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So assuming harris loses, how do you guys think the democratic party will realign for 2026 and 2028? (And don't give me terrible, bad faith answers like, "they won't." They demonstrably have been-- sliding in trump's populist direction since at least 2020).
My predictions are that they'll moderate on cultural issues but head in a strongly left-populist direction on economic issues.
So regarding culture war issues, they won't drop abortion as a platform plank, but if trump fails to restrict it nationally the furor over it will just naturally reduce. Regarding gay, transgender, and minority rights, they'll probably just head in a more libertarian direction... continuing to enforce the same consensus culturally, but switching to a stance of resisting rather than promoting government interventions regarding those groups. The big exception will be immigration... Trump is going to take some sort of action against immigrants, and regardless of how effective those actions are, for the sake of his own ego he'll have to claim that they were successful. And regardless of whether he is, since immigration is mostly a perception issue that will naturally reduce its salience for his base. But on the flip side, democrats will be free to blame anything and everything they want on anti-immigration policies. Police violence, economic stagnation, loss in global standing, etcetera. And they'll be in the enviable position of being able to promise rosy outcomes without having to worry about actual policy, as the republicans are now.
Regarding economic issues... If Trump passes tax cuts (highly likely) they will raise the deficit and interest rates. If he passes tariffs (likely, though probably not to the degree he promised) they will raise the CPI. If he passes immigration restrictions/successfully kicks out illegal immigrants (likely), the price of housing will temporarily stall (likely) or fall (unlikely)-- though the effect here is proportional to the economic damage elsewhere, and in particular the rise in the cost of services. The net effect of all this will be to the benefit of, ironically, well-educated urban professionals with the financial resources to buy (or to already have bought) a house in the near term, and to do their electronics shopping in foreign countries. But in turn, poor people-- and especially poor people in locations that already had cheap housing-- will see a reduction in their buying power, without a commensurate increase in their salaries. If trump cuts welfare too that will in particular activate them. So I forsee a muscular resurgence of Bernie-and-Yang type "free gibs" promises tied to calls to tax "the rich" in a more explicitly redistributive framework. That might not sound too different from what the democratic party currently does, but it is-- current democratic policies are more tailored towards rewarding specific interest groups ("forgivable low interest loans for black male business owners" type beat) and feature complex taxation schemes designed by think tanks to extract exactly enough taxes to pay for them (as assessed by said think tank.) But by 2028, I think we'll see more maximalist proposals that start with a target enemy and a round number and elide specific details about distribution. Think, "10% wealth tax on billionaries and everyone gets their fair share!" They'll learn not to promise X thousand dollars per month, or any nerdy-glasses-emoji policy wonkery bullshit... they'll just rely on people thinking, "wow, bilionaires are mega rich, so if we make them even a little less mega rich everyone can be just regular rich!"
Here's my good faith answer: They won't.
Demographically there is no future 'Republican' party. There are no measures in place to turn the tide of the browning of America. What you'll get is a third world political schema. The playbook runs the same direction everywhere: Brown identitarianism. The democrats can literally do nothing and everything will be golden.
The Republicans will change their tune and move towards 'respectable' and 'sensible' third world politics. A regimented and what they hope to be invisible caste system where specific institutions that separate the good from the bad are solidified and protected. The future 'democrats' exist to destroy this with more extreme class and ethnocentric propaganda.
There's no sense in presuming anything else. Demographically the country is being held together by a bunch of 40-80 year olds. White children are already a minority. On top of that the history of American conservatism is one of nothing but losses. There is not a single thing on earth they have managed to conserve. The only thing democrats need to do is keep on keeping on. Which is what happens regardless of who wins the elections as seemingly every single politician loves nothing but an endless stream of brown immigrants.
I disagree.
The GOP has a clear path forward, Trump has seemingly reinstantiated the Reaganist "coalition of doers", the coalition of people who add value to the economy rather than extracting it. That is a brand with a future.
In contrast it seems to me that it's actually the Democrats who are looking down the barrel of demographic collapse. As they increasingly become the party of queer xes/xirs and wine-drunk cat-moms they become increasingly dependent on "imported" votes and lumpenproles and that is why they have (quite reasonably tbh) been treating Trump's anti-immigration stance as an existential threat.
The "browning of America" is a non issue next to the "Asiaing" or "South Americaing" of America.
Much more so on X than in reality. Apart from Texas, the places that pay net federal taxes are all solidly blue, and the people who actually build Musk's rockets appear to be (based on published stats about who corporate employees donate to) supermajority Democrats. The biggest Republican success story (De Santis' Florida) has an economy that is dependent on attracting retirees who come with large fiscal transfers attached. Remember that Trump's stated economic policy (which his normie supporters are strongly in favour of) is to repeal the CHIPS act, impose 10-20% tariffs on any ASML EUV machines that Intel (or TSMC US) tries to install in their next fab, and focus industrial policy on trying to bring toaster factories back to the Rustbelt.
The problem for a coalition of doers on the right is that most of the doers sit in the libertarian quadrant of the political compass, whereas the easiest place to take votes off the Democrats is in the populist quadrant. In the UK, housing policy is sufficiently centralised that this problem blows up the Conservative Party about once every six months.
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If you want to tie your future to third world politics, sure. That is exactly what happened to Reagan's California.
Democrats are not looking down the barrel of demographic collapse. Every single relevant immigration demographic votes Democrat. You are completely wrong in this assumption. To put things a different way, both Republicans and Democrats in the US face a demographic 'collapse' of their white voter base, as the white share of the population is shrinking. Both need their share of the voting block to grow, but it's only Democrats who are successfully doing it by. Republicans are doing worse than nothing for the last 80 years.
Trump has no 'anti-immigration' stance. As the man has repeatedly stated he wants as many people as possible to come in legally.
The 'browning of America' counts everyone who is not white. That includes Asians and South Americans.
Yes, California's ruling class has been quite vocal in their repudiation of the low-key barstool populism of men like Nixon and Reagan. How has that been working out for them? You want to see what the "third-worlding" of America looks like in practical terms? California is your patient zero.
Yes I know. It's also a rather stupid and Unamerican way to frame things, which is why I made the point to say the "Asiaing" or "South Americaing" of America. Because you see, the problem is not white people brown people or blue people. (that's the woke mind-virus talking) The problem is the importation of parasites and social dysfunction from Asia and South America.
You see, the specific corner of the US I am in has a sizeable black/brown population that's been here since the 18th century. In short, my America isn't "browning" so much as it is brown and has been for longer than anyone can remember. It is also obvious at a glance that it's not these people who are the problem. You want to see the problem? look to California, look to the Northeast. There is your problem.
That's exactly my point? What did you think I was saying when I pointed out the folly of California? How did you think Californias current "ruling class" came to be?
Can you place the parasites and social dysfunction in a box or does it come with the people? It's obviously coming with the people. Where did they get it from? Does it fall from the sky or is it just a product of these people not being like white people? And the most important question of all, are there any realistic mechanisms to sort the people from the parasites and dysfunction?
Your particular corner of America is not representative of America as a whole, which ued to be 85-90% white between 1910 and 1960. The social dysfunction that has followed the largest non-white group of 'Americans' has done so for the entirety of the countries history. These people are obviously a problem, regardless of what you think it is.
I think they "came to be" by rejecting both our nation's founding principles, and the "low-key barstool populism of men like Nixon and Reagan" in favor of the rhetoric of people like you. People who care more about the color of a man's skin than they do their behavior/content of thier character.
Yes you can. Specifically by tackling the behavior directly. The cucked liberal identitarian whinges about "disparate impacts" and "social capital" the based conservative declares "looters will be shot" and allows the cards to fall where they may.
Im going stop you right there. When I look at the US today (or anytime in the last 40 years or so) the most socially dysfunctional states are almost never the states that are the most black or brown, its the states that are the most blue.
Then you would be wrong. The people who came to be the ruling class in California just promised a group of people within their constituency certain things that those people wanted. These things were not illegal because men like Reagan made them legal. The only principle of the founding fathers that was rejected was rejected by both Reagan and the now ruling class of California: That immigration be reserved for white men of good character.
I care about race, since race correlates with behavior.
The cucked liberal runs every socially relevant institution in America. The based conservative licks their boot and talks tough on social media before folding to the new cucked liberal politics like every single conservative before him. I mean, everything you've professed to believe so far is just the cucked liberalism of 30 years ago.
So black population centers aren't the most violent and poorest? The social dysfunction you see in places where the murder rate is comparable to Africa is somehow not as bad as in white neighborhoods in Vermont? I'm far from convinced.
No, you care about race because you made a choice to care about race.
And again, how has that been working out for them? and how has it been working out for those institutions?
Mine is not the "cucked liberalism" of 30 years ago, mine is the cucked liberalism of 200 years ago.
Define black, define poor, define violent. Alternately just take a walk through San Francisco, Chicago, or Minneapolis and then take take the same walk in Atlanta, Mobile, or Jacksonville and tell me which seems more dysfunctional.
I understand that you will likely disagree but i would contend that a reduction in social status is a small price to pay for clean streets and relative peace.
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Demographics isn’t the only story here though. Trump made serious headway with conservative Hispanic voters, which proves that the GOP doesn’t have to be a rump party for grumpy white men hrumpfing their way to demographic irrelevance. The thing drawing people is that the conservatives are also the Christian Party and the party of such values as anti-abortion, pro-marriage, not wanting to trans your kids, teaching the Tem Commandments in schools, etc. all of which conservative Catholic Hispanics would be mostly in favor of. The GOP is also the meritocratic and capitalist party in which hard work and private ownership of goods, businesses etc. are seen as the keys to prosperity. This would also tend to draw the same demographics as they’re fleeing actual socialism, and they know exactly where it leads. They’re not going to vote for socialism in their new country.
I'm hard pressed to call 45% to the 44% of Bush Jr "serious headway".
The reason demographics is the only story here is that the group voting 45% for Trump is growing. Whilst the group voting 60% for Trump is shrinking. And despite allegedly "fleeing actual socialism" the majority of them has consistently voted for the closest approximation of it in American politics.
On top of that, the things drawing people towards the Democrat party are far more tangible than the Republican. Most notably money in your pocket and food in your belly. As can be seen in California where 55% of immigrant households accept some form of welfare benefits. This group, as a total % of the population, is growing. Whilst the "native" group with 25% accepting welfare is shrinking.
The main point that underscores all of this is that the demographics are pushing the country towards third world norms. If people care a lot about whatever third world hole they live in being controlled by people labeling themselves "Republican" instead of "Democrat" I can't fault them. But I point out, usually in complete futility, that once you've reached that point, it doesn't matter. You get to have Brazil level living standards and if you want something else it doesn't matter.
Odd thing to comment on a thread explicitly about the electoral prospects of the Democratic party. Not every post is an invitation to kvetch about immigration.
It's not an odd thing and my answer was on topic.
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Naw. Even if there was some great conspiracy to brown america, intermarriage rates have been getting higher for decades. The endpoint is just brazil. where even people with visible african and amerindian admixture just identify as "white" and have the same culture as everyone else in their city anyways. America's assimilative power is just too great.
Clarence Thomas is "Whiter" in the Kipling-esque sense than any of the queers, trans, furries, Et Al who are very concerned about dysigeninics or "the browning of America". CMV ;-|
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Nawone said that there was.
80-90% of people are not intermarrying. The largest population increases are not from new births but immigrants, most of whom are arriving from rather ethnohomogenous places. I see no relevance to that graph unless you are talking about an America 200 years in the future. My point would be that until you have Brazil and full blown third world politics, you have more and more brown identitarianism. Which is what's already going on and has been going on with every single third world minority group that enters America.
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I think a lot of these are pretty reasonable guesses. What I want to see is a renewed focus on presenting some kind of narrative alternative in opposition to MAGA, particularly Vance who seem like the future of the Republicans.
Right now the Democrats’ vision for America feels like continued management of the existing system, and not only is that boring, it’s incredibly weak against an opponent that has a clear message for what the country should look like. Pointing to specific causes of specific problems beats hand-wavy answers and technocratic tax-credit solutions. (Even if sometimes the hand-wavy answers are correct!)
Bernie style populist policies are definitely a component of that, but I don’t want to flip to the naive “just tax the rich until things are fixed”. I really want to see them push policies that are useful for building secular shared norms and openly present them as such.
I'm surprised to hear this because to me, Vance seems like a truly different kind of politician than trump... and one I like a lot better. He's from a separate part of the republican coalition that's coterminous with, for example, mitt romney. Religiously influence, conservative-trending-dominionist social views, isolationist FOPO views, and a faith in capitalism that's balanced by a paternalistic personal morality. MAGA hats, meanwhile, have more of a "1980's New York Liberal" personality... there's a lot they disapprove of (including the blacks, mexicans, and gays), but they'll accept don't-ask-tell compromises instead of government meddling, The isolationist FOPO views are the same, but economics-wise, it's pure, populist, retail politics.
Anyways, secular shared norms would be great... but I think the era of trump proves that it's more efficient to just find an enemy that 51% of voters can hate.
Oh yeah, I think he’s quite different than Trump, specifically that he’s actually smart and (seems like) competent. I think he presents a clear vision for America, it’s just one I don’t like.
I think democrats could come up with something that competes with that, but not if they let basic pro-family, pro-health, and pro-community messages become further right-coded.
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I think democrats will dial back on the race and gender stuff, because they’ll blame Harris’ loss on her being a bad candidate(and in fairness she was) and then blame that on her being a black woman.
I don’t expect this to be a stable equilibrium; the DNC’s calls for the race and gender stuff are coming from inside the house.
I broadly agree, but "which races" and "what framing" is an important choice. Republicans, for example, have successfully split off the cubans as a clade distinct from the rest of the hispanics. I think the democrats might cede some ground on the traditional "races", but in exchange make a greater effort to isolate local and regional groups. I'm personally a midwestern supremacist, and I think there are fracture points the democrats could target to sever the alliance with the southerners and in particular the gulf-coasters. (Why should iowan farmers pay for flood insurance in florida!? Stop building your houses on sand! Salt water rots your brain!)
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Two big thing I noticed while going through liberal coagulating spaces for schadenfreude is an acceptance that-
Illegal immigration might be a real issue rather than covert racism. The large scale shift of Latino voters towards republican definitely befuddled the traditional Democrat voters ideological worldview. Would this result in bipartisan support for tougher immigration policies or less resistance in enforcement of border security is to be seen.
Maybe the trans issue has been pushed too far. There seems to be an implicit understanding that even with many reaffirming the rights of trans individuals, the push for transition therapy and other CW issues such as trans being allowed to use Women's bathroom has alienated a lot of people. Another thing that commonly came up was regret about the trans movement's confrontation of even people supporting lesbian/gay rights for not supporting far left trans talking points.
I do think that the rank and file Democrats would eventually adjust their messaging regarding these two for sure, but what I am more interested to see is how the far left reacts to these adjustments.
Re: 1, immigration, I agree that non-racism explanations are enough to explain the bulk of the opposition. (Though of course, I would very surprised to hear about any racist that's in favor of it.) But it's worth remembering that Harris also campaigned quite a bit on border security, and the actual party line is more "people have a right to apply for asylum and parents shouldn't be separated from children" than "open borders," (sadly.) You do remember the bipartisan immigration bill, right? But it's definitely true that Trump and the republicans were more successful at credibly presenting themselves as people who would be actually successful at halting illegal immigration, and additionally being more hostile to legal immigration as well. The former was smart politics, but the latter, I think, will prove to be a liability when the effects of restricting immigration turn out to be exactly what the economists said they would be.
Re: 2, trans issues, I'm definitely getting the same vibe.
I'm seeing the usual liberal "ritual apology to rural voters" and usual leftist "liberals will always betray the revolution!" sentiments. Ultimately I think economics will be decisive, though. If Trump's economy does well, contrary to my expectations, a lot of leftists will deradicalize into liberals. If it does poorly, the democratic party will shift left to contrast, pleasing leftists by satisfying their concerns.
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It may but I think the pendulum can swing really fast on this one if Trump overreaches and tries to indulge the 'mass deportations now' crowd. Being tough at the border but generous to people once they're established and resident in the country, even if illegally, seems a winning triangulation position.
I would be very surprised if this made any difference to the election outcome.
I wouldn't. In my admittedly annecdotal experience parents of young kids and young couples looking to have kids weren't just "turned off" by all the secret transition, and men in women's sports stuff coupled with all the "queering of _____" talk, they were in full "kill it with fire" mode and they seem to have broken overwhelmingly for Trump.
In all the exit polls the economy and 'state of democracy' dominated top issues, with abortion and immigration important secondary issues and small slivers for other things like foreign policy. Transgender issues didn't feature anywhere. Could have been an ancillary issue for some? Very possibly, but it's odd that if it was an issue of even secondary/tertiary significance to many voters that it would have appeared nowhere in all the exit polls.
...And you believe them?
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The most plausible way I can see Democrats shifting on trans issues is to shift focus to encouraging and/or mandating individualized unisex bathrooms. It resolves the most salient of the objections (biological men creeping on women), while still enabling trans people and their preferences (not have to be treated as someone of their birth sex), and more importantly appears like they're supporting trans people, while offloading all of the burden onto private enterprises who now have to pay for enough individualized bathrooms to accommodate everyone. They can even spin this as "all inclusive", because only having women's and men's bathrooms still buys into the gender binary, while unisex bathrooms support everyone of all genders and fluidities and whatever.
Agreed. The only practical benefit of sex-segregated toilets is that women don't have to walk past an operative urinal on the way to their stall.
Not quite. There's still the broader bathroom that itself contains the stalls. Men and women both are going to feel less comfortable pooping in a stall next to someone of the opposite sex, and coming out and washing their hands, or doing makeup, or whatever. Not that it's super comfortable to do that among people of the same sex, but its worse if they're opposite. All of the unisex bathrooms I've encountered are real life are defined that way because it's like a normal house bathroom: one room with one toilet, one sink, and a lock on the door. From that perspective then, the benefit of sex-segregated toilets is the economy of scale because you can build 5 stalls in a large room much more cheaply than you can build 5 separate rooms.
I didn’t realize I’d typical minded others in this way until now. I feel no compunctions about shitting next to someone. The only thing that might give me pause is if I’m shitting loudly next to acquaintances, but it’s okay if they don’t know I’m the one in the stall.
The fact that some people feel discomfort from pooping in a public space certainly changes the political implications of such a move.
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I ended up inadvertently catching a bit of the latest Jubilee surrounded video (I won't give them the dignity of a link), 1 democrat vs 25 Trump voters, and it is pretty much as bad as you'd expect. The ensuing conversation with other watchers was more interesting, as I chewed on figuring out the underlying appeal of such videos.
Certainly, in complete contrast of Motte principles, they seem to optimize for heat, not light; the format itself is designed to encourage this. This seems to lead to a dynamic not too dissimilar from other political debate, where participants frequently interrupt in order to be able to get their soundbites in for the crowd (the fact that many participants are primarily social media influencers does not help). This is what accounts for the entertainment factor I suppose; it can be delightfully schadenfreudic to see your outgroup defeated and humiliated.
My vaguely nonpolitical friends tend to enjoy the experience, saying that even if their own stances don't change (which of course with this format they never would) these videos are informative and useful to see what the opposing side believes. Ultimately the videos are quite performative, but I suppose each one contains some pieces of new information slathered in a thick exterior of ragebait to draw in the unsuspecting.
I think it's kind of interesting how much they focus on policy in the debates. Of course it makes sense for a video like this, but it struck me just how irrelevant the policy specifics are to most voters. I don't know if this is a hot take, but it seems to me that Trump and Harris are mostly going to deliver on the standard R or D policy platform and the median R or D voter will find that completely acceptable. Trump's first term or Harris' stint as VP has done little to disabuse people of this notion. I think there are some interesting conversations to be had at the margins; the R or D voter who personally dislike Trump or Harris enough that they'd break for the other side, but I don't know where those conversations are happening - certainly nowhere on Youtube.
Even beyond that fact, no swing voters are really concerned about the exact percentage of Trump's tariff proposals or what the studies say. Whether intentionally or not, Jubilee seems to present an image of an electorate incredibly concerned about the minutiae of policy and largely unphased by all the other surrounding events. The sense I get is that these Jubilee videos do reach a lot of gen Z who otherwise are fairly checked out of what's happening in the race, but that might also just be the specific audience I watched with. It belies how incredibly vibes based the election has been, more than any other in my lifetime.
It also makes me wonder just how possible it is to bridge the record wide partisan gaps of today. I think that a forum like this is leagues better than a Jubilee video for constructive debate, but is constructive debate even the right tool? It's certainly entertaining, as Jubilee watchers or obsessive Motte posters can attest to, but can it possibly change minds? My experience gives me a dim view of the prospect; it seems to me that the process of changing an opinion is a long an arduous one, requiring gentleness and firmness both applied delicately. I don't know if this is a process that scales up or even works reliably. In the meantime, at least we have chronic debaters to keep us entertained.
I don't really get these videos either. I suspect they are entirely jury-rigged to make the 1 look infinitely more prescient than the 25. My wife complains about these same types of videos coming up on her feed but they are always Charlie Kirk debating a bunch of liberal college kids. There are 'owns' galore, but does it change anything? Perhaps. If you watch these vids, at a minimum it can reveal unconsidered problems and different perspectives. Maybe that's enough to justify the entertainment value of naifs looking stupid.
I think the format is just inherently rigged, and in the opposite direction you'd immediately think. The implication of a 1 vs 25 is that the 1 is in the worse position (as in a physical fight), but I think when you have the real-time debate format the inverse is true.
Consider what participating from the 25-person side looks like. Unless you have a very non-real-time debate, the 25 need to share time between themselves and also need to carry on each others' arguments. They need to defend positions another person raised and follow through on a path of attack another person started. And being real time removes the main benefit of having numbers, which is being able to workshop a response and pull out the best ideas from all 25. The result is an inevitable mess.
In practice I suspect the single guy only needs to be moderately consistent with his own statements, not get stumped for a response on anything, and do a passable job of poking holes in the jumbled political positions of 25 people combined in an ad-hoc manner. These aren't trivial tasks but they're well within reach for an experienced debater.
I agree with that.
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Since everything is looking like a Trump win now, what are your actual predictions for the trajectory of the Ukraine war?
As far as I'm concerned, the doomsaying consensus predicting something like an end to supplies, forced armistice followed by Russia rearming to strike later with accumulated force struck me as unfounded and downright strange. If we even accept the premise that Trump would in fact cut supplies and force a truce, it's not at all clear to me that this would be to Ukraine's disadvantage. If anything, UA currently seems to be the side that would greatly benefit from a pause, as they could actually train up their masses of conscripts (probably to a higher standard than is available to Russia, judging by performance of "elite" Ukrainian vs. "elite" Russian troops) rather than burning them as fast as they can be equipped and give their backers time to actually ramp up production of crucial high-tech equipment such as air defense platforms, where it's clear that in the limit the West's ability to produce would outstrip Russia's ability to attrite but they just happen to be stuck on the back foot. Meanwhile, it's not clear how well Russia's losses and departures and weird 8D economic sprezzatura would even hold up under a sudden few months of deafening silence if the guns were to rest, and they don't really have all that much slack left to ramp production up further.
Conditional on Trump forcing a truce, my modal scenario is actually that in a year's time a stronger Ukraine steamrolls a weaker Russia, while conditional on everything continuing as before I would now expect Ukraine losing more and more until its will to fight is broken and it feels compelled to sign a much less advantageous treaty of its own accord. Why is the former scenario not even being treated as a possibility by respectable publications? Is it just that they all tried to convert some pro-Ukraine goodwill into anti-Trump sentiment?
I think one of the big foreign policy goals for Trump is going to be roping Russia into his anti-Chinese coalition. How can he get Russia to pivot from "NATO is the Great Satan, Jade Stick Xi is the best friend" to "actually, fuck China"?
Something like "Ukraine cedes the occupied territory and disarms, but as long as it doesn't discriminate against Russian language and bans the glorification of UPA/OUN, it enjoys American military protection" might sound like a victory to both sides. But that's still not enough to realign Russia against China.
I actually think that supporting Ukraine and making no concessions to Russia unless they give back every square inch of occupied territory strengthens our position against China, because it makes them expect the same treatment if they try something on Taiwan. The absolute best outcome with regards to China is to never have to go to war in the first place because they expect the costs to outweigh the gains. I see Ukraine as an opportunity to make an example out of Russia. They don't need to be completely obliterated, it just has to hurt enough to disincentivize similar actions from them and others in the future.
If instead Trump just gives them what they want as soon as he's in power, then China can reasonably expect to get the same thing (as long as they wait for the next Democrat President).
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I'm not seeing it. If there's a truce, especially an uneasy one, I'm betting all the young to middle-aged men who are currently stuck will immediately bail out. Though I suppose they can try and keep the war-time decree, that forbids them from leaving, in effect.
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I think this is uh improbable without economic and military aide that the West seems to already be unwilling to give (Russia still has a massive production advantage in key areas, and a huge manpower advantage that will not go away), but I agree that there's basically zero reason for Putin to agree to a pause (especially given what apparently happened last time they tried to negotiate) because I think it would disproportionately aid Ukraine. Even if the West doesn't use a pause to rearm and reequip Ukraine, it gives them a tremendous amount of time to build new fortifications. There are also still Ukrainian troops on Russian soil, and I doubt that Putin will agree to a truce of any sort that doesn't involve them retreating. However, I am not necessarily good at anticipating Putin's next move.
If there is a truce, I expect it to be short. I'm unsure as to what Trump finds palatable, but as I see it, for Putin to agree to anything less than territorial concessions and a no-Ukraine-in-NATO treaty would be a geopolitical mistake. It seems likely to me Russia attempts to force Ukraine to disarm, as well.
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Trump will get stonewalled by Putin on his demands, resort to threats of reducing or cutting off aid to Ukraine as a way to force them to make whatever concessions to end the war, and hang the failure on the Biden admin and lack of support by the European satropies. Ukraine will end up a rump, disarmed state, with something like a constitutional requirement of neutrality as well as disarmament (with inspections). Russia will have more territory than it's already currently inducted into the Russian Federation.
Russia gains nothing from stopping the conflict. Everything is in their favor. They are winning all along the front. Every single week their military gets larger, stronger, and better equipped. Ukraine gets weaker, smaller, and less equipped.
I predict the war will end in 2025 with a significant chance of a cascade-failure of the Ukrainian army, likely as a result of a big arrow move by the Russians. I also expect serious political instability or coup against Zelensky & Co., likely by the nationalist faction who implement a universal conscription program in an attempt to stabilize the line and I think this will fail. I think there is a small chance in the event of a cascade failure, Europeans and/or NATO will attempt to put "peacekeepers" into parts of Ukraine in order to stabilize the conflict, perhaps first a trickle in places like Lvov and more if it's not punished enough.
The war will end as a huge embarrassment for the West with permanent degradation in the perception of the West's financial and military strength. It'll be yet another feather in the cap of failure by the US state department over the last 25 years.
Do you not think it likely/plausible that Trump would force Russia to accept a freezing of the conflict along current lines with no additional conditions by way of threats? Between the circumstance that any Republican administration is likely to contain more hawks/military optimists, a general preference his team seems to have for bold moves and a certain "Nixon going to China" effect now that in the public perception the Democrats are the party owning the "help Ukraine" brand, I think he could make the threat of escalation credible - say, to start, by providing Ukraine with significantly more and better deep strike equipment, letting them base combat aviation in adjacent European countries, greenlighting an incursion into Transnistria, or even going through with garrisoning some Western troops in the rear to free up Ukrainian troops for the front. It's not clear what responses would even be available to Russia to any of those that I can see Putin risking, apart from maybe shooting down some US surveillance drones over the Black Sea.
(Ukraine, I imagine, could be strongarmed to accept freezing with no additional conditions; their current public refusal is just for morale reasons.)
I don't think at this point Trump can "force" Russia to do anything because he doesn't have many believable escalatory threats. They will have to be given a lot and I think the bare minimum Putin will accept is Russia keeps the entirety of all oblasts it has already inducted into the federation except maybe certain parts of Kherson and at the cost of the US and Europe removing all sanctions on Russia and Russians and some sort of guarantee going forward, with Ukraine disarming and having their constitution reflect both disarmament and neutrality, as well as "de-nazification," and enshrining protection for russian-speakers.
Russia is winning and will win more the longer the war continues. They have advantage everywhere, they've already sunk a ton of resources into this capability, they've already spent a lot of blood, and they've already spent a lot of legitimacy and political capital on it. To get them to stop, you are going to need to give them something very valuable.
Ukraine is in no position to negotiate. They have repeatedly violated agreements, e.g., don't attack energy infrastructure. Ukraine will accept whatever the US wants because the US is a but-for supporter of their continued ability to fight.
I don't think the Russians will be moved by these escalatory threats. Russia has escalation dominance in region and it's not close. Russians will bomb any airfield irrelevant of where it is if the planes taking off from it are used in military operations in the SMO let alone Russian territory. I doubt the AFU is capable of serious escalation against Transnistria. Any NATO troops which step foot on Ukrainian soil will be immediately bombed. Russians have already framed this discussion because these threats have already been made over the last two years. I doubt they will retreat from any of these threats.
Additionally, I sincerely doubt many in the world would belief radical escalatory threats by the US military. The US military which invaded Iraq was built up during the cold-war; that force, its men, and its equipment have been spent and reformed. The current US is not the country which built that military, filled it's ranks, or built the equipment for it. I doubt the US military could currently accomplish something like the Iraq invasion now. It's been spending multiple years embarrassing itself in missions like protecting international shipping in the Red Sea against the Yemenis. By the time they declared victory, they struggled to convince US flagged ships to make the run through the straight with guarantees of protection. I doubt the US could even fight in place of either side in the war for longer than a few months without conscription and major industrial mobilization.
Donald Trump will not risk escalation to war over a Biden administration debacle when he can just hang the idiotic failure on the Biden administration and even use it as an excuse to clean out the state department and other connected agencies. I agree he has "bold move" guys in his orbit, but I think the "bold move" here would be to blame the neocons, the Biden admin and state department, and walk away from a dumb foreign entanglement.
IMO, Donald Trump escalating something like this to war would end his political legacy and he would lose large portions of his supporter base.
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It isn't a victory, but isn't the fact that Ukraine is still fighting this far still an impressive feat?
At some point, you can't expect the West to be able to defeat Russia in every proxy war context.
Ukraine losing half their population and their most valuable oblasts as well as 600,000+ dead (I haven't seriously looked into casualties for the last 6 mo or so) in order to successfully stall a much larger and more powerful country is impressive. The coordinated western and Ukrainian propaganda blitz and ability to control how the war is perceived in the West is very impressive. Unfortunately, manipulating perceptions eventually has to sync with reality. The West manipulating or buying of Ukrainian elites to feed their people and nation into the shredder is impressive.
However, it's going to result in a catastrophic loss and at enormous cost, too. Western weapons have been exposed, and even if we're being overly kind, western industry and capability to make these weapons in sufficient numbers to affect the battlefield has been exposed, and Russia (and their allies) now have countermeasures to all of them and they're quite effective, the multipolar alliance strengthens, Russia's willingness to supply weapons and tech to American enemies is in overdrive, the deindustrialization of Europe, amongst others.
The West has engaged in dozens of actions which could legitimately be characterized as acts of war and the only reason it's not is because of escalatory danger. There's a difference between supplying some 3rd world guerilla group to combat an enemy and focusing nearly your entirely military output to support a country up to and including on-the-ground military personnel who interface intelligence with that military and even even weapons.
I do think it's reasonable to expect a competent West to pick these sorts of wars only when they can win them and the cost is worth it. I don't consider the Western foreign policy establishment to be competent or reasonable because they have a now 40+ year history of incompetent idiocy which has burned the benefits of winning the cold war.
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This isn't even a symmetrical proxy war. The West is fighting only as a proxy against full Russian involvement. Feels a lot like Russia's Vietnam, even if in the long run Russia might eke out a points victory - a major power thwarted by a minor nation backed by opposing major powers, except even less flattering for Russia because at least Vietnam was half a world away and not bordering America.
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Earlier this year I would've said it'll make a forced Truce more likely, but at this point I don't think the outcome of the election matters that much. The ball is no longer in the West's court after how disastrous this summer was for Ukraine. Ukraine's lack of manpower and conscription failures mean it's basically out of steam regardless of what the west does. There weren't many weapons systems left to deliver that weren't risking overly escalating things anyways. Unless maybe an EU country decides to throw their population into the FAB grinder which seems unlikely Ukraine is SOL.
It'll come down more to how much more Putin is willing to spend and what his goals are. I'm guessing at least the rest of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhia and Kherson oblasts. If things really start to degrade even faster for Ukraine maybe Kharkiv and Odessa I'd put at the more maximalist goals, unless he thinks he can just regime change Kiev at some point.
The whole point of Russia invading was to prevent Ukraine from becoming armed to the point that it was a threat to Russia, and it seemed like they waited too long on that. There is no way Russia will sit back and let the US train up and further arm what is left of Ukraine simply due to a temporary cease fire. They aren't that dumb.
Haven’t you been arguing this exact line for at least a year? What difference did the summer really make?
For longer really, ever since people over corrected their priors on Ukraine's chances vs Russia after Russia failed to take Kiev in 2022.
It just solidified things more, there's uncertainty in anything even if all the facts point in one direction you can't account for every variable. If time passes and you continue to get the results you're expecting it becomes more likely you're correct. That's all.
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Taken from credibledefense:
Nothing quickly changed. Ukraine has been struggling with a major manpower crisis since 2023, now the front is finally collapsing as a result.
First off, military service has never been popular in Ukraine and they had issues with draft dodging since early 2015.
Early in this war the AFU primarily relied on volunteers or at least motivated individuals who eagerly did their duty when mobilized, ie conscription during wartime. However, the Ukrainian mobilization system was corrupt, incompetent, and the pool to pull from was deliberately kept small. Even by early 2023, cracks in the mobilization system were notable since early 2023. But nothing was done, probably because there were high hopes for the Spring 2023 Counteroffensive, if it went well then the war would hopefully end with a military victory in 2024.
But the counteroffensive was a disaster. More so, the Ukrainians kept it going for six months, racking up losses they never planned to take, the mobilization of new soldiers was grossly insufficient to replace losses, so combat units grew weaker and weaker. A reputable military analyst named Michael Kofman says the Ukrainian only cut their counteroffensive off because they basically ran out of troops.
During the summer of 2023, the mobilization crisis finally became so problematic that Zelensky got involved. The UA parliament passed a law to lower the mobilization age from 27 years old to 25, but Zelensky refused to sign it (he was worried about it polling badly). However, he did mass fire every regional military recruitment commander (called the TCC), as corruption and incompetence were the two best words to describe the system.
However, the situation didn't improve, it just got worse. Just as the Ukrainians cut off their strategic offensive due to unsustainable losses, the Russians started theirs, and it's only grown in intensity as time went on. Initially it was largely directed against Avdiivka, that culminated with its fall in April 2024. Then the Russian strategic offensive grew in scale on a broader front, adding Kharkiv in May, with other localized offensives against Chasiv Yar, New York, Kupyansk, and along different locations in the South.
The fall of Avdiivka was outright blamed on two things, limited ammo (blame fell on the US for not passing the large supplemental aid package to help Ukraine) and manpower. Zelensky finally agreed to make mobilization reforms and in April he signed the law to lower mobilization age to 25, he also signed laws expanding penalties for draft dodging, to make it easier for TCC to track mobilized personnel, and a few other odds and ends.
Ukraine mobilization jumped up in numbers in May, when the laws went into effect, and in June too, with the first month numbers of inducted personnel being reported to be at 35k, which was more than they got the previous four months combined. June supposed got about that many too, then it started dropping. Those that came in during May took about two months to be fully inducted into the AFU. counting admin, transportation, screening, training, and more transportation before they would arrive at their units, so it would be around August when the results would become noticeable.
However, August saw a much greater expansion of the war. Ukraine attacked Kursk, successfully too, driving pretty deep and taking close to 1000 sqkm of land. There are many reasons they might wanted to do that but what it did do is turn a relatively quiet frontage on the border hot, necessitating triple or more of AFU units to hold the new ground they took and to try to take more. Kursk has become the strategic main effort for Ukraine, that's where the majority of military assets are going in terms of reserves, quality equipment, and manpower.
In the Donbas, the Ukrainians never stabilized the front after losing Avdiivka and that's come to bite them in the ass. They've had numerous fall back lines but none held and the Russians keep advancing. Now they threaten the key transportation hub Pokrovsk, but also everything south of it. Because priority of everything is going to Kursk, the Ukrainians are losing more there, and many AFU units are being seriously attrited in those locations because they're stuck fighting against the Russian main effort (getting the bulk of Russian military support), taking heavy losses they can't place, effectively dying in place because they're not allowed to retreat and there isn't anybody to relieve them with.
The Russians launched a big offensive against Vuhledar in late August and it fell in late September, largely because the unit holding it was utterly exhausted. Reserves were sent and they did poorly, a mix of unpreparedness and poor morale.
Meanwhile, the manpower crisis keeps getting worse. The May July induction numbers dropped significantly, by 40% according to reports, or more. Zelensky still doesn't want to consider more mobilization reforms especially to expand the pool of potential recruits because he's worried about polling.
Overall, AFU morale is seriously degraded and now desertions have become a major problem, including among the better troops who finally had enough and quit because the way things are going nobody is leaving combat without becoming a serious casualty. The problem was so bad that the UA govt tried to fix it but because they're worried about political optics and polling, they took a very timid approach to limiting desertions, instead of cracking down they outright decriminalized desertion for first time offenders. The hope is those who left already will want to return knowing how badly they're needed and that there won't be any punishments. But it effectively motivated everyone who hadn't deserted yet as they know they too will suffer no consequences.
Overall, the intensity hasn't been this high since the start of the war in terms of Russian momentum. The AFU units fighting can't replace losses, can't be relieved, can't retreat unless violating orders. Losses are beyond casualties, most of the vacancies are deserters now. More and more units are crumbling, and when they crumble it causes Russian successes, as they aren't blind and are timing their attacks against the weakened units to take advantage..
I'm not saying that the AFU will crack and a major operational breakthrough will happen. But historically when those happen due to attrition, the runup to mass collapse looks like what is happening now.
Yeah, this narrative wasn't quite so. Whomever from CD and I remember things differently.
This has some tropes characteristic of the revisionism that Russia tried to interject about the 2022 mobilizations and the 2023 offensive afterwards, both in ignoring the cause of change in the early 2023 and recharacterizing the Ukrainian limitation. Early 2023 is a when the end-2022 Russian mobilization filled the gaps that had been present from the start of the 2022 invasion due to Putin's decision not to actual meet doctrinal manning levels. Both of these elements- the lack of manning and the mobilization- were major Russian scandals that Russia has tried to dismiss / divert attention from since. In contrast, the Ukrainian mobilization challenge in early 2023 was the same as in 2022- equipment, especially artillery ammunition limiting fieldable forces, rather than manpower.
Further, the idea that the Spring 2023 counteroffensive was supposed to lead to an end of the war a year later is, ahem, fanciful. When one looks at the actual direction of advance, scope of the Spring 2023 counteroffensive wasn't any sort of military victory- it was an attempt southward to pressure the Russian logistics chain over the land-route to Crimea. This had value, but it was explicitly a long-war strategy to cause logistical complications, not a short-term 2024 military victory, not an attempt to drive the Russians out of eastern Ukraine.
Again, this narrative wasn't so.
I am familiar with Michael Kofman, have been following him since the war started, and this isn't really capturing his key themes from 2023, or his assessments of the underlying issues at the time of the counter-offensive or afterwards. Kofman was far more focused on the debilitating equipment issues, including special equipment losses and limitations. One of this points at the time was that the Ukrainians were preserving people rather than spending them because of their need of landmine clearing equipment, the consequences of western limitations to go after helicopter airbases, cluster munitions, and so on- but not manpower disaster, and certainly not 'they thought they would take no losses.'
Michael Kofman has made many critiques of the Ukrainian manpower issues, and he's absolutely on record having advocated for more conscription sooner to not have problems now, but not on the basis that the counter offensive continued until they ran out of troops in 2023 / that the Ukrainians never planned to take losses / that the losses were disastrous.
The intensity argument doesn't quite match the narrative you think it does. The intensity equivalence isn't Russia at the start of the war- it's Russia during during the Kharkiv offensive at the end of 2022.
This is just attrition looks like if you aggressively do it faster in a shorter period of time. Both the gains, and the casualties, are accelerated. In terms of scope and scale, though, this is much more like the Kherson offensive in terms of scope and territory changing.
Ukraine's manpower shortage is absolutely contributing to making things worse, it is very relevant, and the loses of terrain are indeed notable- but the terrain was always going to be lost over time. Most of the Ukraine War has been Russia making consistent gains in the area it chooses to focus in, with the Ukrainians trying to make it take time and inflict high casualties in the process, and the counter-offensives have typically followed a similar pattern of penetrations but not dramatic breakthroughs (Kharkiv being a singular exception).
Not really. When attrition collapses approaches- when the state looses the ability to resist- the casualties of the attacker tend to plummet, not scale upward.
This is because attrition has compromised the ability of the defender to bring their systems and networks back. Attriting an air defense network allows you to bring air power to bear against defenses for more effective neutralization, attriting the logistics network deprives the enemy of maneuver or ability to reinforce and makes them easier to flank to attack advantageously, attriting enemy artillery lets your own operate more freely to suppress the enemy more, etc. etc. etc.
The 'high surge then collapse' runup model is less about attrition and more of climatic battles for all-or-nothing standup fights. Those do occasionally happen, but that is pretty clearly not what Ukraine is doing in the Donbas (hence why the counter-attack forces went into Kursk, where they have not faced a climatic destruction).
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It's tough. Zelensky has been clear about not wanting to concede Ukrainian territory but it's obvious to everyone that that particular ship has sailed. It's hard to know if he will secretly be happy to be "forced" to accept a compromise, or if he's a true believer. I also don't think a compromise will be nearly as easy as Trump says, because Russia does seem like it's gearing up for another 1-2 years which Ukraine might not be able to hold. So your scenario is plausible for sure. Execution matters, though. Let's say a cease fire lifts a lot of Russian sanctions. In that case, it's totally conceivable that Russia is able to use that money and tech access to come back to the table better equipped than before.
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Trump has a lot of flexibility given his nothingburger answers so far.
The worst-case scenario (for someone like me, who is pro-Ukraine) is that Trump caves to the Tucker Carlson wing and "forces" the two sides to negotiate by unilaterally demanding Ukraine surrender to Russian terms or face a complete cutoff of US support, or even levying sanctions against them. Trump has the space to simply declare Ukraine to be "Biden's mess", claim it was always rightful Russian lebensraum, that surrendering it will bring peace in our time, and throw them to the wolves. There might be some token concessions ("Russia must agree to play nice") that Trump would claim as "balancing both sides", and largely ignore the situation as it deteriorates like what happened with North Korea during his first term.
But Trump's not naturally anywhere near as pacifist as his supporters make him out to be. He could also decide to just muddle along like he did with Afghanistan. He might make a few incendiary tweets, claim the Europeans need to do more, but he could change his mind back to supporting them when he gets a call from Lindsey Graham or some Polish politician.
The path he takes is very uncertain as Trump has always been a waffle, and it may literally come down to whoever talks to him last getting their way.
This would be a very unusual scenario. The war so far has been completely dominated by hard positional fighting akin to WW1. Unless there's some new innovation that's on par with the tank, I doubt either side would steamroll the other without some massive force-generation problems making one side particularly brittle.
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Trump was the one who started shipping arms to Ukraine (Obama thought it too escalatory) and also help Johnson sell Ukraine aid package by calling it a "loan". "They want to give them $60 billion more. Do it this way. Loan them the money. If they can make it, they pay us back. If they can’t make it, they don’t have to pay us back" [this seems less like 3d chess than an open scam to me].
My prediction is that status quo continues.
Trump did so but only after a mass pressure campaign coordinated by the three letter agencies that painted him as a compromised Russian asset. Which conveniently for the MIC put Trump in a tough spot when it came to doing anything that could be construed as pro-Russia. This time after the whole Russiagate investigation fell flat it will be harder for them to pull off the same maneuver.
Johnson is a snake for sure though and it's a point against Trump's judgement that he was up there celebrating with him at the rally last night. Really a lot of Trump's next term is going to depend on whether he has finally managed to be able to tell friend from foe and won't just fire anyone that doesn't tell him what he wants while hiring every brown noser. Hopefully some of the better allies Trump has picked up can steer him away from the mistakes he made last time.
He's 78. I'd put my bet on the "old dogs" aphorism.
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Mostly the same trajectory as the last year: Russia continues to make slow, steady, and small gains in the Donbas while continuing to overheat its economy, western aid comes in fits disrupted by internal politics, and the Ukrainians continue not to cascade-collapse. Some pro forma attempt at peace talks are attempted, but Russia's inability to compel war termination, the wrong-actor coordination issue of various Russian war demands, and Putin's own habit for strategic procrastination in hopes of a more favorable deal later lead to the failure of talks and a more or less continued western sustainment of Ukraine. Already-underway western industrial expansion continues, and starts to approach Russian production of some key items (particularly artillery ammo), but falls behind 2023 predictions of the 2025 catch-up because of (a) implementation issues in 2023/2024 and (b) the addition of major North Korean arms flows into Russia.
On looser predictions of what 'new' things happen... Putin attempts new and probably counter-productive pressure efforts to try and coerce the Europeans / US into concessions but which also further undermine casefire prospects. If Russia manages to seize the administrative boundaries of the Donbas, Putin attempts to declare a unilateral ceasefire and end the war declaring it won and that Russia would only be fighting in self defense, but I also expect any such effort to fall flat and Russia to attempt to build coercive leverage by attacking elsewhere, further undermining ceasefire prospects. European aid efforts shift as Europeans deal with consequences of Trump. What those shifts mean varies from country to country, but efforts led by France at least to consolidate European military aid at an EU level in the name of European strategic autonomy.
As for talks themselves... maybe late 2025, but probably inconclusive.
Trump is a wild card, but less because there's any particular reason to believe that Trump would cut supplies to force a truce and more that he's been deliberately unforthcoming and his margin of winning from last night means he has previously-non-existing incentives to continue support.
That narrative that Trump would compel a truce is largely based on the reporting covering two non-Trump Trump advisors whose Ukraine proposal was included limits to aid if Ukraine refused to participate in talks, but which also included a lot more aid for Ukraine in general and conditioned nothing on accepting terms Russia was willing to agree to. In short, viewer projection is required to assume what Trump's view of a reasonable deal is, and that the Russian offer would meet it, and that Trump would / could compel Ukraine to accept it, and most of these viewer perceptions were deliberately shaped so during the US election season.
By contrast, Trump has not expressed his own view of Ukraine war termination in any meaningful way in the last two years, and probably won't for another half-year yet as Trump's political priorities are domestic rather than foreign. For Trump to prioritize Ukraine means putting it ahead not only of Israel-Palestine, which he had a personal hand in due to the Israel-Arab normalization efforts he led, but also domestic priorities including domestic agency staffing and removing Biden/Obama opponents. This is not 2016 where Trump thought the opposition would go away, and I have not heard a compelling reason why Trump should care more about ending Ukraine than other issues, particularly when tying support to Ukraine to his own domestic priorities is probably the most credible way of breaking the Democratic attempts at party unity.
My personal prediction is that this is actually the main interest that will motivate Trump regarding Ukraine, and will push him to provide aid conditional on Democratic policy concessions rather than conditional on Ukrainian acceptance of Russian terms. The Ukraine (and to a lesser extent, Gaza) wars will complicate Democrat efforts to recreate the 2016 maximum-anti-trump opposition stance, since that iteration lacked the Ukraine (or Gaza) wars that the ruling party could frame budgetary opposition to as hindering. With the Democrats deeply divided by the Gaza War, and heavily politically invested in the Ukraine War, supporting funding will be a way to break off Democrats to support / bolster narrow Republic majorities, which in turn gives Trump more leeway within the Republican coalition.
Since that will be most relevant in fiscal year budget negotiations, which will be taking place across mid-2025, and which also provide the negotiating leverage of Ukrainian aid to raise against Russia, I wouldn't expect Trump to make a priority of Ukraine until fall 2025 at the earliest.
Further- and even more important to the timing- is the Europeans.
Just from a Putin acceptable-terms perspective, Putin is a strategic procrastinator who often delays when he thinks he can wait out a foe for better conditions and thus better terms. This will most notably come with the end-of-September 2025 German elections, in which the current pro-Ukraine coalition will likely be replaced with something... well, more plausibly less pro-Ukraine. My position across 2024 was that Russian was over-extending its economy and military expenditures (including manpower, material, and monetary) in unsustainable ways to maximize perceived Russian gains in a period of relative industrial advantage and to hopefully shape elections (such as the US one). This same line of logic applies into 2025 for the German as well- the industrial gap momentum will possibly be reversing by the end of 2025, providing the window of relative advantage, and the Germans are the key stakeholders in the European Union budget providing equally-critical economic assistance. Whatever Trump may / may not be willing try to compel, Ukraine could likely be compelled to concede more with a less favorable German government.
So this means that 'serious' talks won't occur until likely until November 2025, when (a) the nature of the new German government has been identified and thus a sense of how much Putin can push for on that end, and (b) when Trump has been able to make political hay out of Ukraine aid to divide Democrats and bolster his domestic priorities.
Post-Posting Major Edit: And in other news that may throw this entirely out of whack, within hours of posting this the German government entered a stability crisis when the German Chancellor fired the Finance Minister, setting the ground for a snap election. This obviously changes the previous predicted timeline reasoning, as a snap election could be held in January-March, but removes the October delay incentive.
I maintain the premise that peace talks in the year are dependent on currently unknown factors (i.e. Trump), but this now also depends on the results of the German governing coalition come Spring.
Good write up. Most IRL Trump supporters I talk to, especially younger ones, seem to be of the opinion that we shouldn't be sending any aid to Ukraine because it's not our war, etc., etc., and I think that general sentiment on the Right has seeped into discourse about Trump since he's been ambiguous on the issue. Trump's actual statements, though, lead me to believe that he still thinks of himself as a master negotiator and that he has the kind of influence with Putin that the Democrats don't, and accordingly he will be able to hammer out a settlement that both sides can live with.
Kudos to Trump if he can pull this off, but I'm pessimistic about the chances. The biggest problem is that any settlement would likely involve freezing the front lines where they are now, and it isn't in Russia's interest to do that. Problem number one is that they're currently making progress — slow progress, but progress — and any pause gives the Ukrainians the opportunity to further entrench their front lines. Problem number two is that the Ukrainians control part of Kursk, and while the area controlled isn't huge, I doubt Putin would be willing to put any of his own territory under semi-permanent Ukrainian control. He can dilly-dally when it comes to retaking it, but publicly acceding to its continued occupation would have negative political consequences.
As far as Kursk is concerned, there could theoretically be some horse trading involved, but it's unlikely that Zelensky would be willing to give up his greatest strategic asset in exchange for a comparably sized piece of the Donbas. Trump could certainly use the threat of withdrawing aid to force a deal down Zelensky's throat, but he'd probably only do this if the deal objectively made sense, i.e., if Zelensky was turning down obviously favorable terms because he wanted to continue the war. As much flack as Trump has gotten for cozying up to Putin, I highly doubt that he'd be willing to give up the store in Ukraine. Add in the probable necessity of some kind of security guarantee for Ukraine, and you have a recipe for failure.
In short, I think the end result of all of this is that Trump tries to hammer out a deal, Putin makes demands that are obviously preposterous, the talks fail, Trump comes back and claims he made progress, and the current levels of military aid continue unabated.
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As I understand it, the situation in the donbas is deteriorating at an accelerating pace in favor of russia. US officials have come to the same conclusion.
In addition the number of glide bomb strikes has increased to >1000 a week, and it is too risky to deploy expensive anti air assets close to the front to counter these, as Russian ISR has improved. Shahed drone strikes are also getting through more easily due to depleted AA, Ukraine is no longer claiming 90% shootdowns as in previous months. Ukrainian desertion numbers have skyrocketed and their solution is that everyone gets 1 AWOL as a treat. Zelensky is still resisting Western calls to conscript 18-25 year olds but there may be no other choice.
Uh, does he know he’s at war? Like I knew Ukraine needed to expand their draft but I didn’t know it was that bad.
One of the dynamics of this war is that both sides are relying on mostly older age brackets. Russia honestly has a bit more youth conscription going on in that the normal conscripts are still occuring, but being used in rear-area roles and kept from the front in favor of increasingly highly-paid volunteers (and, starting recently, less-highly paid north koreans). Michael Kofman has written/spoken more on it if you're curious.
One of the bigger issues for Ukraine is that they don't have brigades-worth of spare equipment to arm more brigades of conscripts with. The prospect of sending poorly-equipped conscripts into combat is a semi-scandal in Ukrainian politics- it raises issues of why more elite children aren't in the poorly-equipped units- and so (very) relative 'equality of equipment' is/was being prioritized over 'raw numbers of bodies.' Ukraine has been deliberately avoiding the Russian 'bring out the WW2 tanks' model of mobilization, as that would be a domestic solidarity issue if they did so. (Also, they don't have a meaningful reserve of WW2 tanks.)
This has actually been occurring since the start of the conflict, including in 2022 when the Ukrainians were turning away would-be volunteers and telling them to stand by for later mobilization. Note that the 2024 Ukrainians still had sufficient 'spare' manpower to launch the Kursk offensive. It's not that they literally can't send more bodies into the Donbas pocket, it's that there's a political consideration not to. (In part because the Donbas pocket is largely unsustainable long-term, so more manpower wouldn't stop the grind, but would incur larger political costs if ill-equipped forces were rushed in.)
I knew about contract soldiers in Russia but Ukraine’s reticence to conscript adequately is new to me. I’d assumed that the unequal brigades weren’t being sent into the Donbas for reasons you describe but that they existed and that, like normal countries in existential conflicts, young Ukrainian men were in the military even if most of what they did there was make-work.
Different kind of existential threat. You are (probably) thinking of existential threat in terms of 'we are about to be overrun', but the Ukrainian perspective is more in 'this war will determine whether the next war will be our last.'
Remember this is the third continuation war since the invasion of Crimea, and that Russia's opening war-termination demands were such as to render a future-Ukraine functionally unable to resist a future attack (i.e. demanding that the Ukrainians demilitarize to a smaller tank fleet than the number of tanks they've lost since continuing to fight, limiting Ukrainians to weapon ranges that couldn't hit rear areas, allowing a Russian veto on foreign assistance to Ukraine). The Ukrainians view their prospects in a future war where they may have no allies / partners far less optimistically than continuing this one with foreign support.
There certainly are plenty of young men (volunteers), and there are definitely unequal brigades (of wildly varying equipment quality), and you aren't wrong in how the unequal brigades are being used (though 'make-work' is probably the wrong way to put it). While Russia is prioritizing efforts in the Donbas, there is a long border to be guarded, and so units of various levels are being sent there.
But for the question of drafting demographic in particular, Ukraine is taking what might be called a seed-corn approach, i.e. prioritizing future growth potential. Ukraine is aware it is a rapidly aging country, and that the youths are the future, and to the degree possible it is trying not to rely on the youth to carry the costs of combat. (Additionally, the older age brackets are far more supportive/tolerant, and thus less politically costly, for mobilization.) The loss of a young man is worse than the loss of an older man, not least because there are a lot more older men and the youth will be needed to take care of the survivors.
Note that this is similar to why women may volunteer, but also aren't being drafted. Women have more long-term value to the nation. If things were so catastrophic in an immediate sense, the state very well could and likely would draft women as well just as it started mixing molotovs in the capital at the start, as many other existentially-threatened states have in the past. But for now it doesn't perceive a need, because the existential risk isn't in the current war, but how this war sets up the next one. Ukraine is operating off of the assumption that it is going to be significantly demographically impacted regardless of how the war ends, but prioritizing the more enduring elements while trying to establish longer-term deterrence.
None of this says that the current strategy is sufficient, or superior, or best. It's not an argument that the Ukrainians aren't losing on the Donbas front. But it is a point that there was a tradeoff of costs, and that the risk perceived as greater isn't imminent military collapse existential risk.
This is one of the issues that the AWOL/foreign flight/draft dodger issue isn't as catastrophic as one may think: the ones doing it are primarily already older (though not old) men, and between expanding the draft age and simply cracking down harder on draft dodger demographics, the state would prefer the later. This is not analogous to the US experience in Vietnam, where college kids flee to Canada to get out of going to war and so spend all their most productive years benefiting another nation.
Fantastic set of posts, reported for AAQC.
Danke
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Man. The 18 - 25 year old conscription ban (on basically prime warrior years) is kinda a funky choice, but I'll feel pretty bad if they lift it. I already don't think Ukraine will recover from this for a long, long time.
I am not sure if I am correct, but I think that 18-25 range is not subject to war mobilization, but they are subject to common draft as they were in pre-war times (unless they get exemption like getting education or something), so maybe changing it won't do much
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My understanding is that contra the popular narratives on /r/noncredibledefense the Ukrainians' major bottleneck is more equipment than it is manpower, and that they are specifically trying to preserve thier youth demographic to maximize future potential.
Yes, my understanding is that the entire reason for the 18 - 25 conscription ban is to preserve the youth demographic they badly need.
It definitely seems plausible to me that they are shorter on equipment than they are on manpower, but they wouldn't have lowered conscription standards if manpower was abundant. Of course, in an existential war you can hardly have too many of either if you are losing and Russia absolutely has them beat on both fronts.
Ukraine had 2x to 3x advantage in soldiers at front in mid-late 2022
Correct, but that was two years ago. Even if the Russians still don't have front-like troop superiority, they have larger manpower reserves and have narrowed the deployed troop gap considerably.
Manpower might not matter if people do not want to fight and Russian propaganda faces much more difficult task than Ukrainian. Russia relies on increasingly large money to hire people for war. The 18-25 range is not subject to war mobilization, but they are subject to common draft as they were in pre-war times (unless they get exemption like getting education or something), so maybe changing it won't do much
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This situation is true, but implication is not necessarily what you understand. The underlying issue that a big % increase of a very small number is a still a small number, and that proportional increases don't continually scale
The theme of 2024 has been that Russia has significantly increased its rate of territorial gains in the Donbass, but 'significant' comes with the contextual caveat of 'compared to 2023.' The Russian gains in 2024 look proportionally impressive in part because the scale of the zoom-in maps was consistent for so long, but the degree of zoom-in was itself a result of how little the Russians were advancing, justifying exceptional zoom in to show differences. This was, in turn, partly because they were focused on advancing in other places (where we no longer see maps).
On a larger scale, however, 2024 has been closer to the creeping artillery campaign in 2022 where artillery overmatch allowed slow-but-steady gains elsewhere on the Ukrainian front, places which didn't receive/retain such familiar maps because they were changing faster and then lost. Unlike in 2022, however, 2024 has not also had simultaneous major Russian military operations across the front- the Russian operations have been primarily focused on the few spots being covered. This is consistent with what was observed in 2023, with the slow-but-consistent Bahkmut. Russia focuses on two-three places at a time, and presses those, and then reaches a point where it transitions to somewhere else.
In short, increasing changes in the Russian position in the current parts of the Donbas aren't themselves evidence of Ukrainian systemic collapse, but where Russia is currently focusing fires. The Russians have always been able to consistently advance when and where they chose to concentrate fires.
The rates of change of territory even lead to changes in where the territory shifts from favoring the operational defense to the operational offense. The formerly defensive high ground the Ukrainians enjoyed in some places became more advantageous to further Russia offensives when the Russians captured them, whether by increasing offensive fires range (thus allowing more concentration of artillery) or compromising other position to prompt a withdrawal of Ukrainian forces (such as has recently happened at the Ukrainian logistic node whose name I can't remember atm).
These positional advantages can even compound. The advantage Russia has gotten from partial-encirclements (approaching 3-side encirclement) is significant. It allows Russia to park more artillery for more range of fires across more of the Ukrainian front and rear. Because more of the Ukrainian rear is in range of fires, high-value-but-costly Ukrainian assets- like air defense or artillery- can't be brought in nearly as close. Because UKR artillery is denied, more Russian artillery can be brought in for further artillery overmatch, and because air defense is blocked the Russians can bring in more glide bomb aviation and helicopters to contribute. This adds up, and consistently enables things like 10-to-1 fires advantages that let the Russian forces make successful rushes for trenchwork and displace the Ukrainians to retreat to less compromised defenses.
But this is positional advantage, not strategic collapse. The artillery army is at its strongest when it can surround the foe on three sides and negate their air defense and airpower, and this position is untenable for most defenders, but there's a reason that the ideal of warfare is about encirclement and not simply flanking. The Russians put the Ukrainians in a bad position, the Ukrainians eventually withdraw, but the withdrawal is a choice to not commit further resources holding untenable positions further, not itself evidence of a lack of resources to commit. The Kursk offensive, for example, demonstrated that the Ukrainians had more combat assets to send, but that they thought there was somehwere better to use them than in the most pressed parts of the Donbas.
The issue with positional warfare analysis is that momentum advantages gradually negate themselves.
When the rate of advance depends on favorable positioning, the victor goes from advantageous terrain to neutral or even unfavorable terrain as new equilibriums are found and defenses rebuilt. If the positioning was favorable, after all, the attacker would continue attacking and advancing. This is more along the lines of 'water runs downhill' than the gallantry of a stream for following the path of least resistance.
But when/if the Russians close the 3-year old Donbas pocket, they won't have a 3-side advantage anymore, but a much 'flater' front. These means less ability to stack fires, less ADA coverage of glide bombs, etc. This means that the Ukrainians can commit more of its limited forces more easily, and more effectively, with defenses that lead the Russians to limit their exposure until they can start re-creating that 3-flank advantage. On the other hand, depending on where they make a push, they themselves may face a three-front disadvantage where a push leaves them exposed rather than able to bring in superior fires.
In other words, rather than a maneuver-warfare acceleration effect- 'Russia is increasing its rate in the Donbas; after the Donbas it will further increase its rate of advance'- positional warfare has a reset-effect. 'The Russian position after the Donbas is no longer as favorable; after the Donbas the rate of advance will slow until Donbas-like contexts can be created again.'
This runs into the separate issue, which I'll address off of your next point.
And as long as those weapons continue to work at the ranges they do, that may be bad news for the Donbas front but it's good news for the ability of Ukraine to generate strategic resistance, because the Donbas isn't where Ukraine draws its ability to fight from.
The Russian glide bombs, as effective as they are, are not what the military would consider long-range weapons vis-a-vis normal indirect fire capabilities. They are launched from behind Russian lines, with the ability to get close limited by exposure to air defense. Since high-value air defenses won't be placed in pockets in range of tube-artillery supported by short-range drones, this is why the glide bomb strikes have been able to increase to >1000 a week: the Russians have a reasonably large array of targets in a zone they can reasonably know is exposed and safe to fight in.
But this makes them, in effect, a different sort of tube-artillery. Bigger boombs, harder to counter-fire, but not a meaningful threat to critical infrastructure / major supply nodes / depots. These are trenchlines, bunkers, or buildings. This is not good for the Ukrainians, but it is not the critical threat, especially if / when / as increasing long-range fires open up attacks on Russian rear areas. The glide bombs can't range those sort of capability-generations.
Shaheds might, but this gets into the limits of a Shahed drone. In short, it's not trivial, but it's not factory-destroying either, while there are indeed less AA rockets to shoot down Shaheds with, there are other limiting factors on their effectiveness, ranging from non-missile AA (not as effective, but a baseline), protection systems (like nets, additional baseline), or just the warhead limitations of a shahed drone. These are often much closer to 'can destroy a vehicle' than 'can destroy a building' payloads. You can throw a lot of Shaheds at a single target to make up in volume, but at that point you're just recreating the narrower and narrower focus of the artillery issue.
What matters more is that neither of these advantages is actually removing the ability of the Ukrainians to generate capabilities and forces, because those capabilities aren't located in the Donbas in the first place.
Ukraine could literally lose all the Donbas, and while it would the advantages of already-prepared defenses it wouldn't lose its force generation potential. Ukraine isn't depending on the remaining settlements in the Donbas for recruitment. Ukraine isn't producing its long-range weapons in the Donbas. Ukraine isn't receiving the import of foreign supplies through the Donbas. The Donbas isn't the Death Star at the battle of endor, where when the Emperor dies the imperial navy flees the field.
The Donbas is, in effect, a political trophy. Its conquest does not win the war for Russia / render the Ukrainians unable to fight. It may shape negotiations or political calculations, most notably Putin's willingness to claim victory with a face-saving 'I own all the territory' salve, but it's not vital to the Ukrainian ability to continue resisting.
But there is a choice, which combines with the fact that the biggest limitation on Ukrainian force generation (still) isn't actually manpower to recruit from, but the gear to equip them with, and the artillery ammunition to back them up with to negate Russia's fires advantages. The former is a question of the next year of foreign supply politics, while the later is something that has been expected to take into next year regardless.
The fact that Zelensky is in a position to resist Western calls to conscript 18-25 year olds is a mark against collapse desperation, not evidence of it (which it will inevitably shift to being characterized as when/if Zelensky does proceed with expanding conscription). The Ukrainian decisions to not conscript more earlier may be the 'wrong' one (I suspect we don't have the insight as to what the priorities actually are- such as if Zelensky wants to scale conscription with western arms deliveries so as to avoid public war support issues of sending ill-equiped troops into battle), but it has been one the Ukrainians felt they could make.
Manpower is one of those information fields where I'd caution you to be very, very cautious with narratives that don't have credible comparative numbers (such as Ukrainian desertion comparisons between years, or comparisons to Russian equivalent acts, or even comparisons to other countries in other conflicts,) especially when it is a field so plagued by deliberate propaganda campaigns. 'Ukraine's army is on the edge of collapse' has been a distinct propaganda theme for years now, and if I were a betting person I'd offer a bet that we'd be dealing with the same theme in twelve months because it is one of those 'maybe it wasn't true before, but it seems credible now' indefinite narratives that can appear credible no matter how many times it fails to materialize.
Is there a name for this kind of narrative? Because it seems like a common failure mode
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Iranian Agents Plotted to Kill Donald Trump, Justice Department Says (non-paywalled link here)
Curious to know what people think of this. My initial cynical reaction was that the plot seems too convenient and that the US government is just trying to drum up support from the right wing young men who would be tasked with fighting a war against Israel in the future. I also am suspicious of why they would release the information about it so soon after it has been found out. I imagine the justice department could just bury the story or not report on it if they don't want people to know about it but it's headline news on WSJ and the NYT right now.
Why would Iran be more interested in killing Trump than Kamala or Biden? Does Iran see Trump as a massive threat? Is Iran just trying to sow chaos in the US?
War with Iran incoming?
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Yeah they've been cooking this one for a while, started around the first assassination attempt. They were already seeding Trump with "intelligence" about Iranian assassination plots, after the first one (which was entirely homegrown) they fed this intel to the media to attempt to co-opt the backlash into fueling the deep state's global imperial ambitions. https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/16/politics/iran-plot-assassinate-trump-secret-service/index.html
Now we have this convenient arrest. Pompeo and his lackey Hook starting to worm their way back into Trump's inner circle. etc.
Probably a good chance this is the deepstate's new strat, similar to how they used the Russian pee tapes to corner Trump on backing out on their expansionist efforts in east europe.
Some other smaller deep state moves as well, like McConnell coming out and saying the filibuster will remain which was framed as being nice and magnanimous but will conveniently limit republican power. Then you have the proposed new senate majority leads with Thune and Cornyn both leading and being RINO deepstate ghouls. Senate of course has to confirm cabinet picks and so will have some influence there.
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First of all, always remember that Osama Bin Laden specifically ordered AQ forces to never assassinate Biden, because he was incompetent and a net negative if left in change.
Second, the US Gov has a strong incentive right now to be seen catching Trump assassination plots. Every announced plot thwarted increases their percentage, given that 1.5 got pretty close to success without government intervention.
Source?
(Inch-resting if true, given that the Allies avoided bringing Hitler to room temperature for the same reason. Considering some of the comparisons going around, I increasingly wonder if the universe is deliberately yanking our collective chains....)
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/osama-bin-laden-letters-al-qaeda-leader-frustrated/story?id=16268578
Obviously Osama could be wrong in his judgment, but then so can the leadership in Iran. It's an insight into an opponents thinking.
“Never interrupt your opponent while they are making a mistake.” Taken to its absolute logical conclusion, I guess. Many such cases.
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Typo or Freudian slip?
Oops, typo.
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Lots of people in Iran are furious with Trump for reneging on the nuclear deal, Maximum Pressure and killing a high-ranking general of theirs. The Iranian government released a fan-made trailer for an assassination attempt on Trump on an official website: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wqcrK-3207g
That's not to say it couldn't be misinformation or some neocon plot. But Trump was Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel, he's bemoaned how Israel's control over the US Congress was lost in recent years, there are many good reasons for Iran to hate this man. He took a lot of money from Adelson who was basically a single-issue Israel partisan. Adelson's dead today but his wife still gave Trump about 100 million this election, she likely shares her husband's priorities. The Adelson's keep a much lower profile than Musk but one imagines they'll get what they pay for.
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The truth is in the middle here. There doesn't actually appear to be any real plot or attempt to kill Trump (the IRGC asked some guy to come up with one, he got two other dudes on board, but apparently never actually came up with a plan) and the FBI has made it abundantly clear they are willing to manipulate Americans to achieve policy aims so the explosiveness and timing and strong push on social media to escalate certainly does appear to be intended to manipulate public sentiment IMHO. But Iran certainly does have incentive to do so after Trump made the wildly escalatory move of having Soleimani killed, so it's not like it's unexpected to anyone that they would try and that people seem to have forgotten this shows how insulated and arrogant many Americans are when it comes to IR.
Did the IRGC ask some guy to come up with one, or did the FBI, pretending to be the IRGC, do so? The FBI has such low credibility in this sort of thing that my prior is it's the latter.
Asking mid-low functioning people to plot to do bad thing and then arresting them for it is absolutely the FBI MO (see also kidnapping Whitmer). I wouldn't be surprised especially since we don't have much information about this guy that would explain why he's the go-to guy for the IRGC (he seems low level, arrested for robbery at one point even).
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I'm not surprised. One of the most effective things Trump did to stabilize the middle east was cut off Iran's funding who is directly funding Hezbollah and anti-israeli sentiment in the middle east. When Biden reinstated Iran's nuclear deal and lifted sanctions on Iran, Iran then had funding to fund Palestine and Hezbollah which led to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict going on today.
With this background, I wouldn't be surprised that Iran sees Trumps rise as a threat to their economic stability and their anti-Israeli agenda. A dead Trump is much better for them than a Trump regime in the presidency.
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This sets off alarm bells. Shakeri, after his confession, was allowed to travel back to Iran? He would be on more surveillance than anyone in the world. Are we sure Shakeri isn’t just some agent pretending to be an Iranian while undercover in prison? I don’t think Iran would ever consider assassinating a US President because it would guarantee direct American and probably European involvement in a war against Iran. That is not in Iran’s interest, and it’s not in America’s interest.
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I decided to post this here, as women's revealed preference for men taller than themselves is culture war fodder to an extent.
Do there happen to be statistics about the growth in the average height of male and female elementary and high school students after 1945? Either in the US or anywhere in the West? I’m asking because I think it may be possible that whatever level of average height difference there used to be between young men and women has decreased in the past few decades for whatever reason, which may also contribute to female hypergamy getting increasingly frustrated.
Height is something that everyone has that you can't change. So anything mentioning height will get rage-engagement in the Internet attention economy. Race-bait, gender-bait, height-bait, they can all be taken as personally as a generic "your mom" insult.
It's not that great to be tall; I still spent most of my life painfully alone, with women often being performatively afraid of me.
I've been tall all my life as well. Still waiting for the heaps of women I was promised
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How tall are you?
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Being taller is one of those things I'd basically take 100% of the time up to probably 6'4-5 or so. It's not a cure-all, but it's like being richer in the sense that it's virtually all upside. That's not to say you can't or don't have other downsides that vastly outweigh it; I wouldn't take being incredibly rich if I were also a paraplegic. Nor would I be made incredibly handsome if I gained agoraphobia as a result.
But if I could get a height boost, a handsomeness boost, or a big pile of money for free I'd take it without reservation.
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I'd say it's pretty great but some people seem to think it's like being able to fly, which it's clearly not.
It's a positive attribute in most circumstances buts it's only *one* attribute.
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Average adult height in US men peaked for those born in the late 70s, but the decline from there to the 1996 birth cohort was less than half a centimeter, and there was a similar decline for women. I suppose it's possible that there was a rapid male-specific decline in cohorts born in the decade after 1996, but it seems unlikely.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-by-year-of-birth?country=~USA
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The average height in the US has fallen over the past several decades due to immigration, but I know of no mechanism by which the gender height gap could be closing except in cases where girls start off more malnourished than boys because of parental favoritism, as they do in a few of the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Testosterone in men has been in steep decline for decades. Surely that has an effect.
Testosterone causes the closure of growth plates. So, surprisingly, lower testosterone might lead to taller heights.
Eunuchs in China were notably taller than men who were whole, and it's been known since antiquity that castration results in larger male bodies (Aristotle: "As a general rule, mutilated animals grow to a greater length than the unmutilated").
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Curious since the BJP enthusiasts I know personally are pro-Trump and point to his anti immigration stance as one reason why.
Yeah, we've got a lot of people unironically advocating for open defection here in the states as well.
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I've seen this term being used plenty in American far-right Twitter, though perhaps less than in previous years?
Maybe partly because it sounds like "wingnut".
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The misinformation in your post and on twitter in general is reaching insane levels. People were voting without American citizenship?Really? Is there any proof of that actually happening? The answer is no , unless of course you pay attention to twitter nonsense too much. Voter fraud is extremely rare. I am waiting for any proof that supports the contrary.
Elon is a hack that's supporting trump in an attempt to avoid massive legal troubles. I am sure he also believes some of the nonsense he spews but that does not make him right. You should look into the voting issue a little more deeply. I am not American either but I attempt at all times to try and seperate the nonsense from reality. When it comes to voting the process is already safe enough from what I understand and fraud cases are minimal. Again you should look this up yourself from a wide variety of sources , but a propaganda man like Elon is certainly not a good source of information.
I have the impression that Musk is just saying stuff he knows will play with Internet conservatives; it comes off a bit fake and pandering. I'd expect his personal opinions to be a lot more orthogonal.
"Fight the woke mind-virus" was good, but it's been downhill from there.
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Wasn’t there the example in Michigan? The chinaman who voted and then told everyone about it because “?”
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Am I reading this correctly that having evidence something wrong occured, is something to be ashamed of? That people get receipts for their claims from the one social media site with the least censorship is to be expected. You won't find anything which undermines the "US elections are secure" narrative in any space in which diversity of opinion isn't a desideratum. But more to the point, twitter is irrelevant here, as it is merely a secondary source. One can use to discover primary ones.
Also for any readers, there is a top level pos by @WhiningCoil just two posts down which gives evidence that non-citizens are voting in US elections.
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Other people already posted links, what made you think this is something that couldn't have happened, and anyone believing otherwise must to be a result of "insane levels" of misinformation?
This is exactly what I meant in my prediction post last night. He's already got everyone playing defense trying to prove reality is real to his satisfaction.
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The Chinese voter in Michigan: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/30/politics/michigan-chinese-citizen-charged-after-illegally-voting/index.html
Charged with the crime, but the vote still is getting counted.
"The Chinese man – a student at the University of Michigan – cast his ballot on Sunday and then reached out to local election officials later that day in an attempt to get the ballot back, according to a source familiar with the situation.
The man registered to vote at the polling place on Sunday, the source said. He used his university ID and other documents to demonstrate his residency in Ann Arbor while filling out a same-day voter registration forms, the source said."
He wasn't even caught, he practically turned himself in. Granted, he was in the US legally, but he is a non-citizen that voted and got away with it but by his conscience.
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The biggest Steelman is that immigrants, legal or otherwise, are counted in the US Census. Then the number of Electoral Votes and congressional seats are apportioned based on that population count. So even without voting, the presence of illegal immigrants can affect the election.
Looking at which states gained and lost EVs, most of it seemed like a wash to me. But I have seen various people lay out paths to a Kamala victory that would not have been a Kamala victory with the pre-2020 electoral vote apportion.
Except they messed up the Census in a way that undercounts Florida by 2 and NY and CA by 1, and refused to fix it after it was discovered. If Trump sweeps the Sun Belt while Kamala wins the Rust Belt, which is not at all implausible, this error will decide the president.
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This guy from China voted and only got caught because he brought attention to it.
There is no reason to believe that this is "very rare" when there is no meaningful process to catch it. No one knows what the rate of non-citizen voting is because there is no meaningful source of truth database to reference against.
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How so?
The SNR has become untenable. Organized thread sliding picked up steam circa July 2016 and has not abated.
SNR? Thread sliding? What are these things?
I assume he means signal to noise ratio.
Thanks! That makes more sense.
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"Bad on purpose (by 4chan standards!) to make you click", pushing other threads off the front page.
thanks for the explanation.
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>front page
>not browsing by board catalog
hownew.ru :^)
Sorry to break character but I didn't want that to make an actual link, would anyone happen to know a convenient way to break autolinking with The Motte's comment formatting?disregard that nyehHey I'm not the one on there whining about slide threads -- simple information man :)
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sorry, Signal to Noise Ratio. By thread sliding I mean the drowning out of interesting content by coordinated spamming of low-effort noise. I'm not trying to not speak plainly, this is just my outside understanding of 4chan. Would that I could attend an academically rigorous course like Advanced Meme Magic Containment Methods.
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You're probably about 2/3 of the age of most Mottezians, from what I recall the last time a bunch of people mentioned their ages.
We should do an annual census, I'd be curious to see if the demographics are changing over time, and how.
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I think we exist in numbers, but we're less represented among frequent posters.
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That's why.
We all feel like we just got here, and the 2016 election is one of the reasons why many of us are here to begin with. We feel like it was barely yesterday.
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2024 is going to be “The Year Politics Went Full Retard” for me. It’s just a level of crazy that I would not believe if it had been pitched as the new season of a political drama. A candidate is nearly thrown off the ballot in CO? The same guy convicted of several felonies? And then his opponent is revealed to be unfit for office on live television? Then the same candidate gets shot. Then the opposition candidate drops out and is replaced without a vote. Then the protests at the DNC over Israel. Another Trump assassination. Like WTF? The crazy around 2024 is insane. And of course the discourse itself — debates around transitions for middle school kids, why FEMA is slowing down aid in hurricane zones, some people are convinced of weather manipulation (which I did not have on my bingo card), claims of election fraud, it’s just wild. And frankly exhausting tbh.
Don't worry, it will soon be over. If Elon is right, then we won't have to worry about competitive elections again. In Soviet America, the people do not choose the government, the government chooses the people.
That’s how elections run here. It’s basically divided by districts carefully chosen to maximize the power of the party that runs the state, then you have the electoral college on top. It’s set up so that 3 states basically pick the president.
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Biden is now a lame duck President. What can he do to help secure his legacy in the small remaining time he has left? Here's a couple ideas:
End the Ukraine War. The war is coming to end soon in the next year anyway (65% chance). Trump might get credit. Why not strike a deal now and make a bid for the Nobel Peace Prize? Obviously, there are pitfalls here. But in the end, it will be seen in the same light as U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Messy, but ultimately necessary. Normie-ish people are starting to reach the same conclustion.
National parks. This is a common thing that Presidents do to secure their legacy. Biden is the first President not to create a new National Park since Truman. Surely they can dig one up (hopefully better than the St. Louis Arch).
Move a department to the heartland. Move the Department of the Interior to... the interior. Build a new "Joseph Robinette Biden Building" for its HQ. This shows his commitment to the common people and sticks a finger in the eye of the DC insiders who shanked him. It also might take the wind out of the sails of the Republicans who would be more loathe to axe jobs in Kansas than in DC.
I hope he resists the urge to issue a bunch of unpopular ultra-left executive orders before he leaves. No doubt his staff will want him to do that, but ultimately this is going on his permanent record, not theirs.
On the other hand, Biden has a chance to soften and improve his reputation by doing something that is non-partisan and magnanimous. (Example: G. W. Bush helping to stop the AIDS epidemic in Africa).
What can he do to salvage what will no doubt be seen as a bottom-tier Presidency?
I don't think anything of the sort will happen. Biden and Kamala are way too chill and upbeat about this. I don't trust it. They are busy cooking up some Steele Dossier V2 or some new rule making red tape so that Trump will be tied up with bullshit for 4 straight years trying to unfuck their executive orders.
Man. I want to argue with you, but I think you enjoy being miserable.
It's a distinct possibility!
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They don’t need this, Trump will do it himself. There was a prescient story in 2018 or something like that where GOP operatives in the Trump White House said the thing they were most scared of was Dems swearing fealty to him, honoring him with big dinners and awards and speeches, calling him great, having big celebrities stop by and pay their respects, and then just quietly whispering in his ear that the people don’t really want all this right wing stuff, why not fire this guy and that guy and just do this and you’ll be loved etc.
And the sad thing, of course, is that it would completely work. Trump loved having Kim Kardashian in the White House. If Oprah and George Clooney and Obama come along and say how impressive he is and how presidential he is, and all he has to do is a couple small tweaks here and there, he’ll do it. The one thing he won’t budge on is tariffs. Everything else is malleable.
Apparently his chief of staff only agreed to take the job on the condition that she have strong power to vet who comes to visit him, precisely in order to avoid him being swung by flattery by the wrong people.
Sure, but he’s very online on Twitter, and if they tweet at him and he responds she’s not going to be able to stop him, at least not if she values her continued employment.
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Any minute now, the Democrats will bend the knee to Donald Trump, their sworn enemy, tripping over themselves to recant each of their decade-long records of anti-Trump rhetoric, so they can tell him he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. The likes of Oprah and George Clooney and Obama can surely overcome these unfavorable initial conditions to convince The Rockstar Formerly Known As Orange Bad Man that the people definitely don't care about that whole tidal wave of illegal immigrants thing that happened for the last few years. Taylor Swift will dramatically un-endorse Kamala Harris, acknowledge that he kinda had a fair point with the childless cat lady thing, and lay the groundwork for some progressive Supreme Court justice appointments. I bet Kathy Griffin will convince him that proudly holding his severed head on a magazine cover was actually a sign of respect.
Fortunately, JD Vance appears to have first dibs on this strategy, and seems more than willing to swallow his pride.
I’m not saying they will, most aren’t even remotely intelligent or cunning to do so. But if they could swallow their pride, it has much more of a chance of working than a lot of conservatives would like it to.
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He can't do (1) because Putin knows that and so he's in a shit position to negotiate. You can't do anything where you want it more than the other guy.
I don’t think it’s clear to Putin at all that Trump will offer him a better deal than Biden. If Trump thinks he’s been shortchanged then he’s liable to reverse his position quickly.
That's surely true. But the point is that Trump will have the benefit of being able to walk away. If Biden decides that he wants a deal, he's got 60 days or so to nail it down.
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I think the defining centerpoint of Biden's legacy will be choosing to run for re-election then dropping out after the first debate. Lots of other things happened in the world while Biden was nearby but that's the one where his personal actions had the most impact and where he most deviated from historical norms.
And I don't think he can redefine his legacy at this point. Nothing requiring physically moving or making anything could possibly be finished in time unless it was already started. Nothing requiring negotiation is going to succeed because there's no point in negotiating with him now. And anything that doesn't require negotiation will either be completely insignificant or immediately overturned by a Trump executive order. Maybe Biden will be nearby during some other significant thing in the next two months but otherwise I think his legacy is set.
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Nothing.
He’s known he wouldn’t be president again since August. If he had an uncontroversial, good-vibes project in mind, why not start it earlier?
For 1, he’s not going to get anything resembling a compromise. Not without something bringing Putin to the table.
Trump has already tarred 3 for Democrats.
I guess digging up another park would be a decent option. It doesn’t involve him giving MAGA exactly what they want, though, so I assume it’s dead on arrival. Maybe that’s too pessimistic.
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All of this is premised on the assumption that Biden is capable of exercising any agency of his own. One would like to imagine that the person or people who were calling the shots in the last two (three? four?) years have some kind of investment in Biden's legacy and might hence be motivated to do something nice for which Biden can get the credit, but I don't know if we have any good reason to believe that's the case. Probably the people calling the shots are some anonymous DNC staffers who have more important things to worry about, like making sure everyone knows that that Orange Man sure is Bad, huh?
Yeah, probably.
I think there's still a man inside their somewhere. I'm on the record saying that Biden's physical decline is worse than his mental decline based on my interactions with other older people with Parkinson's.
But, even in his prime, Biden was always kind of a non-entity who twisted with the political winds.
I just know that there's a window here and maybe there's someone on his staff with a whiff of guts and creativity. Who knows, maybe someone posts here, it gets tweeted by someone important and it reaches someone who matters? (<0.1% chance).
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I was talking to my wife yesterday when I realized how cursed the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize will be if Trump manages to stop the war. Trump, Putin and Zelensky on the stage receiving their three-way award, one genuine smile and two very fake ones.
Nope, if Trump manages to stop the war, the Peace Prize will only be shared by two people.
It won't be Putin
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What's the world in which Putin wins the prize for stopping the war that began as an invasion he ordered? Do aggressors usually get the prize along with resistors? (I mean, honestly, it seens weird for people on either side of a war to win a peace prize .)
Well, they already handed a Peace Prize out to Obama while the country he ran was simultaneously fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, so it seems that actively being involved in one or more wars is not considered a disqualification for the Peace Prize.
They gave it to Henry bloody Kissinger of all people!
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This can't happen - particularly the construction of a new federal building - in less than like 3 years. No way on God's green earth a lame duck president could do it.
They could announce the move at least. What's Trump going to do - move it back to DC?
Of course, it might be hard to protect the name. The J. R. Biden building naming could get switched to the Trump Building. A better idea would be the "Cesar Chavez Building" which would pander to the wayward sheep who wandered from the flock in this election.
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In a way, Biden's legacy is Trump. He was the only one of three candidates to beat Trump, then he's forced out and endorses Kamala to spite the party bosses. (Saw some reporting out today supposedly confirming that this is why he endorsed Kamala.) Biden's whole presidency is defined as the Interregnum Trump. To a large extent his legacy is going to be remembered in the things he's already done, but all those things will be remembered as occurring between Trumps.
It would be hard for Biden to do anything that couldn't get undone by Trump, which also means that most of what Biden could do would be implicitly accepted by Trump. Actually, probably the biggest thing he could do for his legacy would be maintain a smooth and peaceful transition, and maybe even help Trump in a matter or two.
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One thing that might be likely is for him to get to appoint a SCOTUS justice. Sotomayor could and probably should retire and let Biden appoint her replacement while the Democrats control the White House and Senate, since there's no telling how long it might be before they control both again. A quality pick would be a good legacy.
With diabetes ...
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Oops. That'll teach me to trust the Google summary.
Google summary is the most hallucinatory AI I've ever used. For topics on which I have any familiarity, it seems wrong more often than it is right. It sets off sanity check alarms way too often. I'm frankly shocked they thought it was in a state to put front and center on their primary product.
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And, according to former staff, has poorly controlled diabetes.
She’s gonna pull an RBG isn’t she?
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Trump would likely respond to this with a call the end the Senate filibuster.
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Could they get the new justice through in time? 56 days until the next Congress convenes. From Ginsburg's death to Barrett's confirmation was 38 days but from Breyer's announcement to Jackson's confirmation was 70. Biden would just about need someone ready to go already and then they could only lose one of Manchin or Sinema to still confirm the new nominee. Republicans would pull out all the stops and they don't have to delay things all that long, especially over the holidays and with the debt ceiling fight coming up too.
Edit: It would be quite a risk for Sotomayor to voluntarily step down at this point, and she may judge that it's less of a risk to stay in.
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It would be chef's kiss if he could resign and make Kamala the first woman president. From my point of view, this would be great because it removes "make history and elect the first woman president" as a talking point in future elections. From Biden's view, it would have the appearance of making history and being magnanimous while in effect being an absolute humiliation and revenge.
Apparently she's already been the president, for a little over an hour when Biden was under for surgery.
We need more than that. She needs to be officially sworn in, get her portrait on the wall, be listed in the history books, etc.
And to fuck up all the "47" merch that was printed. Naturally.
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I think Biden is quietly pretty mad at Harris for shanking him, especially now that she whiffed the election. I doubt he would agree to that.
It wouldn't be a favor to Harris, she would get all this press attention and have to smile for the press in order to get an absolutely empty gesture right after suffering an all-timer humiliating defeat. If Biden did it, the smart move for Harris would be to resign herself and pass the honor of first woman president to Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi is not in line for the job.
Woops, totally forgot it was already a Republican house.
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If it were as simple as just ending the Ukraine War then he would have done it already. Every peace proposal I've seen ends with Ukraine ceding massive amounts of territory and agreeing to never engage in any kind of security agreement. In other words, give up a bunch of shit now, and leave the door open for another invasion when Russia gets around to it. These terms wouldn't be acceptable to Ukraine, wouldn't be acceptable to Biden, and wouldn't be acceptable to Trump. If Biden tried to end the war on these terms Trump would immediately excoriate him for being weak, and he'd be right. I think Trump has deluded himself into thinking he can sweet talk Putin into a deal that would be acceptable to Ukraine, or at lease so reasonable that Ukraine would lose international support if they didn't take it. It would be great if it were true, but I think the end result of any peace talks would be Trump coming home in disgust and urging congress to send more military aid to Ukraine, possible including the kind of offensive weapons that Biden has been reluctant to give.
As for the National Parks, all of the ones that have been designated since Clinton have been scraping the bottom of the barrel. Take New River Gorge for example. I go there at least once a year, but there isn't a ton to do unless you're running the river. the park only owns up to the top of the hill in most places, which means that most of the park is a steep mountainside that isn't really suitable for any kind of development. There's an overlook at the main visitor's center, a short hike along the rim, and a couple old mining sites with varying degrees of accessibility and preservation (e.g. Thurmond is accessible by car and has a well-done museum, while Lower Kaymoor requires descending 800 steps to the bottom of the gorge on foot, and is just old mine structures). There's some climbing, and probably a few more things I'm not familiar with, but that's it. It works as a National River or Recreation Area but not so much a park.
The only large tract of Federal land that's an obvious location for a National Park is the White Mountains in New Hampshire. The problem is that this is owned by the Forest Service, and transferring it to the Department of the Interior would result in a bitch fight over timber rights, mining rights, and all the other mixed-use things that aren't allowed in National Parks. Even in New River Gorge, they limited the park to a minority of the available acreage so that hunting would be able to continue. Hence, it's technically New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, with the park itself only being about 8% of the total unit. National Park designations also require the approval of congress, which isn't going to happen. See the ongoing fight over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monuments, which can be created by executive order. They keep getting expanded and pared back, but neither area has anywhere near the facilities for congress to just designate a new park and be done with it.
What is the reality of Ukraine's position in the war? Is it in a strong position or a weak one? What is the reality of the US's position in Ukraine? Is it in a strong position or a weak one? What is the reality of Russia's position in the war? Is it in a strong position or a weak one?
Ukraine wants to retake their territory. Below is a war map. Ukraine has not had control of Donestk, Luhansk and Crimea since 2014. And everything not those areas, basically from Mariupol to Kherson, is separated from Ukraine by the Dnieper River. Ukraine has not taken much ground, when the US gave them a bunch of our equipment it did not move the needle. A lot of it got blown to bits. So a weak position to get what they want.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641cf64bd375
The US wants Ukraine to retake their territory. And from the above, they are in a weak position as well. I do not see much of a will for escalation. It does not seem all of the sanctions crippled Russia. And from a strategic prospective, we have driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. I do think that we will get them into NATO if a deal is cut, but that is just my guess. So overall a weak position to get what we want, at least out of the war.
Originally it seemed that Russia wanted to either annex Ukraine or set up a puppet government, but now I think they're just trying to secure Crimea and get what as much pro Russia Ukrainian territory as they can. Looks like they are in a very strong position to do this, the have de facto accomplished this, so they are in a strong position.
So if the US and Ukraine are in a weak position, then accepting weak peace terms would be an acknowledgement of reality more than creation of it. Ukraine is going to lose territory, Russia is going to gain it, Joe Biden forcing a deal is just recognizing this fact. I don't see this war as in our interest, or at least in our interest at the price tag, so I think Joe should be weak and sign the deal. That is the right call for US interest, and we should work to drive the Russians and Chinese apart. Obviously team NATO would want the best possible deal they can get, but if they are in a weak position to take (retake) what they want by force then why would they be able to take it through negotiation? I don't think they could.
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If you want peace, that would be a good result! I've never understood our constant policy of half-measures. If we're going to back Ukraine against Russia by providing weapons then we should be providing the best weapons and in quantity. Limiting our support just keeps the war going as long as possible. Do we want Ukraine to have a strong position or not? If not, then why supply weapons at all?
It's a cynical use of Ukraine to allow us to hurt Russia without declaring war. The well-being of Ukraine was never per se pertinent.
This is the sort of perspective I've heard from some of the 'end the war now' people in e.g. Trump's entourage, and I find it incredibly annoying, because it treats Ukraine as just some pawn instead of an independent country. It's the same perspective Putin has.
Simply look at what Ukrainian leaders are saying. They are the ones who will not accept a cease-fire without security guarantees, who have been pushing to take back their land and insisting on an eventual return to their internationally recognized borders. Do you honestly think they're just saying these things because Biden told them to? It's so demeaning to the Ukrainian people who are fighting for the independence of their country.
I hear people like Vivek Ramaswamy say things like "we need to come to a peace agreement that's good for both Russia and the United States" and I get so frustrated - the parties to the war are Russia and Ukraine! Ukrainians are the ones who will determine how far they are willing to go to protect their homeland and their people. If Western countries decide to withdraw support, that will affect the calculus of the Ukrainians as to what they can accomplish, but the decision is still theirs whether to keep fighting.
Well, you know, that doesn't bother me. I don't believe in countries (states). Literally, I don't believe that they exist. They're fictions, like corporations. Really it's a sort of theological idea.
I do believe in nations and to be charitable I can sub that word in. But in that case, from a secular perspective, it's not clear to me why one nation has a right to a piece of land and another doesn't. Where would such a right come from, if not the test of societal virtue that is war? And how sure are we that the ruling class of a nation actually represents that nation, rather than having parasitized it?
If they don't want to fight they can stop. Or, if the people want to stop but can't -- as is evidenced by their enslavement and sacrifice by the men calling themselves their leaders -- we should ask if perhaps that's the real problem!
It's not clear to me that the ruling society of Russia intends to harm either the land or the people. Actually I think it would be happiest keeping both wholly preserved (but under its own control).
Seems to me that what's going on here is that the land and peoples (the people living there are hardly homogeneous) exist and two competing ruling classes are vying for control over them. One is willing to enslave them and spend their lives to stay in power. The other is basically willing to do the same. It's not clear why either of those is 'right'.
I just don't know where everyone seems to be getting their sense of clear-cut moral stances from.
Definitely an interesting philosophical framing. The moral framework for me is something of a practical one - how can different nations live in the world with a minimum of morally despicable things taking place. Things like: war, slavery, poverty, oppression.
The goal of the 'rules-based international order' was to create rules for the game of international competition and cooperation where the morally worst actions are taken off the table. We don't go to war to settle disputes over who gets to control land and peoples (especially nuclear war) because it's something everyone wants to avoid. It's morally bad and it's practically bad, especially for those lands and peoples.
Russia is the clear bad actor in this framing. They are signed on to a ton of agreements that say 'we will not invade other countries to take their land' - the most fundamental being the UN charter, which says any UN member will respect the borders of the existing countries. This may seem arbitrary under your system, but it serves the very basic purpose of preventing war. It's not a complicated moral stance. If Russia hadn't invaded another country, there wouldn't be a war.
Hell, if Russian troops weren't blatantly and constantly committing war crimes, targeting civilians, indoctrinating the people of territories they've conquered... then maybe we in the West could ignore this as just another border dispute, like the other times in the 21st century Russia has invaded its neighbors. But, Russia is doing all these morally despicable things. They are the clear moral bad agent in almost every way, and are simply flaunting the fact that they can break international rules and norms, essentially do whatever the hell they please, because they have nuclear weapons so nobody will stop them. But whether this deserves punishment from the international community on a moral level is beside the point. This needs to be punished so that every other aggressive authoritarian government with delusions of grandeur doesn't do the same thing, and the whole world devolve back into war.
Right, well, they can't. The incentives don't align that way and never will. It can be more or less overt, and more or less local, but it's going on somewhere. This is due to resource scarcity. Someone has to lose, and usually many people. Those with the ability to change this are better-served by winning, and arguably should. And even they can't change it much.
No, that's just what the most-powerful cabals at the time said to justify the cementing of their power into the foreseeable future. In fact they're plenty willing to do abhorrent things when it suits them.
Only the power of the hegemon prevents war. This is a symptom of that power failing, not a de novo source of evil.
I think you'll find that we and our allies do all that stuff in spades. Who, whom.
From the perspective of the hegemon, it needs to be punished to preserve the hegemony. The question is whether that's possible any longer.
War simply is. There are ways to sort of move it from one column into another on the ledger book but basically, given resource scarcity, this is just how things work. There is no other way. And a bad peace is worse than war.
You're just clearly factually wrong about this. The fact is that there have been no major wars in Europe since the creation of the rules-based order. In other words, when those countries played by the rules they've seen exactly the results they wanted: reduction in war, economic prosperity, global trade.
This to me is proof that you're not arguing in good faith. Anyone who's given even a cursory look at the war crimes committed by Russia could never say something so ridiculous. It's just cynicism for cynicism's sake, untethered to reality.
This is also obviously not true. International relations is not a zero-sum game. The global international order has decreased global poverty from 50% to about 10% in the last century. Who did they steal that prosperity from? Western countries, despite not going to war with each other, have grown wealth exponentially and raised the standard of living to the point where we no longer have extreme poverty at all. This myth of resource scarcity is not only foolish, it's dangerous, because it leads to bad ideas about policy.
I think you're just fundamentally incorrect about all these issues. Not meant as an attack, but you don't happen to be a communist do you?
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The choice is 100% up to Ukraine. It's a shit choice, since it's one of these Copenhagen interpretation of ethics choices, but it's still up to them:
Is it moral to help someone a little if you can easily help them more? Well, states are amoral golems, so it's a moot question.
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and yet when people say that we shouldn't be doing it, the argument is that we've got to protect the poor Ukrainians. There's this maddening bullshit arbitrage between "protect the Ukrainians from the evil Russian Orcs", and "We should harm the Russians as much as possible, who cares what it costs the Ukranians."
Almost like some kind of motte and bailey?
Or that it's debates between large numbers of different people with different positions, even the people within the same coalition.
Just as governments aren't hive minds, neither are 'pro' or 'anti' camps. It's not a motte and bailey if person A takes position A and person B takes position B, even if B is better at some arguments than A (and often vice versa).
This has come up a few times, and the best anyone could come up with is "distributed motte and bailey". Calling it that is obviously unfair to a person being held to account for an argument they may not have made, but on the other hand, it's pretty goddamn frustrating to get mutually contradictory arguments from people sharing a coalition.
There's probably no solution but to recognize that the discourse is fucked.
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You know when you’re watching a movie and a line of dialogue includes the title of the movie?
Same energy as this comment.
There's another level, which is that actually the thing I just said is the bailey and the real motte is spending money for the sake of it (for those who become enriched).
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Okay, the answer to this is actually pretty simple.
In short, the fear of all the Western players is nuclear escalation. There are three ways this likely happens. One: Ukraine starts winning the war, and Putin is pushed into a corner. Two: Russia starts winning the war and gets too close to NATO countries, which leads to direct conflict with NATO, which Russia cannot hope to win without relying on nuclear weapons. Three: regime change in Russia. Putin is a known entity, but anyone who takes his place, especially in the context of a coup, would likely be more radical. Putin already keeps a lot of radicals around who are openly calling to use tactical nuclear weapons, and in a regime change scenario we have no idea who would end up on top.
Once you have this framework, everything NATO and the Biden admin has done is obvious. They can't let Russia win the war, but they also can't let Ukraine win the war. So what's the solution? Slowly degrade Russia's capacity in a way that doesn't destabilize the country, until eventually their economic and domestic issues become so serious that Putin thinks it's better to come to the negotiating table.
What are the problems with this? We're seeing them right now. Firstly, Russia is not as alone on the world stage as Western leaders thought. Putin has in fact built a coalition of autocratic states that are backing his play. North Korean arms and troops are now directly participating to cover the manpower losses in the Russian army. Iran likewise has fully aligned with Russia. This threatens to make the Ukraine war into a world war without the West changing their policies.
Second, the West does not understand the Russian people. Russia is perhaps the most fatalistic country in the world, and also one of the most resilient. The Russian people can handle a lot of suffering and punishment. Poorer Russians are quite happy to roll the dice as assault soldiers in a war where they will very likely die. For Westerners, a mortality rate of 5% in our military would be shocking - nobody would sign on. But a poor Russian with no other path to prosperity (many of them actual criminals freed from prison for this chance) will sign on to a 50% chance of death, shrug his soldiers and say "maybe I'll get lucky". Russians are also quite patriotic, and willing to suffer to see their country succeed. Combine this with the increasing levels of information control (it is, for instance, illegal in Russia to speak poorly of either the government or the military) and you'll see why there is no public outcry against the war - Putin's popularity has actually increased as the war drags on, despite signs that the Russian economy could well collapse within a year. In other words, there is no pressure on Putin to change. Quite the contrary, things really seem to be going his way.
Western countries, if they were able to continue the current levels of support, might have been able to continue the war at the current level for another year, at which point there's a real chance the Russian economy would fall apart. This was essentially the Biden strategy. However, Ukraine is almost at the end of it's rope. They cannot recruit enough to sustain the fight, as anyone who was going to volunteer did so two years ago. And many Western publics have gotten tired of spending boatloads of money on a strategy that has not been explained to them, that in fact looks like a black hole of taxpayer funds with no end in sight.
And so, I'm somewhat hopeful about Trump coming in. I think he can credibly threaten to change the status quo. The way I imagine it is: he proposes a cease-fire deal, which both Russia and Ukraine must refuse based on their geopolitical needs. Then, because Russia turned it down, this gives Trump carte blanche to increase support, not just in materiel but in the permission to strike into Russia that Biden has been refusing for the past two years. In other words, Trump may have the freedom to actually apply pressure to Putin in a way that the Biden alliance has steadfastly refused to do out of fear of escalation. I may be wrong, and Trump will swing the other way and force Ukraine to roll over and surrender. But I personally doubt it. I don't think he wants to go down as a deal-maker who lost a negotiation with Putin. I think he's fundamentally a bully, and will effectively use the power of the US to force Putin into a negotiation where Trump comes out looking like the winner. As far as I can tell, that's what the MAGA people mean by peace through strength.
Only Nixon could go to China....
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What signs?
According to the World Bank, Russia is now a high-income country. Real GDP per capita growth was at 3.6%! If an Australian politician could deliver that kind of growth, they'd be heralded as a living god and probably get Putin-level approval ratings (as opposed to negative approval ratings).
https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/leadership/directors/eds23/brief/russia-was-classified-as-high-income-country
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/05/russia-war-income?lang=en
Even the Carnegie Endowment is struggling to find much bad to say about Russian wages growth. If Biden had delivered positive real wages growth over his term, I think he would still be in office today. Just look at the chart on page 25. Apparently the crushing impact of Western sanctions in 2022 was less harmful to the Russian worker than whatever was going on in America (or the UK, Germany, Australia...) with inflation. And in 2023 Russia left the US in the dust in real wages.
https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/%40dgreports/%40inst/documents/publication/wcms_908142.pdf
China's struggling, failing economy was massively outperforming the vibrant, dynamic US economy in 2022 and 2023, presumably it's still doing so. Real wages, real GDP per capita are rising much faster in China and Russia. They're rising from a lower basis level but are rising fast nonetheless. Yet all we see in newspapers and television is stories of disaster, stagnation and decline over there.
This data on US wages doesnt really match what the US numbers show. Real wage growth was slower under Biden than Trump, but definitely was positive in 2023 (perhaps not on 2022 but only as an artifact of stimulus). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q#0
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The World Bank also says that the year before, 2022, saw real GDP per capita decline of -2.2 %. And that for 2023 total GDP and GDP per capita were both lower than in 2022.
https://data.worldbank.org/country/russian-federation?view=chart
According to the World Bank Australia saw real GDP per capita growth in 2023 at 3%, and in 2022 it was at 4.3%.
If you're measuring the Russian economy in current USD, then sure there was a GDP per capita decline in 2023. But the Russian economy also apparently shrank about 40% from 2013 to 2016, an economic apocalypse comparable only to the 1990s. Exchange-rate games don't really matter for this.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locations=AU
I see 0.6% for 2023 and that's not even real growth, that's just nominal growth. We've been in per-capita recession for some time now.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2024/05/australias-per-capita-recession-worsens/
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Good question. Basically Russia has a war economy right now, and all the military production counts as GDP, which gives the impression of growth. This hides the issues in the economy.
Russia is facing down stagflation. Wages have been artificially inflated because military industries are being propped up, with the consequence that other industries have to match those salaries in order to find workers. This has led to acute labor shortages in many industries. Meanwhile the Ruble is facing serious inflation. The central bank has raised the key rate to 21%, the highest in modern history, but nominal inflation remains at 8-9%. Russia's trading partners are no longer as willing to accept payments in Rubles, for a while now the majority of trade with China has been in the Yuan and it's getting worse. Nobody wants to hold Rubles.
Though, I'm not an expert on the economic side of this problem. One of the sources I trust most on Russia-Ukraine is Anders Puck Nielsen, and he has a good breakdown here: https://www.logicofwar.com/russias-war-economy-is-unsustainable/
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I have been repeatedly told by people arguing for support of Ukraine that our policy is and should be to drag the war out as long as possible to maximize harm to Russia. The fact that this also maximizes harm to Ukraine is waved off as Ukraine is volunteering for the honor. The fact that Ukraine is volunteering for the honor based on their belief that we will help them win, when in fact we have no intention of doing that is likewise dismissed.
And of course, actually providing them the resources needed to win, presuming those resources actually exist, risks escalating into direct warfare with a nuclear power.
This is most commonly raised as a counterpoint to "why are we spending so much in Ukraine, when {pet issue at home} is totally ignored!"
It's also maybe a compromise strategy to appese peaceniks, but this is frankly retarded as peaceniks are never appeased.
I at least fully advocate taking the risk of nuclear escalation, since the alternative (appeasement of nuclear threats) is far worse. This is unfortunately a hard sell to the American voter who cares more about culture war and gas prices. If Trump can make that sell, then I'll be impressed.
How large risk of nuclear escalation do you consider acceptable for returning Ukraine its full territory?
More risk than has been currently been taken.
After almost 3 years of frog boiling, there should have been 30+ escalations along the way that each on their own might receive nuclear responses but that altogether culminate in "there's so much US military involved that Russia loses everything".
Instead of properly following this frog boiling strategy, Biden had a bunch of red lines he wouldn't cross and stopped the boil at a simmer, defeating the whole point of the strategy. There should never be any red lines. At most there should be "don't do that yet" lines.
It took a whole two years to merely let Ukraine fire US supplied weapons offensively. This was not just on its own stupidly risk averse but more broadly demonstrates the failure to commit to the strategy, ultimately justifying the use of nuclear threats. The two year mark of frog boiling should at the very least have both the US air force and navy personnel directly involved, and probably even marines. By three years it should've been guaranteed to be over.
But, well, none of that was politically possible, or maybe Biden just didn't have the balls to do it. I will be pleasantly surprised if Trump escalates properly to give Ukraine the aid it needs to win and/or to get concessions out of Putin, but I'm not holding my breath.
More, in percent?
I don't know how to answer that.
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It's not about maximizing harm to Russia. It's about harming Russia in a way that doesn't destabilize it. Western intelligence is terrified of the balkanization of Russia, because it has nuclear weapons stored all over the place, and even one ending up under the control of a lunatic would be enough to end the world. See also my comment one level up for my fuller thoughts.
well USSR already fragmented, with some balkanization, and then USA successfully lobbied for Ukraine and Kazakhstan to give up nuclear weapons they had, if they could do in then, why not now?
The USSR died a very slow death and the 'balkanization' that took place was primarily revolutionary independence movements. There were no radical idealogues seizing power, rather the people essentially rose up to throw off Russian rule. This would not be the case if Russia collapsed into civil war. Some regions (see Chechnya) are essentially run by warlords who are kept in check by Moscow giving them money. And Putin's cronies include many who have called for offensive use of tactical nuclear weapons, and in a civil war scenario they could easily come out on top.
The question, if you're the West, is to what extent you want to risk the literal end of humanity. At least that's how some people see it.
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