his demands of Poland were not unreasonable, as even the British had generally agreed until they issued their defense guarantee at the last minute, fueling Polish recklessness.

The Polish leadership were more afraid of genocide at the hands of the Soviets than of the Nazis.

Ahistorical. He had never said such a thing about the Poles/Slavs.

He may not have used that exact quote, but he wasn't secret about his views about the Slavs.

Nowhere in Mein Kampf or in any of his private or public remarks does he hint at a plan to subjugate Poland.

He talks extensively in Mein Kampf about subjugating the entirety of Eastern Europe. More to the point, he actually did it.

he actually did it

This was after the war started, after his initial plans were thrown into confusion by Britain's unexpected (because irrational, unfulfillable, and at odds with earlier policy) guarantee to Poland. Hitler insisted even in e.g. private communiques with his generals that he wanted no war with Poland.

His foreign policy record up to that point was that of an able, calculating (if ambitious) diplomatist, not of a megalomaniac who would accept nothing less than the prompt extermination of all racial enemies. In Mein Kampf, he definitely does not present a vision of German annexation let alone genocide of all of Eastern Europe. What he does repeat a number of times is the need for more "living space" while gesturing vaguely to the east (or Russia and her vassal states as the Wikipedia quote has it, i.e., not Poland) and talking up the Bolshevik threat. 90% of his vitriol is reserved for Jews and Communists. The Slavs as such are spoken of in a way more reminiscent of the way the Irish were discussed by Anglo-American conservatives during their early waves of immigration: domestically (in Austria), they pervert democratic institutions with their lower standard of culture and their pursuit of ethnic interest, and take up political space that should belong to the Austrian/Anglo majority. His overarching foreign policy objectives were 1. the destruction of Communism (and, similarly in his eyes, European Jewry), 2. the reunification of existing ethnically German regions under one government, and 3. the colonization of some of Eastern Europe. Since the Poles at least shared Hitler's hostility to Communism, it was hardly a given that genociding them would have been his first choice. As I said before, the Polish leadership recognized this: Soviet policy posed a greater existential risk. In the short term at least, the alliance probably would have been treated similarly to how the Romanian alliance was in fact treated later on: mercenarily, like alliances on both sides of the war, not as a conscious stalling tactic to prepare for their eventual genocide.

Edit: This may downplaying Hitler's imperiousness. The point is that whatever he had in store for the Poles, it was probably better than the predictable consequences of their refusal to accept the weakness of their position.

He showed up for Pilsudski's funeral and really liked the man.

Hitler repeatedly suggested a German-Polish alliance against the Soviet Union, but Piłsudski declined, instead seeking precious time to prepare for a potential war with either Germany or the Soviet Union. Just before his death, Piłsudski told Józef Beck that it must be Poland's policy to maintain neutral relations with Germany, keep up the Polish alliance with France and improve relations with the United Kingdom.

Literally any other option would have been a better idea than putting trust in a British defense guarantee.

but you would trust a nazi or soviet defense guarantee? Sometimes there just aren't any winning options.

Also, correct me if in wrong but was it really resistance to the Nazis/Soviets that caused the deaths or that they ended up being a battleground between the soviets and Nazis as well as having a disproportionate number of Jews? Their disproportionate suffering was due to geography and demographics, not diplomacy.

It seems to me that much of the destruction would have happened either way, but there being a small outside chance that the soviets/Nazis would leave them alone and route around them if they got deterred by the British security guarantees.

Either of the parties routing around them seems like an unrealistic prospect considering their location. In hindsight, the strategy that would probably have preserved the most Polish lives (if perhaps not other things that the Poles valued) would have been to immediately and enthusiastically join one of the two warring parties, preferably the Nazis as they had the initial momentum behind them. The extra ~30m population and industrial base would have probably made enough of a difference to turn the Battle of Moscow into an Axis victory, rapidly putting us in an alternative history timeline where it does not seem so likely that Poland is turned into a primary battleground again anytime soon.

...and then American nukes hitting German cities, not touching Poland?

Nuke availability was nowhere near the point where you could just throw them out of spite without having an invasion army lined up to follow up, and a German victory in Russia surely would have put any Normandy plans at least a few years behind schedule - long enough for the German atomic bomb programme to catch up, at which point there would just be MAD.

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A neighboring state can at least conceivably provide military assistance. Britain cannot.

While I agree that the inter-war Polish leadership played their bad hand badly, I don't see what the likely good outcome for Poland or the Poles is if you assume that Hitler's grand strategy was to pursue Grossreich and Lebensraum - which is what Hitler had said his grand strategy was when speaking to sympathetic audiences ever since he wrote Mein Kampf. Grossreich, even in its benign form of reversing Versailles, implies the annexation by Germany of the parts of western Poland with large ethnic-German minorities and the reduction of the ethnic Polish population of that territory to second-class citizenship. And the available Lebensraum was either in Poland or beyond it. If Poland allies with Hitler, the eventual double-cross is even more overdetermined than Barbarossa was.

Quite apart from Hitler's designs on Poland itself, any timeline where Hitler eventually attacks the Soviet Union involves Poland being ravaged by the German army on the way out and the Soviet army on the way back. This includes the scenario where Poland allies with the Soviet Union - the fact that Barbarossa happened in our timeline is strong evidence that Hitler would have invaded Soviet-allied Poland, particularly as Poland doesn't benefit from the Anglo-French guarantee in this scenario and the Spanish Civil War is a precedent that no Western country is likely to kick up a fuss if Hitler attacks Communists. Realistically, without western help Nazi Germany curbstomps the Soviets, but even if you rate the Red Army as better ex ante than it turns out ex post the best outcome is that the Soviets successfully defend Poland and Poland ends up de facto occupied by Soviets. The only reason Finland gets Soviet client-state status on as generous terms as they do is that they demonstrated the ability to give the Soviets a bloody nose, something the Poles don't have.

So to get a good outcome, you need Hitler to stop. And you pretty much need him to stop voluntarily - the way things played out in our timeline is strong evidence that the process of making him stop probably involves armies crossing Poland in a way which is catastrophic for the civilian population. The military scenario where Britain and France take the initiative in the phony war period and quickly defeat Germany isn't plausible militarily, and even if it was there was nothing Poland could do to make it more likely. Once you accept that, Polish policy looks sane (though incompetent).

In any case, if you don't count Holocausted Jews then Poland's death toll is in the normal range for eastern Europe. One of the dirty secrets of Polish history is that the pre-war Polish government would not have counted Holocausted Jews when evaluating their own performance.

In real history Poland was moved westward by Stalin. The Germans could've moved Poland eastwards, taken Danzig and so on while giving them land from Russia and Belarus. If there was one thing Russia has no shortage of, it's land. Or if they'd fought alongside Russia, they would've surely gotten more land in the peace and better treatment. The Russians treated Romania better than Poland since Romania switched sides.

There was no good outcome on offer, that's my point. The Poles ordered 'good outcome' in the restaurant and they received a double helping of bad outcome.

Territorially and demographically, it makes sense to pick a nearby ally with a strong army. The Poles did not do this and suffered immensely. One German invasion, one Soviet invasion then at the end of the war another Soviet invasion.

There is no plausible scenario in which we emerge from the war in a meaningfully better condition.

We ally with the USSR? Today's invasion might get postponed slightly, but the Soviets would still enter the eastern territories and loot under the guise of help. Katyń might not happen in 1940, but these officers would be probably killed after the war, like e.g. Pilecki. The nightmare march westward in 1945 during which Soviets raped basically every encountered woman between the ages of 10 and 80 would still happen. The latter is most certain out of those, as it historically did happen post-Barbarossa, when we were technically allied with USSR. After the Yałta, instead of a satellite state, we could have ended up as a fully fledged Soviet republic, which means the next 45 of oppression are some 50% worse.

We ally with the Reich? They had no scruples breaking Ribbentrop-Mołotow, why would they have any breaking a (highly implausible, ahistorical) Ribbentrop-Beck? (Seriously, the guy who I entrust my life to w/r/t historical knowledge, who is not a normie but a Mishima-and-Evola-reading /ourguy/, completely thrashes the linked book). The Nazis would still shell and bombard us eventually. The Holocaust would still have happened, maybe worse are the government would be collaborating with the German war-death complex instead of resisting it.

But long term, the worst would come after the war. See, nobody cares too much about Vichy Government these days, or the Swiss, or how Sweden supplied Germans with steel. That is because they had decades to wage a successful diplomatic and propaganda campaigns to bleach their history. Hell, pretty much nobody holds a grudge against Germany now. But Poland would be a poor satellite state, unable to have significant democratic relations with the west. What is nowadays a relatively fringe position would be a mainstream one: all the responsibility for the Holocaust would be offloaded from Germany to Poland. We would remain a pariah state for centuries. We might have not get allowed into the EU and NATO, and become a Belarus-style authoritarian backwater. The war that is happening right now across our border might have been happening on our soil instead.

This is just made-up. There is no reason to think that Russia might have a significantly greater chance of invading Poland based on a point of divergence some 80 years ago. Nobody can predict what would happen over such a time period. The decision not to pick one of the two choices INCREASED the chance of Russian invasion, it didn't lower it. The Ribbentrop-Beck pact book is nonsense (why would Germany invade Western Europe if allied with Poland?) that doesn't mean all variations of similar ideas are nonsense.

all the responsibility for the Holocaust would be offloaded from Germany to Poland

This is also ahistorical, Hungary collaborated. Romania collaborated eagerly. Various Soviet minorities were happy to liquidate Jews. Yet responsibility still lies with Germany. It's not as though Hungary and Romania have enormous influence in world opinion to cover up their misdeeds.

Ally with Germany and hand over Danzig in exchange for parts of Belorussia. Ally with Russia and get gains at Germany's expense (presumably more than received in real life).

Both of those are more realistic options than spurning both powers. There is absolutely no reason to think that the world is fair, that vast suffering is compensated for with rewards of any kind.

Here's another idea: how about offering Czechoslovakia military assistance in the face of a potential German invasion instead of grabbing the opportunity of taking part in its territorial mutilation in 1938?

After the Yałta, instead of a satellite state, we could have ended up as a fully fledged Soviet republic, which means the next 45 of oppression are some 50% worse.

That would be extremely unlikely, Soviets had no plans for so like they had with Finland (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_Autonomous_Soviet_Socialist_Republic )

  • Some later historians believe that the elevation of Soviet Karelia from an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (within the RSFSR) to an SSR was a political move as a "convenient means for facilitating the possible incorporation of additional Finnish territory" (or, possibly, the whole of Finland) into the USSR*

Or Poland could same position as Yugoslavia, socialist in a name but without any Soviet armies on it, being a member of non-aligned and trading with everyone.

The Nazis would still shell and bombard us eventually. They didn't do it with Italy or Hungary or Romania or Bulgaria

The Holocaust would still have happened, maybe worse are the government would be collaborating with the German war-death complex instead of resisting it.

AFAIK in countries where governments and local population resisted it, Holocaust did not happen, including even German allies until Germans couped them when Germans saw they were losing the war. I.e. SS officials come to Italian officials, and said "we need a list of Jews -- Ok, come back next month" next month: "Please give us the list -- Sorry, we didn't do it, come back next month please".

It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight.

It absolutely is not trivially true, in fact it is trivial to prove the opposite. People in Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea welcomed their Moscow liberators in 2014 and ended up being conscripted as cannon fodder for Moscow's new war with Ukraine in 2022. If Ukraine welcomed their liberators in 2022 then who knows, maybe Ukrainians would end up in meat wave assaults against Poland or Baltics in 2025.

Recently there was an article in Czech media loosely titled Russian Border Ends Where it Recieves a Beating. There is large grain of truth in that, not only for Russia but also for other expansive empires.

As far as I can tell, observations so far are inconsistent with that model of reality. Why did Russia not attempt to absorb (at least some part of) Georgia when it was lying flat and defeated in 2008, and could have been easily cut off any prospective allied supplies? Why did they wait until 2022 to attack the rest of Ukraine, giving them time to sort out their political turmoil and overhaul their army? There is little there to suggest that they have the cupidity or ambition to pay the blood toll to make their geopolitical situation better; even the war we are seeing now only suggests that they are paying just barely enough to not let it become much worse (as starting a war only to lose it would inevitably do), that is, they are driven by fear/desperation. (No mobilization, no assassination of leadership, barely even any escalation apart from the power plant bombing that they only did briefly during their "darkest hour")

The leadership of the Baltics asserting that they are afraid of being attacked by Russia is not even a signal of them actually believing this (let alone of it actually being likely), because it would be advantageous for them to claim that and fan the Ukraine war even if they were privately assured that it would never happen. Before 2022 the general dynamics of EU politics was such that the smaller countries of the Eastern periphery were constantly being shoved around by Germany on account of its economic might, which as we now have found out was hanging by the thread of cheap Russian hydrocarbons. Being Ukraine's main supporters and playing up the threat to themselves put them at the top of the list for receiving American military aid (or at least newer gear from countries further west in "ring exchange" schemes). It also no doubt plays well with their populations, many of whom still embrace revenge fantasies against Russia for 45 years of communism (not to mention the leaders themselves, who often are old men who were already politics-adjacent back then and thus personally faced the business end of the red boot).

You have interesting observations, but I think they are far from trivial. A lot of arguments from incredulity and building up some intricate narratives about which country really thinks what.

While on my side I have facts: Russia annexed Crimea and Luhansk and Donetsk. And they definitely are using LDR and DPR troops as cannon fodder in their latest war, so in fact welcoming Russians did not bring them peace.

They are mostly facts (except for the "cannon fodder" part, which by its standard definition also imputes a particular speculative motivation), but I don't understand how these facts are evidence either against the point you were addressing originally (that if all of Ukraine had capitulated immediately, they would have had peace) or the additional hypotheses that you added (which are no less of an intricate narrative) that Russia would have assaulted Poland or the Baltics because they supposedly really think that they can expand their borders up to the point where they receive a beating. That Georgia essentially capitulated to Russian demands, was not annexed even though an annexation would have been well within Russian capabilities, and is now at peace, and no Abkhazians or South Ossetians are being sent to fight against Georgia, is also a fact.

I am honestly a bit baffled by the reasoning in your post. Abstracting over the identities of the participants, it seems to amount to something like: A is fighting against B and C over something, and tells B and C that if they just stop resisting, they will no longer have to fight. B joins A, so now it's A and B against C. You come along and observe that B is still fighting (with A against C). Therefore, you conclude that A's initial claim that if B and C both capitulated there would be no fight is false. After all, B capitulated and is still fighting, and perhaps even if C capitulated D would have come along and have had a fight against A, B and C together.

I am honestly a bit baffled by the reasoning in your post.

Sure, let me help. This was my original post as a response to quoted part. What are you baffled about exactly?

It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight.

It absolutely is not trivially true, in fact it is trivial to prove the opposite. People in Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea welcomed their Moscow liberators in 2014 and ended up being conscripted as cannon fodder for Moscow's new war with Ukraine in 2022.

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So Russia has recent history of using conquered peoples to wage future expansionist wars. What is the bafflement again?

And they definitely are using LDR and DPR troops as cannon fodder

Nah, those reconstituted forces are mostly filled with contract soldiers from Russia now. By summer of 2022, they had been destroyed and the cannon fodder spent. The DPR itself announced over 50% casualties in 2022, after they'd already conscripted almost (3/4) every male 18-65. They literally closed down mines and factories, conscripting their entire workforces. 2 years after, no one is left.

Why did Russia not attempt to absorb (at least some part of) Georgia when it was lying flat and defeated in 2008, and could have been easily cut off any prospective allied supplies?

Because Russia continues to believe that maintaining Abkhazia and South Ossetia as "independent" (without actually recognizing them) offers it influence on Georgian internal politics. If it stopped believing that it is very likely that it would first recognize them and then graciously allow their entry to Russian Federation, at least for South Ossetia, the same way as with DPR and LPR.

Russian tanks were in Gori, 25km from the capital, for several days, and if I remember correctly the Georgian resistance was reduced to the level of shootouts with civilian police units. There's little doubt that they could have pushed into the capital and simply installed a puppet government for a tiny fraction of the losses they have taken in Ukraine, which would have allowed them far more influence on Georgian internal politics, if they were actually interested in conquest/expansion beyond not losing what they already had (Abkhazia and South Ossetia).

If Ukraine welcomed their liberators in 2022 then who knows, maybe Ukrainians would end up in meat wave assaults against Poland or Baltics in 2025.

This has been a popular talking point in media, but it appears to be based on exactly nothing. There is nothing anywhere within Russian rhetoric to suggest that they have the slightest interest in Poland. Even the archetype of launching a surprise attack on Poland, Hitler, spent years talking about the Danzig issue before invading. While it was a surprise attack, Germany's motivation was not a surprise. Russian would need to not only launch a surprise attack, but would need a surprise motivation. Likewise, Russia's invasion of Ukraine did not have a "surprise motivation," but rather a motivation that was well-known and is consistent with Russian thought. The same would not be true of a hypothetical Poland invasion.

You are saying that Russians do not consider Poland to be within the rightful Russian sphere of influence?

I think it barely matters. Even if article five isn’t invoked for some inexplicable reason, the resemblance to the interwar years is mostly superficial.

There’s a key difference; Poland would absolutely fucking shred a Russian invasion on a military level. Russia since the war began wasn’t even guaranteed on any given day to be the most powerful military in Ukraine.

Poland’s military spending and might is nowhere near the disparity that existed in the 30s when the Soviet Union was an emerging superpower.

If anything this war has revealed that the Russian military is a paper tiger riddled with incompetence and corruption. They’re laughable compared to the past, and demographics get worse for them each passing day.

They really are a third rate power at this point. If Ukraine, one of the poorest and most corrupt European nations, is giving them trouble even this deep into the third continuation war, then they don’t have a ghost of a chance at winning a war against Poland, or the Baltics, or Finland.

I’m very sympathetic to the DR in general but the Russia cope is absolutely bonkers, almost a perfect mirror image of the twitchy-eyed Ukraine boosters. That country is completely pozzed on almost every level.

If anything this war has revealed that the Russian military is a paper tiger riddled with incompetence and corruption. They’re laughable compared to the past, and demographics get worse for them each passing day.

It's funny how differently people see this war! I look at it and see the opposite- even with every single US-aligned nation around the world is sending Ukraine all the weapons they can spare, Ukraine is still steadily losing this war.

They've drafted basically every man they could find, sparing only the ones necessary to work the farms and keep their economy running, with patrols on the border stopping any man from leaving (but women are fleeing the country). Meanwhile, Russia has still not needed to send in the conscripts who make up the bulk of its army- it's still able to coast on just volunteers, prisoners, and foreign mercenaries, so the average Russian citizen isn't affected.

We laughed at how mighty the western GDP was- turns out GDP does not magically turn into real weapons. Instead, Russia and its allies continue to massively outproduce all the rest of us in artillery, which is what counts the most. The US makes something like 25,000 a month while Russia makes 250,000. Instead, Ukraine has to rely on what they can scavange from old Soviet nations- the big news lately was that Armenia has agreed to send them some stuff. Armenia, the arsenal of democracy! (meanwhile, North Korea is sending literally millions of shells to Russia)

We boasted about our high-tech superweapons that would make the old Soviet stuff look like a joke. It turns out that GPD-guided munitions are easy to electronically jam, long-range missiles are too expensive and few, and the wiz-bang F35 that's supposed to do everything is too precious to be risked in Ukraine. Instead, the most practical weapon seems to be cheap, simple drones manufactured in Iran.

It's not a quick, flashy war of maneuver, sure. It's a slow, grinding, war of attrition. But they're winning. It boggles my mind that people still seem to think that Ukraine is doing great and will be marching into Moscow any day now. We need to see the reality and adapt- either cut a deal that gifts Russia the donbass region, or massively increase the amount of aid going to Ukraine, and restructure the current arms industry to be suited for a serious war.

They've drafted basically every man they could find

While they lowered their top draft age recently to 25, the fact that 18-25-year-olds are still not getting drafted should by itself prove that Ukraine is, in fact, not drafting (even "basically") every man they can find.

Man come on, at least read the full sentence:

They've drafted basically every man they could find, sparing only the ones necessary to work the farms and keep their economy running

Ukraine is a low-tech economy and needs its young men to work the farms and mines. They're not being given a vacation. They're part of the war effort just as much as if they were fighting on the front lines.

Seems very unlikely that all the young men are still just in the farms and the mines, considering that the universities are still running and so on.

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You’ve missed my point entirely and in a hilarious way sort of made my point about the discourse surrounding Russia for me.

I never said Ukraine was winning, I never even implied it. I was really talking about the supposed other targets of Russia; Poland & The Baltics. I have no doubt that Russia could win this war given enough time and bloodshed, time and numbers are on their side.

The crux of my point was that Ukraine was an embarrassingly easy target and Russia still can’t manage it without enormous difficulty. They might win, they might not. If I had to bet money I’d bet money on Russia winning.

I have basically no dog in this fight but seeing Russia get its nose bloodied by Ukraine is like seeing a tatted up security guard getting their teeth knocked out by a 90lb twink; Turns out the muscleman was hopped up on bullshido and an inflated ego. Even with material support from the west, the arc of the war reveals a lot about the state capacity; all it took was a couple thousand mercenaries to turn around to legitimately threaten the regime. You’d expect that from some tinpot African authoritarian regime, but it was shocking to see that happen in Russia.

All your points on the desiccation of the western arms capability I fully agree with. But that has precedent; nothing reveals what technology is cost effective and practical like field testing in combat. And military spending in Poland and the Baltics are ramping up and have been for a while. Russia’s military capability or lack thereof has been largely revealed, and countries other than the USA and its satrapies and Russia have agency as well.

I think Russia winning the war might not actually improve the Russian position all that much. It’s not cope, I couldn’t give a fuck about the GAE. But every other country on Russia’s border are hardening against them, both politically and militarily. Aside from maybe Moldova, there are no easy targets left. Every other country that Russia wants to fuck with is much more dangerous than Ukraine.

Ukraine was an embarrassingly easy target...Every other country that Russia wants to fuck with is much more dangerous than Ukraine.

Pre-war, I assumed this would be true because of the EXTREMELY mediocre showing of Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Crimea. But (pretty obviously) the Ukrainians did a lot of work between then and the second Russian invasion.

And if you set aside the question of Ukrainian morale, I don't think they are an embarrassingly easy target at all, on paper. They had a very large inherited ground army, and a large population pool. They're more on the level of Poland, not a softer target (say) Estonia or Latvia or even a medium-hard target like Finland. It's true from what I can tell that their weapon modernization was fairly meh and that their air force in particular was probably lackluster (but see also Poland, which is still flying Su-17s!) but the fundamentals (lots of tanks, artillery, warm bodies) go a long way with proper morale. I think that, e.g. non-US NATO would have struggled to invade Ukraine the same way Russia did.

Ukraine is not Liechtenstein! It is not Monaco! They have an army of 1.2 million men and women. When you figure in the aid they have something like a two trillion dollar military budget. They have a territorial area that’s equivalent to France and Germany combined, giving them significant ability to use defense in depth. They have been fighting Russia since 2014, which has given them a significant amount of combat experience that most NATO countries do not have. And those years allowed them to build up a fearsome network of fortifications and bunker systems all along the DPR/LPR border. There’s a reason they got picked to be the buffer state over Poland, and it’s not because they’re an easy nut to crack. To assume that Ukraine is the “easy mode” before having to take on the NATO final boss is foolishness.

Is it? Russia is almost five times the population of Ukraine and militarily supposedly one of the mightiest nations on earth. Russia is noticeably richer and more advanced than Ukraine, and incredibly it’s less corrupt which is absolutely wild.

Lots of smart people thought the Russians would crush Ukraine in a matter of weeks, it’s incredibly impressive on Ukraine’s part that they didn’t. And equally embarrassing for Russia.

Ukraine is largely flat and featureless. Afghanistan it is not. Yes it’s a buffer state but historically buffer states come in many flavors; Ukraine’s particular brew is the easily traversed crossroads type.

A lot has happened between now and then of course, but this whole excercise is, on my end, indicative of the relative weakness of Russia.

Poland, even without NATO protection, is obviously a huge problem for Russia. This whole thread stated with me basically saying that the idea of Russia throwing its weight against Poland is absurd, so I’ll spell it out.

Poland is roughly the same population as Ukraine, with tougher and more diverse terrain, and has had greatly heightened peace-time military spending for years. It’s much richer, more advanced, less riddled by corruption, more homogeneous, and has a much higher state capacity.

And there’s no reason to believe that the ramp up that Poland could achieve would be any less spectacular than Ukraine’s. In fact there seems to be sufficient evidence for the opposite conclusion.

While Russia is clearly not on the ropes and it appears to me that they’re winning, it also appears clear that their regime is pretty brittle and couldn’t sustain the heightened war state to even look seriously at directly messing with Poland or the Baltic countries, or even Finland.

Even in its current fake and gay state, NATO would absolutely eat Russia alive. I can’t believe this is even remotely controversial to stay.

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Tangent, but – it's not merely a question of production; the war has also revealed that Russian technology is able to adequately counter ours (usually, it seems, after an adjustment period). For instance, the Russians shot down our in-service anti-radiation missiles! That was perhaps predictable before the war, but I still think it's a BIG DEAL because US/NATO air superiority doctrine is premised around being able to destroy enemy SAM launchers with (among other weapons) anti-radiation missiles, and the Ruskies just...shot them down with the air defenses they were supposed to be targeting. And that's just one example of their ability to adopt to our drip-feeding them our most modern (surface) weapons systems at an inoculatory rate.

This really gets my goat since in a real no-holds-barred war with NATO where the first two weeks might be determinate, if it takes the Russians two weeks to adjust to our tactics, their ability to adjust eventually is no big deal. But if we give them that month to adjust now, they'll be better prepared if there's ACTUALLY a confrontation with NATO. And presumably so will Iran and China. (The one upside is that this knife cuts both ways; the West has a much better picture of Russian capabilities now.)

We need to see the reality and adapt- either cut a deal that gifts Russia the donbass region, or massively increase the amount of aid going to Ukraine, and restructure the current arms industry to be suited for a serious war.

If you see the war as a way to manipulate NATO countries to US interests by ensuring they are weak and dependent on US military aid so that they do not develop their own, independent military and the foreign policy that is downstream from that, 'we' (the US) absolutely don't need to do either of these things. Letting Ukraine bleed dry and letting Putin station a massive, battle-hardened army rebuilt with modern technology on the Polish border is, from a certain point of view, a massive win for US foreign policy.

Whether or not that's actually the US goal here I obviously can't say but I can't help but notice that everything 'we' (the US) has done seems to be nudging things in that direction.

If you see the war as a way to manipulate NATO countries to US interests by ensuring they are weak and dependent on US military aid so that they do not develop their own, independent military and the foreign policy that is downstream from that, 'we' (the US) absolutely don't need to do either of these things. Letting Ukraine bleed dry and letting Putin station a massive, battle-hardened army rebuilt with modern technology on the Polish border is, from a certain point of view, a massive win for US foreign policy.

Whether or not that's actually the US goal here I obviously can't say but I can't help but notice that everything 'we' (the US) has done seems to be nudging things in that direction.

Nah, I don't believe that either side was that smart. The Russians thought they could drive into Kiev in a matter of weeks (which seemed to be what Western analysts also thought at the start of the war). Then Ukraine proved a lot more resolute than anyone expected. So then the US alliance showed up with hundreds of billions worth of high-tech military gear, and everyone thought that would be the end of the war as "orcs" led "human wave assaults" against our most expensive weapon systems. Turns out that didn't work so well either, like you said- they were able to find ways to, eventually, find ways to adapt and counter our weapons. So now we're stuck in this meatgrinder that no one ever wanted or expected, but it's a sunk cost and both sides still want to win.

Nah, I don't believe that either side was that smart.

On the one hand, I'm inclined to believe you! Everyone overestimates government competence.

On the other hand, here's some excerpts from a 2019 RAND report:

Eastern Ukraine is already a significant drain on Russian resources, exacerbated by the accompanying Western sanctions. Increasing U.S. military aid would certainly drive up the Russian costs, but doing so could also increase the loss of Ukrainian lives and territory or result in a disadvantageous peace settlement. This would generally be seen as a serious setback for U.S. policy.

The option of expanding U.S. military aid to Ukraine has to be evaluated principally on whether doing so could help end the conflict in the Donbass on acceptable terms rather than simply on costs it imposes on Moscow. Boosting U.S. aid as part of a broader diplomatic strategy to advance a settlement might well make sense, but calibrating the level of assistance to produce the desired effect while avoiding a damaging counter-escalation would be challenging.

Obviously RAND hedges their bets here, and I don't mean to claim that they were clairvoyant, or anything. But while Western analysts underestimated Ukrainian resolve, RAND was able to correctly point out the very serious downsides to sending Ukraine more weapons well before the escalation of the conflict. And then...we sent them more weapons...and the war escalated exactly as RAND predicted it could.

Now, supposing that you are a member of the US diplomatic-security apparatus that is concerned about Russian strength (and, let's say, sharing the common belief that Ukraine will not stand up to Russian might), but also nursing the unspoken (but very defensible) belief that a united Europe with an independent foreign policy is more of a threat to the United States over the long term than Russia will ever be. Just going off of this report, all of the things that RAND outlines as "risks" might look to you like "benefits," since you suspect that Russia invading and annexing more of Ukraine will "spook" Europe and increase diplomatic pressure on Germany to stop placing nice with Russia. Now increasing military aid looks like a win-win: you either weaken Russia or you spook Europe and with any luck you manage to thread the needle and do both by making the Russians look boorish and violent without them actually committing. And, as a strategist, an option where the worst plausible scenario has hidden benefits is a good option.

Things, in this postulation, DON'T go to plan: you're not omni-competent, the needle isn't threaded, Putin actually invades instead of just suffering from the weapons you've been shipping to Ukraine. How do you spin that situation?

I think what we've seen out of DC is consonant with that – pressuring Europe to give away their arsenal to Ukraine and buy American-made weapons systems instead.

Now, to your point, I don't even know that it requires the level of conscious thought I've put into it, just a sort of self-advantage-maximalizing sensibility, to get the most for the least. Maybe there's no grand strategy, just a sort of shrewd subconscious impulse. But I do find it very interesting that the "US diplomatic and military failure" DOES seem to have turned out in a way to have maximized US leverage over Europe and weakened them considerably. We replaced reliance on Russia for natural gas with reliance on the United States. We persuaded our NATO allies to give away, what, 500 tanks (many in service) while we have a few thousand Abrams in storage, of which we sent...1% (31). (Incidentally, I believe the reason given for not using more Abrams was that the logistics tail was too long. And while I do believe the logistics tail would be long, if we take this at face value it seems to suggest that we wouldn't be able to support Abrams in Europe during a conflict with Russia, which seems...problematic if true!)

So while I'm very uncertain as to how much of what has developed was planned, and I definitely agree that neither side was smart enough to correctly foresee the exact twists and turns of all these events, the extent to which it's undercut Europe to the benefit of the US is worth asking questions about, I think, but I rarely see it discussed.

If you are such an expert, you know about Suwałki Gap. Russia could invade Poland using Ukrainian stormtrooperzz in order to protect the 40 miles gap while simultaneously marching into Baltics thus connnecting enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast with motherland, achieving its strategic goals. Exactly the reasoning why they invaded Ukraine to protect Crimea.

And what would be the response from NATO? Article 5 is weak,

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

So yeah, in alternative universe Russia gets Ukraine, invades Poland and Baltics in 2025 in order to protect Russian minority from “nazis”, and makes it fait accompli - just like with Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast and Zaporizhzhia oblast and Kherson oblast, that Russia already officially annexed. Germans would send helmets to Poland and US agonizes if sending Himars can cause WW3. Was not NATO expansion in 2002 grave mistake provoking Russians anyways? Nobody has to do anything.

and makes it fait accompli - just like with Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast

Per Wikipedia, Mariupol was conquered by Russia in May 2022, months after the Putins special operation had been begun.

For NATO to be effective, it does not have to be 100% committed to starting WW3 over a few square miles. Instead, following the method EY outlines in planecrash, it would be sufficient to escalate with a probability which is high enough to make the expected value of the defection of your opponent negative. Even a low but finite probability of responding in a way which will eventually lead to nuclear escalation will be enough to outweigh the gain of a bit of territory.

I think that NATO reactions to an invocation of Article 5 would be quite different from Western reactions to the invasion of Ukraine for game theory reasons.

If a slice of Poland gets invaded, and the rest of NATO is like 'well, they have already ceded so much territory to Russia in '45, surely they can spare another 50 square kilometers', then NATO as a defensive pact is dead. There can be some discussion if present day Russia is a credible threat in the same way that the USSR at the height of the cold war was, but if it was, then the options would be simple. Either your soldiers now fight Russia in your neighbors territory, or they fight them in a year in your own country, or they end up fighting someone else for Russia in two years. So the least-bad option would be to support your allies in a conventional war.

Of course, there have been precious few large-scale conflicts between nuclear powers, so the likelihood of such conflicts staying conventional for long is unknown. But both sides would have an interest to cause attrition to their enemies nuclear capabilities, and at some point someone might decide that faced with the choice between losing the retaliatory capabilities of a missile sub or silo or escalating to a nuclear conflict, it is not in their interest to defer nuclear escalation any longer.

Per Wikipedia, Mariupol was conquered by Russia in May 2022, months after the Putins special operation had been begun.

What do you even know about the conflict? Are you not aware of siege of Mariupol, one of the most hard fought battles in the war?

Either your soldiers now fight Russia in your neighbors territory, or they fight them in a year in your own country, or they end up fighting someone else for Russia in two years. So the least-bad option would be to support your allies in a conventional war.

Exactly. Why even risk invoking article 5? Don’t you think?

Originally, you used the term

fait accompli

with reference to Mariupol.

From my understanding, that term can be phrased as "done deal" and generally refers to a party accomplishing their objective before their opponent has time to react. A central case would be Crimea: from my understanding, it was occupied before Ukraine was even aware that it was under attack and could deploy military units. Rather than reinforcing their battling troops, they would have had to mount a completely new counterattack.

A city under siege is the opposite of a done deal. Attacking besiegers to break the siege goes all the way back to the dawn of warfare. If you besiege a NATO city for a few months, NATO will be under a lot more pressure to act than if you manage to take it overnight and cease hostilities.

I used the term fait accompli in relation to Russian invasion of Poland and Baltics. If Russians invaded Suwałki Gap, preventing NATO to supply Baltics, then they could march into Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania in hours or days. Once established there, it would be fait accompli. What would remain is for US/Polish/German/Spanish and other NATO troops to spill blood in house-to-house urban/trench fight to liberate their former NATO allies from the south. I can already see how enthusiastic the coalition would be in that case.

Also Mariupol was a done deal. It was surrounded in 2 days after invasion, the rest was mopping up operation without anybody able to do anything about it, with Russian tanks in suburbs of Kyiv.

meat wave assaults

Where did this bizarre term come from and why are people using it?

Maybe it's a combination of the terms "human wave" and "meat grinder", which both have been used to describe Russia's tactics in the current war.

had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the original Kievan Russ community founded Moscow and then stationed there when the Mongols utterly destroyed Kyiv. They then re-colonized their old territory centuries later. From Wikipedia —

When the Mongols invaded the former lands of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, Moscow was still a small town within the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal.[27] Although the Mongols burnt down Moscow in the winter of 1238 and pillaged it in 1293, the outpost's remote, forested location offered some security from Mongol attacks and occupation, while a number of rivers provided access to the Baltic and Black Seas and to the Caucasus region.[28] Muscovites, Suzdalians and other inhabitants were able to maintain their Slavic, pagan, and Orthodox traditions for the most part under the Tatar yoke

What happened to Kievan Russ is actually relevant to the topic. Kyiv decided to fight against the Mongols, which led to the total desolation of Kyiv and the destruction of the original Kievan Russ culture. Something similar happened to Baghdad. But the Slavs in Moscow decided to acquiesce to Mongol rule, which allowed for the salvation of Kievan Russ culture and the continuation of Russian Orthodoxy. So there are two important things to consider here: Moscow and Kievan Russ are historically the same culture / people, and history shows how delusional concepts of self-determination have destroyed Kyiv before — until, of course, Moscow liberated its former territories, because they chose to submit to the Mongol’s greater strength. (nota bene: being zero percent Slav, I don’t care about anything happening east of Poland, and having the Slavs destroy each other is as beneficial to the West as having the East Asians destroy each other or the Semites destroy each other. But I genuinely feel that there is something deeply wrong with the waste of life in the Russian-Ukraine war especially with Ukraine’s low TFR.)

You one part wrong: Moscow did not bend to the Mongols, it was destroyed. Vladimir (and others) bent. Vladimir had (vague) issues which led to people moving to Tver and Moscow, who then fought over Vladimir. But yes, the main part is right. Russia's national mythology's founded on bending to greater powers (like China, today.) For detail (since your main point is incoherent or evil to me):

The Kievan Rus was barely a single entity and disintegrated by 1100. Where the Holy Roman Empire for most of its existence was a very lose collection for a long period, the Kievan Rus was a section of the Rus (East Slavic lands, post facto held by Russia in the 19th century, but can also mean something like city state or East Slavic statelet). Somehow, this concept stretches far beyond Kiev's rule.

Novgorod's, Rostov's, Kiev's etc. territories are considered as one, because Yaroslav the Wise temporarily controlled them (but they didn't hold together afterwards.) Why consider Vladimir's efforts 100 years later part of Kiev, when at best, the connection by this point is Vladimir briefly conquering Kiev (after Ryazan) around 1150. None of these people wrote of themselves under the Kievan Rus or fighting for some past Kievan unity.

150-200 years after temporarily being together, Rostislav, Prince of Smolensk took Kiev (for 1 week). His son held Smolensk and Novgorod. His son took Kiev in 1215, then took Vladimir, losing Novgorod. In 2023, ~20 independent princes and Turkic tribes sent a host to fight the Mongols, half died. In 1237, Bantu Khan took Kiev. Other statelets like Novgorod and Smolensk were unaffected. The village of Moscow was destroyed at this time. A new Yaroslav asks the Mongols to become prince of Vladimir in 1238. When he dies, the Mongols give the eldest son Vladimir. The younger son, Alexander Nevsky is given (the ashes of) Kiev (not physically by their family). When the Khan died, they were to all go to Sarai and pledge allegiance, which Andrey didn't. The Mongol army returned, removed Andrey and gave Alexander Nevsky all of Vladimir's possessions. Alexander Nevsky then led a Mongol army back to Novgorod in 1259... His son, Daniel, born in 1261, founded a monastery and the first stone church in Moscow, ruling over Tver.

Records are sparse, but from 0 inhabitants in the 1240s, Moscow was able to wrest Vladimir from Tver in the 1300s, gaining the right to... Collect taxes for the Mongols. (You don't hear about Kiev again until the 1650s. The Western Eastern Slavs (ancestors of Belarusians and Ukrainians) had their own stories with/in/as Lithuania and Poland, using the Ruthenian literary language etc.) (Remember, the Polish national poem starts "Oh Lithuania, my native land..."!)

A far better connection between Kiev and Moscow forms from the 1660s, where Ukrainian statesmen, clerics and scholars move to Moscow and establish the structure of the Russian state, reform its church, found schools etc.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the original Kievan Russ community founded Moscow and then stationed there when the Mongols utterly destroyed Kyiv. They then re-colonized their old territory centuries later.

Whether you're right or wrong is irrelevant.

What is rellevant is that Moscow thinks Kiev is Russian and Kiev disagreed stongly enough to go to war over the matter.

How does the development of tools for mass murder in the world wars fit into the paradigm of ‘following the rules’? After the fact, the indiscriminate killings of civilian populations via bombings or starvation by the UK, US, USSR, and to a large degree Nazi Germany are treated ambivalently by contemporary recountings, while the discriminate killings were immortalized by the Nuremberg trials and have been written into the foundation of contemporary morality. ‘Don’t kill civilians’ is perhaps an unworkably high standard, but I’d much prefer if that was held to a bit more strongly than tripwire alliances designed to further geopolitical goals. The US was actually pretty good about not doing evil shit aside from a handful of bombings later into the war, and I’d like that to be that standard, which the indiscriminate and pointless night bombings of the British very much fall short of.

Following what rules exactly?

Why should the British be held as more culpable for waging a war to defend thier allies than those who attacked those allies in the first place?

Why should the pressence (or absence) of WMDs factor into the calculation at all?

Culpability isn’t a very useful metric when this stuff seems pretty overdetermined. Germany and France will try to unify Europe under their control, UK will try to stop said unification, Russia will try to expand the empire, Americans will sell stuff. The stuff I’d like to argue about is whether to treat a particular player as behaving in a respectable way or not. WWI, with all its slaughter, had its deaths concentrated among men explicitly waging the war, with some exceptions for starvation in Germany near the end. We don’t revile Germany for its behavior in that war today, because their conduct was within the relatively wide bounds of honorable conduct for that conflict. WWII on the other hand has widespread and unrelenting barbarity by nearly all players, excepting the US and France. The Germans are rightly reviled not because of their blitzkreig through Belgium but because they liked to kill civilian Jews for bad reasons. We too should revile the British approach of sending planes to scatter bombs indiscriminately amongst civilian German populations for different but still bad reasons.

Very few people care about the alliance between Poland and the UK because the alliance was explicitly built as a last-second deterrent for German expansion, not because the Polish and British governments had a long and close relationship of mutual protection. Local players had their own reasons for disliking said expansion, but from the American perspective there really wasn’t any reason why we should care.

If we aren't discussing culpability what exactly are we discussing?

Likewise while it is true that the US had no particular reason to care about Polish sovereignty in 1939, we arent talking about the US in 1939. We are talking about the Poles and the British, both of whom had very obvious reasons to care. The Poles because it was thier sovereignty being threatened and the British because they had made an agreement with the Poles.

If you want to argue that the Poles should've valued thier sovereignty less or that the British should have valued keeping thier word less that is your perogative, but at least make that argument explicit, and provide your reasons why.

Culpability shouldn’t be a binary thing, where if you throw the first punch I get to burn your family alive and that’s on you. Britain make a last-second alliance with Poland which failed to deter German expansionism, and after Germany beat France the capacity of Britain to win a direct conflict against Germany dropped to zero. The whole of Churchill’s maneuverings were to provoke Germany into committing an atrocity that would bring the US into the war, which he did by targeting civilian German populations. Germany was culpable for starting the conflict, absolutely, but Britain was responsible for escalating the conflict to a total war.

That's certainly a take.

Firstly, the British didn't initiate the bombing of civilian infrastructure and populations the Germans did, the British were just monumentally better at it because the British had more competent leadership and greater resources to draw upon.

Secondly, Churchill's maneuvering didn't bring the US into the war, the Japanese did. Even then, the US didn’t move against Germany directly until after Germany had declared war on the US and started attacking US shipping in the Atlantic.

Finally, the German decision making process looks especially retarded when you recall that they really ought to have known better. The Belgian example two decades prior had already demonstrated that the Anglos were both ready able to wage a costly war against Germany over the sovereignty of a stupid made up country.

The British sent bombers targeting Germany for IIRC 9 months before the Germans retaliated. I can’t speak to Germans bombing civilians in Poland, tho I would believe it.

On Churchill: yes. This is why Churchill sucks. He was a warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do. He was still responsible for pushing the RAF to terrorize the German civilian populous in the hopes that the Germans would retaliate in a way that would pull America into the war. Additional beef: Hitler’s offer to turn Madagascar into a Jewish-German colony was denied by Churchill because he wanted to maximize the number of mouths Germany had to feed on the continent. Decent odds Madagascar would have been turned into a charnel house anyway, but we won’t know thanks to Churchill.

Agree with Germany being dumb, but I think it was more that the Nazis thought that their struggles were due to a Jewish conspiracy that ran Europe, rather than perfidious Albion being perfidious. German theory-of-mind takes the L once again.

The Germans were the ones who opened Pandora's Box by bombing civilian infrastructure in the opening phase of their invasion of Poland. Meanwhile the RAF did not start intentionally targeting civilians until the Luftwaffe made night bombing and the targeting of population center official policy in the latter half of the Battle of Britain.

In short, your claim that the British were the ones to "escalate" the conflict is false.

Churchill sucks. He was a warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do.

I would consider the fact that Churchill's side won pretty much every every war he was involved in to be evidence to the contrary.

He was still responsible for pushing the RAF to terrorize the German civilian populous in the hopes that the Germans would retaliate in a way that would pull America into the war.

This is a very dumb objection for you to be making here. Either Churchill was a brilliant mastermind who played the German high command (and everyone else in the world) like a fiddle or he was a "warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do". Pick one.

In either case it doesn't adress the issue that the US didn't move against Germany directly until after the Germans had declared war on the US and started shooting at American ships.

Finally "the Madagascar plan" wasn't even proposed until the summer of 1940. Not only were Britain and Germany already at war by that point but Madagascar wasn't even Germany's to give. Forget Churchill, what reason would anyone in the British leadership have to agree to that plan at that time?

Maybe if the Germans had used one of thier own colonies, or an ally's colony, or tried to cut a deal with the global hegemon instead of declaring war on them things would've played out differently but we don't live in that timeline.

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